Missing Persons Read online

  Tico doused the headlights on the VW a few hundred yards before he pulled to a stop at an expensive wrought iron gate in an even more expensive high stucco wall. There wasn’t much of a moon and the desert was dark. Raoul couldn’t tell where Tico had taken him, but he was guessing the building was a residence. Tico waved casually toward a security camera mounted on the stucco wall, and seconds later the gates clanked loudly and started to swing inward.

  The place wasn’t much to look at. It was a sprawling, low-slung ranch with long overhanging rooflines designed to protect inhabitants from the relentless Nevada sun. Raoul dated the construction from the ’60s or ’70s. Somebody had once tried to do some landscaping, but the effort had been abandoned a long time before. Tall, vaguely Greek planting urns sat forlorn and empty at intervals around the property. Adjacent to the crumbling concrete driveway a swimming pool shaped like a spade was a third filled with murky water. The front of the separate pool house was almost totally obscured by junk. The shadowed symmetry of the red tile roof on the shack was interrupted by broken and absent tiles and what looked to be an abandoned array of solar panels.

  Raoul said, “That fence we went through is worth more than the house.”

  “Boss isn’t picky about stuff. Everything’s temporary but people. That’s what he says, says it all the time.”

  “I take it he doesn’t swim.”

  “Don’t go there, man.” Tico smiled. “Don’t go there. Uh, uh. No swimming jokes, you dig?”

  “Yes,” Raoul said. “Thanks. Does he live here?” He didn’t expect to get an answer and was surprised when Tico decided to give him one.

  “Stays here sometimes. Other places, too. A lot. He lives where he happens to be. At some point soon enough this place will get sold. They be another, and another after that. Like that. He gets ’em. Gets rid of ’em. We move on.”

  “The Airstream?”

  Tico smiled. “Had that one for a while. May be gone now, too.” He killed the tiny engine on the bug. For a moment the clatter of the valves was the loudest sound in Raoul’s ears.

  Raoul said, “Your boss and me have that in common. Buying and selling. I’m a bit of a speculator, too.” Initially Raoul thought Tico had been considering saying something in reply, but had thought better of it. “You have some advice for me?”

  “Advice?” Tico adjusted the fabric that clung to his shaved skull, pulling it tighter toward his ears, tight enough that a phrenologist could have done a comprehensive exam without removing the cap. “Whatever you think is about to happen here, bro, you wrong. That’s my advice for you. If you think you here ’cause you want to talk to U.P., you wrong. Want to know why you here? You here ’cause U.P. want to talk to you. No other damn reason.” He opened the door and hopped out of the car. “I need to pat you down now. No offense.”

  Raoul joined him on the driveway and lifted his arms. “None taken. I apologize for the smell. The shower in the Airstream wasn’t working.”

  59

  A frosty halo was framing what was visible of the moon as I turned east on Baseline toward my house.

  Most days, late rush-hour traffic would have dictated that I take South Boulder Road across the valley, but that night, because of the hour, I took Baseline. I was stopped at the traffic signal at the Foothills Parkway when my cell chirped in my pocket. I fished it out, managed to hit a tiny button with my almost frozen fingers, and said, “I’ll be home soon, I promise. I’m on my way. I’m sorry.”

  But it wasn’t Lauren. It was Sam.

  “Sweet,” he said. “Total capitulation. I find that so attractive in a man. Where are you?”

  “Baseline. Across from Safeway.”

  “Good, you’re close. Come on over to the department. I want to show you something.”

  “Now?”

  “You’ll want to see this.”

  The signal arrow turned green. I checked my mirrors and cut across two lanes of the intersection to make one of the more illegal left turns in Boulder history, and accelerated back toward Arapahoe.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He of little patience said, “Patience.”

  I arrived at the Public Safety Building on Thirty-third Street within minutes and parked on the deserted street out front. Sam was pacing in the public lobby, eating the last few bites of a Chipotle burrito that I knew had originally been almost the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread. My stomach growled at the tantalizing smell.

  “Chicken?”

  “Carnitas. Not too much fat. Niman Ranch pork. No hormones or shit. I get them with no sour cream, no cheese. Living in Boulder is finally starting to rub off on me.” He stuffed a final chunk of burrito into his mouth. “Probably too much salt, though. Whatever, it’s a treat. A year ago I probably would have been sucking that white shit out of the middle of a Twinkie.”

  “Got any more?” I asked.

  “Ha. Come on,” he said, balling up the tinfoil and dropping it into a trash can by the reception counter. He wiped his mustache with a napkin and tossed that away, too.

  “You already revise your warrant?” I asked.

  “Just waiting on Judge Heller and then we head back to the Hill for round two.”

  I followed him down the central corridor to a detective’s work area that was set up with a video monitor. The detritus of a few other investigations and the refuse of a few other recent fast-food meals littered the surface of three laminated tables that had been pushed into a clumsy U-shape.

  Detectives cleaned up crimes; they apparently didn’t clean up after themselves.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he said, pointing to a chair that didn’t scream “comfort.”

  “I’d be more comfortable home in bed.”

