Gone Cold

by Douglas Corleone

  I don’t want to be sitting here. I want to launch myself off this couch and jump into our Ford Explorer and start combing the streets looking for Hailey. But Rendell insists that I can be of the most help by staying here and providing him and West with the information they need to find my daughter.

  I lean forward. The more I listen to Tasha tell her story the angrier I get. I don’t want to get angrier; I want to sympathize. We need each other right now, more than we have ever needed each other before. I realize that. But part of me wants to—nearly needs to—stand up and shout, “What the hell were you thinking, leaving Hailey out there all by herself? You’re her mother, goddamn you. How could you take your eyes off her even for a second? She’s only six years old.”

  “When I looked out the window to check on her again, I didn’t see her,” Tasha says through her tears. “But I thought she’d just moved to another part of the yard. Or maybe she was heading inside. I listened for the door. When I didn’t hear anything I looked out the window again. Then I walked outside and looked around the yard. The gate was closed, so I thought maybe she was hiding. On the phone, my mother was telling me some ridiculous story about my father fighting with their neighbors over some landscaping issue. I didn’t want to interrupt her or shout in her ear. So I kept looking. After another minute or so, I finally told my mother to hang on and I started calling out Hailey’s name.”

  I know it’s useless to point fingers just now. All that matters is that Hailey is found. But I can’t help but feel as though Tasha’s to blame. She says nothing else in the yard was amiss. That the sandwiches and sweet tea were still on the blanket. She listened and listened and heard nothing but silence. Finally she told her mother she had to go. Didn’t say why, didn’t mention that she couldn’t find Hailey, just said, “Let me call you back, Mom, I’ve got to check on something.” Why? I think. Why not say, “I don’t see my daughter.” Maybe then her mother hangs up and dials the police, sends them to our address. Maybe it saves fifteen minutes. Maybe that fifteen minutes is all the time it would have taken to reverse this hell we’re facing right now.

  “I ran across the street to the neighbor’s,” she says. “They have a daughter a little older than Hailey, and a puppy Hailey loves to play with, a little basset hound named CJ. I rang their bell. I heard the dog barking, but no one came to the door. I was still holding the phone, so I tried to call nine-one-one, but I was too far from the house for the cordless to work. So I ran back to the house and called.”

  Rendell nods his head. “What did you tell the dispatcher?”

  “I said, ‘Someone took my daughter!’”

  “Why?” Rendell cuts in. “Why did you say that? Why did you think that right away?”

  I look at my wife and for the first time since I arrived she fumbles for words.

  “I don’t … I just knew. I mean, she wasn’t in the backyard and the gate was closed. It was locked. Even if Hailey left—which she’d never in a million years do—she couldn’t have reached over and locked the gate.”

  Rendell makes a face I’ve seen before, a face only cops make when they’re skeptical of something someone is saying. “Couldn’t have?” he says. “Or wouldn’t have?”

  Tasha has to think about it. I wait for her to look at me, but she doesn’t. She’s barely looked at me since I arrived home, in fact.

  “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I guess she’s tall enough now. But she knows better than to leave the yard when I’m not there.”

  How often are you not there? I nearly shout.

  “All right,” Rendell says in the voice of an ER doctor about to deliver bad news. “We and the D.C. Police have every available human resource out there looking for your daughter. We’ll watch the phones and hope we receive a call that Hailey’s safe and sound, that she just strolled away and got lost. But it’s been a few hours now since she went missing, so our job, mine and Special Agent West’s, is to operate under the assumption that she’s been taken. If she has, this first twenty-four hours is crucial. So I’m going to ask you a series of questions, some of which may seem completely irrelevant and some of which may make you uncomfortable. But it’s all standard operating procedure, and the more you cooperate, the faster we’re going to find Hailey and bring her home.”

  “We understand,” I say.

  “Good,” he says, opening a small notebook. “Then let’s start with family and friends who live in the area.”

