Fear the Worst Read online

  “What was the number she gave you?”

  I opened my cell phone, found it, read it off to Buttram, who scribbled it down on a notepad. “Let me try it,” he said, dialing the number from his desk phone. He let it ring a good thirty seconds, then hung up.

  “Give me three minutes,” Buttram said and left the room.

  I sat there for nearly fifteen, staring at the empty tabletop, the unadorned walls. I looked at the clock, watched the second hand make sweep after sweep.

  When Buttram returned he looked dour. “I went to see one of our detectives who knows a lot about cell phones and various exchanges and all that kind of thing.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It’s his guess that this is a throwaway phone. He did a quick check of the number, made a call, told me it’s one of those ones you can buy at a 7-Eleven or whatever, use for a short period of time, then ditch it.”

  I felt like I was slowly slipping underwater.

  “None of this makes any sense,” I said.

  Buttram said, “I’ll hang on to this flyer, put the word out, but I don’t want to raise your expectations that we’re going to find your daughter.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “This woman who called you, she wasn’t sniffing about for a reward?”

  “No,” I said.

  Buttram shook his head as he stood up and walked me to the lobby. “Then I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m starting to think Sydney’s not here in Seattle, that she never was, but I’m afraid to fly home. I keep thinking, if I walk around that neighborhood, where the shelter is, just one more time, I’ll spot her.”

  “You’ve put the word out,” he said. “Morgan, at Second Chance, I know her, and she’s the real deal. If she says she’s going to keep her eye out for your girl, that’s exactly what she’ll do.”

  He shook my hand and wished me good luck. I stood on the sidewalk out front of the police headquarters for five minutes before walking back to my hotel and checking out.

  I booked myself on a Jet Blue flight that didn’t leave Seattle until shortly before ten, and would arrive, considering the time change, at LaGuardia at six in the morning. That gave me time to go back into the Second Chance neighborhood and keep looking for Syd.

  I managed to grab the same table in the same diner where I’d eaten the night before and stared across the street at the door to the shelter for the better part of four hours. I ordered food, then a coffee about every half hour.

  I never saw her, or anyone else who looked remotely like her.

  From there I cabbed it to the airport and sat around in the departure lounge like some sort of shock trauma victim, staring straight ahead, hardly moving at all, while waiting for my flight to be called. My cell rang twice. The first call was from Susanne, hoping for good news, but knowing there’d be none since I had not gotten in touch.

  And then the phone rang again.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Hey, Kate,” I said.

  “I kind of flipped out the other night.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You went, right? To Seattle? I noticed you weren’t back yet.”

  So she’d been driving by my house.

  “Kate, I really can’t talk now.”

  “I know I said some things, and I just wanted to apologize.”

  Maybe, if I hadn’t been so tired and discouraged, I might have found a way to be more diplomatic.

  I might not have said, “Kate, this isn’t working out. We’re done. It’s over.” And I certainly wouldn’t have finished with “Life’s too short.”

  But that was what I said.

  Kate waited a few seconds before coming back with “You’re a total asshole, you know that? You’re a goddamn fucking asshole. I knew it the first time I met you. And you know something else? There’s something not right with you, you know that? Something just not—”

  I ended the call, turned the phone off, and slipped it into my pocket.

  I’M NOT NORMALLY ABLE TO NOD OFF ON A PLANE, but this overnight flight was an exception. Exhaustion overwhelmed me and I spent almost the entire trip asleep. I was more than bone weary. I was depressed, crushed, burdened by despair. I’d traveled clear across the country thinking I was going to bring my daughter home with me.

  And I was coming home alone.

  We landed on time, but the pilot had to wait for a gate to clear, so it was nearly seven before I got off the plane, and what with several traffic jams, a couple of pit stops and everything else, it was shortly before noon before I pulled into my driveway on Hill Street back in Milford.

  A defeated soldier coming home from war, I trudged up to the door, bag slung over my shoulder. I put my key into the lock and swung open the door.

  The house had been trashed.

  FOURTEEN

  “SO RUN THROUGH IT AGAIN FOR ME,” Kip Jennings said.

  “I got home, I opened the door, it’s like somebody tossed a grenade in here,” I said.

  “When was this?”

  I glanced at the clock hanging on the kitchen wall, one of the few things still in its place. “About an hour and a half ago.”

  “Have you touched anything since then?”

  “I put that clock back on the mantel,” I said. “It was my father’s.” The gesture was akin to straightening your cap after you’ve been run over by an eighteen-wheeler.

  There were a couple of uniformed cops wandering around the house, taking pictures, muttering among themselves. They’d found a basement window that had been kicked in.

  “You’d been gone how long?”

  “About forty-eight hours. I left here early two days ago. After nine. So two days and four hours, give or take.”

  “Seattle,” Jennings said.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And your daughter?”

  “I didn’t find her,” I said.

