“Yeah, she says she’d be okay with that. She says ‘hi’ to you and Pat.”
“There, you see? All you had to do was ask. Pat…?” he called to his partner somewhere else in the house. “Kenzie and Zachary say hi.”
There was an answer from far away, casual and faint. Then Zachary heard a clear ‘wait a minute!’ The next time Pat spoke, it was obvious he was right next to Mr. Peterson. “Kenzie and Zachary? Together?” His tone was eager and excited.
“Yes. Zachary is at Kenzie’s house as we speak.”
“Well, that’s awesome! Congratulations, Zach!”
Zachary murmured his thanks, blushing even more than he had when he had told Mr. Peterson that he and Kenzie were back together. He listened to Pat and Mr. Peterson banter back and forth for a minute, and then Pat departed to go back to whatever project he was working on.
“As you can tell, we’re both just tickled that the two of you are trying again,” Mr. Peterson said. “That’s really good news.”
“No guarantees,” Zachary warned. “I really want it to work, but I can’t guarantee everything is going to work out like I want.”
“I know, Zach. Trust me. I’ve been through my own relationship issues. When Lilith and I split… well, you know how hard that was. I knew that it wasn’t going to work, that I was just lying by staying in the relationship. But it was so hard to admit it and leave a relationship that I’d been in for so many years.”
Zachary remembered showing up on the Petersons’ front steps to get some help developing his photographs—something Zachary was allowed to do even though it had been a long time since the Petersons had been his foster parents—and Mrs. Peterson informing him that Lorne no longer lived there. It had been a huge shock. He had known they weren’t well-suited to each other but he’d never thought that they would get divorced.
None of it had made any sense until he had met Patrick Parker and realized that Mr. Peterson had, as he had said, been living a lie for all of those years.
But Lorne and Pat had now been together for over twenty years, and it was hard to believe that there had ever been a time when Zachary had thought that Lorne and Lilith Peterson had belonged together.
“I’m going to do my best to make it work,” Zachary repeated.
“Good. How about the two of you come down for Sunday dinner this weekend? It seems like forever since we have seen you, and as for Kenzie, I’m not sure if we’ve seen her since Christmas.”
“It hasn’t been that long,” Zachary protested. He thought back, trying to think of each time that he’d been down to visit Lorne and Pat. He was sure Kenzie had been there at least once since Christmas, but Mr. Peterson was right, it had been a long time since she’d taken the trip with him. “I’ll ask her if she’s free.”
15
Noah was a ghost. Zachary did several image searches to find him on the internet or track down his social profiles, and couldn’t find him. He tried the image alone and in combination with the name Noah, but probably Noah wasn’t even his real name.
It seemed highly unlikely that a boy of his age would not have any social networking profiles. But of course, some parents refused to let their kids set up social network profiles while they still lived at home, and people advised that young people not use their own pictures for the profile pics. Gamers liked to use avatars. But Noah didn’t strike Zachary as the gamer type. Gamers didn’t generally show up at high schools to pick girls up. They were the ones at home, leveling up virtually rather than in real life.
Zachary switched to looking at photos on the school’s website. Kids who had participated in special events, spectators at football games, everything he could find. Maybe he had been a student teacher, and they had misjudged his age. Anything was possible.
That led to another thought, a leap that Zachary hadn’t taken before. He dialed up Campbell’s number and lucked out when Campbell answered.
“Zachary. What’s up? I wasn’t expecting to hear anything from you so quickly. You haven’t found our missing girl already, have you?”
“No. Working on it, but I’m not even close yet. I had a question, but I suspect it’s one that you can’t answer.”
“Why don’t you call someone who knows, then?”
“I think you know; I just don’t think you can say.”
Campbell laughed shortly. “Okay, exactly what does that mean?”
“I’m trying to track down Noah. Anything about him. But I’m not pulling anything up.”
“Welcome to the club. We weren’t able to get an ID on him either.”
Zachary considered that for a moment. But Campbell wasn’t necessarily telling the truth.
“It occurred to me that it’s possible he’s an undercover cop.”
“A cop? No.”
“Is that a real ‘no,’ or just an ‘I can’t tell you that’ no?”
“It’s a real no. As far as I am aware, Noah is not an undercover officer.” There were a few seconds of silence from Campbell. “But it’s not an avenue that we considered. I haven’t contacted any feds about whether they have someone in the area. Could he be DEA or another branch? I have no idea. I can put out a query, but chances are, they won’t answer me.”
“Yeah.” Zachary leaned back in his seat, a less-than-comfortable chair at a diner, stretching. “They aren’t generally too forthcoming about that kind of thing.”
“You giving up?”
“No. Just rethinking. I can’t find a social profile. But he’s out there somewhere. Someone has seen him. What about traffic cams or surveillance at the school? Did any of them capture him? His license plate?”
“It’s on the list of things to check, but it takes a lot of man-hours to go through video logs, if they caught anything, and if they were kept. We can’t check every license plate of every car spotted in the area. We have to see one of the two of them getting into the car or driving it.”
