The Last Good Guy

3

It was after one o’clock by the time I drove onto the Monarch Academy campus in Carlsbad. A sign at the entrance said:

Academy chancellor Dr. Judith Stahl was a stocky, middle-aged woman with short dark hair and round wire-framed glasses. She frowned as I told her about my meeting with Penelope Rideout. She called Penelope and got permission to talk to me. She was still frowning a few minutes later as she led me down the steps from Oxford Hall and into the September sunlight.

“This is wrong,” she said. “Daley should have been in American History at that time. I know she was here and on time yesterday for first period. I saw her. Academy security will get to the bottom of this.”

Chancellor Stahl marched us toward the admin building from which we’d just come, heels brisk on the walkway. The campus was new construction, two levels of right angles, darkly stained lumber, and smoked glass. We backdoored our way to the visitor check-in counter. The same armed and uniformed young man who had signed me in and paged the chancellor for me was still on duty. He rose in respect for his boss. His badge said “Cates.”

“Wayne,” she said. “Get Baxter over here ASAP and come to my office.”

“Yes, Chancellor.”

Her upstairs office was spacious and cool, with views of the Pacific beyond the hills. Chancellor Stahl’s secretary admitted Wayne, who quietly crossed the carpet and took a chair next to me, setting his laptop on his knees.

“Recap yesterday, and Daley Rideout,” said Stahl.

Wayne looked up from the laptop screen. “She passed through student main security at seven forty-one in the morning. According to her teachers, she was in class for periods one through three. She didn’t go through security for lunch in the commons. And none of her teachers after lunch flagged her as absent.”

“Explain why,” said the chancellor. “She was off-campus and in Encinitas by noon, according to Mr. Ford.”

“Yes, Chancellor,” said Wayne. “Her father, Richard Hauser, had signed on to the academy parent portal the evening before, and advised that Daley would be absent periods four through seven and of course lunch. Family matters.”

“And he confirmed with a call later? Per Monarch procedure?” she asked.

Wayne consulted his screen again. “Within the hour, yes, he confirmed.”

Someone did, I thought.

“But Daley did not check out through student security,” said Stahl. “And you didn’t see her leave? None of your people saw her leave?”

“That’s correct. Very busy, the lunch rush.”

“Then she could easily have left the academy alone and unaccompanied by an adult?”

Or accompanied by the wrong adult, I thought.

“I would have to agree, yes, Chancellor.”

Chancellor Stahl was fiddling with a pen, which she now dropped to the desktop glass with a clatter.

I cleared my throat. “How often does a student steal the portal password and book her own vacation getaway? Have a friend play Mom or Dad for the confirmation call? Maybe do it herself?”

An incriminating beat of silence.

“Of course that can happen,” said Wayne. “We ask them to change passwords often.”

“We’re an exclusive private academy,” said the chancellor. “Not a supermax prison.”

I asked about security video.

“Here,” said Wayne, looking up from his computer. “It’s all right here.”

He leaned forward and set the laptop on the chancellor’s desk, turning it so we could all see. I watched the screen quarter into rectangles, each showing a different entrance and/or exit.

My phone vibrated and I checked the caller number and name: Penelope Rideout. Let it go to message.

Wayne set the video calendar to the previous day, then sped the master clock forward to 11:40 a.m. In good, clear audio, the recorded lunch bell pealed through the campus public-address speakers. The lunch getaway lasted two frantic minutes. Boys and girls in their gray-and-white uniforms, slashing their ID cards through the turnstile readers, bursting into the parking lot to begin their fifty minutes of freedom. Juniors and seniors straight to their own wheels, underclassmen with moms and dads for getaway drivers, a jockeying battalion of high-horse luxury.

Cavaliers, baby.

But Daley Rideout was not one of them.

“I hate to keep being the bad guy here,” I said. “But there must be other ways to—”

“Get on and off campus?” snapped the chancellor. “Of course there are. They can sneak out when no one is looking. They can climb a six-foot chain-link fence. They can squeeze past the turnstiles two at a time or just jump the damned things.”

“They always find new ways past the video cameras,” Wayne said with a chuckle. The chancellor glared at him with frank contempt.

On my phone I brought up the picture of Daley and Nick. Both the chancellor and Wayne nodded.

“He picks her up after school sometimes,” said Wayne. “I spoke to her sister. She didn’t approve, but Daley defied her. I think Daley defies her sister often, Mr. Ford.”

“We should all get back to work,” said Judith Stahl, standing. “Please escort Mr. Ford out, Wayne.”

“I’d like to talk to some of Daley’s friends,” I said, not standing.

“We’d need to get Penelope’s and their parents’ approval first,” she said. “And that can take some time.”

“Time? Chancellor, Daley Rideout was last seen getting into an SUV with two men yesterday around noon, when she was supposed to be here at Monarch. I need to talk to some of her friends. Now. They might know who these people are and where they’re going. Every minute counts.”

She gave me a hard stare. “She has two good friends here at Monarch. I know where they are. I’ll handle this, Wayne.”

