Good as Gone (9 page)

Her mouth full, she gestured toward his sandwich with the hamburger in her hands.

“I like to eat one half at a time, in case I want to take the rest home,” he said. “And I find triangles aesthetically pleasing.”

“That’s creepy.” She laughed. “Like a serial killer.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“What an impolite question!”

“Forget it,” he said. “You’re obviously not old enough to want to hide your age, so you must be too young.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

“How old are you?” She put a French fry in her mouth, left it between her teeth for a moment too long before biting down.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Too old for you.”

“Forty?”

“Thanks.” He laughed. “Thirty, actually.”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“Yeah, I bet,” he said. “Christ. Shouldn’t you be in college or something?”

“I graduated early,” she said. “I’m a fast learner.”

“How about that,” Cal said.

“You’re not, though.”

“How do you know?”

She aimed a French fry at his nose and fired. “Because you didn’t see that coming.”

She hadn’t seen it coming either. This flirtatious buoyancy was new to her. She’d never been anything but sultry or sweet with Will, as the situation demanded; with Lina, silent and compliant. She wondered in a detached way how much of this was an act, how much a real response to the warm diner, the food hitting her stomach, her muscles relaxing. The absence of fear, for the first time in months.

Meanwhile, Cal was studying her with a serious expression. “Listen, Gretchen,” he said. “I can find you a place to stay for a while.”

“Can I stay with you?”

He hesitated. “Do you have anyone else you can call?”

“Do I look like I have anyone else I can call?” she said with a gesture that took in the two of them, alone, and the midnight diner.

“Well . . .” He paused, then sighed. “I guess you can crash at my place tonight.”

“You do this often? Offer strangers a bed?”

“I knew someone else who had to leave a bad situation in a hurry once,” he said, ignoring her provocation.

She’d stopped listening, though, after the word
tonight
. The rest would come. Once she was inside his house, she knew well enough how to make it stick. She just didn’t know it would stick for her too. That was her mistake.

Alex Mercado looks about ten years younger than any private investigator I’ve ever seen in a movie or TV show. He has a round, boyish face, tan and clean-shaven. To my relief, he’s not wearing a fedora—I realize now that I’ve been picturing him in one because of the website, but of course he’s dressed unobtrusively, in jeans and an untucked polo shirt. Nevertheless, in a Waffle House sparsely populated with single men drinking coffee alone in booths, I can tell right away which one is looking for me, and he confirms it by standing and leaning over to shake my hand across the booth.

“I’m Alex. Thanks for coming,” he says and gestures for me to sit across from him. The brown plastic of the booth squeaks as I slide toward the wall with its frosted-glass partition on top. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a Waffle House. Looking around, I wonder if this is the type of place where my students hang out when they’re hung over. Its smell—cinnamon apples and slightly rancid cooking oil—is strangely pleasant.

“You come here often?” I ask. “I think I’ve seen you here before.”

He looks slightly taken aback, and I think,
That’s for the caller ID, buddy.

“I just wanted somewhere we could talk without being interrupted,” he says. His voice is a little raspy, but instead of making him seem older, it makes him sound almost adolescent, like his voice is breaking. He looks around and laughs. “There’s only one waitress working the floor right now, and believe me, she’s not all that attentive.”

“Just so you’re aware, my husband knows I’m here.”

“Okay,” he says. I can tell he doesn’t believe me.

“Shoot,” I say to get the pleasantries over with.

“I know this is a delicate subject,” he says, pronouncing the word
delicate
with more attention to each syllable than is usual. “I know you’re probably feeling very—”

“Yes, I am,” I say. “So what’s this all about?”

“Have you talked to your daughter about what happened?”

“The police report—”

“I know what’s in the police report.”

“You do?” I have, of course, seen news footage from the press conference the police gave, but without the family there as a central attraction, it went fast, just someone speaking the words
safe and sound
and
human-trafficking task force
and then
safe and sound
one more time amid flashing cameras while Julie’s seventh-grade picture floated in one corner and a banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen:
KIDNAPPED 13-YEAR-OLD HOME SAFE EIGHT YEARS LATER
. Certainly no details from the police report have been released to the public. “How do you know?”

