“Tinsley is our middle child and our only daughter,” Mrs. Gerrigan said. “She’s a good girl but sometimes a little misguided.”
Misguided had been a carefully selected adjective, the only tell a slight pause before she’d said it. I studied Violet Gerrigan. Her face was emotionless. She could win a lot in poker hands.
“How would you define a little misguided?” I asked.
“Sometimes she has no regard for rules or protocol,” Mrs. Gerrigan said, her jaws visibly clenching. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s not rebellious to the point of making trouble for herself or others. But of all my children she has always been the free spirit. She does what she wants and to hell with anyone who disagrees. But she has never been in trouble with the law or a problem in school. Always made excellent grades.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-five.”
“So, she’s old enough to make her own decisions even if they don’t exactly mesh with yours or your husband’s.”
“Sure, but Tinsley still lives under our roof, Mr. Cayne,” Mrs. Gerrigan said firmly. “And as long as she does, we make the rules. Her age is irrelevant.”
“I understand,” I said. “My father put the same conditions on my living in his house after college. I lasted just shy of a month. Maybe Tinsley got the same itch.”
“Tinsley didn’t leave us on her own. She’s gone off before without any notice, but this time is different. She was supposed to be going to her best friend’s house two days ago. She left our house and never made it there and never came home. I believe something or someone has stopped her from returning.”
“Any idea who that someone or something might be?”
“None.”
I took a moment and let silence fill the room. This made whatever I said next seem as if it came from serious thinking. I had learned this trick from my psychiatrist father. He liked to call it the “pause of deep intellect.”
“It’s a reflex for us to look for the most complicated answers to the simplest of questions,” I finally said.
Her left eyebrow arched again, this time about a millimeter higher than the last time. “Which means?” she said.
“I don’t presume to know your family dynamics,” I said. “But maybe Tinsley just had enough. She’s in her midtwenties. It’s a big, exciting world out there. Sometimes a kid just decides it’s time to cut the cord.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Cayne, I know my daughter,” she said. “And this is not how she would do it. She and her father are extremely close. At the very least, she would tell him.”
I studied her face and couldn’t help but notice how perfectly her makeup had been applied. Violet Gerrigan wasn’t my type of woman, but she was definitely starting to grow on me. Her composure for a mother missing a daughter was remarkable.
“Nothing has been taken from her room from what I can tell,” Mrs. Gerrigan said. “Clothes, jewelry, luggage, personal items—it’s all in perfect order. And more importantly, Tabitha is still at the house.”
“Who’s Tabitha?”
“Her three-year-old shih tzu. Tinsley would never leave without that dog. Worships every inch of ground she walks on.”
I was already trying to assemble everything she had told me so far. Lots of holes needed to be filled in, but my curiosity had been piqued. “I assume you’ve spoken to this friend who she went to see a couple of nights ago,” I said.
“Of course we did,” Mrs. Gerrigan said, as if the question had offended her. Her next words got stuck in her throat. Her neck twitched a bit. “Hunter has no idea where she is. She said that Tinsley never made it to her house that night.”
After Violet Gerrigan pulled herself together and we discussed my fee and operational procedures, she wrote a very generous retainer for my services, then left as distinctly aristocratic as she had arrived. I stood at the window behind my desk, which looked out onto Michigan Avenue. A thin Asian man in a black uniform and matching cap dutifully stood outside a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom, whose shiny front grill looked like it was heavy enough to need a crane to pry it loose. I saw him make a sudden move, and in seconds he had the door open and had ushered Mrs. Gerrigan into the back seat. I stood there and watched as the car slowly pulled up Michigan Avenue, looking like a gleaming yacht among rowboats. As I lost the taillights in the snaking traffic, there was one question I couldn’t get out of my mind. Why had Violet Gerrigan come without her husband?
I picked up my cell phone and called in a favor from a friend in CPD’s Bureau of Investigative Services. Want to find a twentysomething these days? Start with their phone and their digital footprint.
2
THE MORGAN FAMILY ESTATE sat auspiciously in the 4900 block of Greenwood Avenue in the historic mansion district of Kenwood, an exclusive enclave within the Hyde Park neighborhood. This landmark community just minutes south of downtown boasted one of the greatest densities of millionaires in the city. The tree-lined streets had been featured in every significant architectural magazine, the coverage always anchored by the rambling Adler mansion, built at the turn of the twentieth century for Max Adler, vice president of retail giant Sears and Roebuck and founder of the city’s Adler Planetarium. Each gated mansion, vividly unique in design, quietly battled its equally imposing neighbors. Tall maple trees formed a canopy over the wide street as small armies of olive-skinned landscapers diligently tended to the manicured lawns.
I had been to this neighborhood once before purely out of curiosity. A year after making detective I had been told the story of
