Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels Read online

  “A Lab, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can’t blame you for that. A good ol’ Lab.”

  “Yep.”

  “A good ol’ predictable Lab.”

  Was she teasing me? She plainly was.

  “I like to push the envelope,” I said. “Set trends. When other men zig, I zag.”

  “Oh, I can tell. You’re a trailblazer.”

  “Absolutely.”

  There was some flirting going on. No doubt about it. Laura had complained in the past about my tendency to flirt, but I never understood the problem. Flirting is fun, and basically harmless, because I never acted on it. I was faithful. Always had been, always would be.

  Meanwhile, Hannah had slid down from the bench and was making herself more comfortable with Belle, who was obviously enjoying the attention.

  “I want a dog just like this, Daddy,” Hannah announced.

  “You know…” Susan began.

  I laughed. I knew what she was going to say.

  “My brother does have some puppies available at the moment.” Again, here came the smile. But now there was something more. Something in that smile said Go for it. Don’t be a boring married guy with a Lab and a minivan.

  Then I thought of Laura. A pit bull? Wasn’t going to happen. Not in a million years.

  “Uh, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Very nice of you.”

  She knew I was ducking the offer, but she simply smiled, then she and Belle wandered back into the throng of people and their dogs.

  A few minutes later, Hannah and I returned to my Nissan Sentra—which is most certainly not a minivan, by the way—and then I began to think, Maybe I should get her number. Just in case. I could at least talk to Laura about it, right? It wasn’t fair for me to assume that she would say no, was it?

  Hannah was in the back seat, already buckled in, so I hurried to speak to Susan. I’d make it quick. Except I couldn’t find her. It appeared she’d already left. So I gave up and returned to the Nissan. I opened the driver’s side door—and then I froze. A panic gripped me so suddenly that I could feel my heart lurch in my chest.

  The car was empty.

  Hannah was nowhere to be seen.

  9

  I left the sheriff’s department substation and headed back toward my apartment. I was tempted to go directly back to Thomas Springs Road and set up on Brian Pierce, but I had to be realistic. It was almost sundown and there would be nothing to see. I’d be sitting on the side of the road in the dark. Better to go home, think it through, and come up with some options. I needed to talk to someone, so I called Mia while I was driving and told her the full story.

  “What are they going to do?” she asked, meaning the cops.

  “Far as I can tell, nothing.”

  “Why not?” She truly sounded surprised. Then she added, “Oh.” So much meaning in that one soft little word.

  See, Mia and I have no secrets. That’s because not only is she a bartender—and there was a time when I spent many hours in her presence, well lubricated, with loose lips and all that—but she has since become a close friend. So we share stuff. She knows virtually everything about me. Probably more than Laura ever knew.

  For instance, Mia knows that, after Hannah disappeared, I more or less came unglued. Aimlessly wandering the street, day and night, just searching. Pointless rambling with no hope of success. Yet there were several times when I was certain I saw Hannah. Saw her in a car passing in front of me at a red light. Saw her in an elevator with the doors just closing. Saw her in a shot of the crowd on a televised baseball game. Situations like that. Called the cops four different times to report these sightings. Made them think I was losing my shit. That’s almost certainly what made Ruelas and Holland so dismissive of me earlier today. They typed my name into a computer, saw my history, and thought, Okay, this guy is a bit of a nut.

  Hence the reason for Mia’s “Oh.” She’d connected the dots.

  Now she said, “How sure are you of what you saw?”

  A fair question. I didn’t answer right away. Being completely honest, I was starting to question myself. That’s what happens. You lose confidence in your judgment. After being wrong so many times, you think you’ll never be right again. “Ninety percent,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. All I could hear was the background noise. She was at work and it sounded like the tavern was busy for a Wednesday night.

  “You think I’m crazy, right?” I asked.

  “Of course not. I mean, it’s not like you’re claiming you saw Amelia Earhart. You saw a girl and you think it might be Tracy Turner. You did see a girl? Not a shadow or a dog or something?”

  “Are you friggin’ kidding me? It was a girl.”

  “Hey, don’t get all defensive. The eyes can play tricks. Did you shoot any video?”

  “I didn’t have a camera on me.”

  “Hang on.” I could hear Mia talking to a customer. Then she said, “So what’s your plan?”

  “Ha. Plan.”

  “So…no plan yet.”

  “Doesn’t help that his house is stuck in the middle of the woods. I can’t get close enough. Not without being obvious.”

  Now I could tell she was talking to another customer. Then she said, “You want to meet me later and talk about it?” Code for, “I’m too busy to talk right now.”

  “That’s okay. I think I’m in for the night.”

  “Call me tomorrow. My day off.”

  ***

  It’s difficult to understand why one missing-person case catches the nation’s heart and soul while thousands more hardly get thirty seconds on the local news. You know the type of high-profile case I’m talking about. The one that gets near-constant play on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and every other national media outlet hungry for ratings.

  Polly Klaas.

  Elizabeth Smart.

  Natalee Holloway.

  Laci Peterson.

  Caylee Anthony.

