It was late when Zachary got home. He counted himself lucky that his door had been fixed and he was back at his own apartment instead of Kenzie’s house, and therefore wouldn’t have to explain where he had been all night.
Until he got to his door and saw a sticky note on his door, Kenzie’s way of warning him that she was there, so he didn’t have a heart attack or call the police when he realized someone else was in the apartment. He smiled at the little heart that she had drawn on the note, and tried to pretend that her presence there hadn’t just added additional weight to the already heavy burden he was carrying. Which felt like it was right in the center of his chest and stomach instead of on his shoulders, where people normally talked about responsibility or emotional burdens. He felt more like a heavily pregnant woman looking like she was about to burst with all of the additional weight he was packing. The stomach cramps only added to the mental image.
Zachary shook his head, trying to shake the distracting thought of Bridget and her pregnancy out of his mind. He didn’t need that interfering with his life too.
He tried to be very quiet so he wouldn’t wake Kenzie up. They hadn’t talked about getting together. He had thought that she would be happy to have her space back to herself after a couple of nights with him.
Apparently, she wasn’t looking for space.
He didn’t turn any lights on, feeling his way around and occasionally using his phone screen for a bit of light if he needed it. He got ready for bed, plugged his phone in on the bedside table, and slid into the bed as quietly as possible. Kenzie tended to sprawl right in the middle when she was asleep, but this time she was keeping to her own side of the bed.
“I didn’t expect you to be so late,” Kenzie whispered. She turned over to face him.
Zachary’s heart thumped. He didn’t want to have to explain all that he’d been doing that night to her. As far as she knew, he could have ended up doing surveillance for the night. He didn’t always come home.
“Oh, hey. You didn’t stay awake all night, did you? Have you had some sleep?”
“Yes, a little. Pretty restless, though. I was worried about you.”
“You don’t need to be worried. Everything is fine.”
She reached out in the darkness, feeling for his body, and put one arm gently around him, cuddling up to his chest. Zachary relaxed, letting go of the tension. He put one protective arm around her and sighed. He loved when she snuggled up to him like that. He breathed in the scent of her body and her shampoo, resting his face against her head.
“I do worry. I know you said that you were going to be out doing some interviews tonight, but I thought… that would just be during the evening. Unless you’re interviewing someone on night shift.”
“Some interviewing. Some investigating. Watching people, trying to sort out what’s going on.”
“Mmm-hm.” Her voice was sleepy. “Did you figure anything out?”
“I think so. But I’m still not sure where to go from here. I will have to think about it.”
“Sleep on it,” Kenzie murmured.
“Yeah.” Zachary kissed her hair. “That’s what I need to do.”
He listened to her breathing, long and regular. She was soft and relaxed in his arms, slipping quickly back into sleep.
But for him, sleep was always elusive, even when it was late and he was tired. Rather than clouding and slowing down when he got tired, his brain seemed determined to jump into a higher gear, worrying over everything that was on his mind; the case, his relationship with Kenzie, anything he had said or done during the day, whether he had made any mistakes, if he had failed to do something he was supposed to. If he was a good enough human being.
Some days, just the part about being a human being was hard enough.
He lay there holding her and tried to slow his breathing down to match hers and join her in sleep.
17
Despite how late he had been getting home, Zachary was up in the morning before Kenzie. He was having his second cup of coffee and poring over pictures of Madison and Noah when she got up. Kenzie rubbed her eyes, yawning.
“Don’t you ever sleep in?” she complained.
Of course, she already knew the answer to the question, and they had discussed it many times before. Zachary did go through periods of depression when his body and brain wanted to nothing but sleep, or when a stressful situation became too much and he just shut down, but the rest of the time… sleep was elusive, and didn’t stay for long.
But Kenzie wasn’t actually looking for an answer.
“What time did you get in last night?” she asked after pouring herself a mug of coffee from the carafe sitting on the burner. “I know it was late, but I didn’t look at the clock.”
“I’m not sure. Maybe two.”
“Too late. At least I got back to sleep after that. Sometimes when I wake up at night, my body decides it’s time to get up, and I have trouble settling in again.”
“Mmm-hm.”
“What about you? You must have been exhausted. Did you fall right asleep?”
She probably already knew the answer to that one too.
“No. Took a while.”
“You should have stayed in bed a while longer.”
“Wouldn’t have been able to get back to sleep. I would have just kept you awake tossing and turning.”
“Maybe I could have helped you relax and get back to sleep.” She put an arm around his shoulders, bending down to brush his cheek with a kiss. Zachary turned his head to kiss her on the lips, which tasted like morning breath and coffee. He closed his eyes and savored her closeness.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be here.”
“Well, my place felt so empty after you left. I decided I didn’t want to knock around there alone.”
“So you ended up knocking around here alone instead.”
“I wasn’t expecting that, but it was okay. When I’m here, I can still… feel you around me. Because this is where your stuff is, you kind of… leave an imprint here. But at my house, there isn’t enough of you there to feel that.”
