She's Not There (7 page)

“Yeah, they searched the hospital and the neighborhood, but there was no sign of her,” Tobias said. “She has a brain injury, but they aren’t even looking for her now. My wife is missing and the fucking police won’t do a thing. Does that make any fucking
sense
to you?”

The two women at the next table turned to stare. Tobias glanced at them and then picked up his glass and drained it.

“Actually it makes perfect sense,” Buchanan said. “The way the police see it, if your wife was healthy enough to walk out of the hospital then she must be in good enough shape to make her own decisions, concussion or no concussion. And since she’s an adult, if she’s decided she wants to disappear, she has a right to do that.”

Tobias’s blue-green eyes were fixed on him.

“Does your wife have good reason to want to disappear, Mr. Tobias?”

Tobias rose. “I don’t have to put up with this shit. We’re finished here.”

“Sit down, Mr. Tobias.”

Tobias glared at him.

“Sit down. Please.”

Tobias hesitated and then dropped back into the chair. He ran a hand over his sweating brow.

“You want another drink?” Buchanan asked.

Tobias shook his head slowly as he stared vacantly out over the patio. There was a faint roll of thunder, and Buchanan looked up to see storm clouds. The temperature was dropping, and the patio was emptying fast. In the small parking plaza fronting the bar, there was a fifty-foot fake Christmas tree. Its white lights blinked on, the reflection falling like glitter on the Bimmers, Audis, and Bentleys arranged like presents under the tree.

“Let me tell you something about how I work,” Buchanan said.

Tobias looked up.

“I track down people who will do almost anything not to be found. I am very good at this because I am willing to do whatever it takes and go as far as necessary. I am a liar for hire. But I don’t bring back women who have a good reason to want to get away from their husbands.”

“I would never hurt my wife,” Tobias said.

Buchanan waited. It was always better to say nothing and let the silence slice away at the other person’s comfort level. Human nature abhorred a vacuum.

“I need you to find her,” Tobias said.

Again, Buchanan waited.

“Mel
wants
to be found.”

It came out almost in a whisper with a small break in the voice. Alex Tobias was a man with a hole somewhere deep inside him, that much was as easy to discern as the grassy perfume of the women at the next table. But there was something else there, something Buchanan’s senses were not quite picking up.

“Okay,” Buchanan said. “I’ll take your case. I’ll find your wife.”

Tobias met his eyes.

“But this is how it works. All I do is find her and tell you where she is. The rest is up to you—and her.”

Tobias nodded. “Thank you. That’s all I want.” He collapsed back in the chair, as if he had no air left in his lungs. “What’s the next step?” he asked.

“You tell me everything you know about your wife,” Buchanan said.

“Then what?”

“Then we wait for her to make a mistake.”

CHAPTER NINE

The headlights swept across the chain link fence, illuminating the big green sign—
F
ORT
L
AUDERDALE
P
OLICE
V
EHICLE
I
MPOUND
.

Buchanan leaned forward in the taxi’s seat and pushed a wad of bills through the plastic. “This is good,” he said. “Keep the change.”

Buchanan eased out of the taxi and it sped away, leaving him in the dark drizzle. Beyond the ten-foot chain link fence, he could see the misty glow of security lights falling on the rows of cars and SUVs like moonlight on tombstones. A small warmer yellow light deeper in the lot pulsed brighter for a second as a door opened and then closed.

Buchanan heard the man’s footsteps before he saw him. A flashlight shined in Buchanan’s eyes and he blinked.

“You Buchanan?”

“One and the same.”

Buchanan heard the
jingle-clank-creak
of the fence unlocking and opening. As he went through, he caught a glimpse of a fat man in a dirty Dolphins cap and orange plastic rain poncho. After leaving Tobias at the restaurant, Buchanan had called his contact at the Fort Lauderdale PD, who had told him the impound guard was good, that he’d let him in for fifty bucks. Buchanan was having trouble remembering the impound guy’s name.

Quirk . . . that was it.

“Listen, Mr. Quirk—”

“Quark. The name is Quark, like the subatomic particle.”

“Okay, Mr. Quark. I’m here to see a car.”

“Yeah, Larry told me. The Mercedes SL that came in yesterday. So where’s my Christmas present?”

Buchanan pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it over to Quark. The man peeked in the envelope and then slid it into his pants pocket.

“Follow me.”

Quark clicked on his flashlight again, and Buchanan followed him along the line of cars. The first few rows were all in good shape: Toyotas towed from parking lots, Escalades seized in drug raids, and Lexuses lost to loan default. But the farther they went into the lot the worse the cars looked until they deteriorated into crumbled masses of metal.

Quark stopped and pointed the flashlight beam. “There she is.”

