Fear The Worst

“Been there, done that,” I said, recalling desperate times in college. “You run the risk of repetitive strain injury.” Despite everything, Andy gri

“Huh?”

“From the newspapers, online, anything in this area. See who’s selling their cars privately.”

Andy looked at me. It was taking a minute for him to figure this out.

“You call them up, you say hey, I saw your ad for your Pontiac Vibe or whatever it is, you don’t want to buy it, but you wondered whether they’d made up their mind about a replacement vehicle, that we have great financing and lease rates on at the moment, and if they’d like to come in, you’d love to get them into a new Honda, bring their current car in for a trade.”

“That’s a fucking awesome idea.” He smiled giddily. “So I tell Cantrell I’m working a whole bunch of new leads.”

“Just be ready when she rips a page out of the phone book and hands it to you.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She’ll say, ‘Leads, you need fucking leads? Here’s a whole page of them.’ She has one phone book in there, all she uses it for is to rip out pages.”

“Hey, you’re first up, right?” Andy was looking over my shoulder. I turned around, saw a stocky, wide-shouldered, middle-aged guy who looked to have cut himself shaving a couple of times that morning, like he didn’t do it that often but today he wanted to make a good impression and it backfired. He had on a crisp, clean work shirt, but his worn jeans and scuffed work boots betrayed him. It was like he was thinking, if the top half of me makes a good impression, no one’ll notice the rest of me.

He was admiring a pickup truck in the showroom.

“Hi,” I said, out of my chair. As I headed over to him, I caught Laura out of the corner of my eye, summoning Andy, the poor bastard.

“Hey,” said the guy. He had a deep, gruff voice.

“The Ridgeline,” I said, nodding at the blue truck. “Gets a ‘recommended’ rating in Consumer Reports.”

“Nice truck,” he said, slowly walking around it.

“What are you driving now?” I asked.

“F- 150,” he said. The Ford. Also a good truck, recommended by Consumer, but not something I felt needed pointing out. I glanced out the showroom window, looking for it, but instead what caught my eye was a plain, unmarked Chevy, and Kip Je

“Would it be possible to take one of these for a test drive?” he asked.

“Sure thing,” I said. “I just need a driver’s license from you, we make a photocopy.”

He fished out his wallet, gave me his license, which I sca

“Hey,” he said, slipping it into his pocket.

I walked the license over to the girl at reception so she could make a copy, all the while glancing out into the lot at Je

I instructed one of the younger guys in the office to track down a Ridgeline, hang some dealer plates off it, and bring it up to the door ASAP.

“We’ll have one ready for you in just a couple of minutes,” I said to Fletcher. “Normally I’d tag along for the test drive-”

Fletcher looked dismayed. “Last place I went let me take it out alone. Not so much, you know, pressure?”

“Yeah, well, I was about to say, if you’re okay going alone, I just have to talk to this person-”

“That’s perfect,” he said.

“One of the fellows will be bringing up one of our demo trucks in a second. We can talk after?”

Even though Je

It didn’t exactly sound like police business. Je

She flipped the phone shut and slipped it into the purse slung over her shoulder.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to listen in.”

“That’s okay,” Kip Je

“How old is she?”

“Twelve,” she said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Richard Fletcher get into the gleaming new pickup and drive it off the lot. But I was focused on Je

She must have seen the look on my face, a mixture of hope, expectation, and dread, so she got to it right away. She took half a step back so that when she looked up at me she didn’t have to crane her neck so much.

“You have time to take a ride with me?” she asked.

“Where?” I asked.

Please don’t say the morgue.

“Up to Derby,” she said.

“What’s in Derby?”

“Your daughter’s car,” Je

FIVE

“WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?” I asked, sitting up front in Kip Je

“I didn’t find it,” Je

“Was there anyone…” I hesitated. “Was there anyone in the car?” I was thinking about the trunk.

Je

“How long’s the car been there?”

“Not sure. It was parked with a few others, no one really noticed it for a while.”

I closed my eyes a moment, opened them, watched the trees go by as we headed north up the winding two-lane Derby Milford Road, about a twenty-minute drive.

“Where’s the car now?” I pictured a brilliantly lit forensics lab the size of an airplane hangar, the car being gone over for clues by technicians in hazmat suits.

“In a local compound, where they take cars they’ve towed for parking illegally, that kind of thing. They ran the plate, which I’d had flagged in the system. That’s when they called me. Look, I haven’t even seen the car yet. You know the car, you can tell me if you notice anything out of the ordinary about it.”

“Sure,” I said.

Everything about this was out of the ordinary. My daughter was missing. At times over the last couple of weeks, I’d tried to find comfort in the thought that while Syd might have run off, that didn’t have to mean harm had come to her.

The first couple of days she was gone, I told myself it was about the fight we’d had. My questioning her about the Versace sunglasses, asking about the receipt. That had pissed Syd off big-time, and I could imagine her wanting to punish me for thinking she might have stolen them.

But as the days went on, it seemed unlikely that that argument had sparked her disappearance. Then I tried to tell myself that it was something else that had made her angry enough to run away. Something I’d done, or maybe Susa