Vanished

by Kate Watterson

  Ellie said firmly, “Nicole, I am sure no one is glad anyone is dead. But you are talking to me and Detective Santiago, not your parents. What happened?”

  “Okay.” Her hands twisted in her gown. “I had made a date with David to come to the house during the day because my parents won’t let me see him. He was between classes, so I agreed to leave school sick. He pulled in, I answered the door because I saw his car, and when he stepped inside, someone shoved him from behind. The man hit him with something—I didn’t see it—and he hit the wall and there was suddenly a streak of blood on the paint. I was screaming, I think. I don’t remember.

  “They started to fight and I kept thinking I should do something, but it happened so fast. David fell to the floor, and the man stabbed him. Then he made me help wrap him in the shower curtain from my bathroom and carry him out to David’s car, and he forced me to drive, holding that awful bloody knife against my stomach. When David never made a sound from the backseat, I knew he was dead.”

  Santiago moved to the corner of the room to call in the name of the owner of the car. A license plate would be very helpful because all that Nicole said before she was loaded into the ambulance was the car was white and a sedan.

  That sounded like a horrific experience for anyone. Ellie kept her tone firm but gentle. “You are doing great. What happened then?”

  Nicole took in a deep breath. “We drove to this parking lot behind some old church. And he tied me up and went to sleep. I managed to wiggle my arm free and call Jeremy, but the man woke up. Then he sat there and just kind of mumbled to himself for a half an hour until we heard sirens. Then he made me drive to the place where you found me, made me get out, took the keys, and drove away.”

  “Isn’t this enough?” Mrs. Remington asked, her voice thin and shaken. “She has been through a terrible ordeal.”

  “Almost enough.” Santiago finally participated, but he’d wanted to once or twice, Ellie could feel the vibe. “Can you describe him for us again, the man who took you?”

  Nicole looked uncertain. “I tried not to look at him. Like I said, he had a beard and was wearing a gray cap and a long coat. He was … scruffy-looking.”

  Ellie rose. “We’ll probably ask her to meet with a sketch artist tomorrow, if it is possible. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but is always worth a try. Do you happen to know the names of David’s parents?”

  “No.” The word was faint. Nicole looked at the floor. “We weren’t that serious or anything. I think they’re divorced and his dad moved away. His mother remarried. He told me that much.”

  They weren’t really getting anywhere, probably because she was exhausted. She looked it too, not at all like the smiling girl in the pictures in her room. Ellie glanced at Santiago and he met her eyes in unspoken agreement. Ellie told the Remingtons, “We’ll have to interview her again. It is surprising what a witness will remember later, when the shock has worn off. We’ll set up a time.”

  Mr. Remington nodded. Nicole wasn’t the only exhausted one.

  The long hallway was quiet except for a lone nurse with a cart of meds and a janitor mopping the floor. Their footsteps echoed as they walked along toward the elevators. Finally Santiago remarked, “This has been one hell of a fucked up day. So I guess this is still our case. Score one on finding Nicole.”

  “Yes.” Ellie pushed a button for the ground floor. She was still processing, sorting out the events in sequence, and coming up with some unanswered questions. “I hope the bulletin Metzger ordered will help us find the car.”

  “And her abductor and David’s body,” her partner added as the elevator doors opened and they stepped inside. “Maybe with some physical evidence we can find out why she’s lying to us.”

  Her thoughts exactly.

  Chapter Five

  For breakfast, Jason ate a bowl of cereal standing over the kitchen sink, decided that maybe Ellie was right about his eating habits and half an orange wouldn’t kill him, and drank his coffee watching SportsCenter. He was about halfway through when his phone rang. “What?”

  “For the hundredth time, you need to work on your phone skills. Maybe you could take a class or something.” Ellie went on. “A patrol officer found the car about a half an hour ago. He was giving someone a ticket and had them pulled over on a side street by a grocery store that hadn’t opened yet, and he noticed a white car parked by the Dumpster. I guess he didn’t think anything about it at first, but then decided to walk over and check it out. Sure enough, the license was a hit.”

