Five? Maybe six days. Let’s just call it a week,” the woman on the other side of the rusty screen door said. Rain was pounding on the sagging roof of the porch that fronted the small bungalow, the last known address of Roland Camp, who until a week ago had worked the night shift at a mini-mart and gas station just west of town. According to the manager, Roland had called in sick and hadn’t returned. He’d given Morrisette and Reed the number of Camp’s cell, but so far no message had been returned. So they had decided to pay Camp a visit. They’d been blocked at the door by a short, skinny woman with a ragged mop of brown hair that kept falling into her eyes—Peggy Shanks, the latest in a string of Roland Camp’s girlfriends—and she wasn’t giving the detectives the time of day. Balancing a baby of about eighteen months on one hip, she stared through the door at Morrisette and Reed as if they were planning to rob her rather than ask questions of her boyfriend. “Roland, he does this sometimes,”