  Jennings’s eyes softened for a moment. “So you got home, you opened the door,” she said. “Did you see anyone? Was anyone running away from the house when you pulled into the driveway?”

  “No,” I said.

  I told her what I’d found. In the living room, cushions tossed from the furniture, then cut open, the foam scattered about in chunks. Every shelf cleared, every cabinet emptied. Books thrown about, CDs all over the place. Audio equipment pulled from the shelves, some components still hanging from them by their wires, hanging precariously like a truck on a cliff in an Indiana Jones movie.

  In the kitchen, every cupboard emptied. And then, the boxes that were in the cupboard, emptied. Cornflakes all over the floor. Things pulled out of the fridge, the door hanging open.

  It was the same story everywhere. All the drawers in my bedroom dresser pulled out and turned over. So many clothes on the floor you couldn’t see the carpet. Socks, underwear, shirts. Items ripped off hangers in the closet, thrown here and there.

  Syd’s room was no different, although she didn’t have quite as much stuff to trash as I did, since most of her clothes were still at her mother’s house. The dresser had been emptied. Unlike my bed, which didn’t appear to have been touched, Syd’s mattress had been cut open. The contents of the closet were on the bedroom floor.

  In my computer room, all the desk drawers had been opened, the shelves cleared off.

  The basement damage was minimal. The washer and dryer had been opened, and a box of Tide detergent had been emptied onto the floor. The toolbox on my workbench had been dumped out.

  Our boxes of stuff—those things you accumulate through life that you don’t know what to do with but haven’t the nerve to pitch, like your children’s kindergarten drawings, photos, books you’ll never read again, old files and business papers from your parents’ house—had been opened and rummaged through, but only a couple had been dumped out.

  Standing amid the wreckage in the living room, I asked Jennings,
“What kind of little bastards would do this?”

  “You think it was kids?” Jennings asked.

  “You don’t?”

  We went through the house slowly, our shoes crunching on cornflakes as we went through the kitchen. She walked and talked. “Have you noticed whether anything was stolen?”

  “How could you tell?” I said, surveying the wreckage. “I really haven’t had a chance to go through the place and check.”

  “Your computer missing?”

  “No, it’s still up there.”

  “Your daughter’s laptop?”

  I recalled seeing it, nodded.

  “Laptop’s pretty easy to walk off with,” Jennings said.

  “Yes.”

  “How about silverware?”

  I had noticed it earlier, dumped from a buffet drawer onto the living room carpet. “It’s here. Would kids even steal silverware?”

  “How about iPods, little things like that that are easy to pocket?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have one. Syd does, but it’s in my car. But they didn’t take the small TV here.” I pointed to the set hanging from the kitchen cabinet. Someone would have needed a screwdriver to free it from its bracket.

  “They didn’t break it, either,” Kip Jennings said. “You keep any cash in the house?”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “Some, in this drawer over here. Just a few bills, fives and tens, for things like pizza, charities, stuff like that.”

  “Have a look,” she said.

  I opened it. The cash was normally tucked between the edge of the cutlery tray and the side of the drawer.

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  “Other than the cash, anything jump out at you as being missing?”

  “Not really. What are you getting at?”

  “You think maybe it was kids, and maybe it was. But you see any spray paint on the walls? Any TVs kicked in? Doesn’t look like anyone’s defecated on your rug.”

  “A silver lining to everything,” I said.

  “It’s the kind of thing kids will do.”

  “So you don’t think it was kids,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you this much. I don’t think anybody came in here to steal stuff at random. They were looking for something. They were looking for it pretty hard, too.”

  “Looking for what?” I asked.

  “You tell me,” Jennings said.

  “You think I know and I’m not telling you?”

  “No. At least, not necessarily. But you know better than I what you might have hidden in this house.”

  “I don’t have anything hidden,” I said.

  “Maybe it wasn’t you who hid it,” she said.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying your daughter’s missing and we don’t know why. She said she was working at that hotel, but no one there’s even heard of her. That tells me your daughter wasn’t exactly being honest with you about everything. So maybe she was hiding something in this house—or at least somebody thought she might have been—that she didn’t share with you.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Kip put her hands on her hips and studied me. “This is a pretty thorough search. In all the years I’ve been with the police, I’ve seen very few places torn apart like this. I’ve never even seen cops tear apart a place like this. This took a while. Looks like they weren’t too worried about you walking in the door unexpectedly. Looks like they knew they had time.”

  Our eyes met.

  “Who knew you were going to Seattle?” she asked.

  Whom had I told? Who knew? Kate. My boss, Laura Cantrell. My colleague in the showroom, Andy Hertz. Susanne, of course, and no doubt Bob and Evan. And anyone else any of these people might have told.

  I was missing the obvious, of course.

  Yolanda Mills, whoever she was, knew I was off to Seattle. She’d practically invited me there.

