Max shook his head. “Clara, I need to talk to the sheriff. He’s not going to like—”
“We need to go door to door in the trailer park, find someone who saw something,” I insisted. “Maybe we can find someone with information we can use to get a search warrant, to bring my mother and the rest of the family in for questioning.”
Max stared straight ahead, the muscles on the right side of his jaw working. I needed Max. This wasn’t Dallas, not even Texas. In Alber, in Utah, I had no authority to force anyone to do anything. He had to take the lead. “We’re going to do all that, right?”
Max raised an eyebrow. “You know as well as I do that the Amber Alert system won’t take any action without solid proof a child has been abducted and is in danger. Clara, you’re a cop. You know they don’t accept unsubstantiated reports. They want facts. The whole system is set up to block questionable reports.”
“I know, but—”
“No buts,” Max said, his patience fraying. “The system won’t take a vague report like this one, and you know it. We haven’t got a missing person report, no information on how or where Delilah was abducted. Not even when. All of that’s mandatory.”
I sat back and stared out the window. Max was right. The Amber Alert system was set up to only take concrete cases, not suspicions. It required information on how, where, and when abductions occurred. We didn’t even have solid evidence of a crime. “Okay, but we can list Delilah as a missing person on NCIC,” I said. Those guidelines were looser. It would only go out to law enforcement, but it was a place to start. “That’s possible.”
“How much interest are you going to get without even a photo of her or a description of how she disappeared?” he questioned.
“Max, you brought me here because your gut told you something is wrong. I agree. You’re right. And we have to do something,” I said.
“Clara, we can’t—”
“Any chance you know a friendly judge who might be willing to give us a search warrant? If we could get into the trailer, maybe talk to Lily…”
Max scoffed. “Is that the way you do it in Dallas? Judges sign warrants without probable cause? We don’t have enough to justify a warrant.”
“We have the note. We have Lily worried about Delilah. We need to do something. Delilah could be…” I saw the boy from Dallas again, his face in the photo his mother gave me, and I pictured his mutilated body. That couldn’t happen to Delilah. I couldn’t let it.
“I know. I’m worried about her, too.” As resistant as Max sounded, he didn’t disagree with anything I’d said. “Give me a couple of hours. I’ll find the sheriff and talk to him. I’ll do my best to get him on board.”
Two hours. That could be forever with Delilah in trouble.
“Max, I—”
“I can’t go off half-cocked on this, Clara,” Max snapped. “I went out on a limb to bring you here. Don’t make me regret it.”
The sun setting after a long day, the car filled with an uncomfortable silence, while outside Alber passed by. We reached the highway, and I thought about the photos of the woman and little girl in Max’s office. “You must have a family to get home to,” I said.
Max focused on the road, and his voice changed, growing suddenly weary. “My wife, Miriam, passed away a couple of years ago. Car accident.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” I replied.
“No way you could have.”
“You have children?” I asked.
“I have a daughter. Brooke is eight. My sister Alice watches over her.”
I noticed Max’s jaw tighten, and I had the sense that he wanted to say more but held back. We were childhood friends, and once there’d been the promise we might be much more, but time had made us strangers.
I thought of Max’s daughter. I thought again of Delilah. “Max, if it were Brooke missing, you would…”
“Move heaven and earth,” he admitted. “But this decision isn’t mine. I need the sheriff to agree. I’ll work hard to get that done. I promise.”
I sensed he meant it. “Okay. I’ll wait.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Still, I couldn’t just sit back with Delilah in danger. “While you track down the sheriff, I’ll go through the case file. Maybe there’s something in there you missed. You must have looked at similar cases in the area, abductions, sexual assaults of minors. I can get a handle on—”
Max didn’t wait for me to finish. “I wish there was a file to consider. There’s nothing in there but the note. That’s all we have.”
“Why didn’t you run reports?”
“I tried, but there aren’t any. No reports of sexual assaults showed up in the Alber area in the past five years.” Max sounded defensive. “Clara, you of all people know how private the town has always been, how little ever gets reported to anyone in authority.”
Everything Max said was true. From an early age, we were taught that our religious leaders handled what happened in the town. They held all the power, not secular institutions. I thought of what Mother had said, spitting out the words like an indictment: “We take care of our own.”
I turned to Max. “Of course. I should have realized we would have that complication. So there’s nothing there? Nothing to look at?”
“No. No reports. Nothing about any missing girls or sex crime convictions, even accusations against any of the locals. Nothing I could find.”
As we approached his office, I realized that Max looked drained. I would have felt sorry for him, if I wasn’t so worried about Delilah. “Clara, go to the shelter and I’ll
