Ocean Beach (31 page)

Andrew took it. “I don’t think we could possibly miss hearing him cry,” he said with a nod to the bedroom door that was maybe four steps away.

“Not ‘we.’ You,” Kyra said pointedly. “You and Max are in charge.”

Troy didn’t say anything, but Maddie knew from the tilt of his head that he was tuned into the conversation. Just as he was tuned into anything Kyra said or did. Although she knew better than to say so to Kyra, Maddie actually hoped the cameraman was going to be there all evening, not just so that the chance of him discovering their subterfuge would be lessened, but because she’d seen how good he was with Dustin.

He turned and asked, “So what movie are you going to see?”

Maddie froze for a moment. Kyra had gone online to look up a movie and a description just in case anyone asked. She looked at Kyra in question, but before she could answer, Troy added, “Is there a Daniel Deranian marathon at the dollar theater?”

“Very funny,” Kyra huffed as she slung her purse over her shoulder. “Are you ready, Mom?”

Ted’s Hideaway was a small neighborhood bar on Second Avenue just next door to Big Pink and barely a five-minute walk away. Maddie felt silly taking the car, but they wouldn’t have walked to the movies and she didn’t want to blow their cover story.

“I feel like someone should be playing the
Mission: Impossible
theme in the background,” Maddie said as they circled the block looking for ever-elusive parking.

“Maybe Giraldi has an extra trench coat,” Kyra cracked when they finally found a spot. “Or a secret handshake.”

They climbed out and locked the minivan. Maddie smiled at Kyra as they walked toward the building. “I’ll be sure to ask him that first thing,” she said.

Ted’s was dark and denlike with deep red walls, a U-shaped bar, and lots of wood, most of it scarred. Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats, Paul Newman as
The Hustler
, and W. C. Fields as himself, but with cue in hand, hung near the pool table. The rest of the decor, if it could be called that, was classic dive bar. It was the kind of place where the air smelled of fried food and cigarette smoke, Johnny Cash and ZZ Top duked it out on the jukebox, and sports played on the TV screens.

It wasn’t at all the kind of place that Nikki had grown used to and it was a far cry from the quiet intimacy of their dinner at AltaMare, but Giraldi had snagged a table in the back up against a brick wall, which gave them an unimpeded view of the pool table and the front door, a location Nicole assumed came right out of the FBI training manual on seat selection.

Although plenty of people were drinking hard liquor, they’d decided on beer. A half-empty pitcher sat in front of them. Or was it half-full?

Giraldi was big and solid beside her. Even without the brick wall, Nikki couldn’t imagine anyone sneaking up behind him or getting the jump on him in any way.

“So how are things going with Amherst?” he asked. “Do you have him fixed up and ready to walk down the aisle?”

Nikki fingered the handle of her beer mug. “Not exactly,” she admitted. “He’s proven to be a bit elusive. I’m
not sure if he simply doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Or if he’s really not ready to settle down.”

“I think ‘elusive’ is way too gentle a word,” Giraldi said. “I think the guy smells to high heaven. I’d be happy to run a background check on him for you.”

“Is that what you do when you don’t like someone?” she asked. “Run their fingerprints and look for criminal activity?” She could feel herself overreacting, but she was embarrassed that she hadn’t signed Amherst yet. The fact that he’d so far resisted retaining her and was, in fact, a bit odd didn’t mean he deserved to be investigated.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Giraldi said without heat. “It’s just that I’ve learned over the years to trust my instincts. It’s one of the reasons I’m still alive.”

“Well, he smells okay to me,” Nicole said lamely, though in fact it was more a case not of okay, but of okay enough. She’d put up with someone completely unwashed if he’d sign a contract and give her a check. People had short memories and she’d done nothing illegal. Arranging a high-profile marriage could put her back in the headlines in a
good
way. After all, you could choose your friends and your business associates. It was only your family that you were stuck with. “I appreciate your offer,” she said stiffly. “But I think we should save your professional services for our search for Max’s son. Or some other, actual criminal activity.”

Giraldi nodded, unperturbed, and took a sip of beer. His gaze skimmed the bar, ultimately focusing on the front door. A moment later there was a flash of early evening sky and Avery and Deirdre stepped inside.

Nicole raised a hand in greeting and watched the mother and daughter walk back to the table. Deirdre was
overdressed for the casual jeans-and-T-shirt atmosphere; she always looked like she belonged somewhere exclusive and expensive, but she didn’t seem at all bothered by the smoky air and sticky floors. Avery looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but next to Deirdre. Her small curvy body was lost in the billowing beige-ness of her clothing. They looked like identical Barbie dolls that had been dressed at opposite ends of the style spectrum in some mad fashion comparison gone awry.

Maddie and Kyra arrived a few minutes later. They weren’t mirror images in the way that Deirdre and Avery were, but it would be hard to miss the family resemblance.

A waitress appeared to take their drink orders. Kyra, who had apparently left a bottle of expressed breast milk for emergencies, declared she needed a drink. They were still getting settled when another pitcher arrived.

When thirst had been slaked and the chitchat began to die down, Maddie called the meeting, such as it was, to order. “So,” she said. “I thought maybe we could ask Kyra and Joe to share what, if anything, they’ve come up with. And then we can see where we go from there.”

