Lisa Unger - Smoke

“When you’re feeling up to it, why don’t you read this article? I’ll be back in a little while.”

He left the room then and locked the door behind him. He walked into an adjacent room where Lydia and Jeffrey were watching through a two-way mirror. They were in Dax’s dungeon, as Lydia liked to call it, that mysterious maze of rooms in his basement that was an endless source of fascination for Lydia.

Dax saw as he entered the darkened room that Charley sat perfectly still and hadn’t made a move for the article.

“We better take it easy on him,” said Dax. “With that kind of conditioning, he could crack up, get lost forever in there.” He tapped his temple.

“We might need a professional,” said Lydia. It had taken her about a half an hour on the Internet searching stories on missing young men to come up with the website James Rainer’s parents had posted, the articles that had run in the wake of his disappearance, the blogs from friends who recounted the night he’d disappeared, pleas from people who wanted him to know that they loved him and wanted him home no matter what. Jeffrey had recognized the picture from before his eyes had turned purple and swollen.

“Like a cult deprogrammer?” asked Jeffrey.

She nodded. “But first, we need to get in touch with his family.”

“Well,” said Dax, reluctantly. “Once we do that, we’re going to lose him.”

“Dax,” said Lydia, looking at him incredulous. “You’re implying that we keep him here and only let his family know when we’re done with him?”

He shrugged. “He’s been missing for eight months. Another day or two isn’t going to kill them.”

“Jesus, Dax,” said Lydia. “Are you even human?”

Another shrug. “That kid’s the only thing we got out of our botched visit to The New Day.”

“Not quite,” said Jeffrey. He took the blank visitor’s page from his pocket and laid it on the table. Dax and Lydia leaned in.

“Oh, good. So we have this blank piece of paper, too,” said Dax. “Congratulations, Detective, you cracked the case.”

Jeffrey gave him a look and sat down at the round metal table that stood in the corner of the room. He flattened the page out in front of him and turned on the halogen lamp, which shone a bright, direct beam onto the paper.

“You can see the indentation of writing from the page that was above this one on the clipboard. It’s a visitor’s log.”

Dax opened a drawer in the table and took out a pencil. He sat down beside Jeffrey and slid the paper away from him.

“Let me have it,” he said.

“Don’t fuck it up,” said Lydia, leaning over his shoulder.

Slowly, as Dax delicately shaded over the page, a list of names in a long scrawling hand started to appear in relief. Much of it was illegible, the impressions from the handwriting above uneven in the pressure applied. They could make out some common surnames, like Walsh, Smith, Jones.

Lydia looked away in frustration and noticed Charley reaching for the article beside him. She watched as his eyes scanned the page and his hand started to shake. She started to wonder if maybe they shouldn’t have left that for him to read. Maybe it was too much for him, to see it in black and white. She was about to say something when Jeffrey said,

“Whoa, is that who I think it is?” He reached into his coat pocket and took out his glasses.

Lydia looked down at the page and saw what he had seen. Just then, Charley began to cry.

You have no right to take these people into custody,” said Jude Templar on the walkway. He’d jumped out of his Jag when he saw the van approaching and the members of The New Day began filing out of the building. He approached the van’s back door as Matt and a couple of the uniformed officers led The New Day members out into the cold. Everyone was getting tired, the sun starting to make its debut over the horizon. Even Templar was starting to look a little wiped out, a little frayed.

Their search of The New Day buildings had yielded nothing immediate. But they’d spent the last couple of hours interviewing each of the few members they’d found on the premises. But talking to one of them was like talking to a radio. Their programming was not interactive. Finally, in frustration, Matt had called in for a van and told the members that they were going to the Fiftieth Precinct for further interviews. No one objected.

“I’m not taking them into custody,” said Matt calmly. “I’m taking them in for questioning. There’s a big difference.”

At this point, Templar threw up his hands and walked toward his Jag.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Detective,” he said over his shoulder. “And you’ll be seeing me again in a few hours with a court order to release these innocent people.”

“Okay,” said Mount with a friendly wave. “See you then.”

Jesamyn had this low-level anxiety over the way Mount was antagonizing Templar. It was her opinion that when it came to snakes like Templar, it was always better to stay out of striking distance. Matt was poking him with a short stick.

She watched as the six members of The New Day filed into the van with a weird calm. Not one of them ever asked what was happening to them or where they were going. The sight of them made Jesamyn shudder; their vacancy and docility unsettled her.

At the unfamiliar Fiftieth Precinct, Jesamyn found some terrible coffee in the break room and then asked around for a computer. She wound up being escorted to the desk of one of the homicide detectives who would not be in for another few hours. Someone who knew him well, a young black detective in his twenties with broad shoulders and a shy smile, logged her onto the machine using Detective Winslow’s password. As he did this, she stared at a picture sitting on the desk. It was one of those Sears family portraits featuring a big grizzly of a man Jesamyn assumed was Detective Charles Winslow, his petite and lovely red-headed wife and teenage twin daughters. The girls wore coordinating floral dresses, their hair swept up in matching French twists. Mrs. Detective wore a plain cream silk blouse open at the neck to reveal a strand of pearls. They all smiled brightly. They looked so normal to Jesamyn, so solid. She found herself envying them, wishing she and Dylan could have given normal and solid to Benjamin.

Oh, snap out of it, she was thinking to herself as she thanked the detective. Cute. Too young. She turned her attention to the computer and found the FBI’s Missing Persons website. She didn’t have any real names, so she’d have to sift through pictures and hope for a stroke of luck until Matt was able to get some real names to go on. If he was able to.

She scrolled through picture after picture of missing young men and women, sipping on the bitter, tepid coffee. A young Korean girl who’d left a Halloween party on her Pennsylvania college campus and was never seen again, a young man who’d gone to Argentina as an exchange student who was last seen walking the streets of Bariloche in Rio Negro, a young woman last seen jogging in her parents’ Texas subdivision at 11:30 in the morning while home on Christmas vacation. The list went on, tiny thumbnail pictures of smiling faces that she clicked on to learn the details of each disappearance.

Jesamyn was getting that sick, hollow feeling she got when she searched this database. Where were these people, so many of them children and teenagers, so many of them young women? She thought of what would happen to her world if she went to pick up Benji one day and he wasn’t there, the teacher saying, “Oh, his dad/uncle/cousin, picked him up.” Or if she let him go to the store for her the way he always begged her to, and he never came home. She’d created a thousand scenarios like this, lived them a million times in her heart. She imagined seeing his face on a computer screen like this. Her throat was dry just at the thought of it. It was this job that made her overprotective of her son. Because she knew the worst could happen, saw it every day, no matter what the statistics said.