She's Not There (6 page)

The next hour went by like a sensual dream. The warm scented water of the shampoo, and the stylist’s hands—his name was Martin, and he was working at Supercuts only until he could get to New Orleans—were ever so gentle as he cut out the extensions. The pink-haired girl went next door to Sbarro and brought Amelia pizza, which she ate with slow and deliberate pleasure.

As she was finishing a second pizza slice, she had the odd thought that pizza was not something she was allowed to eat.

Allowed?

That Russian voice was there in her head again and she heard the words more clearly now than she had back in the thrift store.

I need to see your bones
.

The Russian man’s face came slowly into focus—a thin hooked nose and sparse white hair—and he was poking her in the ribs, telling her she was too fat, while the girls around her giggled. And a different man was telling her to put the cookie down and calling her Jelly-Belly.

She swallowed the last bite of pizza, and along with it the anger over the old man who had made her cry and the other man who had called her that name. What kind of a person had she been that she had given these men such power over her?

Finally, Martin stepped away from the chair and Amelia put her glasses back on. In the few times she had seen her reflection since waking up in the hospital, she hadn’t recognized the woman staring back at her. She still didn’t.

The woman in the mirror had dark brown hair cut close and boyish with spiky bangs. The haircut made her face look round and her neck very long.

“Is it okay?”

She looked up at Martin. He looked worried.

“It’s sort of just how I pictured you for some reason,” he said. “Sort of Leslie Caron circa
An American in Paris
.”

Amelia stared at her reflection and then smiled. “I like it. Thank you, Martin.”

He let out a long breath. “Well, one thing’s for sure. No one’s going to recognize you.”

It was near one by the time she made her way to JCPenney. Hannah was due to pick her up outside at two, so she didn’t linger as she bought underwear, socks, a nightgown, and a light robe. She picked up a pair of short flat boots and, on impulse, a pair of turquoise Converse sneakers. In the women’s department, she filled her arms with jeans, khaki pants, a heavy nubby gray sweater coat, and five black long-sleeved T-shirts. She quickly tried on the jeans in the dressing room, and was gathering them up to leave when she froze.

Music . . . sweet-sounding, tinkling music. More Christmas music, but not carols this time. Something else, something so very familiar that it was almost like it was coming from deep inside her head instead of from the speaker up on the ceiling.

Nuts? Nut . . .
Nutcracker.
She let out a sigh of relief. That was the name of the music,
The
Nutcracker.

And then, floating on the edges of the music, she could hear words, foreign words, like the ones that had come to her before, but this time she was certain it wasn’t Italian. It was French that she was hearing.

Piqué, piqué, arabesque allongé.
Pas de chat, pas de chat, pas de bourrée.

It was the same voice, the Russian man who had said, “Make ugly go away. You try make pretty.”

Suddenly, she could feel something shift in her body, something buried deep inside her. Without realizing it, she extended her left leg, pointed her toe, and raised her arms over her head.

She stared at herself in the triple mirror. But she was seeing herself reflected back in many, many other mirrors, walls of mirrors, mirrors with railings, mirrors clouded with the steam of condensation in rooms filled with music, the smell of coffee, and wood floors marked with resin. And the Russian was there. He had been her teacher.

Make pretty.

Her mind had forgotten but her muscles had not.

I am a dancer.

I am a dancer!

CHAPTER EIGHT

When he arrived at the restaurant, there was nowhere to sit. At least no place that suited his needs. There was one spot open at the bar, but it would have required him to sit with his back to the door and that was never going to happen in a million years.

So Clay Buchanan waited, standing near the door, savoring the last drags on his Dunhill, and when a seat opened up on the patio facing the street, he snuffed out his cigarette and slid into the rattan chair.

YOLO.
It was a dumb name for a restaurant, he thought. But when he glanced at the matches he had snagged from the hostess, he saw that it stood for
You Only Live Once
.

He ordered a Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. Sixty-five bucks a shot, but he wasn’t paying. He took a sip, closing his eyes in pleasure at the caramel taste.

Carpe diem, baby.

The restaurant was starting to fill up as the nearby glass office buildings disgorged their inhabitants for happy hour. For the next half hour he sat nursing the bourbon and watching the young women
click-clack
in on their sky-high heels, long hair and short hemlines swinging, their eyes honing in on the male prospects.

God, the women were beautiful here.

Silicone-pumped and pouty-lipped beautiful. Not his taste really—he liked his women with real curves on their bodies and more lines on their faces—but these women were exotic compared to the ones back home in Nashville and, like rare birds, interesting to watch.

And watching was what he was really good at.

He had found that out when he was just twelve—that morning out in the duck blind on Old Hick Lake with his dad—found out that he could spot the green heads even before the dogs could hear them. It took him ten more years of sitting in blinds before he realized he didn’t like shooting the ducks. He just liked watching them. He liked watching any creature that flew. He liked the fact that he could tell a Ruddy from a Merganser on the wing with his bare eyes. Liked the fact that he could check off another line in his journal after a sighting. Liked that he had a Wings Over Tennessee certificate on his wall that said he had recorded five hundred sightings. And he really liked the fact that nobody who came into his office had ever had the balls to ask him why a guy like him liked to watch little birdies.

