Runaway (3 page)

“Is there a reason that wouldn’t have set off alarm bells earlier?” Peet said.

“Do you have children?” Mrs. Harrington asked, looking as if she seriously doubted Peet was mother material.

“I have three,” Peet said. “Two teenagers.”

“Then you know how hard it is to keep up with them. My husband and I have crazy schedules. But we mostly stay on top of it.”

“Tell me everything you did today after Eva pointed out the made bed,” Peet said.

“Well, I called Alan first, not that I really expected him to know anything. His company is in the middle of a product launch, which means he is not aware of anything but that. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen Maddy, but he didn’t think he saw her yesterday.”

“Are there any other children at home?”

“Our son, Justin, is at Dartmouth. There’s no one else.”

The maid came in with a gleaming silver tray, and there was a lot of clattering of cups and saucers and passing around of plates before they got back to business. Jan ate a tiny cake while Peet continued the questioning.

“Mrs. Harrington, at what point did you call the police? What made you realize that your daughter was gone? She could have made her own bed, for instance.”

Eva was just leaving the room with the empty tray. She turned and said, “No, she couldn’t. That bed was made the way I make a bed. Maddy hasn’t slept in it for two days, and that’s the truth.”

“Thank you, Eva. That will be all.” Mrs. Harrington sipped her coffee and continued. “After Eva told me this, I went up to Maddy’s room. I knew she was gone as soon as I saw her laptop was missing.”

“Couldn’t she have taken that with her as a normal thing? Some people don’t go anywhere without one,” said Jan.

“She has one of those pad things that she carries with her everywhere. She uses her laptop at home. Both machines are gone.”

“Did you contact the school?”

“Of course. I called them before I called the police. They said Maddy wasn’t in classes on Monday and they had called us to report her absence. They left a message on our home machine, but I usually forget to check. We’re always on our cells,” Mrs. Harrington said as she glanced at her iPhone.

“What have you noticed about Maddy’s behavior, Mrs. Harrington?” Peet asked. “Any recent changes? Moodiness? Withdrawal? Maybe a new set of friends?”

Mrs. Harrington appeared to give the question no thought at all. “Change? No, Maddy stays pretty much the same. She comes home from school and makes a snack and then sits in front of her computer. There’s been no change.”

“She doesn’t hang out with any school friends?” Jan said.

“None that she’s ever brought here. She doesn’t even talk about any friends.”

“You’re saying that Maddy doesn’t have any friends at all?”

“I’m saying that she doesn’t have friends that she actually sees. They’re all on the computer. You know how they are. Everything is online. You could live alone on a mountaintop and still have friends.”

“Are you around when she comes home?”

“No, not usually. But when I come home I ask her about her day and she always says the same thing. ‘What’s new?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What did you do today?’ ‘Nothing.’” Mrs. Harrington cast her head to the side in an odd gesture, like she was posing for a photographer. “I’d be bored to death if I had her life.”

Jan flipped to a new page in her notebook. “We’ll check in with the Winnetka Police, but it’s my experience that police don’t do much when it comes to teenage runaways. Abductions are another matter. Is there any reason to believe your daughter was kidnapped?”

Mrs. Harrington was about to answer when the front door opened and they turned to see a giant man walk into the house with a giant dog. The dog continued slowly into the living room with his head down, as if he were a child forced to say hello to his parents’ guests. He bumped his head against Jan’s legs and she gently pushed his slobbery snout away from her dress pants. She was unmoved by his charm.

“Don’t mind Sanderson,” Mrs. Harrington said. “He’s harmless.”

Not to my clothes he’s not, thought Jan. She hated when people said things like that.
Don’t mind my screeching child. Don’t mind my barking dog. Don’t mind me while I talk really loudly on the phone in the bookstore.

Harrington was at least six feet six inches tall and built like a football player.

“Alan, these are the investigators you had sent over. They want to know if it’s possible that Maddy’s been kidnapped. I’d say you’d know more about that than me.”

“I think you could say that about most anything,” he said. He looked at Jan and Peet in that way that said “Why was I sent two women?” They’d both seen that look plenty of times before.

“Mr. Harrington, have you any reason to believe Maddy was abducted?” Peet asked.

