Chapter 5

 

 

DISREPAIR. BAD shape. Broken-down.

All terms that filtered through my mind as Danny parked on the Greene’s overgrown lawn.

Crack house.

All right, maybe not the last one. But the entire house was a mosaic of shabby, from the top of the gabled roof, which was steadily shedding tile, to the chipped and broken walkway that hugged the house as though to protect it from harm. Even the gabled front window, which should have been the showpiece of the Victorian-style house, was covered with a wooden board.

“Maybe we should revisit that runaway option again,” I said as I eyed the shambles. I certainly wanted to get as far away from the place as I could.

“Could you at least try to look less disgusted?” Danny pressed a button on the remote and the alarm chirped. “Not everyone grows up with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

I scowled. “This is not about wealth. My parents weren’t exactly rolling in it. In fact we weren’t even allowed to take the bus because my father had an aversion to the… let me see if I can quote him correctly—fat-cat oil tycoons stripping and selling out the milk of the Earth.”

His mouth twitched. “Sounds like your dad.”

I shook my head. “Which brings me back to my point. I’m not spoiled. This is just… filthy.”

“We haven’t even seen the inside yet.”

Even the dingy siding was slightly beige and in need of a good whitewash. “I’m going to make a wild guess. More of the same?”

“Not our problem.”

We wound our way around the four cars in various stages of decomposition on the weed-eaten lawn. There was a reindeer statue in the front yard for no reason I could discern. From the looks of things, they dressed the animal according to the holiday, so he wore a pointy witch’s hat. The poor thing looked embarrassed.

As we mounted the porch, my disgust grew. Junk covered the porch end to end—old bottles, cartons, a small child’s rocking chair, an empty gasoline container. It was like a garbage truck had been on its way to the dump and decided good enough.

I sent Danny a sideways look. “You know they have children here.”

“Not. Our. Problem.” He set a finger to the bell and gave me the hairy eyeball. “If there are signs of neglect, we can alert children’s services. Until then, just hush.”

Fine. I would hush. But it was a temporary fix. When I hushed, it never lasted too long.

“Who the hell is it?”

I jumped back, startled by the face that popped through the wall next to the door. “Fuck,” I breathed, staring at the scowling ghost’s face. She looked to be about eighty, with more wrinkles and liver spots than smooth skin and a cigarette dangling from her irritated lips.

“Well?” She reached out and tried to poke me. Her finger passed right through my shoulder. “Who the hell are you?”

“I… I, um….”

“Are you one of Dinah’s friends?” She tried to poke me again. “No visitors on school nights.”

“Christiansen.” I jumped again at Danny’s voice and swiveled around to face him. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes were narrowed. “You okay?”

Okay considering I might’ve just met Dinah Greene’s mother, and she clearly thought it was thirty years ago? I looked back at the old woman, only to find the chipped and peeling wall where her face had been. I swiped a hand over my eyes and barely resisted the urge to dig my thumbs in. “Yeah. Of course. Just fine.”

He didn’t look convinced, but rapped on the door again. The door opened a crack, and I got a quick glimpse of overdyed hair that looked like a pouf of meringue and a painfully thin arm covered with sagging skin. “What do you want?” the door crack demanded.

Well, someone has certainly reviewed her Emily Post guide to good manners.

“I’m Detective McKenna,” Danny said. I didn’t need to be psychic to pick up on the thread of irritation in his voice. “We had an appointment?”

The gravelly voice spoke again. “Who the hell is that?” A single bony finger pointed from the shadowy gloom beyond the door. I followed the sight line of the finger to the tip of my own nose.

Slightly cross-eyed, I opened my mouth to speak, but Danny’s peeved baritone cut me off. “This is Dr. Christiansen of the FBI. He’s assisting with Amy’s case. We’re very lucky to have him here.” His tone practically said “and you are too.”

I didn’t mind that at all. A Danny who appreciated my professional help? Call the Miami Herald.

“Badges” was all she said.

We fished them out obediently and she examined them like we’d got them out of a box of Trix.

