Dark Matter

by R. D. Cain

  Nastos shook his head. “Finally charging more than a plumber?”

  Carscadden shrugged. “Didn’t hear you complaining last year when you were looking at a murder conviction.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He smiled.

  It was a stone mansion on at least two acres, marble pillars supporting a stone terrace — even the circular driveway was stone. The entrance alone was worth more than Nastos’ entire house.

  Nastos was expecting there to be a butler or armed security. There was neither, just a door ornate enough to cost ten thousand dollars, with its stained glass, wood carvings and gold inlay. Carscadden hit the buzzer, then quickly ran his fingers through his hair. He glanced at Nastos. “What?”

  Nastos shook his head.

  A middle-aged woman opened the door. She’d clearly been crying, but she had an easy smile despite her red eyes and seemed sincerely happy to see them. He thought she’d be wearing an evening gown like in the soap operas instead of jeans and a button-up shirt, and maybe sipping a cognac or Scotch instead of touching the discreet, white-gold crucifix hanging from a thin chain around her neck.

  “I’m Claire. Please come in.” There was an expression of hope on her face, making Nastos feel like he’d just been emotionally blackmailed into something. Carscadden led the way and Nastos followed.

  He’d been on a White House tour back in 2000. This place made the East Wing look like a good start. They stood in a fair-sized foyer that featured a large flower arrangement and a double circular staircase with a fifteen-foot antique-looking crystal chandelier hanging down the middle. The artwork was all oil on canvas portraits, old, stern faces. A cat sat on a chair near one of the paintings that was unlike the others. It was of young girl wearing a flowing, blue Victorian dress reclining against a giant redwood tree. With a face bright with wonder, she stretched out to touch a fairy flying nearby. The fairy was little more than a smudge of light, obscured in a way that drew Nastos in closer. But he stopped, noticing that in the background the woods were foreboding and dark. The cat, a long-haired white Persian, moved in an exaggerated stretch then curled into a ball. Nastos noticed the off-white bandage around its front paw.

  “What happened to your cat?” he asked.

  Claire smiled again. “I don’t know. She came in a few weeks ago bleeding. I think she stepped on something sharp and cut herself. It became infected. Had to take her to the vet.”

  Mr. Bannerman came around the corner. His suit was a charcoal Kiton; they started around six thousand dollars. He was lean with a military haircut and hints of grey. “Like the place?” he asked.

  “This is unreal,” Nastos replied.

  “The bank owns it,” he explained. “It’s an executive perk. We have nowhere near this kind of money.” He stuck his hand out. “Craig Bannerman.”

  “Too bad for you, about the money I mean.” Nastos said, extending his hand to shake. “Call me Nastos.”

  “Nastos — that’s Greek, right?”

  “Yes, my dad’s side.”

  “Sure,” Bannerman nodded and turned to Carscadden. “And you must be Mr. Carscadden. We spoke on the phone.”

  Carscadden stepped forward. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances.”

  “Thanks.” Craig gestured toward a hallway. “Here, I’ll show you to the living room.”

  Claire said, “I’ll just take something out the oven and meet up in a sec.”

  Craig moved slowly. He was built like a boxer, with developed shoulders. Through the suit, Nastos could see the defined shoulders and arms. He must have just arrived home from work; he was loosening his conservative blue tie.

  There was the dining room with a rough-cut sixteen-seater table that looked like it was out of a medieval castle. A sliding wall opened up to an entertaining room with a massive flat-screen TV, leather couches and chairs. More artwork, all of it real — no prints in a place like this.

  “There’s sixteen bathrooms, eight bedrooms, a den. We’ve only been here four years, took me two to find my way around.” Craig smiled, almost apologetically. “This is all still pretty new to us.”

  Carscadden asked, “How long have you been with the bank? Twenty years, you said?”

  Craig sat on one of the couches and indicated that Carscadden and Nastos should take their places across from him. “I started off selling mortgages in Shiloh, Manitoba — all they had there was an army base, a boxing gym, a Kmart and a Legion. Now I’m the executive vice-president of a bank.” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it himself.

