Thief (3 page)

I showed up at Currier's Bar and Grill ten
minutes late. Traffic in south Reno this time of year was a bitch.
Currier's was a stone's throw from one of the biggest malls in
town, and Jimmy wanted to meet at five-thirty. I'd been stuck in
stop and go traffic with half the valley. By the time I found a
parking spot in Currier's lot, I had the beginning of a decent
tension headache. Merry ho ho ho. Maybe I should put a sleigh and
flying reindeer on my Christmas list.

Currier's was an upscale, strip mall version
of a British pub. Walls paneled in dark walnut, sturdy booths
upholstered in burgundy leather, and a long, dark wood bar polished
to a mirrored finish. The clientele were mostly young
professionals. By the time I got there, the booths and bar stools
were filling up with the end of the work day crowd. I guessed not
everyone was in the mood for full-body contact Christmas shopping.
Either that, or they needed a little fortification before they
faced the crowds.

A flat-screen television behind the bar was
tuned to ESPN when I walked in. College football. This time of the
year, a Wednesday night game meant it had to be an early bowl game
named after some corporate sponsor. I didn't look at the teams or
the score. I quit following football the day Ryan and I split up. I
told myself I didn't miss it.

Jimmy sat hunched in a corner booth nursing
a beer. I slid into the booth across from him. I barely said hello
before a waitress appeared to take my order.

"Ice tea, no lemon," I said out of
habit.

July or December, I ordered ice tea without
a second thought. Ryan drank, so I didn't. One of those husband and
wife compromise things. Even though my eighteen-year marriage was
over, I hadn't quite come to terms with the idea that I didn't have
to plan my life around his anymore.

I declined anything off the Happy Hour menu.
This wasn't a social visit. I don't conduct business over a plate
of nachos or mozzarella sticks.

Jimmy had peeled most of the label off his
bottle of beer while he waited for me. He'd also ignored the
chilled glass mug and was drinking directly from the bottle. More
than half the beer was gone.

I didn't wait for my ice tea to get down to
business. I was tired and my head hurt, and all I really wanted to
do was get home to my daughter.

"So," I said. "Want to tell me what's so
important we had to meet in person?" I'd wanted to discuss whatever
had Jimmy tied in knots over the phone, but he'd refused.

Now that I was here, Jimmy wouldn't meet my
eyes. He's a big guy, six four easy -- a full foot taller than I
am. Like me, he's in his early forties. His sandy blonde hair was
starting to thin at the top, his hairline receding beneath a shaggy
haircut that hung over his forehead. He was dressed in work casual
-- a forest green sweater over a lighter green silk polo. A sport
coat that looked like tan suede but wasn't hung on the hook at the
side of the booth. Jimmy worked in commercial real estate sales,
but he wasn't a glad-hander like a lot of salespeople I knew. When
Jimmy smiled at you, it was with genuine pleasure, and when he
shook your hand, it was with a firm grip. Right now he looked like
he wanted to fade into the woodwork and disappear.

"I'm in trouble, Abby," he said.

That much was obvious. I could have asked
what kind of trouble, but I've learned over the years that people
need to tell their stories their own way and in their own sweet
time.

Listening was half of what my business was
about. Most people would tell you about themselves if you gave them
half a chance. Or they'd tell me anyway. Strangers struck up
conversations with me in a grocery store or in line waiting for an
open teller window at the bank. Ryan used to tell me it was because
I had a non-threatening look. I thought it was because I couldn't
tell people no. Abby Maxon, woman of marshmallow.

The waitress brought my tea. I stirred in a
packet of the blue stuff, and Jimmy started talking again.

"You heard about the girl who disappeared,
right?" Jimmy said.

It wasn't really a question. I tasted the
tea, grimaced, and ripped open another packet of fake sugar. My
spoon clinked against the glass and ice cubes as I stirred.

"Rachel." Jimmy swallowed hard around her
name. "Rachel Ellison."

I'd heard about Rachel. The local news had
carried the story for the last two days. She'd disappeared on
Monday. According to the broadcasts, Rachel didn't show when her
mother went to pick her up after school. When Rachel didn't come
home that night, her mother reported her missing.

