by Mark Dawson
Milton followed the platform.
He pressed himself against the back wall and risked a glance through the windows. The living room beyond was very different now from how it had been the previous night. It was empty. The furniture had been returned to more usual positions around the room. The DJ equipment was gone. The bar, which had been strewn with bottles and glasses, was pristine. The salvers of cocaine that had been so ostentatiously left on the tables had been removed. The room was cool and dark and quiet. The windows were still open a little at the tops and the curtains shivered in and out on each breath of wind, the only movement that Milton could see.
It was as if the party had never even happened.
Milton flitted quickly across the window to a door that was set into a long extension that had been built across one side of the house. He tried the door. It was locked. Taking off his gloves, he took a pair of paperclips from his pocket and bent them into shape. He slid one into the lower portion of the keyhole, used it to determine which way the cylinder turned, applied light tension and then slid the other clip into the upper part of the keyhole and felt for the pins. He pressed up and felt the individual pins with the tip of the clip, finding the stiffest one and pushing it up and out of the cylinder. He repeated the trick for the remaining four pins, adjusting the torque for each. He turned the cylinder all the way around and the door unlocked.
Milton scrubbed the lock with the sleeve of his shirt, put the gloves back onto his hands and went inside. It was a utility room. He closed the door behind him, leaving it unlocked, and then paused for a moment, listening carefully. He could hear nothing. He was confident that the house was empty. He walked quickly into a huge kitchen with wide windows, then a hallway, then into the living room. It was gloomy, but there was just enough suffused moonlight from outside for him to see his way. He checked the downstairs quickly and efficiently. There was another formal living room with a large, carved stone mantel. A secret doorway in the bookshelves led to a speakeasy-style wet bar. The dining room looked like it was being used as a conference room, with a speakerphone in the middle of the table and videoconferencing equipment at the other. A spiral staircase led down to a wine cellar that had been built around crouching monk corbels that had been turned into light fittings; there were hundreds of bottles, thousands of dollars’ worth of wine, but nothing of any obvious interest.
He found the stairs and climbed to the first floor. There were four bedrooms, all with en-suite bathrooms. He climbed again to the second floor: three more bedrooms, all enormous. He searched them all quickly and expertly. There were no clothes in the closets and no products in the bathrooms. No signs of habitation at all.
It looked as if the house was vacant.
Distantly, down the stairwell, two storeys below, Milton heard the sound of the front door opening.
He froze.
Footsteps clicked across the wooden floor.
“Power’s out,” the voice said.
“The fuck?”
“Whole road from the look of things.”
“Place like this, millions of dollars, and they lose the power?”
“Shit happens.”
“You say so.”
“I do.”
“You got a flashlight?”
“Here.”
There was a quiet click.
“You know this is a waste of time.”
“It’s gotta get done.”
“What we looking for?”
“Just make sure everything looks the way it should.”
“What would look like the way it shouldn’t?”
“Anything that looks like there was a crazy-ass party here.”
“Looks clean to me.”
“Had professionals in––everything you can do, they did.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“We’re making sure, okay? Double checking.”
Milton stepped further back, to another door. He moved stealthily. He could hear footsteps down below. He opened the door; it led to another bedroom. The footsteps downstairs were hard to make out. Was that somebody walking up the stairs to the floor below, the first floor? Or somebody walking through the foyer on the ground floor? He couldn’t tell but, either way, he was stuck. If he crossed the landing there he would have to go past the stairwell and then he might be visible from below for a certain amount of time.
“You ever seen a place like this? Look at all this shit. This is where the real money’s at.”
“Concentrate on what you’re doing.”
They were definitely up on the first floor now.
“Go up there. Check it out.”
“Just gonna be more bedrooms.”
“And crazy ass parties end up in the bedroom, so go up and check them all out.”
“What about you?”
“I’m calling the boss.”
Milton could hear scuffed footsteps coming up the stairs: it was the unenthusiastic, resentful one of the pair. That was probably fortunate.
He dropped to the floor and slid beneath the bed.
“It’s me,” the other man was saying, his voice muffled now by the closed door. “We’re at the house. Yeah––looks good. Clean as a whistle. Power’s out, though. Alarm was off. Whole neighbourhood. I don’t think that’s anything to bother us. One of those things.”
Milton held his breath as the door to the bedroom opened and heavy footsteps sounded against the boards. A flashlight swept the room. The bed was low down, the boards and the mattress snug against his back, and he couldn’t see his feet; he thought they were beneath the valance but he couldn’t be completely sure. He felt horribly vulnerable and suddenly cursed himself for picking the bed over the walk-in cupboard he could have sheltered in. He could have pulled the gun in there, too. If the man saw him under here, there would be nothing he could do. It was a rookie mistake. He was trapped.
He turned his head to the right and looked through a gap between the fabric and the floor. He saw the soles of a pair of boots: heavy treads, worn and scuffed leather uppers, lots of buckles.
