Cry Mercy

FIVE

Nick Perone's auto-repair shop in Khoury's Ford, Maryland, near the mouth of the Susquehanna River, was a fancier affair than Emme had expected. Set at the back of a wide parking lot, the building was red brick, the windows shuttered and the front door painted shiny black, and looked more like a Colonial-style home than a place where cars were fixed. She parked in the shade of a tall maple to the right of the door, and gathered her bag and notebook. She wasn't sure that Nick Perone would have something to say that wasn't reflected in the file he'd submitted to the foundation, but if he did, she wanted it committed to paper rather than memory.

A brass sign on the door welcomed her to Perone Automobilia and invited her in. She found herself in a well-decorated reception room complete with cushy sofas and chairs and a large flat-screen TV. A counter with a granite top separated the room from the receptionist's desk. Emme glanced over the counter but the desk was unattended. She leaned on the cool stone and looked around, thinking perhaps she'd misunderstood what Nick Perone had told her on the phone the day before. When he'd given her an address and driving directions, she'd asked if they'd be meeting at his home.

“No,” he'd replied, “I have an auto restoration business. I get in early, so whenever you arrive, I'll be available.”

A door on the left opened and a man in a light blue button-down shirt entered the reception area.

“Mr. Perone?” Emme asked.

“No,” he replied. “Can I help you?”

“I have a meeting with Mr. Perone this morning.”

“Oh, you're the investigator from the Mercy place.”

“Mercy Street Foundation. Is Mr. Perone here?”

“He's in the back, said to send you on in when you got here.” He opened the door and held it for her. She stepped into a large warehouse-type garage-so well camouflaged from the exterior-where several old cars were parked here and there in various stages of disassembly.

“Where?…” she asked.

“Last bay there on the right.”

Emme walked the length of the garage, ignored by the mechanics she passed, who appeared oblivious to her presence. The air smelled of grease and heated metal and something that reminded her of glue. The last bay held the chassis of a white car up on concrete blocks, the hood of which was open. The back of a pair of worn jeans appeared to be draped over the grill. As she drew closer, Emme could see the jeans were worn by a dark-haired man who was leaning as far into the car as one could without actually being part of the engine.

“Mr. Perone?” she called over the sound of a saw that seemed to echo through the high-ceilinged space.

“Yeah,” he replied without raising his head.

“I'm Emme Caldwell. We spoke yesterday on the phone.”

“Oh. Right. You're here about Belinda.” He withdrew from under the hood and turned. There were dark streaks on his chin and over one very blue eye. Emme extended a hand but he held up a dark-stained cloth. “Sorry. I'd shake but I don't think you want to be wearing this for the rest of the day.”

“It's nice to meet you all the same,” she replied, feeling a bit awkward. “Is there a place where we can talk?”

“We can go in my office.” He draped the cloth over the hood of the car and headed toward the office.

“I didn't realize there were still this many old cars on the road.” She tried to lengthen her stride to keep up with him.

“What?” He stopped and turned and for a moment she felt trapped and held by those deep blue eyes.

“All these old cars.” She averted her gaze and gestured toward the lot of them. “Do you think more people are keeping their older models rather than buying newer ones because of the economy?”

He looked at her as if she had two heads. Then, with studied patience, he said, “These are classic automobiles. Collectors items.”

“Sorry. They just look… well, old to me.”

“Yeah, well, that ‘old car’ I'm working on will be worth about a quarter of a million dollars when I'm finished with it.” He opened the door and held it for her.

She stopped and turned back to look at the car in the last bay.

“You're kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

He paused in the doorway. “That's a 1956 Porsche 356. Back in 1969, the original owner parked it in one of several garages on his property and dropped dead the next day. The family kept the property as a rental all these years but no one bothered to look in those locked-up garages until they decided to sell the whole parcel. When they finally opened the doors, they found that”-he nodded toward the Porsche-“and a 1955 Thunderbird. Mint.”

Emme looked blank.

“Never mind,” he said, holding the door for her. “You're here to talk about my niece.”

“Right. Belinda.” She followed him into an office that was as comfortably furnished as the reception area.

He gestured for her to sit at one of the club chairs that faced his desk. He held up his hands and said, “Give me just a second to clean up a bit.”

He ducked out of the room, and Emme settled into the chair, grateful for a moment to be alone. Nick Perone was nothing like she'd expected. There was a vibration of sorts that seemed to emanate from him and it unsettled her. That he was really good-looking was obvious, but she'd met a lot of really good-looking guys. It was this other thing-this vibe-that set her on edge.

