Fidelity (36 page)

“Gone? Just gone? No message?”

“That’s what he said. He was out all day as usual, and he got home late at night and figured she was asleep. When he got up the next morning around ten, he figured she was at school. While he was at lunch, the phone rang, and it was the math teacher asking whether Allison was going to be sick another day and needed the homework assignment. He said it took him a day and night to realize that she wasn’t just skipping school, and then to find out that she had probably been gone since at least the morning of the day before, or even at the end of school the day before that. She didn’t take the car, didn’t even take credit cards, so he wasn’t ready to panic just yet. Then he discovered that she had taken out three thousand dollars from a savings account her grandmother had started for her. She was gone.”

“He called the police?”

“That was the first step. They seemed to have covered all the friends, interviewed servants, teachers, relatives, and so on during the first week. At that point, he was crazy with worry. He’s a rich man, so he offered a reward and hired a big detective agency that works out of San Francisco-you’ve probably heard of them-Federal Surety and Safety International. They had offices in Fresno, Modesto, and Sacramento, and they had people fanning out all over the place showing her picture and asking questions. Nothing. All this took time. At the end of a month, the cops were clearly preparing him for the probability that she was dead. His detectives, of course, were not about to give up, ever. They had a client who could keep paying until the end of time, and you know this business. There’s always another door you can knock on, and when you run out, there’s always another town where you can start the whole process over again. A customer who can pay can have as much time as he wants.”

“What brought him to Phil?”

“I don’t know. He said he’d had his attorneys check around with Southern California attorneys. Phil got mentioned.”

“But why Southern California?”

Sam shrugged. “If he had really been thinking, he should have done it earlier. L.A. is one of the places where runaway kids are most likely to come.”

“Did Phil take the case right away, or did he hold out?”

“He was pretty good about it. He said right off that he didn’t want to keep the distraught father in suspense. He was willing to try to help. Then he said everything you would want an ethical investigator to say-that the cops were good at this, and that after a month, anything we found was probably not going to make him happy. But Mr. Forrest said he knew all that, and a few other things the cops had told him. He just wanted the girl found, and he wasn’t ready to give up. Clear enough. We went to work.”

“What did you do?”

“We got the pictures copied, and then we went out showing them to people and asking around. We went to nightspots and found kids who were willing to look in exchange for the reward. It was a hundred thousand, so we didn’t hear `No’ a lot. Then we moved to street kids, who were always out there, always looking, always hungry. Next we found some upscale kids outside expensive stores, and got them interested, too. That was an idea of Phil’s. If you think about Allison’s background, you know that’s who she would fit in with. And her looks were good enough to get her in anywhere. We talked to authorities, too-anybody who would run into somebody like her. We went to the volunteers who ran shelters and clinics, a few cops I knew in Hollywood, street vendors, hookers, cabdrivers, anybody who would talk to us. I used to find that I got a lot of good observation from the guys who drive around to fill the machines that sell newspapers. One of these guys will be out in the dead hours from three to six. He has to drive to each spot, get out of his truck, open the machine, empty a coin box, take out the old papers and put in the new ones. It takes a minute or two, and he’s always looking closely at anybody nearby so he doesn’t get robbed. He sees a lot.”

“How long did that go on?”

“That phase of things kept Phil and me occupied for about a month. We went out with pictures day and night, on rotation. We tried to hit everybody’s schedule who might have seen her-the night sleepers and the day sleepers. Then we started over again. Finally, after a couple of months, we got a breakthrough.”

“What was it?”

“A pocket. When you’re looking for people who have seen somebody, you get either none or some. If it’s real, you usually get one, then a few more. If you do, then you’ve found the neighborhood where she hangs out. You chart the sightings-where, exactly, she was seen, and when-and you begin to get an idea of where she was at what time of day and what she was doing.”

“So she was alive after all,” Emily said.

