“Please have a seat, Ms. Clarke.” The duty officer gestured, with a gracious smile, toward a plain gray chair at the table’s nearer side. “Detective Schafer will be here momentarily. Can I get you something in the meantime? Water? …Coffee?”

Anna shook her head, trying—still—to absorb…all of this. “I’m fine. Or…I mean… No, thank you.” She drew the chair back and sat down, glancing around at the virtually empty, fluorescent-lit room.

“Okay, then. Shouldn’t be long.” The officer closed the door behind him as he left.

Anna didn’t think it had locked, but…really didn’t want to test her assumption. She took another look around, noticing two small surveillance cameras mounted in opposing corners near the ceiling. As soon as she and Thom had arrived at the apartment complex and started talking to the officers they found there, she’d thought of Dusty’s criminal record, and realized that he—maybe all of them—must already be potential suspects. But…they had nothing to hide.

Their dead phones and account of being followed had convinced some of those officers to provide Thom and Anna transport to the substation—though they’d had to wait while other tasks at the crime scene were completed. Evenings came early this late in November, and it had been nearly dark by the time they’d finally arrived here.

She and Thom had been given no opportunity to do more than wave at Dusty, seated on a bench farther down the hallway, as the duty officer had led, first Thom, then herself into separate interview rooms with polite if vague explanations about the ‘investigative value’ of ‘gathering everyone’s impressions separately.’

‘A few minutes’ became five or six, then ten or twelve… Anna was starting to regret her refusal of that offered coffee when she heard quiet conversation in the hallway, and the door latch clicked open behind her. She turned to find a slightly portly older man in shirt and tie, with short, rumpled, salt-and-pepper hair and a white mustache, entering the room. He had a trim little laptop tucked under his arm.

“Anna Clarke, right?” He offered her a jovial smile as he shuffled around the table to sit down opposite her and opened up his computer. “I’m Detective Schafer. How’re you doing?”

“I’ve been better,” she said.

His smile gave way to a deeply sympathetic expression. “I can imagine. I apologize for the wait. I’ve been off processing some potentially useful information derived from my discussion with…” he glanced down at his laptop, “your son, is it?” She nodded, and he responded in kind. “We have a lot of officers already hard at work, Ms. Clarke, finding out how best to get Colleen found as soon as possible.”

“Thank you. I’m relieved to hear it.”

He nodded. “I apologize as well for the inconvenience of having to be interviewed one at a time like this. Normally, we’d have detectives seeing you and your husband simultaneously, but with our city still in such disarray, most of our usual desk personnel are out on patrol now, struggling to fill gaps in a very overextended workforce. So…I’m pretty much it for detectives here today.” He gave her an uncertain grin. “Lucky I’m so close to retirement, or even I might not have been available.”

Anna tried to look appreciative, though none of this was comforting. One detective…half retired. “What can I do to help?”

“Well, first, it’s very important you make no effort to decide what’s worth telling me and what’s not. Anything at all might be the detail that points us right. So just tell me everything you can think of, whether it seems likely to matter or not, okay?”

“Understood. …Where would you like me to begin?”

He glanced at his laptop again, and typed something quickly. “If I understand correctly, your son called you around three o’clock this afternoon, is that right?”

“To tell us Colleen was missing, yes.”

“Just start there, please, and tell me everything you can about what’s happened since.”

“Okay. My husband and I were about to leave for the university campus, where I work, to find out what condition my car was in. I left it there just before the flood. But Dusty called to say that Colleen…” Anna shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. …He’d…found her car. In the garage…like that.”

“How did he sound?” the detective asked. “Your initial impressions.”

“Well, he was extremely upset, of course.”

“You could hear that? Right away?”

She nodded. “I know how he sounds when things get…really bad.”

“How’s that?”

“He shuts down. Way down. It’s instantly recognizable.”

“So, he sounded shut down?”

Jesus! Already he was… “I meant just what I said. He sounded just the way he sounds when things get very, very bad. By the end, he was struggling to talk without crying.”

“Did he actually break down then? Or did he manage to hold himself together?”

“I’d say he was barely managing to keep it together.” She reached for her own ‘crisis calm’ as this jovial man tried everything in the book to make her say that Dusty hadn’t seemed…what, upset enough? I should never have agreed to this interview. None of us should have, before calling an attorney. What a dumb-fuck move this had been.

