The disappearing girls, p.9
The Disappearing Girls, page 9
Phelps closed the briefcase he had gathered the papers into and set it on his desk, knowing that Gerant would retrieve it before the night was out. He buttoned his jacket and fished for the office keys as he turned to leave. Behind him, he heard a popping noise, like a prospective customer kicking a tire at a used car lot. He felt his body begin to collapse backwards and a black curtain descending over his mind. His last thought was a silent, dreadful scream into the darkness. The sonofabitch! He lied to me!
CHAPTER EIGHT
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THE NEXT MORNING, Weston woke up feeling better than he had since Janie had died. He didn’t know whether it was because he was finally putting the depression behind him or because he was unaccountably anticipating some progress on the case of the disappearing girls.
Whatever, the rain had stopped and the sun was out and even the coffee from McDonald’s seemed hotter than usual when he arrived at the station and took his first sip. He was early; Jimmy wasn’t there yet, nor any of the other detectives. The first thing he did was boot up his computer to see if anything new had come in overnight. Nothing had, and he began entering his notes which he hadn’t gotten around to the day before, designating key words to go into the general data net which would flag any other files containing them and call them to his attention when he did his usual morning review of cases he was working on. After that, he began entering data for the usual load of reports and statements, and documentation of activities and all the other bureaucratic necessities of the job.
Weston was already finished with his paperwork and dipping into his donut bag when Jimmy arrived. He glanced at Weston’s screen which was displaying the last of the sequence of reports which must be filed. “Jesus, Wes, what time did you get here this morning?”
Weston grinned. Jimmy was usually ahead of him and he the one waiting. “I got up feeling good this morning and decided to come on in and get some work done. You should try it sometime.”
“Ha! This is the first day you’ve beat me here in a month. Save me a donut.” Jimmy sat down at his terminal, and like Wes, keyed in the search pattern for the case of the missing women first thing. A second later he shouted, “Jesus Christ!”
“Goddamn, Jimmy, what the hell is it? You made me spill my fresh cup of coffee. Not that this office stuff is worth drinking.” Weston flicked drops of coffee from his hand towards Jimmy who was getting to his feet, yet still staring at his monitor.
“Look here, Wes! Phelps has gone missing!”
“What! That can’t be! I just plugged his name into the net fifteen minutes ago.”
“Before or after you ran your search program?”
“Oh. After. Here, let me see.” Weston sat down in the chair Jimmy had vacated and read through the file displayed on his monitor while Jimmy looked over his shoulder.
Phelps’ disappearance had been filed by a uniform on the evening shift, simply as an activity report; if the person who had called still reported him missing the next day an actual bulletin would be posted.
“Look at the time. It seems like he never left his office after we saw him,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah. It was his secretary who made the call. Maria Sanchez. I wonder if that’s the same little juvenile delinquent that we saw there?” Weston thought it probably was.
“Most likely. Shall we go see her?”
“Why don’t we split up?” Weston suggested. “It’s got her phone number here. I’ll call and see if she’ll meet me at his office while you start making the rounds in Woolridge’s neighborhood.”
“Suits me. Meet back here at noon?”
“Yeah. Since you still have to finish your paperwork, I’ll give you the pleasure of telling the lieutenant that our only suspect just went missing.”
“Thanks boss. I love you, too. Gimme back my chair.”
Weston printed out a copy of the Phelps file then went back to his own desk and picked up the phone. He dialed the number listed for Maria Sanchez. A sleepy voice answered which he recognized as that of the girl who had been so uncommunicative in Phelps’s office. “Hello?”
“Miss Sanchez, this is detective Tamrick. I’m following up on your report that your employer, James Phelps, is missing.”
“Already? They told me last night that he had to be gone twenty four hours before they could do anything.”
“Well, I’m not busy with anything else right now and thought this might be a good time to talk to you. Could you meet me at Mr. Phelps’s office?”
“I guess so. What time?”
“It would be helpful if you could be there in a half hour or so,” Weston said.
“All right, but it might be a little longer than that. I was asleep.”
“Fine. Shall we say forty five minutes?”
“All right.”
“Thank you.” Weston hung up the phone. “I’m off,” Weston said to Jimmy, grabbing another donut from his bag and leaving the rest of them for him.
MARIA SANCHEZ, good to her word, pulled into the parking lot of Phelps’s office forty five minutes from the time Weston hung up the phone. He had only had to wait a few minutes after arriving there. She was dressed in form fitting jeans and a western shirt, as if ready to drop by a honky-tonk on her way back home.
“Good morning,” Weston greeted her. She appeared not quite so nonchalant as the day before.
“Hello,” Maria said.
“Do you have a key to the office?” Weston asked, not only wanting to get out of the parking lot to question her, but prepared to do a little sleuthing inside the office, search warrant or not.
“No,” Maria admitted, “He never gave me a key. It should be open, though; I had no way of locking up once I discovered him missing.”
“What made you decide to come back to the office last night?” Weston asked her as they walked up to the entrance.