“I read it,” he says.

“How?”

“I’m a PI, I have my ways. But I didn’t ask about the report. Have you talked to your daughter about what happened?”

“I was there when she gave her statement.”

He just looks at me.

“We don’t spend every waking minute talking about it,” I say. “If that’s what you mean.”

“You don’t want to know?”

“I don’t want to pry.”

“Mrs. Davalos.”

“Dr.,”
I say without thinking, but he presses on.

“Have you noticed any inconsistencies in Julie’s story?”

Four missed therapy appointments. A tattoo. The look on her face when she saw the ultrasound screen. Her voice:
Get out.

“Has it ever occurred to you to wonder—” He breaks off and drops his voice, putting on a serious face, not quite apologetic, but concerned. “Look, Mrs.—
Dr.
Davalos. There have been cases of—it’s unusual, but frankly, so is a missing child showing up on her own eight years later, out of nowhere. Even after just three days, when no ransom has been set and there’s a weapon involved, the likelihood of recovery—”

“I’m aware.”

“Now, the cops aren’t going to question it. She’s home, she’s safe, and she’s not their problem anymore.”

“They’re still looking for—”

He cuts me off. “Sure, it would look great for them to pull in the bad guy after all this time, expose a human-trafficking ring. Terrific headline. But I have to tell you, Doc, from what I read, that is one bizarre trafficking ring. You don’t kidnap a kid in Texas and drag her across three states if you’re trying to get her to Mexico. The border’s right there.”

“Maybe the kidnapper didn’t have a plan,” I say.

“Sure,” Alex says. “Maybe he’s a garden-variety psychopath—I mean, they’re not that common, but maybe. And he sees her somewhere, who knows where, and takes her opportunistically, on an impulse, and then he needs to get rid of her fast after—okay. And he happens to bump into this trafficking ring, and she winds up in Mexico with El Jefe the drug lord who lives on a compound right out of a movie.” He pauses, shakes his head. “That was a gutsy move, but smart.”

“What do you mean, smart?” I say. “What move?”

“Because now the FBI is involved.” He’s starting to talk more to himself than to me, the concern yielding to an expression I find almost unbearable—one of
interest.
“Then there’s the statewide task force, HPD, and the county, all these levels trying to work together. Everything gets complicated, and it gets slow. The investigation could drag on for months and months. And in the meantime, do you think the cops
want
her face in the media, reminding everyone how they dropped the ball for eight years? Why do you think that press conference went by in such a hurry? You think they want to remind everyone that America’s kidnapping sweetheart just wandered back on her own?” Alex has been talking rapidly, and now he pauses, so I know I am in for it. “Especially when she was probably right under their noses the whole time, and they didn’t do anything to save her?”

“Under their—”
But she’s safe,
I think.

He pushes a large manila envelope across the table to me, and although I feel a warning signal going off somewhere in my head—
Don’t open it, don’t open it
—I pry open the metal fastener and lift the flap. I lay it flat on the table, put two fingers in, and slide out some articles and a photograph. The photograph doesn’t make sense to me at first, and then it does, for a brief sickening instant—scraps of rotting fabric, and something worse—and I look away and catch a glimpse of the headlines:
River Oaks. Houston Neighborhood.

Remains Found.

I push everything back into the envelope and press the flap over the fastener as my stomach heaves into my throat.

“Who hired you?” My voice is shaking.

“I was just starting out on the force when your daughter disappeared,” Alex says conversationally, without answering or touching the envelope, as if suddenly we’ve been lifted out of this nightmarish Waffle House and dropped into the getting-to-know-you phase of an awkward first date. “I hated it. I was out in a couple of years. Believe me, to walk away from those benefits just gets harder, so if you find out it’s not for you, you have to leave fast.” He laughs once. “My wife evidently thought the same thing.”

“Who hired you?” I repeat.

“Nobody—”

“Then what the hell are you trying to do here?”

