seen as far west as Fairfax at Farmers Market. On the east she went as far as Crescent Heights. If she was on Wilshire, she’d go a little farther, at least as far as the art museum. It was like the territory of a cat, and for the same reasons. She was always on foot, and she wanted to skirt the dens of the scary animals. She went where she felt safe.”
“Was she hiding?”
“She didn’t want to be found, but she was just a kid. She thought all she had to do was travel to someplace new and call herself by another name. Once she was in Los Angeles, she forgot about laying low, and started to go places where other people would see her. She was on an adventure in the big city. I don’t think she ever thought Forrest would hire anybody to find her.”
“But you found her?”
“We did. Once we had mapped her territory, we picked some places for a blind.”
“A blind?”
“A place to wait for her to come by. We got a plain white van with no windows in the back. We would put a different sign on the side of it every day, then park it and sit inside to wait. We figured the time to concentrate on was evening, from dark until maybe two in the morning. It was the best time to spot her because there weren’t as many people out, and it was also the best time to do what we were planning.”
“What was it?”
“We were going to jump out of the van, flash some badges, handcuff her like we were arresting her, and drive off.”
“My God, Sam! What could you have done that was more illegal than that?”
“I know. If we were caught in the act, there wouldn’t be much we could say about the badges and so on. But when the target is a minor, and you’re carrying the father’s written permission to use whatever force is necessary to bring his daughter back, you have a certain leeway.”
“Did you get her that way?”
“We didn’t have much luck at first. We sat and smoked cigarettes and stared at everybody on the street, then went home. The next night we would do it again. After she didn’t turn up for seven nights in one spot, we would move to the next one. She had been gone a long time by then. We figured she must have a job or a boyfriend, a place to live, and fake ID, so it wasn’t just looking for a lost person hanging on a corner. She had choices. But the thing was, we had plenty of time to do it right, because the money was behind us.”
“What did Forrest say?”
“When we called him to tell him we were getting recent sightings from people-that his daughter wasn’t dead, in other words-you should have heard him. We were all happy. Listening to him made us feel good. If we had asked him for a million dollars, he would have written the check. After he hung up, we replayed the recording, and I laughed so hard I thought I was going to have a stroke.”
“Recording? Phil recorded the call? Why?”
“Well, think about it. We’re about to do something that could get us arrested. He had written us a note giving us permission, but Phil wasn’t going to take any chances. I mean, what if he said later that it was a forgery, or even that he’d never heard of us?”
“I guess your arrest would be a conviction.”
“That was our guess, too. But at that point, the guy was ready to drive down here to be in the van when we grabbed her. As you can imagine, Phil didn’t let him.”
“Why not?”
“We knew where she had been a week ago and two nights ago, but not tonight. Also, he was an amateur, a first-timer. We were trying to grab a young girl off a public street, and the only way you want to do that is if you can do a convincing cop. I had been a cop, so I wasn’t acting. Phil was a cop in the marines, so he wasn’t really, either. Part of our credibility was that this Allison girl had never seen me or Phil. If she saw her father on a street, even four hundred miles from home, she would certainly recognize him and take off.”
“So you were expecting her to resist?” asked Emily. “Wouldn’t it be just as likely she would see him and want to come home?”
“If she did, she knew the phone number. And if she wanted to surprise him, she knew the way home.”
“But to take her against her will-“
“You know better than that, Emily. In this state, a sixteenyear-old doesn’t have a will, legally. She does what her parents tell her.”
“I’m not talking about legal fictions.”
“Neither am I. You know any success stories about runaway girls in L.A.? We weren’t sure how she had gotten that far, but neither of us could think of any possible future for her that wasn’t a disaster. I mean, she’s got one thing to trade. We were convinced that we were saving her life.”
Emily was silent.
“So we did it. One night we happened to be in the sweet spot. The van had a sign on it that night that said TWENTY FOUR-HOUR PLUMBING. We parked it right off Hollywood, halfway up on the curb with orange safety cones behind it. We had the back door open so you could see one of those rooter machines Phil had rented that day, and the effect was great. I mean, what fake has one of those things?”
“And?”
“Along comes Allison. It’s around midnight. She comes right along the sidewalk from the direction of those old apartments around Fountain. I don’t know if she was crashing there with somebody she had met, or she just happened to like the route. I came from the building side and Phil came from the truck. We scooped her up and packed her into the back of the truck. Phil went in after her, and I drove off.”
“Didn’t she fight or scream or anything?”
“For a couple of seconds, I could hear her kicking and stuff. But then Phil handcuffed her and put a plastic restraint on her ankles. All the while he was reciting the Miranda warning. It’s a great way to calm somebody down. It intimidates them, but persuades them in a deep way that nothing freaky is happening to them. They’re still in a world where if everything goes wrong, they’re going to court. It also tells them that you think what you say to them matters-that the truth matters. So she went limp and stayed quiet for a long time. We were on the freeway nearly to Camarillo before she figured out we weren’t taking her to the station. She got really agitated, and we had to give her a little something to keep her quiet.”
“You drugged her?” Emily was horrified. “With what?”
“Phil gave her a little shot of something. I think it was that stuff that the doctors give you to put you down before they anesthetize you. Thiopental sodium or something.”
“Where in the world did he get it?”
“You know how Phil was. He had connections with everybody. People did things for him.”
“I know he cheated on me, Sam. I think we can assume he talked some woman pharmacist or nurse he knew into giving him the drug.”
Sam looked at her sadly. “He felt bad, Emily. He always felt like hell after. He really loved you.”
“Just tell me the story.”
Sam’s eyes didn’t move from her face. “It sometimes helps to forgive people for things like that. People have weaknesses.”
“They sure do,” she said. “Phil got some nurse to risk a prison term to give him a needle full of a sedative, and he risked killing the client’s daughter by shooting it into her in the back of a van. Is that about it?”
“That’s about it. For the rest of the trip she was okay and didn’t fight or feel scared. He stayed in the back with her to keep an eye on her pulse and breathing. He had been trained to handle battlefield first aid, and I had been a cop for twenty years.” He paused. “I can see that look on your face, and you’re wrong, Em. If there had been a bad reaction or something, he would have told me, and we would have rushed her to the nearest hospital, even if it meant the next stop would be jail. We were doing a job, taking a young, misguided girl back to her family, which had the resources to help her. If it was drug rehab, or psychiatric help, or just sending her a check for a few thousand a month, she was going to be better off.”
“How did it end?”
“We delivered her to her father at a ranch in the Central Valley. I recognized it from some of the pictures he had given us. There was a sign at the front gate that said ESPINOZA RANCH. There was a big living room he called the `great room,’ with beams made from tree trunks, and a stone fireplace and Tiffany chandeliers and oriental
