Pain Management (3 page)

After a while, I stopped doing that kind of stuff.

But I still knew how to do it. And I needed the work. So, when Gem told me about the money these people were putting up, I said okay.

Most of the clients who hired me for tracker jobs had no illusions. They knew what they were buying, and me not having a PI license was part of what they paid for. This thing Gem had set up was a different game—the clients had started at the other end of the tunnel.

Their kid was missing. A teenager. Soon as they figured out she was gone, they’d played it by the numbers. The cops had marked the case as a runaway, not a career-making abduction. Said they’d keep looking, but more than likely she’d already left town. . . .

When the parents took that bait, the detectives recommended a high-tech investigative firm, heavily staffed with ex-cops. Not a kickback, you understand. A “referral.” Just another way the Man protects and serves. And some citizens are more grateful than others for the service.

But, despite all their licenses and contacts and computers, the firm drew a blank. Then the parents tried looking themselves. The father, anyway. The way it came back to me, he thought he had some special rapport with street kids. Never picked up his daughter’s trail, but he got close enough to the whisper-stream that Gem picked up his.

So, when she told him I didn’t have a license and had to be paid in cash, he not only didn’t balk, he snapped at it.

People with money love the idea of men with shady connections and no particular aversion to violence working for them. Telling their golf buddies that they “know a guy” raises their status a lot higher than a new luxo SUV. But citizens can’t tell a working pro from a two-bit loudmouth, and
Consumer Reports
doesn’t rate working criminals. So the buyers rely on the one standard of truth they’ve come to trust over the years—the movies.

Some chumps are more sophisticated than others. Gem gave me the readout on the father, said he was educated
and
intelligent. In our world, we know those are separate things—so we figured he wouldn’t be looking for something out of
The Sopranos.

Besides, Gem let him think he was hiring an ex-mercenary, not an ex-con. For some reason, citizens think mercs are an honorable breed of outlaw. White citizens, anyway.

I pulled to the curb in front of their house in a two-year-old dark-gray Crown Vic sedan. I was wearing an off-the-rack navy-blue suit and generic tie, clean-shaven, with my hair cut military-short. I couldn’t do anything about my face, but it went nicely with the shoulder holster I’d make sure they got a good look at—it would help them convince themselves they were getting what they were paying for.

I gave the door a light two-knuckle rap. It opened so quickly I was sure my sense of having been watched from the window was on the money. The woman looked to be in her mid-forties, too thin for her age and frame, ash-blond hair carefully arranged to look casual, a salmon-colored dress belted at the waist with a silver chain, a matching set of links around her neck. Business pumps, sheer stockings, salon-level makeup. She had chemical eyes, but I couldn’t tell what was on her prescription pad.

“Are you—?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Our appointment was for—”

“I know, but my husband won’t be home for a couple of hours,” the woman said. “He had to work late, and he didn’t know how to reach you. . . .”

“That’s all right,” I said, stepping past her into a narrow hall. “I can get background from you, talk to him when he gets here.”

“Background? We already told the police everything.”

Didn’t her husband tell her me and the cops weren’t exactly colleagues?
I kept my face expressionless, said, “Nobody ever does that,” and moved toward the living room, bringing her along in my wake.

“Does . . . what?” she asked me, her hands tightly clasped at her waist, as if she was afraid of wringing them.

“Tells anyone ‘everything.’ There’s no such thing.”

“What are you saying?”

“Not what you think,” I told her. “This isn’t about you ‘cooperating.’ You’re not a suspect. But one thing I learned from doing this for so long—until you really take them through it, people don’t know
what
they know.”

“I don’t under—”

“Here’s what that means,” I interrupted her, helping myself to a seat in a Danish-modern chair opulently padded in black leather. “You have information. You might not
see
it as information, but I would. It’s never the fault of the . . . source. It always comes down to the investigator not asking the right questions.”

“And that’s what you do?” she said, seating herself delicately on a love seat upholstered in what looked like tapestry cloth. If my chair suggested money, hers bludgeoned you with it.

