“Indeed, I have. And I’m trying to figure out why the hell she was stalking my boyfriend.”

26
Tuesday, June 22, 3:40 p.m.

As he entered the East End Senior Thriftshop, Carter Decker inhaled a mouthful of dust and mothballs. A dying fluorescent light buzzed loudly. Racks of clothing and tables of clutter were scattered sparsely throughout the otherwise barren space.

“Hello?” he called out.

A woman with close-cropped silver hair appeared through a swinging door at the back of the shop. “Can I help you?” She was probably in her late seventies but seemed to have no problem managing the large cardboard box in her lean, unsleeved arms. Nevertheless, Carter rushed to offer his assistance, which she gladly accepted.

“Are you Mrs. Streeter? I’m Detective Carter Decker. We spoke on the phone.”

“Well, of course you are. Sorry if you were waiting. I’m here by myself today, and we’ve got a lot of new inventory in the back that needed processing.”

“I just got here, not to worry. Do you have the rug ready?”

“Oh, I’ve still got it in the back. We hadn’t made the decision yet whether it was worth sending out to get professionally cleaned or not. We weren’t going to sell it in its current state. And, well . . . none of us was willing to clean up someone else’s bodily fluids.” She made an ick face that he found absolutely delightful.

Carter’s request to release a photograph of Evan Hunter’s rug might have panned out. When Hope Miller was initially reported missing, Carter suspected that she had run off with the cash advance she had borrowed from her boss, along with the rug she was supposed to have placed in the Stansfields’ foyer. The discovery of Alex Lopez’s body had changed that theory. The area rug was about the right size to pull a corpse from a house.

Fifteen minutes after the press conference announcing that they were looking for both Hope Miller and the rug, Carter had received a phone call from a volunteer at one of the local charitable thrift shops, identifying herself as “Mrs. Streeter, the supervisor of operations” and saying she was “ninety-nine percent certain” they had the rug in question. The IKEA label was still attached to the back of the rug, and there was a bloodstain that she described as being “wine red, about the size of an index card.”

Carter’s plan was to inspect the rug for himself and then call out a crime scene technician to transport it to the lab and complete the chain of custody record. “So one of your volunteers pulled this out of the dump?” he asked.