He opened the dishwasher to see if her coffee cup for the day was in there.
There were two, nothing more. One floral one. One brown one.
She only ever drank out of the floral ones, which meant someone else had to have been here.
Someone that she gave coffee to.
He picked up the mug with a paper towel to see if it was still wet. Nope. Dry. Rinsed but still dry, so not from this morning.
He kept looking around for anything out of place and landed on the curtain. It was pulled further away on one side than the other, so he moved toward it and shoved it to the side, but whenhe saw the camera, he didn’t look up into the corner to focus on it, rather pretending to look out the back window.
He turned his head and walked into the living room. “Fuck!”
He didn’t know if there were more cameras in the house, so he left to go to his truck to call his brother.
This was no time for him to panic. Not that he ever did, but everything with Meredith ended up being more than was on the surface.
Clay took a deep breath. It was the only way he was going to get to the bottom of this. It was the way he operated when so much was at stake.
“Hey,” Ford said. “What’s going on?”
“Meredith is missing and I was just in her house. I found one camera in the kitchen. I left before I could look for more and am calling you from my truck.”
“I’m on the way.”
“I’m going to check footage from yesterday to see if I can find who might have been here, but someone was.”
He hung up on his brother, then turned his head when the damn neighbor came out again.
The guy was going to his car, dressed as if he was going into the office.
He rolled his window down. “Hey, Karl, right?”
“That’s me,” Karl said, his smile tight.
“Have you seen Meredith lately?” He wouldn’t let on to anything.
“No,” Karl said. “Sorry. I’m on my way to work, but her car is right there.”
“Yeah, I know. But she’s not in the house.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” Karl said. “I’m sure she’s probably out walking or something. Women never leave the house without their purse. Did you see if it’s on the counter?”
“Thanks,” he said, rolling the window up. The guy was always overly helpful and nosy, but this time something wasn’t right with the way the information was thrown out in a rush.
He snapped a picture of Karl’s license plate as the neighbor pulled out.
He was checking the camera on Meredith’s front window, but she never left after she came in yesterday morning from his house.
No one visited either.
Ford pulled in next to him and Clay got out of his car.
“Did you find anything?”
“No. No one came or left since she got home yesterday and I checked the backdoor for any signs of something suspicious. Doesn’t look as if the lock has been tampered with by someone trying to break in and only residences with a key can get behind the gate in the back.”
“You haven’t talked to her at all since then?” Ford asked.
