by Blair Howard
“What’s her major?”
“Drama, but she’s also taking some other classes. English, math, and something to do with horses, as I said. She loves them, horses.”
“How about friends? Could she be…?”
“We thought about that, but she doesn’t have any close friends, not locally. What friends she does have are at school, and the only one I ever met was a girl named Jessica. She stayed over one weekend. Nice kid. They seemed close. Other than that, I don’t know.”
“Okay, so now the obvious question: boyfriends?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
I stared at him hard. He didn’t give an inch. Stared right back at me.
“When was the last time you heard from her?” I asked.
He sighed, sat back in his chair, and stared up at the ceiling. “Last Saturday morning. She was planning on visiting us on Sunday, but she called her mother and said she was going to stay up on the mountain and study with friends. We haven’t heard from her since. I called up there yesterday morning, and they said she hasn’t been seen since Saturday evening, when they came downtown to eat and party. I talked to the vice chancellor of student affairs, and she said Emily hasn’t attended classes all week…. I also talked to Jessica. She said they ended up at your buddy Hinkle’s place, the Sorbonne. They left there just after one in the morning. Emily caught a ride back with someone else—not… a guy. A female. Look, Harry, you might as well know now: Emily’s gay, a lesbian.”
This wasn’t new information, hence the way I’d phrased the previous question, but I hadn’t been about to let him know that I knew.
“You have a name?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You run her credit cards, bank accounts…?”
He looked at me like I was stupid.
“Yeah, of course you did. Sorry. Nothing, huh?”
Again he shook his head.
“What about her car? I assume she has one, living up there.”
“It’s in the school lot. A red Civic.”
I nodded. “Tag number?” He gave it to me, and I made a note of it.
“What about the friends? Do you have any names other than this… Jessica?”
He was about to shake his head again, but caught himself and said, “She never really mentioned anyone else, but there was one girl, a study partner, I think. A girl in her dorm. Lacy, I think. That’s all.” He looked at me sheepishly. “Yeah, I know. Not much of a father.”
“I wasn’t thinking that, Wes. Look, we both know it’s not good,” I said. “It’s been almost week without a word….”
“Yeah, I know. She’d have called if… if she could have. Christ, Harry. It’s times like these I wish I wasn’t a cop. We know, don’t we.”
I nodded. He knew what I was thinking, and he was thinking it too. It’s what cops do.
“Why me?” I asked. “You have the entire department at your disposal.”
He nodded. “I do, but that school is out in the county. I don’t have jurisdiction up there. You can go wherever the hell you like.” He hesitated, then said, “Harry, you can be an ornery son of a bitch when you want to be, but you’re also the best at what you do. You know every important son of a bitch around, every mover and shaker from here to Savannah, and I know that if anyone can get the job done, it’s you. Most of all, though, you’re discreet, and right now that’s what I need. So, will you help?”
He was right. I have unprecedented access to the rich and powerful in our fair city; most of whom I’d known since my school days, thanks to my old man, who made sure I attended the right schools and received the best possible education. His philosophy, and by proxy my philosophy too, has always been that it’s not what you know that brings success; it’s who you know. And I can count just about every lawyer and judge in town among my circle of friends.
“You talked to the sheriff?”
“Hands? Yeah. You can guess how that went. ‘She’s twenty-two,’ he said, ‘probably met some guy and went off partying with him.’ I didn’t tell him she was… you know. Wouldn’t have made a hill a’ beans’ difference. He’d have just changed the pronouns. Arrogant son of a bitch. Told me to give it time. But that ain’t good enough, Harry, because whatever she is, she’s my little girl.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear how our erstwhile sheriff, Israel Hands, had responded. He was a politician with the insight of a donkey, and I’m being charitable.
“You know I will,” I said, “but I have some conditions.”
Wes raised an eyebrow.
