The Consultant

by Sean Oliver

  “What’s this?”

  “You’ve been transferred back to your home school downtown. You should report directly there—your assignment here is over. “

  Moore stood unplugged; he didn’t open the envelope. He tucked it in his pocket.

  “Okay, then,” Moore said. George didn’t move from his spot atop the stairs. Moore grabbed the railing and started back up toward the security desk. “Just need to grab some of my stuff. Then I’ll be off.”

  George turned and reached down near the security desk. He grabbed a box and stood back up to meet Moore before the guard could pass him.

  “Here you go,” George said. “Everything should be in here.” George extended the box and Moore took it. He stood for a moment and looked into the box. There was a Carson district ID card on a lanyard, two copies of Sports Illustrated with his name and address in the subscription area on the cover, a flashlight, and an umbrella. The security desk was five feet up and past George, and Moore started for it.

  “I got more stuff up there.”

  “Hang on,” George said, stepping in front of him. “We have an issue we are dealing with.”

  The entrance door opened behind Moore as the squawk of a police radio call filled the foyer. He turned to see a unformed Carson police officer entering the building.

  SIXTY-ONE

  DEANNA HELD BETH McAllister’s hand as they sat in a conference room at the Carson detective headquarters. Both of their palms were sweaty. They waited for O’Malley, who’d shown them to the room only moments before, heading back out to fetch a couple of waters.

  The room was a large collection of mismatched items, probably servicing a dozen functions each day. It was too big to be an interrogation room. This is more than likely where victims’ families or the press went or where cops strategized. The drop-ceiling tiles were yellowing and the dust collecting at the A/C vents was enough to make you question even breathing in there. The building was probably over a century old and any large-scale improvements couldn’t offset the toll of age.

  “How’s Mr. McAllister?” Deanna asked Beth.

  “Oh, Lord,” she said as she closed her eyes and shook her head solemnly. “Thomas will not exit the house. Even when I’m there he’s afraid news will come while he’s out. He talks less and less each day.” Beth composed herself before relating the any more of the effects of their only daughter’s disappearance. It looked like the retainer wall was already giving way to the heartache, but Beth McAllister was composed and elegant always, if nothing else.

  “I can imagine,” Deanna said. “I don’t think I blame him.”

  Beth closed her eyes again. “We all do this differently, I guess. Just that most people never get time to practice it.”

  “Thank God.” The ladies sat silent in the empty room and filled it with a world of thoughts. Being in a police station made everything about Trisha’s disappearance real and tragically pessimistic. But they wanted to be kept up to date regarding the investigation. Being in the purgatory of silence might have been worse than coming to the precinct every few weeks for updates, fruitless as they’d been.

  The conference room door opened and O’Malley appeared with an accordion folder and two bottles of water, which he placed on the table before each of the ladies.

  “Okay, guys,” he said. “Glad you could come down.”

  “I’m not,” Deanna said.

  “Well, obviously I’d prefer you didn’t have to come at all,” the detective said, “but I’m glad you are reaching out and being proactive about the investigation.”

  An awkward silence prevailed as O’Malley sat kitty-corner to the ladies. He slid papers out of the folder.

  “I regret to say we don’t have anything new and groundbreaking.”

  “Detective,” Beth said, tilting back her perfectly coiffed head, “my house-bound husband and I have been talking to everyone we know, everyone Trish knew—and to a person they cannot think of anything that would have made her willingly leave us. She was careful, maybe too trusting, but not vulnerable.”

  “I understand that,” he said. He waited for more, maybe some clarity as to where she was headed.

  “She doesn’t want you wasting your time looking for boyfriends, or sugar daddies, or stuff like you suggested when I came here,” Deanna said. “She didn’t just leave. She was taken, and no one that knows her thinks any different.” She looked right into his eyes.

  “I don’t think anything we would do in the course of an investigation would be a waste of time,” O’Malley said. “We have to explore every possible avenue. We owe it to whoever we are searching for to do that.”

  Beth opened her mouth to speak, but Deanna jumped in.

  “But that’s because you don’t know them. How many bad-boyfriend cases that you get are a real shocker to the friends and family of the girl? I would bet almost everyone knew some shit was going to happen. They probably warned her, too.”

  O’Malley shrugged. “Nothing is one hundred percent.”

  “How about eighty?” Deanna asked. He shrugged again.

  “My daughter called me every day since she moved out of our home,” Beth said. “Every day. She either saw or spoke with Deanna every day, as well. Do you know why?”

  Another shrug.

  “Because she loved her family,” Beth continued, taking Deanna’s hand in hers once again. “She loved the idea of home. She loved her dear friend here. Not only would she never have left us of her own volition, but nothing could have been strong enough to come between that bond. Not without…” She couldn’t finish. She brought her fist up to her lips, gaining composure. “Force.”

  Deanna dropped her head. The three of them sat with that, the most terrible of options. But certainly the most likely after nearly two months of this stalemate. The article in the Dispatch the other day publicly proclaimed there were no developments in the case after eight weeks. Deanna took that headline right off the teacher’s room table and slammed it in the trash.

  Two months.

