Fear the Worst Read online

  “I get it.”

  “These kids trust us. They have to be able to trust us or we can’t help them.”

  I was thinking. “So then, if you did have someone on staff who was doing this, who was trying to reunite kids with their parents, and you found out, they’d be fired.”

  “Very likely.”

  “So maybe whoever called me works here but didn’t use her real name.”

  Morgan Donovan considered that a moment. “Why would someone have to give you a name at all? She could have gotten in touch with you anonymously.”

  “I have an email address for her,” I said.

  Morgan asked for it and wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

  “There’s no one here with that address that I know of. A Hotmail address ain’t exactly that hard to get.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “So like I said, maybe someone’s yanking your chain,” she said. When I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, she said, “Wanna coffee or something? I’d offer you something stronger, but it’s a church foundation that tops up our budget and they take a dim view of my keeping scotch in my bottom drawer. Not that there isn’t a bottle in there right now. We’ve got a pot of coffee that’s been going continuously since 1992. Want some of that?” My face must have given away my reluctance. “A Diet Coke, then?”

  I said sure.

  “Hey, Len!” Footsteps scurrying down the hall, then Len poked his head in. “Can you grab us a couple cans of DC?”

  Len continued farther on down the hall, where I could hear an old-fashioned fridge open and then latch shut, and then he was back with one can and a paper cup. “We’re running a bit low,” he said, putting both items on her desk and leaving.

  Morgan got up and started clearing some papers off a wooden chair so that I could sit down.

  “Let me get that,” I offered, but she held up her arm to deflect me, then used it to scoop up the files.

  “I’m pretty good at this,” she said. “Although you know what pisses me off? Those taps in public washrooms, where you only get water so long as you’re pressing down? So as soon as you let go of the tap to get your hand under it, there’s no fucking water. I’ve just got the one fist, but if I could find the guy who invented that goddamn tap I could knock his teeth out.”

  I smiled awkwardly.

  “You can ask,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “How I lost it.”

  “It’s none of my business,” I said.

  “You ever hang your arm down the outside of the door when you’re in a car?”

  Slowly, I nodded.

  She smiled. “My husband’s driving, I’m chilling out in the passenger seat, my arm dangling out the window, the asshole runs a red and we get broadsided. I lost my arm in the front grille of a Ford Explorer. Maybe if the two of us hadn’t been three sheets to the wind, it wouldn’t have happened. Getting your wife’s arm cut off tends to put a strain on a marriage, so rather than look at me every day and be reminded of what he’d done, he hit the road. At least I had the one arm left to wave goodbye, the son of a bitch.”

  She popped the Diet Coke can, filled the paper cup to the rim, and handed it to me. She sipped what was left in the can and returned to her spot behind the desk.

  I sat in the chair she’d cleared for me.

  “I don’t think you answered my question,” she said. There had been a question? I was still processing the lost-arm story. Morgan refreshed my memory. “Why couldn’t this person have just sent an anonymous tip? Why give you a fake name?”

  “I guess she wanted me to know she was legit,” I said. “And she was. I’m sure of it. She even sent me a picture of my daughter.”

  “A picture?”

  “Sydney was caught in the frame of a shot she took with her cell phone.” I sipped Diet Coke from the paper cup. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how parched I was. “It was her. In the picture. I’m positive.”

  Morgan shook her head slowly back and forth. “Maybe she wanted you to know your daughter’s out here, she wants you to believe her, so she gave you a name. But maybe there was some reason why she couldn’t reveal her true identity to you.” Morgan laughed. “Makes her sound like Wonder Woman or something.”

  “It wasn’t you, was it?” I asked. The idea had just popped into my head.

  Morgan Donovan was too worn down by her job to register any surprise at my question. She said tiredly, “It’s all I can do to get these kids to have some breakfast, let alone reunite them all with their families.”

  “I’m taking a lot of shots in the dark these days,” I said.

  “Where are you staying?” Morgan asked me.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t book anything before I left. I thought, maybe, if I found Syd right away, we’d catch a red-eye back home tonight.”

  She smiled pitifully at me. “An optimist. It’s been so long since I ran into one of those I almost forgot they existed. Give me your cell number. I’ll put some of your snaps up on the bulletin board, tell everybody to see me if they know anything. Then I’ll call you. That a deal?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d really appreciate that.” A couple more swallows and I had finished my cup of Diet Coke. “Would you mind if I asked the other people who work here if they’ve seen Syd, or heard of Yolanda Mills?”

  “Actually, yes, I would,” Morgan said. “I’ll do what I can for you, but I don’t want you stirring things up around here.”

  I didn’t like her answer much. I got up from the chair, nodded, and said thanks. She went back to the mounds of paper on her desk. When she noticed I hadn’t left yet, she said, “Was there something else?”

  “You were going to put my daughter’s picture on the bulletin board,” I said.

  “So I was.” She brushed past me on her way out of the room, went down the hall and into the main reception area, where kids were still milling around. There seemed to be more here than before I’d gone into Morgan Donovan’s office. She crossed the room and stuck Syd’s face to a bulletin board and wrote under it, If you’ve seen this girl, see Lefty.

