Moonlight Mile (12 page)

“And Sophie,” Angie said, “found her alpha?”

“Yup.” She stood from her chair. “She sure did. She hasn’t called me in . . . Since July, maybe? I hope I was some help.”

We assured her she was.

“Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for talking to us.”

We shook her hand and followed her and the dog out of the barn and down the dirt path to our car. Dusk was settling into the bare treetops and the air smelled of pine and damp, decaying leaves.

“When you find Sophie, what will you do?”

I said, “I was hired to find Amanda.”

“So you won’t feel obligated to bring Sophie home.”

I shook my head. “She’s seventeen now. I couldn’t do anything if I wanted to.”

“But you don’t want to.”

Angie and I spoke at the same time. “No.”

“Would you do me a favor
if
you do find her?”

“You bet.”

“Tell her she has a place to stay. Any hour of the day. High or not. Angry or not. I don’t care about my feelings anymore. I only want to know she’s safe.”

She and Angie hugged then in that unforced way women can pull off that eludes even those men in the world who are at ease with the bro clench. Sometimes, I give Angie shit about it. I call it the Lifetime Hug or the Oprah, but there was no easy sentiment powering this one, just a recognition, I guess, or an affirmation.

“She deserved you,” Angie said.

Elaine wept silently into her shoulder and Angie held the back of her head and rocked her a bit the way she so often does with our daughter.

“She deserved you.”

Chapter Thirteen

W
e met Andre Stiles out front of the DCF offices on Farnsworth Street and the three of us walked down along the Seaport in a light flurry to a tavern on Sleeper Street.

Once we were settled in our seats and the waitress had taken our orders, I said, “Thanks again for seeing us on such short notice, Mr. Stiles.”

“Please,” he said, “don’t call me ‘Mister.’ Just call me Dre.”

“Dre it is.”

He was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight, brown hair cut short, the gray just finding its way along the temples and along the edges of his goatee. Well-dressed for a social worker—black cotton crewneck and dark blue jeans far nicer than anything you’d find at The Gap, black cashmere overcoat with red lining.

“So,” he said, “Sophie.”

“Sophie.”

“You met her father.”

“Yup,” Angie said.

“What’d you think?”

The waitress brought our drinks. He plucked the lemon wedge out of his vodka tonic, stirred the drink, and then placed the stirrer beside the lemon wedge. His fingers moved with the confident delicacy of a pianist.

“The father,” I said. “Piece of work, isn’t he?”

“If by piece of work you mean douche bag, yeah, he’s that.”

Angie laughed and drank some wine.

“Don’t sugarcoat it, Dre.”

“Please, don’t,” Angie said.

He took a sip of his drink, chewed a chip of ice. “So many of the kids I deal with, the problem’s not the kid. It’s that the kid drew an asshole in the parental lottery. Or two assholes. I could sit here and be all PC about it, but I do that enough at work all day.”

“Last thing we want is PC,” I said. “Anything you can tell us would be greatly appreciated.”

“How long you two been private investigators?”

“I’ve been on a five-year sabbatical,” Angie said.

“Until when?”

“This morning,” she said.

“You missed it?”

“I thought I did,” she said. “Not so sure anymore, though.”

“You?” he asked me. “How long have you been at it?”

“Too long.” It unsettled me how true those words felt. “Since I was twenty-three.”

“You ever think of doing anything else?”

“More and more every day. You?”

He shook his head. “This
is
my second career.”

“What was your first?”

He finished his drink and caught the waitress’s eye. I still had half my scotch and Angie still had two-thirds of her wine, so he pointed at his own drink and showed her one finger.

“My first career,” he said. “I was a doctor, believe it or not.”

Suddenly the delicate grace of his fingers made sense.

“You think it’s going to be about saving lives but you find out quick it’s about turnover, just like any other business. How many services can you deliver at a premium price with the lowest expenditure on supplies and labor? Treat ’em, street ’em, and upsell ’em when the opportunity presents itself.”

Angie said, “And you weren’t any more PC then, I take it?”

He chuckled as the waitress brought his drink. “I was fired from four hospitals in a five-square-mile area for insubordination. It’s a record of some kind, I’m pretty sure. I suddenly found myself unhireable in the city. I mean, I could have moved to, I don’t know, New Bedford or something. But I like the city. And I woke up one day and realized I hated my life. I hated what I was doing with it. I’d lost my faith.” He shrugged. “A couple days later I saw an ad for a human services position with the DCF, and here I am.”

