Six

 

The Upper West Side, New York City—The Murray Residence

Wednesday 3:40 p.m.

 

Tanaka turned to face Sophie. “Miss Drake? I’m Detective Tanaka. I’ll be looking into your sister’s disappearance.”

Sophie recovered her composure instantly and gave Tanaka a dazzling smile as she took his umbrella. “Please, call me Sophie. I must say, I didn’t expect such special treatment. You got here so quickly.” Although her honeyed drawl sweetened her words, Michael detected a tart edge of displeasure in her voice.

“Hey, anything for the kid here,” Tanaka said, coming over to where Michael sat on the sofa. “How’re you doing, Rev?”

“Better.”

“Well, you still look like hell. I mean, heck. I’ll have to tell everyone that you’re not just taking a vacation here.” His tone changed from teasing to real concern. “And this is probably the last thing you needed, huh?” The level of worry on his face and in his voice suggested to Michael that the rapid and high-level response had nothing to do with the potential seriousness of this case and everything to do with Tanaka’s concern about how it might affect Michael’s currently fragile health. In short, he was being humored.

Sophie joined them after setting Tanaka’s umbrella in the bathroom to dry. “Can I get you anything to drink, detective?”

“No thanks,” Tanaka said.

She gestured toward the chair facing the sofa. “Then please, have a seat.” She seemed to have forgotten that this wasn’t her home.

“I’ll need to talk to you too, Rev,” Tanaka said as he settled into the chair. “You’re the neighbor, and you know her habits.”

“I don’t like being on this side of things,” Michael grumbled.

Tanaka nodded. “I know.”

Sophie paused for a second, watching the two of them, before joining Michael on the sofa. As soon as she sat, she started to lift her right foot out of its shoe, then she seemed to realize what she was doing and shoved her foot back down.

Tanaka took out his notebook and a pen, opened the notebook, and braced it on his knee. “Now, Miss Drake, I’m going to ask you both some questions. Please don’t take offense, but there are some things I need to rule out. I’m not casting aspersions on your sister.”

Sophie nodded. “I understand. And in the interest of saving time, I’ll tell you that, to the best of my knowledge, my sister didn’t have money troubles and wasn’t in debt. I’ve never noticed any signs of substance abuse. She has no history of mental illness. She hasn’t mentioned dating anyone, and that means she also hasn’t mentioned any recent breakups. She wasn’t planning a vacation, since she just took over the lead role of a Broadway show. She got a good response to her debut, so she isn’t hiding in shame. Is there anything else you need to know?”

As Sophie went through this recitation, Michael watched her in something that felt uncomfortably like awe. He’d conducted hundreds of interviews, and he’d never seen anything like this. She sat perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap, staring steadily at Tanaka as she spoke. She didn’t clutch or smooth her skirt, tuck her hair behind her ear, pick at her fingernails, or exhibit any of the other signs of nervousness he usually saw when he was questioning people. When it had been his turn in her place, he’d been a mess. He remembered grabbing his knees so it wouldn’t be obvious how badly his hands were shaking.

But Sophie was the steadiest, calmest person in the room. Her unwavering gaze was getting to Tanaka, who had beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He kept his eyes down on his notebook instead of looking up at her, avoiding the intense eye contact. That was something Michael never thought he’d see—this delicate girl was making Tank sweat, just by looking at him. The most hardened psychopaths hadn’t been able to get to Tank like that.

No, not a girl, Michael corrected himself. She was about four years older than Emily, as he recalled, so she was over thirty. She’d probably get carded in a bar, but no one would dare treat her like a child.

Tanaka shifted his shoulders uncomfortably and turned to Michael. “What about you, Rev? Does this fit with what you’ve seen?”

“Yeah.”

Tanaka nodded. “Okay, that eliminates the usual reasons people go missing.”

“Which means foul play, right?” Sophie asked.

Tanaka took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead, then shot a worried glance at Michael before answering Sophie. “Let’s play it safe and investigate like it is foul play. Now, I need a physical description of your sister.”

