Just Cause (44 page)

The two entered the restaurant.

It was well past the lunch hour and before the evening rush, so they had the place to themselves. They sat in a booth alongside a window overlooking the parking lot. A waitress in a tight white outfit that exaggerated her ample bosom, and a gum-chewing scowl that indicated that any suggestive remarks would be greeted with little enthusiasm, took their order and passed it through a window to a solitary cook in the back. Within seconds they could hear the sizzle of hamburgers frying, and seconds later the scent hit them.

They ate in silence. When they'd finished, Brown ordered a slice of key lime pie with his coffee. He took one bite, then speared another, this time gesturing with the fork toward Cowart.

'Hey, homemade, Cowart. You ought to try a piece. Can't get this up in Pachoula. At least, not like this.'

The reporter shook his head.

'Hell, Cowart, I bet you're the type that likes to stop at salad bars for lunch. Keep that lean, ascetic look by munching on rabbit food.'

Cowart shrugged in admission.

'Probably drink that shitty bottled water from France, too.'

As the detective was speaking, Cowart watched as the waitress moved behind him, into another booth. She had a razor-scraper in her hand, and she bent over to remove something from the window. There was a momentary scratching sound as she cleaned tape from glass. Then she straightened up, putting a small poster under her arm. Cowart caught a glimpse of a young face. The waitress was about to turn away when, for no reason that he could immediately discern, he gestured for her.

She approached the table. 'Y'all gonna try that pie, too?' she asked.

No,' he answered. 'I was just curious about that poster.' He pointed at the paper she'd folded under her arm.

'This?' she said. She handed it over to him, and he spread it out on the table in front of him.

In the center of the poster was a picture of a young black girl, smiling, wearing pigtails. Underneath the picture, in large block letters, was the word MISSING.

This was followed by a message in smaller lettering:

DAWN PERRY, AGE 12, FIVE FEET TWO INCHES, 105 POUNDS,

DISAPPEARED THE AFTERNOON 8,12,90, LAST SEEN WEARING

BLUE SHORTS, WHITE I-SHIRT AND SNEAKERS, CARRYING

BOOK BAG. ANYONE WITH ANY KNOWLEDGE OF HER

WHEREABOUTS CALL 555-1212 AND ASK FOR DETECTIVE

HOWARD.

This message was completed with a large print: REWARD.

Cowart looked up at the waitress. 'What happened?'

The waitress shrugged as if to say that giving information wasn't part of her job. 'I don't know. Little girl. One day's she's there. The next, she's not.'

'Why are you taking the sign down?'

'Been a long time, mister. Months and months. Ain't nobody found that girl by now, I don't suspect this sign's gonna make any difference. And anyway, my boss asked me to yesterday, and I forgot until just now.'

Cowart saw that Brown had started examining the poster. He looked up. 'Police ever come up with anything?'

'Not that I'd know. Y'all want something else?'

'Just a check, Brown replied. He smiled, creased the flyer and slid it onto the table between them. 'I'll take care of this for you, he said.

The waitress walked away to make their change.

'Makes you wonder, doesn't it?' Brown said. 'You get into the right frame of mind, Cowart, and all sorts of terrible things just pop right in, don't they?'

He didn't reply, so the detective continued. 'I mean, you hang close to death enough and unusual things just jump up, like they were so normal and routine you'd ignore them if you weren't thinking so hard about how and when people kill each other.'

Cowart nodded.

Brown leaned back after stabbing at the last few crumbs of pie on his plate. I told you the food would be fresh,' he said. Then he pushed forward abruptly, closing the distance between them.

'Steals your appetite away, doesn't it, Cowart? A little coincidence for dessert, huh?'

He tapped the folded flyer. 'I mean, it probably doesn't amount to anything, right? Just another little girl that disappeared one day. And it probably doesn't fit in, time and opportunity and all that. But it is interesting, isn't it? That a little girl disappears not too far from the highway leading down to the Keys. I wonder if it was from in front of a school.'

Cowart interrupted. 'Fifty miles from Tarpon Drive.'