She looked around the room, taking in the décor. On the walls were rows of photographs of-what else? she thought wryly-cars. Lots and lots of cars. Old cars, mostly, as best she could tell. She wondered if any of them had passed through his garage.

“Sorry,” he said as he returned and took his place behind his desk. “Now. About Belinda…”

“I've read through the file you sent to the foundation, of course, but I wanted to get some facts nailed down. You're Belinda's legal guardian-”

“Until she turns twenty-one, yes,” he nodded.

“She'll be twenty-one in…?” She looked through her notes to avoid making eye contact.

“In two years. And while I appreciate you speaking of her in the present tense, I understand the odds of finding her alive.”

“Well, I think we both realize the odds, Mr. Perone. I'm not going to try to build up your hopes. Your niece has been missing for five months and there's been no word from her. Could she still be alive? Possibly. Is it likely? No, but stranger things have happened.”

“I just want to know the truth. If she is alive, let's find her. If she isn't, let's find out what happened.”

“I promise we'll do our best to find the truth.”

She acknowledged his “Thank you” with a nod, then continued. “So Belinda is your sister's daughter…”

Emme had read all the reports, but she wanted to hear what Nick Perone had to say about his relationship with his niece in his own words. Sometimes the depth of information depended on the manner in which the questions were asked, and she preferred to ask her own questions.

“My sister, Wendy, was her mother, yes.”

“And she's deceased.”

“Wendy died in a car accident five years ago.”

“I noticed there was no information in any of the reports about Belinda's father.” Emme flipped over her notebook as if she were reading.

“I have no idea who her father was.”

“You don't know who fathered your sister's child?” Emme raised an eyebrow as if learning this for the first time, too, though of course she was well aware of what he'd previously told the police.

“No. She never told me, and since it wasn't something she wanted to talk about, I never pressed her on it.”

“Did she ever marry?”

“Once, very briefly, right out of college. I think it lasted maybe three months. Once they were divorced, she never mentioned his name again.”

“But you weren't curious? Not even a little?”

“Sure. But when someone makes it clear that they don't want to discuss something, you leave it alone.”

“So no hints, no clues?”

“The only thing Wendy ever said about Belinda's father is that he would never be a factor in her life. Look, we weren't particularly close. And we were half-siblings. Same dad, different mothers. Wendy was twelve years older than me. I was eighteen, just starting college, when Belinda was born. My contact with Wendy was usually limited to Christmas and birthdays. Frankly, I was surprised when I got the call from Wendy's lawyer telling me that she'd been in an accident and wasn't expected to survive, and that I should come right away because I was soon to be the guardian of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“She never told you she'd made you Belinda's guardian?”

“Nope.” He leaned back in his chair. “Not that I'm complaining. Belinda is a great kid. It wasn't always easy, not by a long shot. The first eighteen months she was with me were pretty rocky, frankly, but we've done okay these past few years. We managed to become a family in spite of ourselves.”

He handed her a framed photograph from his desk. In it, he had his arm over the shoulders of a tiny, confident-looking young woman in a cap and gown.

“Belinda's high school graduation. Just two years ago, almost to the day.”

“She's beautiful.” Emme had seen other photographs of the missing girl in the file. When Nick submitted his application, he'd sent several pictures in an attached file. Belinda Hudson had been petite and perfectly proportioned, with dark blond hair and a pretty smile. Had some unknown someone been dazzled by that smile, drawn to that beautiful face, with dark intentions? She'd seen all too many times what could happen to pretty young girls when they'd unwittingly attracted the attention of the wrong person.

“Let's go back to the weekend your niece went missing. You were out of town?”

He nodded. “I was in Los Angeles at a car show, had been there since Tuesday of that week. When I got home on Monday night, there was a call from her roommate on my answering machine, asking if Belinda had come home for the weekend. Said she'd left their sorority house on Saturday morning, that they had tickets for a concert on Sunday night, but Belinda never showed up. I called the police in Eastwind and when they tried to ignore me, I drove there and made them take a report. I'm sure you've seen the police reports. I sent in everything I had with my application.”

“Why did they ignore you?”

“They said she'd probably gone off for the weekend and forgot to tell anyone.”

“And you didn't think that was likely?”

“No. If she was going away for an entire weekend, she'd have told someone. Deb, maybe, or me, if she was going to be away for more than a day or two. She wouldn't just go and stay away and not let me or Deb know.”

“So you told the police this and they made a report. Then what?” She gestured for him to continue.

“Then they interviewed the girls in the house, and they looked around her room hoping to find something that might give them a clue, where she might have gone. But there wasn't anything.” He looked at the ground. “I looked too, when they were finished, in case they missed something.”

