Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  “She was so determined to confront her fears about Christmas, to grow out of it. She desperately wanted to get past all this, to feel safe.”

  “The police know all this?”

  “Of course; it’s why they think she ran. They think she got spooked and left to go find her mom and that something-you know-happened to her on the way.”

  “Did she know about Doyle? About the blackmail?”

  “She knew something was up with me, that I wasn’t myself. She’d mentioned it. It’s in her journal.”

  “Did she know about the tunnel?”

  “I know what you’re thinking-that that’s how she got out of the house. But how could she know about it? I didn’t know about it until last night. She was terrified of the basement. The basement is where her friend’s body was found eight years ago. She never went down there. Never.”

  “Doyle?”

  “Doyle could have shown it to her, I guess. But why? He had too much to lose if he exposed what he was doing. And I think he knew I meant that I’d kill him if he went near the kids.”

  I thought, Bob. That’s how she could know. Bob’s fingerprint was in the basement. Bob was taking care of Doyle’s empty house. Bob knew all about the theater-he had told me that he thought it was a great place to watch movies. And Bob certainly knew about the tunnel.

  Bob and Mallory had talked.

  Had Bob actually been there on Christmas night, holed up in Doyle’s theater watching movies?

  Mallory’s friend-the other little girl, the tiny blond beauty queen-had died eight years before as Christmas Day became the day after.

  She was scared, Bob had said about Mallory.

  She thought it was going to happen again, her father had said about Mallory. She feared that someone was going to come into her house and do to her what someone had done to her little friend. She feared that someone was going to bust in and leave her head crushed and her neck garroted, that someone was going to abandon her alone and dead in her grungy basement on Christmas night.

  Doyle? Bob? The man loitering outside?

  Who?

  I’m a gullible guy. But I’m aware that I’m a gullible guy, so aware that sometimes I catch myself and pause long enough to question what I’m hearing. Right then, I stopped, and I questioned. Do I believe what Bill is telling me?

  Yes, kind of.

  Is he telling me the truth? No, probably not completely.

  I replayed some of the earlier conversation I’d had with Bill Miller. “When Doyle moved out in the fall and put his house on the market, I thought he might have realized that the till was empty, you know? He knew my finances as well as I did. Better, maybe. I thought-God, I was naive-I thought things might be over. But that’s when Doyle went to Walter and started blackmailing him, too. Walter and I realized he’d moved away so that we couldn’t find him. My boss wasn’t happy. He’s not a pleasant man when he’s not happy.”

  “What,” I asked, “did your boss do when Doyle started blackmailing him?”

  “Same as me. He paid him off, bought some time. After so many years you don’t expect to get caught.”

  Content is the aphrodisiac of psychotherapy. For a therapist, it’s so tempting to get caught on the wave of the story, to get lost in the facts and the promise and the details of the narrative. What suffers when the therapist succumbs to that seductive lure?

  Process. And process-what is going on in the room-is almost always where the truth hides. I forced myself to be a therapist. I returned my attention to the process.

  “Why did you decide to tell me all this, Bill?”

  “I didn’t know what you’d already figured out. I actually thought you might know too much. That would be a whole new problem for us.”

  “Us?”

  “Me and Walter.”

  “I don’t quite understand,” I said. But I did.

  Bill’s voice was almost apologetic as he said, “I’ve just tied your hands, Alan. You can’t tell anyone what I told you. It’s confidential, now. I can’t afford to have anyone know what I’ve done. Walter can’t either. So, just in case-for some insurance-I’ve sealed your lips.”

  Was Bill right?

  In his reading of the law, and of my professional responsibilities, yes.

  In his reading of me, no. He had no way to know, but I was more than ready to say “screw it.” Was I angry? A little. Less than I would have anticipated. “Doyle knew everything,” I said. “He may have-”

  “Doyle’s dead, remember?”

  “Did you-”

  “Kill him? No. God, no. I would have liked to, I might even have been willing to, but… no.”

  “Did your boss?”

  “He’s probably capable of it. Walter’s in Vegas now trying to find Rachel. To see if Mallory’s with her. We have to keep her under control. He and I are in the same boat on this one. Our families are both at risk.”

  “Rachel knows about the orthodontist?”

  “She’s my wife; of course she knows. I don’t have secrets from Rachel.”

  I stated the obvious. “You’re desperate, then. You and… Walter?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Why did he go to Vegas?”

  “One of us had to get to Rachel. I couldn’t-the press might have spotted me. They’re everywhere.”

  I’d noticed. “Do you think Mallory’s there?”

  “I hope she is.” His despair about his daughter was palpable. “The alternatives are so horrifying that I can’t even…”

  My cell phone rang. I checked the screen: Raoul. Thank God. “I need to get this,” I said. “It’s an emergency. There may even be some news that affects Mallory.”

  “Go ahead then,” Bill said.

  “Raoul?” I said. “Any news?”

  “I’m at the hospital with her. She’s okay.”

  Diane? “Hold on a second; I’m with someone.” I covered the phone and turned to Bill. “Could you please go out to the waiting room while I take this?”