“You miss it?”

“Sometimes. More often than not, though? Not so much. It’s like any dysfunctional relationship—sure there were good things about it or else how would you get into it in the first place? But for the most part, it was killing me. Now I have regular hours, I do work I’m proud of, and I sleep like a baby at night.”

“And the work you did with Sophie Corliss?”

“Confidential mostly. She came to me for help, and I tried to help. She’s a pretty lost kid.”

“And the reason she dropped out of school?”

He gave me an apologetic grimace. “Confidential, I’m afraid.”

“I can’t really get a clear picture of her,” I said.

“That’s because there isn’t one. Sophie’s one of those people—she entered adolescence with no real skills, no ambition, and zero sense of self. She’s smart enough to know she has deficiencies but not smart enough to know what they are. And even if she did, what could she do about them? You can’t
decide
to be passionate about something. You can’t manufacture a vocation. Sophie’s what I call a floater. She bobs along waiting for someone to come along and tell her where to go.”

“You ever meet a friend of hers named Amanda?” Angie asked.

“Ah,” he said, “Amanda.”

“You’ve met her?”

“If you meet Sophie, you meet Amanda.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said.

“You met Amanda?”

“I knew her a long time ago when she was—”

“Ho,” he said, pushing his chair back a bit. “You’re the guy who found her back in the ’90s. Right? Jesus. I knew the name sounded familiar.”

“There you go then.”

“And now you’re looking a second time? A bit ironic.” He shook his head at that irony. “Well, I don’t know what she was like then, but now? Amanda’s a real cool kid. Maybe too cool, you know? I never met anyone of any age so self-possessed. I mean, to be comfortable in your own skin is a rare quality in a sixty-year-old, never mind a sixteen-year-old. Amanda knows exactly who she is.”

“And who is that?”

“I don’t follow.”

“We’ve heard about Amanda’s cool from a lot of people, and you describe her as knowing exactly who she is. My question is—who is she?”

“She’s whoever she needs to be. She’s adaptability personified.”

“And Sophie?”

“Sophie is . . . pliable. She’ll follow any philosophy if it brings her closer to the group-think of the room. Amanda
adapts
to whatever the group
thinks
it wants. And she sheds it as soon as she leaves that room.”

“You admire her.”

“ ‘Admire’ is a little strong, but I’ll admit she’s an impressive kid. Nothing affects her. Nothing can change her will. And she’s sixteen years old.”

“That’s impressive,” I said. “I wish, though, that just one person I talked to mentioned something about her that was goofy or warm or, I don’t know, messy.”

“That’s not Amanda.”

“Apparently not.”

“What about a kid named Zippo? You ever hear of him?”

“Sophie’s boyfriend. I think his real name is, like, David Lighter. Or Daniel. I can’t be positive on that one.”

“When’s the last time you saw Sophie?”

“Two weeks ago, maybe three.”

“Amanda?”

“Around the same time.”

“Zippo?”

He drained his drink. “Christ.”

“What?”

“It’s been three weeks on him, too. They all . . .” He looked at us.

“Vanished,” Angie said.

• • •

Our daughter climbed the jungle gym in the center of the Ryan Playground. It had been snowing since sundown. There was a foot of sand below the jungle gym but I kept my hand nearby anyway.

“So, Detective,” Angie said.

“Yes, Junior Detective.”

“Oh, I’m Junior Detective, huh? Wow, there really is a glass ceiling.”

“You’re Junior Detective for one week. After that I’ll give you a promotion.”

“Based on what?”

“Solid casework and a certain nocturnal inventiveness after lights-out.”

“That’s harassment, you cad.”

“Last week that harassment made you forget your name.”

“Mommy, why would you forget your name? Did you hit your head?”

“Nice,” Angie said to me. “No, Mommy didn’t hit her head. But you’re going to fall if you don’t pay attention. Watch that bar. There’s ice there.”

My daughter rolled her eyes at me.

“Listen to the boss,” I said.

“So what’d we learn today?” Angie asked me as Gabby went back to climbing.

“We learned that Sophie is probably the girl who talked to the police and said she was Amanda. We learned Amanda is very cool and collected. We learned Sophie is not. We learned five people walked into some room, two died, but four walked out. Whatever that means. We learned that there’s a kid in this world named Zippo. We learned it’s possible Amanda was abducted, because no one thinks she’d run away with so much to stay in school for.” I looked over at Angie. “I’m out. You cold?”

