Missing Persons

42

“Hi, guys,” Sam said to the two detectives. He didn’t feign surprise. I had to give him credit for that.

I glared at Sam. He made the same little hey-everything’s-copacetic face and did the same hey-everything’s-cool hand gesture that he’d thrown at me back in my waiting room while I was trying to figure out why he was camping out reading magazines.

“Make some room,” he said to me.

I slid over and was immediately pinned against the wall, with no chance of escape, by Darrell Olson.

Sam and Jaris Slocum-their chests and shoulders were much broader than mine and Darrell’s-totally filled the space on the other side of the table. A waitress came by and took our drink order. Apparently sensing the tension at the table, she skipped any flirtation and kept her smile under wraps. We all ordered beer. Four different brands. Just another way of shouting out that we weren’t a bunch of buddies sharing a pitcher.

“You guys hungry?” Sam asked.

“You bet,” Darrell said. “I love this place.”

One mystery solved: Darrell had chosen the restaurant. I slid my menu toward him. My own appetite was wavering. While glaring at Sam, I asked, “What’s this about? You should check with my attorney if you want another interview, Detective Slocum. We shouldn’t even-”

He snapped back. “I know exactly what-”

Sam interrupted Slocum’s interruption. He said, “Call him Jaris, Alan. We’re all friends here.”

What?

Slocum tried again. “I’m perfectly aware that I need to go through your attorney to discuss… that other matter. I’m always eager for a chance to chat with Mr. Maitlin. But Darrell and I aren’t here to talk about Hannah Grant.”

I might have been offended by the gratuitous sarcasm about Cozy if I wasn’t still stuck on Sam’s announcement that “We’re all friends here.” Since when? And if we’re not here to talk about Hannah, what the hell are we here to talk about? At that moment I thought of Bob Brandt, and to no one in particular said, “It’s your move.”

“Hey, allow me,” Sam said. “This little party was my idea.”

I thought my narrowed eyes and tight brow aptly communicated to Sam that I didn’t approve of any of the choreography he’d put into his soiree so far.

“A little background to start,” he said, sticking to the charade that we were all just friends having a beer and sharing some crispy tofu triangles. “Jaris and Darrell had a piece of the Mallory Miller investigation. Lucy and I were doing time line. They were assigned to follow up a couple of potentially promising leads: one being the empty house next door-the one that’s for sale-and two being the possibility that the girl somehow ended up with her mother.”

“This is all about Mallory, then?” I asked. Despite my skepticism, I knew my question was evidence of capitulation on my part. I should have been throwing money on the table for my beer and walking full speed away from the three Boulder cops.

“A little patience, maybe?” Sam said. The drinks arrived. Sam waited until the waitress was gone again before he continued. “I was thinking about the conversations you and I had, you know, about the guy with the car, that classic Camaro, and about the house next door to the Millers’ with the waterfalls and shit, and about your friend, Dr. Estevez, and what happened to her in Las Vegas.”

Darrell said, “Sam came to us. We heard his thoughts and started wondering whether there might be some connection, something that tied things together.”

“Some connection?” I asked, even more skeptically than before. I already feared a connection among Bob and Mallory and Diane, and I was beyond skeptical that I was hearing about this from Darrell Olson and Jaris Slocum.

“Yeah,” said Slocum.

As far as I was concerned he was nothing more than a punk with a shield. “I’m uncomfortable with this,” I said, trying hard not to sound petulant. Sam’s expression told me that I hadn’t quite succeeded. I felt as though all the confidential information that I’d been trying to guard about my patients was in a balloon hovering above the table, and that each of the three detectives was dimpling the latex with the point of a saber.

The worst part? I knew I’d gotten myself into this one by trying to finesse the confidentiality rules with Sam.

“Hear us out,” Sam said.

Slocum’s mug of beer was almost gone. He’d either been real thirsty, or he was real anxious. He looked toward our waitress and raised the mug and his eyebrows. He wanted a refill.

Darrell said, “We didn’t know about the guy with the car. The one who rents the garage next door to the Millers. That was news to us. It could be an important piece of information. We should have picked up on it, but it slipped through the cracks.”

I glared at Sam. “Slipped through the cracks, huh?”

Slocum picked up from there. “And the fact that your friend disappeared in Las Vegas? That’s curious to us, too.”

“Curious?”

“Well, worrisome, of course, but curious, too. Given the circumstances.”

“What circumstances are those?” I asked.

“Everything,” Slocum replied.

