Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  Sam nodded. I’d expected him to mount a defense of Slocum, but he didn’t. He said, “I’ll deny this if it’s ever repeated, but Slocum didn’t ever lay eyes on the Millers’ neighbor. After the initial search of Chandler’s house was negative, Slocum did the follow-up interview by phone-by frigging phone-not in person.” Sam paused and grimaced like he had a bad tooth. “And he never ran him.”

  I was incredulous at the last bit. Sam was admitting that the Boulder Police had never put Doyle Chandler’s particulars through the NCIC-National Crime Information Center-database.

  “He never ran him? If he’d simply run him, you guys might have focused on Doyle a day or two after Christmas?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Would have changed everything. Everything. For Mallory, maybe for Diane,” I said. I’m a master of understatement.

  “Woulda, coulda.”

  Sam didn’t seem particularly contrite about his support for Jaris Slocum. Did I want him to be? I guess I did. It seemed to me that a whole gaggle of Sam’s colleagues had been complicit in covering for Jaris. “Well?” I asked. Sam wasn’t looking at me; he was staring at his right hamstring, which was the size of a pork tenderloin.

  “Jaris is meeting with the bosses now. They’re trying to find a way out of this that doesn’t smell too bad for the department. But no matter what, it’s not going to turn out too good for Jaris.”

  I considered what I’d witnessed at dinner at the Sunflower. “Alcohol?”

  “That’s part of it.” Finally, he looked up from his leg.

  “You knew?” I said.

  “His wife left him a year ago, got his kids after a nasty custody eval. As you might expect, Jaris had developed a little animosity toward mental health professionals and lawyers after that little fiasco. He should never have been sent out to Hannah Grant’s office that night, but that’s hindsight-who knew that he’d be spending his evening hanging out with shrinks and lawyers?”

  “Sounds like his superiors should have known enough to rein him in. You did. Darrell Olson did.”

  “This all started right after Sherry left me. Despite the fact that I’d never really liked him, I had sympathy for the guy. I thought he just needed some room, some time to sort through all that was going on. We covered for him, all of us did. Could’ve been me, Alan. Could just as well have been me. Or you. You done chewing on him? I have other stuff I want to tell you.”

  “He was still drinking the other night at dinner, Sam.”

  “Couple of beers.”

  “That he downed like Gatorade after a marathon.”

  “And?” he said. He said it provocatively.

  “And what?”

  “You’re doing it again, Alan.”

  “I’m doing what?”

  “Cops are people. Guess what? We have problems. Sometimes we handle them, sometimes we don’t. Same as shrinks. Same as teachers. Everybody. Jaris Slocum screwed up. Happens. People cut him some slack. Nice people like Darrell Olson do that. Slocum hung himself with it. Happens. Get over it. Nobody knew he fudged his investigation of Doyle Chandler. And nobody guessed what was going to come of it.”

  Sam offered me nothing but a stony face that was more punctuation than anything else. I read the punctuation to be a period.

  I said, “Okay, I’m done.”

  “Wise. The partials we found in the search last night? One of them is Bob Brandt’s right index finger.”

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Oh shit. We have his fingerprint in the basement theater and we have his car leaving the garage of the house at the other end of the tunnel during the window when Mallory disappeared from her home. Circumstantially speaking, it doesn’t look too good.”

  “But nothing on the BOLO?”

  “It’s a rare car. It shouldn’t be as hard to find as it’s turning out to be. I’m thinking it’s parked inside someplace. I don’t think he’s using it; we’d have it by now. We’re going back into his place on Spruce later, this time with a warrant. We’re going to test that blood.”

  “Pine.”

  “Pine then.”

  “Say hi to Jenifer for me.”

  “Jenifer?”

  “The cute kid? The one who wants to go to Clemson?”

  “I’ll be sure to send your regards,” Sam said sarcastically.

