They would. It was just instinctual, but now that he had something solid to deal with he thought they would find her. It was starting to feel like a case with a shape and a pattern—something he could sink his teeth into. And the more he applied himself to that case, the further away he got from the self-doubts and the sense of uselessness that had settled into his bones.
Susan forwarded the picture to him, and he was at his office by 7:30 a.m. looking at it on his computer screen. The picture said a lot. The most important thing was the smile—seemingly genuine and unforced. He couldn’t be sure, but it appeared that Alexi wasn’t being mistreated. According to Susan, the clothes she was wearing were different. She recognized them as Alexi’s clothes, but it wasn’t the same outfit that she were wearing when she left home on the day she disappeared. That was important news—and, almost certainly, good news. What it said was that she hadn’t been snatched up off the street in some sort of kidnapping. Instead, her disappearance had been planned enough in advance for her to take a change of clothes. Alexi seemed somehow to have been involved in the planning of it.
What other information was the photo giving him? One thing seemed sure: Alexi was not in this alone. The photo was no selfie. She was anywhere from eight to ten feet from the camera. Although she could have set it somewhere with an automatic timer, it looked far too posed. It was also possible that she asked a stranger to take the picture, but he couldn’t imagine a fifteen-year-old on the run being comfortable enough to do that. No, there was someone with her who had taken the picture, and that person was probably the one who had arranged her disappearance.
Susan said the photo had appeared on her phone in the early evening. Although the sun had set by the time she received the message, the photo was taken while there was still natural light. There was no time stamp on the photo, but it was definitely taken during daylight. Could Alexi and her mysterious companion have taken the photo several hours earlier before sending it to her mother? Why would she do that? The note with the photo said simply, “Mom, I’m okay.” If she wanted to give her mother reassurance about her safety, it made no sense for her to wait and do it later.
She hadn’t waited at all—he was sure of that. Alexi was standing in full daylight, with the sun off to her left and her long shadow stretched out to her right. Judging by the length of that shadow, the photo was taken sometime between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. The question, then, was not when it was taken but where it was taken. It seemed clear that she was no longer in Indianapolis or the immediate vicinity. When the photo was taken, Alexi was probably about two time zones to the west.
Where was she exactly? The photo seemed ready to give up that information as well. The background behind Alexi was hazy, but if you looked at it carefully you could see the outline of a large mountain range that appeared to be rising up from the broad plain. There was nothing like that in Indiana or anywhere near there. After studying the photo and comparing it with a few stock travel photos on the Internet, he thought he had it pinned down. The timing was right as well. If someone had been driving west from Indianapolis ever since Alexi disappeared, that’s just where they would be when the photo was taken. Alexi and her traveling companion were somewhere just east of Denver.
He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, trying to decide what to do next. At some point he had to tell Susan, but he didn’t want to do that just yet. If he thought she had information about why Alexi was heading west, he would have asked for her help immediately. But their conversation the day before had been pretty exhaustive, and he doubted if she knew anything. He knew he’d have to tell her what he had discovered before the morning was out, but he didn’t want to alarm her any more than he had to. It was one thing for her to think that her daughter was away from home, just hiding out somewhere. But it was something else for her to find out that Alexi was on the road, heading west, and probably getting farther and farther away by the hour.
There must be something in his notes that would help. He’d spent yesterday afternoon walking a tightrope with Alexi’s friends, trying to get as much information as he could without telling them that she had gone missing. He hated working under those kinds of restrictions. Nevertheless, he got the impression from her friends that she didn’t hang around with anyone suspicious—no one who might have enticed her to run away. If there had been someone in the shadows, worming their way into Alexi’s life over a period of time, they would have left some sort of pattern or trail. No one was that careful.
But perhaps that’s the clue—or the non-clue. Maybe he should be looking for something that had happened just recently—someone who had just come into Alexi’s life and caused her to get up and run. What had her friend Laura said? He found the page with his notes: “Alexi said she had just met someone who might be able to help her.” Apparently, that was all she said. There was no hint of what she meant.
“Met someone”—how do you narrow down the possibilities? Theoretically, Alexi could have met someone anywhere. It might have been in a place or in a context that no one would ever imagine. But the starting place was the everyday things she did. She led a rather orderly life—predictable days in a very structured environment. There was a lot of footage of her movements in the video files from the cameras around the church complex. That was a good place to start.
He looked at the videos for the last few weeks, skimming through them, using all the shortcuts. But the work was still tedious. If he found a snippet in which Alexi appeared, he hit the pause button and scrolled back to look at that section more closely. But it was pretty dull stuff—mostly, Alexi in a youth group meeting, Alexi walking through the sanctuary with her mother, and things like that. If he hadn’t already invested so much time, he might have given up the whole idea as useless. But after searching through nearly two weeks’ worth of video files, he decided to go all the way to the end.
