Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

Back outside, I checked the window’s appearance. It would pass, unless someone was paying a lot more attention than it looked like they ever had.

I let myself back into the Lexus, got under the blankets, and closed my eyes.

It was at least another half-hour before I heard the driver’s door open.

Clancy drove to where he’d left his Nissan, but said to leave the Lexus where it was—he’d drive me back himself.

It was a quick run—we were going against the traffic. Besides, Clancy drove about 50 percent past the limit, returning pages on his cell phone, concentrating all over the place. He pulled into the drive for the hotel, cut the engine.

“What’d you get?” he asked.

“Pair of Mercedes, just like you said. I couldn’t make out the years—I haven’t been able to do that since the sixties—but they looked pretty new.”

“Colors?” he asked, consulting his notebook.

“Black for the sedan, yellow for the little roadster.”

“Checks out,” he said. “Sedan purchased March of ’98; SLK, purchased May, same year. What did you get for mileage?”

“The sedan has thirty-five hundred and change, the roadster less than three.”

“Sure. Haven’t been driven for years.”

“The keys were in the ignition.”

“Yeah. Marushka probably goes out there, turns them over every once in a while, keeps them from going stale.”

Marushka, huh? I thought to myself. I’m no linguist, but I know the “ka” at the end of a Russian name means “little one.” I thought about the girl at the front desk of the hotel. Recalled something else Wolfe had told me about Clancy. He was divorced. And a major cock-hound. But all I said was, “I found something else, too.”

He looked a question at me. I unpeeled the label carefully, handed it over.

“Vancouver. I was there once for a tournament. It’s … Wait a minute, this isn’t Vancouver in Canada, it’s in Washington State.”

“Yeah.”

“And she had a whole roll of these labels?”

“Uh-huh. Probably printed them up herself, on a home computer. Pretty handy things to have if you’re remailing everything that comes in. They probably send everything back to her, too. That way, there’s a local postmark on everything.”

“You put it all back the way you—?” He caught my expression, cut himself off in mid-sentence. “Can you hang around another couple of days?”

“I’m in no hurry,” I told him.

The bar was in a part of Chicago called Uptown. Clancy was at a table with two other guys, one built like a bull, with “COP!” written all over his face, the other a young blond guy with Slavic cheekbones and the flat expression of a working thug. They both spent about a minute memorizing my face, not making any secret about what they were doing.

“See you later,” the big one said, as he got up to leave. He might have been talking to anyone at the table.

The younger one got up, too. He didn’t say a word.

“Friends of yours?” I asked Clancy.

“Good friends.”

“They both on the job?”

“Mike is. Zeffa was,” he said, explaining the pistol I’d seen in her purse. “Zak isn’t.”

“The kid? What’s he, between jobs?”

“He’s a writer,” Clancy said, pride strong in his voice. “In fact, both of them are.”

“They’re here gathering local color?”

“No,” cutting it off.

“It’s your car,” I told him. “And you’re driving.”

“Here’s what I got,” Clancy said, getting down to it. “The little boy’s mother reported him missing on June 29, 1990. His DOB’s April 4, 1986, so he’d just turned four. No signs of a ransom kidnap—and no note ever turned up. The parents were together, so it wasn’t one of those custody grabs. Whoever took him came right into the back of the house. Like with Polly Klaas, only nobody actually saw this one go down.”

“Or found a body.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Or the dirtbag who did it, either. None of the kid’s possessions were missing. You know how it works after that: they checked the kid’s friends, used the search-and-rescue dogs working off his scent, combed the maximum area a kid his age could travel by himself … everything. Finally, he went from missing to missing-and-presumed.”

“Presumed dead?”

“Not necessarily. But with no ransom note, no contact from anyone, and no body, we figured it for a sex-snatch. And that maybe the kid was still alive. Some of them turn up, even a lot of years later, like the Stayner kid out in California. If we haven’t found a body, the BOLOs stay out there for every confirmed abduction, no-clues disappearance. All of them. Doesn’t matter if they’d be adults by the time we find them, people’re still looking. We’re looking for this boy, too.”

I took a sip of my ginger ale, thinking Wolfe was right—this was a personal thing with Clancy. “When does school let out around here?” I asked him.

He gave me a sharp look. “End of May,” he said.

I gave him a neutral look back.

“Yeah,” he said, quietly. “And it was broad daylight, that time of year.” He put two fingers to his forehead. “It wasn’t my case.”

“I know. When did the Gee come in?”

“Maybe a week later. The record’s not clear.”

“I saw that story in the newspaper.…”

“That was a while afterwards. They kept it quiet, didn’t want to spook the kidnappers, in case it was about money.”

“Maybe it wasn’t about money or sex,” I probed.

“What, then?”

“They, the parents, they knew how to find the … guy who got shot in New York. If they were players in the Russian mob, maybe washing money, the snatch could have been a message.”

“It’s possible, I suppose. But nothing like that came up when they were being investigated. Look, that kind of case, you have to eliminate all the possibilities. You know how many kids are killed every year by their parents, or the boyfriend of the mother, or …? Dumped in some vacant lot, reported missing. And the perps go on TV crying crocodile tears and ask everyone to help them search for their precious baby. Something like this, you have to check the parents, see if maybe they weren’t the perps.”

“Like they did in Boulder? With JonBenét Ramsey?”

“This isn’t Boulder,” Clancy said, his voice as stony as his eyes.

“Sorry. The parents, they came up clean?”

“They did. And it wasn’t because the job was sluffed. Everybody got talked to. Teachers, their pediatrician, their housekeeper, neighbors; you name it. Not one person had the slightest suspicion of the parents. No history of child abuse. Not even a hint of booze, or drugs. Or domestic violence. The parents themselves were asked about enemies, and they said they hardly even knew anybody over here.”

“What about an old grudge? From the old country?”

“It’s possible,” he said again, the “anything’s possible” unspoken, but clear on his face.

“The reason I ask … I’m guessing that nobody on your side could have known about any connection to the Russian mob back then. No way they could have.”

“You’re right. If there was a connection back then, it didn’t show up anywhere in the investigation.”

“Okay.”

“I got a friend in the Bureau,” he said, dropping his voice. “We’ve got photos of the kid from just before he disappeared. There’s a computer program, factors in everything known about the subject, right down to his genetic makeup. Anyway, this program ‘ages’ the subject. He’d be, what, fourteen or so now? The kid you saw when the thing went down—would you recognize him?”