by April Smith
“What’s all this?”
I stepped forward and offered my hand. “Ana Grey with the FBI.”
Mrs. Meyer-Murphy continued to squint as if she’d suddenly gone blind.
Andrew touched her shoulder.
“Remember, Lynn, I told you? We were bringing in the FBI?”
She’d been pumping my hand with both of hers. Autopilot. Cold, long fingers. She was tall and strikingly underweight, short black hair with short bangs that kind of triangulated out over the ears. Sassy. On a good day. She wore a mismatched yellow cardigan over a T-shirt and blue nylon track pants. She was tired and wired at the same time, sallow skin, and the circles underneath her eyes profound. She was in that state of fluid grief where tears just come and go. But now the nervous blinking stopped. She peered at me with all the spirit she could muster.
“Thank God you’re here.”
“We’re going to do everything possible to get your daughter home safely and quickly. May we enter the house, ma’am?”
“Please.”
She stepped back.
The gang, which had been pawing the driveway impatiently, trampled through the door.
It was like opening day at the big sale at Target.
In a matter of minutes they had fanned out through the house, hoisting metal briefcases and coils of wire.
Mrs. Meyer-Murphy stared. Strangers were chugging up her steps and opening her closets.
“What are they doing?”
“We’re taking over your home.”
Wide-eyed. “You are?”
“Where is your husband, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy? Who else is in the house?”
Inside the door a heap of helmets and Rollerblades sat underneath a hat rack. She led me through a living room dominated by a fireplace of river rock. Family pictures on the mantel. I would get to those. A Santa Monica uniform was leaning over a coffee table, reading off the top of a pile of newspapers that had spilled onto a rose-patterned rug. There were shoes all over the place, kid sneakers and grown-up running shoes.
“My little one’s at school,” said Lynn Meyer-Murphy. “I took her to school, was that wrong?”
“Not at all. I’ll send an agent over.”
The tears—“I didn’t know what else to do!”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy. Beautiful home.”
There were gingham-covered sofas, distressed-pine tables, quilts and old-fashioned brass lanterns — artfully arranged but incongruous. The country style of the inside seemed to have nothing to do with the Spanish style of the outside. Or maybe the purple door held a symbolism that I missed.
“This morning, around six o’clock, I actually drank a martini. Is that crazy?”
“Understandable.”
“But it had absolutely no effect.”
As we passed through an arched doorway I noticed a cluster of miniature watercolors — tiny corsets and hats and high-button shoes. Commercial quality, obviously trained.
“Those are nice.”
“They’re mine. I’m a clothing designer and my husband is the manufacturer. A good idea at the time,” she added dryly.
In the kitchen the husband was half seated on a bar stool, talking on the phone. Lynn threw up her hands at the sight of him.
“Ross. Get off.”
He held up an index finger, telling us to wait while he continued to talk, focused on the floor.
“Ana Grey with the FBI.” Badging him. “I need you to hang up the phone immediately.”
He lowered the receiver. “It’s my phone.”
I stayed cool. I did not engage his anger.
“The lines need to be clear in case your daughter calls.”
“Oh, really? I never thought of that.”
He had the body type where the fat goes to the shoulders, round and bulky on top, a waist pinched by a belt too tight for those fancy jeans, stocky powerful legs. Balding. A light beard, color indiscriminate, which he was rubbing up and down.
“This is my husband.”
“She’s Meyer,” he said dolefully. “I’m Murphy.”
I gave it a smile.
Ramon hustled in, whipping a screwdriver from his tool belt.
“The police already hooked something up,” the dad said, indicating a small tape recorder attached to the phone.
“I know, sir, but we have to install our own equipment.”
“How are we doing?”
Now Andrew entered the kitchen, trailed by another Santa Monica police officer, statuesque, with blonde hair in a French braid. She had been the first responder. Her arms were strong and capable beneath the tight-fitting midnight blue uniform but her broad Slavic cheekbones were oily, eyelids heavy with fatigue. She had been on her feet for hours. Seeing another female on the job was a relief for both of us; we exchanged brief smiles.
“I just want to say one thing.” The dad pivoted on the bar stool. His chin was up, weary eyes defiant. “You already know this, Andrew.”
I cringed. Police officers like to be addressed by their rank. So far neither one of the Meyer-Murphys had gotten it right.
“Juliana is loved. She comes from a loving home. She is a good kid. She doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke—anything.”
Andrew said, “I hear you.”
The police officer put a fist on her hip and shifted weight, keeping her expression neutral. She had heard it, too.
“Juliana has never even been late without calling,” the dad went on. “Something happened to her, because she would never do this to us.”
“We know something happened to her,” began the mom a little desperately.
“Do you have a recent picture of your daughter?”
They had already been to the shoe box with the sheaves of family photos like a mixed salad of time — trips to Big Bear and fifteen years of Halloween — and pulled the standard school portrait, one of those cookie-cutter images that reduced the victim to an everyday teenager with long brown hair and a pleasantly chubby face, along with a black-and-white full-body shot of her holding on to a tree, an exaggerated pose with her butt sticking out, imitating a model, with a tight self-conscious smile.