  63

  Sam wasn’t talkative as we ran, nor was I. My lungs were trying to recover from their shock at being forced to process enough oxygen for cardiovascular exercise in Colorado’s best impression of a deep freeze. After his initial, “Let’s go,” we covered a good quarter-mile before Sam grunted anything more. He had been running on my heels, but pulled up astride me and said, “News.”

  I thought it was a question, that Sam was asking me what I’d heard about Diane. Tapping my pocket I replied, “Nothing. Got my phone with me in case Raoul calls.”

  “No, I have more news for you. About the neighbor.”

  “Doyle?”

  “You’ll hear this soon enough: Doyle Chandler’s not Doyle Chandler. It’s a stolen identity. We don’t know who he is. Was.”

  “You’re kidding.” I knew he wasn’t kidding.

  “The Doyle Chandler whose social security number matches that of the guy we found murdered yesterday died in a car crash with his parents, Renee and Dennis, in 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia. He was six years old at the time. The man who lived next door to the Millers filched the kid’s identity. He’s been using it for sixteen years.”

  “So whose body was it?” I suddenly didn’t even know what to call Doyle.

  “We don’t know, and we may not ever know. AFIS doesn’t pull a match on the index print he gave for his Colorado driver’s license. NCIC has bupkis.” Sam paused to allow his breathing to catch up with his talking and running. “Animals had chewed off almost all of the fingertips and most of the face before the body was discovered. We’re not going to get usable prints from what’s left. We have his teeth, of course, but the guy hadn’t seen a dentist in a while.”

  “What about the house? There must be prints there.”

  “The techs aren’t hopeful-the place had been professionally cleaned after he moved out. Need to match them with something, anyway.”

  “This case,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” he agreed, and fell back into position on my heels.

  Five minutes later, from the ridge top above the neighborhood, I watched a sedan without headlights approach the junction of dirt lanes that leads toward our house. It wasn’t a car I recognized. Light in color, GM in ancestry, its boxy shape dated it back a decade or more. Our neighbor Adrienne’s latest nanny? Possibly. I kept an eye on the car as it took the turn onto our lane, but our route carried us down the other side of the ridge and I couldn’t see the car’s ultimate destination.

  Sam passed me on the downhill and increased the pace for the final mile. I was exhausted after the run. He, too, seemed unnaturally winded. We both knew it wasn’t just the jog. “Coming in?” I asked. “I’ll make you breakfast.”

  I’d already looked around for the GM sedan. It wasn’t at my house or at Adrienne’s.

  “Have to get to work,” Sam said. “Simon’s with Sherry.”

  I was perseverating on Sam’s news that Doyle wasn’t Doyle. But I had no easy way to digest that news, so I refocused on Sam’s implication that Bob might be deeply involved in Mallory’s disappearance, but couldn’t get anywhere with that either. Bob was a schizoid personality. He was as schizoid as anyone I’d ever met. Bob kidnapping Mallory-or anyone else-made no more sense to me than a pedophile breaking into an old folks’ home.

  “You no longer consider Mallory a runaway, do you?”

  Sam said, “I go back and forth. If she is, it looks like she had help getting out of the house. If she isn’t, we have a different problem. What was the neighbor’s role in all this? Did he take her? Did he help her? What was Camaro Bob’s? Did he have something to do with it? Looks
like he did. What’s what exactly, I haven’t decided. I still want to know why Doyle dug that tunnel in the first place. Why did he want into the Millers’ house so badly?”

  The obvious was to me, well, obvious. “He lived next door. People prey on kids, Sam. He could’ve become obsessed with her.”

  “A voyeur? That’s all you got?”

  “I’m thinking worse.”

  He scowled. “Why dig a tunnel?”

  “To do his thing. Access.”

  “Risky as shit. Three people live in that house. He’s bound to get caught wandering around in there trying to get at the girl. Doesn’t work. You live next door, there’re much easier ways to spy on a kid.”

  “Maybe he went in at night when they were asleep.”

  “There are pervs who like to watch girls sleep?” Sam asked.

