Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  Missing Persons

  Stephen White

  The stakes have just been raised for psychologist Alan Gregory: His friend and fellow therapist Hannah Grant has died at the office, mysteriously and suddenly. The police are baffled, leaving another apparent homicide unsolved in Boulder, Colorado. Only Alan has the means to decipher Hannah’s clues, a quest that will take him to Las Vegas and lead him to question the integrity of those closest to him.

  The clock is ticking as Alan tracks one of Hannah’s most elusive patients; has she been kidnapped, or is she a runaway? The answers to both cases may be locked in the mind of a patient he has been treating for a schizoid personality disorder. In a maze of dilemmas that could cost him his career, or his life, Alan takes a bold risk that will have readers racing to the stunning conclusion of Missing Persons.

  Smart and fast-paced, Missing Persons showcases the rapid-fire dialogue and taut story lines that have made Stephen White the bestselling author that he is today.

  Stephen White

  Missing Persons

  Book 13 in the Dr. Alan Gregory series

  for Lynn Nesbit

  … Peace is poor reading.

  – Thomas Hardy

  A girl was missing.

  In any other town it would have been local news. Even here, on any other day, it might have been just local news.

  But it wasn’t any other town.

  It was Boulder.

  It wasn’t any other day.

  It was Christmas.

  And a girl was missing.

  Again.

  God.

  1

  The fact that I was sitting with Diane behind Hannah Grant’s office at 6:30 on a mid-December Thursday evening meant that I’d already lost the argument we’d been having since she yanked me out from behind my desk five minutes earlier. She killed the ignition on her Saab and summed things up for me anyway. “We can’t leave in the morning if we can’t reach Hannah. It’s that simple.”

  She was right.

  With only nine shopping days until Christmas, Diane Estevez and I were scheduled to make the short flight over the Rockies to Las Vegas for a weekend professional workshop-Diane, I suspected, was pretending to be much more enamored of EMDR than she really was-and Hannah was generously providing coverage for our clinical psychology practices while we were away. Without coverage, we couldn’t go.

  Diane had switched our Frontier flight the next day from noon to the cusp of dawn so that she could cram in a few additional hours getting intimate with some dice, and Hannah needed to consent to the slight change in plans. But Hannah-whose adaptive lassoing of her myriad OCD symptoms typically dictated that an unreturned phone call caused her a degree of psychological discomfort equivalent to the physical distress of a sharp stone in her shoe-had failed to return three different messages from Diane since breakfast.

  “Is that her car? Do you know what she drives?” I asked. The only other car in the tiny lot was a silver Volkswagen Passat.

  “Looks like hers.” Diane offered the comment with a slightly sardonic lilt, and I assumed that she was referring more to the car’s pristine condition than to either its make or model. In stark contrast to the spotless Passat, Diane’s Saab was covered in the gray-beige film that adheres to virtually every moving vehicle in Colorado after any slushy late fall snowstorm, like the one we’d had the previous weekend.

  I stepped out of Diane’s car and peered into Hannah’s. No clutter on the console. No errant French fries on the floor. No empty Diet Coke can in the cup holder. In fact, the only indication that the vehicle hadn’t just been hijacked from a dealer’s showroom was a copy of Elle, still in its plastic sleeve, on the backseat.

  The mailing label on the magazine read “H. Grant,” and was addressed to the Broadway office. The code in the corner indicated that the subscription would terminate the following April. “It’s hers,” I said.

  Diane had joined me beside the Passat. “Hannah reads Elle?”

  My own reaction was a little different; I was thinking, Hannah leaves magazines in her car? Shame! I said, “I think you’re missing the point. It means she’s inside with a patient. She’ll return your call when she gets a minute.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’m getting a feeling,” she said. “And not a good one.”

  “About Hannah?”

  “A little, but more about Vegas.” Diane’s tone was somber. She took her craps seriously. “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  Hannah was a clinical social worker and her therapy practice was in one of the old houses aligned on the side of Broadway closest to the mountains, only a few blocks from the Pearl Street Mall. The cumulative force of more than a decade of migration by psychotherapists had allowed mental-health types to usurp most of that particular urban habitat from sundry lawyers and accountants who had previously set up shop in the houses-some grand, some not-in the row. The uprooted professionals had moved to less charming but eminently more practical spaces in the modern buildings recently erected to fill parking lots a few blocks away on Canyon Boulevard.

  The back door of the single-story house was locked. Diane and I followed a flagstone path down the side past a hedge of miniature lilacs that stood naked for winter. We made our way to the front of the building and strolled up a few stairs into a waiting room that had probably been the home’s original parlor. On the far side of the lamp-lit room a thirties-something woman with an astonishing quantity of frizzy hair was sitting on a green velvet settee reading a copy of Yoga Journal while munching from a bag of Cheetos. I noted that she checked her wristwatch after she glanced up at us.

  I also noted that her fingertips were almost the exact same color as her hair.

  “Which office is Hannah’s?” I whispered to Diane. I’d never been in the building before. Hannah was one of Diane’s close friends; I had no doubt that Diane knew which office she occupied.

