Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [42]
It was a quick run—we were going against the traffic. Besides, Clancy drove about 50 percent past the limit, returning pages on his cell phone, concentrating all over the place. He pulled into the drive for the hotel, cut the engine.
“What’d you get?” he asked.
“Pair of Mercedes, just like you said. I couldn’t make out the years—I haven’t been able to do that since the sixties—but they looked pretty new.”
“Colors?” he asked, consulting his notebook.
“Black for the sedan, yellow for the little roadster.”
“Checks out,” he said. “Sedan purchased March of ’98; SLK, purchased May, same year. What did you get for mileage?”
“The sedan has thirty-five hundred and change, the roadster less than three.”
“Sure. Haven’t been driven for years.”
“The keys were in the ignition.”
“Yeah. Marushka probably goes out there, turns them over every once in a while, keeps them from going stale.”
Marushka, huh? I thought to myself. I’m no linguist, but I know the “ka” at the end of a Russian name means “little one.” I thought about the girl at the front desk of the hotel. Recalled something else Wolfe had told me about Clancy. He was divorced. And a major cock-hound. But all I said was, “I found something else, too.”
He looked a question at me. I unpeeled the label carefully, handed it over.
“Vancouver. I was there once for a tournament. It’s … Wait a minute, this isn’t Vancouver in Canada, it’s in Washington State.”
“Yeah.”
“And she had a whole roll of these labels?”
“Uh-huh. Probably printed them up herself, on a home computer. Pretty handy things to have if you’re remailing everything that comes in. They probably send everything back to her, too. That way, there’s a local postmark on everything.”
“You put it all back the way you—?” He caught my expression, cut himself off in mid-sentence. “Can you hang around another couple of days?”
“I’m in no hurry,” I told him.
The bar was in a part of Chicago called Uptown. Clancy was at a table with two other guys, one built like a bull, with “COP!” written all over his face, the other a young blond guy with Slavic cheekbones and the flat expression of a working thug. They both spent about a minute memorizing my face, not making any secret about what they were doing.
“See you later,” the big one said, as he got up to leave. He might have been talking to anyone at the table.
The younger one got up, too. He didn’t say a word.
“Friends of yours?” I asked Clancy.
“Good friends.”
“They both on the job?”
“Mike is. Zeffa was,” he said, explaining the pistol I’d seen in her purse. “Zak isn’t.”
“The kid? What’s he, between jobs?”
“He’s a writer,” Clancy said, pride strong in his voice. “In fact, both of them are.”
“They’re here gathering local color?”
“No,” cutting it off.
“It’s your car,” I told him. “And you’re driving.”
“Here’s what I got,” Clancy said, getting down to it. “The little boy’s mother reported him missing on June 29, 1990. His DOB’s April 4, 1986, so he’d just turned four. No signs of a ransom kidnap—and no note ever turned up. The parents were together, so it wasn’t one of those custody grabs. Whoever took him came right into the back of the house. Like with Polly Klaas, only nobody actually saw this one go down.”
“Or found a body.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Or the dirtbag who did it, either. None of the kid’s possessions were missing. You know how it works after that: they checked the kid’s friends, used the search-and-rescue dogs working off his scent, combed the maximum area a kid his age could travel by himself … everything. Finally, he went from missing to missing-and-presumed.”
“Presumed dead?”
“Not necessarily. But with no ransom note, no contact from anyone, and no body, we figured it for a sex-snatch. And that maybe the kid was still alive. Some of them turn up, even a lot of years later, like the Stayner kid out in California. If we haven’t found a body, the BOLOs stay out there for every confirmed abduction, no-clues disappearance. All of them. Doesn’t matter if they’d be adults by