Rick Mofina - They Disappeared

Can you help me find my family?

“No. Thank you.”

Jeff went to the elevator. While waiting he was joined by two women who were well into their sixties; they chatted softly about their day as the elevator ascended.

“Did your group see Central Park, wasn’t it lovely?”

“Oh, it was.”

“This is such an exciting city, full of urban grit, isn’t it?” one of the ladies said to Jeff.

He forced a half smile. “Yes, it is.”

The women stepped off on the third floor and Jeff was grateful to be alone as the car droned to the twelfth. The doors opened to two men, about his height, swarthy, unshaven, late twenties, early thirties. Surprised to see Jeff, they were eager to get on and engaged in some awkward sidestepping, brushing against him as he got off, leaving a hint of mild cologne as he glimpsed their reflections in the large mirror. They seemed to be watching him with unusual intensity.

He shrugged it off.

A couple of weird tourists.

He walked down the hall to his room. The floor was quiet but he hesitated at his door.

Maybe they’ll be inside with a wild story. Or maybe I am really dreaming and this is the point where Sarah wakes me up.

His hand shook when he went to insert the plastic key card. He inhaled and got it to work on his second try, stepped in and hit the lights.

Empty.

The room had been made. The beds were turned down crisply. Fresh towels were folded in the polished bathroom. He conjured up memories of Sarah, Cole, himself, preparing to leave earlier that morning.

He stood there, unable to move, unable to think, and stared at nothing, like the sole survivor left behind in the aftermath. He began to inventory the room and noticed something was not right.

Their luggage.

Some of Sarah’s clothes were still nicely folded, a ghostly reminder of her, but some of his clothes had spilled from their bags. Jeff allowed that maids repositioned items to clean but that was not how he and Sarah had left things. Was it? Or had someone rummaged through their clothes, looking for something?

Jeff went to the compartment where he’d left extra cash and traveler’s checks, relieved they were still there. But soon unease pinged in the back of his mind.

What is it?

He detected a smell beyond the carpet freshener and disinfectant tile cleaner, something familiar, a weakening trace of cologne.

Where had he smelled it before?

The men at the elevator.

Was it the same cologne in his room?

Jeff’s heart rate picked up before he recalled that he’d brushed against one of them. Did he smell it on his shirt? Maybe he shouldn’t have refused Cordelli’s offer to have cops stay with him. Maybe he should call him.

Maybe I’m just imagining everything?

Jeff started a shower to clear his mind.

He checked to ensure his cell phone’s volume was up and set it beside the room’s wireless phone, on a shelf near the shower. Cordelli would have alerted me to any calls, right? As steam rose around him, guilt and fear rippled through his body. He replayed the day, how it started in turmoil with Sarah before the vanishings, then Cordelli’s suspicions, how he’d tracked the SUV to the Bronx to have a gun pointed at him, the fire, two murders and Brewer’s accusations.

It’s all too much.

It’s my fault. Like it was with Lee Ann.

And like it was with Lee Ann, he was helpless again.

My daughter died in my care and I could do nothing.

Where are they? God, are they like that kid, bound somewhere?

Dying.

What should he do? What could he do?

Jeff made the water ice-cold to feel something other than useless and sorry for himself. His skin went numb.

But he endured.

He closed his hands into fists and hammered the walls.

He couldn’t cry. He couldn’t give up. He would never give up.

After the shower he checked his cell phone.

He checked it every minute.

Jeff thought about what Cordelli had said about the alert and reasoned that he should tell their family and friends back home because they were going to hear, if they hadn’t already with all the police calls to Montana.

Sarah had an aunt and uncle in Billings. In Laurel, there was Sarah’s principal. Jeff also needed to tell his boss, Clay, Sarah’s friends, Alice and Val. He scrolled through their numbers.

What do I say? How do I begin to tell them?

His thoughts scattered beyond the horror he was facing, back over time, beyond the agony he’d suffered with his daughter’s death, back to the moment he’d learned his mother and father had been killed.

It was the summer he’d turned fifteen and his parents were on vacation in Canada while he stayed with his grandfather, who’d given him a summer job helping him with his towing business.

It was the weekend and they’d gone to the fair in Billings to have some fun. Jeff loved the shooting gallery and the hot dogs. He remembered how he had just bought one for himself and his grandfather when a couple of highway patrol troopers, friends of his grandfather, appeared and took his grandfather aside.

The troopers’ grave faces contrasted with the joyous air of the fair. They raised their voices over the noise and Jeff heard fragments as one of them told his grandfather, “We tried your radio in your truck…somebody told us you were here at the fair…so damned sorry…”

Their eyes turned to Jeff, and they removed their hats when they joined his grandfather to approach him. Something terrible was coming and he felt his body go numb.

“Jeff, son,” his grandpa started, the tears rolling down his face, “your mom and dad… Oh, Jesus…”

Jeff let the hot dogs fall to the grass.

At fifteen, the world he knew had ended amid the deafening rock music, the diesel roar of the Scrambler and screams from the midway.

Jeff was at a loss then, as he was now, confronting the need to tell their people in Montana what had happened to Sarah and Cole. He thought hard about calling but he couldn’t bear to hear their voices, their horror and their questions.

He wrote the same short text message to each of them:

Sarah and Cole are lost in NYC. Very worried. Police trying to find them. Tell you more when I know it. Please pray.

Jeff closed his phone, stood at his hotel window and searched the lights of Manhattan as sirens echoed in the night.

Manhattan, New York City

Nearly four miles south of where Jeff Griffin stood, Sheri Dalfini was on the brink.

At any moment this redheaded piece of work from the Bronx was going to give up something. Brewer was sure of it as he turned the laptop so she could see the arson-homicide photographs.

A little visual aid.

The two figures in the pictures were barely recognizable as human. Amid the two black masses there was a piece of shirt here, a shoe there, something that looked like a hand.

Sheri’s gasp bounced off the walls of the interview room at One Police Plaza where Brewer had been questioning her relentlessly since they’d released Griffin. Brewer was using a different strategy with her than he’d used with Griffin.

“Take a good, long look, Sheri,” Brewer said, “because if you don’t start telling me what I need to know, things are going to get real bad for you.”

Brewer showed her slide after slide.

The victims looked like charcoal mannequins. Their hair and facial features had been burned off, leaving split skin and white teeth exposed in a death grimace.

“Who are these people, Sheri?”

She shook her head.

“Where are Sarah and Cole Griffin?”

She continued shaking her head, frustrating Brewer.