The Disappearance

by J. F. Freedman

  But there’s another, deeper reason he’s determined to keep Doug Lancaster in the dark for as long as he can. The accepted rule of thumb in every prosecutor’s office in the land is this: When a child is murdered, and there is no concrete evidence to the contrary, the presumption of guilt falls first upon the family. And most of the time, someone in the family did it.

  He doesn’t know where Doug was the night his daughter was taken from her room and subsequently murdered, or what he was doing. Given his history, he was probably shacking up with some woman. But as of now—and he’s the only one who knows it, besides Doug—the man’s time can’t be accounted for. And he flat-out lied to the police about it, which casts even more suspicion on him.

  But what if, on that awful night, Doug wasn’t lying in some other woman’s arms? Sometimes, if you’re doing your job right, you have to think the unthinkable. Emma Lancaster was carried away from her bedroom without putting up a struggle. She knew her abductor, she went willingly. She was pregnant, very possibly by whoever carried her away.

  Did Doug know his daughter was pregnant? According to the sheriff’s files, he and Glenna were stunned when they found out she’d been sexually active. But what if Doug had known? How would he have reacted to that? Here’s a husband so estranged from his wife that she’s thinking of divorcing him, which means, almost certainly, that they aren’t having sex with each other. His daughter is beautiful, precocious, she’s becoming a woman before his eyes. Is she also becoming, in his eyes, a love object?

  It’s a scary, sobering thought. It would explain why Doug was so aggressive in running lawyers off Allison’s defense, why he would try to bribe Luke with such an outrageous amount of money.

  Think the unthinkable.

  Back in the office at the end of the day, he and Riva compare notes. “Joe Allison was having an on-and-off affair with Glenna Lancaster,” he tells her.

  She stares at him. “What in God’s name did you say?”

  “Allison and Glenna Lancaster were clandestine lovers.”

  The information stuns her. “How do you know?”

  “My client finally told me,” Luke says, his voice heavy with angry sarcasm.

  “That ruins your case.” She slumps onto a couch. “Just when I was beginning to think you might have one.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He sits next to her. “But that doesn’t mean he killed Emma.” He fills her in on the discussion he and Allison had, and Allison’s reason why he wouldn’t have been involved with Emma.

  “That sounds like bullshit to me.” She turns. “Where does this leave you now?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  Riva moves closer to Luke, their bodies touching. “What’s next, then?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think about it. What do you have that’ll brighten my day, besides your body naked in bed next to mine and a good bottle of champagne?”

  She gives him a smooch. “We’ll do that later.” She sits back up. “Actually, I have some real information that, until you told me your own news, was lifting my spirits.”

  “What?” he asks impatiently.

  “Hillary, Emma’s best friend, thinks Emma was in a sexual relationship with at least two adult men. One was someone whose kids she baby-sat—”

  “That should be easy enough to find out,” Luke kicks in.

  “—and the other was a good-looking stud who drove a cool car,” she finished.

  He groans. “Sounds like our close personal friend Joe Allison. Who was boffing her mother, but not her. So he says, the lying bastard.”

  She nods. “I thought the same thing as soon as she said it. About the description fitting Allison.”

  “Great!”

  “But,” Riva says, trying to find a sliver of brightness in that dark cloud, “Hillary was told the second man fit that description. I don’t know anyone who ever actually saw Emma with a man who could be her lover.”

  “Yeah,” Luke says dubiously. “But taking it all together, it isn’t good. We need to find out who she was baby-sitting for.” He pauses. “There is another man who fits the second one’s description.” He hesitates.

  “Who?”

  “Her father.”

  “You can’t mean that. I know it’s happened before, but still …”

  He walks her through how he’s arrived at this theory.

  “You’d have to have actual proof to introduce that,” she says, shaking her head at the idea. “You bring that into the mix without solid, concrete footing underneath you and any jury in the world will cut you to ribbons.”

  “Where was Doug?” he challenges her.

  “Like you said, in bed with another woman.”

  “He’ll have to expose himself with that,” he says. “Which will be damned embarrassing, and cast doubts on his credibility. It’s a lousy alibi to give a jury.”

  She stares at him with uneasiness. “You’re hoping he can’t, aren’t you? You’re hoping he has no alibi for those eight hours.”

  He nods. “Yep, I am.” He shrugs. “Anyway, even if Doug has a mistress alibi, my other idea still holds, that he might have gotten involved with a woman who set this up behind his back. That is not so implausible. In fact, if Joe Allison weren’t a suspect, I’d say it was the most likely explanation.”

  Riva shakes her head, the look on her face dubious at best.

  He brings up his other point. “And what about Glenna? She admitted to her lawyer that she was seeing someone. Now we know it was Joe Allison. But what if she had another stud horse in her pocket, a backup for when Joe wasn’t available? Hey,” he says, “if she and Allison were screwing, what’s to say she wasn’t doing others? Why stop with one?” He’s pacing around the room. “The father’s screwing around, the mother’s screwing around, the fourteen-year-old daughter’s screwing around, and she’s pregnant. This trial’s going to be a frigging three-ring circus!”

