The Detective Megapack

by Various Writers

  “You’ve called everyone?”

  “Yes.” She rested her hand gently on a stapled stack of papers on the table beside her. “I called everyone I could think of. Everyone in his contact list in his e-mail program that might have heard from him. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” Her fists suddenly clenched, her eyes narrowed, and her lips pressed tightly together.

  I kept going, hoping to distract her. I asked about money, his credit cards, retirement accounts, investments. Nothing had been touched. She’d spent considerable time over the past few days going over the last three years worth of financial data, and nothing seemed amiss. Nothing was missing from the house, as far as she could tell. He didn’t even have much money with him. She thought it would have been less than $20, since he rarely carried much cash anymore.

  “Oh,” I said quickly, “why is that?”

  She half smiled. “He’d always be donating money, or loaning it out, or just giving big tips to people wherever he went. I don’t mean to sound…I mean, I love that about him, that he’s so generous, but you see—well, he’d just go through the money so quickly, so we agreed. He carried just enough for a paper, lunch, maybe a few little things, and told everyone his wife had him on a strict allowance.” She shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I suppose people thought I was controlling and cheap, but we really couldn’t afford for him to spend so much.”

  She looked intently at me, as though waiting for my approval or my judgment, so I said, “Sure, that makes sense.”

  She nodded again, and began shuffling through the papers.

  Based on what she showed me, it was clear they were comfortable financially, though not wealthy by any means. Most of their money was in the house, which was paid for, and their two cars. Kidnapping seemed unlikely, but still worth considering, I suppose.

  “Had anyone asked either of you for a large loan recently, or seemed particularly interested in your finances?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  I continued. “Since the night he disappeared, especially right afterwards, were there any strange phone calls or hang-ups?”

  “No.”

  “Any odd letters or packages?”

  She froze. “Gosh, I don’t know. We don’t even have a mailbox here. Everything goes to our post office box, and there’s been nothing unusual there. I guess someone might have put something in a neighbor’s box by mistake.”

  I asked her to check with the neighbors, glad to have a task to give her, and then I asked for a copy of the contact list. She stood and took it with her to a room down the hall where I heard a copier running.

  While she was gone, I scanned the room. It was neat, spare, with a faint haze of dust on everything. The furniture was mostly new, in an odd mix of overstuffed upholstery and shaker-style pieces, with a few ornate antiques thrown in. An upright piano stood in one dim corner with a handful of photos scattered across the top. A pleasant room, but it didn’t tell me much.

  Harriet’s shoes—navy leather pumps—thudded faintly as she moved from carpet to wood to rug coming back into the room. She handed me the pages and we sat for almost twenty minutes going through them, page after page.

  “He never deletes anyone out, even people he hasn’t spoken to in ages. Tom always says that some of his best times are spent talking to old friends and business associates. He can pick up the phone and call someone he hasn’t heard from in a decade or more, and talk and laugh and do business with them like they’d played golf that weekend.” She smiled, looking almost happy for a moment. “I’ve never understood how he could do that. I’ll run into someone I haven’t spoken to in six months and not have a word to say beyond, ‘How are you?’ and ‘You look wonderful.’”

  Harriet showed me the code she used when she went through the list, noting which ones she called, which people he knew only faintly—say, through church or rotary—which were family and close friends, business associates, people she knew he hadn’t spoken to in years. I added a few notes as well, including highlighting people Harriet hadn’t been able to locate, and anyone who lived on the peninsula.

  After a few more questions, I finished by asking, “Is there anything else you’d like to ask me, or any questions you have?”

  She stiffened abruptly and looked down at her feet, and I braced myself. She said, “Do you think he’s alive?”

  I paused, trying to come up with the right answer, but there just wasn’t one. “I really don’t know, Harriet.”

  She sighed and leaned back in the chair, looking exhausted and defeated.

  I suggested she get some rest, and promised I’d call the next day to give her an update. She nodded dully and sat staring straight ahead while I let myself out.

