Songs for the Missing (14 page)

The interstate was dangerous this way—too many unbroken miles letting his thoughts wander. He was glad to leave 90 for a two-lane black-top, dipping through rolling vineyards, slowing for crossroads towns not much smaller than Kingsville. Their main streets were a mix of white Greek Revivals and brick Victorians partitioned for business, their suburbs a sprawl of well-spaced ranches and, farther out, new construction and dormant farmland for sale, including several apple orchards—always a selling point. He could imagine life here, and the idea soothed him.

When he reached the Sandusky city limits, the zoning totally collapsed. The road in was a gauntlet of muffler shops, fast food chains and used car lots. A stranded caboose maintained by the chamber of commerce hawked the local attractions, though the only one of note, Cedar Point, needed no advertising. As he neared the address of his motel, he passed, in quick succession, a Super 8, a Ramada, a Travelodge, a Comfort Inn, a Rodeway Inn, a LaQuinta, a Quality Suites, a Budget Suites, a Red Roof Inn, an Econo Lodge, a Best Western, a Hampton Inn, a Holiday Inn and a Howard Johnson’s, as well as several raw job sites. He was looking for the Country Inn, and had to fight the signage to figure out which driveway was his.

Yesterday Fran had spent hours online trying to find him a room. With the amusement park, the weekends were impossible. His reservation was for five nights, ending Friday, but, faced with writing the departure date, he told the desk clerk he might want to stay longer.

“That could be a problem,” the clerk said, checking.

Ed leaned against the counter, bowing his head, and guiltily wished he was wearing a button. He couldn’t fault the kid for being thorough, but after driving for so long, standing still made him feel like he was wasting time.

Yep, the clerk said, they were full up. August was their busy month. They got a lot of visitors from Europe, and cancellations were rare. He could leave a note for the manager if he wanted.

“That would be great,” Ed said, and went back out to drive around to his room.

It was a musty cinderblock box with a knee-high dresser along one wall, on which sat a dusty TV crowned by a laminated ad for Pizza Hut. There was no refrigerator, just an ice bucket with a filmy plastic bag. He dropped his duffel on the round table in the corner and used the bathroom, then hung up his shirts, turned the a/c to lo cool and left, making sure the door was locked. Before starting off he called the barracks to let them know he was coming, and promptly got lost, finally stopping at a Sohio to ask.

An officer was waiting for him—Sergeant McKnight, a squat brunette with ramrod posture who introduced herself as the troop’s media liaison. Her hair was pulled back under her hat, making her face look bare. She was thin-lipped, with stark mascara and a plain engagement ring. She handed him her card and offered the family their collective sympathy, nodding to make it stick. On the way to her office she apologized for Lieutenant Solari, the incident commander, who was coordinating from a command post on site. They had tracker dogs out, and the county search-and-rescue. She didn’t give her opinion on how it was going, as if that wasn’t her place, and he wondered what she was withholding from him. He imagined she knew about Wooze and J.P. and the speed, and figured Kim for some rotten-toothed meth-head.

She had a file of pictures for him to look at—the interior of the Chevette and then, item by item, against a white background, the contents. There was no broken glass, no slashed seats, no blood that he could see. The translucent blue dolphin air freshener still hung from the rearview mirror, the paisley box of Kleenex still sat in the backseat. The contents were presented like evidence, flat and shadowless. He identified a CD case with a pink and yellow daisy sticker, an ice scraper with a blue brush on one end. He couldn’t be sure of the Altoids, but the crushed pack of Newports was hers. There was a picture of nothing but cigarette butts, another of used tissues and foil cocoons of chewed gum. Her registration and insurance, and the warning for excessive speed that Perry had written her. The photographer had emptied out the glove compartment, down to the tiny metal box of fuses that had resided there since he’d fixed the bubble light for his mother, back when she still had her sight. Here was the tire gauge he’d bought for Kim, and the screwdriver and the adjustable wrench for emergencies, and the Motorist’s Prayer Fran had found at a card shop. Pens and pencils, a film canister full of quarters for the car wash, a plastic spoon still in its cellophane wrapper, a mint-flavored toothpick, a straw and several wet wipes from the Dairy Queen, a tiny packet of salt. All of it belonged.

