Stay With Me (15 page)

“One was Wikipedia, where she looked up . . . um . . . Thomas Hardy?”

“Yeah,” Brenna said. “She did a book report on
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
.”

“Gotcha,” Trent said. “But the other one was Chrysalis.”

Brenna stared at him. “The search engine?”

“Yep.”

Chrysalis. The search engine that was also home to dozens of chat rooms, on one of which Nelson Wentz’s wife had been a regular, impersonating the mother of a missing girl . . .

Brenna turned to Trent. “Had you ever heard of Chrysalis before the Neff case?”

“Well, yeah . . .” he said. “But that’s only because I’ve heard of everything.”

“I hadn’t heard of it,” Brenna said, very quietly. “And I’ll bet you anything, neither had Maya.”

To get to Chrysalis.org’s chat rooms, you had to go to “Other Services” and then click on a “plus” icon. Once you did, you were given three choices: ChrysBlogs, ChrysForSingles, and ChrysChats. Brenna clicked on ChrysChats, found the category marked “Living,” and then, under all the hobby chat rooms and senior citizen chat rooms and chat rooms for infertile couples and cancer sufferers and victims of violent crime (
Living indeed
, she thought now, just as she’d thought on September 30 at 12:15
P.M. . . .)
, she found the heading marked “Families of the Missing.” They were arranged regionally. Brenna scrolled down to the chat room she’d trolled on September 30 in search of Carol Wentz: “Families of the Missing, New York State.”

After the Neff case had made the news and the Families of the Missing, New York State chat room was mentioned in a Huffington Post piece, the room had gotten so overloaded with traffic from reporters and murder fans that the server broke down.

Administrators had shut all the chat rooms down for a week. But that was back in October—ancient history by today’s news cycle standards. The chat room was back, the heading looking just the same as on September 30, when Jim, chatting with Brenna via instant message the way he used to every night back then, had urged,
Go to the other services, and click on the bottom icon
.

Even without hyperthymesia—because anyone would have remembered—there was no avoiding the comparison . . . How very far her life had come since September 30, since last month, since this morning. How very far down . . .

“You on?” said Trent.

“Not yet.”

“Dude.”

“I have to think of a screen name.”

“How about SexyBack88? That’s mine. I mean that’s the one I use for . . . uh . . . other types of online experiences.”

“Subtle.”

“It is! I could have gone with SexyBack69 but nooo. See? I’m classy.”

Brenna sighed. “The Families of the Missing chat names tend to be a first name and an area of the state.”

“Uh . . . EighthStreetBrenna?”

“I need something shorter,” she said. “And less true. I don’t think they’re huge fans of mine in there.”

“Right. How about KarenStatenIsland? That’s my mom. Everybody likes her.”

“Sounds good.” Brenna created the identity SIKaren and entered the room. There were ten people in there, and she recognized quite a few screen names . . . LIMatt61, ClaudetteBrooklyn20, SyracuseSue . . . They were involved in a conversation about the Jets winning the playoffs—no mention of missing family members. Brenna thought about that—these people, joined together by a grief so lasting that it had become part of who they were. This could have just as easily been a chat room for knitters or senior citizens or people with blond hair. A group of friends, with something in common—only instead of a hobby or a hair color, it was a pain, deep and enduring, a part of them. They didn’t need to talk about it. It was always there.

ClaudetteBrooklyn20 typed:
Hi Karen! New here?

Brenna closed her eyes, opened them again:
Yes,
she typed.
My daughter is
missing.

SyracuseSue:
So sorry
.

ClaudetteBrooklyn20:
How long?

Brenna typed:
Today.

SyracuseSue:
Oh no! Police are helping, I hope.

Yes and no,
Brenna typed.
I’m actually on here because I think she may have visited this room before she went away.

LIMatt61:
Sorry, Karen, but how do we know who you really are?

She is thirteen years old,
Brenna typed.
She is my daughter and she’s gone.

SyracuseSue:
That’s a good point, Matt. No offense, Karen. You’re new, and you have to be here a while to gain trust.

WoodstockJackie:
Most people don’t find this chat room until their loved ones have been missing for years.

