Runaway. Part 2

Mrs. Harrington looked up from the pad of paper she was jotting on. "Are you implying that I don't know what is happening with my own daughter?"

Jan could see that Peet was trying to restrain herself. Mr. Harrington, however, felt no such reticence.

"I don't think we need waste our time with implications, Lynette. Let's just come right out and say it. You don't."

Jan jumped in. "It's hardly unusual, Mrs. Harrington, for parents to not know what their teenage children are really up to."

Mrs. Harrington looked worried. Mr. Harrington took a peek at his watch.

Jan went on. "We also need her cell phone records. You can probably go right online and download the detail from her most recent bills."

"Actually, we won't be able to do that," Harrington said. "Maddy set up and paid for stuff like that with her own credit card, and I paid the credit card bill each month."

"Then print out the detail on the credit card statement and we'll take it from there. Don't cancel the card, whatever you do. It will give us some valuable information if she continues to use it," Jan said. "I'll also need the account number and pa.s.sword for your Internet service provider. We should be able to get some information on Maddy's recent Web activity."

"I'll write down the name of friends I can think of, but there won't be many," Mrs. Harrington said.

"Please be as thorough as you can be."

"Of course."

Harrington looked at his watch again and put his empty gla.s.s down. "Listen, why don't we do this? You gals get on your way so you can start tracking Maddy down. We'll put the information together that you've asked for and call you when we've got it, probably tomorrow sometime.

Jan rose and stepped in closer to him. "Actually, Mr. Harrington, here's what we're going to do. You'll a.s.semble that information while we go take a look at Maddy's room."

Mr. Harrington opened his mouth and his wife stopped him with a hand in the air. "We'll get it for you," she said. "I'll take you to her room while my husband gets you the other information."

Mr. Harrington moved back to the drinks cart and turned his back on them. Jan couldn't remember meeting a bigger p.r.i.c.k, and she'd met her share of them.

Mrs. Harrington led them upstairs and down a long hallway. Jan lost track of the number of bedrooms along the way. Maddy's was the last one.

"Is your room also on this level?" Jan asked.

"Yes, it's at the opposite end of the hall. Why do you ask?"

"I'm wondering if you would have heard her leaving at night. Do you recall waking up to any noise?"

Mrs. Harrington shrugged. "I wear earplugs because of my husband's incessant snoring. But Maddy could have slipped away and I wouldn't have heard it, with or without the earplugs."

She opened a door next to Maddy's room, which led to carpeted stairs leading down to the back of the house. A perfect teenage escape route.

"Isn't it just as likely that she left during the day?" asked Peet. "She could have taken off when you thought she was going to school."

"She could have gone at any time, and it would probably have been a while before we noticed."

Jan and Peet looked at each other as Mrs. Harrington walked into Maddy's room. She'd spoken as if it were perfectly normal for a family to not have any idea where their sixteen-year-old daughter was.

"I'll leave you to it," Mrs. Harrington said. "The police have been through it already. You won't find anything here to help you."

They remained silent until Mrs. Harrington left the room.

"What a piece of work," Peet said. "That poor kid is probably a thousand miles away by now. Who wouldn't run away from parents like that?"

Jan, for one. They looked around Maddy's room, which was bigger than the living room in Jan's condo. She thought Peet sounded naive about what const.i.tuted bad parenting, especially as a former police officer. You'd think one night on the beat would be enough to make the Harringtons look like Ozzie and Harriet. One night in the camp she'd grown up in would make the Harringtons' home look like Shangri-La.

Maddy's room looked like it belonged to a forty-year-old neat freak, which Jan recognized as a pretty good description of herself. There wasn't a single thing out of place. There were no posters on the wall, no hint of any teenage pa.s.sion. Instead, there were a series of mountain landscapes, professionally painted, framed, and hung, almost certainly not of Maddy's choosing. A large desk and high-end ergonomic chair took up one corner of the room, and Jan imagined those might have been picked out by Maddy. The desktop was completely bare, except for a printer cord and a blank memo pad.

"I'll take the closet," Jan said. She opened a door and stared at the huge walk-in closet. It was more than half empty, and Jan thought about the jeans and T-s.h.i.+rt that Maddy wore in the photo they'd been shown. The girl was not a clotheshorse. A few dresses hung toward the back, behind a row of flannel and oxford cloth s.h.i.+rts. Several pairs of blue and black jeans were ironed and hung next to the s.h.i.+rts. A built-in dresser took up the end wall of the closet, one drawer filled with folded underwear and socks, two others devoted to short and long sleeve T-s.h.i.+rts. None of the s.h.i.+rts were decorated with band names or slogans or causes. They were all plain and stacked together according to color. A shoe rack ran the length of the floor along the long closet wall, but Maddy didn't have a thing for shoes either. There were cowboy boots, hiking boots, and snow boots, tennis shoes and soccer shoes, and a pair of dress shoes that had a fur of dust on them.