“One: You have to agree that however it turns out, whatever I find, you will let me follow it through to its conclusion, whatever that may be. Two: I want access to your facilities—labs, forensics, everything. Three: I want you to turn Kate Gazzara loose to work with me and act as a liaison between me and your department. Four: Stay off my back. I don’t need you looking over my shoulder, hounding me for minute-by-minute updates. I can’t give you that. Agreed?”
He nodded, staring at me. I could tell he wasn’t happy, but it was his call, and he made it.
“I’ll have Gazzara take some leave. God knows she’s got plenty owed her. Discretion, Harry. Until we know what’s happened to my daughter. You good with that?”
“Yes, of course. Not even Kate.”
“Ah. She already knows, about the gay thing.”
“Mm. You got photos?”
“Yeah.” He took them from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed them to me. “The one on top is the best. It was taken on her birthday. The others….” He shrugged.
“Call Kate. I want to talk to her this evening. Put her in the picture; make sure she understands that it’s my investigation, that she’s to work with me, and keep everything to herself.” I told him I’d stay in touch, and call him as soon as I found anything, and then he left.
I sat for a moment, staring out through the open door into the outer office. Emily. Little Emily. Not good. Six days. Not good at all.
I was startled out of my daydreams when my iPhone buzzed and began to travel across my desk. I picked it up and flipped the lock screen.
“Hey, Kate. Yeah, he just left. You good with this? Good. We need to talk. You busy tonight? Can you stop by? Amanda’s cooking dinner…. No, she’ll be fine with it.” I looked at my watch. It was after six. “Shall we say seven thirty?”
Chapter 2
I arrived home at six thirty to find Amanda busy in the kitchen.
“So,” she said, an enigmatic smile on her lips, “we have a guest, do we?”
She was wearing a simple form-fitting gray dress cut just below her knees, and she was barefoot. I crept up behind her, slipped my arms around her waist, and nuzzled her ear.
“Stop it, you ass. Tell me why Kate’s coming over.”
There wasn’t much to tell yet, but I filled her in on what I did know, and how Kate and I would be working together for a couple of days.
Now, let me put something on the table. Amanda is a very special, strikingly beautiful woman, and the love of my life. She’s tall, five feet nine, with a figure you can’t buy anywhere, and wears her strawberry blonde hair bobbed, elfin-like. Her heart-shaped face is sharply defined by high cheekbones, a small, slightly upturned nose, and wide-set, pale green eyes. She’s the star of the small screen owned by the local Channel 7, and she’s smart: she has a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from Columbia. Yeah, she’s quite the package.
Kate Gazzara is also quite special and was, until a couple of years ago… well, you get the idea. So you can understand Amanda’s question. I’ve known Kate since she was a rookie cop, more than fifteen years, and until I quit the force in 2007, she was my partner. Now she’s a lieutenant with the Chattanooga PD, a homicide detective in the major crimes unit. She’s almost six feet tall, and she works out. A lot. She has a high forehead and long, tawny blond hair. She and Amanda get along. Well. Sort of.
So, that was the situation. While Amanda f
inished getting dinner ready, I showered and changed, and when I returned to the kitchen, Amanda had three fingers of my favorite beverage waiting for me: Laphroaig scotch, poured over a single ice cube into a Waterford Baccarat crystal glass.
I went to the living room and looked out over the river. The light was fading fast, but my gaze was drawn inevitably to the tree stump on the far riverbank. My longstanding love affair with the great river was over. Mary Hartwell had ended it for me back in June, when she crouched behind that tree stump with a rifle and tried to kill me. She only succeeded in shooting out the window, but I used to sit for hours in front of that window, enjoying the view. Not anymore. Now I’m always… wary. Looking for something that isn’t there, wondering when it will be there. That’s no way to live….
“Hey,” I said, as I wandered back into the kitchen. “You have any luck with the realtor today?”
No, Amanda doesn’t live with me, at least not yet, though she might as well. She spends more time at my place than she does at hers.
