Girl Missing

by Tess Gerritsen

  “And that was the last time she was seen?”

  “No. I took her out to lunch. To try to patch things up. Instead we had an argument. Naturally.”

  “Let me guess,” said Kat. “You took her to L’Etoile, on Hilton Avenue.”

  He nodded. “Maeve showed up in black leather and green hair. She insulted the maître d’. Lit up a joint in the nonsmoking section. And proceeded to tell me I had sick values. I told her she was sick, period. I also told her I was withdrawing all financial support. That if she shaped up, behaved like a responsible human being, she was welcome to come back to the house. I’d just changed my phone number—I was getting crank calls—so I wrote my new number in a matchbook and gave it to her. Just in case she wanted to get in touch with me. She never did.”

  “And the matchbook?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe she passed it around to a friend, and somehow Jane Doe got it. I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t seen her since the restaurant?”

  “No.”

  She paused. “Where does Lou Sykes come in?”

  “A private detective I hired told me Maeve was hanging around South Lexington. That’s Sergeant Sykes’s beat. I simply asked him to keep an eye out for her. As a favor to me. He thought he spotted her once, but that was it.”

  It sounded believable enough, Kat thought, studying his pose, the elegant cut of his tuxedo. So why do I get the feeling he’s still hiding something?

  His gaze was focused elsewhere, as though he was afraid to let her see his eyes.

  “What you’re telling me, Mr. Quantrell, isn’t exactly earth shattering. Lots of families have problems with their kids. Why were you afraid to tell me about her? Why hide it from me?”

  “It’s a rather … embarrassing state of affairs.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” He swung around to look at her, the challenge plain in his aristocratic face. She felt trapped by the spell of that gaze. What was it about this guy?

  She gave her head a shake, as though to clear it. “No,” she said. “It’s not enough. So what if you had told me the truth before? I’m just a public servant. You don’t get embarrassed in front of your servants, do you?”

  He gave her a tight smile. “You, Dr. Novak, I hardly consider a servant.”

  “Is there something else about Maeve you don’t want to tell me? Some minor detail you haven’t mentioned?”

  “Nothing of any relevance to your job.” He turned away, a sure sign that he wasn’t telling the whole truth. His gaze focused on one of the body drawers.

  “Then I’d say our business here is finished,” she said. “Go on home to your guests. If you hurry, you might be able to make it back in time for brandy.”

  “Who is this?” he asked sharply.

  “What?”

  “This drawer here. It says Jane Doe.”

  Kat took a closer look at the label: 372-3-27-B. “Another one. Dated seven days ago. Clark must have processed this one.”

  “Who’s Clark?”

  “The other assistant ME. He’s on vacation right now.”

  Adam took a breath. “May I …” He looked up mutely at Kat.

  She nodded. Without a word, she pulled open the drawer.

  Wisps of cold vapor swirled out. Kat felt her old reluctance to lift the shroud, to reveal the body. This Jane Doe she hadn’t laid eyes on. She steeled herself against the worst and slid off the shroud.

  The woman was beautiful. Seven days of stainless-steel imprisonment couldn’t dull the glow of her hair. It was a rich red, thick and tumbling about her shoulders. Her skin had the luster of white marble, and in life must have seemed flawless. Her eyes, revealed by partly opened, heavily lashed lids, were gray. Her torso was marred by a sutured Y-incision, the ugly aftermath of an autopsy.

  Kat looked across at Adam.

  He shook his head. “You can close the drawer,” he murmured. “It’s not her.”

  “I wonder who she is?” said Kat, sliding the drawer shut. “She looks like the kind of woman who’d be missed. Not our usual Jane Doe type.”

  “Would you know how she died?” The question was asked softly, but its significance at once struck Kat.

  “Let’s pull the file,” she said.

  They found it in Clark’s office. It was buried in a stack on his desk, waiting to be completed. On top were clipped a few loose pages, recent correspondence from the central identification lab.

