The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  He staked out a table, and waited. It was nearly half past seven when James MacCready wove his way through the crowd, his camel overcoat flapping, making him a stalk of corn in a field of crows.

  “Hey,” he said by way of greeting. “Sorry about the early hour, but I needed to talk to you. And I didn’t want Dickhead dropping in. I’d rather it wasn’t on the phone, either.”

  Enzo assumed Dickhead was the American consul. James had a variety of names for him, depending on his mood. Or the consul’s recent behavior. The phone was one of James’s fetishes. He didn’t trust anything but landlines, and nobody had those anymore. It had crossed Enzo’s mind more than once that James was lonely, and that the whole can’t-talk-on-the-phone thing was just an excuse to meet up for coffee or get somebody to buy him a beer.

  “So,” he said, biting the top off a sugar packet and emptying it into his cup. “About our little problem.”

  Enzo started to say he’d made a mistake, that James had been right and the idea of Kristin Carson’s stepmother being involved in her disappearance was desperate. Or just plain silly. And either way, wrong. Then he changed his mind.

  “Is she?” he asked. “A problem?”

  A smile twitched James’s lip. For a split second, he looked almost sinister.

  “Like I said, or maybe I didn’t,” he added. “I have this friend. A good guy, in New Jersey.” James reached for a second sugar packet. “Anyway I thought it was better, you know, than calling DC. Would look more run of the mill—and my guy was happy to do it. So he ran a routine check on Anna Carson of 237 Monument Street, Concord, Massachusetts. White female, born Manhattan, May 11, 1960. Social Security number blah, blah, blah. No problemo.”

  Enzo waited. James picked up the tiny silver spoon on the edge of his saucer and began to stir.

  “And?” he asked finally. “That was it? No problemo?”

  James MacCready shrugged, his overcoat falling back to reveal a tiny American flag pinned to his suit lapel.

  “More or less,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  Mobile phone paranoia was one thing, but dragging him over here to buy two cups of overpriced coffee to tell him nothing was entirely another. Enzo scowled. Which made James smile.

  “Hold your horses,” he said, taking a sip. “So my friend, he does this check, and she comes back clean as a whistle. Right? Anyway,” James went on, “no outstanding warrants. No previous arrest record. Not so much as a goddamn parking ticket. My friend calls me and tells me our Mrs. Blond Perfect is indeed perfect. That’s at about six p.m. last night. Our time.” He put the cup down. “So that’s all fine and dandy, right?”

  Enzo nodded.

  “Right,” James said. “Until midnight, one o’clock this morning—my cell rings. Hauls me out of la–la land where I’m having a really nice time with some hot girl I last saw in high school. So I jump up, and there I am in my underwear thinking, shit, they’ve found the Carson kid in pieces in a garbage can. Or Dickhead has gone and started World War Three. Or there are riots out at the base because of God knows what, or—”

  “But no?”

  James shook his head.

  “But no, indeed,” he agreed. “Guess what? Or rather who? It’s my friend from Jersey. And he wants to know what the fuck I’m doing, because he’s just had one weird phone call.”

  James pushed the cup away. He leaned toward Enzo, dropping his voice. “He’s leaving the office, right? Closing up for the day, and the phone rings. So he grabs it, thinking, OK, it’s probably his wife telling him what to get for dinner or something, and well—” James MacCready leaned back. “All I have to say,” he said, pointing at Enzo, “is, You. Are. The Man. You don’t just hit the jackpot, pal. You win the whole freakin’ lottery.”

  Enzo frowned. James MacCready glanced over his shoulder. Then he leaned forward, lowered his voice again, and said, “The call came from some guy from the Federal Marshal’s Office.”

  “The federal marshals?”

  James nodded. “Uh-huh. Wanting to know why my friend wanted to know about Anna Carson.”

  Enzo thought for a moment. James MacCready was watching him.

  “Like I said,” James said, finally. “It looks like you hit the sweet spot, my friend. Because this guy was real interested. Within hours of filing an ordinary background search from a police station in Jersey, the federal marshals know about it. And they want to know what he wants to know about Anna Carson, and why he wants to know it.”