“As a matter of fact I did,” Amanda said. “She has a place on East Brow Road she wants us to look at.”
“East Brow? That sounds expensive.”
“Probably, but it needs some work, so if you like it maybe you can cut some sort of a deal. When do you want to go look at it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow afternoon, if I get done with the Johnston thing….” It was then that the doorbell rang.
Amanda raised an eyebrow at me. “I thought she had a key.” It was lightly said, but there was no mistaking the undertone.
“I got that back eighteen months ago, as you well know.”
She smiled at me, but there was little humor in it.
I went to let Kate in, and as soon as I opened the door I knew I’d made a mistake. She was dressed to kill.
When are you ever going to learn, Harry?
She had her hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a sleeveless white top, a black skirt cut above the knee, and three-inch heels.
“Hey, come on through,” I said, leading the way into the kitchen.
“Hi Kate,” Amanda said, coming around the breakfast bar and giving her a hug. “Wine, or something stronger?”
“Wine please. Anything red will work.”
“Dinner’s ready. Nothing fancy, I’m afraid. Just salmon, baked sweet potatos, and asparagus. I’m on a diet.”
Diet, my ass, I thought. You could eat an elephant and not put on a single pound.
We ate quickly and in silence; the whole meal couldn’t have taken us more than ten minutes. When we were done, I cleared the table and made coffee, and we talked.
“So you’re all right with this, Kate?” I asked. She nodded. “How much did Johnston tell you?”
“Not much, just that I was going to take some vacation days and spend them working with you. What the hell is this all about?”
“Emily.”
“Emily the chief’s daughter? What about her?”
“She’s missing. Five days, six if you count last Sunday, which was the last time anyone heard from her. She was last seen leaving Hinkle’s place around one in the morning.”
“Shit. I was talking to her only last Friday. She’d just come out of Johnston’s office. She was all smiles. Happy.”
“Well, from what he’s been able to discover, she was last seen outside the Sorbonne getting into a car. The driver was female. Her friends said she hitched a ride back to school, but… well, she never made it.”
“What school?” Amanda asked.
“Belle Edmondson, on Signal Mountain.”
“Ahhh.”
“What?”
“Well, I know it. It’s… exclusive, and very, very expensive. I did a story on it years ago. Weird place. Liberal arts college, emphasis on the liberal. Small. No more than five hundred or so students, and a small faculty too. I think it’s more a finishing school than anything else. They have classes, of course—acting, music, dance, history, journalism, and so on—but I think they focus more on the social graces than on academic excellence. I found them to be an affected, catty bunch, the girls and the faculty both. The students come from all over the world. It’s very difficult to get accepted, too, and I’m not talking about grades. From what I could tell, they tend to choose from a certain… shall we say, elite class of people.”
“How the hell did Emily get in then?” Kate asked.
I’d been wondering that myself.
Amanda shrugged. “You’d be the best person to answer that, Harry. It’s not what you know, right?”
“It’s like that, huh?” I said. “But who the hell does Johnston know with that kind of pull, I wonder? Any idea what it costs?”
“About the same as one of the Ivy League schools. $55,000 a year, plus another five for personal expenses, books, etcetera.”
“Jesus.” Kate said. “Where the hell is Johnston getting that kind of money? Must be up to his ears in debt.”
I opened my legal pad and scanned the notes I’d taken while talking to Johnston. I shook my head. It was little enough.
“I have two names. Jessica, no last name, who’s a friend from school, and a girl named Lacy. I don’t know if she’s a friend or not; her name was all Wes had. Kate, I need you to check and see what security cameras there are downtown, close to Hinkle’s place. If there are any, we might get lucky. If not, it’s back to good old-fashioned footwork. Hinkle has cameras; I do know that. We’ll check those. We need to find out who she was with that night, what they saw, and we need the make, model and tag number of the car she got into…. Shit. I don’t like it. Not one bit.”
