by David Grace
“All right, then she bought it herself and we just have to identify the name she used,” Janet said, trying to control her stinking fear. Virgil shook his head. “What?” she snapped.
“All she needed to do was give the seller the legitimate name of any person who does have a driver’s license – her hair dresser, the woman at the drugstore, one of the teachers from Nicole’s school – anybody. She gets the seller to sign the pink slip on the back in blank and she tells him that she’ll fill out her buyer’s information later. Then she drives off in her new Chevy or whatever and disappears.”
“She’ll still have to register the car and when she does her new name won’t match the buyer’s name on the Transfer of Ownership form,” Janet said, desperation creeping into her voice. “We match up all the new registrations against the names of the transferees on the 138s and we’ll have her.”
“No, we won’t,” Virgil said, leaning back and closing his eyes.
“Why the hell not!”
“Jeez, you’d think it was your wife and kid who’d disappeared.”
“Why won’t it work?”
“Because she can wait six months, maybe a year, to turn in the pink slip and when she does it might be in Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, Washington, hell, Vermont for Christ’s sake. She hands over the pink slip for a car we know nothing about to some DMV clerk in Pennsylvania with her new name filled in on the back. How the hell are we supposed to find out about it? We don’t have access to every vehicle registered in every state in the country and even if we did we couldn’t run them all against the names of all the buyers of the thousands of cars sold in Southern California during the months before she skipped. There’s no way we can ever hope to pick her out of that haystack.”
“But–”
“Face it, Janet. It’s a dead end. I appreciate all your help, everything you tried to do. It was a good idea. It was. But it just didn’t work. Now, I have to go back to square one and start all over.”
“But, where? How could she do this? How could she be so . . . devious?”
“Like you said. She’s a crazy bitch. But I’m the one who married her. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.” But, Janet thought, it is. “Are you OK?” Virgil asked noticing the sick expression on her face.
“I’m just so . . . disappointed, for you,” she said watching her twisting fingers, then she looked up and tried to smile. Virgil’s face seemed to go blank and she saw his eyes drifting past her. She followed his gaze to Penny from HR who glanced over her shoulder and smiled in Virgil’s direction. When Janet turned back Virgil was wearing his “I don’t know anything about the missing cookies” expression.
“Oh my God, Virgil.”
“What?”
“Now I guess I know what you meant by ‘one thing led to another.’ She’s why you never made it home last night, isn’t she?” Janet asked in a voice like ashes.
“It was just sex.”
“She’s a kid!”
“She’s twenty-three, which was over the legal age to drink and screw the last time I checked. Besides, you’re my partner not my wife. I don’t ask you who you’re sleeping with.”
Janet stood, frozen, her mouth half open, her fantasy dreams of a life as Mrs. Virgil Quinn crumbling to dust.
“I . . . ,” she began then, tears running down her cheeks, turned and raced for the ladies’ room.
“Janet, I’m . . . .” Virgil sputtered to a stop, and, as she disappeared from view, muttered, “. . . sorry.”
For the next two days they barely spoke, and when they did talk it was only about how they were going to grab up the next fugitive on their list. On Friday afternoon Janet asked Virgil to walk her to her car. She stopped at the curb and turned toward the Wells Fargo building glowing bronze in the afternoon sun.
“I’ve put in for a transfer,” she said, not looking at him.
“What? Why? Come on. Is this about Penny? She doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“I know she doesn’t, Virgil.” Janet glanced at him briefly then, again, looked away. “Edgar approved it. I asked him to rush it through. The Chicago office is short-handed so that’s where I’m going.”
“When are you leaving?”
“I’m supposed to start Monday but they’ll give me a couple of personal days to find a place to live. I’ll have somebody pack up my stuff and ship it out.”
“Janet, I– are you sure about this?”
“I think I need to make some changes in my life. You understand?”
“Not really,” Virgil said, studying her face.
“It doesn’t matter.” Suddenly, she hugged him. “I’m so sorry about Helen and Nicole. If I could fix it, if I could get them back for you, I would,” she said, tears slurring her words. She stood there for several seconds, crying softly, then released him and hurried away.
Chapter Four
PROVO, UTAH - MAY, EIGHT AND ONE-HALF YEARS AGO
It was a neighborhood of two and three story apartment buildings framed in mixtures of brick and wood. With the end of the school year only days away the oaks and sycamores shading the sidewalk were in full leaf. Virgil parked his rented Focus one building away from his target. For the hundredth time he ran over the steps that had brought him here on this Monday afternoon.
He had re-started his search for Helen and Nicole with the knowledge that a ten-year-old could get by with a completely false identity but an adult could not. No one expected a kid to have a credit history or an employment record. Helen could have used Photoshop to fake up a birth certificate in any name she wanted, but that wouldn’t work for an adult. Helen would need an identity solid enough to allow her to open a bank account and get a job and apply for a credit card. The most common way to do that was to find someone who had been born around the same time you were and who had died when they were old enough to have had a driver’s license, a social security card and a high-school diploma, someone whose identity you could steal without their being around to complain about it. His daughter’s new name didn’t have to be real. Helen’s did.
