by R. L. King
“So, you think she might have had one and it caused her to take off?”
“It’s quite possible. She did make an unauthorized phone call, as you know, which tells me that she might well have suffered a setback. Some of her particular delusions involve paranoia—the belief that certain people mean her harm.”
“Certain people? Who?” Jason leaned forward. “Have people around here been mistreating her? Bullying her?”
Delancie shook his head. “No, no. In fact, the few times I’ve seen her under this impression, the focus is invariably upon different people each time. Sometimes it’s random people who walk by. Sometimes it’s a staff member, or a resident. Once, it was even me. It’s not an uncommon problem, and she’s not the only one here who suffers from it.”
Jason sighed. “Well, whatever’s going on, I need to find her. And when I do, I’m taking her home with me, back to Ventura. This place obviously isn’t working for her.” He glared at Delancie. “I want the number of the local police department, and I want to talk to her friends here.”
“I’ll be happy to provide you with all the information I’ve given the police about the case, and put you in touch with the detective who’s responsible for it. But I’m afraid I can’t let you talk to any of the residents here.” Delancie looked genuinely rueful. “I doubt they would know anything anyway, but regulations prevent it. I can’t allow you to compromise their treatment programs by interrogating them.”
Jason almost growled. “But you’re okay with compromising V’s treatment program by not keeping a close enough eye on her that she can bolt without anybody seeing a damn thing, right?”
“Mr. Thayer—”
“No, no, never mind,” he said, shaking his head and standing. “Forget it. I can see I’m not gonna get anywhere with you. Give me the police info and I’ll get out of your hair. Next time you talk to me, it’ll be with my lawyer. If you can’t run this place well enough to keep track of a seventeen-year-old girl with mental problems, maybe there needs to be somebody put in this place who can.” Jason was bluffing, but he hoped Delancie didn’t know that. He didn’t even know any lawyers. Maybe Stan did. It didn’t matter anyway, because there was no way he could afford one.
“Again, Mr. Thayer, you’ll have to do what you must,” Delancie said, rising also. “Let me get that information for you. And if there’s anything else I can do to help you that doesn’t require compromising confidential information—”
Jason was about to grunt out a negative when he realized there was something. Let’s see how much Mr. Sharing-and-Caring really does want to help. “Yeah. There is, actually. Do the kids here have their own rooms?”
“Some of them do, yes.”
“Does Verity?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Okay, then. I want to see it. If she doesn’t have a roommate, that shouldn’t compromise anybody’s confidential information, right? I’m my sister’s legal guardian, so I should have access to her stuff, right?”
Delancie didn’t answer for a moment, appearing to be mulling over Jason’s request, perhaps looking for ulterior motives. Finally he nodded. “All right, Mr. Thayer. I’ll take you there. But I must insist that I remain in the room with you while you look.”
“Yeah, whatever. Let’s go.”
They were heading out the door when a young girl around fourteen came barreling down the hall. “Dr. Delancie,” she called, skidding to a stop. “Davey Chen is having an attack. Brittany said I should come get you.”
Delancie looked ruefully at Jason. “I’m sorry, Mr. Thayer, but I do need to attend to this. I hate to ask you to wait, but I can’t let you go to Verity’s room alone.”
Jason was about to protest when another voice sounded from behind him. “I’ll take him up there, Doc.” He turned to see one of the two guys who’d come to the door with Delancie—the bald black man. “You go deal with Davey. It’ll be okay.”
Delancie obviously didn’t like this idea, but he got one look at Jason’s expression and sighed. “All right. Thank you, Charles. Just make sure that he just goes to Miss Thayer’s room, that he doesn’t take anything with him when he leaves, and that you both come back here when he’s done. I’ll be up when I can.” With another sigh, he quickly headed off to follow the girl.
“Let’s go,” Jason told Charles. “I gotta get out there and start looking for her, so time’s wasting.”
Charles nodded, leading him back down the hall to the common area, then up a flight of stairs. “This way.” Jason noticed a kid about fifteen sitting at the top of the stairs, his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking gently back and forth. The kid didn’t even appear to notice him and Charles as they passed.
Verity’s room was second from the end of the hall. Charles pushed the door open— “We don’t let the residents have locks here,” he said in answer to Jason’s questioning look—and waved him in. “Like the doc said, you can look around, but I can’t let you take anything with you.”
Jason got started right away, and it didn’t take long for him to determine that the room held nothing of interest. Desk, dresser, and closet contained nothing but a few pieces of clothing, notebooks, pencils, and similar impersonal items. He checked under the bed and beneath the mattress, but found nothing else. “She didn’t have much stuff, did she?” he asked Charles. “Do you know what she took with her?”
“She had a bag—I think she took some clothes, a few books, her portable CD player and some discs. She didn’t have a lot, you’re right. She wouldn’t have had a lot of time to pack, either—the staff do rounds every hour, and they’d have caught her for sure if she didn’t get out fast.”
Jason nodded, feeling more and more stressed. There were no clues here. “You guys already went through here, yeah?”
