Thin Luck

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Detective Joe Turner

THREE DAYS HAD gone by with no sign of Robyn Hughes. Turner wondered if she'd died that night in Kansas as Officer Knutson had thought.

Since the press had gotten ahold of the story, reported sightings of Robyn were an hourly waste of Turner's time. No real reports of her had been verified since before the accident in Kansas. However, plenty of fake sightings were entertaining. So far she'd been seen at several grocery stores, a movie theatre, a wedding, and on a flight to Mexico. He knew the report on the flight to Mexico was bogus, but followed up on it anyway. One woman claimed a friend of her friend was Robyn Hughes, but that turned out to be a prank.

Turner needed to get out of the squad room. Based on nothing but the sick descriptions of the death of Professor Morgan in Nick's novel Lies, he was out driving the back roads of Western Connecticut. Five years was a long time to think Turner was going to miraculously come across the shallow grave of Brendan Behan, but the cafe the novel's characters had stopped at after burying the body sparked a memory in Turner, right down to the red painted cement pig that Raven initially mistook for a real one.

Of course, Nick could have pulled the details of burying the body through a lot of research and exploration, but there was one detail about Professor Behan that was held back from being published in the press. One little fact that Nick happened to have weaved into the novel. Not one single person, except Brendan Behan's wife and the emergency room doctor who saw him, knew that he had a cut on his thumb the morning he disappeared. The cut was about two inches long fixed with six stiches. He'd been prepping breakfast that morning and the knife slipped. Professor Morgan from the novel also had a 'stitched' hand he held up when Raven forced him into the car with her pearl-handled pistol.

Even if Robyn was dead as Knutson suspected, Turner knew the key to finding her was to examine Robyn's relationship with Nick. The key to her cross-country trail of felonies lay in her past.

The state prosecutor, Welch, had threatened to go to the FBI to find Robyn. The trial against Carla Brooks was set to start in ten days. If Robyn wasn't available for questioning by the defense soon, the case would be dropped and Robyn would no longer be valuable to Welch.

Turner stopped the car and then put it in reverse when he spotted a green shed out of the corner of his eye. How many times had Nick driven out here to get the details so accurate? Turner took out his cell phone and then took a few pictures. He marked the location using the GPS in the car.

The novel wasn't going to be enough evidence to get a warrant to search the property, but that wasn't the only way to go about getting the job done.