Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  Everybody, that is, except Sam Purdy.

  And Sam probably should have been cranky. He had been for all of the many years we’d been friends. A lot was going on in his life. He was on the cusp of completing his first holiday season as an unmarried man. He had just celebrated the anniversary of surviving for a year after a heart attack-he’d reminded me that it beat the alternative, hands-down-and he had just managed to complete twelve-plus months without developing a fresh gallstone.

  He was still learning the ropes of single-parenting his son, Simon.

  And because of Mallory Miller, he was being forced to work overtime on a high-profile holiday crime, not exactly his thing, as part of a team of many detectives, most definitely not his thing.

  But Sam’s mood was good. Boulder’s streak of gray days was nothing compared to the winter stretches he’d endured in his family home on Minnesota’s Iron Range. His health problems? He had grown philosophical about them, felt he was doing all he could-with diet and exercise-to manage them. His divorce? Despite some stumbles he thought that he and Sherry had handled it all like grown-ups. Was there enough money to go around? Of course not-as Sam had indelicately put it, “I live in fucking Boulder. How could there be enough money?” Sam’s son Simon? He was a good kid. He had some emotional bruises from what his parents’ marital disruption had forced him to endure, but Sam was confident that his son would do okay.

  I didn’t disagree.

  The Mallory Miller case? Right from the start, Sam had pitched his tent in the don’t-get-too-worked-up-about-this, she’s-a-runaway camp. But he was a professional cop, and until his captain told him otherwise he planned to continue to investigate the details of her disappearance as though she might have been kidnapped by some mysterious intruder.

  I knew the truth about Sam’s personal life. I knew that Sam’s pleasant demeanor wasn’t due to his positive outlook, but rather that his positive outlook was due to a girl.

  Okay, a woman. Her name was Carmen Reynoso. She was a cop, another detective, a class act who lived somewhere within commuting distance of the police department in Laguna Beach, California, and she and Sam were in love. They had met a little more than a year before while on the track of a serial killer.

  It was a long story in which I’d had a part, and I liked to think I’d introduced them.

  Sam and Simon had tickets, or some airline’s digital equivalent, to fly to John Wayne International Airport to spend the New Year’s holiday with Carmen and her daughter, Jessie. Jessie, a student at UC Santa Cruz, had promised Simon a trip to Disneyland during the visit.

  In Sam’s world, gray skies or blue skies, all was cool.

  I met Sam at the new ice rink off the Boulder Turnpike in Superior, where Simon’s peewee team was playing on the Wednesday night that fell within our streak of end-of-the-year bleak weather. Simon-who, unlike his father, played offense-was doing a sleep-over at a teammate’s house after the game and Sam and I were going to go someplace for a beer. It had been a while since we’d had time to get together socially.

  Perhaps the flyers that were posted all over the ice rink doors should have been a caution for me about how the evening might progress, but, like most people in Boulder County, I was already growing somewhat immune to them. Two types predominated. Each version was on a standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper. One was on brilliant yellow stock, screamed “MISSING!” and had a black-and-white photograph of Mallory-she was airborne, just launched from a trampoline-above a brief physical description. The other flyer was on white copy paper and was adorned with a color photograph that had been taken by a school photographer who had already taken too many pictures that particular day. Large block letters asked, “HAVE YOU SEEN HER?”

  No, was the short answer.

  I hadn’t seen her. But in the few days since Mallory’s disappearance I’d seen, literally, thousands of the flyers. Volunteers had papered almost every vertical surface Boulder had to offer, and some horizontal ones as well, with a yellow flyer or a white one, or more often, with multiple copies of each.

  Towers of Mallory.

  White and yellow checkerboards of Mallory.

  Although I was growing inured to the posters themselves, the messages weren’t lost on me. MISSING! and HAVE YOU SEEN HER? ran through my mind like an ever-repeating crawl at the bottom of some cosmic TV, the messages as insistent as the lyrics of an annoying jingle.

