by Todd Borg
I glanced at the photo. The girl had purple hair and rings in her eyebrows and a tattoo of a sword on her cheek.
I slid it off and looked at the next photo.
Charlie looked just like the pencil drawings on the wall. The photo showed just how accurate the drawings were. The photos made the same powerful impression of the kid who was going places.
The next photo would be Silence.
Unlike Jersey and Charlie, she wasn’t facing the camera. Her eyes looked at something on the floor, but the overall impression was that she was staring inward. She’d shut out the camera and the photographer and the commotion around her and retreated to some inner place.
Her face was all corners, from cheekbones to chin to pointed nose. She looked like what a sculptor might create using triangular pieces of red clay. Although she wasn’t pretty, she was striking.
I put the photos in my pocket.
“May I see Charlie’s room?”
“Yes, it’s the next one down.”
Marlette walked in, flipped on the light and began straightening things up.
“You don’t need to pick anything up. I prefer to see his room in a natural state.”
Marlette looked embarrassed, although the room was much neater than I expected. But for a pair of jeans and some socks on the floor and a couple of empty Red Bull cans on the dresser, it was quite orderly.
There were two 49ers posters above the bed. His iPod hung from the desk chair, its cord plugged into a computer below the desk. To the side of the computer monitor was Charlie’s football helmet. His closet door stood open and more jeans hung from hooks on the inside of the door.
There was nothing to connect him to any of the outsider groups, no drug paraphernalia, no ashtrays, no posters intended to offend parents. His only stickers seemed to be on his football helmet rather than on the walls where they would be hard to remove.
Next to the door, above the light switch, was a 3x5 color photo in an inexpensive frame. It was from several years earlier before Charlie had started his growth spurt. It showed Charlie holding his older sister on his back, his arms holding her legs. She had her arms around his neck. He was clearly laughing hard, his mouth open, teeth bright. She was looking ahead, no laugh pulling at her mouth, but not unhappy, either.
“Looks like they get along very well,” I said as I backed out of the room.
Marlette had a faraway look in her eyes. “He’s simply the best brother to her. Sometimes I wonder how he’d be with a sister who wasn’t autistic. I think he’d be very nice. But with Silence, Charlie has a special purpose. It’s like his calling. I always know that Silence is okay because Charlie looks after her.”
“Can you give me the names of a couple of Charlie’s best friends?”
“I’d hardly know where to start. Everyone loves Charlie.”
“Pick a couple whose phone numbers you have.”
FIVE
After Spot and I left Marlette’s house, I drove across the state line, turned up Kingsbury Grade and pulled into the little alley behind the building where Street Casey has her lab not far from my office. I told Spot to stay put and left him in the Jeep.
The last time we’d visited, Spot, in his excitement at seeing Street, wagged so hard that his tail swept all the papers off her desk. As we tried to calm him down and get him to sit, he backed up and did the same to her workbench. Six bug containers hit the floor. Five of them popped open and suddenly five armies of orange and green beetles were lifting up their little shell-type wing coverings, spreading vibrating gossamer wings and taking flight, filling the air with a buzz like distant chainsaws.
From now on Spot stays in the Jeep unless Street has Spot-proofed her workspace.
When I walked into Street’s lab she was sitting at her microscope, looking through the lenses. It was a double eyepiece affair with a digital camera attached. The cables went to a computer. On the screen was some kind of purple bar graph. Or maybe the bars were touch-screen sliders like on a music mixing board. I couldn’t tell.
“What’s playing at the microplex?”
“Cockroach Love Story,” she said without looking up. “I’m studying some quirks of mating behavior. Properly exploited, it may provide some new chemical-free cockroach population control. Hormones, pheromones, stuff like that.”
“Can’t we teach them to just say no?”
“Well, it’s true that cockroaches have more discipline than your average teenager, but that approach hasn’t attracted many proponents.”
“Is it exciting?”
“Watching cockroaches perform a mating dance? Very. If you want to know more, I’m giving a paper at an entomologists’ conference a week from Saturday at the San Francisco Marriott.” Her tone was dry.
“It would be fun. We could do theater and dinner afterward.”
Street rotated her head away from the scope and looked at me. “You mean, dinner and theater would be fun.”
“Your talk would be, too.”
“Tell the truth,” she said, turning back toward the slide or petri dish or whatever it was that the probing end of the microscope was jammed against.
“Really. I find bug stuff interesting,” I said.
“You’ve never found it interesting enough to come to any of my talks. I’ve given maybe a dozen of them now. One of them as close as Reno.”
“Well, I’ve wanted to, but something has always gotten in the way.” As I said it I realized that the truth was I had no excuse.
Street looked at me again. “Owen, bugs mean a lot to me. You want to be supportive of my work, and I appreciate that. But if your words about my work are too casual and sound hollow, that’s worse than coming right out and saying that you find what I do boring.”
“It’s not that I don’t find your work...” I suddenly stopped as I remembered the proverb that says when you find that you’re digging yourself into a hole, stop digging.
I grabbed one of the old mismatched wire chairs that Street has here and there, brought it over and sat next to her. “A week from Saturday at the Marriott?” I said.