Then the video from the last Sunday service caught his attention. There was something that could be important. He ran back the portion that began with Susan talking to the other congregants in the waiting room just before the services. He remembered that sequence, because it occurred just before Alexi emerged from the side door into the waiting room with an angry look on her face. He went through the video again, following Alexi as she worked her way through the crowd until she was face-to-face with her mother. But it wasn’t the confrontation with her mother that caught his attention. What jumped out at him was the other woman in the picture.
He remembered that woman as she entered into the church. She was tall, quite attractive, and seemingly out of place. She had a brief conversation with Susan, but after a few moments, Susan turned away to talk to some other people who seemed to need her attention. The important part came next, as he watched the other woman’s eyes over the next several minutes. He took the video that was focused on the woman and ran it on another monitor side by side with the feed from the camera that had been pointed at Alexi. Looking at the two monitors in sync, he saw something that he otherwise might have missed. As Alexi crossed the room and changed directions to get around groups of people, the woman’s eyes changed direction as well. By the time he was through playing through the videos again, he was more convinced than ever. The woman was ignoring everything else and following Alexi’s every movement.
The excitement surged through him as he realized that he may have found the person he was looking for. He froze the screen for a minute and tried to enlarge the picture of the woman, but he couldn’t see anything else that was really helpful. But what happened next on the video reinforced his theory. When Alexi finally reached the area where Susan was standing, her mother was talking to someone else. Alexi’s anger and frustration was apparent from her body language, but the mysterious stranger seemed eager to help her. She had a few brief words with Alexi and then reached over toward Susan, letting her know that her daughter needed her. It was a brief encounter, but it was a contact nonetheless. He’d have to check with Susan to s
ee if she had ever met this woman before, but he felt certain she had no idea who she was.
And then he remembered something else. He fast-forwarded the video until it reached the point several minutes later after the waiting room had emptied and the last of the congregants had filed into the Sanctuary. The video monitor showed only an empty room for several minutes while the services were going on. But suddenly, it happened as he remembered. The door to the sanctuary opened, and the same woman came walking out alone well before the end of the services. She headed across the waiting room, walking in long, hurried strides, until she reached the outside door and continued out into the parking lot.
He quickly checked his library of video files, searching for the batch that had the videos from the parking lot cameras. He found himself hurrying at this point, as if his quarry might somehow get away. He found the parking lot video with the same time stamp as the last scene from the interior of the church. As if on cue, the door to the church opened up, and the woman emerged and began walking across the parking lot until she reached her car. She opened the driver’s door and got in and sat down. She remained there for a few minutes and didn’t move. That struck him as a bit odd, but he kept watching the screen waiting for her to leave. She finally pulled what looked like a smartphone out of her purse and aimed it straight ahead through the windshield, apparently taking a picture.
That last gesture had him puzzled. He checked the files from the other cameras monitoring the parking lot, looking for some movement in that direction. If there had been anyone there, the cameras would have recorded it. But then it hit him. She wasn’t taking a picture of a person but of the sign that appeared in large letters on the outside wall of the building: the God’s Children Foundation.
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If there was one thing the foundation’s video cameras were calibrated to do, it was to focus in on the license plates of cars in the parking lot. Davey wrote down her license number, noting that they were Illinois plates. Then he saw something next to the license plate that he quickly seized on: the sticker from the rental car agency. Luckily, it wasn’t just any agency but rather one that he knew exactly how to deal with. He found the phone number he needed in an old pocket calendar from his days on the police force. After a few rings, there was a voice he recognized.
“Denby.”
“Jim, it’s Davey Fallon.”
“Davey! How are you? I haven’t heard from you in a while. I understand you’re not on the police force anymore.”
He exchanged pleasantries with Jim Denby until he was ready to ask what he wanted.
“Jim, I need a favor.”
“Davey—anything you want. You want me to set you up with a good deal on a rental car?”
“I don’t need a car. What I need is information.”
Denby’s voice lost a little of its joviality. He was looking for information about a customer who had rented a car, and he wanted her name and address. More than that, he wanted to know if she had rented any other cars since then.
“I don’t know if I can do that. We have a pretty strict company policy about giving out that kind of information without a warrant or a subpoena—or something.”
He feigned a bit of commiseration for the plight that Denby was in, but he pressed on. This involves a missing teenage girl, he told him. She may have been kidnapped. She could be in danger. He kept pushing buttons.
“The people holding her might be abusing her right now, so every minute counts. We need that information right away.”
That button opened the door. Seven years earlier, he’d worked on a case in which Denby’s own teenage daughter had been abused by a school counselor. When the case was over, Denby kept telling him how grateful he was for his help. He said if he ever needed anything, just ask.
Now, he was asking.