“Mrs. Greene, I’m glad you made time to meet with us,” I said with a smile.

The door slammed in our faces.

My pleasure. Always in the mood to help you find my missing child. Nice to see you too. I flipped my wallet closed and slid it back in my pocket.

Danny raised his fist to pound on the door, but before he could begin, he heard the chain slide. The rusted door creaked open, and Mrs. Greene stalked off deeper into the interior. I don’t know what flabbergasted me more—her obvious lack of common decency or that the ragged front door had the temerity to demand a chain.

I exchanged a quick look with an irate Danny and then ducked into the gloom. Guideless, we picked our way over the junky entryway and toward the noises deeper in the house. Halfway down the narrow hall, I saw something scuttle under a side table.

“Fuck. I just saw a damned rat.”

Danny’s brow lifted in amusement. “You did not.”

“I know what I saw,” I said in a hushed whisper.

“Stop being dramatic.”

“Dramatic?” I demanded dramatically. “This was not a Ratatouille rat. This was an ‘I’m gonna start with your toes’ kind of rat.”

Danny ignored that and pushed past a stack of discarded mismatched shoes. “Where did that blasted woman get to?”

I listened for a moment and tried not to think of the giant rat, safe under that pile of old magazines, plotting to take me down by the ankles. “I think she went this way.”

We finally found her in the dated kitchen, leaning against a stained and chipped counter. A cigarette was clenched firmly between her lipstick-caked lips, her head tilted slightly as she flicked a lighter. Despite her youthful dress, she had the look of a woman who’d lived a hard life. Danny took a seat at the table, displacing a bristly cat. I joined him more gingerly and wondered where the hell that rat had gotten off to.

She paused in her lighting efforts. “You boys want something to drink? Diet Coke? Coffee?”

Busy pulling out his pen and pad, Danny accepted her offer of coffee. When she turned to prepare his drink, I sent him an incredulous look. Danny rolled his eyes in return.

Suit yourself. I knew Danny had a raging coffee addiction, but as far as I was concerned, eating or drinking anything out of that house was akin to jamming a dirty needle in my tongue.

She plunked the chipped mug down in front of Danny and resumed lighting her cigarette. “You the new detectives assigned to Amy’s case?”

“Yes. We’re here to get more information about your daughter’s disappearance,” Danny said and sipped his coffee.

She shook her head wearily. “I ain’t got nothin’ to tell you that I haven’t told you before. If I knew something extra, I’d tell you.”

“If you could just run us through the day again—”

“What is there to tell? She always came straight home after work, and that night she never showed. I called her work, and they said she’d left around the usual time. At first I wasn’t too worried. She was always such a good girl. Never gave me a drop of trouble.” Her cigarette finally caught and flared to life, and she dropped the lighter on the table. She inhaled deeply and blew out a large, smoky cloud that obscured her face. “I called all her friends to see if she’d gone over there. By midnight I knew something had happened, and I called her stepfather, Luke.”

“Whatever happened to her real father?” Danny asked.

“Why is that relevant?”

“It’s just a question.”

“Nothing’s just a question with you people, I suspect.” She took a long drag of her cigarette, and it was clear no other answer would be forthcoming.

I cleared my throat. “So when Amy didn’t come home that night, did you call the police?”

She scowled at me. “’Course I did. They gave me some song and dance about waiting twenty-four hours before they could do anything.” She exhaled again and stared at us accusingly. “They didn’t give a goddamn.”

This is us. Giving a goddamn. “At what point did they begin looking for Amy?” I asked.

“The next day they took us more seriously. We made up posters. We did searches. But nothing ever turned up. The police were more interested in trying to convince us that she’d run off than looking for her.”

“Well, do you think that’s a possibility?” I had to ask. “Could she have just left of her own accord?”

“That’s what some people seem to think.” She frowned. “My own husband thinks she just took off. But I know my girl. She just wouldn’t do that. Not this long. Not without letting me know she was all right.”

“Did you know her boyfriend?”