“Unfortunately, I’ve got a lot of nothing,” Kyra said. “I made copies of Aaron’s baby and toddler photos and posted them along with his full name, and the dates of his birth and disappearance, on the locator sites that looked the most legitimate and didn’t charge an arm and a leg.” She slid the photos she’d “borrowed” and copied from Max’s box. “But it feels a lot like looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. At least on the adoption sites there’s always the chance that both parties have signed up and are looking.” She looked at Giraldi. “Do you think that if he was abducted
when he was three, he would have any memory of his parents?”

“Unlikely,” Joe said.

Their faces fell as they absorbed this.

“And if all we have are those old photos, it wouldn’t help to post them elsewhere on missing-person sites, would it? I mean, who would recognize a fifty-four-year-old man from those?” Nikki asked.

“I did see some sites that offer to do age progression,” Kyra said. “The sites seem targeted to people who’ve lost a child and want to know what they might have looked like if they’d lived. It’s really heartbreaking. One of them showed the dead child at a prom and in graduation robes.”

“People search for and get comfort in different ways.” Maddie put a hand on Kyra’s. Nikki knew they were both thinking of Dustin.

“Actually, that’s something I could help with,” Giraldi said. “I have a friend at the Bureau who’s a forensic artist. I could have a progression done for use in posting, but the truth is, this
is
like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

He lifted the pitcher of beer and topped off their mugs. “I looked over the case files, both the Miami Beach Police Department and the Bureau’s. Everybody followed standard operating procedure for the early 1960s. They canvassed and interviewed the family, the neighbors, deliverymen—anyone who might have been in or near the area at the time. They led searches of the area, double-checked Max and Millie’s accounts of what happened, broadcast appeals on local television. But there were no signs of a struggle, no ransom demands, no pertinent fingerprints, no anything. And there was never a body.”

Giraldi shrugged his broad shoulders. “It was twenty years before Adam Walsh disappeared and changed how these cases were handled forever. There was no Internet, no databases, no DNA testing. And even if there had been, there was no evidence to test and no suspects to do a search on.” He took a long pull on his beer and shook his head. “It’s just one big dead end.”

“You’ve seen that wrought-iron fence, there’s no way a three-year-old could have opened it and just wandered off,” Maddie said.

But it had only been latched not locked, Nikki thought. How long would it have taken someone who might have been watching and waiting to push it open, walk over, and scoop up a child—thirty seconds, a minute?

“Millie’s statement said she’d been inside for less than five minutes and that she’d left the front door open so that she could hear,” Giraldi said. “But by the time she was interviewed, she was hysterical. And none of the neighbors who happened to be home at the time saw or heard anything unusual or suspicious.”

Nikki listened to the calm, comprehensive way he presented the facts. There was a strength of purpose there, but compassion too. Giraldi went by the book, but he wasn’t an unfeeling stickler. If there was room to do anything for Max, she had confidence that he would. “What about a cold-case unit?” Nikki asked. “Does Miami have one?”

“Sure,” he said. “But after all these years there’d have to be some kind of new information or lead, something that didn’t exist when the disappearance was originally investigated, for them to reopen the case.”

“And we don’t have anything like that,” Deirdre said. It was not a question.

“No,” Giraldi said. “There’s nothing that could legitimately be considered a clue or a lead. If there had even been a suspect, I could take another look at him or her. If anything pointed in any direction, there’d at least be a place to start.”

“But doesn’t the fact that there was never a body indicate that Aaron might be alive somewhere?” Deirdre asked.

Giraldi shook his head again. His expression and tone were almost apologetic. “I wish I could say yes. But there are lots of ways and places to dispose of a body, especially a small one.”

They sat in silence for a moment, absorbing this. Nikki was certain she wasn’t the only one trying not to picture what could have happened to Aaron Golden’s sturdy little body.

Around them, the country ballads had given way to rock and roll. The bartenders were loud and friendly and fast, which meant the crowd was already well lubricated. There were whoops of victory and shouts of despair from the group around the pool table. Nikki thought their table looked like an island of unhappiness in a sea of good times.

“So there’s nothing we can do?” Maddie asked.

“Not at the moment,” Giraldi said. “I’ll go ahead and get these photos to the artist I mentioned. And if anyone stumbles across anything that gives us somewhere to focus, I’ll be happy to help.”

They sipped their drinks, looking everywhere but at one another, none of them willing to believe the search could be finished before it had really begun.

“Well, at least once we have the photo of what Aaron would have looked like, we’ll have something to give Max,” Avery said.

None of them perked up at this. It seemed like such a small thing in comparison to what they’d hoped to give him.

“Remember that our real gift to Max is The Millicent,” Maddie said. “That’s something significant.”

“Of course it is,” Kyra agreed, her tone as heavy as their moods. “But unless one of us comes up with something that resembles a clue, he won’t have anyone to leave it to.”

At the moment Maddie could not understand why any house needed this many doors. They’d spent the entire day removing them from their openings and carting them downstairs, where they then spent forever removing and labeling all the hinges and hardware before stacking them out back against The Millicent’s exterior walls.

Maddie watched as Avery and Andrew set up the sawhorses in assembly-line fashion, as they’d done at Bella Flora, placing each station in its own patch of shade.

“Okay,” Avery said. “Today Nicole and I will strip as many doors as possible. Andrew will handle the sanding at that station.” She pointed to a spot near the pool house. “And the third will be for staining. Nikki can move there tomorrow once we have some doors ready and Kyra can help with either stripping or staining in between shooting and Dustin.