  “Yeah,” he said wistfully, but without any empathy whatsoever.

  I sat. “What is it you wanted me to see?”

  He gestured at the AV setup. “You tell me.”

  He flicked on the monitor and used a remote control to start a VCR. After a moment’s whirring the familiar logo of the local Fox news affiliate filled the screen.

  “We recorded this off the air. TiVo. Somebody upstairs transferred it to tape for me to play with. VCRs I can handle, barely. TiVo? Sorry, I don’t TiVo.” He chuckled at something. “Department has frigging TiVo. When I got here we had yellow squad cars.”

  I ignored the fact that the allusion made no particular sense and smiled at the memory of the banana-colored patrol cars that Boulder’s cops had driven around town for a while as part of a short-lived, amusing experiment in community-friendly policing.

  I expected I was about to watch tape of the local Fox affiliate’s coverage of the discovery of Doyle Chandler’s body near Allenspark that afternoon. Why? Sam would tell me when he was ready. Not before. But Sam surprised me, as he often did.

  “Christmas night,” Sam said as the screen showed Fox’s infamous Mallory Miller money shot: the helicopter footage of the Hill on Christmas night, the tape that purportedly showed no footprints or tire tracks leaving the Millers’ home after the snow started falling in earnest.

  “You oriented?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I’d seen the footage often enough to know what was what. If you lived in Colorado in the days after Mallory’s disappearance and had turned on your TV set, you had seen this film as many times as you’d seen the other little Boulder girl dancing around at beauty pageants.

  Sam paused the screen, picked up a laser pointer, and let the red dot settle. “Harts’ house.”

  “Got it.” The holiday lights were unmistakable.

  “Millers’ house and Doyle Chandler’s house are over here.” He made a dot appear on the wall behind the monitor.

  “Right where they’ve always been.”

  “Fox has been kind enough to superimpose the time line on the bottom of the screen.” He started the tape again. “Here’s where the controversy starts: nine-sixteen.”

  The footage was the enhanced version that Fox had promoted and promoted and p
romoted a few days after Christmas. It was the clip that started at 9:16 on Christmas night and stopped a couple of minutes later with the famous few seconds that showed no footprints or tire tracks leaving the Millers’ home.

  “I’ve seen this,” I said.

  “Yeah, but have you seen it? Start with your eyes at the lower-right corner of the screen-here, Doyle Chandler’s garage.” He paused the footage momentarily. The Harts’ house was in the center of the screen; Doyle’s house, but not the Millers’ house, was visible on the lower edge.

  I’d never noticed that Doyle’s house showed up in the early moments of the Fox footage. Sam said, “That’s smooth snow around the garage, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fresh? You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, keep your eye on the garage as the chopper moves around. With the distraction of the Christmas lights and the shadows it’s kind of hard to follow, but try.”

  Sam aided me with his laser pointer; he was remarkably adept at keeping the red dot targeted on the dark mass of Doyle’s garage. As the angle of the shot varied with the helicopter’s movement the garage would frequently shift totally out of the frame; one long absence lasted for a good half minute, another for almost as long.

  I stated the obvious. “Can’t see it most of the time, Sam. It goes off the screen.”

  “I know. It’s important that you can’t see it. The last few seconds are coming-watch carefully.”

  Fox hadn’t enhanced the area on the footage that included Doyle’s garage-they’d focused all their technological wizardry efforts on the Millers’ property-and it wasn’t easy to discern much detail in other parts of the frame, especially with the startling bright lights that stayed mostly centered on the screen, lights that were emanating from the garish Christmas display at the Harts’ house on the next block.

  The Very Hart of Christmas.

  “There,” Sam said. He paused the tape and allowed the red dot to linger on the short driveway that led from Doyle’s garage to the alley. “What do you see now?”

  I stood up and moved closer to the monitor. The closer I got, the larger the pixels on the screen appeared. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, or even if I was seeing anything at all. Then I was.

  I turned and faced Sam. “Are those… tire tracks leaving Doyle’s garage?” I asked. “Those weren’t there at the beginning.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I see, too,” Sam said. His tone was understated and self-satisfied.

  Bob, I thought. Bob had pulled his Camaro out of Doyle’s garage during the second extended period that the garage was out of the frame.

  The tunnel. The damn tunnel.

  The damn movie in the damn theater in the damn basement.

  Did Bob really have something to do with Mallory’s disappearance?

  I was shocked. “Did he help her leave, Sam? Or did he take her?”

  I didn’t have to say who “he” was. He knew I was talking about Bob.

  “You don’t know where he is, do you?” Sam asked.

  “No, I told you I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “This isn’t some therapist nice-nice secret-secret bullshit?”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “You know where to look for him?”

  I hesitated for a split second. “No.”

  Sam made a guttural noise-okay, he growled at me-and mouthed a dry “f” sound. It didn’t take much lip-reading skill to know what exactly he’d thought about saying.

  “I really don’t, Sam. If I did, I’d tell you. Given what already happened to Doyle, Bob could be in danger, too. I would tell you if I knew.”