“Brock Johnson.” She gave them a disgusted look. “Punk kid. He wasn’t just her boyfriend. Had a couple other girls too. Tried to tell her he was bad news.” The same disgruntled cat jumped up on the table, and she absently began to scratch his ears. “Couldn’t tell that girl nothing about that boy.”

I pulled up a picture of Amy on my iPad. It was the last picture we had of her, a still taken from the gas station video. She was headed for her car, backlit by the glare of artificial station lights, a slender figure clad in a pink-and-white-striped top and white jeans. “Can you take a look at this photo and tell us if anything looks amiss to you with her appearance?”

Her hand trembled as she took the iPad. She stared down at the image. “No. She looks just like she did when I saw her leave for school.” One stained finger touched the photo and it enlarged beyond visibility. She blinked and handed me back the iPad. “You can’t see it here, but she also had a broken-heart necklace that she never took off. Rose gold. I think her boyfriend got it for her. It’s not worth much, but… I’d like it back.”

Her eyes were a bit sunken. Hollow. I swallowed hard. She might not be June Cleaver, but she clearly missed her daughter. Didn’t mean she didn’t kill her, of course. Sometimes people missed people they’d killed.

Danny looked up from his notes. “Do you know if Amy is in contact with her real father?”

“Luke is the only father she knows. I intend to keep it that way.”

“How do they get along?”

Another smoke cloud drifted up in the dying sunlight and fought with sparkly motes of dust. She coughed until I worried she’d need a lung transplant, and she eyed us suspiciously. With that cigarette hanging from her fingers, she looked like Cruella de Vil. “Asking routine questions?”

“Depends.” Danny shrugged. “You got a routine answer?”

A quick twist of the lips contorted her thin face—maybe a smile, maybe something else. “They get along just fine, Detective. Same issues most stepfathers and daughters do.”

I could imagine. “Your dress is too short,” “you’re wearing too much makeup,” and “as long as you live in my house, you’ll follow my rules” versus “I hate you,” “I don’t have to do what you say,” and “you’re not my real father.”

“Anything violent?” Danny asked.

“Depends on who’s doin’ the askin’.” She leaned forward. “Is child services askin’? The cops? The feds? Or the man who’s trying to find my damn daughter?”

“How about all of the above?”

“There’s no one here who did nothin’ to my girl.” She stubbed out her cigarette in an ash-laden tray. “And I think this interview is over.”

She let the curious cat take a lick of creamer from her coffee spoon and stuck the spoon back in her coffee. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek and tried not to look at Danny. How does that coffee taste now?

“We’ll leave if that’s what you really want.” Danny capped his pen. “But shutting down a police interview is something that guilty people do.”

“Guilty of what? Missing my child? Maybe you should do your goddamned job. That’s what we’re payin’ tax money for, isn’t it?”

“Would you be willing to take a polygraph?” Danny asked/demanded, ignoring her rant.

Mottled color rushed to splash across her cheeks like spilled wine. “What are you accusing me of, exactly? Murdering my own daughter?”

“Amy is still just missing,” I broke in coolly. “Unless you know something we don’t.”

She stared at us pugnaciously. We stared right back. I was starting to think we’d all been roped into a game of impromptu freeze tag when a door slammed somewhere in the house. She finally blinked, and I barely resisted grabbing at my dry eyeballs. Visine. I need some fucking Visine!

“Dinah, where are you?” a voice demanded.

“In the kitchen,” she answered.

I heard someone navigating the hallway more expertly than we had. Before long a man stood in the doorway, scowling at us all. He scrubbed one hand down the front of his dirty undershirt and fumbled in the pocket of his ragged jeans. Danny and I both tensed briefly until the man came out with a pack of smokes that had seen better days.

“Honey, I was just talking to the detectives trying to find Amy.” Dinah’s face took on an anxious cast as he went to stand behind her. “Detective McKenna and Detective Cristen, this is my husband, Luke.”

I didn’t bother to correct her that I wasn’t a detective and that wasn’t my name. In my experience you don’t argue with someone who thinks a face tattoo is a good look. I eyed the inked cross by Luke’s right eye. Clearly a sign of mental illness.