  As I climbed in and started my car, I felt as though I’d escaped. I was relieved to be away from her grief and fear. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling thrilled to be working on such a baffling case. Together, those emotions brought a truckload of guilt with them. The only thing I could really do to help her was to find her husband, and I needed enthusiasm to do my job well, but did that excuse it? That was another question I wasn’t prepared to answer.

  As I drove out of the Reynolds’ neighborhood, I called the Sheriff’s office and made an appointment to meet with a Lieutenant Withams, who was surprisingly willing to talk. We met at a nearby Hardees and found a quiet corner to sit in.

  “So, what is it you need to know, ma’am?” he asked, with a large, rough hand planted firmly on the creased and dirty file folder in front of him.

  A full copy of the file would have been nice, but it seemed unlikely. “How about telling me what steps you’ve taken so far. I’m sure you’ve been thorough,” I added.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Are you?”

  “Well, I know your time and resources are limited, but I have a lot of respect—”

  He put a hand up. “Sheriff told me to cooperate, and I will. I don’t need my ego stroked.” He started by pulling out a map and folding it into about a twelve-inch square. “Here,” he said, making Xs with a blue ballpoint, “is where we found the car, here’s his Mom’s house, his own home, and the gas station we’re guessing he would’ve headed for.”

  I studied it briefly, asking questions about the exact spot where Tom’s car was. “I was wondering—could he have gone to a nearby farm or something where they might have had some gas to give him?”

  Withams shrugged again. “That area’s mostly a mix of marsh, housing developments, and fields.” He turned the map toward him. “Lots of folks have dogs and shotguns, too. Not to mention jobs to get up for, bright and early. That time of night, I don’t see a man like him waking someone up just because he was dumb enough to let his tank run dry. But, who knows?”

  I took notes as Withams continued. He had been thorough. He’d spoken with dozens of people, knocked on a lot of doors, checked accounts, cell phone usage, even spoken to a few people at Tom’s former job.

  “And the car?”

  He flipped through the file until he got to a report from the state police, who had more of a crime lab than the local department. “No signs of blood, no tampering or forced entry. Nothing illegal or out of the ordinary at all, in fact. No papers aside from the manual and registration. Missus Reynolds said he’d just cleaned it out, and the garbage all went to the dump. And the scene? No skid marks, no footwear impressions, nothing dropped or discarded.” He scowled. “Nothing. Just nothing.”

  He listed a few other things he’d done, including checking Tom’s credit and his criminal history, which basically got him nowhere. When he was finished, I asked, “Lieutenant, what do you think happened to him?”

  He pushed back slightly from the table and reached down to adjust the gear on his belt. Finally, he sighed and shook his head. “I haven’t the slightest idea, ma’am. There is not one piece of this that makes sense to me. It’s that damn car.” He looked up to see how I’d react to the curse, and seemed reassured by the lack of offense on my face. “Well, if it
weren’t for that, I’d be sure he’d taken off with some lady. As it is?” He shrugged. “I was expecting him to roll in hung over the next day, or for his wife to get some kind of half-assed redneck ransom note.” He looked at me more confidently this time, almost challenging me to object to his words.

  I ignored them and went on. “Could he have gotten lost in the woods?”

  He exhaled sharply and tilted his head. “I don’t see how. He might’ve forgotten the woods around here since he moved away, but I understand he’s been a hunter all his life. He’d be too savvy for that.”

  “Have there been any abductions that look similar to this? Kidnappings?”

  “Only on TV,” he said. “I’ll tell you what we have seen, when adults have disappeared. The person, man or woman, has had some bad news—usually money or health, or maybe a cheating girlfriend—and they’ve gotten in a car or thumbed a ride on the highway, and they’ve just vanished. Sometimes they turn up again. Sometimes not. But oftentimes, there’s just no way to find them until they get locked up for something, killed or hurt bad, or…hell, one guy—real sumbitch—he sent his wife a postcard from someplace sunny telling her how much happier he was not to have to listen to her whining anymore. As if there was something unreasonable about her expecting him to work now and then and help pay the bills.” Lieutenant Withams had a mean look on his face as he remembered it.

