There was just enough room for a single bed.
There was a person under the covers, and judging by the shape it definitely looked to be a young woman. Not moving. Drugged, I thought.
Or worse.
The covers were pulled high enough to hide everything but a few locks of blonde hair. Despite all the ruckus, she still hadn’t moved.
Oh dear God…
“Syd,” I said. “Syd?”
I sat on the edge of the bed and was about to pull down the covers when I sensed Ian coming through the door. I turned and pointed and fixed my eyes on him with such fury that he stopped.
“You make one move and I swear I’ll fucking kill you,” I said, barely able to get the words out I was panting so hard. Sweat was dripping off my brow, my shirt was plastered to me.
I pulled the covers back down to the girl’s shoulders. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. Her skin looked rubbery, had an odd sheen to it.
“What the fuck?”
This girl was not Syd.
This girl was not a girl.
She was a doll.
EIGHTEEN
I TURNED AROUND AND LOOKED AT IAN, who stood in the doorway staring at me, his face flushed from our grappling and, I suspected, embarrassment.
“Just get out of here,” he said quietly. There was a bruise coming up on his cheek.
“I thought… I thought she… I thought it was my daughter.”
Ian just stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “When I saw you…”
“You were spying on me?”
“I saw you carry something in from your van.”
I put my hand around the doll’s arm, raised it up to get a sense of its weight. No wonder it was so easy for Ian to carry it in here. It couldn’t have weighed much more than ten or twenty pounds. The inside of the arm felt like pillow stuffing.
I got off the bed and moved past Ian into the main room.
“You bought that next door?” I said.
Ian nodded. His nearly naked body seemed to have caved in on itself. Instead of seeming menacing, he now bordered on pitiful. “Please don’t tell my aunt,” he said.
I lowered my head, shook it regretfully. “Yeah, sure. I’m sorry.” Then I remembered the command I’d shouted out to Carter as I’d run out of the Just Inn Time. We could probably expect to see the police here any moment.
I said to Ian, “You keep… it… here?”
Ian shook his head. “My aunt’s in here all the time, cleaning up, making me things to eat. I got a storage unit in Bridgeport where my family’s stuff is. I keep her there and bring her over sometimes, then take her back before my aunt gets here in the morning. Sometimes, we just go for a drive, maybe park down by the harbor for a while and listen to the radio and stuff.”
I didn’t want to think about the stuff.
I ran my hand through my hair. Now I understood why Ian had been so odd when I’d spoken to him before. It was because he was, well, odd.
“Listen, Ian,” I said. “The police are probably going to be here any minute.”
“Oh shit no. That can’t happen.”
I felt a bit the same way. Ian, once he recovered from the inevitable mortification, would have every right to charge me with breaking into his apartment. He could have me charged with assault. I was a regular home invader.
“I don’t want the police here,” he said. “It’s not just… her.”
“What?”
“I’ve got weed here, too.”
“Okay, look, I’m just going to go,” I said. “When the cops show up, I’ll tell them I thought I saw my daughter hitchhiking or something.”
Ian, despite all I’d done, managed to mutter, “Thanks.”
I left without saying anything else. I was expecting to see police cars screaming into the lot out front of the florist shop and XXX Delights, but there was nothing going on. I jogged back to the Just Inn Time, spotting along the way one police car driving up Route 1 at a regular rate of speed. It drove past the Howard Johnson’s and kept on going.
When I walked back into the lobby of my hotel, Carter came out from behind the desk and said, “What’s happened, Mr. Blake?”
“Did you call the police?”
“Not yet,” he said. “You ran out of here and didn’t say where you were going or what you’d seen. What was I supposed to tell the cops?”
Ordinarily, I’d have been pissed, but not this time. “No harm done. It was my mistake,” I said and went back up to my room.
ON MY WAY OUT IN THE MORNING, I grabbed a complimentary stale blueberry muffin and coffee from the lobby. There was no sign of Carter or Veronica, but Cantana, the young Thai-looking woman I’d met here the other morning, was working the breakfast nook. She handed me a takeout coffee cup.
“You can tell just by looking at me that I need coffee,” I said, trying for Mr. Amiable. Instead of returning the smile, she nodded politely, looked away, and went back to work.
I threw my bag into the back seat of the CR-V, put my coffee in the cup holder, and took a bite of muffin, crumbs raining down into my lap. Before turning the ignition, I let my head fall back onto the headrest and let out a long sigh. I’d had little sleep since my raid on Ian’s apartment. I felt like a damn fool. And worse, I was no closer to finding Syd.
I turned the key and hit the button on Syd’s music shuffler. There was an old Spice Girls tune—Syd was too young to have paid much attention to them their first time around, but got interested when they reunited for a tour a year or two ago—and another Beatles tune, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” from the White Album. What father didn’t want one of his daughter’s favorite songs to be about people having a fuck in the passing lane?