“That’s right. Allison’s territory was a long, thin strip of pavement. She was seen in several clubs along Hollywood Boulevard near Highland. And during the day she was in stores and coffee shops along Melrose. She was seen as far west as Fairfax at Farmers Market. On the east she went as far as Crescent Heights. If she was on Wilshire, she’d go a little farther, at least as far as the art museum. It was like the territory of a cat, and for the same reasons. She was always on foot, and she wanted to skirt the dens of the scary animals. She went where she felt safe.”

“Was she hiding?”

“She didn’t want to be found, but she was just a kid. She thought all she had to do was travel to someplace new and call herself by another name. Once she was in Los Angeles, she forgot about laying low, and started to go places where other people would see her. She was on an adventure in the big city. I don’t think she ever thought Forrest would hire anybody to find her.”

“But you found her?”

“We did. Once we had mapped her territory, we picked some places for a blind.”

“A blind?”

“A place to wait for her to come by. We got a plain white van with no windows in the back. We would put a different sign on the side of it every day, then park it and sit inside to wait. We figured the time to concentrate on was evening, from dark until maybe two in the morning. It was the best time to spot her because there weren’t as many people out, and it was also the best time to do what we were planning.”

“What was it?”

“We were going to jump out of the van, flash some badges, handcuff her like we were arresting her, and drive off.”

“My God, Sam! What could you have done that was more illegal than that?”

“I know. If we were caught in the act, there wouldn’t be much we could say about the badges and so on. But when the target is a minor, and you’re carrying the father’s written permission to use whatever force is necessary to bring his daughter back, you have a certain leeway.”

“Did you get her that way?”

“We didn’t have much luck at first. We sat and smoked cigarettes and stared at everybody on the street, then went home. The next night we would do it again. After she didn’t turn up for seven nights in one spot, we would move to the next one. She had been gone a long time by then. We figured she must have a job or a boyfriend, a place to live, and fake ID, so it wasn’t just looking for a lost person hanging on a corner. She had choices. But the thing was, we had plenty of time to do it right, because the money was behind us.”

“What did Forrest say?”

“When we called him to tell him we were getting recent sightings from people-that his daughter wasn’t dead, in other words-you should have heard him. We were all happy. Listening to him made us feel good. If we had asked him for a million dollars, he would have written the check. After he hung up, we replayed the recording, and I laughed so hard I thought I was going to have a stroke.”

“Recording? Phil recorded the call? Why?”

“Well, think about it. We’re about to do something that could get us arrested. He had written us a note giving us permission, but Phil wasn’t going to take any chances. I mean, what if he said later that it was a forgery, or even that he’d never heard of us?”

“I guess your arrest would be a conviction.”

“That was our guess, too. But at that point, the guy was ready to drive down here to be in the van when we grabbed her. As you can imagine, Phil didn’t let him.”

“Why not?”

“We knew where she had been a week ago and two nights ago, but not tonight. Also, he was an amateur, a first-timer. We were trying to grab a young girl off a public street, and the only way you want to do that is if you can do a convincing cop. I had been a cop, so I wasn’t acting. Phil was a cop in the marines, so he wasn’t really, either. Part of our credibility was that this Allison girl had never seen me or Phil. If she saw her father on a street, even four hundred miles from home, she would certainly recognize him and take off.”

“So you were expecting her to resist?” asked Emily. “Wouldn’t it be just as likely she would see him and want to come home?”

“If she did, she knew the phone number. And if she wanted to surprise him, she knew the way home.”

“But to take her against her will-“

“You know better than that, Emily. In this state, a sixteenyear-old doesn’t have a will, legally. She does what her parents tell her.”

“I’m not talking about legal fictions.”

“Neither am I. You know any success stories about runaway girls in L.A.? We weren’t sure how she had gotten that far, but neither of us could think of any possible future for her that wasn’t a disaster. I mean, she’s got one thing to trade. We were convinced that we were saving her life.”

Emily was silent.

