“Hey, good, you’re back!” Lindsey was sitting up, supported by pillows, on Shay’s bed. Shay had moved her in here after it got too noisy in the living room. She’d needed a door that closed as she’d talked on the phone, and a seat more comfortable than the desk chair in Shay’s home office. So the bedroom it was.
He likes it in here.
And yeah, Shay was hyper-aware that Peter was in her room for the first time, and as she looked around she saw it as he did—with its bright white-painted furniture and soothing blue walls. Mexican tile floor. King-sized bed. Private bath. Super comfy reading chair that was big enough for two. Provided the two liked each other significantly.
“Fiona’s mother finally called you?” Peter asked.
“I called her,” Lindsey said. “After I saw the police report.” At Peter’s obvious confusion, she looked at Shay.
“He just got here,” Shayla told the woman. “All he knows is that I think Maddie’s at Manzanar.”
“Okay, Lieutenant,” Lindsey said as she looked up at Peter. “Full sit-rep. Right after you left for your meeting in Coronado, I ran another search through the system and discovered that the police in Sacramento just posted a B&E report for Fiona’s mother’s address. It happened this morning. The two perps: one male and one female. The homeowner—Maisy Clark, aka Fiona’s mom—described the intruders as a scruffy man, thin, average height, white, in his early twenties and a teenage girl, petite, of Asian descent. So definitely Maddie and Dingo. They also knocked on the mother’s door this morning, looking for Fiona, who apparently has been—and I quote—sent away to boarding school. Later, the mom went out, but came home to find the same two had gained entry via a house key and were fleeing the premises.”
“Was anything stolen?” Peter asked.
“Not that the mother knows of, no,” Lindsey said. “But several books had been moved in Fiona’s room, and one of them had the inside pages cut out. You know, a stash-hole.”
“Fuck,” Peter said.
“So, I called the mom again, and left a message telling her I was a private investigator working on a runaway teen case, which is not untrue, and that her description of the girl who broke and entered was similar to the girl I was looking for, and could we please talk?” Lindsey nodded at Pete. “She finally called me back. She’s actually really nice, but definitely exhausted both by her bullshit ex-husband and her drug-addicted—her words—daughter. I sent her a photo of both Maddie and Ricky Dingler—aka Dingo—and she gave me a positive ID. Maddie and Dingo were in Sacramento this morning.”
“They must’ve driven all night,” Shay murmured to Peter. “After the earthquake.”
Lindsey nodded. “Shay told me that you guys got a text from Maddie right after last night’s quake—which means they had to be close enough to San Diego to have felt it. But they were definitely in Sacramento at tenA.M.” She smiled at Peter. “Ten hundred hours for the SEALs in the room.”
Peter was already processing the information he’d received. “So Fiona’s already off at some boarding school. Do we know where? And isn’t it likely Maddie and Dingo would go there, to get whatever it is that they think she has?”
“Longfield Academy in Roanoke, Virginia,” Shayla told him. “It’s a lockdown facility—really more of a rehab center than a school.”
“It’s for rich kids with addictions.” Lindsey put it more bluntly. “I called their head of security and asked them to watch for Maddie and Dingo. She promised to give me a call if they show.”
“But we don’t think they’re going to Virginia,” Shay said. “We think they know that they’ve gotten everything they’re going to from Fiona.”
“Her mom told me that she and her husband found drugs in their house. She believes Fiona brought them with her, from San Diego,” Lindsey reported. “The mom wasn’t helpful when it came to what kind of drugs, or quantity. She was really freaked out when she found them, and she just flushed them all. So it’s hard to say if there were twelve thousand dollars’ worth. Or eleven or ten or whatever the value was before the interest rate went up.”
“What do we think was in the cut-out pages of the book?” Peter asked.
“Not drugs,” Lindsey said. “Mrs. Clark told me that her husband—not her ex, her current husband—was so freaked out by Fiona that he hired a drug-sniffing dog. That’s how they found the drugs. They were hidden in his den. The dog was completely uninterested in Fiona’s bedroom.”
“So, money?” Peter asked.
“Or an address book with the names and numbers of high-level U.S. Navy admirals who regularly hired Fiona as a hooker,” Shayla suggested.
Lindsey looked at her. “Your brain is a wonderfully dark and scary place.”
Peter turned to her, too. “So why, exactly, do you think they’re in Manzanar?”
Shayla shrugged. “To start with, it’s notthatfar from Sacramento—I mean, considering the size of California—and…well…bottom line, Maddie told Hiroko that she wanted to go there. It’s possible that some of what she’s said is the truth. I’ve seen the pictures, andI’mfascinated—and horrified and intrigued. If I were Maddie, I’d want to see it and…smell it, you know? Feel it. Really know where I came from—or maybe more important, where Maddie’s mother came from, since she was raised by people who’d been unjustly imprisoned there. Lisa’s gone, but there’s still a little piece of her—an echo of a moan, a wisp of a lingering sigh—in the dust of Manzanar.”
“Does she talk this way all the time?” Lindsey asked Peter. “God, I love writers.”
Peter glanced at his watch, and Shay knew he was calculating the time it would take them to get to Manzanar. Three-hundred-ish miles, should take five and a half hours, plus traffic….If they left immediately, with a little luck, they’d arrive well before midnight. He nodded. “All right. You sold me. I’m going up there.”
“I’m going, too,” Shayla said.
“Not a chance,” Peter said. “You’re safest right here.”
Her response was to hold out her phone and show him the text that Maddie had sent.Can we set up a time and place to meet and talk? Not just dad, but you, too?