“Yeah, after we discovered her missing. Sometimes they leave notes. Didn’t find anything, though.”
Jason sighed. “Well, this was a bust,” he said at last.
“Coulda told you that,” Charles said. “But it makes sense you’d want to look for yourself.”
Jason glanced up. Charles was scribbling in a small notebook he must have taken out of his pocket. “What are you writing there?”
“This? Oh, nothing to do with Verity. I keep notes about stuff I need to do so I don’t forget.” He motioned toward the door. “Hey, listen, if you’re all done here, we’d better go. I gotta get back to work, unless you want to see anything else—?”
Again, Jason sighed. “Nah, that’s okay. I guess my next stop is the police station.” He looked at Charles. “You knew V, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve worked here for a while. You get to know the residents.”
“Did she seem upset about anything? Was anybody hassling her? Do you have any idea why she might have wanted to leave here so quickly?”
Charles shook his head. “Not that I know of. She was always kind of a quiet kid—listened more than she talked, and seemed sad a lot. But nothing different than usual lately.” He paused. “This is a good place, Mr. Thayer. They take good care of the kids here. And she was on track to get out on her own soon, too. It didn’t make any sense for her to take off now.” He offered Jason his hand. “You take care. I hope you find your sister. I’m sure Doc Delancie’s doing the best he can to track her down, but havin’ family involved can move things along, you know?”
Jason shook the offered hand. He almost jerked, startled, when he felt a small piece of paper touch his palm, but managed to suppress the reaction. He shot a questioning look at Charles, but the man merely made the most imperceptible of head-shakes and smiled. “You ready to go back down now?”
“Uh…yeah. I’m ready.” Jason pocketed the little piece of paper and followed Charles back down to the common room.
Delancie was just coming out another doorway, looking frazzled. Jason was strangely satisfied to see that the man was capable of being frazzled—it made him somehow more human. “Did you find anything, Mr. Thayer?”
Jason shoo
k his head. “Nope. I guess my next stop is the police. You got that contact info?”
Delancie nodded. He pulled out a notebook similar to the one Charles had, quickly copied the information from a business card onto it, and handed it to Jason. “Lt. Arrelli is handling the case. Talk to him, and he should be able to tell you more than I’m allowed to. Good luck, Mr. Thayer. I assure you, this kind of thing happens occasionally, and we’ve always had the runaway back here within a few days, safe and sound. I’m confident the same will be true for your sister.”
“Yeah…” Jason grumbled. “I hope you’re right.”
He waited until he was back at his motel room before he looked at the paper Charles had slipped him. Carefully unfolding it and spreading it out on the table, he stared at the hastily scrawled words:
Kona Club, SJ, 8 p.m.
He scrambled to the nightstand, yanked the local phone book from the drawer, and riffled through the business section. There it was: Kona Club, on Monterey Road in San Jose. He found a pen and wrote down the address below the penciled note, then pulled out his map. That was a few miles south of here. Sounded like some kind of bar. What the hell—?
Why would this guy want him to go there? Did he know something about V? Or was he part of whatever was going on, and wanted to get him on his own turf? Who was this Charles guy anyway, and why did he—
The thought that popped suddenly into his head almost made him cringe in embarrassment. All at once he could hear Verity’s voice on his machine, clear as if he was playing the recording again: “Charles says I have to go…”
He could have kicked himself. He had somebody who was connected to V, who might even know what the hell was going on, right there alone in a room with him and he’d spent his time pawing through her underwear drawer and looking for clues in her textbooks! “Idiot!” he said to the empty room.
Okay, then, of course he was going to have to go. But eight o’clock was a long time away, and he still had the cops to talk to. Maybe they’d already found her.
He didn’t really believe that, and thus wasn’t surprised when he went to the precinct station and got the story from Lt. Arrelli. He had to wait a while, but eventually a short, balding guy with a moustache and an outfit that practically screamed “harried, overworked civil servant” showed up and asked him what he was doing there.
Jason explained things to him, and he nodded. “Yeah, I know. She’s definitely on our radar, and we’ve got word out to the beat cops keep an eye out for her. But I gotta tell you, Mr. Thayer, with all the violent crime going on around here these days, it’s not a high priority. Girl almost eighteen who runs away of her own free will—I know you don’t want to hear this, but when I got gangers killing each other every day, guys dismembered in alleyways, women getting gang-raped, bums and hoboes everywhere…one girl who’s eighteen in a month who took off on her own—” He shrugged. “We’ll do what we can, that’s all I can promise you.”
Jason sighed. He couldn’t even dredge up his usual anger at the man. He’d been a cop’s kid—he knew all about how some crimes got investigated more than others. Police departments were almost always strapped for funds, and they had to make the hard choices every day. Especially these days, with the government in bad shape and so many people unemployed and not paying taxes. “But you are looking for her, right? You haven’t just written her off because you think she’s fine?”
“We’re looking for her, Mr. Thayer. I just wanted to be straight with you.”
Jason nodded. “Fair enough. And I’m gonna be straight with you—I’m gonna be out there lookin’ for her too. Because I don’t believe she’s fine. And if you’d heard the message she left on my machine, you wouldn’t either.”
