Runaway (5 page)

“It’s weird to not have any friends,” Sandy said. “I wonder whether she didn’t have any friends because she was on the computer all the time, or whether she was on the computer all the time because she didn’t have any friends. You see what I mean?”

“I’ll be her friend,” Lily said. She looked so earnest that Jan couldn’t help smiling. Sometimes she thought Peet’s kids were from central casting. Kevin put a plate of eggs in front of her. He was also from central casting—a handsome firefighter secure enough to marry a woman who looked like she could carry him out of a burning building. They probably had great sex too.

They were silent for a long time as they headed back to the office. Peet snuck a look at Jan.

“There’s a new firefighter at Kevin’s station,” Peet said, startling Jan. She’d been staring out the window, feeling bad about Gwen.

“And?”

“I’ve met her. She’s just your type.”

“How do you know what my type is? I don’t even know what my type is. Is it because she’s a lesbian, ergo I’ll be attracted to her?”

“She’s not clingy.”

“How do you know whether this woman’s clingy or not?”

“I asked her.” Peet said this as if it were a good thing.

“Do you mean you asked her during a conversation about me?”

“Yeah. It came up. She said she hated clinginess in others so she wasn’t that way herself.”

“Goddamnit, Peet. You know I hate this. What’s the matter with you?”

“Come on. What can it hurt? You’re so stubborn about this.”

Jan knew exactly what it could hurt—whatever good opinion Peet might have of her. The whole scenario had a sense of inevitability to it, just as it had a few hours earlier with Gwen. If she were to sleep with the firefighter there would be greater ramifications than usual when things didn’t work out between them. The firefighter would tell Kevin. Kevin would tell Peet. Peet would look at Jan in a new way and…what? Maybe it would be good for Peet to know Jan wasn’t the kind of person who could have the ideal home life she and Kevin had. Maybe then she’d stop trying to set her up with people.

“No,” Jan said. “I don’t do blind dates. It’s not like I need help, you know.”

“Then why haven’t I seen you with any girlfriends?” Peet was turning into the office parking lot.

“I’m telling you to back off. You have no business in my sex life. Period.”

Peet looked surprised by Jan’s anger, but completely unfazed.

“Why are you pissed? I’m your partner. Don’t you think I want to see you happy?”

“What makes you think I’m not happy?” Jan was practically screeching. She threw open her car door and then slammed it shut behind her. She didn’t miss seeing the grin on Peet’s face.

She led the way into the building and past the first floor security division. It seemed a lifetime ago that she left security and moved upstairs to investigations. She started as a twenty-year-old guard on the graveyard shift. Ten years later, armed with a college degree and a record of heads-up service, she got her shot in the newly formed investigations division. It didn’t take long for her to outshine the former detectives who trained her. Peet was the only former police officer Jan felt might be her match in private investigations.

When they reached their desks they saw Don Detmer standing by the door of the break room, holding a cup of coffee. He was also an ex-cop, but not in Peet’s league. He had left the sheriff’s department after putting in his twenty and seemed to view TSI as a hobby. Jan couldn’t imagine what he was doing in the office after hours. He bitched so loudly about working evenings that he managed to be assigned only the type of work that could be done during the day or from home—skip tracing, mainly. He had a particularly hangdog look on his chubby face.

“What are you doing here?” Jan asked him.

“The only time I could talk to a witness is tonight, and I forgot the fucking file.”

“You look like you’re ready to kill yourself,” Peet said. They went into the break room and poured themselves coffee from the fresh pot. “But since you made coffee, you must be intending to live.”

Don sat at the small table and looked at them. “You guys haven’t heard yet, have you?”

“Heard what?” Jan said.

“LJ and his old man sold the company.”

“What?” Peet said. She went pale.

Don looked smug at having delivered the bad news. “Vivian told Collins and Collins told me.”

David Collins was another TSI investigator. He’d recently started dating Vivian and apparently not yet discovered her darker side. He was going to have to answer for breaking her confidence, Jan thought.

“I don’t understand,” Peet said. “How could we not have heard about this? Wouldn’t we have seen people poking around?”

