A Welcome Grave (4 page)

“Finding someone can take half an hour, or it can take weeks,” I said. “I’d have to know the details.”

“It’s been five years.”

“That’s how long he’s been missing?”

She nodded, then said, “Well, no. Not missing. I mean, missing to Alex.”

“But not the kind of missing where you call police.”

“Right.”

I lifted a hand and ran it through my hair, looked at the floor. “Where’s his mother? Is he estranged from her, too?”

“No. She died about two years after the divorce. Matthew was probably around fourteen at the time. She’d moved to Michigan. He came back to live with Alex until he went to college. They’ve been estranged since Matthew was in law school.”

“His name’s Matthew Jefferson?”

“Yes.”

“A hell of a common name. Probably a couple thousand of them in the country. I’d need identifiers. Date of birth, Social Security number, whatever you’ve got.”

“I can get everything by this afternoon.”

I raised my head and looked at her. “The fee you quoted is ridiculous. It’ll probably take me a day or two at most. Regardless, I’ll bill my normal rate.”

“You’ll get what I promised.”

Eighty grand for a routine locate. I did skip traces for two hundred bucks. At the end of the day, that’s all this would really be.

“I remember when you borrowed a hundred dollars from me to cover your car payment,” I said.

She looked at me, trying hard for empty eyes, but not succeeding. After a few seconds, she turned her head.

“Call me with the identifiers,” I said after some silence passed. I’ll find him for you, and then we’ll be done. Okay?”

She didn’t answer, but she nodded. I stood up and paused for a moment, considering crossing the room, reaching out to her, an embrace, a hand on the shoulder, something. Instead, I let myself out of the house.

J
oe was on his back on the living room floor with a broomstick clenched in his hands. While I leaned against the doorframe and watched, he lifted the broomstick from his waist and raised it in an arc. A normal person would have brought the broomstick back behind his head. Joe stopped with the broomstick at about chin level and grimaced. There was sweat on his face, and when he remembered to breathe, it was a harsh gasp. He narrowed his eyes, and I saw his jaw muscles bulge slightly, the molars clenching. The broomstick inched back, but just barely. He held it there for a moment, took another breath, and tried for another inch. Didn’t get it. He exhaled heavily and returned the broomstick to his waist.

“Didn’t you have therapy this morning?” I said.

“Yes.” He shifted slightly on the floor, then began the exercise again.

“So you come right back from therapy and start all over again? Isn’t there a rest period in there somewhere?”

“You’ve got to work hard at it.”

I shook my head, swung my body off the door frame, and moved around him and into the living room. He was pushing it hard—probably harder than any of the medical professionals who dealt with him wanted—but it was Joe. I knew him too well to be surprised, and certainly too well to try to discourage it.

He took another one of those shallow, gasping breaths, and I looked away.
Almost three months of this now, and still I had to look away. That’s how it goes when someone takes a bullet because of you.

“You heard about Alex Jefferson?” I said, taking a seat on the couch.

He lowered the broomstick and set it aside. Then he sat up with a grunt, wiped sweat away from his face with the back of his hand, and stared at me.

“Yeah, I heard. You aren’t here to confess, are you?”

“No.”

He smiled. “Had to check. What do you think of it?”

“Think he was probably a prick in all areas of his life, so not too hard to imagine a guy wanting to whack him.” I paused. “Cops came to see me.”

“About Jefferson?” Joe got to his feet. It took him some time, and some effort. At the start of the summer, we’d gone running several times a week, Joe breathing easily as we’d pushed up the hills, laughing at me, and at each of his sixty years. A long walk could wear him down now.

“Uh-huh.”

Joe walked out of the living room and into the kitchen. I sat there alone for a second, then got to my feet and followed. He’d poured a glass of water, and now he leaned against the sink and took a sip, a few drops sliding down his chin onto his sweatshirt. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt. Until the last few months, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen him without a tie on a weekday. While he drank the rest of the water and poured another glass, I looked out the window, watching leaves scatter along the sidewalks and blow out into Chatfield Avenue.

“They give you much of a hard time?” Joe asked.

“The cops? Nah.” I turned away from the window. “Karen called, too.”

He lowered the glass and swished a mouthful of water around for a bit before swallowing it, as if an unpleasant taste had suddenly come upon him.

“Karen,” he said. “No kidding.”

I nodded. “Wanted to apologize for the police, she said. And to ask a favor.”

He set the glass on the counter and sighed, as if he’d been expecting to hear this last bit. I told him what Karen wanted, and he listened quietly until I was done.

“You said you’d do it?”

“Eighty grand, Joe. For a locate. We need the money.”

“Eighty grand is insane, LP.”

“I know it. But if there’s one thing she’s got, it’s money. I saw that much from the house.”

“You’re actually going to take it? Take eighty thousand dollars for a job that you’d normally do for under a thousand?”

I met his eyes. “I told her it was too high. But if she cuts me the check, you better believe I’m cashing it.”

“She owes you that much, eh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Thinking it, though?”

I shrugged. “We could use the money, and she’s not going to miss it. End of story.”

“Okay,” he said. “You are the boss, after all.”

“Till your return, at least.”

He didn’t say anything to that, just dumped the rest of the water down the sink and moved back into the living room. I stood where I was and watched him. His shoulder was still in bad shape, yes. His range of motion was poor, and there was substantial pain, but his condition was much improved now. He could drive a car; he could sit at a desk and answer a phone and work a computer. Still he stayed here, doing his exercises, reading books, watching ESPN Classic. We’d never discussed a timetable for his return, but I’d always been sure a return would be made. In the last few weeks, however, I’d started to wonder.

