Hanna did several days of work on her own, and with a little help from James.
“It’s impressive, for sure,” he said with a sigh.
“Impressive?”
“Don’t take that to mean I’m impressed. To disappear completely in a bar full of people all focused on buying you as many drinks as possible and then to be seen nowhere in town for days after? It’s unsettling, downright frightening for some moms out there, but impressive.”
“I find it horrifying.”
“I don’t disagree.”
She’d been going to the police station late at night. She doubted Roarke was still having her followed since his main concern now seemed to be keeping her as far away from the entire ordeal as possible. But she wasn’t about to blow it all on a cheap mistake like walking in broad daylight into a police station without a care in the world.
“So what resources are you putting on this?” she asked, turning her spinning chair to face him and crossing a leg over the other.
“A few,” he said matter-of-factly. “For a number of reasons, before you get huffy in the face. It’s vital to your cover that they have no idea we know. So I can’t risk blowing a larger operation but getting too gung ho about a missing girl. Terrible as it is, sacrifices have to be made where they have to be made. We have to keep our energy obviously focused on official investigations.”
She wanted to think that it sounded political, bureaucratic. But she knew he was right. If Roarke even suspected that the police knew something about the disappearance, then she’d be in deep shit. He was pig headed and incredibly infuriating. But he wasn’t dumb. He’d know exactly who to come for if something went a way he didn’t like. So instead of focusing her irritation of all that on her uncle, she focused on Roarke’s smug face.
“So you know your next question,” her uncle said, taking a sip of coffee and raising an eyebrow at her.
“My next question?”
“This is the part where you ask me ‘what can I do’ and I tell you that you need to just be patient,” he said. “The last thing we need is you getting unnecessarily hurt in all this.”
“The last thing ‘we’ need or you need?” she asked.
He lifted up his hands in surrender. “Guilty as charged, but I won’t apologize for it, Laura.”
She shook her head and sighed, turning her chair back to the computer screen that continued to hold no answers. She loved her uncle, he was all she knew, she’d die for him. But, God, did she hate working for him. They’d had plenty of fights about it over the years. No matter what he said, she was his niece first and cop second. And before either of those things, she was the small girl he raised on his own.
She poured over the documents detailing everything they knew about Isabelle Withers. She had lived in Los Indios all her life. She worked as a bartender at the Pharaohs bar and a secretary at the auto shop. Based on her tax records, both jobs had been cash only, under the table deals. That was something she was willing to overlook in the face of all of this. Let the feds deal with getting their money. She’d been working there since she was a teenager. As far as profile went, Hannah would say that this girl was brainwashed from birth.
She always hated cases like that. She’d had them before, kids in a religious upbringing trapped in a cult their parents created. Kids immersed in neo-Nazi dogma and getting arrested for performing it themselves. It always hurt to see kids who could have gone to school, been doctors or teachers, forced to end up like their parents. And Isabelle was smart.
She had impressive scores on her SATs and transcripts from high school. She excelled in math and English classes. The big ticket item missing there was extracurriculars. She had none, which didn’t exactly jive with the grades considering the usual correlation of after school clubs to grade point average. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. She was putting in hours with the Pharaohs.
Hanna rubbed her eyes and pinched at the bridge of her nose viciously. The profile of Isabelle was there, the foundations of it, anyway. If she wanted more she’d have to go through Roarke, the prospect of which made her want to gag on her own tongue. Besides, if she burst in asking questions about his sister’s favorite type of music or color, the gig would be up fast.
“I’m going to walk the beat for a bit,” she said, getting up quickly.
“I’m not so sure--”
“It wasn’t a request, James,” she said. “I’ll call you when I’m back at my apartment if you want, like some teenager back from a date.”
He had the decency to look a little embarrassed by that, but shrugged. She scoffed and walked out as he waved goodbye and went back to his office. She hoped there was a bar in her path as she stepped out into the night air.
***
Roarke first noticed her coming out of Sneaky Deaks. The bar was on the corner of Los Santos Ave and Main Street. It was famous for being annoyingly cash only and not separating checks on any party. It was a nice place to force a date situation where one person had to front the bill, if greasy Tex Mex and the smell of spilled tequila was the vibe you were hoping for to get you laid.
Watching Hanna walk out of there wasn’t what really caught his attention. Everyone found their way into Sneaky Deaks at some point, it wasn’t exactly a joint known for organized crime or deals. But the thing that caught his eye was that she walked out and pulled out a notebook. She sat on a bench outside and frowned at the pages in front of her. She wrote some things down and Roarke was enraptured with the sight.
