Chapter Twenty-seven
The surveillance program was one I was familiar with. The images recorded were stored on a Cisco Video Surveillance Storage System, which permitted the authorized user, yours truly, to access any point in time over the past five years.
So where to begin? Admittedly, using my apparently increasing psychic powers could help here, but I wasn't sure how to harness such extrasensory perceptions to an actual date. Maybe someday I would get to the point where if I sat quietly enough, an actual date would just appear in my thoughts. I wasn't quite there yet, and I somehow doubted my gifts could be that accurate.
So I went about this as any investigator would. Deduction, deduction, deduction.
According to official accounts, Madison and her mother had gone missing about three months ago. According to Bill, the "My Little Pony" Happy Meal theme had concluded nearly four months ago. Those timelines nearly coincided.
I removed the police file from my handbag, opened it, and looked again at the only picture of Maddie's mother on record. The woman was probably twenty-two but she looked fifty. She also looked like a typical user: skeletal, pallid, lost. Meth eats away at the brain like a tapeworm from undercooked pork, and the results are typically the same: extreme paranoia, loss of motor control, and a disinterest in anything that isn't meth. Even your kids. The woman in the picture - a mug shot taken of her years before - wouldn't have cared about her daughter's health. Or anyone's health. She cared only for getting high and it had gotten her killed. And put her daughter in harm's way.
I decided I would start four months ago and work my way forward.
And that's exactly what I did for the next five hours. Going through day after day, studying the faces of anyone who was towing a child with them. The camera was a good one, and it was set up behind the counter, looking over the employee's shoulder. There were only three active cash registers and the wide-lensed camera was able to capture the faces of any and everyone who walked up to the counter. Little kids tended to disappear below the counter, but I generally had a good view of any kids approaching the registers. Not that it mattered since I had no clue what Maddie looked like anyway.
I'll know her when I see her, I thought. Or so I hoped.
As I went through the days and fast-forwarding only to promising targets, I thought about my son, Danny, Fang and Kingsley.
The men in my life.
My thoughts lingered on Kingsley and something pulled at me. Something important. What was it? I wasn't sure. Something he had said perhaps. Something that had been important, or could be important. Whatever it was, it got my heart racing.
I would think about it later, whatever it was.
Days and weeks passed. I paused often and studied faces. There were a few possibilities that made me sit up and take notice. But upon further view, the woman/child or man/child didn't add up. The girl was too perky. The mother was too happy. The father seemed particularly loving. None of this added up, at least not to me.
I continued forward. Hours sped by. Whole families appeared in the frame. I wasn't looking for whole families. I was looking for a lonely girl and someone else. Someone that made sense.
And then I found them.
The girl was dirty, dressed in a stained dress that had a torn Strawberry Shortcake patch over her chest. She trailed behind a woman who seemed confused by the McDonald's order board. Who gets confused over a McDonald's order board? It's the most famous menu in the world. She frowned and bit her lip and seemed to talk to herself. The woman herself was dressed in torn denim shorts. One leg was torn higher than the other. A white pocket hung free, squared off with a packet of cigarettes. Not once did the mother look back for her little girl, who stayed behind her, swaying gently to unheard music. The girl hooked one of her tiny fingers in her mouth and waited for her mother. She could have just turned and walked out of the restaurant and her mother would never know, and perhaps never care. The little girl kept swaying. She was barefoot. Her feet were dirty. So were her ankles. The mother had been wearing flip flops, but now I couldn't see the mother's feet, since they were below the counter. The girl was far back, easily in the camera frame. I stared at the girl, fascinated, my eyes glued to the monitor in front of me. In my thoughts, I could hear the girl talking. This little girl.
"He kilt my mother. He shot her dead."
"Maddie," I whispered.
And as the mother fumbled her way through the order, the worker placed an open Happy Meal on the counter, and as Lauren dug into her pocket, presumably for money, someone else came into the McDonald's. A man. A big black man wearing a long trenchcoat. Maddie saw him and shrank away immediately. The man said something sharply and the mother nodded. She, too, shrank away.
The man jerked his head and little Maddie followed him deeper into McDonald's, where she disappeared out of the camera frame.