As a mother of a teenage daughter, I paid
attention whenever a teenager turned up missing. Kind of like
passing a wreck on the freeway and thanking your lucky stars it
wasn't you, and hoping like hell it wasn't someone you knew.

"I knew Rachel as Ellie Mack," Jimmy
said.

He knew her? "Was she one of the kids you
coached?"

Jimmy destroyed the rest of the label off
his beer instead of answering me.

A loud group of business suit types poured
themselves into the booth behind Jimmy. Men in their mid-twenties,
clean-cut in uniform white shirts and expensive ties, their
conversation pegged them as lawyers. Probably associates at one of
the large law firms downtown. I didn't recognize any of them.

Most of my workload involved accident
investigations for lawyers and insurance companies. Sometimes I did
a little process service or tracked down deadbeat judgment debtors.
The work wasn't glamorous or exciting, but I was good at it. It
paid the mortgage on the house Samantha and I still lived in, and
the rent on the small office I shared with a freelance writer in
one of the renovated mansions downtown near the Truckee River. The
writer worked nights; I worked days. We rarely saw each other,
which worked out just fine. Both our jobs were solitary
professions.

Jimmy glanced over his shoulder at the young
lawyers. When he looked back at me, he seemed to hunch in on
himself. He lowered his voice so only I could hear him. "The cops
are going to come after me," he said.

I quit stirring my tea. "You have something
to do with her disappearance?"

"No!" Jimmy looked around to see if anyone
had heard him besides me, then he lowered his voice again. "No, I
don't. But they're going to think I did."

I got a heavy feeling in my belly to go
along with the headache. He was going to tell me something I didn't
want to hear. The last time I'd felt this way was when Ryan told me
he wanted out of our marriage. When he told me he'd been sleeping
with someone else, and this time it was serious.

I took a sip of tea I didn't really want
anymore. The second packet of the blue stuff made the tea too
sweet. The lawyers next to us ordered a couple of pitchers of beer,
and someone at the other end of the bar shouted at the
television.

Jimmy couldn't seem to look me in the eye.
He stared at the pile of shredded label, but I didn't think he was
really seeing it. His face had taken on a hollow, haunted look.

"You have to understand," Jimmy said. "Ellie
-- Rachel -- whatever she called herself--" He took a deep breath,
seemed to try to fortify himself. "I just wanted to be with her,
you know?" He raised his head. It looked painful, like he was
making himself look at me even though it was the last thing he
wanted to do. "But I swear to you, Abby, on my daughter's life, I
didn't know she was only fifteen."

Jimmy and my ex met in college. High school
jocks, both of them. Neither one was good enough to last long
playing college football, but that didn't stop them from playing
everything else. From throwing a Frisbee on the quad between
classes to softball in the nighttime leagues sponsored by Reno
Parks and Recreation, Ryan and Jimmy played them all. They snow
skied at Mt. Rose in the winter and water skied on Lake Tahoe in
the summer. They played touch football with the frat boys. They
golfed when they could afford it and played tennis or basketball on
the university's courts when they couldn't.

Me? I went along for the ride. I had fun
watching the boys enjoy themselves, and besides, Ryan looked damn
fine in tennis shorts Good old Abby, Ryan used to say. What a good
sport. And I had been where Ryan was concerned, back then.

When Ryan left me last spring for a younger,
more athletic girlfriend who just happened to work in his building,
Jimmy was one of the very few of Ryan's friends who didn't treat me
like a pariah the next time he saw me. The memory of that kept me
from walking out on him now.

Barely.

"Fifteen?" I said. Jesus. "What the hell
were you thinking?" Was he even thinking? My own daughter was
fifteen years old. The mere idea that someone Jimmy's age wanted --
what? sex? -- with a fifteen-year-old girl made my stomach
turn.

"It's not like that," he said, his voice
urgent. "I love her. I--"

"Love? She's
fifteen
, Jimmy. Give me
a break."

"Wait." He started to reach across the table
for my hand, but stopped halfway. If he had touched me at that
moment, I think I would have slapped him. "You've got to hear me
out," he said.