He started by tracking down every new, first-time elementary school registration for nine, ten or eleven-year-old girls in the twelve western states. He eliminated private schools, figuring that their admittance criteria were higher and their background checks would be more thorough than Helen would want to risk.
It took months. Once he had the list of new female students he ran the mothers’ names and dates of birth against the death records in each of the same twelve states. He uncovered a surprising number of possibly fictitious identities but the list was small enough to be manageable. He had thirty-two mothers whose names and dates of birth were the same as someone who had been reported dead.
Virgil next ran the thirty-two girls’ names and dates of birth through the listed state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. Three of the children’s names didn’t exist. He called the principals at each of their three schools. The first two were dead ends, then he got to number three.
Before she would answer any of his questions the Vice Principal at Provo Glen Elementary School demanded that Virgil fax her a copy of his ID and then she insisted on calling him back at the L.A. Marshals’ publically listed phone number.
* * *
“You understand that we must be careful with any information concerning our children,” Evelyn Slidell told him in a prissy voice.
“Of course. I’m going to need your email address so that I can send you a couple of sketches.”
“What is this about?” She demanded.
“We need some information for an investigation we’re pursuing.”
“Is the child’s father a criminal? What did he do?”
“Ms. Slidell, what is your email address, please?”
“Because I need to know if our children are in danger.”
“They’re not in any danger.”
“Then why are you looking for them?”
“Ms. Slidell, are you refusing to cooperate with law
enforcement?”
“Of course not, but–”
“Do I need to send a couple of policemen to your office in order to secure your cooperation?”
“No,” she snapped after a two second pause.
“Good. What’s your email address?”
Virgil hadn’t realized until he’d started preparing the BOLO on Helen and Nicole that over the weeks before she fled his wife had deleted every photo of herself and his daughter from his phone and their computer. She’d even removed the hard copy pictures that he kept in his wallet. In the end the best he could do was make a copy of her DMV photo and get a Marshals’ Service artist to work up a sketch of Nicole. Virgil had already attached Helen’s picture and the artist’s sketch to a form email and it took only a few seconds to type Ms. Slidell’s address into the “TO” line.
“All right, I’ve got it,” She said a minute later. “What do you want me to do?”
“Look at the pictures and tell me if they look familiar.”
“I only talked to the mother for a couple of minutes.”
“Please look anyway.”
The phone made a CLACKING noise when she put it on her desk, then Virgil heard a string of clicks and taps then silence then more computer sounds. Finally, she picked up the phone again.
“I’m looking at your pictures,” she said uncertainly, “but I don’t know. The little girl sort of looks similar, in a way, but her hair is wrong. If it was a picture instead of just a drawing I might be able to tell. The mother . . . I suppose it could be her. She looked heavier to me.”
Virgil held his breath for a count of three before he trusted himself to speak.
“Let’s try this. Can you say that you are certain that the mother and daughter you met are definitely not the people in the pictures?”
“Oh, no. It could be them. It’s just that I can’t say for sure that it is them. Do you have any other photos you could send me?”
“Thank you, Ms. Slidell. That’s all I need.”
“Should I call the police or Child Services?”
“No! Don’t do anything. Not one word. This is official business. Do you understand?”
“Not really, no.”
“Do absolutely nothing. Pretend that this call never happened. All right?”
“All right,” she agreed uncertainly after another long pause.
“Good. Thank you for your help and don’t tell anyone about our conversation. Please fax me their address.”
Now, one day later, Virgil was parked a few yards away from 487 East 500 North Street, Provo, Utah, waiting for his long-lost daughter to come home from school. At half past three the bus passed his position and half a minute later a girl in a blue blouse and dark pants headed up the apartment building’s front walk. Her hair was wrong, almost a honey blonde instead of Nicole’s deep chocolate, but he figured Helen had probably dyed it to disguise her identity.
Virgil reached for the binoculars then pulled his hand away when he noticed a woman across the street staring at his car. A strange man in a parked car watching a little girl through a pair of binoculars was going to cause problems. Virgil squinted into the sun and tried to make out the child’s face but she was in profile and heading slightly away from him. It could be Nicole, he told himself. It had to be.
As soon as she entered the building he left the car and sprinted for the front doors. Through the glass he saw her climb the stairs to the second floor. The building was full of students from Brigham Young and a few seconds after pressing half a dozen random buttons one of them buzzed him in.
Virgil reached the second-floor landing just in time to see the girl enter unit 209. He draped the lanyard holding his star over his head and hurried to the door. For a second he hesitated, then knocked twice. He expected a “Who is it?” or the pale edge of a face to peer at him through a gap between pulled-aside curtains, but instead the door was opened by a woman whose expression instantly shifted from smiling to terrified.
