The Finishing School (4 page)

“So why didn’t you?”

“You know, I very confused. Mr. Seward say he gonna call for me.”

“But I thought you just said it was
your
request that Mr. Seward call.”

Reyes started to sob noisily. “Yeah. I dunno. Is very confusing,” he choked out.

Jeez, this guy was a mess. Maybe there was nothing here. Anyway, she’d better get the basic facts down.

“Okay, I don’t want to get hung up on this detail. Mr. Reyes, please.” Melanie gave him a tissue from her bag. “Are you okay to talk?” she asked after he’d blown his nose and wiped his eyes.

“Yeah, okay.”

“Now, do you remember what time it was when you first called Mr. Seward?”

Again Reyes looked alarmed. “Time? No, I can’t say.”

“Any idea? You said it was probably around…” She paused, getting confused herself now. “Ray-Ray, what time do we have that Mr. Reyes entered the Sewards’ apartment?”

Ray-Ray flipped back to the preceding page in his spiral notebook. “‘Witness states daughter went upstairs around seven forty-five. Witness further states he became concerned when daughter had not returned after two to three hours.’”

“So at the latest it was ten forty-five when you entered the apartment,” Melanie said to Reyes.

Pain and panic raced across Reyes’s face. “I don’ know times, okay? I’m not looking at my watch. All I know is, I wanna find my Carmen. You gonna help me do that or not?”

“Yes, of course. We just need to hear what happened. We have to get the facts.”

“Look, I don’t know the time, okay?” Reyes snapped. “I call for a while and don’t get no answer. Finally I reach him, he say he gonna call the cops himself. So I wait for him to come home. Mr. Seward tell me do sonthing, I listen, because I need my job.”

Melanie nodded. Whatever Seward’s motives, Reyes’s motives for obeying seemed authentic. “So what happened next?”

Reyes sighed deeply, his face scrunching up. For a moment Melanie thought he might cry again. But then he began speaking very quickly, the words spilling out in a rush. “Around midnight Mr. Seward and the missus come home. He check the bodies, very fast. He call the police. The rest you know. So let’s talk about sonthing else.”

She looked at him searchingly, wondering why he was so determined to change the subject, but then decided to let it go. This man was obviously upset. She had enough to do to solve this case without imagining credibility issues where there were none.

“Tell me about Carmen. How she spent her time, where she went. Anything that might help us track her down.”

“Mostly she go in school, she work, she go in church. She very quiet girl.”

“What about her friends? Was there anyone Carmen associated with who might have been involved with illegal drugs?”

“A kid calling her a lot. Him, I don’t like. Maybe you gotta check him out, see if he know sonthing.”

“Of course. Tell us about him.” She looked over at Ray, who nodded and continued to take notes.

“Carmen meet him in church. A real
cholo
.”

“Cholo?”

“You know, a gangster. He’s from El Salvador.” Reyes scrutinized Melanie closely. “You
puertorriqueña, ¿sí
?”

“Yes, I’m Puerto Rican. So you don’t like the boy because you think he’s in a gang or because he’s Salvadoran?”

“He’s a gangster, and he don’t got no papers. I tell Carmen, La Migra gonna deport this one any minute. I complain to the priest about my daughter meeting
ilegales
in the church, and you know what he say to me? Jesus don’ care about papers!” He shook his head with disgust.

“Was Carmen dating this kid?”

“No, I never let her. She teaching him to read, from the church program. But he call her too much. So I tell him no call here no more.” Reyes shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe is sonthing. Maybe he get mad.”

“What’s the boy’s name?” she asked.

“Juan Carlos Peralta.”

“Do you know how to get in touch with him?”

“Carmen had his
número de celular
in her book.”

“We’d like to see Carmen’s address book.”

“Okay. Is in her room. You come.”

Reyes led them down a small hallway and pushed open a door at the end. Two narrow beds and a dresser filled the tiny room. A young girl sitting on the bed nearest the door looked up at them, startled. Presumably Carmen’s younger sister, Lulu. She’d been staring vacantly into space, fiddling with a silver peace sign that hung around her neck on a cowhide string. She was about thirteen or fourteen, with enormous brown eyes just like Maya’s and dark hair in a ponytail. And she looked scared.

Reyes took Carmen’s address book from a table between the twin beds and handed it to Melanie.