ClaudetteBrooklyn20:
Yes, who would come on here after just one day?

LIMatt61:
We’ve been trolled before.

“I’m blowing it,” Brenna said.

Trent leaned over her shoulder. “Don’t give up.”

Brenna typed:
Just please tell me if there’s been a teenager in here, and if she’s said anything unusual in the past few days.

SyracuseSue:
We’ve had teenagers come and go.

LIMatt61:
Don’t tell her anything more. I just checked and she doesn’t have a profile.

Brenna cringed.
A profile . . .
The last time she’d been in this room, she’d used the screen name of an established member. Of course she should have thought about creating a profile of her own. She should have made a profile for SIKaren and logged on and discussed the Jets with them first. She should have claimed someone else in her family was missing, had been missing for years. She should have said that she’d heard about this room from a friend’s daughter.
Do you know her? She’s thirteen. Not sure what screen name she was using . . .
Too late now. Desperation was turning her into a bad investigator, just as it had made Nick fire at Mark Carver. She needed to take a step back, get rid of her emotions. She had to, if she was going to find Maya, and she needed to find Maya.

Trent said, “Tell ’em you’re sorry.”

She did.

No one replied. They didn’t even speak to each other. It was almost as though the screen had frozen.

“Tell ’em you watched the Jets, too.”

She did.

ClaudetteBrooklyn20:
I’m sorry, Karen. You aren’t welcome here.

“No . . .” Brenna whispered.

Trent sighed heavily. “Dude, don’t worry. I can find out who the site administrator is. Request transcripts from the last month.”

“But how long will that take?” Brenna said.

“Depends.”

“You know the first forty-eight hours someone goes missing are crucial, Trent.
You know that
.”

“And how many times have we proved that wrong? Come on, Spec, please.” He put his hand over hers. “Don’t freak out. Stay with me . . .”

Brenna heard a beep. On the bottom of Brenna’s screen a message appeared:
You have a private chat request
.

Brenna shot a look at Trent, clicked on it. It was from someone in the room: NYCJulie.

If you would like to private chat,
the message read,
Go here.

“NYCJulie,” Trent said. “She’s from here.”

“Maybe,” Brenna said. “Or maybe she’s from Staten Island and her real name is Karen.”

“Yep.”

Brenna clicked on the link—a chat room for two appeared, NYCJulie’s screen name blinking, waiting . . .

Brenna typed:
Hi

NYCJulie:
Hi Karen
.

SIKaren:
Sorry I invaded your chat room, but I really am telling the truth.

NYCJulie:
I believe you.

SIKaren:
Thank you.

NYCJulie:
I just didn’t think she was from Staten Island.

Brenna let out a gasp.

“Whoa,” said Trent.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. She could very easily be full of crap.”

Brenna typed:
You know my daughter?

She waited, no response. Brenna gave Trent a look, then typed:
Sorry, but I’m going to need some proof.

The screen said:
NYCJulie is typing.
Brenna held her breath . . .

NYCJulie:
Spirited Away is her favorite movie. She used to like Justin Bieber, but now not so much. She likes to draw.

More typing. “Okay,” Brenna whispered. “Okay . . .”

NYCJulie:
She has mixed feelings about her missing aunt.

Brenna and Trent leaned forward at the same time, Brenna remembering Maya’s drawing of Clea, the bleeding bullet hole . . .

Trent said, “Maya’s been to this site.”

“We don’t know for sure.”

Brenna typed:
That all sounds good. But lots of kids have missing aunts. And lots of them have mixed feelings.

There was a pause, then finally . . .
NYCJulie is typing
.

The words appeared. Brenna and Trent stared at the screen.

“I think that’s your proof,” Trent said.

Her screen name is NYCYoru,
NYCJulie had typed,
But her real name is Maya.

Diane Plodsky was good at waiting. Her ex-husband, Bruce, used to tell her she was like a spider, and in a way he’d meant it as a compliment.
You’ve got patience, Diane,
he’d say.
Endless amounts of it.
Truth. At the end of their marriage, Diane had waited in the parking lot of the Starlite Motel in Tenafly, New Jersey for three hours, just to catch Bruce leaving a room with their neighbor, Laurel Farkus.