  Claire came back into the room carrying a tray of drinks, chopped fruit and home-baked cookies. She put it down gingerly and smiled. “Help yourself, guys.”

  Nastos grabbed a cookie and bit into it — just to be polite, he told himself. “This is incredible.”

  Carscadden opened a bottle of water. “Great, thanks.”

  Craig slid a folder on the table toward him. He opened it to the first page. It was a full-body picture of a young girl: a thin nose, high cheekbones and full lips; her hair was blond with pink streaks. There was a resemblance to his wife, Madeleine. Maybe if Josie had an older sister . . . She stood next to Claire Bannerman in a kitchen, probably in this house. They both seemed happy enough; the girl was a little too thin to be healthy.

  Craig waited till they had both spent time examining the picture. “My adopted daughter, Lindsay Bannerman.”

  Nastos understood when Craig confirmed the obvious. She looked nothing like either of them.

  Carscadden had wanted to get into private investigation work. A lot of lawyers used the private sector. He had even gotten an agency license. Nastos wasn’t sold on the idea himself; there were a lot of questions and details to work out. Being a wanna-be cop made being a civilian harder to bear. The hints he’d given to Madeleine that he had briefly considered it were met with a clear message: not a chance. The last thing she wanted was a return to the cop lifestyle of overtime and late-night call-outs.

  Craig glanced between Carscadden and Nastos, taking a read of them, then he continued gingerly, like he knew he had to walk on eggshells with Nastos. “She was dating a young guy six months ago and when he dumped her, she kind of went off the deep end.”

  Nastos looked up from the picture. “What do you mean?”

  “She started taking drugs and coming home late. It kept getting worse. She wouldn’t tell us what was going on, where she was. We booked a psychologist, but she wouldn’t go.” There was something about Craig that was nervous; it was hard for Nastos to decide if he was anxious for help or hiding something — maybe even holding something back. It wouldn’t be unusual for the parents to hold something back. Everyone lies — especially the victims.

  Nastos asked, “Where do you think she was at night?”

  Craig leaned back and exhaled. “Could be anywhere.”

  Nastos smiled to himself. That wasn’t a very good answer, Mr. Bannerman. Nastos glanced at Carscadden, who still refused to say what was going on. “So what’s the deal with your daughter, Mr. Bannerman? Why are we here?”

  Craig exchanged a nod with Carscadden that Nastos found himself resenting. “She’s been gone for three weeks. No phone calls, no bank withdrawals, no school, no contact with friends. We don’t know where she is and we want you to find her.”

  Nastos saw the anxiety this was causing Craig. From her corner armchair, Claire was silently hanging on every word, letting her husband the businessman, the deal broker, do the talking. He asked, “And the cops have done what, exactly?”

  “Nothing. They say she’s a habitual runaway, and she’s seventeen.”

  Nastos agreed. “They get ten thousand missing persons a year. If she’s a habitual, they aren’t going to go looking for her. They just put her in the system, then wait till she comes back on her own or turns up doing something stupid. And they can’t apprehend her, she’s ove
r sixteen. It’s not like she was abducted.”

  Carscadden asked, “So no holds barred, get her home as soon as possible? That’s what would you’d like us to do, Mr. Bannerman?”

  Bannerman gave his wife a meaningful look, like this was one of the secrets he finally felt comfortable enough revealing. “Don’t bring her here. When you find her, take her to the Bellwood for drug treatment.”

  Nastos knew the place. “The private live-in rehab centre. That’s not far from here. I just don’t think they’d even take an eighteen-year-old. They look for a certain amount of mature commitment to the process that I don’t think a girl her age could muster.”