"Give me a good reason."

"Terri." Terri was Jimmy's thirteen-year-old
daughter. "If this gets out, it's going to destroy her. I don't
want her hurt like that. You know how kids are."

How kids are. Yeah, Jimmy, I know. Do you?
The irony of his remark seemed lost on him.

"Maybe you should have thought of that
sooner," I said.

Bringing the issue around to Terri was the
one thing he could say to get me to stay, and he knew it. Like any
good salesman, he knew what would close the deal, and he hadn't
hesitated to use it.

Thirteen-year old girls thought life was
impossibly hard. I had gone through that phase with Samantha,
although for her, it had been interrupted by a harsh dose of
reality that showed all of us exactly how hard life could really
be.

"I was stupid, okay?" Jimmy said. "But it's
not like that, not what you think. I never even met her in
person."

"What?"

"On the Internet, I met her on the
Internet." He dropped his gaze again. "We've been talking on the
computer for months now."

Good god. My own daughter had an Internet
browser open on her computer every night while she did her
homework. Her desk was in the family room where I could keep an eye
on her. Or at least I thought I could. Was she having conversations
with some guy like Jimmy, someone she thought was a kid like
her?

I turned away from Jimmy and looked out the
plate glass windows at the front of the pub. Currier's had
decorated for Christmas. Strings of colored lights blinked on and
off around the windows to frame the world beyond the bar in
Christmas cheer. The street was still clogged with traffic, red
brake lights and bright headlights lighting up the night. A half
hour ago I might have thought the decorations were cheery. I didn't
now.

Out there people were going on with their
lives, heading toward the mall for a little Christmas shopping or
just stuck in traffic on the way home to their families. I should
be on the way home to my own daughter. What was Rachel Ellison's
mother doing? Was she sitting at home waiting by her phone, scared
and angry and frustrated with the need to do something to bring her
daughter home? Or was she out there in the night, trying to find
Rachel herself?

I settled back in the booth and looked at
Jimmy. I'd hear him out. Not for him, but for his daughter. For
Rachel, and for her mother.

Jimmy stopped the waitress and ordered
another beer. While he drank the second one, he told me his
story.

He'd met up with Ellie, the name Rachel used
on the Internet, in an online roleplaying game. Jimmy played late
at night after his family went to bed. To unwind, he said. "I could
beat up the virtual bad guys. It let me deal with the real life
jerks. Be a hero, I guess." He shrugged. "Some hero."

I let the remark slide. I wasn't about to
buy into Jimmy's pity-party.

At first Jimmy talked to her through the
game's chat window. Innocent flirtation, Jimmy said. They talked to
each other in character. It made the game more fun. He started
staying up until two or three in the morning, just hoping to catch
her online.

"How long ago was this?" I asked.

Jimmy looked off to the side, trying to
remember. "I got the game about a year ago. I didn't play it much
until I met up with some people online, then we'd go on raiding
parties together. Ellie was one of the people I met. I don't know.
Six months ago? Eight months? Maybe longer."

The more they talked through the game, the
less they stayed in character. They started setting up times to
meet in a chat room that had nothing to do with the game.

"She was fascinating," Jimmy said. "I swear,
she didn't sound like a kid. Not like any of the kids I coach, and
not like any of the women I meet. She had no idea who I was."

Jimmy Fisher had done well for himself in
commercial real estate, just as Ryan had done well for himself as
an attorney. They'd taken the competitiveness that made them play
every sport under the sun for the win, not the draw, and turned it
into a successful work ethic. The few times Ryan and I were at the
same party with Jimmy and his wife, I'd watch women flirt with
Jimmy, and I knew most of them were only interested in his bank
account. The allure of flirting with someone while totally
anonymous apparently had been more than Jimmy could ignore.

According to Jimmy, Ellie claimed to be a
college freshman who lived in an apartment with two other girls.
She'd created an entire online persona for herself. She told Jimmy
she was an education major, and she worked as a waitress to make
ends meet. When she let it slip that she was going to UNR, Jimmy
started asking her to meet him in real life.