The four of us sat at a picnic table in the shade of a coral tree in the now deserted lunch quad. Thin Alanis Tervalua regarded me from behind a wall of shiny black hair. Stout Carrie Calhoun was a corn-silk blonde with green, seldom-blinking eyes.

Trying not to alarm them, I told them who I was, then laid out the basics of Daley’s activities the day before as best I knew them, ending with her being seen talking to two men in a silver SUV with a round blue emblem on the driver’s door. The men were both late twenties or early thirties. They were clean-cut and conservatively dressed. I told them this had happened at Nick Moreno’s place, omitting Nick’s fate and Daley’s departure with the men.

The girls watched me intently, Alanis with one brown eye not hidden behind her hair, Carrie with green, wide-eyed attention.

When they attempted furtive glances at each other, their cat was at least partially out of its bag. I heard the faint catch of Chancellor Stahl’s breath.

“Nick is, like, a totally cool guy,” said Alanis.

“He can be kind of edgy, too,” said Carrie.

Their glances caromed, and I guessed that Nick was not their subject at all. “What about the men in the SUV?” I asked.

“Well, there’s this club,” said Carrie. “And sometimes these two guys in an SUV take us there after school. Connor and Eric. They drop us off, but mostly we just Uber there and home.”

Carrie’s and Alanis’s descriptions of Connor and Eric were not unlike Scott Chan’s version of Daley Rideout’s escorts. And if they were the same men, it would account for Daley Rideout’s apparent comfort with them.

Time to go fishing: “Do they drive a silver SUV?”

“With a sign on the door,” said Carrie. “Of an eagle holding lightning bolts in its talons. It’s their security company.”

The sign that Scott Chan couldn’t quite see?

My phone thrummed again: Penelope Rideout.

“You two girls are absolutely foolish, taking rides with men you don’t know,” said Chancellor Stahl.

Alanis shrugged, but Carrie brought some force to her voice. “Monarch teaches us to trust our judgment and be our own security guards,” she said.

“Maybe we should revisit that policy,” said Stahl. Then she looked at me. “They’re talking about Alchemy 101. It’s a teen club in Oceanside. Live music, big-screen videos, vegan menu. No smoking, no alcohol.”

“Some of the people there are ugly,” said Alanis.

“They are not,” said Carrie.

“Not ugly-looking,” said Alanis. “Looking ugly.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

Alanis shrugged. “At me. They look ugly at me.”

Then an awkward moment between the girls, a stand-off I sensed they had had before.

“Did you see them yesterday?” I asked. “The Alchemy 101 men?”

They both nodded, and both looked at Chancellor Stahl with visible worry.

“We went to the sneak-out with Daley at lunch,” said Carrie. “Because she asked us to. Because in a group you don’t stand out to Mr. Cates. That’s Wayne, the security geek. And Daley snuck through the hole in the chain-link that’s hidden by ivy. And she got picked up by Nick in his van with the dog’s face on the doors. Alanis and I watched Nick drive away and we waved. And just as we were about to head back to the quad, that’s when we saw the silver SUV and the Alchemy 101 guys.”

Who followed Nick and Daley to Nick’s place, I thought.

“I take it the sneak-out is your latest way off campus without permission?” asked the chancellor. “Out there behind the visitors’ bleachers?”

The girls pursed their lips and nodded glumly, more concerned with their fates as lunchtime conspirators than the possible fate of Daley in the company of two murderers. Youth isn’t wasted on the young, I thought. They just can’t see over it.

Chancellor Stahl walked me to the main exit. Her default expression was the frown, but it looked like one of concern more than disapproval. I dropped my visitor’s badge back into the box.

“Daley Rideout is a troubled girl,” she said. “Bright, but easily distracted. She tested at one thirty-one on the Stanford-Binet but only makes Bs. She has a list of Monarch infractions a mile long. Mostly absences. I don’t know much about this Nick Moreno, except that he walks dogs for a living and is twenty years old to Daley’s fourteen. So a child with a man. I have spoken with the police about this, though Mr. Moreno has broken no laws in associating with Daley. She’s been here two years now and this is her third interaction with a man much older than she is. She is sexually mature. Which puts Monarch in a difficult position. Quite honestly, I don’t think the sister can control her.”

“Does she try?” I asked.

“She seems powerless. Penelope was just eighteen when her parents died. Daley was all of four. So they have a deep sisterhood. But is that the basis for competent stewardship? Not for me to judge. I can say that I’m worried about Daley and what has happened to her. And what might happen in the next days.”

“What about the husband?”

“Distant and disengaged, from what I’m told. He’s only been on campus a couple of times. Penelope says he travels a lot on business. What business, she hasn’t said.”

Parental kidnapping came to my mind. The most common form of child abduction on the planet. But Richard Hauser wasn’t Daley’s biological father, and there was no custody battle going on, at least according to Penelope.

I listened to Penelope’s message from the road. Voice jittery. Detective Darrel Walker had come to the house. I called and told her I was just a few minutes out. She clicked off without a word.