Chapter 25: The Light of My Life

About eleven-thirty, Andi slipped out of bed and started feeling around for her clothes. I turned on a bedside light and just watched her beautiful body as she gathered her things together, apparently in no big hurry to dress. She turned and smiled at me as I watched her.

“Do you have to leave?”

“Curfew,” she said. “What’s fair for the daughter is fair for the...”

“The mom,” I finished. “In every sense of the word except biological you are her mother and always will be.”

“Yes. But I’ll have to tell her now. Soon.” I slid out of bed and stood with her in the tiny pool of light. I helped her on with her clothes. It was a lot more difficult than helping her off with them. I finally gave up as we laughed over tangled underwear and then began pulling my own clothes on. “You don’t need to get up.”

“What would your daughter think if your boyfriend didn’t even walk you home after a hot date? Besides, it gives me five more minutes with you.” We left my apartment and went down the back stairs across the alley from her door. She unlocked her door and turned to kiss me goodnight when the hall lights came on.

“Well, you’re finally home,” Cali said from inside. She came down the hall wearing Andi’s plush robe and fuzzy slippers with her hair in curlers. “I guess I can go to bed now that I know you’re safe.” It took us a moment and then all three of us broke up.

“You don’t really wait up for her like that, do you?” I asked Andi.

“Not like that! What would her date think if he saw her mother looking like that?”

“Well, maybe I overdid it with the curlers,” Cali laughed. “Anyway, I’m going to bed now so you two can kiss goodnight. Just don’t stand out there on the porch where all the neighbors can see you.”

“‘Night, Cali.”

“‘Night. Love you, Mom. Love you, Dag.” She kissed each of us on the cheek and went back down the hall. I stepped in far enough that I wasn’t on the porch, but we kept the door open.

“See? That was much more effective than if you had come home alone. She’d have been so disappointed.”

“I think she likes you.”

“I’m glad. I intend to be around for a long time.”

“I love you, Dag.” We kissed.

“You are my heart’s desire, Andi.” I looked at her for a long moment and then retraced my steps back to my apartment.

Five hours earlier, I’d been so exhausted I couldn’t keep my eyes open. After an evening spent in the arms of my lover, I was so energized I could scarcely sit. I had work to do. My little girl’s friend was missing. I needed to find Mel.

There were 4,173 correlations that my search and compare algorithms had revealed. That sounded like a lot, but when compared to the fifteen million results a standard Google search yields, it seemed manageable. I plunged into the life of a rebellious teen and was sucked into the slimy dregs of America.

It was a neighborhood—if you could call it that—in which bright neon lit up a thousand doorways with promises that paled against the reality inside. Crossing any threshold could result in loss of money, reputation, or civil liberty. I could defend myself against the threats of these commercial venues. It wasn’t that I could walk with impunity anywhere I chose, but I was well-protected. It took more than a casual touch to cripple me.

More dangerous were the darkened alleys between various strip shows, sex shops, and offers to get laid tonight by imaginary bored housewives. Drugs, guns, sex in every variety were offered by people with no front door presence. Unwilling organ donors wailed in the distance as their bloody body parts were offered to the highest bidder. And as ineffectual as policing the district was, any alley could hide a cop waiting to arrest patrons for the least suggestion of solicitation.

I had new leads to follow up now that I was in Nowhere Land. I started by entering a reverse phone booth and feeding the list of numbers into the device. In minutes it started feeding back a list of names, addresses, marital status, spouses, children, and even a history of where each man had lived for the past thirty years. There were a few people smart enough to use an Internet phone service that yielded less ready information, but the vast majority had solicited favors from a fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old girl using their personal cell phones. The world was filled with the illusion of privacy.

I focused on the numbers in the same area code and when I had addresses, I narrowed my search to those who were within the residential and business community of downtown Seattle. I walked through their neighborhoods tacking up posters where their friends and neighbors could see them with a picture of Mel and the message, “This seventeen-year-old girl is missing. Reward for information.” I used my own Internet phone number connected to a message collection service that I book for a month at a time. I included an email address routed through one of the adult services websites. I didn’t expect any of the men on my list to respond. As soon as they realized the woman they’d solicited was a minor, they’d flee the sites where they met her. But it was always possible that someone else in their more respectable neighborhood might have spotted her, especially if she’d been seen with one of their neighbors.

I put up posters around her school community and the various sports groups she participated in. It was always possible that her disappearance had nothing to do with her activities on the adult forums and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I even posted at her church. Somehow, I didn’t think her parents were the type who would alert their critical-thinking religious community about their wayward daughter. They’d be surprised, but there really wasn’t anything they could do about it.

And finally, I contacted her cellular system. Her parents had disconnected her cell phone. I wanted to know the instant it was reconnected or reassigned. That took some tricky hacking as the big cell systems don’t freely give out that information. I had to settle for attaching a flag to her phone number so that it would notify me if a call was made in or out.

In the old days, detectives did this footwork literally on foot. By sunrise, I’d covered more virtual territory than Sam Spade could have imagined existed. I’d posted notices on the message boards of every ‘friend’ Mel had on the Internet as far as I could tell. There was no question in my mind that she could run away and hide if she truly wanted to, but if she had been taken, she would become a hot property quickly.

My email started lighting up at about seven o’clock with messages. Most were innocuous ping-backs, testing my spam filters. Nothing related directly to Mel’s disappearance. I started seeing one message appear from several directions at once. At first I thought it was one of those phishing schemes that start off, “I couldn’t believe it was you in this video. ROFLMAO.” Usually those were followed by a link to a porn video that demanded an account password in order to view the footage. But this link kept appearing with a caption that began trending on some of the popular sites. “Unsung superhero rescues woman. You won’t believe this guy!” The link led to a legitimate video sharing site and when I finally decided to follow it, I was stunned.