The boots made their way from one end of the room to the other.
A door opened, creaking on rusty hinges, and then closed again.
The man downstairs was still on the phone. “Up to you, obviously, but I say we check the garden, then get out of here. Alright? Alright. Sweet. We’ll see you there.”
The flashlight swept across the floor, the light glowing through the thin cotton valance.
The boots came closer, shoes on polished wood. He saw them again, closer this time. He could have reached out and touched them.
The boots moved out of sight, away to the door, steps sounded going away again.
“Nothing up here,” the man said.
“You sure? They want us to be absolutely sure.”
“Check yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“If you say it’s okay, it’s okay. Take it easy.”
Milton slid carefully out from under the bed and stayed low, crouching, listening. He heard steps, a pause, more steps, a door opening downstairs, then closing, then another door, a heavier door, then closing, and then silence.
He moved quickly but quietly out onto the landing, gently pulled the door closed and then descended, treading on the sides of the steps as he made his way down to minimise the risk of putting weight on a creaking board. He did the same on the next set of stairs. He was halfway down the final flight, facing the big front door and about to make the turn to head back along the long hall to the kitchen and the rear door, when he heard the sound of a key in the front door’s lock.
He froze: too late to go back up, too late to keep going down.
The door didn’t open.
He realised what it was: they had forgotten to lock it.
The fresh, cool evening air hit his face as he opened the rear door and stepped out into the garden. He breathed it in deeply. He heard the sound of two powerful motorcycle engines grumbling and growling into life, the sound
fading as they accelerated away. He shut the door behind him and walked carefully and quickly to the road.
10
MILTON MADE HIS WAY towards the house that Madison had run to last night, the one with the old man who had threatened to call the police. It was another big place, a sprawling building set within well tended gardens and fronted by a stone wall topped with ornamental iron fencing. Milton buzzed the intercom set into the stone pillar to the right of the gates and waited. There was no answer. He tried again with the same result. He was about to leave when he saw the old man. He came out of a side door, moving slowly and with the exaggerated caution of advanced age. Behind him was a wide lawn, sloping down to the shore. A collie trotted around the garden with aimless, happy abandon, shoving its muzzle into the flowerbeds in search of an interesting scent.
“Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” Milton said. “Could I have a word?”
Milton assessed him as he approached. He was old: late eighties, he guessed. He was tall but his frame had withered away with age so that his long arms and legs were spindly, sharply bony shoulders pointing through the fabric of the polo shirt that he was wearing.
“What can I do for you?”
“I was here last night.”
The man thought for a moment, the papery skin of his forehead crinkling. He remembered and a scowl descended. “This morning, you mean?”
“That’s right.”
“She woke me up, all that racket, my wife, too. You with her?”
“No, sir. But I drove her out here.”
“So what are you? A taxi driver?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“John Smith. And you?”
“Victor Leonard.”
“Sorry about all the noise, Mr. Leonard. The disturbance.”
“What the hell was she so exercised about?”
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me––did she say anything?”
Milton watched through the bars of the gate as he pursed his withered lips. “Didn’t make a whole heap of sense. She was in a terrible panic. Just asking for help. I’ve no idea what she wanted help for. She had her cell phone out and kept trying to make a call but it didn’t look like she was getting through. I could see she needed help so I told her she could come in. My wife, Laura, she sleeps downstairs because she’s just had her knee replaced, she was up too, all that noise. I got her inside but then she got a whole lot worse. Couldn’t make any sense out of her. Laura picked up the phone and started talking to the dispatcher, ‘this girl here is asking for help, can you send someone to help her,’ and as she finished the call and turned to her and told her to sit down and relax, the police were on their way, as soon as she said that, out the door she went.”
“And?”
“And nothing much. Police came around half an hour later. It was a single officer, he had a look around the place. Said he looked around the whole neighbourhood but he couldn’t find her anywhere. They asked me the questions I guess they ask everyone: what did she look like, what was she wearing, what did she say, all that. I told them what I could remember.” He paused. “I’ve got six kids, Mr. Smith, and I’m sure one or two of them could probably tell you more about drugs than I could. But, you ask me, that girl was pretty well drugged up. She had her hand on the sideboard to help her stay upright. Big eyes––pupils practically as big as saucers. She almost fell over twice while I was talking to her. And she wasn’t making any sense. If that’s not someone under the influence of something or another, I don’t know what is. You ask me, whatever she thought her problems were, they were in her mind––hallucinations or whatever you want to call them.”
“Did you see where she went?”
“Over the fence. Straight into Pete Waterfield’s garden, I guess because he had his security light on, looked like maybe he was in. She pounded on his door but he’s off on vacation with his grandkids and when she didn’t get an answer she kept on going––into his back garden and then away.”
“That leads down to the cliffs?”