  “Looks like she’s no longer a Jane Doe,” said Kat. “They found a fingerprint match. Her name’s Mandy Barnett. I guess Clark never got around to relabeling the drawer.”

  “Why does she have fingerprints on file?”

  Kat flipped to the next page. “Because she has a police record. Shoplifting. Prostitution. Public drunkenness.” Kat glanced up at Adam. “Guess she wasn’t as sweet as she looked.”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  Kat opened the folder and squinted at Clark’s notes. He must have been in a rush when he wrote them; it was a typical doctor’s scrawl, the i’s undotted, the t’s uncrossed. “ ‘Subject found March twenty-seventh at two thirty-five A.M. in public restroom at Gilly’s bar, off Flashner Avenue.’ ” Kat looked up. “That’s in Bellemeade. I live there.” She turned to the next page. “ ‘No injuries noted … tox screens pending. Police report empty bottle of Fiorinal pills found near body. Conclusion: cardiopulmonary arrest, most likely due to barbiturate overdose. Awaiting tox screen from state lab.’ ”

  “Is the report back yet?”

  Kat went to the courier box and riffled through the stack of pages. “I don’t see it here. It’s probably still pending.” She closed the file. “This case doesn’t really fit with the others. Bellemeade’s a different neighborhood, with a different class of drug users. Higher-priced.”

  “The others were all in South Lexington?”

  “Within blocks of each other. Jane Doe was smack in the Projects. So was Xenia Vargas. Nicos Biagi was a little farther out, on Richmond Street. Let’s see, that’d make it somewhere near the old railroad tracks. But it’s still the same neighborhood.”

  “You seem to know the area well.”

  “Too well.” She tossed Mandy Barnett’s file on Clark’s desk. “I grew up there.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “You?”

  “Me.”

  “How did you …” He paused, as though not certain how to phrase the question with any delicacy.

  “How did I happen to grow up there? Simple. That’s where my mom lived. Right up until she died.”

  “So you would know the people there.”

  “Some of them. But the neighborhood’s always changing. People who can get out, get out. It’s like this giant pond. Either you float up and crawl out or you sink deeper into the mud.”

  “And you floated.”

  She shrugged. “I got lucky.”

  He studied her with new appreciation, as though he was really seeing her for the first time. “In your case, Dr. Novak,” he said, “I think luck had nothing to do with it.”

  “Not like some of us,” she said, looking at his tuxedo and his immaculate shirt.

  He laughed. “Yes, some of us do seem to be rolling in it.”

  They rode back up in the elevator and walked out of the building. It was chilly outside. The wind blew an empty can down the street; they could trace its progress by the tinny echoes in the darkness.

  He had driven in his car, and she in hers. Now they paused beside their respective vehicles, as though reluctant to part.

  He turned to her. “What I was trying to say earlier—about your knowing people in South Lexington …” He paused. She waited, feeling strangely breathless. Eager. “I was trying to ask for your help,” he finished.

  “My help?”

  “I want to find Maeve.”

  So it’s my help he wants, she thought. Not me in particular. She wondered why that fact should leave her feeling so disappointed. She said, “Lou
Sykes is a good cop. If he can’t find her—”

  “That’s just it. He’s a cop. No one out there trusts cops. Certainly Maeve wouldn’t trust him. She’d think he was out to arrest her. Or reel her in for me.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  “I just want to know she’s alive and well.”

  “She’s an adult, Adam. She can make her own choices.”

  “What if her choices are insane?”

  “Then she lives with them.”

  “You don’t understand. I made a promise to her mother. I promised that Maeve would be taken care of. So far I’ve done a pretty deplorable job.” He sighed. “At the very least, I should look for her.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to be found?”

  “Then she should tell me that, face-to-face. But I have to find her first. And you’re the only one I know who’s familiar with South Lexington.”

  Kat laughed. “Yeah, I guess it’s not the sort of neighborhood your dinner guests would frequent.”

