The Last Good Guy

by T. Jefferson Parker

  I nodded.

  “You believe he’d do that?” Walker asked.

  “It’s not something that people like us can understand.”

  “His own daughter?” asked Darrel, disgust in his voice and on his face.

  I let the obvious answer go unspoken.

  “What if she’s lying about all of this?” asked Darrel. “According to your story, she’s been lying successfully for fourteen years.”

  “I believe her.”

  Darrel set the pencil on his desktop. “Do you want to believe her?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You bet it does, so don’t fool yourself. I’ve met her. She’s convincing. Beautiful, too.”

  “I believe her, Darrel.”

  A sigh and a dry smile from the detective. “My mom likes Reggie Atlas. Never misses Four Wheels for Jesus on her damned phone.”

  One of Darrel’s Explorers came to the cubicle with two cups of coffee, set them on his desk, told Darrel that one of the lieutenants needed him when he was finished. Darrel thanked him for the coffee and said he was almost done.

  I still hadn’t gotten an answer to my biggest question, but before I could ask it again, Darrel surprised me.

  “SNR Security is a secretive bunch,” he said. “Privately owned. Won’t talk to the press, as you’ve probably discovered. Won’t talk to law enforcement without a warrant or a subpoena. But here’s the kicker—they don’t like black people or Muslims very much. I’m a Black Law Enforcement Union member, right? So-Cal chapter. Have been for years. We have a good relationship with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Long story short: There’s a list of complaints against SNR longer than any other private security company in the whole damned country. Everything from verbal abuse to physical assault. SNR won’t hire blacks or Muslims, and they won’t work for black- or Muslim-owned companies. This, according to complaints filed with us and the SPLC. SPLC has yet to take legal action. They have to choose their battles. That’s why the private databases have nothing on SNR.”

  I tried to make sense of discriminating against Muslims and people of color often enough to raise complaints. Maybe legal action. Bad publicity for a company trying to guard its privacy. No upside at all that I could see.

  “So,” Darrel said. “Let me know when you’ve got SNR all figured out. Right now, I have to run.”

  “Has anyone seen Daley since the 7-Eleven?” I asked again. “I figure you’ve been in touch with your counterparts in San Clemente.”

  Darrel weighing me, sharp eyes in a heavy face. A distant tug of brotherhood between us, but maybe not enough to count for much.

  “A girl who looked like Daley Rideout was seen at the Blue Marlin in La Jolla, two nights ago. So says the manager. Daley was with three men and a woman. All older, relationships unknown. They ate dinner in one of those upstairs cabanas that have the privacy curtains you can pull.”

  “To hide the missing child you’re socializing with,” I said.

  “The general manager is Yvette Gibson. Tell her Darrel says hello.”

  “I owe you, Darrel.”

  “Yeah, you do.” He drummed his big fingers on the table. “Roland? I don’t want to believe Penelope Rideout. It would confirm my worst opinions about the human race. But I do believe her. So this favor is just Darrel Walker betting his conscience. Keep me in the loop.”

  23

  ////////////////////////

  YVETTE GIBSON met me in the lounge of the not-yet-open Blue Marlin, a prosperous restaurant in a jewel-like town. She was one of the most striking women I’d seen, tall, elegant, and ebony-skinned. Hair up, a sleeveless silver dress, and sharp short boots. No smile. I told her hello from Darrel and still got no smile.

  She walked me through the stainless-steel stools and bistro tables, past the huge aquarium that divided the dining room. Hundreds of fish, big and little, locked in that hypnotic round-and-round thing they do.

  We climbed the stairs. Through the smoked-glass walls I saw the Pacific surging against the rocks below and sailboats clipping atop the spangled sea. One of my favorite writers is buried down there.

  Upstairs, the restaurant offices and an outdoor patio with heaters, a long grill, a bar, and several cabanas. We stood amid the cabanas, white-and-green-striped, with heavy canvas draperies you could close for privacy.