“Has Juliana ever run away?” I asked.
The dad rolled his eyes.
“I know you’re tired and you’ve been over this—”
He put up his palms in submission. “No. Okay? My daughter has never run away.”
“Does Juliana have a boyfriend?”
“Are you kidding? She has no friends at that school.”
“She’s doing fine,” countered the mom.
“What school are we talking about?”
“Laurel West. It’s a private academy.” Ross seemed to like the word. “She just started there, just when we moved into this house.”
New house, new school. New money? I was making handwritten notes.
“How is Juliana doing at Laurel West?”
“Maintaining a C average,” the dad said with some sarcasm. “In middle school she was pulling A’s.”
“How do you account for the change?”
Neither parent had an answer.
“Can you give me a general idea of her activities?”
They looked at each other. “Well,” said Lynn, “she likes to hang at the Third Street Promenade.”
“Was she at the Promenade yesterday afternoon?”
“Not yesterday. Yesterday she was going over to her friend Stephanie Kent’s house. She does have friends. He thinks he knows her. He doesn’t know her at all.”
“I don’t know my own daughter?”
Lynn ignored him, gripping the back of a bar stool.
“They had to work on a science project,” she continued deliberately. “They had to make a car out of paper.”
Ross: “For this we spend fifteen thousand dollars a year.”
That was it. Lynn crumbled and Andrew was there to catch her, just as he had been for the pair of terrified bank managers on the Mission Impossible job. He’d had both arms around them — one male, one fema
le — as they wept on his shoulders after the ordeal of being held in the vault. I had been impressed to see that. With quiet patience he now held Lynn Meyer-Murphy through the present wave of anguish, his face closed down and solemn.
“Why don’t we sit?” Andrew said finally, indicating the breakfast nook. “When was the last time either of you had anything to eat?”
Lynn opened a drawer, pulled out a bag of bagels, put them on top of the counter and forgot about them.
Spread before us on the breakfast table was evidence of a family in the midst of a life too hurried even to sort out: mounds of magazines, catalogues, homework pages, The Silver Palate Cookbook, spelling tests and piles of mail still in rubber bands.
“What is that hammering?” Ross was staring at the ceiling.
“We’re putting in direct lines to the Santa Monica Police Department.”
“What for?”
“We’re setting up a command post over there. But we will have agents in your home, twenty-four/seven.”
This, also, was “new politics.”
“Twenty-four hours a day!” cried Lynn in a panic. “Where do they sleep?”
There was some drama happening across the room where Ramon was messing with a phone jack.
“Excuse me,” the uniform was saying. “You can’t just go ripping out our stuff.” She was holding the discarded tape recorder by the wires. She thrust it at him like a dead rat.
“Lady,” said Ramon, “the Bureau always puts in its own equipment — you never worked a kidnap before?”
“It’s Officer Oberbeck—”
The parents were watching. Andrew scrambled to his feet.
“Sylvia …,” he called.
“We were here first.” She jabbed an acrylic fingernail.
“It’s our jurisdiction.” Ramon angled the screwdriver.
“The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing,” Ross commented grimly.
“Sylvia,” said Andrew, walking over. “Take a deep break.”
“Don’t let them talk to you like that!” Lynn chimed in. “Just because you’re a woman!”
Officer Oberbeck suppressed a smile. “I’m really okay.”
“You’re more than okay — she’s terrific!” Lynn declared to the room. “When we got that hang-up call, I thought I would go over the edge—”
Me, alert: “A hang-up? A second call? Did anybody monitor it?”
Negative, according to Officer Oberbeck, and there was nothing on the tape.
“So nobody logged the call,” I said heatedly.
The police officer straightened, wiping an arm across her forehead, midsection held in tight. I could see her in basketball shorts playing hoops with the boys.
“I’m going home,” she said, adding kindly: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy. By dinnertime Juliana will be sitting here, and you’ll be yelling at her for scaring you to death.”
Lynn started blinking rapidly again.
It was twenty minutes into Day One and already I was corked.
“A call came in that we missed, people. We don’t know who it was or what they said? What the hell is going on?”
“It’s chillin’,” said Ramon. “We got it under control.”
Holstering the screwdriver, he left.
His emotion, my emotion, none of it mattered. The pressing absence of the girl was making itself felt even in the confusion of the kitchen: A leopard bag with ruby beads hooked on a chair. A Tale of Two Cities in paperback, a pink marker stuck in the pages. Blue nail polish. Size-eight pool thongs. These things, obviously Juliana’s, had become Day-Glo talismans, striking my eyes with mocking urgency as we took swipes at one another in frustration and landed on our butts.
There was a moment of bleak silence.
“Cream cheese or butter?” Andrew asked.
You had to love a guy standing in the center of a room, holding up a bag of bagels.
The dad’s eyes slowly rose.
“She’s Meyer, I’m Murphy. You figure it out.”
“No problem,” Andrew replied crisply. “My first wife was Jewish.”
“I didn’t know that,” I blurted.