  “Ladies,” O’Malley began, “the most unfortunate part of my job is sifting through misery and tragedy all day, every day. I’d be very bad at my job if I didn’t spend as much time as I do working cases like this. And I can tell you, on a personal level, that it has never gotten easier. It has never made me take anything for granted. No victim and no crime has ever become standard.”

  O’Malley seemed a sincere guy. He never had that tough-cop thing. He was never a know-it-all. And now he was letting them know he wasn’t a seen-it-all type either.

  “I appreciate that, Detective,” Beth said.

  “Nothing about any case is typical,” he said. “Not to me.”

  They looked at each other for a few seconds. The women nodded. Beth gestured to the folder.

  “After all of that experience navigating such pain and suffering, what do you think happened here, Detective?”

  He looked down at his paperwork. “I suppose this part of the discussion will satisfy your desire not to hear me talk about trips out of town with a boyfriend. But it’s going to be hard for me to say nonetheless. And hard for you to hear.”

  He shifted in his chair and leaned in, talking with his hands.

  “Trisha leaves school at 3:13 p.m. that day. We know that from the security camera at the front desk. Best I can guess, she’s on the road and gets a flat down by Gove Street, which is not her normal route but there’s traffic and detours and a million things that make me change my preferred path home every day. The high rises and condos keep going up but there aren’t any more roads.”

  “It’s so congested,” Beth said. The detective nodded in acknowledgment and kept on.

  “Anyway, I think she feels the tire or gets an indicator light on her display. She sees a parking spot and pulls into it. Or she doesn’t feel the tire, parks to run into a store, pays cash for something because we have no card activity, and comes back to discover the tire. Either way, she’d parked with a flat tire. She gets an o
ffer of help before she can call a tow, you, Deanna, or anyone else. She accepts the help—“ He raised his hands and shrugged yet again.

  “God in heaven,” Beth said. She dabbed her eyes.

  “Someone knows something,” O’Malley said. “In every case, someone knows something. And eventually they tell someone, or their conscience gets the best of them. Someone comes forth.”

  “I pray,” Beth said.

  “Me, too,” O’Malley said.

  Beth stood and offered her hand. O’Malley shook it gently, but held it.

  “I’m here if you need anything,” he said. “Even just to talk. Tell Mr. McAllister, too.”

  Deanna stood and waved.

  “Did you come together?” O’Malley asked.

  “No, we met here,” Deanna said.

  “Deanna, can you hang here a minute? I want to ask you some more questions about your school.” Deanna turned to Beth before replying.

  “I’m fine, sweetie,” Beth said, kissing Deanna on the cheek. “You stay. Help Trisha.” She rubbed Deanna’s arm and headed out. O’Malley closed the door behind her and sighed. He turned to Deanna.

  “I assumed you had something for me, based on your text last night.”

  “How do the pings and cell towers work?” Deanna asked. “You told me Trisha’s phone only pinged towers in Carson.”

  “If you got a text right now, here in the middle of Carson, a big city, it could ping any one of twenty towers around the area. It has to do with availability and cellular traffic. So it’s not exact down to the square foot. But what it does tell us is that a phone that pinged in Carson was not in Parsippany.”

  Deanna took out her phone and opened her messages. She handed the phone to the detective.

  “I sent her this text at 8:08 p.m. on Friday, the day she went missing. And you’re telling me it hit a tower in Carson?”

  He looked at her phone. “It’s not past midnight, so yeah.” He shuffled through some papers on the table in front of them. “I have the cell records here.”

  “Did you think that was weird? That she lives a half-hour away from Carson, but that night she never leaves the city, never calls her family or her best friend that lives in Carson, even though she has a flat tire?”

  “A little,” O’Malley said. “But I didn’t know her. And we got all the pings from Carson.”

  “Because she was here.”

  O’Malley scrunched his brow. She was going somewhere with this, laying something out. He stayed quiet.

  “Maybe you’re right about getting the flat tire,” Deanna said, “but she leaves school close to regular time. You saw that on the camera.”

  “Okay,” O’Malley said, inviting more with his hands.

  “I don’t know why she was driving by Grove Street, but whatever—she gets a flat. I think she does meet someone there who offers to help, but I guarantee you she knows him.”

  “Maybe,” O’Malley said. “But she could have parked the car, gotten grabbed by someone and thrown in the back of a van and driven off. This could still be a stranger crime.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How do you know?”

  Deanna pointed down to his cell phone tower record. “You said she’s pinging all around this area, here in Carson. You think this guy grabbed her and took her to dinner at Cuba Libre?”

  O’Malley was rocking slowly in his chair. He kept looking at Deanna like he was deciding on a talent contest.

  “She doesn’t hang out in Carson,” Deanna said. “She doesn’t shop in Carson. Unless she’s at my place or school—she’s not in Carson.”

  “And she left school.”

  “And she wasn’t at my place.”

  O’Malley kept looking at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  He rolled his eyes and stood up. He began digging through the accordion folder and pulled out a photo and slid it to Deanna.

  “Guess I’m doing this because I see how upset you are and I have a daughter,” he said.

