could see the end of the detective business. He was being pinched. On one side there were huge security companies that provided an umbrella service against unpleasantness. They monitored alarm and surveillance systems for businesses, swept offices and phones for bugs, took care of paper shredding and burning, did background checks on employees, rivals, and customers. They supplied bodyguards for foreign travel, and forensic specialists for testifying in court.
On the other side, there were small, low-end operators. Those guys would tap telephones, do black-bag jobs to steal papers from offices and houses, threaten or beat up opposition witnesses. They seemed to spend every day with one foot in a jail cell. But the other foot was in the bank, on the way in to cash a fat check.
Phil wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next, but he had said several times that he was in a game he was losing gradually, and all he could do was try to make his chips last as long as possible. Now maybe he had decided it was time to stand up and cash in.
According to Ray, for a couple of years, Phil hadn’t been able to concentrate on the actual cases that came in. He seemed to have occupied his time looking for grand strategies and shortcuts. If he could have gotten to work again-really working-he might not have felt this way.
During one of these conversations Emily had wondered aloud if he was in a midlife crisis. He had been insulted. What the hell was a midlife crisis? Were troubles supposed to happen only when you were a child or a dying man? He supposed that if he made it to ninety, then fortyfive was the exact definition of midlife. And he was sure as hell in a crisis. He had to do something that worked soon.
Phil’s written narrative said: “For several years, Kramer Investigations had been running at a deficit. I had cut costs by not replacing personnel who left. I had been keeping the business going by using my family savings to keep the office open and the employees paid.” Emily stopped. There it was: the explanation of where the money had gone, and the halfhearted way he had been running the office. He had been trying to keep it alive.
Phil continued: “I had begun a project of going through the company archives to find clients with open accounts.” He was reading the files of his agency’s old cases, looking for money. He assembled a list of deadbeats. He started a policy of reissuing bills to them, even if their cases were ten years old. Emily felt a sad closeness to him, because she had seen the letters in the files. As of May, the billings had not been a startling success, but April’s wheedling had brought in a few dollars. Then, while he had been finding open accounts, he had noticed another kind of client: those he or his detectives had served especially well, and who had businesses that might require help again.
He started to build a mailing list of satisfied clients to remind them that Kramer Investigations was still around and still cared about them. A lot of companies did that and thrived. After a few weeks of work, he hit on the file of Theodore Forrest. It had been eight years.
Phil admitted he wasn’t sure exactly what services a man like Forrest might need after eight years. But as Phil looked at the case file, he wrote, he “felt proud of how effective Kramer Investigations had been.” He and Sam had found Forrest’s daughter when several police forces and big security companies had failed. He and Sam had managed to snatch her off the street and deliver her to her father unharmed and without leaving a hint of how it had happened. The girl could go on with her life as though she had never had her little breakdown. It occurred to Phil that in the eight years that had passed, time had not stood still for Allison, either. She would be twentyfour or twentyfive. She had almost certainly gone to college, graduated, and done something with herself by now.
As Emily read the next portion, she could tell that Phil’s mind was sparked, ideas blazing in his mind, each igniting others. Forrest had been obsessed with his daughter. He had wanted her back so badly that he had been willing to do just about anything, to pay just about anything. And Phil Kramer had delivered her. When it was over, he had not taken advantage, he had not padded the bill. He could have invented ten or fifteen imaginary operatives, or gotten thousands in cash to pay rewards to imaginary informants. He could have done almost anything, and Forrest would have paid and then thanked him. Maybe now, Forrest would consider paying a retainer for a permanent all-purpose security service, like the big companies offered.
Eight years was a long time. Maybe by now Allison Forrest had married. Maybe she had a husband Forrest wanted watched. She could even have a baby or two. Forrest would be the sort of grandfather who would pay for surveillance to be sure no harm ever came to his grandchildren. And whom could Forrest trust more than the detective agency that had saved his daughter from ending up as a teenaged prostitute or an unidentified body in the L.A. County Morgue?