That was followed by—and I was guessing here on some of these—songs by Lily Allen, Metric, Lauryn Hill. Then some familiar chords kicked in and I thought, yes, a band I know and love: Chicago. Too bad the song had to be “If You Leave Me Now.”
I hadn’t cracked the lid on the coffee by the time I’d pulled up to the curb in front of my house a few minutes before eight, but there were muffin crumbs all over my lap and down on the floor mats of the CR-V.
There was a police car in the driveway, and parked out front of the house next door, what looked to be Kip Jennings’s car. There was no one in the driver’s seat, but there was someone sitting on the passenger side.
I took my coffee and as I came up even to the car I saw that there was a young girl sitting there. Twelve, thirteen years old. There was a backpack on the floor by her feet. On her lap was an open textbook. She glanced through the open driver’s-side window at me.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m guessing you’re Cassie.”
She didn’t say anything.
I stood well away from the window. “Doing some last-minute studying?”
“My mom’s a cop and she’s coming back any minute,” she said.
“I’ll leave you be,” I said and turned for my house. Kip Jennings was coming down the driveway.
“Morning,” I said. “You’ve trained your daughter well.”
“What?”
“The whole talking-to-strangers thing. I backed right off.”
“I have to get her to school. I was dropping by here on the way. We’re done with your house. You can have it back.”
“Great.”
“It’s still a mess.”
“I figured.”
“There are companies you can call to help with the cleanup. I can get you a list.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“You’re not going to be charged,” she said. “The cocaine.”
“Nice to know.”
“And it was coke,” she said. “But cut with so much lactose you’d be one pissed-off junkie if you paid very much for it.”
“It wasn’t mine.”
She regarded me thoughtfully, then said, “Doesn’t much matter one way or another. The D.A. would never have gotten a conviction.”
“I think it’s important that you know I’m innocent.”
“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I think you’re probably telling the truth.”
Probably.
“Because,” she said, “I believe we were meant to find it.”
“Meant?”
From her car: “Mom! I’m gonna be late!”
“Hold your horses!” Jennings shouted. “Yeah. Meant to find it, meant to think it was yours.”
I remembered Edwin Chatsworth advising me not to talk to this woman, but said, “They tore the place apart like they were looking for something. They knew the moment I came home I’d call the police. Then the police would find the cocaine.”
Detective Jennings nodded back. “Yeah. And then we put the heat on you.”
I looked at her. “Why would someone do that?”
“What a coincidence. I was going to ask you that.”
“Mom!”
Jennings sighed. “She’s just like her father.”
I had thought Jennings was a single mom. “He a police officer, too?” I asked.
Something in Jennings’s face twitched, even though she tried hard not to show it. “No,” she said. “He’s an engineer. And he’s working somewhere in Alaska, and if we’re lucky, he won’t ever be coming back.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t.
“Divorced, three years,” she said. She puffed herself up a bit. “And Cassie and I, we’re good.”
“She’s tough,” I said. “That comes across pretty quick.”
“Mr. Blake,” she said, “you need to think why someone would go to all the trouble to get you out of town and then see if they could get you framed for drug possession.”
I looked up the street at nothing in particular.
“And you need to keep thinking about the question I asked you before. Just how well did you know what your daughter was up to?”
I said, “The bloodstains on Syd’s car… have you found out anything yet?”
“You’ll be the second to know,” she said, then got into her car and drove her daughter to school.
I DECIDED TO TACKLE THE CLEANUP a room at a time.
First, of course, I went upstairs to check for any phone or email messages, even a fax. There was nothing. It occurred to me that with all of today’s technologies, there were now more ways than ever to know with absolute certainty that no one wanted to get in touch with me.
Then I went back down to the kitchen. It made sense to put this room in order first. I found some garbage bags under the sink and dumped in food that could not be saved. Items from the refrigerator that had been tossed about and gone bad, spilled cereal that covered the floor.
I’d been going at it for about an hour when I heard someone shouting over the drone of the vacuum cleaner.
“Hello?”
The front door was open. Standing there was a slight man in a suit that had to be five sizes too big for him. You could slip three fingers between his neck and his buttoned shirt collar. His stringy black tie was askew, and it seemed awfully early in the day to look this unkempt. His concave chest made him look as though he was caving in on himself. He was the guy who got sand kicked in his face on the back page of my comic books when I was a kid.
“I rang but you couldn’t hear me,” he said.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Are you Tim Blake?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Arnold Chilton,” he said. “I think Bob Janigan mentioned me to you?”
Huh?
Then I remembered. The detective, or security expert, whatever. The one Bob said might be able to help us track down Sydney. I was surprised, knowing how pissed Bob was with me at the moment, that he’d still decided to go ahead with this.
“Bob got in touch with me a few days ago,” he said, “but I’ve kind of been swamped getting my mom moved into a nursing home.”
“Oh,” I said. I extended a hand and he took it.
Arnold Chilton whistled as he took in the mess. I hadn’t started on the living room yet. “That must have been some party,” he said.
“It wasn’t a party,” I said. “Someone broke in and tore up the place.”