“So, he was struggling to hold himself together,” said the detective. “Did he…” He leaned back, eyes raised, as if looking for what he wanted to say somewhere on the ceiling. “Given your intimate knowledge of his manner at difficult times, would you say he seemed entirely himself? …Coherent?”

Anna’s mouth fell open. She’d gotten this completely wrong. “You mean, did he sound crazy?” she asked in disbelief.

The detective leaned back in with arched brows. “I’m…not trying to upset you, Ms. Clarke. If I have, it was completely inadvertent.”

“Do you think Dusty had something to do with this?” Anna pressed, all too aware of how much she wasn’t helping things this way, but just a little too depleted by all this insanity to find a working handle on herself. “Because, if you don’t already know it—Dusty’s spent most of the past two weeks in a hospital. Colleen’s car got swept up in the flooding Saddle, and he nearly drowned himself trying to save her. So, why on earth would he turn around and—”

The detective leaned in farther, holding up a hand to stop her. “I am just gathering information, ma’am. As much of it as possible, as quickly as I can, from every smallest nook or cranny I can think to look in for it. ’Cause that’s the most effective way I know to find the truth in time to do that poor girl any good.” He leaned back, trying to look sympathetic again, to Anna’s further irritation. “Right now, your son is sitting in that hallway, unrestrained and unsupervised, free to leave this building and take a taxi anywhere he wishes, if he chooses to, because I’m not currently aware of any reason to arrest him—or of anything to charge him with.” He fell silent, and they gazed at one another while Anna wrestled with the possibility that she’d just made an utter fool of herself. “I’m aware of your son’s recent hospitalization, and the reasons for it,” Schafer said at last. “I know quite a bit already about both Dustin Clarke and Dustin Bennett, and about your husband’s unresolved kidnap, and your own father’s current whereabouts.” Anna closed her eyes and drew a long breath, trying to calm herself. Of course they’d gone there. How could she have expected otherwise? “We’re doing our work very thoroughly here, Ms. Clarke.”

“Anna,” she said quietly, staring at the table now. “Please, it’s been an awful day…it would…help, I think, if you just call me Anna.”

The detective nodded. “Thank you, Anna. Would it help to call me Carl?”

She nodded, too embarrassed to look up.

“Then we’re all good here, Anna,” said Carl. “I’ve watched way too many people struggle with this kind of distress. It takes even the best of us apart. I get that. After everything you’ve been through today, it would be weird if you didn’t lose it a little. So, I’m gonna break a few of my usual rules, and level with you more than I probably should yet, because I’m making a professional assessment that we’ll get farther, faster this way.” Anna looked up, unsure what to make of ‘Carl’ now. “Dustin has been very forthcoming; earnest, helpful, and, as far as I can tell, honest to a fault with me—all of which have scored points in his favor. He didn’t even try a little to fudge about his record—and, believe me, I gave him every chance to do so. But he’s also told me some very strange things about all this. Things it’s hard to…make sense of in any usual way.”

Anna nodded. “Yeah. There is…a lot of ‘strange’ here.”

Carl gave her a long, probing look. “When he called, did he mention a ransom note?”

“Yes. On the wall above her bed.” She looked down again. “He told us what it said.”

“Are you aware that when officers went to see that note, it was nowhere to be found? Our forensics team can’t even find a trace of anything wiped away there.”

Anna gaped at him. “What? …But…we were there for…half an hour, at least, talking to those guys in the garage. No one said a thing about—”

“That’s right,” Carl cut in. “Their job is to do nothing that might alter your impressions of this event before I get to talk with you. I’m breakin’ my own rules to tell you even that. Your husband’s not waiting next door for me to come ask him all these same questions because I suspect him—or you—of anything. He’s waiting over there because memory is such a quicksilver thing that just hearing someone else talk about what happened to them could change your mind about what happened to you. You might not even realize it as some earlier set of details in your head was instantly reconfigured by someone else’s ‘better understanding’ of what happened. Then, poof!” He leaned back and spread his hands. “There goes some crucial little clue I never even got to hear about before it was displaced and erased by someone else’s story.”

“So then…why are you breaking all these rules for me now?”

