Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  I shrugged.

  With gorgeous understatement, Sam said, “Well, too many missing pieces. It all sounds too goofy for words to me.” He began walking. “Come on. I want to hear more about Diane and what’s going on with her in Las Vegas.”

  He led me back out through the dormant water features of Doyle’s yard. Just before we got to Sam’s car at the curb I said, employing a voice that was much more measured than I was feeling at that moment, “Diane and I were both there the day that Hannah Grant died.”

  Without even a glance in my direction, he said, “I know that. Don’t you think I fucking know that?”

  33

  My car was across downtown outside the house where Bob rented rooms from the Donalds. After pressing me for some more details about Diane’s disappearance in Las Vegas, Sam headed toward Pine Street to drop me off.

  “So what do you know about the owner of the house with the water park?” I asked.

  He killed the volume on the radio, squelching some country lament that I didn’t really want to hear. While I waited-rating the odds at three out of ten that he’d actually answer my question about Doyle-I was thinking, and not for the first time, that most of Sam’s favorite country artists could use a few sessions of psychotherapy.

  “Owner’s been out of the house for a while; it’s vacant now, was vacant over Christmas, too, if that’s what you’re wondering. And yes, we’ve talked to him-the owner-got in touch with him right away through the real estate lady who’s listing the house.”

  Sam paused poignantly. Okay, provocatively. I thought he was waiting to see if my sense of self-preservation was so impaired that I would choose that moment to remind him of something he had once confessed to me about the last time-the Christmas when the little blond beauty queen was murdered three blocks away. That time, Sam admitted one night over beers, eleven long months passed before any cop, any DA’s investigator, any FBI agent-anyone in law enforcement-got around to interviewing one of the dead girl’s family’s nearest neighbors.

  For eleven months after a child was viciously murdered, the cops had failed to interview the residents of a house with a perfect view of the crime scene.

  To me, unbelievable.

  But I didn’t remind him. He didn’t need reminding.

  He went on. “The owner gave us permission to search. No hesitation, no bullshit, totally cooperative. Agent unlocked the place and we searched it. Nothing. And all this happened in the first few hours after Mallory’s father reported her missing.”

  “Is the owner in town?”

  Doyle. I wanted to use his name out loud, but I couldn’t. I wanted to know if Doyle was in town.

  “No.”

  “You guys thought Mallory might have been in there after she disappeared?”

  “Vacant house right next door? It’s one of the first places we look.”

  “But nothing?”

  “Just a vacant house. Kitchen’s hardly bigger than mine. Terrific yard, sure, but no place to toss a football. Definitely overpriced. Hey, what isn’t in this town?”

  Sam pondered the inflation of Boulder’s housing stock more than I did, but taking that detour didn’t seem productive to me. I asked, “Was the Camaro in the garage when you searched the house at Christmas?”

  “Now there’s a good question. I don’t recall that it was. If it had been, somebody would’ve run the tags and talked to your guy. I’m sure of that. And I don’t think we’ve ever talked to your guy.”

  I could tell that I had only about half of Sam’s attention. He was considering some angle I couldn’t see. His answer to my last question was probably in the vicinity of honest but he wasn’t telling me all that he could. But then I wasn’t telling him all that I could, either. “Something else is spinning in that big head of yours. What is it?”

  He startled a bit at my question as he pulled from Ninth onto Pine. “I’m connecting dots, looking for a damn crime. I need a rationalization I can use.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He didn’t answer right away, not until we were almost on the Donalds’ block. My car was just ahead. The lights were still off in Bob’s rooms; I would have been truly surprised if they weren’t.

  Sam flashed the Cherokee’s headlights at a van coming at us from the other direction. The driver of the van responded by flashing to his low beams for half a second before he went right back to his brights. He beeped his horn to underline his aggravation that another motorist would deign to question his choice of headlamp settings. I couldn’t see the van driver through the high-intensity glare but I would have bet he was flipping Sam off, too.

