“News to me.” He shrugged, as if to say, So what if I don’t know who works here? “Is there something I can do for you?”
“I’m trying to find my daughter,” I said. “Sydney Blake. She’s been in here a couple of times in the last week, I think. We’ve been going out of our minds, her mother and I, wondering what’s happened to her. Hang on, I’ve got a picture.”
I reached into my jacket pocket for reprints of the photos of Sydney that were on the website. I handed a sampling of them to the man, who glanced at them quickly and then put them on his desk.
“Never seen her,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Len,” he said.
“Len, would you mind just taking another look?”
He gave the shots another cursory glance and said, “We get a lot of kids through here, you know. It’s possible she’s been around, but I don’t recognize her.”
“You here all the time?” I asked.
“Nope. So maybe she was here when I was off. How did you hear that she’s been in here?”
I didn’t want to tell him that Yolanda had tipped me off. She might have violated privacy rules by getting in touch. I was betting one of the reasons runaways felt comfortable coming here was that it was understood the management wasn’t in the habit of ratting them out to their parents.
So instead of answering directly, I said, “There was a tip to the website I set up when my daughter went missing. That she might have been here. So then I was in touch with Yolanda Mills.”
“Okay,” Len said.
“Has Yolanda gone home for the day?”
“Like I said, I don’t know her.”
“Is this her day off? Does she work a different shift?”
“What’s the name again?”
“Yolanda Mills.”
Len had a blank look on his face. “And she works here? At this shelter?”
“That’s what she told me,” I said.
“You spoke to her?”
“Yes. By email, and over the phone,” I said. I was getting a strange tingling at the back of my neck.
“Can you give me a second?” Len got up from behind the desk and went through a door that led down a dark green hallway dotted with notices that had been taped directly to the wall. I saw him go into a room halfway down the hall. He was in there no more than twenty seconds, then came back.
“We got nobody working here by that name,” he said.
“That’s not possible,” I said, feeling my anxiety level go up a notch. “I spoke to her. Who were you talking to back there?”
“Lefty.” My look must have told him I thought he was jerking me around. “Morgan. She’s the boss. We just call her Lefty. You want to talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“Great. She loves interruptions.”
He led me down the hall, stuck his head in the doorway, and said, “Guy wants to talk to you, Lefty.”
She was nearly hidden behind a desk stacked with paper-stuffed folders. Forties, probably, although the thin gray streaks in her brown hair and the wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses suggested to me that she might be older. A blue long-sleeved sweater hung off her thin frame, and when she stood up I could see that she’d cinched her belt tight to keep her jeans, a couple of sizes too large, from falling off her.
“Yeah?” she said.
“I’m Tim Blake,” I said, extending my right hand. Instead of returning the gesture with her own right hand, she stuck out her left. She had no right arm. The right sweater sleeve, hanging empty, was tucked into a pocket. I was glad I hadn’t called her Lefty.
“Morgan Donovan,” she said. “This is my empire.” She waved her hand majestically at the chaos that was her desk. “You’re looking for somebody?”
“Two people, actually,” I said. “My daughter, Sydney Blake. And a woman who works here. Yolanda Mills.”
“Nope.”
“Excuse me?”
“No one by that name works here.”
“She told me she worked at Second Chance. Is there another drop-in place with this name?”
“Maybe in some parallel universe,” Morgan said. “But we’re the only one in Seattle.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Maybe you got the name wrong. She works for some other shelter. God knows the city is full of them.”
“No, I’m sure I have it right,” I said. I put the pictures of Syd on top of one of the folders. “This is my daughter, Sydney Blake. Yolanda Mills said she’d seen her here. Twice.”
Morgan gave the pictures a more thorough examination than Len had. “I’m good with faces,” she said. “But this girl, she’s not familiar. She’s a looker. If I’d seen her, I’d have remembered her. So would Len.” She rolled her eyes. “Especially Len.”
“But you’re back here in the office,” I said. “She could have come in and you wouldn’t have seen her.”
She nodded. “Yup,” she said. “But if there was a Yolanda Mills working for me, that I’d know. I sign the checks.”
“Maybe she’s a volunteer. Do you have volunteers here?”