The car was wedged between two other wrecks—a Kia and an accordioned Ford Fiesta. It was small, about the size of a Miata, and though the grill was damaged, the distinctive Mercedes emblem was still visible.

Something was itching at Buchanan’s memory, something from his Google of Alex Tobias. “Can I have your flashlight?” he asked Quark.

Quark handed it over, and Buchanan trained it on the car’s side. He couldn’t see the doors, but he knew what he was looking at—a Mercedes 300SL gullwing.

That’s what Buchanan had been trying to remember. His Google of Alex Tobias had revealed that Tobias had paid $800,000 for the gullwing at an auto auction. It was the kind of collectible car you didn’t even drive on city streets. What was Amelia Tobias doing driving it out in the Everglades?

It started to rain.

“You about done here?”

Buchanan looked back at Quark, turtled down into his poncho.

“No, I’m going to be a while.”

“Well, I’m going back to my office. Make sure you drop the flashlight off before you leave.”

Quark left and Buchanan looked back at the Mercedes. The passenger side appeared intact. The driver’s side had taken the brunt of the damage, and its front fender was smashed, the headlight broken. The Mercedes was wedged smack up against the wrecked Ford so there was no way to see inside. Buchanan climbed on top of the Kia. He had to lie down on the hood to angle the flashlight beam into the car’s interior.

The light picked up the glitter of glass from the broken driver’s-side window. There were brown smears on the tan bucket seat and on the dashboard—dried blood, Buchanan guessed. When he moved the flashlight beam, he saw the spider crack in the windshield over the steering wheel.

Buchanan started to get up but then stopped. Suddenly he was seeing what wasn’t there.

Seat belts.

The gullwing was a classic car, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be retrofitted with seat belts, even though any such alteration would diminish the car’s value. With no seat belt to stop anything, Amelia Tobias’s head had smashed into the windshield.

Again, the question: What was she doing driving a car like this? Most rich women surrounded themselves with as much metal and airbags as bulky sedans or SUVs could provide. He made a mental note to find out if she had another car.

Buchanan jumped off the Kia down to the mud. The rain had turned into a downpour, beating an ear-splitting tattoo on the hoods of the dead cars.

Something was still bothering him, something about the car’s gullwing doors, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. And then there was the big question: Where the hell was Amelia Tobias going that night?

His experience and his instincts were telling him she had been on her way to meet a lover. But who wore a Chanel cocktail dress to a tryst in the swamp?

He clicked off the flashlight and trudged off through the rain.

Amelia Tobias’s life was spread out before him on the bed.

Buchanan’s eyes swept over the scattering of papers and photographs. For two hours now he had been working the phones, scouring the Internet, and printing out the results of his search, working to put together a clear picture of the woman. Normally, after even this limited amount of time and research, he had a good bead on what kind of runner he was chasing.

All he had to do was sift through the mundane data of their daily lives—phone records, Facebook postings, credit card bills, what books they bought on Amazon, what movies they rented from Netflix—and the runners always revealed themselves.

It was, he always thought, like watching one of those old Polaroid pictures come into focus. And once he got a clear picture of what the person had been, he could always figure out where they had gone.

But this one . . .

There was a strange
lack
of information on Amelia Tobias.

There had been plenty of stuff on Alex Tobias: articles about his law firm’s cases, his successes, and his business holdings. Amelia—“the lovely Mrs. Tobias”—was mentioned in his big profile in
Lawyer Monthly.
But the only things Buchanan had found on Amelia herself came from the society pages.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up a printout.

It was a home décor piece from
Florida Design
. It showed the Tobias home, a big pink Spanish-style place. To his eye, it looked like some place Zorro would live if he had no taste. But apparently, Amelia had rescued what was an important “Mizner-style manse” from the wrecking ball. There were quotes from her about how she had devoted three years to overseeing the renovation, accompanied by lots of pictures of the big white rooms. There was a photo of Amelia standing in front of the pool in a red dress.

The only other pictures of her that he had found were in
Gold Coast Magazine
’s “Scene and Heard” section and in
City and Shore Magazine
’s
“Out & About.” The names of the events changed—Diamond Ball for Cancer Research, Pawpurrazzi Party for the Humane Society, Opera Guild Disco Night—but the pictures were always the same. Alex Tobias in a tux, clutching a champagne glass and showing a lot of teeth. And there at his side was Amelia, beautiful for sure, but always with one of those smiles that said
I’m here but I’m really not here.

It was like she lived in a bubble. The woman didn’t even have her own Facebook page.

The rich are different from you and me, Bucky, and it’s not just the money.

He knew that. He had worked cases for a couple people who could buy Alex Tobias ten times over. But he had never gotten used to the world they lived in. He tossed the printout to the bed, and his eyes drifted around the hotel room. He had to admit, though, that when the case paid well enough, it was nice to hover around the gilded edges.

