Gone The Next

by Ben Rehder

  “What now?”

  “I think we need to look through every album — every last photo — and see if Pierce is in any of them. If we can find one, maybe it’ll give us some idea how Erica Kerwick knows him.”

  “In that case, we’ll probably need to go through all the photos of all the relatives.”

  “No argument here.”

  “You’d better pull up a chair.”

  “Harder to look down your blouse.”

  “Grab a chair, you perv.”

  We spent the next two hours wading through all of the Facebook pages of the people listed in Curtis Hanrahan’s Family section. Sometimes those pages led to yet more pages of additional people. It was back to being boring, mind-numbing work. But I’m glad we kept digging, because there was one more big break to come. Maybe the biggest break yet. Certainly the most unexpected.

  We were sorting through more photos, this time in an album owned by a man named Skip Grogan.

  “Skip,” I said. “Who names their kid Skip?”

  “Probably a nickname.”

  “Still.”

  Mia took a moment to stretch her arms. “I’m losing track. How is this guy related to the Hanrahans? Or Erica Kerwick?”

  “Hell if I know. I can barely keep track of my own relatives. You want a Coke?”

  “Love one.”

  I went to get refreshments while Mia continued with our chore. When I came back with two cans and a bag of tortilla chips, Mia was clicking through photos of some fancy black-tie affair. She said, “You know, there’s a theme here: Seems like everybody in this family has money.”

  “Which family?” I asked. “The Grogans or the Hanrahans?”

  “I hope that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “Indeed.”

  I sat back down in the chair beside her, and if I’d been just a second later, I would’ve missed it. A photo was on the screen, but only for a split second before she clicked to the next one. I had seen something. Well, someone. Or I thought I had seen someone. Couldn’t be. Impossible. I was tired. Seeing things. Had to check, though. Just as I’d had to check when I had seen — or thought I’d seen — Tracy Turner.

  “Go back,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Go back one photo.”

  And she did. I was staring at a bunch of happy people in tuxes and cocktail dresses seated at a long dinner table. Not a posed shot, a candid shot, as when a photographer floats through a ballroom and takes discreet photos documenting some ritzy event. The kind of photo that shows up in the society column of the newspaper.

  Off to one side of the photo, and more in the background than the intended subjects of the shot, was a waitress. A blond waitress. My waitress. Jessica.

  Mia could tell I was stunned. “What is it?”

  “That’s the girl I just went out with.”

  “Sorry, guy, but you’re gonna have to narrow it down a little.”

  “The waitress from the other day. Jessica.”

  “Oh, that one. She’s pretty. Really pretty. What in the world is she doing in this photo?”

  “You tell me, because I don’t have a clue.”

  “You think she knows the Hanrahans or Erica Kerwick?”

  “I am completely and totally baffled. Let’s try her Facebook page.”

  Jessica appeared in the search results, but her privacy settings didn’t allow us to see much. Couldn’t see her wall or her photos. But we could see her friends list, and none of the people we’d been investigating were on it.

  “I got nothing,” I said.

  “Well, regardless, we have to go to the cops, right? Call that detective you talked to?”

  I didn’t answer right away.

  “Roy?”

  “Think about it from the cops’ perspective. What exactly do we have? I’ll tell you. We have evidence that Brian Pierce knows a woman who knows the Hanrahans.”

  “Not just one woman, two. Erica Kerwick and your new girlfriend. Pierce knows both of those women, and those women know Hanrahan.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend, and we don’t know whether Jessica knows the Hanrahans.”

  “But she was a waitress at some event they attended!” Mia was starting to raise her voice.

  “Exactly,” I said. “She was a waitress at some event they attended. So what? Despite how that looks to us, it could actually be a coincidence. She might not know the Hanrahans from Adam — and Eve.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know. I do know that we don’t have evidence that Pierce knows the Hanrahans. In other words, we still don’t have anything that will compel Ruelas to act. He won’t be able to get a warrant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s still going to think I’m a nutjob and that I’ve got some sort of obsession with Pierce.”

  “But it’s logical. The Hanrahans’ daughter went missing, then you saw her with someone who has a connection to them.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have any evidence that I saw her. And, again, we don’t know that Pierce knows the Hanrahans.”

  “He has to.”

  “It seems likely that he does, but that doesn’t make it so. I bet a rich power couple like the Hanrahans know a lot of people, so that means there are a lot of people who know someone who knows the Hanrahans.”

  “Weak, Roy.”

  “You think? Let me ask you something: Have you ever friended someone on Facebook, only to learn that you have a mutual friend in common that you never knew about?”

  She rolled her eyes. She was resisting me, but I thought it was a good thing. This debate was forcing me to think things through more than I normally do.

  “Come on, Mia.”

  “Yes. I have.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “That’s a lame comparison and you know it. Bottom line — what if Pierce has the girl, Roy? Pierce and Erica Kerwick and the guy who attacked you. What if they kidnapped her?”

  I sat silently.

  She said, “If they have the girl, and you don’t go to the cops with what you know, and then something happens to her...”

  I let out a sigh of frustration.

  Damn it.