I walked back out of the kitchen and followed him into the living room. He had settled into the old armchair in the corner and put his feet up. I sat on the couch and looked at him. I wanted to ask him, flat out, when he was planning to come back. I didn’t ask, though. Maybe because I was trying to be patient; maybe because I was afraid to hear his answer.

“I don’t have much of a starting place for finding Jefferson’s kid,” I said. “Weird scenario. He took off five years ago, apparently, before Karen married into the family, so she doesn’t know much about him. No contact since then. She said she can provide some identifiers, but that’s all I’ll have.”

“Computer databases will give you a start, once you get those identifiers.”

“Yeah. We’ll see how far they can take me, though.” I cocked my head at him. “Not going to tell me to stay away from this one?”

“You already made the decision to step into it. Looks like a simple enough job, too.” He picked a book off the table beside him and set it on his lap. I’d expected questions about my emotional response to Karen, warnings about the risks of getting involved—but the conversation, it appeared, was done.

“I guess I better head out,” I said.

“Okay.” He opened the book. “Good to see you.”

“Right.”

I was halfway through the kitchen when I heard a rustle of movement. I glanced back to see Joe pulling a blanket over his legs as he settled in with the book. I stood where I was for a moment, frozen. His gray head was bent over the book, his shoulders poking at the sweatshirt, the blanket wrapped around his legs.

Joe Pritchard looked old.

He lifted his head then, noticing me standing there, and I looked away quickly, as if I’d been caught at something, and walked to the front door. I left the house and went back to work, alone.

The phrase “missing person” carries with it connotations of kidnapping and abduction, mystery and mayhem. I work about ten missing person cases a month, though, and most of them don’t fall anywhere near those categories. In my experience, the person is usually missing only to a small portion of his or her world. People travel; they marry, divorce, and remarry; they take jobs and lose jobs. Along the way, they drop out of contact with certain areas of their lives. It’s my job to find the area they
haven’t
lost contact with and use the resources there to track the missing ones down. Sometimes, they want to be hard to find. These are the people leaving problems behind—legal troubles or unpaid debts or unwanted family responsibilities. Other times, they simply fade out of sight because nobody cares enough to pay attention to where they’re going.

I had no idea which category Matthew Jefferson fit into, but I was feeling good about my chances of finding him quickly and easily. He came from prestige and money; he’d have active bank accounts, cars registered in his name, maybe a mortgage. The hardest people to find are the sort whose lives are in constant disarray. They have suspended driver’s licenses, no assets, no credit, and they live with family or friends or whomever they can bilk out of a free month’s rent. I didn’t anticipate that the son of one of Cleveland’s most prominent attorneys would fall into that lot.

I was wrong. Wrong, at least, in assuming he’d be easy to find. Karen had left me a voice mail with Matthew Jefferson’s date of birth, Social Security number, and driver’s license number. Where she came up with that, I didn’t know, but it also didn’t help me. The driver’s license had expired three years earlier, when Jefferson was twenty-six. He was twenty-nine now, and the last computer record I could find on him put him in Bloomington, Indiana. There
were several addresses for him in that town, all apartments. Bloomington was home to Indiana University. Maybe Matthew Jefferson had gone to school there.

Amy Ambrose had once provided me with a great link to newspaper Web sites all around the country. I went to that page now and tracked down a student newspaper for Indiana University, ran a search for Matthew Jefferson, and got a few pages of results. There was a Matt Jefferson who appeared to be something of a track star, and then a reference from several years earlier to a Matthew Jefferson who’d won a few academic honors at the law school. In one, his hometown was listed beside his name: Pepper Pike, Ohio.

“Got ya, Matt.”

I ran a check through the Indiana and Ohio bar associations, as well as two national databases, and couldn’t find an indication that the Matt Jefferson I was looking for had ever taken up the practice of law.

Next I put his Social Security number through Ohio Department of Motor Vehicle records, and got nothing but the expired license. Surprised, but not concerned, I tried a live credit header search. Contrary to popular belief, private investigators can’t access personal credit reports, but we do have access to the “headers,” a portion of the credit report that includes the address and the reporting date. If you apply for a credit card, a loan, or anything else along those lines, at least one of the major credit bureaus tracks the date and the address you use. Matthew Jefferson’s Social Security number generated an address match in Indiana, for a town called Nashville, reported six times in the last few years.

I pulled a road atlas out and flipped through it until I found the Indiana map. Nashville was a small town in Brown County, maybe a five- or six-hour drive from Cleveland.

“I suppose I’ll make the trip,” I said aloud. “There’s certainly enough money in the budget.”

I laughed at that, but nobody laughed with me. I was talking to myself more regularly, particularly in the office. Sometimes, like when I laughed at my own jokes and no one joined in, it wasn’t that different from having Joe around, at all.

The phone rang, and I answered on speakerphone.

“Turn that thing off—it makes you sound like you’re in a cave,” Amy Ambrose said.

“I only turn it on for certain callers. People I know will talk so long I’ll get a neck cramp if I actually hold the phone.”

“Hilarious. Joe back yet?”

“No,” I said, and some of the humor went out of my voice. “No, and he’s given no indication of when he thinks he will be. To be honest, today I was about to ask him if he ever will come back. I’m not sure anymore.”

“You should have asked.”

“Probably.” It was quiet for a moment, and then I changed the subject. “Hey, what are you doing the next two days?”

“Writing great stories, per the norm.”

I’d first met Amy when she was working on a newspaper story about a murdered high school student who’d been a member at my gym. After a contentious start, we’d become friends, and now she joined Joe in the small circle of people I trusted completely.