Jan felt in every drawer, every nook and cranny, and found nothing else. The overhead rack that ran along each wall was completely bare. She needed to ask if it had once held luggage.

She stepped back into the room to see Peet going through the drawers of Maddy's computer desk. "There's nothing in the closet except clothes," she said. "It's almost like a guest had hung their clothes there. Nothing personal at all."

"Nothing in the desk either. Some school records, a few letters from a grandma, office supplies. That's it."

"Let's ask the parents about the grandma. Maybe they didn't think to call her. Maybe she's hiding Maddy from them."

Next to the desk were a printer, a shredder, and a couple of scanners.

"I wonder if she operated paperlessly?" Jan said. "Maybe she scanned everything and then shredded it." She looked at the shredder bin, but it was empty also.

"If there was anything in this room before she left, it's gone now. But I get the feeling there wasn't much to begin with," Peet said.

"I hope we find out more when we look at her computer activity. Otherwise, there isn't squat to go on."

Peet took a look in the closet. "This is kind of creeping me out. It's like this kid is a guest in her own house. Do you know what a teenager's room is supposed to look like?"

"What? Because I don't have kids I'm not supposed to know what they're like?" Jan failed again to keep the defensive tone out of her voice and hated hearing it there. "I was a teenager too, you know."

Peet raised her hands, palms forward. "Jan, that was a rhetorical question. You don't need to get huffy."

Jan felt huffy. She felt like she probably knew more about Maddy than Peet did, or her parents. She felt a connection with a kid who ran away and didn't leave a trace. She brushed by Peet and headed to the stairs in back.

"Let's get that info from them and get the h.e.l.l out of here," she said.

The rear stairway took them soundlessly to the first level and out into a kitchen/great room area. Mrs. Harrington stood at the breakfast bar writing on a notepad.

"I'm trying to get this information all in one place for you."

"Thanks," Peet said. "I'm just curious whether Maddy has always been so neat?"

"Neat? I'd call it more neurotic. She hated anything out of place. Hated clutter. Drove us all crazy, really. If you put a cup of coffee down, thinking you might get another cup in a minute, there was no chance it wouldn't end up in the dishwasher if Maddy walked through the room."

"Hey, I'd love it if my kids were neurotic like that."

Mrs. Harrington looked at Peet again with doubt on her face. Something about Peet and motherhood wasn't computing for her, which Jan thought was funny as h.e.l.l. Peet's kids were all happy at home.

"It drove her brother wild. His room looked like a hurricane hit it."

"They're pretty different from each other, I take it," Jan said.

"Night and day." It was pretty clear which child Mrs. Harrington favored. She stared out the windows looking over the backyard. It was dark, but the deck and garage were lit up. Jan saw a car pulling out of the garage. "My husband is going back to work." She turned back to the counter and picked up the slip of paper. "Here's the information you asked for. I hope it's helpful."

Jan looked it over. There were three names and numbers on the list, including Justin Harrington's, along with Maddy's telephone number and e-mail address, and a network log-in. "We'll need a router log-in as well if we're going to find out what she's been looking at on the Internet. I should have mentioned that before."

Mrs. Harrington looked exasperated, as if there were no end to the demands on her. "I don't even know what that is. I'll have to have my husband help with that."

"And an e-mail to you or your husband from Maddy," Peet said. "We need her IP address as well."

"Yes, yes. I promise we'll do what we can."

"We saw letters to Maddy from her grandmother. Are the two of them close?"

"They were, but all of Maddy's grandparents are now dead."

"How about any other relatives she's close to?"

"There's no one. I'm an only child, and my husband's family isn't close."

"Close as in tight, or do you mean they live far away?" Jan asked.

"Both, I'd say."

She led them to the front door. Jan watched her face recompose itself into a concerned mother expression. She thought she'd seen better acting by Peet's eight-year-old daughter.

"One last thing," Jan said. "Did Maddy have any luggage in her bedroom closet?"

"Luggage? No, that was kept downstairs and there's nothing missing. But she has a backpack. You know, the large kind for when you're camping. She kept that in her room."

"It's gone now."

Mrs. Harrington looked stricken. "So she has run away?"