“Nice to meet you, sir,” I offered.

I was promptly ignored. Luke’s hand came down to rest on the back of his wife’s neck, but it didn’t look like a show of support. It looked like a threat.

Luke’s scowl deepened even as he stuck the cigarette in his mouth. “What could they possibly have to ask that they haven’t already asked?”

“At this point we’re just running down leads,” Danny said smoothly.

“We don’t have time for this shit.” Luke’s face seemed to be creased in a perpetual sneer. “She just took off, okay? All those tipsters calling in and saying they’d seen her here and there.”

“Tipsters can be very unreliable,” I said. “And if I were in your position, I’d want to know what happened to my daughter.”

“Yeah? And if I were in your position, I’d sell your fancy fucking watch and fix my bike. I know what happened to my daughter. She ran the fuck off and can’t be bothered to let her family know she’s okay.”

“Sir—”

“And if she ain’t got time for us, we damn sure don’t got time for her.” Luke stabbed a finger toward the door. “You know how to let yourself out.”

So we did.

We trudged back through the land Pine-Sol forgot and headed for the car. The heat hit me in the face the minute we stepped outside. The midday sun was no joke and beat down on my back like actual pressure.

I wasn’t used to that kind of heat anymore. Everything was sun-warmed—the hood of the car, the leather seats, even the buckle burned me a little as I fastened my seatbelt. When Danny turned on the AC, I sighed, leaned back, and tried to remember what it was like to not sweat my ass off.

When I was fairly certain my skeleton would hold and I wasn’t going to melt into a puddle of goo, I finally spoke. “That could’ve gone better.”

“Could’ve gone worse.”

I glanced over to find Danny thumbing through his phone, checking messages. Everything seemed copacetic to him. All in a day’s work, I guess. I sent him a narrow-eyed look. “That’s a surprisingly upbeat attitude for a man who just got kicked out of a house.”

“If I had a nickel for every time someone got annoyed with me, I’d be—”

“Scrooge fucking McDuck,” I supplied. The glare he aimed my way made me feel a lot better. So did visions of him swan diving in piles of animated Duckburg nickels. I pulled out my iPad to update case notes. “So where to?”

“We should start talking to some of the people she had regular contact with.” He finished texting and tossed his phone in the cupholder. “Deck just texted me. He finished with the school counselor, and he’s headed over to speak with the best friend, Jenna Macmillan. She works at a nearby school as a fourth-grade teacher.”

“Black Bay Elementary.” I scrolled down and made a notation next to the name. There were a lot of names. Apparently she’d been a very popular girl. “What’s this note about the Learning Annex?”

“Amy was really into art. She had a mentor down at the Learning Annex who thought she was something special.”

I was starting to get a bad feeling about this. “Oh no.”

The smirk on Danny’s face as he pulled out into traffic solidified that bad feeling into a sure fucking thing. “I thought about sending Gonzalez and Tab down there, but I figured you’d want to do it.”

“Fuck me,” I sighed.

“Not right now, dear. I’ll let you hazard a guess about who her art teacher was.”

“Don’t say Robin Christiansen.”

“Robin Christiansen,” he said sweetly.

I sighed again, heavier this time. It had to be an unfortunate coincidence that Amy’s mentor and art teacher was my mother. Otherwise I’d have to admit that someone cosmically disliked me, and I’m not ready to do that. So yeah, it was just an unfortunate coincidence.

As Danny drove toward the Annex, I came to terms with the fact that she would be there, she was going to be ready for me, and she was going to give me a hard time. It was death and taxes at that point.

“So I guess we’re going to see my mother?”

“Exactly right.” Danny whistled. “You know, I didn’t orchestrate it that way, but this is perfect payback for that Scrooge McDuck comment.”

It was a strange phenomenon. No matter how long I left, how far I went, or what I did, all roads seemed to lead back home. All twisting, confusing, winding roads, that is. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. Off the top of my head? I’d have to say the scale was definitely leaning toward strange.

Very strange.