Freddie made his way noisily around the stick to where I sat, appraising the college girls as he passed their table. I was glad to see him. If not a friendly face, his was at least a familiar one.
“Mr. Fredericks,” I said happily in recognition as he sat next to me. “Let me buy you a beer.”
He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “Why?” he asked bluntly.
“Well, you did save my life.”
“Don’t get misty-eyed about it; it wasn’t anything personal. I was paid, remember? It’s not like we’re friends. Is that what you think? We’re friends now?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
“Shit,” he said, making the word sound like sheet.
“We are in the same business,” I reminded him.
“Only as competitors.”
Scott took Freddie’s order. Pete’s Wicked Ale. I insisted on paying for it.
“Call it professional courtesy,” I told him.
Freddie gave me a look when he snatched the bottle from the bar top, but there was no thank you in it. Yeah, me and Freddie. Pals forever.
“What brings you down here?” I asked, just to be polite.
“Lookin’ to git me an order of spare ribs,” Freddie grunted.
“They don’t serve spareribs here.”
“Oh, man … Spare ribs, Taylor. Spare ribs. You know, like Eve was made from Adam’s spare rib.”
“Do you make this stuff up, Freddie, or do you subscribe to a magazine or something?”
“Is this banter? Huh, Taylor? Are we supposed to be fucking bonding now?”
“Apparently not.”
“Shit,” he said, this time breaking the word into two syllables: shii-it.
Freddie had turned his back to me. He was watching one of the college girls, who was watching him while pretending not to. “You got business, Taylor, you need air cover, you got my card. Otherwise, fuck it.”
“Whatever you say.”
He smiled then. “I do believe supper’s on the table,” he muttered for my benefit.
“Ladies!” he shouted and juke-jived his way to the college girls. Sixty seconds later he had them giggling hysterically. In another sixty seconds he was kneading the shoulders of the girl who had given him the eye. In two minutes more he was sitting at the table next to her, gesturing wildly with one hand to the beat of yet another seemingly hilarious story. What he was doing with the other hand under the table, your guess is as good as mine.
I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. How come I can’t do that? I have charisma! I decided I hated Freddie. Decided I should have shot the surly sonuvabitch when I’d had the chance.
I quickly settled my tab and left, considerably drunker yet no more cheerful than when I’d arrived. I was in no shape to drive. But I drove anyway. If I was busted for DWI on the way home, maybe Cynthia would defend me.
The morning broke cold and gray and didn’t hold much promise for improvement. The woman on the radio said eighty percent chance of showers. It was a good day to stay in bed, I decided, and drew the blankets close to my chin. What with my pounding head and unsteady stomach, I could use the extra shut-eye, anyway.
Besides, I was tired. So tired, it was difficult to even roll over and find a more comfortable position. Yet deep sleep did not come. Nor had it last night, despite the numerous beers. Nor the night before. Nor the night before that. I kept waking after only a few hours, from dreams that were all too vivid, filled with the shadows of ninety-six murder investigations, with the ghosts of men whose lives I’ve taken in anger.
Whenever a case disturbs me, it seems like all my past troubles resurface and crowd around it. And this case disturbed me. In the beginning my desire to find Alison, to find her alive, tingled throughout my body like lust, making me aware of everything: the way my fingers caressed the keyboard of my personal computer, the way my chest heaved up and down with my breath—Cynthia had been right about that. Only now, twenty-four days after convincing Truman that Alison was alive, my passion was spent. I found I had no enthusiasm for the day, no energy. The search for Alison had stopped being fun, stopped being a game. It had become work, hard work at that, and I had begun to challenge the logic of it. Alison had not broken any laws, unless some overzealous prosecutor wanted to hang an abandonment rap on her—Cynthia had been right about that, too. And if her abrupt disappearance had made life difficult for Raymond Fleck and Irene Brown and Stephen Emerton and the rest, well, golly gee, that just broke my heart.
Still, I was taking money for it, wasn’t I? Four hundred dollars a day. And expenses. What was the meter at now? Ninety-six hundred? Something like that. I found myself wishing I was broke, that I needed the job, needed the money. At least that would have given me an excuse for dragging my sorry ass to the office to resume the chase. It would let me pretend that I wasn’t looking for Alison for personal reasons.
I stayed in bed until my headache shrieked for relief and the nausea in my stomach forced me into the bathroom.
The yellow Post-it note said that two packages were waiting for me at the office next door; the receptionist who worked there had promised the UPS man she’d mind them. She was young and attractive and wanted to have her way with me. I could tell by the way she called me “mister” and interrupted her typing only long enough to point to the packages.
One box contained the subscription list of Dog Universe magazine printed on mailing labels twenty to a page. The other held a floppy programmed with the complete mailing list for X-Country. X-Country had 447,000 readers, which seemed like a lot to me and I wondered if they padded their list for advertising purposes. Dog Universe had only ninety-three thousand. I checked both for Alison’s name, hoping she had been careless, hoping she had forwarded the publications to her new address. No such luck.
I started with Dog Universe, X-ing out every label with a man’s name, every label with an address located outside North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin—the states where she had traveled in the course of her business. It took me fifteen minutes to get through the As and another five before I paused at Michael Bettich, 4001 Capitol Street, #314, Deer Lake, Wisconsin.
It wasn’t the name that stopped me, it was the address. Deer Lake, Wisconsin. The same as Alison’s best friend, Deputy Gretchen Rovick. Then I assured myself, “Michael could be a woman’s name. What was the name of that actress who starred in The Waltons on TV? Michael Learned?”
I fired up my PC, loaded the X-Country disk, reminding myself that fifteen hundred and fifty-seven people live in Deer Lake, and it shouldn’t be surprising if one of them liked dogs. I quickly discovered that Michael Bettich, 4001 Capitol Street, #314, Deer Lake, Wisconsin, also liked to cross-country ski.
If you have a credit card, a mortgage, a car loan; if you’ve borrowed money from any business for any reason, you are listed with one of the major credit bureaus, probably all of them. Most of the information they’ve gathered on you, including your complete credit history, is restricted by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Which means not a helluva lot. The government claims it is cracking down on people who abuse the privacy laws, but there’s not much they can do about it. Still, conscientious fellow that I am, I try not to violate federal regulations unless I really, really need to. And this time I didn’t. The Federal Trade Commission ruled not too long ago that noncredit information such as name, address updates, DOB, social security number, etcetera, didn’t fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and it went online for people like me to access, for a price. And when I accessed Michael Bettich’s header information, I discovered: