Gone, Baby, Gone (3 page)

“Sit down,” Beatrice said.

“No. I need to know what that means. Are you suggesting my sister could have had something to do with Amanda’s disappearance?”

Angie watched him steadily. “You tell me.”

“No,” he said loudly. “Okay? No.” He looked down at his wife. “She’s not a criminal, okay? She’s a woman who’s lost her child. You know?”

Beatrice looked up at him, her face inscrutable.

“Lionel,” I said.

He stared down at his wife, then looked at Angie again.

“Lionel,” I said again, and he turned to me. “You said yourself it’s like Amanda disappeared into thin air. Okay. Fifty cops are looking for her. Maybe more. You two have been working on it. People in the neighborhood…”

“Yeah,” he said. “Lots of them. They’ve been great.”

“Okay. So where is she?”

He stared at me as if I might suddenly pull her out of my desk drawer.

“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes.

“No one does,” I said. “And if we’re going to look into this—and I’m not saying we will…”

Beatrice sat up in her chair and looked hard at me.

“But
if
, we have to work under the assumption that if she has been abducted, it was by someone close to her.”

Lionel sat back down. “You think she was taken.”

“Don’t you?” Angie said. “A four-year-old who ran off on her own wouldn’t still be out there after almost three full days without having been seen.”

“Yeah,” he said, as if facing something he’d known was true but had been holding at bay until now. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

“So what do we do now?” Beatrice said.

“You want my honest opinion?” I said.

She cocked her head slightly, her eyes holding steadily with my own. “I’m not sure.”

“You have a son who’s about to enter school. Right?”

Beatrice nodded.

“Save the money you would have spent on us and put it toward his education.”

Beatrice’s head didn’t move; it stayed cocked slightly to the right, but for a moment she looked as if she’d been slapped. “You won’t take this case, Mr. Kenzie?”

“I’m not sure there’s any point to it.”

Beatrice’s voice rose in the small office. “A child is—”

“Missing,” Angie said. “Yes. But a lot of people are looking for her. The news coverage has been extensive. Everyone in this city and probably most of the state knows what she looks like. And, trust me, most of them have their eyes peeled for her.”

Beatrice looked at Lionel. Lionel gave her a small shrug. She turned from him and locked eyes with me again. She was a small woman, no more than five foot three. Her pale face, sparkled with freckles the same color as her hair, was heart-shaped, and there was a child’s roundness to her button nose and chin, the cheekbones that resembled acorns. But there was also a furious aura of strength about her, as if she equated yielding with dying.

“I came to you both,” she said, “because you find people. That’s what you do. You found that man who killed all those people a few years ago, you saved that baby and his mother in the playground, you—”

“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, holding up a hand.

“Nobody wanted me to come here,” she said. “Not Helene, not my husband, not the police. ‘You’d be wasting your money,’ everyone said. ‘She’s not even your child,’ they said.”

“Honey.” Lionel put his hand on hers.

She shook it off, leaned forward until her arms were propped on the desk and her sapphire eyes were holding mine.

“Mr. Kenzie, you can find her.”

“No,” I said softly. “Not if she’s hidden well enough. Not if a lot of people who are just as good at this as we are haven’t been able to find her either. We’re just two more people, Mrs. McCready. Nothing more.”

“Your point?” Her voice was low again, and icy.

“Our point,” Angie said, “is what help could two more sets of eyes be?”

“What harm, though?” Beatrice said. “Can you tell me that? What harm?”

2

From a detective’s perspective once you rule out running away or abduction by a parent, a child’s disappearance is similar to a murder case: If it’s not solved within seventy-two hours, it’s unlikely it ever will be. That doesn’t necessarily mean the child is dead, though the probability is high. But if the child is alive, she’s definitely worse off than when she went missing. Because there’s very little gray area in the motivations of adults who encounter children who aren’t their own; you either
A
, help that child or,
B
, exploit her. And while the methods of exploitation vary—ransoming children for money, using them for labor, abusing them sexually for personal and/or profit concerns, murdering them—none of them stems from benevolence. And if the child doesn’t die and is eventually found, the scars run so deep that the poison can never be removed from her blood.

