Page 20 of The Newcomer
“Right.”
Zoey was back with the coffeepot, but Evan waved her away.
Vikki Hill sipped her ice water. “I talked to the detective running the investigation. I worked on a housing-inspection thing with him a couple years ago that ended up also being a child-endangerment case. He’s pretty straight.”
“Did he tell you anything useful?”
“Just that they recovered the Mercedes in Philly yesterday. Stripped and abandoned.”
“Figures.”
“She used your wife’s…”
“Girlfriend,” Evan corrected. “Ex-girlfriend.”
Vikki plowed ahead. “A woman who fits the description of Scarlett Carnahan used your ex-girlfriend’s credit card to rent a car at the Hertz counter at Newark Airport, then turned it in at RDU.”
“That’s the airport in Raleigh?”
“Yeah. Do you know if the girl has any connections down that way?”
“Not that I know of. She and Tanya moved around with their mother a lot when they were growing up. They lived in West Virginia for a while, and then I think there was a relative who lived in Indiana. To tell you the truth, I didn’t pay much attention to any of that. But neither one of them ever mentioned Raleigh.”
“Have you talked to the mother?”
“No,” he said succinctly. “They weren’t close. I know her name was Terri, but Tanya and Letty didn’t talk much about her.”
“Okay. You say the sister worked here, when she first moved to the city?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll check with the manager. Maybe she used her mother’s contact info as next of kin on her job application.”
“Doubtful,” Evan said. “But I guess you could ask.”
“Tell me more about Letty,” Vikki Hill prompted. “What was she like? Who were her friends? Places she hung out, like that.”
He gave it some thought. “She was sharp, you know. No college that I knew of, but she read a lot and she was street smart. You couldn’t hustle Letty, that’s for sure. She’d been doing acting, but not getting very far with that. She was pretty enough, but nothing like her sister. Tanya had presence, you know? Like, drop-dead gorgeous.”
His lips twisted. “Of course, as it turns out, Tanya, unlike Letty, was a major head case.”
“Friends?”
He jerked his head in the direction of the counter, where Zoey was busily trying to look like she hadn’t been staring at them.
“That waitress? She was a friend of Letty’s. There’s another girl, who quit around the same time as Letty. Corinne Tapley. She’s working at a boutique in the East Village. I went to see her, but she claimed she hasn’t heard from Letty and doesn’t know where she might have gone.”
“Did you believe her?”
“Not really.”
“Text me the girl’s name and the name of that shop. I’ll talk to her. Let me ask you something. What motive would Letty have for killing her sister?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Who knows? Jealousy? Letty was living the good life up here. And then little sister shows up and poof! Everything changes.”
Everymorning when she woke up in what she still thought of as Monica’s apartment inFriends,Letty felt like she was living in a dream. She arose early, sipped coffee on the balcony, and planned her day.
Managing the Airbnb guests was more involved than her newemployer had led her to expect. One of the tenants on the second floor had begun to complain about all the people coming and going from Evan’s unit there, so she’d taken to meeting guests in the lobby, wheeling their suitcases as though they were hers, and ferrying them into the unit.