“Wow,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You got some time for some questions?” he asked.
“Why don’t we go outside?” I suggested. “There’s really nowhere to sit down in here yet.”
“Okeydoke,” Chilton said. We walked out onto the front lawn, turned, and looked back at the house.
“This is good of Bob to bring you into this,” I said. “He and I, we don’t always see eye to eye on everything.”
“He said something like that.”
“I’ll just bet he did,” I said. “The police are investigating Syd’s disappearance, of course, but having someone else on this, that’s great. I’ve been doing everything I can to find her—I even went on a wild-goose chase to Seattle this week—but haven’t made much headway. You know her car was found?”
“Didn’t know that,” Chilton said.
I thought the mention of the Seattle trip and the discovery of Syd’s car would have sparked further questions.
“Have you spoken to Detective Jennings?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Kip Jennings,” I said. “The police detective?”
“I think Bob did mention her, or his wife Susanne did.”
“Susanne is not his wife,” I said. “We used to be married, but she hasn’t married Bob. Yet.”
“That’s right! I knew that.”
“Did they tell you about Detective Jennings? Did they give you her number? Because you’re going to want to talk to her.”
“I’m pretty sure they mentioned her. I just don’t think I wrote it down.”
“I have her number,” I offered.
“Good,” he said, nodding agreeably.
“So, are you, what, a friend of Bob’s?” I asked. “Or have you done work for him before?”
“Yeah, I’ve done some stuff for him in the past,” Chilton said.
I wondered why my ex-wife’s boyfriend might have used the services of a private detective. And whatever reason it might have been, did Arnold Chilton actually produce any results? He wasn’t inspiring me with confidence.
“So, let’s get down to cases,” he said. “Tell me about the day your daughter disappeared.”
I told the story for the hundredth time. Chilton scribbled into a tattered notebook that had been jammed into a jacket pocket.
“What about friends?” he asked. “You got some names of her friends?”
“Patty Swain,” I said. “And there was a guy she used to go out with a few times, Jeff Bluestein. He helped me set up the website.” That reminded me. I had meant to ask him, when he’d popped by the dealership with Patty, to double-check that emails sent to the site were actually getting there. Not fully understanding how all that stuff worked, I was paranoid about things going wrong.
“How do you spell that?” Chilton asked.
I started to spell Bluestein, but he held up his hand. “The first name,” he said.
I blinked. “J-e-f-f,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, making his notes. “Sometimes people spell it with a G, don’t they?”
“That’s true,” I said.
“But not G-e-f-f. It would be G-e-O-f-f.”
“Yes,” I said. Did I need to tell him it was Syd with a y and not an i?
“Now,” he said, “did you notice anything weird with Sydney before she took off?”
“No,” I said. I only hoped he was right, that Sydney “took off.” “We had a small argument at breakfast. About some new sunglasses she had.”
“What was that about?”
I didn’t want to get into it with him. I didn’t want to believe it had anything to do with why Syd left, and it wasn’t any of Arnold Chilton’s business anyway. “It wasn’t a big d
eal,” I said.
“Was she doing drugs? Like, dealing or something like that?” I thought about the coke found in my room, but said nothing. He continued, “Hooking, maybe?”
That made me want to punch his lights out. I felt my hands forming into fists. “Listen, Mr. Chilton—”
“Just call me Arnie.” He grinned.
“Arnie,” I said, stretching the word out, “my daughter was neither a drug dealer nor a prostitute.”
Chilton, clearly a very keen detective, picked up something in my tone. “Okay,” he said, and made a note in his book, muttering under his breath, “No drugs, no hooking.” He glanced back up. “And how about yourself? Can you account for your whereabouts?”
“What?”
“At the time your daughter disappeared, where were you?”
I said, “Arnie, if you don’t mind my asking, just what sort of work have you done for Bob? Or anyone else, for that matter?”
“Pretty much all my security work has been for Bob,” he said.
“Just what kind of security work was it?” I asked. “Without,” I added, with mock sincerity, “violating any sort of confidentiality, of course.”
“No, no problem,” Arnie Chilton said. “Watching stuff, mainly.”
“Watching stuff,” I repeated. “What kind of stuff?”
“Cars,” he said.
“So let me get this straight. You were, what, a security guard?”
Arnie nodded. “The night shifts are the worst. Trying to keep your fucking eyes open, you’re almost hoping someone will break into the compound so it’ll keep you awake, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “Arnie, you mind waiting out here a moment while I make a phone call? I just remembered there’s someone I have to get in touch with.”
“That’s cool,” Arnie said. “I’ll just review my notes.”
I went back into the kitchen and hit one of the buttons already programmed into the phone’s speed dial.
Susanne, clearly looking at the caller ID before picking up, said, “Anything?”
“No,” I said. “Is Bob there?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I need to talk to him.”
“I don’t think he’ll be interested. He’s furious with you.” But there was nothing in Susanne’s voice to indicate she felt the same.
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