In the last four years, I’d killed two men. I’d watched my oldest friend and a woman I barely knew die in front of me. I’d seen children desecrated in the worst possible ways, met men and women who killed as if it were a reflex action, watched relationships burn in the violence with which I’d actively surrounded myself.

And I was tired of it.

Amanda McCready had been missing for at least sixty hours by this point, maybe as long as seventy, and I didn’t want to find her stuffed in a Dumpster somewhere, her hair matted with blood. I didn’t want to find her six months down the road, vacant-eyed and used up by some freak with a video camera and a mailing list of pedophiles. I didn’t want to look in a four-year-old’s eyes and see the death of everything that had been pure in her.

I didn’t want to find Amanda McCready. I wanted someone else to.

But maybe because I’d become as caught up in this case over the last few days as the rest of the city, or maybe because it had happened here in my neighborhood, or maybe just because “four-year-old” and “missing” aren’t words that should go together in the same sentence, we agreed to meet Lionel and Beatrice McCready at Helene’s apartment in half an hour.

“You’ll take the case, then?” Beatrice said, as she and Lionel stood.

“That’s what we need to discuss between ourselves,” I said.

“But—”

“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, “things are done a certain way in this business. We have to consult privately before we agree to anything.”

Beatrice didn’t like it, but she also realized there was very little she could do about it.

“We’ll drop by Helene’s in half an hour,” I said.

“Thank you,” Lionel said, and tugged his wife’s sleeve.

“Yes. Thanks,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound real sincere. I had a feeling that nothing less than a presidential deployment of the National Guard to search for her niece would satisfy her.

We listened to their footfalls descend the belfry stairs and then I watched from the window as they left the schoolyard beside the church and walked to a weather-beaten Dodge Aries. The sun had drifted west past my line of sight, and the early October sky was still a pale summer white, but wisps of rust had floated into the white. A child’s voice called, “Vinny, wait up! Vinny!” and from four stories above the ground there was something lonely about the sound, something unfinished. Beatrice and Lionel’s car U-turned on the avenue, and I watched the puff of its exhaust until it had pulled out of sight.

“I don’t know,” Angie said, and leaned back in her chair. She propped her sneakers up on the desk and pushed her long thick hair off her temples. “I just don’t know about this one.”

She wore black Lycra biking shorts and a loose black tank top over a tight white one. The black tank top bore the white letters
NIN
on the front and the words
PRETTY HATE MACHINE
on back. She’d owned it for about eight years and it still looked like she was wearing it for the first time. I’d lived with Angie for almost two years. As far as I could see, she didn’t take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they’d been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I’d never solve—like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.

“Don’t know about this case?” I said. “In what way?”

“A missing child, a mother who apparently isn’t looking too hard, a pushy aunt—”

“You thought Beatrice was pushy?”

“Not any more so than a Jehovah with one foot in the door.”

“She’s worried about that kid. Tear-her-hair-out worried.”

“And I feel for that.” She shrugged. “Still don’t enjoy being pushed, though.”

“It’s not one of your stronger qualities, true.”

She flipped a pencil at my head, caught my chin. I rubbed at the spot and looked for the pencil so I could throw it back.

“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” I mumbled, as I felt under my chair for the pencil.

“We’re doing real well,” she said.

“We are.” The pencil wasn’t below my chair or the desk, as far as I could see.

“Made more this year than last.”

“And it’s only October.” No pencil by the floorboard or under the mini-fridge. Maybe it was with Amelia Earhart and Amanda McCready and the bell.

“Only October,” she agreed.

“You’re saying we don’t need this case.”

“Pretty much the size of it.”