"It looks that way. Now we go find her."

Chapter Two.

Jan and Peet were back on Willow Road before either said a word. Jan stared out the pa.s.senger window, lost in thought.

"Okay, let's hear it," Peet said.

"What?" She turned to Peet. "What's there to say? The Harringtons are jerks and their daughter's a runaway. We do our job; that's all."

Peet's knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "Jerks? No. A jerk is someone who spills beer on you at Wrigley Field and then laughs about it. These people are criminal, as far as I'm concerned. You probably had a better upbringing than Maddy did."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Jan felt a flush climb up her face.

"You grew up in the system, right? Out west? I'm just saying you probably got more love and caring there than Maddy Harrington has."

Jan stared back out the window. "It was a group home. An orphanage, not a foster home with a brood of happy, mismatched kids."

"Sorry."

"Think Oliver Twist and you're halfway there."

"Sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I just can't imagine parents who don't notice when their daughter's been gone for two nights."

Jan shrugged. "At least we have one motive for Maddy running away. I doubt it's the whole story." She wanted the conversation steered away from her own childhood. She'd known when Peet became her partner that she'd have to say something about her past. Peet was too curious and chatty to not ask questions and expect answers. Jan told her the same story she'd been telling since she was sixteenparents killed, no relatives, the group home. It usually shut people up. She'd never had to flesh out the details because most didn't probe too deeply. She rebuffed, ignored, or abandoned those that persisted. The lie was much easier and safer than the truth. She didn't think she had the ability to describe her childhood.

Though she tried to avoid remembering her life in the camp, she knew it was impossible. Just as it became impossible for her to stop thinking of a life outside the camp once she started to realize one might exist. In the two years prior to her escape, Jan had discovered ways to slip beyond the camp's perimeter and explore the woods beyond. Timing and stealth were all she needed. She discovered a ranch four miles north of the camp, and in the ranch she found her hope. It was a small homestead run by a large family, and Jan would spend every moment she could tucked up next to a boulder on a ridge overlooking it. She watched men, women, and children doing ch.o.r.es, sitting together on the porch of the house, entertaining guests, hugging and kissing, coming and going from the property as they pleased. She knew she had to have some of that, any bit of it, in her life. She would somehow find a way to get it.

Peet pulled into the parking lot of the Winnetka police station. It was past seven o'clock and they didn't expect to see the detectives who'd taken the call from Mrs. Harrington, but they needed to let the department know as soon as possible that they'd been hired to find Maddy. The police would be only too happy to share information and offload as much of the work as they could on to the private investigators.

The desk sergeant made a call to the back of the shop and pointed them toward some folding chairs lined up along a wall. He never said a word directly to them. Jan hated the scorn that some police felt toward private investigators, the kind she now saw on the sergeant's face. She started to say something to him, but Peet took her arm and pulled her over to the waiting area.

"It's not worth it," Peet said. "We want them to cooperate."

"We're surrounded by a.s.sholes," Jan said. She put her elbows to her knees and stared at the floor while they waited. Within a few minutes, a very short and very sharply dressed detective came to get them. If Winnetka had a minimum height requirement for its officers, this man had found a way around it. Peet towered over him as they shook hands.

"Donald Hoch. Glad to meet you both," he said. He led them down a hall and into his private office. It was small but painted a tasteful cream color and furnished in wood and leather. A new computer sat on his desk.

"I talked to Mrs. Harrington this morning. Frankly, I'm glad they've called you in on this. We're getting a late start if the girl's really been gone two days."

"She's likely to be far away by now," Peet agreed.

"Or she may be right here, just seeing whether her parents care enough to try to find her," Jan added.

"That too." Hoch pulled a slim file off a stack on his desk and opened it.

"She's never been in trouble with us. Her teachers say she's a good student, especially in the sciences, but not really working to her potential. They describe her as withdrawn. I haven't met the father, but they seem like the kind of parents a kid would run away from."

"Exactly. Do you intend to keep trying to track her down?" Jan asked.

"We don't want to duplicate your steps or get in your way," Peet said. "I used to be on the job. I know what a pain PIs can be."

"Oh yeah? Where did you work?"

"Chicago. Homicide."

Jan knew Peet always worked this in for a reason. Cops were cops and the brotherhood ran deep. It p.i.s.sed Jan off as a general rule, but she couldn't deny the benefits. Peet often got information much more quickly from the police than she did. As Peet and Detective Hoch talked for a bit about cops they knew, what their shops were like, and who had the best benefits, Jan wondered where Maddy Harrington had disappeared.