  Deanna picked up the photo. It was Trisha’s cell phone, in an evidence bag.

  “You have her phone?” Deanna asked.

  “It was at school. She must’ve dropped it and left without it. Explains all the pings in Carson—phone was here. She, however, could’ve been anywhere.”

  “You never said—”

  “Sometimes we don’t. We didn’t mention her leaving her phone at school until we got all the tower data back. Doesn’t really matter now. Phone was sitting in the school all day.”

  Deanna was shaking her head. “No way.”

  “Deanna, I’m telling you the truth. A janitor found it when he was sweeping up late Friday. Turned it in to lost and found on Monday.”

  “She would never leave school without her phone. No one under forty would, no offense. Especially on a Friday.” She shook her head.

  “There’s no other reasonable explanation. It lines up with the towers saying the phone was in Carson, corroborated by you and her mom and everyone else saying she wouldn’t hang out in Carson.”

  “Nope. She left. And she had her phone.” Deanna was staring straight ahead, putting it all together. She prepared herself for what she was about to say. “And someone brought her back to school.”

  Deanna looked up at the detective, the stark reality on her mind and in her eyes from the way the detective recoiled.

  “Someone brings her back to school and no one sees it?”

  Deanna nodded. “Late.”

  “And the phone…” he stopped.

  “Never leaves again.” Deanna was trying to navigate her grief and also an explosive anger.

  “Or,” he said, changing the tone, “she could have left her phone at school. You can’t say for sure.” It did nothing to change the terror in Deanna.

  O’Malley stood and walked to the conference room door.

  “Pete,” he called into the detective’s bullpen. A few seconds later O’Malley was giving instructions to a stocky detective in the doorway. “Call down to P.S. 21 and ask for the principal. Tell him I need to see camera footage from January 19th. But night time. From after school.”

  “No,” Deanna said. “Don’t ask the principal.” She looked away.

  “Okay,” O’Malley said.

  “Call the security desk,” Deanna said. “Ask Mr. Moore instead.”

  O’Malley gave a nod and the other detective left. O’Malley sat back down across from Deanna.

  “What was that all about?”

  “I think he’s out. Principals’ meeting.” Deanna was quick. O’Malley seemed to buy it and moved on.

  “We can check out your theory pretty easily. I’m going to head down to the school now. Let’s see what the cameras come back with. Sound good?” He stood, threw on his blazer, and strolled to the door. Deanna followed.

  She was sullen, unable to shake the feeling after seeing the cell phone. O’Malley stopped her on her way through the door and placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Have faith,” he said.

  “In what?”

  “In the process, the investigation. In us.”

  Deanna took a step back into the conference room.

  “Okay, you’ll think I’m nuts and probably start investigating me next, but you should know there is something very powerful going on in that school.” She left some air between them. “You won’t beat that building.” The detective listened patiently.

  “They’re just people, Deanna. Just like you and me.”

  She shook her head and moved through the doorway. O’Malley followed her out into the bullpen. A dozen or so desks lined the perimeter while large file cabinets split the room down the center. Deanna caught the attention of some of the detectives as she walked through the room, none too subtle.

  “You’re stopping the room, kid,” O’Malley said under his breath.

  “Blue collar apes with no employable skills,” Deanna said. “I’m so lucky.” The cops in her immediate sphere bugged their eyes out
and had one-word replies of their own, under their breath.

  One detective holding a Post-It watched them as they approached. He had a face like he was ready to talk. It was that Detective Pete.

  “Your timing is off, O’Malley” he said. O’Malley stopped when he got to the stocky detective’s desk. Deanna turned, as well. Detective Pete didn’t say anything to O’Malley, gesturing to Deanna instead.

  “She’s okay,” O’Malley said. “Go ahead.”

  “This Moore guy isn’t there anymore,” Pete said. “I talked with a security guard named Alexis Diggs instead.”

  “Okay. I’ll go watch the video with Miss Diggs.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” Pete said. “She said there was some serious theft at the school last night. Maybe a break-in. They took the security officers’ desktop computer—the one with the videos on it.”

  O’Malley dropped his head. “You shitting me?”

  “Nope. I called down to the desk sergeant at the West Side precinct. He said uniforms took a report this morning.”

  “Thanks, Pete,” O’Malley said as he resumed walking through the department, motioning for Deanna to keep going. He called back to Pete without turning. “That’s about all the good news I can handle today. I’m heading out.”

  “Wait, there’s something else,” Pete said.

  “Bet I won something,” O’Malley said to Deanna as he stopped and turned back to Pete.

  “This Alexis woman gave me a tip,” Pete said. “I don’t know if she told the uniforms this morning, but she says it was an inside job. Thinks we should go grab an employee.”

  “Who?”

  “Your security guard. Moore.”

  O’Malley looked to Deanna.

  “You won’t beat that building,” she repeated.

  SIXTY-TWO

  MARIANA WROTE APRIL 5TH in the section marked “Date of Departure.” She felt that tingle again, but it was just a little flurry. She looked over to Lorenzo, who was working at his desk.

  “Two or three?” she asked. Lorenzo thought for a moment.

  “Did you ask Anastas?”