  “Is there a body in the backseat?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  Good thing he’d already showered, mostly to wake up more than anything. “Give me a couple of minutes to brush my teeth and get dressed. If you give me your new address, I’ll pick you up.”

  There was a slight hesitation before she told him, and he had to wonder if she didn’t want him to ask why she’d moved out of Grantham’s house. He was intensely curious—that went without saying—if they had officially called it quits, but he wasn’t going to ask, so she didn’t need to worry.

  She hadn’t asked him yet what he was going to do about the information she’d given him about his mother, so fair was fair.

  Part of the reason he’d found it so difficult to wake up had nothing to do with the case except in an oblique way. He’d been so wound up he couldn’t sleep, and for some reason he still couldn’t explain, decided to read through more of that damned file.

  Lawrence Degas had done time for drug trafficking, but over thirty years ago the penalties hadn’t been quite so stiff or else pressure put in the right places was applied by people he knew with money or influence—it was implied in a newspaper article—so his prison sentence was only a few years. He’d just gotten out a month before Jason’s mother left without a backward look.

  It was a shock to learn he had two siblings. The power of the Internet was remarkable, and Ellie had pulled up pictures of both of them on social media and put them in the file, and considering the resemblance, he was starting think these weren’t a half-brother and half-sister, but they all shared the same parents.

  Yes, he was a detective, but he had to admit it left him at a loss. Why the hell, he’d wondered later, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, would a woman leave a child with a man who obviously knew he wasn’t his son. It made more sense now how his father had treated him, like an annoyance he barely tolerated, but surely his mother had known that would be the situation.

  Then again, he didn’t really remember her very well, so perhaps she just didn’t want the burden of a child. If that was true, why did she have two more?

  He finally fell asleep to restless dreams and woke tangled in the sheets, definitely bleary-eyed.

  The case was a welcome distraction in that way.

  Ellie’s apartment building was definitely nicer than his, a sleek silhouette with lots of glass, but not too fancy, because he knew exactly how much her salary was and she was definitely trading down from Grantham’s expensive address. She was waiting in the lobby and came out swiftly, got in the car, and said one word. “Hurry.”

  He took her at her word.

  The supermarket was off a main street, but bordered by a residential area, and at the moment, like the church last night, crawling with law enforcement. A crime-scene technician greeted them when they walked up. He had a clipboard and a distracted expression. “Detectives. We are still processing, but if you want to look at the body, go ahead. The ME is on her way, but until she takes a look and removes it, we can’t really get started, so we are concentrating on the area of the parking lot, and the Dumpster, always my favorite.” His smile was thin. “Since this isn’t the actual crime scene, the car will be our main focus when we get the go-ahead. It is more your province, but I’d guess your killer parked the car here and just walked away. It wasn’t even locked.”

  Both Santiago and Ellie went to the car, saw the body had been wrapped in a shower curtain just as
Nicole said. To get photos, the plastic had been opened.

  David Lambrusco hadn’t just been stabbed a time or two. Pretty gruesome.

  “Ouch.” Santiago leaned a gloved hand on the headrest of the passenger seat as he peered at the body and touched nothing else. “Someone meant business.”

  “When Nicole said stabbed, I thought she meant once.”

  “I was kind of under that impression myself.” He straightened. “Let’s go ask around and see if anyone saw anything. I’d love to look for ID, but don’t want to disturb the body until the ME is done.”

  Several hours later, they had nothing more to go on except that the victim had been carrying a wallet with David Lambrusco’s driver’s license, student ID, and credit cards. It had been dark when they’d picked up Nicole, and the lights in the lot were in the front of the store, not in the back, except for a half-lit sign that said RECEIVING DOCK, so it was not surprising no one saw the driver park the vehicle and leave.

  They drove to the station in silence. To get a positive ID, they had to call on his parents to tell them the news and ask them to come in and identify the body. Shit—Jason hated that part of the job.

