A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “Chief Dutton is on his way,” the dispatcher said. He gestured toward one of the molded plastic chairs lining the waiting area, and I sat.

  There wasn’t much going on at police headquarters, which wasn’t a tremendous surprise. A large-bellied man in ugly pants came in to bother the dispatcher for a while, but was ignored. As he was in (relatively) plain clothes and carrying a gun, I’m guessing he was the detective on the really late or really early shift. Other than that, it was me and the dispatcher, who did his best to avoid looking at me, for quite some time.

  Finally, the door opened, and I began to stand, expecting Dutton. But the little man who walked in, bringing a freezing breeze with him, was the chief’s exact opposite: small, thin, Caucasian, and unimposing.

  “What’s up, Doc?” The dispatcher grinned.

  “Just on my way home,” the little guy said. “Figured I’d drop the report by.” He waved a blue file toward the dispatcher, who nodded.

  A sheet of paper from the file flew out and landed at my feet. I picked it up and handed it back to “Doc,” but almost snatched it back again when I saw the name Chapman printed at the top.

  “Is this the autopsy report on Russell Chapman?” I asked the little man.

  “Yuh,” he said. “Just finished it. You the detective?”

  I considered it, but the dispatcher was watching. “No,” I said, “I’m not even an interested party.” And I sat down again, trying to vanish into thin air. Like Sharon.

  The little man slid the file through the bulletproof glass and waited until the dispatcher looked at it, signed a form, and gave the form back to “Doc.” Then the little man yawned broadly and headed to the door.

  He walked out just as Dutton walked in. The chief nodded at the dispatcher, then walked to me as I stood up.

  “Why, exactly, am I here at this ungodly hour?” Dutton rumbled.

  “Sharon’s missing,” I said.

  Dutton looked at me. For a while. A long while.

  “Why, exactly, am I here at this ungodly hour?” he repeated.

  “I mean she’s really missing,” I said. “Up until now, I thought she was just off licking her wounds. Now I’m sure she’s being held somewhere against her will.”

  Dutton’s eyebrows did a quick cha-cha on his forehead, but his voice stayed steady. “Let’s go talk in my office,” he said.

  On the way there, he poured himself a cup of coffee that looked like it had been sitting on the counter in the hallway for six or seven weeks. He did not offer me a cup, and I was grateful.

  Dutton opened the door to his office, turned on the light, and blinked a few times to adjust his eyes. He sat down behind his desk and gestured me to the chair in front of it. “Now get your breathing back to normal and tell me what you’re talking about,” he began.

  “When I got back to the town house, everything in my living room had been tossed,” I told him. “The futon was slashed and the stuffing was all over the room. The DVDs were out of their boxes and scattered to the corners. The . . .”

  “The DVDs?” Dutton’s eyes widened. He’s seen the DVD collection.

  I nodded. “It was obvious someone was looking for something.”

  “Or, they just wanted to hit you where it would really hurt.”

  I hadn’t considered that. “But it’s too big a coincidence that this happens the same time Sharon vanishes. She didn’t just go away. She must have been taken.”

  “Elliot, there’s no evidence that Sharon has been taken anywhere against her will. No signs of forced entry at her home, her office, or her parking space.”

  I bit my lips. “Forced entry at a parking space?”

  Dutton nodded. “No broken glass. No evidence anybody broke into her vehicle. She got into her car and she drove away.”

  “Then maybe it was someone she knew,” I suggested.

  “Maybe. But as a police officer, I’ve got to tell you, there’s nothing that points to a kidnapping. Nothing.”

  I sat there and looked at him.

  “Okay,” Dutton said, “what is it you expect me to do?”

  “Look for her.”

  “I’ve been looking for her since yesterday afternoon,” the chief countered. “I’ve sent out bulletins to other police departments. I’ve gotten photographs of her distributed to every cop in town and to the Middlesex County prosecutor’s office and the state police. I’ve questioned everyone who saw her the day before she vanished. What else am I supposed to do?”

  “Find her,” I suggested.

  “I know this is hard for you, Elliot. Believe me, I do. But everything that can be done is being done, and you’re just going to have to be patient until such time as something resembling a lead presents itself. That’s just how investigations work.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Pretend everything is normal while the clock keeps ticking? You and I both know that the first forty-eight hours are critical in . . . these cases. And a good half of that time is already shot. Tell me what I can do.”

  Dutton put his right hand to his nose, which I’d noticed in the past was something he did when he didn’t have a satisfactory answer. “You can go home and go to bed, Elliot. I’ll drive you.”

  “I’ll never get to sleep.”

  Dutton stood up and reached for his coat. “Take a sleeping pill.”

  “I can’t. My doctor is missing.”

  7

  SATURDAY

  AS I expected, sleeping was pretty much impossible. The truth was, I did have some sleeping pills in the house, but I didn’t take them in case the phone were to ring. I doubt my mind would have shut up long enough to allow for rest, anyway. I didn’t toss and turn, since I have no idea how to toss anything but a baseball, but as the sun came up I sure did lie in bed and watch the ceiling fan, which was turned off and in desperate need of a cleaning.