Behind her was a giant blowup of the famous photograph of a young woman kneeling next to the body of a demonstrator gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State.

“It’s part of what I do,” I told her, more convinced than ever that her husband had told her I was some kind of “alternative” to the police, not the working thug he’d known he was hiring. “Because I don’t have the same handicaps as the police, I can work differently.”

“What . . . handicaps?”

“Cops have bosses. They have to answer for their stats. But, mostly, they’re prisoners of their minds.”

“Prisoners of their—?”

“Cops don’t believe anyone actually runs away, ma’am. In their mind, the bodies are always in the basement.”

Two sharp dots of brutal red burst out on her cheeks. She made a swallowing sound, reached out with one hand as if she’d lost her balance. I didn’t move. Her hand found the arm of the love seat. She gathered herself slowly, eyes on the carpet.

“How could they—?”

“It’s nothing personal,” I said gently. “That’s what I mean by them being prisoners of their minds. You can’t expect them to overcome their conditioning.”

“But they didn’t act like that at
all,
” she said, an undercurrent of something like resentment in her voice. “They were almost . . . I don’t know . . . dismissive, perhaps. The only thing they seemed really interested in was that damn computer.”

“You mean your daughter’s . . . ?”

“Yes. As soon as they found out she was online, they got very excited. They even got some specialist to examine it. He did a . . . ‘hard-drive sweep,’ I think they called it.”

“Sure. Thinking maybe she got lured away by someone she met in a chat room.”

“That’s exactly what they said. But after they got done with the computer, they said there was nothing. They asked us about her friends, her teachers . . . but you could see their hearts weren’t in it.”

“How did they leave it, then?”

“They have Rose listed as a runaway. No evidence of foul play, that’s what they said. One of them told us she’d probably turn up. The other didn’t even seem to care
that
much.”

“You expected . . . ?”

“More,” she said, somewhere between bitter and disappointed. “I expected . . . more.” She took a shallow breath, switched to a singsong voice, as if she were answering stupid questions: “No, our daughter was not a Goth, not a drug addict, not an alcoholic. No, our daughter was not involved with someone we didn’t approve of. No, our daughter was not adopted . . . although why they thought that was important, I’ll never know.”

“Kids . . . teenagers—they’re natural seekers. Adopted children sometimes get this romantic notion about their ‘real’ parents, especially when they hit puberty and start to have social problems. They get the idea that DNA can explain things happening in their lives. If they ask their adoptive parents questions, and don’t get the answers they’re looking for, sometimes they go looking for themselves. That’s all they meant.”

“Oh. Well, they
said
all the right things. They just didn’t seem truly . . . concerned, I guess.”

“Concern’s just window dressing,” I said. “It might make you feel better, but it wouldn’t make them do a better job.”

“My husband didn’t trust them.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Kevin doesn’t trust the police,” she said, making an apologetic noise in her throat.

“Any special reason?”

“He was almost forty when Rose was born,” she said, as if that explained everything. When my expression told her it didn’t, she went on: “Kevin was an antiwar activist.”

“Ah. And now?”

“Now he’s an architect,” she said, pride rich in her voice. “A very fine one. With a very prestigious firm. But I wish he’d go out on his own.”

“You sound as if that’s something you’ve discussed more than a couple of times.”

This time her laugh came from her chest. “Only about once a night for ten years. But Kevin makes so much money where he is. . . .”

“Did your daughter ever get involved in those arguments?”

“Rose? Don’t be silly. And they weren’t arguments. I just think Kevin could do better for himself professionally. Be more creative, choose his own projects. But he’s more comfortable where he is.”

“All right,” I said, deliberately moving her away from any domestic unhappiness. “Could I have a look at Rose’s room?”

“I . . . Kevin
hated
that.”

“Letting the police search her room?”

“Yes. He said it was an invasion of Rose’s privacy.
We
would never do such a thing ourselves. So it seemed . . . bizarre . . . that we would let anyone else do it.”

“Well, given the circumstances . . .”

