Where Are You Now?

50

L ucas Reeves had not taken the weekend off. He had spent it in his office, working with his technicians. Charles MacKenzie Sr. had hired him nearly ten years ago to find his missing son, and the fact that he had never been able to uncover even the slightest hint of what happened to Mack had given Reeves a sense of failure that was never far from his consciousness.

Now he considered it even more urgent that he find the answer, not only to learn what had happened to Mack, but to find the real killer and perhaps save Leesey Andrews’s life.

On Monday morning, Lucas was back in his office on Park Avenue South at eight o’clock. His three permanent investigators had been told to get in early. By eight thirty they were seated around his desk. “I have a hunch, and some of my hunches have worked in the past,” he began, “so I’m going to act on it. I am going to assume that Mack is innocent of these crimes, and I am going to assume that someone who knew him at least reasonably well is responsible. By that, I mean knew him well enough to hear about the Mother’s Day calls, and to have his family’s unlisted phone number.”

Reeves looked from one investigator to the other. “We are going to start by concentrating on the people around Mack. By that I mean his two roommates, Nick DeMarco and Bruce Galbraith. We are going to dig up everything we can learn about the superintendent couple, Lil and Gus Kramer. From there we will concentrate on Mack’s other friends from Columbia who were with him in the nightclub the evening that first girl disappeared. Over the weekend, our techs have gathered all the newspaper accounts and media clips that were headlines when each of those other three girls vanished. We have enhanced the faces of everyone caught in those pictures, whether he or she was identifiable or not. Study those faces. Memorize them.”

Lucas had come in so early that he had made his own coffee. He took a sip, grimaced, and continued. “The media is camped outside Sutton Place. One of you must be in the vicinity at all times. Have your cell phone out, and be using it as a camera. Somebody also has to be on the street when the Woodshed opens tonight, taking pictures not only of guests entering and leaving, but of people hanging around in the streets. There are a couple of other clubs opening in SoHo this week. Be there with the paparazzi.”

“Lucas, that’s impossible,” Jack Rodgers, his most senior aide, protested. “The three of us can’t cover all that ground.”

“No one asked you to,” Reeves snapped, his normally deep voice several octaves higher. “Get out the list of the guys we use when we need extra help. We must have thirty retired cops available.”

Rodgers nodded. “Okay.”

Reeves lowered his voice. “My hunch is that the perpetrator loves attention. He may want to be on-site when there’s a media rush. The faces that show in every picture you snap will be enhanced in our lab. I don’t care how many there are, and I assume there will be hundreds. Maybe, just maybe, one of them will be a match for someone who was around during the media frenzy that followed those other disappearances. I repeat, for the present we are going to assume that Mack MacKenzie is innocent.”

He looked at Rodgers. “Why don’t you say it, Jack?”

“All right, Lucas, I’ll say it. If you’re right, we may find a picture of a guy who shows up all over the place. He may be fat, he may be thin, he may be bald, he may have a ponytail. He’ll be someone his own mother wouldn’t recognize, and he’ll be Charles MacKenzie Jr.”