  He wasn’t satisfied. “You know something, don’t you? You know something that could help me? Something you’re not telling me?”

  “Sam…”

  “Man…” He stood up quickly, almost knocking his chair over.

  Five minutes later Sam walked me back to my car. He seemed impervious to the cold. I bet he didn’t even care that his Cherokee didn’t have seat heaters.

  “Chinooks tomorrow,” Sam said.

  “They thought they were coming today, too. They’re wrong a lot,” I replied, wondering why we were talking about the weather. “If the Chinooks do start to blow, at least it will warm things up a little. It’s too cold.”

  “The media isn’t going to know what to do with those winds,” Sam said. “Should be fun.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll be back tomorrow. You know they will. With word of the tunnel and the Doyle Chandler situation? All the trucks and all the cameras-they’ll all be back outside the Millers’ house doing their stupid live shots. The idiot lawyers on cable will all be saying we blew it again. Us, the Boulder cops. ‘It’s just like Christmas eight years ago,’ that’s what they’ll say. But then the Chinooks will start blowing late morning and they’ll blow the goddamn experts all the goddamn way to Denver, maybe farther. It’ll be too windy to raise the antennas on their trucks. I wish I could be there; it’ll be fun to watch.”

  I checked his expression. He was truly sorry he was going to miss it.

  “I’m going to tell Lauren about all this, Sam. The tunnel, Doyle, Bob,” I said. “I need some advice from her.”

  “Tell her to sit on it till morning. Our bases will be pretty well covered in the next couple of hours. Get some sleep for me tonight.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think I’ll be getting much.”

  “How did you put this together?” I asked as I clicked open the wagon doors with the key remote. “The Camaro? Why did you decide to go back and look at that tape?”

  “This is far from together. The tunnel changes everything. One of the things it changes is which house we should be paying attention to. Where Mallory’s disappearance is concerned, we’ve had our eyes on the Miller house, not on Doyle Chandler’s house. On the way back here to amend the warrant app I remembered that you had asked me if there was a car in Doyle’s garage when we searched the house the day after Mallory disappeared. I told you I didn’t think so, but it’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask your patient Bob about if we ever caught up with him.”

  “But you decided to check the Fox footage instead? Smart, Sammy. So do you have a theory to explain all this? Does tonight-the tunnel and this video-does it change your thinking about her disappearance? You still sure she’s a runaway?”

  “I have a few theories,” he said. “How many do you have?”

  He waited for me to answer.

  When I didn’t, he added, “Thought so. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

  I left the show-and-tell right there. “You still want to run in the morning? I’m happy to bag it if you’re too busy.”

  “I want to run,” he said. “No excuses. Since it’s Saturday, I’ll let you sleep in. Come outside at seven-thirty-I don’t want to ring the bell.”

  60

  I finally made it home from the police station, took the dogs out for a last time, climbed into bed, and rubbed Lauren’s back until she awakened. Although I left a few names and a few details out of my story, I told her enough of what I knew that she understood the magnitude of my dilemma. I finished by asking for her advice.

  Her counsel was succinct. “Higher, on my neck. Right there.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No, that’s not it. On one hand you know a lot. On the other hand you don’t know much. You need to leverage what you have. Save Diane no matter what it takes, screw the rest.”

  “It’s all that clear to you? I could get censured, lose my license.”

  She rolled over and faced me. My eyes were adjusting to the dark and I could see the shimmer of her irises. She said, “You’d have to sleep with a patient, kill her, and then have sacrilegious sex with her dead body before that spineless state board would yank your license, and you know it. But what if they do? You and me and Grace? We’ll make it if you have to change careers. We will. Will you make it if you kn
ew you could have done something that might have helped Diane and you didn’t do it? I don’t think so. You’re pussyfooting around this, Alan. The rules need to be broken sometimes. This is one of those times. Break the damn rules, save your friend, suffer the consequences. You won’t be able to live with any other choice, you know that.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  She reached a warm arm out from under the comforter, put her fingers on the side of my neck, and lowered her voice to a late-night whisper. “There’s some things I know about you, sweetie: You’re a better cook when you’re not too hungry. You’re a better dad when you’re not feeling too protective. And you’re a better lover when you’re not too horny.”

  “You have a point?”

  “You want this to be right too much, and it’s clouding your judgment. Step back. Take off your therapist hat. Be a friend, first. You’ll know what to do.”

  I didn’t have to think long to know that her advice was sound.

  “What?” she said, sensing something.

  “I’m a better lover when I’m not too horny? Really?”

  She smiled and shrugged. She dropped her hand so that it slid down my bare chest. “You want to prove otherwise?”

  The truth was, I didn’t. Not right then.

  61

  The way he told it to me later, Raoul’s evening, like mine, ended with just the slightest ray of hope.

  More quarry tile than he had seen in a long, long time. Big tiles-eighteen-inch squares. Brick-red, uneven surfaces, with dirty grout lines as fat as a grown man’s finger. The tile extended through every doorway, down every hall. This house was apparently where the awful quarry tile from that dubious ’70s design burp had gone to die.