“She’s twenty eight, five foot nine, very slender build, has strawberry blond hair a shade redder than mine. I think she’s wearing it past her shoulders now. Her hair is a little curlier than mine. Blue eyes.” She broke her focus on Tanaka, who sighed in relief, to take a photograph out of her purse and hand it to him. “This is the most recent photo I have of her. I printed it before I left.”

Tanaka tucked it away in his coat pocket. “Thank you, that’s helpful. Any tattoos or other distinguishing marks?”

“No tattoos, unless she got one recently that I don’t know about. She is a dancer, though.”

“So?”

“It gives her some distinguishing marks.” Sophie pulled her right foot out of her shoe and extended her leg in front of her, her toes pointed. Michael would have expected a woman like her to have the kind of dainty foot that would slide easily into a glass slipper, but her foot was gnarly. Her toe joints were large and knotted, and there were calluses around her toes. The nail on her big toe was a purplish black. Two of her smaller toes were taped. “Dancers tend to have hideous feet,” Sophie said, putting her foot back in its shoe.

Tanaka raised an eyebrow as he made a note. “I never knew you could spot a dancer by her feet.”

“Oh, honey, ballet is brutal.”

Tanaka flipped a page in his notebook. “When did you last talk to your sister?”

“Last night, shortly after ten my time, which would have been eleven here. She’d just come offstage, and she called to tell me how the show went. She was about to go out with some friends from the cast. She said she’d call me later, but she didn’t, and she hasn’t answered when I’ve called her, either at home or on her cell.”

“Did she mention the names of these friends?”

“I’m sorry, no, but they’re in the chorus of Emma: The Musical.”

Tanaka turned to Michael. “And what about you? When did you see her last?”

“She came up yesterday evening before she left for the theater bring me some soup. She left Beau with me for the night and said she’d come by in the morning to walk him.”

“She didn’t come by?”

“No, but I didn’t notice it at the time. I was kind of out of it. I fell asleep on the sofa, and Beau woke me up this morning when he wanted to go out. I took him for a walk, then I fed him, ate something, and I fell asleep again. Next thing I knew, Sophie was knocking on the door.”

“Did you hear Emily come home last night?”

Michael shook his head. “Nope, but she could have had a wild party down there and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

Tanaka consulted his notebook. “Now, Sophie, Michael said you knew Emily was missing when she didn’t show up for the matinee.”

“That’s right.”

“You flew to New York from—where, exactly?”

“Maybelle, Louisiana. It’s about forty miles northeast of Shreveport.”

“Michael called us soon after three. The matinee started at two. How could you have known to come before anyone knew she was missing?”

Michael wanted to groan out loud. He hadn’t even registered the time incongruities.

He wasn’t the only one to react to the question. For the first time during this interview, Sophie’s steely composure faltered. It wasn’t an extreme reaction, just an overall tensing and a tightening of the muscles around her eyes, and for a split second, she broke eye contact with Tanaka, but it was more of a response than she’d shown thus far. She looked mildly furious, and Michael wouldn’t have been surprised if Tanaka had turned to stone from her glare.

She lifted her chin ever so slightly, fixed Tanaka with her steady gaze, and said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“Okay, then, I had a feeling.” She said it simply and directly, without stammering or looking at all embarrassed.

Tanaka raised his eyebrows and smirked. “A feeling?”

“A wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-knowing-something’s-horribly-wrong feeling.”

“You mean a nightmare?”

She shook her head. “No. A feeling. That’s the only way I can describe it. I knew something was wrong with Emily.”

Tanaka cocked his head, radiating skepticism. “You flew to New York from Louisiana because you had a ‘feeling’ something was wrong with your sister?”

“My feelings tend to be accurate. It’s a family trait. For instance, my father died of a heart attack in his office. I was out shopping with my grandmother, and right there, in the middle of the store, we looked at each other and knew something was wrong, so we headed to his office. We got there before his secretary found him. So, yes, a feeling is enough for me to take action.” She shrugged. “I figured if I was wrong, Emily and I could have a good laugh and spend some time together, but if I was right, then the sooner I got here, the better.” Her voice took on a sharp, challenging tone. “And, as it turns out, I was right, wasn’t I?”

