Lorne and Pat’s house was a couple of hours north of Zachary’s, and he was later getting back to his apartment than he had expected, but he was calm and hyperfocused on the investigation during his drive back. He could barely even remember his time on the road.
He was glad he had gone back in to find out what was wrong. If he hadn’t, his own anxiety would have been through the roof by the time he got home, and he probably would not have slept that night. Going back had been the right choice. Zachary hadn’t wanted to kick Tyrrell out to talk to Lorne and Pat privately, but he had needed to find out what was bothering them. It had been too obvious that something was wrong.
It was too late to start making phone calls on the case, especially not to the police officer. Zachary wouldn’t even be able to get patched through. They would just tell him to call back in the morning.
But he could start by running Jose’s name through the databases he had access to. He didn’t expect to find much. Jose would not show up as a property owner or having a driver’s license. He wouldn’t have any arrest records. No credit history. But something still might pop up somewhere, on a news page, social network, or some other site. He should have asked Pat about an email address as well, which might have given Zachary access to Jose’s email or social accounts if some of his data had been breached in the past.
There were a couple of social media accounts that might have been Jose’s, but the avatars were cartoons rather than his face, so Zachary couldn’t match them to the photo that Pat had given him, and their activity was private rather than public, so if he was to get into them, he’d have to have a password, or the police would have to deal with the providers to get access to them.
Eventually, his eyes were getting too gritty to look at the computer screen any longer, and he knew he needed to get to bed. He still felt wired, so he just took one sleeping pill and nothing else with a couple swallows of flat Coke from the fridge, and headed to bed. He would really get into gear in the morning.
He slept restlessly, but that was normal. If he got a few hours of sleep, he was doing well, especially with a new investigation buzzing in his brain. So when light started to make its way through his window signaling the impending dawn, he got up. He shuffled into the kitchen to put on some coffee, took his morning meds, and woke up his computer again. At least the computer didn’t require a certain number of hours of rest. It was too early to call Detective Dougan, so Zachary checked his email. He hadn’t checked it the night before.
There was a short email from Tyrrell saying that he had enjoyed having supper with Zachary and his extended family, and one from Mr. Peterson thanking Zachary for looking into Jose’s case for them. Just casual, polite emails, but Zachary savored them, appreciating the touchstones. After all of the horrible email he’d gotten from Devon Masters before Christmas, it was a huge relief to be able to open his email inbox without feeling like he was facing the firing squad. Those casual little polite emails were the best remedy in the world. So he fired one back to each of the men and sipped his coffee. He took a glance at the morning news. Nothing much happening that would impact him.
He went back to his email and sent one to Kenzie as well. Nothing big or important, just touching base with her too. She had been a rock during his pre-Christmas depression, and now that things were back to normal, he wanted to pay her back in some way. There wasn’t any big, life-changing thing he could do for her or give her, so for the time being, he would have to do the little things, and hope that they added up to something meaningful to her.
When she had first started seeing him, she’d had no idea what kind of a mess she was getting herself into. She’d been looking for a casual date, a fun time, and instead had ended up with him. She deserved a prize for not dumping him after the first confrontation with Bridget. Maybe part of that had just been the entertainment value Bridget provided, since Kenzie had never really considered her a rival, but had been amused that Bridget claimed to hate Zachary when, as far as Kenzie was concerned, Bridget was still attracted to him.
Zachary could have told Kenzie that wasn’t the case—and had, in fact told her so several times—but Kenzie stubbornly refused to believe it. She said it was up to Zachary to boot Bridget out of his life, which wasn’t something that he could do. It wasn’t exactly polite to admit to his date that he still had feelings for his ex, but Zachary couldn’t help that. He and Bridget had been apart as long as they had been together, but he still couldn’t let go of the life that he had thought they would have together.
