Dead Certain: A Novel Read online

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right,” says Zach.

  Once, when Charlotte was little, maybe three or four, I convinced her that I could read her mind. I told her it was a power that all older sisters possessed. I had her going for a day before she figured out that I had no such ability.

  How I wish I had it now.

  In need of something to calm me, I put on a kettle of water. I know peppermint tea isn’t the answer, but I pour myself a cup nonetheless.

  And then I wait. For Charlotte to call and tell me she’d just come home and was fine. False alarm. She was out with a friend and decided to stay over. She’d told Zach, but like the idiot he was, he’d forgotten.

  But deep down I know that’s not going to happen.

  DAY THREE

  THURSDAY

  7.

  From my days in the District Attorney’s office, I know that a large percentage of missing-persons cases involve children abducted by a noncustodial parent, and they’re usually found unharmed. It’s difficult to know how many of those cases factor into the overall stats in order to make a reasoned analysis concerning the likelihood that a twenty-five-year-old woman who vanishes without a trace will come home safe and sound.

  The Internet adds nothing I didn’t already know, and greatly increases my already-through-the-roof anxiety. The one constant in the online stories is the unwavering belief that the first hours are the most critical.

  The cops may have told Zach that forty-eight hours have to pass before an investigation can begin, but Zach isn’t a former Assistant District Attorney. I decide not to wait another minute more.

  Despite the early hour, I call Lauren Wright on her cell.

  Lauren is more than just my ex-boss, or even a mentor. She’s the closest thing I have to a mother figure in my life. I met her just as I was beginning my professional career, and she took me under her wing from day one. I’ve always considered myself extremely fortunate in that regard, and right now it’s an absolute godsend. There’s no better friend to have when your sister’s missing than the head of the DA office’s Special Victim’s Bureau.

  Lauren answers on the fourth ring with a quizzical “Ella?”

  It sounds as if I’ve woken her. But even groggy, Lauren knows that I’m not calling her at sunrise to make lunch plans.

  “I’m sorry to call so early, but I’m afraid I need your help,” I say. “And not just yours, but all the favors you can pull in for me.” I realize as I’m saying it that she might think I’m calling about a case, so I quickly disabuse her of that notion. “My sister’s missing. She’s twenty-five and a student at NYU, in the MFA program for writers.”

  Aside from my father, Lauren is the smartest person I know. She’s also a methodical thinker, unwilling to draw any conclusions while key facts remain unknown. Her hesitancy to indict sometimes made me crazy, but it had also prevented at least two innocent people from going to jail.

  “How long has she been missing?” Lauren asks.

  “All day and all night.”

  This is met with silence. I know what Lauren is thinking: that Charlotte hooked up with some guy and she’ll stagger home any minute now.

  “Believe me—I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t think something was seriously wrong. My sister lives with her boyfriend and Charlotte just isn’t the type to stay out all night without telling someone. Her boyfriend says he saw her yesterday morning, but I haven’t heard from her since Tuesday afternoon. So that’s almost forty-eight hours. I’ve left her several urgent messages and she hasn’t responded. That’s just not like her. We usually text constantly. She’d never go two days without contacting me unless she was physically unable to do so.”

  For the second time, dead air fills the phone. Now it’s as troubling as anything Lauren could say. She’s not the kind to tell me that everything’s going to be fine when she sees evidence piling up on the other side of the scale.

  “Please, Lauren. I’m begging you,” I say, although I assume my desperation has already come through loud and clear.

  “No need to beg, Ella. You know I’ll do anything for you. As soon as I get off the phone, I’ll start making some calls. Someone will get in touch directly with you within an hour or two. If they don’t, call me back and I’ll get the DA involved.”

  “Thank you so much. I can’t even begin to tell you how appreciative I am.”

  “Let’s just hope that my help isn’t needed.”

