Without a Whisper

I have always preferred to interview people independently. When people are together, they can take cues from each other and hold a fake story easier than me picking them apart separately. I'm not a cop anymore. The two don't show reluctance in speaking with me. Quite the opposite. They seem somewhat overjoyed that someone finally cares about what happened to their friend.

"Was something about Katie found?" Angela asks first. I nod.

"Her gun," I say, and they look at each other. They knew about it. "Did you know she brought one with her?" I know they know, but I still need to ask.

"We did," Angela says for the two of them.

"Why did she run away?" I ask. They look to each other again. Not to psychically discuss how much they tell me, but what to start with. "I'm not a cop. Any crime that was committed is likely well past statute of limitations anyway."

"Katie was pregnant," Leland says. Nothing in the original case had any indication of that. Her parents never mentioned it. Not even the women sitting across from me.

"Was she leaving to get an abortion?" I ask. It's a dumb question, because in this state it wouldn't have mattered. Dumb questions need to be asked right along with the smart ones.

"No, her parents were trying to force her to get one," Angela says. "She didn't want that. I even told her to get one, but she was adamant for some reason. I wasn't even aware she was dating someone or was with someone just one time. I believed she would have told me something about that, but she never did. She never told me who the father was."

"Me neither," Leland says while shaking her head.

"So, you helped her run away?" I ask, and they look at each other, then nod in unison. "Why didn't you help the police?"

"She didn't want to be found. We helped because it sounded more like she was asking us to help her run away from someone in particular. Her parents maybe, but she never told us who. It was like she was ashamed of it."

"That sounds like a better reason to help the police," I say, and they look down into their laps. They were teenagers in over their heads, and now realize what I just said was what they should have done in retrospect. "That aside, how'd you guys pull off the My Cousin Caper?"

Their heads snap upright. They don't have to say they did it for me to know they did. They're trying to hold back smiles now. It is a little funny to finally get caught.

"What prompted that flash of brilliance?" I ask, matching their smiles. If I show it's funny too, they're more likely to brag about it.

"That was my idea," Angela says after a moment to remember what I said about statute of limitations. "Katie didn't have her own car, and she couldn't take her parents because it would have been noticed right away. Her parent's cars were expensive. They had a tracker in them in case someone stole it."

"Why the Buick?" I ask. "Why not just take the Pontiac? Why take the chance with the swap?"

"Because only the exterior of the Pontiac was finished. It could handle around the block, but not an extended drive," Angela explained. "My dad was a reservist in the Army at the time. He was on active orders deployed to the Middle East, and my mother never went in the garage. No one would notice the car was stolen for at least six months. I worked on the car with my dad, so I knew my fingerprints would be incidental. I'd be a suspect, but they could never prove it. Who'd pursue charges if they could? My dad?"

"You swapped the Pontiac with the Buick, because the latter could make the drive?" I ask, and they nod in unison again.

"That was the plan," Leland said. "I figured my dad would notice eventually. Maybe a week but give Katie a decent head start. We didn't figure it'd take him two months."

"But because he swears up and down he noticed immediately, the police could never figure it out because Katie was two months gone. A detective did talk to us, but he was trying to make us admit it was a prank. When the Buick never turned up, he started to believe something else and never spoke to us again," Angela says. "I had never even heard of the movie My Cousin Vinny until the detective brought it up."

"You should watch it, it's great," I say, and she lets me know she did shortly afterwards. "Katie stole some stuff from her parents to finance the trip?" I ask, and they do their nodding routine again. "What about the gun?"

"Young girl, pregnant, traveling alone. Likely running away from someone she feared," Leland explains, and I nod. Makes sense. It was more of a comfort. Better to have it and not need to use it, than do need it and not have it.

"How far along was she?" I ask.

"Not sure, she never really told us much about it. She was starting to show a little. So, maybe, two and a half, three months," Angela guesses.

"Now I have the how she did it. I still need the why and where," I say, and they look at each other, then shrug. "Come on."

"She didn't tell us. She said she'd contact us after she got there. Let us know she arrived safely. She probably assumed we'd be asked, so never told us," Angela says. Katie wanted them to have plausible deniability. Her eyes start to moisten with tears. "She never called."

