by Tim O'Mara
Allison’s cell phone.
I ran to the liquor store and the owner told me Allison had not been in. I went into every open store within two blocks of the apartment and Allison was nowhere to be found.
Her phone buzzed. It was a text from her.
‘I’m OK,’ it said. ‘They said you’ll be hearing from me.’ They?
‘Who’s they?’ I texted.
Then another text came in. All this one said was, ‘She loves you, tough guy.’
Fuck.
THIRTY
Whoever had taken Allison must have followed us from the precinct. The police – including Detective Royce – were now going from door to door interviewing anyone who may have seen anything. As of now,no one had.
All I knew was that my girlfriend was gone, and no one was admitting to seeing shit. Royce told me to go back upstairs and wait, but he knew I wouldn’t. I paced back and forth, up and down my block. Using Allison’s phone, I called a bunch of people on her contact list on the off chance they’d heard from her. I knew it was an exercise in futility but, short of knocking on doors, it was the only thing I could do to keep from going crazy.
Royce came out of the McDonald’s on the corner and walked over. The look on his face was as close to sympathetic as I’d ever seen from him.
‘How you doing?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Not good. Still nothing?’
‘We’ll expand the canvass area, see if that helps,’ he said. ‘I hate to ask you this again, but you’re sure you saw nothing suspicious when you were driving here or when Edgar dropped you off?’
‘I wasn’t looking for anything, Detective. There was no reason to.’ Clearly there had been. We just didn’t realize it until it was too late.
‘I hear ya,’ Royce said. ‘I just saw you on the phone. Nothing?’
‘I didn’t expect anything, but …’
Then it hit me who my next call should be to. He picked up after two rings.
‘Nephew,’ Uncle Ray said. ‘You keep this up and I’m—’
‘Allison’s been kidnapped, Uncle Ray. From in front of my fucking apartment.’
It takes a lot to shock Uncle Ray. This seemed to do the job. He was speechless for a few seconds. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m back at One PP. I’ll be at your place in ten minutes.’ I heard him tell someone to bring the car around and do it quickly. ‘You got cops there already, I assume.’
‘Royce is here. We’ve got lots of uniforms working the scene.’
‘You’re about to have a whole lot more,’ my uncle said. ‘Put Royce on.’
I handed the phone to Royce. ‘Yes, Chief,’ he said. ‘Already done, sir, and still working on it. I understand.’ Pause. ‘I won’t go anywhere until you get here.’ Pause. ‘You’re welcome, Chief. I’ll see you in ten.’
Royce handed me back the phone.
‘What did he thank you for?’
‘Doing my job, I guess. You do know he’s quite fond of your girlfriend.’
‘Yeah.’ I could feel my eyes starting to fill up. This was no time for that. ‘I do.’
Royce looked around the intersection. He did one of those three-sixties he’d seen me do on the school roof right after MoJo had been killed. ‘If I know Chief Donne, this corner’s gonna look like the Saint Paddy’s Day parade in about twenty minutes.’
‘He does like to do things big.’
‘That’s good for this kind of thing. We’ll have all those cops to help us, the media will turn up, this is gonna be a big deal. Hopefully, all the attention will bring someone to say they actually saw something helpful.’
‘Along with the usual nut jobs and attention-seekers.’
‘Can’t have one without the other.’ Then he did something he’d never done in all the years I’ve known him. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘We’re going to find her, Mr Donne. Believe that.’
I looked the detective in the eyes. ‘I do, Royce,’ I said. ‘I have to.’
Sometime later, my uncle walked up. He was alone so I figured he had told his driver to stay with the car. Five minutes after he arrived, the intersection of Greenpoint Avenue and Leonard Street did, indeed, look like Saint Patrick’s Day.
He saw Royce a few feet away, finishing up with a uniform. Uncle Ray gave him a face that said Give me something.