The detective nodded.

'And absolutely nothing that indicates anything about the cases that happen to concern us.'

'So,' Brown said slowly. 'Why'd you want to see it, when the waitress was pulling it down?'

The policeman crumpled up the flyer into a ball and stuck it into his pocket as he pushed back in his seat and rose to leave the restaurant.

The two men stopped on the sidewalk outside. Cowart looked down toward the toy store at the end of the mall and saw that a blue-shirted man was sitting outside the door, carrying a truncheon at his side. Security, he realized. He wondered why he hadn't noticed the man before. He guessed that he'd been added after the kidnapping, as if the guard's presence would prevent another lightning strike from occurring in the same spot. He remembered that even with the police gathered outside, people had continued to walk into the store, and that a steady stream of adults and children, all carrying large plastic bags filled with various toys, had continued to emerge, ignoring the savagery that had started on the sidewalk.

He turned toward Brown. 'So, what now? We've been to the Keys and all we've got are more questions, Where now? Why don't we go see Ferguson?'

The detective shook his head. 'No, first let's go back to Pachoula.'

'Why?'

'Well, it would be nice to know that Sullivan was telling you the truth about one thing at least, right?'

The two men separated warily shortly after returning to Miami and thick black night had encased them. The day's heat seemed to linger in the air, giving the dark a weight and substance. Cowart dropped Brown outside the downtown Holiday Inn, where he'd obtained a room. The hotel was across from the county criminal courts building, about halfway between the Orange

Bowl and the start of Liberty City, in a sort of urban no-man's-land defined by hospitals, office buildings, jails, and the slums' ubiquitous creep into their midst.

Once inside his room, Brown tore off his jacket and kicked off his shoes. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and dialed a telephone number.

'Dade County Sheriff. South Station.'

'I want to speak with Detective Howard.'

He heard the line being transferred and a moment or two later a clipped, official-sounding man's voice came over the line. 'This is Detective Howard. Can I help you?'

'Maybe. This is Detective Lieutenant Brown, Escambia County…'

'How yah doing, Lieutenant? What can I do for you?' The man's voice instantly lost its military tone, replaced with a simple jocularity.

'Ahh,' Brown said, sliding instantly into the same tones, 'probably nothing more than a wild goose chase. And it sounds pretty crazy, but I'd appreciate a little information about this young kid, a Dawn Perry, disappeared a few months back…'

'Yeah, heading home from the civic center. Christ, what a damn mess…'

'What exactly happened?'

'You got some sort of line on her?' the detective asked abruptly.

'No,' Brown replied. 'To be honest, I just saw the flyer and something in it reminded me of a case I once worked. Just thought, you know, I'd check it out.'

'Hell,' the detective answered. 'Too bad. For a minute I got hopeful. You know how it is.'

'So, can you fill me in a bit?'

'Sure. Not that much to tell. Little girl, not an enemy in the whole wide world, goes off to her swim class at the civic center one afternoon. School's out, you know, so they run all sorts of programs down there for the kids. Last seen by a couple of her friends walking toward her home.'

'Anyone see what happened?'

'No. One old lady, lives about midway down the street – you know, it's all old houses with air conditioners blasting away in every window, makes a damn racket. Anyway, this one old gal can't afford to run the electrics, you know, not so much, so she's sitting in her kitchen next to a fan, and she heard a little scream and then a car pulling away real fast, but by the time she can get out there, the car's already two blocks away. White car. American make. That's all. No plate, no description. Book bag with her swimsuit left on the street. Old lady was pretty sharp, give her that. Calls in what she sees. But by the time a patrol car finds her house, listens to her story, and gets out a BOLO, well, things are pretty much history. You know how many white cars there are in Dade County?' A lot.'

That's right. Anyway, we work the case best we can with what we got. Hell, we could only get one of the television stations to run the girl's picture that night. Maybe she wasn't cute enough, I don't know…'… Or the wrong color.'

