The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  The Disappeared Girl

  Martin J. Smith

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Martin J. Smith

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition March 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-189-8

  More from Martin J. Smith

  Time Release

  Shadow Image

  Straw Men

  Combustion

  To Lisa Wren

  Chapter 1

  Definitely not my demographic, Dorsey thought. Undesirable ears, in radio parlance. These were Bottoms dwellers, the people who lived for generations just three miles downstream from Pittsburgh’s crystalline skyline, but in an area most real estate agents called simply “Hell Adjacent.” A dozen faces turned as he approached—kids mostly, malicious and dirty white—drawn to the downstream railing of the McKees Rocks Bridge by the news reports. Now here comes this out-of-breath 240-pound white man in a $1,700 suit.

  “Gents,” Dorsey said, tipping an imaginary hat. “Ladies. Mind if I join you?”

  No one recognized him, which figured. No one answered, either. Maybe that was best. They just turned away, focusing again on the salvage barge anchored in the brown Ohio River a hundred feet below. He checked the time on his Blackberry—still an hour before he was due to meet Carole at her brother’s house for Sunday dinner. He tried again to be friendly. “They’re trying to pull something up?”

  The tallest one shrugged. “Got it hooked on. Heard the dude say.”

  “’Bout time.” Stringy-haired guy. “Guy’s already down there half an hour. Sea Hunt’s gonna run outta air.”

  Dorsey’s stomach clenched as he eased toward the railing. He was standing on crumbling concrete at the center of Western Pennsylvania’s most self-consciously monumental span. Damn, this was high. But the spot offered the only clear view of what was happening below without crossing paths with the local TV news crews documenting the operation from the riverbanks. He gripped the railing and leaned closer, closer, trying again to blend in.

  “Got what hooked on?” Dorsey asked.

  The tall one gave him a hard stare, and Dorsey answered with his friendliest smile. The kid was maybe fifteen, a basketball wedged under one arm, shorts sagging. He pointed at the barge. “Airplane. Army or something. Heard the dude say they got it hooked on, like, five minutes ago.”

  “In the river?” Dorsey tried to sound astonished. “It crashed?”

  A tattooed woman spoke up. “Like, a million years ago.”

  Another woman rolled her eyes. “Like they even had airplanes a million years ago.”

  Dorsey slid the tailored silk suit jacket from his shoulders, draped it over one arm and rolled the cuffs of his white linen sleeves up to his elbow. In the humid summer heat, a boatman’s voice rose in a syrupy bubble from far below: “Clear!”

  “’Bout freakin’ time,” Stringy Hair said.

  The crane’s motor coughed a cloud of black smoke. Dorsey watched the boom as the steel cable tightened. The plane was buried in muck, or so said the radio station’s news director who’d read it off the Associated Press news feed. The rest Dorsey knew or assumed. The impact sheared off both wings as the pilot ditched in the Monongahela River one icy night in January 1983, twenty-two years before. The plane parts sank like bricks, but the fuselage rode the currents for months or even years, covering a mile of the Mon, past the Point where that river and the Allegheny flowed together in a grand geographic accident that became the Ohio. But the Ohio River got weird near Neville Island. The same currents that regularly delivered the bodies of bridge jumpers and mob hits to McKees Rocks must have deposited the plane’s hydrodynamic fuselage here as well. It finally settled, and over the years silt buried everything but the tip of its tail. That’s what finally gave it away. County divers spotted the tail while on a body search, according to the news report, sticking up from the mud like a shark fin.

  The crane boom groaned, and the operator revved its motor to a bellow. The entire barge dipped like a bobber, straining against the weight and the sucking mud. The guy beside Dorsey pulled a mouthful of malt liquor from a quart bottle of King Cobra.

  “Big goddamn carp,” he said, and the Bottoms crowd laughed.