His current therapist had traced his inability to let go of the relationship back to Zachary’s love for his mother and the fact she had abandoned him as a child, which was a pretty obvious parallel for anyone to draw, but being able to see the similarities between the two relationships and being able to get over his pining for Bridget were two different things. Until he could, Zachary was determined to ‘fake it until he could make it,’ to show Kenzie the attention she deserved and pretend that Bridget was out of his life and didn’t mean anything to him.
Kenzie wouldn’t be checking her email for a couple more hours, so he started to work his way through the stack of paperwork on his desk. If anyone had told him how much paperwork there would be as a private detective, he might not have set his sights on becoming one. He had never done well in school, his ADHD causing too many problems in any classroom setting. At least at home, he didn’t have to deal with the distractions of thirty other people coughing and sniffling and shifting around in their seats. He worked through some routine skip traces, added paragraphs to reporting letters, and drew up invoices for cases that he had closed and needed to collect on. As much as he hated accounting, he wasn’t going to get paid without them.
The hour hand finally crept around to eight—or since he didn’t actually have an analog clock, the display on his phone and computer screen read eight—and he figured it was worth seeing if he could get Officer Thurlow Dougan. He dialed the number that Pat had given him and listened to the ringing, fully expecting that he would end up in Dougan’s voicemail and have to explain what he wanted to the machine. He was scripting it in his head when the line was picked up, not by voicemail, but by a real person.
“Dougan.”
“Oh, Detective Dougan. You don’t know me,” Zachary fumbled a little. He hated dealing with people by phone, where he couldn’t read their facial expressions and body language. “I’ve been talking to Pat Parker about Jose Flores, the man that he reported missing…?”
“Right,” Dougan said, his voice taking on an edge. Too early in the morning and he apparently didn’t have his morning coffee on board yet. “And who are you?”
“Pat is my step-father,” Zachary said, fudging the relationship a bit, but he knew Pat wouldn’t mind. In fact, he would have been delighted. “And I’m a private investigator.”
“I see.”
“I know you’re busy and you have plenty of other cases that demand your time and attention. I wondered if I could get a report from you on anything you were able to find, and then I’ll do a little follow-up investigation, see if I can put Pat’s worries to rest.”
“I don’t suppose Mr. Parker explained to you that Jose Flores is an illegal immigrant.”
“Yes, he did. And I know that makes him a lot harder to trace through the usual channels.”
“It makes him damn near impossible to trace. These guys don’t leave a trail. Like I told your father when he made the report, this guy probably just got worried about an Immigration investigation and decided to move on to another location. Or he decided to go back home. It happens all the time. With undocumenteds, there’s really nothing we can do.”
“Yeah,” Zachary agreed, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible, “and you’ve got plenty else on your desk to worry about.”
“Darn right I do.” Dougan sounded a little mollified. A few more minutes, and Zachary would have him volunteering everything he knew. The man didn’t want to have to investigate it any further and he didn’t want to waste his time in reporting to Pat that he hadn’t been able to find anything. He just wanted it off his desk.
“I’m wondering what you were able to cover. Did you talk to his boss?”
“Sure. First place I went. As usual, the guy wouldn’t admit that Jose even worked there. Of course he doesn’t hire illegals. Everything he does is above board. But a little pressure and he did admit that he knew Jose, but hadn’t seen him since your friend had. He just stopped showing up one day. Nothing unusual for these guys. They come and they go, and they don’t say what they’re doing. They just disappear. They’re ghosts.”
“Yeah. Pat said that he was sure that if Jose went back to El Salvador or to a different job, he would have said something about it, and he never did…”
“Pat doesn’t deal with these guys on a daily basis. That’s just not the way it works. It’s pounded into these guys. Don’t tell anyone where you are or where you’re going. It’s too dangerous. ICE will get you. Don’t leave a trail. So even though Pat may think that it’s a suspicious disappearance, that is not my opinion.”
“Got it. And how about the roommate?”
“Roommates,” Dougan corrected. “You never get just two of these guys in one place. You get whole families living in one room. With single guys, you get half a dozen or more in one apartment. They sleep in bunk beds, on couches, on the floor. Anywhere there’s room.”