  I said, “Asshole’s tugging on Superman’s cape.”

  “He’s lucky I’m in a good mood.”

  I smiled out loud.

  “There’s nothing here for me, Alan. Your guy’s been gone, what? A day or two maybe? There’s half a thimble’s worth of blood near his door-and some clothes on the floor. No sign of forced entry. No witnesses. Guy’s gone. His car’s gone. Ergo: He split. People do it all the time without warning anybody, without telling anybody. Even their therapists. I have nothing I can give my bosses that they’ll find the least bit interesting. I take this in, I know what I’m going to hear: So far this isn’t a police matter. So that’s what I tell you: So far this isn’t a police matter.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And your friend, Diane? She’s so far out of my jurisdiction it isn’t funny. I put myself in the Vegas casino’s shoes and I’m not going to give a crap about her welfare until another few days pass and the hotel needs her room for the next convention. I put myself in a Vegas cop’s shoes, I feel basically the same way. Grown-ups do what grown-ups do. But say she’s really missing? By the time people get worried enough to look for her, it will probably be way too late to do anything to help her. I pray she’s okay, but just disappearing off a casino floor like that? I don’t like what you’re telling me. That’s just the truth. I wish it were different.”

  Sam pulled the Cherokee to a stop nose-to-nose with my wagon and doused the headlights. The glow from a streetlight washed into the car from the driver’s side, silhouetting Sam against the glass.

  “The dots I’m connecting are actually way more interesting to me,” he said. “See, if I put on my decoder glasses I see your footprints just about everywhere I look, which shouldn’t be too surprising considering your history with this kind of thing.”

  I opened my mouth to disagree. Closed it. What was the point?

  Sam went on. “First? I think maybe you and your partner, Diane, have some connection to the Millers-I’m guessing Mrs. Miller, Rachel-that I don’t know about. Want me to guess? Okay, I suspect it goes back a few years, maybe more. Could I guess what it is? Yes, I could.” He paused, allowing me to digest his conclusion.

  “Next? I think that the Camaro man has some connection to the guy who owns the water-park house and for some reason that connection makes you much more nervous than a simple rented garage should make you. So it’s something else entirely. I’d like to know exactly what that connection is, but experience tells me I’m not going to get shit from you tonight, so I’m trying not to give myself a headache about it. My assumption at the moment is that you think it has something to do with Mallory Miller. Frankly, that worries me. It worries me that you’re playing detective again, and it worries me just the slightest little bit that you might be on to something that we don’t know.”

  The sound of Sam’s stomach complaining that it hadn’t seen a meal in a while filled the car. The growl made me realize that I was hungry, too. I wondered if Lauren had saved me some dinner.

  “More? We already know that you and Diane were the ones who found that vic on Broadway. And-”

  “Sam, you just called Hannah Grant a ‘vic.’ ”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. She was your friend. My apologies. Habit, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You think Hannah’s a victim? You think her death was a homicide?
The coroner called it ‘undetermined.’ Has that changed?”

  “It’s Slocum’s and Olson’s, not mine. I’m not the authority on that case. Manner was undetermined yesterday. Manner is undetermined today. End of story, sorry.”

  In almost any other circumstance I would have pushed him. But I needed Sam to stay interested in Diane and Bob. We could get back to Hannah later. I couldn’t help but wonder, though: What do the cops have?

  “What else?” I asked. “You were going to say something else.”

  “Reese Miller,” Sam said. He’d forgotten which finger he’d used to keep track of his last point. By default, he chose his thick thumb to represent Reese Miller. “Why are you so interested in him? Where the heck does he fit into this puzzle?” He turned his head toward me and looked right at me. “Do you even know?”

  I opened my mouth, closed it, and emitted some sound that was closer to a sigh than anything else. Reese was an unknown to me. I said, “No, I don’t really know anything about him.”

  “Good,” he said. “Listen, I have to get the babysitter home and I promised to help Simon with a poem he’s writing. Did you have to write poems at his age? It’s a good thing. Getting kids to write a lot. Keep me up to speed on Diane.”