  “I would appreciate it. I really would. Just show me the place. Put me in touch with some of the people. I’d reimburse you for your time, of course. You only have to say how much—”

  “Wait a minute.” She moved closer to him, her chin tilted up in astonishment. “You were going to pay me?”

  “I mean, it’s only appropriate—”

  “Forget it. Forget it. I’m a doctor, Quantrell, okay? I’m not the butler. I’m not the cook. I’m a doctor, and I already get paid for what I do.”

  “So?”

  “Which means I don’t need a moonlighting job. When I do a favor for a friend—and I’m not necessarily putting you in the category—I do it as a friend. Gratis.”

  “You want to do it out of the kindness of your heart. You want me to feel grateful. And I do, I really do.” He paused, then added softly: “I also really need your help.”

  Kat wasn’t philosophically opposed to helping her fellow man. And a devoted dad in search of his daughter, well, that was an appeal she could hardly refuse. But this particular dad was no charity case.

  Still …

  She walked over to her car and flung open the door. “Get in, Quantrell.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re not taking your car, because a nice new Volvo’s an invitation to a chop job. So let’s go in mine.”

  “To South Lexington?”

  “You want an intro to the place, I know some people you can talk to. People who’d know what’s going on in the neighborhood.”

  Adam hesitated.

  “Listen,” she said. “You want to live dangerously or not?”

  He regarded her battered Subaru. Then he shrugged. “Why not?” he said, and climbed into her car.

  South Lexington was a different place at night. What by day had seemed merely drab and depressing had, by night, assumed new menace. Alleys seemed to snake away into nowhere, and in that darkness lurked all the terrible unknowns a mind could conjure.

  Kat parked beneath a streetlamp, and for a moment she studied the sidewalk, the buildings. A block away, a dozen or so teenagers had gathered on the corner. They looked harmless enough, just a bunch of kids engaged in the adolescent rites of spring.

  “It looks okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  They got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk, toward Building Five. The teenagers, at once alerted to intruders in their territory, turned and stared. Automatically, Adam moved close beside Kat and tightly grasped her arm.

  The building was unlocked, so they went inside. The lobby was as she’d remembered it: dingy walls, nutmeg-colored carpet to hide the stains, half the hall lights burned out. The graffiti was a little more graphic and less poetic than she remembered; the artwork had definitely taken a slide for the worse.

  The elevator, as always, was out of commission.

  “I don’t think it ever worked,” she muttered, noting the faded OUT OF ORDER sign. “It’s four flights up. We’ll have to walk.”

  They went up the stairs, stepping over broken toys and cigarette butts. The handrail, once smoothly burnished, was now scarred by a series of initials carved in the wood. Noises filtered out from the various apartments: crying babies, blaring TV sets and radios, a woman yelling at her kids. Floating above it all were the pure and crystalline tones of a girl singing “Amazing Grace.” The sound soared like a cathedral above the ruins. As they ascended the stairs to the fifth floor, the girl’s voice grew louder, until they knew it was coming from behind the very door where they stopped.

  Kat knocked.

  The singing stopped. Footsteps approached, and the door opened a crack. A girl with a silky face the color of mocha gazed out over the security chain with doe eyes.

  “Bella?” said Kat.

  The smile that appeared on the girl’s face was like a brilliant wash of sunshine. “Kat!” she cried, unlatching the door chain. She turned and called out: “Papa Earl! It’s Kat!”

  “Don’t rush me,” grumbled a voice from the next room. “I don’t go runnin’ for no one.”

  Bella gave Kat an embarrassed look as they stepped into the apartment. “Those bones of his,” she murmured. “Ache him real bad in this weather. He’s in a foul mood …”

  “Who’s in a foul mood?” snapped Papa Earl, shuffling into the room. He moved slowly, his head tipped forward, his once jet-black hair now a grizzled white. How old he had gotten, thought Kat sadly. Somehow, she had never thought this man would be touched by the years.

  Kat went forward to give him a hug. It was almost like hugging a stranger; he seemed so small, so frail, shrunken by time. “Hi, Papa Earl,” she said.