Maria waited until they were inside before answering. “Actually, I never really left. I just parked out of sight and waited to see where he was going.”
“Why was that?”
The young girl looked pained. “I think the old bastard was planning on dumping me. I wanted to find out if he was seeing someone else. I was going to follow him but he never came out of the office.”
Weston passed through the receptionist’s alcove and tried the door to Phelps’s office. It opened with no resistance. Maria trailed behind him. A quick glance showed no sign of a struggle. The only discordance was a drawer half open on the lower part of the desk. He looked in the file cabinet. Not only was it empty, it showed no signs of ever being used.
Weston turned and asked, without warning, “Was Mr. Phelps supporting you?”
Maria blinked but answered readily enough. “Yeah, I guess you could say that. I never did much work here, and so far as I could tell, he never did either.”
“Is there anything missing that you notice?”
Maria shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. He never showed me anything in here. I suppose we could check my desk. I had a few files there.”
Weston followed her back to her own desk and waited while she looked through it. As she dug through the desk drawers, he noted that she didn’t appear to have much of a filing system.
Finally she looked up at him. “I had a file on Mr. Woolridge’s house that was going to be sold. I typed the papers up last week. They’re gone. So is the file on his bank account. I bet he just took off.” She looked puzzled. “The thing is, I had a good view of the front and back entrance both and I never saw him leave.”
“You’re certain?” Weston asked.
“I’m sure. ”She pointed out the window. “That Lincoln there in the lot belongs to him. It’s still here.”
“Do you have an address for him?” Weston asked.
Maria shook her head. “He never said where he lived, if he did live anywhere else, that is.
Most of the time he stayed with me. I guess I’ll have to move out now. I sure can’t afford to stay where we were living.”
When Weston asked where it was, he could see why. The apartments she named rented for upwards of a thousand dollars a month. “Did he keep any papers there?”
“No, nothing but clothes and stuff in the bathroom.”
“Would you mind if I had a look?” Weston asked.
“I guess not, but you won’t find much there.”
“Let’s try anyway,” Weston said.
While he placed crime scene tape across both entrance and exit and over the Lincoln, he asked Maria several other questions and got only a good case of exasperation for his efforts. She couldn’t remember the name of the development company nor the name of Woolridge’s bank, other than that it was “First” something or another, nor the names of what might have been clients or friends other than an occasional call from someone named Gary, when she admitted that Phelps did get a rare phone call. He began to understand why she had been apprehensive over the thought that Phelps might have been intending to break off the relationship with her.
She would certainly never win any Secretary of the week honors.
After wrapping the Lincoln, Weston followed her to Plantation North Apartments, a newly built complex on the northern edge of Kingwood. Inside their apartment, it was just as she had described; Phelps apparently kept only clothes and such other items as might be seen in any bathroom in America: an electric razor, deodorant, toothbrush and floss and a few other inconsequential items. After examining them, with no reward for his efforts, he sat with Maria and had her describe the sequence of last night’s events. He asked her where she had parked, how long she had waited before going back into the office, and what time she had called 911.
But when he asked her to describe Phelps as a person she had known rather than as an
“employer”, she grew reluctant to answer.
“How does stuff like that matter?”
“It’s just routine, Miss Sanchez; anything we know about him might help us to track him down.”
“I hope so. He still owes me two weeks salary.”
“How much would that come to?” Weston asked.
Maria was vague. “He gave me some one time and other amounts at other times. It was never the same.”
That led Weston to the next question. “I take it that he paid you in cash, then?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Did you claim it on your income tax return?”
Maria didn’t answer at once. When she did speak, it was only to ask, “Am I going to get in trouble?”
That answer made Weston decide to run a background check on her as soon as he got a chance. In the meantime, he played her answer for more information. “So long as you’re honest with me, probably not; we don’t have anything to do with the IRS. Let’s go on. I’m sorry I have to ask this, but believe me, it’s routine and whatever you say will not be made public. Tell me, did Mr. Phelps have any odd habits?”
“Sometimes he would be gone for days at a time. He always told me they were business trips, but lately I stopped believing him.”
“Why was that?”
The girl looked off in various directions and wouldn’t meet Weston’s gaze. “Well, when he came back, he was never good for much for weeks afterward.”
“In what way?”
“You know, like sex.”
“You mean he couldn’t perform after those trips?”
“Yeah. And when he could he always wanted me to wear a blond wig for some reason.”
Bingo. The missing women were blond. Unfortunately, the girl’s memory for dates was as bad as for names and banks and development companies. He questioned her closely and between them arrived at several tentative times when she thought Phelps had been away, but he wouldn’t bet the bank on them corresponding with any of the disappearances when he checked. Finally, he gave her his card and asked her to call him if and when her memory improved. He didn’t think it would. He had already judged her IQ to be about the same as the temperature on a cool spring morning along the Gulf. He didn’t think she had lied about anything; he had scrutinized her reactions closely during the questioning and the only sign of nervousness he had seen was when he asked her about income taxes.