  The two photographs of Mallory-one smiling and content, the other mischievous and teasing-had a much more subtle effect on me than did the banner headlines. The photos of the young girl lingered in my preconscious and provided fodder for unsettling dreams of the things that fathers dread. More than once I woke with a startling sense of vulnerability, a visceral awareness that I had a daughter and that it could have been she.

  Sam had lost a lot of weight-I was guessing thirty-odd pounds-in the last year, but none of it in his face. He still had the face of a big, round guy. Much of the motivation for the weight loss had been medical. The past few years had confronted my friend with a minor heart attack, kidney stones, and gallstones. A new, healthy diet was one of his ways of fighting back.

  He’d sworn off doughnuts and bacon and brats, and hadn’t had a burger and fries in most of a year. He was learning to cook and he’d already warned me that he was going to count on me to be his running buddy while he trained to run his first 10K, the late-spring Bolder Boulder.

  Health aside, most of the motivation for his self-improvement program, though he’d never admit it to me, was his recent separation and divorce, and that new girlfriend in California. Sam was a mature guy, a serious cop, and a devoted father. Still, he wanted to be buff so he could get the girls.

  Prior to that night, I’d never observed Sam watching his son play in a competitive game in any sport, and anticipated that it wasn’t going to be an inspiring sight, especially given the fact that the sport was hockey. Sam had a little bully in him-ask me, all effective cops do, they have to. In addition, Sam had the natural-born arrogance of Minnesotans who believe that they know more about hockey than any native-read: citizen of the United States of America-referee who might tie on skates and pull on a striped blouse in some Colorado barn. Sam granted Canadians special hockey dispensation.

  I feared that it was a combustible combination of traits, and that I was about to discover that Sam was going to be one of those parents who give youth sports a rotten name. If, or when, he got too embarrassing to be with, I was more than prepared to move to a seat in the arena as far from him as possible.

  Sam, as he often did, proved me wrong. Every word he screamed at the game was a word of encouragement. He knew the names of every one of Simon’s teammates and lavished praise on the kids for their shots and their passing, but especially for their positioning and their defense. He even screamed out some kind words for the opposing players.

  The two times he yelled out to the referees it was with a hearty, “Hey, good call, guy. Let’s keep ’em safe out there.”

  Between periods I asked, “Case driving you nuts?”

  “Nah,” he said. But he knew what case I was talking about. “If cases like that drove me nuts, I’d have been hanging out in your office a long time ago.” That thought caused him to chuckle to himself; Sam’s opinion of psychotherapy wasn’t particularly benevolent. Then he lowered his voice and tilted his big head toward me. “There’re still some guys who think somebody took her, a few. But it didn’t come down that way. She was a kid with issues, Alan. The girl ran, plain and simple. Because of all the media and, you know-that other girl, back when, and what happened to her-the bosses have to go overboard on this, look for intruders under rugs, dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s, but everything or damn near everything says that she ran.

  “Hey, a fourteen-year-old girl gone from home? It’s a sad thing. Worse around Christmastime. But it happens. This time it happened at the wrong time in the wrong town in the wrong neighborhood under the wrong circumstances, so now
the whole world is watching one family’s tragedy unfold. But that’s all it is: one family’s tragedy. I’m afraid that the real tragedy is what happened to her after she ran; that’s what keeps me awake at night. Is she in a ditch somewhere? Discarded by the side of some highway? In some asshole pimp’s hands? When I hear what happened to her I think it’s going to break my heart. My advice? Leave it alone.”

  He was probably right. But Diane’s story about Hannah Grant’s intake interview with Mallory was still haunting me. I wasn’t able to leave it alone.

  “What about the guy that the Crandalls saw, the neighbors? The one they thought was loitering on the block before the snow started?”

  Sam grimaced. “If those people were really so concerned, why didn’t they call us when they saw him? He was probably just some guy out for a stroll, trying to walk off his Christmas dinner. Maybe his kids were out caroling and he was keeping an eye on them. You know what it’s like after something like this. People think they’ve seen all kinds of things.”