  After a moment, he turned his attention back to me and I asked, “Is there anything you can recommend I look into? Anything you didn’t have time to do that might be promising?”

  He leaned forward, resting his chin on his folded hands. “Let me see. Did she give you the list of contacts?”

  I nodded.

  “I called the top tier—the ones he’d spoken with the most. But there are maybe two hundred more on there that I just didn’t have time for.”

  I grimaced, and he smiled.

  “And I didn’t knock on every single door between the gas station and where we found his car.”

  I sighed and nodded. “OK, I’ll start on those. Will you let me know if you can think of anything else that might be useful?”

  “You bet. And if you find anything…”

  “I’ll keep you up to speed.” Only with Harriet’s permission, that is, but he didn’t need to hear that.

  * * * *

  I followed the lieutenant to the field where the car had been found. There was nowhere to pull off except for the dirt-and-gravel farm road that Tom had left his car on, and I wanted to leave that clear. The roads were narrow with no shoulder, and edged with deep drainage ditches, so Withams obligingly turned on his lightbar and waved to me to park in front of him along the road. I got out and he showed me the spot, pointing out various landmarks. There was a trio of rusting bins—wide, squat silos made of corrugated steel that farmers store grain in—just visible above the treeline.

  “Those bins—” I started.

  “Checked ’em, first thing. Also the abandoned house beyond those trees there,” he pointed toward where I knew the bay was, “and the five closest houses.”

  I walked around for a few minutes, eyes down, studying the ground. There were prints all over, from boots and sneakers mostly, but I knew it had rained heavily early on the morning after Tom had disappeared, so they’d be more recent. I nudged at some trash with my foot, and peered under a plastic bag.

  Withams watched with a slightly amused expression. “What are you expecting to find?”

  “More than I’d find if I didn’t look at all,” I said. “I’m sure you already did this, but it never hurts to have another set of eyes.”

  He shrugged, then walked back to his car and propped himself on the hood.

  I kept going, moving in a spiral pattern out from the car’s location. I wanted intensely to find some critical piece of evidence. After ten minutes, I’d have settled for finding something mildly interesting or even vaguely suggestive. But aside from a disturbing amount of roadside trash, there was nothing that struck me as deserving to be called evidence.

  Finally, as I saw the lieutenant checking his watch and my own patience began to wane, I gave in and decided to spend the rest of my afternoon knocking on doors. Withams wished me luck, and we drove off in opposite directions.

  I went to house after house that day, well into the evening, repeating the same words. “Hi, my name is Lauren Lindsay. I’m a private investigator. I was hired by Harriet Reynolds, from over near Craddockville, to help find her husband Tom. Can you tell me about the night he went missing?”

  I met some very nice people; some that were fairly polite, but probably wouldn’t tell me if my butt was on fire; some that didn’t seem bright enough—or sober enough—to remember a night eleven days earlier; and a handful that were so creepy that I found myself checking their yards for signs of freshly-turned earth or unusually well-fed hogs.

  After repeating my spiel yet again, one woman asked, through a barely-cracked door, “There a reward?”

  I hesitated, and she started to close the door, so I said, “Sure. Yeah, I’m sure that could be arranged. Did you see something?”

  “I might have,” she said. “Which night was that, again?”

  I told her, and she said she saw a man picked up by a maroon sedan, around 11 P.M. “And…I think they was fighting.”

  I got the clear impression she was inventing on the spot in the hope of making some cash, so I asked for a description. The woman hesitated. “Did you see if he had a ponytail?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, that’s right. I remember he did.”

  “Thanks, then,” I said. “Wrong man.”

  She slammed the door, swearing, as I turned and walked back to my car. That was the closest I came to anything useful—and it wasn’t anything remotely like close.