After leaving the impound lot, he had retreated to a nearby bar and fired up the laptop to find a hotel on Expedia. He had chosen the W Hotel on the beach, deciding he deserved to stay in a place
Condé Nast Traveler
called “the perfect balance of style and soul.” Tobias was paying the freight—three ninety a night—for what was called “A Cool Corner Room.”

It was almost nine hundred square feet, bigger than his apartment back in Nashville, the king-sized bed flanked by two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows that opened onto a wraparound balcony. Even the crapper had an ocean view.

Buchanan rose, grabbed the last wedge of a club sandwich off the room-service table, and went to the desk. He punched a key on his Acer, and the notes he had transcribed from his meeting with Alex Tobias flashed up on the screen.

It had taken two hours and two more Armadale vodkas to get Tobias really talking.

Tell me everything you know about your wife’s past.

Why?

Because there’s a good chance she’s still here in town and she might go where she feels safe.

He hadn’t mentioned that might be a lover’s bed.

Tobias’s recall of his wife’s early years was sketchy, but Buchanan knew he could fill in the gaps himself later.

Amelia Tobias had been born in Morning Sun, Iowa, thirty-three years ago. Daughter of Barbara and George Bloodworth. Mother a housewife, father a salesman for John Deere, strict Baptist home. Father died in a car accident when Amelia was twenty; mother died five years ago from cancer. Older brother Ben killed in action in Afghanistan three years ago. Amelia met Alex Tobias in 2004 at a gala party for the Miami City Ballet. Amelia was a ballet dancer, first with the New York City Ballet, but then she had moved to Miami to take a position with the ballet company there. She left the Miami City Ballet in 2006 and married Tobias soon after.

Tobias had paused at that point to stare down into his empty glass.

After she stopped dancing, she dedicated herself to building our life. I was nothing before I met Mel.

Well into the third vodka, Tobias had gotten pretty puffed up talking about how he had been hired by one of Florida’s most prominent lawyers—Owen McCall. They had partnered up to start a new firm, luring away the biggest clients from McCall’s old firm down in Miami. Success had come fast. Or as Tobias had poetically put it, “it was like we were white-water rafting in a lava flow of gold.”

Tobias filled his garage with cars and his wine cellar with old Burgundies. The couple honeymooned in Provence, rented villas in St. Barts, and skied in the Italian Alps, often with Owen McCall and his wife Joanna. Tobias talked about how Joanna had taken Amelia under her wing and gotten her involved in charity work and social circles. The law firm thrived; money rolled in.

Mel was happy. We were happy.

But then Tobias had gone morose as he stared down into his vodka.

Buchanan paused at a note he had made.
No kids. Diagnosed fallopian tube blockage. Tobias seems upset talking about this.
But Buchanan knew it couldn’t be as simple as that. It never was.

He rose and went back to the bed, picking up the
Florida Design
article again. He stared hard at the photograph of the blonde woman in the red dress but he was remembering something his dad had told him one morning in the duck blind.

See that
crested grebe, Clay? Well, it’s all bright and red now in summer. But come winter, it’ll change itself to gray. It won’t look like the same bird because it needs to blend in and hide.

Buchanan went back to his laptop and pulled up his e-mail. It took only a second for the photograph to download. It came up on his screen large and bright, and in lovely clear 500-pixel resolution.

Back at the restaurant, Buchanan had asked Alex Tobias if he had a good picture of his wife. Tobias had quickly e-mailed him one from his iPhone. At the time, Buchanan had thought it was strange he didn’t have a photo of his wife in his wallet. But Alex Tobias was thirty-eight, ten years younger than he himself was. Some young guys didn’t even carry wallets anymore.

Buchanan stared into Amelia Tobias’s eyes.

Blue . . . Windex blue.

Tobias had told him that Amelia wore contacts, which she had left at the hospital. The contacts were tinted blue, and her eyes were really brown.

Buchanan leaned back in the chair.

So now Amelia Tobias had brown eyes. And maybe tomorrow she would have red, black, brown, or purple hair. In a couple days, he might be looking for a woman who looked nothing like this one. Because if she really was a runner, her primitive brain would kick in and she would do three instinctively animal things—find a place to hide, cover her tracks, and change her spots.

Disguises.

He had seen all manner of them, seen the weird lengths people would go to when they were desperate to disappear. Men shaving themselves bald, women resorting to bad wigs that made them look like the mother from
The Brady Bunch
. And then there was the tax evader he had chased for three years before he finally found him living in Costa Rica. The man was black but had bleached his skin with Fair & Lovely whitening cream and sewn up his nose, like a cook trussing a chicken, to make it look smaller.