  “You got your nerve, girl,” he grumbled. “Go two years, three, not even droppin’ by.”

  “Papa Earl!” Bella said. “She’s here now, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, got good ’n’ guilty, did she?”

  Kat laughed and took his hand. It felt like bones wrapped in parchment. “How you been, Papa Earl? Did you get the coat I sent?”

  “What coat?”

  “You know,” Bella said, sighing. “The down jacket, Papa Earl. You wore it all winter.”

  “Oh. That coat.”

  Bella gave Kat a weary you know how he is look and said, “He loves that coat.”

  “Papa Earl,” said Kat. “I brought someone with me.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Adam. He’s standing right over here.”

  Gently she turned the old man to face Adam. Papa Earl extended his arm, held it out in midair for the expected handshake. Only then, as the two men faced each other, could Adam see the snowy cataracts clouding the old man’s eyes.

  Adam took the offered hand and grasped it firmly. “Hello … Papa Earl,” he said.

  Papa Earl let out a hoot. “Makes you feel dumb, don’t it? Big fella like you callin’ a shrimp like me Papa.”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “So what you got going with our Katrina here?”

  “He’s just a friend, Papa Earl,” said Kat.

  There was a pause. “Oh,” the old man said. “It’s like that.”

  “I wanted you to meet him, talk to him. See, he’s looking for someone. A woman.”

  Papa Earl’s grizzled head lifted with sudden interest. The blind eyes seemed to focus on her.

  “What do I know?”

  “You know everything that goes on in the Projects.”

  “Let’s sit down,” the old man said. “My bones are killing me.”

  They went into the kitchen. Like the rest of the apartment, the room was on the far side of used. Linoleum tiles had worked loose below the sink. The Formica counters were chipped. The stove and refrigerator were straight from the Leave It to Beaver era. Papa Earl’s other grandchild, Anthony, sat hunched at the table, shoveling spaghetti hoops into his mouth. He scarcely looked up as the others came in.

  “Hey, Anthony!” barked Papa Earl. �
�Ain’t you gonna say hello to your old babysitter?”

  “Hello,” Anthony grunted and stuffed in another spoonful of spaghetti hoops.

  Their personalities hadn’t changed a bit, Kat realized, watching Anthony and Bella, remembering all those evenings she had looked after them while Papa Earl worked. Back in the days when the old man still had his vision. These two might be twins, they might have the same mocha coloring, the same high, sculpted cheekbones, but their personalities were like darkness and light. Bella could warm a room with her smile; Anthony could chill it with a single glance.

  Papa Earl shuffled about the familiar kitchen with all the sureness of a sighted man. “You hungry?” he asked. “You want something to eat?”

  Kat and Adam watched Anthony noisily lap tomato sauce and they said, in the same breath, “Nothing, thanks.”

  They all sat down at the table, Papa Earl across from them, his cataracts staring at them eerily. “So who’s this woman you looking for?” he asked.

  “Her name is Maeve Quantrell,” said Kat. “We think she’s living in the Projects.”

  “You have a picture?”

  Kat glanced at Adam.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, I do,” he said, and reached for his wallet. He placed a snapshot on the table.

  Kat had been expecting to see a version of what he’d described to her, a hellion in black leather with Technicolor hair. What she saw instead was a fragile blond girl, the sort you’d find shrinking in the corner at a school dance.

  “Bella?” said Papa Earl.

  Bella reached for the photo. “Oh, she’s real pretty. Blond hair. Sort of shy looking.”

  “How old?”

  “She’s twenty-three,” said Adam. “She looks different now. Probably dyed her hair some crazy color. Wears more makeup.”

  “Anthony? You seen this girl around?” asked Papa Earl.

  Anthony glanced at the photo and shrugged. Then he rose, tossed his empty bowl in the sink, and stalked out of the kitchen. A moment later they heard the apartment door slam shut.

  “Like a wild animal, that boy,” Papa Earl said with a sigh. “Comes and goes when he wants. Don’t know what to do ’bout him.”