“Lots of things you don’t know about me.” Untwisting the bag.
I hoped they thought we were being entertaining for their benefit instead of slip-sliding into the wrong movie.
I flipped a page in my notebook. The phone calls had come four hours apart. Maybe there would be a pattern.
“The next time the phone rings, who is going to answer, Mom or Dad?”
Lynn slowly raised her hand.
“The guy says, ‘We have Juliana and we want a million dollars ransom.’ You say, ‘I want to talk to my daughter. Put my daughter on the phone.’”
“I don’t ask where she is or anything like that?”
“You want to hear her voice,” I repeated calmly. “Before we even get into any type of negotiation, we need to know she’s alive. We call it ‘proof of life.’”
Lynn looked stricken by the implication. Her fingers went to her throat. “‘Proof of life’?”
“Anyone else, tell them nothing, get off the phone.”
She caught her breath.
“What if it’s my mother? I can’t tell her what happened. I can’t say, Mom, your granddaughter is missing, we don’t have a clue where she is, but we’re good parents, we really are.” She was twisting her wedding ring.
“Where does your mother live?”
“Florida. She moved there after my dad died.”
Ross: “After the loser”—making an elaborate point of gesturing to himself—“took over the business.”
Lynn’s cheeks were suddenly flushed. “You don’t understand. She’s very critical.”
“There will be a negotiator sitting right there, wearing headphones, listening to the conversation, passing notes on what to say.”
“A team of professionals,” said Ross, “trained to deal with your mother. God bless America.”
“I can’t do this.”
“For Juliana,” Andrew prompted. “Come on, you’ve been very brave.”
Lynn looked up with brimming eyes. She almost believed him.
“I’d do it,” said Ross. “But I hear that bastard’s voice, I’m gonna go ballistic, tear his fucking throat out over the phone …”
Then he saw something in his wife, a deep, sick fear he perhaps had never understood.
“You’re a good mom,” he said firmly. “Never let anyone tell you different.”
Lynn held on to her husband’s hand.
I asked about their manufacturing business.
“Business is fine,” answered Ross briskly, rubbing his beard. “Andrew went all over that.”
“We still need to look at your records. It would be helpful if you’d allow access to what’s on your desk.”
“My desk?”
“Employee records, ledgers, address books …”
“Fine,” said Ross. “How about what’s up my ass?”
Lynn said crossly, “Oh for Christ’s sake.”
Ross put his hands flat on the table and tilted back on the hind legs of his chair.
“Goddamnit, we are not the criminals.”
“In most kidnappings, the victim and the suspect know each other,” Andrew reminded them. “Someone in your world might have taken Juliana.”
Ross’s eyes went out of focus.
“I can’t do this. I can’t do this anymore.”
We waited.
“I just want her home.”
The scrambling went on around us. You could hear them working in the walls. Ramon appeared at the doorway, got the vibe, and backed away.
“Why,” whispered Lynn, “would someone we know take Juliana?”
“A grudge.” Andrew was watching her closely. “A threat.”
The mom’s cheeks flared even brighter.
“I’ll tell you who it is!” Ross snapped his fingers. “I should have thought of it before! David Yi.”
&nb
sp; David Yi was a trusted employee who turned out to be a member of a Korean gang that worked the downtown garment district. He figured out the alarm system, broke into the plant and stole three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of spandex. Ross had testified against him.
“Good. We’ll check out David Yi. Next.”
It is a statistical certainty that the longer a person is missing, the smaller the chances of recovery.
“Stephanie Kent. The girl Juliana was supposed to meet. Do you have an address?”
Lynn said she did, and I followed her up the bare oak stairs to get it, she in her blue running pants moving heavily, I in the black suit, impatient. I wanted to see the daughter’s room. To touch her bedclothes and breathe her teenage hibiscus perfume.
It was my job to know the victim as if she were my own flesh and blood.
In that way, I would know her abductor.
“I see Juliana swims.” Spotting a suit and towel hanging over the banister. Remembering the thongs.
“She was on the swim team,” replied the mother, “but she quit. Another thing she quit.” Her voice was faint. “I guess we should have told you.”
“It’s okay. We’re only at the beginning of this.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
She pushed on the door, and Juliana’s world opened up to me.
Three
The Kent residence was on a walk-through street in a “transitional” part of Venice, which meant you could pay six hundred thousand dollars for a tear-down and still get hit by a random gang bullet.
Andrew and I stayed in contact on the cells all the way over. Cell phones and pagers were our thing. Because of our schedules sometimes we couldn’t see each other for a couple of weeks, but we’d talk, weaving in and out of a never-ending conversation about police work, police gossip, police movies, police screwups and the Dodgers. Tension would build. Then would come the teasing call, the secret beeper code: it is surprising how sexy you can feel driving a tan Crown Victoria.
“Think the parents are in it?”
“I’m not ready to rule them out.”
“Me either. What about the dad? Think he’s molesting the girl? That’s why she split?”
“I don’t know, but the guy was pretty stuck on that spandex theft. We should check it out for insurance fraud.”
“Would you wait on the polygraph?”