Her teeth chattered. “I never wanted to leave the house. How’d we get Edna the Eskimo for a kid?”

“Irish genes.”

“Daddy,” Gabby said, “catch me.”

Two seconds after she said it, she pitched herself off the bar and I caught her in my arms. She wore earmuffs and a hooded pink down coat and about four layers of underclothing, including thermal leggings—so much clothing the little body wrapped inside felt like a snap pea in its pod.

“Your cheeks are cold,” I said.

“No they’re not.”

“Uh, okay.” I hoisted her up onto my shoulders and gripped her ankles. “Mommy’s cold.”

“Mommy’s always cold.”

“That’s because Mommy’s Italian,” Angie said as we walked out of the playground.

“Ciao,”
Gabby chirped.
“Ciao, ciao, ciao.”

“PR can’t take her tomorrow—dentist—but she can take her the next couple days.”

“Cool.”

“So what’re you going to do tomorrow?” Angie asked me. “Watch that ice.”

I stepped over the ice patch as we reached the crosswalk. “You don’t want to know.”

Chapter Fourteen

H
elene McCready’s current abode was, on the surface, a hell of a step up from the Dorchester three-decker apartment where, until recently, she’d seen fit to poorly raise her daughter. She and Kenny Hendricks lived at 133 Sherwood Forest Drive in Nottingham Hill, a gated community two miles off Route 1, in Foxboro. All I knew about Foxboro was that the Patriots played there eight times a year and it wasn’t too far from the outlet mall in Wrentham. After I accessed those two factoids, I was out. End of list.

It turned out Foxboro was also home to half a dozen adorably named gated condo communities. En route to Nottingham Hill, I also passed Bedford Falls, Juniper Springs, Wuthering Heights, and Fragrant Meadows. All, as mentioned, gated. I couldn’t understand what the gates were for, though; Foxboro had an extremely low crime rate. Other than a parking space on game day, I had no idea what they’d want to steal out here, unless there was a sudden shortage of barbecue utensils or power mowers.

The gate at Nottingham Hill wasn’t hard to circumvent, since there was no gatekeeper. A sign on the kiosk read
DURING DAYLIGHT HOURS, PRESS
*958
FOR SECURITY
. A couple of car lengths past the kiosk, the main road, Robin Hood Boulevard, forked. Four arrow signs at the left fork directed me to Loxley Lane, Tuck Terrace, Scarlett Street, and Sherwood Forest Drive. The road was straight, and what lay ahead appeared to be the kind of middle-class cookie-cutter subdivision I’d expected.

To the right, however, the arrows promised to lead me to Archer Avenue, Little John Lane, Yorkshire Road, and Maid Marian’s Meeting House, but the road led only to a collection of sand mounds with a lone yellow backhoe sitting atop one. Somewhere during the Nottingham Hill development boom, the boom had lowered.

I took the left fork and found 133 Sherwood Forest Drive at the end of a cul-de-sac. The backyards around here were the same tan sand as the mounds where Maid Marian’s Meeting House was supposed to stand, and both 131 and 129 were vacant, the building permits still hanging in windows speckled with sawdust. The front lawns were green, however, even in front of the vacant houses, so someone at the holding company still believed in proper upkeep. I circled the cul-de-sac, slowly enough to note that the curtains were drawn across Helene and Kenny’s windows, those facing north, south, and west. The east windows faced the tan mounds of sand in the rear, so I couldn’t see them. But I was willing to bet their curtains were drawn, too. On my way back up the street, I counted two more
FOR SALE
signs, one with a smaller sign dangling underneath that read
SHORT SALE. MAKE AN OFFER. PLEASE.

I cut over to Tuck Terrace and parked by a half-finished ranch at the end of another cul-de-sac. Houses to the right and the left had been completed. They stood empty, though, the lawns and shrubs recently planted and green as shamrocks, even in December, but the driveways awaiting a paving crew. I went through the skeleton of the half-finished ranch at 133 Tuck Terrace and crossed an acre of tan sand with wooden stakes and blue yarn carving out the backyards-to-be. Soon enough I stood behind Helene and Kenny’s house. It was the two-story Italianate model, a McMansion-wannabe so predictable I could smell the granite kitchen countertops and the hot tub in the master bath from the almost-backyard.