Carl nodded, whether to her or to himself, she couldn’t tell. “Because this case is rapidly becoming one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. And every minute the ground keeps shifting underneath our feet before I can point my people in some clear direction is another minute that your son’s fiancée gets farther away or harder to help. I need someone I can both believe and make clear sense of to help me sort all the shit from Shinola here as fast as possible. I’ve seen enough of your profile to know what an intelligent, competent, respected professional you are, and I think you’re my best candidate. But I’m gonna need your trust now—in a hurry—so I don’t want you feeling patronized, or played. Took me a couple seconds into our talk to figure that out. But now that I have, I’m willing to put a whole lot of cards I should hold close right down here on the table instead, if that means I can ask you a lot of potentially uncomfortable—maybe even offensive questions without wasting time we can’t afford on all kinds of angry blowback.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Ask away.”

“Thank you. So, though I am likely to sound as if I’m accusing your son of something here, I’m not. Not right now, at least. We clear on that?”

She nodded.

“Good. I just spent forty-five very helpful minutes with that boy, and nothing about him seems crazy to me either. But right now, I have no verifiable ransom note, or any plausible explanation of how it could have disappeared. Except for Colleen’s slightly crunched up rental car and phone, I have little if any circumstantial evidence to prove foul play at all. For all I know, she could just have run off for some reason. People do—all the time. Even people you think wouldn’t. We’ve tried to contacted her parents, but they haven’t gotten back to—”

“Oh, god!” Anna threw her head back and closed her eyes. Shelly and Robert hadn’t even occurred to her yet. “They were just here two weeks ago, terrified their daughter had died in the flood! If you’ve already called them, they’ve probably been trying to call us.”

“Right,” said Carl. “Your dead phones. We’ll get to that in a minute, but one thing at a time, please. As I’ve said, the demands of current city-wide crisis management have left us severely understaffed right now, and the amount of resource I’m allowed to allocate to this possible abduction will depend heavily on the amount of certainty I can demonstrate that those resources are clearly warranted here.”

“Are you kidding?” Anna barely managed not to shriek. “Her wrecked car and crushed phone aren’t clear enough? She’s missing! We’re all agreed on that, right? Ten minutes after they’d agreed to meet there.”

“She’s experienced major trauma herself in the past two weeks—as you just pointed out,” Carl said patiently. “Who’s to say she didn’t look down at her phone as she drove into that garage, wreck the car against that piling, and just snap from all the pent-up stress. She could’ve jumped out, hurled her phone to the ground in a fit of temper, and just run away. We have yet to find any other evidence of a struggle—or of anybody else’s presence there at all. But I am concerned, Anna. So right now I’m grasping at straws to justify as much personnel and priority as I can get for this case; which means figuring out what to think of that vanishing ransom note.”

“Well, if Dusty says it was there—” 

“He’s been overwhelmed by recent trauma too and, as I was getting at before, a sudden shock like this can sort of knock things loose inside. Especially with people already holding a lot all bolted down in there—which your son does seem to do.” Anna opened her mouth to defend Dusty’s mental health, but Carl held up a hand, more gently this time, and she shoved her impatience down again. “I need your unvarnished opinion, please, about whether anything in Dustin’s phone call leaves any question in your mind about whether this elusive ransom note might just have been the product of…some kind of temporary breakdown.”

Anna shook her head. “I’ve known Dusty since he was seventeen. He’s been all sorts of unpleasant things—as you clearly know already. But the one thing I have never seen him exhibit—even at the most broken times in his life—is any hint of psychosis. Nor can I recall a single thing from our conversation that sounded…unlike him in any way, or made me wonder for an instant whether he was sane. And it’s not just Colleen’s car and broken phone. Our phones—”

“Yes,” he cut in with a sigh. “I’ve spoken with the officers who brought you here from the apartment complex. Your son’s phone seems to have stopped working shortly before yours did—which, since we’re being recklessly frank here, could suggest collusion between the three of you as easily as anything else.”

“But we were followed by someone—for over an hour. It’s why your guys brought us down here instead of just directing us to the station.”

He nodded. “They told me all of this. Followed by a car that just kept going when you reached the complex. So, no one else saw that either.”

“The parking lot was full of police cars,” Anna objected. “Of course he kept going!”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” Carl assured her. “I’m just still waiting for something we can verify to convince my superiors to green-light the support needed to respond aggressively when so much else around here is already under water—if you’ll pardon the pun.” He gave her an apologetic shrug. “So, let’s try a change of subject. Tell me what you make of these wacko messages from Dustin’s long-lost creepy friend.”

