by N. M. Brown
‘Ah.’ Leighton nodded and pretended to understand.
Peering at the screen, Vicki began to tap furiously on the keyboard. She slowly shook her head. ‘Damn! There’s nothing here to indicate who authored the site. But it does provide some data.’
‘What about the “www” address part, does that help?’
‘Not really, it’s usually bogus.’
‘That list you were looking at first, does that show the pages in the order Laurie viewed them?’
‘Yeah, why?’
‘Well, in previous cases where the situation was unclear, I would walk the path of the victim. Find out what they did on that final day. Retrace the route. Maybe we could take a virtual walk through?’
‘Sure.’
Viewing the pages revealed Laurie had initially visited the website of her alma mater, possibly reliving her student days in a bout of nostalgia. The next set of pages related to weather and facilities in Oceanside. This made Vicki smile sadly. Finally, Laurie had performed a Google search for buses and located the Greyhound Coach homepage.
‘I don’t understand this,’ Vicki said as she bit her bottom lip.
‘What?’
‘I don’t see where the Route King’s page came from. I mean she was on the Greyhound page for seven seconds, and then, out of nowhere, this window opened. She didn’t go back to Google – it must have been an automatic pop-up.’
‘So, could this page…’ Leighton looked uncertainly to Vicki, who nodded at him to continue. ‘Could it have been activated or triggered by her search – is that even possible?’
‘Sure.’ Vicki yawned. ‘Excuse me.’
‘It’s okay.’ Leighton grinned. ‘I have that effect on most people.’
‘Don’t be silly; I’m just tired. Anyway, most searches are recorded somewhere and are used to predict future results, so I guess you could program a page to load in response to that. Hang on, there’s something weird here…’ Vicki clicked between windows.
‘What is it?’
‘It looks like the Greyhound site window opened twice simultaneously.’
‘Maybe she clicked on it twice?’ Leighton asked hopefully.
‘Yeah – possibly. But it’s more likely that one of the pages was false – a dummy page designed to sit on top of the real one.’
‘Like a mask?’
‘Exactly. Like a mask.’
‘But why?’
‘False pages are often used to collect bank details or scam users into giving up cash or personal information. However, they can also be used to show artificially inflated prices so guiding customers away from them and on to less reliable sites.’
‘Ah.’ Leighton shifted in his seat. ‘Vicki, can I use the bathroom.’
‘Sure,’ she said and yawned. ‘Sorry, it’s at the end of the long hallway on the right. The light’s on the left wall as you enter.’
The brightly lit corridor was lined with framed sepia photographs of old New York. The first two doors in the hallway were open, and Leighton glanced in as he passed them. Two clinical looking bedrooms featured matching beige and chocolate coloured bedding. Both were lit by identical bedside lamps. In one of the rooms, the bed was covered in a mixture of photographs that looked to have been taken from an overturned shoe box sitting amongst them. Leighton imagined Vicki had been looking through her past when his arrival interrupted her. He sighed guiltily and continued on to pass a neat office, a messier bedroom, and then the bathroom.
When Leighton returned, Vicki was curled up like a child, asleep on the sofa. Obviously, the combination of exhaustion, beer, and emotional turmoil had finally eclipsed her desperation to remain vigilant. Beside, Vicki, some process was happening on the computer, as rows of numbers gradually filled the screen. Tiptoeing around her, Leighton carried the coffee cups to the kitchen, then returned and knelt in front of the sleeping girl.
‘Vicki,’ he said softly. There was no response, just the quiet rise and fall of her breathing.
He figured the white vest and grey sweatpants wouldn’t be enough to keep her warm, so he found a linen closet and returned with a fleece blanket.
Tucking it around Vicki’s shoulders, Leighton had to stop himself from brushing her hair away from her face, as he had done to a smaller sleeping girl decades earlier. He lifted up the stack of photographs and the writing pad and moved to the dining table, where he sat down and began making some basic notes. The facts were increasingly clear to him now. There was a missing girl who had never contacted anyone or returned to her home and job in over a month, there was also a dubious website that seemed to disappear right around the same time the girl did, and finally, there was a bus that seemed to show up and vanish at will. Scratching out possible scenarios on the page, Leighton found that all of them seemed based upon the alarming possibility that Vicki had been right.
Leighton had only managed to write a page and a half when his own eyes began to close. He had planned to rest his head on his arms for a moment, but the combination of food and beer and the company had left him equally drowsy, and within moments, he too was lost to sleep.
When he opened his eyes again, six hours had passed and a stranger was standing over him, pointing a 9mm gun at his head.
Chapter Twenty-One
As the bus approached her, Martha Coombs was nervous as hell. At the age of sixty-seven, she had never left the town of Blythe, but ever since Nigel, her son, had moved down to San Diego six months earlier, she had been determined to visit him for a few days. Nigel, thankfully, had taken care of organising the whole thing for her. Going down to the city hadn’t been her first choice. Once or twice she had called him up and suggested he might come up to visit the old house – she could make his favourite meatloaf, but he had explained he had been too busy with work for that. Martha had lived a long time, and she wasn’t entirely convinced this was the only reason behind her son’s reluctance to visit.
