Vanishing Act Read online

I thought about some of the things I’d done and gotten away with when I was younger. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  Tim and I wasted ten minutes debating the issue before we went back to work. The rest of the day was uneventful. I set up two appointments regarding Melissa at the university, after which I caught up on my orders, paid my bills, and inventoried the freezer in the back room. I wanted to make sure everything I was supposed to do was done, because I was planning on spending a large amount of time tomorrow out of the store working on the Hayes case and I didn’t want to give Tim anything to complain about.

  When I’d spoken to the head of university security the previous day, I’d gotten the strong impression he wasn’t exactly eager to talk to me, but he’d agreed to the meeting because he couldn’t afford not to, which was why I was trudging up what had looked like endless sets of stairs from the street below, at nine o’clock in the morning, fighting against gusts of wind that were making my eyes tear and my skin feel numb. Given the conversation Mr. Morrell and I had had, I wasn’t expecting much, but I had to go through the motions. And anyway, you never know what you’re going to get out of someone till you talk to them face-to-face.

  Morrell’s office turned out to be located on the ground floor of a tired-looking building that was crying out for a good sprucing up. The trim could have used a couple of coats of paint and the bricks needed pointing. Tucked away on a far corner of the campus, like a poor relation no one wants to acknowledge, it had taken me a while to find. The view as I labored up the steps to the campus was less than inspiring.

  From where I was standing, if you looked down from the hill, you could see the 690 overpass, a parking lot, and a housing development known informally as the Bricks. A poor, mostly African American area, it would have been called a ghetto in a more plain-speaking time, before euphemisms became the order of the day.

  I was wondering why so many universities are built on hills looking down at the poor below, when I reached Morrell’s office. I crushed the cigarette I’d been smoking out with my heel, deposited the butt in the sand-filled ashtray nearby, and went inside. When I told the secretary, a Betsy Seyffert according to the nameplate on her desk, who I was, she gestured to the open door on my left and told me to go in.

  Morrell pointedly glanced up from the papers he was reading to the clock on the wall as I entered. “You’re late,” he observed, sounding pleased at having the opportunity to catch me in a mistake.

  “I had trouble finding your office,” I replied, sitting down in the black armchair in front of his desk.

  “That’s funny. I would have thought that you of all people, seeing how you’re a detective and all”—here he turned the corners of his mouth up slightly—“would have been able to figure out where it was.”

  Ah. A guy with a sense of humor. I let the crack go and studied the man who’d made it. Morrell’s hands were lightly resting on the edge of the desk. They were big, but then, so was Mr. C. Morrell. He was in his fifties, his bearing radiating the remnants of the military man I was sure he’d been. Deeply tan, his long, narrow face was cross-hatched with the type of thin, deep lines the sun etches in your skin after a lifetime spent out in her.

  Handsome, with regular features, he had pale blue eyes and neatly clipped gray hair. His clothes, white shirt, striped regimental tie, and gray jacket reinforced his conservative, “man-in-charge” image. I wondered if his appearance had played a part in the getting of this job. He was someone the handlers could trot out before parents. See, his looks said. Your son or daughter will be safe with me. It was the feel-good approach to security.

  Which is what most of it was about everywhere anyway. The majority of measures at airports, offices, and schools was packaging designed to make people think “things are being done to ensure that everything is under control.”

  Whereas the truth is, if you want to do something bad enough, you can. All it takes is a modicum of thought. And a little bit of luck.

  Security requires loss of freedom, an increase in inconvenience.

  Even then the measures might not work.

  Short of putting a homing device on Melissa Hayes, could anyone have prevented what had happened to her?

  Especially since the odds were she was a willing participant in whatever had occurred. At least in the beginning.

  Morrell made a minuscule adjustment to his tie and said, “Explain to me again why I should tell you anything about Melissa Hayes’s disapppearance.”

  “I thought we went over that on the phone.”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  I suppressed my rush of irritation and let a couple of beats go by before answering. If he wanted to play Lord of the Manor, so be it. “I see the question as: why shouldn’t you?”

  “Legally, I’m not required to give you any information.”

  I leaned forward slightly. “That’s what you told me yesterday on the phone.”

  “That’s right, I did.” Morrell brushed his tie tack with the tip of his finger. “That being the case, I’m curious. Why did you insist on coming here?”

  “Why did you agree to see me?” I countered. If the guy wanted to rehash the conversation, that was fine with me.

  He acknowledged my comment with a wintry smile.

  “You know,” I continued, “what happened to Melissa Hayes is every parent’s worst nightmare. You send your kid off to college, a college, I might add, that has taken all possible measures to ensure your child’s safety.”

  Morrell’s expression didn’t soften, but he gave a slight nod to indicate acceptance of the compliment.

  “And she walks out the door of her dorm and disappears in the middle of the afternoon without a trace and no one sees anything.”

  Morrell formed a steeple with the tips of his fingers. “That is correct. No one did. But that said, what’s your point? Why should I cooperate with you?” he asked. “I don’t think the university wants any more publicity over this. We would prefer to put this painful episode behind us.”

