Jefferson Parker
Then She Vanished
IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, MARY CAROLINE HOPPE
One
Lately I’ve been turning over some advice my mother gave me when I was eleven. Roland, she said, you need three things to be happy: something to do, something to look forward to, and someone to love. My mother isn’t a sentimental person and I believed her. Still do. Once, I had all three of those things going in my life. Then, my someone to love was swallowed by the dark Pacific, taking with her my something to look forward to, and most of my something to do. This was some years ago. We don’t heal stronger in the broken places, but we do heal. I’m a private investigator. You need certain qualities for my kind of work, such as being mostly sober, alert, and mission driven. Durability helps, too: I was once a marine and once a deputy and am forever a Ford. I can take care of myself and I am not above revenge.
Most private investigators you’ve heard of were born of simpler times, when the world was noir and the streets were mean. But as you know, more than the streets are mean. Schools and churches, synagogues and mosques, casinos and nightclubs. Our republic of violence. A gun in every hand and a million camps of grievance. Fresh menace in the air. We PIs have changed with the times. We’re a tougher crew these days because we have to be.
Even without our afternoon appointment, I would have recognized Dalton Strait when he came through the door of my office.
We had both fought in the First Battle of Fallujah, Iraq. April 2004. Some of the darkest days of that long and wasteful war. But we never met over there. Different battalions. I knew of his decoration for valor in combat, and later learned that he’d lost half his leg to an IED, but that also wasn’t why I knew his face.
Now Dalton Strait (R), 82nd California State Assembly District, limped across the wooden floor with his wry, TV-tested smile, his wing-tipped prosthetic foot clomping heavily on the worn hardwood floor. A wrinkled navy suit and a worn brown briefcase in one hand. He looked like a salesman on his last call of the day.
We shook hands and he sat across the desk from me, setting the briefcase on the floor. Full face, blue eyes, thick brown hair. The suit looked expensive and fit well. White shirt, a red-striped tie.
“Nice office,” he said.
“Not really.”
“No. But we have a lot in common.”
I told him I’d followed his political career.
“I should have hit you up for campaign money. November’s just six months away.”
“I hear it’s going to be a close election,” I said.
Strait shrugged, gave me a blue-eyed inspection. “Then I’ll put you down for a grand. That’ll get out three thousand more mailers. They’re nice, three-color and glossy. You’re right, the election is going to be close. My opponent is cuter than I am, and she’s outspending me four to one. I love representing the North San Diego County. I love this little Fallbrook.”
He nodded at the window toward Fallbrook’s Main Avenue, a quaint street in a small town in the most populous state in the union. Part of his 82nd district. Fallbrook is old-fashioned, but evolving with the times. Norman Rockwell with occasional shadows. Rich and poor live together here. We try to be race tolerant. Conservative territory sprinkled with liberal outposts. And plenty of characters. Originally founded dry, there are still many more churches than bars. Classic cars sail the winding roads, grand as yachts. We grow the best avocados on earth, and bill Fallbrook as the avocado capital of the world. Don’t you forget it.
In fact I’d known of the Strait family since the year I moved here after Fallujah and became a deputy. The Straits were long and well-known to the sheriffs — a plainly visible line of scofflaws and small-bore criminals fired into California by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. They’d settled in an East County of few people, sparse law enforcement, rugged mountains, rock-heaped hills, and low desert. Pulled themselves up from poverty, made their runs at the American Dream. Their present-day patriarch was Dalton’s grandfather Virgil, a retired personal injury lawyer turned judge who’d been convicted decades ago for taking bribes. Dalton’s father, who’d founded the local Better Burger fast-food chain, had been wounded during an armed robbery of his flagship store in El Centro twenty-one years ago, and remained bedridden ever since. Last I’d heard, Dalton’s younger sister, Tola, was running a string of almost legal marijuana dispensaries in and around San Diego, while his older brother, Kirby, had just finished prison time on fraud and tax evasion charges.
Dalton turned from the window to me, used his hands to lift and cross his plastic leg over the flesh-and-bone one. A silent flinch.
“I was brought up to believe that a good PI always has a bottle in his office somewhere,” he said.
“You were brought up well.”
Bottle in the drawer, old-fashioned glasses by the coffeemaker. “RF” etched into them, set of four, a birthday gift to a happy husband from a happy wife. Once upon a time. Bourbon neat with a small splash of water. We tapped glasses and I sat back down.
We talked about the Padres, the drought, the fires, and — briefly — the battle we’d shared. U.S. forces in Fallujah numbered just over two thousand but we managed to come up with a few names in common. Dalton had seen the burned Blackwater employees hanging from the bridge over the Euphrates and the anger was still in his voice. I had arrived a week later, and done a lot of door-to-door clearing of homes, looking for insurgents hiding among the friendlies. A buddy had bled out on me in a Fallujah doorway. His name was Ernie Avalos. Dalton had spent his tour on Humvee patrols, which, I remembered, was how he’d earned his Silver Star. And later the Purple Heart, when the IED took his leg.
Then came the long moment of silence between combat vets, as our memories tailed back into their holes.
“The reason I’m here,” he said, “is that Natalie is missing. My wife. As of Tuesday, two days ago. The only things I know for sure are gone are her and her car. Maybe some clothes and personal things. She has lots of stuff so it’s hard to tell. She hasn’t come home or returned my calls. No action on her credit cards. No one I’ve contacted has seen or heard from her.”
The last time Dalton had talked to Natalie was Monday night, in bed. He had flown to Sacramento early Tuesday morning; Natalie was due at work at eleven a.m. but didn’t show and didn’t call in. She sold BMWs at the Escondido dealership.
Dalton had already talked to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, whose jurisdiction covered the Straits’ semi-rural residence southeast of here. Due to his status, Dalton had been immediately introduced to the Special Enforcement Detail. He had not filed a report yet because he didn’t want negative publicity and didn’t believe that the sheriffs would aggressively investigate so soon after her disappearance. The Special Enforcement Detail said that if Natalie had not been heard from in the next forty-eight hours, she would become a high-profile priority. They gave Dalton the usual assurances that missing spouses almost always return within a week. This had pissed Dalton off but he’d held his temper.
“So I came to you,” he said. “I want you to find her and bring her home. Now. Not two days from now. Not a week from now. She could be in danger. Abducted. Her car could be in a ditch. I know you’re good at this. You’ve been mixed up in some heavy stuff lately and you always come out on top.”
I’d come out of some heavy stuff but I wasn’t sure about on top. My ribs and legs still hurt, though less.
“Has she done anything like this before?”
Dalton sipped the bourbon and looked away from me, out toward Main Avenue again.
“Fourteen months ago she took off in her car and went incommunicado for three days,” he said. “Called me from Las Vegas, disoriented and afraid and something north of forty thousand dollars down. She’d been gambling and shopping. I hired a Vegas PI to keep her safe until I could get there. A well-known and very expensive La Jolla shrink examined her. Said she’d suffered a psychotic break. After tests and some long interviews with each of us, he pronounced Natalie bipolar. Something had likely triggered the manic phase flameout in Vegas. Family helped us out with the money, but that diagnosis changed our lives. Nothing has been the same. Her condition hovers over everything we do. Hovers over the reelection campaign. We’ve kept it quiet. Natalie is great about taking her meds. Flattens her out a little, but no dramatic relapses, until now. If, in fact, this is another break.”