  Doing that didn’t prove to be very easy. Sitting at his desk, he spent hours on the phone. The address on the victim’s registration was no longer his residence, since he’d moved. The insurance card was more helpful, because he could call the company and get the new billing address. A brief conversation with Dr. Hammet, the chief medical examiner, yielded that the autopsy was scheduled for that afternoon but only because it was a murder investigation.

  “I’ve got several customers in front of him,” she’d said, in her usual brisk tone. “I am sorry to say it has been a busy week in our fair city for unexplained deaths. Two elderly sisters who shared a house in Cedarburg were found dead in their beds with no sign of foul play. Each having a heart attack the same night seems unlikely. The family is pestering my secretary half to death, no pun intended. Then there is that school bus driver who went off the road. Luckily he was the only one killed. Every parent with a child on that bus wants to know if he was intoxicated. No alcohol in his blood. I’m going to have to figure that one out as well. Get the picture? The school district is putting pressure on for that one.”

  Jason tapped a pen on his desk. “I’ll take a swift first impression then, for our case.”

  “Detective, you just want to avoid a trip to the morgue. I know how much you love it down here.”

  It was true, the place made him squeamish, but he had other reasons. “It certainly isn’t about manner of death; he was obviously murdered. Cause of death seems pretty clear too, but I want to hear from you how you think it went down.”

  “That is what they pay me to do. Ask Detective MacIntosh, as she has already called me.”

  He hung up and took that advice.

  Ellie was at her desk at her computer—she was a lot better about keeping up with reports than he was—and he took a moment to admire her profile, until she glanced up and caught him just standing there.

  Her brows lifted a fraction. “You got something?”

  “Lambrusco’s address, but according to the landlord he has a roommate, so I’m waiting on the warrant. I also have his class schedule at the university; he was a TA for a lower-level class, so we might be able to get something from the professor there. I tried to call the professor’s office number, but he was in class. I left a message. So far no-go on the parents. How about you? What did Hammet tell you?”

  “Nicole was telling us the truth, in doctor’s estimation, from the examination at the scene. Blunt trauma to the head and multiple stab wounds.”

  As usual, it was controlled commotion, with ringing phones and officers going by, and occasionally laughing from other officers—you had to deal with it in some way—and always a certain measure of urgency in the air. Jason pulled up a chair and sat down, leaning his elbows on her desk. “While we wait for the warrant, let’s go over what we have. I’ll start. I think what Nicole told us is basically how it happened, but I’d like to know how she still had her phone. If I abducted someone, that would be the first thing I’d take.”

  Ellie somberly regarded her partner. As usual, he barely skimmed by on the dress code in black jeans, a blue shirt, and a knit tie that was also black; Metzger had given up long ago on trying to make him wear a suit coat, so instead he usually wore a leather jacket or no coat at all. Still, he had the air of a cop, a street-smart one at that, like he might be a viable force in a fistfight.

  Ellie was fairly sure he would be. A positive in her book, because they occasionally ran into some not-so-nice people.

  “Excellent question. Here’s another one.” Ellie had thought about it long and hard. “She was wearing her coat when we picked her up and there was no blood on it. Blood all over her clothes, but none on her coat? Did the kindly intruder who murdered her boyfriend and kidnapped her suggest she bring along a coat so she wouldn’t catch a chill?”

  “I noticed that too.” His blue eyes were troubled. “I’m also wondering why, if he was following her, he waited until a young man arrived who could possibly be a physical match before he made his move. It is possible, of course, that she went into the house too quickly, or that he arrived about the same time as Lambrusco, but logic dictates he was waiting.”

  “The laptop wasn’t in the car and she didn’t have it. The victim’s phone wasn’t on him either,” Ellie mused out loud. “Why? Lambrusco was dead. Why toss it? It makes more sense to me to not bother with it because then there is a trail of evidence.”

  “Hard to tell what these nut jobs are thinking. I don’t even want to know. But her parents said they were continuously calling Nicole, so her abductor had to know she had hers.”