"What else did she bring with her?" I ask. I don't let myself get hung up on certain questions. I can always come back. "Besides the gun and the money from the pawn shops?"

"Some clothes," Leland says, trying to think.

"Records," Angela says, and sniffs hard to clear her snot.

"Records?" I ask.

"Like music. Vinyl. Katie collected them."

"How many?"

"A dozen maybe. She carried them in a plastic milk crate," Angela says, the last part of her sentence distorted from her phlegm.

"If you had to guess where she would go," I say, circling back around to repeat questions I don't have satisfactory answers for.

"Maybe her real dad who lived in upstate New York," Angela said.

"Wait..." I say, and they thankfully get ahead of me.

"She lived with her mom and step-dad Tom. She kept her father's last name, but their last name was Hollinger," Leland said to help fill in my gaps. I'm really losing my edge if I overlooked Tom being her stepfather. I'm curious on who she was scared of, and a stepfather usually fits the bill.

"What was Tom like?" I ask.

"A fucking dick," Leland says, her eyes narrowing as she said it. "He was more concerned with getting his stuff back than looking for Katie. He was super strict and controlling. Never let her go out. Sometimes he would pick her up at school and Katie would just..." Leland pauses, taking a deep breath, "...she'd be fucking petrified. Not embarrassed your-dad-is-goofy petrified either. I mean fucking terrified to get into the car with him." Leland is now crying too.

"You never told the police this?" I ask, and they shake their heads, and then hang them in shame.

"I almost didn't want them to find her. If they found her, they'd bring her back. And then what?" Angela asks.

I think I have all I need from them. I now have much more to work from than I did at the start. All I wanted was leads, and I have plenty of those now.

The women ask me to let them know if I find her. Regardless of what that means. I thank them for their time and apologize for tearing open the wound. After leaving the café, I call Frank Blanchard. It rings twice and he answers. I explain the reason for the call, and he says he's got the time to meet in person at his work. I only have a few questions, so it won't take long.

--

Frank Blanchard pulled the pin at exactly twenty years for the pension, and now works as an insurance investigator. He originally had a security supervisor job, but someone offered him a little more money to use his detective skills, so he jumped ship for a bigger paycheck. He's certainly an opportunist, but Lauren held the guy in high regard. Lauren called him 'lazy but honorable'.

I take a cab to his work, and when I walk up to the front, he's outside smoking. He offers me one, but I decline.

"Which one of my illustrious cases did you want to talk about?" Franks asks as we shake hands. I see his body tilt to look at my leg, and a lightbulb goes off. "You're the dude who got his leg blown off by the Russian Mob."

It wasn't exactly blown off. We were transporting a suspect and got ambushed. The van rolled over, and my shin was snapped in the crash. I aggravated it beyond repair in the ensuing shootout in which my friend SWAT Sergeant Nathan White was killed. The suspect got away too, and no one has seen her since.

"Sorry," Frank says after I don't reply to the comment. "Anyway, which case?"

"I solved the My Cousin Caper for you," I say. Frank keels over in laughter, and then coughs from the cigarette smoke.

"That fucking case. That's an oldie. Before you tell me, let me guess," he says, and I raise my eyebrows. "It was the daughters." I figured he knew it the whole time. The father just made it impossible to close.

"Yup," I say, and he laughs himself into a coughing fit again.

"I fucking knew it," he says while slapping his leg. "How'd you figure it out?" he asks like he honestly believes I did.

"They straight up told me less than an hour ago," I say.

"Statute of fucking limitations," he says, and I nod. "Where the fuck is the Buick? That's the shit that always bothered me. I thought it was a fantastic prank until the car never materialized. After that, I had to lean on it like it was an insurance scam." I figured that's the reason he stopped talking to the girls. The suspect had shifted to Vincent Bach himself.

"I don't know where the car is now," I say, and he shrugs.

"Last lead I had, was in Pennsylvania," Frank says.

"Pennsylvania?" I ask.

"After the car was reported stolen, the VIN number was distributed to neighboring states and added to a BOLO list. I thought it was an insurance scam, because the VIN for the Buick pinged in a repair shop in Pennsylvania. The date when it entered the shop was in fucking July. Two months before the owner reported it. I checked it out, they said some girl owned it, and drove out of town when the repairs were done. I showed the guy the picture of the daughters, but no go."