Buchanan took another sip of bourbon, his eyes flitting over the bar crowd.

When he was in a place like this, or any place where humans gathered, he saw himself as a big bird of prey—a peregrine falcon maybe—soaring high above and looking down at the world below from all the angles. He could see things that others, so intent on their little grounded lives, could not. He could see the big picture.

Funny how things turned out. There had been some bad detours in his life and a soul-killing job as an insurance fraud investigator. Yeah, it was funny, that all those mornings freezing his ass off in a duck blind had led to this, doing something that he was really good at.

He finished the bourbon and thought about ordering another but he was tired from the job he had just finished up in New York and the plane ride in from Kennedy, and he needed to stay alert. He asked the bartender for a glass of water instead and glanced at his watch.

Almost six . . . a half hour late. So where was this guy Alex Tobias?

Then he saw him, getting out of the white Mercedes G-Class SUV about twenty feet away.

The man looked just like his Google images—an easy six six and reedy thin, like he ran marathons or, more likely, power-biked up computer-screen mountains. He had thick black hair and was wearing a gray suit, white dress shirt, and light blue tie.

Buchanan honed in on the details: The suit was a two-button tight fit, probably John Varvatos. The shoes were sleek and black, maybe Tod’s. The effect was stylish but restrained, like Tobias wanted to be the hippest guy in the room but pulled back from the edge just enough to keep the old guys from feeling too old.

Buchanan wished he’d had more time to check out Tobias. He didn’t like taking on a case without knowing as much as he could ahead of time.

Back at Kennedy, there had been just enough time for him to fire up his Acer in the airport and do a quick search on the man. Plenty of sites popped up that gave him the basics: that Tobias was thirty-eight, had graduated from Florida State law school but was now a partner in McCall and Tobias. It was one of the Southeast’s best law firms, complete with sleek mahogany and glass offices in a high-rise, a staff of eighty, and a client list peppered with the names of basketball stars, banks, and cruise-line titans. The firm even had a motto: “We’re In This Together.”

Tobias was a hotshot in social circles, donating major bucks to Big Brothers, American Cancer Society, Humane Society, the Dan Marino Foundation. Just three months ago, according to the
South Florida
Sun-Sentinel
business pages, he had paid $800,000 for a vintage gullwing Mercedes at the Auctions America classic car auction. His house was featured in
Florida Design,
and Tobias himself had been a cover boy in
Lawyer Monthly.

A visit to the Broward County property appraiser’s site told Buchanan that Tobias lived on Castilla Isle in a house he bought in 2007 for $1.2 million. Five keystrokes later, Buchanan found the Tobias home on Trulia with a current value of $4.8 mil. A nice tidy increase in just seven years.

Buchanan wondered if the guy came from money or if he’d had to work his way into it. Maybe he started out with a strip mall office in Tallahassee and one Men’s Wearhouse suit in his closet. He had that sort of trying-too-hard look about him. But then, most of the people Buchanan had seen here did. He decided he’d do a deep dive search on Tobias later.

For now, he just watched as Tobias handed the keys to the valet, yanked off his tie, and tossed it in the SUV. Tobias came toward the bar, pausing at the edge of the patio. He took off his sunglasses, hung them on the pocket of his shirt and scanned the crowd.

Picking up his Dunhills, Buchanan shook out a cigarette and lit it, deciding to let the bastard twist for a few seconds, letting him worry that maybe he had popped for that first-class ticket from Kennedy for nothing.

Buchanan watched Tobias, watched him searching the crowd, watched him getting pissed that he didn’t know the face of the man he was meeting. This was a guy, he decided, who wasn’t used to being fucked with.

Enough. It was time to get on with business.

Buchanan met the man’s eyes across the crowd and nodded. The guy practically pushed his way over.

“Are you Clay Buchanan?”

“That would be me. Sit down, Mr. Tobias.”

Alex Tobias slid into the chair and signaled the blonde server with a wave. When she ignored him, he swung his gaze back to Buchanan.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Buchanan,” Tobias said.

“A five-thousand-dollar consult fee showing up in my QuickPay account has a way of clearing my calendar rather quickly.”

Tobias forced a smile. “I should tell you, this wasn’t my idea.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Hiring you, Mr. Buchanan.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“My law partner, Owen McCall. He said you’re the best at this sort of thing.”

When Buchanan’s cell had chirped back in the bar at JFK, he hadn’t recognized the name McCall-Tobias. But experience had taught him not to ignore calls from law offices. Still, he had been surprised when a secretary told him that the firm wanted to “engage his services” to find a missing woman, the wife of one of the partners, Alex Tobias.

The secretary didn’t hesitate when Buchanan told her his fee. Buchanan didn’t ask any details. The ticket to Fort Lauderdale was waiting for him at the Delta counter, and his money was in his bank account by the time he landed. This was just a consult. If things didn’t smell right, he could always walk away and keep the five grand. It went like that sometimes.

Tobias took his sunglasses off his pocket, started to put them on, then carefully set them down on the table.

