Fear the Worst: A Thriller (9 page)
Read Fear the Worst: A Thriller Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Tags: #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Fiction
But in a plane, you just sit there and slowly go out of your mind.
Of course, driving to Seattle was not an option. A six-hour flight was preferable to a three-day drive. But the fact that I could do nothing more than look out the window, leaf through my magazines, or watch in-flight entertainment that, even with headphones, could barely be heard over the drone of the engines made the trip interminable.
But it did finally end. While I may have been screaming in my head while I waited for everyone in the seats ahead of me to get their luggage together and exit the plane, I managed to keep my cool. Once I was off the plane, I powered up my cell phone and checked to see whether I had any messages.
I didn’t.
I found my way to the taxi stand, got in the back of one, and said to the driver, “Second Chance.” I offered him the address, but he waved me off.
“I’ve been driving a cab in Seattle for twenty-two years,” he said. “I know my way around.”
I settled into the seat, gazed out at the unfamiliar territory, feeling like a stranger in a strange land.
I’m coming, Syd. I’m coming
.
ELEVEN
T
HE TAXI WAS HEADING INTO DOWNTOWN
in the middle of the afternoon commute home. The regular traffic would have been bad enough, but we got bogged down where three lanes were being narrowed to one for an accident. Just before six, we were pulling up in front of the Second Chance shelter, a light rain coming down. I’d lost all sense of direction coming in, couldn’t guess north from south, east from west, especially with no sun visible.
I paid the cabby and grabbed my bag. I was in an older part of town. Used-record shops, discount clothing stores, pawnshops. This must have been the only block in Seattle where there wasn’t a Starbucks. Second Chance looked more like a diner than a refuge. There were tables pushed up to the windows, young people in scruffy clothes seated at them, drinking coffee out of cardboard cups. They had an aimless look about them, as though they’d already been sitting there a long time, that if I came back a couple of hours from now they’d still be there.
Already I was looking. Scanning the sidewalk in both directions, searching the faces. Satisfied that Syd wasn’t hanging around the street, just waiting for me to show up, I entered Second Chance.
Once inside, I started doing the same thing. I scanned. A couple of dozen teens—some actually looked older than that, late twenties maybe, even one who could have been in his early thirties—were milling about, but none of them was Syd. They seemed to sense that they were being studied, and several of them subtly turned their backs to me.
I was expecting something like a hotel front desk, I suppose, but what I found off in the corner of the room was a door resting on two sawhorses, and sitting behind it, peering through wire-rimmed glasses at a computer, was a man in his late thirties, prematurely balding but with enough hair at the back to make a short ponytail, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He held up one finger, resumed typing something, then hit, with some fanfare, one button. “Send,” he said. He turned in his chair and said, “Yeah?”
“My name is Tim Blake,” I said. “I just flew in from Connecticut.”
“Good for you,” he said.
I wasn’t in the mood for attitude, but pressed on. “Is Yolanda around?”
“Beats me,” he said. “Who’s Yolanda?”
“She works here,” I said.
“News to me.” He shrugged, as if to say,
So what if I don’t know who works here?
“Is there something I can do for you?”
“I’m trying to find my daughter,” I said. “Sydney Blake. She’s been in here a couple of times in the last week, I think. We’ve been going out of our minds, her mother and I, wondering what’s happened to her. Hang on, I’ve got a picture.”
I reached into my jacket pocket for reprints of the photos of Sydney that were on the website. I handed a sampling of them to the man, who glanced at them quickly and then put them on his desk.
“Never seen her,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Len,” he said.
“Len, would you mind just taking another look?”
He gave the shots another cursory glance and said, “We get a lot of kids through here, you know. It’s possible she’s been around, but I don’t recognize her.”
“You here all the time?” I asked.
“Nope. So maybe she was here when I was off. How did you hear that she’s been in here?”
I didn’t want to tell him that Yolanda had tipped me off. She might have violated privacy rules by getting in touch. I was betting one of the reasons runaways felt comfortable coming here was that it was understood the management wasn’t in the habit of ratting them out to their parents.