“I have the phone numbers of a couple of her friends. I can see if any of them can tell me what kind of a car he drove.”
“I think I have that in here somewhere. Hang on a moment.”
Zachary could hear Campbell rifling through papers and a few key clicks as he looked for the information. It was a few minutes before he came back on.
“Yeah. White late model Subaru is what I’ve got.”
“So you wouldn’t have to look for any car, just the white Subarus.”
“Or anything that looks like a Subaru. Because witnesses honestly are not that good with cars. And there’s always a possibility that he changed what he is driving, too. If they planned to disappear, he might very well have swapped for something else to lead us in the wrong direction.”
“True,” Zachary admitted. “But it wouldn’t hurt to check the white Subarus.”
“We will if we have the time and manpower. Until then, it’s going to have to wait.”
“If he took her, or if she went with him, then his address is the best place to look for her. Unless you’ve got some good leads in another direction. Without his name or identity, the best bet is to find his license plate.”
“We’ll get to it when we can,” Campbell repeated.
“But you don’t think there’s anything to worry about. You think she’s just shacked up with this guy somewhere.”
“There’s no law against disappearing.”
“There is for sheltering a runaway.”
Campbell grunted. “Not worth our while.”
Zachary cast around for some other way to find Madison. “How do the phone logs look? She must have called this guy a lot over the last couple of months. So you must know his cell number.”
“Looks like he’s changed it a couple of times. My guess is that he’s buying burners and not refilling the minutes. Use one up, switch to a new one.”
“Are they registered?”
“Fake info. No joy there.”
“What about location? Can you see where his phone was most of the time? You must be able to narrow d
own the location he lived and worked in by where the phone is most often.”
“Need a warrant to get that kind of information from the phone company. And who knows how long it takes them to get it to us. Or how useful it will be once we get it. It’s not like we live in a big city. It’s not going to narrow the search radius much.”
Zachary sighed. “Well, I’ll keep up the search the best I can.”
The only concrete information Zachary had on Noah was what he looked like. He had pictures of the boy’s face. An internet search had not turned up anything, but that didn’t mean it was a dead end. Zachary messaged Rhys to send him all of the pictures he had of Madison and of Noah.
Of course, Rhys wouldn’t send him everything. Judging from what Zachary had seen so far, Rhys had a lot of pictures of Madison. He’d been watching her for a while, maybe for months before Noah showed up on the scene. Since the school year had started, if not before that. As far as Zachary could tell, Rhys had a crush on Madison and had demonstrated some borderline stalkerish behavior in taking candid pictures and videos of her.
Zachary could understand it. He’d had problems of his own with letting Bridget go after they had broken up. And with having to keep tabs on where Kenzie was and what she was doing when they had first started to go out together. Since he had gone back to therapy and had some med changes, he’d been able to curb most of those impulses.
Most of the time.
So he knew that Rhys wasn’t going to send him everything, but Zachary needed as many pictures as he could get.
Rather than trying to send them all individually, Rhys set up an online album and shared it with Zachary, which allowed him to browse through them and pick out the ones that would work best for his purposes. Armed with several different shots of Noah and Madison, he started his search near the school, working in an outward spiral.
He approached everyone on the street or in the commercial establishments that he could, showing a couple of pictures of Noah and asking whether they knew him or had seen him around.
There were plenty of ‘no’s,’ people who avoided him, and those who wouldn’t look at the pictures. But he did get a few who looked at the pictures and thought that they had seen Noah around, or who identified other people in the pictures that they knew or had seen around. Zachary noted the information in his notepad, along with a list of addresses where people had recognized him. He would plot them all when he got back to his computer and, hopefully, there would be some clusters that would help him to nail down where Noah lived or worked or hung out. People had to know him.
If the police had thought that there was foul play, then they would have at least published Noah’s picture to ask for information on him as a person of interest. But they didn’t think that Madison was really missing. Putting Noah’s picture in the paper, under those circumstances, could be considered inflammatory. It could ruin the reputation of a young man who was innocent of any crime.
At a bodega half a mile from the school, the elderly man at the counter frowned at the picture Zachary showed him and used his fingers to zoom in on Noah’s face, and then on Madison’s and each of the other people in the background of a party shot. Hopefully, people Noah and Madison hung out with on a regular basis. Eventually, the man put the phone down on the counter. He jabbed a finger at Noah’s face.
“I know this boy. He comes from the neighborhood. Been here a few years. The girl, I don’t know her. Not one of the ones I have seen him with.”
Zachary was a little surprised by that. “You’ve seen him with other girls?”
“He’s been here a few years,” the man repeated. “He has one girlfriend all that time?”
“No,” Zachary agreed that wasn’t likely. Noah had only been with Madison for a couple of months. If he’d been there for a number of years, then of course he’d gone through a string of other relationships. “No, just the last little while.”