“Thank you. Is this Lulu?” Melanie asked, her eyes on the girl.

“Yes. Lulu, you be polite. Say hello to the prosecutor who gonna find Carmen for us,” Reyes said.

“Nice to meet you,” Melanie said.

Lulu stared back at her silently. Melanie couldn’t decide if the girl was sullen, in shock, or just sizing Melanie up before she decided to open her mouth.

Melanie sat down on the bed next to Lulu. “I can see you’re upset. I’d like to introduce myself and tell you what I’m trying to do, because maybe you can help me. Okay?”

Lulu shrugged. “Whatever.”

“You go to Holbrooke, too?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s in eighth grade,” Reyes said.

“You know two Holbrooke girls died tonight from snorting heroin?” Melanie asked.

She finally had Lulu’s attention. “No. Papi didn’t tell me that. Who?”

“Whitney Seward and Brianna Meyers.”

“Whitney was into drugs.” Lulu nodded, unsurprised.

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody knew.”

“Does your sister do drugs?”

“No way. Never.”

“Does she hang out with kids who do?”

“Carmen doesn’t hang out with anybody.”

“Do you have any idea where Carmen might have gone? Do you think she ran away?”

Again Lulu looked at Melanie with that strange, steady gaze. There was a lot going on behind her brown eyes. Melanie almost thought Lulu was weighing whether or not to talk. She seemed old beyond her years; yet there was something in her gaze that Melanie recognized from her own childhood, from that dark time after her father was shot in a robbery, after he went back to Puerto Rico and left them alone to face life in their bad neighborhood. It was fear.

“Who knows? Maybe she did run away,” Lulu said finally, sighing.

“No!” Luis Reyes burst out, slamming a fist against the bedroom wall. “That’s crazy, Lulu! What you saying? You making me very sad. Carmen no run away, never! Since Mami die, all we got is each other. Carmen never do that to us!”

Reyes began to sob again, and Lulu lay facedown on her bed and put her pillow over her head. This interview was going nowhere fast.

Melanie pulled a business card from her bag. “I’m leaving you my cell and office phone numbers, Lulu,” she said to the girl’s back. “If there’s anything else you think I should know, you call me. It could be a matter of life and death for your sister.”

Lulu just lay there silent as a stone. Melanie handed a card to Luis Reyes as well. Reyes then escorted them to the door of the basement apartment, crying the whole way. As Melanie was about to leave, he grabbed her by the arm.

“You gonna find her, right?” he asked urgently, eyes streaming tears.

Melanie looked into the man’s desperate face and found herself wishing her own father had cared this passionately about
her
.

“Yes,” she said gently, vowing to herself to make it happen. “I will find your daughter. I promise.”

COLD PINK LIGHT from the rising sun bounced off windows on the west side of Park Avenue as Melanie and Ray-Ray emerged from the building and headed for his car. While the Crime Scene guys finished up, they’d check out leads on Carmen Reyes. Bernadette had called a team meeting for 9:00 A.M. sharp. Melanie planned to have some answers by then.

As he drove, Ray-Ray radioed Carmen’s description to the DEA dispatcher for relay to other law-enforcement agencies. Melanie kept her mouth shut when he called it in as “subject wanted for questioning” rather than as a missing person. Her goal was to find Carmen, and describing the girl as the subject of an investigation might actually generate a meaningful response. It was better than calling her a runaway, certainly. Teenage runaways were a dime a dozen. With no evidence of foul play, the most the cops would do was put in a few perfunctory calls to hospitals and the morgue.

Melanie went through Carmen’s address book and read out the location where they could expect to find Juan Carlos Peralta. This early there was practically no traffic, and they whizzed across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. The East River below glittered cold and black, and the silver towers of midtown stood out like knives against the morning sky. In mere minutes they were cruising the mean streets of Queens looking for Peralta’s building.

“Okay, I have a gut feeling about this,” Melanie said, unable to keep silent any longer.

Ray-Ray said nothing, staring out at the street signs, fingertips drumming restlessly on the steering wheel. He didn’t seem the type to follow a hunch.

“Maybe Carmen’s getting a bum rap,” Melanie continued. “To me she reads like a nice, studious girl from a decent family. Plus, her little sister seemed really scared of something.”

