I had the tag number, description of the car, so I got out my cell phone and called Fairchild.
“Now what, Angel?”
“I just saw your kid, Detective. Me, America’s foremost finder of missing per—”
“Where?”
“—sons. South Virginia Street. Driving a Pontiac Grand Am, white, couple years old. Last I saw her, she turned off Virginia, east on Vassar. Shanna was with her.” I gave him the license plate of the Pontiac, and he hung up on me, probably felt he had things to do, but he didn’t give me time to give him a description of the girls, an oversight that was likely to bite him in the ass.
Okay, then. C’est la vie.
I went back to my car, headed east on Vassar keeping my eyes open, but the neighborhood was a vast rectangular grid, too many turns and exits, so I came up empty. I did, however, see a sudden increase in the number of police cars patrolling the streets between Virginia Street and Kietzke Lane.
Now what?
Fairchild and sixty or eighty police officers probably had the streets covered. Danya and Shanna’s rental house was a beehive of crime scene activity. I couldn’t think of any other place to look. I’d gotten damn lucky, finding them at the bank—luck being the reason Russell had hired me. But luck runs in streaks, and I felt like this streak had about run its course.
So, time to make my own luck.
I drove back to Velma’s place, got my bag of clues, checked her drain again, still suckin’ it down, then went back home and sat in the kitchen sorting through the things I’d gathered, trying to find a thread I could pull to unravel this sweater. A longneck of Pete’s Wicked Ale didn’t help, but didn’t seem to hurt, either. Fairchild wanted me to skate around the fuzzy edge of the law, avoiding the kind of rules that did nothing but get in the way. Speaking of which, I’d gotten away with a felony or two, which pleased me enough that I rewarded myself with another Pete’s.
The stuff I’d found on Jo-X were the felonies. Ripping the downspout off the side of the house was probably no more than a misdemeanor so it barely counted. Maybe I should’ve kept it as a souvenir. I mean, the downspout of the place where Jo-X was last seen decomposing? You kiddin’? I could have picked up five grand on eBay once things cooled down.
But now, when I thought about it, I had reached the end of this rope, spinning my wheels, hitting a brick wall, mixing metaphors, so I opened a third Wicked Ale and considered other options.
At 5:05 that afternoon, Fairchild called me. I was standing in the kitchen looking out at the backyard, reluctantly coming to the conclusion that things had run their course here in Reno and I was going to have to head south. Vegas was calling; its voice was getting louder. And Caliente. And hot desert temperatures of a hundred five, hundred ten degrees. Things pointed that way, not very tangible or compelling, but in Reno, nothing was pointing anywhere, nothing that wouldn’t be neck-deep in police.
“Didn’t find her,” Fairchild said. He sounded tired. “We got the car. Danya borrowed it yesterday from a boy she knew up at the university, left it on the street in front of his house in Sparks. But they got away somehow.”
Maybe because they were in disguise, Russ? Could that have been it?
So they’d made it as far as Sparks, then ditched the car. Sparks is so close to Reno you could set a McDonald’s cup on the border between them and the two cities would wage a pitched battle to determine whose union workers would pick it up.
“How close was the car to a bus stop?” I asked.
Silence. “Well, shit on a biscuit. I’ll have to check that.”
He hung up again.
I fired up a grill and cooked a couple of burgers, ate them with a plate of beans, tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do in Vegas. Finally I decided to wing it, which is what I do.
Six eighteen p.m., Russell was back on the phone. “Checked with the bus driver on the nearest route, two other nearby routes. No one saw Danya or Shanna.”
“Sorry about that, Russ.”
“You come up with any more ideas?” An indication of just how desperate he was, treating me as an equal. Or more.
“Working on some stuff,” I told him. “Nothing definite yet. I’ll let you know if I get anywhere.”
He wanted to know more about the “stuff” I was working on, but that wasn’t our deal. I work best when I skate around the murky edge of the law, which meant working alone. He told me Danya still wasn’t answering her cell. They’d pinged her GPS but still hadn’t gotten anything. She had a credit card but hadn’t used it. Finally, he hung up, unhappy because his kid was doing things he associated with criminal behavior—or using the kind of tricks she’d learned by having a cop for a father.
A hundred ten degrees. The Toyota would hate that, hate Vegas, leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere just for spite. I phoned a car rental place near the airport and ordered up a car for tomorrow morning.
I had five grand. I could run up a hefty credit card bill and pay it in full later, so I made the car a good one.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS A convertible—a silver Ford Mustang, three hundred ten horsepower, 6-speed manual transmission, great for laying rubber. I thought a convertible would be fun after driving around last summer in Jeri’s Porsche with the top down. Paying for it with Fair-child’s money was like the cherry on top of a smokin’ hot sundae. I figured he owed me fresh air after all the secondhand smoke he’d subjected me to a year ago when we were sorting out