“Owen said he read a book you wrote—
Nowhere to Hide,
or something. He told me about this Mexican millionaire’s son who was abducted and how you traced him—”

“I know the ending,” Buchanan interrupted. He didn’t want to rehash his resume with this man. The book had just been a quickie thing he published himself to make some extra money. It had sold maybe twenty copies, but Tobias didn’t need to know that.

“Owen said you’re not like any normal private eye.”

“I’m not like
any
private eye, Mr. Tobias. I’m a skip tracer.”

“A what?”

“Skip tracer. I do one thing and one thing only. I find people who don’t want to be found.”

Tobias frowned. “I don’t understand the difference.”

“You will. If I take your case.”

Tobias nodded slowly and then his eyes slid toward the bar, looking for the server again. When he turned back, Buchanan got his first good look into the man’s eyes. They were the color of the Cumberland River on a cloudy day—a muddy blue-green but shot through with tiny red veins. The guy had been drinking.

“So if hiring me wasn’t your idea, what changed your mind?” Buchanan asked.

“I don’t know how else to find my wife,” Tobias said. “The police won’t do anything. They say that since she walked away on her own, she’s not technically missing.”

“She walked away on her own? From where?”

“Broward General Hospital.” He frowned. “No one told you any of this yet?”

“Someone from your office called me four hours ago, Mr. Tobias, and hired me to come down here for a consultation about finding a missing woman. That is all I know. Maybe you better fill me in.”

Tobias sighed, seemingly frustrated he had to tell his story again. Buchanan figured he’d already been grilled by the doctors at the hospital and the cops. He’d cut him a break and get him a drink. Loosen him up a little. Buchanan caught the blonde server’s eye and she came over quickly.

“Another bourbon?” she asked him with a smile.

“Club soda for me.” He looked to Alex. “What are you drinking?”

“Armadale on the rocks,” Tobias said.

The server left and Buchanan leaned back in his chair. Armadale vodka. Just like the man himself—corporate-clean and a little too polished.

Buchanan had always been good at reading people. It was just like watching birds, really. He could identify almost any bird just by being patient and looking for the details—its shape, size, voice, coloration, or flying style. Birders called it
jizz
, that special vibe you got when you watched a bird that helped you figure out its species even if it was hiding in the trees. The word was supposedly an acronym used by WWII pilots—“General Impression of Size and Shape” of an aircraft. Now it was a porno term, but birders didn’t care
. Jizz
was theirs. And it was never to be ignored.

Right now, Alex Tobias was putting out some weird
jizz
—confusion, anxiety, worry, fear, and a musky bass note of desperation to keep things under control.

The drinks arrived. Tobias took a long swig of his.

“What exactly happened to your wife?” Buchanan asked.

Tobias set the glass down. “Four days ago, Mel was in a car accident. She was alone when it happened, but some guy in a truck found her and left her in the emergency room.”

“Police find the guy?”

“No. They have his truck on the security camera but no plate number. They think he was an illegal immigrant and was afraid of getting busted, so he left Mel and ran.”

“Why’d your wife leave the hospital?” Buchanan asked.

“I don’t know. No one seems to know anything.” He took a big drink of vodka. “She has a brain injury, a concussion. She has amnesia.”

“Amnesia?”

Tobias nodded. “Yesterday, she finally remembered her name and they called me. When I saw her, she was asleep and they made me leave. But when I came back twenty minutes later, she was gone.”

“Has she called you?”

“No.”

“You’ve tried to call her, of course.”

“I haven’t stopped. But it just keeps going to voice mail.”

“Does it ring?”

“What?”

“When you call her phone, does it ring before it goes to voice mail?”

Tobias shook his head. “The police told me the phone was turned off. They said that’s why they couldn’t use the GPS to find it.”

“They can trace the phone’s last location. Have they told you anything?”

“Yes. They said the last known location of the phone was about two miles from where her car was found. But they never found the phone or her purse.”

“What about the car’s GPS?”

“It doesn’t have one.”

“And you don’t know where your wife was going?”

Tobias shook his head slowly. He picked up his glass, stared down into it for a long time, and then finally took a drink.

“What do you know about the accident?”

“Not much. They said the car spun off the road in the rain and went into a ditch. It happened out on some road in the Everglades.”

“Everglades? What was your wife doing driving alone in the Everglades?”

Tobias stared at him for a long time, as if he were trying to figure something out. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know.”

What the fuck did this guy know?

“I’ll need to see the accident report,” Buchanan said.

“Why?”

When Buchanan gave him a hard stare, Tobias held up a hand. “I’ll get it to you.”

“Where’s the car now?”

“My insurance agent said it was towed back here last night. It’s in the police impound.”

Since the police did not consider Amelia Tobias to be a missing person, Buchanan knew their initial search of the wrecked car had probably been cursory. He knew, too, that even the smallest clue could lead to something big. With no GPS, Amelia Tobias could have scribbled directions on a piece of paper. And if he could figure out where she had been going, maybe he could find out where she went. He would need to check out the car.

“You said the police looked for your wife?” Buchanan asked.