  Bannerman’s tone was flat. “They’ll try for fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Yeah, they probably would,” Nastos agreed. “It’s not a locked facility; if we get lucky and actually catch her, she can just get up and leave whenever she wants.” Nastos rose to his feet slowly. “I don’t think we’re the best people for the job.” He avoided eye contact with Claire — not that it mattered; the weight of her gaze clung to him anyway. He looked at Carscadden and waved for him to step out with him for a moment, then excused himself, thanking the couple for their time.

  He heard Carscadden, behind him, say, “Just give me a minute,” then Carscadden followed him through the foyer and out the front door onto the terrace. Without turning, Nastos said, “I don’t think so, Carscadden.”

  “Why not?”

  He felt a hand on his arm turning him around. “I feel like a bottom-feeder.”

  “A bottom-feeder, for helping a lost little girl?”

  “Seventeen, Carscadden — she’s only as lost as she wants to be.”

  The lawyer’s mind was calculating his counter-argument. Nastos wondered for a moment if for Carscadden, it might be about the money.

  “You said it yourself, Nastos: the cops aren’t exactly going to kick down every door until they find her. Don’t you think she’s a bit too young to be alone? You saw the picture; a lot of guys would want a piece of her. One might want it a little too much. And what are you doing, anyway? You quit your job, you’re unemployed, you need the money and you have the skills. You’re just going to sit at home and rot? Going to watch the afternoon soap operas until you die on the couch at eighty-five? Sounds like a fun forty years of waiting. You need to keep yourself busy. Let’s find his little girl.”

  Nastos paused a moment to consider his options. He’d known Carscadden was getting a private investigator’s license and didn’t exactly try to stop him. Working at Canadian Tire wasn’t a very attractive option. Finding people was something a cop could do in his sleep.

  Changing his tone, Carscadden asked softly, “So what’s this really about, Nastos? What’s holding you back?”

  Nastos felt anger and conflict subsiding. He was ready to admit to himself what was stopping him; it wasn’t just his wife. “Maybe it’s that she’s not in a very nice place. What if we find her dead? That’s not very appealing to me, especially when it comes time to head back here and tell the Bannermans the terrific news. Death is one part of the job I am happy to leave behind. I guess my gut is telling me that there’s only bad news at the end of this story; maybe the cops should just take this one.”

  “You’re just making excuses. You may not know it, but you need this. I know you’re worried about feeling like a glorified security guard after having been a cop for so long, but this is you taking your life back — cleaning up a mess that the cops left behind.”

  Nastos shrugged.

  “You’ve locked yourself down in that dungeon, punishing yourself for everything that happened to Josie. Now that piece of garbage is dead and rotting in hell. So maybe this is an opportunity to show her how to survive and put things behind you. Step back into the world and accept what you are.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You’re the guy who can find that man’s daughter. You said it yourself: the cops aren’t going to do anything for a habitual.”

  “Maybe they’ll arrest her for hooking, and everything will turn out okay.”

  Carscadden looked at the ground, nodding slowly to himself. “Nastos, why did you quit the insurance job after only a few months?”

  “I told you before, sitting in an office photocopying police service reports wasn’t very exciting.”

  “Or fulfilling, you told me that too,” Carscadden reminded him.

  “Dumpster diving for children isn’t my idea of fulfilling either.” Nastos turned away, wanting to end the conversation. Carscadden silently moved to a position beside him.

  Nastos surveyed the neighbourhood. The Bridle Path was a quiet, well-treed winding road dotted with multi-acre properties and modern-day castles. Nastos saw more than the sheen of surface glamour. Through coloured maple leaves, he examined a nearby mansion. It had dark fieldstone walls, honey-stained wooden window frames, tall black wrought-iron light fixtures. For the most expensive real estate in the country, it was beginning to look like something from Amityville.

  “Nastos, they need help. How many kids have no one to love them? They love Lindsay and are going crazy to get her back. I don’t know how we can turn our backs on them. Unless — if this is about Madeleine . . .”

