Tommy had an hour to sit and cogitate.
He and Sam both had started working the phones at roughly the same time and had continued to do so, on and off, over the last four days. Earlier that morning, they'd talked on the phone and had shared their findings.
There'd been little for either to report.
Tommy was able to confirm the broad outline of what Sam had told him about Amy. In addition, he'd tracked her activities for the few months preceding her disappearance, scrutinized her business affairs, and ascertained that Amy had been living for the last four years with a domestic partner named Linda Cahn in a house near Flagstaff, Arizona. It wasn't much, but it was somewhat more than they'd had.
It surprised both Tommy and Sam that they hadn't known such important details about Amy as where she lived and what her domestic status was. Both had presumed that she lived more-or-less constantly on the road. She had that itch. But thinking of Amy, it should have been no surprise. Their friend always had compartmentalized her life carefully, and though both recalled Amy speaking fondly of someone named Linda, there was nothing in her words to suggest any hint of domesticity.
Sam had news on another front.
Of the seven friends he'd attempted to track down, he found two alive, one living near Biloxi and another outside Olympia, Washington. A third had died of a heart attack at about the time Sam had lost contact with him. A fourth, a woman Sam had last heard from about six years before, recently had been in Lubbock. Sam hadn't been able to contact her, but two different associates of his had admitted to having seen her as recently as six months before.
Save for the one death, that was good news. But it forced Sam and Tommy to presume that the three friends who Sam couldn't locate were among the missing. That raised the list of abductees to nine.
Sam had passed all their pertinent information to Tommy and had briefed him on what his white board looked like. It was then that he'd given Tommy two other names to add to the list of missing.
A young woman who Sam had first met in Houston about 10 years before, named Philly Mettouchi, had provided them.
"She's something of a high-tech whiz kid," Sam had claimed. "Her Gift is hiding in plain sight."
Apparently, the young woman could move about in public without being noticed. Her practical ability was organizational skill. She'd spent most of the last decade developing information systems for Internet start-ups. In that trade, she'd made a fortune.
"She's wicked smart, wants to help, and can set us up with better information systems than my sorry-ass white board," Sam had said during their phone conference. "I trust her, but I didn't want to say anything until you got a chance to meet her."
Sam had good instincts about people, but he usually deferred to Tommy when it came to reading folks. Neither of the men were paranoid, but there was no guarantee anyone with whom they shared information had the best intentions, and even an honest person might exercise faulty judgement.
But, so far, walking around and flashing old pictures of Amy had gotten Sam nowhere.
They both wanted her back, but if they intended to find her and to get to the bottom of what appeared to be a much broader conspiracy, they needed the assistance of someone who could extract and collate potentially large volumes of information. If necessary, they needed the help of someone who could hack government systems.
Tommy bridled at that last thought—the Tommy of recent decades had become an unusually law-abiding creature—but things had gone too far for him to be squeamish.
After further parley, he and Sam had decided that Tommy would depart that very night, fly out and see Amy's girlfriend first thing in the morning and then move on to the San Francisco Bay Area to meet Philly.
Sam would leave straightaway for Milwaukee, which was the last place Amy had been before St. Louis. After that, the Chicagoan would go to Amy's next previous destination, Minneapolis. Amy made her living consulting on efficiency and corporate security and had conducted meetings in both cities in the weeks leading up to her disappearance. She also was still an incorrigible card player, so Sam would hit all the casinos and riverboats in and around those areas.
The last place she'd been before Minneapolis was Kansas City. Tommy would stop in KC on his way back from the West Coast and trace her activities there. The two then would regroup in five days in St. Louis and move on to Indianapolis, where Amy had next been scheduled to work. Their combined road trip would account for the five-weeks leading up to Amy's disappearance.
That plan gave Tommy many hours to kill before sunset, when he would depart. There were errands to run and things to do, including a meeting with Mueller and Thomas at 11:00 am. At 10:00, Tommy began getting ready. Boots, blue jeans, and a t-shirt were his usual uniform, but after kicking around the house for a few minutes, it was apparent that the boots had walked off.
Sitting on the couch to pull on his running shoes, Tommy noticed a pillow-faced Rhonda come staggering out of the bedroom. She made no sound but cut a beeline to the refrigerator. After briefly appearing to look inside, she closed the door and walked, eyes still closed, over to the couch, where she collapsed on top of him and immediately was back to sleep.