‘A guy who was sitting on his fire escape,’ Royce said as he walked over with his walkie-talkie and pointed it across the street, ‘says he saw a woman matching Allison’s description getting into a van. It seemed to him she didn’t want to get in, but it all happened so fast.’
‘What kinda van?’ I asked.
‘Guy said it was silver. Or white. Or possibly gray. It either did or didn’t have a logo on the side for some sort of business.’ He paused. ‘Our eyewitness was taking advantage of the nice weather to enjoy a taste of Mother Nature’s gift to Jamaica.’ He put his index finger and thumb to his lips. ‘He did say the plates were yellow and blue, so it’s a New York vehicle. It’s not much, but it’s something.’
It wasn’t much, and I didn’t think it came all that close to something. And with at least a twenty-minute head start, the white-silver-gray van with or without a logo on its side was probably miles away by now – either on its way upstate, out to Long Island, maybe even hiding in plain sight across the bridge in Manhattan with thousands of other similar vehicles. My head was pounding. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down.
When that didn’t work, I turned around and kicked the metal garbage can that was sitting on the corner. It hurt like hell, but I had to do something.
‘You know that doesn’t help, Raymond,’ my uncle said.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, feeling like an ass. ‘But at least it hurts like hell.’
Royce looked at us both and wanted to say something. Whatever it was, he decided against it and took out his notebook instead. What he did say was, ‘Tell me again what Allison had on her. Not what she was wearing, I have that, but in her possession.’
I’d told a cop earlier, but I figured this was Royce’s way of protecting any more of the city’s property from being taught a lesson by my foot.
‘Her work bag,’ I said. ‘Notebooks, pens and pencils, her laptop. Maybe her video drone, but I doubt it. I’d have to check upstairs for that.’
‘The wonderful video drone.’
As he said that, Edgar pulled up in front of my apartment, almost exactly where he had dropped Allison and me off less than an hour ago. Along with his expansive knowledge of technology, Edgar was also an Olympic-class finder of parking spaces.
He walked over to where Royce, Uncle Ray and I were standing. ‘Ray,’ he said, ‘I just heard.’ He looked at Royce and my uncle and knew he couldn’t say he found out through his mostly illegal police scanner. ‘What the heck happened?’
I filled him in on the details and he got quiet.
‘Mr Martinez,’ Royce said, ‘how did you get through all the squad cars?’
He gave an embarrassed shrug and glanced at my uncle. ‘I showed them my business card and told them Chief Donne was expecting me.’
Royce grinned. ‘Did you notice anything suspicious before when you drove from the precinct to here?’
Edgar shook his head. ‘I didn’t even think to look. I probably should have.’ He turned to my uncle and stuck out his hand. ‘Hello, Chief Donne. Sorry for the lie.’ For Edgar, each time he saw my uncle it was like meeting Mickey Mantle.
‘Hey, Edgar,’ my uncle said. ‘Don’t worry about it. You got any ideas here?’
Edgar gave that some heavy thought. The Chief of Detectives had just asked for his opinion. ‘You tried her phone?’ he asked.
I held it up to show him.
He thought some more and then said in a voice above his usual volume, ‘Darn it!’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Her laptop.’
‘What about it?’ Royce asked.
‘Does she have it with her?’
I stepped in. ‘As f
ar as we know, Edgar. Why?’
He reached into his bag and pulled out his laptop. ‘I should be able to find her computer using the Find My device on her computer.’ He leaned on the hood of his car, punched a bunch of buttons and waited. After a while, he said, ‘Dammit!’
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Someone turned the device off. Unless they turn it back on, it’s no good.’
‘Shit,’ I said, loud enough to attract the attention of a few cops.
‘All right, boys,’ my uncle said. ‘Let’s bring it back together here.’ Royce, Edgar and I faced him like we were in a huddle in a pickup football game. ‘We know that Allison’s been abducted. We know her computer’s not going to help us find her. We have the slightest piece of info to go on about a van that could be thirty to fifty miles away in any direction.’ He paused. ‘Anything else we have that I don’t know about?’
