No Show

by Simon Wood

  “Yeah, well,” Terry said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “But she hasn’t called or left a message?”

  “No. If she had, I wouldn’t be searching for her.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Terry wasn’t sure if Jake was as dumb as he made out. If he was, he couldn’t see him being much help to Sarah’s research. He wondered if this guy really knew Sarah.

  “Why did you want to get in contact?”

  “Just reaching out. I liked working for Sarah and I want to help find her. If you need someone to ask questions, chase down sightings, I’m your guy.”

  Help sounded good to Terry. With Oscar, he was a team of two. A team of three wasn’t much better, but if he could build a grass roots team working to find Sarah, he stood a chance of finding her.

  “Do you think her disappearance has anything to do with the story we were working on?” Jake asked. “Because if it does, then I should be looking over my own shoulder. What do you think?”

  The question took Terry by surprise. Sarah’s work had the potential for drawing trouble. “I don’t know much about Sarah’s work. What story were you working on together? Was it Genavax?”

  Terry regretted mentioning Genavax the second he had said it. Holman’s warning about cranks rang loud in his head. It occurred to him that this guy could be anyone. He needed Jake to give him information, not the other way around.

  “Nah,” Jake said, shaking his head. “Our story wasn’t anything heavy. It must be something else. She was working on a lot of things. Have you found any of her notes?”

  “No. I haven’t found anything.”

  “Look, if you do find them, I’d be happy to look them over.”

  “Thanks.” Jake seemed well-meaning enough, but Terry wasn’t sure he trusted him.

  “Got any ideas about what made her disappear?” Jake asked.

  “None.”

  “So you haven’t seen Sarah, heard from her, found any of her notes, and you don’t know what stories she’d been working on that could have led to her disappearance, right?”

  “Right,” Terry said warily.

  “It’s a stumper, all right.” Jake checked his watch and jumped to his feet. “Well, I’ve gotta go.”

  Terry tried to stop him. “Can I get a number?”

  Jake screwed up his face. “I’m really late, and I don’t have a pen.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t have time. Sorry.”

  Don’t have time, Terry thought. What was this guy playing at?

  “I’ll call you.” He brandished the flyer. “We’ll talk real soon, Terry.”

  Jake darted off, swallowed by the evening shoppers. Terry didn’t know what to make of his new acquaintance. He took another stab at his meal, but the food wasn’t that great and his appetite had made a discreet exit. He dumped the chicken and rice into the nearest trash can but kept his soda.

  “Hey there, pal.”

  Terry turned to find Oscar walking toward him with shopping bags in each hand. Terry smiled, but Oscar didn’t.

  “Who was that you were talking to?”

  Terry didn’t like the suspicious tone in Oscar’s voice, and he tried to lighten it. “What, jealous?”

  “I’m serious, Terry. Who was that you were talking to?”

  “His name’s Jake. He said he worked with Sarah, but he was kind of odd. I’m not sure who he was.”

  Oscar didn’t look convinced. Shoppers leaving the food court brushed by them.

  “Oscar, what’s up?”

  “I don’t know what he told you, but I doubt he worked with Sarah.”

  “So you don’t think his name’s Jake?”

  “His name’s Jake, all right. Jake Holman.”

  “Jake Holman,” Terry said slowly. “Sheriff Holman’s son?”

  “The one and only.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Terry let himself into his house with Holman still on his mind. The sheriff had sent his son to spy on him. What the hell was that all about? Did Holman think he was hiding something? Terry thought they were past that stage, especially after Holman had gone to all the trouble of organizing a press conference. This had to be some plan to try to trip him up. He remembered some quotation about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. The answering machine blinked a red number one at him. He hit play.

  “Terry, it’s Marcus Beasley. I forgot to mention something. Why I didn’t remember it when you were here earlier, I don’t know. It must have something to do with getting old—or just the workload. You wouldn’t believe the long hours I spend here. It’s more than a full-time job.”