  “Down that hall on the left. The one on the right is Mary’s.”

  “Mary” was Mary Black, M.D., a psychiatrist who without benefit of fertility concoctions had given birth to triplet boys only a few weeks before, on Thanksgiving eve. Both Mary’s extended maternal adventure and her extended maternity leave were in their earliest stages, which meant that Hannah was without doubt going to be working alone in the building for a while.

  Diane stepped down the hall toward the offices. “Look,” she said.

  Stuck into the jamb of Hannah’s office door were four folded notes. Two were addressed to “Hannah,” one was addressed to “H. Grant,” and one was intended for “H. G.” Diane picked the one addressed to “H. Grant.” It appeared to have been written on the back of a page from a daily calendar of unintentionally humorous quotations by the second President Bush.

  “What are you doing, Diane?” I blurted. “Those are probably from patients. You can’t read them.”

  Without even a microsecond of indecision Diane rejected my protest. “Of course they’re from patients. That’s the point,” she said. She glanced at the first note, handed it to me, and said, “Look, Hannah missed her one o’clock.” Next, she grabbed the paper that was addressed to “H. G.” “And see? She missed her four-thirty, too. How come she’s missing all her appointments if her car’s here? Huh? How the hell do you explain that?”

  I didn’t know how to explain that.

  The other two notes were from patients whose therapist had stood them up earlier in the day. Hannah had apparently been missing her clinical appointments since at least nine o’clock that morning.

  The woman with the orange Roseanne Roseannadanna hair appeared behind us in the narrow hallway. Despite the fact that she was balancing on tall, chunky heels, she still had to gaze up at an acute angle to look Diane in the eyes. “Are you
here to see Hannah?” she asked. “I have a six-fifteen appointment. Every Thursday. She’s never late.”

  The woman’s voice was part annoyed, and part something else. Concern? Fear? I wasn’t sure. But her point about Hannah’s reliability was well taken. Hannah’s obsessiveness was legendary among her friends and colleagues. She was never late.

  Never.

  I’d begun tasting acid in my throat; I had a bad feeling, too. Though, unlike Diane’s, mine had absolutely nothing to do with dice. I tapped lightly on Hannah’s office door with my knuckles. My cautious incursion was apparently way too timid for Diane; with an NHL-quality hip-check she moved me aside and grabbed the knob.

  The door slid right open.

  2

  Hannah’s classic black patent-leather purse, as unscuffed as the day it had been crafted, rested on the floor in the middle of the room. It stood up neatly, its arched handles perfectly vertical. But the bag was on the floor.

  It shouldn’t have been on the floor.

  Diane apparently had the exact same reaction I had to the presence of the purse in the middle of the room. But since the distance between her cortex and her mouth was much shorter than mine, she verbalized her conclusion first: “Hannah would never put her purse there.”

  Diane meant on the floor. Nope.

  In the middle of the room. Never.

  What was certain was that Hannah had a place for her purse. A specific place. A correct place. I didn’t know where she kept it. Probably in a drawer in her desk. Maybe someplace more esoteric, in her filing cabinet under “P.” But in any circumstance that approached ordinary, she absolutely wouldn’t put it on the floor in the middle of the room.

  The rest of the office was neat. OCD neat, with one exception: Hannah’s coat was tossed carelessly over the top of the desk. I noted the swirled torn paper from an open roll of LifeSavers licking out of one of the coat pockets.

  Hannah’s 6:15, the woman with the cheddar-colored locks, was trying to peer past us into the office, but she was too short to manage a look over our shoulders. I felt her hand on my back and turned toward her.

  I said, “Hello, I’m Dr. Alan Gregory, one of Ms. Grant’s colleagues. Why don’t you have a seat in the waiting area while we try to figure out what’s going on?” Not overconfident about her emotional stability, I’d adopted a voice that was as comforting as a hot-water bottle wrapped in fleece.

  Neither my words nor my tone had the desired effect, though. “This is my time,” the woman protested, tapping the crystal of a garish purple Swatch on her wrist. I detected more than a little pout in her retort, considered the bag of Cheetos, and gave a momentary thought to the clinical regression that Hannah was confronting in her therapy with this woman.

  “I know,” I said even more gently. “I know. But the circumstances today are a little unusual. If you want to leave your name I’ll make sure that Ms. Grant gives you a call as soon as we straighten all this out. I’ll tell her you were here. I promise.”

  She wanted none of it. “I’ll just wait,” she said. “It is my time. Though I do hope I’m not being charged.”

  I sighed, pausing a moment as the woman retraced her steps and resumed her perch on the velvet settee in the waiting room. As she lowered herself to the sofa her fingertips left bright orange imprints on the forest green velvet upholstery. Once I was sure she was settled, I joined Diane inside the doorway to Hannah’s office.

  I said, “I think you should go check the bathroom, Diane. Maybe Hannah fell or something.”

  “Oh God!” she said. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?” She rushed past me and down the hall.

  I’m not sure why I did what I did next. Maybe it was because I was standing by myself in the hallway feeling lost and stupid. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was because I thought the Cheetos lady might be back and I was looking for a place to hide. I don’t really know.