  The board was a collage version of a graduating class photo. Hundreds of photos. Boys and girls. White, black, Hispanic, Asian. Some as young as ten or twelve, others who looked to be in their thirties. The moment Morgan stepped back from the board, Sydney’s face blended into all the others. Not one lost daughter, but the latest addition to a lost generation.

  I stared hopelessly at the wall.

  “I know,” Morgan said. “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  I ASKED LEN FOR A SHEET OF PAPER from his printer before I left. I leaned over the door that was his desk, positioned a photo of Syd in the middle, and wrote above it, HAVE YOU SEEN SYDNEY BLAKE? Below the shot I printed my own name and cell phone number, adding, PLEASE CALL.

  I left and found a drugstore with a photocopying machine, positioned the picture in the center of the sheet, and placed the two items on the glass. I set the counter to one hundred and pressed Print. Once I had the copies, I went up and down the street. I figured if Syd had been in this area at least a couple of times, she might have frequented other businesses. Maybe she’d even have gone into some of them looking for work. She’d always been a pretty resourceful kid, and I could see her looking for odd jobs so that she could afford to feed herself.

  Most of the shopkeepers politely took the flyers, glanced at them, put them aside. Some just said, “Sorry.” Others glanced at the sheet and crumpled it up.

  There wasn’t time to get angry with any of them. I just moved on to the next shop.

  I did that until about nine. There was a diner across from Second Chance, and I managed to get a seat by the window. I put my cell phone on the table and ordered a hot open-faced turkey sandwich and coffee and sat there, rarely taking my eye off the front of the drop-in center. There was a streetlamp on the sidewalk there, and it cast enough light that if Syd appeared, I was confident I could spot her, even through the off-and
-on drizzle.

  I ate my dinner mechanically. Put the food in my mouth, chewed, swallowed. Drank my coffee.

  I tried the Yolanda Mills number again. No answer, no way to leave a message.

  I’d no sooner put the phone down than it rang. I grabbed it so quickly I knocked my fork to the floor. I didn’t stop to see who was calling before I flipped the phone open and put it to my ear.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “It’s me,” Susanne said.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing up? What time is it? It must be after midnight where you are.”

  “I’ve been sitting here by the phone all night, waiting for you to call.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “The lead… hasn’t panned out.”

  I heard a sigh of disappointment. “You sound… beat,” she said.

  “I’m going to find a place to stay. There’s a Holiday Inn or something up the street. I’ll get an early start tomorrow. See if I can find the woman who called me, hit all the other shelters I can find, see if Syd went to one of those.”

  “You haven’t connected with the woman who called you?”

  “No one’s heard of her.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know.”

  I could sense Susanne’s frustration thousands of miles away. “I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  I propped my elbow on the table and rested my head in the hand that wasn’t holding the phone, still watching the Second Chance shelter across the street.

  A girl stood in the doorway of the shelter. Blonde.

  “It’s just, you get some hint that maybe this is it, you grab on and hold on with everything you’ve got,” she said. “If you hear anything, you’ll call?”

  “I will,” I said. Switching gears, I said, “Susanne, how close are Evan and Sydney? I mean, before she disappeared.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not that close, as far as I could tell. I mean, they’d be civil with each other at the dinner table, but it’s not like they hung out together or anything.”

  “What do you think he’s into?”

  “What do you mean ‘into’?”

  “You think he’s stealing from you; he’s always on the computer with the door closed. You don’t think it’s porn. What’s your best guess?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it may be nothing. He’s really into music. You know, they’ve got all these programs where you can create music on the computer. Maybe he’s doing that, with the headphones on so we don’t hear it.”

  But she didn’t sound convinced.

  I kept watching the girl across the street.

  “Do you think Evan might have dragged Syd into whatever he’s up to?” I asked.

  “I never saw anything to suggest—”

  “Susanne? Hello?”

  “Sorry. I just closed the study door. I don’t want to wake Bob. Anyway, no, I don’t think Syd was mixed up in anything Evan’s up to. But there’s something I have to tell you.”

  The girl kept moving in and out of the shadows. She’d move in close to the shelter entrance where I could barely see her, then poke her head out to watch the cars go by, the streetlights catching her blonde hair.

  Come on, come on, step out, step out all the way.

  “I saw that van again tonight,” Susanne said.

  “What van?” I said. The girl took a step forward, the light hitting her face for less than a second. She glanced down the street, then retreated into the shadows.

  “The one on our street? The one Bob doesn’t think is a big deal?”

  I knew what van she meant the first time, but I was having a hard time keeping track of the conversation while I watched the girl.

  “When did you see it?” I managed to ask.

  “Tonight. A couple of hours ago. After it got dark, I happened to look outside and saw a van parked a few houses down, and when I went out and walked down to the end of the driveway it started up and backed up to the corner and took off.”

  A boy—a young man—was approaching the shelter from the right. He came up to the door, and the girl threw her arms around him, kissed him. He had his back to me, and all I could really see of the girl was the top of her head and her arms.

