Runaway

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Runaway Page 2

by Anne Laughlin


  Vivian saw them coming. “He’s waiting for you.”

  She made Jan as nervous as a fourteen-year-old boy, as if she were about to reach out and smother Jan with her breasts. She was so richly voluptuous and sure of herself that Jan felt ill-equipped to deal with her. It was like having Mae West as your office manager. If Vivian ever let her into her bed, Jan thought she could probably satisfy her. But she’d want to bring in her special toolbox and leave nothing to chance.

  They walked into LJ’s office.

  “There you are,” he said as if they were an hour late and not fifteen minutes early for their shift. “Sit down, already. We’ve got a lot to go over.”

  LJ was a block of a man, broad-shouldered and muscular, but starting to fill out. Middle age and sloth were going to force him into a new wardrobe soon.

  He turned to Peet. He always addressed her when the three of them met, had done so ever since Peet joined the company. It was clear he thought Peet’s background with the homicide police gave her more stature than Jan would ever have.

  “What’s up, boss?” Peet asked.

  “A buddy of mine sent a guy to us. Some North Shore executive whose daughter is missing. I need you to go up there right away to interview the parents.”

  He passed a piece of paper across the desk.

  “How long has she been missing? How old is she?” Jan asked.

  “She’s sixteen and she’s been gone at least twenty-four hours,” he said. “That’s about all I know, other than he sounds like the sort of guy who needs to make things happen fast.”

  “Well, it’s his daughter missing,” Peet said. “I think any parent would sound frantic.”

  “No, it’s not like that, exactly. It’s more like he’s just pissed that she’s gone.”

  “Has the girl run away before?” Jan asked.

  LJ looked at her as if she were a little slow. “Didn’t I just say I don’t know anything else? You have to go up there and ask them. And find the girl, pronto. This guy is the CEO of some electronics manufacturer up there. If we impress him here we might pick up his worker comp business.”

  Jan looked at the man’s name and address. Alan Harrington on Willow Road in Winnetka, one of the wealthy suburbs north of the city. Jan had worked quite a few missing teen cases in that area, and she wondered about the number of kids from there that she found on the city streets, dirty and drug-addled and still resistant to going back to a comfortable home. She understood running away from something bad, but her conception of a bad living situation was light years away from that of an upper middle class suburban kid.

  “We’re still on for following the Wilson husband tonight?” Jan said.

  Their plan for the evening had been to catch up on paperwork and then head out to the Lincoln Park address of Ron and Paula Wilson. Paula Wilson wanted proof that her husband was leaving their bed in the middle of the night to go have sex with another woman. She’d confronted him about his absences, but he said he had insomnia and driving was the only thing that made him feel sleepy. As if he were a baby. Jan and Peet spent four nights at the outset watching the house from the street, but he never went out. Peet thought Paula Wilson was paranoid. Jan thought Ron Wilson was just laying low.

  LJ was standing now, clearly anxious to be on his way. “Let’s hope he heads out tonight. The wife has been calling me to complain, like it’s our fault the man’s not sneaking out to get a little.”

  “Maybe he’s not,” Peet said. “He comes home every night for dinner, walks the dog, plays with the kids. I’m not convinced he’s cheating on her.”

  “We’ll give it a few more days and then tell her to let it go. Now get out of here. The traffic on ninety-four is going to be a bear.”

  *

  Not everyone who lived in Winnetka was rich. Just a huge majority of them. The Harrington house was on the east side of Sheridan Road, just yards from Lake Michigan. It was built to look like an English manor home—quaint and enormous at the same time. Peet pulled into the semi-circular drive and parked behind a landscaping truck. A small army of gardeners was blasting the oak leaves blanketing the lawn, shouldering their leaf blowers as if they were weapons. Jan pulled the bell by the enormous wood door.