There were about forty different ways I hadn’t cased the place properly. I’d driven around the front so slowly a three-legged basset hound with hip dysplasia could have lapped me. I’d parked my car in the vicinity—a block over, but still. I’d approached across open ground. I hadn’t come at night. Short of standing out front with a sandwich board that read
BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A FRONT DOOR KEY?
I couldn’t have made myself more conspicuous.

So the smart move would have been to walk straight past the house, hope anyone inside took me for a land surveyor or a finish carpenter, and hightail it back home. Instead, I decided the odds had been working in my favor so far—it was two in the afternoon and I hadn’t seen a soul since I’d pulled into the development. It’s stupid to believe in luck, but we do it every time we cross a busy street.

And mine kept holding. The sliding glass doors around back couldn’t keep out Gabby. Or even me with my rusty B&E skills. I picked the lock with a keychain bottle-opener and a credit card. I entered the kitchen and waited by the door in case an alarm sounded. When none did, I jogged up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. I passed through all the bedrooms only long enough to confirm no one was in them and then worked my way back downstairs.

I counted nine computers in the living room. The closest one had a pink stickie attached that read BCBS, HP
IL
. The next one had a yellow stickie: BOA, C
IT
. I tapped the keyboard of the first computer and the screen pulsed softly. For a moment, I saw a screen saver of the Pacific, and then the screen turned lime green and a quartet of animated figures with the heads of the cast of
Diff’rent Strokes
danced across the screen. A speech bubble appeared by Willis’s head and a cursor blinked. Arnold said, “Whachoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” Kimberly was sparking a blunt when she rolled her eyes and said, “Password, dickhead.” A stopwatch appeared in the thought bubble above Mr. Drummond’s head. It ticked down from ten as Kimberly did a striptease and Arnold changed into a security guard’s uniform and Willis hopped into a convertible and immediately crashed it. As it burst into flames, the clock above Mr. Drummond’s head exploded and the screen went black.

I called Angie.

“The entire cast of
Diff’rent Strokes
?”

“Now that you mention it, Mrs. Garrett wasn’t there.”

“Must have been the
Facts of Life
years,” she said. “Whatta you got?”

“Computers with password protections. Nine of them.”

“Nine passwords?”

“Nine computers.”

“That’s a lot of computers for a living room with no furniture. Did you find Amanda’s room yet?”

“No.”

“See if there’s a computer there. Kids are less likely to password-protect.”

“Okay.”

“If you can get on, just get me an IP address, and the incoming and outgoing servers. Most people, no matter how many computers they’ve got, use just one server. If I can’t hack it, I know someone who can.”

“Who
do
you meet online?”

We hung up and I went upstairs to the bedrooms. Helene and Kenny’s was as expected—Bob’s Furniture dresser and chest covered in wrinkled clothes, box spring on the floor, no nightstands, several empty beer cans on one side of the bed, several empty glasses sporting some sort of sticky residue on the other side. Ashtrays on the floor, wall-to-wall carpeting already soiled.

I passed through the master bathroom, gave the hot tub a smile, and entered the next bedroom. It was tidy and empty. The faux-walnut dresser, chest, matching bed and nightstand all looked cheap but respectable. The drawers were empty, the bed was made. The closet was two dozen empty hangers, evenly spaced.

Amanda’s room. She’d left nothing behind but hangers and the sheets on the bed. On the wall, she’d left a framed Red Sox jersey, signed by Josh Beckett, and a Just Puppies calendar. It was the first hint of sentiment I could attach to her. Otherwise, all I got was the same impression of precision I’d been getting off her trail from the beginning.

The bedroom across the hall was another story. It looked like someone had tossed it in a blender, pressed
STIR
, and then removed the cap. The bed hid under a patchwork of comforter, blanket, jeans, sweater, sweatshirt, denim jacket, capri cargo pants. The dresser sported open drawers and a vanity mirror. Sophie had tucked photographs into the left and right sides of the mirror, between the glass and the frame. Several were of a boy in his late teens. Zippo, I assumed. He usually wore a Sox cap turned sideways. A stripe of hair extended from ear to ear like a chin strap and a matching tuft of hair sprouted from the space between his lower lip and chin. Tats on the side of his neck and silver rings protruding from his eyebrows. In most of the photos, he had his arm around Sophie. In all of them, he was brandishing a beer bottle or a red plastic cup. Sophie wore big smiles but she seemed to be trying them out, looking for one that fit what she thought people were looking for. Her eyes seemed sensitive to light—in every photo she looked one step from squinting. Her tiny teeth peeked out uncertainly from her smile. It was hard to imagine her happy. Tucked above and below the photos were club postcards for dates long past—last spring and early summer, mostly. All the venues were over-21 clubs.