  My father called at seven. “Have you heard anything yet?”

  “No, Dad. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.”

  “Yeah, and you don’t sound like I woke you up.” My father has a rather eerie ability to see into my mind. He’s like my own personal Amazing Kreskin.

  “Okay, so I’m worried. Don’t tell Mom.”

  “I know you’re not worried.” My mother must have been in the room. “Just let us know when you hear from her.”

  “You sure you don’t want to ask your other son, Gregory?” Never let it be said I can’t be as petty as the next man if I set my mind to it.

  “It’s just cards, for goodness sake, Elliot. You could come, if you knew how to play pinochle.”

  I tried to banish the image of myself, Dad, and Gregory sitting around a card table, and moved on. “I haven’t heard from the plumber yet,” I told him. “Care to give me a guess on how long I’ll have to keep the theatre closed?”

  Dad thought about that, which was good. It didn’t really matter what his estimate would be, but it was a good way to get him onto a new subject, and away from Gregory, at least mentally.

  “I’d guess a couple of days,” he said. “It depends on how far down the rust goes in your pipes.”

  “The way my week is going,” I told him, “I’d expect it goes down to the shopping center of Earth’s molten core.”

  “Don’t be negative, Elliot,” Dad said. “Let me know when the plumber calls. I’ll come up to supervise.”

  “You don’t have to . . .”

  “Yes, I do.”

  After we hung up, I checked the clock. Another five minutes had gone by, and nobody had found Sharon yet. I couldn’t do much until nine, when offices opened. But there was someone I could call who would undoubtedly be awake and attentive this time of the morning.

  “Homicide. Sergeant Vidal.”

  “Hi, Meg. It’s Elliot Freed.”

  “It’s only been two months since I’ve heard from you, Elliot,” Meg said. “Are you forming an unhealthy attachment to me?”

  I wasn’t in the mood to banter. “Meg, Sharon’s missi
ng.”

  Her tone became professional and concerned. “Since when?” She was probably already taking notes.

  “Night before last.” I gave her all the details I knew.

  Meg sighed a little, thinking. “Okay, consider carefully, Elliot. Is there any reason other than what happened to this Chapman guy that Sharon might be a target? Anybody mad at her, anybody with a strange infatuation, anything like that?”

  “Nobody besides me, and I didn’t take her.”

  “Sit tight. Let Chief Dutton do his job. He’s good.”

  A sound came out of my throat that resembled pain and impatience. I’d never heard it before. “I know he’s good, Meg. But I can’t just sit here and wait. I’ve got to do something .”

  “I’m on my way up, Elliot.”

  That threw me. I hadn’t actually seen Meg Vidal since I was doing research for Woman at Risk, which meant I hadn’t been in the same room with her in a good number of years.

  “You’re coming up? Is there something you can do?”

  “Yes. I can sit and wait with you.”

  “Meg . . .”

  Her tone allowed for no argument. “I wasn’t asking, Elliot.”

  “Do you even know how to get here?”

  “I’m with the cops, Elliot. We have GPS now.”

  There could be no dissuading her. I gave Meg my address, and she promised to be in a car on her way from Camden as soon as possible, which would put her here in about an hour and a half. I had no idea how she’d clear it with her department, but she didn’t sound like she cared.

  I took a shower, because if . . . when Sharon got back, it would be best for me not to smell like unwashed socks. And as I was walking back into the bedroom, drying off (carpet be damned!), the phone rang.

  After the ensuing heart attack, it took me roughly .04 seconds to pick up the receiver, but I’d had enough time to think, so I didn’t yell “Sharon?” at the top of my lungs.

  “Is this Mr. Freed?” For a kidnapper, the guy had a very young voice. Cagey little ploy, but I wasn’t falling for it.

  “Who wants to know?” I asked. I was leaning heavily on Bowery Boys movies now, trying to sound like Leo Gorcey, or at the very least, Huntz Hall. You had to respect a guy whose first name was Huntz.

  “This is A-OK Plumbing,” he said. “You called about a problem?”

  WE agreed that I’d meet the plumber at Comedy Tonight within the hour, which would give me enough time to bike to the theatre and still be able to start harassing anyone I could think of about Sharon—mostly her colleagues at the practice—as soon as businesses opened for the day. I got dressed, layered myself with sweatshirts and long underwear (not in that order) to make the ride to Midland Heights tolerable, skipped breakfast (my stomach was in no mood to eat), and grabbed my beautifully reconstructed bicycle to head out.

  I didn’t even look at the DVDs in the living room. I didn’t want to be reminded.

  Now that I thought about it, I’d probably be at or near the theatre by the time Meg arrived. So I called the cell phone number she’d given me, and gave her directions to Comedy Tonight. She said she’d “dealt with the department,” and would be on her way within minutes. I had no doubt she would.

  It had been a while since I’d been out this early—movie theatres don’t often require their owners to be early birds—so it was something of a surprise how cold it was, and how low the sun was in the sky. I’m told some people like the morning, and someday, I must ask one of them why.

  I found myself pedaling much too fast, especially up the hill into Highland Park, and had to scale back. I wouldn’t be very helpful in searching for Sharon if I had to do it from a hospital bed.