  Nancy Grace will yack about one particular case for an hour without telling the viewer anything new. Looping the same video over and over. There’s something salacious about it. It seems to be more about entertainment—and ratings—than about offering information that may somehow help solve the case.

  Something else bothers me, too. The cases that receive mega-airtime almost exclusively involve a white victim. An upper middle-class white victim. An attractive, upper middle-class white victim. I’m not sure if that says something about the value we place on various members of society, but I hope not.

  Regardless, for whatever reason, Tracy Turner quickly became one of those high-profile cases. When I got home and turned on the TV, there she was on the screen, hair in pigtails, and I could feel a hole open up in my chest. The news anchor was talking to an expert who was delivering statistics that I knew, unfortunately, by heart.

  Roughly 800,000 children are reported missing in the United States every year. Two thousand every day. Many of them are runaways, some are abducted (usually by a family member), and some are lost or injured.

  Child abductions leading to murder are relatively rare. One hundred cases a year. Most are “average” kids leading “normal” lives with “typical” families. Three quarters of the victims are female. Eighty percent of the time, the initial contact between victim and killer takes place within a quarter-mile of the child’s home.

  The average abductor-killer is twenty-seven years old, unmarried, and has at least one prior arrest for a violent crime. He lives alone or with his parents. He’s unemployed or working in an unskilled or semiskilled occupation. He’s what cops and psychologists and criminal profilers call a “social marginal.”

  When a child goes missing—listen up, mom and dad; listen up, small-town deputy who thinks the kid might’ve just wandered off—you’d better get your ass in gear, regardless of what the statistics say. More than three quarters of children who are abducted and murdered are dead within the first three hours. Yes, the odds are overwhelming that a
missing kid won’t be killed, but if he or she is in the hands of a killer, time is absolutely of the essence. Three hours. That’s how small the window is.

  Tracy Turner had been missing for 36 hours. When—okay, if—I had seen her this afternoon, she’d been missing for about 32 hours. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I had to hope that since she’d made it past the first three hours, that she’d make it for many more.

  Brian Pierce had a Facebook page.

  I’ll admit that I was a little surprised. A lot of lowlifes don’t bother with Facebook because they don’t have many friends to begin with, or because they aren’t social animals. They value their privacy. They don’t want to share anything with anybody. More often than not, they are hiders, not sharers.

  Even bigger surprise, Pierce had 359 friends. That’s a pretty big number. I couldn’t see his wall, so I wasn’t able to gauge how many of those were real friends versus online friends. If I could see some of his status updates and the resulting comments, I could learn a lot about him. But he had his privacy locked down fairly tight. Facebook users can still hide most of their content, despite gripes to the contrary.

  I couldn’t see Pierce’s photos, either, or even his friends list.

  What I sometimes do in this situation, in the course of an investigation, is send a friend request to the suspect. Not from my own account, of course, but from either “Linda Peterson” or “Robert Tyler.” They are fictitious identities that I had created in the past couple of years. Both of them have been online long enough to collect more than one hundred friends. Both of them are above average on the attractiveness scale, but their profile photos aren’t such ridiculous come-ons as to look like spam. Beyond that, both of them are average people with average tastes in music, film, and literature. They don’t post often, but when they do, it’s never about politics or religion. Examine either page more closely and you’ll notice that there is hardly any identifying information. No high school listed, no college, no job history. Just a hometown and some favorite musicians, books, and movies.

  But it works, especially when Linda Peterson contacts a young, single guy. You’d be surprised how many men will accept a friend request from a strange woman if she is a pretty redhead. Sometimes I have to pretend I’m a forgotten classmate, or a former co-worker, or whatever works. Sometimes I’ll get a “Do I know you?” in response, but I can usually make up something that gets me in, especially if their wall is visible.

  Did I want to do that now? I had a hard time thinking of a reason not to, so I went ahead and sent Brian Pierce a request. I mean Linda Peterson did.

  10

  It took me several hours to fall asleep, but I was finally snoozing soundly when my cell phone rang at 7:17 the next morning. Mia calling.

  “What?” I croaked.

  “Love you, too.”

  “What are you doing up this early?”

  “You watching CNN?”

  “No, I’m busy organizing my stamp collection.”

  “They’re talking about Tracy Turner’s parents. Her mom and her stepdad. You need to turn it on.”

  I grabbed the remote off my nightstand and powered up the small flat-screen mounted on the wall opposite my bed. Punched in the numbers for CNN. One of their anchors was speaking with one of their crime reporters.

  The reporter was saying, “—with Kathleen Hanrahan last night, until she refused to answer any more questions and walked out of the interview.”

  Kathleen Hanrahan was the mom. Remarried, so she had a different last name than Tracy Turner. I sat up in bed.

  The anchor asked, “At this point, do the investigators think she had anything to do with the disappearance of her daughter?”

  “No, they are saying that they were asking routine questions, but Kathleen Hanrahan was no longer willing to speak with them. They did acknowledge that Mrs. Hanrahan has spent more than twenty hours in interviews so far, and she has been a willing participant.”

  “Interesting, huh?” Mia said in my ear.