  Chapter 12

  I woke on the sofa in the sitting room of an elegant suite on the top floor of the Radisson. Daylight was squeezing through the razor-thin opening where the curtains were supposed to meet. I glanced at my watch and sighed. It was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. I was disappointed with myself, but not the least bit surprised. After viewing the surveillance footage from the Stalemate, Zoey and I had stayed up most of the night, attempting in our own strange way to catch up on the past thirty-six years of our lives.

  When I sat up on the couch, I noticed that Ashdown had retrieved my Swiss Army suitcase from his vehicle. I decided to shower and dress before knocking on the bedroom door and waking them.

  I walked into the bathroom. Shed the clothes I’d been wearing since I spoke to Kati back in the States nearly thirty-six hours ago and stepped into the shower. As the scalding water beat down on my chest, I thought about last night.

  Over the past couple of years I’d often daydreamed about what it would be like to meet my sister, Tuesday. (I still hadn’t fully adjusted to the name change and seriously doubted that I ever would.) In any event, my sister was nothing like the woman I’d fantasized meeting. I’d expected a demure woman, refined in the ways in which most Americans imagine the British to be. But this woman was crass, even crude at times. She wasn’t the modest, soft-spoken little girl I’d lost thirty-six years ago. She was blustery and garish; she drank like a sorority girl and cursed like a stockbroker witnessing a career-ending crash on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

  At one point during the conversation here in the suite, I’d asked her how she met Ashdown. She raised her lip in a snarl as her ex-husband looked on. “Damon was working at the Met at the time. I’d been a dancer. After work, me and some of the girls would hit the car park for a bit of dogging and a wee taste of Charlie.…”

  Ashdown casually averted his eyes.

  “The car park was in a secluded spot,” she continued, “and no one round there raised much of a fuss, so it was rare for the filth to make an appearance. But one night, he and his partner roll up like bloody Starsky and Hutch, and this one taps on our window and flashes his badge and tells us, ‘Out of the car.’ My girlfriends think we’re right fucked because of the drugs, but from the way this one was looking at me, I could tell straightaway he was as randy as a schoolboy, and that if I gave him half the chance he’d bend me over the hood for a quickie. So, I ask him, ‘Fancy a shag?’ and he turns all red in the cheeks and says as coolly as he can under the circumstances, ‘How about a date to start?’ So, I say, ‘Sure, whatever floats yours, ya know, long as you let us go,’ and the next night he picks me up from my flat and takes me to this club, only he doesn’t dance, so instead we grab a few bevvys and get pissed and end up snogging like a pair of teenagers right there in the middle of the lounge. This goes on for over an hour before he finally realizes, What the fuck? and takes me back to his place to have it off straight through the morning.” She shot Ashdown a look. “Now, of course, he regrets the whole bloody episode.”

  Ashdown turned to her. “I don’t regret a single minute of that night, love. It’s my cock-up the next morning I’ll never live down, isn’t it?”

  She looked at me and smirked. “The wanker falls for me straightaway, asks me to move in with him after breakfast. A bit dodgy, wouldn’t you say, little brother?”

  Little brother. Simply hearing those words returned me to the London of my childhood, where Tuesday and I alternately laughed and fought with each other, she a fan of flicking my large fiv
e-year-old ears, me a master at pulling her longish brown hair. Both of us lousy little tattletales to boot.

  When I stepped out of the shower I found Ashdown standing on the balcony, smoking a cigarette, gazing out over the lush grounds.

  “Didn’t take you for a smoker,” I said, stepping outside to join him.

  “I’m not. The trollop just draws it out of me.” He quickly looked over, said, “Sorry, mate. I didn’t mean to…”

  I shrugged it off and moved back inside. It wasn’t me to whom he owed the apology.

  Ashdown flicked his butt over the railing and followed me in. “What’s the first order of business this morning?”

  “A double shot of espresso,” I said.

  “And then?”