  Terry smiled. He could see why Sarah liked working for Beasley. C’mon, Marcus, get to the point.

  “Sarah told me once that she keeps a file box or some such with all of her notes on the hot stories. She never keeps them in the office or anywhere they could be poached. I don’t know if that helps. But if you find anything, let me know.”

  Jake Holman had mentioned something about Sarah’s notes, and now Beasley had. There had to be something in it. That something galvanized him into action.

  He started with Sarah’s home office. He pulled the room apart. He emptied out drawers and unloaded the closet. The floor was awash with discarded storage boxes, their contents eviscerated. Only after he had gutted the room did he realize that if Sarah wanted to keep something hidden, the last place she would hide it would be her office.

  The house didn’t have a full attic. The roof’s pitch was shallow, but it did have enough space to store a file box. Using a ladder and flashlight he found in the garage, he climbed into the crawl space. It was a nice thought, but no good. The flashlight beam uncovered fiberglass insulation and roof joists, but that was all.

  Terry moved the search into the garage. He put himself into Sarah’s mind. If he wanted to hide something, where would he put it? He popped open old paint cans. He found a box marked “Christmas Decorations” and hoped it was a lie, but the contents were true to their labeling. The toolbox would have been a good place, but Sarah wasn’t using it.

  Every smart hiding place resulted in disappointment. The toilet tank held only water. Bedroom closets and a chest of drawers contained clothes. No matter which room he tore apart, it was how it should be. Standing in the living room with the couch upside-down, he lost faith in the quest.

  He hoped Beasley hadn’t been wrong. The house was a bomb site. Every room was overturned, and he had nothing to show for it. Then he spotted it.

  The coat closet by the front door had a floor panel. The panel gave access to the crawl space under the house. There was another access panel in the smallest of the three bedrooms and he’d already opened that one. He’d even gone into the crawl space, but he hadn’t checked every corner of the building. He yanked the panel up.

  Terry didn’t have to go down into crawl space again with all the cobwebs and dirt. Sitting on the dirt below was a metal file box. He reached down and snatched it up. It was locked, but he didn’t have time to find the key. He grabbed the screwdriver from the garage and jimmied it open, snapping the lock.

  Papers tumbled onto the floor. Terry gathered them up. He cleared a space on the dining table by wiping an arm across the surface, sending everything onto the carpet. He sat and examined his find.

  His discovery was a jumble. Dropping the contents on the floor had decimated any order the notes were in. It would take painstaking patience to get it all back in order—patience he didn’t have. He was too excited. He wanted the answer to leap out at him, but good sense took over and he persevered. He examined every scrap of paper, but it didn’t mean a thing. Some of it was in shorthand—a foreign language to him. That could be easily deciphered. Beasley or someone would help him out. But that wasn’t the problem. If her non-shorthand notes were anything to go by, it wouldn’t make any sense to anyone anyway. These were Sarah’s notes, for Sarah to understand. The reason for her disappearance might be contained among the sheets of paper in h
is hand, but it meant nothing without Sarah to explain it all. As depressing as his task seemed, he plowed on.

  Fatigue seeped in and he could barely keep his eyes open, but as something started to trickle from Sarah’s notes, the drive to keep going filled him. A thread was developing. He kept coming across the names of four women. None of them seemed very special. They had led unremarkable lives. In fact, they seemed to be pillars of their respective communities in various parts of California, Nevada, and Oregon. Nothing seemed to point to anything that would have made the information worth hiding from would-be news poachers.

  Terry continued to sift through the information hoping to find a nugget worth its weight in gold. After another hour of sifting, dawn crept over the horizon, bathing the dining area in peach-colored light, and Terry didn’t think that nugget was going to present itself. He was ready to call it a night—a day now—when a fifth woman’s name appeared on a list with the other four. He hadn’t found any other notes on the fifth woman, but he didn’t need to find any. He knew her already.

  “Alicia Hyams,” he murmured to himself.