  After all his years as a cop, Sam’s residual naiveté still ambushed me sometimes.

  “There are pervs who like just about everything.”

  He held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  I thought about the theater in Doyle’s basement. All the top-end electronics. “Did Doyle wire their house? Hide video cameras in Mallory’s room? The bathroom? Anything like that?”

  “We checked. Fixtures are all clean, attic’s clean. No holes drilled where they shouldn’t be drilled. There’s nothing there, not a single extra cable in the Millers’ house, not a single cable coming back through the tunnel to Doyle’s. No transmitters. If he put surveillance in, he took it back out when he moved away.”

  I thought for a moment, forcing myself to go back to basics. Psychology basics. The best predictor of someone’s future behavior-maybe the only predictor-is his past behavior. I said, “Car thieves steal cars, right? Bank robbers rob banks?”

  Sam looked at me as though he’d just realized I was mentally challenged. “Yeah, and psychologists ask stupid questions.”

  “What do we really know about Doyle Chandler?”

  “Not much,” Sam admitted. “Did I tell you he was shot?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “He was shot. Behind the ear, slight upward angle. Shooter wasn’t real close, no burns on his skin. Slug looks like a.38. Second and third shots to his back. But they were just insurance. He was already dead with the first slug.”

  “Suspects?”

  “Camaro Bob’s on the list.”

  I didn’t want to hear that. I went back to Doyle. “You know one more thing about Doyle for sure, Sam: He steals identities,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  He knew where I was going. I said, “You were wondering about the motive for the tunnel. There it is.”

  “Doyle went into the Millers’ house to build a new identity?” Sam said.

  I noted-with some relief-that his question was almost entirely devoid of skepticism.

  “What better place? Say Doyle went in during the daytime when Bill was at work and the kids were at school. He’d have the run of the house. Personal records, financial records, work stuff that Bill left laying around. Computer files, his e-mails, maybe even passwords. Be like Wal-Mart for an identity thief. With a tunnel he could take all the time he needed to fill in every last blank.”

  “ ‘Lying’ around. Bill would leave stuff ‘lying’ around. Not ‘laying’ around.”

  I smiled. “Does the gratis English lesson mean you think I got the rest right?”

  “Maybe,” Sam said. Even though he’d already caught his breath, he put his hands on his hips the way exhausted athletes do, stared at me, and momentarily left any parsimony behind. “We blew it the first time. Eight years ago? We did. I don’t care about the public face we tried to put on it, the damn truth is that we fucking blew it. Guess what? I don’t want to be the guy who blows it this time. If you have something that’ll help me find that girl, I need to hear it. Second chances don’t come around too often in life. I have one. We need to redeem ourselves.”

  In the years since the other little girl’s death, I’d never heard Sam be so brutal in his appraisal of law enforcement’s role. “Okay, yeah,” I said.

  “Yeah, you have something? Or, yeah, you understand?”

  Did I have something? If I did, I wasn’t sure what it looked like. I said, “Yeah, I understand.”

  He stepped toward the Cherokee. “I don’t need your understanding.”

  64

  I tried to stretch out my calves a little more as I pondered Sam’s challenge and watched him disappear down the dusty lane. I was just about to go back inside when the square front end of an approaching car came my way. It stopped a hundred yards or so down the road, in a little turnout on the soft shoulder.

  The car was the GM sedan I’d seen earlier. The sun had crested the eastern horizon and was reflecting off the windshield. From my vantage point I could tell the car was pale yellow. The hood ornament clued me in that it was a Cadillac.

  I stuck my hands in my armpits to warm my fingers, and I waited.

  A man climbed out of the driver’s seat, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and began walking toward me.

  Bob Brandt.

  Even at a hundred yards I recognized the denim jacket. My thought? Thank God you’re alive.

  “Somebody’s been in my house,” he said when he got within fifty feet. His voice was pressured. He didn’t say hello.

  So what else is new?

