Long Gone

heart, people were wired to comply with authority.

“Federal?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s urgent. My guess is, if I call corporate, they’ll have me hammer out a subpoena. Not a problem, of course, but it’s a delay. All I need is a name.” He heard another urgent voice in the background, and added in the kicker. “We have reason to believe that, in addition to the crimes we are investigating, whoever rented that car has switched the license plates on it, which could be an indication that he’s planning to use the car as an instrumentality of criminal activity. I’m sure Quick wouldn’t want one of its cars to be the next suspicious vehicle abandoned in Times Square. If you want verification that I’m at the FBI, I can give you the number of my office down here at Federal Plaza, and you can give me a call back.”

The voice in the background got louder. Something like, If you’d ever get off that phone.

“Okay, give me that VIN again?”

He recited the numbers.

“Well, this is funny. The computer says it’s no longer in our inventory.”

“Why would that be? Do you sell cars out of your fleet?”

“Oh. Wait. This is a gray BMW 335i sedan? Says it was last checked in at a garage on Fourteenth Street.”

“That means something?”

“Oh, hell. I remember this. Some fool at that garage let some lady just run off with the keys.”

“It was stolen?”

“Oh, hell yeah. Must have been around a month ago. Now, you’re calling the central location, where every car on this lot’s a QuickCar, and I work directly for the company. But we keep our cars at garages all over the city, just a few cars here and there scattered at private lots for customer convenience. Not everyone’s gonna pay the same kind of attention to the cars, you know what I’m saying?”

“So one of the private garage attendants let his guard down?”

“Let his something down. All he could say afterward was that some pretty lady was asking questions about how the QuickCar rentals worked. He left to dig out a buried car for a resident. Next thing he knew, she was gone, and so was the Beemer.”

“He said it was a woman by herself?”

“Yeah. A white girl. A pretty white girl with long red hair.”

Chapter Nineteen

E ven with his eyes closed, Morhart would have known his location simply from the squeaks and boing s echoing down the hallway. The squeaks of rubber and the boing s of leather against maple. Nothing sounded quite like an indoor basketball court. This particular court, down this particular hallway, was familiar territory to Morhart, but Linwood High School felt so much smaller than it had when he graduated sixteen years earlier.

Lingering inside the double doors to check out the team’s practice, he recognized Dan Hunter right away from his Facebook photos. The players were in uniform, sprinting from half court to baseline, tagging the floor with their fingertips at each end. Hunter kept up okay step for step, but by the time the team was ten laps in, he lagged half a court back from the pack and would have eventually gotten lapped if the coach hadn’t blown the whistle. Next were rapid layups. The students fell into line, a few paces between them, each galloping toward the basket for a one- handed reach. This time Hunter wasn’t the worst, but he was no Air Jordan, apparently both slower and more prone to gravity than the average team member.

But then came the outside shots. Twelve boys formed an arc around the three-point line, hurling ball after ball after ball. Some throws ricocheted hard off the backboard. Some barely skimmed the metal rim. The coach shook his head as the number of airballs multiplied. But one kid was swooshing balls through the net, seven out of ten. Dan Hunter could shoot.

The shrillness of the whistle halted the cacophony of bouncing leather and squeaking rubber. Morhart stepped onto the court and raised a friendly wave. “Coach, you got a second?”

Not much older than Morhart himself, David DeCicco had started at Linwood High long after Morhart’s own years here, but he’d gotten to know the man two years earlier when Linwood’s starting center broke the wrist of a girl who dared to break up with him the day before prom. A lot of coaches would have been tempted to protect one of their best players, but DeCicco had walked into the station on his own to report that he’d once seen the player grab his girlfriend’s arm when she tried to walk away from him at a postgame party. Morhart had felt the man’s guilt for having looked the other way at the time. He heard later from the girl’s parents that the coach kicked the kid off the team and brought in a guidance counselor to talk to the other boys about teenage dating violence.

“Water break, guys, but no wandering off.” DeCicco shook Morhart’s hand. “Any chance you just had a sudden urge to watch a basketball practice, Detective?”

“Something like that. What can you tell me about Dan Hunter?”

“Aw, Jesus. Hunter? He’s the only man I got who can shoot from the outside. What the hell did he go and do?”

Morhart raised his palm. “Nothing like that, Coach. I’m talking to anyone who might have some insight into that missing girl, Becca Stevenson.”

DeCicco made the same tsk sound Morhart was already accustomed to hearing after every mention of Becca’s name.

“I wouldn’t have thought Hunter would even know that girl.”

“Why do you say that?”

He squinted. “You know how kids are. Cliques. Popularity contests. The social hierarchies, if you will. Hunter’s a jock. My thirteen-year-old daughter tells me he’s a cutey patootie. Her words, not mine. He’s into, you know, cheerleaders and pep squad girls with perky smiles and, well, perky everything, not that I try to notice. A girl like Becca-”

He cut himself off, but Morhart urged him to complete the thought. DeCicco glanced around and lowered his voice. “I’ll be blunt. She’s an odd bird. Had her in American History last year. I’m sure she’s a decent kid, but there’s something that’s, I don’t know, just off. Sullen. Dark. Probably very insecure. Something almost broken about her, but, you know, no big behavioral problems, no signs of abuse, no obvious indications of drug use. Not positive enough to really be engaged in school, but not quite bad off enough to be one of the problem children.”

“Invisible.”

“Exactly. One of those invisible kids. Look, I know the reality about a lot of my guys. For most of them, these will be the heydays. They’ll wind up going to JuCo at best, and they’ll never leave this town. But at least they’ll have their years in this building, with the cheering in the stadium and the letter jackets and the pretty girls to look back on as some moment in their lives when they were something. The kids my guys pick on? They’ll wind up inventing the next electric car or something. They’ll date supermodels and buy Italian villas or whatever, and will look back on this place as a joke. But then there are kids like Becca. These sad kids who don’t have much happiness now and give you the feeling they’ll never have anything in the future.”

“That’s fucking depressing.”

“Needless to say, I’m a little more encouraging to my players. Save the armchair psychology for the grown- ups.”

“And what would the shrink have to say about Dan Hunter if it turns out he was spending time with the Stevenson girl?”

He waited a full five seconds before answering. “He’s not a bad kid, but he’s not inherently good either. His ethics are, how can I put this? Situational.”

Hunter sported the shaggy hair that young kids seemed to favor these days, resorting to a series of lopsided head spasms to flip his long bangs out of his eyes. He swept the back of his hand across his face to wipe away some of the sweat.

“Coach said you wanted to see me?”