  Then something popped. It was muffled by sixty feet of river water, but Dorsey heard it—the sound of corroded metal snapping like a branch. The crane’s motor changed pitch, and with a high whine the steel cable started to move. Whatever was still hooked on wasn’t putting up much fight.

  Something fluttered beneath the water’s surface as the prize moved back and forth like an underwater kite, growing by the second. Blurry edges became distinct. When the fractured piece of an airplane tail finally broke the river surface in a cascade of white water, Dorsey felt an odd mix of emotions. Sadness—remembering again his long-ago losses—but also an unexpected surge of relief.

  With the plane missing all those years, conspiracy buffs had run amok with what the newspapers called the “Mystery of the Mon.” Now, finally, they’d realize that the plane hadn’t been carrying a secret payload of nuclear bombs or biological weapons or Soviet spies, and hadn’t been extracted from the river during a covert, late-night government operation. It had simply broken apart and drifted in the river until it sunk into the mud. Its recovery would end the talk, all that hackneyed freelance speculation. At least that’s what he hoped.

  The crane operator swung his boom over the barge, his catch clearly now a tail section from a C-130 Hercules. It rotated slowly like a suspended side of beef while two guys from the salvage crew hosed away the accumulated filth.

  “That the wing?”

  “Ain’t no wing.”

  “That thingy on back then.”

  “Snapped right off, huh?”

  “Oopsyfuckingdoops.” The guy with the malt liquor took another long pull, finishing it off. “They’s done for the day. Running outta sun.”

  “I’m hungry anyway.”

  The locals shuffled away, heading west, following the bridge back into the Bottoms, moving to the cadence of a bouncing basketball. Dorsey watched them go, wondering if his Lincoln Navigator was safe in the Ukrainian Orthodox church lot where he’d parked it. When he turned back, a solitary figure lingered at the downstream railing. Dorsey could tell, even with the man facing away, that he wasn’t with the others. The clothes were too nice, his shoes shined, his silver-streaked hair oiled and combed straight back along the contour of his skull.

  “Michael Dorsey,” the man said without turning around.

  Dorsey swallowed hard. There was something familiar about his voice, a softness to what should have been the hard “K” sound in Dorsey’s first name. It was the distinctive accent of a Buenos Aires native, and Dorsey responded as a reflex.

  “Ramon?”

  How long had it been? Guerra finally turned. His smile was genuine. “They say there are no coincidences, my friend.”

  For the first time in at least a decade, Dorsey experienced the disorienting sensation of looking into Guerra’s eyes—one a bright and brilliant blue, the other darker, almost violet. His instinct was to look away, and when he finally did Dorsey notice
d the heaviness of Guerra’s jawline and the thinness of the hair sweeping straight back from his forehead. He was a little stooped, too, in the way the older men seem to get after their children are grown. He reached for Guerra’s hand and found genuine warmth in his grip.

  “I’ll be damned, Ramon. On the way down, I wondered—I just had this weird feeling I might see you here.”

  “A premonition? Or perhaps you heard the news this morning, like me, and decided to come?”

  “Curious, is all. You?”

  Guerra nodded. Something unspoken passed between them.

  Guerra relaxed, but it seemed a conscious choice. “I’ve been terrible about staying in touch, Michael. I’m sorry about that. But it seems—I listen to you all the time, you know. Your show. You are very good.”

  “Lucky, mostly.”

  Guerra waved away his attempt at modesty. “Your slogan, how does it go again?”

  Dorsey lapsed into his on-air voice: “‘Backtalk with Michael Dorsey—Keeping the Thought in Thought-Provoking Radio.’”

  Guerra spilt a grin beneath his thick moustache. “So true. So much talk, talk, talk out there, but no one is saying anything. You, your call-in show, it is very different. There is clear moral vision. Values. A voice of authority. Your voice.”

  Dorsey studied Guerra, trying to decide if he was sincere or just blowing smoke up his ass. It was hard to tell even with their history.

  “What about you, Ramon? Your business?”