Street nodded as she used the computer mouse to adjust something on the screen.
I said, “What time is your talk?”
“The seminar is from nine a.m. to five p.m. You probably wouldn’t find the whole schedule worth listening to. I give my paper from two-thirty to three. If you just came to hear me that would make me very happy.”
“Okay, count on it. Any preference for dinner and theater?”
“Quiet restaurant and a thoughtful play?”
“Done. Do we ride down together?”
“No, sorry. Do you remember me mentioning a bug colleague named Sandra Barrington at Stanford? I’m meeting with her the evening before down in Burlingame. I’ll fly down on the shuttle from Reno and I’ll stay with her Friday night. So you and I can meet at the Marriott Saturday afternoon. I’ll be all yours after five. Then we can drive home together on Sunday.”
“I’ll pick a restaurant,” I said, “But will you pick the play? You know me and theater.”
“You’re still thinking about that Greek tragedy that turned out to be a musical in drag?”
“Yeah. The soldiers in feather boas were my favorite.”
“I’ve got last Sunday’s Chronicle at home,” Street said. “How ‘bout kebabs and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale while we read up on the theater? You can go there now if you want. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
“Spot and I will be waiting,” I said as I kissed her and left.
Dark October clouds swirled ominously around the mountains across the lake as Spot and I drove up the east shore to Street’s condo. The clouds hinted at the coming storms of winter and made me think about the two Ramirez kids, possibly yanked from their front yard, possibly held at this moment somewhere in the Tahoe mountains. I didn’t know what to think about the Granite Mountain Boys, but I knew that ten thousand or more motorcyclists were coming to Tahoe for the various biker festivities. Some o
f them, doctors and dentists and veterinarians and insurance salesmen and pilots and art dealers and software engineers and fashion designers and consultants and professors would stay at the luxury hotels, watching the showroom productions and soaking in the hot tubs and ordering champagne sent up to their rooms. Other bikers, perhaps of different socioeconomic strata, would camp out, small and large groups alike huddled around campfires, drinking beer and barbecuing burgers and pulling their leather jacket collars up to ward off the cold high-altitude wind.
Neither group was necessarily more likely to have members who would kidnap a brother and sister, but I had the absurd hope that if Silence and Charlie were being held by bikers, they were kept in a warm hotel room and not huddled in a freezing tent camp at 8000 feet.
As I unlocked Street’s door, a gust of wind hit me and the temperature dropped ten degrees in a second. An involuntary shiver shook my shoulders. Like many people, especially those in law enforcement, I’d confronted some of the bleakest things that people can do to other people. At those times I’d learned that you can’t survive without pushing it back a little here and there. If you face the darkness 24/7 you wear down and eventually succumb to it. So you periodically go around turning on lights and looking in closet doors to see if there is any room left to stuff a little more inside, way at the back where it won’t be so readily seen and heard and smelled.
A little sparkle and crackle and pop in the fireplace seemed appropriate. So I grabbed some kindling and a couple of split logs off the pile next to Street’s front door. Spot looked at me with anticipation.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to be neglectful of your mastication needs,” I said to him. I handed another log to him and he took it the way other dogs grab a stick. His big jowls flopped over the rough wood and he trotted inside with it.
I got the fire going as Spot did his best to splinter his log into twelve thousand Lodgepole pine toothpicks. “What is it with the chewing work ethic?” I said to him as I pulled two Sierra Nevadas from Street’s fridge and opened a Kunde cab to catch a little breath. Spot’s ears perked toward me and his eyes lifted up against his drooping lids, but he kept his nose down and his teeth focused on the task.
Ten minutes later, he dropped what was left of the log and lay his head down on the wood chips that covered his paws.
“Not working to ability,” I said as I lifted his head, scooped up the chips and splinters in my cupped hands and tossed the detritus into the fire. “There’s still half a log left.” I tossed it on the flames as well. Spot didn’t seem to care.
The door opened and Street breezed in, open coat flowing behind her tight jeans.
The cold breeze had gotten stronger, so we skipped the outside barbecue and put beef and onion and green pepper kebabs under the broiler while we drank our beers. We were nearly through with our wine and dinner before I brought up my activities that had started sixteen hours before at four in the morning.
When I was through explaining what I’d learned about Silence and Charlie and the Granite Mountain Boys, Street just sat quietly, shaking her head. Finally, she said, “What is your next move?”
“Tomorrow I’m going to call the girl in Santa Monica. Then I’ll drop in on Charlie’s friends. Marlette gave me a couple of names.”
“Time is a worry, isn’t it?” Street said.
“Anytime kids go missing, every hour longer that they’re gone, the less likely it is that they turn up alive.”
Street winced and her eyes moistened and I thought I should have put it more softly. But it was too late. I’d already opened the closet door.
SIX
I was awake and coffeed-up and showered before dawn, which was arriving later and later each day. At 7:00 a.m. I called the number Marlette had given me for Jersey Walker, quiet friend of quieter Silence.
“Hello,” a stern-voiced woman said after the second ring.
“Mrs. Walker?” I said.
“Yes?”