“Uh-huh. Did you find anyone over there who was willing to talk to you?”
“Just got the same line everywhere. Jose doesn’t live here anymore. Maybe Jose went home. Maybe Jose found a better job. Nobody knows anything. But they’re not worried about it, either.”
Zachary nodded to himself. It was going to take more digging to get anything more out of the roommates or friends. More time and effort than a police officer had to pursue such things.
“Did you find anything at all that indicated that he had planned to leave? Or anything that didn’t jive with what the roommates were saying?”
“No. It was all pretty much what I expected. Nothing suspicious.”
“Any enemies? Jealous—uh—lovers? Any risky behaviors?”
“No. No hint of any foul play. I gather from your, uh, step-father, that they were under the impression he was gay, but I didn’t find any hint of that.”
It didn’t surprise Zachary that Jose had kept that part of his life a secret. It sounded like it was less acceptable in his circles than it was for Lorne and Pat. And they hadn’t been comfortable with being openly gay for a lot of years.
“I’ll take a closer look at that,” he told Dougan. “Is there anything else that you would look at more carefully if you had the time to spend on the case?”
Dougan didn’t answer immediately. Zachary wondered if he had pushed too fast. He didn’t think he’d have Dougan’s attention for long, so he didn’t want to waste any time. He hadn’t implied that the police weren’t putting enough effort into the case, just that they didn’t have unlimited time.
“I’d take a harder look at the roommates,” Dougan said finally. “They’re all undocumented, of course, so there’s no way to check criminal records or follow their histories without getting federal agencies involved… but when you are trying to encourage them to talk, getting the feds involved is counterproductive.”
“Yeah. That makes sense. Was there any roommate in particular that gave you a bad vibe? The one that Pat mentioned was Nando González.”
“He seemed okay. But some of the others… I honestly couldn’t even tell who was living there and who was just visiting. It seems like a free-for-all. If it was me, I wouldn’t want to be living there with people coming and going in my room all the time. I wouldn’t feel like I had any security.”
“Yeah.” Zachary thought about some of the foster homes he had been in, where there had been no sense of personal space or ownership, and if there was anything he didn’t want anyone else to get their hands on, he had to keep it on his person. Like his camera. Places like that, the neck strap didn’t leave his neck, not even while he was sleeping. “I wouldn’t like that either.” He let silence draw out for a few seconds. “Was there anything else that bothered you about the case? Anything that felt discordant?”
“We don’t usually get missing persons reports for illegals. So that was a bit different. Not bad or wrong, just unusual. When we’ve got a case involving illegals, it’s usually a body in the morgue, smuggling, human trafficking… we’re not looking for immigrants that have gone missing.”
Zachary jotted a few quick notes. “Great. Thanks for your time, Detective Dougan. I’ll let you know if I run into anything you would want to act on. Feel free to call me if anything comes to mind later that didn’t seem right or that you couldn’t pursue at the time. Did I give you my number?”
He hadn’t, but it was a way for Dougan to feel like he was still in control of the flow of communications. As if Zachary were acting for him, taking just one thing off of his desk that he didn’t have to worry about anymore.
Dougan grunted that he hadn’t, so Zachary gave it to him, and repeated his name, first and last. “And can I call you if I have any other questions? I promise I won’t become a pest. But just in case something comes up that I need to get your read on.”
“Yes, fine. I suppose. But if you do start harassing me, I’m going to block your number.”
“Fair enough,” Zachary agreed. Probably he wouldn’t need Dougan for anything else, but he wanted to leave the lines of communication open and to leave a good impression with Dougan in case Zachary ever had to deal with his department again. He knew how much cops hated investigators who interfered with their cases. He had both friends and enemies in his own local precinct. He couldn’t always avoid stepping on toes, but he did the best he could to keep relations friendly.
“Thanks for all of your help, Detective Dougan. I appreciate you taking the time.”