“So we did it. One night we happened to be in the sweet spot. The van had a sign on it that night that said TWENTY FOUR-HOUR PLUMBING. We parked it right off Hollywood, halfway up on the curb with orange safety cones behind it. We had the back door open so you could see one of those rooter machines Phil had rented that day, and the effect was great. I mean, what fake has one of those things?”

“And?”

“Along comes Allison. It’s around midnight. She comes right along the sidewalk from the direction of those old apartments around Fountain. I don’t know if she was crashing there with somebody she had met, or she just happened to like the route. I came from the building side and Phil came from the truck. We scooped her up and packed her into the back of the truck. Phil went in after her, and I drove off.”

“Didn’t she fight or scream or anything?”

“For a couple of seconds, I could hear her kicking and stuff. But then Phil handcuffed her and put a plastic restraint on her ankles. All the while he was reciting the Miranda warning. It’s a great way to calm somebody down. It intimidates them, but persuades them in a deep way that nothing freaky is happening to them. They’re still in a world where if everything goes wrong, they’re going to court. It also tells them that you think what you say to them matters-that the truth matters. So she went limp and stayed quiet for a long time. We were on the freeway nearly to Camarillo before she figured out we weren’t taking her to the station. She got really agitated, and we had to give her a little something to keep her quiet.”

“You drugged her?” Emily was horrified. “With what?”

“Phil gave her a little shot of something. I think it was that stuff that the doctors give you to put you down before they anesthetize you. Thiopental sodium or something.”

“Where in the world did he get it?”

“You know how Phil was. He had connections with everybody. People did things for him.”

“I know he cheated on me, Sam. I think we can assume he talked some woman pharmacist or nurse he knew into giving him the drug.”

Sam looked at her sadly. “He felt bad, Emily. He always felt like hell after. He really loved you.”

“Just tell me the story.”

Sam’s eyes didn’t move from her face. “It sometimes helps to forgive people for things like that. People have weaknesses.”

“They sure do,” she said. “Phil got some nurse to risk a prison term to give him a needle full of a sedative, and he risked killing the client’s daughter by shooting it into her in the back of a van. Is that about it?”

“That’s about it. For the rest of the trip she was okay and didn’t fight or feel scared. He stayed in the back with her to keep an eye on her pulse and breathing. He had been trained to handle battlefield first aid, and I had been a cop for twenty years.” He paused. “I can see that look on your face, and you’re wrong, Em. If there had been a bad reaction or something, he would have told me, and we would have rushed her to the nearest hospital, even if it meant the next stop would be jail. We were doing a job, taking a young, misguided girl back to her family, which had the resources to help her. If it was drug rehab, or psychiatric help, or just sending her a check for a few thousand a month, she was going to be better off.”

“How did it end?”

“We delivered her to her father at a ranch in the Central Valley. I recognized it from some of the pictures he had given us. There was a sign at the front gate that said ESPINOZA RANCH. There was a big living room he called the `great room,’ with beams made from tree trunks, and a stone fireplace and Tiffany chandeliers and oriental rugs.”

“Odd,” said Emily. “Why there? Why not the family home?”

“He had his reasons. He seemed to feel that it was likely she was going to make a scene about being snatched off the street like that, and that she would probably raise hell and fight. He didn’t want the house staff and visitors to know all about it. He said he couldn’t think of a way it would do anybody any good, and he didn’t want her to become the staple of local gossip. I could agree with that.”

“Were there other people there?”

“I didn’t meet them, but there certainly were. This was a big place. When you got past the gate, there was a gravel road that wound a bit to get around a hill and past some old oak woods. The house was there. And beyond it there was a stream that looked as though it might have some trout in it. You need people to keep a house that size from turning musty and dusty. It was just private. He wanted to spend time with her and talk to her and see where he had messed up, and begin to fix it. He had always planned to have her go east to an Ivy League school. He said that running off in her junior year had probably blown that for good. But he said he had learned that it didn’t really matter. She was home and she seemed to be all right, and that was all that mattered.