From the age of five, Nigel Coombs had been such a sensitive and fey young man, who she had secretly believed was most likely gay. While his classmates would play whooping war games in the playground, Nigel would collect pretty flowers from the perimeter of the school grounds and bring them home crushed in his satchel. She had never raised the issue of his sexuality with him, mainly because he was so sensitive, such a conversation would prove more difficult for him than it would for her. She had, therefore, waited patiently all through his teenage years for her growing son to confide in her. Even in his early twenties, when he had started working as a hairdresser in Blythe’s only salon and would come home to share the day’s dramas with his momma, he never mentioned romance of any sort. Then, in the last few years, he had taken to spending entire evenings on his computer. Sometimes, late at night, when he thought she was asleep, she would hear the murmurs of other voices and giggles from his bedroom as he spoke to that tiny camera.
Still, she couldn’t criticise him – especially after he had taken the time to buy her a bus ticket. And he had explained it wasn’t just an ordinary one, either – this one was for a new bus company with real nice facilities. He had sent her a paper ticket through the mail and told her to put it safely in her purse straight away.
As the bus rumbled to a stop, Martha checked for the sixth time that the ticket was still in her white leather purse – which it was – then adjusted the back of her permed hair. When the noisy doors hissed open, Martha was both surprised and relieved to see the bus driver – who was not much younger than herself – was a friendly looking man with a neat little white moustache. However, when she stepped upon the stairs and into the gloom of the bus, she saw almost all of the other passengers were men in their twenties or thirties. She smiled at the driver and held out the ticket.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘my son bought this for me so if it’s not right, you can take it up with him.’
‘Not a problem, ma’am,’ replied the grinning driver, who took her ticket without even looking at it. ‘You just find yourself a seat, and once you’re nice and comfy, we’ll
get moving.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
The hands of the woman holding the automatic handgun did not tremble. This, thought Leighton, is someone who had spent sufficient time at a gun club, time to be comfortable gripping that heavy lump of power.
‘Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my house?’ Abigail Reiner asked.
‘It’s okay, ma’am,’ Leighton said, seeming suddenly more alert.
‘Yes, I know it is. I’ve called the police,’ she said as if to confirm his defeat. The woman was dressed in a navy blue suit finished off with some expensive looking jewellery.
‘Mrs Reiner,’ Leighton held up a hand, ‘I’m a friend of your daughter.’
‘Ha,’ she snorted. ‘Somehow I doubt that.’ Stepping to one side, she peered at the kitchen area and glanced distastefully at the beer bottles and food cartons. She then returned her attention to Leighton.
‘Mrs Reiner, my name is Leighton Jones. I’m a retired police officer. I was here speaking to Vicki about the disappearance of her friend – Laurie Taylor.’
Something shifted in the woman’s cold expression.
‘Let me see some identification.’
Leighton reached slowly into his jacket pocket and produced a worn leather wallet, which he held out to her.
Abigail Reiner took the wallet as if it was a smeared in excrement. She then peered inside for longer than was necessary, then finally lowered the weapon. Her expression did not soften.
‘As an ex-police officer, you should know better than to ply a naïve young woman with alcohol. If I discover you’ve touched her, I’ll have you charged with sexual assault. Now get out of my house and stay the hell away from my home, and my daughter!’
‘She came to me – asked for her my help,’ Leighton said as he slipped on his jacket.
‘My daughter is psychologically vulnerable at the best of times, but especially so right now.’
‘I heard about your husband and–’
‘Ex-husband,’ Abigail corrected.
‘In either case, I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, clearly. Men like you disgust me. Now, please, leave my house.’
As he rose from the chair, Leighton tried momentarily to glance at Vicki, who remained asleep on the sofa, but the woman folded her slender arms and shifted her body to ensure she blocked his view.
‘I’m sorry I gave you a fright, ma’am,’ Leighton said sincerely and walked to the door.
‘You didn’t,’ Abigail called victoriously after him.
Leighton stepped out of the Reiner apartment into the bright morning sunlight and the steady sound of the waves against the shore. All around him was an explosion of colour and fragrance from the pink and orange flowers fringing the white apartment.
As he walked to his car, Leighton reflected upon Vicki’s relationship with her mother. It couldn’t have been easy for her growing up beneath the crushing weight of such a formidable personality.
Driving out of the parking area, he was passed by a rookie in a black and white cruiser – no doubt responding to the false alarm. Thankfully, he had escaped just in time.
Leighton drove home, where, after the therapeutic benefit of a long hot shower, he dressed in a pair of charcoal coloured chinos and a white t-shirt and sat, barefoot, at the metal table on his tiled patio. Before him was a breakfast of black tea and a toasted cinnamon bagel spread with apricot preserve. Lying next to this was the envelope containing the bus photographs. After taking a bite of food, Leighton slipped open the envelope and removed a pencil and the sheet of notepaper he had scribbled on. He had drawn a number of squares around the sides of the page. Within these boxes, he had noted certain relevant details. He had also drawn joined lines connecting several of the facts to each other.