Zachary considered the comment. Did that mean she wanted him at her house more often? That she wanted him to leave some of his things in her closet, drawers, and bathroom? That she wanted him to move in?
He tried to cut off the train of thoughts. He didn’t want to push the relationship too fast. They would just end up derailing again.
Kenzie sat down on the couch and pulled a blanket throw around herself. “Did you make some progress last night, then? Was this on your missing persons case, or something else?”
“The missing person. I… have some thoughts about it. Spotted a couple of people that she or her boyfriend partied with. Watched them for a while.”
Kenzie nodded. “Did you ask them if they had seen her? I suppose you would have started with that if they had said so.”
“I didn’t approach them. Just watched.”
Kenzie raised an eyebrow. “You can’t get very far if you don’t ask. You didn’t think it would be productive?”
“I was warned—and I could see—that they were not the kind of people who would want to share anything with a private investigator or the police. You have to be careful who you talk to.”
“Yes, you do,” Kenzie agreed, with a direct gaze that reminded him he had done just that when trying to track down Jose. He had not been as careful as he should have been. He had walked into it as if none of the people he was talking to might actually be dangerous.
Lesson learned.
He ducked his head, trying to suppress the red flush he knew was spreading across his face. As if he could prevent it just by trying.
“I’m glad you’re being careful,” Kenzie said. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Zachary nodded.
Kenzie leaned forward, looking at Zachary’s screen. “Is this her? Do you mind if I look?”
Zachary considered, then decided it was okay. Kenzie helped him out with other cases
. They were used to bouncing ideas off of each other. He got up from his desk chair, disconnected his laptop, and took it over with him to sit beside her on the couch.
“I’m looking at the pictures of her and her boyfriend, looking for people who reoccur across several pictures, and also looking for clues in the pictures as to where they were. The more information I can get about where they were spending their time, the more easily I’ll be able to find where they are now. Chances are, they will have gone to places convenient to her house, the school, or his place. There should be two or three clusters of locations.”
“And whichever one is not close to her house or the school should center on his place.”
Zachary nodded. “Unless he is also close to the school. It sounds like he grew up close to there, but I don’t know if he still lives in the area. And Madison doesn’t live far from the school. So I might just end up with one big cluster.”
“Nothing is ever for sure,” Kenzie agreed.
“Yeah.”
Zachary swiped to the next picture in the gallery. They both studied the faces and any location clues. Kenzie pointed to a window, through which a two-color neon sign was visible.
“That looks like it’s close to Old Joe’s Steakhouse.”
Zachary closed his eyes, picturing the street and everything he could construct around it. Kenzie was right. There was a bar on the same street with a similar two-color neon sign. He wrote down the photo number and a notation next to it. “I’ll check that out.”
Kenzie had her phone with her. She tapped at it, zooming in on the steakhouse on a map until she got down to street view. She panned around, looking for the neon sign and for what was across the street from it.
“If it’s that sign, then that was taken in something called Union Public House.”
Zachary added this to his note. “Never been there. Have you?”
“No. Kind of a seedy place, if I remember right. Not the kind of place I’d hang out with the girls.”
Zachary nodded. The bits of the interior caught in the pictures were not fancy. Dim lights, black and white photos on the wall, not a trendy place you might expect young adults to go. “They seem to show up in a wide variety of places. Some of them higher-class, and some of them… cesspools.”
Kenzie laughed. “I guess young people are always trying out new places, experimenting, seeing where they are comfortable. Playing different roles. Trying to find out where they feel comfortable. What fits.”
“Yeah.”
Zachary swiped to the next picture. In each one, they looked for clues about the location.
“These aren’t all pictures you got from Rhys, are they?” Kenzie asked, frowning.
Zachary immediately understood her concern. Rhys was especially vulnerable. And too young to be attending at bars and clubs.
“No. I pulled a bunch of them from Madison’s social networks. Selfies that she or her friends took. She shouldn’t have been there either… must have false ID.”
Kenzie nodded. “I’m just glad Rhys wasn’t.”
By the end of the day, Zachary had identified as many locations as he could from the pictures. Some of them helpfully had geographical locations in the metadata, but most of the ones that Madison had taken did not. She or someone else had been smart enough to shut off geolocating on her phone.
He reviewed the different locations, trying to identify clusters that would help him to track her down. The pins were scattered much more broadly across the city than he would have expected. It was only a small city, not a big metropolis like in other states, but he still hadn’t expected Madison to have had the run of the whole city.
There were also a few people who he had spotted in a number of pictures. There were, of course, several with the friends that he had interviewed at school. But there were also a handful of men Noah’s age or older who made repeat appearances at different parties or clubs. Zachary tagged the various subjects. He’d try finding all of their social networks and then comparing friends lists. “Probably time to put those away,” Kenzie commented when she saw Zachary rubbing his eyes. “You remember how late you worked last night. You need to give your body and brain a rest tonight.”