“How did you find us?” she cried, tears beginning to stream down her face.
“Who are you?” Virgil looked past her to the little girl standing a few feet behind.
“What? Don’t you know?”
Frightened and confused the child drew closer and clutched her mother’s waist. She was about Nicole’s age, a little taller, and her eyes were more hazel-green than brown. It wasn’t her.
“Ma’am,” Virgil stuttered, his heart pounding, “I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Quinn. What’s your name, your real name?”
“He sent you, didn’t he, Glenn? Why are you helping him? Do you know what he’ll do if he finds us?”
“Glenn is your husband?”
“No!” the woman cried. “He was my boyfriend. He’s crazy. Why are you helping him? Why. . . .” Her words trailed off, choked by a flood of tears.
“May I come in, ma’am,” Virgil asked in a soft voice, “so that you can explain all this to me?”
Half an hour later, after he had called his office and checked out her story, he was heading back to the airport. Her name was Etta Latham. She had gotten herself tangled up with a rich psychopath named Glenn Purdue and when the warnings from the local cops and multiple restraining orders had bounced off Purdue like BBs fired at Superman’s chest she had bought a set of fake papers and fled. Virgil promised that he would keep her new identity a secret but he suspected that she was going to run again as soon as he left the building. A new city, a new name.
After he boarded the flight back to LA he tried to sleep but failed, his brain tortured by a whirl of emotions. All that time. All that work. All for nothing. Helen and Nicole were still as lost as the day they had disappeared. Now what? he asked himself. Where had they gone? How had they managed to vanish so completely? How the hell was he ever going to find them?
Quinn closed his eyes but sleep wouldn’t come, only more questions for which he had no answers.
* * *
“60% Off” signs fluttered like dying leaves as Helen led Nicole up one aisle and down the next.
“Mom, look, that one’s only $500.”
“I told you, we’re not getting a computer.”
“I could use it for school.”
“We have to keep a low profile, Elaine.” Nicole suppressed a scowl at the use of her new name. “People can track what you do on the Internet.”
Helen paused at the end of a row of monitors and looked around helplessly as streams of bargain hunters pushed past them.
“Over there, I think,” she said finally, and led Nicole toward a ceiling banner that said: “Phones.”
“I’d just look up stuff, for homework and stuff like that.”
“I think the answering machines are over there,” Helen said and pulled Nicole down the lefthand aisle.
“Everybody at school has a computer,” Nicole argued and pulled her hand away. Helen stopped and looked left and right like a spy-movie hero about to hand off a package of secret papers. Finally satisfied, she led Nicole into a corner underneath a display of TV antennas.
“I know why you want a computer, Elaine,” she whispered.
“I told you. For school.”
“You want to use it to look up information about your father.” Nicole’s lips compressed a little and after a moment of locking eyes with her mother she looked away.
“No I don’t,” she muttered in a tone that cried out, Yes, I do.
“That’s what they’re waiting for, the drug people,” Helen whispered angrily. She paused and glanced furtively down the aisle then pulled Nicole a few inches closer to the wall. “They have traps on the Internet that watch for things they’re interested in. One of them is your father’s name. The minute you type in ‘Victor Quinn’ a signal goes out and they know exactly where that person is, where we are. Then they’ll come for us.”
“Victor? Daddy’s name is ‘Virgil.’”
Helen’s face twisted into an irritated expression.
“Virgil’s not his real name. I’d had a very
bad experience with someone named ‘Victor’ and when I told your father that I couldn’t date a man with that name he said, ‘Then call me something else.’ We went back and forth about it and, eventually, we agreed that I could call him ‘Virgil’ after his maternal grandfather, and that's what we did. It was a special name only between the two of us, but that's all beside the point. What you need to understand is that it’s too dangerous for you to start typing ‘Victor Quinn’ into the Internet.”
“But you could get a laptop and I could connect it up at one of my friends’ houses. By the time they traced it I’d be gone,” Nicole said in a whispered rush.
“And what do you think would happen to your friend when the drug dealers showed up? Do you think that with guns pointed at her head your friend wouldn’t tell them it was you?”
“But what if we–”
“Elaine!” Helen hissed, “You have to stop this right now. You cannot, cannot, ever search the Internet for the words ‘Victor Quinn,’ ever! You have to realize that your old life is over. We have to move on. Your father is gone. Victor Quinn is gone, Elaine, and nothing will ever bring him back.”
Nicole’s lips trembled and she stared up into her mother’s face.
“What do you mean, he’ll never come back? You said he was under cover. You said that it would only be for a year or maybe two. You said–”
“Elaine, keep your voice down!” Helen ordered, glancing around to make sure no one was watching. After a couple of seconds she turned back and rested her hands on Nicole’s shoulders. “I didn’t want to tell you this, certainly not here, but something’s happened. There’s–”
“Something’s happened to dad?”
Helen locked eyes with Nicole for a heartbeat then nodded.
“Yes. I’m sorry. He’s disappeared.”