I watched Lauren count out her money, then wait for her change, and finally hurry deeper into the restaurant. Thirty-three minutes later, the happy family left together, with Maddie trailing behind, forgotten, her finger hooked in her mouth.
Holding her Happy Meal box.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The surveillance software has a nice feature that allows you to freeze a face and zero in on it, which I did for Maddie, her mother, and the man.
Now I was sitting outside a Starbucks on a cool night with Detective Hanner of the Fullerton Police Missing Persons Unit. Neither of us was drinking a coffee, which was a damn shame. Detective Hanner was studying the photos and making small, disapproving noises. I wondered if she knew she was making those sounds. Then again, my hearing tends to be exceptional these days, so perhaps I was never meant to hear her small, disapproving noises.
She looked up from the pictures.
"Good work," she said.
"I sometimes get it right."
"Detective Sherbet said that if anyone was likely to turn something up, it would be you."
"Detective Sherbet says the nicest things."
Hanner shook her head. "Actually, rarely. He likes you."
"The feeling is mutual."
She tapped the photo of the black man in a trench coat. Her fingernail was long. And sharp. I might have gasped a little. "He was with them around the time of their disappearance," Hanner said. "He's a person of interest."
"He's got my interest," I said.
"This photo will be everywhere as soon as I get back to the station. We'll catch this bastard."
"If you don't mind, I would still like to help."
"Hey, Maddie picked you. Maybe there's something bigger at work here. Of course I want your help. After I drop by the station, I'm heading out to work three more missing person cases. One of them is an old lady from a nearby nursing home. My second call about her in two weeks. Found her last time partying with some local crackheads, high as a kite, dancing the Charleston naked."
I snorted. "Now that's getting high old school."
"If you saw the place she lived, you probably wouldn't blame her. Creepy as hell. An old folks home for retired witches and wizards, if you ask me. A sort of Hogwarts for old farts."
"Here in this city?" I asked.
She looked at me for a heartbeat or two before smiling. "You would be surprised what's in this city."
I found her oddly closed off, as if there was some sort of shield around her. Her aura, I noticed, was an even blue. The same color as Kingsley's. It also hovered only a few inches from her skin, same as with Kingsley.
"I like you," she added. "We should get a drink some time, and talk." She winked, and as she did so, her pupils shrank noticeably. "You know...girl talk."
"Sure," I said.
"Good." She got up and threw her handbag over one shoulder. She reached out for my hand. "Let me know what you find, and thanks again."
As always, I hesitated before shaking any hand. But hers I was almost eager to shake. I did so now, taking her small hand in my own, and I was not very surprised to discover it was ice cold.
She stared at me intently, just a few feet away. The hair at the back of my neck was standing on end. And then she winked at me, turned, and strode off through the parking lot.
She moved gracefully and effortlessly, and I watched her until she got into her dark Mercury Sable and drove out of the parking lot, and as she did so, I was certain I had just met my first vampire.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I sent Danny a text asking for an update, and he responded almost instantly: Anthony was in stable condition and sleeping soundly. I texted Danny back and reminded him that his cell phone was supposed to be turned off.
He wrote back: Yes, Mommy. And added a happy face.
Danny was being oddly playful and, well, nice. Maybe it had to do with his son being seriously ill. I didn't know, but I found it creepy as hell. Any feelings I had had for Danny were long gone.
And what did he want to talk about? I didn't know.
I sat in my minivan for a few minutes, wondering what I should do next. The museum could wait. The girl needed my help, except I didn't have much to go on. I removed my copy of the picture of the big black man, and I suddenly knew what I needed most.
Manpower.
* * *
His business card was still in the van's center console. I turned the interior light on, even though I really didn't need it.
His card was simple but compelling. On the right side were written the words: Jim Knighthorse, Private Investigator. On the other side, filling the entire left half of the card, was his picture. He was smiling. A sort of crooked half-smile that showed a lot of teeth. The smile was arrogant. The smile was casual. The light in his eyes was filled with good humor, as if he alone was in on a joke.