  “We have a free-trade president again, thank God.” Guerra gestured to the heavens. “Do what you can to keep the Republicans in power, Michael. I nearly starved with the Democrats.”

  Dorsey held up both hands, palms out. “Strictly nonpartisan, Ramon.”

  “Of course.” Guerra’s grin this time was more like his moustache, carefully considered and trimmed for effect. He turned back toward the bridge railing. “Strictly.”

  “Do you ever miss medicine, Ramon?”

  Dorsey asked it without thinking, and regretted bringing it up as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Guerra looked away without answering, then leaned out over the bridge railing. Dorsey joined him, gazing almost straight down at the salvage barge. The crane operator had lowered the twisted chunk of the airplane’s tail onto the deck, and they stared at it a long time before either of them spoke again.

  “We are both lucky, Michael. It nearly ended for us both the night that plane went down. For us all.”

  Dorsey stepped back, uncomfortable now. They hadn’t spoken about this since it happened. Guerra leaned his forearms on the bridge rail and laced his fingers together high above the river. He closed his eyes, and for a moment Dorsey thought he might be praying. Then, suddenly, Guerra said, “The girl must be a young woman now.”

  Dorsey thought for a moment. “Melissa’s twenty-seven—hard to believe—and she’s had a rough go. Lot of hardwired emotional problems, the kind you so often see in late-adopted kids. Actually, I’m on my way to their house. Her father—her adoptive father—remarried, and—”

  “Remarried?” Guerra said. “Don’t tell me a divorce, after all they went through to adopt a child.”

  Dorsey shook his head. “Jim, my brother-in-law, lost his first wife a few years ago. Car accident. Coma. Nasty stuff. But he remarried, and Carole and I are getting together with them tonight. I’ve been so busy with—anyway, Melissa should be there.” He chanced another look into Guerra’s mesmerizing eyes. “She’s struggled, Ramon, but everything worked out as well as it could, considering. For her. For them. For me. What we did, it was a good thing—” Dorsey cocked his head toward the river below “—even if things didn’t go exactly as we’d planned.”

  Guerra nodded. “For me as well. I have a good life here, thanks to you.”

  “We helped each other, Ramon.”

  The crane motor stopped. The kid was right. The salvage crew was shutting down for the night. But they’d be back at it in the morning, and they’d keep at it until the river released its grip on the plane, or whatever was left of it.

  Dorsey checked his watch again. “I should get on out to Shadyside.”

  “Of course.”

  Far below, a dark, rubbery head rose from the mud-brown river right next to the barge. The scuba diver kicked to a ladder dangling from the barge’s lip and tossed a pair of black swim fins onto the deck.

  Guerra sighed. “Twenty-two years the river held our secrets, Michael.”

  Dorsey answered with words he wanted to believe: “I think we’re fine.”

  Chapter 2

  Christensen upended the Merlot, letting the last rosy drops trickle into his older sister’s glass. Not drunk, but not exactly sober, he set the empty bottle next to the other two in the center of a broad dining room table covered with dessert dishes and one empty, untouched dinner plate. Where was Melissa, anyway?

  “Kicked already?” his sister asked.

  “We’ve got more, Carole. I’ll get it.” Brenna lifted her bare feet from his lap, starting to get up.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Michael Dorsey held up both hands, palms out. At that moment, Christensen thought his brother-in-law looked like Buddha dressed for business, though with a tear-shaped stain of au jus on the breast pocket of his crisp white linen shirt. “Early flight tomorrow.”

  Carole leaned forward, took her husband’s hand in hers and kissed his palm. She was a teetotaler, but Christensen knew he’d poured her at least two glasses. She spread her arms wide and sang. “If I can—buhm, buhm—make it there …”

  Dorsey shot her a look, a gentle reprimand.

  “New York?” Christensen asked.

  Carole rolled into the chorus: “New York, New York!”

  “Oh God.” Her husband looked pained. “Not Sinatra again.”