  A woman in her early forties answered. She was thin in an anorexic-chic way, her angles and bones shown off in a heather gray knit sweater dress. She had a shawl scarf over her shoulders and pearl earrings on. She’d pulled her thick hair into a ponytail so tight it was stretching her skin away from her eyes. Either that or she’d had some very bad plastic surgery.

  “Mrs. Harrington?” Peet said. “I’m Peet O’Malley and this is Jan Roberts. We’re both senior investigators at Titan Security. You were expecting us?”

  “Yes, of course. Please come in.”

  They followed her into a living room to the right of the front entryway. It was enormous, sumptuously decorated, and looked barely lived in. Jan sat in an uncomfortable Windsor chair. Peet took the other end of the plush sofa from Mrs. Harrington.

  Mrs. Harrington leaned over and pulled a long brocaded cord that hung from the wall. “My husband stepped out for just a moment but will join us soon,” she said. She seemed to have a slight lisp. “May I offer you something to drink?”

  “No, don’t get up,” Jan said. “We’re perfectly fine.”

  A uniformed maid entered the room.

  “It’s no trouble, I assure you,” Mrs. Harrington said. “What would you like?”

  “Coffee,” said Peet.

  “Coffee,” said Jan. “With cream.”

  “Bring the coffee service, Eva.”

  Peet opened her notebook and began. “Mrs. Harrington, we’d like to begin with some preliminaries before your husband arrives, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Let’s start with a photograph of your daughter that we can take with us.”

  Mrs. Harrington picked up her phone and went through a number of screens before handing it to Peet.

  “This is the photo I gave the police this morning. It’s Maddy, just a few weeks ago. We’d promised her a new car for the school year, and this is just after her father had given her the keys.”

  The girl standing next to the new Honda squinted as she faced the sun. Her blond hair was long and limp, her T-shirt and jeans standard teenage issue, though not as dressy as many girls would have chosen, and they hung loosely on her slender figure. She wore black Converse sneakers. She was dressed like a boy, but was unmistakably a girl, a slouchy, unhappy girl.

  “If you could print this for us?” Peet said.

  “I can e-mail this to you,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  “Even better. Now, when did you discover that Maddy was missing?”

  “This morning when our housekeeper asked whether she was here. Her bed didn’t look like it had been slept in, and we realized that neither of us had seen her since the night before last.”

  “Are you saying that she may have gone missing as long as forty-eight hours ago?” Jan said.

  “It’s hard to know exactly. Today is Tuesday, so it was this morning when Eva said something about not knowing that Maddy was out of town. I asked her what she was talking about, and she said she didn’t think anything about it yesterday because maybe Maddy had fallen asleep in front of the TV. She only watches in the dead of night, when no one else is awake. When Eva saw the untouched bed again this morning, she was curious. That’s when it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember actually seeing Maddy for a little while.”

  “Is there a reason that wouldn’t have set off alarm bells earlier?” Peet said.

  “Do you have children?” Mrs. Harrington asked, looking as if she seriously doubted Peet was mother material.

  “I have three,” Peet said. “Two teenagers.”

  “Then you know how hard it is to keep up with them. My husband and I have crazy schedules. But we mostly stay on top of it.”

  “Tell me everything you did today after Eva pointed
out the made bed,” Peet said.

  “Well, I called Alan first, not that I really expected him to know anything. His company is in the middle of a product launch, which means he is not aware of anything but that. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen Maddy, but he didn’t think he saw her yesterday.”

  “Are there any other children at home?”

  “Our son, Justin, is at Dartmouth. There’s no one else.”

  The maid came in with a gleaming silver tray, and there was a lot of clattering of cups and saucers and passing around of plates before they got back to business. Jan ate a tiny cake while Peet continued the questioning.

  “Mrs. Harrington, at what point did you call the police? What made you realize that your daughter was gone? She could have made her own bed, for instance.”

  Eva was just leaving the room with the empty tray. She turned and said, “No, she couldn’t. That bed was made the way I make a bed. Maddy hasn’t slept in it for two days, and that’s the truth.”