“I have not seen him for a long time. Maybe a year. Used to be here all the time, when he was younger. Some of these other boys,” he poked his finger at some of the other faces in the party crowd. “Some of them, I know. Seen them here. Not in here,” he clarified, indicating his store, “out there… other places. On the street, in cars, in bars. Not a good crowd.”
A knot tightened in Zachary’s stomach. He nodded his understanding. “Do you know where any of them live? Any idea, even if it’s not a particular building, just the area…?”
“Him… used to live with his grandma. Red brick building a few blocks down.” He gestured in the direction of the building Noah had lived in with his grandmother. “But no more.”
“Does she still live there? His grandmother?”
“No. She died. Then he was gone, not living here anymore. But then I started seeing him again. Maybe he was back for a while.”
“With these guys?” Zachary suggested, indicating the other young men in the picture.
The old man scratched his bristly chin, thinking about it. “Yes, maybe. Them or other boys like them. Trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
He shrugged. “Can’t say. I’m not looking for any trouble.”
“What are they? A gang? Friends? Organized crime?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I keep my head down. Don’t make waves. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have eyes. These boys are trouble. If he is in with them now…” He looked down at the picture. “Looks like he is. That means he’s trouble too.”
“Okay. I appreciate it. You know where any of the others live?”
“Don’t know. Come back at night, check out the bars and clubs, maybe you see some of them. But you be careful. They hear you’re asking questions…” He trailed off and grimaced. “I don’t think you want to be on the wrong side of that crowd.”
Zachary nodded. “Thanks. I’ll be careful.” He hesitated. “The girl, though, you’ve never seen her?”
“I don’t remember. Not a good idea to stare at girls you don’t know.”
16
Kenzie wouldn’t like the idea of Zachary going back to bars and clubs at night to find known troublemakers related to the missing persons case, so he didn’t tell her. He said only that he had to go out to do some interviews.
If she knew, she would have told him it was stupid to go into a dangerous situation without a gun or some kind of weapon to protect himself. But Zachary would never carry a gun, and he knew that whatever weapon he took into a situation could potentially be used against him. There wasn’t any point in trying to explain that to Kenzie. She already knew, but that wouldn’t stop her arguing about it.
His guts were in knots as he got out of his car to check out a few of the hot spots. He could have taken a tranquilizer, and it would have helped to settle him down, but he didn’t. There were some situations in which hypervigilance and his ADHD distractibility were advantages rather than disabilities. He needed to be aware of everything going on around him. He needed to key in on everything that was off by the slightest bit. Every detail could be significant. Any change in the environment, every person approaching him, could be a danger. And he would be aware of it all.
He took a few deep breaths before going into the first club. His chest and abs were tight with tension. He tried to look casual and relaxed, to smile and slouch and mask the anxiety. He circulated for a few minutes before going up to the counter. Took the temperature of the room, walked to the men’s room in the back in order to scout out any extra security, any private areas in the back. He wasn’t part of the club scene and, even if he had been, he probably would have avoided the area.
There weren’t any obvious hazards. It might be a slightly tougher crowd than he was accustomed to, but there weren’t obvious weapons or illegal activities going on. Any drugs were below the tables. Any illicit business being conducted there was quiet, not out in the open. After checking out the bathroom, Zachary wandered out to the bar. He ordered a beer because ordering a soft drink when he was there by himself might be suspect. He
wouldn’t do much more than wet his lips; it was only a prop.
He turned on his stool as he raised the glass, looking around. He had a good memory for faces, so he didn’t need to refresh his memory looking at the pictures he’d already looked at a hundred times that day as he canvassed. He scanned faces, not meeting anyone’s eyes or looking in any one direction for very long.
He saw one young man he recognized from a picture of Noah partying. Just one, but that was a good start, especially when it was the first place he had entered. He sipped the beer and put it down on the bar. There was a mirror on the wall behind the bar, and he used it to spy on the boy without looking directly at him.
He was loud. His manner confident, almost bullying. But not quite. He behaved pleasantly toward the small party he was in and toward the wait staff. Brash and full of smart comments and stories. Enjoying himself. Unconcerned with anyone outside of his bubble.
He downed several drinks before having anything to eat. Zachary suspected he was already high on something. Loud and talkative, having a great time.
There were mostly men in the group. A lower percentage of women, not a one-to-one ratio like there would be if they were all couples. The women with them were young, dressed well, showing plenty of skin and acting happy and eager to please. They all had drinks.
It wasn’t easy to nurse his one beer for long enough to keep an eye on the party. Zachary ordered wings and fries and a coke as well, eating slowly, pretending he was using social apps on his phone and enjoying himself.
The girls weren’t paired with specific men, but slowly circulated among them. They danced several times, different songs with different men. They sat in different seats, carrying on conversations with different members of the group. They walked down the hallway that led down to the bathrooms in the back at different times, in various combinations.
Zachary sighed, eating a few more fries. Something was going on and, as the old man at the bodega had pointed out, if he got into the middle of it and started asking questions, he was going to get in trouble.
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