  “What about the blood?” I asked.

  Sam looked at me sideways, as though that question had surprised him. “Simon cut his heel on the back door last summer, on the screen. My God, did it bleed. He hopped all over the house looking for me to get him a bandage and by the time he found me, there was blood everywhere. I still don’t think I got it all cleaned up. I’m not the world’s best housekeeper, and I promise you that I wouldn’t want the crime-scene guys checking my house for splatter. The fact that there’s some blood in the Millers’ house doesn’t mean any felonies came down. Hey, I bet if I walked in with some Luminol I could get your house to light up, too.”

  “Well, then what about the snow thing?”

  17

  The snow thing.

  Christmas had been on the previous Saturday. The day had been clear and cold with a high temperature in the mid-twenties. An upslope developed and snow started falling in earnest in Boulder some time around seven o’clock in the evening. At first, it had been a steady snow; three quick inches fell before the wind shifted directions around 9:30 and the snow paused for an hour. When the upslope resumed so did the snow, which fell insistently until early morning.

  “All these questions? It isn’t like you,” Sam said. “You working as a stringer for the Enquirer in your spare time?”

  “Actually, I’ve been trying my hardest to keep my head in the sand about this whole thing.”

  “You’re failing miserably.”

  “I don’t get the snow thing. Humor me.”

  “I don’t either,” Sam admitted.

  Bill and Reese Miller left Mallory at home alone with her stomachache around 6:30, just before the snow started. Her cell-phone records show that Mallory made a few phone calls-all to girlfriends-in the next couple of hours, and received a few others. The first call out was at 6:39. The last call in came at 8:47. It was from her father, checking in on her from the Christmas gathering, and letting her know they’d be home soon.

  Bill Miller said that his daughter answered the phone, and reported to the police that Mallory told him she was doing okay. She was all packed up for the next day’s ski trip, had a heating pad on her belly, and was watching a DVD she got that morning for Christmas.

  “The snow thing isn’t important?” I asked Sam.

  “I didn’t say that. I said I don’t get it. There’s always something in every case that I don’t get. Always.”

  “Where are her footprints?”

  “I said I don’t know. I wasn’t kidding-I really don’t know.” He popped a peanut into his mouth and pointed toward the ice. “So where do you think a place like this gets money for a Zamboni like that?”

  The Zamboni that was scooting around the rink between periods grooming the ice surface looked brand-new. All shiny and painted a shade of green that was much too close to chartreuse for my comfort. It was covered with more commercial messages than the NASCAR champion stock car.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “When I retire, I think I’d like to drive a Zamboni in a place just like this. I’d do it for free, just for the fun of it. For the kids. You know about Zambonis? How they got started?”

  I admitted I didn’t.

  Sam did. He explained the whole history of the Zamboni as though he’d grown up with Mr. Zamboni’s daughter and lived through the experience himself. I listened with some wonder, not because of any particular fascination with Zambonis but because of the extent of Sam’s knowledge base. The truth was that Sam knew a lot of crap. He was the kind of guy with whom you did not want to play Trivial Pursuit.

  “How come you know so much trivia?” I asked him when he’d exhausted the Zamboni tale.

  “I just remember stuff. It’s one of the things that makes me a good cop. And I don’t consider it trivia.”

  “No?”

  “No. I like to think of it as information of infrequent utility.”

  “It’s occasionally important to know that the first Zamboni was made from an old army Jeep?”

  “That’s the thing. You never know what might be important. It’s all just information and then, out of nowhere, something becomes useful. I just store it so it’s there when I need it.”

  Like the snow thing, I thought.

  The Millers’ home was on the eastern side of Twelfth Street, facing the mountains that rise dramatically only a dozen blocks away. How dramatically do the Rockies jut out of west Boulder? On one side of a street you’re on a gentle hill. On the other side, you’re on the slope of a mountain.

