“No signs of foul play,” Zackis said. “No blood, nothing broken, no sign of forced entry. No hint of a weapon. Neighbors saw nothing.”
“You put out a Missing Person?”
“Yep. Nothing. Not a peep,” Zackis said.
“Neighbors shed any light?”
“Nope, pleasant couple,” Zackis said. “She was a little older than he was. Both of them were friendly enough. Didn’t bother nobody.”
“How about the car?” I said.
“Missing,” Zackis said. “Turned up a few months later in a parking lot at a mall in Toledo.”
We were quiet for a time. At the next desk another detective, with his feet up, was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife.
“This ain’t Cleveland, you know? Or Chicago. This is a little-city police department. Most of the time we get it done, but we don’t have a ton of resources. Anne Marie Turner has a sister in Lexington, Kentucky. I actually went over there and talked with her.”
He shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Mail?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Bills, flyers, bank statements, no per sonal letters to either one of them.”
“Credit card statements?”
“Usual, nothing caught your eye and after . . .” He looked at the file. “August twenty-sixth, no activity at all. He cleaned out both their bank accounts on September seventeenth.”
“I know,” I said.
“We haven’t cleared the case,” Zackis said. “But we haven’t closed it either. Every once in a while, when it’s a slow day, one of us revisits it, and comes up as empty as the rest of us.”
I nodded.
“Ever hear of a guy named Perry Alderson?” I said.
“Perry Alderson,” Zackis said. “I’ve heard that name some where. Perry Alderson.”
He rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully for a moment. Then he stood up.
“Lemme check something,” he said.
Zackis went out of the squad room. The dick that was cleaning his fi ngernails looked at me.
“You private?” he said.
“Yep.”
“How’s that pay?”
“Not so good in this life,” I said. “But in Paradise you get all the virgins you want.”
He looked at me for a moment and then said, “I guess maybe I’ll stay here, wait out my pension.”
Zackis came back into the squad room with a piece of paper.
“I knew I’d seen the name,” Zackis said.
He handed it to me. It was a Missing Persons circular on Perry Alderson with a picture, probably from a driver’s license. I’d never seen him before.
“Erie police put it out,” Zackis said. “Missing Person on a guy named Perry Alderson. Same year that the Turners went south.”
“In Erie?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Nice memory,” I said.
Zackis grinned.
“Made me think of Perry Mason,” Zackis said. “I know a guy up there, want me to call him?”
“More than you know,” I said.
56.
The cop in erie was named Tommy Remick.
“Alderson had a charter boat,” he told me after Zackis handed me the phone. “Fishing. Sightseeing. That kind of thing. One morning it shows up empty, half aground near the marina where he kept it. No sign of him or anyone else. No evidence of foul play.”
“When was this?”
“September thirteenth, 1994,” Remick said.