  “Mr. Ford, I am not in the habit of discussing my guests with investigators of any kind. All I can tell you is what I told Darrel. A girl had dinner here on the patio two nights ago. A party of five. She looked like a picture Darrel’s deputy showed me on his phone. I’d never seen her before, here or anywhere else. They had dinner between seven and nine.”

  “What name was the reservation under?”

  A heavy stare. Assessing the damage to my face. “Darrel said the girl is in trouble,” said Yvette Gibson. “On the missing kids websites.”

  I nodded. “She’s fourteen and bright. Challenging the status quo at home and school.”

  “This girl didn’t look like an eighth grader,” said Yvette. “Expensive clothes. Makeup and lipstick, but not heavy. Carried herself well and seemed comfortable with her people. But she was by far the youngest one of the group.”

  “Did you talk to any of them?”

  “I did not.”

  “Did you overhear any conversation?”

  “They drew the privacy curtain after cocktails were served.”

  “Did the girl drink?”

  “A virgin Moscow Mule. I won’t tolerate underage service here. I looked at the check after Darrel’s man left.”

  “May I see it?”

  “No. I can’t do that kind of thing.”

  I nodded. “They picked her up at a friend’s condo after lunch, Tuesday of last week. She hasn’t been home since. ‘They’ being two young men of questionable moral character. Dangerous men.”

  The heavy stare again. “You’re not playing very fair, Mr. Ford. But maybe that’s your nature.”

  “She’s up against something, and time is short.”

  She sighed, shaded her eyes from the midday sun. “They used a corporate credit card. Signed by the man who made the reservation. Adam Revell.”

  “He’s one of the girl’s acquaintances.”

  “Might he have been the gentleman who did that to your face?”

  “Which cabana?”

  I followed her over. It was one of eight, its privacy curtains tied back and the tables and chairs neat and clean for the day’s first seating. We stood under the canopy and I pictured Daley and her SNR escorts.

  “Middle chair, facing west,” said Yvette. “The woman beside her, three men across.”

  In the shade of the canopy I called up the photo gallery on my phone, found the downloaded IvarDuggans pictures of Connor Donald, Eric Glassen, and Adam Revell. She identified Connor Donald and Revell as two of the three men in Daley’s party.

  I found the Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry website photo of Pastor Reggie Atlas. “I know he wasn’t there that night, but . . .”

  She took a long look, shaking her head. “He looks familiar, but I see hundreds of faces a week.”

  I explained Atlas, his Cathedral by the Sea in Encinitas, his popular streaming sermons, his thousands of online followers.

  “I go to Jah Love in El Cajon,” she said. “We’re lucky to get fifty people on any Sunday.”

  On a long shot I found my downloads of the oddly old-fashioned family taking down the flag at Paradise Date Farm that evening.

  Yvette Gibson swiped the screen with a slender finger, studied the image. Scrolled forward. Scrolled back.

  “Yes. The couple,” she said. “They were dressed much nicer, and not wearing guns. Visibly, at least. Who are these people?”

  I explained SNR the best I could: a private security company with accounts all over the country
and ties to the Paradise Date Farm in the Imperial Valley, and the Cathedral by the Sea. Where, I pointed out, Daley Rideout had apparently attended at least once. Yvette handed my phone back.

  “Mr. Ford? I have a thirteen-year-old girl. She’s looking for some kind of grown-up trouble, just like I was at her age. So much of it out there. This girl Daley. Maybe she’s looking for that kind of trouble. I’ll call you and Darrel if I see her again.”

  I followed her downstairs and into the lobby. A frogman was in the aquarium, changing out a filter. Some of the fish fled in schools, others nosed closer to him with what looked like simple curiosity.

  “I want you to tell me how this turns out,” said Yvette. “No matter how it breaks. You do that, Mr. Ford, I’ll buy us a drink and get us a quiet place to talk.”

  I said I would.

  Standing in the shade of the Blue Marlin awning, I wondered where our fun five had gone after leaving here. Was Daley free to go her own way? Or was she a willing captive?