  “I know,” I said. I’d come to the conclusion that it was Doyle who had trashed Bob’s place, but I kept the guess to myself.

  “Did you read my stuff?” he asked.

  That’s why Bob was at my house: to chastise me for breaking his trust and spilling his secrets. That was fair-I had broken his trust and spilled his secrets. “Hi, Bob,” I said, reframing things, at least for a moment. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  Bob’s “why” was a classic schizoid question, but perfectly sincere. His disorder left him with only the most rudimentary concept of “concern,” at least the person-to-person variety.

  “I hadn’t heard from you, thought you might be in… danger.”

  “Oh.” He played with the notion for a moment before he added, “I went somewhere. Do you know what’s going on? Who was in my place?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Tired. Drove all night.”

  “Are you here by yourself?”

  He turned his head and looked back at the Cadillac, as though he needed to check to be sure. “Yes. What’s going on? Did you read my stuff? I told you not to. You must have seen my note.”

  “Like I said, I got worried. Anyway, I think you wanted me to read it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have given it to me. We can talk about it.” It was shrink talk, but it also happened to be true.

  “I was just getting started. It’s just a story.”

  “The tunnel part is real.”

  He swallowed, and his eyes started their disconcerting shimmying. He spit a solitary word: “So?”

  Bob’s retort was schoolyard bravado, nothing more.

  “How can I be of help right now?” I said, trying to sound therapeutic.

  He seemed surprised by my offer. After a moment, he said, “That’s a good question.”

  He stepped back, literally and-I feared-figuratively. Instinctively, I sought safer ground for him. “Is that your car?”

  His eyes found the Caddy and lingered there. “It’s my mother’s.”

  Your mother’s? Was Bob being sardonic? I couldn’t say. “You like it?”

  He’d returned his attention my way, but was looking past me toward the distant turnpike. Finally, he said, “Lots of power. Good cruiser. Cushy. Only fourteen K on it.”

  “Not as cherry as your Camaro,” I said.

  “Close,” he said. “Pretty close.” He made an unfamiliar popping sound with his lips. “Maybe you can help somebody… I know.”

  “A friend?” I asked. Please tell me Mallory’s okay.

  Emily chose that moment to erupt; she’d app
arently just realized that her homeland security had been violated and that a stranger was on her doorstep. Her fierce barking-even though it came from inside the house-caused Bob to retreat a few steps.

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  “I don’t like dogs. You know that.”

  I didn’t think I knew that. “She’ll stay inside. Bob?” I waited until I thought I had his attention. “The police are looking for you. They want to talk with you about Mallory. I think you should get a lawyer and go see them. I can put you in touch with someone.”

  “Sheesh,” he said, and did his little half head-shake thing.

  I experienced an odd sense of relief that I’d finally lit on something I could share with Sam. I said, “You should know that whatever you decide to do, I’m going to tell the police you were here.”

  He was puzzled. “Is that some… rule? You have to tell?”

  “No. It might even be breaking some rule. It’s what I think is the right thing to do.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I did, too. What I thought was the right thing.”

  “You could be in danger. Doyle’s dead.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  Okay. I didn’t see a point in arguing. “The police need to talk with you.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “It’ll be fine then. Let me put you in touch with an attorney.”

  My phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket and checked the screen: Sam. I said to Bob, “Excuse me. This will take just a second.” I turned away, putting a dozen feet between us. “Yes,” I whispered into the phone.

  “I passed that DeVille on the way out of your neighborhood-the one we saw during our jog. Had a funny feeling, so I ran it. Expired tags, but it’s registered to somebody named Verna Brandt in-”

  “I know.”

  “He’s there?”

  “Yes.”

  “A deputy is on the way. I’ll be right behind them.”

  I turned around. Bob was almost all the way back to the Cadillac. “Don’t,” I yelled.

  He jumped in the car, spun the sedan in the dirt as though he practiced the maneuver on weekends, and was gone within seconds.