So instead of answering directly, I said, “There was a tip to the website I set up when my daughter went missing. That she might have been here. So then I was in touch with Yolanda Mills.”
“Okay,” Len said.
“Has Yolanda gone home for the day?”
“Like I said, I don’t know her.”
“Is this her day off? Does she work a different shift?”
“What’s the name again?”
“Yolanda Mills.”
Len had a blank look on his face. “And she works here? At this shelter?”
“That’s what she told me,” I said.
“You spoke to her?”
“Yes. By email, and over the phone,” I said. I was getting a strange tingling at the back of my neck.
“Can you give me a second?” Len got up from behind the desk and went through a door that led down a dark green hallway dotted with notices that had been taped directly to the wall. I saw him go into a room halfway down the hall. He was in there no more than twenty seconds, then came back.
“We got nobody working here by that name,” he said.
“That’s not possible,” I said, feeling my anxiety level go up a notch. “I spoke to her. Who were you talking to back there?”
“Lefty.” My look must have told him I thought he was jerking me around. “Morgan. She’s the boss. We just call her Lefty. You want to talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“Great. She loves interruptions.”
He led me down the hall, stuck his head in the doorway, and said, “Guy wants to talk to you, Lefty.”
She was nearly hidden behind a desk stacked with paper-stuffed folders. Forties, probably, although the thin gray streaks in her brown hair and the wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses suggested to me that she might be older. A blue long-sleeved sweater hung off her thin frame, and when she stood up I could see that she’d cinched her belt tight to keep her jeans, a couple of sizes too large, from falling off her.
“Yeah?” she said.
“I’m Tim Blake,” I said, extending my right hand. Instead of returning the gesture with her own right hand, she stuck out her left. She had no right arm. The right sweater sleeve, hanging empty, was tucked into a pocket. I was glad I hadn’t called her Lefty.
“Morgan Donovan,” she said. “This is my empire.” She waved her hand majestically at the chaos that was her desk. “You’re looking for somebody?”
“Two people, actually,” I said. “My daughter, Sydney Blake. And a woman who works here. Yolanda Mills.”
“Nope.”
“Excuse me?”
“No one by that name works here.”
“She told me she worked at Second Chance. Is there another drop-in place with this name?”
“Maybe in some parallel universe,” Morgan said. “But we’re the only one in Seattle.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Maybe you got the name wrong. She works for some other shelter. God knows the city is full of them.”
“No, I’m sure I have it right,” I said. I put the pictures of Syd on top of one of the folders. “This is my daughter, Sydney Blake. Yolanda Mills said she’d seen her here. Twice.”
Morgan gave the pictures a more thorough examination than Len had. “I’m good with faces,” she said. “But this girl, she’s not familiar. She’s a looker. If I’d seen her, I’d have remembered her. So would Len.” She rolled her eyes. “Especially Len.”
“But you’re back here in the office,” I said. “She could have come in and you wouldn’t have seen her.”
She nodded. “Yup,” she
said. “But if there was a Yolanda Mills working for me, that I’d know. I sign the checks.”
“Maybe she’s a volunteer. Do you have volunteers here?”
“Some. But none by that name.”
I took out a slip of paper on which I’d written the shelter’s address, my flight info, and several phone numbers, including Yolanda’s. “I’ve got her number right here.”
Morgan asked me to read it out to her. “That’s not the shelter number,” she said.
“It’s her cell,” I said. “I called this number last night and talked to her. She said she helped with the food orders here, that she was out all the time picking up groceries.”
Morgan Donovan just looked at me.
“Hang on,” I said, got out my cell, flipped it open, and punched in the number. “I’ll get her on the phone and you can talk to her yourself.”
“Why the hell not,” she said tiredly. “It’s not like I have anything else to do.”
I let it ring a dozen times, thinking that eventually it would go to message, but it didn’t. I ended the call, then immediately tried the number again. I let it go another dozen rings, then snapped the phone shut.
Morgan said, “You don’t look so good.”
