Vanished in the Night (8 page)

“So you want to talk to me about Max Shelden,” Jackson said as he stirred something on the stove. “It’s
been a long time. I’m not sure what I can tell you at this point.”

“Tell you the truth, we’re a little worried about that ourselves.” Frank pointed at one of the kitchen chairs. “You mind if I sit? My dogs are barking.”

Jackson bit back a smile. “Sure. Take a load off. Haven’t heard that phrase in a long time.”

Frank shrugged. “I’m kind of an old-fashioned guy.” He pulled one of the chairs out and sat down heavily. Zach stayed leaning against a counter.

“So do you remember Max at all?” Frank asked.

“You bet.” Jackson turned from the stove. “I had him on the squad for two years before his parents took him out of the public school system.”

“What kind of kid was he?” Zach asked.

Jackson twisted his shoulders as if to work out a knot. “In what way?”

Why the sudden caginess? “Coach Jackson—”

“Call me Derrick,” he interrupted.

Zach started over again. “Derrick, we’re trying to find someplace to start investigating what happened to Max. Nothing you’re going to say is going to hurt him now. I’m sure you know that.”

There wasn’t a news outlet in town that hadn’t led with Max Shelden’s identification. The picture that Veronica Osborne had given them was running on pretty much every major news outlet today.

Jackson thought for a moment. “Max was a pretty ordinary kid. He was good at basketball, good enough to make the team, but it wasn’t going to get him a free ride to a university. He wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t exactly a brainiac, either. He was a kid.”

“So if he was so normal, why’d his parents yank him out of the school and send him up to that Sierra School?” Zach pressed. Most parents didn’t send their kids off to residential schools unless it was really necessary.

Jackson snorted. “Have you met Max’s stepfather?
Him
I remember all too well.”

“We’ve had the pleasure,” Frank said dryly.

“Well, I think he’s your first clue as to why Max got sent away. He was always looking for any excuse to knock Max down a few steps. There’s a lot of hate in that man.” Jackson leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “I only met him a handful of times, but I sure haven’t forgotten him.”

“You have run-ins with Osborne?” Zach asked, more interested now.

Jackson dropped his head. “I wish they were just run-ins. It’s more like I got run over. I was a relatively new teacher back then. Nothing they taught me at Sac State prepared me for a man like George Osborne. The man charged into one of my practices looking for Max. He was livid. There was some chore
Max had been supposed to do before he came to practice—something stupid like taking out the garbage or sweeping the porch. Anyway, Max had blown it off. Osborne hauled him out of my practice practically by his hair, screaming obscenities at him the whole time.”

Jackson looked over at both men. “You know how there are moments in your life when you have to act fast to do the right thing? If you hesitate, the moment’s gone and you’ve blown it?”

Frank and Zach both nodded. Zach knew those moments all too well. His days were full of them. Every cop’s were. His nights, too, sometimes. Nightmares where he reacted too slowly to save someone, or too quickly and his rash behavior endangered someone. Too often it was a lose-lose proposition.

Jackson said, “This was one of those moments. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been confronted by a parent who acted like that. Before I could do anything, they were gone. I’ll always regret not stepping between them, not protecting Max from Osborne.” He shrugged. “I choked. The game was on and I didn’t even throw up a brick.”

“Did you ever see Max again?” Zach asked. An unswept porch? He remembered some of the things he’d done as a teenager. The car he’d stolen from a neighbor’s driveway. The CD he’d shoplifted from a store.

“He was back the next day, acting like nothing had happened. What else could he do to save face? He laughed it off.” Jackson turned away from Zach and Frank. “And I let him. I didn’t ask for more information, and Max sure as hell didn’t volunteer any.”

“Did Osborne show up a lot?” Zach asked.

Jackson shook his head.

“What about the mother?” Frank asked, his head cocked to one side like a dog waiting for a treat.

“Pretty much never.” Jackson turned back around from the sink to face them again, his face composed. “But really, what good is this now? What does it have to do with how he died?”