  “Maybe I was set up,” I said.

  “Come again?” Jennings asked.

  “I was set up. The woman who called me, who said she’d seen my daughter. She knew I wasn’t going to be home.”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  I told her about Yolanda Mills, how I couldn’t find her in Seattle, how the cops out there believed she’d called me from a disposable cell phone.

  “Seattle’s about as far away as someone could send you and still be in the country,” Jennings said. “Once you were on your way to the airport, they knew they had at least a couple of days to go through your house.”

  “But she had a picture of her,” I said. “She sent it to me. It was a picture of Syd. I’m as sure of that as I can be.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Computer,” I said.

  I led us into the study, stepping over tossed books and dumped shoe boxes spilling out receipts. While the computer tower and monitor had been shoved about, they were reasonably intact. I fired it up, opened the email program, and found the message and attached photo from Yolanda Mills. I opened it for Detective Jennings to see.

  “It’s not the greatest picture in the world,” she said. “The way her hair is falling, you can’t see much of her face.”

  “You see this?” I said, pointing to the coral, fringed scarf that Syd had tied about her neck. “I know that scarf. Syd has one just like it. You put that scarf with that hair, and that bit of nose you can see there, and that’s her. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Jennings leaned in close to the screen and studied the scarf. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said.

  I sat there at the computer, checked to see whether anyone else had been in touch in the last two days. There had been hardly any hits on the website for Syd, and my emails were all junk.

  Jennings appeared in the doorway, something bright and colorful wadded up in her hand. She held up a scarf.

  “The color caught my eye when I was looking in your daughter’s room earlier,” she said. “It was dumped out onto the floor with everything else.”

  I stood, reached for the scarf, and held it as though it might dissolve in my fingers.

  “Is that the scarf?” she asked.

  I nodded very slowly. “That’s the scarf.”

  “So if your daughter was supposedly wearing this scarf in Seattle a few days ago, what’s it doing here in your house?”

  That was a really good question.

  I didn’t have much time to ponder it. A minute later, one of the uniformed cops poked his head into the study and said to Jennings, “I think we found what they were looking for.”

  FIFTEEN

  “WHAT?” I SAID.

  The cop said nothing. He led Jennings to my bedroom and I followed. One of the pillows had been stripped of its case and was slit open. A clear plastic freezer bag that was filled with a white powdery substance lay on the bedspread.

  “I noticed a funny bump under the pillowcase,” he said.

  Detective Jennings pinched the corner of the bag between thumb and forefinger, lifted it up for an inspection.

  “Lordy, Lordy, what do we have here?” she said.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Detective Jennings said, eyeing me, the cop in uniform studying me as well. “What do you think it is?”

  “I think it might be cocaine.”

  “If that turns out to be right, what do you think it’s doing in your pillow?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Want to hazard a guess?”

  Slowly, I shook my head. “No.” I thought a moment. “Yes.”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Someone put it there,” I said.

  The cop made a small snorting noise.

  “I’d have to agree with you there,” Jennings said.

  “I slept on that bed two nights ago. There was nothing in that pillow then. Someone put it there while I was away.”

  “So what are you saying?” Jennings said. “That there were two different
break-ins while you were away? That someone came in here and hid this what-may-prove-to-be cocaine in your pillow, and then someone else broke in trying to find it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “To be honest, as strange as this is, I’m a little more concerned about how my daughter’s scarf can be here if she had her picture taken wearing it in Seattle.”

  “One thing at a time,” Jennings said. She set the clear bag on the bed. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that someone snuck in while you were away and hid this in your pillow. Wouldn’t that be pretty stupid? First time you get into bed, you put your head on the pillow, you notice it’s there.”

  “I agree, that’d be pretty dumb,” I said. “About as dumb as my inviting you into my home to find it. And if this house really was broken into twice, once to hide those drugs, and then a second time by somebody else trying to find them, then how the hell did they overlook them? It took your officer here ten minutes to stumble onto them. I mean, look around. This house has been turned fucking upside down. And that pillow’s just sitting there full of drugs. Does that make any sense at all?”

  Jennings said nothing. She was standing there, one hand held thoughtfully over her mouth and chin. She was trying to work it out.

  “Unless whoever put those drugs there did it after the house was torn apart,” she said. “A place that’s already been searched is a great place to hide something.”

  “Even if that’s what happened,” I said, “my pillow is still a stupid place to hide anything. I’d find it.”

  She turned her head and looked at me. “Unless you’re the one who put it there.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said.

  “Do you have a lawyer, Mr. Blake?” Detective Jennings asked.

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” I said.

  “I think maybe you do.”

  “What I need is for you to believe me. What I need is for you to help me figure out what’s going on. What I need is for you to help me find my daughter.”

  That stopped her for a moment. “Your daughter,” she said. “She certainly wouldn’t have to break through a basement window to get in.”