Beatrice said, “Not as far as I know.” She thought about it. “No. We’ve seen her in shorts and tank tops all summer. We’d have seen tracks.”
“Wait.” Lionel held up a hand. “Just wait. We’re supposed to be looking for Amanda, not talking about my sister’s bad habits.”
“We have to know everything about Helene and her habits and her friends,” Angie said. “A child goes missing, usually the reason is close to home.”
Lionel stood up and his shadow filled the top of the desk. “What’s that mean?”
“Sit down,” Beatrice said.
“No. I need to know what that means. Are you suggesting my sister could have had something to do with Amanda’s disappearance?”
Angie watched him steadily. “You tell me.”
“No,” he said loudly. “Okay? No.” He looked down at his wife. “She’s not a criminal, okay? She’s a woman who’s lost her child. You know?”
Beatrice looked up at him, her face inscrutable.
“Lionel,” I said.
He stared down at his wife, then looked at Angie again.
“Lionel,” I said again, and he turned to me. “You said yourself it’s like Amanda disappeared into thin air. Okay. Fifty cops are looking for her. Maybe more. You two have been working on it. People in the neighborhood…”
“Yeah,” he said. “Lots of them. They’ve been great.”
“Okay. So where is she?”
He stared at me as if I might suddenly pull her out of my desk drawer.
“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes.
“No one does,” I said. “And if we’re going to look into this-and I’m not saying we will…”
Beatrice sat up in her chair and looked hard at me.
“But if, we have to work under the assumption that if she has been abducted, it was by someone close to her.”
Lionel sat back down. “You think she was taken.”
“Don’t you?” Angie said. “A four-year-old who ran off on her own wouldn’t still be out there after almost three full days without having been seen.”
“Yeah,” he said, as if facing something he’d known was true but had been holding at bay until now. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”
“So what do we do now?” Beatrice said.
“You want my honest opinion?” I said.
She cocked her head slightly, her eyes holding steadily with my own. “I’m not sure.”
“You have a son who’s about to enter school. Right?”
Beatrice nodded.
“Save the money you would have spent on us and put it toward his education.”
Beatrice’s head didn’t move; it stayed cocked slightly to the right, but for a moment she looked as if she’d been slapped. “You won’t take this case, Mr. Kenzie?”
“I’m not sure there’s any point to it.”
Beatrice’s voice rose in the small office. “A child is-”
“Missing,” Angie said. “Yes. But a lot of people are looking for her. The news coverage has been extensive. Everyone in this city and probably most of the state knows what she looks like. And, trust me, most of them have their eyes peeled for her.”
Beatrice looked at Lionel. Lionel gave her a small shrug. She turned from him and locked eyes with me again. She was a small woman, no more than five foot three. Her pale face, sparkled with freckles the same color as her hair, was heart-shaped, and there was a child’s roundness to her button nose and chin, the cheekbones that resembled acorns. But there was also a furious aura of strength about her, as if she equated yielding with dying.
“I came to you both,” she said, “because you find people. That’s what you do. You found that man who killed all those people a few years ago, you saved that baby and his mother in the playground, you-”
“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, holding up a hand.
“Nobody wanted me to come here,” she said. “Not Helene, not my husband, not the police. ‘You’d be wasting your money,’ everyone said. ‘She’s not even your child,’ they said.”
“Honey.” Lionel put his hand on hers.
She shook it off, leaned forward until her arms were propped on the desk and her sapphire eyes were holding mine.
“Mr. Kenzie, you can find her.”
“No,” I said softly. “Not if she’s hidden well enough. Not if a lot of people who are just as good at this as we are haven’t been able to find her either. We’re just two more people, Mrs. McCready. Nothing more.”
“Your point?” Her voice was low again, and icy.
“Our point,” Angie said, “is what help could two more sets of eyes be?”
“What harm, though?” Beatrice said. “Can you tell me that? What harm?”
2
From a detective’s perspective once you rule out running away or abduction by a parent, a child’s disappearance is similar to a murder case: If it’s not solved within seventy-two hours, it’s unlikely it ever will be. That doesn’t necessarily mean the child is dead, though the probability is high. But if the child is alive, she’s definitely worse off than when she went missing. Because there’s very little gray area in the motivations of adults who encounter children who aren’t their own; you either A, help that child or, B, exploit her. And while the methods of exploitation vary-ransoming children for money, using them for labor, abusing them sexually for personal and/or profit concerns, murdering them-none of them stems from benevolence. And if the child doesn’t die and is eventually found, the scars run so deep that the poison can never be removed from her blood.
In the last four years, I’d killed two men. I’d watched my oldest friend and a woman I barely knew die in front of me. I’d seen children desecrated in the worst possible ways, met men and women who killed as if it were a reflex action, watched relationships burn in the violence with which I’d actively surrounded myself.
And I was tired of it.
Amanda McCready had been missing for at least sixty hours by this point, maybe as long as seventy, and I didn’t want to find her stuffed in a Dumpster somewhere, her hair matted with blood. I didn’t want to find her six months down the road, vacant-eyed and used up by some freak with a video camera and a mailing list of pedophiles. I didn’t want to look in a four-year-old’s eyes and see the death of everything that had been pure in her.
I didn’t want to find Amanda McCready. I wanted someone else to.
But maybe because I’d become as caught up in this case over the last few days as the rest of the city, or maybe because it had happened here in my neighborhood, or maybe just because “four-year-old” and “missing” aren’t words that should go together in the same sentence, we agreed to meet Lionel and Beatrice McCready at Helene’s apartment in half an hour.
“You’ll take the case, then?” Beatrice said, as she and Lionel stood.
“That’s what we need to discuss between ourselves,” I said.
“But-”
“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, “things are done a certain way in this business. We have to consult privately before we agree to anything.”
Beatrice didn’t like it, but she also realized there was very little she could do about it.
“We’ll drop by Helene’s in half an hour,” I said.
“Thank you,” Lionel said, and tugged his wife’s sleeve.
“Yes. Thanks,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound real sincere. I had a feeling that nothing less than a
