entry no. 14, the only game in town, a serial by denver day
'ain't nothing but trouble for you here'
Miri’s mother was the first to miss her, but grown-ass women being out of pocket unannounced is not a matter of police business before a couple days’ passing. She called the cops that Monday afternoon but it was mid-week before they would take a missing persons report on Miri’s account. There was no official, active police hunt for her but she was put on the regional interagency missing persons list and such all.
The situation did get a whiff from the Harvey city chief of detectives who, reviewing the updated list recognized her name. Of course Miri’d been a “person of interest,” more specifically a conjugal relation to the victim of the year-old unsolved murder of a local crack dealer. Talk about free beer, he thought, might as well take a few notes and compare them with whatever loose ends the investigators had previously gathered from that crowd.
By the next weekend, there was no official man hunt and no press releases so no newspaper articles or mentions on the T.V. news about Miri who was still missing. But the werewolves of Harvey’s finest were toeing the sidewalk with hound-dog boners rousted by the incidental disappearance of the girlfriend of a yet-unsolved murder victim. They had questions, basically, for everyone whom they’d previously had questions for after Sloe was killed. Excepting Miri of course whom they could not again question in the standard sense.
The dicks sliding into the Bar One North was the polar opposite of ideal. Not everyone they’d previously questioned regarding the abrupt conclusion of Sloepop was a regular customer or employee at Bar One but about half of them were. Nevermind the various known police assets in that bar district generally. Of course it was just a minor investigative cul-de-sac, bars being bars after all, but now there was a possible lead so, lightly they tread.
Eldorado Marquez and Carson were both questioned since they both saw her regularly as a bar patron. Both of their personal relationships with Miri were practically obscured by the fact that they had cause to see her and talk to her as a regular, and both had solid background on her because they’d both known her nearly their entire lives. Richie Jones was questioned for obvious historical circumstantial reasons but his exceptional alibi was completely true: He’d seen her once since he’d gotten out, he was clean, and they were no longer involved. Jack Ross was not questioned, no more than were Hank, Seamus or the dart team.
Questions directed about other of Sloe’s old haunts on the other side of town conjured sincere question marks floating from the heads of those asked. “Miri who?” they said uniformly.
They were asking questions about a missing woman, answers to which they were hoping might make some connections with at least one murder and at least one missing person. Now in terms of finding Miri, well, it wasn’t fated to happen. Closest they could get to that was once-removed by literally catfishing in the right place, but they’d likely never know what they were eating had eaten. So has gone the food chain in Rio Brazos De Dios since the Late Pleistocene. Alternatively, perhaps, if sufficiently submerged in the muddy river bed, she’d eventually fossilize.
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