  I opened the Jeep’s door and was freshly surprised by the bitter chill of the January night. “Thanks, Sam.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then: “Wait.”

  I leaned back into the car. Sam looked away from me for a couple of seconds before he turned back. “I know you expect me to find a way to help you. But I can’t. There’s no hook for me. There has to be something I can grab on to.”

  “I don’t especially want anything to do with this either, Sam. Since the day that Mallory fell off the face of the earth I’ve tried like hell to make this leave me alone. But it keeps tracking me down. From my point of view, you get close enough to this thing and you’ll find it has as many hooks as a square foot of Velcro.”

  I slammed the door shut and he drove off.

  34

  The clock read just shy of 8:30 when I walked in the front door of my house. Emily greeted me exuberantly, but I found my other two girls sound asleep in the master bedroom curled into the familiar big spoon/ little spoon configuration. They were surrounded by that night’s bedtime books and Grace’s favorite stuffed animals. Our not-so-stuffed poodle, Anvil, was curled into a tight ball at Grace’s knees.

  I was feeling remorse that I’d been missing out on the bedtime ritual so often.

  Sound asleep at Grace’s bedtime was a little early, even for Lauren, but the energy depletion that she suffered as a result of multiple sclerosis wasn’t always easy to predict. If you asked her on a day when she wasn’t suffering any of the acute effects of one of the disease’s myriad symptoms, she’d tell you that what she hated most about the illness was that it made her days so much shorter. As each successive year took its toll, Lauren had fewer good hours, fewer strong hours, fewer waking hours, fewer hours when pain or weakness didn’t drive her to bed. Ask her what she’d most like to change about having MS, and she’d tell you she wished her days were longer. She’d tell you that on most days her energy lasts about as long as daylight endures on a December day in Anchorage.

  This had apparently been one of those Yukon days. That’s what she called them. I’d call her from work and find her at her desk at the DA’s office. I’d ask how she was doing. Too often she’d say, “You know, babe. It’s a Yukon day.”

  I rearranged the comforter so that it provided some cover for both mother and daughter, kissed the tops of their heads, lifted Anvil from the sheets, and led the dogs outside to pee. Once the odd canine couple had done their thing and our little parade was safely inside the house, I checked for a message from Raoul or, even better, Diane.

  Nothing.

  I scrambled a couple of eggs, folded them into some honey wheat toast, and carried my plate into the living room. I ate standing up at the big windows that faced down into Boulder, trying to spot the house where Jenifer Donald was visiting her grandparents, trying to spot the overpriced house with the water park up near the foothills on Twelfth, trying to spot the small house on Broadway where Hannah Grant had died.

  Far to the west, on the other side of the vast mountains, I wondered if Raoul was on his date with the woman from Venetian security. Or was he still chatting up gamblers at the craps tables trying to find someone who remembered his wife?

  And where the hell in all those lights were Bob and his cherry Camaro?

  What answers, if any, were sitting in a Kinko’s box in my office?

  My impulse was to charge downtown and find out.

  I reminded myself that what Bob had written was part of a novel.

  Fiction.

  Stuff he’d made up.

  Stuff I was supposed to wait to read.

  35

  Diane, in rare moments of candid self-doubt, would express astonishment that she’d ended up with Raoul. “Why me? Look at me. Look at him. Why on earth did he choose me?”

  Raoul was an olive-skinned Spaniard with piercing eyes, a prodigious intellect, an entrepreneurial instinct for innovation, and a bloodhound’s nose for money. He had a smile as sweet as honey, and his thick hair looked black until the sun hit it just so and lit it up like golden floss. He could give charm lessons to George Clooney, put on continental airs when he felt the situation demanded, or pull on faded jeans and cowboy boots and slide right into a farmhouse discussion of southern Colorado water rights as though it had been his family that had cut the first irrigation canals into the dusty San Luis Valley.

