He lowered the broomstick and set it aside. Then he sat up with a grunt, wiped sweat away from his face with the back of his hand, and stared at me.
“Yeah, I heard. You aren’t here to confess, are you?”
“No.”
He smiled. “Had to check. What do you think of it?”
“Think he was probably a prick in all areas of his life, so not too hard to imagine a guy wanting to whack him.” I paused. “Cops came to see me.”
“About Jefferson?” Joe got to his feet. It took him some time, and some effort. At the start of the summer, we’d gone running several times a week, Joe breathing easily as we’d pushed up the hills, laughing at me, and at each of his sixty years. A long walk could wear him down now.
“Uh-huh.”
Joe walked out of the living room and into the kitchen. I sat there alone for a second, then got to my feet and followed. He’d poured a glass of water, and now he leaned against the sink and took a sip, a few drops sliding down his chin onto his sweatshirt. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt. Until the last few months, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen him without a tie on a weekday. While he drank the rest of the water and poured another glass, I looked out the window, watching leaves scatter along the sidewalks and blow out into Chatfield Avenue.
“They give you much of a hard time?” Joe asked.
“The cops? Nah.” I turned away from the window. “Karen called, too.”
He lowered the glass and swished a mouthful of water around for a bit before swallowing it, as if an unpleasant taste had suddenly come upon him.
“Karen,” he said. “No kidding.”
I nodded. “Wanted to apologize for the police, she said. And to ask a favor.”
He set the glass on the counter and sighed, as if he’d been expecting to hear this last bit. I told him what Karen wanted, and he listened quietly until I was done.
“You said you’d do it?”
“Eighty grand, Joe. For a locate. We need the money.”
“Eighty grand is insane, LP.”
“I know it. But if there’s one thing she’s got, it’s money. I saw that much from the house.”
“You’re actually going to take it? Take eighty thousand dollars for a job that you’d normally do for under a thousand?”
I met his eyes. “I told her it was too high. But if she cuts me the check, you better believe I’m cashing it.”
“She owes you that much, eh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Thinking it, though?”
I shrugged. “We could use the money, and she’s not going to miss it. End of story.”
“Okay,” he said. “You are the boss, after all.”
“Till your return, at least.”
He didn’t say anything to that, just dumped the rest of the water down the sink and moved back into the living room. I stood where I was and watched him. His shoulder was still in bad shape, yes. His range of motion was poor, and there was substantial pain, but his condition was much improved now. He could drive a car; he could sit at a desk and answer a phone and work a computer. Still he stayed here, doing his exercises, reading books, watching ESPN Classic. We’d never discussed a timetable for his return, but I’d always been sure a return would be made. In the last few weeks, however, I’d started to wonder.
I walked back out of the kitchen and followed him into the living room. He had settled into the old armchair in the corner and put his feet up. I sat on the couch and looked at him. I wanted to ask him, flat out, when he was planning to come back. I didn’t ask, though. Maybe because I was trying to be patient; maybe because I was afraid to hear his answer.
“I don’t have much of a starting place for finding Jefferson’s kid,” I said. “Weird scenario. He took off five years ago, apparently, before Karen married into the family, so she doesn’t know much about him. No contact since then. She said she can provide some identifiers, but that’s all I’ll have.”
“Computer databases will give you a start, once you get those identifiers.”
“Yeah. We’ll see how far they can take me, though.” I cocked my head at him. “Not going to tell me to stay away from this one?”
“You already made the decision to step into it. Looks like a simple enough job, too.” He picked a book off the table beside him and set it on his lap. I’d expected questions about my emotional response to Karen, warnings about the risks of getting involved—but the conversation, it appeared, was done.
“I guess I better head out,” I said.
“Okay.” He opened the book. “Good to see you.”
“Right.”
I was halfway through the kitchen when I heard a rustle of movement. I glanced back to see Joe pulling a blanket over his legs as he settled in with the book. I stood where I was for a moment, frozen. His gray head was bent over the book, his shoulders poking at the sweatshirt, the blanket wrapped around his legs.
Joe Pritchard looked old.
He lifted his head then, noticing me standing there, and I looked away quickly, as if I’d been caught at something, and walked to the front door. I left the house and went back to work, alone.
The phrase “missing person” carries with it connotations of kidnapping and abduction, mystery and mayhem. I work about ten missing person cases a month, though, and most of them don’t fall anywhere near those categories. In my experience, the person is usually missing only to a small portion of his or her world. People travel; they marry, divorce, and remarry; they take jobs and lose jobs. Along the way, they drop out of contact with certain areas of their lives. It’s my job to find the area they
I had no idea which category Matthew Jefferson fit into, but I was feeling good about my chances of finding him quickly and easily. He came from prestige and money; he’d have active bank accounts, cars registered in his name, maybe a mortgage. The hardest people to find are the sort whose lives are in constant disarray. They have suspended driver’s licenses, no assets, no credit, and they live with family or friends or whomever they can bilk out of a free month’s rent. I didn’t anticipate that the son of one of Cleveland’s most prominent attorneys would fall into that lot.
I was wrong. Wrong, at least, in assuming he’d be easy to find. Karen had left me a voice mail with Matthew Jefferson’s date of birth, Social Security number, and driver’s license number. Where she came up with that, I didn’t know, but it also didn’t help me. The driver’s license had expired three years earlier, when Jefferson was twenty-six. He was twenty-nine now, and the last computer record I could find on him put him in Bloomington, Indiana. There were several addresses for him in that town, all apartments. Bloomington was home to Indiana University. Maybe Matthew Jefferson had gone to school there.
Amy Ambrose had once provided me with a great link to newspaper Web sites all around the country. I went to that page now and tracked down a student newspaper for Indiana University, ran a search for Matthew Jefferson, and got a few pages of results. There was a Matt Jefferson who appeared to be something of a track star, and then a reference from several years earlier to a Matthew Jefferson who’d won a few academic honors at the law school. In one, his hometown was listed beside his name: Pepper Pike, Ohio.
“Got ya, Matt.”
I ran a check through the Indiana and Ohio bar associations, as well as two national databases, and couldn’t find an indication that the Matt Jefferson I was looking for had ever taken up the practice of law.
Next I put his Social Security number through Ohio Department of Motor Vehicle records, and got nothing but the expired license. Surprised, but not concerned, I tried a live credit header search. Contrary to popular belief, private investigators can’t access personal credit reports, but we do have access to the “headers,” a portion of the