  But that’s to the west. A block to the east-in that part of the Boulder Valley “east” means downhill-and a few doors north of their home, the Millers had a new neighbor. A neighbor they had probably never met. The new family, the Harts, had moved into their brick Tudor the previous spring and within two months of unpacking their moving vans had begun diligent work on the family passion-which involved turning the facade and entire front yard of their house into a garish, illuminated, motorized tribute to the Christmas holiday.

  The number of lights involved-all of the family members seemed to prefer to call them “points” when they spoke to the media, which they did frequently-ran well into five figures. Six major illuminated displays-exactly half were loosely biblical in theme-ranged from three feet to nine feet in height, and eleven different motorized extravaganzas kept elves bowing, stars shooting, donkeys walking, and reindeer flying all over the front of the house and far up into the trees. An enterprising reporter with an incipient personality disorder found 116 distinct representations of Santa Claus secreted in various locations. On the wide expanse of roof beside the center gable of the house a huge arched sign of shimmering red neon announced to all that this home was indeed “The Very HART of Christmas.”

  It was something.

  Families who like to make an annual trek through other people’s neighborhoods in search of the best and brightest Christmas decorations seemed to adore what the Harts had done to their home. The Harts’ neighbors, and the neighbors of the Harts’ neighbors, all of whom had to endure the endless crawl of traffic down Thirteenth Street, were probably not quite so enamored of the family’s efforts.

  Boulder being Boulder, the controversy became sport, and arguments flourished about light pollution and the environmental consequences of all that electricity being used on something so, well, garish and transient. The local paper, the Camera, actually published a series of letters about the brouhaha, the first of which compared the Harts’ extravaganza to one of Christo’s installations. Follow-up missives predictably belittled the aesthetic sensibilities of anyone who could possibly think that way.

  “But,” I asked Sam, “do you think the news footage shows what everybody thinks it shows?”

  “Pretty much,” Sam said. “It shows what it shows, I guess. I don’t have much argument with Fox News. Well, that’s not exactly true. Let’s just say I don’t have much argument with what Fox News has to say about those few minutes in the Millers�
�� neighborhood on Christmas night.”

  “So?” I said. “Explain it to me.”

  “What?”

  “The snow thing.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t?”

  He smiled. Not at me, exactly. He smiled as though he were enjoying my consternation. “So that’s it? You can’t explain it?”

  What he couldn’t explain was the footage that had been shot by the Fox News helicopter on Christmas night. The shot was live for their 9 P.M. newscast-which had included an announcement of the three winners of Fox’s best-holiday-decorated-house-in-the-metro-area contest. The Harts’ home had been awarded a disappointing, to them, third place, which earned the earliest appearance of any of the winners on that night’s evening news. Records revealed that the live chopper footage from Boulder was aired beginning precisely at 9:16. Viewers eager to see the ultimate champion would have to stick with the newscast until the bitter end because the helicopter would have to make a trek across the entire metro area to Aurora for a shot of the grand-prize winner.

  “Snow started sticking right away, yes? Around seven?” I asked.

  “At my house it did.”

  “And phone records show that Mallory was still home at eight forty-seven?” That tidbit of information had been leaked to the media earlier in the week. Locally, it had been played up by one of the TV affiliates as though the scoop was as important as a cure for cancer.

  Before Sam had a chance to reply the kids skated back onto the ice to warm up for the next period. “For the sake of argument, yes, let’s say there was phone activity at eight forty-seven,” Sam said. “I don’t want to talk about this during the game, so make it quick. I’m getting bored.”

  After the news helicopter completed its shot of the Harts’ home, it had banked away for a wide shot of the neighborhood, which included, for about three seconds-Fox timed it at 2.8614, and who was I to argue with that-the Millers’ totally undecorated house on Twelfth Street. Two days after Mallory’s disappearance, an astute Fox producer realized what the station might possess in the additional neighborhood footage that had been shot on Christmas night, and Fox launched a huge advertising blitz to promote its “crucial new information in the Mallory Miller case. Tune in Tuesday. Exclusively on Fox News at Nine.”