No Return: A Contemporary Phantom Tale (25 page)

The living room opened directly into the tiny bedroom, which barely had space for a daybed and a small antique dresser. The bed was neatly made up with a faded blue and white quilt; no signs of any struggle there. He pushed aside the lace curtain she apparently used as a closet door and looked inside; the tiny closet could hold only the most meager of wardrobes, but most of the hangers were empty, signaling to Ortiz that the clothing had been taken away.

Beyond the bedroom was one of the tiniest bathrooms Ortiz had ever seen, sparkling clean except for the inevitable rust stains in the sink and bathtub. He opened the medicine cabinet but found nothing except a half-used bottle of generic ibuprofen and a mostly empty box of band-aids. Toothbrush, toothpaste, any prescriptions or cosmetics she might have used—all that was gone.
 

There was another door leading out of the bathroom into a small area that must have been the laundry room at one point. A few unused pipes coming out of the wall and a light square against the paint were hints of a wash basin that had probably occupied the space. Now, apparently, Christine used it for storage, as several boxes of books were stacked against one wall, and he also found a few pieces of inexpensive nylon luggage, the kind you would buy in sets at someplace like Target or Walmart. A large suitcase and a small carry-on still sat there, but it looked as if a medium-sized piece had once occupied the space between the two.

As far as he could tell, everything he’d seen so far pointed to only one plausible conclusion—the pressure had been too much, and Christine had just bolted. Where and why, he had no idea, but that wasn’t really his problem.
 

He came back through the bedroom. As he did so, his right foot connected with a small object, sending it skittering across the hardwood floor. Immediately he squatted down, scanning the wooden surface for the source of the sound. He spotted it almost immediately and picked it up with a pair of tweezers that he pulled out of his breast pocket—it was a woman’s ring, antique by the look of it, with a small oval ruby surrounded by tiny flickering diamonds in a filigree setting.

Odd. Nothing in the meager tidiness of Christine’s home suggested that she would be careless with what looked like a family heirloom. That such a precious object would have been left on the floor when the rest of the house was in perfect order didn’t make any sense at all. Frowning, Ortiz fished in his coat pocket with his left hand, fumbling for one of the small plastic evidence bags he carried with him at all times. Finally he pulled it out and dropped the ring inside. He’d have to ask Randall or Meg if they’d ever seen it before.

He gave the kitchen a cursory look before leaving—as he’d expected, it too was neat and tidy, with one plate and a coffee mug sitting in the wooden dish drain. Everything was in order: the refrigerator mostly empty except for a now-expired quart of milk and a couple of forlorn-looking yogurt containers, the coffee maker clean, a pair of bananas blackening in a bowl on the counter.

Except for the ring, Ortiz couldn’t think of a single piece of evidence in the bungalow that pointed to anything but a planned, orderly departure by Christine. He knew he should probably just go back to his office and let Randall know that it looked as if Christine had just taken off—sorry, kid, them’s the breaks. But still, that carelessly dropped ring bothered him.

Frowning, he came back out to the living room, took one last obligatory look around, but saw nothing else. With a sigh he stepped out onto the porch, where Panagapolous dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the carefully swept cement.
 

“Find anything?”

“Not really.” Not for the first time, Ortiz was glad of the conventions that kept him from having to discuss a case in progress.

The landlord sniffed. “So what am I supposed to do with this place? The rent was due two days ago, and the girl’s missing. I’m not going to hold it forever.”

Just when he’d thought he’d heard it all… Ortiz cleared his throat and said, “This is still an open case unless I say otherwise. Since this property is the site of a possible crime scene, you won’t do anything with it until you hear from me or the Pasadena P.D. Got that?”

“All right.” The man’s small dark eyes narrowed even more. “I got bills to pay, same as everybody else.”

Yeah, my heart bleeds
, Ortiz thought, looking out to where the shiny Lincoln was parked at the curb. “I’ll inform you if the situation changes. Until then, the property stays as it is.”