TWELVE
I
WAS HAVING A DÉJÀ VU MOMENT.
First Syd’s not working where she says she is. Now the mysterious Yolanda.
“You want to sit down?” Morgan said.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. My legs were rubbery, my stomach was doing a slow somersault. “Where the hell is she?” I said, more to myself than the woman sitting behind the desk.
Morgan sat down, leaned back in her chair, and sighed tiredly. “You might as well fill me in.”
So I did. Syd going missing. The hotel. The car. Then, a hit on the website I’d set up from a woman claiming to have seen her in Seattle.
“And she said she worked for us,” Morgan said. “That’s some story. Sounds like a scam. Maybe some kid, jerking you around.”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t sound like a kid, and she didn’t ask me for anything. Didn’t want a reward.” Wheels were turning. “If you knew someone here was sending tips to parents, telling them their kids were here, would that be against the rules?”
“Big-time,” she said. “We’d like nothing more than for these kids to get back together with their mothers and fathers, but some of those moms and dads don’t deserve to have them back. You got no idea the kind of crap a lot of these kids have had to put up with. Not that they’re all angels. Seventy percent of them, I’d probably kick them out myself if they were mine. But they’re not all trouble. Some of these girls, when their stepdads weren’t using them for punching bags, they were trying to get into their pants. We got kids out there whose parents are drunks and drug dealers. We had a girl here last year, her mom was pimping her out. She was getting a little too old in the tooth to do it herself and figured her daughter could take over the family business.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah, well, he seems to be M.I.A. at the moment. We had a kid here last week, his skin was a mess, like it had all peeled off and was growing back on again, especially his face. Anything that wasn’t protected. His dad was pissed he hadn’t taken a shower when he’d told him to. So he hauls the kid out to the driveway and takes a power washer to him. You ever feel the pressure of one of those things? You can strip paint with them.”
I said nothing.
“So we’re not exactly going to put a call into mommies and daddies like that and say hey, guess what, we found your little angel, why don’t you come on down and take them home.”
“I get it.”
“These kids trust us. They have to be able to trust us or we can’t help them.”
I was thinking. “So then, if you did have someone on staff who was doing this, who was trying to reunite kids with their parents, and you found out, they’d be fired.”
“Very likely.”
“So maybe whoever called me works here but didn’t use her real name.”
Morgan Donovan considered that a moment. “Why would someone have to give you a name at all? She could have gotten in touch with you anonymously.”
“I have an email address for her,” I said.
Morgan asked for it and wrote it down on the back of an envelope.
“There’s no one here with that address that I know of. A Hotmail address ain’t exactly that hard to get.”
“I know,” I said.
“So like I said, maybe someone’s yanking your chain,” she said. When I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, she said, “Wanna coffee or something? I’d offer you something stronger, but it’s a church foundation that tops up our budget and they take a dim view of my keeping scotch in my bottom drawer. Not that there isn’t a bottle in there right now. We’ve got a pot of coffee that’s been going continuously since 1992. Want some of that?” My face must have given away my reluctance. “A Diet Coke, then?”
I said sure.
“Hey, Len!” Footsteps scurrying down the hall, then Len poked his head in. “Can you grab us a couple cans of DC?”
Len continued farther on down the hall, where I could hear an old-fashioned fridge open and then latch shut, and then he was back with one can and a paper cup. “We’re running a bit low,” he said, putting both items on her desk and leaving.
Morgan got up and started clearing some papers off a wooden chair so that I could sit down.
“Let me get that,” I offered, but she held up her arm to deflect me, then used it to scoop up the files.
“I’m pretty good at this,” she said. “Although you know what pisses me off? Those taps in public washrooms, where you only get water so long as you’re pressing down? So as soon as you let go of the tap to get your hand under it, there’s no fucking water. I’ve just got the one fist, but if I could find the guy who invented that goddamn tap I could knock his teeth out.”
I smiled awkwardly.
“You can ask,” she said.
“Sorry?”
“How I lost it.”
“It’s none of my business,” I said.
“You ever hang your arm down the outside of the door when you’re in a car?”