“We’re trying to figure out where he may have gone after he ran away from the school. We were hoping that you might have some ideas about that.” It seemed completely possible that Max could have turned up on his coach’s doorstep, looking for help.

“I never saw him after they transferred him up to Sierra.” Jackson’s forehead creased.

“What about his teammates? Was there anybody he was especially close to?” A kid who’d learned to mistrust adults might be more likely to turn to another kid for help.

Jackson thought for a moment. “Absolutely. Let me think for a minute. It was a long time ago, and names and faces tend to run together.”

“We brought along a yearbook,” Zach said. “In case it might help.”

“It would. It would help a lot.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jackson had given them a list of five boys who were good friends of Max’s back in the day. He had no idea where any of them were now.

One of his sons, the more solid one, poked his head into the kitchen. “Hey, Dad, what’s for dinner?”

“Meatball subs. They’ll be ready in about five.”

“Excellent,” the boy said and ducked back into the living room.

“We’ll get out of your way, then.” Frank stood up, scraping the chair legs on the floor. “Thank you for your help.”

Jackson took in a deep breath and blew it out. “I wish I could do more. I wish I
had
done more. It’s a shame. He was a good kid.”

He saw them out, and as they walked down the sidewalk to the Crown Vic, Zach heard him call his sons in for dinner. “You think he’s righteous?” he asked Frank.

“Yeah. He seemed on the up-and-up.”

Zach had thought so, too. “What about the names? You think we should run ’em down tonight?”

Frank looked at his watch. “I think they’ve been sitting for twenty years; another night won’t hurt.”

“Okay if we run Veronica Osborne’s photo over to her at St. E’s on our way home?”

Frank glanced at his watch. “Just barely. Sheila will be getting antsy. Tonight’s our ballroom dance class.”

Zach’s eyebrows went up. “Ballroom dance?”

Frank scratched his belly. “It’s very romantic. Sheila loves it. I spend two hours cha-chaing once a week and then I get laid without even taking her out to dinner. Plus it’s good exercise.”

“Sounds like a win-win to me.”

Frank pointed at him. “There are not too many of those in life, my boy. Pay attention. Grab every one of them that comes your way.”

6

Susan Tennant was a careful and precise woman. Paying attention to things was part of being a good nurse. You had to notice things that other people might not notice, see things that other people might not see. A slight bluish tone around the lips, or a slight dip in a blood test or in blood pressure—little details that would slide right by the average person could mean the difference between someone’s life and death.

So Susan noticed the car idling down the street from her house when she got home. It was already dark. She rarely ever got home when it was still light out at this time of year. But she actually welcomed the dark. The long, light evenings of summer made her melancholy.

Susan couldn’t make out the color of the car in the dark or its license plate, but she noted that it was a big
solid sedan with an expensive purr to its engine. She wished whoever was inside would turn it off. It was a waste of gas and was making extra pollution in the air that Sacramento definitely didn’t need. “Spare the Air” days came around plenty without any extra help.

Susan set her emergency brake—just in case—got out of the car, locked it, and let herself into her two-bedroom, one-bath ranch in the Arden-Arcade neighborhood.

She liked it here. It didn’t take her long to get downtown, but the tree-lined streets made the ugliness she dealt with every day seem far, far away. Sometimes it even made the past seem far, far away.

It
was
pretty far away. All that unpleasantness had happened years before. She’d practically been a girl, young and green and trusting. Not anymore. Those days were definitely gone.

She took the badge from around her neck and dropped it in the bowl by the front door; her keys followed. She stowed her purse in the cabinet and plugged her cell phone into the charger. Her shoes went into the closet on a rack, and she put on her slippers.

As she walked into the kitchen, her cat wound between her legs. She scooped him up and burrowed her face in his soft fur. “Hello, Patches, how are you tonight?”

He replied with a little chirping meow. She set him
down next to his bowl and filled it with food, then filled up the kettle to make herself a cup of tea.

The doorbell rang. She set the kettle on the burner, turned it on, and went back to the front door. Who would be ringing her doorbell at this time in the evening? A neighbor needing a favor? Certainly not a salesperson. Maybe one of those people out collecting for a cause.