  Terry needed sleep, but he went into work. He couldn’t afford to take a third personal day. Besides, he didn’t want to be at home right now. After last night’s discovery, he needed distance, a chance to think things through. Not that he was in any condition to think about anything. It felt as if mice had been scurrying around inside his head, and one of them had taken a crap somewhere small and inaccessible. He was physically shattered too. His mental battering had filtered through to his body. He seemed to be coated in a layer of sludge that showering couldn’t remove.

  He sneaked into the lab ten minutes late. If he was expecting Pamela Dawson to be all sweetness and light, he was wrong. She was the Ice Maiden again. Actually, he was glad about the return to normality. Nice didn’t suit her too well. He went to his bench, feeling her searching stare burning holes in his back. He guessed there would be a closed-door visit to her office, and there was. It was nothing too vicious—just slightly menacing. Genavax was sympathetic to his situation, but the company wasn’t about to let him slack off at the expense of others, blah, blah, blah. Returning to his bench, he descended into a work mode that kept him busy, but not especially focused.

  Terry made it through to lunchtime and sat in the staff lunchroom in a daze. Returning to work, he bumped into Kyle Hemple. Kyle wasn’t happy to see him and blanked him. He’d certainly lost an ally.

  Terry checked his watch and was glad to see the day coming to an end. His cell-culture samples were completed and needed storing in the freezer. It was a walk-in affair with a six-inch lip inside the door to prevent spills from escaping. Putting his samples on a bench, he eased back the meat locker-style door.

  A blanket of arctic air smothered him, taking his breath away and crystallizing the blood in his veins. The freezer was kept at a soul-numbing minus thirty degrees Celsius. It wasn’t cryogenically cold, but it didn’t feel far off.

  He didn’t like the freezer—nobody did. It was dangerous, and everyone was extra careful when entering the damn thing. According to the company grapevine, it had been expensive to construct, and engineers had pored over the design to ensure the refrigerant and the insulation were state of the art to guarantee Genavax didn’t run up a monstrous utility bill. So much effort went into this single aim that the safety-release handle inside the freezer was of secondary importance. A couple of years ago, a person had gotten trapped inside when the safety-release button failed with near-tragic consequences. If the door closed while someone was inside, the poor bastard would have about thirty to forty minutes before hypothermia killed him. The trapped person’s only hope was that someone heard him screaming and thumping on the door. After the near-fatal incident, Genavax took swift action to remedy the situation. Taking no chances, it made a door wedge from a packing case. So the lives of Genavax’s employees rested on a fifty-cent chunk of wood. Terry jammed the wedge under the crack of the door with his foot.

  He snatched up his samples. He tried not to, but he breathed in. His lungs burned as if icicles were forming on them. His actions were swift. He didn’t want to be stuck inside the yeti’s jockstrap any longer than necessary.

  The freezer was filled with shelf after shelf of microtiter trays arranged on mobile racks similar to a baker’s cart of loaves of freshly baked bread. Each cart was labeled with a project name and number, and each rack was labeled with the particular sample ID. Terry made sure that he knew which rack was set aside for his test runs. With the skill of a well-practiced waiter, he slid batch 243 onto rack 243.

  The tray snagged on something. Terry retracted it and dropped to his knees to clear the blockage. He breathed in and the arctic python constricted his chest. Glancing through the narrow slit between trays, Terry saw his problem immediately. There was a tray, half the size of his, already on his rack. He couldn’t quite reach it, so he pulled the cart clear of the others and removed the tray from the back.

  Terry would have returned the tray to its rightful place, but the labeling and the tray size weren’t like any of Genavax’s other projects.

  “What are you doing?”

  Terry turned to find Luke Frazer standing in the doorway. He was Pamela Dawson’s right-hand man—so much so, some said he was perched on her middle finger.

  “Do you know how long you’ve been in here?” he barked. “The temperature has risen ten degrees. You should be in and out in less than a minute. And what are you doing with that?”

