“I’m on my way.”
Grabbing her belongings, pulling on her jacket, she rushed for the door. Pausing to turn out the light only because she felt she had to, she glanced involuntarily at the corner behind the desk. Even in the sudden gloom, the plant still looked like a plant. Of course, the disappearing woman had not been real, she told herself as she rode down the elevator and hurried out of the building, so she was going to put her permanently out of mind. What was real was the huge backlog of work Allison had left behind that Jess needed to power through to get caught up. The sheer amount of it should have been daunting, but Jess found that she was actually looking forward to digging into it. Besides being a way to prove her worth to Pearse and anyone else who was interested, it was something she was good at. In this very exacting small sphere, she could make a difference.
Jess was so tired, so frazzled, so drained by her day so far that she barely spoke except to give Mark the address once she was ensconced in the Suburban. Having forgotten to take any Advil since the two she had popped at lunch, she was now paying the price. Her head pounded and her side hurt worse. Shaking two of the small tablets out of the bottle in her purse, she swallowed them without water, casting Mark a sideways glance that dared him to comment as she did so.
“I have coffee.” Sending a half smile her way, he tapped the lid of a Styrofoam cup he’d wedged in the cup holder. With one of the pills lodged in her throat, Jess accepted the de facto offer without a word and took a grateful sip. The coffee was fresh, hot, and strong. She guessed he had bought it at the cantina in the lobby as he’d gone to fetch the car. Without much more than a grunt of thanks, she drank about half of it, then left him to finish the rest.
Luckily, Mark didn’t require conversation. With Jess resting bonelessly in her seat waiting for the Advil and coffee to take effect, they listened to the radio and the occasional voice of the GPS giving directions until they reached Shelter House.
The city was divided into quadrants, and Southwest was the quadrant no one wanted to be in. That some people had no choice just seemed to tick them off. Street gangs patrolled the blocks, and turf wars over whose block was whose were common. Hookers and drug dealers routinely worked the corners. Cars left on the street for more than five minutes risked being stripped of everything from their tires to their seats, and never mind about anything in the nature of CD or DVD systems, which usually didn’t make it past the one-minute mark. Housing ranged from flat-fronted brick tenements to abandoned, boarded-up, single-family homes that provided a haven for roving meth labs. Graffiti was everywhere, and so was trash. Eruptions of gunfire were as common here as firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Drive-by shootings were an everyday occurrence. The area took perverse pride in reporting more murders per capita than anyplace else in the nation. If D.C. was the murder capital of the country, Southwest was the murder capital of D.C.
It came as no surprise, then, to find that Shelter House looked like a bunker. A long, two-story cinder-block building the color of mustard, it sat almost on the sidewalk and sprawled out over half a block. The windows were bricked up and painted over. The front door looked to be solid steel. A vacant lot directly to the left of the building held a single metal picnic table, bolted down to a slab of concrete. The lot was surrounded by two layers of chain link fencing topped by loops of razor wire. The outer layer of fence had big No Trespassing signs affixed to it. Another solid steel door opened from the side of the building directly into the lot. That scraggly, dusty rectangle of grass had to have been what the young residents used as a yard.
Shelter House, indeed.
“Grab my police tag out of the glove compartment. It might buy us a few extra minutes.”
As he parked in front of the building, Mark was looking at the pack of toughs on the corner, who were already eyeing the Suburban like vultures spotting fresh carrion. The usual street characters—the wino shuffling past with his hand wrapped tight around the neck of a bottle in a brown paper bag, a homeless woman pushing her few belongings in a shopping cart, a couple of brothers who looked like they were on their way to swell the ranks of the gang on the corner—he ignored.
“You’re not police,” Jess protested even as she found the long white tag with its DCPD symbol and handed it over.
“Yeah, but we get a police parking tag. It’s easier.” He hung the tag from the rearview mirror. “If we’re lucky, they won’t want to mess with the cops. Sit tight, I’ll come around for you.”