"Did you get a name of the girl?" I ask.

"I probably wrote it down, but I don't remember," he says. "The owner said he noticed it gone immediately. I figured the girls were pranking him, but his timeline of the theft gave the girls an alibi. They were with the pep rally squad for the first away game for the high school. They stayed overnight. After I couldn't find it in Pennsylvania, I handed it off to fraud. At that point I was only handling GTA."

"Anything else about the case stand out?" I ask.

"Not really. It was just funny," he said with a laugh.

"Where in Pennsylvania?" I ask.

"Not far over the border. I could ask my old colleagues if they can pull up the case file. Bare minimum give you the name of the town."

"Anything you can do to help."

We bullshit for a minute, and he asks me how Lauren is doing. Last I knew she's still working for the ECTF out in D.C. We tried to get together when I was visiting my dad last Christmas, but she was working. He kills the cigarette under his heel and goes into his building. I clean up his litter and hail another cab, hoping the address for the Hollinger residence is still accurate.

--

Monday - April 13, 2020: Three Days Gone

~Midge Appletree~

I sign out a van from the motor pool and Yvonne and I drive up to Chase's home in bumblefuck nowhere. Yvonne demands to play Michael Jackson on the ride up, and I eventually agree to alternate songs so we're both happy. The King of Pop is just not my style. If shuffled into a mix, he's tolerable. To punish me for the slight against her idol, Yvonne is mouthy during my songs, and won't talk during her own.

The one instance she talks during her music time is when 'You Rock My World' starts playing. She dances in her seat like it was a club and casually states, "I'm pretty sure my second baby was made to this song." Her two sons are named Michael and Jackson. God help this world.

"You fuck to this?" I ask.

"I dance to this. I sing to this..."

"...please don't..." Yvonne has the body of an angel, not the voice. Karaoke plus four Irish car bombs is not a good mixture.

"...I do laundry to this. I clean dishes to this. And I fuck to this."

"Part of me still believes the accusations against him," I say. Having a son reinforced that belief.

"All of me doesn't care. Believe what you want. I've read thousands of pages of court documents, transcripts, affidavits, sworn declarations, the FBI vault release, everything. You've read retracted tabloids," Yvonne says. Yvonne believes Michael Jackson is innocent, but I'm not sure. Too much weird shit. She makes a compelling case though. Everything I had heard she shot down in exhaustive detail last time we spoke about it. When she says she's read everything, she means it.

"What do you fuck to?" she asks.

"I don't really bone to music," I say. It's not something Gianna and I do. I think a little more and remember that's not entirely true; it was a thing for Shane and me. Back when we 'kind of' happened. We'd put on some Rolling Stones, Queen, AC/DC, whatever, in the background. We'd make out more than we'd do anything else because he helped me redevelop my boundaries after I was raped. We never had sex, but we did everything just short of that. Even though I still proudly say I'm a lesbian, I don't regret a moment I spent with him.

Yvonne is a profiler, so she sees I'm leaving something out. I'm so used to her doing that, I just say it.

"Shane and I used to play music," I say. She knows about Shane. So does my wife. "Stones, AC/DC, Queen. You know what I jam to."

"Fun fact, without Michael Jackson, there is no 'Another One Bites the Dust' as we know it. He talked the band into releasing it as a single," Yvonne says. I love her little factoids. "Queen I get, but I can't do AC/DC. Middle of getting hot and heavy, then bam, big balls!" Yvonne says, and I laugh out loud. I laugh because it happened. Shane's dick was halfway down my throat and my chin hit his nuts the moment it started playing.

"It's a left up ahead," Yvonne says. She's the one following the directions on her phone. I drive past a local sheriff's deputy who is parked in a position to watch the entrance of Chase's driveway. They're taking this seriously.

Chase's house stands at the end of a long dirt road. There are two cars in front, and I pull the van to the right. I park with the side door of the van facing his front door, so it'll be easier to load. I step out of the van and stretch. With the minute I have, I dig into my pockets for the cigarettes.

"Midge, we got a wife worried about her husband. Talk to her before you light up," Yvonne says from the other side of the van. I turn and see her over the hood. I can only see her because she's so tall.