He’d hated himself for falling victim to her low cut shirt, but now what had him so interested was the concentration on her face, the intelligence there. He’d slept with plenty of women over the years with minds focused only on their next fuck or their next paycheck. He never minded that. It made things easier when they both mumbled their goodbyes as they got dressed and went back to their lives. But this was something different entirely. He wasn’t one of those assholes who didn’t think women could be intelligent. Isabelle outshined them all in everything she knew and studied and read. He was proud of her. But he never imagined himself watching a woman who made him have to take a cold shower with smarts of her own.
It was incredible to see and he couldn’t stop. He watched her until she left for the night and he was left with nothing but to think about how pathetic he was, watching her like some school boy with a crush. He didn’t do crushes. So he walked home that night and immediately put on porn to put her out of his mind.
It stopped working when he continued to see her. He saw her with papers and notebooks. He spotted her talking to a girl Roarke recognized as one of Isabelle’s friends from high school. She went into the record shop Isabelle always got her vinyls from. She went into the coffee shop Isabelle always brought their coffee from in the earlier mornings at the shop. It wasn’t hard to figure out what she was doing. He told her to stay out of it and she was throwing a giant middle finger his way.
She was investigating. And she was incredibly invested. That was even harder to ignore. He wanted to think it was somehow for personal gain. He wanted to paint it in any way he could that made her look bad. But the more he noticed her, anticipated her moves to places he’d looked at as well, he felt something a lot closer to grateful. She was spending all her free time towards this. He needed to thank her or find out why to get images of her out of his head every night. It was easier when he was just imagining her skin and toned arms and breasts in that push up bra.
It wasn’t until a week of watching her from afar that he decided to do something to end the anxiety-inducing holding pattern.
“Hi,” he said, hating how young his voice sounded. She turned around and he watched her eyes recognize him and turn to a scowl. “I thought you might look at me like that.”
“Hi,” she said, curtly, and moving past him. He walked after her.
“You’ve been busy.”
“And I’m not surprised you’ve been watching me.”
“I wasn’t having you tailed or anything. I just happened to see you. When I figured out what you were doing it was pretty easy to predict where you’d be next.”
“And what am I doing?”
“Why are you taking all of this so personally?”
She stopped and turned around to look at him. The scowl was gone and instead she was giving him all sorts of confusion and the hints of softness waiting there. It was interesting to see how much people could change when abrasion was taken out of a conversation. And all they seemed to have for each other was bruises and smacks in every sentence.
“I’m a woman too, I’m a little concerned for my own safety,” she said and he knew in an instant that was a lie.
“They take young girls. No offense, but we both know you’re closer to thirty than nineteen. That isn’t what has you so obsessed with this,” he said, crossing his arms.
“Is it so wrong to have a little empathy? Your sister seemed like a good kid. She just turned twenty-one. That’s a lot of promise to go flying out of the window in one second. I’d like to help get her back,” she said. “Besides, it’s not like I have anything better to do since leaving the Caracals.”
That he was more willing to buy. He told himself he should stop trying to find reasons to distrust her. She’d been nothing but kind and helpful and earnest in all of this. She was sketchy, he thought her showing up at the birthday party was strange, but she’d done nothing malicious since then.
“Maybe we should join forces,” he said. “You’ve clearly got a better handle of doing this that probably works better than me ripping my hair out and threatening people.”
“Do I have to hear you talk?”
“Well, unfortunately communication is part of a partnership. But I can try to be as quiet as possible only speak when spoken to, master.”
She gave him a glare but he saw the corners of her mouth start to quirk upwards. That was a start. The hint of her being willing to smile. There was a less serious woman underneath there who was willing to put her defenses down. He should focus on that for now, instead of the color of her bra or hot she must look when she comes. There was something playful underneath the sheen of seriousness she put on for everyone to see.
“So...we have a deal?” he asked.
“We have a trial period.”
He laughed. “I’ll take what I can get.”
***
They moved around the town all day. Hanna asked plenty of questions about Isabelle and wrote down the answers. Some of them he understood, like asking for her usual hangout spots. Some of them were stranger, like about her favorite hobby. He didn’t question her methods though. At least she had methods. He had crazed scrambling. He’d follow her moves and see where it led them.
Towards the end of the day, he convinced her to call it a day and go back to the bar for some food and drinks.
“I don’t think overly greasy fries counts as ‘refuel food’,” she said as they walked in.
“Our fries are not overly greasy.”
