Good Morning, Killer

Now Andrew entered the kitchen, trailed by another Santa Monica police officer, statuesque, with blonde hair in a French braid. She had been the first responder. Her arms were strong and capable beneath the tight-fitting midnight blue uniform but her broad Slavic cheekbones were oily, eyelids heavy with fatigue. She had been on her feet for hours. Seeing another female on the job was a relief for both of us; we exchanged brief smiles.

“I just want to say one thing.” The dad pivoted on the bar stool. His chin was up, weary eyes defiant. “You already know this, Andrew.”

I cringed. Police officers like to be addressed by their rank. So far neither one of the Meyer-Murphys had gotten it right.

“Juliana is loved. She comes from a loving home. She is a good kid. She doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke— anything.”

Andrew said, “I hear you.”

The police officer put a fist on her hip and shifted weight, keeping her expression neutral. She had heard it, too.

“Juliana has never even been late without calling,” the dad went on. “Something happened to her, because she would never do this to us.”

“We know something happened to her,” began the mom a little desperately.

“Do you have a recent picture of your daughter?”

They had already been to the shoe box with the sheaves of family photos like a mixed salad of time — trips to Big Bear and fifteen years of Halloween — and pulled the standard school portrait, one of those cookie-cutter images that reduced the victim to an everyday teenager with long brown hair and a pleasantly chubby face, along with a black-and-white full-body shot of her holding on to a tree, an exaggerated pose with her butt sticking out, imitating a model, with a tight self-conscious smile.

“Has Juliana ever run away?” I asked.

The dad rolled his eyes.

“I know you’re tired and you’ve been over this—”

He put up his palms in submission. “No. Okay? My daughter has never run away.”

“Does Juliana have a boyfriend?”

“Are you kidding? She has no friends at that school.”

“She’s doing fine,” countered the mom.

“What school are we talking about?”

“Laurel West. It’s a private academy.” Ross seemed to like the word. “She just started there, just when we moved into this house.”

New house, new school. New money? I was making handwritten notes.

“How is Juliana doing at Laurel West?”

“Maintaining a C average,” the dad said with some sarcasm. “In middle school she was pulling A’s.”

“How do you account for the change?”

Neither parent had an answer.

“Can you give me a general idea of her activities?”

They looked at each other. “Well,” said Lynn, “she likes to hang at the Third Street Promenade.”

“Was she at the Promenade yesterday afternoon?”

“Not yesterday. Yesterday she was going over to her friend Stephanie Kent’s house. She does have friends. He thinks he knows her. He doesn’t know her at all.”

“I don’t know my own daughter?”

Lynn ignored him, gripping the back of a bar stool.

“They had to work on a science project,” she continued deliberately. “They had to make a car out of paper.”

Ross: “For this we spend fifteen thousand dollars a year.”

That was it. Lynn crumbled and Andrew was there to catch her, just as he had been for the pair of terrified bank managers on the Mission Impossible job. He’d had both arms around them — one male, one female — as they wept on his shoulders after the ordeal of being held in the vault. I had been impressed to see that. With quiet patience he now held Lynn Meyer-Murphy through the present wave of anguish, his face closed down and solemn.

“Why don’t we sit?” Andrew said finally, indicating the breakfast nook. “When was the last time either of you had anything to eat?”

Lynn opened a drawer, pulled out a bag of bagels, put them on top of the counter and forgot about them.

Spread before us on the breakfast table was evidence of a family in the midst of a life too hurried even to sort out: mounds of magazines, catalogues, homework pages, The Silver Palate Cookbook, spelling tests and piles of mail still in rubber bands.

“What is that hammering?” Ross was staring at the ceiling.

“We’re putting in direct lines to the Santa Monica Police Department.”

“What for?”

“We’re setting up a command post over there. But we will have agents in your home, twenty- four/seven.”

This, also, was “new politics.”

“Twenty-four hours a day!” cried Lynn in a panic. “Where do they sleep?”

There was some drama happening across the room where Ramon was messing with a phone jack.

“Excuse me,” the uniform was saying. “You can’t just go ripping out our stuff.” She was holding the discarded tape recorder by the wires. She thrust it at him like a dead rat.

“Lady,” said Ramon, “the Bureau always puts in its own equipment — you never worked a kidnap before?”

“It’s Officer Oberbeck—”

The parents were watching. Andrew scrambled to his feet.

“Sylvia …,” he called.

“We were here first.” She jabbed an acrylic fingernail.

“It’s our jurisdiction.” Ramon angled the screwdriver.

“The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing,” Ross commented grimly.

“Sylvia,” said Andrew, walking over. “Take a deep break.”

“Don’t let them talk to you like that!” Lynn chimed in. “Just because you’re a woman!”

Officer Oberbeck suppressed a smile. “I’m really okay.”

“You’re more than okay — she’s terrific!” Lynn declared to the room. “When we got that hang-up call, I thought I would go over the edge—”

Me, alert: “A hang-up? A second call? Did anybody monitor it?”

Negative, according to Officer Oberbeck, and there was nothing on the tape.

“So nobody logged the call,” I said heatedly.

The police officer straightened, wiping an arm across her forehead, midsection held in tight. I could see her in basketball shorts playing hoops with the boys.

“I’m going home,” she said, adding kindly: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy. By dinnertime Juliana will be sitting here, and you’ll be yelling at her for scaring you to death.”

Lynn started blinking rapidly again.

It was twenty minutes into Day One and already I was corked.

“A call came in that we missed, people. We don’t know who it was or what they said? What the hell is going on?”

“It’s chillin’,” said Ramon. “We got it under control.”

Holstering the screwdriver, he left.

His emotion, my emotion, none of it mattered. The pressing absence of the girl was making itself felt even in the confusion of the kitchen: A leopard bag with ruby beads hooked on a chair. A Tale of Two Cities in paperback, a pink marker stuck in the pages. Blue nail polish. Size-eight pool thongs. These