Vanishing Act (11 page)

“That's right. My first name is Michael.”

I let out a low whistle.

W
hen I told Tim whom I'd been on the phone with, he stopped putting new bedding in the dwarf Russian hamsters' cage and straightened up. Little shreds of pine bark clung to his black T-shirt. “Michael West?” he asked, brushing them off.

I nodded as I watched the five hamsters, upset that their carefully amassed food store had disappeared, scurry around.

“The
Michael West?”

“That's what I just said.”

“You're kidding.”

“Do I look as if I am?”

“How could you not have known?”

“Hey, West is a common name. No one told me,” I said, thinking of Marks. That son of a bitch. After the bargain I'd given him on the snake for his stepson. He'd owed me that much, at least.

“But you saw him,” Tim protested, dusting himself off.

“Only for a minute.” No wonder the guy had looked familiar. “Anyway, his picture isn't in the paper that much. And it's not exactly as if I travel in that social circle.” Zsa Zsa danced around my feet, and I absentmindedly held out a treat to her. “No wonder Mr. West didn't want his son to get married,” I observed as she grabbed it out of my hand and ran away to eat it.

“How much is West worth?”

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. I wasn't good remembering numbers. “A lot.” The guy was a builder who'd made his fortune by taking inner-city housing, rehabing it, and convincing middle-class people to move in. He'd started out as a framer working for a contractor down in Miami and ended up a multimillionaire. In the last couple of years he'd been profiled in several magazines as an example of what businesses can do to save American cities. Recently, he'd taken up politics. A major player in the Republican party, he was rumored to be up for an important party position.

“What did West say to you?” Tim asked.

“Basically, in so many words, he told me to stay away from his son.”

“What did you say?”

“Not much.”

Tim gently tugged on the diamond stud in his right earlobe. “One of my friends did some electrical work for someone who worked for his company down in Georgia. He said he had ties to the mob.”

One of the parrots started to shriek. “That doesn't mean anything. If you work in that business, you work with the mob or you don't work at all.”

“Kip said he heard West's a real bastard.”

“No surprise there. You don't get to where he is by being a nice guy.”

“Yeah. The assholes are running the world.”

“They always have.”

Tim snorted. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

I nibbled on the edge of a torn cuticle. “That depends on where the questions I'm asking lead. I'm not going to go out of my way to talk to Tommy again, but I won't not talk to him either, if I feel it's warranted.”

“Do you think his kid is involved?”

I weighed the alternatives. “Given the way Mr. West is acting, it's possible. His son certainly could have a motive for wanting Melissa out of his life. On the other hand, maybe Mr. West is telling the truth. Maybe the guy's just trying to shield his kid. Maybe he's an overprotective father.” A dull ache of pain made me look at my finger. Somehow I'd managed to rip the cuticle off. I cursed silently. The damn thing was going to hurt for a week now. The way my luck was going, it would probably get infected. “If I had a kid, I'd probably do the same thing myself.”

“I wouldn't,” Tim said, starting in on the hamster cage again. “I don't think you do people favors by protecting them. If they don't suffer the consequences of their actions, they're never going to learn.”

I thought about some of the things I'd done and gotten away with when I was younger. “I'm not sure that's true.”

Tim and I wasted ten minutes debating the issue before we went back to work. The rest of the day was uneventful. I set up two appointments regarding Melissa at the university, after which I caught up on my orders, paid my bills, and inventoried the freezer in the back room. I wanted to make sure everything I was supposed to do was done, because I was planning on spending a large amount of time tomorrow out of the store working on the Hayes case and I didn't want to give Tim anything to complain about.

 

 

When I'd spoken to the head of university security the previous day, I'd gotten the strong impression he wasn't exactly eager to talk to me, but he'd agreed to the meeting because he couldn't afford not to, which was why I was trudging up what had looked like endless sets of stairs from the street below, at nine o'clock in the morning, fighting against gusts of wind that were making my eyes tear and my skin feel numb. Given the conversation Mr. Morrell and I had had, I wasn't expecting much, but I had to go through the motions. And anyway, you never know what you're going to get out of someone till you talk to them face-to-face.

Morrell's office turned out to be located on the ground floor of a tired-looking building that was crying out for a good sprucing up. The trim could have used a couple of coats of paint and the bricks needed pointing. Tucked away on a far corner of the campus, like a poor relation no one wants to acknowledge, it had taken me a while to find. The view as I labored up the steps to the campus was less than inspiring.

From where I was standing, if you looked down from the hill, you could see the 690 overpass, a parking lot, and a housing development known informally as the Bricks. A poor, mostly African American area, it would have been called a ghetto in a more plain-speaking time, before euphemisms became the order of the day.

I was wondering why so many universities are built on hills looking down at the poor below, when I reached Morrell's office. I crushed the cigarette I'd been smoking out with my heel, deposited the butt in the sand-filled ashtray nearby, and went inside. When I told the secretary, a Betsy Seyffert according to the nameplate on her desk, who I was, she gestured to the open door on my left and told me to go in.

Morrell pointedly glanced up from the papers he was reading to the clock on the wall as I entered. “You're late,” he observed, sounding pleased at having the opportunity to catch me in a mistake.

“I had trouble finding your office,” I replied, sitting down in the black armchair in front of his desk.

“That's funny. I would have thought that you of all people, seeing how you're a detective and all”—here he turned the corners of his mouth up slightly—“would have been able to figure out where it was.”

Ah. A guy with a sense of humor. I let the crack go and studied the man who'd made it. Morrell's hands were lightly resting on the edge of the desk. They were big, but then, so was Mr. C. Morrell. He was in his fifties, his bearing radiating the remnants of the military man I was sure he'd been. Deeply tan, his long, narrow face was cross-hatched with the type of thin, deep lines the sun etches in your skin after a lifetime spent out in her.