  “I can imagine.” I reached over and idly ran a finger along the edge of Morrell’s desk. He frowned. I deliberately repeated the gesture, then, point made, leaned back. “In fact, I empathize. Unfortunately, things being the way they are these days, that seems the best way to ensure adverse coverage. You know what media people are like. Always twisting things. Making something out of nothing.”

  The corners of Morrell’s mouth twitched. Maybe they were the only facial muscles he could use. He brought the tips of his fingers up to the bottom of his lip. His expression stayed the same. Unreadable. “That’s right. How could I have forgotten. You used to work for the local newspaper, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Refusing to talk to me makes the university look ungenerous at the very least. At the most, it makes you guys look as if you’re stonewalling, when the reality is that you’re not. From what I heard, your staff did everything you could to help find her.”

  “True. We did.”

  “And if you throw in the fact that I’m working for Melissa’s mother and she has only a few months left to live ...” I trailed off, leaving thoughts of bad PR dancing in Morrell’s head.

  “I see,” he said.

  “I thought you might.”

  The sounds of footsteps from the hallway outside filtered into the room. Morrell’s phone rang. He didn’t look at it. A moment later the noise stopped. His secretary must have picked up. He brought his hands back down and rested them on the edge of the desk again. “All right. What is it, exactly, that you’d like to know?”

  “Your ideas about what happened to Melissa. Who your staff talked to. What they noticed. What they did after the disappearance. That kind of thing.”

  Morrell didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he picked up a pencil and twirled it between the fingers of his right hand while he mulled my request over. After a few seconds he put the pencil down and gestured to the door leading to the outer office. “Would you mind waiting outside,” he said. “I need to m
ake a phone call.”

  “No problem.” My guess was that he was calling the head of public relations for final clearance on whether he should talk to me or not.

  While I was waiting, I approached the secretary.

  Secretaries, I’ve found, usually know more than anyone else in the place. Sometimes, especially if they don’t like their bosses, they can be invaluable fonts of information. A case that was true here, I was willing to wager, judging from the expression of distaste on Betsy Seyffert’s face after she got off the intercom with Morrell.

  I judged her to be in her late thirties. Her face was thin, her profile Roman, her hair ash blond. Her makeup was immaculate, her blouse white silk. She looked as out of place in this office as a calla lily would among a bouquet of daisies.

  “Been at this job long?” I asked.

  “Long enough,” she replied as she went back to scanning papers on her desk. Her movements were quick and precise.

  “I used to work at NYU. As a secretary in the poli sci department. I left after a year.”

  “Well, I’m leaving here in two weeks. I’m going down to New York City. I have a sister who lives in Queens. She’s going to get me a job with an advertising firm.”

  “Sounds good.”

  She gave me a confiding smile. “Believe me, it’ll be better than this. At least I’ll meet some interesting people.”

  I leaned against the side of her desk. “Your boss seems as if he’d be a tough man to work for.”

  She rolled her eyes by way of an answer. “His only saving grace is that he’s out of the office a lot. Like today, after his meeting with you, he’s gone for the rest of the day.”

  I laughed. I liked this woman. I was thinking about how sometimes you just connect with someone, when her intercom buzzed. She pressed a button. It was Morrell telling her to tell me to go back inside.

  “You are summoned,” she intoned, capitalizing each word with her voice.

  When I entered, Morrell was glancing through a folder I assumed to contain the Melissa Hayes case. “There isn’t much to tell,” he said as I sat down.

  “That’s all right. I’ll take whatever you can give me.” I got my pad and pen out of my backpack and prepared to take notes.

  “We received a call at four-thirty on Friday, November twenty-second from her brother, Bryan Hayes. A member of our security team responded, and after ascertaining what the problem was, advised Mr. Hayes to wait until twenty-four hours had passed before recontacting us.” Morrell looked up from the paper he’d been reading from. “That’s standard policy everywhere when the subjects are above sixteen,” he explained, emphasizing the word everywhere.

  I told him I was aware of that.

  Morrell ignored me and kept talking. “In ninety-eight percent of the cases, we find students reported missing turn up within twelve hours. Usually, they’ve taken a road trip with their friends and failed to inform their family of their plans or they’ve become intoxicated and passed out somewhere.”

  “Interesting,” I murmured even though he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I doodled an M on my pad. “What did you say the name was of the guard that caught the call?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Could you give it to me?”

  “The gentleman has moved on. Anyway, it’s against university policy.” The way Morrell pronounced the words university policy, you would have thought he was talking about the National Security Act.

  “Why is that?”

  “Experience has shown us that it’s more efficient to funnel our communications through one person. That way we avoid miscommunications and misunderstandings.”

  “Very commendable.” What was even more commendable was that I managed to make the comment with a straight face.

  “We like to think so.”

  “Is that the royal we?”

  A tic of annoyance traveled across Morrell’s face. “People I’ve spoken to told me you had quite a mouth on you.”