  “So what the hell does that mean?”

  “Well,” James said. “That was the very question I asked myself.”

  Before Enzo could ask if his self had come up with an answer, James smiled his twitch of a smile.

  “Think about it,” he said. “For a start, it means the search is flagged. Right? Anybody anywhere runs a routine check on Anna Carson, the feds know about it. I wondered if it was some kind of mistake, you know, like the do-not-fly lists, or some screwed-up Terrorist Watch thing. But that’s Homeland Security.”

  “And this was definitely the federal marshals?”

  Enzo was scrolling back through his head, trying to sort through the tangle of US federal agencies. There was the FBI, the ATF, the Treasury, the behemoth of Homeland Security, and a host of others. As far as he could remember, the federal marshals were responsible for court security, for arresting federal fugitives, for moving high-profile prisoners, and—

  Watching him, James MacCready nodded.

  “Right” he said. Then he added, “Look, I don’t know about you, but unless you think Mrs. Blond Perfect is a high-value prisoner they’ve misplaced—in which case I think they would have mentioned it—or a federal fugitive from justice, in which case I think they would also have mentioned it—not to mention the fact that a warrant as long as my arm would have turned up—or, unless you think she’s done a runner before giving evidence in a mob trial, which is possible, but personally, I think they might also have said something. Then that leaves only one possibility.”

  He leaned back, looking pleased with himself.

  “Think about it,” James said. “It’s what the federal marshals are famous for, right? Sort of like the Mounties. They claim they’ve never lost a man. Or in this case, I guess, a woman. My friend calmed them down,” he added. “Made them dry up and blow away. Told them he was doing background checks for a local charity that works with children.” James shrugged. “It’s a federal law—easiest thing to say, for women—some after-school program or something. If it’s a guy, go for a gun license. They don’t ring any alarms, you know? Anyway,” he added, “my friend thinks it was a babysitting call. You know, just making sure their little Bundle of Joy is A-OK.”

  Enzo stared at him. “Let me just get this straight,” he said finally. “What you’re telling me is, Kristin Carson’s stepmother is in the Federal Witness Protection Program?”

  James looked back at him.

  “Hey,” he said, raising his hands, “I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Which means she probably isn’t really Anna Carson.”

  “Or at least she hasn’t always been.”

  “So who the hell is she?”

  James MacCready laughed. “Well, if she’s in Witness Protection, we don’t know. That’s kind of the point. My friend didn’t ask,” he added. “Not that they’d have told him.” James looked at Enzo. “You absolutely sure you don’t know?” he asked.

  Enzo was already zipping his jacket. He looked up.

  “Why would I know?”

  “Just a hunch.” James MacCready’s blue eyes were suddenly shrewder than his thatch of blond hair and all-American boy talk suggested. “Same hunch that tells me you think this thing is a little more complicated than a roaming teen. The girl, Kristin,” he asked. “You think she’s dead?”

  Enzo shook his head. “I don’t know. Honest to God.” He looked at James. “I don’t. I don’t know what to think.”

  “So what have you found out?”
/>
  “Nothing good.”

  “This is about the guy. The guy in the picture, right? The guy Mrs. Blond Not So Perfect After All recognized. You going to tell me who he is?”

  Enzo hesitated. Before he could answer, James smiled. “You owe me dinner,” he said, and turned toward the door.

  * * *

  Enzo Saenz stepped onto the street feeling like a fool. He had started to call Pallioti to tell him about Anna Carson, or whoever she was, then thought better of it. Eating humble pie, particularly when you might choke on it, was best done in person.

  He broke into a half trot, shouldering his way through the flood of office workers who swarmed up onto the pavement chattering so loudly he didn’t hear his cell phone, just felt it start to jump like a demented cricket in his pocket. Feet still moving, he pulled it out, saw it was Guillermo, and put it to his ear.

  “Get to the Excelsior,” Guillermo barked. “Now. Lorenzo’s already on his way.”