Emme tapped her pen on the top of her notebook. “I know it's been asked before, but can you think of any reason why Belinda would want to walk away from her life?”

“That's a nice way of saying run away,” he observed dryly. “No, no reason I know of. Her roommate told me she wasn't dating anyone in particular, that she hadn't mentioned anyone stalking her or paying undue attention to her, or following her. Deb-that's her roommate, Debra Newhouse-said Belinda was just enjoying her sophomore year. She was into all the activities at her sorority house, but she was also focusing a lot on her grades. She spent a lot of time in the library, Deb said. Beyond that, I don't know what else I can tell you.”

Emme pulled a folder from her bag and opened it. She removed a sheet of paper and slid it across the desk to him. “This is from the police file you sent us. It's a copy of the page from Belinda's datebook for Saturday, January twenty-fourth.”

“The day she disappeared,” he noted as he reached for the copy.

“She has initials circled there.” Emme pointed.

“D.S., yes. The police asked me if I knew whose initials they are.” He shook his head from side to side. “Like I told them, I have no idea. I'm afraid I really don't know any of her friends, except for Deb.”

“Maybe by now, she or one of the other girls in the sorority house has thought of someone.” Emme reached across the desk and dragged the sheet of paper back toward her with one finger. She slid it back into the folder.

“I'm guessing you'll be contacting her?”

“I'll be meeting with her this afternoon.”

“You'll let me know if there's anything new?” he asked.

“Of course. Is there anything you can add… maybe something that's occurred to you since you sent in the application?”

“No. I wish there were, but no. There's nothing. She's just… gone.”

“By the way, what happened to your niece's things from her room at school?”

“The housemother boxed everything up and sent it to me. It didn't occur to me to clean out her room when I was there, but when the semester ended and she wasn't there, they thought it was best to send it home.”

“Have you gone through her things? Maybe there's something there-a note, a letter, something that the police might have missed.”

“I didn't really go through the boxes. Like I said, I looked through her desk and all when I was there.” He paused. “Do you think there might be something there?”

Emme shrugged. “It's possible. Maybe you could take a little time over the weekend to find out.”

“I'll drive out to the house later and take a look. Would you want to come along?”

“I really would, but tonight's out. I'm pretty much tied up until Monday.” She and Chloe had some house hunting to do tomorrow and she wanted to get an early start.

Emme tucked the file back into her bag and stood. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“You're kidding, right?” He stood as well. “This is my niece we're talking about here. I appreciate your organization taking on her case, more than I can say. I had hired a private investigation firm, but didn't feel overly confident in them. Plus, let's not talk about the expense. They told me up front it could take months. I'd have had to mortgage my business to have kept them on. After six weeks they had nothing for me except a whopping bill.”

“Well, the foundation was set up to take on cases like this. Ones the police haven't been able to move off dead center. We'll give it our best, Mr. Perone.”

“Nick,” he told her. “Call me Nick.”

She removed a card from her bag. “I don't have any cards of my own yet, but this one has the numbers of the foundation on it, and I added my new cell number as well.” She glanced at the card as she passed it to him, then said, “Oh, give it back and I'll add my name to it.”

“No need.” He tucked the card into his back pocket and smiled for the first time since she'd arrived. “I'll remember your name. Emme Caldwell, right?”

“Right.” She nodded, wondering how long it would take for the name to stop sounding strange to her ear, how long before she'd stop feeling like a total fraud. “Emme Caldwell.”

The drive from Khoury's Ford to Eastwind on the opposite side of the Chesapeake took just over an hour. Emme found the police station housed in the newly constructed municipal building right past a sign that read WELCOME TO EASTWIND, MARYLAND, HOME OF THE EASTWIND HURRICANES. Chief of Police Edward Dietrich was standing in the lobby talking to the receptionist when Emme entered through the automatic glass doors.

“I just came out here to tell Kate I was expecting you,” he told Emme as he extended a beefy hand in her direction. “Come on back to my office.”

He led the way to the first office off the hall.

“Have a seat there next to the desk, Ms. Caldwell.” He sat on one end of his desk and stared down at her. “So you're here about the girl that went missing from the college back a few months.”

“Yes. Belinda Hudson.”

“You been on the job?” He narrowed his eyes to study her. “You have that look about you.”

“Seven years,” she told him. “In California.”

“Well, then you'll understand what I mean when I say that I'm happy to turn it over to you. That case has been a pain in my ass since day one.” He paused before adding, “We charge ten cents a page for copying, by the way. I explained that to the lady who called.”

“I'm sure that's not a problem.”

“Yeah, this was just one of those cases that started out bad, right out of the gate, you ever have one of them?”

Emme nodded. “I don't know a cop who hasn't.”