On the way back to the station, Weston mused. Phelps’s disappearance had all the earmarks of the disappearing women. Were men now going to begin vanishing? Or was Phelps mixed up with them in some fashion? Having Maria wear a blond wig during sex was suggestive, but certainly not conclusive. What really struck him was that Phelps had gone missing and left no evidence behind, no sign of a struggle, no report of anyone else in the vicinity, and like several of the women and girls, he had vanished from a place as if by magic, leaving no signs of his exit. However, suppose he was the culprit they were looking for? Would the disappearances stop, at least in this area? Suppose he had just pulled up stakes in order to begin operations elsewhere? Well, one way or another they would find out. There were already bulletins out to other law enforcement agencies in most metropolitan areas asking them to be notified of similar occurrences. Sifting through those reports had become almost a daily duty.
Jimmy hadn’t returned yet when Weston got back to the station. He took the time to run a background on Maria Sanchez and turned up one violation for solicitation of sex and a bust at a topless club which had been violating the Houston sexually orientated business regulations.
There was nothing else in the file to suggest that she was anything other than what she appeared to be. Like hundreds of thousands like her, she was nothing more than a young woman depending on her beauty and willingness for sex to support herself.
Weston was becoming very hungry by the time Jimmy appeared; the donuts had long since disappeared and it was after one o’clock. Before he had a chance to question his partner, Ward called them into his office.
“I hope you guys have turned up something,” Ward said with no preliminaries, raking his hands through his hair twice in succession while fidgeting nervously at his desk.
Weston went over his morning’s activities. Ward cursed when he told him about the missing files, then turned to Jimmy. “How about you, Thang? Anything?” It was a feeble attempt at humor, Weston thought.
“I spent the morning tracing Woolridge’s activities for contacts. Not much luck there.
Apparently he was very reclusive and no one knew him well. However, I did find out a couple of things—not that I have any idea what they might mean.”
“C’mon, Thang. At this point, I’d settle for a stray piece of lint. Out with it.”
Weston smiled. Jimmy never got in a hurry reporting to anyone. He shifted out of his chair and stood behind it, holding the backrest with his hands. “Well, there aren’t many stores in that area, as you might imagine. However, I found that he had shopped fairly frequently at a little grocery just off the freeway; one of the cashiers recognized his picture. Now what’s funny is that he bought canned goods and items which didn’t need to be cooked almost exclusively.”
Ward looked disgusted. “Goddamnit, Thang, that’s nothing. So far as we know he lived alone. Shit, back when I was batching it, that’s all I bought, too.”
“Did you buy enough for five or ten people every time you shopped?”
The expression on Ward’s face changed immediately. “What? Why would he do that?
Oh—goddamn!”
“There’s more,” Jimmy continued. “As I said, he was fairly reclusive, but I did find one old man living on the same road who recognized his pickup. He lives right on a sharp curve near the mansion. One day a year or two back, he doesn’t remember exactly when, he saw the pickup as it slowed. He said it was loaded to the gunwales with packages and boxes.”
“That’s no help unless we know what was in them.”
“He remembered seeing an Academy label on a couple of the boxes. That’s where I went next. We got lucky. His big shopping spree was two years ago, but one of the clerks remembered him simply because he paid in cash, with hundred dollar bills, so many that the clerk had the manager scan them for counterfeits.”
Ward was alert now. He used one hand on his hair while the other yanked at the knot of his tie. “Goddamn, this might be our break. If we put those facts together with his suicide note, it sounds as if he might have been the perp and was holding some of the women and girls captive. God, we might even find some of them alive! Wouldn’t that be great?”
“They’re going to be hard to find with his place off limits—if they’re anywhere around there, that is.” Jimmy said.
Ward looked pained, then remembered that Weston had as much as said he was going to sneak into the mansion at night. “We might get a break on that, too,” he said.
“You mean the chief might rescind his order?”
Weston winked at Ward, reminding him that he didn’t want anyone else to know where he would be staying. Ward nodded his head, both confirming Weston’s secrecy and assuring Jimmy at the same time. “Well, I don’t expect him to right away, but I expect to get a few facts in the meantime anyway.”
Jimmy’s normally solemn face became even more impassive. He was imagining that Ward intended to have someone do a clandestine inspection but thought there was something incongruous about the idea; Ward had never been noted for exceeding the bounds of his authority. After a moment he shrugged to himself and let it pass.
Weston still didn’t know why he wasn’t informing his partner of his intentions and felt a moment of guilt. He decided that if he found out anything at all, he would break his silence. In the meanwhile, he just didn’t want to be bothered by a lot of questions as to his intentions.
Jimmy knew his history. He hadn’t gone out much since Janie’s death and the subsequent divorce and didn’t want to put up with the teasing that would be sure to follow if he knew.
That, plus the fact that it wasn’t quite appropriate to be keeping such close company with a potential witness; the DA would frown on such activities.
Ward leaned back in his chair and loosened his tie some more. “OK, here’s the situation.
