Out on the Cutting Edge

She paid her rent on the sixth and her room was found to be vacant ten days later, so that's the best I can narrow down the time of her disappearance, and that's because he left the machine on."

"How do you figure that?"

"Her parents called a couple of times and left messages. If the machine hadn't picked up they would have kept calling until they reached her, and when they didn't reach her no matter what time they called, they would have been alarmed, they would have thought something happened to her. In all likelihood her father would have come to see you two months earlier than he did."

"Yeah, I see what you mean."

"And it wouldn't have been a cold trail then."

"I'm still not sure it would have been a police matter."

"Maybe, maybe not. But if he'd hired somebody private back in the middle of July—"

"You'd have had an easier time of it. No argument." He thought for a moment. "Say she left the machine behind herself, not by accident but because she had a reason."

"What reason?"

"She moved out but she doesn't want somebody to know she's gone. Her parents, say, or somebody else she's trying to duck."

"She'd just keep the room. Pay the rent and live elsewhere."

"All right, say she wants to move out and skip town but she wants to be able to get her calls. She could—"

"She couldn't get her calls from a distance."

"Sure she could. They've got this gizmo, you just call your machine from any touch-tone phone and punch in a code and the machine plays back your messages."

"Not all machines have the remote-pickup feature. Hers didn't."

"How do you know that? Oh, right, you saw the machine, it's still in the room." He splayed his fingers.

"Look, what's the point going over this again and again? You were a cop long enough, Matt. Put yourself in my position."

"I'm just saying that—"

"Put yourself in my fucking position, will you? You're sitting at this desk and a guy comes in with a story about bed linen and a telephone answering machine. There's no evidence that a crime has been committed, the missing person is a mentally competent adult, and nobody's seen her for over two months.

Now what am I supposed to do?"

I didn't say anything.

"What would you do? In my position."

"What you're doing."

"Of course you would."

"Suppose it was the mayor's daughter."

"The mayor doesn't have a daughter. The mayor never had a hard-on in his life, so how could he have a daughter?" He pushed his chair back. "Of course it's a different matter if it's the mayor's daughter.

Then we put a hundred men on it and work around the clock until something breaks. Which doesn't mean something necessarily does, not after all this time and with so little to go on. Look, what's the big fear here? Not that she went to Disney World and the Ferris wheel got stuck with her at the top of it. What are you and her parents really afraid of?"

"That she's dead."

"And maybe she is. People die all the time in this city. If she's alive she'll call home sooner or later, when the money runs out or her head clears up, whatever it takes. If she's dead there's nothing anybody can do for her, you or me or anybody else."

"I suppose you're right."

"Of course I'm right. Your problem is you get like a dog with a bone. Call the father, tell him there's nothing to run with, he should have called you two months ago."

"Right, make him feel guilty."

"Well, you could find a better way to put it. Jesus, you already gave it more than most people would and took it as far as it would go.

You even dug up some decent clues, the phone calls and everything, the answering machine. The trouble is they're not attached to anything. You pull them and they come off in your hand."

"I know."

"So let go of it. You don't want to put in any more hours or you wind up working for chump change."

I started to say something but his phone rang. He talked for a few minutes. When he hung up he said,

"What did we do for crime before we had cocaine?"

"We made do."

"Did we? I guess we must have."

I walked around for a few hours. Around one-thirty it started raining lightly. Almost immediately the umbrella sellers turned up on the streetcorners. You'd have thought they had existed previously in spore form, springing miraculously to life when a drop of water touched them.

I didn't buy an umbrella. It wasn't raining hard enough to make it worthwhile. I went into a bookstore and killed some time without buying anything, and when I left the rain still didn't amount to much more than a fine mist.

I stopped at my hotel, checked at the desk. No messages, and the only mail was an offer of a credit card. "You have already been approved!" the copy blared. Somehow I doubted this.

I went upstairs and called Warren Hoeldtke. I had my notebook at hand, and I gave him a quick rundown on what lines of investigation I'd pursued and what little I'd managed to determine. "I've put in a lot of hours," I said, "but I don't think I'm much closer to her than I was when I started. I don't feel as though I've accomplished anything."

"Do you want more money?"