The Next Time You See Me (35 page)

A wooden box labeled
MAIL
was mounted to the wall beside the refrigerator. Beneath slots labeled
BILLS
,
COUPONS
, and
PERSONAL
was a little shelf and a series of hooks; Ronnie’s car keys dangled from one of them, as Tony had already noted in his inventory. He didn’t know if
this was a spare set or her primary set, and Susanna hadn’t been sure, either—the difference might make for radically different scenarios for her disappearance. He slipped on plastic gloves, hooked a finger through the loop on the key ring, and went outside to the Camaro. The night had gotten bitter, and a light rain, almost a mist, drizzled down. Maybe it would become snow if it kept on, he mused. Uncommon this time of year, but the forecast called for freezing temperatures overnight.

He had pulled a flashlight from the glove box of his car, and he switched it on now, shining it with his left hand on the lock and using his right to turn the key, then pull the handle. The door sighed as it opened, and Tony was hit with the musk of worn-in leather. He got down on his haunches and let the light play over the inside: the driver’s and passenger’s bucket seats, the floorboards (clear of trash but grimed with dirt and bits of dried leaves), the narrow backseat. There was something back there—he leaned around the seat carefully and grasped it, pulling it forward to where he could get a better look. It was a pillow or a cushion of some kind: round, overstuffed, and tufted with a single button in the center, little ties trailing off where it would have been looped to a chair back. According to Susanna, Ronnie was a small woman, barely five feet tall; this looked like the kind of thing she might have used to give her a little extra lift behind the wheel.

But it wasn’t in the driver’s seat. It had been in the backseat, on the passenger’s side of the car—as if the person behind the wheel had tossed it there.

Tony put it back where he had gotten it and slipped gingerly into the driver’s seat. He was six foot two, and the windshield bore down on him oppressively, but his legs fit under the steering wheel pretty comfortably, and he could extend his arms in a natural way to mime moving the gearshift and hitting the turn signal. If he were going to start this car and drive off, he might move the seat back another couple of inches.

When Wyatt met him at the door, Tony had noticed that the man stood, in sock feet, perhaps three or four inches shorter than he,
putting him at five foot ten or five foot eleven. A man of that height could sit in this seat and get to the gas and the clutch with no problem. A woman of no more than five feet would have to sit forward on the edge of the seat, and even then she might not have the reach to depress both pedals at once. To do so, he thought, would be an exercise in pointlessness, when that simple latch on the chair could move her into a more sensible position, lickety-split.

He locked the car, returned the car key to its hook inside the house, and shut off all the lights in the house before locking the house, too. When he opened the door to his cruiser, a message was crackling on his radio—he caught only the last words, “to the station, please copy.”

He picked up his handset and depressed the button. “Dispatch, this is eight oh five, copy. Please repeat your message.”

“Eight oh five, I thought you were off duty. I tried you at home.”

Tony smirked into the microphone. “Nope. Still plugging away. What’s going on?”

“We have a family at Two eleven Poplar reporting a missing child. Eight ten took the call. Can you come to the station?”

Tony looked back at the little shotgun house and the Camaro. “Copy,” he said, wondering how he’d managed to get so busy in just a week’s time. “I’ll be there.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

1.

While Pendleton took point with the parents and began with some other officers to make an initial sweep of the child’s neighborhood—which happened to also be Wyatt Powell’s neighborhood, Tony noted with unformed disquiet—Tony was conferring with the police chief and a state Search and Rescue official to plan a more organized, large-scale search effort. By nine thirty he was on the phone with a representative from a nonprofit out of Elizabethtown, the Commonwealth Bloodhound Search and Rescue, to find out when the nearest dog and handler could get to town. By eleven he was joining a search team in the housing projects just south of Emily Houchens’s neighborhood. The temperatures dropped to the midthirties, and flurries, fine and dry as salt, started to drift down. There was no time to rest, no time to wait for better light. A thirteen-year-old girl was out in this, perhaps injured, unable to move. The parents had said she’d sprained her ankle a couple of weeks ago, and so it seemed to Tony that she might have been clumsier on that ankle than usual and had perhaps aggravated the injury.