  What I did was that I took half a step across the narrow hall and tried the knob on Mary Black’s office door. To my surprise I discovered it unlocked. Immediately after I let go of the knob the door began to swing open on its own, as though the old building was listing just the slightest bit in that direction.

  One look inside and I knew Hannah was dead.

  I knew it because living people’s flesh is never that shade of gray and living people can’t, or don’t, hold the posture that Hannah was in. Her body was splayed backward over a leather cube ottoman, her head only a yard from the edge of the open door. Her legs were spread immodestly, her torso twisted forty-five degrees at her waist. A dark pool stained an area the size of a basketball on the dhurrie rug below her legs. My gut reaction was: blood. But my nose said urine.

  Hannah’s right arm was bent at the elbow and the thumb of her right hand was hooked in the fabric of the silk blouse near her armpit, as though she’d been thinking about hitchhiking someplace when she died.

  Oddly, the left front tail of Hannah’s blouse was tucked up under the front of her bra, exposing a few inches of pale abdomen. Why a woman would tuck her blouse up under her bra, I couldn’t begin to guess.

  Hannah’s mouth was open, as were her eyes, and her fine dark hair spilled down, perfectly filling the eight- or nine-inch space that existed between the back of her head and the worn finish of the old pine floor.

  I dropped to one knee and touched the smoothly stretched skin on Hannah’s neck with the tips of three fingers. I tried not to look into her dark brown eyes but they drew me in like pools of still water. Despite shifting my fingertips a few times I couldn’t find a carotid pulse. It didn’t matter; the chill of Hannah’s flesh on my own had already confirmed to me that I wouldn’t.

  Hannah had been dead a while. I recalled the four notes that had been stuck in the jamb of her office door, and figured that she had fallen into her current posture sometime that morning. The arithmetic was simple. My watch said 6:45 P.M. Hannah’s first known missed appointment had been almost ten hours earlier, at 9 A.M. A brief stint as a coroner’s investigator earlier in my career had taught me the usually trivial fact that, after death, human bodies at room temperature yield core temperature at the rate of about one degree an hour. Ten hours meant ten degrees. I guessed that the flesh that my fingers had just touched was probably a good ten degrees cooler than my own.

  But I knew it could have been cooler than that, or warmer than that. My experience touching the flesh of dead people was, admittedly, limited. I allowed for the possibility that Hannah had been dead since the night before and I tried to recall how long a body needed to be dead before the stench of death became apparent. Couldn’t.

  I began inhaling slowly and self-consciously, as though I hadn’t already been breathing the air in the room. I thought it tasted stale and sour, but the only foreign odor I detected was that spill of urine.

  I knew that medical examiners working to determine time of death also did calculations about flying insects and their eggs and the life cycle of maggots, but I quickly decided that I would leave that entomological arithmetic to them.

  I was also self-aware enough to know that I was doing all the distracting contemplating so that I wouldn’t be forced to confront the fact that I was unexpectedly alone in an office with a friend’s dead body.

  Behind me I noted the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by the timbre of water running, the click of a door opening, and the cadence of familiar footsteps down the hall. Diane, apparently forgetting that she and I were not alone, called out, “Hannah’s not there, but I really had to pee.”

  I backed out of the room and saw Diane retracing her steps down the hallway from the bathroom. Her eyes caught mine, registering wariness that quickly disintegrated into shock as she digested my expression. I blocked her path and took her into my arms before she could reach the entrance to Mary Black’s office. I whispered into her hair, “Your friend is dead. I’m so, so sorry.”

  The sound that came from Diane’s throat as she processed my words was plaintive and poignant. Resig
nation and denial and the first disbelieving chords of grief were all mixed into one long, sad wail.

  When I looked up I saw the Cheetos lady standing at the other entrance to the hallway, tears streaming down her face. A bright orange smudge across her cheeks marked the spot where she’d tried to wipe away her grief.

  And failed.

  3

  Neither Diane nor I was going to get home in time for dinner.

  It had taken all of my physical strength to keep Diane away from her friend’s inert body-I was far from being able to consider it a corpse-and it had taken all my powers of persuasion to get both Diane and the Cheetos lady out of the house while we waited for the police to arrive.

  I was staggered by Hannah’s death, but my loss was nothing compared to the loss that either Diane or Hannah’s patient was feeling. I kept telling myself that I could freak out later.

  Diane needed to freak out now.

  Outside the house, after I’d called 911 on my cell, I was standing helplessly with Diane on the front walk when she said, “I don’t want to leave Hannah alone. She shouldn’t be alone. Let me go in and wait with her. Please. What can it hurt?”

  My arm was firmly around her shoulders and I know I whispered replies to her pleadings, but I don’t recall exactly what I said. My tight grasp on Diane reinforced my words: I didn’t think she should go back inside.

  Had Hannah died at home after an illness I would have led Diane to her friend’s bedside, not held her back. But Hannah had apparently died in strange circumstances in her colleague’s office. Until those circumstances became clear, I knew from my coroner’s experience that the environment around Hannah’s body should stay uncontaminated.

  Three things kept replaying in my brain.