  Nastos had to smile; the lawyer had snuck it in. Carscadden hadn’t kept a girlfriend, or his ex-wife, for more than two years, and now he was the woman expert? Nastos on the other hand had been married for fifteen years and he knew that once kids arrive, as anyone will tell you, everything changes. “I’ll tell you, Carscadden, constantly telling your wife that you are going to do one thing, and then doing the complete opposite, is a good way to get divorced.”

  Carscadden paused like he had nothing to say, looking down at his shoes, hands in his pockets. “But she didn’t hate the cop part. She hated the you not being there. This is private work. We choose the hours and the pay is a lot better. And you know no one’s going to find her if we don’t do it.”

  Nastos shrugged again. If they could confine the hours to nine to five, maybe it would be enough — besides, Canadian Tire would always be there. “Okay, let’s see what we can do.”

  Carscadden led the way back into house to the living room and they both sat back down. Nastos wasn’t hungry until he examined the food tray. He grabbed a wedge of pineapple and another fresh-baked cookie — couldn’t be too polite. “Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

  Nastos noted that Claire had moved and was now sitting next to Craig on the couch. They both seemed relieved that Nastos had returned. “We adopted her when she was seven years old. Single mom had committed suicide, by hanging. There was no one else in the picture.”

  Nastos asked, “No boyfriend for the mom?”

  “Some loser — he disappeared shortly after she died. Lindsay was on her own. A girlfriend of the mom’s contested the adoption. She wasn’t a family member and was herself a drug addict. We adopted Lindsay less than a year afterwards. Most adopters want infants, but we saw her and it was love at first sight.”

  Nastos noticed how Claire tensed when Craig referred to the boyfriend as a loser, touching her crucifix again. She probably thought he was being harsh, non-Christian. She said, “We prayed so long for children; I guess God had different plans for us. Then we were blessed with Lindsay. And now she’s gone.”

  If there was a rift in the marriage, in Nastos’ estimation, it was regarding the church. The loving couple with home-baked cookies seemed to angle away from each other once Claire brought up praying. Craig was obviously more of a realist than she was. Nastos used the silence in the room to consider how much money, or realism, was spread around to speed up the notoriously slow adoption process. She probably had no idea he had greased the wheels for her.

  Craig began again. “Since her boyfriend broke up with her, she’s been staying out late, using drugs and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down: jewellery, cas
h — she even tried to get the car out of the garage but I had the alarm set.”

  “I’d like to start with a list of her friends, phone records, if you have them —”

  “Here,” Craig interrupted. “Her Facebook password, all of her phone records — we still pay the bill. If you call it goes to voicemail.”

  Nastos had seen the paperwork and was surprised that Craig had an entire dossier ready to go. “You have a total file all done?”

  “This is everything the cops said they’d want and never bothered to pick up.”

  Craig slid it over and Nastos flipped through a few pages. “You even have stuff on the woman who contested the adoption?”

  Craig’s face creased. “Jessica. I put the adoption information in there when I saw that she had added Jessica as a Facebook friend. You think it’s important?”

  “I have no idea.” Nastos checked through the phone records; there were quite a few numbers. “When exactly did Lindsay take off?”

  “September twenty-seventh, three weeks ago.” Bannerman’s eyes didn’t waver, but the corners of his mouth turned down.

  Nastos scanned through the phone numbers on her billing record. There were a few numbers that Lindsay had called regularly right up until she left.

  “You ever get this to the cops?”

  “Copies of everything. I had to actually go in and hand it to them myself. I guess I should look for her myself too. Jesus Christ, I pay enough property taxes to have three personal cops assigned to me twenty-four-seven, and this is all the help I get.”

  Nastos flipped pages, keeping his face blank. If the house was a perk, why was Craig paying taxes? It was as if he felt uncomfortable revealing the extent of their wealth. He decided that as long as he had a sense of what Craig was holding back, it wouldn’t pose a problem. Returning to the page before him, Nastos felt he had everything they’d need: a dozen pictures, birthmarks, blood type. With her phone number, they could trace her phone’s GPS in about five minutes. Nastos closed the file.