  My father prides himself on being the first person at the office. He usually comes in before seven, even though the firm officially doesn’t start its day until nine. His first secretary, Robin, arrives at seven, at which time he’s already working, coffee cup in need of refilling beside him. His second secretary, LeeAnn, works the three-to-ten swing shift.

  Today he answers his own phone even though it’s a quarter past seven. Robin must be running late this morning, or fetching his coffee refill.

  “Dad, it’s me. I have some troubling news. Zach called me and said that Charlotte didn’t come home last night and he’s worried about her. I haven’t heard from her in more than a day, and that’s not like her. Have you spoken to her?”

  Silence on the other end of the line. My father is many things, but contemplative is not one of them.

  “Dad? Are you there?”

  “Yeah . . . I’m here. Just trying to think. No, I haven’t spoken to Charlotte since . . . I don’t know, to tell you the truth. Certainly not yesterday. When did you say someone last spoke with her?”

  “I had lunch with her on Tuesday. We usually speak at least once a day. It’s now been two nights since I last heard from her.”

  “When did Zach last see her?”

  “He said he saw her early yesterday morning.”

  “You say it like you don’t believe him.”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  My disclosure is met with another long silence. Yesterday he suggested Jennifer Barnett might well be safe and sound even though she’d been missing for four days, but I’m certain that now he fears the worst has happened to Charlotte after less than two. But isn’t that always the way it works? A thousand planes take off and land every day without incident, and yet the moment you’re aboard, the risk of a crash hardly seems remote.

  “I reached out to my old boss at the DA’s office,” I tell him. “She said she’d contact the proper person at the NYPD and try to get them to open an investigation.”

  I’m brought back more than a decade, to the aftermath of my mother’s death. The feeling that I needed to care for him, to keep my father from being overwhelmed by grief.

  “I’m sure it’s going to be okay, Dad.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Tell me as soon as you hear anything.”

  His voice has dropped an octave.

  He clearly doesn’t believe anything is ever going to be okay again.

  Shortly before 9:00 a.m., the phone rings. My first thought is that maybe it’s Charlotte, even though the caller ID flashes a number I don’t recognize.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Is this Ella Broden?” a man’s voice asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Hello, Ella. This is Gabriel Velasquez. Lauren Wright reached out and asked me to call you about your sister.”

  I owe Lauren a big thank-you. If I had my choice of everyone in the NYPD to handle the search for Charlotte, I would have selected Gabriel Velasquez. And I say that notwithstanding our personal history. Five years ago—before Jeffrey—Gabriel and I went on a couple of dates, the last of which ended with a particularly good make-out session. But then I never returned any of his subsequent calls.

  Gabriel and I have since overlapped on a few cases, and our interactions have always been strictly professional. He never referenced our past or asked why I blew him off. I’ve always assumed that was because he was more than smart enough to figure out that I had passed up something real with him because I was a snob who couldn’t see myself ending up with a cop.

 
; “I’m very sorry to hear about your situation,” he continues. “I’m hopeful that this is a false alarm. But, as you know, the first hours are the most critical in any missing-persons case. So, just to be on the safe side, I don’t want to waste another second. I’d like you and your sister’s boyfriend to come down to One PP as soon as you can.”

  8.

  One Police Plaza is a prime example of Brutalist architecture, a term I’ve always found ironic because the classification has nothing to do with its English meaning—it refers to the French word for concrete. This despite the truly “brutal” appearance of many such buildings. The police headquarters in New York City fits the English connotation to a T. It’s like a fortress with windows punched into it, and is about as uninspiring as a public building could be.

  “My name is Ella Broden and I’m here to see Gabriel Velasquez,” I say to Ruth, the police receptionist.

  She’s a civilian, which means she’s wearing regular street clothes. Ruth has got to be close to seventy, and I imagine she’s been sitting behind that same table for more than half of her life. She looks at me without a hint of acknowledgment that I was once a fixture on the floor. Even my name doesn’t seem to register.