Website booking Victim boarded bus
Phone unused Website dead
Victim’s home empty Home undisturbed
No show for work No reports of incident on bus
Bus missing Victim still on bus?
Picking up the pencil, he tapped it on the table for a moment then began writing. Beneath the list of facts, Leighton now wrote a list of words followed by question marks:
Hostage?
Intentional entrapment?
Complicit passengers?
It was these final two words that concerned Leighton most. To break the tension, he sipped his tea and tried to put the pieces together. It had been easy to accept that Laurie may have been abducted from a truck stop restroom by some psycho, but the question of the bus remained. Why would it pretend to be bound for San Diego, but never travel beyond the Escondido bus terminal? Even if there had been some problem at the terminal that meant the bus couldn’t continue, the disgruntled passengers would all have disembarked at the depot. More importantly, if some assault had taken place on an interstate bus, it would have been witnessed and reported by somebody.
Draining the bitter remnants of his tea, Leighton watched the hypnotic sway of the morning lawn sprinklers as they spurted to life. He decided there was now enough of a case to make the whole thing official. He breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of handing this messy burden on to somebody else. The “somebody” in question was his steel-jawed former boss, Chief Roger Gretsch.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mark tried to convince himself he was not deluded as he stepped off the droning plane into the bright air of San Diego’s Lindbergh Field Airport. Shambling down the steel ramp to the bus that would transfer him to the grey terminal building, he shouldered his rucksack and pulled down his sunglasses. The blurry heat haze rising from the tarmac made the planes on the fringe of the runway appear to be melting.
It was still possible, he told himself, he would arrive at the Black Cat Club and simply discover Jo with a guitar slung around her neck, singing to a mesmerised crowd. She would be shocked, and perhaps pissed off about Mark having the gall to show up. They would initially make small talk, but he would eventually ask her why she hadn’t been in touch. However, beneath the pleasantries would be the message she was happy without him. What made the situation so bizarre was that Mark simultaneously hoped this was and was not the case. He didn’t want the rejection, but at least that would mean that she was okay.
In recent weeks, he had heard nothing from Jo. After giving her a few days to settle in with room to breathe, Mark had sent her a simple text message asking if she was okay. It felt needy, but there was nothing romantic about it – just a simple check in. His cell phone confirmed that the message had been delivered but never read. After a couple of weeks of pouring foamy beers and serving burgers, Mark had deleted the original message. He realised that if Jo didn’t want him in her life, he should respect that. But on the previous Friday, he had the night off and had spent it drinking in his own bar. That evening a young local guy with an acoustic guitar had been singing. When he played a couple of Joni Mitchell songs, Mark had been overcome with drunken nostalgia and felt the urge to call Jo, just to tell her that he missed her. simply hear her voice again after five long weeks. Standing in the windy alleyway at the side of the bar, he dialled her number and took a deep breath. There was a click and Mark momentarily felt his heart flutter, then an automated voice told him that the cell phone he was calling was switched off.
At closing time, Mark had staggered home and flopped on his bed. Holding his phone unsteadily in his hand, he looked through all of Jo’s social media accounts. Her final post on Twitter had been on the night she left. Moments into her bus journey, she had taken a photo of herself and shared it with the caption:
‘Off to start the next part of my musical adventure…’
After that there had been no further posts. Mark’s sense of unease grew as he looked at her Facebook page, which had also showed no activity since the day she left. The following morning, with a throbbing head, he had arranged to fly down, to put his mind and heart at rest.
Today, Mark stepped onto the juddering shuttle bus and moved aside as the other passengers
clambered aboard. There were no seats on the vehicle, which was designed purely to shuttle passengers and their hand luggage. At the opposite end of the bus, Mark could see a group of young women who were clearly on holiday and bristling with excitement as they peered out of the window looking for landmarks. They nudged each other and took photographs to share with on social networks. Mark glanced at them, envious of their freedom and vitality. He wished Jo had taken a flight down instead of the damned bus.
The cab journey from the airport sped by in a blur as Mark tried to breathe life into the possibility Jo was okay. Somehow, the more real Mark could imagine the scenario, the more realistic it seemed to be.
An hour later, after stopping at seemingly endless sets of traffic lights, the cab came to a stop on University Avenue – where the cab driver pointed out the bar on the opposite side of the street. Mark handed the driver a bundle of ten dollar bills and climbed out. Slinging his bag over one shoulder, he crossed the busy street and found himself in front of a classical old building with a neon silhouette of a freaked-out cat above the name.
Inside, the bar was dark and smelled of fresh Mexican food. Some fliers advertising live music were scattered around the tables. Mark approached the bar and was greeted by a tall man with a pierced eyebrow.
‘Hey.’ He smiled at Mark. ‘What you after?’
‘A bottle of Anchor, please.’
As the barman opened a cold beer and placed it in front of him, Mark pulled a scrunched bill from his pocket and handed it to the younger man.
‘Good choice of beer, man.’
‘Cheers,’ Mark replied and took a mouthful of the tangy cold liquid.
‘You want any food?’ the barman asked as his hand reached for a laminated menu.
‘No, thanks.’ Mark shook his head. ‘I’m actually here looking for a girl.’