  I stared at myself in the mirror, took in my own hooded gaze. Truth was, I didn’t know what came next. The crime scene hadn’t spoken to me; the dead man’s hotel room had said even less. I told myself it didn’t matter. It felt vital for me to remember that I was looking for Hailey, not Eli Welker’s killer. As far as I was concerned, this wasn’t an investigation; it was a search.

  I started to respond to Ashdown’s question but was saved by the bell on my BlackBerry. I hurried over to the desk and picked it up.

  The screen was lit with Kurt Ostermann’s mobile number.

  “I’ve got good news and bad,” Ostermann said. “Which do you want first?”

  “Give me the bad news.”

  “Well, I’m in London and Becky’s a mess. I tried to explain to her why she hasn’t been contacted by anyone official yet, but she doesn’t want to listen to it, Simon. So don’t be surprised if she calls the Guards and spills the beans about the vic being her husband.”

  “What’s the good news?” I said.

  “Well, I haven’t quite finished giving you the bad yet. The really bad news, as far as I’m concerned, is that Becky has no idea who hired her husband, and the information isn’t in the thin files she allowed me a look at. She says Eli made his client’s privacy top priority. Maybe some good old-fashioned police work—tracking down phone numbers, pounding the pavement, knocking on doors—will help us figure it out, but it’s possible that the identity of his client is a secret he’ll take to his grave in a few days.”

  I cursed under my breath. “And the good news?”

  “Well, Becky wouldn’t consent to me having a look around his home office, so I sent her off on a walk, you know, to clear her head. Then I picked the lock and had a see for myself. No physical finds whatsoever; everything’s locked tight. Nothing on his hard drive either. But I scoured his recent e-mails and found a few photos he’d recently sent to himself.”

  “What kinds of photos?”

  “I’m forwarding them to you now. Have yourself a look, then call me back if you still have questions.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’m staying in London a few days, Simon. Just say the word if you need me up there for anything, anything whatsoever, you understand?”

  “Perfectly. Where are you staying?”

  “The Corinthia. I have a corporate client here; I figure it’s high time I started billing him what I’m worth.”

  As soon as I disconnected, I let Ashdown in on the conversation. Meanwhile, I opened Ostermann’s e-mail, clicking on the attachments one by one.

  It was the girl. The young woman in the photographs was the same woman caught on tape outside the Stalemate in Temple Bar following Eli Welker’s murder. She appeared in the photos with a guy, a big fellow in his early thirties, I guessed. His arms and neck were heavily inked, his head completely shaven. His ears were pierced—gauged, actually, the lobes stretched to accommodate half-inch plugs. From the looks of him, I doubted they were the only part of his body that contained man-made holes. From the images, it appeared that he and the girl were intimate; lovers certainly, perhaps even boyfriend and girlfriend.

  “Clearly they didn’t know they were being photographed,” Ashdown said, his eyes locked on my BlackBerry.

  “The backgrounds,” I said, “do you recognize any of them?”

  Ashdown scrolled through the pictures, zoomed in on a few of them then nodded his head. “You can make out the street signs in a few of these. Balornock. Keppochhill. Edgefauld Road. No question; the photos were taken in Glasgow.”

  “There are a number of pictures there that were shot in and around pubs,” I said. “Seems to me, we talk to a few barflies, there’s a good chance we get a lead on the guy, whoever he might be.”

  “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “Happen to have any contacts in the Police Service of Scotland?”

  “I do,” Ashdown said, handing me back my phone. “But no one I trust near as much as Colleen MacAuliffe. Trouble in Scotland—and Glasgow in particular—is that it’s often difficult to tell the cops from the crooks.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “Glasgow’s the most violent city in the UK. We can’t just run down there asking questions. We need to have a plan.”

  “We?”

  “You didn’t think I was going to let you go this alone, did you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Thing is, you and I, we’re going to stick out like sore thumbs down there. And the only folks they like less than the English are English law enforcement.”