The implication that she couldn’t walk twenty feet without his protection didn’t set well with Jess. In consequence, she got out, grimacing at the pain in her side and her head, which had not yet significantly decreased. She trudged a couple of feet along the sidewalk through the thick humidity before Mark caught up with her. Their ranks having just been increased by the two newcomers, the youths on the corner seemed emboldened. They looked her over, made some catcalls, and one of them even made a move in her direction until Mark shot him and his buddies a look that stopped them cold. The would-be aggressor melted back into the group, and the catcalls ceased. Meanwhile, with a single glinting glance that rebuked her for not having done as he’d said, Mark hustled her to the door, placing himself between her and the youths as she stopped in front of the entrance. He was in his Federal Agent mode, his body language authoritative, his face tough and aggressive. Clearly the message that he was not a man to be messed with had gotten across, because they weren’t bothered as she rang the button and waited. Identifying herself to the disembodied voice that finally answered, Jess was buzzed in.
The place was surprisingly quiet for an institution that housed some eighty—Jess had checked—teenage girls. With the all-female household she’d grown up in for a template, Jess would have expected her ears to be bombarded with sound: talking, laughing, arguing, something. Instead, there was a palpable hush. The smell of some strong cleaning agent—Pine-Sol?—hit her the moment she walked through the door. Jess wrinkled her nose in silent protest. Inside, the place looked as much like a bunker as it had from the outside. The room she entered was stark with fluorescent lighting, its gray linoleum floor and beige walls unremittingly dingy. Bulletin boards thick with layers of papers in a host of colors broke up the walls. A metal desk staffed by a bored-looking receptionist sat in front of another metal door. Jess barely had time to notice that the receptionist was young and had dreadlocks before the door behind her opened and a woman came out to greet them.
She was around Jess’s own height, but her stockier build and the swirling bun perched like a doughnut on top of her head made her appear taller. In possibly her midfifties, she had black hair, dark eyes, swarthy skin, and small, pinched features. Her only makeup appeared to be vivid red lipstick. Her short-sleeved black dress was midcalf length, and she wore it with midheeled black pumps.
She held out her hand. “Ms. Ford? I’m Paloma DeLong.”
“Please, call me Jess. And this is Mark Ryan.”
She didn’t specify that Mark was Special Agent Mark Ryan, because the explanation that would entail would be long and involved and had nothing to do with her purpose in visiting Shelter House. Better to let the woman assume what she would, which was probably that Mark was with Ellis Hayes, too. Which, temporarily, Jess supposed he was.
“And I’m Paloma. When will Allison be back in town, do you know?”
Jess shook her head. “I don’t really know. I understand she’s on her honeymoon.”
“I heard that, too. What a surprise! I’m so happy for her, of course, but I’m a little disappointed that she didn’t let me know in time to cancel today’s luncheon. It was more than awkward not to have our guest of honor show up, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
Jess remembered the red star Allison had drawn on her calendar.
“She was supposed to be your guest of honor?”
Paloma nodded. “We were presenting her with our Volunteer of the Year award. She seemed to be thrilled when I told her about it, and we had our board of dir
ectors and everybody come, and then she just didn’t show up. When I frantically called Ellis Hayes to see where she was, they told me what had happened, and of course I can understand that eloping like that could make anyone forgetful, but I just wish she had called.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jess said.
“Well, it certainly isn’t your fault. I’m just glad you’re here. But I am concerned about Clementine.”
“Clementine?”
Paloma nodded. “Her cat. When Allison originally left, she said she would be away on a business trip and asked me to come by her apartment to feed Clementine while she was gone. She was supposed to get back a week later, on Sunday night, so the last time I stopped by was that Sunday morning, when I left the key on her kitchen table. I just assumed she was back. But when she missed today’s luncheon and I called in and Lenore said she had run off to get married and was on her honeymoon, and that you would be replacing her because she’d resigned, I wondered who was watching the cat.” She took Jess and Mark back into her office as she spoke. It was basically a smaller version of the reception room except for what was on the bulletin boards, which seemed to be covered with photographs by the dozens instead of flyers and notices.
