Good As Gone (3 page)

“But there is,” Davignon said quickly. He lowered his voice to a near whisper. “I am afraid that Lindsay is not the only young girl to be abducted in Paris this month.”

I shuddered despite the warmth of the cottage. Children abducted by estranged parents was one thing; physical harm was seldom done to them. But victims of stranger abductions—the crimes often committed against them were unthinkable. And when more than one went missing from the same region in a short period of time, it eliminated a number of innocuous possibilities. Rarely did such stories conclude with the parents and child happily reunited. Indeed, the odds of recovering the missing in these situations were rather bleak. Tragic endings, from my experience, were almost inevitable.

I suddenly found myself in an impossible situation. The reason I didn’t take on cases dealing with stranger abductions was simple: I couldn’t bear to relive the days following Hailey’s abduction. It didn’t matter that Lindsay Sorkin wasn’t my own daughter. I would see this case through Vince’s eyes, watch Lori’s heart tear a little more every moment there was no news. If I became involved to any significant extent and little Lindsay couldn’t be located, I didn’t think my body could make it through the next seven days. My stomach would never mend if this six-year-old girl was found dead. Since Hailey’s abduction, I’d felt as though I was teetering along some imaginary line and I feared this search would finally push me over the edge.

But when I turned back to the Sorkins to apologize one last time, I fixed my eyes on Lori and saw total devastation, the same desolate shell I had faced ten years ago when I stared across the kitchen table at Tasha and tried to explain that there was nothing else we could do to bring Hailey home.
Isn’t there, though?
she’d shouted.
Isn’t there?
And that unfathomable weight—that absolute helplessness—that had been pressing down against my chest since the day my daughter disappeared finally caused my ribs to cave in and crush my lungs. In that moment I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and that same pressure was bearing down on me again now as I stared across the marble table, trying to blink away my light-headedness and explain to Lori Sorkin that there was nothing I could do to return her daughter.

Isn’t there, though?

Those three words still held so much power over me.

As I looked into Lori’s moist, pleading eyes, I thought,
What if I could do for her what I couldn’t do for Tasha?

And what if I walked? How could I go on, having failed her twice?

What could I possibly say? That I couldn’t get involved? Like it or not, I was already involved and I had no right turning Lori Sorkin and her husband down. No right giving up on Lindsay without making a proper effort. Finding Lindsay alive wouldn’t return Hailey, but at least it would mean there were two less parents in the world walking aimlessly through their own hell on earth. If there was a chance I could spare Vince and Lori Sorkin the burden of losing a child, I had to try, my own feelings be damned.

Chapter 4

In the case of a missing child, the parents are always suspects. Unfortunately, Vince and Lori Sorkin were no exception. Negligent death followed by a cover-up couldn’t be ruled out. Nor could outright murder. But then, I’d been working with parents of abducted children going on eleven years now, and both Vince and Lori Sorkin played the role of frantic parents to a tee. I had a hard time imagining that either one of them was involved.

Entering the Hotel d’Étonner, one would never suspect that a small child had been abducted on the premises less than thirty-six hours earlier. All seemed perfectly normal. A pair of guests stood patiently at the front desk, apparently waiting to be checked in. Carrying luggage through the opulent lobby were two bellhops, neither of whom Vince Sorkin recognized. Of the desk clerks on duty, one was fair-haired and the other was male, so no Avril.

“We’ve questioned both the female clerk and the male bellhop,” Davignon informed me, “and it seems highly unlikely that either of them was involved.”

“You demanded my assistance for a reason,” I told him, “so, with all due respect, Lieutenant, that’s something I’d like to decide for myself.”

Straightaway we went up to the Sorkins’ hotel room, one of eight rooms located on the fifth floor. Actually, it was considered a junior suite, spacious and bright, with a view of the hotel’s lavish patio. The suite consisted of three parts, including an entryway, a sitting room, and a capacious bedroom complete with its own master bath.

“This is where Lindsay slept,” Vince said, pointing to a large roll-out bed in the sitting room.

