Missing Persons

63

Sam wasn’t talkative as we ran, nor was I. My lungs were trying to recover from their shock at being forced to process enough oxygen for cardiovascular exercise in Colorado’s best impression of a deep freeze. After his initial, “Let’s go,” we covered a good quarter-mile before Sam grunted anything more. He had been running on my heels, but pulled up astride me and said, “News.”

I thought it was a question, that Sam was asking me what I’d heard about Diane. Tapping my pocket I replied, “Nothing. Got my phone with me in case Raoul calls.”

“No, I have more news for you. About the neighbor.”

“Doyle?”

“You’ll hear this soon enough: Doyle Chandler’s not Doyle Chandler. It’s a stolen identity. We don’t know who he is. Was.”

“You’re kidding.” I knew he wasn’t kidding.

“The Doyle Chandler whose social security number matches that of the guy we found murdered yesterday died in a car crash with his parents, Renee and Dennis, in 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia. He was six years old at the time. The man who lived next door to the Millers filched the kid’s identity. He’s been using it for sixteen years.”

“So whose body was it?” I suddenly didn’t even know what to call Doyle.

“We don’t know, and we may not ever know. AFIS doesn’t pull a match on the index print he gave for his Colorado driver’s license. NCIC has bupkis.” Sam paused to allow his breathing to catch up with his talking and running. “Animals had chewed off almost all of the fingertips and most of the face before the body was discovered. We’re not going to get usable prints from what’s left. We have his teeth, of course, but the guy hadn’t seen a dentist in a while.”

“What about the house? There must be prints there.”

“The techs aren’t hopeful-the place had been professionally cleaned after he moved out. Need to match them with something, anyway.”

“This case,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” he agreed, and fell back into position on my heels.

Five minutes later, from the ridge top above the neighborhood, I watched a sedan without headlights approach the junction of dirt lanes that leads toward our house. It wasn’t a car I recognized. Light in color, GM in ancestry, its boxy shape dated it back a decade or more. Our neighbor Adrienne’s latest nanny? Possibly. I kept an eye on the car as it took the turn onto our lane, but our route carried us down the other side of the ridge and I couldn’t see the car’s ultimate destination.

Sam passed me on the downhill and increased the pace for the final mile. I was exhausted after the run. He, too, seemed unnaturally winded. We both knew it wasn’t just the jog. “Coming in?” I asked. “I’ll make you breakfast.”

I’d already looked around for the GM sedan. It wasn’t at my house or at Adrienne’s.

“Have to get to work,” Sam said. “Simon’s with Sherry.”

I was perseverating on Sam’s news that Doyle wasn’t Doyle. But I had no easy way to digest that news, so I refocused on Sam’s implication that Bob might be deeply involved in Mallory’s disappearance, but couldn’t get anywhere with that either. Bob was a schizoid personality. He was as schizoid as anyone I’d ever met. Bob kidnapping Mallory-or anyone else-made no more sense to me than a pedophile breaking into an old folks’ home.

“You no longer consider Mallory a runaway, do you?”

Sam said, “I go back and forth. If she is, it looks like she had help getting out of the house. If she isn’t, we have a different problem. What was the neighbor’s role in all this? Did he take her? Did he help her? What was Camaro Bob’s? Did he have something to do with it? Looks like he did. What’s what exactly, I haven’t decided. I still want to know why Doyle dug that tunnel in the first place. Why did he want into the Millers’ house so badly?”

The obvious was to me, well, obvious. “He lived next door. People prey on kids, Sam. He could’ve become obsessed with her.”

“A voyeur? That’s all you got?”

“I’m thinking worse.”

He scowled. “Why dig a tunnel?”

“To do his thing. Access.”

“Risky as shit. Three people live in that house. He’s bound to get caught wandering around in there trying to get at the girl. Doesn’t work. You live next door, there’re much easier ways to spy on a kid.”

“Maybe he went in at night when they were asleep.”

“There are pervs who like to watch girls sleep?” Sam asked.

After all his years as a cop, Sam’s residual naiveté still ambushed me sometimes.

“There are pervs who like just about everything.”

He held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it.”

I thought about the theater in Doyle’s basement. All the top-end electronics. “Did Doyle wire their house? Hide video cameras in Mallory’s room? The bathroom? Anything like that?”

“We checked. Fixtures are all clean, attic’s clean. No holes drilled where they shouldn’t be drilled. There’s nothing there, not a single extra cable in the Millers’ house, not a single cable coming back through the tunnel to Doyle’s. No transmitters. If he put surveillance in, he took it back out when he moved away.”

I thought for a moment, forcing myself to go back to basics. Psychology basics. The best predictor of someone’s future behavior-maybe the only predictor-is his past behavior. I said, “Car thieves steal cars, right? Bank robbers rob banks?”

Sam looked at me as though he’d just realized I was mentally challenged. “Yeah, and psychologists ask stupid questions.”

“What do we really know about Doyle Chandler?”

“Not much,” Sam admitted. “Did I tell you he was shot?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“He was shot. Behind the ear, slight upward angle. Shooter wasn’t real close, no burns on his skin. Slug looks like a.38. Second and third shots to his back. But they were just insurance. He was already dead with the first slug.”

“Suspects?”

“Camaro Bob’s on the list.”

I didn’t want to hear that. I went back to Doyle. “You know one more thing about Doyle for sure, Sam: He steals identities,” I said.

“Yeah?”

He knew where I was going. I said, “You were wondering about the motive for the tunnel. There it is.”

“Doyle went into the Millers’ house to build a new identity?” Sam said.

I noted-with some relief-that his question was almost entirely devoid of skepticism.

“What better place? Say Doyle went in during the daytime when Bill was at work and the kids were at school. He’d have the run of the house. Personal records, financial records, work stuff that Bill left laying around. Computer files, his e-mails, maybe even passwords. Be like Wal-Mart for an identity thief. With a tunnel he could take all the time he needed to fill in every last blank.”

“ ‘Lying’ around. Bill would leave stuff ‘lying’ around. Not ‘laying’ around.”

I smiled. “Does the gratis English lesson mean you think I got the rest right?”

“Maybe,” Sam said. Even though he’d already caught his breath, he put his hands on his hips the way exhausted athletes do, stared at me, and momentarily left any parsimony behind. “We blew it the first time. Eight years ago? We did. I don’t care about the public face we tried to put on it, the damn truth is that we fucking blew it. Guess what? I don’t want to be the guy who blows it this time. If you have something that’ll help me find that girl, I need to hear it. Second chances don’t come around too often in life. I have one. We need to redeem ourselves.”

In the years since the other little girl’s death, I’d never heard Sam be so brutal in his appraisal of law enforcement’s role. “Okay, yeah,” I said.

“Yeah, you have something? Or, yeah, you understand?”

Did I have something? If I did, I wasn’t sure what it looked like. I said, “Yeah, I understand.”

He stepped toward the Cherokee. “I don’t need your understanding.”