My breath stuttered.
“It is?” Gemma asked.
“No more than a couple of days old,” Joey declared, and since she was a nail tech, she would know.
“Also, the makeup job is off,” Tex offered.
We turned to him.
He tipped the bottom edge of his rosé can to the picture.
“I’ve taken my fair share of beatings,” he announced. “Given them too. You get swelling and discoloration. She’s got the discoloration of a woman who recently took a beatdown, but no swelling. Beatdown like that, she’d be swelled up for days. By the time the swelling went down, the bruising would not look like that. It’d be a lot more faded.”
Joey scrutinized closer before she decreed, “Holy shit, it’s a makeup job.”
“Yeah, it is,” Raye piped in from the back.
We turned that way.
Raye was sitting at the desk, still staring at the screens, her expression hard.
Shanti was standing straight as an arrow beside it, appearing like she wanted to kill someone.
This did not bode well at all.
“Amy Small doesn’t miss visitation days with her son at prison,” Raye stated. “Including last weekend.”
“Oh my God,” Harlow breathed the words I was sure we were all thinking.
“Prison records show, he also frequently calls her, and that has not dropped off at all in the last two weeks,” Raye added. “The only difference is, he’s calling her on a different number. She has two phones.”
“Son’s name is Dillon Small,” Shanti put in. “On his list of known associates is a Thomas Jefferson “TJ” Boda. And Dillon and TJ run with a loose gang headed by a man named William Dexter.”
I gasped.
TJ and Dex!
“Dexter also pays for Dillon’s phone calls from prison to his momma,” Raye put in.
I stood, my blood heating in my veins, my attention turning back to the photo, what was happening maybe not fully forming in my brain, but I was getting the gist. “She’s playing him. She found her mark at Food City, and I don’t know what they want him to do, but she’s playing him.”
The photo on the screen changed to the mugshot of a white guy whose looks were so average, I might not even remember what he looked like after I turned away from the pic.
“William Dexter,” Shanti said.
That image disappeared and some grainy footage of a parking lot came up, and sure as shit, there was Amy Small, standing beside a car, talking to the man in the earlier mugshot.
It was not remotely an attack, and even grainy, it was clear they were just talking and doing it like they knew each other.
Amy gave him a quick kiss before she turned and walked away, and I couldn’t see clearly, but it looked like the man smiled at her while she did, then she looked over her shoulder and waved.
I was no expert, but I felt it was safe to say that was definitely not abductor and abductee behavior.
“And William Dexter with Amy Small about two days before she ‘disappeared,’” Shanti punctuated what we just saw.
“She’s playing him,” Luna spat.
“That is some serious fucked up,” Jessie snapped.