“Anything that should be here that isn’t,” the sergeant prompted.

He pictured Kim leaving for work, sweeping through the kitchen and out the back door. “Her cellphone. Her purse. Sunglasses. Keys.”

She took out a second file and leafed through another set of photos, shielding them from him until she found the one she wanted and slid it across the blotter. “This isn’t information we’re releasing.”

The shot was a close-up of the old-style chrome door handle on the driver’s side. Poking from the keyhole was the jagged shank of a key, the dirty brass bright gold where it had sheared off.

More than anything he’d seen today this hurt him, but what did it mean?

“The car was locked when they found it.”

He still didn’t understand.

“It suggests someone continued to use the car after they parked it. Again, this isn’t something we’re making public.”

“I understand.” Did they think she’d willingly gone with someone?

“Also, the driver’s seat was pushed all the way back.”

“That’s normal. She’s tall.”

He asked to see the car, if that was possible.

“Of course,” she said.

He expected it would be housed in a spotless garage, attended by technicians in labcoats. She led him out back, across a hot parking lot full of idle cruisers and then a weedy patch of grass to a long, shedlike carport with open stalls, some empty, some occupied by wrecks. The Chevette sat in its dim pen, facing out. Beside the sleek Crown Victorias it looked like a toy. The front bumper on the passenger side was mashed like a fat lip. While he’d had doubts after finding out about Wooze, he knew absolutely that she wouldn’t treat her car like this.

“It wasn’t like that before,” he told the sergeant, and entered the dirt-floored shed, circling to check for further damage, careful not to touch anything.

Soot mottled the window frame and door’s edge down to the handle as if it had been burned—they’d dusted for prints and not cleaned it off. Below the handle was a hole; the missing lock rested in a baggie on the driver’s seat, along with a pink invoice. The hatch had been dusted, and they’d pulled up the rear deck to get at the spare and then left it open so the back looked ransacked.

The sergeant said they hoped to release it to him this week.

“That’s fast,” Ed said. He’d just assumed they’d keep it until they solved the case. Up until yesterday he thought he might never see it again, and now its presence was disorienting. The idea that he would take it back with him—without Kim—seemed wrong.

Before they headed over to the site he gave the sergeant Kim’s clothes. She accepted them without ceremony, tucking the bag under one arm.

He showed her everything else he’d brought with him, dishing it out of the backseat like a traveling salesman. She liked the DVDs. They could hand them out at the press conference tomorrow. He pinned on a button and offered her one. They weren’t allowed to wear anything on their uniforms, but she took a couple for her nieces.

Her car had a laptop mounted between the seats, separating them like a wall. As they drove over to the command post he pointed to her ring. “When’s the big day?”

“We haven’t set a date.”

“Is he in law enforcement?”

“Thank God, no. He’s a bank manager.”

“So you’re both in security.”

“What do you do?” she asked, though she must have known.

He was happy to tell her about himself, baiting his answers with interests they might have in common. Boating was the first, an instant bond. She’d grown up on the water; her father was a serious fisherman. “That’s what I’d be doing today,” he said. She lived in Bayview, a small town not much different from Kingsville. She’d gone to Kent State—Fran too, though she’d only taken a few night classes at the Ashtabula satellite. She’d served a tour in Iraq, as had several of Kim’s friends (he flashed on the faceless Wooze, their white limbs tangled in the dark). “Let’s just say it’s good to be back,” she said, and he realized there was no need to stretch for connections. It was her job to make him feel welcome.

The detective said they’d found the car in a hospital parking lot outside the city, but the neighborhood the sergeant drove him through was urban—redbrick rowhouses with adjoining porches abutting vacant lots and old funeral homes, shuttered drug stores and abandoned gas stations on the corners. He thought he shouldn’t be alarmed that there was trash everywhere and all the people on the streets were black, but as the blocks wore on he found himself hoping she’d keep going until they were out of this part of town.

She turned onto a boulevard edged on one side by an endless park behind a spiked wrought-iron fence and on the other by a massive bus yard defended by razor wire. A half mile down the road she signaled and turned into the park—Mercy Hospital, according to the brass plaque. It wasn’t a place you’d just stumble on, he thought; you’d have to know it was there.