  Terry was shivering, and he hoped it didn’t look like he was quaking in his boots. His wavering voice didn’t help matters.

  “I found a rack in the wrong place. I was trying to refile it.”

  “Let me see,” Frazer said, barging into the freezer.

  Frazer snatched the tray out of Terry’s hands and gave it a cursory glance. He tried to give the impression that he didn’t know what he was holding and that he had used his superior knowledge to solve the mystery, but it was obvious he recognized the rogue samples immediately.

  “I’ll deal with this,” he said, looking down his aquiline nose.

  Strangely, he didn’t seem to be affected by the extreme cold. No wonder he was dubbed Frosty Frazer, a nickname that went hand in hand with Pamela’s Ice Maiden persona.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then rack your test and get out before you ruin everything this company is working toward.”

  If he weren’t so damn cold, then maybe Terry would have argued. Instead, he picked up his tray and slid it easily into rack 243. As he left the cold for what seemed to be the tropical heat of the lab, Frazer stopped him.

  “Sheffield, if I were you, I wouldn’t poke my nose into business that didn’t have anything to do with me. Your wife did that and look what happened to her.”

  Oscar’s 4Runner followed Terry’s Ford Focus into his driveway. Terry parked inside the garage and Oscar left his SUV outside. Hopping out, Oscar didn’t look too happy with Terry’s request to meet him after work.

  “What’s so important that you couldn’t talk over the phone?” he asked as he entered the garage, the door closing behind him. “I do have a business to run.”

  “After I left you at the mall, I had a message from Sarah’s editor. He said Sarah kept a private lockbox with her stories she didn’t want anyone to find.”

  “And you found it?”

  “Yes. And I think Sarah’s in real danger.”

  Terry fiddled for the key to the door from the garage to the house. He didn’t normally lock it, but after last night’s discovery and the run in with the Honda, he wasn’t taking any chances. Excitement made him all fingers and thumbs.

  “Hey, why all the security?” Oscar asked.

  Terry told him about the Honda with the garage opener.

  “But what if this person has keys to the house too?”

  “No one’s managed to get into the house yet,” Terry remarked.

&
nbsp; “Have you been to Holman about any of this?”

  “No, not yet. I wanted to run it by you to make sure I’m not blowing things out of proportion.”

  Terry found the key and stuck it in the lock. As he swung the door open, he knew something was wrong.

  “Jeez,” Oscar said. “Did we have an earthquake?”

  Terry stepped inside, with Oscar close behind. Oscar shook his head at the carnage of last night’s search. Terry cast his eye over the scene and his feeling intensified—something wasn’t right. This wasn’t how he had left his home this morning.

  “You’ve been robbed, pal.” Oscar brushed past Terry. “I’ll call the cops.”

  “No…don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I did this.”

  Oscar snorted. “Why?”

  “I was searching.”

  Terry answered Oscar’s questions, but his focus wasn’t on his friend. His mind was recounting his last actions before leaving for work. He’d done enough tidying to make a bed to sleep on and a shower to bathe in. He hadn’t bothered with breakfast, but what had made him late was packing Sarah’s notes into the box file and replacing it in the crawl space. Terry went to check the rooms.

  “Hey, where are you going, Terry?” Oscar asked.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “I know. You’re a crappy homemaker,” Oscar said. Terry disappeared into a bedroom and Oscar had to raise his voice to be heard. “I would guess you were never in the military.”

  He caught up with Terry in Sarah’s office.

  “What is wrong with you? You’re like a dog on a bone hunt.”

  “Someone’s been here. I can feel it.”

  Oscar blocked Terry’s path and gestured with his hands. “It’s hard to tell with your talents as a cleaner.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, what’s been changed?”

  “Nothing,” Terry said after a long moment.

  “You’re losing me, man.”

  Terry brushed past Oscar and walked back into the living room. “Something’s not right.”

  “You’re telling me. You need to Febreze this place. It smells like dirt in here.”