“I asked them why they waited until after seven o’clock to call, and they told me that the girl had a habit of taking off on walks after school,” Pendleton said when he and Tony touched base at midnight.
They were standing in the station parking lot, collars on their light jackets raised against the cold, and Tony rubbed his bare hands briskly together. He hadn’t brought gloves to work today. “She’d come in from the bus, yell hi, and take off again. They tried to put a stop to it last week, after word got around that Ronnie Eastman was missing, but they say she can be willful.” He hunched his shoulders so that his ears got more cover. “Anyway, she was always home by dinner before, and tonight she missed dinner.”

“Do they know where she went?”

“They didn’t seem to have a clue. Nice, right? The mom told me that she claimed to be spending time with a friend in the neighborhood, but we asked the girl and she flat-out denied it. She said she hadn’t even talked to Emily Houchens in the past year.”

“That’s strange,” Tony said.

“Yeah, I know. Other than that, she’d been walking a dog for a neighbor, some guy who’d been sick. But that was only a few days last week, and now the dog’s back with the owner.”

“Huh,” Tony said. “Well, she’s thirteen. She’s not exactly a little girl. Maybe she has a secret boyfriend or something.”

“That’s what I kind of figured at first. The parents—they’re nice enough, I really don’t get a bad vibe from them, but they’re clueless. There’s a retarded kid in the household, and I got the impression that he takes a lot of their energy. He was bawling and carrying on in just the time I was there.”

“Did they let you look in her bedroom?”

“Yeah,” Pendleton said. “They’re being cooperative. I had Mrs. Houchens help me go through it—I was curious to see if anything surprised her. Anyway”—he lit a cigarette—“if the girl’s got a secret life, nothing in that room pointed to it. It was all kid stuff, old dollies, rock collection and twigs, binders full of pressed leaves and shit. I didn’t see anything like a real diary, just stuff about science experiments. It was a little bit odd, actually. When my stepdaughter was thirteen she had posters of boys up all over her room.”

“She sounds a little sheltered,” Tony said. He was thinking about the rocks and the twigs, the binders of pressed leaves.

“Sheltered,” Pendleton said. “Yeah, that’s the right word.”

“All those rocks and things—she’d have to gather them up somewhere.”

Pendleton nodded. “There’s a group searching the woods between this subdivision and the Grant Road development. It’s a lot of ground to cover—half a mile between the subdivisions, and then it extends all the way to the bypass on the north side. That’s about a mile and a half. And then three-quarters of a mile toward town.”

Tony exhaled tiredly. “What did the mother say about the room?”

“That it all looked right. That Emily’s a good girl, smart and serious, kind of quiet. She told me she’d been having a hard time at school lately—some of the kids were bullying her. Apparently a pack of them got suspended for throwing food at her in the cafeteria. Guess who one of them was.”

Tony shrugged.

“Johnny Burke’s kid.”

“Figures.”

“Think we should ask around about that? Maybe it’s a stretch.”

“I have a friend who works at the middle school,” Tony said. “I’ll say something about it to her tomorrow if we still haven’t found the girl.”

“All right,” Pendleton said. “I’m going to try to catch some shut-eye. When’s the dog getting here?”

“I talked to the handler an hour ago, and she’s on her way. She has a two-hour drive.”

“Will she get started right away?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “I think it’s supposed to be best if the dog works while the trail’s still fresh, but we don’t even know for sure where the trail starts.”

“I’d like to see it in action,” Pendleton said. “I sure love a good dog.”

“I’ll trade you,” Tony said. “You meet the handler, and I’ll go home and sleep.”

Pendleton laughed shortly. “No, thanks. I’m older and fatter than you are. I can’t go and go all night.”

Tony put his hand on his scar unconsciously. “Go on,” he said. “Leave this to the professionals.”

When Pendleton had taken off, Tony pulled out his pills, thought for a moment, and broke one in half, swallowing it dry. He couldn’t afford to get sleepy right now; he had a feeling he was going to be in for a long night.

2.