“Everything?”

“Yeah.”

I found that I liked him almost as much now that we were all friends having beers and I was calling him “Jaris” as I had when he was ordering me around outside Hannah Grant’s office and I was calling him “Detective.” I said, “For old times’ sake, Jaris, treat me like you treated me at Hannah’s office. You know, like an idiot citizen. Tell me what ‘everything’ means.”

“Alan,” Sam said.

I remained unconvinced about the announced agenda for this impromptu meeting. “We’re not talking in code about Hannah Grant right now? You’re all sure about that? If we are, my lawyer’s probably not going to be too happy about it. Come to think about it, neither will my wife.” I don’t know why I threw in the part about Lauren. It was petty, but then so was my state of mind.

Darrell held up a hand to shush Sam. He said, “Let me, Sam, please.” Darrell was using the conciliator’s voice that I’d heard him try on with Slocum and later with Cozy Maitlin the night that we found Hannah’s body. I suspected that Darrell had been a conciliator at least as long as he’d known how to ride a two-wheeler, and that his initial mediating role had been to intervene before his argumentative parents ripped the flesh from each other’s throats.

“Alan-we didn’t get off to a good start with you and Dr. Estevez last month-Jaris and I didn’t. Water under the bridge, right? Is that okay? Because based on what Sam’s been able to tell us, it sounds like both you and her might have something to do with another situation we’re working.” He lowered his voice here, and leaned closer to me. “Yes, I’m talking about Mallory. Now, it may just all be coincidence. That’s always possible. But it’s also possible that everything’s related.”

I couldn’t resist a jab. “If it turns out that everything’s related, it sounds like you and Detective Slocum-Jaris-might have missed some important details during your initial investigations.”

Sam said, “I’m not sure that’s helpful, Alan.”

I turned on him. My tone was level. My words? Not as much. “And you’re the best judge of that, Sam? Of what’s helpful? Please. He”-I pointed at Slocum-“roughed up Diane last month for no reason other than that he’d had a bad day or his feelings were hurt or God knows what else, and now he wants to have a nice dinner with me and down a few beers and he thinks I’ll just bow down and help him cover up his mistakes on the”-I caught myself and lowered my voice to a coarse whisper-“Mallory Miller fiasco. Because what I think this is about is ass-covering.”

Slocum’s face was red. He raised his glass and drained the dregs from the bottom of his first beer-a version of counting to ten to calm himself down, I thought-before he said, “I’m guessing you need help finding her. Not to mention the guy with the old Camaro. Him, too. I don’t expect you to like me-to be honest, I don’t give a shit-but I’m willing to try to find these people. You want to work something out, or not? Your choice. I don’t have time for your sissy-ass games.”

Sissy-ass games? I supposed that meant that Jaris and I were no longer friends. “What can you do to help? Last time I looked, Las Vegas was in Nevada.”

Sam sighed loudly. I thought he was expressing relief that most of the cards were finally on the table.

The waitress chose that moment to return with Jaris’s second beer. She dropped it off in record time and withdrew as though she’d just remembered she’d left the water running in her bathtub.

“If we reach out from here,” Darrell said as she retreated, “the Las Vegas police maybe show a little more interest in trying to find out what happened to her. I suspect that could make a significant difference. The current situation-an out-of-state husband who can’t find his wife for a couple of days-probably isn’t creating a lot of investigative curiosity in Sin City.”

Of course he was right. I asked, “And the other guy? The one with the Camaro? How are you going to help with him?”

“One phone call-and one BOLO later-every cop in the state will have an eye peeled for that car,” Jaris said.

I hadn’t touched my beer. I picked it up and took a long, slow sip. “On what pretense?” I asked.

Across the table, Slocum had already finished half of his second mug. Sam spied Jaris getting ready to jump back into the fray and decided to run interference. He said, “That’s our problem. We’ll come up with one. It’s not as hard as you might think. By the way, BOLO is be-on-the-look-”

“I know what a BOLO is,” I snapped, almost spitting my beer. “So what do you want from me, Jaris?”

Sam wasn’t done orchestrating. “What do you say let’s order first, okay? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starving here. Darrell, what’s good? Think I’d like the tempeh cutlets?”

Sam’s tempeh question was theater-of-the-absurd offered purely for my benefit. Tempeh was so far outside the boundaries of Sam’s comfort universe that Hubble couldn’t have spotted it.

Sam was thinking that he’d won, and he was pretty darn proud of himself.