  “Really atrocious Sinatra,” Brenna added. “You’ll be hearing from his estate.”

  Carole put a finger to her lips, teasing her husband. “Ooh, right. Almost forgot. Strictly hush-hush.”

  Dorsey shook his head, but he was smiling. He clasped his hands across his belly and leaned back. His chair creaked in protest. “Nice cover, hon. Nobody suspects a thing.”

  “For crying out loud,” she said, “they’re family, only family we’ve got.” Carole turned, unable to suppress a broad smile. “Michael has some news.”

  “Nothing’s inked. We’re still—”

  “Backtalk is going national,” Carole interrupted.

  “May go national. Nothing’s final.”

  Carole took that as permission to spill it all. “He’s been in talks with the network people for months. It’s unbelievable, what could happen.”

  “National?” Brenna said. “You mean, like, national?”

  The announcement brought the banter to an abrupt halt. Dorsey’s show had become a Pittsburgh talk-radio powerhouse in the three years since it hit the air. Backtalk had even been featured on Nightline from time to time, whenever Dorsey wrenched some significant revelation from one of his high-profile guests. But national?

  “Wait,” Christensen said at last, “you’re telling me there are that many fanatical right-wing sociopaths out there?”

  Dorsey picked up his fork and scraped the last bit of cheesecake from his wife’s dessert plate. “Damned right. It’s finally paying off.”

  “Your hard work?”

  The man waited a perfect beat. It was his genius. “Our breeding program. There’s a ranch in Wyoming.”

  Christensen’s laugh erupted, honest and spontaneous. He loathed his brother-in-law’s politics, but never doubted that Dorsey was one of the funniest and best-informed social commentators around. His conservative credentials were impeccable. Years in the State Department. Reagan-era diplomat. Eastern Regional Commissioner of the INS—a role that gave him remarkable insight into an agency with critical national security importance after the World Trade Center attacks. In a world where conservative listeners embraced Rush’s ravings and the pompous pieties of Dr. Phil, where the prerequ
isites for mass media punditry were woefully low, Michael Dorsey was impossibly overqualified. He had a self-effacing sense of humor plus a dead-on, deadpan delivery that, combined with his velvety basso profundo voice, had fast become a radio trademark. TV might never be an option given Dorsey’s girth and his increasingly desperate comb-over, but the man was outright seductive with a radio mike.

  “One favor, Michael,” Christensen said. Carole retrieved her husband’s plate and handed it across the table. Christensen paused for emphasis, dead serious. “Raise the level of discourse out there in Radioland. Strike a blow for evolved people everywhere.”

  Dorsey nodded. “I’m going to try. Thank you for your confidence.”

  Christensen raised his wineglass in toast: “To your success, Michael. That’s wonderful news.” The others followed suit, and the glasses met midtable with a clink of crystal.

  Christensen sipped his wine and turned to Brenna. “And while I’m at it—” He cleared his throat. “A little Irish number in tribute to my wife, Ms. Kennedy here.”

  He raised his glass again. Brenna rolled her green eyes, so striking in a face framed by her copper-colored hair, but he recited anyway: “The mist on the glass is congealing, ’tis the hurricane’s icy breath. And it shows how the warmth of friendship grows cold in the clasp of death. So stand, stand to your glasses steady, and drink to your sweetheart’s eyes.”

  After a silent moment—impressed silence, he hoped, not awkward embarrassment—they all drained their glasses. Then Carole reached for her husband’s hand. At the same time, Brenna laid her left hand gently along the right side of Christensen’s face. She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, tasting like heaven, then wiped away a tear as she pulled back. Everyone saw her do it, and she was suddenly self-conscious. She started clearing dishes.

  “OK, folks, show’s over,” she said.

  “Damn, Jim,” Dorsey said. “You couldn’t just buy her a Toast-R-Oven like a regular guy? I’m feeling a little inarticulate here.”