  “Thank you, Eva. That will be all.” Mrs. Harrington sipped her coffee and continued. “After Eva told me this, I went up to Maddy’s room. I knew she was gone as soon as I saw her laptop was missing.”

  “Couldn’t she have taken that with her as a normal thing? Some people don’t go anywhere without one,” said Jan.

  “She has one of those pad things that she carries with her everywhere. She uses her laptop at home. Both machines are gone.”

  “Did you contact the school?”

  “Of course. I called them before I called the police. They said Maddy wasn’t in classes on Monday and they had called us to report her absence. They left a message on our home machine, but I usually forget to check. We’re always on our cells,” Mrs. Harrington said as she glanced at her iPhone.

  “What have you noticed about Maddy’s behavior, Mrs. Harrington?” Peet asked. “Any recent changes? Moodiness? Withdrawal? Maybe a new set of friends?”

  Mrs. Harrington appeared to give the question no thought at all. “Change? No, Maddy stays pretty much the same. She comes home from school and makes a snack and then sits in front of her computer. There’s been no change.”

  “She doesn’t hang out with any school friends?” Jan said.

  “None that she’s ever brought here. She doesn’t even talk about any friends.”

  “You’re saying that Maddy doesn’t have any friends at all?”

  “I’m saying that she doesn’t have friends that she actually sees. They’re all on the computer. You know how they are. Everything is online. You could live alone on a mountaintop and still have friends.”

  “Are you around when she comes home?”

  “No, not usually. But when I come home I ask her about her day and she always says the same thing. ‘What’s new?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What did you do today?’ ‘Nothing.’” Mrs. Harrington cast her head to the side in an odd gesture, like she was posing for a photographer. “I’d be bored to death if I had her life.”

  Jan flipped to a new page in her notebook. “We’ll check in with the Winnetka Police, but it’s my experience that police don’t do much when it comes to teenage runaways. Abductions are another matter. Is there any reason to believe your daughter was kidnapped?”

  Mrs. Harrington was about to answer when the front door opened and they turned to see a giant man walk into the house with a giant dog. The dog continued slowly into the living room with his head down, as if he were a child forced to say hello to his parents’ guests. He bumped his head against Jan’s legs and she gently pushed his slobbery snout away from her dress pants. She was unmoved by his charm.

  “Don’t mind Sanderson,” Mrs. Harrington said. “He’s harmless.”

  Not to my clothes he’s not, thought Jan. She hated when people said things like that. Don’t mind my screeching child. Don’t mind my barking dog. Don’t mind me while I talk really loudly on the phone in the bookstore.

  Harrington was at least six feet six inches tall and built like a football player.

  “Alan, these are the investigators you had sent over. They want to know if it’s possible that Maddy’s been kidnapped. I’d say you’d know more about that than me.”

  “I think you could say that about most anything,” he said. He looked at Jan and Peet in that way that said “Why was I sent two women?” They’d both seen that look plenty of times before.

  “Mr. Harrington, have you any reason to believe Maddy was abducted?” Peet asked.

  He moved to the drinks cart near the bay window looking over the expansive side lawn. It was nearly dark and the leaf blowers were silent. Apparently, the gardeners had decamped. He poured himself a neat Scotch.

  “It’s certainly possible. I have money, although not the kind you think of in kidnapping cases. But it’s like I told the police this morning. If she were abducted, wouldn’t we have heard something by now?”

  “Probably. It all depends on why she was taken. If it were money or something else from you, you’d probably have heard of their demands by now. If it’s for some other reason . . .” Jan didn’t want to spell out the alternatives.

  Mrs. Harrington glared at her husband. “If anything happens to her it’s your fault.”

  “Shut up, Lynette. We don’t need your histrionics now, for God’s sake.” He poured another drink. “Can I get you gals anything? No?” He knocked back the drink and put the glass down. “I think what you’re asking me is whether I have any enemies.”