"Fuck. Fine," I say, and shove the pack and lighter back into my pocket.

Jenn walks out onto the porch as we walk up the steps. I didn't know she was pregnant. Before she retired, she was briefly my Lieutenant. A strong empathetic leader. Half-Japanese, but you'd be forgiven for believing she was full. We hug for a moment, then she leads us inside. An FBI technician is sitting in her living room monitoring call equipment. It's all routed to our task force room next to the Chief's office, but someone must be present to make sure the equipment is running properly. Nathan sees me and requests a high five. I taught him that.

"What do you know?" Jenn asks us.

"Not much of anything yet," I say.

"Chase was starting to make some progress on that case Derek gave him. An old missing person case," Jenn says. She takes us to Chase's office. I'm not surprised they chose a one-story ranch style. His office is the last room down a hallway. There is plastic sheeting over part of the house for renovation. "We're building an addition for the baby."

If I didn't know in advance this was Chase's workspace, I still would have known by looking at it. A large whiteboard with information overload. His timeline is stretched across the board with articles and notes written to fill in gaps. He has question marks to annotate things he speculates rather than having evidence to prove. Chase is the master of organizing chaos. In the corner of the room is a large gun safe. Beside my service pistol, there is only one other gun in my house. Their safe is taller than me, and wider than two of me standing side by side.

"This looks like Chase," I say. Jenn nods in agreeance, as does Yvonne. She remembers his addiction to whiteboards to help him streamline his thoughts. Yvonne takes a picture of the board so we can put it back together the same way after we take it apart and move it.

"I have to give this to you," I say. I hand Jenn the warrant, and she nods, understanding the need even if we have her permission. Do it by the book so if we get a suspect, the defense lawyer can't pick apart this search.

"When was the last time you saw Chase?" I ask. Yvonne starts the evidence collection while I conduct the interview. We agreed to this during the drive. Jenn would be more responsive to me asking the questions.

"He started driving to New York five days ago. He got caught up after his tires blew out in Pennsylvania, so had to stay in a town while new tires were being shipped in from Pittsburg," she explains, and write that down.

"New York City?" I ask, and she shakes her head.

"Upstate New York. Katie Grossman's biological father lives there. Chase concluded after interviewing her old friends that Katie could have been going to her father's."

"Okay," I say, then jot that down as well. My eyes scan over the board, and I see a photograph of a car held by a magnet. I recognize the car: 1964 Buick Skylark. Underneath the picture he wrote My Cousin Caper. "He solved that case?" I was in Property Crimes for years, so I know that case. It's a legend in unsolved oddities.

"He thinks he did," Jenn says. "Her friends swapped the cars so Katie could get a vehicle. Father claims he noticed it missing right away, but the girls told him the car was taken months before he realized. The VIN number popped up in a town called Whisper, which is where his tires blew out."

"I'll be damned," I say, then continue the purpose of the interview. "When was the last time you guys spoke?"

"Three days ago. He stopped calling, and now his phone is dead."

"What did you guys talk about?" I ask.

"He mentioned something about Katie getting stuck in that town too. They both hit a pothole on the way in and needed repairs."

"Where was he stuck again?" I ask.

"A town called Whisper in Pennsylvania," Jenn says. "Local police there are looking, but they're saying he drove out of the town three days ago."

"Then nothing?"

"Yes."

"Did he sound worried?" I ask.

"Nothing like that. He said he was staying an extra day, because like I said, he found something that pointed to Katie Grossman also getting stuck in that town ten years ago," she says. That's a hell of a coincidence. The happenstance of their disappearances is far too suspicious.

"Did he take a gun with him?" I ask, pointing to the safe.

"Probably, let me check," she says. I patiently wait for her to open the safe. I hear bars snap and watch her pull the door open. I stop counting their weapons when I finish the fingers on both hands.

"Jesus. How much would you wager you two have spent on guns?" I ask.

"I don't want to know," Jenn says, managing a small laugh. "Some girls collect purses and shoes. I collect guns."

"Anything missing?"

"Glock44," Jenn says, pointing to an empty slot on her line of semi-auto pistols and revolvers. "It's his favorite for conceal carry." I've looked at that gun as a training gun for the boys and Wendy. It's a .22 about the same size as a Glock19. Concealable, but only just.