  “Susanne…”

  “It’s freaking me out. Bob says I’m getting paranoid about everything because of Syd. Why the fuck wouldn’t I be?”

  The girl stepped out from the entrance, into the streetlight, but the way she had her arms wrapped around the boy, her head tucked down onto his chest, I couldn’t see her face. But my gut said it wasn’t her. There was something not quite Syd about her. This girl’s legs, they seemed a little shorter.

  They started walking up the street. In another moment, they’d be gone.

  “So I’m thinking, is someone watching our house? Or one of the other houses on the street? If it’s our house, are they watching me, or are they watching Bob? Or has this got something to do with Evan?”

  Then the girl leaned her head back, tossed her hair back over her shoulder.

  I’d seen Syd do that a thousand times.

  “Susanne, I have to go for a second. Hang on.”

  “What? Why—”

  I bolted from the diner, leaving my bag behind, my phone on the table. I threw open the door and ran into the street, forcing drivers coming from both directions to hit the brakes. Horns blew, someone shouted, “Asshole!”

  They were forty yards ahead, thirty, twenty. Arm in arm. She had an arm around his waist, her thumb in a belt loop.

  “Syd!” I shouted. “Syd!”

  Before the girl had a chance to turn around, I was on them, grabbing her by her free arm, using it to swing myself around in front of her.

  “Syd!” I said.

  It wasn’t Syd.

  The girl jerked her arm back as her boyfriend shoved me away forcefully with both hands. I stumbled back, tripped over my own feet, landed on my ass on the sidewalk, my head narrowly missing a brick wall behind me.

  “Fuck’s your problem?” he said, grabbing the girl and taking her across the street.

  THIRTEEN

  THE NEXT MORNING, I DEBATED RENTING A CAR, but Seattle isn’t exactly laid out like New York. I wanted to hit as many teen shelters as possible, and didn’t want to waste time attempting to navigate the city’s winding streets, so I talked to a cabby out front of the hotel and cut a deal to have him take me from shelter to shelter, and wait while I was at each one, for $200.

  “That’ll take you to noon,” he said.

  “We’ll see where we are then,” I said. “Let me go find a cash machine.”

  The hotel—not a Holiday Inn, not even close—at least had a computer in the lobby I could use, and I went online to get a list of local shelters. The desk clerk said the printer was busted, so I had to write down names, addresses, and phone numbers on a pad I’d found next to the phone in my room.

  I handed the sheet, and the cash, to the cabby and said, “Let’s hit the closest first and work our way out to the others.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me running you all over the place. You’ve already paid me, the meter’s off, and with gas costing what it is, we’re doing the shortest route possible.”

  “Great.”

  He delivered me to all the shelters on my list by half past eleven. It was the same story everywhere. I showed them Syd’s picture, left them some flyers with my cell phone number on them. I stopped kids at random, pushed the photo under their noses.

  No one recognized Syd.

  Nor had anyone heard of Yolanda Mills. Every place I stopped I asked for her, too.

  After the last shelter, I dropped into the back seat of the taxi. “You know of any other places that aren’t on this list?” I asked.

  “I didn’t even know there were this many,” the cabby said, turning in his seat to look at me. The Jesus bobblehead stuck to his dash, which had been bouncing madly during our dr
ive around Seattle, had had a chance to calm down. My driver was heavyset, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and spent most of the time as we wandered the city talking on his cell phone to his wife about what they could do to find somebody to marry his sister. She was, from what I could tell, unlikely to be named Miss Washington in the near future, and this was a major stumbling block.

  “All right,” I said, dejected. “Is there a main police headquarters?”

  “Sure.”

  “Drop me off there and that’ll be it,” I said.

  “Tough about your daughter,” he said.

  I hadn’t discussed Syd with him, but given that we were hitting all the shelters for runaways, and I had a stack of flyers in my hand, you didn’t have to be Jim Rockford to figure out the nature of my mission.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” he said, poking Jesus with a finger and making him shake, “you just have to let them do what they want to do, and wait until they realize they need your help, and they come home on their own.”

  “What if they’re in trouble?” I countered. “And they’re waiting for you to find them?”

  The driver thought about that for a moment. “Well, I guess that’s different,” he said.

  * * *

  THE SEATTLE POLICE HEADQUARTERS WAS ON FIFTH AVENUE. I went into the lobby and up to the counter and told the woman there I needed to speak to someone about a missing teenage girl.

  An officer named Richard Buttram came out to see me and led me to an interview room. I told him about Sydney, when she’d gone missing, how I’d been led to Seattle. That I’d lost touch with Yolanda Mills since I’d gotten here, and that I’d had no luck finding my daughter.

  I gave him one of my flyers, told him about the website.

  He listened patiently, nodded, stopped me to ask the occasional question.

  “So you don’t really know,” he said, “whether your daughter’s here in Seattle, or whether she ever was here in Seattle.”

  Slowly, not wanting to admit it, I said, “I suppose that’s true.” Then, trying to sound more confident, I continued, “But this woman told me she was here. That she had seen her. She even sent me a picture that I’m as sure as can be was of my daughter.”