“I know. Kevin agreed, finally. But he just wasn’t comfortable with the whole thing. He insisted on being there every second. Not to look at anything himself,” she assured me, “to make certain the police were . . . respectful.”

“He’s a very protective father?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say
that.
I think I’m more . . . strict with Rose than he could ever be. Kevin believes too much parental control stifles a child.”

“Do you want me to wait until your husband comes home to check Rose’s room?” I asked her bluntly.

“No . . . I don’t think so. I mean, Kevin knows you’re coming. And, anyway, you’re working for us, not the police, isn’t that correct?”

“I’ve got nothing to do with the police,” I said, making sure she got it. I knew better than to try and hold her eyes to emphasize the point. My eyes don’t track together ever since I took that
coup de grâce
bullet that hadn’t worked out like the shooter intended. People who try and stare me down get disconcerted pretty easy.

“All right, then. You can—”

She clamped her mouth shut suddenly as a little girl exploded into the room. The kid was maybe ten, wearing a red-and-white barber-pole-striped T-shirt and blue jeans. “Mom! Can I—?”

“Daisy, we have company. Do you think you can wait until I have—?”

The kid spotted me, whirled to bring me into focus. “What’s your name?” she demanded.

“B.B.,” I told her, pulling it out of the air.

“Like a BB gun?”

“Yep,” I said, going along.

“What happened to your face?”

“Daisy! What kind of question is that to ask our guest?”

The kid ignored her mother, watching me like she damn well expected an answer.

“I was in an accident,” I said, keeping my voice level and polite.

“Oh. A car accident?”

I nodded agreement, trying for gravity.

“How come your eyes are two different colors?” she demanded.

“That is
it,
young lady,” her mother said sharply.

“You’re here about Rose, aren’t you?” the kid asked me, hitting the mute to her mother’s station on some private remote.

“I am.”

“You’re the private detective!”

“That’s right.”

“And you think
you’re
going to find her?”

“I’m going to try.”

“The cops will never find her,” the child said solemnly.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they don’t know her.”

“That makes sense, Daisy. And
you
know her, right?”

“Yes. We are very close,” the child said, smug and sad simultaneously. Proud of her adult phraseology . . . and terrified that she’d slip and use the past tense when she was referring to her sister.

“Then, later, you and me, we’ll talk, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, coming closer and sticking out her hand for me to shake. I did it, sealing the bargain. She whirled and charged out of the living room on full boil.

“I must apologize for—”

“She just wants to help,” I said to her mother. “And—who knows?—maybe she can.”

“I’m . . . not sure. She absolutely
worships
her sister, but I don’t think she could possibly know anything about . . . this.”

“It can’t hurt,” I assured the woman. “And it would make her feel better to be helping.”

“Do you want to see Rose’s room now?” she replied, moving me away from something that made her uncomfortable.

The girl’s room was on the second floor. Bigger than most Manhattan apartments, with its own attached bath. Between the skylight in the sloping ceiling and the triple-pane bay window, the room was flooded with natural light.

The furniture was a polyglot mixture of different woods and fabrics. The only linking theme was that it was all old. Looked like reconditioned flea-market stuff to me . . . except for a magnificent rolltop desk that stood in one corner, closed. As soon as I slid it open, I knew it was some kind of priceless antique: a maze of tiny, perfectly aligned drawers, each with a separate inlay, intricately rendered in contrasting woods, and miniature handles so small you’d need a toothpick to pull them open. The pigeonholes were widely varied in size. Reminded me of the California Job Case I was trained to work with in the institutional print shop when I was a kid. I couldn’t see the slightest trace of a nail. The whole piece was hand-finished to an artistic perfection beyond what any machine could hope to duplicate.

I’d heard that artists always sign their work, but I couldn’t see any evidence of that until I noticed the brass plate surrounding the keyhole had “Erwin Darrow” engraved on it. I’d heard that name before. Michelle once told me he was an American master, explaining why she’d laid out a couple of grand for a jewelry box he’d made. The desk probably cost enough to buy a nice car. But it fit right in with all the recycled stuff, somehow.