  “I wish there were another way to do this,” she says. “I wish you didn’t have to drag so many people through the mud. Especially Emma. She can’t defend herself. She’s going to come off as a cheap little whore, no matter what finally happens.” She pauses. “I want you on the high road, Luke, not in the gutter.”

  He puts his hands on her shoulders. “So do I.”

  She puts her arms around him and lays her head on his chest. “I know this can get ugly and dirty—it already has. I’m hoping not too much of that mud will splatter on you.”

  He should’ve checked this out when he was in L.A. talking with Ramon Huerta, the car parker, but he didn’t, he was too excited about what he’d heard from Huerta to think clearly and thoroughly, so he has to drive back down there again, to Shutters, the hotel where Doug had been that night.

  He meets the detective outside the hotel, in the parking lot. Nolan Buchanan was an investigator for the D.A.’s office when Luke was the boss. Ray Logan, insecure, felt Buchanan was a loyalist to Luke (which was true) and forced him into early retirement. There’s no love lost between the two.

  Luke fills Buchanan in on what’s required.

  “That’s all? You could do this yourself, boss.”

  Luke knows he could, but if the ploy were discovered, he’d be in trouble. “I’ll watch you from the other side of the lobby,” he says.

  Buchanan enters the hotel and strides confidently to the concierge desk. “I’d like to speak to the manager or assistant manager,” he says, flashing his badge. Like cops in many jurisdictions, they get to keep a facsimile when they retire.

  The woman scrutinizes the badge. She writes the name down. Without questioning him, she picks up the telephone on her mahogany desk and dials a number. Within minutes a tailored woman whose hair is pulled back in an efficient bun comes out of the elevators and approaches him. “I’m Noreen Strong, the assistant manager. How can I help you?”

  “We’re investigating a credit-card fraud ring that may have made calls from your hotel last year,” Buchanan lies smoothly—he’s had decades
of practice. He gives her the date of the night Emma was abducted. “The calls would have been made between ten p.m. and two a.m.” Luke has given him the times in question. No point wading through twenty-four hours of telephone calls.

  It takes her a few minutes to retrieve the telephone logs from the basement files. Buchanan takes them to a quiet table in a corner of the lobby, where he sits and begins scanning the calls and the room numbers.

  From across the room, Luke watches. His former investigator writes some numbers down, hands the logs back to the concierge, and skedaddles. Luke meets him outside. He hands over two hundred-dollar bills.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You’re a professional. When you work, you get paid.”

  “Easy money,” Buchanan says. “Good luck, boss.” He pockets the bills and walks away.

  Sitting in his car, Luke looks over the information. Doug Lancaster made two phone calls that night. One was shortly after eleven, to his house. The other was logged in at 12:45 in the morning, to a 310 area code. The prefix is near the beach, the Palisades or Malibu.

  Now he has a club: Doug Lancaster called someone shortly before one in the morning, then left his hotel and didn’t return until after nine.

  Riva has done more checking. Emma Lancaster had been a babysitter for five families. She’d been doing it for a little over a year before she died. She was thirteen when she started, but she had an air of maturity and authority about her, and adults felt comfortable entrusting their five- and six-year-olds to her care for a couple of hours in the early evening while they took in a movie or went out to dinner. All the families she sat for had kids at the same school she went to, Elgin—they knew her and her parents. She didn’t need the money, but even at thirteen she liked making some money of her own; from an early age she wanted to be independent.

  Riva checks out the families. Two of them are single-parent, both mothers. In each of those cases, Doug or Glenna or one of their staff dropped Emma off and picked her up. In two of the other families, the mother always drove her home, for propriety’s sake. Only in one of the families Emma sat for did the father transport her, not only bringing her home but often picking her up at the house as well. On a few occasions, he picked her up at school.

  Riva drives to the man’s business, All Natural, a well-regarded health food store and restaurant at the northern edge of the city’s center. She browses for a few minutes, taking note of the large cheese display including sheep and goat cheeses from France and Italy, the impressive wine area featuring local and regional wines, the fresh organic fruits and vegetables (there are NO CHEMICALS signs scattered throughout the store), and the long meat counter at the rear, where only free-range meat and poultry, raised without pesticides in the feed, are sold.

  A wine and cheese dinner would be nice. She buys half a dozen hunks of various cheeses, a bottle of locally produced syrah, and a head of romaine. “Is Mr. Fourchet around?” she asks the cashier as her groceries are being bagged. Mr. Fourchet is the father in question.

  “He’s in the back,” the woman replies. “Would you like me to get him for you?”

  “If you would.” She walks to an uncrowded corner near the front door and waits.

  A man comes out from the back near the butcher counter and walks up the aisle to the cashier, who says something to him and points to Riva. He strolls over to her. “Hi,” he says, fixing her with an easy, practiced smile. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  He looks like the kind of man who would own a store like this. Bearded, longish hair, triathlete-thin, wearing a short-sleeved denim shirt and wrinkled khakis, he was probably an organic farmer or something related before he became an entrepreneur.

  “I’d like to talk to you about Emma Lancaster,” she says.

  The smile vanishes. He looks back over his shoulder, as if fearful someone might have heard her. “What about Emma?” he asks cautiously.