  27

  Emily’s temperature finally came down after two harrowing days, but the ordeal — the fear he felt about losing her — made him realize that he might have less time with her than he had thought. He had to move things along more quickly.

  He was not a brute. He was not an abuser. There would be no force involved. He would need to gain her trust. Her affection. But it wasn’t proving easy so far. She didn’t seem to dislike him, and she didn’t actively avoid him, but she had most certainly not warmed up to him — not by any stretch of the imagination. And she was not forgetting as quickly as he had hoped. It was a problem.

  Just this morning, as she sat at the breakfast table, she refused to eat the eggs he had prepared for her. He thought it was the lingering effects of her illness. She hadn’t regained her appetite yet.

  Then she said, “I miss my mommy.”

  He didn’t reply. Didn’t react at all. Just kept buttering a piece of toast.

  “I want to go home.”

  “You are home, Emily.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  Jesus, not this again.

  “Your name is Emily and my name is Jimmy.”

  She didn’t reply. He resisted looking at her for the longest time, but when he couldn’t help himself any longer, he glanced over and saw that she was tearing up, her lip quivering, her face contorting in prelude to an emotional outburst. A tantrum. These had been rare. Only a couple. Admittedly, he wasn’t sure how to respond to these events, and he hadn’t been consistent.

  He went back to his toast, but before he was finished, the dam broke, and Emily began to wail.

  “I want my mommy!”

  Blubbering and hiccoughing so much she could barely get it out. Under different circumstances, it might be humorous.

  He
ignored her.

  “I want to go home!”

  “You are home, Emily.” Persistent. Don’t give in.

  “I am not! I want to go home!”

  “You are home. This is your home.” He was showing a calm exterior, but it was beginning to eat at him. His patience was running thin.

  Now Emily simply resorted to ear-piercing screams. But he knew it was simply a ploy to make him give in. He was stronger than that.

  “Eat your breakfast,” he said.

  She gulped air, then began to scream again.

  “Hush, Emily, and eat your breakfast. I went to a lot of trouble to make it for you.”

  In mid-scream, she shook her head. Being a brat. He could feel the heat rising in his face. She had no appreciation for him at all.

  “Emily, I’m going to say it just once more. Eat. Your. Breakfast. If you don’t, you won’t get anything else until lunch.”

  She let loose with her loudest scream yet, the little bitch, and his anger flashed, white hot, making him raise his hand, wanting to strike her. He grabbed her plate instead and hurled it across the room, where it shattered against the wall.

  28

  Detective Ruelas was staring at me with a total poker face. No emotion whatsoever. It was just after five o’clock — the earliest he’d been able to meet with us. I had almost finished giving him the complete story — everything that had happened since I had called him three days earlier.

  I’d told him about the woman arriving at Pierce’s place in the Jetta. Told him about Emma Webster seeing a little girl in Pierce’s truck earlier that year. Told him about setting up the rock camera and putting the dryer in Pierce’s driveway. Described how I was ambushed and temporarily abducted when I went back for the camera. (He exhibited no empathy at all and possibly even looked skeptical.)

  I mentioned that Mia had cleverly deduced that the camera might still be on the right-of-way. At this point, he’d glanced appreciatively at Mia, who was sitting beside me. He’d been glancing a lot, which I thought was a good thing. We’d predicted that having her along would give me credibility. I wouldn’t look so nutty with someone backing me up.

  Then I’d shown Ruelas the video — which I had edited down to the important parts — on my laptop. We were sitting in the same interview room as the last time I’d visited the substation, Ruelas on one side of the table, us on the other, which allowed us to watch his face as the video played.

  No expression. Like his face was made of stone.

  When the video stopped, I said, “We were able to identify the woman through Facebook. I friended Pierce a couple of days ago, and she was on his friends list.”

  “You friended Pierce?” The first words he’d spoken since we’d sat down.

  “Yeah. Well, one of my alter egos did. Pierce has since unfriended me, but not before I was able to dig through his friends list and save some important information.”

  Maybe — just perhaps — I saw a tiny bit of grudging respect in his eyes. Like he was thinking, Okay, that was pretty clever of you.

  He tried to cover it up by saying, “Where are we going with all this?” Impatient. Busy man with urgent stuff to do and important people to see.

  “Just give me thirty more seconds.”

  I swung the laptop around where I could see it and opened a folder of jpegs on my desktop, talking at the same time. Time to drop the bombshell. “Just so you can see it yourself, here’s a screen capture of the woman’s face from the video. And here’s a capture of her Facebook timeline. As you can see, her name is Erica Kerwick. Here’s one of her own photos — a better shot of her face, so you can compare it to the frame from the video. Same woman. Agreed?”

  “Sure. Any idiot can see that. Same mole on the chin.”

  I might’ve heard a tiny sound from Mia. Stifling a giggle.

  I was glad that I was about to shove this guy’s condescending attitude back in his face. “Here’s a capture of a post she left on her nephew’s wall. The nephew is named Curtis Hanrahan.”

  Boom! Detonation.

