“What’s up, JB?” he asked.
“Just wanna ask a question, Aug. What can you tell me about Asaan Witherspoon?”
“Gang leader in the area until he was sent away on a robbery charge. Got out a couple of years ago, said he found God, runs a community center now. Does a lot of work with the kids. Any of that help?”
“Confirms what I’ve already been told,” I said.
“He knows the kids almost as well as most of the staff at school,” said Augie. “Probably knows the gang kids even better, spends a lot of time trying to get them to keep the peace. You gonna talk to him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Next Monday.”
“Good. He can tell you as much about the gangs as anybody else can. We still on for b-ball next Thursday?”
“Yep. See ya then.”
I finished the laundry and did a few more chores and then had a late dinner while watching a Travel Channel program about Hawaii, but I couldn’t really get into it, because I kept trying to imagine what it would be like to be a parent and think that you were losing your child.
Chapter 18
The next morning, after running and lifting a little, I called Peterson Toyota and talked to Brian in the service department. He said they had an opening at 11:00 for an oil and lube on the 4Runner, and I told him I’d take it. I can change the oil myself, of course. Really. I did it once, over at Angie and Simon’s. Well, Simon helped a little, but it was yours truly who actually popped the hood, which is the first and most important step in the whole process. Think about it.
Okay, so I know beans about cars, which is why I have always taken my vehicles in for their regularly scheduled maintenance. I’m a whiz at whipping off thousand-word essays, not to mention arm-wrestling, but I pretty much suck at anything more involved than topping off the windshield washer fluid. Yeah, I know, how can I be a private detective, which is supposed to be such a manly profession, and not be able to navigate my way around cars? I just never had any interest in learning about the care and feeding of automobiles. A long time ago, I tried my hand at some of the simpler procedures, like that oil-changing thing, in case of emergencies, but that phase of my life came to an abrupt halt when I became aware of the existence of Triple A. I mean, c’mon.
* * *
Peterson Toyota is owned by Phil Peterson, who’s got me by about ten years. I bought my very first car from Phil, when I was still in college. The car was an old Tercel, and I think Phil realized right away that my financial situation didn’t allow for anything beyond basic transportation. He gave me a good deal on the Tercel and didn’t try to talk me into any nonsense like rustproofing, so I’ve continued to buy my cars from his dealership. About four years ago, our relationship took a different turn. Somebody snatched his six-month-old daughter, grabbed the girl out of her stroller at a playground while the babysitter sat two feet away. Within twenty-four hours, two things about the case stood out to the cops and anyone else who’d ever been involved with the abduction of a child. First, the kidnapper was a teenage boy. Second, there was no ransom demand. Every cop in the city was working overtime trying to find the girl. Two days after she was taken, Phil called to ask if I’d help look for his daughter. I told him I would, and then I called Dennis to see what the police had learned.
The babysitter hadn’t been able to provide a very good description of the boy who’d taken the baby, just that he was white and skinny and wore a blue cap. The cops had canvassed the area around the playground, to no avail. There were lots of teenage boys who fit the description, but they all had solid alibis for the time of the kidnapping. Denny told me that the police had also checked with the local hospitals, asking about girls who’d recently had miscarriages or even abortions, thinking maybe one of them and her boyfriend had decided to grab someone else’s baby. You never know with kids. But that turned out to be a dead end, too.
I spent a day looking into other possibilities, with no success at all, and then, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do, I checked with a source in the adoption field, not to see about babies who’d suddenly became available, the cops had done that early on. Instead, I tried the backdoor approach and asked about females, teenagers to early twenties, who’d put kids up for adoption during the previous few months. My friend gave me a sheet with over fifty names on it, which I arbitrarily narrowed to twelve by excluding anyone living more than a few miles from the playground. I was pretty sure that I wasn't supposed to have such a list in my possession, and I was equally sure that I didn’t care. As I scanned the list, one name, Roberta Johnson, caught my eye, something about the paper just a few days earlier. I got on the Post-Gazette’s website and within thirty seconds found the five-line bit on the back page of the Local News section. Fifteen-year-old Roberta Johnson had been reported missing. The other four lines described the clothes she’d been wearing the day she disappeared and mentioned that Roberta was “easily confused.”
A contact at the paper got me Roberta’s home address, and less than half an hour later, I was talking to her parents. Her father told me that Roberta was “always runnin’ off,” and the only reason they’d reported her disappearance this time was his wife was worried “on accounta she thinks Bobbie might do somethin’ stupid, feelin’ bad about gettin’ rida that kid