  She was hoping to catch him off guard, and she did. “Can we go someplace private?”

  Another nervous look-around. “Follow me.”

  Fourchet leads Riva back through the store to his office. It’s a small, cluttered, utilitarian space. There’s a desk with a computer screen and keyboard on it, a multiline telephone, a fax-copier. The only chair is an old, beat-up wooden one on casters behind his desk; against the other wall is a small futon couch covered with an Indian blanket. He moves around behind the desk, creating space between them. “How can I help you, Ms.—?”

  “Montoya. I’m working for Joe Allison’s lawyer.”

  He stares at her. “You are?” he says dumbly.

  She nods briskly. “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Fourchet?”

  He lowers himself into his chair, which wobbles unevenly. “What do you want to talk about?” he asks impatiently. “I talked to the police last year, when Emma disappeared.”

  “I want to know about Emma as a baby-sitter,” she says.

  He nods. “Well, you probably know she baby-sat our seven-year-old son occasionally, when my wife and I wanted to get out for a few hours.” He pauses.

  “Was she a good baby-sitter?” she asks, working her way in circuitously. “Never any problems with her?”

  “No problems. She was very good,” he says. “She was the only sitter Seth would tolerate.”

  “You liked her.”

  “We did.” He nods vigorously. “We all did. She was a great kid.”

  “How did you feel when you heard what happened to her?”

  Fourchet grimaces. “We were devastated, all of us.”

  It’s time to up the ante. “Mr. Fourchet, could you tell me where you were the night Emma was kidnapped?”

  No longer the friendly, accommodating storekeeper, he stares at her suspiciously. “Why are you asking this?”

  “I’ve asked all the families Emma worked for.” A small lie, which he’ll never check on.

  He sits upright. “I was in Paso Robles, with some of my produce growers.”

  “All night long.”

  “Yes. In fact, I was there from the day before she disappeared until the day after.”

  “The police asked you where you were because you used to drive her home from her baby-sitting some nights?” she asks.

  “I guess so.” His attempted nonchalance doesn’t come off. “They questioned everyone who knew her. Hundreds of people.”

  “There were times when you were alone with her. Picking her up and driving her home.”

  He’s squirming now. “Yes.”

  “Sometimes you even picked her up from school. Even when it was the afternoon and she wasn’t going to sit for you until evening.”

  He starts to speak, his mouth a furry hole in the middle of his beard.

  “You were seen,” she tells him. Not exactly what Hillary told her, but close enough.

  He nods unhappily. “It was more convenient sometimes to do that. Seth was always with us in the car,” he affirms. “They went to the same school, Elgin. It’s a private school in Montecito.” He knows he’s talking too much, but his mouth won’t obey his brain.

  She shakes her head. “Not always.” She stares at him.

  He jerks nervously at a sidelock.

  “When did Emma stop baby-sitting for you?”

  “About four months before she …” He doesn’t finish.

  “Before the kidnapping.”

  He nods.

  “Why did you stop using her, if she was the only sitter your son liked?”

  He turns away, fixing his look on a side wall. “My wife didn’t want her to.”

  “Why not?” Riva asks. She feels the closeness of the windowless room, the stale air. She’s claustrophobic, she would like to open the door, but she restrains herself. They’re in a vacuum together that has to be kept sealed.

  Another bad shrug. “I don’t know. It was just …”

  There’s a silence. Riva waits for him to continue. When he doesn’t, she hits him with the hard question. “Your wife t
hought you and Emma were getting into something, didn’t she?”

  Fourchet reddens. “My wife has a suspicious mind about that topic. It’s from when we used to live on a commune and everyone was free and easy.”

  “Including adult men and teenage girls.”

  “It was a different situation.” He’s beginning to have a hard time getting his breath. He covers his face with his hands. She leans forward on the desk, bracing her weight on her hands.

  “How old was Emma when you started sleeping with her, Mr. Fourchet?”

  He begins sobbing soundlessly behind his hands.

  “How old?” she asks again.

  He moves his hands from his face, staring up at her with red eyes. His complexion is red and blotchy. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “Fourteen.” He pauses. “Maybe not quite.”

  Riva rocks back onto her heels. Jesus. “Were you the first?”

  His sigh is an Old Testament lamentation. “I think so.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Her hymen was broken,” he says. “She said it was from riding horses.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  He nods. “I did.” He buries his head in his hands again.

  Riva stares at him. She knows what Emma must have gone through. She was involved with a drug dealer, she’s seen the dark side from several angles. But this is plumbing the depths. “Why would you do such a thing?” she can’t help asking. “How could you be so craven as to seduce a thirteen-year-old girl?”

  The first time was at his store. He and his wife had returned earlier than expected—they didn’t like the movie—so Emma wasn’t due home for another hour. The store wasn’t far from his house, and he needed to check on his walk-in refrigerator, make sure it was running at the right temperature, he was worried about his meat. They had installed some new coils that afternoon, and he wanted to make sure the unit was working properly.

  “It’ll just be a few minutes,” he told her. “You can wait in the car.” She had her schoolbooks with her, she had been doing homework when they came home.