  Good morning to you, too, Enzo thought. If he’d been in a different mood, he might have smiled, and marveled at Guillermo’s mind reading. Again. Or paused to wonder how on earth Pallioti could have gotten ahead of him so quickly.

  “Is he bringing her in?”

  Enzo could imagine this scene, exactly how thrilled Kenneth Carson would be to be informed that his wife was being escorted to the Questura for questioning. He was probably bellowing down the phone to the consul right this second. Demanding that the marines be deployed to protect his family from the depredations of the Italian police. MacCready must have already known. No wonder he’d been smiling. He was probably at the Excelsior now.

  “Bringing who in?” Guillermo asked.

  Enzo’s feet slowed. “Anna Carson. Bringing her in for questioning. Isn’t that why Pallioti’s—” Enzo didn’t get to finish.

  “I’m sure he’d love to,” Guillermo snapped, cutting him off. “In fact I can almost guarantee you nothing would thrill him more. If he could find her.”

  Enzo stopped dead. A woman ran into him from behind, shook her head, and stepped around him down into the street, picking her way through a crust of slush.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Dr. Carson’s having trouble keeping track of his women. He ought to put those chip things in them.”

  “What do you mean?” Enzo asked.

  “I mean,” said Guillermo, “that he called here in hysterics fifteen minutes ago because his wife is missing.”

  * * *

  “How did this happen?”

  White lines pinching the edge of Pallioti’s nose were the only visible sign that he was angry. Enzo, who had just relayed the bare bones of his conversation with James MacCready, took a breath. Pallioti dismissed whatever he’d been about to say with a wave of his hand.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured. “We don’t have time.”

  They were standing in the sitting room of the Carsons’ suite. Behind the half-open doors of the bedroom they could hear the sound of running taps. Kenneth Carson had excused himself, said he needed a glass of water. Enzo wondered what he was taking with it. Some kind of sedative probably. Not that he blamed him. His teenaged daughter had driven off with a man old enough to be her father and who had just served the better part of thirty years in jail for being a terrorist and possibly a murderer—not that they’d shared this piece of joy with him yet—and his wife had disappeared. In Kenneth Carson’s place, Enzo would probably take something, too.

  He glanced at the sitting room’s unmade sofa bed, the rumpled pillows, sheets, and blankets spilling onto the rug, and wondered if they were a one-off or a regular occurrence.

  “I snore. At least I do when I’ve been drinking.”

  The answer came from the bedroom door where Kenneth Carson stood running his hand through his hair. The man at the head of the table, the captain of the surgical team who had been so visible at the consulate forty-eight hours ago, was gone. Now Dr. Carson just looked scared. And hungover.

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Pallioti said gently. “Tell us everything you can remember. When was the last time you saw your wife?”

  Coffee had been delivered. Enzo crossed to the tray and poured a large cup, black, and added extra sugar.

  “We were going to dinner.” Kenneth Carson shook his head as Pallioti shepherded him to a chair. “With the consul and his wife,” he said. “Or at least we were supposed to. I mean, I did.”

  He took the cup Enzo handed him, tasted the coffee, and made a face. Then he drank it down. The winter sunlight falling through the suite’s window was unkind. Kenneth Carson’s skin looked gray. A night’s growth of whiskers bristled his cheeks.

  “Annie insisted on going running. She does that.” Kenneth Carson shrugged. “She’s, well, obsessed. Like a lot of these runners. That’s how we met, actually.” He glanced up and smiled. “I operated on her knee.”

  Enzo remembered the magazine article and nodded.

  “Or actually, I didn’t,” Kenneth Carson said. “Not really. I went in and did the minimal then oversaw her physio. I can’t do that with most of my patients, or I’d be out of business.” He put the cup down. “It worked for Anna, though. She qualified for Boston this year. You know, the marathon. It’s a big deal, that’s why she went out yesterday.”

  “To go running?”

  It was Enzo who asked. Kenneth Carson took a moment to nod, and Enzo wondered again how many pills he’d popped.