  “That’s right. Anyone at all, even if you don’t think they’d go this far,” Peet said.

  Harrington stared at his wife accusingly. She stared back at him. They seemed to be wrapped in loathing.

  “I think we can eliminate me as a suspect,” Mrs. Harrington said to her husband, “as much as I know you’d like to see me hauled away. I did not abduct my own daughter. In case you’d forgotten, we all live together.” Mrs. Harrington leaned back against the sofa, a furrow in her brow forming, despite the g-force strength of her ponytail.

  “Do you want to retain us to attempt to locate Maddy?” Peet asked.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Harrington.

  “I want her found,” Mr. Harrington said, “but I also want some idea of what it will cost.”

  “Do you have a budget in mind for how much you’ll spend to find your daughter, Mr. Harrington?” Peet said, her tone pointedly neutral.

  “God, you’re unbelievable,” said Mrs. Harrington.

  Harrington ignored his wife. “I’ll take the billing up with your superiors. You two need to get to work finding Maddy.”

  He made it sound like Jan and Peet were dillydallying. “We need you to compile a list of all of Maddy’s friends. Give us as much contact information as you can. I also need to talk to your son. It’s her friends and her brother who probably know what’s going on with her,” Jan said.

  Mrs. Harrington looked up from the pad of paper she was jotting on. “Are you implying that I don’t know what is happening with my own daughter?”

  Jan could see that Peet was trying to restrain herself. Mr. Harrington, however, felt no such reticence.

  “I don’t think we need waste our time with implications, Lynette. Let’s just come right out and say it. You don’t.”

  Jan jumped in. “It’s hardly unusual, Mrs. Harrington, for parents to not know what their teenage children are really up to.”

  Mrs. Harrington looked worried. Mr. Harrington took a peek at his watch.

  Jan went on. “We also need her cell phone records. You can probably go right online and download the detail from her most recent bills.”

  “Actually, we won’t be able to do that,” Harrington said. “Maddy set up and paid for stuff like that with her own credit card, and I paid the credit card bill each month.”

  “Then print out the detail on the credit card statement and we’ll take it from there. Don’t cancel the card, whatever you do. It will give us some valuable information if she continues to use it,” Jan said. “I’ll also need the accou
nt number and password for your Internet service provider. We should be able to get some information on Maddy’s recent Web activity.”

  “I’ll write down the name of friends I can think of, but there won’t be many,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  “Please be as thorough as you can be.”

  “Of course.”

  Harrington looked at his watch again and put his empty glass down. “Listen, why don’t we do this? You gals get on your way so you can start tracking Maddy down. We’ll put the information together that you’ve asked for and call you when we’ve got it, probably tomorrow sometime.

  Jan rose and stepped in closer to him. “Actually, Mr. Harrington, here’s what we’re going to do. You’ll assemble that information while we go take a look at Maddy’s room.”

  Mr. Harrington opened his mouth and his wife stopped him with a hand in the air. “We’ll get it for you,” she said. “I’ll take you to her room while my husband gets you the other information.”

  Mr. Harrington moved back to the drinks cart and turned his back on them. Jan couldn’t remember meeting a bigger prick, and she’d met her share of them.

  Mrs. Harrington led them upstairs and down a long hallway. Jan lost track of the number of bedrooms along the way. Maddy’s was the last one.

  “Is your room also on this level?” Jan asked.

  “Yes, it’s at the opposite end of the hall. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m wondering if you would have heard her leaving at night. Do you recall waking up to any noise?”

  Mrs. Harrington shrugged. “I wear earplugs because of my husband’s incessant snoring. But Maddy could have slipped away and I wouldn’t have heard it, with or without the earplugs.”

  She opened a door next to Maddy’s room, which led to carpeted stairs leading down to the back of the house. A perfect teenage escape route.

 

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