Vanished in the Night (5 page)

“Yeah, I do. It was the last time you saw your son. I expect it to stick in your head.” Zach kept his voice pleasant. It was an effort.

“Stepson,” Osborne corrected. “Not my kid.”

“You married his mother. He was your responsibility,” Zach shot back.

Osborne came up out of his chair. It was meant to be an aggressive move, but the waver in his balance made it more pathetic than threatening. “And
I met my responsibilities. I put a roof over the brat’s head. I put food on the table. What do I get in return? A juvenile delinquent bringing drugs into my house where my little girl could find them.

“You want to know the last time I saw him? It was when they came and took him up to that school. I never laid eyes on him again after that, and that’s just fine with me.”

Frank glanced over at Zach, eyes narrowed. “What kind of drugs?”

Osborne sat back down and waved the question away as if it was inconsequential. “Marijuana. In a Baggie with a pipe and some matches.”

“So you never went to visit him up at the Sierra School for Boys?”

“Nope. The wife did once. Came back weeping and wailing. I wouldn’t let her go again after that.” Osborne’s attention was back on the game. The Kings had let their lead dwindle to six points. Typical.

“How long was he there?” Frank asked.

Osborne shrugged. “A year. Maybe a little more. Why’s it matter?”

“We’re trying to nail down a time frame here,” Zach said. “Your daughter indicated that Max had run away from the Sierra School.”

Osborne looked at him sharply. “My daughter? You’ve talked to Ronnie?”

“If you mean Veronica Osborne, yeah. She was listed as next of kin after your wife.”

“What’d she say?” Osborne sat very still.

“Not much. She seemed pretty shocked.” And sad, and a little frightened. Beyond that moment of hesitation at the front door, Max’s death didn’t seem to shock Osborne in the slightest.

Osborne shook his head. “She worshipped that kid. It was part of why I had to get him out of the house. He was a bad influence. She was a little girl. She doesn’t know anything about this. I don’t want you talking to her again.”

“So when exactly did Max run away from Sierra?”

“I told you, it was around twenty years ago. What do you think, I made a notation in my diary? ‘Dear Diary,’” Osborne said in a singsong voice. “‘Today I heard that my piece-of-shit stepson took a powder from the place that was supposed to be kicking some sense into his good-for-nothing head.’”

“How ’bout you, Osborne? You ever try to kick sense into Max’s head? You knock him around a little?” Zach got into his face.

“Maybe.” Osborne didn’t meet Zach’s eyes. “No more than was necessary.”

It was damn tempting to knock some sense into Osborne’s head, but the satisfaction wouldn’t be worth the consequences.

“So you never saw Max after he went to Sierra? He didn’t come back here after he ran away? Maybe stop by to ask for some money?” Where else did the kid have to go? Blairsden was a far piece away. It couldn’t have been easy to get away from there.

Osborne snorted. “The kid wasn’t stupid. He knew if he showed his face around here, I’d kick his ass back up the hill with pleasure.”

“So you’ve got no clue as to exactly when Max went missing?” Frank asked.

“You want a clue? Go dig it up yourself. You’re the detective, aren’t you? Go detect. Start with detecting the missing persons report that the school filed.” His eyes still glued to the television, Osborne waved his hand as if to dismiss them.

“A report was filed? Up in Blairsden?” Zach hadn’t seen that when they ran Max’s name through the databases, but not everything from back then was computerized.

Osborne spared them another glance. “Wherever. They filed one at the school. Said it was protocol or something.”

Zach had a nagging suspicion the man knew more than he was letting on, but they weren’t going to get anything more from Osborne.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Osborne. We’re very sorry for your loss. We’ll see ourselves out.” He turned to go.

“Don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out,” Osborne called after them.

“Classy,” Frank said as they got into the car.

“True that,” Zach said. “What do you think? Could he have done it?”

Frank leaned back in his seat and loosened his tie. “Kid could have shown up with his hand out for money. Osborne could have taken a swing. Maybe things got out of hand and the kid ended up dead. Doesn’t explain how he ended up in that construction site, though.”

“Even if Osborne didn’t see the kid, maybe the wife did. Maybe she gave him some money. Or the sister,” Zach added.