“Sure does. You see the boat he’s got parked down there? Behind the car?” Milton said that he did. “She crouched down there, between the two, as if she was hiding from something. I saw her try and make a call on her phone again but I guess it didn’t get anywhere, like the others, because she upped and made a run for it. And that’s the last time I saw her.”
“Yes,” Milton said. “Me too. The cliffs are fenced off there?”
“Around the house, sure they are. But not further down.”
“You think she might have gone over the edge?”
“I hope not. That’s a fifty foot drop right onto the rocks.” He paused. “What’s it got to do with you, anyway? She’s just a customer, right?”
“I’m worried.”
“Ain’t like no taxi drivers I know, get worried about the people they drive.”
“I think something bad has happened to her.”
“Nothing bad happens around here, Mr. Smith.”
“I don’t know about that.” Milton took a business card for his taxi business from his pocket. “I appreciate you talking to me. Maybe I am worrying too much, but maybe I’m not. The police won’t even treat this as a missing person enquiry until she’s been gone a couple more days and, even then, it’s not going to be very high up their list of priorities. I wonder, if you think of anything else, or if you hear anything, or if anyone says anything to you, could you give me a call?”
“Sure I can.”
Milton passed the card through the bars of the gate.
“One more thing,” he said. “The house over there”––he pointed to the house he had just been inside––“do you know who owns it?”
“The company place?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s owned by a company, one of the tech firms down in Palo Alto. Was on the market last year. Ten million dollars. What do you think of that?”
Milton made a show of being impressed.
“Good for the rest of us, too. They send executives there to stay––guys they’ve just hired before they can find a place of their own. None of them ever make much of an effort round here with the rest of us. Not unreasonable, I suppose. Why would they? They’re only stopping on the way to something else.”
“Know who’s in there now?”
“Afraid not. It’s empty, I think.”
“Apart from last night.”
“You can say that again.”
Milton thanked him and the old man went back to his front door. Milton turned back to the big house again. The place was quiet, peaceful, but there was something in that stillness that he found disturbing. It was as if the place was haunted, harbouring a dark secret that could only mean bad things for Madison.
11
MILTON PRESSED THE buzzer on the intercom and then stepped back, waiting for it to be answered. It was early, just before nine, and the sun was struggling through thinning fog. The brownstone was in Nob Hill, a handsome building that had been divided into apartments over the course of its life. Rows of beech had been planted along both sides of the street twenty or thirty years ago, and the naked trees went some way to lending a little bucolic charm to what would otherwise have been a busy suburban street. The cars parked beneath the overhanging branches were middle-of-the-road saloons and SUVs. The houses looked well kept. Both were good indications that the area was populated by owner-occupiers with decent family incomes. Milton thought of Madison and her reticence to talk about the money she was making. It must have been pretty good to be able to live here.
“Hello?”
“It’s John Smith.”
The lock buzzed. Milton opened the door and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
Trip was waiting for him inside the opened door.
“Morning, Mr. Smith.”
“Anything?”
He shook his head.
Milton winced. “Two days.
”
“I know. I’m worried now.”
He led the way into the sitting room.
“You’ve spoken to the police?”
“About ten times.”
“What did they say?”
“Same––they won’t declare her missing until this time tomorrow. Three days, apparently, that’s how long it has to be. It’s because of what she does, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“If this was a secretary from Sacramento they would’ve been out looking for her as soon as soon as someone says she’s not where she’s supposed to be.”
Milton gestured to indicate the apartment. “Do you mind if I have a look around? There might be something you’ve missed. The benefit of fresh eyes?”
“Yeah, that’s fine. I get it.”
“Could you do me a favour?”
“Sure.”
“Get me a coffee? I’m dying for a drink.”
“Sure.”
That was better. Milton wanted him out of the way while he looked around the apartment. He would have preferred him to have left the place altogether, but if he worked quickly he thought he would be able to do what needed to be done.
The place was comfortably sized: two bedrooms, one much smaller than the other, a bathroom, a kitchen-diner. It was nicely furnished. The furniture was from IKEA but it was at the top end of their range; Milton knew that because he had visited the store to buy the things he needed for his own place. There was a sofa upholstered in electric blue, a large bookcase that was crammed with books, a coffee table with copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and a crimson rug with a luxurious deep pile. A plasma screen stood on a small unit with a PlayStation plugged in beneath it and a selection of games and DVDs alongside. There was a healthy-looking spider plant standing in a pewter vase.
Milton went straight to the bedroom. It was a nice room, decorated in a feminine style, with lots of pastel colours and a pretty floral quilt cover. He opened the wardrobe and ran his fingers along the top shelf. He opened the chest of drawers and removed her underwear, placing it on the bed. The drawer was empty. He replaced the clothes and closed the drawer again. Finally, he took the books and magazines from the bedside table. He opened the magazines and riffled their pages. Nothing. Once again, beyond the detritus of a busy life, there was nothing that provided him with any explanation of what might have happened to her in Pine Shore.
