Something was niggling at me, and I looked into the bag.
“Where the…”
I dumped everything left in the bag—a couple of pairs of socks, some underwear, a pullover shirt—onto the bed.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
I left my room and went into Syd’s, thinking maybe I’d already found what I was now looking for, had put it back in its place, but forgotten.
I gave Syd’s room a quick look, came up empty.
“Where the hell are you, Milt?” I said aloud.
I grabbed my keys, went outside, and unlocked my car. I looked in the trunk, the back seat, under the seats, but Sydney’s favorite stuffed moose was nowhere to be found.
“The hotel,” I said to myself.
I had placed it on the bed when I’d spent my night at the Just Inn Time. Then, when I’d grabbed a pillow to rest my head on the window, Milt had taken a tumble.
I didn’t have the energy to go over there now, but made a mental note to pop in the next time I was driving by.
I went back inside and up to my room. It made sense to go to bed, but I felt so overwhelmingly frustrated. Sure it was late, but I should be doing something. Making calls, going to more shelters, driving to—
A noise.
I heard something outside. A thump, a bump, something.
Maybe it was just a car door opening and closing.
But if I could hear it, it probably wasn’t one of the neighbors. It had to be someone in my driveway, or out front of my house.
I went down the stairs, trying not to make any sounds of my own, and was getting ready to peek out the front window when the doorbell rang.
My heart jumped.
I went to the door, peered through the window at the side. A man was standing there, holding something boxy—about the size of a car battery—in his right hand. I threw the deadbolt, opened the door.
“Mr. Blake,” the man said.
“Mr. Fletcher,” I said.
“You remembered,” he said.
“I never forget someone who uses a test drive to deliver manure.”
“Yeah,” Richard Fletcher said, and extended the arm that was holding the package. I could see now that it was a six-pack of Coors, in cans.
I accepted the package. The cans were warm to the touch, and he said, “First time I came by, I’d just come from the store, and they were cold. But they’ve warmed up since then.”
“You’ve been by before?” I said.
“A couple of times, earlier in the day,” he said. “I figured out your address from the card you gave me. Matched the home number to an address in the phone book.”
“You might as well come in,” I said, and opened the door wider.
I led him into the kitchen, motioned for him to take a seat, and took out two cans. I tossed him one, cracked the tab on mine, and sat down opposite him.
We both took a sip of beer.
“It would have been better cold,” he said.
“Yeah, well,” I said.
He nodded. Finally, he said, “I’m not really in the market for a new truck.”
“I figured.”
“I promised a guy I’d deliver him some manure, but then my truck wouldn’t work. He was promising me forty dollars.”
“Sure,” I said, taking another sip of the Coors.
“I didn’t have money to rent a truck,” Fletcher said. “And there wasn’t anybody I could borrow one off of.”
“Sure,” I said.
“So,” Fletcher said, “that’s why I did it.”
I nodded.
“Next time,” he said, “I could try the Toyota dealer.”
I smiled. “I’d be grateful.”
He returned the smile. “So, that’s what I came by to say.” He struggled a moment. “Sorry,” he said. “I never meant any harm.”
I took another sip of the warm beer. “What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked.
“Sofia,” he said.
“That’s a pretty name,” I said.
We each took another sip of our beers.
“I should be going,” he said. He looked down at the can. “I don’t think I can finish this. I used to be able to sit down and drink half a dozen of these, but now it’s all I can do to finish one.”
I got up and walked with him to the door, followed him outside to the driveway. We stopped briefly behind the CR-V. I stuck out my hand, and he took it. We shook.
“When I win the lottery, I’ll buy a car off ya,” he said.
“Sounds fair,” I said.
As I turned to go back into the house, there was a distant squeal of tires, the gunning of a car engine.
The sound got louder. Someone was coming up the street very, very fast.
Just as I turned to look, there was a popping noise. Before Fletcher came at me, I caught a glimpse of a van barreling up the street.
As Fletcher took hold of me around the waist and pulled me down onto the cool grass, I heard more pops, then glass shattering.
“Head down!” Fletcher barked into my ear.
I managed to turn my head toward the street, caught another glimpse of the van as it sped off.
Once the van was gone, Fletcher got off me. I stood up, saw that the back window of my car had been shot out.
“I’d been thinking maybe the beer wasn’t enough,” he said, “but now I definitely think we’re even.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
I RAN INTO THE HOUSE TO CALL THE POLICE. When I came back out, Richard Fletcher was down at the bottom of the driveway, only a few feet away from his yellow Pinto. I had to run to catch up to him before he turned the key.
“Where are you going?” I asked as he rolled down the window.
“Home,” he said.
“The police are on their way,” I said. “They’ll want to talk to you. You’re a witness.”
“I didn’t see nothin’,” he said. “I’ve got enough problems getting by and raising my girl without getting dragged into whatever mess you’re in. If you tell the police I was here, I’ll deny it.”