Sophie definitely cultivated an over-21 look. But you couldn’t overlook the baby fat that hung, pupa-like, from the underside of her chin or covered her cheekbones. Any club let her in knowing she was underage. Most of the photos were of her and Zippo; two were of her and other girlfriends, none of whom I recognized and none of whom was Amanda, though both photos had been cropped on the left-hand side, amputating Sophie’s shoulder at the point where it had presumably touched someone else’s.

I tossed the rest of the room and found some pills I didn’t recognize, with a holistic-medicine vibe to the labels. I snapped photos of them with my Droid and moved on. I found several wristbands, enough to suggest a fetish for wristsbands or a purpose. I took a closer look at them. Most of them were stacked in a pile on the upper shelf of the closet, but a few were strewn in with the general mess.

I pulled all the covers off the bed and pushed the clothes out of the way and found the laptop waiting for me, the power light blinking. I flipped it open and was greeted by a screen saver of Sophie and Zippo, flashing the universal two-fingered “gangsta” sign, which immediately defined them as white non–gang members. I double-clicked on the Apple icon in the top left corner of the screen and worked my way into the main control panel without a single password prompt. There I discovered the IP server info Angie required. I copied it all onto my Droid and texted it to her.

I clicked back to the main screen and then clicked on the mail icon.

Sophie wasn’t a big deleter. Her inbox had 2,871 messages dating back over a year. Her
SENT
folder contained 1,673 messages, also dating back over a year. I called Angie and told her what I’d found. “With the IP info, you can hack this?”

“Candy from a baby,” she said. “How long have you been in there?”

“I don’t know. Twenty minutes.”

“That’s a lotta time to be in the house of people who don’t have predictable work schedules.”

“Yes, Mom.”

She hung up.

I put everything back the way I’d found it and worked my way downstairs. In the dining room, I found a cardboard box filled with mail on the card table in the center of the room. Nothing out of the ordinary about the mail—utility bills mostly, some credit-card bills and bank statements—until I looked at the names and addresses of the recipients. None of them lived here. There was mail for Daryl Bousquet in Westwood, Georgette Bing in Franklin, Mica Griekspoor in Sharon, Virgil Cridlin in Dedham. I thumbed through the stack and counted nine more names, all living in nearby towns—Walpole, Norwood, Mansfield, and Plainville. I looked through the portico into the living room at the bank of computers. A barely furnished house, what furniture there was from a discount wholesaler, and no sense that anyone intended to make this a ten-year abode. Nine computers. Stolen mail. If I had another hour, somewhere I’d find birth certificates for babies who’d died decades ago. I’d bet every dime I had on it.

I looked at the mail again. Why so stupid, though? Why password-protect the computers but forget to turn on the house alarm? Why pick a perfect spot to do this kinda shit—in a house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a stalled development—and leave stacks of stolen mail in a box?

I looked around the kitchen, found nothing but empty cabinets and a fridge filled with Styrofoam take-out containers, beer, and a twelve-pack of Coke. I closed a cabinet and remembered what Amanda’s classmate had said about the microwave.

I opened it and stared inside. It was a microwave. White walls, yellow light, circular heating tray. I was about to close it when I got a strong whiff of something acrid and I took another look at the walls. They were white, yes, but there was an extra layer of white. When I tilted my head and adjusted my eyes, I saw the same film on the yellow bulb. I found a butter knife and scraped one of the walls very lightly, and what came off was a fine powder, as white and light as talc.

I closed the microwave door, returned the knife to its drawer, and went back into the living room. That’s when I heard the front door knob turn.

I hadn’t been face-to-face with her in eleven years. I’d kind of liked it that way. But here she was, four steps into her living room when her eyes locked on mine. She’d gained weight, mostly in the hips and the face, the sides of her neck. Her skin was splotchier. Her cornflower eyes, always her most attractive feature, remained so. They widened under her feather-cut ginger hair, the roots showing gray by the crown, and her mouth opened into a tight, wrinkled oval, then formed a hesitant P.

It wasn’t like I could claim I was here to fix the garbage disposal. I gave her what I’m sure was a hapless smile, held out my arms, and shrugged.