  “She didn’t even want to come, I mean on this trip.” Kenneth Carson looked down at the cup and saucer and seemed mildly surprised to find himself holding them. “I only convinced her,” he said, “finally, because it’s Kris’s birthday. And because it was only eight days. She said she couldn’t leave, she has a couple of big jobs on at the moment—” He glanced at Pallioti. “She consults on web design. Builds pages and stuff for corporations. Although that was bullshit,” he added abruptly. “About the jobs. She didn’t want to come because of Boston. The marathon. Training. Distance runs. All that shit. I promised her I wouldn’t bug her about it—she could run where and whenever the hell she wanted. Jesus!” He started suddenly. “What if she’s been hit by a car? What if—”

  “There’s no record of her being admitted,” Pallioti said. “But we’re checking the hospitals again, to be certain. She wore an ID?”

  “Yeah. One of those wristband things. And, yeah, she had it on. It’s missing.” Kenneth Carson leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I don’t know if that’s worse or not. About the hospital. To be honest, she was so mad at Kristin. And at me, because of Kristin. And just because. We haven’t been getting along that well,” he said, “for a while. So I thought she might have just gone back to the States. But her passport and her purse—everything’s here.”

  “Would that have been like her?” Pallioti leaned forward. “To leave without telling you?”

  Kenneth Carson shook his head. “No. Not really.” He made a face. “Anna’s nothing if not responsible. Even when she’s mad.”

  “But you argued? About Kristin?”

  Enzo remembered the way Anna Carson had sat at the meeting in the consulate, studying her hands, barely whispering. He’d thought then that she was just tired.

  “Yeah, we argued. Sure we argued.” Kenneth Carson made an attempt to smile. “We’re married. And like I said, we’ve been going through sort of a rough patch. Couples do. But Annie’s had it rough with Kristin. Kris never gave her a break, not one. Her patience is pretty much worn out. She didn’t want me to pay for this year thing to start with, at least not here, in Italy. God knows why. There was another program she thought Kristin ought to go to, in Paris. Or she thought we should send her to a crammer, you know, for her grades, to get the credits. Then this went and happened, Kris taking off—again.” He shrugged. “So, yeah, we argued about it, so when she didn’t show up—I mean, I wasn’t that surprised.”

  “When your wife didn’t show up?” Pallioti had unbuttoned his overcoat.
He leaned forward on the stiff brocade chair. “When your wife didn’t show up where, Dr. Carson?”

  “At the restaurant. Some fancy place in town where we were supposed to be meeting Edward, the American consul, you know, and his wife. They thought it would make us feel better. It was nice of them. Anyway, Annie didn’t go out running until late, and I knew she was going a long way—she does these distance things, and I was mad at her because I thought she did it on purpose—go out late so she could miss the dinner. She said if she wasn’t back that I should go ahead, apologize for her, and she’d meet us there. Come on over as soon as she could.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  “No. No—” Kenneth Carson shook his head. He reached up and tugged at the collar of his shirt as if it was making him hot. “No,” he said. “She called me. At about seven, said she’d just gotten in. She’d slipped on some steps somewhere and she was afraid she’d twisted her knee. She was going to put ice on it, put it up, and stay off it, so she wouldn’t be coming.” He glanced from Pallioti to Enzo. “I wasn’t really surprised,” he said again. “She doesn’t like the consul, Edward, much. And, like I said, we’d been arguing.”

  “So you thought she was lying, about her knee?”

  Kenneth Carson opened his mouth and closed it. He appeared to have been about to snap at Pallioti, rise like a fish to the bait of defending his wife, then decided against it.

  “No,” he said. “No, not exactly. I mean, not necessarily. It might have been true,” he added finally. “I mean, I know how much running Boston means to her, if—” His voice fizzled out. “I went to the bar,” he added a moment later. “Here in the hotel, when I got back from dinner. I drank—I don’t know how much. Too much. A lot. When I finally got up here, the bedroom doors were closed and the sofa bed was made up. Annie’d left a note. On the pillow. She said her knee was OK, but she needed the sleep. She’d taken a pill and didn’t want to be disturbed. She’d see me in the morning.”