Not wanting to prolong the conversation, Ortiz capped his last statement with a brisk nod of dismissal, then strode down the front steps to his own Ford Crown Victoria—really, he thought, it might as well have a big sign on the door that said “unmarked police car.” Still, he was glad to heave himself in behind the wheel and get out of there. He’d had an overwhelming urge to pop Panagapolous in his fat mouth—here a girl had disappeared, a bright, beautiful, talented girl—and all the guy cared about was his lousy rent. Ortiz had seen worse over the years, but the petty small-mindedness of it still amazed him.

By the time he pulled into the parking lot behind the station, he was in a foul mood. It hadn’t helped that some bastard had parked his car in Ortiz’s spot—he’d been forced to park off in a distant corner and hoof it in under a sky that looked increasingly like rain. Crazy weather. Last year it had been dry as a bone, and now they were seriously heading into ark-building mode as far as he could tell.

Officer Campbell was on his tail almost the second he set foot inside the building. “Detective Ortiz—”

“What?”

She blinked her big chocolate-brown eyes at him, but Letisha Campbell had grown up in the rough end of Altadena—it would take more than a detective’s bark to put her off her stride. “Meg Garrison is waiting to talk to you. I told her you were out conducting an investigation, but she said she’d wait until you got back. Should I bring her over to your office?”

“Yeah, sure. Give me a couple of minutes—I need to hit the men’s room before I get into anything else.”

“Sure thing, detective.” She winked at him and then sauntered off.
 

Feeling a little more himself a few minutes later, he watched as Meg entered his office, sans Randall this time around. Today her dress was a little more subdued, as was her demeanor.

“I’m sorry to bother you, detective, but you said I should contact you if I thought of anything else, and since I was on my way in to work—”

“It’s no bother, Miss Garrison,” he said immediately. “What’s up?”

She bit her lip. “Well, I’ve been thinking and thinking about Christine. About this guy she says she saw, about anything else unusual that might have happened to her. And for a while I really couldn’t think of anything, couldn’t see anything that would have a connection. But then I remembered Halloween, and thought I should tell you.”

Ortiz picked up his pen. “What about Halloween?”

“Well, it was a Saturday night, so George—our boss—had a big party for the evening: costume contest, dancing, that sort of thing.” Meg pushed up the sleeves of her jacket in a sudden nervous gesture. “Anyway, there was this guy who paid the hostess two hundred bucks so he could sit at Christine’s station.”

The pen stopped scratching on the yellow pad. Ortiz looked up at Meg. “Two hundred dollars?”

“Yes. And he left Christine a huge tip—almost three hundred and fifty. She didn’t think I saw it, but she got held up on her way back to the table, so I sneaked a peek. I figured a guy like that would have to be a pretty big tipper, but I wasn’t really expecting
that
.”
 

Who would?
thought Ortiz. Then he asked, “Description?”

She hesitated. “Well, it was a costume party after all. He was dressed as the Phantom of the Opera.”

Ortiz had a brief flash of Lon Chaney menacing a frizzy-haired singer; that unmasking scene had scared the crap out of him when he was a kid. “Must have been a hell of a makeup job,” he said.

For a second she just looked at him blankly, and then gave a nervous laugh. “Not
that
Phantom of the Opera. The one from the musical—you know, with the half-mask.”
 

“So you were able to see half his face?”

“Well, the lighting wasn’t that great, but—”

“Anything would be helpful.”

Meg stared off into the corner, as if concentrating on the faded urine-colored walls would help her to remember. “He had dark hair—really dark. It looked black in that lighting. Pale skin—but he could’ve been wearing makeup or something. And he was hot.”

“Hot?”

“Okay—good-looking. Really. I could tell he was older than Christine and me, but when someone looks like that, who cares?”

“Anything more specific than that?” Ortiz felt a wave of irrational dislike for the unnamed man. Certainly no one—not even his wife Manuela—had ever referred to
him
as “hot.”

“I don’t know—he had kind of a long nose, but in a good way. I couldn’t see what color his eyes were. And his mouth wasn’t real full or anything, but it had a nice shape.”

Apparently once Meg had categorized someone as “hot” she didn’t spend a lot of time on specifics. “Approximate age?”

“Maybe forty?” The rising inflection on the last syllable telegraphed her uncertainty. “Late thirties or early forties, possibly,” she amended.