Endless amounts.

That patience had served her well at work—both in her current job with Missing Persons and in her previous incarnation as a precinct detective in Brooklyn. She could question a suspect for hours, probably weeks if it were allowed. She could wade through the most tedious and extensive case files, learn them thoroughly. And when it came to stakeouts, well, that went without saying. Diane didn’t need much sleep. She stayed alert, focused. She could outlast anyone, and for the most part she even enjoyed the wait.

So she didn’t mind sitting in the Tarry Ridge ER for five hours, waiting for Mark Carver to come out of surgery. She didn’t mind the brush-off answers she got out of Maya’s mother or her boyfriend Detective Morasco. They were agitated and she wasn’t and so of course extended questioning was going to unnerve them, of course it was going to make them snappish. Sifting through snappishness to pluck out real info had long been a part of her job. And so she’d learned to appreciate it . . . Well, anyway, she didn’t
mind
it.

But she did mind this doctor. She minded him a lot.

The thing about Diane’s endless patience: It demanded a payoff. When a suspect would crack, when the thickest, dullest case file would finally yield a piece of useful information—hell, even when her ex-husband had come out of the motel room with his belt undone and his hand on Laurel Farkus’s infinity-shaped ass—Diane would get this strange but powerful sense of relief, the feeling that all her waiting had been for something.

Not so tonight. “Mr. Carver has been sedated,” Dr. Clark said, standing over her. “He can’t have any more visitors.”

“Are you serious?”

“He became agitated with his previous visitor. We can’t risk any additional strain to his heart.”

“Great.”

“Check back in the morning. Hopefully he’ll be out of the woods.”

“I thought he was already out of the damn woods.”

He stared at her without saying anything for several seconds. Then he walked away.

Outside, Detective Morasco was heading into the parking lot, tapping a number into his phone, but Diane managed to catch up with him before he completed his call.

“What the hell did you do to him?” she said.

He stopped.

She glared at him. “What did you say to Carver?”

“Nothing.” He sighed. “I got mad at him.”

“Shooting him wasn’t enough for you?”

“I know Maya Rappaport. Everything he was giving me was complete crap. It was like he was purposely trying to mess with me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“A lot of things.”

“You know, Detective, a little specificity would go a real long way with me right now.”

“Fine,” he said. “Carver said he smoked oxycodone with Maya’s mother, and that she was the one who gave him the phone.”

She gaped at him. “He said he was smoking prescription drugs with Brenna Spector?”

“He said he met her on Craigslist.”

“How do you know he didn’t?”

He shook his head. “That’ll teach me to be specific.”

“Okay, maybe that’s going too far,” Diane said, “but you’re too close to this case. You’re not seeing it from every angle.”

He shot her a look, a familiar one. Bruce used to look at her the same way whenever she beat him at Scrabble. “Good night, Detective Plodsky,” he said.

He started to walk away.

“Did he refer to her as Brenna Spector, or did he just say, ‘her mother’?”

Morasco stopped, turned.

“Did he physically describe Maya’s mother?”

He watched her, sleepy eyes widening as realization dawned. “No,” he said. “He didn’t describe her. He didn’t name her.”

“So . . .”

“So she could have been anyone. Any woman could have had Maya’s phone and given it to him.”

“You see what I’m saying?” she said. “You would have gotten that right away if you weren’t so close to the case.”

“Any woman could have abducted her. Any woman could have claimed to be her mother.”

Diane thought it and said it at the same time. “Or Maya could even see her that way. This woman could be one of the ‘new friends,’ she mentions in the text. Part of the new family she’s found.”

“No. I told you already. You don’t know Maya, so—”

“So I can be objective.”

He started to say something, then stopped. He looked a little disgusted with her.

Honestly, Diane wasn’t sure why she kept pressing the runaway thing. Yes, it was a very real possibility. If there was one thing she’d learned during her twenty-five years in law enforcement, it was this: Everybody’s got secrets. Doesn’t matter how young or sweet or squeaky clean you are on the surface.