Frank shook his head. “The sister would have told us. Osborne, though, I’m not so sure. You have a feeling he knew more than he was letting on?”

Zach nodded and buckled his seat belt. “I did. Let’s go back to the station and check out Osborne’s record. Then let’s run it past the lieutenant. Seems like we might have enough for a warrant.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Rodriguez tossed Zach his cell phone. “Text Sheila for me. Tell her I won’t be home.”

“Okay, but I’m not sexting for you.”

“Asking you to tack xoxo to the end of a text is not sexting, Zach. You’re such a prude.” Frank started
the engine and pulled away. “Here’s what I don’t get about Osborne, though. If you didn’t want to put up with a woman’s kid, why marry her in the first place? There’s lots of fish in the sea. Why not hook up with one who doesn’t have a kid? Or at least doesn’t have one who bugs the crap out of you just by being the color he is?”

Zach shook his head. “I don’t have an answer for that. Why does anybody marry anyone? It’s a mystery.”

“Spoken like a true bachelor. Just you wait. You’ll meet the right one someday. Then you’ll be building picket fences in your head and you’ll understand why men get married.”

“Just like you, Frankie?”

“Just like me.”

“Which time exactly? The first one? Number two? Or number three?” Zach razzed him.

“All of them, Zach, all of them. What can I say? I give my heart too easily.”

It wasn’t his heart that Frank gave away with such abandon, it was another body part entirely. In all fairness, he did seem pretty happy with number three. Zach had never met number one, but two he had met. He might still have the scars from it, too. Doreen was a hard, hard woman.

4

Veronica walked up the steps to her father’s porch, a McDonald’s bag in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. She’d gotten off work at seven, driven through McDonald’s to pick up breakfast for her and her dad, then come straight here. She wasn’t sure if the cops had talked to him or not yet, but either way, she figured she should stop by.

It was something of a routine anyway. She showed up once or twice a week, usually with a sausage egg McMuffin and a black coffee. She figured the booze would kill him long before the fat and cholesterol did. He already had the facial veins and the swollen nose of the habitual drinker, not to mention the distended stomach. She hated to think of what an ultrasound of his liver would look like, so she just didn’t. She had
long since perfected the mental equivalent of plugging her ears and chanting “la la la.”

She knocked on the door, even though she didn’t expect an answer. It was a courtesy and a reminder to herself that she didn’t live here anymore. She could walk out the door anytime she wanted and she never had to come back. She was here by choice. Sort of.

She’d left at eighteen, despite her mother’s begging and her father’s threatening. She’d only gone to San Jose to attend nursing school, but you would have thought she’d been leaving for Borneo, never to return, the way her mother had wept. And after all her father’s bluster and threats to cut off support—as if she’d ever expected any—he’d gone silent. As she’d walked out the door that August, he’d growled, “You’ll be back.”

He’d been right about that, although not in the way he’d meant it. Her mother had been diagnosed with pancreatitis only a few months after Veronica graduated from nursing school. She’d moved back to Sac to look after her.

It hadn’t done any good. Her mother had kept on drinking and ended up killing off most of her pancreas, developing an infection and dying as Veronica sat next to her bed. She should have moved back to the Bay Area then—it would have been the moment to make a clean break. But somehow she hadn’t. She’d
gotten a job here at St. Elizabeth’s, made friends, and bought a condo.

Veronica knew what compelled her to stay here; she’d gone through Al-Anon and a few stints of therapy. He was still her father. Despite everything, she wanted to love him, even if he made it damn near impossible. She could only do what she could do. So she stopped by with McDonald’s every so often, called a couple of times a week, but generally kept a safety zone between them. Kind of an emotional DMZ. It was what she had to do to be able to live with herself. It probably wasn’t good for her. Hell, it probably wasn’t good for her dad. But without her, he’d have either hit bottom by now or gotten himself killed. Or both.

She juggled the bag and the coffee and pulled her keys out and opened the door. “Dad,” she called. “It’s me. Ronnie.”

No one else called her that anymore. Just him.

“You bring coffee?” she heard him call from upstairs.

