Marcia Muller: Vanishing Point

“You’ll be in the field, Shar?” Craig asked.

“Yes. Ted’ll be holding things together here in the office, and Kendra-you’ve all met Kendra, right?-she’ll be holding him together.”

“About time somebody did,” Charlotte said.

“Wait till you turn in your next expense report,” Ted warned her.

I said, “Okay-assignments. I’ll be personally talking to everyone we can locate who is mentioned in the accounts of Laurel Greenwood’s disappearance, as well as anyone else Jennifer Aldin suggests. Derek-you’ll locate and background those people, starting immediately. I’d also appreciate it if you’d make yourself available to conduct spur-of-the-moment searches for me while I’m in the field.”

Mick was frowning, hurt at being left out.

I said to him, “You-the genius, as Derek calls you-need to concentrate on running your department.” There was a growing corporate demand for computer forensics-the science of recovering files that had been inadvertently or deliberately deleted. Mick had originally suggested we offer the service to our existing clients, and once we’d announced it, the work had poured in, both from them and other companies they’d referred to us.

“Shar,” he said, “I can handle both.”

“Not and have a life, you can’t. And I think Charlotte would agree that you having a life outside the agency is a good thing.”

“Amen to that!” Charlotte exclaimed.

“Don’t get excited,” I told her. “You may end up being the one in your household who needs coddling and cosseting.”

“Say what?”

“Needing TLC after a hard day at the office. You’ll retain your caseload, but I may have to call on you if any tricky financial angles come up. Plus I’m temporarily taking Patrick away from you. Patrick,” I added to Neilan, “you’ll be assisting me full-time.”

His eyes widened, and then his freckled face glowed with pleasure.

Patrick Neilan was my newest operative, and I suspected most of the staff regarded him as a sympathy hire. When I’d first encountered him-as a witness during last month’s major investigation-I’d learned that he was also the subject of a search we had undertaken for his ex-wife the year before. My regret at the fact that the information we’d provided her had resulted in his financial downfall had prompted me to hire him temporarily, and he’d shown the potential to be a good investigator. Now that I’d hired him full-time, I wanted to give him the chance to prove himself to his coworkers.

I added, “Let’s get back to work, everybody. Patrick and Derek-I want to see you in my office.”

My office was at the far end of the pier, a large space with a high arching window overlooking the bay and the East Bay cities and hills. One side wall rose toward the roof, a strip of multipaned windows at its top letting in soft northern light; the other was an eight-foot-high partition with a door that opened onto the catwalk. The furnishings-desk and clients’ chairs; file cabinets; armoire that served as a coat closet; easy chair beneath a schefflera plant, in which to do serious thinking-seemed dwarfed by their spacious surroundings. When we’d moved in, the rent set by the Port Commission had barely seemed affordable, even though it was low by waterfront standards because of the pier’s unfortunate location under the western span of the Bay Bridge and next door to the SFFD fireboat station. But within a couple of years, we’d taken over all the upstairs space on the northern side and were handling the increased cost easily. We’d also become inured to the fire station’s siren going off, as well as the roaring and clanking of traffic on the bridge’s roadbed overhead.

I dumped my files on the desk, motioning for Patrick and Derek to be seated. Then I pulled a list from on top of the pile and handed it to my computer expert.

“These are the people we need to locate and background,” I said. “Whatever information we have on them appears in your packet. E-mail the files to me, copy Patrick, and also print it out for Ted to copy and distribute to everybody. Any questions?”

Derek studied the list. “You want me to search in the order you’ve got them listed?”

“Yes, but don’t waste too much time on those that’re difficult to locate, just move ahead.”

“Will do.” He stood.

“One more thing,” I said. “Mick will want to help you. Don’t let him. He’s got enough to do.”

Derek nodded and gave me a little salute as he left the office.

I turned to Patrick. “Okay, your function will be to coordinate things here in the office. I’ll be messengering tapes and e-mailing reports back from the field for you to organize and study for patterns or leads that I may have missed. Any and all suggestions or theories will be welcome. As you saw last month, I’m not the sort of investigator who refuses to listen to input, so feel free to offer your two cents whenever. Right now”-I looked at my watch-“I think we should grab some lunch. Then I want you to come with me while I conduct a field interview with Jennifer Aldin’s sister, Terry Wyatt.”

Patrick stood, looking eager. He was thirty-four, twice a father, had a business degree from Golden Gate University, and had been an accountant before his job was eliminated and he’d been forced to turn to security work to make ends meet. His wife leaving him for another man, her frequent refusals to allow him to see their children, her garnishing of his small wages-all that should have left him a broken man. But Patrick had somehow maintained a balance, and now, as he began a new career, he exhibited both optimism and an almost childlike pleasure in life.

We walked down the Embarcadero and had burgers at Miranda’s, my favorite waterfront diner, then headed east over the Bay Bridge in the agency van, our destination Davis, the university town west of Sacramento. On the way I conducted an informal training session on the art of the field interview: how to structure it; when to press for answers; when to sit back and wait for the answers to come; what body language to watch for; what tones of voice, inflections, and hidden meanings to listen to.

“Even when a person has nothing to hide, there will be details they’ll deliberately omit or that will slip through the cracks,” I told him. “A bad memory, a rewriting of history, an aversion to a certain subject, or simply the idea that something isn’t important-they all can contribute to your getting an incomplete picture.”

“You say ‘picture,’ rather than ‘answers’ or ‘set of facts.’ What exactly d’you mean?”

“What do the facts a given individual provides you with add up to? How do they relate to the facts others have given you? Do they agree? Contradict? Where do they fit within the framework of the investigation? What other avenues of investigation do they point to?”

Patrick shook his head. “Conducting and analyzing an interview’s more complicated than I thought. You study this in school?”

“Nope. I was a sociology major at Berkeley-which was interesting enough, but not very practical. Some of this stuff I learned from my first boss, the man whose investigator’s license I trained under. But most of it came from trial and error. A lot of error. When I started training people myself, I realized I’d have to articulate the process, or they’d make the same mistakes I did. That meant I had to do a lot of thinking about what it is I actually do, whereas before I was just winging it.”

“I’ll bet you could write a textbook.”

“I was asked to, after I gave a talk at a symposium last year, but it’s not going to happen. I spend too much time at my desk as it is.”

I took the central Davis exit and followed Terry Wyatt’s instructions to a quiet, tree-shaded block of Twelfth Street, lined with ranch-style homes that I judged to have been built in the 1950s. The uniform size of the lots indicated the area was an older subdivision, and all the houses probably had once been alike, but over the years they’d been remodeled and embellished with decorative touches so now no two looked the same. Terry Wyatt’s was the exception; its clean, simple lines were in the classic suburban style of fifty years ago.