“Some. But none by that name.”
I took out a slip of paper on which I’d written the shelter’s address, my flight info, and several phone numbers, including Yolanda’s. “I’ve got her number right here.”
Morgan asked me to read it out to her. “That’s not the shelter number,” she said.
“It’s her cell,” I said. “I called this number last night and talked to her. She said she helped with the food orders here, that she was out all the time picking up groceries.”
Morgan Donovan just looked at me.
“Hang on,” I said, got out my cell, flipped it open, and punched in the number. “I’ll get her on the phone and you can talk to her yourself.”
“Why the hell not,” she said tiredly. “It’s not like I have anything else to do.”
I let it ring a dozen times, thinking that eventually it would go to message, but it didn’t. I ended the call, then immediately tried the number again. I let it go another dozen rings, then snapped the phone shut.
Morgan said, “You don’t look so good.”
TWELVE
I WAS HAVING A DéJà VU MOMENT. First Syd’s not working where she says she is. Now the mysterious Yolanda.
“You want to sit down?” Morgan said.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. My legs were rubbery, my stomach was doing a slow somersault. “Where the hell is she?” I said, more to myself than the woman sitting behind the desk.
Morgan sat down, leaned back in her chair, and sighed tiredly. “You might as well fill me in.”
So I did. Syd going missing. The hotel. The car. Then, a hit on the website I’d set up from a woman claiming to have seen her in Seattle.
“And she said she worked for us,” Morgan said. “That’s some story. Sounds like a scam. Maybe some kid, jerking you around.”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t sound like a kid, and she didn’t ask me for anything. Didn’t want a reward.” Wheels were turning. “If you knew someone here was sending tips to parents, telling them their kids were here, would that be against the rules?”
“Big-time,” she said. “We’d like nothing more than for these kids to get back together with their mothers and fathers, but some of those moms and dads don’t deserve to have them back. You got no idea the kind of crap a lot of these kids have had to put up with. Not that they’re all angels. Seventy percent of them, I’d probably kick them out myself if they were mine. But they’re not all trouble. Some of these girls, when their stepdads weren’t using them for punching bags, they were trying to get into their pants. We got kids out there whose parents are drunks and drug dealers. We had a girl here last year, her mom was pimping her out. She was getting a little too old in the tooth to do it herself and figured her daughter could take over the family business.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah, well, he seems to be M.I.A. at the moment. We had a kid here last week, his skin was a mess, like it had all peeled off and was growing back on again, especially his face. Anything that wasn’t protected. His dad was pissed he hadn’t taken a shower when he’d told him to. So he hauls the kid out to the driveway and takes a power washer to him. You ever feel the pressure of one of those things? You can strip paint with them.”
I said nothing.
“So we’re not exactly going to put a call into mommies and daddies like that and say hey, guess what, we found your little angel, why don’t you come on down and take them home.”
“I get it.”
“These kids trust us. They have to be able to trust us or we can’t help them.”
I was thinking. “So then, if you did have someone on staff who was doing this, who was trying to reunite kids with their parents, and you found out, they’d be fired.”
“Very likely.”
“So maybe whoever called me works here but didn’t use her real name.”
Morgan Donovan considered that a moment. “Why would someone have to give you a name at all? She could have gotten in touch with you anonymously.”
“I have an email address for her,” I said.
Morgan asked for it and wrote it down on the back of an envelope.
“There’s no one here with that address that I know of. A Hotmail address ain’t exactly that hard to get.”
“I know,” I said.
“So like I said, maybe someone’s yanking your chain,” she said. When I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, she said, “Wanna coffee or something? I’d offer you something stronger, but it’s a church foundation that tops up our budget and they take a dim view of my keeping scotch in my bottom drawer. Not that there isn’t a bottle in there right now. We’ve got a pot of coffee that’s been going continuously since 1992. Want some of that?” My face must have given away my reluctance. “A Diet Coke, then?”
I said sure.