  “Please have a seat,” she says. “Someone will be out to get you soon.”

  “Is Zachary Rawls here?”

  “Who?”

  “Zachary, or Zach, Rawls. I’m supposed to meet him here.”

  “Nobody else is here. Have a seat and someone will be out shortly.”

  The only place to have a seat is on one of two unpadded wooden chairs set out in the hallway. I do as directed and wait for Gabriel to appear.

  As a prosecutor, you spend a lot of time dealing with cops. And while I’m rather outspoken on the topic that the way attorneys are portrayed on television is nothing like real life, cop shows are even worse. For starters, people with 150 IQs or photographic memories rarely choose a career in law enforcement. Another thing is that real-life detectives don’t look like movie stars. By and large, they’re middle-aged men who haven’t seen the inside of a gym in some time.

  The one exception that I’ve encountered to that latter rule is Gabriel Velasquez. The female DAs call him “TDH”—tall, dark, and handsome. Gabriel—no one ever called him Gabe—is not only easy on the eyes, but also sharp as a tack. Many of the cops I worked with had street smarts, but most of them lack the candlepower to become lawyers or college professors. Gabriel undoubtedly had those types of choices, and I suspect he went into law enforcement because he sincerely thought it was the place where he could make the biggest difference.

  We worked together on my first murder case, which, as it happened, was also the first case where he was lead detective. It was hardly a whodunit. A rich doctor beat his wife to death with a golf club and then claimed self-defense, putting a kitchen knife in her hand hours after she’d been killed. The husband stuck to that story on the stand—despite the fact that the ME testified that rigor mortis had already begun to set in when the wife’s fingers were folded over the knife’s handle—and the defense couldn’t find an expert to testify to the contrary even though price was no object. The jury deliberated for less than an hour before coming back with a guilty verdict. Five minutes after that, Gabriel asked me out.

  He looks even better today than I remember. In addition to all his easy-on-the-eyes physical attributes, Gabriel is also a good dresser. Not flashy, but stylish. More like an architect than a cop, usually favoring monochromatic combinations. Today, he’s attired in gray slacks and a slightly darker gray button-down shirt. His badge hangs on a chain around his neck. Lots of cops wear their shields that way, but I always thought Gabriel did it with greater flair.

  After we shake hands, Gabriel says that it’s good to see me again and once again apologizes for the circumstances. When he asks me to follow him back to his office, I try not to show too much surprise at the fact that he even has an office. The plaque on his door indicates that he’s been promoted since we last worked together. It’s Lieutenant Velasquez now.

  “I know that even though you’ve seen this process from the law enforcement side, it’s not the same as when it’s family,” Gabriel says as he closes the door. He then takes a seat behind the desk and gestures for me to sit as well. “So I’m going to treat you as if you aren’t my favorite former ADA, but the sister of a woman who’s gone missing and fears the worst. Okay?”

  I smile at his compliment. Anybody else might hold our past against me, but Gabriel is above that. It further proves just how much of an idiot I was five years ago for not returning his calls.

  “That’s what I want too.”

  “Good,” he says with a smile of his own. “Obviously, we all hope that this is a case where your sister went home with someone, maybe had a little too much to drink, and is now sleeping it off. I know you’re worried that it’s something else, and so for purposes of the investigation I’m going to assume that as well. That means we’re going to treat this as a missing-persons case from the get-go, so as not to lose any time. The first order of business is for me to learn everything I can about your sister. And it’s got to be warts and all, because it’s the warts that are going to help us find her.”

  I had been thinking about how to answer this very question on my cab ride over to One PP. What would they need to know? How could I distill Charlotte’s essence into words?