A waitress walks up with a tall plastic carafe in hand, and, unbelievably, Alex gestures toward his cup and lets her fill it up. He gives her a little nod of thanks and watches as she walks away, then turns back to me. As he opens his mouth, I feel a buzz at my hip. Tom must be wondering where I am. What time is it anyway?

“Anna, I was there. Don’t you want to know why they never found your daughter?”

“I assume gross incompetence was an issue.” The sound of my first name in his scraping voice makes me so angry I can barely contain myself. It’s time to end this farcical conversation. “I have to go,” I say, standing up. Distantly, I feel my phone vibrate in my purse a second time.

“You want the truth. So do I. Well, I have reason to believe the truth is . . . worse than we thought. What’s in that envelope”—he’s talking faster and faster, jabbing his pointer finger at the unspeakable thing burning a yellow rectangle on the bottom of my cornea—“they’re not even going to compare it with your daughter’s dental records. Julie Whitaker’s been removed from the missing-persons database. I checked.”

“Because she’s home,” I whisper. Lying on the sofa under an afghan.

Brr.
Another text.

“They think the remains are eight to ten years old, Anna. They think it’s a thirteen-year-old girl. But Julie’s name won’t come up at all—”

“Why should it?”

“—unless you introduce a reasonable doubt that the woman living in your house is not who she says she is.”

“The woman living in my house?” I repeat, like an idiot.

“Could you just do me a favor? Could you get me a sample of her DNA? Some hair off a brush, ideally.”

Brr. Brr.
I pull the phone out of my purse, look down briefly, read Tom’s latest text, and feel suddenly dizzy.

But Alex goes on. “I have a friend in the crime lab who’ll run a hair sample and see if it’s a match. We don’t go to anyone, and no one finds out, not even her, until you’re—until we have an answer.”

“I’m sorry.” I push the envelope back across the table, like an entrée I can’t finish.

“Put it this way. You’re sure it’s her? Okay. So this is just confirmation, peace of mind.” He looks at me shrewdly.

Brr.

“But you’re not sure, are you? Not entirely.”

He’s still seated with his hands folded in front of him on the table, but it feels like he’s looming over me, reaching into the innermost recesses of my mind, putting his fingers all over everything. It’s the kind of violation that implicates you through and through, like failing to set the alarm or leaving the door unlocked or simply living in a world where anyone can walk into your kitchen and take your daughter away at knifepoint. A world where that can happen is a world where I can fail at every act of faith and trust, a world where the best thing that ever happened to me is just another mask for the worst thing, and the worst thing that ever happened to me fits inside a manila envelope, fits into two words, really:
Remains Found.

“I’m sure,” I say.

“You have my number,” he says. He doesn’t offer me the envelope again. “Call me if you want to talk more.”

My phone is buzzing continuously now. I have to get home to Tom and face the punishments already raining down on us for my doubts. I start toward the door. It feels like I’ve been gone forever, impossible to believe I stormed out of Carol Morse’s office just a few hours ago. But the thought of the missed therapy appointments suddenly gives me a use for the wrecking ball in the booth behind me. I turn and take a couple of quick steps back toward the table.

“I don’t give a damn about
that,
” I say, refusing to look at the envelope again. “But if you really want to help me, find out where she goes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She leaves the house at one thirty. Follow her.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“This is not pro bono,” I say. “This is for me. I’ll pay.”

“Okay.” He nods. “But you do something for me too, Anna. Search for a band called Gretchen at Midnight. Look for a video on YouTube. Tell me whose face you see. And if it changes your mind, call me.”

woke up at seven in the morning with a stiff jaw and sticky yellow stars behind her eyes. Will was still passed out beside her, snoring and rasping.

For a moment she didn’t remember why her jaw hurt. Then she stepped into the bathroom and saw the shower curtain half pulled down and the shampoo bottles arrested mid-roll in the tub, remembered his hands holding her neck against the wall under a rain of water. When he’d released her, she’d grabbed at the curtain blindly to keep from falling, with predictable results. She’d stayed huddled there, listening to the sound the water made hitting the plastic curtain over her head, waiting for him to come back and yell at her for the mess she’d made. He never came.