Good Morning, Killer

things, obviously Juliana’s, had become Day-Glo talismans, striking my eyes with mocking urgency as we took swipes at one another in frustration and landed on our butts.

There was a moment of bleak silence.

“Cream cheese or butter?” Andrew asked.

You had to love a guy standing in the center of a room, holding up a bag of bagels.

The dad’s eyes slowly rose.

“She’s Meyer, I’m Murphy. You figure it out.”

“No problem,” Andrew replied crisply. “My first wife was Jewish.”

“I didn’t know that,” I blurted.

“Lots of things you don’t know about me.” Untwisting the bag.

I hoped they thought we were being entertaining for their benefit instead of slip-sliding into the wrong movie.

I flipped a page in my notebook. The phone calls had come four hours apart. Maybe there would be a pattern.

“The next time the phone rings, who is going to answer, Mom or Dad?”

Lynn slowly raised her hand.

“The guy says, ‘We have Juliana and we want a million dollars ransom.’ You say, ‘I want to talk to my daughter. Put my daughter on the phone.’”

“I don’t ask where she is or anything like that?”

“You want to hear her voice,” I repeated calmly. “Before we even get into any type of negotiation, we need to know she’s alive. We call it ‘proof of life.’”

Lynn looked stricken by the implication. Her fingers went to her throat. “‘Proof of life’?”

“Anyone else, tell them nothing, get off the phone.”

She caught her breath.

“What if it’s my mother? I can’t tell her what happened. I can’t say, Mom, your granddaughter is missing, we don’t have a clue where she is, but we’re good parents, we really are.” She was twisting her wedding ring.

“Where does your mother live?”

“Florida. She moved there after my dad died.”

Ross: “After the loser”—making an elaborate point of gesturing to himself—“took over the business.”

Lynn’s cheeks were suddenly flushed. “You don’t understand. She’s very critical.”

“There will be a negotiator sitting right there, wearing headphones, listening to the conversation, passing notes on what to say.”

“A team of professionals,” said Ross, “trained to deal with your mother. God bless America.”

“I can’t do this.”

“For Juliana,” Andrew prompted. “Come on, you’ve been very brave.”

Lynn looked up with brimming eyes. She almost believed him.

“I’d do it,” said Ross. “But I hear that bastard’s voice, I’m gonna go ballistic, tear his fucking throat out over the phone …”

Then he saw something in his wife, a deep, sick fear he perhaps had never understood.

“You’re a good mom,” he said firmly. “Never let anyone tell you different.”

Lynn held on to her husband’s hand.

I asked about their manufacturing business.

“Business is fine,” answered Ross briskly, rubbing his beard. “Andrew went all over that.”

“We still need to look at your records. It would be helpful if you’d allow access to what’s on your desk.”

“My desk?”

“Employee records, ledgers, address books …”

“Fine,” said Ross. “How about what’s up my ass?”

Lynn said crossly, “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

Ross put his hands flat on the table and tilted back on the hind legs of his chair.

“Goddamnit, we are not the criminals.”

“In most kidnappings, the victim and the suspect know each other,” Andrew reminded them. “Someone in your world might have taken Juliana.”

Ross’s eyes went out of focus.

“I can’t do this. I can’t do this anymore.”

We waited.

“I just want her home.”

The scrambling went on around us. You could hear them working in the walls. Ramon appeared at the doorway, got the vibe, and backed away.

“Why,” whispered Lynn, “would someone we know take Juliana?”

“A grudge.” Andrew was watching her closely. “A threat.”

The mom’s cheeks flared even brighter.

“I’ll tell you who it is!” Ross snapped his fingers. “I should have thought of it before! David Yi.”

David Yi was a trusted employee who turned out to be a member of a Korean gang that worked the downtown garment district. He figured out the alarm system, broke into the plant and stole three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of spandex. Ross had testified against him.

“Good. We’ll check out David Yi. Next.”

It is a statistical certainty that the longer a person is missing, the smaller the chances of recovery.

“Stephanie Kent. The girl Juliana was supposed to meet. Do you have an address?”

Lynn said she did, and I followed her up the bare oak stairs to get it, she in her blue running pants moving heavily, I in the black suit, impatient. I wanted to see the daughter’s room. To touch her bedclothes and breathe her teenage hibiscus perfume.

It was my job to know the victim as if she were my own flesh and blood.

In that way, I would know her abductor.

“I see Juliana swims.” Spotting a suit and towel hanging over the banister. Remembering the thongs.

“She was on the swim team,” replied the mother, “but she quit. Another thing she quit.” Her voice was faint. “I guess we should have told you.”

“It’s okay. We’re only at the beginning of this.”

I shouldn’t have said that.

She pushed on the door, and Juliana’s world opened up to me.

Three

The Kent residence was on a walk-through street in a “transitional” part of Venice, which meant you could pay six hundred thousand dollars for a tear-down and still get hit by a random gang bullet.

Andrew and I stayed in contact on the cells all the way over. Cell phones and pagers were our thing. Because of our schedules sometimes we couldn’t see each other for a couple of weeks, but we’d talk, weaving in and out of a never-ending conversation about police work, police gossip, police movies, police screwups and the Dodgers. Tension would build. Then would come the teasing call, the secret beeper code: it is surprising how sexy you can feel driving a tan Crown Victoria.

“Think the parents are in it?”

“I’m not ready to rule them out.”

“Me either. What about the dad? Think he’s molesting the girl? That’s why she split?”