“It’s not important. Well, maybe it is. That’s how I got into this predicament.”
Loren wanted to get to it. “You told my boss that you have information on Katie Rochester?”
“How is Ed?”
“He’s good.”
She smiled warmly. “He’s a nice man.”
“Yeah,” Loren said, “a prince.”
“I’ve known him a long time.”
“He told me.”
“That’s why I called Ed. We had a long talk about the case.”
“Right,” Loren said. “And that’s why he sent me here.”
Edna Skylar looked off, out the window. Loren tried to guess her age. Mid-sixties probably, but she wore it well. Dr. Skylar was a handsome woman, short gray hair, high cheekbones, knew how to sport a beige suit without coming across as too butch or overly feminine.
“Dr. Skylar?”
“Could you tell me something about the case?”
“Excuse me?”
“Katie Rochester. Is she officially listed as missing?”
“I’m not sure how that’s relevant.”
Edna Skylar’s eyes moved slowly back to Loren Muse. “Do you think she met up with foul play—”
“I can’t really discuss that.”
“—or do you think she ran away? When I talked to Ed, he seemed pretty sure she was a runaway. She took money out of an ATM in midtown, he said. Her father is rather unsavory.”
“Prosecutor Steinberg told you all that?”
“He did.”
“So why are you asking me?”
“I know his take,” she said. “I want yours.”
Loren was about to protest some more, but Edna Skylar was again staring with too much intensity. She scanned Skylar’s desk for family photographs. There were none. She wondered what to make of that and decided nothing. Skylar was waiting.
“She’s eighteen years old,” Loren tried, treading carefully.
“I know that.”
“That makes her an adult.”
“I know that too. And what about the father? Do you think he abused her?”
Loren wondered how to play this. The truth was, she didn’t like the father, hadn’t from the get-go. RICO said that Dominick Rochester was mobbed up and maybe that was part of it. But there was something to reading a person’s grief. On the one hand, everyone reacts differently. It was true that you really couldn’t tell guilt based on someone’s reaction. Some killers cried tears that’d put Pacino to shame. Others were beyond robotic. Same with the innocent. It was like this: You’re with a group of people, a grenade is thrown in the middle of the crowd, you never know who is going to dive on it and who is going to dive for cover.
That said, Katie Rochester’s father… there was something off about his grief. It was too fluid. It was like he was trying on different personas, seeing which one would look best for the public. And the mother. She had the whole shattered-eye thing going on, but had that come from devastation or resignation? It was hard to tell.
“We have no evidence of that,” Loren said in the most noncommittal tone she could muster.
Edna Skylar did not react.
“These questions,” Loren went on. “They’re a bit bizarre.”
“That’s because I’m still not sure what to do.”
“About?”
“If a crime has been committed, I want to help. But…”
“But?”
“I saw her.”
Loren Muse waited a beat, hoping she’d say more. She didn’t. “You saw Katie Rochester?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“It’ll be three weeks on Saturday?”
“And you’re just telling us now?”
Edna Skylar was looking out at the parking lot again. The sun was setting, the rays slicing in through the venetian blinds. She looked older in that light.
“Dr. Skylar?”
“She asked me not to say anything.” Her gaze was still on the lot.
“Katie did?”
Still looking off, Edna Skylar nodded.
“You talked to her?”
“For a second maybe.”
“What did she say?”
“That I couldn’t tell anybody that I saw her.”
“And?”
“And that was it. A moment later she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“On a subway.”
The words came easier now. Edna Skylar told Loren the whole story, how she’d been studying faces while walking in New York, how she spotted the girl despite the appearance change, how she followed her down into the subway, how she’d vanished into the dark.
Loren wrote it all down, but fact was, this figured into what she’d believed from the beginning. The kid was a runaway. As Ed Steinberg had already told Skylar, there had been an ATM withdrawal at a Citibank in midtown near the time she vanished. Loren had seen the bank video. The face had been covered by a hood, but it was probably the Rochester girl. The father had clearly been on the over-strict side. That was how it always was with the runaways. The too-liberal parents, their kids often got hooked on drugs. The too-conservative, their kids were the runaways with the sex issues. Might be a stereotype to break it down like that, but Loren had seen very few cases that broke those rules.
She asked a few more follow-up questions. There was nothing that they could really do now. The girl was eighteen. There was no reason, from this description, to suspect foul play. On TV, the feds get involved and put a team on it. That doesn’t happen in real life.
But Loren felt a niggling at the base of her brain. Some would call it intuition. She hated that. Hunches… that didn’t really work either. She wondered what Ed Steinberg, her boss, would want to do. Nothing, probably. Their office was busy working with the U.S. Attorney on two cases, one involving a possible terrorist and the other a Newark politician on the take.
With their resources so limited, should they pursue what appeared to be an obvious runaway? It was a tough call.
“Why now?” Loren asked.
“What?”
“Three weeks, you didn’t say anything. What made you change your mind?”
“Do you have children, Investigator Muse?”
“No.”
“I do.”
Loren again looked at the desk, at the credenza, at the wall. No family pictures. No sign of children or grandchildren. Skylar smiled, as if she understood what Muse was doing.
“I was a lousy mother.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I was, shall we say, laissez-faire. When in doubt, I’d let it go.”