I hesitated to touch anything but Davignon said that the room had already been gone over with a fine-tooth comb.

“This is more a matter of gaining your perspective,” he said.

I knelt next to the roll-out. From where Lindsay was lying, she wouldn’t have been able to see her parents’ bed.

I looked up at the parents. “The door to your room was open, I assume?”

Lori shook her head. “Even though we were so exhausted from all the traveling, we made love, then fell asleep right away. I don’t know if it was jet lag or being in a strange bed, but something woke me in the middle of the night. When I looked up I noticed our door was still closed. I got out of bed to open it and look in on Lindsay.” She paused to regain her composure, then rushed through the final few words as though saying them aloud somehow made things worse. “But Lindsay wasn’t there. She was gone.”

“Wait here,” I said, moving toward the bedroom. “When I close the door behind me, Mrs. Sorkin, I’d like you to say my name, Simon, six times, beginning in a conversational tone and increasing in volume with each repetition.”

I stepped into the bedroom and closed the heavy wooden door. I waited thirty seconds but heard nothing, just as I’d suspected. I walked out of the room, shaking my head, then moved on to the front door.

“No sign of forced entry,” Davignon said.

I opened the door. The lock and the dead bolt required a key, not the usual electronic cards you find in most hotels these days.

“Do either of you recall sliding the chain?” I said.

“I was pretty certain I did slide the chain after slipping our room-service trays out into the hall,” Vince said. “But with Lindsay gone, I guess I couldn’t have.”

Don’t be so sure,
I thought. “What time was that?”

“After nine,” Vince said. “Probably closer to ten.”

I stood in the narrow entryway, examining the coat closet.

“You stored your jackets and stuff in here?”

“No,” Vince said, “we hung them in the bedroom. That door was locked when we arrived.”

“Did you call down to the front desk for the key?”

Vince shrugged. “Never got around to it. It didn’t seem that important. There’s more than enough closet space in the bedroom.”

“It was still locked when we arrived,” Davignon added. “The hotel manager opened it for us. He said it has a lock because of the hotel’s wealthier clientele. Women customarily store furs and such in that closet.”

“Did the manager inventory the keys?” I said.

Davignon nodded. “None were missing. We printed the two sets they kept downstairs. Both were clean.”

“Clean? As in they’d been wiped?”

“All the keys receive a quick polish before they’re hung back on the rack for the next guest, we were told. We checked just about every key they had down there and didn’t find a single print.”

I stepped inside the closet and examined the back wall, feeling around for seams. The closet was only two feet deep, barely enough room for a man to stand comfortably.

“Do you have a flashlight, Lieutenant?”

Davignon stepped to the doorway of the closet a moment later, holding out a miniature Maglite.

“That’ll do,” I said.

I twisted the flashlight on and studied the ceiling, then turned the narrow beam to the floor and ran it across the edges. Having spotted nothing, I got down on one knee and ran my finger along the floor, collecting nothing but dust. When I aimed the light on my finger, one lone white speck stood out against the gray-black dirt.

I stood and exited the closet, then walked into the sitting room.

“When room service arrived,” I said, “did the server leave the door open behind him as he brought in the food?”

Vince peered down the entryway. “I don’t know. I opened the door and the server followed me back to the sitting room. I didn’t look behind me, and because of the long hallway, the door wouldn’t have been in my line of vision if I had.”

“Think,” I said. “Do you recall
hearing
it close?”

He shook his head. “I honestly don’t remember.”

Lori said, “I was in the other room with Lindsay. It was late, I was getting her ready for bed.”

I stared down at the white speck still on my right index finger.

Oh, what the hell
, I thought.
It’s not going to kill you.

I placed the finger on my tongue.

Bitter. Could be MDMA.

“What have you found?” Davignon said, studying my face.

“Maybe nothing,” I said. “But it seems there was a tiny piece of a tab of Ecstasy lying on the floor in that hall closet.”

“Ecstasy?” Lori said.

“A club drug,” I told her. “A pill that vastly improves the mood, makes you want to hug and dance.”

Her voice caught. “You think they drugged my child?”