  He looked at me and one of his eyebrows went up. In the scheme of things, it was an overpowering display of emotion. Then he looked at the screen again and verified that what I was saying was true. Before he could speak, I said, “And here is a photo of Erica Kerwick with Patrick and Kathleen Hanrahan.”

  He leaned forward for a better look. Studied the photo closely. Now I think I had him hooked.

  I said, “We don’t know exactly how they are related, but clearly they are. So Pierce knows Kerwick, and Kerwick knows the Hanrahans. There’s a connection. And while I’m not one hundred percent sure that I saw Tracy Turner at Pierce’s house, I’ll say that I’m almost positive I did, and now there’s a good reason to check it out.”

  Ruelas kept his eyes on the screen for a few more moments, then he leaned back and looked across the table at me. Had a trace of a smirk on his face. Hard for a man like him to deal with the idea that I had been right all along. He turned toward Mia. “How long have you worked with this guy?”

  She dodged the question a little. “I’ve known him for a long time.”

  “Is he nuts?” I guess he just had to get his digs in.

  Mia laughed and started to answer. Then she gathered her thoughts and said, “He’s hardheaded, cocky, sometimes smug, occasionally arrogant, and even a bit egotistical, but no, he’s not nuts. Not even close.”

  “Arrogant?” I said.

  She didn’t look at me, nor did he. They were still looking at each other. I think it would qualify as lingering eye contact. What the hell?

  “You helped him with this research?” he asked her.

  “Yep.”

  “You can vouch that he didn’t Photoshop this all together or something?”

  I wanted to answer that myself. With a long string of insults and profanities. I managed to restrain myself.

  “Absolutely,” Mia said. “But feel free to get on Facebook and double-check our work.”

  Smart.

  He drummed his fingertips on the table. Again. And again. I knew what drove guys like him. He was the type who loved to make people wait for him to make Critical Decisions. Because he was an Important Man.

  Finally, just as I was about to stand up and leave, he looked in my direction. “Okay. I’ll check into it.”

  I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. “You’ll check into it?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask what that will involve?”

  He shook his head.

  “Can you get a warrant?”

  He looked at Mia. “You should add ‘pushy’ to your list.”

  She laughed. He grinned. I didn’t know he was capable of it.

  “I bet you have enough to get a warrant now,” I said.

  Ruelas said, “Also add ‘repetitive.’”

  And Mia laughed again. She was just playing along. Trying to make things go more smoothly.

  I think.

  Walking out of the substation, I said, “You know, it pisses me off a little.”

  “What does?”

  “He wasn’t grateful at all. Didn’t say, ‘Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Good work. Well done.’ Nothing. What an ass.”

  She didn’t reply. I unlocked the van and we climbed in.

  “Don’t you think?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That he’s an ass?”

  She shrugged. “He seemed okay. Just a cop. He has to deal with the public, and the public can be filled with idiots. I know that firsthand.”

  I started the van and backed out of the parking spot. “Still, there’s no reason to act like an ass when you’re dealing with people who aren’t idiots. And to not even let us know how he’s going to proceed...”

  “You did the right thing, Roy. Now it’s out of your hands and you don’t have to worry about it. Think positive. Be optimistic.”

  I pulled out of the parking lot onto Ranch Road 620. We rode in silence for about a mile.<
br />
  “You two seemed to be getting along well,” I said, with an unmistakable implication in my tone.

  “Oh, shit, Roy, did you really just say that?”

  “All I meant was — ”

  “Who’s being the ass now?”

  I can’t even tell you how fortunate I was that my phone alerted just then. Heidi emailing. Saying she’d be sending a new case by noon tomorrow.

  29

  After we got back to my place, Mia took off, and I ordered a pepperoni pizza. I was looking forward to a quiet, uneventful evening.

  I hadn’t realized until after our meeting with Ruelas how much the Tracy Turner thing had been stressing me out. It did feel good to know it was out of my hands now. I had no idea what that situation entailed, but the fact that someone related to the Hanrahans was involved made me much more confident that Tracy wasn’t in danger. A stranger was much more likely to do harm.

  But there was still one little detail lingering in my mind. One odd little circumstance that was difficult to dismiss as a coincidence, even though I’d earlier argued that it might be just that.

  Jessica.

  What was she doing in one of the Hanrahans’ photos? What were the odds? Better question: Why was I worried about it? It was on Ruelas’s plate now. Not my concern.

  Of course, as Mia had pointed out on the drive home, I hadn’t mentioned Jessica to Ruelas.

  “Didn’t see why I should,” I’d said.

  “Really?”

  “Why would I drag her into it?”

  “‘It’s always nice to have all the facts when you can.’”

  I had a feeling she was tricking me. “That sounds familiar.”

  “You said it earlier today. I’m sure Ruelas would agree.”

  “Well, I never said I was a genius, but I’m flattered that you can quote me.”

  And that had been the end of it.

  Okay, not completely. It was starting to eat at me. Both things — Jessica being in the photo, and my not telling Ruelas about it. But there was a solution. Call her up, make a date, and simply ask her about it. Discover that it’s a coincidence, or that there is some harmless explanation, and be done with it.