“I don’t know anything about her cat,” Jess said apologetically as she and Mark followed Paloma to her desk.
“Well, I’m sure she made arrangements for her. Probably another friend, or a kennel. Only she said Clementine was really funny about kennels.” Walking behind her desk, shrugging as if to dismiss the subject, Paloma opened a drawer and pulled out a sheaf of papers, which she handed over to Jess.
“This is courtesy of Jaden’s brother, apparently. His name is Jax Johnson. I mean, he claims he’s her brother, but I don’t have any way of knowing for sure.” Paloma clasped her hands together in a gesture that betrayed her anxiety as Jess looked the papers over. They were all standing, with Paloma behind her desk and Jess and Mark in front of it. “He called us wanting to speak to her about four days after she went missing. We had to tell him what had happened. Well, I guess we didn’t, but it wasn’t a secret. We were trying to find Jaden and Lucy, and we thought he might be able to help. Since then, he’s been calling two and three times a day, pestering everybody, demanding that we find Jaden. He’s become such a nuisance that we stopped taking his calls. So I guess this is the result.”
The suit, filed against Shelter House and Child Protective Services, appeared to contain a number of irregularities, Jess saw, although the central charge—negligence in allowing the minor child remanded to Shelter House’s custody to escape—seemed on the surface of it to have at least some small degree of merit.
“He’s her brother?” Mark asked while Jess flipped through the papers. “Where’s he been? Where are the parents?”
Paloma shrugged. “The parents are out of the picture. Mother’s a junkie, currently in jail. Father’s dead. I verified that there actually is a brother. He’s about twenty-three, but we’d never heard anything from him until this. He’s never called before, or visited Jaden while she’s been with us.”
Looking up, Jess said, “Unless the brother is her legal guardian, he has no standing to file a suit of this nature. Do you know who her legal guardian is?”
“She’s a ward of the District of Columbia.”
“Has the brother asked you for money? Tried to shake you down in any way?”
Paloma shook her head. “He says he wants to know where his sister is. I keep telling him we have no idea. That we are doing our best to find her. We’ve notified the police. We’ve notified the social service groups in the area—homeless shelters, soup kitchens, that kind of thing. We’ve put out flyers. There’s really nothing else we can do until the girls—Jaden ran away with another girl, Lucy Peel—resurface. And they will. They’ll do something, they’ll get picked up, they’ll be back in the system sooner or later. They all come back into the system, I can vouch for it.”
The woman sounded, and looked, as if she was resigned to the cycle.
Jess glanced around. “This is a lockdown facility, isn’t it? How did they get out?”
“A delivery man left a door open.”
Leaving a door open where a pair of troubled girls could use it to escape could also argue negligence. Not that it really mattered. Getting the suit dismissed would be easy enough—first, because successfully suing a government agency was almost impossible, and, second, because the purported brother did not have standing. The larger question, though, was what had become of the girls. As pro bono counsel for Shelter House, Jess had to ask herself whether finding escaped residents was part of the deal. Who knew? Jess decided that it was a gray area, and also decided to follow her heart, which urged her to do what she could.
“Have you tried calling … what are their names?”
“Jaden. And Lucy.”
“Have you tried calling Jaden and Lucy on their cell phones? Or tracking them down through Facebook, something like that?”
Paloma gave her a wry smile. “We can’t call them on their cell phones, because the first thing we do when they get here is confiscate those.” She pointed toward a large plastic bin tucked away in a corner, which Jess could see was full of neatly labeled manila envelopes, all of which, from the bulge in them, presumably contained cell phones. “No, I haven’t tried Facebook. I guess I could do that. Well, truthfully, I could have my assistant Teresa, who is not here right now, do that. I’m not really familiar with Facebook. That dates me, I know.”