'Well, you said it. I don't know how those bastards make up their minds what's news anyway. After we got the flyers out, we took a couple of dozen calls saying she'd been spotted here, there, all over. But none were good, you know. We checked out her family real good, wondered if maybe she'd been snatched by someone she knew, but, hell, the Perrys were good folks. He's a clerk for DMV, she works in an elementary school cafeteria. No problems at home.

Three other kids. What the hell could we do? I got a hundred other files on my desk. Assaults. B and E.

Armed robbery. I even got a couple of cases I can make. Got to spend time valuably, you know. Probably the same for you. So, it just turned into one of those cases where you gotta wait for someone to find her body, and then Homicide will take it over. But that maybe never happens. We're so damn close to the edge of the Everglades down here. You can get rid of someone pretty damn fast. Usually it's drug dealers. Like to just drive down some old deserted access road, dump some body out in the 'Glades. Let that old swamp water take care of hiding their work. Easy as one-two-three. But same technique works for just about anybody, if you catch my drift.'

'Anybody.'

'Anybody who likes little girls. And doesn't want them to tell anybody what happened to 'em.' The detective paused. 'Actually, I'm kinda surprised we don't work a hundred cases like this one. If you get that kid in your car without being made, well, hell, ain't nothing you can't get away with.'

'But you didn't…'

'Nah, we didn't have any others like this. I checked with Monroe and Broward, but they didn't have anything, either. I ran a sex offender profile through the computer and got a couple of names. We even went and rousted a couple of the creeps, but both were either out of town or at work when Dawn disappeared. By that time it was already a couple of days old, you know…'

'And?'

'And nothing. Nada. Zilch. No evidence of anything, except a little girl is long gone. So, tell me about your case. Ring any bells?'

Brown thought hard, considering what to respond. 'Not really. Ours was a white girl coming out of school. Old case. Had a suspect, but couldn't make him. Almost.'

'Ahh, too bad. Thought maybe you had something that might help us.'

Brown thanked the detective and hung up the telephone. His thoughts drove him to his feet. He walked to the window and stared out into the darkness. From his room, he could see up onto the major east-west highway that cut into the center of Miami, and then led away, toward the thick interior of the state, past the suburban developments, the airport, the manufacturing plants and malls, past the fringe communities that hung on the backside of the city, toward the state's swampy core. The Everglades gives way to Big Cypress. There's Loxahatchee and

Corkscrew Swamp and the Withlacoochee River and the Ocala, Osceola and Apalachicola state forests. In

Florida, no one is ever far from some nowhere, hidden, dark place. For a few moments he watched the traffic flee through his line of sight, headlights like tracer pounds in the darkness. He placed a hand to his forehead, reaching as if to hide his vision for an instant, then stopped. He told himself, it's just another little girl that disappeared. This one happened in the big city and it got swallowed up amidst all the other routine terrors. One instant she's there, the next she's not, just like she never existed at all, except in the minds of a few grieving folks left with nightmares forever. He shook his head, insisting to himself that he was becoming paranoid. Another little girl. Joanie

Shriver. There have been others since. Dawn Perry.

There was probably one yesterday. Probably one tomorrow. Gone, just like that. An elementary school.

A civic center. The lights beyond his window continued to soar through the night.

There was only one other person in the Miami Journal library when Cowart arrived there. She was a young woman, an assistant with a shy, diffident manner that made it difficult to speak to her directly, since she kept her head down, as if the words she spoke in reply were somehow embarrassing. She quietly helped Cowart get set up in one of the computer terminals and left him alone when he punched in Dawn Perry.

The word Searching appeared in a corner of the screen. followed rapidly by the words Two Entries.

He called them up. The first was only four paragraphs long and had run in a police blotter roundup well inside a zoned insert section that went to homes in the southern part of the county. No story had appeared in the main paper. The headline was: POLICE REPORT GIRL, 12, MISSING. The story merely informed him that Dawn Perry had failed to return home after a swimming class at a local civic center. The second library entry was: POLICE SAY NO LEADS IN MISSING GIRL CASE. It was a little longer than the first, repeating all the details that had previously run. The headline summed up all the new information in the story.