He moved to the drinks cart near the bay window looking over the expansive side lawn. It was nearly dark and the leaf blowers were silent. Apparently, the gardeners had decamped. He poured himself a neat Scotch.

“It’s certainly possible. I have money, although not the kind you think of in kidnapping cases. But it’s like I told the police this morning. If she were abducted, wouldn’t we have heard something by now?”

“Probably. It all depends on why she was taken. If it were money or something else from you, you’d probably have heard of their demands by now. If it’s for some other reason . . .” Jan didn’t want to spell out the alternatives.

Mrs. Harrington glared at her husband. “If anything happens to her it’s your fault.”

“Shut up, Lynette. We don’t need your histrionics now, for God’s sake.” He poured another drink. “Can I get you gals anything? No?” He knocked back the drink and put the glass down. “I think what you’re asking me is whether I have any enemies.”

“That’s right. Anyone at all, even if you don’t think they’d go this far,” Peet said.

Harrington stared at his wife accusingly. She stared back at him. They seemed to be wrapped in loathing.

“I think we can eliminate me as a suspect,” Mrs. Harrington said to her husband, “as much as I know you’d like to see me hauled away. I did not abduct my own daughter. In case you’d forgotten, we all live together.” Mrs. Harrington leaned back against the sofa, a furrow in her brow forming, despite the g-force strength of her ponytail.

“Do you want to retain us to attempt to locate Maddy?” Peet asked.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Harrington.

“I want her found,” Mr. Harrington said, “but I also want some idea of what it will cost.”

“Do you have a budget in mind for how much you’ll spend to find your daughter, Mr. Harrington?” Peet said, her tone pointedly neutral.

“God, you’re unbelievable,” said Mrs. Harrington.

Harrington ignored his wife. “I’ll take the billing up with your superiors. You two need to get to work finding Maddy.”

He made it sound like Jan and Peet were dillydallying. “We need you to compile a list of all of Maddy’s friends. Give us as much contact information as you can. I also need to talk to your son. It’s her friends and her brother who probably know what’s going on with her,” Jan said.

Mrs. Harrington looked up from the pad of paper she was jotting on. “Are you implying that I don’t know what is happening with my own daughter?”

Jan could see that Peet was trying to restrain herself. Mr. Harrington, however, felt no such reticence.

“I don’t think we need waste our time with implications, Lynette. Let’s just come right out and say it. You don’t.”

Jan jumped in. “It’s hardly unusual, Mrs. Harrington, for parents to not know what their teenage children are really up to.”

Mrs. Harrington looked worried. Mr. Harrington took a peek at his watch.

Jan went on. “We also need her cell phone records. You can probably go right online and download the detail from her most recent bills.”

“Actually, we won’t be able to do that,” Harrington said. “Maddy set up and paid for stuff like that with her own credit card, and I paid the credit card bill each month.”

“Then print out the detail on the credit card statement and we’ll take it from there. Don’t cancel the card, whatever you do. It will give us some valuable information if she continues to use it,” Jan said. “I’ll also need the account number and password for your Internet service provider. We should be able to get some information on Maddy’s recent Web activity.”

“I’ll write down the name of friends I can think of, but there won’t be many,” Mrs. Harrington said.

“Please be as thorough as you can be.”

“Of course.”

Harrington looked at his watch again and put his empty glass down. “Listen, why don’t we do this? You gals get on your way so you can start tracking Maddy down. We’ll put the information together that you’ve asked for and call you when we’ve got it, probably tomorrow sometime.

Jan rose and stepped in closer to him. “Actually, Mr. Harrington, here’s what we’re going to do. You’ll assemble that information while we go take a look at Maddy’s room.”

Mr. Harrington opened his mouth and his wife stopped him with a hand in the air. “We’ll get it for you,” she said. “I’ll take you to her room while my husband gets you the other information.”

Mr. Harrington moved back to the drinks cart and turned his back on them. Jan couldn’t remember meeting a bigger prick, and she’d met her share of them.

Mrs. Harrington led them upstairs and down a long hallway. Jan lost track of the number of bedrooms along the way. Maddy’s was the last one.

