“Randy?” I ask with a smile, or what I hope is a smile. It may be more a baring of my teeth. “You’re here looking for Kat?”
I extend a confident hand and maintain strong eye contact, the way my mom always told me to. I’ve locked eyes and done that confident handshake countless times. But never before have I thought of her.
“And you are?” he asks as I yank my hand back from his clammy grasp.
“Her daughter,” I say, motioning to the chair across from me.
Randy looks perplexed, but still hopeful. “Ah, that explains the similarity,” he says slowly. “Am I in trouble? This like the middle-age version of getting a talking-to from somebody’s parents? The kid comes instead.” He lifts his hands and laughs like a donkey. “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it, Officer.”
“My mom, Kat, is missing.”Open questions. Only open questions.
“Missing from where?” he asks.
“From everywhere. She’s missing from everywhere.”
He frowns. It’s a weird answer.
“Interesting,” he says eventually. “That seems out of character.”
“Out of character how?” Didn’t he barely know her?
He shakes his head. “Well, of course, we only met a couple of times, but she just struck me as a responsible person.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, maybe not so great setting boundaries with her ‘work.’” He hooks the word in air quotes.
“What does ‘that’ mean?” I mimic his air quotes.
“I don’t know—it seemed like something weird was going on with her job,” Randy says. “Maybeweirdis the wrong word. It was intense. She canceled our first date like four times for work reasons. I could never tell if there really were all those emergencies or if she was lying for some reason. I mean, what corporate lawyer hasthatmany emergencies? Something didn’t add up.”Probably because she couldn’t figure out why she was going out with you and had a moment of actual clarity—though this seems not to have occurred to Randy. “And then when we did meet up,” he goes on, “she took a call—said it was a client, but she was pacing outside the restaurant, talking on the phone for like twenty minutes! Your mom is lucky she’s a babe!”
I nod. “Right.”
Randy chews on the end of his sunglasses, in thoughtful, full sleuthing mode now. “If she really is missing, you might want to look into that woman she was talking to that night. The call seemed pretty … heated.”
“Did she mention the woman’s name?”
“No.” He looks away. “But she did leave her phone to go get a glass of water. You know, the place had a setup like that.” He motions to the big jug and paper cups on the nearby counter. “Anyway, I inadvertently saw a text come in:Don’t fuck this up or I’ll kill you.” He raises one eyebrow.
“Holy shit,” I whisper.
“I know. Nice, huh?”
“Did you see a name, who the text was from?”
“I did, in fact,” he says with an impish grin he tries, but fails, to hide. “Vivienne Voxhall. It’s not exactly a name you forget.”
TRANSCRIPT OF RECORDED SESSION
DR. EVELYN BAUER
SESSION #3