They sat at the bar and one of Rick’s sisters immediately brought them a pitcher of Bud Light. He asked for barbeque wings and she didn’t say a word as she took a massive gulp of her beer and dropped the glass down onto the bar counter hard. She rubbed at her forehead and opened the notebook full of her scribbles. He wanted to say something encouraging. He wanted to think they’d gotten somewhere today. But her face looked too grim for her notebook to house any good news. They’d just learned more of the same: no one had seen her since that night.
It blew Roarke’s mind to think of someone being able to vanish into thin air. There were satellites watching everything. The FCC and government listened to everything they said over the phones and in texts. Not that they had access to that kind of information as a help, but how was it possible for a grown woman to completely vanish like she’d never been there at all? It was like she only existed in everyone’s memories.
“So, what do we now?” he asked, tearing into a wing with his teeth.
“You watch too many cop shows,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I don’t watch any.”
He sloppily wiped his mouth with a napkin from the pile near the bowl of salted peanuts. He saw her cringe out of the corner of his eye and tried not to smile. There was something endearing about making her uncomfortable with his eating habits. Women were always so prim and proper and daintily wiping their mouths after every bite. He shoved the plate of wings in her direction.
“I’m good, thanks.”
“Yeah right. Just eat some. You were the one who said you were hungry.”
She stayed put, looking at the notebook but he watched her eyes dart from the papers in front of her to the plate of wings every few seconds. He held in his snickers, not wanting to scare her away. The sour smell of the barbecue sauce had to be getting to her. It was irresistible. He knew that much, he constantly stole jars of it to take back to his apartment and slather on every piece of meat he ate. He pretended to be focused on the wing in his hand which gave her just enough of an opening to reach over and take a small drumstick wing.
Point for the home team. He’d tell her “I told you so” after they got through the wing pile.
“I’ll say this much,” she said, licking the excess sauce off her fingers. “This does totally reek of the Caracals. They’re experts at nabbing people and making sure no one sees them again.”
“That’s not exactly comforting,” Roarke said, his few seconds of a good mood gone completely.
“We have to be objective with the facts,” she said. “Can’t let them get you in any kind of mood.”
“You talk like a fucking super sleuth wannabe.”
She turned cold again, looking back at her notebook. The small amount of progress they made was gone. Roarke shrugged it off. Progress towards what? She wasn’t going to just jump in his bed and he wasn’t sure he wanted that anyway. He wanted to be around her though, he knew that much.
“I’m taking a smoke break,” he said, dropping the remains of the wing he’d been gnawing on and wiping off his hands, tossing the napkin down after it.
She didn’t say a word as he moved out of the bar and through the door that lead to the dumpsters in the back. They reeked of garbage from the week and he quickly overpowered it with the smell of tobacco and smoke, sucking in deeply and holding it before releasing it with just as much of a sigh. He needed to be smoking something stronger.
Amber had been spending all her time with their grandfather. While he was running around town, she’d been doing the smart thing and consoling the people who needed it. It seemed like everyone knew how to be more useful.
He kicked one of the garbage cans and didn’t make a sound when the pain shot from his toes and up his ankle. He deserved that. He sucked harder on the cigarette. He deserved that too, all the coughs and black lungs he’d get from his days feeling sorry for himself in the mirror or in the back alleys. Maybe forcing Isabelle into a life like his had been a mistake. But it was family business. They’d all been expected to take it up. You don’t turn your back on family. He thought her intelligence could help them, she was so clever and bright. She was something the Caracals could never have.
He tossed the used bud if his cigarette and it bounced off the graffiti-covered wall in front of him. He watched the remains of the burning ash as they hit the ground like tiny rains of fire. He watched them snuff out against the unforgiving asphalt and garbage water leaking from the dumpster that drowned them.
That’s when he saw it.
An iPhone was sitting, cracked and dirty, by the wall. His first thought was how much he could sell it for if he got it a little cleaned up and claimed it was brand new. He walked over and, as he reached for it, saw a familiar star sticker flaked off of the back of it. He turned it over. The battery was beyond dead, but the phone was unmistakably Isabelle’s.
He looked around frantically for anything else, her wallet, for footprints like something out of a goddamn Scooby Doo episode. He spotted nothing on the ground or against the walls. There were no clues, no scraps of clothing or leftovers besides his sister’s cellphone in his hand.
He very nearly tripped over himself to rush back inside with it.
When he burst back into the bar he found someone had taken his seat next to Hanna. Robert was sitting there, saying something and she was laughing, her notebook of facts and clues pushed aside. Her beer was full again and he had his typical drink of a whiskey sour sitting in front of him. Amber was lingering nearby, looking miserably into her own rocks glass of bourbon. The phone in his hand seemed to grip him back as he squeezed it and walked over.