The drive wound uphill past a looming crucifix through landscaped grounds to a complex of ivied buildings with slate roofs that reminded him of a small college, an aqua water tower and banded smokestack topped with lightning rods rising to the sky. At the far end of the cordoned-off visitors’ lot sat a huge RV painted battleship gray and bristling with satellite dishes and mast antennas like a TV truck. An awning off the side shaded a long counter where a pair of troopers wearing headphones manned built-in workstations. They were so focused they barely noticed him, nodding to the sergeant as they directed people in the field.

Inside it was bright and spare as a space capsule, and the air smelled of coffee. The floors were gray nonslip rubber, the white walls massed with cabinets. Lieutenant Solari stopped tapping at a monitor, spun around in his chair and stood to shake Ed’s hand. Like the sergeant, he was squared away and military. On receiving Kim’s clothes he immediately excused himself and gave them to one of the men outside, who doubletimed it to a cruiser and charged off.

The dogs were all working, so the lieutenant showed Ed around the ERV, or Emergency Response Vehicle. The idea was to take the specialized technology that was out there—GPS, wireless, IT—and combine it with the dogs and their handlers. A single dog could cover the same ground as twenty-four searchers, and much more thoroughly. Nature had simply equipped them better. And the handlers weren’t weekend warriors; they were all law enforcement, trained in specific types of terrain.

There was a flatness to his delivery, a rote recitation of facts that told Ed he’d done this before. Even his little joke, calling the ERV their 9/1 1-mobile, was rushed. No, Ed wanted to tell him, this is not how you sell a client.

Still, compared to their command center at Lakeview it was impressive. The forward bay was dedicated to communications, with a phone bank, three flat-screen monitors and rack upon rack of scanners. In the aft conference room, beside a pull-down topo map, hung an aerial photo divided into sectors. Ed found the gate and the drive and the O of the smokestack. Behind the hospital, surrounded by woods, sat a black tadpole of a reservoir. On the far side of the spillway was a high school with two tan baseball diamonds and an oval track ringing a football field. Across the street the city continued, tightly packed blocks repeating to the photo’s upper edge. He had no idea Sandusky was so big.

“Here’s where we’re at right now,” the lieutenant said, pointing to a dry-erase board with a menu of checked-off action items. The first thing they did once they identified the vehicle was to initiate a reverse 911, the system automatically sending a recorded message to every residence and business in a one-mile radius. Since yesterday, tracker K9s had performed searches of all four quadrants. Air scent K9s covered the un-populated areas, two water-certified dogs checking the reservoir. Last night a helicopter ran infrared scans of the area, looking for any strange heat signatures. They’d be going up again tonight. Today there was a dive team working the reservoir, and they were rotating the trackers clockwise through the quadrants for triple redundancy. That’s where the officer was taking Kim’s clothing. With a better scent article the teams could work the blocks beyond the grounds that much harder.

The whole scene made perverse sense to Ed. Now that it was too late they had everything they needed.

“What have you found so far?” he asked, hoping it didn’t sound like a challenge.

The lieutenant reached up above the map and pulled down a rattling mylar transparency that featured three grease pencil Xs and a short dotted line. The line led from the X in the center of the parking lot, around the power plant and a couple hundred feet downhill toward the reservoir. The second X, in the woods between the reservoir and the football field, represented a single latex glove that was now at their forensics lab. The third, a half mile west of the high school, was a torn shirt found in a dumpster behind a 7-Eleven. It didn’t fit the description of what Kim had been wearing, but a tracker had alerted on it, so they were making sure. Yesterday two cars had been reported stolen within a mile of the hospital—not uncommon for the neighborhood. “There may be no connection,” the lieutenant said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to determine that when we locate those vehicles. At this point we’re not assuming anything.”

“Sounds like you guys are on top of it,” Ed said, though for all the technology involved they hadn’t turned up much. Already he was discounting the shirt out of hand and creating explanations for the glove (it was a hospital, dogs loved garbage). The sheer abundance of resources guaranteed nothing. He needed to watch his optimism.