“Anything happen last night?” Mike peeled the lid and gave the coffee a sip, trying to look normal.
“Nope; nothing going on. I’ve been driving by. She arrived at the house between nine and ten, lights went out before midnight. Hey, I got the bulletin for the missing guy – Lennox Palmer, right? He worked at the same place as your vic, yeah? Social Services in Pierce County?”
Mike nodded. Drummond marveled, seemed ready to say something else, thought better of it, and shut his lips.
Mike’s phone vibrated on the seat of the car. He saw Eddie Roth’s number when he leaned in.
“Hey,” he said to the cop. “Sorry – gotta take this.”
Drummond dipped his head in a nod and said, “No problem; good luck,” and walked back to his SUV.
Mike answered. “Eddie? What’ve you got?”
“Mike. I was told you were an early riser…”
“Yeah, I’m up. What did you find?”
“Well, we’re still looking. I heard this was ten months ago, Mike, and there’s been a winter.”
“Good – snow and ice to preserve any evidence. This guy brought her out there, dead or unconscious. She could’ve been bleeding, leaving a trail, something.”
“We’re looking, Mike. We’ve been through bogs, marshes, rivers…”
“Seen any grouse?”
Roth paused then said with a smile in his voice, “Oh yeah. Spruce grouse; saw some warblers, couple of black-backed woodpeckers.”
“What about the boardwalk?”
“Well, no. You gotta have a permit from the Conservancy to do the boardwalk. Spring Pond Bog is all a protected preserve. I mean, I can ask for a list of permit holders, I don’t know if they’ll go for it, but…”
“Do that,” Mike said. “But you’re right – the body wasn’t within the boundaries, just outside. What else is around there?”
“Well, not much. It’s several miles back to Tupper. There’s a few homes, a cemetery over on Haymeadow Road; that’s about it. Anyone coming in with a… I mean, you think this guy was carrying the victim, right? My guess is he pulls off on Kildare Road, you know, pretty rough in the spring, but by fall the frost heaves are all smoothed out – so that’s where we’ve been looking. Beer cans, soda cans, some snack wrappers… all that’s being given to your people. As far as broken branches, signs of a trail, I mean, you got deer runs in there, you got a lot of wildlife activity, Mike. I can’t tell you I found any blood.”
“I hear you,” Mike said. “Thanks, Eddie. Keep me posted.”
He rang off, crossed the road toward Bobbi’s apartment, turned instead and walked to the church. Went in the main entrance, slipped into the bathroom near the sacristy, took a leak, and splashed some water on his face. He lingered a moment at the back of the church, gazed over the empty pews, the different Biblical moments depicted in the big, stained-glass windows.
Back outside, the rising sun was burning off the residual rainwater. The first motorcycles sounded somewhere on the road behind him, the one connecting Lake Haven and Placid. Second and final week of the Empire State Rally. Afterwards, the bikers would be going back to their lives, picking up a hammer, putting on a tie, maybe counting up coins for whatever little drug run they’d had going on.
* * *
Bobbi looked out to check the weather and saw Mike Nelson coming down the sidewalk from the church, coffee cup in hand. He crossed the street and out of sight.
She stepped over Rachel, who’d managed to work her way off the mattress and onto the floor, like a little kid. No sense in waking her just yet. Rachel had been distraught, unable to settle down, unwilling to go home and be alone, terrified for Lennox. And for herself.
Bobbi quickly finished dressing, descended to the first floor, and stepped out into the sunshine. Mike saw her coming and got out of the car. He was disheveled, his hair sticking up in the back, circles under his eyes.
“Hey,” he said.
They stood together off the street and she decided not to bring up that it clearly looked like he’d slept in his car, but she asked him if everything was okay.
“Yeah, everything’s…” He seemed to chase around for the right words. “Came by to talk to you. How are you holding up?”
“I’m good,” she said. “Rachel slept over. We spent all day yesterday looking for Lennox. Went to his mother’s house, checked all the hospitals in 100 miles, everyone he knew. No one has… No one knows anything.”
Mike made a vigorous nod. “We’re looking. And that’s part of what I want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about Lennox. You got time for a quick bite?”
She hadn’t eaten anything besides ibuprofen yesterday. “Let me just grab my phone and wallet, leave a note for Rachel.”
* * *
They ordered breakfast from a downtown café, took their egg sandwiches to the municipal beach, unoccupied this early but for a teenage boy fishing off the dock. They sat at a bench beyond the sand, Mike not saying anything, so she opened the conversation. “I heard about a body that was found in the woods, Mike. The rumors are, a woman who used to work with DSS. Here, Pierce County.”
Mike squinted in the sun shining off the lake. “I wish I could say something comforting. What I can say is that we have several leads on this thing, and one of them is about to break wide open any minute.” Then he said, “I’m just not sure which one.”
“With respect, Mike, it’s not your job to comfort me. I’m not your daughter.”
He gave her another look, seemed to weigh her words, and said, “No, you’re not. But I know this has been tough, and I wish I had been able to give you more definitive answers. What could help, though, is if you could clear something up for me.”
“If I can I absolutely will.”
“We’re going to pull Lennox’s old files, have a look at everything, same thing we went through with Harriet Fogarty. We were able to take a warrant and get into Harriet’s stuff because of what happened. With Lennox it’s a bit trickier getting into his files because there’s no evidence of a crime.”
“You need me to say something? Talk to the DA with you?”
“What would help me is if you can answer a question, point blank if you can. How good is the record-keeping at DSS?”
She felt some relief, worried he was going to ask her a more pointed question about her ongoing cases, or say something about Jamie. “Well, that’s a good question. But I’m new. So I can only tell you what I’ve seen over six months. And I mean it’s supposed to have been improved, but we still write most everything down first, plug it into the system later. That hasn’t changed.”
She looked from Mike to the water. “I’m sure Jessica would disagree, but from what I’ve seen, the record-keeping is not perfect. We lose files, lose kids, lose details. The case managers have dozens and dozens of cases, and we forget to document things. We just do, sometimes.”
“You’re human.”
“We’re overworked and underpaid, and the kids just keep coming.”
“Lot of turnover?”
“Oh, the turnover in this field is phenomenal. Each child, you know, they’ll often have several case managers during their experience in dependency. If you were to see a typical case file, it would be inches thick, with seven different handwriting samples, missing pages, documents hanging out the sides. Well, I guess you have seen them.”
“I have.”
“There’s this one girl – she was Harriet’s case – ten months old when she got placed in foster care, and four years old when she was adopted by the same foster parents. But during that time she had eight different case managers, four different child advocacy attorneys, and three different judges. Dozens of support workers that took her to visits, handled her staffings. Luckily, only one foster home. Have you been able to see the foster care placements on these cases? What does that take? Subpoena?”
“Yeah. We did. We got the list of CPS adoption actions.”
“So then you know, even if law enforcement can find a certain file and get access to it, it’s still not easy to figure out where the child was on any given day.”