  I called Howard Wilkin, one of my acquaintances at the San Diego Union-Tribune. I’d helped him out with a story last year because I trusted him. A big story, biggest of the year for San Diego, if you measure in terms of life and death. We made thirty seconds of small talk. One of the things I like about reporters is they’re always in a hurry. He thought about my request for a moment, then said he’d get back to me with Reggie Atlas’s home address.

  I called Darrel Walker, disappointedly unable to confirm that Atlas was at the Blue Marlin with Daley Rideout that night. He told me maybe we had the good pastor all wrong. Which meant that Penelope Rideout was an even better liar than I’d thought. Darrel told me to keep up the good work.

  * * *

  —

  BACK HOME, BURT was glued to Clevenger’s wasp-cam feed from Paradise Date Farm—nothing unusual going on there.

  Then I called Penelope. No answer, so I left a message.

  On my way to the truck, my phone rang. I figured Wilkin or Penelope, but I was wrong. Didn’t recognize the caller number. Sometimes you catch a break.

  “Ford Investigations.”

  “Mr. Ford? This is Alanis Tervalua. We talked last week at school about Daley?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Daley still won’t answer calls. She’s on all the missing-children sites. We want to talk to you again.”

  24

  ////////////////////////

  I SIGNED IN at the security desk in the Monarch Academy office and talked briefly with Wayne Cates, who eyed my battle scars suspiciously but said nothing about them.

  “Good news from the Rideout family?” he asked.

  “We’re working on it.”

  The girls and I sat at the same picnic table under the coral tree in the same September heat. I told them Daley had been seen at a restaurant in La Jolla two nights ago. They looked at each other when I said that. Then back to me, disbelief on their faces, as if the stakes had been raised when they weren’t looking.

  “Everything we told you last week was the truth,” said Alanis.

  “But we didn’t tell you everything,” said Carrie.

  I waited, looking at them in turn. Alanis with a one-eyed stare from behind her shiny black hair. Carrie with her wide, green, seldom-blinking eyes.

  “Okay,” said Alanis. “Daley was kind of with Nick, like we told you. And Nick was . . . murdered the same day Daley left here. So we know it wasn’t Nick that abducted her. But there was a secret guy that Daley had also been talking to. For maybe, like, a couple of months. While Nick and her were, like, together, sort of.”

  “No,” said Carrie. “They’d been talking for three months when she first told us. But Daley had known him for years. Off and on. They were like ghosts flying through each other, she said.” She shrugged. “That was how she described it—like ghosts flying through each other.”

  “But she swore us not to say anything about him,” said Alanis. “Not to anybody. She wouldn’t even tell us his name. Like we’d know him. Or like he was important.”

  “She wouldn’t tell us how they met, either,” said Carrie. “But it wasn’t online, because her sister wouldn’t let her use her phone for that. Right? So we don’t know his name and we don’t know how they met.”

  “What do you know about him?” I asked.

  “That he’s old enough to be her father,” said Alanis.

  “No, grandfather!” said Carrie.

  “And she thinks there’s something spiritual between her and him. Daley said that before she met him she felt like a puppet in the rain. That talking to him was like turning off the rain so she could turn into a girl instead of a puppet.”

  “She actually said turn into a woman,” said Carrie.

  Alanis swept aside her hair and cut her friend a look. Then back to me. “And know what else? Daley said this secret old man was the first person she’d ever met who didn’t make Jesus Christ seem funny.”

  “Like a joke,” said Carrie. “Who didn’t make Jesus Christ seem like a joke.”

  “Whatever. Why do you always miss my points?”

  I said nothing for a moment. Watched Alanis Tervalua’s cyclopic stare collide with Carrie Calhoun’s wide green eyes.

  “Sorry, Lana.”

  “Always have to win.”

  “I know. I just get excited.”

  “So there you go again.”

  “Sorry. I’ll be quiet.”