Michael was an expert at detecting lies. He spent a good part of his working days asking people questions and trying to figure out how much of what they said was true. Over the years, he’d learned to spot all the little clues that indicated a lie, from body language to facial expression to tone of voice and even the way things were phrased. And it looked to him like Sophie was telling the truth. This wasn’t an elaborate cover-up.

Tanaka seemed to have the same assessment. His eyes widened, then after a momentary pause, he said, “When did you have this feeling?”

“At about half past one, my time, so that would have been two thirty here.”

“So whatever happened to her would have happened at about that time?”

“That is the way it seems to work, yes.”

“And whatever that was would have been bad?”

“I’m afraid so. She was terrified, and it was like she was calling me to come help.”

“She hasn’t mentioned any stalkers or overzealous fans, has she? To either of you?”

“I don’t think she’d tell me,” Sophie said. “She wouldn’t want me to worry.”

“She would tell me,” Michael said, “but she hasn’t mentioned anything.” That earned him a quick glance from Sophie, the first time she’d acknowledged his existence since the interview began. “She once said she was glad to have a cop living upstairs,” he explained.

“You haven’t received any ransom demands, have you?” Tanaka asked.

“I believe that’s the sort of thing I would have mentioned up front,” she drawled dryly.

Tanaka got Sophie’s contact information, flipped his notebook closed, then said, “Thank you for your time, and for your honesty. Now, I’d better get a look at Emily’s apartment. I’ll have to take her computer so we can see if there’s anyone she’s been communicating with.”

She nodded. “Yes, of course. Detective Murray has a key.”

Michael stood with some effort. He was long overdue for a painkiller, and he felt like someone was stabbing him repeatedly in the upper chest with a chisel. It would be good to turn the key and the situation over to Tanaka so he could return to the blissful oblivion of his sofa.

Sophie went with the two men to the door. “Once you’ve looked around, would it be okay if I stayed in Emily’s apartment?” she asked.

“That depends on what we find there,” Tanaka said. “It may be a crime scene.”

“You think you’ll find her body in there,” Sophie inferred.

Tanaka flinched at her directness. “That is a possibility. The fact that no one’s seen her since last night doesn’t mean she didn’t come home last night.”

That didn’t stop Sophie from following them down the stairs. When Tanaka turned to glare at her while Michael unlocked the door, she said, “I know I can’t go inside, but I have to know.”

“Wait out here. You, too,” he added to Michael. “In this case, you’re a civilian.” It didn’t take Tanaka very long to go through the studio apartment. He came back to the door a moment later. “She’s not here,” he announced, “but I can’t let you in until I’ve checked things out.”

She nodded her assent. “Maybe I’ll go find something for dinner. I’ve been traveling all day and I’m suddenly starving.”

Michael reached through the doorway and took two keys off the row of hooks just inside Emily’s door. “Here’s Emily’s key to my place, so you can let yourself in when you get back,” he said, handing it to her. “And this one opens the front door.”

“Thank you,” she said before running upstairs.

Once she was gone, Tanaka said, “You wanna help me poke around?”

“I thought I was a civilian here.”

“Now I know it’s not a crime scene, and you’d know better than I would if anything’s different or missing.”

There wasn’t that much to search. While Michael scanned the one-room apartment for anything that seemed out of place, he asked, “So, Tank, what did you think of her?”

“Very pretty, in spite of her feet. Great legs.”

“That’s not what I meant. Don’t you think she’s kind of, well, odd?”

“Oh, you mean the woo-woo stuff? That ‘feeling’?”

“That, and other things.” He heard the front door close, went to the window, and saw the ballerina umbrella gliding rapidly down the sidewalk.

“Well, quite frankly, she scares the sh–heck out of me. That was one freaky stare. Her eyes are weird.”

