I needed a computer. Since my office in Dania was closer than Linderman’s office in North Miami Beach, we’d caravan there. Linderman opened the door and started to get out of my car. I stopped him.
“I’ve figured out what these guys’ motivation is.” I tapped the file. “The evidence is right here.”
Linderman pulled his leg back in and shut the door. He was sweating profusely, even though the car’s temperature was comfortable.
“Go ahead,” the FBI agent said.
“They’re abducting nursing students.”
His face clouded. He shifted his gaze and stared out the windshield.
“My daughter was a nursing student,” he said quietly.
“I remember you telling me that.”
Linderman looked back at me. The pain had disappeared from his face. I’d seen this happen before. One minute he was a grieving parent, the next an unflappable FBI agent. I didn’t know how he did it. I know I couldn’t.
“Time’s a-wasting,” Linderman said. “Let’s go.”
– – I drove to my office with Linderman riding my bumper. I ran my business above a restaurant called Tugboat Louie’s in Dania. Louie’s boasted a good-time bar, dockside dining, and a busy marina. Not many respectable businesses would operate out of a place where drunkenness and all-night partying were considered appropriate behavior, but I wasn’t one of them. Louie’s owner, my friend Kumar, didn’t charge me rent, and that made the place perfect in my book.
The Rolling Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” was blaring out of Louie’s outdoor loudspeakers as Linderman and I entered the building. Kumar sat on a stool by the front door, wearing his traditional white Egyptian cotton shirt and oversized black bow tie. Next to him was a blackboard with the day’s lunch specials. Cheeseburger, grouper sandwich, conch fritters, Key lime pie. I’d been frequenting Louie’s for years, and the specials never changed. Seeing me, Kumar exclaimed “Hello, Jack! Hello, Buster! Hello, Jack’s friend!” He clapped his hands. “There is always excitement when you’re around, Jack. How about some lunch? I can heartily recommend the cheeseburgers. They are very good!”
“Sure. I’ll take a cheeseburger, medium rare,” I said.
“Well done,” Linderman said.
“And Buster?” Kumar asked.
“He would like the usual,” I said.
Kumar hopped off his stool. “Coming right up, gentlemen.”
I entered the restaurant and walked behind the noisy bar. Unhooking the chain in front of a narrow stairwell, I climbed the stairs to my office, Linderman behind me.
The second floor contained two offices: mine and Kumar’s. My office was long and narrow, and contained a desk, an ancient PC, two folding chairs, a rusted file cabinet picked up at a yard sale, and a wall containing the photographs of a dozen missing children I looked for but never found. Sitting at my desk, I booted up my computer and opened my e-mail.
Typing with two fingers, I composed a letter that I planned to send to every law enforcement agency in the state, asking them to search their databases for young women who’d gone missing in the past eighteen years who were nursing students.
Linderman stood behind my chair as I typed, staring at the computer. In the screen’s reflection I saw him shake his head.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“How many police departments are there in Florida? Sixty-six?” he asked.
“Sixty-seven,” I said.
“How many of them are going to drop whatever they’re doing to help you? Based upon my experience, they’ll pass the request down the line, and it will end up in the hands of a secretary, who may or may not look through the files.”
“Do you want to write it?”
“I won’t get any better response. The FBI isn’t liked by most cops.”
Our food came. Two cheeseburgers swimming in french fries, and a bowl of ground beef for Buster. Linderman pulled up one of the folding chairs, and we ate our lunches.
I couldn’t taste the food. Sometimes that happened to me when I was on a search. My appetite disappeared and nothing tasted particularly good. I had lost weight since leaving the force, and didn’t want to lose any more.
I forced the food down, then got up from my chair and went to the window. Parting the blind with my finger, I stared down at Louie’s dock and watched a teenage girl wait on a table of drunk guys with sunburns and loud shirts. The waitress didn’t look like she was more than sixteen years old. Staring at her gave me a thought.
“I’ll talk the Broward cops into helping us,” I said. “They can get the cops in the other counties to respond to my request.”
Linderman put his burger down. “And how would the Broward PD do that?”
“Fort Lauderdale is a magnet for teenage runaways. I can’t name a county that hasn’t had to send a cop down here and retrieve a kid who’s run away from home. The Broward cops always treat the visiting cops nice, and make sure the kids get home safe.”
I returned to my computer and redid my letter. I addressed it to Candy Burrell, marked the e-mail urgent, and hit Send. There were several stray french fries left on my plate. I started tossing them to Buster when my phone rang.
“Carpenter here.”
“Burrell here,” Candy said. “I just picked up your e-mail on my BlackBerry.”
“I need your help.”
“Back at ya, pal. I’m sort of up to my eyeballs right now.”
“What’s going on?”
“A thirteen-year-old girl named Suzie Knockman didn’t come home from school yesterday, and no one knows where she is. One of her classmates said she was having problems at home. Suzie has a large extended family-two sets of grandparents, an uncle and his wife, two older male cousins, and her parents. We interviewed the family and got all sorts of conflicting information. When we tried to reinterview them, they lawyered up, which is really weird. This girl’s in trouble, Jack.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“There was a photograph of Suzie in the house. She was all dolled up and looked like she was going on twenty-one.”
“Girls do that sometimes,” I said.
“The photo was taken last year. Looking at it gave me the creeps. Take my word for it, the kid’s in trouble.”
Burrell had to make her own priorities. Right now, Suzie Knockman was at the top of her list and nothing I was going to say would change that.
“Who’s the lawyer they’re using?” I asked.
“Some white-haired creep out of Miami.”
“Leonard Snook?”
“That’s right. Do you know him?”
I tossed my paper plate into the trash. Leonard Snook was on speed dial for every drug dealer and murderer in town. For Suzie’s family to have hired Snook meant something really bad was going down. Burrell was a hundred percent right in her assumption that the girl was in trouble.
“Snook is your key,” I said. “He should lead you right to Suzie.”
“And how is he going to do that?”
I hesitated. I had a priority list as well, and Sara Long was at the top of my list.
“I’ll show you, but you have to do me a favor.”
“You want me to respond to your e-mail?”
“Yes.”
“You want the detectives in my unit to call every police department in the state?”
“You got it,” I said.
“When do you need this done?”
“The moment after I find Suzie Knockman.”
“This sounds like extortion, Jack.”
I frowned into the phone. Burrell was tired, her voice on edge. Unfortunately, so was I. “How is that extortion? I’m putting your case first, and I won’t even charge you for my time. All I’m asking you to do in return is to assign the unit to work on my case when we’re done. There’s no skin off your nose for doing it that way. No one’s going to complain because your phone bills went up for one day.”
“Jesus, Jack. Don’t be so angry.”
“Do we have a deal or not?”
A long moment passed. I didn’t like to resort to these tactics, but there was nothing else I could do. This was my last lead toward finding Sara Long. If I didn’t pursue it, Sara was as good as gone.
Burrell started to speak, and I heard a catch in her voice. Something told me that I’d burned another bridge with the Broward County Police Department.
“All right, Mr. Carpenter. You have a deal,” Burrell said.
I started to say thanks, but she hung up on me.