  “You’ve already helped me plenty,” I said. “I can take things from here.”

  Ashdown shook his head. “You’ll get yourself stabbed or slashed first pub you enter, Simon. There aren’t many guns in Scotland, but Glasgow’s the knife capital of Europe.”

  “You just said so yourself; you’re not going to fare much better than me. Not with that accent.”

  “I might not,” he said, “but I know someone who’d be accepted in Glasgow straightaway, regardless of accent or creed or country of origin.”

  “Did I hear somebody mention Glasgow?” Zoey said, entering the room in her underwear, a mismatched set of bra and panties.

  “Simon and I are heading there now. Want to come along?”

  “I’d like to see the two of you try to stop me.” She returned to the bedroom, muttering something about getting dressed.

  I looked a question at Ashdown.

  He shrugged. “I had a feeling she’d come aboard. Glasgow has the best bloody skag in all of Great Britain, she says.”

  Part Two

  THE BARONS OF GLASGOW

  Chapter 13

  Figuring we wouldn’t have much success finding the character in the photos during daylight hours, we decided to drive from Dublin to Glasgow rather than fly and arrived in Scotland’s largest city shortly before dusk.

  Well-rested and well-fed—and charged with a fair amount of adrenaline—I felt stronger than I had in nearly a year. During the five-and-a-half-hour drive in Ashdown’s rented Nissan crossover, I’d stared at the photos on my BlackBerry until I’d etched every feature of the girl (and the man she was with) into my mind. Whether I’d been struck with a rare bout of optimism or a devastating case of wishful thinking, I didn’t know. But I was beginning to believe that the young woman in the photos could conceivably be Hailey Fisk.

  Fortunately, all the photos Eli Welker had taken of the couple were set in the same area. Unfortunately, that area was Springburn, an inner city district in northern Glasgow, best known for its drug trade and abundance of violent crime.

  “Well, there’s certainly no shortage of dive bars to choose from,” Ashdown muttered as we cruised north along one of Springburn’s desolate roads. “We may as well park and hoof it from here.”

  “No shortage of spaces either,” I noted. Even on Springburn’s main drag, traffic was nearly nonexistent. The few cars that were on the road were early model sedans that had surely seen better days.

  Ashdown pulled the Nissan to the curb. “That’s because two-thirds of Springburn’s population can’t afford a motor vehicle,” he said, yanking the parking brake and killing the ignition. “Poverty has plagued this area for decades.”<
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  I turned and nudged Zoey, who’d spent the past couple of hours sprawled along the backseat, sleeping.

  “Here already, are we?” she said, yawning as she gazed out the windshield. “Shit. It’s beginning to snow. Some holiday you boys are taking me on.”

  “At least it’s not brutally cold,” I said as I stepped out of the vehicle. I’d opened the door expecting to shiver, but unlike my final night in D.C., there was no wind. Not so much as a breeze.

  “Can’t last though,” Zoey cautioned.

  I turned to her. “You know Springburn. Where should we start?”

  “Bishop’s, Highland, Shevlanes,” she said with a shrug. “Makes no difference, really. They all attract the same sort.”

  Along with dive bars, the road was littered with rundown churches. Black iron gates discouraged trespassers from trampling their overgrown lawns, defacing their cracked and crumbling tombstones, their statues of saints thick with bird shit.

  In the distance stood a group of cement blocks, thirty-some stories tall.

  “Projects?” I asked.

  Ashdown said, “Here in the UK, we call them council houses. Sounds more sophisticated, doesn’t it?”

  In the past couple of years I’d witnessed poverty in so many of its ugly forms, from the Podil district in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to the La Carpio slums in the Costa Rican capital of San José. Watching needless human suffering in a world where so many have so much never got any easier.

  “Let’s start there,” I said, pointing to a brown brick cube on the corner. A collapsing sign hanging against the side of the structure read THE OLD SOAK, which Ashdown explained was British slang used to refer to drunkards of long standing.