  “What is this I hear about witness fatigue?” the anchor said. “Isn’t it true that even the most agreeable witness can reach a point where she’s simply had enough and needs a break?”

  “Oh, absolutely, Roger.”

  “Could that be what’s happening here?”

  “There’s no real way to know for sure.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “This is all bullshit.”

  “What? Why?” Mia said.

  “Hold on.”

  The anchor asked, “Has she brought in an attorney?”

  “Not yet, no, but that might be the next step.”

  The reporter was on audio only, because now they were showing photos of Kathleen Hanrahan. Photos of her alone, with Tracy, with her husband, all three of them together. She was an attractive and well-put-together woman. Maybe forty years old. Impeccable clothes, precise makeup, expensive jewelry. Your garden-variety affluent white woman with good taste. The headline at the bottom of the screen said: MISSING TOT’S MOM ENDS INTERVIEW.

  “What about Patrick Hanrahan?” the anchor said. “Where does he stand in this? Is he still speaking with the police?”

  “That’s a good question, and we’re looking into it. The interview last night took place in the Hanrahan home and it’s unclear if Patrick, Tracy’s stepdad, took part. However, he has been interviewed at length several times already and we’ve seen no sign that there has been any sort of problem as it relates to him. I also understand that he has offered a one million dollar reward for information that leads to her safe return.”

  “Are the investigators making any comment about the possibility of kidnapping?”

  Good question, I thought. A lot of people lump kidnapping and abduction into the same category. They are a world apart.

  The reporter: “Nobody is raising that possibility at the moment, but nobody has ruled it out, either. The fact is, Patrick Hanrahan is worth upwards of fifty million dollars—”

  “Jeez,” Mia said.

  “—and it’s only natural to wonder if that played a role in this situation. There is one other adult with regular access to the Hanrahan house—a nanny—but she has been interviewed and cleared.”

  They continued to talk, speculating on this or that, but nothing substantial or factual came up. I turned the TV off.

  “Why did you say it was bullshit?” Mia asked.

  “About the mom ending the interview?”

  “Yeah? Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

  “Not even a little bit,” I said. “First of all, we don’t even know if that report is accurate. She might have said, ‘Guys, look, I’m beat, and I need to take a break.’ By the time it gets to the reporters, it sounds like she’s got something to hide. But even if she is refusing to talk anymore, let me tell you, sometimes there are good reasons.”

  “Such as?” She wasn’t being snotty. It was an honest question.

  “The parents are always the first suspects. Always. Everybody knows that. When you’re the parent, you want to answer their questions as quickly as possible and get them moving on to other things, to the real investigation. But sometimes they don’t move on. They keep asking you questions—totally irrelevant questions—and the clock is ticking, and you start to lose your patience. You know they are wasting their time, but they won’t let it go. Just a few more questions. One more interview. Finally you just want to throw your hands up and say, ‘Enough!’ You want to make them move on. They’re used to that kind of behavior, the stonewalling. They know it might mean nothing at all. But the public—well, they’re ready to believe just about anything. You’re guilty until proven innocent. Worse than that, you’re probably a goddamn murderer. You killed your kid and dumped her in a lake, or you chopped her into pieces and flushed her down the toilet. Doesn’t matter how whacked out the theory is. And the media? Hell, they’ll keep pimping whatever draws the ratings.” I realized my voice had been rising and my fists were clenched. I took a deep breath. “Do I sound cyni
cal?”

  Mia didn’t say anything.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.” A pause. Then: “I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, but I’m really sorry for everything you went through.”

  By now—again, being totally honest—my ninety percent certainty from last night had dropped even further. Had I really seen a little girl in Brian Pierce’s doorway? I had been a long ways away, looking through binoculars. Sometimes light can play off a screen door in odd ways. The eyes can do tricky things. For instance, who hasn’t heard of a hunter mistaking a stump or a shadow or a fellow human being for a deer? Happens with alarming regularity. People “see” Bigfoot, leprechauns, and UFOs. Your brain tricks you into seeing what you want to see.

  So I did what I would have done anyway if I hadn’t possibly spotted a missing girl: I loaded up all of my regular supplies—my laptop and an ice chest full of food and drink—and headed out to conduct surveillance on Brian Pierce. It was, after all, my job.

  But as I drove down Thomas Springs Road toward Pierce’s place, I saw something unexpected. A marked deputy’s cruiser was parked in the church parking lot, shaded, and fairly well concealed by the canopy of a towering oak tree. Almost exactly where I had parked yesterday. In that position, the deputy would be able to see Pierce’s driveway where it met the road.

  I had to wonder—was this cop simply running radar, just like the deputies had said yesterday? Or had Ruelas perhaps changed his mind and decided to keep tabs on Pierce after all? That could make sense. Hide in plain sight with a marked unit. As I passed, I gave a little wave. The deputy—one of the deputies from yesterday, I think—glared at me, stonefaced, and didn’t wave back. He probably recognized my minivan.

  I continued down Thomas Springs until it teed into Circle Drive, where I pulled into the empty parking lot of the Circle Country Club, a modest little beer joint I had visited once or twice in years past. It wasn’t open this early, so there wasn’t a soul around. I let the engine idle.