  Reluctantly, I thought, he walked out of my office and down the hall. I kept my hand on the phone until I heard the waiting room door open and close.

  67

  “She’s really okay?” I said.

  “She’s safe. She held my hand. We talked. She had a little food. Now she’s sleeping.”

  “Where has she been? What happened?”

  “I was sure Canada had Diane, or he could lead me to her. I had it all wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “None of Canada’s people have seen Rachel since Tuesday. Turns out Canada’s had me on a leash since I got to Vegas. He’s been watching me, concerned I’d be causing him more trouble with Rachel, later on hoping that I’d lead him to her.”

  “I don’t understand. How did you find Diane?”

  That’s when he took a deep breath and slowed his voice and began relaying the long story about the ratty cab and doing dead time in the Airstream and about the old VW bug and Tico, and about playing the echoes with Canada.

  Before dawn on the morning after Raoul met with Canada in the walled house in the scruffy desert outside of the city, Tico fired up the VW and drove Raoul into the desolate mountains west of Las Vegas. Raoul recalled seeing a sign for Blue Diamond near their destination-so wherever that is, that wasn’t too far from where they ended up. Just as it was beginning to get light Tico stopped the bug on a mountain curve, and asked Raoul if he was up for a little hike.

  “This is where the accident was?” Raoul asked him, recalling Canada’s story the night before.

  “The guy’s driving too fast,” Tico said, pointing down the road. “Way too fast, and he comes around the curve-that one-and sees a guy standing in the road with a.45 pointed at his windshield.” He held up both hands. “This is what I hear. The man in the road fires a shot-you know, to warn the guy-a little bit over the top of the truck. Driver doesn’t handle it good. Freaks.” Tico then pantomimed a dive off a cliff before he kicked off his flip-flops and began pulli
ng an ancient pair of orange high-top Keds onto his bare feet.

  A moment later Raoul followed him down a scruffy hillside covered with nothing but scree and big boulders. They went down a hundred feet or more into a narrow wash that had been invisible from the road above. A battered, crushed, bronze Silverado with Colorado plates rested upside down on a rock that was half the size of Tico’s VW. Inside was the body of a man. The stink was horrific.

  Tico said, “That’s the guy, the guy in the picture with Howard, the guy who met your wife in the Venetian. You want me to check for ID?” Raoul wasn’t able to come up with an answer for him, but Tico pulled on some work gloves and crawled into the overturned truck. A minute later he handed Raoul a Colorado driver’s license.

  The name meant nothing to Raoul. “What’s farther up the hill? Where was he going?” Raoul asked.

  “A couple of old cabins. Might be important. To you, anyway.”

  “But not to you?”

  “This… accident? It happened before Rachel lost touch with the boss. We weren’t too interested in what was up there. Not our business, you dig. We stay out of things that aren’t our business. That’s one of the boss’s rules.”

  “Can we look?” Raoul asked him. “At those two cabins? Now?”

  Tico said, “I got a little time.”

  The second cabin they checked, the last one on the road, was where they found Diane. Raoul went in alone and found her cuffed to an iron bed. She’d been there a long time. She was delirious, almost unconscious.

  Tico used his mobile phone to call somebody down in Vegas, asked them to send help. Then he told Raoul, “I gotta go before, you know… And my man? The police don’t need to know about the Silverado. That’d be better for everybody.”

  Raoul told him he understood and he promised to come up with a story for the police.

  Fifteen minutes later people started showing up to help Raoul save his wife.

  I briefly relayed to Raoul most of what I’d told Lauren the night before. I told him about the tunnel and the car that had left Doyle’s garage right around the time Mallory disappeared. I told him that Doyle Chandler wasn’t Doyle Chandler, and that whoever he really was, he was dead.

  “Are you coming home?” I asked.

  “As soon as they clear her to travel,” he said.

  “Can you tell me who the guy in the Silverado was?”

  “Does it make a difference?” he asked. “I promised I’d be discreet. The cops didn’t find it. It needs to stay that way.”

  “I think I know.”

  “Who?”

  The irony didn’t escape me: Raoul was protecting secrets, too. I gave him the name he already had: “Guy named Walter.”

  His voice grew tight. “You’ve known about him for how long?”

  “This afternoon. Just now.”

  “He was a bad guy?”

  “He had something important to hide. He was afraid Diane might have learned what it was from Hannah.”

  “When I get back we’ll have a beer, you’ll tell me how you know all this.”

  “I’m looking forward to that, Raoul. Listen, I’m with a… patient. Call me back when I can talk with Diane, okay? Please?”

  We said good-bye after Raoul asked me if I had any idea how to thank someone for saving his wife’s life. “Canada?” I wondered.

  “No, Norm Clarke,” he said.

  I thought I’d read somewhere that Norm had a weakness for foie gras, but I promised Raoul I’d think more about it and stepped back out to the waiting room to get Bill Miller.

  The front door was wide open. The coffee table was tipped over, magazines scattered on the floor.

  Bill was gone. Damn. Immediately, I regretted leaving him alone for such a long time.