  Withams was right, too—most of the locals did have dogs. I was sniffed and growled and barked at. A gorgeous black lab-rottweiler mix lunged at me so hard that the chain around his neck yanked him off his feet, and he struggled in the mud to stand again, shaking himself. He was more cautious, but continued barking just the same. If I were home in Richmond, I’d have grabbed my pepper spray before wandering through this area. I hadn’t thought I’d need it on vacation. Next time, I was bringing it.

  * * * *

  The next morning, I was awakened by gulls crying, and the sound of a small boat as it chugged away from the dock near my rental. For a moment, I wished I was going with them, but then the wind gusted and blew a wave of rain against the front windows. An awful day for a boat ride, but a perfect day for computer searches. I started with the PI databases, and found little of interest. The database showed the few places they’d lived—they spent nearly thirty-six years in the same house in Charlottesville, Virginia—but I found almost nothing of note. He had a hunting and fishing permit, which wasn’t a surprise, and it showed his last employment, at the Virginia National Bank. The rest was as expected—family, neighbors, a whole bunch of people the system thought might be related to Tom, but probably weren’t.

  It was never easy teasing the meaningful data out from the rest, but I saved the report to refer to later, just in case something came up. Often, the database showed unadmitted bankruptcies, a criminal record here or there—it was always more luck than anything when the system could spit that out—and even suggested a spouse or kids that the person had forgotten to mention. But I already knew Harriet and Tom were married, and their data was pretty straightforward. They had no mortgage on their current house, owned no other properties, and there wasn’t even a speeding ticket showing.

  I moved on to a whole slew of other searches, like newspapers, blogs, and general web searches. I turned up some interesting articles, including a profile of Tom in the Charlottesville Daily Progress, published when he retired. I learned that he was an avid golfer, an active member of Rotary and the local chamber of commerce, and had served on the city council for two terms more than ten years earlier.

  Harriet’s name came up in a few similar ar
ticles, though she was less public with her activities. I pulled up one story whose title caught my attention—“Reynolds Indicted for Check Fraud”—but it was Shauna Reynolds, no apparent relation. Her attorney’s name was Tom, which is why the article came up. I sighed in disgust and went outside for a quick break.

  The overhang on the porch protected me from the slow, light rain, except when the wind carried it in my direction. The air was warm and smelled salty-sweet, and I wished I could go walk on the beach. I knew there was a short path I could take to get a closer look at the lighthouse that I could see from the small deck, and there were overlooks where I could see herds of wild ponies and flocks of egrets and ibises. And then maybe some nice, fried local seafood for lunch. I wanted so badly to go out and play.

  Over the last few months, I’d taken scores of repetitive statements in a huge class-action lawsuit, picked up medical records, made thousands of copies, written reports, handled stupid questions, and answered phone calls at all hours—all of it critical, urgent, life-or-death. Then the clients would call with questions that made it obvious they hadn’t even read the reports I’d sent them.

  I complained to Jess about it—she’d referred the law firm to me—but she was less than sympathetic. “Brainless paperwork and brain-dead clients are part of the gig, darlin’,” she told me, and then reminded me how much they were paying. And yeah, that was nice, but I’d barely seen or spoken to friends and family since it started. And as for dating…well, I wasn’t sure I’d particularly missed that. Still, I wondered if I’d made a mistake by becoming a PI. Is this what my future would be like? I heaved another deep sigh, went back to my desk, and started plugging keywords into the browser again.

  By the time the sun began setting and I’d decided to stop for the day, I had a large file of copied web pages on my computer’s desktop, a couple pages of written notes, and a half dozen appointments for the following day. I’d called a few people that the lieutenant and Harriet had both already spoken with, just because they were the most likely to hear from Tom: his siblings, his best friends, a nephew in DC that he was close with, and some former co-workers. I mostly heard what I expected—a whole lot of nothing—but the nephew, a salesman for Verizon, had some interesting insight.