I gave up on the pencil and looked out the window for a bit. The wisps of rust had deepened to blood red, and the white sky was gradually darkening into blue. The first yellow lightbulb of the evening clicked on in a third-story apartment across the street. The smell of the air coming through the screen made me think of early adolescence and stickball, long, easy days leaking into long, easy nights.

“You don’t agree?” Angie said after a few moments.

I shrugged.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” she said lightly.

I turned and looked at her. The gathering dusk was gold against her window, and it swam in her dark hair. Her honeycomb skin was darker than usual from the long dry summer that had somehow continued to extend well into autumn, and the muscles in her calves and biceps were pronounced after months of daily basketball games at the Ryan playground.

In my previous experience with women, once you’ve been intimate with someone for a while, her beauty is often the first thing you overlook. Intellectually, you know it’s there, but your emotional capacity to be overwhelmed or surprised by it, to the point where it can get you drunk, diminishes. But there are still moments every day when I glance at Angie and feel a gust cleave through my chest cavity from the sweet pain of looking at her.

“What?” Her wide mouth broke into a grin.

“Nothing,” I said softly.

She held my gaze. “I love you, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Scary, ain’t it?”

“Sometimes, yeah.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, not at all.”

We sat there for a bit, saying nothing, and then Angie’s eyes drifted to her window.

“I’m just not sure we need this…mess right now.”

“This mess being?”

“A missing child. Worse, a completely vanished child.” She closed her eyes and inhaled the warm breeze through her nose. “I like being happy.” She opened her eyes but kept them fixed on the window. Her chin quivered slightly. “You know?”

It had been a year and a half since Angie and I had consummated what friends claimed was a love affair that had been going on for decades. And those eighteen months had also been the most profitable our detective agency had ever experienced.

A little less than two years ago, we’d closed—or maybe just merely survived—the Gerry Glynn case. Boston’s first known serial killer in thirty years had garnered a lot of attention, as had those of us credited with catching him. The spate of publicity—national news coverage, never-ending rehashes in the tabloids, two true-crime paperbacks with a rumored third on the way—had made Angie and me two of the better-known private investigators in the city.

For five months after Gerry Glynn’s death, we’d refused to take cases, and this seemed only to whet the appetites of prospective clients. After we completed an investigation into the disappearance of a woman named Desiree Stone, we returned to publicly accepting cases again, and for the first few weeks the staircase leading up to the belfry was jammed with people.

Without ever acknowledging it to each other, we refused out-of-hand any cases that smelled of violence or glimpses into the darker caverns of human nature. Both of us, I think, felt we’d earned a break, so we stuck to insurance fraud, corporate malfeasance, simple divorces.

In February, we’d even accepted an elderly woman’s plea that we locate her missing iguana. The hideous beast’s name was Puffy, and he was a seventeen-inch-long iridescent green monstrosity with, as his owner put it, “a negative disposition toward humanity.” We found Puffy in the wilds of suburban Boston as he made a dash across the soggy plains of the fourteenth green at Belmont Hills Country Club, his spiky tail wagging like mad as he lunged for the hint of sunlight he spied on the fairway of the fifteenth. He was cold. He didn’t put up a fight. He did almost get turned into a belt, though, when he relieved himself in the backseat of our company car, but his owner paid for the cleaning and gave us a generous reward for her beloved Puffy’s return.

It had been that kind of year. Not the best for war stories down at the local bar but exceptional for the bank account. And as potentially embarrassing as it was to chase a pampered lizard around a frozen golf course, it beat getting shot at. Beat the hell out of it, actually.

“You think we’ve lost our nerve?” Angie asked me recently.

“Absolutely,” I’d said. And smiled.

“What if she’s dead?” Angie said, as we descended the belfry steps.

“That would be bad,” I said.

“It would be worse than bad, depending on how deep we got into it.”

“You want to tell them no, then.” I opened the door that led out to the rear schoolyard.