We all thought about that. I said, ‘She’d been writing about this kid. She’s been calling him Harlan S., but that’s not his real name. According to him, people are looking for him, so he’s been bouncing around a lot.’
‘How does she contact him?’
‘She doesn’t. He contacts her, sets up a meet, she goes.’
‘OK,’ Uncle Ray said. ‘So it’s a possibility that whoever’s looking for this Harlan S. might have taken Allison, thinking she knows where he is. Does she?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He called her from a different phone each time and they met at a different location each time. The kid knew how to stay below the radar.’
Uncle Ray said, ‘Fuck.’ Then he turned to Royce. ‘You gave her access to the crime scene. Anything there?’
Royce shook his head. ‘Just what you know already. She’s the one who made the connection to the Roman numerals.’
‘So,’ Uncle Ray said, ‘there’s also the possibility that whoever took Allison did so as retaliation for helping us with the case.’
Now it was my turn. ‘Fuck.’
The four of us stood in silence for about half a minute. Surprisingly, it was Edgar who broke the silence. He turned to me. ‘Was there anything else she was working on? For the website?’
I ran that through my brain for a bit. ‘She was doing some restaurant features and a report on dating apps for college students, but—’
‘Nothing worth snatching a journalist for,’ Royce said.
‘No.’ Then something came to me. ‘After we realized what MoJo was looking into, she was thinking about doing a piece on the various ways opioids are distributed in the city. Legal and non. She was interviewing doctors, users, and some dealers on the street. It’s possible she hit on something.’
‘Did she tell you anything?’ Royce asked.
I shook my head. ‘She was always tight-lipped about her work until it was published or she needed my opinion on something, so I don’t know.’
‘And again,’ Edgar said, ‘that would all be on her laptop and she didn’t wanna save any of her stuff in the Cloud because she was afraid of people hacking into it. She did save it on a flash drive, but she always kept that with her. I told her to keep a copy at home, but …’
Again, thirty seconds of silence. This one was broken by my uncle.
‘So we go back and talk with all the people we know she’s spoken with in the last seventy-two hours. With any luck, one of them turned her onto something or someone else we don’t know about and we go talk to them.’ He looked up and spun around. ‘I’m gonna put a rush on seeing what any of these traffic and surveillance cameras got on ’em.’ He turned to me. ‘You ready to go upstairs yet, Ray?’
I shook my head. ‘I think I’d go crazy up there alone.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Edgar said. ‘For a walk,’ he added. ‘Not crazy.’
‘Thanks, man. How about you just pace the streets with me for a while?’
‘I can do that.’
Royce asked if Allison’s phone was fully charged. ‘Close enough,’ I said.
‘Keep it on you and I’ll be in touch.’
‘Thanks, Royce. I appreciate it.’
‘Thank me when we get her back. All bullshit aside,’ he said, ‘she’s one of the good ones, Mr Donne. Trust me when I say that any rock I come across is going to be turned over.’ He looked at my uncle. ‘And I’m not just saying that because Chief Donne is three feet away.’
That got me to smile. ‘I feel ya, Royce.’ I shook his hand and hugged my uncle. I turned to Edgar. ‘You ready to pace?’
We got as far as the church when my phone rang. I looked at it optimistically but did not recognize the number. ‘Hello?’ I said, not knowing who or what to expect.
‘Is this Ray?’ a female voice wanted to know. ‘Raymond Donne?’
‘Yeah. Who’s this?’
‘It’s Robbie,’ she said. ‘Robbie Roznowski? I work with Allie at Here and Now. I was monitoring my police scanner and just found out what happened. This is just horrible. Is there any news?’ Then she added, ‘Any new news, I mean?’