“Is your room also on this level?” Jan asked.

“Yes, it’s at the opposite end of the hall. Why do you ask?”

“I’m wondering if you would have heard her leaving at night. Do you recall waking up to any noise?”

Mrs. Harrington shrugged. “I wear earplugs because of my husband’s incessant snoring. But Maddy could have slipped away and I wouldn’t have heard it, with or without the earplugs.”

She opened a door next to Maddy’s room, which led to carpeted stairs leading down to the back of the house. A perfect teenage escape route.

“Isn’t it just as likely that she left during the day?” asked Peet. “She could have taken off when you thought she was going to school.”

“She could have gone at any time, and it would probably have been a while before we noticed.”

Jan and Peet looked at each other as Mrs. Harrington walked into Maddy’s room. She’d spoken as if it were perfectly normal for a family to not have any idea where their sixteen-year-old daughter was.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Mrs. Harrington said. “The police have been through it already. You won’t find anything here to help you.”

They remained silent until Mrs. Harrington left the room.

“What a piece of work,” Peet said. “That poor kid is probably a thousand miles away by now. Who wouldn’t run away from parents like that?”

Jan, for one. They looked around Maddy’s room, which was bigger than the living room in Jan’s condo. She thought Peet sounded naïve about what constituted bad parenting, especially as a former police officer. You’d think one night on the beat would be enough to make the Harringtons look like Ozzie and Harriet. One night in the camp she’d grown up in would make the Harringtons’ home look like Shangri-La.

Maddy’s room looked like it belonged to a forty-year-old neat freak, which Jan recognized as a pretty good description of herself. There wasn’t a single thing out of place. There were no posters on the wall, no hint of any teenage passion. Instead, there were a series of mountain landscapes, professionally painted, framed, and hung, almost certainly not of Maddy’s choosing. A large desk and high-end ergonomic chair took up one corner of the room, and Jan imagined those might have been picked out by Maddy. The desktop was completely bare, except for a printer cord and a blank memo pad.

“I’ll take the closet,” Jan said. She opened a door and stared at the huge walk-in closet. It was more than half empty, and Jan thought about the jeans and T-shirt that Maddy wore in the photo they’d been shown. The girl was not a clotheshorse. A few dresses hung toward the back, behind a row of flannel and oxford cloth shirts. Several pairs of blue and black jeans were ironed and hung next to the shirts. A built-in dresser took up the end wall of the closet, one drawer filled with folded underwear and socks, two others devoted to short and long sleeve T-shirts. None of the shirts were decorated with band names or slogans or causes. They were all plain and stacked together according to color. A shoe rack ran the length of the floor along the long closet wall, but Maddy didn’t have a thing for shoes either. There were cowboy boots, hiking boots, and snow boots, tennis shoes and soccer shoes, and a pair of dress shoes that had a fur of dust on them.

Jan felt in every drawer, every nook and cranny, and found nothing else. The overhead rack that ran along each wall was completely bare. She needed to ask if it had once held luggage.

She stepped back into the room to see Peet going through the drawers of Maddy’s computer desk. “There’s nothing in the closet except clothes,” she said. “It’s almost like a guest had hung their clothes there. Nothing personal at all.”

“Nothing in the desk either. Some school records, a few letters from a grandma, office supplies. That’s it.”

“Let’s ask the parents about the grandma. Maybe they didn’t think to call her. Maybe she’s hiding Maddy from them.”

Next to the desk were a printer, a shredder, and a couple of scanners.

“I wonder if she operated paperlessly?” Jan said. “Maybe she scanned everything and then shredded it.” She looked at the shredder bin, but it was empty also.

“If there was anything in this room before she left, it’s gone now. But I get the feeling there wasn’t much to begin with,” Peet said.

“I hope we find out more when we look at her computer activity. Otherwise, there isn’t squat to go on.”

Peet took a look in the closet. “This is kind of creeping me out. It’s like this kid is a guest in her own house. Do you know what a teenager’s room is supposed to look like?”

“What? Because I don’t have kids I’m not supposed to know what they’re like?” Jan failed again to keep the defensive tone out of her voice and hated hearing it there. “I was a teenager too, you know.”