'All right, say she wants to move out and skip town but she wants to be able to get her calls. She could —'
'She couldn't get her calls from a distance.'
'Sure she could. They've got this gizmo, you just call your machine from any touch-tone phone and punch in a code and the machine plays back your messages.'
'Not all machines have the remote-pickup feature. Hers didn't.'
'How do you know that? Oh, right, you saw the machine, it's still in the room.' He splayed his fingers.
'Look, what's the point going over this again and again? You were a cop long enough, Matt. Put yourself in my position.'
'I'm just saying that—'
'Put yourself in my fucking position, will you? You're sitting at this desk and a guy comes in with a story about bed linen and a telephone answering machine. There's no evidence that a crime has been committed, the missing person is a mentally competent adult, and nobody's seen her for over two months.
Now what am I supposed to do?'
I didn't say anything.
'What would you do? In my position.'
'What you're doing.'
'Of course you would.'
'Suppose it was the mayor's daughter.'
'The mayor doesn't have a daughter. The mayor never had a hard-on in his life, so how could he have a daughter?' He pushed his chair back. 'Of course it's a different matter if it's the mayor's daughter.
Then we put a hundred men on it and work around the clock until something breaks. Which doesn't mean something necessarily does, not after all this time and with so little to go on. Look, what's the big fear here? Not that she went to Disney World and the Ferris wheel got stuck with her at the top of it. What are you and her parents really afraid of?'
'That she's dead.'
'And maybe she is. People die all the time in this city. If she's alive she'll call home sooner or later, when the money runs out or her head clears up, whatever it takes. If she's dead there's nothing anybody can do for her, you or me or anybody else.'
'I suppose you're right.'
'Of course I'm right. Your problem is you get like a dog with a bone. Call the father, tell him there's nothing to run with, he should have called you two months ago.'
'Right, make him feel guilty.'
'Well, you could find a better way to put it. Jesus, you already gave it more than most people would and took it as far as it would go.
You even dug up some decent clues, the phone calls and everything, the answering machine. The trouble is they're not attached to anything. You pull them and they come off in your hand.'
'I know.'
'So let go of it. You don't want to put in any more hours or you wind up working for chump change.'
I started to say something but his phone rang. He talked for a few minutes. When he hung up he said,
'What did we do for crime before we had cocaine?'
'We made do.'
'Did we? I guess we must have.'
I walked around for a few hours. Around one-thirty it started raining lightly. Almost immediately the umbrella sellers turned up on the streetcorners. You'd have thought they had existed previously in spore form, springing miraculously to life when a drop of water touched them.
I didn't buy an umbrella. It wasn't raining hard enough to make it worthwhile. I went into a bookstore and killed some time without buying anything, and when I left the rain still didn't amount to much more than a fine mist.
I stopped at my hotel, checked at the desk. No messages, and the only mail was an offer of a credit card. 'You have already been approved!' the copy blared. Somehow I doubted this.
I went upstairs and called Warren Hoeldtke. I had my notebook at hand, and I gave him a quick rundown on what lines of investigation I'd pursued and what little I'd managed to determine. 'I've put in a lot of hours,' I said, 'but I don't think I'm much closer to her than I was when I started. I don't feel as though I've accomplished anything.'
'Do you want more money?'
'No. I wouldn't know how to go about earning it.'
'What do you think has happened to her? I realize you don't have any hard knowledge, but don't you have some sense of what went on?'
'Only a vague one, and I don't know how much weight to attach to it. I think she got mixed up with somebody who appeared exciting and turned out to be dangerous.'
'Do you think—'