He turned the key. The engine wheezed three times before it turned over. He gave me a final nod and drove off down Hill Street, the Pinto sputtering and gasping.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THE STREET looked like a cop convention. At least a dozen cars out front of the house, rotating roof lights casting a strobing glow on the houses and trees. Farther up the street, a news crew van. Neighbors were milling about, talking in hushed tones to one another, trying to figure out what had happened while the police strung yellow tape around the scene.
They were roaming all over the inside of the house, too. They knew their way by now.
Standing out front of the house with me, Kip Jennings said, “So you’re standing out here talking to who again?”
“Richard Fletcher,” I said. “He lives on Coulter.”
“And where’s he?”
“He went home.”
“This guy saves you from someone doing a drive-by, and then he just goes home.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What was he doing here in the first place?”
“He dropped by with a peace offering,” I said. “He took a pickup out on a test drive, used it to deliver manure. I called him on it, and he came by tonight with a six-pack of Coors. The drive-by happened as he was leaving.”
“He set you up?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He saved me. If he hadn’t tackled me, I’d be dead now.” I paused. “He said if you go see him he’s going to deny being here. He doesn’t need the hassle.”
“Really,” she said. She decided to go in a different direction. “You said you saw the car?”
“Speeding off, yeah. A van. I just caught a glimpse of it. It might have been the same van that was parked across from the dealership, the one that belonged to the guy who tried to kill me.”
“Maybe he’s going to keep doing this until he gets it right,” Jennings said.
; A uniformed cop came out of the house and said to Jennings, “There’s something upstairs you should see.”
Jennings looked at me like I should know what the officer was talking about. I shrugged. I followed her, and the uniform, into the house and up the stairs. The cop stopped outside the bathroom door in the upstairs hallway and pointed inside.
“We found those,” he said.
He was pointing to some bloodied towels, wadded up and tossed onto the floor beyond the toilet.
Jennings looked at me. “That your blood?”
“No,” I said. “But—”
“We’re going to have to get that bagged,” Jennings said to the cop. “Forensics here yet?”
“Just arriving,” the cop said.
Jennings said to me, “I thought you said no one got hit.”
“I can explain those,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. I mean, forensics-wise.”
“Come with me,” Jennings said, heading back downstairs and into the kitchen, where there was less traffic. “Explain.”
“You know Sydney’s friend, Patty Swain?”
Jennings, who had what I would call a poker face most of the time, did something with her eyes. They seemed to pop for a hundredth of a second.
“Yes,” she said.
“She called me late last night. She was at a party down on the beach strip. She’d had a lot to drink and she’d hurt herself.”
“Go on.”
“She asked me to come and get her. When the phone rang, and I picked up, I thought it was Syd calling for a second. They almost sound the same on the phone.”
“And why did she call you?”
“I guess she felt she didn’t have anyone else.”
“Why’s that?”
“Her father left years ago, and she says her mother’s a bit of a—this isn’t me saying this, this is Patty, and Syd’s made comments in the past—she says her mother’s a bit of a drunk. Said even if she called home, her mother wouldn’t have been able to come and get her.”
“So you went,” Jennings said.
I sighed. “Yeah. I was pretty exhausted, but it’s not like she was calling from far away. So I drove down, found her, and brought her back here. It was pretty ugly down there, guys getting a bit aggressive, you know? I offered to drive her back to her own place, but there was no way she’d let me take her there. Her knee was cut up pretty bad.”
“What happened?”
“She fell on some broken glass.”
“And you patched her up?”
“I brought her into the house, got her cleaned up in the bathroom up there. I blotted up some of the blood with the towels, tossed them in the corner, forgot all about them when I headed out this morning.”
Jennings was wearing a very serious expression.
“What?” I asked. “It’s not a big deal. I mean, set your forensics people loose on the towels if you want, but that’s all it was.”
“What happened after you took care of her knee?”
“Okay, well, I bandaged it up, and then I offered again to take her home, but she didn’t want to leave, so I said she could sleep in Sydney’s room for the night.”
“Really,” Jennings said.
“Maybe that was stupid,” I said. “But she said that if I drove her home, she’d just run off someplace, and the idea of a teenage girl, who’d been drinking, wandering around town on her own in the middle of the night, didn’t seem like a good idea to me.”
“Of course not.”
“The fact is, I don’t know whether she stayed here for the night or not,” I said. “I went straight to bed and when I got up in the morning she was already gone and the bed didn’t even look as though it had been slept in. She’d let herself out, the front door was unlocked.”
“What time did you get up?”
“About seven-thirty,” I said.
“Did she talk to you about anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just, anything.”
I shrugged. “A bit about her father. She doesn’t much care for him, but it sounds like she hasn’t seen much of him for years. Her mother, the drinking. She offered to stay here, look after the house, until Syd comes back.”