The fact that Kramer Investigations had never tried to capitalize on the case would help a lot. In eight years, Phil had never even used Theodore Forrest as a reference. He had kept everything confidential to protect the family’s privacy. Emily knew the truth was that he had kept it quiet because of the girl. Phil genuinely liked women, and the idea of compromising a young girl’s reputation would have been unthinkable to him. But he was not in a position to turn down additional work if the Forrests happened to feel gratitude he had legitimately earned.
It was clear that he saw the Forrest family as a potential solution to a lot of his financial troubles. There were big, complicated familybusiness interests to protect. There were undoubtedly pieces of real estate to watch, employees to clear. There were probably deals all the time that would be safer if the parties on the other side were the subjects of quiet, discreet investigations.
He recorded his uncertainty about how to approach Theodore Forrest that day. He looked in the case file for the telephone numbers, picked the home number, and started to dial, then stopped. It had been eight years. What if something had happened in the past eight years that he ought to know about? If there had been some major event, Forrest might say, “Some detective,” and hang up. Eight years was enough time for some fundamental change, and it was more than enough time for Forrest to forget how pleased he had been with Phil’s work.
Phil turned to his computer and began to run searches. At first all he discovered was that Forrest Enterprises was mentioned a few times a year in regional newspapers in Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento, and even San Jose. But Theodore Forrest was almost never in the article. Phil tried typing in the girl’s name-Allison Forrest, Fresno, California.
In Phil’s narrative, he described the entire process. His computer screen had said: “Your search for Allison Forrest, Fresno, California returned no results.” He deleted the request and typed “Allison + Missing.” In seconds the search engines threw up dozens of references: “Allison Missing,” “Still No Sign of Missing Girl.” Of course there would have been local news reports from years ago. The fact that she had been missing was why he knew Theodore Forrest at all: Private detectives and cops met rich people only when disasters happened. He kept searching for something that sounded more recent. Finally he found a Web site titled “Allison’s Story,” and up it came.
Emily could imagine what it must have looked like: At first the opening page appeared in a small window in the center of his screen. He clicked on the Enlarge box and it blew up, the pale white face coming at him like a swimmer rising toward him from the bottom of a lake. The picture was a reproduction of a newspaper article. The caption: BODY OF MISSING GIRL FOUND.
There was a printout of the page in the file that Emily was reading. She could see that it was a picture of the same young girl that was in the snapshots. She could tell that seeing her face again must have been a shock to Phil.
She could almost hear Phil making that sound of surprise, just a quiet “Uh” as though he had tripped. He would have turned instinctively to exclaim to someone about what was on his screen, but there was nobody to tell. Sam Bowen had retired two years ago and moved to Seattle. Ray and Dewey and Bill were probably out of the office on jobs, and he had never told even Ray much about the case. The only one always in the agency office in the middle of the day was April, and she was beyond the glass wall, on the telephone. Even though he must have felt affection for her, the idea of telling her any of this would have seemed impossible to him.
Phil described the difficulty he had trying to understand the article. The name was Allison, and the picture was Allison Forrest, but it said she was dead. Could the paper have made some weird mistake at the time when Allison was missing?-maybe assumed some unidentified body was hers and printed her picture? He looked at the date at the top of the article. It was November eight years ago, a few months after he had brought Allison home alive and well. This made no sense. Maybe the mistake was that some other girl was missing and had been found dead, but the paper had accidentally used an old picture from the time when Allison Forrest had disappeared.
Phil said he looked at the screen and forced himself to scroll down and read the article-just as Emily read it now. The article said the girl’s name was Allison Straight. She had been found in an abandoned irrigation ditch on a large farm ten miles outside Mendota. The ditch was just a trench about five feet wide and four deep that ran alongside a huge empty field about five hundred yards from a road. The trench was part of an old irrigation system