“You know she’s probably dead, right?” Kate asked. “People don’t just drop off the map like that, not unless they want to get lost, and Emily didn’t give me that impression. So….”
“Come on now, Kate. Let’s try to be a little optimistic.” I said it, but I knew she was right. I’d seen it before, and all too often. I had a bad feeling, and those feelings were rarely wrong. Damn it.
“Do you want me to start at the Sorbonne?” Kate asked.
“I’ll go see our friend Benny Hinkle. You check the other bars. There would have been plenty of places open at one in the morning on a Saturday. Here, show those around. See if you get any hits.” I handed her copies of the photos Johnston had given me. I’d run them off on the office copier before I’d headed home. “We can meet up there when we get done.”
“What about me?” Amanda asked.
I looked at her quizzically.
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
I opened my mouth to object, but the look on her face told me not to bother. So I didn’t.
I looked at my watch. It was a little after eight thirty; still early, which was good, because I didn’t want to be in the Sorbonne on a Friday night when things started jumping. I’d always thought that if I were to be given a choice between going to Hell or the Sorbonne, Hell would win out every time.
The Sorbonne. With a fancy name like that you’d think it would be one of those ritzy places society folks like to inhabit. But you’d be wrong. Oh so wrong. Sorbonne is a fancy name for what can only be described as a boil on Chattanooga’s ass. Benny Hinkle, the proud owner, likes to call it a nightclub. It is not a nightclub. It’s a dump and a place of ill repute, the last refuge of every lowlife that can afford the price of a watered-down drink and stand the soul-destroying cacophony Benny likes to call music. I knew the place well, and knew its owner even better. I’d spent more time in there than I probably should have, sometimes just to jerk myself out the lethargy brought on by the daily grind—it can be quite an entertaining experience—but mostly to keep an eye on the lowlifes that inhabit the place.
Kate also knew the place well. Amanda, not so much. But I’d taken her in there a couple of times and, to my utter amazement, she’d hit it off not only with the fat smear of humanity that was Benny Hinkle, but also with his sidekick, Laura. Don’t ask me her last name. I don’t know it, and I don�
��t want to.
Laura is Benny’s longtime partner, a big, blowsy blonde, usually dressed in a tank top that barely covers an amazing pair of breasts, cutoff jeans that barely cover her even more amazing ass, and… cowboy boots. Unbelievable. She is the epitome of the stereotypical Southern barkeep, and that in itself is worth a fortune to both of them.
So I gathered up my pad and the photos and, with healthy enthusiasm, we all headed out the door.
Chapter 3
We parked our cars—Amanda and me in my Maxima and Kate in her personal Accord—in the Unum lot just off East Third and from there went our separate ways. We’d arranged to meet at the Sorbonne at ten thirty; it was almost nine when Amanda and I walked into Hell that night. Satan himself, in the form of Benny Hinkle, spotted us the moment we crossed the threshold.
“Goddamn it, Starke. I told you to stay the hell out of here. Oh hey, Miss Cole. Nice to see ya. What will you have?”
“I’ll have a gin and tonic, Benny,” I said, “heavy on the gin, light on the tonic.” That was supposed to get me something that might, on a good night, be close to drinkable.
“Screw you, Starke. I was talking to the lady, an’ that is what you ain’t. So zip it. Better yet, get the hell out of my club.”
I leaned over the bar and grabbed him by the front of his beer-stained shirt and pulled, and he yelped, and the customers on either side of us scattered, most of them heading for the door.
“You gonna get me a drink, or do I have to come around there and get it myself?” I said it, and then literally gasped as he choked and hit me with a blast of fetid breath. It was too much. I dropped him and took a step back. Hell, I almost lost my salmon.
I looked sideways at Amanda. She had a hand to her mouth and was laughing silently.
“One more time, Benny,” I said. “A gin and tonic for me and another for the lady.”
“I’ll get ’em,” a voice said, just off to Benny’s right.