I awoke the next morning feeling like I’d stepped back twenty years. My rented room above the Sunset looked like my old college dorm room. A few sickly pieces of furniture, and a mattress on the floor. Buster lay beside me, head resting on my chest.
I hit the beach and took my dog for a long run, followed by a hard twenty-minute swim. I was sucking down my second cup of java when my cell phone rang. Sonny moved down the bar, and I took the call.
“I thought we were having dinner last night,” Burrell said, sounding pissed.
“I’m sorry. I had to help a friend recover some stolen goods.”
“How many times did you hit the guy?”
“I didn’t lay a hand on him, Your Honor.”
“I’ve heard that line out of you before.”
An elderly couple came into the bar and inquired about breakfast. Seven in the morning and they were both dressed like they were going to church. I was soaking wet from my swim, and saw them stare at me. I headed outside.
I stood in the building’s cool shade. The tide was up, the crash of waves as loud as a passing train. I lifted the phone to my face. “Sorry about that. How did your search for the file on Daybreak go?”
“Not good,” Burrell said.
My spirits sagged. If I couldn’t identify Lonnie and Mouse outside of their first names, I’d never find Sara. “What happened?”
“I went to the police stockade like you suggested. The Daybreak file was stored in a box from 1990. It’s pretty thick-maybe a hundred pages long. I took it home, and read through it over cold Chinese.”
I made a mental footnote to take Burrell out to dinner someday soon. Otherwise, she’d probably never speak a civil word to me again.
“What did the file say?” I asked.
“I couldn’t read half of it. The pages were blacked out with Magic Marker. There was a memo in the front of the file that said the information had been censored from the file to protect the rights of the patients.”
“Was there a roster of patients’ names?”
“Yes. It had been blacked out as well. I took the page to the lab, and had a tech scan it with ultraviolet light. Unfortunately, the Magic Marker had wiped out the writing. The tech said it was hopeless.”
I leaned against the building. Hopeless. It was a word that rarely slipped into my vocabulary, yet it was exactly how I felt right now.
“I scanned the pages that were legible into my computer, and e-mailed them to you,” Burrell said. “Maybe there’s a clue hidden somewhere in those pages.”
“How many pages did you send?”
“All of them.”
That had probably taken Burrell a few hours. I felt like a real heel.
“I’ll go look at them right now,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back last night. I owe you dinner.”
“Yes, you do,” Burrell said.
She was gone before I could say good-bye.
Dogs do not know failure, at least not any I’d been around. They treated each day like a new adventure, their spirits never wavering. This was especially true for Buster. He rode to my office with his tail wagging, ready for whatever challenges the day held. I wanted to share his enthusiasm, but it was hard. I was running out of road.
I parked by Tugboat Louie’s front door. Thirty seconds later, I was in my office, booting up my computer. I went into e-mail, and opened Burrell’s missive. The pages she’d sent to me were hard to read, but that didn’t stop me. I was determined to read every line on every page, no matter how long it took.
Several hours later my cell phone rang. I had a splitting headache from staring at the computer screen, and I pulled myself away and looked at the face of my phone. It was Jessie, the light of my life. I turned away from the computer to speak with her.
“Hey honey, how’s it going?” I answered.
“I’m okay. How are you? I hadn’t talked to you in awhile, and wanted to see how things were going. Mom called me this morning, and I filled her in. I thought you were going to call her. You said you would.”
Another broken promise. I’d left a trail of those recently. But the fact was, my job was the reason Rose and I were no longer together. Calling my wife when I was in the middle of a job would only exacerbate the problem, so I hadn’t called. I said, “I know this is going to sound like a lie, but I haven’t had a moment free.”
“Are you still looking for Sara?” my daughter asked.
“Yes. It’s consuming every minute of my day.”
“Some kids are going around campus saying that if the police don’t find a missing person within forty-eight hours, they almost never do. Is that true?”
“No, honey, it’s not.”
Jessie went silent. Normally, she had more words in her than a dictionary. I guessed the loss of her friend and teammate was starting to sink in.
“I want to help,” my daughter finally said.
“What about your classes?”
“I’m done for the day.”
I hesitated. I normally didn’t get my family involved in cases, only Jessie had already helped me link Mouse and Lonnie to three other abductions.
“You’re on,” I said.
“Great. What do you want me to do?”
“There was a mental health facility in Broward called Daybreak that got shut down. I want you to go online, and see what information you can find about the place. I’m interested in finding a list of patient names.”
“Are these the guys who kidnapped Sara?”
“Yes. Their first names are Lonnie and Mouse. If I can find out their last names, I can contact social security, and learn where they’re originally from. It’s a slim lead, but I need to have it run down.”
“I’ll get on it right away.”
“Thanks. Please don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”
“I won’t tell a soul,” my daughter said.
I spent the rest of the morning and a few hours into the afternoon pouring over the Daybreak file on my computer. The majority of what I read was medical mumbo jumbo that didn’t have any bearing on my search. Whenever I did run across something that felt promising, I was met with the black line from a Magic Marker.
By the time I reached the last page, my brain was fried and I didn’t know any more than when I’d started. I needed to take my frustration out on something, and chose the plastic garbage pail beside my desk. My kick sent it clear across the office, where it bounced off the wall and left an ugly bruise. I should have felt better, only I didn’t.
My cell phone rang. It was Jessie. Perhaps my daughter had found the information that had so far eluded me, and I excitedly flipped open my phone.
“I hope your morning was more productive than mine,” I said.
“I’m pulling my hair out,” Jessie said. “I Googled Daybreak, and found over ten thousand places where it’s referenced. I went to a few hundred of those places, and tried to find your information. Every time I thought I’d found what you were looking for, the site told me that the information had been deleted.”
More bad news. Buster had retrieved the garbage pail and brought it back to me. I pulled open my desk drawer and tossed him a dog treat.
“I did find one thing that looked promising,” she said.
I sat up straight in my chair. “What’s that?”
“I found a website called browardoddities. com. It’s got all sorts of crazy stuff about Broward County posted on it, including some information about Daybreak. I did another search, and discovered that a guy named Ray Hinst runs the site. I searched his name, got his number, and called him. Hinst lives in Broward, and sounds like a decent guy. He told me that he worked as an orderly at Daybreak. He offered to give you a tour of the place, if you’re interested.”
“Hinst gives tours?”
“Yeah. He said a lot of thrill-seekers like to go into the buildings, but don’t like to go alone. I guessed you’d want to hear what Hinst had to say, so I arranged a tour for you. Hinst agreed to meet you at Daybreak’s front gates at three o’clock.”
I checked the time. I was going to have to move fast if I was going to make it.
“This is really great,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Maybe I can be your assistant one day.”
Jessie’s words sent an icy finger down my spine. Nothing would have made me happier than to have my daughter working by my side. But not at this. I had seen too many bad things to want my only child to follow in these footsteps. Anything but this.
“We’ll have to talk about that sometime,” I said.
“Is that a promise?”
“Yes, it’s a promise.”
“Good-bye, Daddy.”