I tried to make it sound official. “Good morning. This is Detective Owen McKenna calling from Lake Tahoe. Apparently, Marlette Remmick explained to you the other day that her son Charlie and her daughter Silence have gone missing. I understand your daughter Jersey knew Silence when you lived in Tahoe. I’d like to talk to Jersey and ask her a few questions about Silence.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t see what Jersey has to do with them disappearing.”
“Nothing, I’m sure,” I said, “but Jersey was Silence’s closest friend in Tahoe and I’m hoping she can give me some insights into Silence and Charlie.”
“That’s ridiculous. Silence never had friends. Least of all my daughter. There is nothing she can help you with.”
In the background I heard a small voice say, “Who’s that?” followed by Mrs. Walker’s muffled voice saying, “Never mind, be quiet.”
I said, “Mrs. Walker, I won’t trouble your daughter for long. I just have a few questions. May I speak to her for a minute?”
“No. As I told Marlette, if we hear anything about Silence or Charlie, we’ll let her know. Although I’m certain that won’t happen. Now I must be going.” She hung up.
I dialed back and it rang six times before synthetic voicemail answered and said to leave a message. I hung up, wondering what Jersey’s mother was so afraid of.
I decided to put my other ideas on hold and go down to Santa Monica and talk to Jersey in person. If I hurried there was a chance I could catch her as she left school. If she went to school.
It was a reasonable risk.
I called Street, and she said she’d stop in and attend to Spot. I drove over Spooner Summit to Carson City, sharing the highway with several knots of bikers, then headed north on the freeway to the Reno Tahoe Airport.
Inside, I studied the departure board and found that if I hurried I could catch a United flight to L.A.
The flight time was only one hour. I didn’t have time to find a rental car, so I grabbed a cab over to Santa Monica and had the driver drop me outside of the high school where I hoped Jersey spent her days. It was nearly 3:00 p.m. I didn’t know what time the school let out so I waited across the street.
Fog rolled in off the ocean and pushed up around the buildings, swirled around the high school in tendrils so thick I could almost feel it wrapping around my legs.
The front doors of the school pushed open at 3:30 and a flood of kids surged out.
I walked over, aware that high schools across the country were implementing security procedures, guards and cameras, designed to keep strange men off campus. But I had my license and a reason to be there. Nevertheless, I stayed back and let the kids fan out past me.
Jersey was one of the stragglers at the rear of the pack, unmistakable with her facial metal and tattooed cheek and colored hair, which was now electric pink. She was one of the new segment of teenagers who’ve embraced the fat stomach, pushing it out and swinging it proudly in front. Her tight elastic shirt came down over small breasts to the bottom of her ribcage, and her jeans hung low on her hips to allow a full display of belly flesh that, in an earlier era, would have indicated a pregnancy eight months along. Now it just indicated pride in what no exercise and a large daily intake of junk food can produce.
Most of the other kids headed for cars, and for a moment I worried I’d lose her to a vehicle. But she came out to the street as if to walk home, and when she drew even with where I stood leaning against a post, I spoke.
“Hi Jersey. I’m glad I found you. My name is Owen McKenna. I called this morning to talk to you about Silence Ramirez, but your mother wouldn’t let me speak to you.”
Jersey stared at me. Up close, I could now see that the smudges around her eyes were some kind of deep purple eye shadow applied not to enhance beauty, but to look like a Halloween ghoul. A flicker of worry shaded her face, but her natural sullen demeanor wouldn’t allow any strong reaction to me, pro or con. After staring for another moment, she looked away and continued walking.
I turned and walked along next to
her. “I know you’re busy and that’s why your mother is being a good executive secretary, screening your calls and all, careful to make certain you don’t fire her ass for incompetence.”
Without turning my head I looked down at her and saw a tiny grin that disappeared almost immediately.
“So I thought I’d catch you during your commute. ‘Course, if you have to tune up the cell, send off some text messages or videos or something, no problem, I can wait. But maybe when you’re done I could...”
“I don’t have a cell,” she said, her voice high and angry. “Don’t want one. They’re stupid. I don’t even want a laptop. Technology’s stupid. Why would I want to talk to anyone anyway? People suck.”
“Lotta people, lotta the time, I agree. But from what I’ve heard, Silence doesn’t suck. She and her brother are missing and they were maybe kidnapped and you probably don’t think so but you were Silence’s best friend. So I need to talk to you. I need to pick your brain even if you don’t think you can help. I’m trying to find Silence and Charlie and right now, you’re all I’ve got.”
Jersey kept walking, staring down at her feet.
We walked a block without talking. “Please help me?” I said.
“So ask,” she said. “What. Ever.”
“Here’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “I’m picturing Charlie and Silence are outside of their house. Out on Pioneer Trail a bunch of bikers are going by. There’s a big biker gathering in Tahoe in a few days. Some witnesses say they heard motorcycles coming down the street. The prevailing view is that these bikers grabbed both Charlie and Silence and hauled them away.”
“Hauled? Like on the back of the bikes? That’s stupid. I’ve been on a bike. You can totally fall off the back if you want.”
“My thought exactly. So I’m wondering if Silence and Charlie would do that, try to fall off the backs of the bikes. Or would they be too scared and just hang on?”