  “Unless she’d turned it off for her little visit with David Lambrusco. Supposedly she was sick, so she could justify that to her parents and say she wanted to sleep.”

  “I somehow don’t think sleeping was their intention, though it might have involved a bed, but maybe.”

  It was possible there was a logical explanation for all of the red flags.

  They were interrupted by Metzger’s secretary, who walked up and dropped an envelope on Ellie’s desk. “Here you go. There’s your warrant. Have fun, Detectives.”

  Santiago rose to his feet with alacrity. “Always do. Thanks.”

  The day had cleared, and all traces of snow were gone as they walked across the parking lot. Horsetail wisps of clouds floated above, and though it was hardly spring quite yet, the grip of winter was losing strength, uncurling chill fingers. Up north there would still be feet of snow on the ground. Ellie didn’t miss that so much, but the clean smell of pine, evocative of woods and water … that she did miss.

  “This is hell and gone better than snow,” Santiago said as he politely opened her door, which seemed to be a habit of his, and had surprised her from the first. The breeze ruffled his hair. “Still cold, but better.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. In a different way, but yes.” She got in and he went around, pressing a button on his keychain to start the truck.

  “Different way?” he asked as they pulled out of the lot—a little too fast maybe, but while the sense of urgency from yesterday was gone, the unanswered questions were not.

  “Never mind. I miss the frozen north now and then.” She laughed, but it held a rueful note.

  “Lumberjacks and wolves and all?” He made a turn and caught a side street which was not what her phone GPS said to do at all, but this was his city and he knew it well, so she didn’t comment.

  “Yeah, well, I am not positive either of those are what make me nostalgic.” She changed the subject back to the one at hand. “I’m hoping the roommate is at home.”

  “We’ll need to talk to him, one way or the other.” He turned on yet again another street that wasn’t part of the directions on her phone, and she gave up. “Maybe he can give us a more accurate impression of Lambrusco’s relationship with Ni
cole.”

  “You know, if the killer had an obsession with her, maybe he did wait for David Lambrusco out of jealousy, and maybe he did let her get her coat and keep her cell.”

  Santiago shot her a quick glance and made a sound of derision. “The abduction was what? A field trip? If it is the same guy who ran her off the road, he wasn’t being very solicitous then, was he? I don’t get why he let her go either. No sexual assault, and a catch and release policy? He took her for a reason—nothing good probably—but then he lets go a witness that can nail him for murder in court?”

  “He’d be a whole lot more conspicuous dragging her along,” Ellie pointed out. “The way he handled it was to swiftly ditch the car with the body. By himself he’s just a guy who probably hailed a cab or caught the bus. With Nicole, he’s a scruffy-looking guy with a very pretty young girl wearing bloody clothes. People would be much more likely to remember the couple.”

  “Yeah.” He braked for a light and ran his fingers through his hair in a habitual way that meant he was thinking.

  The light turned green, the truck rolled forward until Santiago slammed on his brakes so abruptly Ellie’s seat belt locked. A small red coupe flashed in front of them, running the light, the woman driving definitely on her cell phone.

  “Son of a bitch.” Santiago took a left instead of going straight, gunning the engine, speeding until he got behind the little red car, and told Ellie, “Get her fucking license plate and call it in. We’re on Sherman and I’ll catch the next street here in a second. Describe the car. Tell dispatch when they pull her over that the cell phone guy from TV almost T-boned her when she ran the light, and he’s very pissed off she ignored his message.”

  Chapter Six

  David Lambrusco lived in what used to be a single-family residence on a tree-lined street in an older, but very nice part of the city.

  Or he had lived there anyway.

  It had a wide wraparound porch and Victorian architecture and, from the row of mailboxes, had been divided into four apartments. His was on the ground floor on the right-hand side, and it had a tall door that was obviously original. Jason knocked with purpose, and then put his hand back in the pocket of his coat because that breeze really held a chill edge.