When the dog team first arrived at one o’clock, Tony experienced a surge of energy and even hopefulness. The dog, Maggie, was a beautiful creature, younger and leaner than Wyatt Powell’s bloodhound, with a coat so lustrous that it shimmered under the security lights, and the dog’s handler, Sharon, emanated confidence and good sense. She was petite, fortyish, and pleasant in a prematurely matronly way, with feathered dark blond hair that she’d sprayed into an unmoving helmet; a scrubbed-looking, unlined face; and the sturdy body of a mother. In fact, she referred several times to her children as Tony drove her to Emily’s house to select a scent article from the things in Emily’s bedroom, always calling them “my boys.” “My boys are playing in a basketball game tomorrow night,” “My boys would go crazy over that skate ramp,” and, to Emily’s parents, “Maggie and I are going to do everything we can to find your daughter. My boys are right around her age.” Tony could tell that Emily’s parents, too, were soothed by her manner—that she came across as the kind of person who simply wouldn’t truck with failure on her watch.

Tony brought them first to Emily’s regular bus stop, where she would have disembarked if she had, in fact, ridden it home. Sharon unzipped the plastic bag she’d placed some gauze and the scent article in—it was a dirty T-shirt of Emily’s—and put the cloth under the dog’s nose. “Maggie, ready,” she said, and the dog’s head bobbed, its
ears shivering. “Find.” Maggie put her nose close to the ground and stalked around in circles. For a second, it seemed as if she’d found a trail, but she led them directly back to Emily’s house down the road. “Are you sure she didn’t come home at all?” Sharon asked Tony. “Maybe she popped into the house without the parents noticing.”

“Mrs. Houchens and Emily’s brother both insist that they never saw her come in. And her habit was to leave her things in the bedroom before going out again, but they didn’t find her backpack.”

“No backpack,” Sharon said, musing.

“No.”

“Well, Maggie’s probably just backtracking, then. She would have walked this way to catch the bus in the morning, too.”

Tony sighed in frustration. “Let’s go around the house.”

They tried the road leading in the opposite direction from the bus stop without luck. Then they tried the Houchens’s backyard, which abutted a vacant property and offered a path, if one didn’t mind cutting through between fences, to another cross street. Nothing there, either.

“Could it be the snow interfering with the scent?” Tony asked as they made one last circuit of the yard. Sharon’s brisk confidence was starting to annoy him, and the whole business of a trail-sniffing dog struck him suddenly as suspect, as if he’d contracted the services of a psychic or some other crackpot. “Maybe it washed it away?”

“No, sir, the wetter the better,” Sharon said in a singsong way that suggested this was a catchphrase of hers. She had Maggie on a long lead, which she’d shortened by wrapping it around her arm several times, hooking it between her forefinger and thumb. She kept spooling to pick up slack on the leash and unspooling when Maggie fixed on something interesting. “Precipitation actually helps things.” She finally stopped the dog and patted her hide. “We could both use a drink of water and a break. You said there was one more starting point you wanted to try?”

“The middle school,” Tony said.

Twenty minutes later, they started Maggie at the double doors
exiting the seventh- and eighth-grade wings, and Sharon repeated her mantra: “Maggie, ready. Find.” After some furious sniffing, the dog seemed to fix on something, and she took off eagerly down the steps and along the sidewalk. Tony’s heart started to thump, and he thought very briefly of Pendleton, and his interest in the dog, because he couldn’t deny that this was thrilling to watch. They made a hard right as they approached the street, walked another twenty feet, and Maggie halted, circling near the curb.

“This is where the buses line up,” Tony said. “Does this mean she got on one?”

“Looks like that to me. It’s possible she’s picking up on an old scent, but she’s reacting to it like it’s fairly fresh.”

Tony leaned over and caught his breath. “God,” he muttered, lifting up and stretching to open his lower back. He huffed. “OK. I’m sorry, I’m just worn out. Can she follow a person’s scent if they’re in a vehicle? I mean, theoretically, could she follow the bus Emily took?”

“Theoretically, yes,” Sharon said. “I haven’t been able to do a lot of that kind of training with Maggie, though.”

“I’d like to give it a shot,” Tony said.

It was almost three in the morning, and Sharon’s eyes had bruise-colored shadows beneath them. Tony remembered that she’d driven in from Owensboro and felt a twinge of guilt.

“OK,” Sharon said. “Let’s try it.”

For another half an hour, she brought Maggie out into the road, held the scent article under her nose, and chanted, “Find.” The dog was worked up, jowls foamy, tongue lolling. They tried her at several points along the path of the bus—from the school until Sunset Street was one-way—but the dog just kept circling as if she were going after her own tail. Tony knew the feeling.