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Stephen White
Missing Persons
Book 13 in the Dr. Alan Gregory series
for Ly
… Peace is poor reading.
– Thomas Hardy
A girl was missing.
In any other town it would have been local news. Even here, on any other day, it might have been just local news.
But it wasn’t any other town.
It was Boulder.
It wasn’t any other day.
It was Christmas.
And a girl was missing.
Again.
God.
1
The fact that I was sitting with Diane behind Ha
She was right.
With only nine shopping days until Christmas, Diane Estevez and I were scheduled to make the short flight over the Rockies to Las Vegas for a weekend professional workshop-Diane, I suspected, was pretending to be much more enamored of EMDR than she really was-and Ha
Diane had switched our Frontier flight the next day from noon to the cusp of dawn so that she could cram in a few additional hours getting intimate with some dice, and Ha
“Is that her car? Do you know what she drives?” I asked. The only other car in the tiny lot was a silver Volkswagen Passat.
“Looks like hers.” Diane offered the comment with a slightly sardonic lilt, and I assumed that she was referring more to the car’s pristine condition than to either its make or model. In stark contrast to the spotless Passat, Diane’s Saab was covered in the gray-beige film that adheres to virtually every moving vehicle in Colorado after any slushy late fall snowstorm, like the one we’d had the previous weekend.
I stepped out of Diane’s car and peered into Ha
The mailing label on the magazine read “H. Grant,” and was addressed to the Broadway office. The code in the corner indicated that the subscription would terminate the following April. “It’s hers,” I said.
Diane had joined me beside the Passat. “Ha
My own reaction was a little different; I was thinking, Ha
“I don’t know about that. I’m getting a feeling,” she said. “And not a good one.”
“About Ha
“A little, but more about Vegas.” Diane’s tone was somber. She took her craps seriously. “Let’s go inside,” she said.
Ha
The back door of the single-story house was locked. Diane and I followed a flagstone path down the side past a hedge of miniature lilacs that stood naked for winter. We made our way to the front of the building and strolled up a few stairs into a waiting room that had probably been the home’s original parlor. On the far side of the lamp-lit room a thirties-something woman with an astonishing quantity of frizzy hair was sitting on a green velvet settee reading a copy of Yoga Journal while munching from a bag of Cheetos. I noted that she checked her wristwatch after she glanced up at us.
I also noted that her fingertips were almost the exact same color as her hair.
“Which office is Ha
“Down that hall on the left. The one on the right is Mary’s.”
“Mary” was Mary Black, M.D., a psychiatrist who without benefit of fertility concoctions had given birth to triplet boys only a few weeks before, on Thanksgiving eve. Both Mary’s extended maternal adventure and her extended maternity leave were in their earliest stages, which meant that Ha
Diane stepped down the hall toward the offices. “Look,” she said.
Stuck into the jamb of Ha
“What are you doing, Diane?” I blurted. “Those are probably from patients. You can’t read them.”
Without even a microsecond of indecision Diane rejected my protest. “Of course they’re from patients. That’s the point,” she said. She glanced at the first note, handed it to me, and said, “Look, Ha
I didn’t know how to explain that.
The other two notes were from patients whose therapist had stood them up earlier in the day. Ha
The woman with the orange Rosea
The woman’s voice was part a
Never.
I’d begun tasting acid in my throat; I had a bad feeling, too. Though, unlike Diane’s, mine had absolutely nothing to do with dice. I tapped lightly on Ha