Don sighed. “I don’t know how the fuck they do these things. It’s probably all Web conferences and secure websites and crap like that. Plus, what do they need to look at? They’re not really buying the building or us. They’re buying the client base. They’ll probably fire us and bring in all their European James Bond types.”

“They’re European?” Jan asked.

“I don’t know. Global something something.”

Jan was wondering if this didn’t start having the ring of truth to it. If Collins was using a company name, it indicated a level of detail not found in the usual office rumor. She left the break room and headed to her cubicle.

“Where are you going?” Peet asked.

“Let’s look it up.” She fired up her computer and did searches on “Global Security Company,” wading through a lot of muck before seeing a reference to a London firm called Chartered Global Security, an international security and investigations firm with offices in quite a few US cities. A news release from London announced the planned acquisition of a small Midwestern company intended to be another step toward expanded penetration of the United States market.

Peet was reading the screen with her. “God, it’s true. Shit.”

Jan knew Peet would be worrying about her job. They needed it to pay for college for their kids, and TSI paid surprisingly well. Jan was worried for a different reason. She didn’t know much of the work world beyond TSI. The thought of looking for a job made it a little harder to breathe.

“You gotta wonder when the hell they were going to tell us,” Don said. “If you just found it in the computer in a minute and a half, others will too.”

Jan looked up at Peet. “It doesn’t mean they’ll be firing us. They’re not going to replace everyone in the company.”

Don shuffled away, looking grim at the idea of losing his job, or worse, having to work harder if he kept it.

“They’ll definitely weed out some people. They always do,” Peet said.

“Then let’s not give them any reason to pick us. Let’s do our jobs.”

Jan pulled the Harringtons’ list out of her pocket. It was past ten p.m. on the east coast, much too early for a college student to be in bed; she called Maddy’s brother at Dartmouth. He picked up on the first ring, and Jan could hear bar noise in the background.

“Yo,” he said. It was a bad sign when a white boy in a loud bar answered with “yo.” She hoped Justin Harrington cared that his sister was missing. Jan started to fill him in.

“Wait, are you telling me that no one knows where Maddy is?” Justin sounded serious. The background noise grew softer. “Hang on a sec. I’m walking outside.”

Jan looked at her watch again. They’d have to leave the office soon for the Wilsons’ weenie watch, as Peet called it. Justin came back on the line.

“Who are you again?” he asked.

“Your parents hired me today to help track down your little sister. She’s been missing for two days.”

“Two days? God, they’re unbelievable.”

“So she’s not there with you.”

“No way. She wouldn’t come to me. We’re not that close.”

“Has your sister run away before?”

“Not since she was really little. Like seven or so. The police found her late at night hiding in a big box behind the grocery store. She’d set up her things in there like she was planning to stay for a while.”

Jan thought about that. Was it normal childhood adventure stuff? Or was Maddy running from something even then?

“I get the feeling that you and Maddy might both have some problems with your folks. Can you tell me about that? It might help me find her.”

Jan heard Justin light a cigarette and take his time exhaling. “I don’t know if you’d call it a problem. Basically, they leave us alone to do what we want to do, which is cool with me.”

“How about Maddy?”

“It’s hard to say with her. The main reason we’re not close is that she doesn’t tell me anything, and I’d be surprised if there’s anyone she shares stuff with. She’s a complete enigma.”

“Even when she was little? She must have played games or had friends or something.”

“Yeah, when she was real little. Mom would have her go to play groups and stuff. She played soccer the last few years and she was really good at that. I don’t know if she hung out with those girls or not. I never saw them at the house.”

“So was she a loner? Or was she unpopular with kids for some reason?”

Justin gave it some thought. “I just think she was too fucking serious about everything. It’s kind of creepy, actually.”

“Like how? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

Justin paused again. “It’s kind of weird, but right before I left for school, Maddy and I had one of the few real conversations we’ve had in the last several years. We were reading the paper in the kitchen, the folks were gone, of course, and she suddenly blew her stack at some article. I asked her what the matter was and all she said at first was that she could hardly stand living in this country anymore.”

“What?”

