For the thousandth time in his career Virgil wished that catching crooks in real life worked like it did on TV, that DNA scans actually came back in twenty minutes, that getting phone dumps and credit card records took half an hour, and that a few clicks on a keyboard would instantly tell you where your suspect would be ten minutes from now.
Unfortunately, real crooks used credit cards with fake names and post-office-box addresses, bought most things for cash, carried burner phones, drove leased cars registered in someone else’s name, and never filed tax returns.
The team had two new names, Ralph Anderson and Kyle Neddick. They had no current addresses, vehicle registrations, bank accounts, or real-estate records. So far, all they did have were Anderson’s criminal package – date of birth, social security number, the names of his next-of-kin, and where he had done his time.
The name “Kyle Neddick” came up clean which meant that it was probably an alias, so he was a ghost. Virgil had worked until his legs had begun to shake and the room tilted a few degrees out of true before settling back to horizontal. This time he didn’t wait for Kudlacik to tell him to call it a day. This time he punched out on his own.
On the way home he stopped long enough to grab a combo-meal from McDonalds and he ate it on the couch while watching the local news. Someplace between a fire in a scrap-metal yard and the possibility of hail accompanying the weekend’s threatened storm his brain clouded over and his eyelids went on strike, leaving him with vague memories of Steve McGarrett screeching around a corner in his black Mercury in a race to get a crucial witness to the courthouse before Jack McCoy finished his closing argument.
“This is Classy, Classy TV,” a distant voice announced. Virgil twisted his shoulders and idly thought about opening his eyes. “We’re the home of Classic TV, the shows that made America great.” The room went silent for a couple of seconds then Johnny Western began singing, “Have gun, will travel reads the card of a man. A knight without armor in a savage land.”
Virgil smacked his lips and struggled to sit up, knocking the remote to the floor in the process. By the time he managed to flick the power off, Johnny Western was crooning, “A man called Paladin.”
Virgil wandered into the kitchen and guzzled a bottled water so quickly that he got a brain freeze. It was five after nine. He thought about going to bed but he knew that if he did he’d wake up around four a.m. and then he’d spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling.
Instead he paced back to the living room and settled down in front of the computer. He’d been searching college Facebook pages for pictures of female freshman, hoping against hope that Nicole’s image might magically appear and even more unbelievably that he would recognize his own lost child in a young woman’s guise.
“Facebook? That’s the best you can do?” a voice called from behind him.
Virgil twisted around. Jane/Nicole was sitting on the couch, her feet dangling several inches above the floor.
Cover a man’s face with a hood and put him in an airplane with an invisible glass floor. Circle it a thousand feet over a field of rocks, pull off the hood, then tell him he can’t fall and not to be afraid. It doesn’t matter what the mind knows. His heart will still feel what it feels. Emotion will win out.
She’s just an hallucination, the logical part of Virgil’s brain insisted, but it was drowned out by his heart shouting, Nicole! Nicole! Nicole!
“I’ve done everything I could think of,” he said to the little girl who, to him, looked as real as life itself. “What else can I do?”
Nicole smiled. “That would be telling,” she said in a teasing voice.
“Because you’re just a figment of my imagination and you don’t know anything that I don’t know.”
At first she shrugged, then a sly look painted her face. “Maybe,” she said, “I know something that you don’t know you know.”
“Tell me.”
“What if it’s something you don’t want to know?”
“I don’t care. Just tell me.”
Nicole stared at him for a moment then looked down and fiddled with the folds of her dress.
The blue dress with the birds on it, Virgil thought. The one she wore to her fifth birthday party. She had named all the birds. A month later she spilled grape juice on it and she cried when Helen threw it away.
“You don’t understand,” Nicole said without looking up.
“Then explain it to me.”
Nicole smoothed out a patch of fabric then frowned when it dissolved into wrinkles again.
“You want me to give you answers, but all I have are questions.”
“Tell me the questions,” Virgil begged, ignoring the fear growing in his stomach.
Nicole’s face went blank for an instant then turned sad.
“Is the real reason you want to find me because you think it’s your fault that mama took me away?”
“No, I–”
“Are you doing all this,” Nicole waved at the laptop on the desk behind him, “because you’re just trying to fix your mistakes?”
“No! You’re my daughter and I love you.”
“But maybe not as much as you loved your job?”
Virgil opened his mouth to protest but no words came out, and he hid his face in his hands.
“She had no right to make you choose,” Nicole answered for him. Virgil wiped his eyes and saw that she was now standing only a couple of feet in front of him. He started to reach out then stopped himself, certain that at his touch she would disappear.
“What will happen if you find me?” Nicole asked, her face serious.
“I don’t know.”
“What if I don’t want to have anything to do with you? Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if I blame you for mama taking me away?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if I hate you?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said, his voice breaking.
Nicole took half a step closer, her face intent. “You’ve done the best you can. No one would blame you for stopping. Wouldn’t it be better if you just let me go?”
“No. I won’t!”
“Why?”
“I love you and I’ll never let you go,” Virgil said in a voice like broken glass.
Nicole’s face seemed to melt then flickered back into place. A little smile curved her lips.
“All right,” she said, dipping her head. “I’ll tell you a secret.” She leaned closer but her voice was like the murmur of a breeze through a pile of stones. Virgil bent forward and closed his eyes but the sounds grew softer and then disappeared, and when he opened them again she was gone. He swivelled his head left then right, searching vainly for her in the corners of the room. Finally, defeated, he spun around and reached for the mouse, but his hand froze in midair as a new idea tickled his brain.
What if I’ve been going about this all wrong? he thought. I’ve been looking for Nicole. Maybe I should have been looking for Helen. What would Helen have or do or need or become that would make her stand out?
She was left handed. She had worked as a bookkeeper. She hated pineapple. She liked to cook Italian food. Her father was an insurance agent. Her mother was a teacher. Her father died from throat cancer. Her aunt died young from something or other. Her mother had been sick with . . . her mother had had surgery for breast cancer.
He had begun his search by creating a list of every nine-to-eleven year old female child who had been registered in a new school in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Washington and Oregon the Fall after Helen disappeared. Expanding that search to the entire country would have yielded an impossibly large pool of candidates which he would have had no way to narrow down. But what if now he did have a way?
In case there was a recall or a newly discovered side effect there had to be some database someplace that kept track of who filled prescriptions for certain kinds of drugs. Someone must have set up something like that after the Thalidomide disaster. If he could find it, if he could get access to it, what if he ran the list of the mothers of those nine to eleven year old girls who were newly registered in school in all fifty states against the list of women of Helen’s approximate age who had received prescriptions for one or more cancer drugs at some time in the last three or four years?
It was a long shot, the longest. Just because Helen had a family history of cancer didn’t mean that she was going to get it. What were the odds? 10%? 5%? 1%? But that was better than 0% which was what he had now.
In his gut Virgil knew that he was wasting his time, that this was just another dead end in nine years of nothing but dead ends, but what was the alternative? Give up looking for Nicole? No, never, he would never, ever do that. Virgil reached for the keyboard and started typing.