When had she walked into this house without coffee in the past ten years? “Yeah, Dad, I got coffee. And breakfast.”

“I’ll be right out.”

She pulled the food out of the bag and set the wrapped sandwiches on place mats on the kitchen table. Then she started her rounds.

First she emptied the garbage from the kitchen and the hall bathroom. She could hear the toilet flush in the master bathroom. Then she gathered the piled-up newspapers and magazines and catalogs from the living room and dumped them into the recycling bin. She’d run the vacuum cleaner around the place after they’d eaten. She could hear the water running now; he’d be out in a minute or two.

She started gathering up the bottles. It was almost like a perverse kind of Easter-egg hunt. Where had Daddy hidden her treats this time? Oh, look, it was an empty bottle of Early Times under the sofa. And what was that peeking out from behind the dusty silk plant in the corner of the living room? Oh! It was an empty Bushmills bottle. She found only four bottles. It could have been worse, she supposed. Hell, it
had
been worse at other times.

“What brings you around?” her father growled as he stomped into the room.

He didn’t look good. His eyes were red and his face looked puffy; his hands trembled at his sides. Still, he was standing and he looked sober.

She countered with her own question. “Have the police been here?”

He nodded and headed into the kitchen, sitting down and unwrapping a sandwich without waiting for Veronica to join him.

She followed behind him. “And?”

He chewed and swallowed. Washed down the bite with a sip of coffee. “And what?”

Her McMuffin had already gone cold. She set it down. “They told you? They told you about Max?”

Her father looked up at her. “Yeah. They told me. Been dead this whole time. Your mother wasted a lot of tears on that kid.” He took another bite of his sandwich and made a face. “Cold.”

Veronica tightened her lips. The tears hadn’t been wasted. Self-pitying, maybe. But there was no point in arguing with him about it. She picked up their sandwiches and put them in the microwave. “I wonder what happened. I wonder how he died.”

“Nothing that kid ever did made sense to me. I doubt whatever happened to him’ll make sense, either.”

The microwave beeped and Veronica brought the sandwiches back to the table. “We’re not talking about some random kid here, Dad. We’re talking about my brother.”

“Half brother.” Osborne picked up the sandwich and dropped it immediately. “Too hot.”

“My brother,” she said again.

“Whatever.” Osborne drank a little more coffee.

Let it go, Veronica. Don’t react.

Her father must have seen something in her eyes, though. “Oh, here we go again. Are you going to
preach the gospel of St. Max to me again, Ronnie? Because I’m not interested.” He pushed back from the table and walked into the living room.

Veronica swept the remains of their breakfast into a garbage can. “That’s it, then? That’s all you have to say?” Her voice was calm and steady.

“Christ, Ronnie, what do you want me to say? The kid was no good from the start. He ran off. Now he’s dead. There ain’t much more to it than that.”

“He died out there, maybe alone. Probably frightened. Doesn’t it bother you? Even a little?” She shoved the garbage can back under the sink. To hell with it.

“No. It doesn’t. I’ll tell you why, too, Veronica Gail. That kid was no good from the second he was conceived.”

“That’s not true.” Max had been funny and kind and patient.

He waved her away. “You don’t know. You don’t remember. You were a little girl.”

“I remember plenty, Dad.” It was both her blessing and her curse. It kept her from following in her parents’ footsteps. On the other hand, it kept her up a lot of nights and maintained a steady burn in her stomach that was more than likely the beginning of an ulcer.

It wasn’t as if her childhood had been that horrible. She saw plenty worse nearly every day in the emergency room. Her father had never raped her or pimped her out to earn money for the family.

But Max had been backhanded at the dinner table so often that Veronica had thought that one of the family members getting slapped was the way everyone knew that dinner was over. And that hiding in the closet until Daddy wasn’t mad anymore was what most little girls did.

George and Celeste Osborne had been what Veronica and her colleagues at the emergency room often referred to as “volatile.”

On the other hand, her father always had a job. He moved around a fair bit because his temper tended to get him in trouble. Still, he always found a new job. He was good with his hands, and that was still valued in a lot of places. There was food on the table and a roof over her head. She saw plenty of kids every day who would count a childhood like hers as an incredible luxury.