He shook his head, and a strand of white hair flipped onto his forehead. “I've been a cop for almost forty years, and I never had a case where there were no clues. Nothing. That girl just walked out of that house on College Avenue and disappeared into the mist, just like you see on TV. You know those shows about missing people, how they just sort of evaporate? That's what this girl did. She just evaporated.”

“Well, there's the datebook with the initials-” Emme pointed out.

He kept on going as if he'd not heard. “No one saw her leave the house that day, no one saw her on campus, no one saw her-period. We interviewed damn near everyone who was on campus that weekend, and spent two days making the rounds of the shops on Main Street. Nothing. A lot of folks knew her, but no one had seen her on Saturday morning. Now, that could be due to the early hour she left the house.”

“She left a little before seven, I think the report said.”

“That's what the roommate told us. Said she was half asleep but she knows that the Hudson girl was there because she borrowed some money from her. The roommate figured she was going to grab a coffee somewhere there on campus, then go on to the library, the way she usually did.”

“Chief, do you have her datebook?”

He nodded. “I do. Did you want to look at it?”

“I would, thank you.”

“Just a second, and I'll have that brought out for you. We have several boxes of interviews-you're welcome to go through them, too, if you like.”

Emme turned her wrist to look at her watch. She had a few hours before she had to meet with Belinda's roommate. “I'd like that, yes.”

“We can set you up in the office next door-we're waiting for the town council to approve a new hire for us. Built us this nice new space but didn't give us the money to put any more officers on board. Though with the college complaining to the mayor every week that the girl is still missing, you'd think someone would think it would be a good idea to put a few more uniforms on the street.”

He shoved himself off the desk and disappeared into the hall, then returned a few minutes later, telling her, “They're going to bring the files down for you in a few, along with the evidence box.”

“Chief, I appreciate you being so cooperative,” she said. As a cop, she'd found most departments to be highly territorial, but Chief Dietrich didn't appear to be holding anything back.

“Hey, the sooner it becomes your problem, the sooner it's no longer mine,” he told her bluntly. “I got enough problems in other areas without having the mayor, the council members, the college, parents of kids at the college, all on my back. If you can find this girl, that'll be great. But in the meantime, people call me, I tell them to call you, far as I'm concerned.”

“That will be fine, Chief,” she said evenly.

“You think you'll do a better job than we did?”

“This is my only case right now, Chief. If your guys had the luxury of devoting all their time to one case, I imagine by now we'd have some idea of what happened to Belinda Hudson,” she answered, as diplomatically as she could. “I know how hard it is to work a complex case like this, to watch it grow cold, and meanwhile the new cases are stacking up on the desk. So no, to answer your question, I don't think I'll do a better job than your people did. I just think I'll have more time to do it.”

He nodded, satisfied with her response.

“Hey, just think of me as that extra set of hands you always wish you had around here.” She tried to sound chipper.

A uniformed cop stuck his bald head through the door. “Chief, the files are on the desk, like you asked.”

“Thanks, Feldman. Take Ms. Caldwell next door and see that she gets what she needs.” The chief turned to Emme. “There's a copier at the end of the hall there, if you need it. Just keep track of how many you run. Council's been driving us crazy down here, keeping track of every damned thing.”

“I'll be sure to do that, thanks. And thanks for everything. We appreciate it.”

“Good luck with the case. You'll keep us in the loop?”

“Of course. It's still your case.”

“Right. You're just ‘the extra set of hands,’” he said as she walked past. “But if you settle the case, I guess the press is going to be real good for your organization.”

“Mine and yours.” She smiled. “Like I said, it's still your case. If there's an arrest to be made in Eastwind, it's going to be your collar.”

He stared at her. “You crack it here, you're turning it back over to us?”

“That's right. You're the law here.” She'd already figured out that everything the foundation did was going to be scrutinized, that word in the law enforcement community traveled fast, and that she had to make nice with the cops into whose cases she'd be interjecting herself. She might as well start now, with the first case. Besides, other than making a citizen's arrest, what jurisdiction did she really have here?

The smile still plastered on her face, she followed the officer to the next room and dropped her bag next to the desk. There were seven boxes piled on top, in no particular order. She only had a few hours to go through them.

“Oh, Chief?” she called back to him. When he appeared in her doorway, she asked, “What about Belinda's computer? Has it been found?”

He shook his head, “No. She must have taken it with her. Sorry. No computer, no phone.”

“The records from the phone company?”

“Should be in one of those boxes. We didn't get a whole lot of information from them, though. As often as kids use those things, you'd have thought we'd come up with more than some calls home and a couple of wrong numbers…”