  The winds seemed to have stopped.

  68

  Huh. What did Bill’s hasty exit mean? Why the overturned table and the open door? Had something happened while I was talking with Raoul, or was Bill making a statement about his frustration with me, or about his annoyance that I’d interrupted our meeting to take a phone call?

  My relief that Diane was okay was so strong at that moment that I wasn’t particularly upset about whatever had prompted Bill’s departure, but I was perplexed. Why had he taken off so suddenly?

  I was becoming more and more convinced that Mallory’s Christmas night disappearance had been accomplished with Bob’s help. What had happened next? I was guessing that she’d talked Bob into driving her somewhere and I was hoping that she’d somehow made it to Vegas to visit her mother. Where were mother and daughter right then? I didn’t know. Raoul’s story satisfied me that Bill’s boss, the by-then-dead Walter, hadn’t been successful in tracking them down in Vegas.

  But where was Bob? If Sam had caught up with him, I was sure he would have called and let me know.

  I straightened up the waiting room, walked back to my office, and phoned Bill Miller at his home. No answer. I left a message, and asked him to call me back on my pager. Then I called home. The girls were still out on their excursion. I left Lauren a message that I was going to run a few errands and that I’d be home in time for dinner.

  As cold as it can be in Colorado in January, there are always respites, warm days in the high fifties or low sixties when the sun defies its low angle in the southern sky and the blue above is just a little bluer. I was surprised when I stepped outside to discover that the Chinooks had abated and left the day so much warmer than it had been earlier. The seat heaters in the Audi seemed superfluous. I flicked them off and drove east to begin my errands.

  I felt the vibration of my pager while I was waiting in line to buy some fish for dinner at Whole Foods. Had Lauren asked for ono or opah? I couldn’t remember. I pulled the beeper off my belt and read Bill Miller’s familiar number. My turn at the fish counter had arrived, so I mentally flipped a coin and chose a good-sized piece of opah before I meandered over to the relative quiet of the dairy department to return Bill’s call.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “I went back out to the waiting room and-”

  “I just got a call about Mallory.”

  “From whom?”

  “The Colorado State Patrol. They found a body, a girl, in a ditch near I-70 west of Grand Junction.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “What can I do?”

  “I want to talk to you before whatever happens next. I need to make sure I’m thinking straight.”

  “Bill, you just admitted that you’re using the therapy to shut me up. I don’t think I’m the right person to-”

  “Fire me tomorrow. Tonight I need some help.” He sounded genuinely frantic. I couldn’t imagine his terror. I looked at my watch. “My office. Ten minutes,” I said.

  “I have to be here, at home, if they call back. I can’t leave. Can you come over?”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said. I tossed the opah on top of a display of organic butter in the dairy case, and sprinted to my car.

  69

  Maybe it was the time of day, just past dusk. Or maybe, as Sam predicted, the fierce assault of the Chinook blitzkrieg had scared everyone off. But the media encampment outside the Millers’ home was deserted, the street peaceful. Doyle’s house was dark.

  Bill met me at the front door. I didn’t even have to knock.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said as he ushered me inside. “Can I get you something? Some tea? I make good hot chocolate. That’s what the kids tell me, anyway.”

  “No, thank you.”

  His cordial greeting left me off-balance as he led me to the back of the house and a battered oak claw-foot table with some mismatched pressed-back chairs. “Sit, please.” He pointed me to a seat that faced the service porch and the rear yard. “Thank you,” he repeated.

  “What can I do to help, Bill?” I wanted to get down to business, whatever it was. I wanted to get home. I wanted to convince myself that I hadn’t made a big mistake by agreeing to this impromptu house call.

  �
��You being here helps.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear from him. “Bill, I’m glad you find my presence comforting. But my advice to you is simple: Tell the police everything you know. The journal, everything. If you have new information, they need to know it. Mallory’s welfare is more important than anything else.”

  “I appreciate your counsel. You were absolutely right about Rachel years ago. But I’m not sure you really understand the dilemma I’m in. Calling the police isn’t an option.”

  “Mallory’s safety is the most important thing. Your legal situation is secondary.”

  “I’m her father. She needs me. Both kids do.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, but-”

  “But nothing. If someone had your daughter, or your wife, or both, you would do anything to get them back, wouldn’t you? Anything?”

  Once I had. Once when a madman was trying to break into my house I’d closed my eyes and pulled a trigger to protect my pregnant wife. I’d do it again if I had to. And again after that.

  Bill had continued talking through my silent reverie; I wasn’t sure if I’d missed anything. When I tuned back in he was saying, “Like right now, if you didn’t know where your family was, I bet you would do anything to find them, to make sure they were safe. Right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you know where your wife and daughter are right now?”

  What? “What do you mean?” I was trying to keep my voice level. I was certain I was failing.

  “Your family? Do you know where they are right now?”

  No, I didn’t know where they were. “Right now? What are you saying, Bill?”

  “Nothing. I’m just trying to describe my situation in a way that might make sense to another father. The desperation I’m feeling. Do you understand the desperation?”

  “Are you threatening my family, Bill?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”