  Thus, silence. Just the breeze in the coral tree leaves and the droning sound of a Cessna 182 lowering into Carlsbad Airport. I recognized the sound of that plane without even looking, the very plane in which Justine had met her terrifying, solitary, unnecessary end. This time I didn’t look up. Sometimes the throaty growl of that Lycoming engine brings joyful memories, and sometimes brute loss.

  “Where is she, Mr. Ford?” asked Alanis.

  “Two nights ago she was with Adam Revell, and Connor, and some others.”

  “So she’s okay, then?” asked Alanis. “Is she going to go home soon?”

  “I don’t think she’s okay,” I said. “We need to find her. Tell me about Adam and Connor.”

  “We’re kind of friends,” said Carrie. “I mean, we all knew each other from Alchemy 101. Like we told you last week.”

  “I was never kind of friends with those two,” said Alanis.

  “But we haven’t been to Alchemy 101 much the last few weeks,” said Carrie. “There’s something kind of off about it. Daley thought so, too. But it’s hard to say what.”

  “I can say what,” said Alanis. “They hate on you with their eyes.”

  I stepped closer to what I thought was the deep end, touched my toe to the water. “Do you go to the Cathedral by the Sea?”

  “Once,” said Alanis. “Same creep-out I got from Adam and Connor.”

  “Twice,” said Carrie. “Both times with Daley.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “Cool building. And—you know how churches are, everyone smiling and forgiving you ahead of time. For stuff you don’t even know you did. That cathedral has all these activities for teens. They want you at Surf Day and Snow Weekend and Mountain Camp, on and on.”

  “But you’ve never done any of those?” I asked.

  “Not my deal,” said Carrie.

  “You were there twice with Daley?”

  “She’s interested in activities because of her sister,” said Carrie. “Who’s even more stricter than my own mom. Taking away her Facebook and all that. I mean—you can’t ever say I told you—but Penelope locks Daley in her room sometimes. After nailing the window shut. I’ve seen the nails. And I’ve seen Daley’s foot marks on the door where she’s kicked it.”

  “The more her sister wouldn’t let her do things, the more she felt trapped,” said Alanis. “So she’d hang out with Nick. And she’d sneak off to
Alchemy 101 with Adam or Connor.”

  I pictured Daley in all her teenage frustration, paying her five bucks, getting her hand stamped, and losing herself in Alchemy 101. Music, dancing, and plenty of other girls and boys to hang with. And I imagined her at the Cathedral by the Sea, being wooed by the youth minister—or maybe by Atlas himself, her own very, very secret father—hoping that her meddlesome sister wasn’t about to bust her.

  “Did either of you ever meet the pastor, Reggie Atlas?”

  “Once,” said Alanis. “He shook my hand with both of his. But I saw something in his eyes I didn’t trust.”

  “Daley introduced me to him,” said Carrie. “He was nice and kind of reserved. Like older guys can be. I mean that as a compliment, you know?”

  “So Daley knew him?” I asked.

  Carrie pursed her lips, green eyes scanning my face. “Well, I guess at least sort of. She was the one who took me to the cathedral my first time. She’d been there before, but not often. We had to make up this double lie to her sister and my mom so Daley could get away that morning.”

  “What was Daley’s opinion of the pastor?”

  Alanis shrugged. “Never said anything to me.”

  Carrie was nodding along. “Me neither. You don’t think he’s got something to do with Daley, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  In my profession, I tell lies to get to the truth. People expect it and I don’t mind doing it. Except lying to the trusting. Trust is hard to betray. Ask anyone who’s hidden a diagnosis from a child, or cheated on a spouse, or had a faithful pet put down.

  Maybe someday I could do better. Tell them not a lie but the truth: Hey—Daley is back now and she’s fine and she can’t wait to see you.

  “How can we help you?” asked Alanis.

  “Please let us help,” said Carrie.

  I put one of my big mitts over one of each girl’s hands, small and warm as sparrows. I looked intently at them with my older-guy eyes in my older guy’s beat-up face. They looked back at me in their young, unique, and peculiar way, and they were afraid.