Slowly, I nodded.
She smiled. “My husband’s driving, I’m chilling out in the passenger seat, my arm dangling out the window, the asshole runs a red and we get broadsided. I lost my arm in the front grille of a Ford Explorer. Maybe if the two of us hadn’t been three sheets to the wind, it wouldn’t have happened. Getting your wife’s arm cut off tends to put a strain on a marriage, so rather than look at me every day and be reminded of what he’d done, he hit the road. At least I had the one arm left to wave goodbye, the son of a bitch.”
She popped the Diet Coke can, filled the paper cup to the rim, and handed it to me. She sipped what was left in the can and returned to her spot behind the desk.
I sat in the chair she’d cleared for me.
“I don’t think you answered my question,” she said. There had been a question? I was still processing the lost-arm story. Morgan refreshed my memory. “Why couldn’t this person have just sent an anonymous tip? Why give you a fake name?”
“I guess she wanted me to know she was legit,” I said. “And she was. I’m sure of it. She even sent me a picture of my daughter.”
“A picture?”
“Sydney was caught in the frame of a shot she took with her cell phone.” I sipped Diet Coke from the paper cup. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how parched I was. “It was her. In the picture. I’m positive.”
Morgan shook her head slowly back and forth. “Maybe she wanted you to know your daughter’s out here, she wants you to believe her, so she gave you a name. But maybe there was some reason why she couldn’t reveal her true identity to you.” Morgan laughed. “Makes her sound like Wonder Woman or something.”
“It wasn’t you, was it?” I asked. The idea had just popped into my head.
Morgan Donovan was too worn down by her job to register any surprise at my question. She said tiredly, “It’s all I can do to get these kids to have some breakfast, let alone reunite them all with their families.”
“I’m taking a lot of shots in the dark these days,” I said.
“Where are you staying?” Morgan asked me.
“I don’t know. I didn’t book anything before I left. I thought, maybe, if I found Syd right away, we’d catch a red-eye back home tonight.”
She smiled pitifully at me. “An optimist. It’s been so long since I ran into one of those I almost forgot they existed. Give me your cell number. I’ll put some of your snaps up on the bulletin board, tell everybody to see me if they know anything. Then I’ll call you. That a deal?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d really appreciate that.” A couple more swallows and I had finished my cup of Diet Coke. “Would you mind if I asked the other people who work here if they’ve seen Syd, or heard of Yolanda Mills?”
“Actually, yes, I would,” Morgan said. “I’ll do what I can for you, but I don’t want you stirring things up around here.”
I didn’t like her answer much. I got up from the chair, nodded, and said thanks. She went back to the mounds of paper on her desk. When she noticed I hadn’t left yet, she said, “Was there something else?”
“You were going to put my daughter’s picture on the bulletin board,” I said.
“So I was.” She brushed past me on her way out of the room, went down the hall and into the main reception area, where kids were still milling around. There seemed to be more here than before I’d gone into Morgan Donovan’s office. She crossed the room and stuck Syd’s face to a bulletin board and wrote under it,
If you’ve seen this girl, see Lefty
.
The board was a collage version of a graduating class photo. Hundreds of photos. Boys and girls. White, black, Hispanic, Asian. Some as young as ten or twelve, others who looked to be in their thirties. The moment Morgan stepped back from the board, Sydney’s face blended into all the others. Not one lost daughter, but the latest addition to a lost generation.
I stared hopelessly at the wall.
“I know,” Morgan said. “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
I
ASKED LEN FOR A SHEET OF PAPER
from his printer before I left. I leaned over the door that was his desk, positioned a photo of Syd in the middle, and wrote above it,
HAVE YOU SEEN SYDNEY BLAKE?
Below the shot I printed my own name and cell phone number, adding,
PLEASE CALL
.
I left and found a drugstore with a photocopying machine, positioned the picture in the center of the sheet, and placed the two items on the glass. I set the counter to one hundred and pressed Print. Once I had the copies, I went up and down the street. I figured if Syd had been in this area at least a couple of times, she might have frequented other businesses. Maybe she’d even have gone into some of them looking for work. She’d always been a pretty resourceful kid, and I could see her looking for odd jobs so that she could afford to feed herself.