‘Just what you heard on the scanner, Robbie.’ I was starting to put a face to the name. They had an opening party a few months back and I met all her co-workers, but I’m not always good with connecting names to faces. She sounded like she may have been the one Allison told me reminded her a bit of Edgar; she thought the two should meet. Apparently, Robbie was also not too skilled in social situations, but technically savvy and a top-notch researcher and fact-checker. ‘Have you heard anything?’
‘No,’ Robbie said. ‘But we want to put it online.’
What? ‘Like for a story, you mean?’ I did not hide my disgust.
‘Not like that, Ray. I mean for our readers to know what’s going on. We have more than one thousand subscribers now. That’s a thousand more sets of eyes keeping a lookout. We can also get the more mainstream media involved. Most of us still have lots of connections out there.’ She paused for a second to breathe. I picked up that she pronounced mainstream the same way the former governor of Alaska had. ‘Allie told us about your attitude toward the press – sometimes – but this is one of those times we can really help. No matter what you think, we do stick together. When something bad happens to one of us, it’s an attack on all of us.’
I let that sink in and decided she was right. Desperate times and all that. I told her everything I knew – including what Allison was wearing and what the cops were doing. I even threw in the vague description of the van – and she promised to get it on their website and to as many other media outlets as she could.
‘Thanks, Robbie,’ I said. ‘Hey, if she kept a record of who she was talking to the last few days, reach out to them or send me their numbers.’
‘Will do. Keep me in the loop, Ray. It’s the only way we can help. I’m gonna post this right now along with a picture of Allison and the number of the police tip line. Do you want to add a quote from you?’
I declined firmly enough so she knew not to ask again. I thanked her for her efforts, we said goodbye, and I filled Edgar in on the conversation. He seemed pleased.
‘This is what social media should be used for,’ he said. ‘Not spewing that horse manure Lansing and his group put out there.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Right.’
Edgar looked at me as I slid the phone back into my pocket. ‘Sorry, Ray,’ he said. ‘I know this has to suck. A lot.’
‘Yeah. I can’t imagine what’s going through Allie’s mind.’ Actually, having just been abducted myself, I could. ‘It’s gotta be freaking her out.’
‘I know I would be if I were her. Then again, she’s a pretty tough customer, Ray.’
‘That she is, Edgar,’ I said. ‘That she is.’
THIRTY-ONE
There have been two mornings in my life where I’ve awakened hoping the events of the previous day had been a dream: the day after my father’s fatal heart attack, and the day after nine-eleven, which forever changed the word impossible.
This was the third such day.
Ron Thomas. I already knew what this was going to be about. I thought about not answering, but knew he’d just keep trying until he got me.
‘Hello, Ron,’ I said. I was now feeling the headache from last night.
‘Ray,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t reach your phone, so I tried Allison’s. I am so sorry about what happened. It’s all over the front pages, the radio and morning TV.’ Say what you want about journalists – and a lot of it has been said by me – but when something happens to one of their own, they band together. ‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m in shock, Ron.’ How are you doing? ‘I’m still processing it.’
‘That’s why I’m calling, Ray. I think you need to stay home tomorrow.’
Right. ‘I don’t know, Ron. I can’t do much from home and I think that’s gonna drive me crazy. I may need something to distract me.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Your job is not something that distracts you, Ray. It’s something you do to the best of your abilities.’
Said the man with the forty-eight-inch high-definition TV in his office.
‘Normally, I’d agree with you, Ron, but tomorrow I think it’s best I come in.’
‘And I’m telling you the opposite, Ray.’
I rolled out of bed and stood up. It hurt to do so. Lying in bed for hours with your body in stress can do that to you. ‘Ron,’ I said, ‘with all due respect, you can’t tell me not to come to work.’
‘Actually, Ray, I can.’ I heard some papers being shuffled on his end. ‘It says in your contract that, and I’m quoting here, “If there comes a time when an administrator determines any teacher is unfit for duty in such a way that it creates an undue risk of danger to the school environment, said administrator has the authority to insist that teacher remove himself from the school grounds until further notice.”’