Upstairs, the restaurant offices and an outdoor patio with heaters, a long grill, a bar, and several cabanas. We stood amid the cabanas, white-and-green-striped, with heavy canvas draperies you could close for privacy.
“Mr. Ford, I am not in the habit of discussing my guests with investigators of any kind. All I can tell you is what I told Darrel. A girl had dinner here on the patio two nights ago. A party of five. She looked like a picture Darrel’s deputy showed me on his phone. I’d never seen her before, here or anywhere else. They had dinner between seven and nine.”
“What name was the reservation under?”
A heavy stare. Assessing the damage to my face. “Darrel said the girl is in trouble,” said Yvette Gibson. “On the missing kids websites.”
I nodded. “She’s fourteen and bright. Challenging the status quo at home and school.”
“This girl didn’t look like an eighth grader,” said Yvette. “Expensive clothes. Makeup and lipstick, but not heavy. Carried herself well and seemed comfortable with her people. But she was by far the youngest one of the group.”
“Did you talk to any of them?”
“I did not.”
“Did you overhear any conversation?”
“They drew the privacy curtain after cocktails were served.”
“Did the girl drink?”
“A virgin Moscow Mule. I won’t tolerate underage service here. I looked at the check after Darrel’s man left.”
“May I see it?”
“No. I can’t do that kind of thing.”
I nodded. “They picked her up at a friend’s condo after lunch, Tuesday of last week. She hasn’t been home since. ‘They’ being two young men of questionable moral character. Dangerous men.”
The heavy stare again. “You’re not playing very fair, Mr. Ford. But maybe that’s your nature.”
“She’s up against something, and time is short.”
She sighed, shaded her eyes from the midday sun. “They used a corporate credit card. Signed by the man who made the reservation. Adam Revell.”
“He’s one of the girl’s acquaintances.”
“Might he have been the gentleman who did that to your face?”
“Which cabana?”
I followed her over. It was one of eight, its privacy curtains tied back and the tables and chairs neat and clean for the day’s first seating. We stood under the canopy and I pictured Daley and her SNR escorts.
“Middle chair, facing west,” said Yvette. “The woman beside her, three men across.”
In the shade of the canopy I called up the photo gallery on my phone, found the downloaded IvarDuggans pictures of Connor Donald, Eric Glassen, and Adam Revell. She identified Connor Donald and Revell as two of the three men in Daley’s party.
I found the Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry website photo of Pastor Reggie Atlas. “I know he wasn’t there that night, but...”
She took a long look, shaking her head. “He looks familiar, but I see hundreds of faces a week.”
I explained Atlas, his Cathedral by the Sea in Encinitas, his popular streaming sermons, his thousands of online followers.
“I go to Jah Love in El Cajon,” she said. “We’re lucky to get fifty people on any Sunday.”
On a long shot I found my downloads of the oddly old-fashioned family taking down the flag at Paradise Date Farm that evening.
Yvette Gibson swiped the screen with a slender finger, studied the image. Scrolled forward. Scrolled back.
“Yes. The couple,” she said. “They were dressed much nicer, and not wearing guns. Visibly, at least. Who are these people?”
I explained SNR the best I could: a private security company with accounts all over the country and ties to the Paradise Date Farm in the Imperial Valley, and the Cathedral by the Sea. Where, I pointed out, Daley Rideout had apparently attended at least once. Yvette handed my phone back.
“Mr. Ford? I have a thirteen-year-old girl. She’s looking for some kind of grown-up trouble, just like I was at her age. So much of it out there. This girl Daley. Maybe she’s looking for that kind of trouble. I’ll call you and Darrel if I see her again.”
I followed her downstairs and into the lobby. A frogman was in the aquarium, changing out a filter. Some of the fish fled in schools, others nosed closer to him with what looked like simple curiosity.
“I want you to tell me how this turns out,” said Yvette. “No matter how it breaks. You do that, Mr. Ford, I’ll buy us a drink and get us a quiet place to talk.”
I said I would.
Standing in the shade of the Blue Marlin awning, I wondered where our fun five had gone after leaving here. Was Daley free to go her own way? Or was she a willing captive?
I called Howard Wilkin, one of my acquaintances at the San Diego Union-Tribune. I’d helped him out with a story last year because I trusted him. A big story, biggest of the year for San Diego, if you measure in terms of life and death. We made thirty seconds of small talk. One of the things I like about reporters is they’re always in a hurry. He thought about my request for a moment, then said he’d get back to me with Reggie Atlas’s home address.
I called Darrel Walker, disappointedly unable to confirm that Atlas was at the Blue Marlin with Daley Rideout that night. He told me maybe we had the good pastor all wrong. Which meant that Penelope Rideout was an even better liar than I’d thought. Darrel told me to keep up the good work.
Back home, Burt was glued to Clevenger’s wasp-cam feed from Paradise Date Farm — nothing unusual going on there.
Then I called Penelope. No answer, so I left a message.
On my way to the truck, my phone rang. I figured Wilkin or Penelope, but I was wrong. Didn’t recognize the caller number. Sometimes you catch a break.
“Ford Investigations.”
“Mr. Ford? This is Alanis Tervalua. We talked last week at school about Daley?”
“What’s up?”
“Daley still won’t answer calls. She’s on all the missing-children sites. We want to talk to you again.”
24
I signed in at the security desk in the Monarch Academy office and talked briefly with Wayne Cates, who eyed my battle scars suspiciously but said nothing about them.
“Good news from the Rideout family?” he asked.
“We’re working on it.”
The girls and I sat at the same picnic table under the coral tree in the same September heat. I told them Daley had been seen at a restaurant in La Jolla two nights ago. They looked at each other when I said that. Then back to me, disbelief on their faces, as if the stakes had been raised when they weren’t looking.
“Everything we told you last week was the truth,” said Alanis.
“But we didn’t tell you everything,” said Carrie.
I waited, looking at them in turn. Alanis with a one-eyed stare from behind her shiny black hair. Carrie with her wide, green, seldom-blinking eyes.
“Okay,” said Alanis. “Daley was kind of with Nick, like we told you. And Nick was... murdered the same day Daley left here. So we know it wasn’t Nick that abducted her. But there was a secret guy that Daley had also been talking to. For maybe, like, a couple of months. While Nick and her were, like, together, sort of.”
“No,” said Carrie. “They’d been talking for three months when she first told us. But Daley had known him for years. Off and on. They were like ghosts flying through each other, she said.” She shrugged. “That was how she described it — like ghosts flying through each other.”
“But she swore us not to say anything about him,” said Alanis. “Not to anybody. She wouldn’t even tell us his name. Like we’d know him. Or like he was important.”
“She wouldn’t tell us how they met, either,” said Carrie. “But it wasn’t online, because her sister wouldn’t let her use her phone for that. Right? So we don’t know his name and we don’t know how they met.”