“Every day that I let pass without finding her…”
Kenzie’s lips pressed together. She nodded. “I know. I don’t like thinking of her out there alone. But remember… the police don’t think she was kidnapped. If she’s just somewhere with this boy… then it’s not like when Bridget was missing, or when you were… you know.”
“But we don’t know that.”
“I know. But at least you’ve made progress.”
Zachary nodded. He wasn’t going to be able to go on another bar crawl looking for Noah and the other men and girls that appeared in the pictures. If he didn’t get enough rest, his brain would let him down. He wouldn’t be alert enough to spot danger or clues. He wouldn’t be able to make the split-second decisions that might be needed to save his own life or Madison’s.
18
Zachary knew that it was probably too early in the day for Madison and Noah to be out and about. If they were spending a lot of time partying, they probably slept until noon or later. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t look around and ask questions at some of the locations around the clusters he had identified. If he were lucky, maybe he’d be able to get a line on them before they even woke up.
People were not nearly as willing to help him as they had been when he had canvassed around the school. He met with a lot of blank stares and clenched jaws, and more than one person told him to get lost. Though not that politely.
He was glad he was there in the morning instead of at night. Experience told him that this was probably not a neighborhood he wanted to be wandering after dark. Not without a posse of his own.
He approached a woman sweeping the sidewalk in front of her store. “Excuse me, ma’am? I’m looking for a missing girl…”
She rested, leaning on the broom, looking at him. Zachary approached with his phone held low, so she wouldn’t think he was trying to make some kind of move on her. Both hands visible, no weapons. Nothing threatening. He was glad in such situations that he was so short and slight; it would have been a lot harder to portray a nonthreatening appearance if he were six feet tall and two hundred and fifty pounds.
She studied his face for a moment before looking down at the phone, still wary, but willing to look.
“She’s been missing almost a week,” Zachary explained. “There have been some sightings in the neighborhood; I’m trying to find out where she might be staying.”
“Staying? If you think she’s just staying somewhere, why are you looking for her?”
“She might be in danger. I don’t know whether she is being held against her will. If she is… I want to help her.”
“And if she isn’t?”
“Then I’ll just talk to her. I’m not here to cause trouble, just to give her a hand, get her reunited with her family if she wants.”
The woman studied Madison’s picture. “I don’t know. She looks like a lot of girls. They come and go.”
Zachary nodded understandingly. “Is there someplace they tend to live? Maybe an apartment where a few of them share the rent, different girls rotating in and out?”
She started to sweep again, moving slowly, the movements of the broom short. Away from his feet, but Zachary still felt like she was trying to shoo him away.
“Who knows where they go, or why?”
“Right. So you don’t know? Maybe a building you’ve seen girls at before? Young girls like this?”
She had been with other girls in the pictures. New friends, not the girls from school. Drinking buddies. Party girls. A new lifestyle. One that didn’t fit with her home life.
“I didn’t tell you anything,” the woman muttered.
Zachary looked at her in confusion for a moment. “Okay,” he agreed. “You didn’t tell me anything. Send me on my way.”
She nodded. Her eyes fl
icked down the street. “The brick apartment building down there. That’s where they go. That’s where I see them.”
Zachary didn’t turn his head. He looked out the corner of his eye. “I’m just asking!” he said in a louder voice, one meant to be overheard by any watchers.
The woman batted at his shins with the broom. “Just get out of here. I don’t know anything.”
He withdrew, not looking her in the face again, muttering under his breath about crazy old bats and striding across the street, shaking his head.
He stopped there, taking a deep breath. He pulled a water bottle out of the courier bag over his shoulder and took a drink, taking a glance down the street at the building she had referred to.
Was the woman overly cautious about reporting anything that went on in the neighborhood? Or were they being watched? Was she aware of something going on with the girls in that building and didn’t want to be seen tipping him off?
There were plenty of old women who were just paranoid or delusional. She might be one of them. But she was not that old. And she had seemed to have it together. She hadn’t been warning him about squirrels or unicorns or Martians trying to monitor their brainwaves.
Zachary took a few more swallows of his water, looking around for anyone who might be paying attention to him. He didn’t see any watchers. But that didn’t mean that there weren’t any. They could be inside the buildings, watching through cracks in the blinds. They could be out of sight, listening and monitoring everything going on in the neighborhood. Zachary put his water bottle back away and walked down the street. He stopped to tie his shoelace, looking around from another angle. He went into a convenience store and bought a chocolate bar. He didn’t ask the man at the counter about Madison. He didn’t announce himself as a private investigator. He was just a guy having a chocolate bar for breakfast.
The owner or manager of the store didn’t say anything to him. Watched him, but didn’t comment on him being new to the neighborhood or warn him to stay out of business that had nothing to do with him. Just another guy, slaving away in a convenience store, making sure that he didn’t get ripped off by a shoplifter or armed robber.
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