  “Charlotte’s twenty-five and a graduate student in creative writing at NYU,” I begin. “She lives uptown, at One Hundred and Eighth and Riverside. She has a boyfriend named Zach. Zachary Rawls. They’ve been living together for a year, probably a little less than that. He’s an actor. Of course, that really means he’s unemployed. The last time my sister and I discussed Zach, which was a few weeks ago, she said she was thinking about ending things with him, but I don’t know if she ever said anything to him about that. I guess I should say that my sister and I are very close. Even though she’s six years younger, we’re really best friends. We talk or text multiple times a day, every day. The last time I saw her was Tuesday. We had lunch at Tom’s Diner, at One-Twelfth and Broadway. Actually, that’s not right. We met to have lunch, but I got called back to the office before our food arrived. The reason she wanted to meet was because she had this exciting news—that her first novel was going to be published and she wanted me to be the first person she told. I normally would have heard from her that night, but I didn’t. Then the next day I got caught up in something and didn’t focus on the fact that I hadn’t spoken to her all day. That was yesterday. I spoke to Zach this morning, at around six. That’s when he told me Charlotte didn’t come home last night.”

  Gabriel nods as I give him this download, careful not to interrupt. Standard police intake procedure.

  “Okay,” he says when I come up for air. “It’s good that you’re close with your sister; that will help us. And that’s important information about the boyfriend too. Let me start with the obvious question. Did she have any enemies? Anyone who might want to hurt her?”

  “No. Everyone loved her.” He smiles, and although I’m sure he didn’t mean for me to take it this way, it strikes me that he doesn’t believe me. “Seriously. Ask anyone.”

  “I believe you, Ella. So, if there weren’t any enemies, what about other men aside from the boyfriend?”

  “No one,” I say with conviction, but as the words come out, I realize that I might not know if she was cheating on Zach. After all, I wasn’t going to share with her my night with Dylan Perry, although in that case it wasn’t because I was embarrassed, but so as to not reveal my life as Cassidy. But perhaps the point is still the same. No matter how close Charlotte and I were . . . are . . . we still probably keep secrets from each other.

  “You know, I don’t think there was anyone else, but who really knows what people choose to tell you about themselves? Especially family. I guess it’s possible she’d keep that kind of thing to herself.”

  “Fair enough,” he says. “Any exes tha
t I should be aware of?”

  “No. I mean, she had boyfriends from time to time, but she’s been with Zach for more than a year, and she was single when they met. So I can’t imagine anyone from her past coming back now to harm her.”

  In a matter of seconds, I’ve ruled out everyone but Zach. Could he have hurt Charlotte? She had shared with me that Zach had a hair-trigger temper, but she’d never even hinted that he’d gotten physical with her. Although, now in hindsight, maybe her reference to his volatility was that hint and I didn’t pick up on it.

  “Now you said it’s been two nights since you’ve heard from your sister?”

  “Yeah, but Zach—her boyfriend—didn’t call me until early this morning.”

  “I know, but you think it’s odd you didn’t hear from her all day yesterday, right?”

  Gabriel has latched on to my suspicion that Zach might not be an ally in the search for Charlotte. The boyfriend is always the first suspect, so I’m sure he was heading there even without my help. Still, I’m glad we’re on the same page.

  “Yeah. And I didn’t speak to her the night before that either. Our last conversation was in person, on Tuesday. Two-fifteen or so. Usually we communicate every day. Multiple times. Without fail.”

  “So the fact that she didn’t reach out to you Tuesday night could mean she was involved in something intense, and that could be relevant to her disappearance.”

  The phone rings. Gabriel answers by barking his last name into the receiver. Then, “Yeah, I’ll be right out to get him.”

  “Zachary’s here,” he says to me in a softer tone than he’d used on the phone. “It’s best if I talk to him alone. Then I’ll ask him to step out, and I’ll fill you in about the next steps. Sound good?”

  “Sure,” I say, although nothing sounds good right now.

  Zach is sitting in the same wooden chair in the hallway outside of Gabriel’s office that I’d previously occupied. When I approach, he stands and embraces me—which has to be the first time he’s ever done that.