“Thank you,” I said when she offered me a napkin.
“You want cookies?” she asked, her Texas accent at odds with her Asian features.
“No, thank you,” Cookie said.
“I’ll be back.” She rushed off to the kitchen, her flip-flops padding along the carpet as she walked.
“Can I just take her home with me?” Cookie asked. “She’s adorable.”
“You can, but that’s called kidnapping and is actually frowned upon by many law enforcement agencies.” I chuckled into my teacup when she offered me a scowl. Apparently, paper cuts made her grumpy.
Hy trod back with a plate of cookies in her hands. I smiled as she handed it to me. “Thank you so much.”
“Those are good cookies,” she said, sitting in a recliner opposite us.
After placing one on my napkin, I handed the plate to Cook. “Mrs. Insinga, can you tell us what happened?”
We’d told her we were here to ask her about her daughter when we introduced ourselves on her doorstep. She was kind enough to let us in.
“That was so long ago,” she said, withdrawing inside herself. “I can still smell her hair.”
I put my cup down. “Do you have any idea what happened?”
“Nobody knows,” she said, her voice faltering. “We asked everybody. The sheriff interviewed all the kids. Nobody knew anything. She just never came home. Like she disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
“Did she go out with a friend that night?” The pain of her daughter’s disappearance resurfaced, emanated out of Hy. It was disorienting. It made my heart pound, my palms sweat.
“She wasn’t supposed to leave. She snuck out her window, so I have no idea if she was with anyone.”
Hy was struggling to control her emotions, and my heart went out to her.
“Can you tell me who her closest friends were?” I asked. Hopefully we would at least leave with a few contacts.
But Hy shook her head in disappointment. “We’d lived here only a few weeks. I hadn’t met any of her friends yet, though she did talk about a couple of girls from school. I’m not positive they were close—Hana was painfully shy—but she said one girl was very nice to her. After Hana disappeared, the girl moved to Albuquerque to live with her grandmother.”
“Mimi Marshal,” I said sadly.
She nodded. “Yes. I told the sheriff they were friends. He said he questioned all the high school children. Nobody knew anything.”
I couldn’t ethically bring up Kyle Kirsch’s name. We had no evidence that he was actually involved in any of this. But I decided to approach it from a different angle. “Mrs. Insinga, were there any boys? Did she mention a boyfriend?”
Hy folded her hands in her lap. I got the feeling she didn’t want to think of her daughter in that way, but the girl was at least fifteen when she disappeared, possibly sixteen. Boys were very likely a big part of her thought process.
“I don’t know. Even if she had liked someone, she would never have told us. Her father was very strict.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said when she mentioned her husband. She’d told us he died almost two years ago.
She bowed her head in gratitude. After steering the conversation to greener fields, asking about her hometown and what she missed most about Texas, Cookie and I stood and walked to the door.
“There is something else,” she said as she led us out. Cookie was already headed toward the Jeep. “We began getting money deposited directly into our account every month about ten years ago.”
I stopped and turned to her in surprise.
“I didn’t want to believe it had anything to do with Hana, but I have to be honest with myself. Why would anyone give us money for no reason?”
That was a good question. “Is it transferred from another account?”
She shook her head. Of course not. That would have been too easy. “It’s always a night deposit,” she added. “One thousand dollars cash on the first of every month. Like clockwork.”
“And you have no idea who it is?”
“None.”
“Did you talk to the police?”
“I tried,” she said with a shrug, “but they didn’t want to waste the resources to stake out either bank location when there really wasn’t a crime being committed. Especially since we refused to file any charges.”
I nodded in understanding. It would have been a hard point to argue with the authorities.
“My husband and I had tried a few times to see who was doing it, but if we were staking out one location, the deposit was made at the other. Every time.”
“Well, it’s certainly worth looking into. May I ask you one more question?” I asked as Cookie turned at the end of the sidewalk to wait for me.
“Of course,” she said.
“Do you remember who the sheriff was at the time of Hana’s disappearance? Who the lead investigator was?”
“Oh, yes. It was Sheriff Kirsch.”
My heart skipped a beat, and a soft gasp slipped through my lips. Hoping my surprise didn’t alarm her, I said, “Thank you so much for your time, Mrs. Insinga.”
After we left, Cookie and I sat in Misery—the Jeep, not the emotion—a stunned expression on both our faces. I’d told her who the sheriff on the case had been.
“Let me ask you something,” I said to Cookie as she stared into space. “You told me Warren Jacobs is wealthy, right? He writes software programs for businesses all over the world.”