“He told you about those?”

“Oh, he did more than that. He got us copies of everything—including the sixty-volume novel, or whatever it is. Like I said, your son’s been enthusiastically helpful.”

“How…did he get you copies? None of our phones work, and the only other copies we have are still at home.”

Carl gave her a puzzled look. “He just logged onto his Gmail account, from a station computer, and there they were. …Would you like a moment to…regroup before we go on?”

Anna shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m just…so…”

“I know. We’ll be done soon. And, if it reassures you any, your son is clearly sane enough to understand how each new revelation he produces just makes him sound more like a nut case—which is one reason I’m interested to hear what you make of these emails.”

“Well…if you have those, then how can you still think that ransom note’s not—”

“—not what? Visible? Anna, those emails are my main reason for continuing to press at this as hard as I am. It’s not Dustin’s sanity—or his involvement—that I’m currently most concerned about here. It’s his friend’s. I’ve read all about why Dustin Bennett was arrested seven years ago, and the deal you cut with that judge to save him from a felony conviction. If I had to hazard any bet right now—which I’m not doing, officially—it would be that Dustin’s one-time friend has carried quite a grudge since that mysterious night, and is finally having his revenge—whatever he may claim to the contrary in those emails. But, again, the problem there is that no one can seem to find anything on him—anywhere—before or since his induction at the halfway house where he and Dustin had their altercation. Without something more about him to check into, his supposed emails could have been sent to you from anyone, including Dustin himself. In that context, even these crazy fairytales will just make it extra clear to my superiors why Dusty might hallucinate exactly such a ransom note this afternoon.” He arched his brows and gave her a pointed look. “If you weren’t so torched right now, I’m pretty sure you’d be pointing all this out to me. So, what can you tell me about this ‘Matthew Rhymer,’ and his bizarre letters?”

“Matt, at least, is no hallucination,” she said. “I knew him for several years, fairly well, while I was doing nonprofit work on the Avenue.”

“In the university district,” Carl said.

“Yes. He and Dusty were good friends for several years back then. Until they weren’t. I could probably still find others down there who would remember him as well.” She shrugged. “He was very well liked by everyone—except for a few badly damaged players that no one down there liked.” She looked away. “In most ways, he was…one of the sanest people I’ve ever met.”

“In most ways?” Carl pressed.

“He’d clearly been through some kind of serious trauma before showing up there. Which of those kids hadn’t? He claimed not to recall whatever happened, though I think he just didn’t want to talk about it.” She looked back at Carl. “How much of his ‘novel’ have you read yet?”

“Me?” Carl released a short huff of laughter. “Haven’t got a lot of time for reading just now. I’ve skimmed the first few pages—enough to see that, however sane he may have seemed back then, he’s gone clear around the bend now.” He gave Anna another helpless gesture. “I’ve got one poor schmuck skimming that massive doorstop of his—who tells me there are fairies hiding all over the city.” Carl shook his head. “We’ll examine it all as carefully and quickly as we can with such short staff, but I don’t think there’s going to be much ready help there. Which is why I’m hoping you can just cut us to the chase, and tell me if there’s anything in there we should know right away.”

“Well…” It was Anna’s turn at helpless gestures. “We were all just starting to read it ourselves when the flood derailed our lives. I haven’t even looked at it since then. Until today…I’d hoped all that was just…over now.”

“Dustin hasn’t read much of it yet ether, unsurprisingly,” said Carl. “That’s too bad.”

“I think Colleen had probably read more of it than anyone. She had it on her phone at the hospital, and not a lot to do while Dusty was recovering.”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna help us much now either.”

“Did Dusty mention the letters we were given? That started it all?”

Carl gave her a pointed look. “The ones that have all gotten mysteriously lost, which no one ever called the police about or mentioned to anyone outside your family—until now?”

She nodded sadly. Hindsight certainly made them all look like fools or liars, didn’t it? “For whatever it’s worth, mine disappeared the morning after we received them, from my office at home. I’m…pretty sure someone took it.”

“From your home?” Carl asked. “As in, broke in and took it?”

