For Money or Mayhem

{25} The Light of My Life

About eleven-thirty, Andi slipped out of bed and started feeling around for her clothes. I turned on a bedside light and just watched her beautiful body as she gathered her things together, apparently in no big hurry to dress. She turned and smiled at me as I watched her.

“Do you have to leave?”

“Curfew,” she said. “What’s fair for the daughter is fair for the…”

“The mom,” I finished. “In every sense of the word except biological you are her mother and always will be.”

“Yes. But I’ll have to tell her now. Soon.” I slid out of bed and stood with her in the tiny pool of light. I helped her on with her clothes. It was a lot more difficult than helping her off with them. I finally gave up as we laughed over tangled underwear and then began pulling my own clothes on. “You don’t need to get up.”

“What would your daughter think if your boyfriend didn’t even walk you home after a hot date? Besides, it gives me five more minutes with you.” We left my apartment and went down the back stairs across the alley from her door. She unlocked her door and turned to kiss me goodnight when the hall lights came on.

“Well, you’re finally home,” Cali said from inside. She came down the hall wearing Andi’s plush robe and fuzzy slippers with her hair in curlers. “I guess I can go to bed now that I know you’re safe.” It took us a moment and then all three of us broke up.

“You don’t really wait up for her like that, do you?” I asked Andi.

“Not like that! What would her date think if he saw her mother looking like that?”

“Well, maybe I overdid it with the curlers,” Cali laughed. “Anyway, I’m going to bed now so you two can kiss goodnight. Just don’t stand out there on the porch where all the neighbors can see you.”

“’Night, Cali.”

“’Night. Love you, Mom. Love you, Dag.” She kissed each of us on the cheek and went back down the hall. I stepped in far enough that I wasn’t on the porch, but we kept the door open.

“See? That was much more effective than if you had come home alone. She’d have been so disappointed.”

“I think she likes you.”

“I’m glad. I intend to be around for a long time.”

“I love you, Dag.” We kissed.

“You are my heart’s desire, Andi.” I looked at her for a long moment and then retraced my steps back to my apartment.

Five hours earlier, I’d been so exhausted I couldn’t keep my eyes open. After an evening spent in the arms of my lover, I was so energized I could scarcely sit. I had work to do. My little girl’s friend was missing. I needed to find Mel.

There were 4,173 correlations that my search and compare algorithms had revealed. That sounded like a lot, but when compared to the fifteen million results a standard Google search yields, it seemed manageable. I plunged into the life of a rebellious teen and was sucked into the slimy dregs of America.

It was a neighborhood—if you could call it that—in which bright neon lit up a thousand doorways with promises that paled against the reality inside. Crossing any threshold could result in loss of money, reputation, or civil liberty. I could defend myself against the threats of these commercial venues. It wasn’t that I could walk with impunity anywhere I chose, but I was well-protected. It took more than a casual touch to cripple me.

More dangerous were the darkened alleys between various strip shows, sex shops, and offers to get laid tonight by imaginary bored housewives. Drugs, guns, sex in every variety were offered by people with no front door presence. Unwilling organ donors wailed in the distance as their bloody body parts were offered to the highest bidder. And as ineffectual as policing the district was, any alley could hide a cop waiting to arrest patrons for the least suggestion of solicitation.

I had new leads to follow up now that I was in Nowhere Land. I started by entering a reverse phone booth and feeding the list of numbers into the device. In minutes it started feeding back a list of names, addresses, marital status, spouses, children, and even a history of where each man had lived for the past thirty years. There were a few people smart enough to use an Internet phone service that yielded less ready information, but the vast majority had solicited favors from a fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old girl using their personal cell phones. The world was filled with the illusion of privacy.

I focused on the numbers in the same area code and when I had addresses, I narrowed my search to those who were within the residential and business community of downtown Seattle. I walked through their neighborhoods tacking up posters where their friends and neighbors could see them with a picture of Mel and the message, “This seventeen-year-old girl is missing. Reward for information.” I used my own Internet phone number connected to a message collection service that I book for a month at a time. I included an email address routed through one of the adult services websites. I didn’t expect any of the men on my list to respond. As soon as they realized the woman they’d solicited was a minor, they’d flee the sites where they met her. But it was always possible that someone else in their more respectable neighborhood might have spotted her, especially if she’d been seen with one of their neighbors.

I put up posters around her school community and the various sports groups she participated in. It was always possible that her disappearance had nothing to do with her activities on the adult forums and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I even posted at her church. Somehow, I didn’t think her parents were the type who would alert their critical-thinking religious community about their wayward daughter. They’d be surprised, but there really wasn’t anything they could do about it.

And finally, I contacted her cellular system. Her parents had disconnected her cell phone. I wanted to know the instant it was reconnected or reassigned. That took some tricky hacking as the big cell systems don’t freely give out that information. I had to settle for attaching a flag to her phone number so that it would notify me if a call was made in or out.

In the old days, detectives did this footwork literally on foot. By sunrise, I’d covered more virtual territory than Sam Spade could have imagined existed. I’d posted notices on the message boards of every ‘friend’ Mel had on the Internet as far as I could tell. There was no question in my mind that she could run away and hide if she truly wanted to, but if she had been taken, she would become a hot property quickly.