“You’re allowed to curse in front of me. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Then I’d be lying, and I’d be corrupting the Reverend Saint Michael into lying, and that’s worse than having to put a dollar in the jar.”

Michael had long since given up fighting his department nickname and all the nonsense that went with it, so he asked, “What’s weird about her eyes?”

“Didn’t you notice? They’re two different colors. One’s blue and one’s gray. I thought it was just the light at first, but the way she was staring at me, I couldn’t help but see it. It was like I saw a different face depending on which eye I focused on.” He shuddered.

Michael couldn’t help but smile, in spite of the situation. “I never thought I’d see the day someone could make you sweat in an interview.”

Instead of responding to that, Tanaka said, “Emily must be old school—a landline and a machine,” and hit the “play” button on Emily’s answering machine.

“Hey, Em, it’s Sophie,” Sophie’s voice said, sounding much less steady than Michael had heard it so far. “I know it’s really early, and you probably hate me for waking you up if you’re there, but I got one of those feelings again, like when Daddy died, or that time before with you, and I’m on my way to New York. If you are around and I’m just being silly and paranoid, call my cell. I’ll be changing planes in Atlanta, so that’ll be your last chance to tell me to turn back. They’re calling my flight now, so I have to go.” Her voice took on a strained quality, like she was close to tears. “Call me, Emily. I love you.”

The call clicked off, then the robotic voice of the machine gave the time stamp as seven thirty a.m., Wednesday. “Her story checks out,” Tanaka said. There was another message from Sophie a couple of hours later, followed by one from a friend an hour after that and three from the show’s stage manager, starting at one. “All these messages back up what she said. So she really did know in the middle of the night, all the way from Louisiana, that her sister was in trouble. Holy s–wow. That is freaky. I’ve dealt with a few of those psychics who volunteer to help in investigations, and none of them have been that accurate.”

Michael thought the message also meant that Sophie was human, after all. She was as scared and worried as anyone might be in this situation, even if she hid it well. He took a framed photo off the bookcase to get a better look. The picture showed two little girls in ballet outfits. The older one, maybe about seven, stood tall and proud, her hair slicked back into a tight bun. The younger one, no more than three, was still pudgy with baby fat, and there was a bow stuck in her short curls. Her fingers clutched her sister’s skirt. “I think it has something to do with them being family,” he said. “It’s not like she gets the Bat Signal whenever random people are in trouble.”

“I didn’t want to put you on the spot in front of the sister, but I have to ask, what’s the nature of your relationship with the missing girl?” Tanaka asked as he searched a drawer.

“She’s my downstairs neighbor.”

“Her dog is at home in your place, and you have keys to each other’s apartments. Look, I’m not prying into your personal life, but you know how these things go. There’s no hiding anything in an investigation like this, and it’s better if you come clean with it now.”

“Yeah, I know, the husband, lover, or boyfriend is the first suspect. But there’s nothing to come clean about. She’s just my neighbor. You met Sophie. Now imagine her taller and more extroverted. If she wants to look after you, there’s not much you can do to stop her that doesn’t involve physical violence or moving out in the middle of the night.”

“Uh, huh.”

“Gene, I’m married. There’s nothing going on.”

Tanaka turned to face him directly. “Rev, don’t you think it’s time you moved on? It’s been, what, seven years?”

“They found that girl in California after eighteen years. Alive.”

“That’s why you’re so keen on this case, isn’t it? You find this girl, and it gives you hope.”

“I’m so keen on this case because it’s my downstairs neighbor, and I’ll be stuck with her inanimate bulldog if you don’t find her.”

Tanaka opened the laptop on the desk in front of the window. “Hey, she left her computer on, and the e-mail’s still up. I won’t need the geeks to hack in.”

Michael leaned over his shoulder. “Anything good?”

“No ransom notes or creepy stalker messages that I can see. Still, I’ll take it and let the tech guys give it a once-over. I hope they come across something. Otherwise, it’s like this girl disappeared into thin air.”

“And those cases are nearly impossible to solve.” As Michael knew all too well.