“No,” I said. “At least not with this. It could be that someone snuck into that hall closet while your food was being delivered, someone with a key. For most people who slide the chain on a hotel-room door, it’s pure habit, and I’m betting Vince did, just as he thinks. That means someone had to be lying in wait. If so, it’s possible the perpetrator kept himself busy with drugs, either to boost his courage or to kill time until the two of you finished dinner and went to sleep.” I paused. “Then again, this bit of Ecstasy could have been sitting in that closet for ages.”

“So where does that take us?” Vince said.

“To the most viable route of escape.”

I moved toward the entryway and told them to follow. When I exited the hotel room, I surveyed the edges of the hallway ceilings for cameras.

“CCTV is set up only in the elevators and the main lobby,” Davignon said.

“Then our man would have taken the stairs,” I said.

Davignon nodded. “Closest exit is to our left.”

“Your men searched the stairwell, I assume,” I said as we moved down the hall.

“Of course,” he said. “It was clean.”

When I entered the stairwell, I raised my arm against the flickering fluorescent lights. Like a vagrant, I assiduously searched the steps for cigarette butts, a dropped coin, something, anything that could connect me to the next dot. But the stairs leading to the fourth-floor landing were empty; those leading to the third, the same. On the fifth step down to the second floor, I found something.

“What is it?” Davignon said from the landing above me.

“Something your men evidently missed,” I called up to him.

The pill was crushed to pieces and spread over two steps, but one taste told me it was the same chemical I’d discovered in the Sorkins’ hall closet. An off-white tab of MDMA with a stamp on the face of it. Only it was in too many pieces to make out the stamp.

“Stay there,” I said as Davignon and Vince started down. “I need the light.”

I knelt on the second step and tried to piece the bits of the pill together like a puzzle. It was damn difficult, required more concentration than I thought I could muster in this dingy stairwell with the flickering lights.

The stamps on Ecstasy tabs were marketing tools, like the various brand names for heroin and marijuana. I’d seen Mitsubishi Turbos stamped with the car manufacturer’s logo; dolphins; doves; playboy bunnies; shamrocks; hearts, stars, and diamonds; crowns; peace signs; smiley faces. Some were even stamped
FBI
or
DEA
, though I’d never seen one marked for the U.S. Marshals.

This pill appeared to be stamped with letters. Or was it numbers?

“What have you got, Simon?” Davignon called down.

It
was
numbers. I continued to piece the top of the pill together as best I could. Three distinct numbers finally materialized before my eyes.

“Simon,” Davignon called down again, unable to contain the impatience in his voice. “Tell us, what is it you’ve found?”

“Bond,” I said under my breath. “James Bond.”

Chapter 5

Following a long conversation with Davignon about Paris’s present drug scene, I decided there was nothing much I could do until the sun went down. Dipping into the governmental coffers, Davignon provided me with enough money to get through the next few days in Paris. The first thing I did was grab a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich at a nearby café, forgoing the espresso I was dying for because I knew I’d need to get some sleep before night came.

I hadn’t promised Davignon that I would stay if I found a lead, only that I’d leave if I didn’t, but I was never one to play with semantics, and the truth was, I wanted like hell to find Vince and Lori Sorkin’s little girl. I knew what the Sorkins were going through, thoughts as black as night racing through their heads like an invading army. I knew they’d be unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to make the slightest efforts to maintain their health, to preserve their bodies. They would age a year for every day Lindsay remained missing, until their hearts finally grew calluses that not even the sharpest blade could penetrate. Even then, they’d loathe themselves for allowing their little girl to go missing, regardless of whether they could have done anything to prevent it.

I was put up in a small hotel on a quiet cobblestone street a few blocks away. The room, which contained nothing but a wooden desk and a double bed, was quaint and cozy, with matching floral-patterned wallpaper and bedding that reminded me of Tasha’s favorite bed-and-breakfast back in Newport, Rhode Island. I filled a plastic cup with tap water, then finally stripped out of the clothes I’d been wearing since I arrived in Paris.