“If you want to give me their cell phones, I’ll check their call history and see if I can turn up friends, family, someone they might have been in contact with before, someone who might know where they are now,” Jess said.
“Can you do that? I had no idea such a thing was even possible. When the police came to take the report, they didn’t say a thing about looking at the girls’ cell phones, so they must not know it either. Or else they’re too busy. Probably too busy. But in any case, I thank you.” Bestowing a quick smile on Jess, she turned to rummage through the bin. “Finding them would be the best thing that could happen. Jaden’s brother would be satisfied, and then maybe all this”—her tone made it obvious she meant the lawsuit—“would go away.”
“Don’t worry about the lawsuit. I’ll take care of it.”
“That is such a relief to hear.”
“Do you have a picture of them?” Mark asked.
“I had flyers made up with their pictures on them. Though I think we’ve run out.” Paloma straightened, two manila envelopes in her hand. She gave them to Jess. “Our staff has put them up everywhere. I can get more, of course. We still have the pictures from their IDs, which is what we used, but I don’t know where Teresa’s put them right off the top of my head.” Moving out from behind her desk, she pointed to a photo tacked near the bottom of one of the bulletin boards. “But if you just want to see what the girls look like, here they are right here.”
Mark joined her in front of the picture. Tucking the envelopes under her arm, Jess walked over to look at it as well. It showed maybe eight teenage girls, plus adults she assumed were chaperones, standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building.
“So they aren’t on twenty-four-hour lockdown,” Mark said.
“No, of course not. We take them out for approved events. Doctor appointments, church, the occasional movie, or concert. As long as they’re well supervised. Here they’re on a field trip. It was taken just last month. This is Jaden.” Paloma pointed to a tall, thin, girl with spiky black hair. “And this is Lucy.”
With her frizzy red hair, Lucy looked like a funky teenage version of Little Orphan Annie. Okay, a funky teenage version of Little Orphan Annie with a sulky stare instead of a beaming smile.
Both of them—all of them—looked like typical teenage girls, not juvenile offenders who deserved to be locked away.
They could be Maddie’s friends. Or Taylor’s.
Jess was just thinking that when one of the three adults in the picture
caught her gaze. She did a double take, her eyes widening as she stared in growing shock at the image.
It was of a woman who was standing at the back of the group. She wore a yellow summer jacket with a jumble of bright orange beads around her throat. Most of her body was hidden because she was behind the others, but Jess could see that she was a little thick-set and not particularly pretty. She was blunt-featured, with blue eyes and shaggy auburn hair.
Looking at her, Jess felt as if the room had just decompressed and all the air had suddenly been sucked out of her lungs.
That’s the woman in my office. The one who vanished.
“Who is that?” she asked, her finger miraculously steady as she pointed at the tiny pictured figure, and hoped her voice didn’t sound as croaky to the others as it did to her own ears.
“Why, that’s Allison. Allison Howard.” Paloma looked at her curiously. “Don’t you know her?”
Jess shook her head. “We’ve never met.”
But Jess was almost positive she’d seen Allison before.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What the hell happened in there? You went white as a sheet.”
Mark’s hand clasped her elbow as he steered her back down the sidewalk toward the Suburban, which thankfully seemed to be in one piece. The gang on the corner had left. The usual suspects were on the sidewalks, but singly or in pairs, which made them seem not as threatening.
Jess said nothing until they were both back inside the Suburban and it was turning left two blocks away, on Lamont. It wasn’t that she was deliberately ignoring Mark. It was simply that she was still processing the possibilities. And, okay, admit it, also because she was still in something very closely resembling shock.
She finally answered his latest sharp “Jess?” with “I think I saw Allison Howard in my office this morning.”
“So?”
“Then she vanished.”
“What?”
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