Stephen White - Missing Persons

“There’s something else to wonder about, too,” he said.

“What?”

“Say the Camaro guy knew about the tunnel. What’s his part in all this? You’re afraid he’s a victim. Not me. I’m seeing his name on our list of suspects. Everything’s in play again, Alan. Everything from Christmas Day on.” He opened his eyes wide in amazement. “And I’m right in the f-ing middle of it.”

It was at that moment that I stopped waiting for Sam to thank me for my help in discovering the tunnel. It was apparent he wasn’t too happy about being right in the f-ing middle of whatever the tunnel represented.

“Sam, Mallory could be alone somewhere. If you guys have been wrong all along-if she didn’t run, if she was abducted by Doyle… well, Doyle’s dead. She could be locked in some crappy cabin up in the mountains all by herself. She may not have food or water. It’s freezing outside. She may need help.”

“I know all that.”

“Did you guys find out where Doyle’s been living since he moved out of here?”

Sam just shook his head. “We have a cell number, that’s all. He was pretty intent on keeping his profile low.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We don’t know.”

“You don’t know or you won’t tell me?”

“We don’t know,” Sam admitted.

“Did you find his car?”

“Truck, but no.”

Finally, he opened the front door and allowed me to walk out in front of him. “Go home. We can do this,” he said.

I thought he was trying to convince himself, but I kept that thought to myself.

I took advantage of the cover provided by the cluster of crime-scene techs still huddled outside the front door of Doyle’s house and immediately cut across the neighbor’s front lawn toward my car. I was hoping that Bill Miller hadn’t spotted me either arriving or leaving, but I didn’t turn around to check for his silhouette at the window.

The night had turned cold, bitter cold, so cold that the snow on the ground squeaked beneath my feet with each step. I raised the collar on my jacket and stuffed my hands as deeply into my pockets as I could. A breeze was blowing down from the north and I lowered my face to retard the harsh chill of the Canadian air. Each fresh gust cut at my skin like a shard of glass.

“I thought that was you over there.”

Someone was leaning against the hood of my Audi wagon, bundled in a ski parka, a wool cap pulled all the way down past the ears. It took me a moment to process the available data-first, that the person was a man, and second, that the man was probably Bill Miller.

“Good evening,” I said. I thought I’d managed a pretty fair attempt at disguising my fluster.

“We need to talk,” he said.

Politely, I said, “Well, we have a time set up, I think. I don’t have my calendar with me.” I didn’t really expect my parry to work, but mounting it seemed like a necessity.

It didn’t work.

“No, now. You’re back in my neighborhood. And you’re here with a whole shitload of police. That means we talk tonight. Is that too much to ask?”

Shitload? That wasn’t a Bill Miller word.

I was starting to shiver from the cold. I was dressed to travel short distances between warm houses and cars with seat heaters. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough to linger on a Boulder sidewalk in January in the face of a north wind.

“It’s not appropriate for me to see you here, Bill. This isn’t the place for a professional meeting.”

“You want to come over to my house?”

The tone of the question was appropriately sarcastic. When I didn’t reply, he added, “Or I could follow you over to your office. That would be fine with me, too.”

My fingers clumsy, I fumbled for the tiny button on the key that would unlock the doors on the Audi. “Let’s get out of the cold. At least tell me what’s on your mind.”

Bill’s ski parka was noisy. The nylon or Gore-Tex or whatever the sleek fabric was rustled and crackled as he settled into the front seat of my car. I waited patiently for the crinkling to diminish, and I used the time to put the key in the ignition, start the engine, and flick on the seat heaters. Truth be told, the seat heaters were half the reason I’d bought the Audi. I never knew it before I tried seat heaters for the first time, but it turned out that if my butt was warm, I was warm.

What an epiphany.

I tried to guess what was coming next from Bill Miller. On that front, I was drawing a blank.

Bill pulled his cap back so that it sat high on the crown of his head like a kid’s beanie. He stared at me. In another circumstance I would have found the portrait humorous, and might have laughed. Not that day, though. Not those circumstances.

“Yes?” I said.

Bill turned his whole body on the seat, locking his eyes on mine. His parka erupted in fresh crackles and I concluded that the fabric wasn’t Gore-Tex. It would be quieter. He said, “In Las Vegas? Where Rachel is? There’s this guy named Canada.”

Holy moly, I thought. Holy moly.

I had no way knowing it, of course, and wouldn’t learn about it until much later when he told me the story, but at that moment Raoul was in circumstances similar to my own.

Similar, not identical.

The weather, he told me, was warm in Las Vegas, the air in Nevada’s southern desert hovering in the low seventies. Needless to say, no one was wearing a ski parka or a wool cap. And no one in his right mind was flicking on an electric seat heater.

But, like me, Raoul was thinking about Canada.

The man sitting in the driver’s seat of the car in which Raoul was a passenger was wearing a cap, but Raoul wasn’t totally certain what the cap was made of. Not wool. The stuff seemed to be part of the stretchy family of fabrics ideally suited to follow the curves dictated by women’s swimwear. The cap hugged the contours of the man’s shaved skull and was a dark enough charcoal to be mistaken for black. His shirt wasn’t Gore-Tex; it was a sleeveless, well-ventilated version of the kind of shell that boogie boarders use to retard board rash. Raoul thought the random vertical ventilation slits in the garment had been fashioned with a razor blade. All the man had on his feet were fluorescent orange flip-flops with rubber soles that had been worn almost all the way through at the heels.

“You carrying?” he asked Raoul. “I’m gonna be checking later. Tell me now be better.”

Raoul said, “No, nothing.”

“Cell phone?”

“The cabbie who dropped me off took it. I’d love to have it back.”

“I’ll look into it,” he said. They pulled to a stop at a red light. “U.P. doesn’t fuck around. You have to know that. Just go back home wherever that is, you don’t know that. Don’t even.”

The car was an old VW bug, similar to the first car Raoul purchased in America decades earlier after ignoring the expiration of his student visa. From dashboard clues Raoul guessed that it was a late ’60s vintage, one of the models that came just before what Raoul considered to be the particularly ill-advised bumper design change in ’68. The Beetle still had the original beige paint, and the original radio. From the scratchy sound of the hip-hop that was playing, the car had its original speaker, too.

Raoul liked the car. It brought back memories of uncomplicated times.

The man’s ethnic background and racial makeup were a puzzle, even to Raoul, who prided himself on his ability to distinguish a Montenegran from a Serb or an Egyptian from an Iraqi across a crowded café. The driver definitely had some Asian blood-Raoul was guessing Tibet-and some African American blood as well, but something else was mixed into his DNA cocktail, too, something Raoul couldn’t quite put his finger on.