“Okay, give me the license number. Do you want me to call you back?
“If you don’t mind, I’ll just hang on the line.”
Five minutes later, Denby was back with the information. He had the name, address, and phone number of the woman who rented the car.
“She rented it last Saturday at O’Hare Airport and left it off the next day at the Indianapolis Airport.”
He thanked him, and then he waited.
“And like you guessed, she rented another car at the same place three days ago, and this one is scheduled to be returned in San Francisco.”
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He got home at about 8:00 p.m., wondering if his sense of exhilaration would last. He’d accomplished something. He hadn’t been able to say that to himself in a long time. But there was still something tentative about it. It could be that he was starting to get control over the direction of his life…but, maybe not.
There was a letter in the mail from Jimmy’s sister, Carolyn. Just looking at the envelope gave him a sudden sinking feeling. He didn’t know why he was alarmed, but it was probably because Carolyn always contacted him by email and never by letter. But why should that be a problem? Had the world reached the point where a simple written letter had become ominous?
He walked upstairs and checked the phone for messages, and then he looked to see what was in the refrigerator. But these were time-wasters. He was just putting off Carolyn’s letter. For reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, he had a feeling it was going to be unpleasant. He opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. As he did so, a picture fell out.
Dear Davey
I’ve put off telling you this for far too long, and now I feel terrible about it. It would have been a lot easier for me to come right out with it many years ago, because I could have avoided so many lies. Now I feel ashamed.
Jimmy only hid the truth from you for the few months that you knew him, but I’ve been holding back things for the last forty-five years. I feel awful about that. There were times when I wanted to say something. And there were other times when I was afraid I would slip up and use the wrong name and be mortified about the whole thing. But all of that is now in the past. I only hope that you won’t think badly of me for deceiving you for as long as I did.
My only excuse is that I thought I was doing what Jimmy would have wanted. He had a reason for hiding the truth, because things were so different then. He didn’t feel he could trust anyone connected with the army. He knew the consequences would have been far too harsh if it had gotten out. I know he loved you, and I’m sure he wanted to tell you. But he was afraid. But as I think about things now, I know he would approve of what I’m doing. He probably would have wished I’d done it sooner.
Davey, I’ve received word from New York that Lou has died. I heard about it just before I talked to you the other night, but I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I had to do it in writing. When Lou was alive, I could rationalize that I had a reason for keeping the whole story from you. But with Lou dead, that’s over with. There’s no reason to hide the truth.
Davey, it was just Lou. “LouAnn” was a name that he and Jimmy agreed to use when they were around others and felt that a male name would give too much away. Lou was a sweet boy with whom Jimmy had a very tender affair. He grew up to become a wonderful man—a successful art dealer in New York. A few years ago, Lou went to Canada and got married to the man he had been living with for twenty-five years. They were very happy together. It was his husband who called me to tell me that Lou had died.
Davey, I know this will come as a shock to you, but I hope you won’t think badly of Jimmy. The affection that he had for you was very real, and he was very lucky to have had you as a friend.
I don’t know if what I’m sending you is something you’d like to have or not. However, I just thought you might like a copy of a picture that I took of the two of them together before Jimmy was sent to Vietnam.
Please forgive me for all of this. Your friendship means so much to me. I just hope that I haven’t done anything to destroy it.
Love,
Carolyn
He stared at the photo. It showed Jimmy sitting on a bench with a guitar resting on his right thigh. It was the same guitar that was now sitting in the closet. Jimmy’s left arm was draped over the shoulder of a young man who was sitting just to his left. They were both smiling into the camera.
His hand started to shake. But before the photo fell out of his grasp, he found a place to put it on the shelf next to his own picture with Jimmy—the photo that had been taken so many years ago in Saigon.
He stood there for a second, gripping the side of the table, as he looked at the photos. Then he realized he had to sit down.
Alexi
She wrote in her journal as they drove, but she stopped doing it when she began to get carsick. Gina asked her if everything was okay, and she said she was fine. She decided to just lean back against the headrest and focus on the music.
Gina had what she called her “road pack”—a little battered case of CDs to play when there was time to kill on a long trip. Alexi had never heard of any of the singers before, but she liked the music and the acoustic guitar that accompanied the words. The songs all seemed to have a story to tell, and she got caught up in several of the more poignant ones.
“I have a guitar at home,” Gina said. “I get it out every so often and try to play some of those songs—especially the ones from the Indigo Girls. There are also some Chris Williamson and Ferron tunes that I like to work on. Do you play any musical instruments?”
“I used to.”
The memory wasn’t a happy one. But she finally told Gina about the guitar that she had sitting in her closet. She hadn’t played it for almost a year.
“I had no idea you knew how to play the guitar. If I get out my guitar when we get home, will you play something for me?”
Through the Bookstore Window Page 14