  “What people?” I asked, though I really didn’t care. Not being well liked has a certain freeing power.

  “Would you like me to continue or not?”

  “By all means.” I went back to taking notes. I could always get the guard’s name if I needed it. “Fine. I can live with that. What happened next?”

  “The brother contacted our offices again twenty-four hours later. When we ascertained that Melissa Hayes was indeed missing—”

  I interrupted. “How did you do that?”

  “We spoke to her roommate, her boyfriend, her suitemates, interviewed students in the dormitory, talked with her teachers, as well as conducted a visual examination of the grounds.”

  Morrell gave me the information in a flat tone of voice. As he scanned the report in front of him and precised it for me, I was thinking about how much I would have loved to have seen the file, but that, I knew, was out of the question. Unless, of course, I paid a visit to the office when he wasn’t there. Lots of times, people in security aren’t as tight about that kind of stuff as one would think.

  Morrell lifted his eyes from the paper and looked at me again. “Once we had concluded our search and come up empty-handed, we immediately got in touch with the Syracuse Police Department and turned the matter over to them. From that point on we have rendered every available assistance asked.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “Unfortunately the gravity of the situation was obscured by the fact that Miss Hayes disappeared right before Thanksgiving break. I fear we all assumed she’d decided to take her holiday early.”

  “With her mother in the hospital?” I asked incredulously.

  “She was having trouble with her academics as well.”

  I stopped doodling. “No one told me that.”

  Morrell gave me a tight little smile. “Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe she was too embarrassed to tell them. Over the years, I’ve found that good students don’t take failure well. That and her mother’s illness. Her friend’s death ...” Morrell’s voice drifted off. “Frankly, given the circumstances, I’m surprised she elected to return in September. She should have taken the semester off. I don’t know why she didn’t.”

  Here was something Morrell and I could both agree on. “Anything else I should know?” I asked.

  Morrell shook his head.

  “Unoffically, what do you think happened to her?”

  He spread his fingers out on the desk’s surface. “Given the circumstances, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “You must have some idea,” I insisted.

  He studied the onyx pen holder on his desk while considering his answer. “In this job, I’ve found that college students don’t seem to be very good at processing stress. They tend to overreact to life’s setbacks.”

  I translated to English. “Are you saying you think Melissa killed herself?”

  Morrell picked up his pen and put it back down. “I don’t think we can rule out the possibility.”

  Chapter 16

  “Suicide,” Fell said reflectively, combing his mustache with his fingers. “I can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed my mind.”

  He had to raise his voice to be heard over the construction noises. I looked out the window. A building was going up not more than fifty feet away from Fell’s office.

  “They started building in November.” He got up and closed the window a little harder than necessary. “It’s making me crazy. When I leave the window open, it’s so noisy I can’t think, and when I keep it closed, it gets so hot I feel as if I’m in a sauna.”

  “What’s it going to be?”

  “A new computer center. God forbid they should put any money into the humanities and the social sciences.” He raised his eyebrows in disgust. “Look at this place.” He waved his hand around to indicate his office. “Could it possibly be any smaller?”

  “Not really.”

  The room was cramped and narrow, the height almost double the width of the room. It reminded me of
an elevator shaft. If you could have magically tipped the room on its side, it would have been spacious, but as it was, there was barely enough space for a desk and two chairs. Add a love seat, bookshelves overflowing with textbooks and professional journals, and an aggressively large ficus, and the effect was claustrophobic in the extreme.

  “But that’s the university for you.” Fell took a chocolate chip cookie out of a Tupperware container. “They’ve got plenty of money. They’re just not putting it in the right place. If it doesn’t have an immediate payoff, they’re not interested. The humanities have become the stepchildren of higher education.” He stopped and laughed. “God, listen to me. My wife said I’m becoming a certifiable old fogy. I think she’s right.” He took a bite of his cookie. “Here. Have one.” He pushed the container across the desk. “I made them from scratch. Good, aren’t they?” he asked after I’d eaten one.

  “Very.” I brushed a crumb off my notebook.

  Fell reached for another, leaned back in his chair, and rested his hands on his belly. With his slight double chin, unkempt mustache, and his plaid shirt, he had a homey, rumpled appearance, and I could see where Melissa would have felt secure confiding in him.

  I shifted around in the chair in front of his desk, trying to get comfortable, but it was no use. The seat was lumpy and there were small cracks running along its arms. It reminded me of the chair in my office that I’d taken to piling old newspapers on. No wonder Fell was annoyed by the new building going up. Not only was the noise a constant irritant, but here they were, spending millions of dollars, and he couldn’t even get a new chair for his office.

  Fell took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose before putting them back on. Black-rimmed, with Coke-bottle lenses, they were the glasses of someone who either couldn’t afford or didn’t care about buying better. “Melissa disappearing like this almost makes me glad I didn’t have children.” His voice was reflective.

  “Me too.”

  He smiled wryly. “Well, now that we’re agreed on that, how I can help you? We have a half hour before my next class.”