Stephen White - Missing Persons

I stuffed my hands into my pockets to try to ward off the January cold and followed Sam down the front walk until he moved onto a path that intersected with it and led around to the back of the house. After a few more steps, I could see the gable of a single-car garage roof toward the rear property line.

“You’re not going to introduce yourself to whoever lives here?” I asked innocently.

“Place is empty. Owner moved away a couple of months ago. Guy’s asking way too much is what I hear. You know, given the market and interest rates and all. But who the hell knows what’s up with Boulder real estate these days? Did I tell you some agent’s been dropping by begging me to sell my place? Says he already has a buyer and can get me a fortune for it. I think he’s a developer and wants to scrape my shack and put up a spec. I could take the money but I’d have to move halfway to Wyoming to find someplace new to live. What’s the point of that? It would mean commuting for me, and new schools for Simon.”

A casual observer might have mistaken Sam’s ramblings for whining, or for the opening gambit in a friendly discussion of Boulder County property values and the moral and economic consequences of chasing the appreciated dollar. I knew better. Sam’s moves were misdirection. From experience, I knew that he used misdirection the same way magicians used it.

So what was it that I was not supposed to notice?

Sam has been in Doyle’s yard before.

I was sure of it. Despite the darkness he was leading me across the property as though he’d sat in on the design meetings with the landscape architect. Once we made it to the backyard, he followed a flagstone path over a little wooden bridge that spanned a curving faux streambed. When the path split, Sam chose the fork that ran toward the rear of the lot.

Only the top half of the garage was visible behind a stunning series of man-made granite-for want of a better word-cliffs. At the bottom of the natural-looking walls was a good-sized, but drained, pond that would flow into the streambed we’d crossed earlier. I had no trouble imagining the waterfall that would cascade down those rocks into that pool come spring.

“This way,” Sam said. He stopped at a garage window and shined the beam of a flashlight through the glass. The garage was clearly empty.

No cars. No cherry Camaro.

“There you go,” Sam said. “Your guy took his car and went somewhere. Free country. Mystery solved. Nothing that requires the services of Boulder’s finest.”

“You?”

“Me. This is the right house?” Sam asked. He was holding the flashlight between us down near his waist, aiming the beam straight up toward the night sky. With the up light his forest of nose hairs was illuminated with way too much clarity for my taste. His face and head took on eerie contours inside the fog of his steamy breath.

I felt like saying something in reply to his question but couldn’t figure out anything that confidentiality permitted me to say.

He smiled, recognizing my conundrum. “Thought so.”

Over his shoulder I saw movement in the Millers’ home. A silhouette in the upstairs window. I tried to watch it without watching it. I said, “I’m worried about Diane.”

“What?”

I had his attention. I repeated my concern.

“Your partner? That Diane?”

“She went to Las Vegas a couple of days ago. I was talking with her on the phone last night from one of the casinos and the call suddenly went dead. She’s disappeared. Her husband flew out there a couple of hours later and he can’t find a trace of her. The Vegas cops aren’t interested.”

Sam moved the flashlight beam away from our faces. A second glance next door revealed the silhouette moving from the Millers’ window. In an instant, it was gone.

“Your friend Diane went to Las Vegas?”

Sam knew precisely what I had told him by telling him that fact. With Sam I rarely had to say things twice. “To talk to someone,” I said, as a way of underlining my point, just in case.

He nodded, wetting his lower lip with his tongue. “You’re looking at something behind me. Don’t do it again. Look at me. Eye contact. Good, good. What is it?”

“Somebody watching us in an upstairs window.”

“Still there?”

I shook my head.

“Dad?”

“Couldn’t say. Just a silhouette.”

“Which window?”

“Closest to the street.”

He nodded and ran his fingers through his hair before he stuffed his free hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “Diane went to Las Vegas to talk with someone and then yesterday she vanished? Now you have a client you’re worried about that you think may have just vanished, too? You and I are standing in the backyard of a house on Twelfth Street where said client garages his old car. Right next door a young girl happened to disappear on Christmas Day. I got it all right, so far?”

“You’re doing pretty well.” The car part is a little off, I was thinking. The Camaro may be old, but it’s cherry.

“Great, glad to hear it. Let me add a couple of things to the list, things I’ve already been a little concerned about. You know something about Mallory Miller’s mother that in my book you don’t have any reason to know. You probably even know she lives in Vegas. You’re way too curious about Reese’s aggressive tendencies for my taste. And it was not too long ago that you kind of predicted that you and I were going to knock heads about this house next door to the Millers.”

“That’s three things, Sam, at least.”

“Do me a favor, ignore the arithmetic.”

“I can’t confirm some of what you’re saying. But I can’t argue with what you’re saying, either.”

“From you that’s a ringing endorsement.”

I shrugged.

With gorgeous understatement, Sam said, “Well, too many missing pieces. It all sounds too goofy for words to me.” He began walking. “Come on. I want to hear more about Diane and what’s going on with her in Las Vegas.”

He led me back out through the dormant water features of Doyle’s yard. Just before we got to Sam’s car at the curb I said, employing a voice that was much more measured than I was feeling at that moment, “Diane and I were both there the day that Hannah Grant died.”

Without even a glance in my direction, he said, “I know that. Don’t you think I fucking know that?”

My car was across downtown outside the house where Bob rented rooms from the Donalds. After pressing me for some more details about Diane’s disappearance in Las Vegas, Sam headed toward Pine Street to drop me off.

“So what do you know about the owner of the house with the water park?” I asked.

He killed the volume on the radio, squelching some country lament that I didn’t really want to hear. While I waited-rating the odds at three out of ten that he’d actually answer my question about Doyle-I was thinking, and not for the first time, that most of Sam’s favorite country artists could use a few sessions of psychotherapy.

“Owner’s been out of the house for a while; it’s vacant now, was vacant over Christmas, too, if that’s what you’re wondering. And yes, we’ve talked to him-the owner-got in touch with him right away through the real estate lady who’s listing the house.”

Sam paused poignantly. Okay, provocatively. I thought he was waiting to see if my sense of self-preservation was so impaired that I would choose that moment to remind him of something he had once confessed to me about the last time-the Christmas when the little blond beauty queen was murdered three blocks away. That time, Sam admitted one night over beers, eleven long months passed before any cop, any DA’s investigator, any FBI agent-anyone in law enforcement-got around to interviewing one of the dead girl’s family’s nearest neighbors.