The Chronoliths

It took a while, but he gave us a mostly-legible handwritten list of names, addresses, terminal numbers.

“Just keep my name out of it,” he muttered.

Hitch gave Janice a big hug and Janice returned it. She had never much cared for Hitch Paley, probably for good reason, but the fact that he was here and searching for Kait must have redeemed him in her eyes. She took my hand as we were leaving and said, “Thank you, Scott. I mean it. I’m sorry about what I said a few days ago.”

“Don’t be.”

“The police are still telling us Kait’s in town. But she’s not, is she?”

“Probably not.”

“God, Scott, it’s just so—” She couldn’t find a word for it. She put her hand to her mouth. “Be careful,” she said. “I mean, find her, but… you be careful.”

I promised her I would.

When we left the house Hitch said, “Does Janice know she’s married to an asshole?”

“She’s begi

We went to Ashlee’s for an evening meal and to plot strategy.

I helped Ash in the kitchen while Hitch used his pocket terminal to make a few calls. Ashlee put together a rice and chicken dish she called “poverty pilaf,” cubing the raw chicken neatly with a cheap steel cleaver. She asked me how long I’d been married to Janice.

“About five years,” I said. “We were both very young.”

“So you’ve been divorced a long time.”

“It doesn’t seem so long sometimes.”

“She strikes me as a very together person.”

“Together if not always very flexible. This has been hard on her.”

“She’s pretty lucky, living the life she does. She ought to appreciate that.”

“I don’t think she feels very lucky right now.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“I understand, Ashlee.”

“Putting my fucking foot in it again.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes.

“Can I chop those carrots for you?”

She seasoned the pilaf, meticulously and sensibly. We rejoined Hitch while it baked.

Hitch had rested his big booted feet on Ashlee’s coffee table. “Here’s what we have,” he said. “This is from Whitman and a couple of other sources including the cop, Ramone Dudley. Whit’s bullshit Copperhead club has twenty-eight regular dues-paying members, and ten of them are upper management from the company he works at, so maybe he’s right about joining for career reasons. Twenty-eight adults, of whom eighteen are single or childless couples. Ten members have kids of various ages but only nine actually introduced their offspring to the Youth Group. Including a pair of sibs, that’s ten kids plus six outsiders like Adam who applied independently. But there was a core group of eight who were deeply involved, including Kait and Adam. They’re the ones who disappeared.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So let’s assume they left town. They would have been too conspicuous on a plane or a bus, given that they’re traveling together. I doubt the suburban contingent would have agreed to hitchhike, considering the number of fucked-up adults already on the road. So that leaves private transportation. And probably something fairly big. You can stuff eight people into a landau, but not without attracting attention and making everybody grouchy.”

“This is pretty conjectural,” I said.

“Okay, but follow me for a minute. If they’re driving, what are they driving?”

Ashlee said, “Some of these kids must own cars.”

“Right. And Ramone Dudley looked into that. Four of the eight do have vehicles registered to their names, but the vehicles are all accounted for. None of the parents reported a stolen car, and in fact pretty much every auto theft in the city during the time these kids took off was either clearly professional or a joyride that ended with the vehicle trashed or burned. Stealing a car isn’t as easy as it used to be. Even if you get past the personalized locks, every car assembled or imported in the last ten years routinely broadcasts its serial number and GPS coordinates. Mostly people use it to find their car in a parking lot, but it also complicates auto theft considerably. A modern car thief is a technician with a lot of different cracking skills, not a kid out of high school.”

“So they didn’t use one of their own cars and they didn’t steal one,” Ashlee said. “Great. That leaves nothing. Maybe they are still in town.”

“That’s what Ramone Dudley thinks, but it doesn’t make any sense. These kids are pretty obviously on a haj. So I asked Dudley to check the four cars they own, a second time. So he did.”

“Ah — he found something?”

“Nope. Nothing’s changed. Three of the vehicles are still exactly where they’ve been parked for the last week. Only one’s been moved at all, and only for round trips to the local grocery pickup, not more than twenty miles on the odometer since the disappearance. The kid left a set of keys with his mom.”

“So we’re no farther ahead.”

“Except for one thing. This mom who’s driving her kid’s car to the store. On Whit’s list she’s Eleanor Helvig, member in good standing of the Copperhead club along with her husband Jeffrey. Jeffrey is a junior VP at Clarion Pharmaceuticals, a couple of levels above Whit. Jeff’s making pretty good money these days and there are three vehicles registered to the family: his, his wife’s, and his kid’s. Nice cars, too. A couple of Daimlers and a secondhand Edison for Jeff Jr.”

“So?”

“So why is the wife driving the Edison for groceries, when her Daimler’s a big utility vehicle with lots of room in the back?”

Ashlee said, “Could be all kinds of reasons.”

“Could be… but I think we should ask her, don’t you?”

Di

In the car I said, “About that package…”

“Right, the package. Forget about it, Scotty.”

“I’m not going to forget an old debt. You fronted me the cash to leave Thailand. All I owed you was a favor, and it didn’t happen.”

“Yeah, but you tried, right?”

“I went to the place you told me about.”

“Easy’s?” Hitch was gri

I said, “I went to Easy’s, but—”

“You mentioned my name to the guy there?”

“Yeah—”

“Old guy, gray-haired, kinda tall, coffee-colored?”

“Sounds like the man. But there was no package, Hitch.”

“What, he told you that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did he tell you that in a gentle way?”

“Far from it.”

“Got a little irritated, did he?”

“Practically reached for a gun.”

Hitch was nodding. “Good… good.”

“Good? So the package was late, or what?”

“No. Scotty, there never was any package.”

“The one you told me to pick up for you — ?”

“No such object. Sorry.”

I said, “But the money you gave me—”

“Mainly, no offense, but I thought you’d be safer back in Mi

“You made it up?”

“I’m sorry, Scotty, I guess you thought you were a drag mule or something, but that kinda appealed to my sense of humor, too. Knowing your whole college-educated clean-cut image of yourself, I mean. I thought a little moral dilemma might put some variety into your life.”