My email started lighting up at about seven o’clock with messages. Most were innocuous ping-backs, testing my spam filters. Nothing related directly to Mel’s disappearance. I started seeing one message appear from several directions at once. At first I thought it was one of those phishing schemes that start off, “I couldn’t believe it was you in this video. ROFLMAO.” Usually those were followed by a link to a porn video that demanded an account password in order to view the footage. But this link kept appearing with a caption that began trending on some of the popular sites. “Unsung superhero rescues woman. You won’t believe this guy!” The link led to a legitimate video sharing site and when I finally decided to follow it, I was stunned.

The video clip of less than thirty seconds showed an oncoming bus, a woman being pushed into the street, and a guy jumping out to catch her and swing her to safety before the bus mirror hit him in the head. It showed me on Thursday morning.

I was still in my jeans and sweater with a Gore-Tex jacket and a baseball cap protecting my eyes from the morning rain as I swung off the bus at Third and Union. I’d watched the video a dozen times—maybe twenty. I still couldn’t figure out how I’d moved the way I did or what had alerted me to the fact that there was a danger just behind me. Granted the video compression had certainly dropped some frames from real time, but even slowing it down, most of the action was blurred.

But one thing was clear: There was a fourth person involved in the incident.

I hadn’t been following the case closely. I knew that if it came to trial, I’d be called as a witness. I would be unable to provide any details because the action of pushing her off the sidewalk occurred behind me. She had accused her boyfriend and he had been arrested and was out on bail with a restraining order against being within fifty feet of her. The video showed that it clearly wasn’t the boyfriend who pushed her, but it didn’t show a clear image of the person who had.

I forwarded the link to the police detective in charge of the case, pointing out that the video cleared both the boyfriend and me. It was clear that the squabbling couple had turned their heads away from each other—her toward the street and he toward the sidewalk—when a person directly behind the couple pushed her. The boyfriend was too far away and facing away from his girlfriend to have been the one doing the pushing. He turned as I moved and the culprit had slid past on the right. The video ended before the perp had come fully into view, though. I needed to find the rest of that footage and in order to do that, I needed to know where the camera was that took it so I could request the rest of the sequence.

I was only half a block from the EFC office when I stopped to measure out where the accident had happened. As best I could tell, I was in the right place. I waited there, just listening and trying to put myself back in that space. I turned to see an approaching bus.

Damn! They move like hell down that street until they screech to a stop at the shelter in front of the office. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed! I looked at the tail of the bus as it stopped to pick up passengers. That gave me a reference point. I pulled out my tablet and replayed the video, trying to reverse the perspective and look up at where the camera was. Yes. The perspective was from several feet above the sidewalk which confirmed my suspicion that it was not caught on a cell phone by someone at street level.

A few years ago when I was complaining to my cell phone carrier that I kept losing calls, I started observing where I had good service and where I didn’t. A little research showed me what a cellular tower looked like. I started looking around me when I had good service and gradually became aware of cell towers within my line of sight. They weren’t always towers. They were stuck to the sides of buildings downtown, on rooftops in the suburbs. Huge towers were located every few miles along the freeway. I suddenly started seeing cell towers everywhere. And when my service started to improve, I could almost always identify a new tower within sight.

The same was true now. As I looked up I spotted a black glass globe hanging from what would otherwise look like a street light. I recognized it for no other reason than the ceiling of a casino is peppered with the things. Each one contains a camera—some static and focused on a single table or game, some panning from side to side like the cameras inside EFC. This black globe hung off the wall of the EFC office building. As I looked down the block, I saw four more exterior cameras. I turned around in place. Jutting up off the nearest traffic signal was a white bar with a camera on top. In front of the bank, there was another series of cameras. At the entrance to a parking garage across the street, a camera was pointed at incoming autos. Even under the awnings of Benaroya Hall, there were security cameras. A camera across the street and fairly high on the building looked like it was pointed at the bus stop. A matching camera was positioned opposite.

I wasn’t sure there was anyplace I could walk downtown and not be caught on a security camera.

The one I wanted access to, though, was one I could actually get to. It was part of the EFC security system.

My phone buzzed as I was walking up the street holding my tablet in front of me recording the locations of the various cameras I saw on the built-in video recorder. The unique chime I set up told me it was Andi.

“Hello, darling.”

“Ooo. I like hearing that.”

“I like saying it. Did you sleep well?”

“I’ve slept alone all my life. Why does it suddenly seem so lonely in my bed?”

“Mmm. I’d love to take up residence in part of it.”

“You’d want to be in the same part as me, though.”

“That’s true enough.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m downtown at the office. I’ve got something really remarkable to show you.”

“Really? Sounds like a big break-through. Why don’t you come for lunch?”

“Lunch? Aren’t you teaching?”

“I completely forgot that today the college is closed for a symposium that’s occupying every corner of the campus. I have the day off, and Cali gets off school early today. Come on. How does lunch with your two favorite girls sound?”

“Absolutely wonderful! I can be there by eleven-thirty. Is that okay?”

“Make it noon. Cali needs some supplies for a project she’s working on. We’re going out as soon as she gets home.”

“Great. I’ll see you at noon.”

“Oh Dag…”

“What is it, Andi?”

“I love you.”

“You’re the light of my life, Andi.”

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