Anna nodded. “Just one more unverifiable assertion, I know. But I’m sure I brought it home. I remember very clearly where I put it, and it was gone in the morning. Dusty and Colleen had me half convinced I’d just left it at the office. But I know I didn’t, and they never found their copy again either.”

“In the scattered piles they left all over her apartment before the flood,” he said, unimpressed. “Think hard, Anna. Did anyone besides the four of you see those letters—or the people who brought them to you? Anyone at all?”

Anna thought back. “Oh! My student assistant, Maggie! I came out and waved it at her. Asked her if she’d seen who left it?”

“Did she?” Carl asked with keen interest.

Anna sighed. “No. She’d been away at lunch—for ten minutes—when it arrived…mysteriously.”

Carl seemed visibly to wilt. “You seeing a pattern here?”

“Yes. …It all looks like a fabrication, and us the most likely fabricators.”

“Emails can be traced, at least,” said Carl. “And we’re working on that. But everything is slowed way down right now, and it’ll just get slower ’til morning when most of what little staff we have right now gets back. I think it’s time I see your husband. You’re free to go sit with Dustin.” He gave her a smile. “You two can talk all you want now. I’ve got what I—” He fell silent, looking down at his laptop screen. “Just a minute,” he said distractedly, reaching to tap a few keys in rapid succession, before scanning whatever he was looking at. “Well…look at that. I’ll be damned.”

“What is it?” Anna asked.

“Rescue, of a sort.” He looked up at her, unsmiling. “Surveillance cameras at the gas station your son claims to have stopped at on his way to the apartment show him pumping gas there at about the time Colleen must have disappeared.”

“Good!” said Anna.

He nodded. “But even more helpfully, they’ve finally located the apartment manager, and gotten a look at the footage from security cameras in that garage. It shows Colleen’s car entering at the same time Dustin was pumping gas elsewhere, but for two minutes after that, all those cameras recorded was snow.” He looked up at her. “All of them down at once, for just two minutes. Then…a wrecked car, and no one around.”

A chill of dread passed up Anna’s arms and neck to tingle across her scalp and vanish.

“We still have no idea what happened, or who’s behind it,” Carl said, staring at his laptop screen again, “but I think this buys our ticket to the war.” He looked back up at Anna. “Everything else you guys have reported could, conceivably, have been arranged by yourselves. But…” He shook his head. “I’d be pretty surprised if you managed this one too—given where you all were at the time—and your apparent skill sets.” He sighed and looked away. “Sadly, this does suggest that Colleen has, in fact, been the victim of some crime.”

“So…what does that mean?” Anna asked. “What happens now?”

“Now I interview your husband, who’s got some interesting things of his own to explain, and then,” he raised an arm to glance at his watch, “I think the three of you had better go find some new phones. The Apple Store downtown doesn’t close ’til eight. I’d stay together somewhere tonight. Maybe not at home—if you really think your house has been compromised.  Maybe even leave your cars where they are for now. We can drop you all at a hotel, or a car rental agency. Entirely your choice, of course. ” He closed his laptop and stood up, tucking it under his arm again as he came around the table and reached out to shake her hand. “Thank you for your help, Anna. Give us a call as soon as you get those phones. We’ll likely want to check in with you all again tomorrow morning, unless something happens before then.”

“Okay,” she said, struggling with the implications of these parting suggestions.

He offered her a tight, sympathetic smile, and headed for the door, holding it open as she followed him out. “Oh… One more thing,” he said quietly. “Your son looked…pretty startled when I mentioned your father.” Anna brought a hand to her mouth, as if to keep the quiet gasp there from escaping. “I apologize for…any beans I may have spilled.” He seemed to mean it.

“Why… Why did you…?” The question died, unfinished. It didn’t matter now.

“Dustin seems to have turned his life around remarkably,” said Carl. “Looks like you and that judge made the right decision, and I’m sorry he—any of you—are entangled in whatever this turns out to be. But we both know how deeply his former life was woven through with criminal family members and acquaintances. I had to find out if he thought there might be some connection between any of them and what’s happened to Colleen.” He shrugged again, sadly. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you might not have told him.”

“Please, just get her back for us,” said Anna. “That’s all that matters to me.”

He nodded, soberly. “I’ll send your husband out to you as soon as we’re finished. Take care, Anna; all of you. Get as much sleep as you can.”