“I can’t stop you from doing that,” Arrelli said. “Just don’t get in the way of my investigation, and don’t do anything illegal. I know you’re worried about your sister, but don’t become my problem. You got that?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Oh, and Thayer?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful. I know you’re not from around here. I don’t know what things are like down where you come from, but this area—it’s more fucked up than the garden-variety burbs. There’s a lot of dangerous characters on the streets here, and we don’t got the manpower to keep ‘em all under wraps. So take care of yourself, especially at night. I s’pose it won’t do me a damn bit of good to tell you to just go home and leave this thing to the professionals, will it?”
“Not a damn bit,” Jason agreed. “But thanks for the advice. I’m pretty good at lookin’ out for myself.”
“That’s what they all say,” the cop muttered.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jason had several hours to kill before his meet with Charles, so he used them for research: studying his map of the area (he liked to be familiar with the streets in case he had to get out of a bad situation in a hurry) and then heading over to the nearest library to take a look at the last few weeks of local newspapers. He doubted it would do any good, but figured he’d see if there were any other suspicious-looking missing persons stories or anything else that might catch his eye. It was another thing he’d learned from his dad and Stan—sometimes it was the thing that seemed totally unrelated that ended up breaking the case. He asked the librarian for the previous two months’ worth of papers, then took the stack off to an empty table in a back corner and spread out the most recent one.
Two hours later, he’d gotten through them all. He stared at the neat stack for a long time: Arrelli had been right. For an area that was supposed to be mostly bedroom communities and computer companies, this place was seriously screwed up. Practically every paper he’d opened had contained a story about at least one missing child, escalating gang activity (the predominant gang around here seemed to be something called Dead Men Walking, but other, smaller ones were getting in on the fringe action as well), rapes, murders, violent armed robberies—sure, this was a large area and large areas had crime, but this was crazy.
Even that wasn’t the strangest of it, though. Jason doubted he’d have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking through the papers sequentially, but two other types of stories caught his eye as well. They were less frequent, maybe once or twice a week at most, but they seemed so odd that by the time he got through the first month he started looking for them specifically.
One had to do with a significant uptick in the number of transients who’d showed up in the area and seemed to be settling in, with more turning up every week. Jason didn’t have anything against most of the ones in Ventura—he’d even gotten to know a couple of them who hung out downtown and been fascinated by the stories they’d told him in exchange for a fast-food meal or a bottle of cheap booze. But he knew, too, that they weren’t all just unemployed people looking for work. A significant number of them—higher than you might expect, Jason realized now—weren’t right in the head. It had gone from the old days, with the occasional bag lady walking down the street talking to her shopping cart, to whole camps of them who had somehow found each other and huddled together for mutual protection. Jason tended to avoid this type when he encountered them—he felt a little ashamed about it, since none of them had ever approached him in a threatening manner—but he just didn’t want to get involved. He had enough of that to deal with Verity. His mind flitted briefly back to the two bums he’d met at the rest stop.
The other type of story that he noticed—it was hard to miss—was the accounts of horribly violent crimes. These were less frequent than the transient stories by far, but much more shocking. Jason remembered something Lt. Arrelli had tossed off in his list of things the department had to deal with: “guys dismembered in alleyways”—he’d thought at the time that the cop was exaggerating for effect. But no, there it was, right there on page 3 of the paper from a couple of weeks ago next to a cheery ad featuring a grinning used-car salesman: Gruesome murder claims man near East San Jose bar. This was a respectable local paper, so they didn’t go into
the gory details, but it was clear enough: the man, who had been a semi-regular at one of the nearby bars, had indeed been dismembered, or disemboweled.
Jason stared at the words, eyes wide. That wasn’t the kind of thing you saw every day. That was fucking Jack the Ripper territory. You’d have to be pretty damn pissed at a guy—or a class A psychopath—to do something like that to him. The police, said the article, had no leads, but advised members of the public to be careful and to avoid going out alone at night. No shit, Sherlock, he thought.
He found two similar stories: the first was a businessman who had suddenly and inexplicably tossed a 61-year-old female stranger in front of a commuter train, and the second was a small camp of transients who’d all been slain around their campfire, their throats cut and their bodies laid out in a wheel-spoke pattern with their feet facing the fire. The businessman was in custody and, as of the article’s publication date, was on suicide watch—he claimed he had no idea why he’d done it and had immediately collapsed, distraught, as the train had crushed the screaming woman’s body. No suspects were in custody for the hobo camp murders. Cynically, Jason wondered how high a priority that would be, given the nature of the victims.
He sighed, tossing the last paper on the pile. Of course, all of this had nothing to do with Verity—except that it made it even more imperative that if she was out there, he had to find her fast. Sure, she’d been a resourceful kid when they were growing up, but she’d spent the last five years living mostly outside normal society. The thought of her out on the street with violent gangers and dismembering murderers and mentally unhinged bums made his blood run cold. Why was he sitting here reading newspapers when he should be out there looking for her?