We left the parking garage and drove through town on our way to Highland Park. New Brunswick is a college town with Rutgers at the one end and Douglass College at the other. I graduated from Douglass without distinction. I was in the top ninety-eight percent of my class and damn glad to be there. I slept in the library and daydreamed my way through history lecture. I failed math twice, never fully grasping probability theory. I mean, first off, who cares if you pick a black ball or a white ball out of the bag? And second, if you’re bent over about the color, don’t leave it to chance. Look in the damn bag and pick the color you want.
By the time I reached college age, I’d given up all hope of flying like Superman, but I was never able to develop a burning desire for an alternative occupation. When I was a kid I read Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics. Uncle Scrooge was always going off to exotic places in search of gold. After Scrooge got the gold, he’d take it back to his money bin and push his loose change around with a bulldozer. Now this was my idea of a good job. Go on an adventure. Bring back gold. Push it around with a bulldozer. How fun is this? So you can possibly see the reason for my lack of motivation to get grades. I mean, do you really need good grades to drive a bulldozer?
“I went to college here,” I said to Ranger. “It’s been a bunch of years, but I still feel like a student when I ride through town.”
“Were you a good student?”
“I was a terrible student. Somehow the state managed to educate me in spite of myself. Did you go to college?”
“Rutgers, Newark. Joined the army after two years.”
When I first met Ranger I would have been surprised by this. Now, nothing surprised me about Ranger.
“The last woman on the list should be at work, but her husband should be at home,”
Ranger said. “He works food service for the university and goes in at four. The guy’s name is Harold Bailey. His wife’s name is Louise.”
We wound our way through a neighborhood of older homes. They were mostly twostory clapboards with the front porch stretching the width of the house and a single detached garage to the rear. They weren’t big, and they weren’t small. Many had been badly renovated with fake brick front or add-on front rooms made by enclosing the porch.
We parked and approached the Bailey house. Ranger rang the bell and, just as expected, a man answered the door. Ranger introduced himself and handed the man the photographs.
“We’re looking for Evelyn Soder,” Ranger said. “We were hoping you might be able to help. Have you seen any of these people in the last couple days?”
“Why are you looking for this Soder woman?”
“Her ex-husband has been killed. Evelyn has been moving around lately, and her grandmother has lost touch with her. She’d like to make sure Evelyn knows about the death.”
“She was here with Dotty last night. They came just as I was leaving. They stayed overnight and left in the morning. I didn’t see much of them. And I don’t know where they were off to today. They were taking the little girls on some sort of field trip. Historical places. That sort of thing. Louise might know more. You could try reaching her at work.”
We returned to the car, and Ranger took us out of the neighborhood.
“We’re always one step behind,” I said.
“That’s the way it is with missing children. I’ve worked a lot of parental abduction cases, and they move around. Usually they go farther from home. And usually they stay in one place longer than a night. But the pattern is the same. By the time information on them comes in, they’re usually gone.”
“How do you catch them?”
“Persistence and patience. If you stick with it long enough, eventually you win. Sometimes it takes years.”
“Omigod, I haven’t got years. I’ll have to hide in the Bat Cave.”
“Once you go into the Bat Cave it’s forever, babe.”
“Try calling the women,” Ranger said. “The work number is in the file.”
Barbara Ann and Kathy were cautious. Both admitted that they’d seen Dotty and Evelyn and knew they were also