“Did that seem odd to you?” Jennings said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s like she wants to live here instead of her own house. She’s spent a lot of time here since she and Sydney became friends. I told Patty that wouldn’t work. And I told her she had to be gone first thing in the morning, so maybe I pissed her off and she left right after I went to bed.”
“Is there anyone who can back this story up for you?” Detective Jennings asked.
“Why’s that necessary?”
“I’m just asking.”
Kate Wood. She could back up the first part of my story. She saw me going into the house with Patty. But was Kate someone I wanted to put the police onto? Would talking to her make things any better?
“Look, there is someone,” I said hesitantly. “But I have to tell you, she’s a bit, you know, she’s a bit of a flake.”
“Is that so?” Jennings said.
“A woman I was seeing, her name’s Kate Wood. She drove by here when I was bringing Patty into the house. And I talked to her later, explained what was going on.”
“Why did you feel the need to do that?” Jennings asked.
Because it looked bad.
“Just, I don’t know, I thought she might have gotten the wrong idea,” I said. “Kate probably wanted to drop by, have a talk—”
“Why would she do that? Didn’t you say you used to be seeing her?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s true. But I guess, I don’t know, I guess she thought there were still issues to resolve.”
Jennings said, “Is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything you want to get off your chest?”
“What? No. I mean, yes, there are things I want to talk about. I want to know what you’re doing to find Sydney. You’re always asking me questions, but you never have any news for me.” Other than Sydney’s blood being on the car, of course. “I’ve been driving all over the place today, showing Syd’s picture to hundreds of people. How many people have you shown her picture to today?”
Jennings held my gaze momentarily, then said, “We’ll talk more in a minute.”
She was taking out her cell phone as she left the kitchen. By the time she was talking to whoever she wanted to talk to, she was outside, where I couldn’t hear her.
I leaned up against the fridge, tried to get my head around what had happened here in the last hour.
Sydney was still out there.
People who wanted to know where she was were trying to kill me.
Just call me, Syd. Tell me where you are. Tell me what’s going on.
Jennings returned a moment later, pocketing her phone. “I’d like to go over this again. When you picked Patty up, when you brought her home.”
“Why’s this a big deal?”
“She’s missing,” Kip Jennings said.
TWENTY-NINE
THIS MUCH KIP JENNINGS TOLD ME:
Patty had a part-time job in that accessories store in the Connecticut Post Mall, two or three shifts a week. She was due in at ten that morning, and no one thought much about it when she hadn’t shown up by ten-thirty Patty had a somewhat cavalier attitude about things like punching in on time.
But when it got to be eleven, they started to wonder whether she didn’t realize she was scheduled to work, so they tried her cell. When they didn’t get any answer there, they tried her home. No luck there, either.
One of the staff knew where Patty’s mother, Carol Swain, worked, so a call was put in to her at a glass and mirror sales office on Bridgeport Avenue. She hadn’t seen her daughter since the afternoon of the day before, and while it was not unusual for Patty to get home late, her mother was surprised not to find her home in the morning. And then for her not to show up for work—while she was often late, she’d eventua
lly show up—that was definitely out of the ordinary.
When Carol Swain got home and Patty wasn’t there, she tried her daughter’s cell herself. When that failed to raise her, she considered calling friends of her daughter’s, then had to admit she didn’t know very much about Patty’s friends. Patty didn’t tell her a damn thing about the kids she hung out with. Carol was telling all this to one of her friends, a woman she sometimes went drinking with after work, and the friend said, “Carol? Has it occurred to you your daughter might actually be in some trouble?”
So around six o’clock, Patty’s mother called the police. Almost apologetic about it. Probably nothing, she said. You know what girls are like today. But had there been, you know, any teenage girls who looked like her daughter run down at an intersection or anything?
The police said no. They asked Carol Swain if she wanted to file a missing-persons report on her daughter.
She thought about that a moment, and said, “Hell, I don’t want to make a federal case out of this or anything.”
The police said, “We can’t do anything to help you find her if you’re not going to report her missing.”
So Carol Swain said, “Oh, why the hell not?”
Jennings told me all this, finishing up with “I just made a couple of calls in the last few minutes, and she hasn’t turned up.”
“I tried to call her a couple of times today,” I said. “She never answered.”
“At the moment,” Jennings said, “it seems that you’re the last person who’s seen her.”
That seemed to be more than just an observation. “What are you saying?”
“Mr. Blake, you seem like a decent enough guy, so I’m just trying to be straight with you. We’ve found bloody towels in your house that you say were used to help a girl who hasn’t been seen in nearly twenty-four hours.”
“I’ve been totally straight with you,” I said.
“I hope so,” she said. “Now we’ve got two missing-girl cases, and you’re at the center of both of them.”
IN THE MORNING, I PHONED SUSANNE AT WORK.
“Has Bob got that Beetle ready?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “New tires, new headlight.”
“Oil leak?”