She peered through the peephole, but could make out only a square, distorted head. She opened the door and said, “Can I help you?”

“Hello, Susan. Long time, no see.” He pushed into the house past her and locked the door.

That was the moment that Susan Tennant realized that in trying to confront her past, she might have closed off her future.

“What I need,” Tina said to Veronica, rubbing her lower back, “is a big juicy code. Something dramatic that brings everyone running.”

Veronica shook her head. “You are a sick puppy, you know that?” She turned back to the lab results she was entering in the chart.

Tina grinned. “Yep, and you’re one, too. ’Fess up. You’re as big an adrenaline junkie as me, and it’s been too damn slow around here.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Veronica warned her, but she knew what Tina meant. “Why don’t you go try to get Donny to shut up again? He’s cussing out those two women who brought their mother in. It’s not nice.”

Donny was one of St. Elizabeth’s frequent fliers. He was a Vietnam vet living on disability who, on a fairly routine basis, got rip-roaring drunk and started threatening people downtown. He’d added the very special trick of using a broken bottle this time, so he was handcuffed to a gurney waiting for a psych consult in bay number 3. In bay number 2, two middle-aged sisters had brought in their mother, who had clearly had some kind of minor stroke.

Every time the sisters started to talk, Donny let loose a string of obscene epithets, the most recent being “stupid retard fucking bitches.” Amazingly, the sisters found this hysterically funny—Veronica was glad to know someone else on the planet laughed inappropriately in times of great stress—and kept giggling. This was whipping Donny into grander and more elaborate strings of obscenities, which just made the sisters laugh harder.

Another night of saving lives and defying Darwin one drunk at a time.

One of the real problems with working the emergency room was how few actual emergencies they got.
The car crashes and gunshot wounds were few and far between; the vast majority of the cases barely even qualified as urgent care.

Nothing really got the heart racing like someone showing up in full cardiac arrest.

Or looking up from your paperwork to see Sergeant Tall, Dark, and Dangerous striding through your emergency room.

“Ooh, even better than a code. Armed and hot and coming straight at us,” Tina whispered.

“Ms. Osborne,” McKnight said as he walked up to them.

Tina shot her a look. “Holding out on me, Osborne?”

Veronica gave her a quick shake of the head. “Sergeant McKnight, how can I help you?”

He glanced around the nurses’ station. “My sister works night shift, too. Up in cardiology.”

“Your sister?” She ran through the possibilities in her head. There was a nurse named McKnight she’d met at an in-service training. “Your sister is Rhonda McKnight?”

“Yep. That’s her.” He smiled. He had a nice smile. “Bossy as hell.”

Veronica loved a nice smile. She had a soft spot for broad shoulders and well-developed biceps, too. Not this one, though. This one thought her father might
have killed her brother. This one would need more than a nice smile and a well-developed set of guns to impress her. “We’ve met.”

“I came to return your picture.” He handed her the photo of Max.

Tina was looking back and forth between the two of them, wide eyed. Veronica turned, glared at her and made a shooing gesture. Tina backed away slowly, but not without pointing to her own eyes and then to Veronica. She was being watched. Whatever.

She stared at Zach. He had a lot of nerve, doing this where she worked. “You’re done using all the information I gave you against my family, then? Gosh, thanks.”

He clenched his jaw. “I’m sorry you feel that way about it. We’re trying to find out what happened to your brother. I know you want to know, too.”

“I do. I just don’t want to have to hire legal representation while you do it. Especially because of something I might have said during a moment of great emotional distress.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m sorry. I really am. Even you have to admit that we would have been derelict not to look into your father as a suspect.”

“Is he still a suspect?”

McKnight didn’t answer.

Veronica took in a deep breath and blew it out slowly.
So her father was still a suspect. What’s worse was that McKnight was right. It didn’t make her feel any better, though. Especially since she was the one who had made the police look at her father in the first place.

McKnight broke the silence. “I’ll be going, then. You know where to reach me if you think of anything else that might help.”