1
“MY DAUGHTER IS MISSING, and I want you to find her.”
The woman sitting across from me was beautiful in an aristocratic way. Her blonde hair had been perfectly coiffed and pulled back from her angular face; her enormous teardrop diamond earrings reflected light across my office like shards of glass stuck in fresh blacktop. She wore a formfitting French blue wool suit with a gold clasp on the blazer hooked by two Cs. Chanel. Everything about her reeked of wealth, including that clipped voice and its trace of venerable New England. She was old and young at the same time.
“Have you tried the men in blue?” I asked.
“I did,” she said, nodding her head about a millimeter. “And that’s why I’m here.”
I raised my eyebrows and opened up my hands.
“They’re the ones who told me about you,” she said. “They said they’d look into my daughter’s disappearance, but they weren’t convinced she was missing. I was surprised they said that. I thought if someone had not been in contact for forty-eight hours, they were officially considered a missing person.”
“That’s only in TV land,” I said. “In the real world, there are no hard rules. It could be several days; it might be just several hours. Depends on the officer taking the report. It’s usually based on a suspicious deviation from a person’s normal behavior or their typical movement patterns.”
“Such as?”
“Take a guy who comes home between five and six every day, and if he’s going to be late, he always makes sure to call his wife to let her know. One night he doesn’t come home, no one has been able to contact him for several hours, and none of his points of contact know where he is. If there’s a reasonable degree of suspicion that his routine has been interrupted involuntarily, then that person would be considered missing.”
The woman nodded. “One of the officers pulled me aside and said you could probably do a faster job than they could. That you worked with fewer restrictions. No red tape. He gave me your address.”
“The truth shall set you free,” I said, smiling with as much charm as I could muster. “But unfortunately, I don’t take on many cases this time of year. It’s my quiet season. About two weeks left before it’s too cold to play golf, three if I’m lucky. I’m still trying like hell to bring my handicap down a couple of strokes before the season ends.”
What I didn’t tell her was that I turned down a lot more cases than I took on. Thanks to an extremely generous settlement from Chicago PD upon my negotiated resignation and an Ivy League whiz kid who managed my money, work was now a choice, not a necessity.
“Mr. Cayne, my name is Violet Gerrigan,” she said, moving slightly in her seat but enough for me to see her legs. I didn’t think it was intentional. They were very nice to look at, however, and very tan, especially for this time of year. Given her $5,000 suit, I figured this hue was not the work of a tanning bed crammed into some second-floor salon in a walk-up in Wrigleyville. This was coloration earned on a yacht docked in the Mediterranean or lounging poolside in one of those ritzy gated Florida communities like West Palm Beach or Fisher Island.
“Money is no object,” she said firmly. She wasn’t boasting, simply proffering a statement of fact. “I have the means to pay you whatever it takes to find my daughter. I just want her home safely.”
I knew the Gerrigan name. You’d have to be living on the bottom of Lake Michigan not to know it. Randolph Gerrigan was a real estate mogul, second only to the city itself in owning the most real estate in Chicago. The family’s portfolio of properties was so large that when an interviewer asked how much of the city his family owned, Randolph Gerrigan replied, “Come to think of it, I have absolutely no idea, but I know it’s a helluva lot.”
“For the record, money alone doesn’t motivate me,” I said to Violet Gerrigan. “But it at least gets my attention. Tell me about your daughter.”
Mrs. Gerrigan reached into her blue snakeskin purse, which probably cost more than my yearly mortgage, and pulled out a four-by-six color photograph. She looked at it for a moment, then slid it across my desk. No one would dare say that the Gerrigan daughter had average looks. She was the American dream—thick blonde hair and stunning sapphire-blue eyes. Her teeth were perfect in every way. She was innocently leaning against a tree in a black skintight dress. She looked athletic and very capable. A real heart crusher.
“Tinsley is our middle child and our only daughter,” Mrs. Gerrigan said. “She’s a good girl but sometimes a little misguided.”
Misguided had been a carefully selected adjective, the only tell a slight pause before she’d said it. I studied Violet Gerrigan. Her face was emotionless. She could win a lot in poker hands.
“How would you define a little misguided?” I asked.
“Sometimes she has no regard for rules or protocol,” Mrs. Gerrigan said, her jaws visibly clenching. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s not rebellious to the point of making trouble for herself or others. But of all my children she has always been the free spirit. She does what she wants and to hell with anyone who disagrees. But she has never been in trouble with the law or a problem in school. Always made excellent grades.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-five.”
“So, she’s old enough to make her own decisions even if they don’t exactly mesh with yours or your husband’s.”
“Sure, but Tinsley still lives under our roof, Mr. Cayne,” Mrs. Gerrigan said firmly. “And as long as she does, we make the rules. Her age is irrelevant.”
“I understand,” I said. “My father put the same conditions on my living in his house after college. I lasted just shy of a month. Maybe Tinsley got the same itch.”
“Tinsley didn’t leave us on her own. She’s gone off before without any notice, but this time is different. She was supposed to be going to her best friend’s house two days ago. She left our house and never made it there and never came home. I believe something or someone has stopped her from returning.”
“Any idea who that someone or something might be?”
“None.”
I took a moment and let silence fill the room. This made whatever I said next seem as if it came from serious thinking. I had learned this trick from my psychiatrist father. He liked to call it the “pause of deep intellect.”
“It’s a reflex for us to look for the most complicated answers to the simplest of questions,” I finally said.
Her left eyebrow arched again, this time about a millimeter higher than the last time. “Which means?” she said.
“I don’t presume to know your family dynamics,” I said. “But maybe Tinsley just had enough. She’s in her midtwenties. It’s a big, exciting world out there. Sometimes a kid just decides it’s time to cut the cord.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Cayne, I know my daughter,” she said. “And this is not how she would do it. She and her father are extremely close. At the very least, she would tell him.”
I studied her face and couldn’t help but notice how perfectly her makeup had been applied. Violet Gerrigan wasn’t my type of woman, but she was definitely starting to grow on me. Her composure for a mother missing a daughter was remarkable.