“Think I like locking up Chinese people, ma’am?” Ray-Ray said, taking his eyes off the road long enough to give Melanie a disapproving look. “But I do it if I got the evidence. This girl is most likely involved. Or else why split?”

Ouch. Maybe he was right. On the other hand, maybe he was wrong. Imagination did not appear to be his strong suit. Melanie kept silent for a few minutes, leafing through Carmen’s address book, tiny, with a flowered cloth cover and worn, gilt-edged pages. There was nothing of interest in it other than the Salvadoran boy’s cell-phone number and address. Just a few relatives in Puerto Rico and a pen pal in Wisconsin named Heidi.

“Okay, forget Carmen. What about her sister? Didn’t she look scared to you?” Melanie asked.

“Scared?”

“Yes.”

“No. Not particularly.”

“Oh, come on, Ray-Ray, she definitely did!”

“She looked upset, ma’am. Natural reaction under the circumstances. You asked if she knew anything about her sister’s disappearance, and she replied negative. In fact, from what I observed, the younger sister believes this is a runaway situation.”

“She never said that.”

“She implied it. To my mind anyway. Granted, that doesn’t necessarily equal the Reyes girl supplying the drugs. There’s about a million reasons a teenage girl might run away. Maybe she just didn’t like being told not to date this Peralta kid.”

“What about Seward and Reyes? Didn’t you think there was something off in the timing there? Who called the police—and when?”

He shrugged. “Seward’s a rich asshole pulling strings. Reyes is your average member of any minority community. Doesn’t like the cops, worried about his job, so he lets Seward call. Nothing unusual as far as I can tell.”

“Yeah, well, I think there’s more here than meets the eye. We should look beyond the obvious.”

“Honestly, ma’am, I’ve never found much call to do that on this job. The obvious generally works pretty well.”

Ray-Ray slowed down and scanned the numbers on a series of rundown tenements. He pulled up across the street from one of them.

“That’s the place,” he said, jerking his head toward the building. “What do you advise we do?”

Melanie checked her watch. It was seven o’clock in the morning. “He’s probably inside. You knock and announce, then ask to interview him. If he says no, I run back to my office and type a quick subpoena while you sit on the house to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ray-Ray said.

They got out of the car and crossed the street. Plows had gathered last night’s snow into ugly gray mounds, now decorated with intermittent streaks of bright yellow dog pee. Ray-Ray tried the door, plate glass embedded with chicken wire, with a huge crack across it. It was unlocked. They climbed three flights up a steep, poorly lit staircase to Peralta’s apartment. It wasn’t lost on Melanie that Ray-Ray kept his hand on the gun at his waistband. Normally Melanie didn’t ride along like this. The agents went out, located the witnesses, and rendered them safe—translation: disarmed them—before bringing them back to the sterile sanctuary of her government office to be interviewed. But with an investigation this urgent, there wasn’t time for such niceties.

The door of Peralta’s apartment boasted a tattered poster of the blue-and-white Salvadoran flag. Ray-Ray raised his fist and rapped loudly with his knuckles.

“
¿Quién es
?” asked an old woman’s faltering voice after a pause.

“Drug Enforcement Administration. We’re here to speak with a Mr. Peralta, ma’am,” Ray-Ray said.

“
La Dea
! ” the old lady shouted.

From inside the apartment came the sound of pounding footsteps, followed by the screech of a window being thrown open. Ray-Ray lowered his shoulder to hurl himself against the door. Melanie grabbed his arm.

“Exigent circumstances!” he barked, looking at her accusingly.

He was right. They could hardly afford to wait for a warrant. A young girl was missing, and someone who might have information was escaping out a window.

“Go!” she yelled.

Ray-Ray threw himself against the flimsy door several times in quick succession until it burst open. Inside, curtains flapped in the wind as a dark head disappeared from view down a metal fire escape.

Ray-Ray blew into the room and out the open window. Melanie raced after him, leaning out the casement in time to watch him clamber down the fire escape in hot pursuit of his quarry. The dark-haired kid reached the end of the metal railing and jumped the remaining six feet or so, hitting the ground and rolling. Ray-Ray leaped right behind him, scrambled to his feet at the same instant the kid did, and lunged for his legs, yanking them out from under him. In a second Ray-Ray had the cuffs on him and looked up at Melanie with a huge grin on his face. She saw what Albano meant. Ray-Ray lived for this shit, you could just tell.