  In much the same way that the progeny of Holocaust survivors have been indelibly scarred by Germany’s twentieth-century embrace of the Nazis, Raoul had been bruised deeply-down to the place where tissue ends and the soul takes up corporeal space-by Spain’s fifty-year flirtation with fascism. Memories of long-absent relatives, and nightmared imaginings of what had happened to them at the hands of Franco’s Falangists, flowed through his blood like perpetual antibodies to authority.

  The result? Raoul had wide shoulders, and a chip on them that was sometimes big enough to obscure his handsome head.

  My impatience to hear an update finally compelled me to dial Raoul’s cell number before I climbed into bed. He answered after three rings.

  “Yeah?” he said to the accompaniment of Las Vegas background sounds. Music, traffic. Something else-hissing, muted explosions. I wasn’t sure what it was.

  The single word he’d spoken as he answered had carried a boatload of hope; every time his phone rang he was praying that the caller was Diane. To me, ironically, his hope meant that he hadn’t found her. My own hope, which was hovering like a flat stone skipping on a smooth lake, sank instantly to the muddy bottom.

  “It’s me, Raoul. You didn’t find her.”

  He said something in Catalonian. It sounded like “bandarras.” From the spitting tone he employed, I guessed it had been a profanity and that it didn’t really require translation, although I was always more than a little eager to add to my knowledge of the profane spectrum of his native tongue.

  “Were you able to talk with that woman from hotel security?” I found myself shouting to be heard above the din.

  “Marlina has a story,” he said. “Unfortunately, it takes her a while to tell it.”

  “Yeah?” I didn’t get whatever he was saying.

  “She’s from Mexico. What’s on her mind is about her brother and something that happened to him on the way from Chihuahua to Tucson. She needs to talk. With some women, it has to first be about them. She is one of those women. Fer un solo de flauta. Trust me, it’s the only way.”

  Raoul spoke about women the way he spoke about IPOs and RAM. With authority. Again, I considered asking him for a translation of the Catalonian, but I didn’t.

  “You haven’t learned anything?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  He sounded fried-Raoul’s anxiety seemed to be swelling with every conv
ersation we had. The appearance of my voice, and not his wife’s, on the line had robbed him of whatever buoyancy had been keeping him afloat. I could feel the deflation in his spirits as hope leaked away; whatever vessel he was in was taking on water and he was getting tired of bailing.

  “Did you find anyone playing at the craps tables who remembered Diane?”

  “I set up a half-million-dollar credit line. I assumed that would give me a little bit of latitude in the casino.”

  I couldn’t imagine. “Yeah? How much were you betting?”

  “Five or ten. Sometimes twenty.”

  Thousand. “You win anything?” I asked.

  “I did all right,” he said. Raoul, I knew, would take no joy in a big pile of craps winnings. In his various tech businesses, he played for stakes that would make a huge pile of casino chips seem paltry by comparison. But given the events of the last twenty-four hours, Raoul would take some pleasure in the fact that he had taken the money-if it were a large enough pile-from the coffers of the Venetian.

  “How good?

  “I’m up eighty or so. The only luck I’m having in this town is at a craps table.”

  I whistled. “Thousand?”

  “Minus four. I tipped a couple of dealers. I’m hoping they’re appreciative, might let me buy them a drink.”

  Two craps dealers were each a couple of grand richer than they’d been before they’d gone to work that day and met Raoul. With that kind of incentive they might be inclined to have a drink with him after their shifts were over.

  I asked, “When are they off?”

  “Three hours or so. We’ll see what happens. My expectations are low. I gave a woman some money to pass each of them a note that said I wanted to talk with them. She says she did it, but who knows? Their bosses may have warned them off.”

  “A frustrating day?”

  “They’re the house. They have the cards; they have the odds. My only advantage is that I’m more motivated than they are. They don’t understand that yet. One guy at the craps table slipped me his business card when he heard me ask the woman next to him about Diane. He’s a VP for some shopping-center developer. They do malls.”