“Go!” she orders when she pulls back. “Please be careful, Tony. Call with any news. Any time,” she adds as she pushes me out the door.
Chapter Twenty-One
Detective Jake Plummer, bless his heart, has answered my panicked plea for help the following morning. Brittany still hasn’t been heard from, nor has Bobby Harland. They were last seen departing the drama meeting just after seven o’clock last night. After I finally got home to find neither Brittany nor any indication that she’d been there, Pat had called the cops to file a missing person report.
I watch from inside a busy Dunkin’ near Cedar Heights PD headquarters as Jake exits his unmarked police car and hustles inside. Cops and others mill about, coming and going in a cacophony of conversations and shouted orders. The scents of baking, coffee, and fast-food cooking compete for olfactory supremacy.
“Coffee?” he mouths after he gets into the order line.
I shake my head and point at the cup sitting in front of me, my tenth or twentieth of the interminable night and morning. I fidget nervously until Jake finally slips into the molded plastic seat on the opposite side of my table for two. He arrives with a tall coffee and—what else for a cop?—two doughnuts.
“Yeah, yeah,” he sighs when he catches me looking. “A cop and his doughnuts.”
I don’t reply, just sit and watch him getting organized with sugar and creamers and napkins. He chatters while he does. “Still bugs me that the corporate dicks who run this joint dropped the word Donut to change the name to Dunkin’,” he continues without waiting for an answer. “It’s a doughnut shop! I don’t even wanna think about how much this boondoggle costs me every time I buy a damned doughnut. Supposed to appeal to younger customers or some such bullshit. Read somewhere that they kept the pink-and-orange color scheme to reassure old farts like me that I’m still welcome. Bunch of corporate doublespeak, if you ask me. I swear to God, we should be sending young cops to the overblown ego-stoking productions these corporate executives indulge in to herald the latest and greatest BS they’re peddling. Great way to teach rookies how to spot someone spouting a line of horseshit. Good practice for the interrogation room.”
I’ve got other things on my mind. “Thanks for coming, Jake.”
“No problem,” he says before he bites off half a doughnut in a single go. He chews and swallows. “Max is back from Italy. Says he could happily live in that little Italian village Francesco is holed up in. He stuck around for a few extra days to make sure everything seemed to be okay and fell in love with the place.”
Jake’s detective game face slides into place when he looks up from his doughnut and finds me sitting mute and disinterested in his news. “What’s up?”
I fill him in on the events of last night and conclude, “They’re still missing.”
Jake pushes the doughnuts and coffee aside, plunks his notebook on the table, and starts scribbling while he walks me through the story and wrangles every conceivable detail he can think of out of me.
“What’s the word from patrol?” he asks when I finish.
“Not a thing,” I reply bitterly.
“Which is why you called me. They gave you the story that a person has to be missing for twenty-four hours before they’ll do anything, huh?”
I nod. “Seems like bullshit when we’re talking about a couple of kids.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“I know missing kids isn’t really your thing,” I say by way of apology. I don’t really mean it. I want his help.
“It isn’t until it is,” he mutters, then winces for having said that to a parent who’s still clinging to hope. “Sorry.”
I shrug it off. Sort of.
“You’ve been in touch with this Bobby’s parents, right?” he asks while looking down at his notes.
“Pat has. They’re scared shitless, too. He’s a good kid.”
Jake’s eyes rise to mine. “Let’s hope so. How well do you know this kid?”
“Not well,” I admit, “but—”
“If cops had a dime for every time we’ve heard that about some prick who abuses a woman or worse,” he interjects. Then his face falls again. “Jesus, I’m sorry I put it that way.”
As if I don’t already have enough shitty ideas bouncing around my skull about what may have befallen Brittany, that somehow hadn’t yet occurred to me. I grow more incensed as the idea begins to fester, but my anger isn’t directed at Jake. “The asshole cops we talked to last night and this morning chalked it up to a couple of kids out for the night with their raging teenage hormones taking their natural course. You know where they were going with that.”
Jake nods. “They may be right.”
“Damn it—”
He cuts me off with a raised hand. “It’s a possibility, Tony, but only one of several. The guys Pat spoke with should have considered the not-so-innocent explanations, especially once their minds turned over the sexual possibilities.”
“Such as only Bobby’s hormones getting out of control.”
“Yeah,” he mutters while he gathers up the half doughnut and inhales it. He wraps the second doughnut in a napkin and jams it into one of his suit-jacket pockets as he stands and grabs his coffee. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” I ask as I scramble to my feet.
“Down to the station to make sure a missing person report gets filed and worked. It’s time to get this show on the road.”
We take his car, which smells much like the inside of Dunkin’. While he peels out of the parking lot, he orders me to call Bobby’s parents to make sure they’ve filed a missing person report on their son. “Give them my name and number and tell their local cops to call me if they need a kick in the ass to get to work on it.”
I’m still on the phone with Mr. Harland when we park behind Cedar