Most of the shopkeepers politely took the flyers, glanced at them, put them aside. Some just said, “Sorry.” Others glanced at the sheet and crumpled it up.
There wasn’t time to get angry with any of them. I just moved on to the next shop.
I did that until about nine. There was a diner across from Second Chance, and I managed to get a seat by the window. I put my cell phone on the table and ordered a hot open-faced turkey sandwich and coffee and sat there, rarely taking my eye off the front of the drop-in center. There was a streetlamp on the sidewalk there, and it cast enough light that if Syd appeared, I was confident I could spot her, even through the off-and-on drizzle.
I ate my dinner mechanically. Put the food in my mouth, chewed, swallowed. Drank my coffee.
I tried the Yolanda Mills number again. No answer, no way to leave a message.
I’d no sooner put the phone down than it rang. I grabbed it so quickly I knocked my fork to the floor. I didn’t stop to see who was calling before I flipped the phone open and put it to my ear.
“Yes?” I said.
“It’s me,” Susanne said.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing up? What time is it? It must be after midnight where you are.”
“I’ve been sitting here by the phone all night, waiting for you to call.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The lead… hasn’t panned out.”
I heard a sigh of disappointment. “You sound… beat,” she said.
“I’m going to find a place to stay. There’s a Holiday Inn or something up the street. I’ll get an early start tomorrow. See if I can find the woman who called me, hit all the other shelters I can find, see if Syd went to one of those.”
“You haven’t connected with the woman who called you?”
“No one’s heard of her.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.”
I could sense Susanne’s frustration thousands of miles away. “I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
I propped my elbow on the table and rested my head in the hand that wasn’t holding the phone, still watching the Second Chance shelter across the street.
A girl stood in the doorway of the shelter. Blonde.
“It’s just, you get some hint that maybe this is it, you grab on and hold on with everything you’ve got,” she said. “If you hear anything, you’ll call?”
“I will,” I said. Switching gears, I said, “Susanne, how close are Evan and Sydney? I mean, before she disappeared.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Not that close, as far as I could tell. I mean, they’d be civil with each other at the dinner table, but it’s not like they hung out together or anything.”
“What do you think he’s into?”
“What do you mean ‘into’?”
“You think he’s stealing from you; he’s always on the computer with the door closed. You don’t think it’s porn. What’s your best guess?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it may be nothing. He’s really into music. You know, they’ve got all these programs where you can create music on the computer. Maybe he’s doing that, with the headphones on so we don’t hear it.”
But she didn’t sound convinced.
I kept watching the girl across the street.
“Do you think Evan might have dragged Syd into whatever he’s up to?” I asked.
“I never saw anything to suggest—”
“Susanne? Hello?”
“Sorry. I just closed the study door. I don’t want to wake Bob. Anyway, no, I don’t think Syd was mixed up in anything Evan’s up to. But there’s something I have to tell you.”
The girl kept moving in and out of the shadows. She’d move in close to the shelter entrance where I could barely see her, then poke her head out to watch the cars go by, the streetlights catching her blonde hair.
Come on, come on, step out, step out all the way
.
“I saw that van again tonight,” Susanne said.
“What van?” I said. The girl took a step forward, the light hitting her face for less than a second. She glanced down the street, then retreated into the shadows.
“The one on our street? The one Bob doesn’t think is a big deal?”
I knew what van she meant the first time, but I was having a hard time keeping track of the conversation while I watched the girl.
“When did you see it?” I managed to ask.
“Tonight. A couple of hours ago. After it got dark, I happened to look outside and saw a van parked a few houses down, and when I went out and walked down to the end of the driveway it started up and backed up to the corner and took off.”
A boy—a young man—was approaching the shelter from the right. He came up to the door, and the girl threw her arms around him, kissed him. He had his back to me, and all I could really see of the girl was the top of her head and her arms.
