“Get everybody looking,” Lucas said. “She was supposed to be talking to a grand jury about now. If there's a problem, I'll talk to the chief. We need everybody you can spare.” To Barth: “We need to know what she was wearing… the names of all her friends. I need to talk to her best friend right now.”
The woman in the turban hadn't said anything, but now spoke to Barth: “Kelly McGuire.”
“I called, but she's not home yet,” Barth said. Her face was taut with anxiety. She'd seen it all before, on TV, the missing girl, the frantic mother. “She's at a dance place and the phone's off the hook. She won't be home until five-thirty.”
“You know what dance place?” Lucas asked.
“Over on Snelling, by the college,” Barth said. “Just south of Grand.”
“I know it,” Lucas said to the cop, “I'm going over there. Let me give you my cell number…” The cop wrote the number on a pad. “If you need any more authority, call me. I'll call the governor if I have to. Talk to whoever you need to, and tell them that this could be serious. You want everybody out there looking, because the press is gonna get on top of this and by tomorrow, if we don't have this kid, the shit is gonna hit the fan.”
“All right, all right,” the cop said. And to Barth: “You said she had a yellow vest…”
Lucas hustled back to his car, cranked it, and took off. The dance studio was called Aphrodite, the name in red neon with green streaks around it. The windows were covered by Venetian blinds, but through the slots between the blinds and the window posts, you could see the hardwood floor and an occasional dancer in tights.
Lucas parked at a hydrant and pushed through the studio's outer door. An office was straight ahead, the floor to the right, with a door in the back leading to the locker rooms; it smelled like a gym. An instructor had a half-dozen girls working from a barre, the girls all identically dressed in black. Another woman, older, sat behind a desk in the office, and peered at Lucas over a pair of reading glasses. Lucas stepped over and she said, “Can I help you?”
Lucas held out his ID. “I'm with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We have a missing girl, and I need to talk to one of your students. A Kelly McGuire?”
“Who's missing?” the woman asked.
“One of her classmates. Is Kelly still here?”
“Yes… Just a minute.” She got up, stepped onto the floor, and called, “Kelly? Could you come over here for a moment?”
McGuire was a short, slender, dark-haired girl who actually looked like professional dancers Lucas had met. She frowned as she stepped away from the barre and walked across the floor: “Did something happen?”
Everybody paused to listen. Lucas said, “Ah, I'm a police officer, I need to talk to you for a second about a friend of yours. Could you step outside, maybe?”
“I'll have to get my shoes… Or, it's nice, I could go barefoot…” She took off her dance shoes and followed Lucas outside. “What happened?”
“Have you seen Jesse Barth today?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. When school got out.” Her eyes were wide; she'd see it all on TY too. “I talked to her, we usually walk home, but I had a band practice and then my dance lesson… Is she hurt?”
“We can't locate her at the moment,” Lucas said. “She was…”
“She was going to testify to a jury today, tonight,” McGuire said. “She was pretty nervous about it.”
“If she decided to chicken out, where would she go?” Lucas asked. “Does she have any special friends, a boyfriend?”
McGuire was troubled: “Jeez, I don't know…”
“Look, Kelly: if she doesn't want to testify, she doesn't have to. But. We can't find her. That's what we're worried about,” Lucas said. “Somebody saw her on the street, walking home, but she never showed up. We've got to know where she might've gone. If she's okay, we can work it out. But if she's not…”
“Ah…” She stared at Lucas for a moment, then turned and looked at a bus, and then said, “Okay. If she hid out, it'd be either Mike Sochich's house, or she might have gone to Katy Carlson's-or she might have taken a bus to Har Mar, to go to a movie.
Sometimes she goes up to Har Mar and sits there for hours.”
“Where can I find these people…?”
McGuire was an assertive sort: She said, “Give me two minutes to change. I'll show you. That'd be fastest.”
She took five minutes, and hustled out with a bag of clothes. In the car, she said, “Turn around, we want to go over to the other side of Ninety-four, into Frogtown.
Mike would be the best possibility… Best to go down Ninety-four to Lexington, then up Lexington. I'll show you where to turn…”
He did a U-turn on Snelling, caught a string of greens, accelerated down the ramp onto I-94, then up at Lexington, left, and north to Thomas, right, down the street a few blocks until McGuire pointed at a gray-shingled house behind a waist-high chain-link fence. Lucas pulled over and McGuire slumped down in her seat and said, “I'll wait here.”
Lucas said, with a grin, “If she's here, she's gonna know you ratted her out. Might as well face the music.” He popped the door to get out, and heard her door pop a second later. She followed him across the parking strip to the gate. There was a bare spot in the yard with a chain and a stake, and on the end of the chain, the same yellow-white dog he'd seen at the Barth's.
“Jesse's dog,” Lucas said.
“Naw, that's Mike's dog,” McGuire said. “Sometimes Jesse walks home with it. Dog likes her better than Mike.”
Again, they stepped carefully. The dog barked twice and snarled, but knew where the end of the chain was. And a good thing, Lucas thought. All he needed this afternoon was a pitbull-wannabe hanging on his ass.
Mike's house had a low shaky porch, with soft floorboards going to rot. The aluminum storm door was canted a bit, and didn't close completely. Lucas rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door. He heard a thump from inside, and a minute later, saw the curtain move in a window on the left side of the porch.
He felt the tension unwind a notch. He banged on the door, pissed off now. “Jesse.
Goddamnit, Jesse, answer the door. Jesse…”
There was a moment's silence, then Lucas said to McGuire, “If she comes to the door, yell for me.”
He stepped off the porch, circled the dog, and hurried around to the back of the house: five seconds later, Jesse Barth came sneaking out the back door, carrying a backpack.
“Goddamnit, Jesse,” he said.
Startled, she jerked around, saw him at the corner of the house. Gave up: “Oh, shit.
I'm sorry.”
“Come on-I've got to call your mom,” Lucas said. “She's freaked out, half the cops in St. Paul are out looking for you. People thought you were kidnapped.”
“I was just scared,” Jesse said as he led her through the ankle-deep grass back around the house. “What if I make a mistake?” Her lip trembled. “I don't want to make a mistake and go to jail.”
“Did Conoway say she was going to put you in jail?” Lucas asked. “Who said they were gonna put you in jail?”
“Well, you did, for one.”
“That's if you tried to sell your testimony,” Lucas said. “If you just go down and tell the truth, you're fine. You're the victim here.”
“But if I make a mistake…”
“There's a difference between lying and making a mistake,” Lucas told her. “They're not gonna put you in jail for making a mistake. You have to deliberately lie, and know you're lying, and it's gotta be an important lie. You talked to Conoway about what you're going to say. Just say that, and you're fine.”