“So he was the same age as the man Christine thought she saw at school?”

“I guess so. But I don’t think it’s the same guy.”

She actually sounded certain of that fact. Ortiz leaned forward, tapping his pen on the desktop. “What makes you say that?”

“Christine said the guy she saw at school was just medium height. I saw this Phantom guy stand up when he left, and he was pretty tall. Definitely over six feet. And Christine said the first guy had brown hair, but this guy’s was almost black. Besides, if she’d thought it was the same guy she would have told me.”

Great. So now Christine had two stalkers after her?

“This is the weird thing, though,” Meg continued. “I thought I’d ask around at work and see if anyone else had noticed him. The other wait staff hadn’t, really, because they were all swamped at their own stations. But then I talked to Jeff, one of the valets who was on duty that night, and he said he thought he remembered him—mostly because of what he was driving.”

“Which was?”

“A brand-new Mercedes S600. I guess it’s the top of the line. Jeff’s a car nut, so he knew all about it. He said it was worth about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Ortiz could not keep himself from letting out a low whistle. That was more than he’d paid for his first house.

“Yeah,” Meg said. “We don’t get too many of those at
L’Opéra
, I guess. But then Jeff said the other interesting thing about it was that it had diplomatic plates.”

Eyes narrowing, Ortiz asked, “Diplomatic plates?”

“You know, whatever they put on cars that belong to ambassadors and stuff like that. Jeff said they were sweet because regular cops almost never pull over cars that have diplomatic plates on them—too much trouble.” Her dark eyes widened a bit, as if she suddenly realized to whom she was speaking. “Um, sorry, detective, but that’s what he said.”

“It’s okay, Meg. I know the drill.” The unfortunate thing was, he really did. Most big-city cops had some kind of horror story about the sort of crap pulled by drivers of officially designated “foreign organization” vehicles. Technically they were supposed to abide by the rules of the road in whichever state they had residence, but officially the local police couldn’t do much about it if they decided to ignore those rules.

He sighed. So Christine had two whack jobs after her, one possibly an extremely rich foreign national? “Did Christine happen to mention if this Phantom person had any kind of accent?”

“I don’t think so. But we didn’t get much of a chance to talk that evening—the restaurant was crazy-busy.”

“Naturally.” The information she’d given him had only deepened the mystery, unfortunately. Was there a connection, or was Meg only grasping at straws, trying desperately to find some sort of meaning in her friend’s disappearance? He set down his pen. “Well, Meg, thanks for the update. We’ll see if we can follow up on it. But without an actual license plate number it might be difficult to track down—even with a car as distinctive as the one you said this man was driving.”

“Oh,” she said, her expression faltering a little. It was obvious that she’d hoped her information would be of more use.
 

“I did want to ask you something, though,” he continued, and she perked up a bit. “Have you ever seen this before?” And he produced the ring he’d found in Christine’s bedroom and laid it on the desk before him.

Meg picked up the little plastic envelope and looked at the ring inside for barely a second before replying, “That’s Christine’s grandmother’s ring.”

“You’re positive?”

She nodded. “I’ve seen Christine wear it a few times—mostly at special functions like recitals and stuff. She’d never wear it to work, of course. But I think I also saw her wear it on a chain around her neck sometimes.”

“So she was careful with it?”

Giving him a condescending look, Meg said, “Well, yeah. It’s not like Christine had lots of valuables. Most of her grandmother’s stuff got sold off when she died, so Christine didn’t have much left. She loved that ring, even if she didn’t wear it that often.” She frowned. “Where did you find it?”

“On the floor of her bedroom.”

“Christine would never have dropped it and left it there—” She broke off, giving Detective Ortiz a narrow look. “What do you think it means?”

“I think,” he said, retrieving the ring in its little plastic envelope and tucking it back in his breast pocket, “that it may be the only piece of evidence I have to show that Christine didn’t just up and leave of her own accord. Nothing I could prove in a court of law, of course, but it’s enough that I’m not going to treat this as a simple missing-person case any more.”

Clasping her hands together, Meg leaned forward. “What are you going to do?”