On her birthday, Lana had hovered over her phone, telling herself Vivien would definitely call by eight a.m. Vivien always insisted on being the first to sing youHappy Birthday. It was like a superstition. Lana told herself she’d be so grateful to hear Vivien’s smoky voice that she’d resist demanding to know where she’d been. When eight a.m. slipped by, and then nine, Lana extended the deadline to eleven, then two p.m., then five p.m. Even at midnight, she told herself Vivien had gone on aninterstate road trip and miscalculated the time difference. At three a.m. she ran out of fabricated excuses—and hope.
“I take it you’ve checked her home address?” Officer Sheng said. Lana rubbed her breastbone, trying to dislodge the anxious knot in her lungs. Again, the phone stopped ringing, and she exhaled. Again, it started. “It’s not listed on the report. Says here the DMV address is out of date. She’s homeless?”
“I don’t know. She moves around a lot, chasing films. Last I knew, she was living with her boyfriend in North Hollywood.”
“Julian Vega?” the cop said, scrolling down.
“That’s him. But when I showed up at their apartment a few weeks ago, he was moving out. Turned out they’d broken up a month or so earlier and she’d left.”
“And you believed him?”
“You think I shouldn’t have?”
“I have no idea. She hadn’t told you about the breakup?”
“No.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Yes, but we had argued.”
“About what?”
“Money, mostly. She asked for a loan.”
“Ah,” he said, as if that cleared up the matter.
“But there was more to it. Julian said she’d gotten obsessed with something. Some secret she said could ‘blow lives apart.’ She’d be on her laptop at all hours, and she’d switch screens when he came near. Once, she went to the bathroom and he looked up her search history but found nothing. And not ‘nothing’ as in ‘nothing much.’ Nothing as in, she’d wiped it before going to the bathroom. In her own house. Who does that? This is a woman who’s a chronic over-sharer. She’s not good with secrets.”
“It does seem like she was troubled,” the cop said, choosing his words carefully. “Any history of mental illness?”
“Nothing diagnosed. Can we subpoena her search history? Check her bank records?”
“That would be some process. I understand your concern, but an adult acting strange and disappearing isn’t a strong probable cause. I see she previously claimed to have been abducted by aliens?”
“That was less about little green men and more about little white pills.”
“Miss Fleming, I’d love to say I’ll put a team of detectives on this, but I don’t have that power, or resource. She’s a grown woman with a history of unpredictable behavior and there’s no evidence of foul play. Look, I used to work in Missing Persons. The number of active cases in California averages?—”
“Twenty thousand.” Lana’s mind kindly supplied the Dewey decimal number, as it so often did at times it wasn’t at all useful: 363.2336: Missing Persons. She sat straighter. “How about an AMBER alert?”
“That’s for a child abduction. See, those twenty thousand missing people? Most are missing because they want to be, for one reason or another.”
“A BOLO?” she said, spelling out each letter. “‘Be On The Lookout?’”
“We call that a ‘bolo,’ and you’ve watched too much TV.”
“Read too many books. Otherwise, I’d know how to pronounce it. I assumed it was an acronym.”
“A bolo is for immediate risks.”
“But she could be at risk.”
“You don’t have evidence of that, beyond her ghosting you. She could well be sitting at home—wherever that might be—binge-watchingFriends.”
“I’m not sure she has many friends. How about an APB? Or do you pronounce that ay-pib?”
“Not applicable and, no, that’s an APB.”