I had met the tall man a few weeks earlier. At the time, he had radiated a quiet strength and a lot of cockiness. Both were good qualities when it came to investigations. In fact, I would argue that both were ideal in a good investigator. But more than anything, I had sensed a sort of old-school chivalry in him, that he was a man who protected those who couldn't protect themselves.
I needed this man.
I made the call and, despite the fact that I sensed I had interrupted him from something important, he immediately agreed to meet me.
* * *
"I had a strange feeling we would meet again," he said, as he approached my van.
Correction: swaggered to my van. Even though he limped noticeably.
"Maybe you're psychic," I said.
"I'm a lot of things," he said, grinning easily, "but being psychic isn't one of them."
By a lot of things, I knew he meant a lot of good things. I shook my head. The guy was too much. But he was hard not to love.
I was standing outside my minivan, itself parked outside a Norm's in Santa Ana. When you work the night shift like me, you're fully aware of each and every all-night restaurant, even if, like me, you can't actually partake from them, outside of water and cheap wine.
Knighthorse glanced over at the dimly lit Norms. "You would make a cheap date."
"What can I say, I'm a simple woman."
He glanced at me sideways. "I somehow doubt that. Anyone who hangs out with Orange County's most famous defense attorney has a few surprises up her sleeve."
He was, of course, talking about Kingsley, whom I was with when I first met Knighthorse on the beach a few weeks ago. "Okay, maybe one or two," I said.
He folded his arms over his chest and leaned a hip against the van's front fender. Although it was chilly out, he was wearing only a black tee shirt and blue jeans.
I'm a woman. I'm recently divorced. Outside of an orgasm a few weeks ago, I hadn't had any sex in six years. The orgasm, I think, opened the floodgates.
So I'll admit it. I found myself staring at his biceps. Just his biceps, I swear. The way they reflected the yellowish parking lot lights. The way the thick veins protruded nearly an inch off his muscles. The way the muscle itself seemed to undulate even with the slightest of movements. I have keen eyesight, and I used every bit of it as I studied his biceps.
He looked down at his shirt. "Is there something on me? It's jelly, isn't it? I just ate a jelly donut and I felt some of it drop, I just didn't know where."
"It's not jelly. Sorry, I just have a lot on my mind."
He quit inspecting his shirt and went back to leaning a hip against my fender.
"So tell me more about the little girl."
I did, recalling everything I could. I handed him a photocopy of the trio at McDonald's. He studied it closely. Holding it up to the parking lot lights. Myself, I could see it perfectly, but he didn't need to know that.
"We'll need to canvas the area," he said.
"That's what I figured."
"A guy like this, some lowlife drug-dealing asshole, is probably on the move, especially if he just killed the mother."
"We're making a lot of leaps here," I said. "The guy could be innocent. Maybe he's an old friend."
Knighthorse shook his head and came over to me. He smelled of raspberry donuts and Old Spice. God, I loved a man who wore Old Spice. The jelly donuts, not so much. He held up the picture of the black man and pointed.
"Look here," he said. "He's wearing a trench coat for a reason."
"Covering a gun?"
"Why else? It's 80 degrees here 300 days of the year. But look..." Knighthorse shuffled through the three photos I had given him. "There. Look."
I saw it. It was a slight bulge at the man's hip. "A gun," I said.
"Of course."
"And we're not racially stereotyping him?" I said. "Because he's black?"
Knighthorse looked down at me, and all the swagger and cockiness was gone, and I saw the real investigator in him, the man who took his job deadly serious. "What does your gut say about him?"
"That he's our guy. That he killed Maddie's mom, or at least knows the person who did. That he presently has Maddie somewhere, perhaps hurting her, perhaps killing her."
Knighthorse's jaw rippled. I think his teeth actually ground together. "Yeah, that's what my gut says, too. And race has nothing to do with that."
"What are the chances he's a drug dealer?"
"About the same chance that I'm tall and roguishly good-looking."
I shook my head. The guy was too much. I said, "So, if he supplies drugs to the neighborhood...."
"Few will talk," he said.
"That, and they're probably scared of him."
"Someone will talk," said Knighthorse.
"And if he did kill Maddie's mother, then he's laying low."
Knighthorse winked. "We're gonna need more manpower."