Handsome, with regular features, he had pale blue eyes and neatly clipped gray hair. His clothes, white shirt, striped regimental tie, and gray jacket reinforced his conservative, “man-in-charge” image. I wondered if his appearance had played a part in the getting of this job. He was someone the handlers could trot out before parents.
See,
his looks said.
Your son or daughter will be safe with me.
It was the feel-good approach to security.

Which is what most of it was about everywhere anyway. The majority of measures at airports, offices, and schools was packaging designed to make people think “things are being done to ensure that everything is under control.”

Whereas the truth is, if you want to do something bad enough, you can. All it takes is a modicum of thought. And a little bit of luck.

Security requires loss of freedom, an increase in inconvenience.

Even then the measures might not work.

Short of putting a homing device on Melissa Hayes, could anyone have prevented what had happened to her?

Especially since the odds were she was a willing participant in whatever had occurred. At least in the beginning.

Morrell made a minuscule adjustment to his tie and said, “Explain to me again why I should tell you anything about Melissa Hayes's disapppearance.”

“I thought we went over that on the phone.”

“Refresh my memory.”

I suppressed my rush of irritation and let a couple of beats go by before answering. If he wanted to play Lord of the Manor, so be it. “I see the question as: why shouldn't you?”

“Legally, I'm not required to give you any information.”

I leaned forward slightly. “That's what you told me yesterday on the phone.”

“That's right, I did.” Morrell brushed his tie tack with the tip of his finger. “That being the case, I'm curious. Why did you insist on coming here?”

“Why did you agree to see me?” I countered. If the guy wanted to rehash the conversation, that was fine with me.

He acknowledged my comment with a wintry smile.

“You know,” I continued, “what happened to Melissa Hayes is every parent's worst nightmare. You send your kid off to college, a college, I might add, that has taken all possible measures to ensure your child's safety.”

Morrell's expression didn't soften, but he gave a slight nod to indicate acceptance of the compliment.

“And she walks out the door of her dorm and disappears in the middle of the afternoon without a trace and no one sees anything.”

Morrell formed a steeple with the tips of his fingers. “That is correct. No one did. But that said, what's your point? Why should I cooperate with you?” he asked. “I don't think the university wants any more publicity over this. We would prefer to put this painful episode behind us.”

“I can imagine.” I reached over and idly ran a finger along the edge of Morrell's desk. He frowned. I deliberately repeated the gesture, then, point made, leaned back. “In fact, I empathize. Unfortunately, things being the way they are these days, that seems the best way to ensure adverse coverage. You know what media people are like. Always twisting things. Making something out of nothing.”

The corners of Morrell's mouth twitched. Maybe they were the only facial muscles he could use. He brought the tips of his fingers up to the bottom of his lip. His expression stayed the same. Unreadable. “That's right. How could I have forgotten. You used to work for the local newspaper, didn't you?”

I nodded. “Refusing to talk to me makes the university look ungenerous at the very least. At the most, it makes you guys look as if you're stonewalling, when the reality is that you're not. From what I heard, your staff did everything you could to help find her.”

“True. We did.”

“And if you throw in the fact that I'm working for Melissa's mother and she has only a few months left to live ...” I trailed off, leaving thoughts of bad PR dancing in Morrell's head.

“I see,” he said.

“I thought you might.”

The sounds of footsteps from the hallway outside filtered into the room. Morrell's phone rang. He didn't look at it. A moment later the noise stopped. His secretary must have picked up. He brought his hands back down and rested them on the edge of the desk again. “All right. What is it, exactly, that you'd like to know?”

“Your ideas about what happened to Melissa. Who your staff talked to. What they noticed. What they did after the disappearance. That kind of thing.”

Morrell didn't answer immediately. Instead, he picked up a pencil and twirled it between the fingers of his right hand while he mulled my request over. After a few seconds he put the pencil down and gestured to the door leading to the outer office. “Would you mind waiting outside,” he said. “I need to make a phone call.”

“No problem.” My guess was that he was calling the head of public relations for final clearance on whether he should talk to me or not.

While I was waiting, I approached the secretary.

Secretaries, I've found, usually know more than anyone else in the place. Sometimes, especially if they don't like their bosses, they can be invaluable fonts of information. A case that was true here, I was willing to wager, judging from the expression of distaste on Betsy Seyffert's face after she got off the intercom with Morrell.

I judged her to be in her late thirties. Her face was thin, her profile Roman, her hair ash blond. Her makeup was immaculate, her blouse white silk. She looked as out of place in this office as a calla lily would among a bouquet of daisies.

“Been at this job long?” I asked.

“Long enough,” she replied as she went back to scanning papers on her desk. Her movements were quick and precise.

“I used to work at NYU. As a secretary in the poli sci department. I left after a year.”

“Well, I'm leaving here in two weeks. I'm going down to New York City. I have a sister who lives in Queens. She's going to get me a job with an advertising firm.”

“Sounds good.”

She gave me a confiding smile. “Believe me, it'll be better than this. At least I'll meet some interesting people.”

I leaned against the side of her desk. “Your boss seems as if he'd be a tough man to work for.”

She rolled her eyes by way of an answer. “His only saving grace is that he's out of the office a lot. Like today, after his meeting with you, he's gone for the rest of the day.”

I laughed. I liked this woman. I was thinking about how sometimes you just connect with someone, when her intercom buzzed. She pressed a button. It was Morrell telling her to tell me to go back inside.