  Perhaps a mile from the theatre, I became aware of a car on my left, so I hugged the curb a little more than usual. I’d had enough experience with cars getting too close to bicycles on the road. But this one honked its horn, and when I turned to look, I saw Chief Barry Dutton driving his own personal car up Route 27 and pointing toward the sidewalk, indicating I should pull over.

  Heart in my mouth, I did so. Dutton pulled the car up and opened the passenger side window. “What have you heard?” I sort of screamed.

  “Nothing yet,” Dutton said. “But I need you to verify something for me.”

  For a hideous moment, I had a mental flash of me trying to identify a body at the morgue in Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and I closed my eyes tight to banish the image.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Credit card receipts with your name on them,” Dutton said. “It looks like someone’s been busy charging things. Do you still have a joint credit account with Sharon?”

  “No,” I said. “I have a credit card, but I haven’t used it in years.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Dutton challenged. “Aren’t you an American?”

  “Yeah, but not a good one.”

  “Get in.” He popped the trunk, and I took the front wheel off the bike and deposited it, then got in on the passenger side. When I sat down, he asked, “How did your ex-wife get your credit card?”

  “We were still married when I got the card. We probably got two, and Sharon has one. Can we tell where Sharon is from the receipts?”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” Dutton said as he pulled away from the curb. “We don’t even know it’s Sharon yet. Someone could have stolen your credit card when they were in your house last night.”

  “I carry it in my wallet,” I told him.

  “You keep records of the numbers? There’s such a thing as identity theft.” Dutton was intent on the road, so he didn’t see me cringe.

  “None of the receipts is from before the break-in?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Dutton told me. “We know that someone was in your town house between the time you left for the theatre yesterday and the time you got home. That gives them . . .”

  I groaned. “Roughly twelve hours,” I said.

  “Exactly. So yes, the credit card receipts are all from yesterday, and you can tell me when you left in the morning and when you got home, so the time stamps on the receipts will tell us if they were all while you were out. But we don’t know exactly when the break-in took place. Would any of your neighbors have seen anything, someone suspicious around the front door?”

  I closed my eyes. “I’ve never met any of my neighbors, Chief.”

  “You really are a bad American.”

  He drove me all the way to police headquarters before I remembered about the plumber. Once we got to Dutton’s office, I asked to use his phone, and he groused anew at my resistance to cell phone mania, but gestured that I should go ahead and dial.

  I called Sophie, and thanked my guardian angel that I had her cell phone number, so there would be no danger of Ilsa or Ron Beringer answering the call.

  “Hello?” she asked, tentatively, after a number of rings. It was a Saturday, and she was a teenager. The idea that she’d be awake at eight in the morning was just a little more ludicrous than the idea that I would be.

  “Sophie,” I said. “It’s Elliot. Do me a favor, and go to the theatre. Let the plumber in to look at the pipes in the men’s room. Use your key. You’re in charge.”

  “Of what?” she asked, and I hung up.

  Dutton pulled a file from a rack on the wall next to his desk, and sat down. He opened it to show me faxed copies of several credit card receipts. The chief put on a pair of half glasses to read them, creating an image of Godzilla in middle age, looking over his financial records.

  “These are the receipts from a number of retailers and a hotel bar in Manhattan, all from yesterday,” he said. He turned the records toward me so I could peruse them.

  “These stores don’t strike me as the kind where Sharon would shop,” I told him.

  “You really never use a credit card?” he asked.

  “Really.”

  “How about an ATM card?”

  I’ve never under
stood the word sheepish, because sheep are rarely embarrassed at their actions, but I believe that was the expression I gave Dutton at that moment.

  “You don’t have an ATM card, either?” he marveled. At least, I like to think of it as marveled.

  “Do you have any idea how much the government can find out about you from your ATM records?” I asked him.

  “I’m the chief of police, Elliot. I am the government. And I don’t really think that the fact you withdrew twenty dollars from your checking account on a Friday night is really a dangerous piece of information.”

  I decided to change the subject, since Dutton was showing troublesome signs of having a point. “Anyway, why can’t we take the addresses from these card purchases and trace Sharon, maybe back to the hotel?”

  “I called the hotel already. Sharon is not listed as a guest there, and never has been. The card didn’t pay for a room, only a bar bill. Still, you wouldn’t want useful records like that to show up in your file if you ever disappeared, would you?” Dutton grinned and suddenly seemed very Bill Cosby- esque. I half expected him to put on a colorful sweater and eat some pudding.

  Summoning my best judgment, I ignored him. “If someone’s holding her against her will, the room could be in that person’s name, couldn’t it?”

  “Yes, but since you’re so interested in preserving our citizens’ privacy, I assume you think it would be a bad idea for me to get the name of every single guest in the hotel, and then show it to a civilian like yourself to see if any of the names ring a bell?”

  “You’re not going to let it go, are you?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why I should.”

  “Well, if you want to show me the list, you can say whatever you want about my commitment to privacy or my hypocrisy.”

  “I didn’t get the list. It wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. I sincerely doubt a kidnapper would register at a hotel under his own name.”