“I know. It wasn’t the first political thing I’ve ever heard her say, but this time she was really hot. She went on a rant about not being truly free and government regulation and stuff like that.”

“Like a conservative?”

“I’m a conservative, but I’d say it was more like a paranoid. Then she started going on about Ayn Rand’s books and
Atlas Shrugged
and that whole Objectivist spiel. I tried to discuss it with her, but she wasn’t interested in a debate. She talked right over me. I finally just got up and left.”

Jan didn’t know the Objectivist spiel or who Ayn Rand was, but it sounded like something she could look up on the Internet.

“Justin, do you know if your sister was doing drugs or running with a crowd, or anything that could help us track her down?”

“No, she didn’t do drugs. At least she didn’t the one time I offered to share a joint with her. She called me an idiot and a degenerate.” Jan could hear him taking another drag on his cigarette. “As you can see, we aren’t close.”

“Sounds like Maddy may be hard to be close to.”

“I feel sorry for her in a way. I mean, she’s always been so alone that she just doesn’t know how to act with people. If she’s out there on her own, she could get in trouble pretty quick.”

Jan thought the same thing.

*

The CarMax manager handed Maddy a cashier’s check for $20,000.

“I’d feel better if one of your parents were here,” he said. He was a pudgy, sweaty old man. Maddy couldn’t wait to get away from him.

“I owned the car, not them. It doesn’t really matter how you feel.”

She tucked the check in a pocket of her backpack, hunched it onto one shoulder, and strapped a heavy computer bag across the other. She left without thanking him or saying good-bye. Fuck him, anyway. He’d made the whole process of selling the car an exercise in patience, and she had little of that to spare.

Once on the Metra train into Chicago, she pulled out a pay-as-you-go cell phone, one of several she’d bought. She planned to use them and toss them, not giving anyone the opportunity to track her down through a signal. She sent a text to David. He was already downtown, waiting for her at the train station. She pulled her ball cap lower over her eyes and relaxed into her seat, watching the familiar suburban landscape flash by. It would be all new scenery after this.

David. She would recognize him, though they’d never met in person. They’d started video chatting a few months ago after discovering each other in the comments section of a conservative political blog. Both were too radical in their ideas for the forum, so they took their conversations private. Now she was running away with him. She wasn’t nervous, but she’d be pissed off if he turned out to be another All Talk, No Action sort of guy. It was easy for people to talk about going off-grid, but few had the guts to do it.

She found him outside of Union Station, leaning against an old pickup truck parked in a tow away zone. It was early evening and getting dark, the fall air cooler every day. He was dressed in flannel shirt and jeans, no jacket, and she was surprised at how tall and thin he was. She’d only ever seen him from the neck up. He looked more like a boy her age than a man of twenty-five. He stepped toward her and shook her hand.

“You definitely do not look eighteen,” he said. “Have you been lying to me?”

“I’m eighteen. I can’t help it if I look young. Dude, you look about twelve.”

David grinned. “I’ll show you my ID if you show me yours.”

Maddy reached for her backpack and pulled out the check. “Here’s what I’ll show you.”

He took the check and looked it over. “Cool. This is going to help a lot.”

“Do we have to get that cashed here?”

David slipped the check in his shirt pocket. “Nah. It’s made out to cash. They’ll take it at my bank in Michigan.”

“We’re all set then. Let’s get the hell out of here. Where are we going first?”

David put her bags behind the seats in the truck.

“First we go back up to my house. You can stay in my basement while we’re getting all our shit together.”

“When will we leave for Idaho?”

He glanced at her as he entered the ramp to the expressway. “No cold feet for you, I see.”

“Hell no. The sooner the better.”

“We still have some things to do here. We’ll lay it all out for you, but most of it you already know. We’ll close on the land this week and then we’re there.”

Maddy sat back and took a deep breath. It was all happening fast, but it felt exactly right. She wanted something real. David thought like she did; tired of all the endless bullshit all around them, in everything they heard on the news or read in the media or listened to spewing out of the mouths of idiotic, corrupt politicians. To live in a meaningful way, they were going to have to leave a meaningless society.