Tommy leaned back and enjoyed the soft warmth of Rhonda's delightful form across his lap. This pleasure lasted about 15 minutes. He wanted to remain sitting but needed to get to the meeting early. Scooping up his girl, he carried her back to bed and tucked her in.
She wouldn't be up for at least another two hours and would remember nothing of what had just transpired when she did. There was no convincing the woman that she sometimes walked in her sleep.
Back at the couch, he pulled on his shoes before grabbing his things and heading out the door. It was a 20-minute walk to the small café, a place seldom frequented by the police. Tommy wasn't worried that he might be seen with the detectives, but it never hurt to play it safe.
***
The two detectives arrived 10 minutes early. Tommy stood, smiled, and extended his hand to Mueller. "Hello, detective."
It was just a moment for Eric Mueller to realize by whom he was being addressed. The man who the detective remembered from their first encounter looked somewhat different than the man who now stood before him, but Camille Thomas, who was right behind her partner, extended a warm smile and handshake, a look of clear recognition in her eyes. Apparently, she'd found her permanent face during the search for Tiffany Childes.
The three sat, ordered drinks, and began looking at the menu. After they'd ordered, Tommy announced that lunch was on him. "But I got a little favor to ask of you," he began with a hesitation that he hadn't intended.
A flash of suspicion showed on both detectives' faces. Without missing a beat, though, Mueller said that as long as it wasn't something illegal that Tommy had earned a lot of credit with the two officers.
"Oh, thanks so much," Tommy began. "I have a friend, Amy Lascar, who's gone missing. The problem is that she travels a lot for work, and it isn't clear when and where she fell off the map. To my knowledge, no department is looking for her."
The eyes of both detectives gave short flashes of understanding.
"Where was she seen last?" asked Mueller.
"In St. Louis, sometime in early March. It was the middle of the month before friends started to realize she hadn't checked in with anyone. The St. Louis police opened and closed the file on the same day. No one else will touch it."
"How long was she there?"
"She was supposed to be there five days, total. Before that, she was in Milwaukee. After that, she was supposed to be in Indianapolis for a week. She never arrived there."
Mueller was writing this all down. "What do you want us to do?"
Tommy took a breath and blew it out.
"Detectives, my friend is like me." He paused to let the meaning sink in. "I'm more than certain she's in government custody somewhere ... down some federal blackhole. I was hoping you might look into whether any agencies or departments have been tracking her, currently or in the past."
He looked each in the eye in turn.
"I know this is a huge ask. If there's any chance at all this could roll back on you in some bad way, don't do it. But if you can do it, please do. Amy is a good person. She had a few bumps with the law when she was a kid, but that was more than 30 years ago. She's a corporate efficiency consultant now, for crying out loud. No one deserves just to be disappeared."
"Ugh. This'd better be a good lunch," Mueller said, palming his face in a theatric manner. All three laughed, before the detective added, "Of course, we'll look. Tell us about this friend of yours."
Tommy spent the next 10 minutes regurgitating everything he imagined even vaguely pertinent about Amy as the detectives took notes. Finally, Camille stopped him.
"You said she's a gambler?"
"Inveterate."
Looking over at Mueller, she said, "Paris."
"Paris," he said. He looked at Tommy. "We're looking at this guy named Emil Paris, who we think chopped up his girlfriend and buried her in Jersey. He's a degenerate gambler and works the underground games here and along the coast. Your friend ever come to the City?"
"Every few years." Tommy again cursed himself for having missed Amy when she'd last been in town, almost two years before. I should have insisted. She still hasn't met Rhonda.
"Excellent," said Mueller. "That's our hook. We'll give her the complete background review. If anybody asks why, we got a tip from a source that she might know something."
"It has the added benefit of being mostly true," chimed in Camille.
"You see, there," added Mueller. "That's why she's the brains of the operation, and I'm just the eye candy."
"It'll be a few days or a week before we know anything," Camille said.
Tommy thanked them humbly, insisting, no matter what he'd done in the past, that he was deeply in their debt. After lunch, he thanked the detectives again and headed home to prepare for his journey.