Moonlight Mile Part 14

"Could you be be more cryptic?" more cryptic?"

She shrugged and bit a nail. "Gotta go."

As she walked past me, I said, "Why talk to me?"

"Because Zippo was a friend of mine. Last year? He was more than a friend. First more-than-a-friend I ever had."

"Who's Zippo?"

Her facade of apathetic cool collapsed and she looked about nine years old. Nine years old and abandoned by her parents at the mall. "You're serious?"

"I am."

"Christ," she said, and her voice cracked. "You don't know anything."

"Who's Zippo?" I said again.

"Buzzer's buzzed, man." She flicked her cigarette to the street. "Gots to get my education on. You drive safe."

She walked up the street as the melted snow continued to rush along the gutters and the sky turned to slate. As she vanished through the same door Princ.i.p.al Nghiem had gone through, I realized I'd never gotten her name. The door closed, and I climbed in my Jeep and drove back across the river.

Chapter Eleven.

While I'd spent the morning interviewing annoying prep-school girls, Angie's friend, PR, had agreed to watch Gabby for a few afternoons. So it was that my wife joined me on casework for the first time in almost five years, and we drove north of the city to meet Sophie Corliss's father.

Brian Corliss lived in Reading on a maple-lined street with wide white sidewalks and lawns that looked like they shaved twice a day. It was a solidly middle-cla.s.s section of town, leaning toward upper maybe, but not to an elitist degree. The garages were two-car, not four, and the cars were Audis and 4Runner Limiteds, not Lexuses and BMW 740s. All the houses looked well cared for, and all were adorned with Christmas lights and decorations. None more so than the Corliss house, a white Colonial with black shutters and window trim, a black front door. White icicle lights dripped from the gutters, porch posts, and railings. A wreath as big as the sun hung above the garage door. In front of the bushes on the front lawn stood a manger replica and figures of the three kings, Mary, Joseph, and a menagerie of animals arrayed around an empty cradle. To their right stood a somewhat incongruous menagerie of snowmen, elves, reindeer, Santa and Mrs. Claus, and a leering Grinch. On the roof, a sled sat by the chimney and more lights spelled out MERRY CHRISTMAS MERRY CHRISTMAS. The mailbox post was a candy cane.

When we pulled up the driveway, Brian was in his garage, unloading groceries from the back of an Infiniti SUV. He greeted us with a wave and a smile as open as a heartland prairie. He was a trim man who wore a denim Oxford unb.u.t.toned over a white T tucked into a pair of sharply pressed khakis. His canvas safari jacket was maroon with a black leather collar. He was in his mid-forties and looked to be in exceptional shape. This made sense, because he'd made his living the last ten years first as a fitness trainer and then as a fitness guru. He traveled New England speaking to small companies about how they could raise their productivity by getting their employees into better shape. He'd even written a book, Lose the Fat and All That, Lose the Fat and All That, which had become a local bestseller for a few weeks, and a cursory study of his Web sites (he had three) and his autobiography suggested he hadn't neared his career ceiling yet. He shook our hands, not overdoing the grip the way a lot of workout fiends do, and thanked us for coming and apologized for not being able to meet us halfway. which had become a local bestseller for a few weeks, and a cursory study of his Web sites (he had three) and his autobiography suggested he hadn't neared his career ceiling yet. He shook our hands, not overdoing the grip the way a lot of workout fiends do, and thanked us for coming and apologized for not being able to meet us halfway.

"It's just the city traffic, you know? After two, forget about it. But I mentioned it to Donna and she said, 'But won't the detectives have to drive back in that same traffic?' "

"Donna's your wife?"

He nodded. "She had a point. So I feel guilty."

"But we're imposing on you," I said.

He waved that off. "You're not imposing at all. If you can help bring my daughter back to me, you're most definitely not imposing."

He lifted a grocery bag off the floor of the garage. There were six of them, and I reached for two. Angie took two more.

"Oh, no," he said. "I can get them."

"Don't be ridiculous," Angie said. "It's the least we can do."

"Jeesh," he said. "You're very kind. Thank you."

He closed the hatch of the Infiniti and I was mildly surprised to see one of those moronic 9/11 Terrorist Hunting Permit decals on the rear window. I suppose I should have felt safer knowing that if Bin Laden dropped by to borrow a cup of sugar, Brian Corliss was ready to put out his lights for America, but mostly I just felt annoyed that the thousands who had died on September 11 were being exploited for a dumb f.u.c.king decal. Before my mouth could get me into trouble, though, we were following Brian Corliss up the path to the black front door and entering his two-hundred-year-old house.

We stood by the granite kitchen counter as he unloaded the groceries into the fridge and cabinets. The first floor had been gut-remodeled so recently you could smell the sawdust. Two hundred years ago, I doubt the builder had seen the need to go with the sunken living room or the pressed copper ceiling in the dining room or the Sub-Zero in the kitchen. All the window frames were new and uniform eggsh.e.l.l. Even so, the house had a mismatched feel. The living room was white on white-white couch, white throw rugs, off-white fireplace mantel, ash-white logs in the ivory metal log basket, a huge white Christmas tree towering over it all from a corner. The kitchen was dark-cherrywood cabinets and dark granite counters and black granite backsplash. Even the Sub-Zero and the chimney hood above the stove were black. The dining room was Danish Modern, a clean, blond hard-edged table surrounded by hard-edged high-backed chairs. The ultimate effect was of a house that had been furnished from too many catalogs.

Framed pictures of Brian Corliss and a blond woman and a blond boy sat on the mantel, on the shelves of a credenza, on top of the fridge. Collages of them hung on the walls. You could follow the boy's growth from birth to what looked like four. The blond woman was Donna, I a.s.sumed. She was attractive the way sports bar hostesses and pharmaceutical reps are-hair the color of rum and lots of it, teeth as bright as Bermuda. She had the look of a woman who kept her plastic surgeon on speed dial. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were prominently displayed in most of the photos and looked like perfect softb.a.l.l.s made of flesh. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock. In a couple of the photos-just a couple-stood a dark-haired girl with anxious eyes and an unsure, fleshy chin: Sophie.

"When was the last time you saw her?" I asked.

"It's been a few months."

Angie and I looked across the counter at him.

He held up both palms. "I know, I know. But there were extenuating ..." He grimaced and then smiled. "Let's just say parenting is not easy. You have any kids?"

"One," I said. "Daughter."

"How old?"

"Four."

"Little child," he said, "little problems. Big child, big problems." He looked across the counter at Angie. "And you, miss?"

"We're married." Angie tilted her head toward me. "Same four-year-old."

That seemed to please him. He smiled to himself and hummed under his breath as he put a dozen eggs and a half-gallon of skim milk into the fridge.

"She was such a happy child." He finished emptying the bag and folded it neatly before putting it under the counter. "A joy every day. I fully admit I was unprepared for the day she turned into such a Sullen Sally."

"And what turned her into ... that?" Angie asked.

He peered at the eggplant he pulled from the next bag, frozen for a moment. "Her mom," he said. "G.o.d rest her. But, yes, she ..." He looked up from the eggplant as if surprised to find us there. "She left."

"How old was Sophie when she left?"

"Well, she left with Sophie."

"So, she left you. She didn't leave Sophie." Angie glanced at me. "I'm a little lost, Brian."

Brian put the eggplant into the crisper drawer. "I regained custody when Sophie was ten. She-this is hard-Sophie's mother? She developed a chemical dependency. First on Vicodin, then on OxyContin. She stopped acting like a responsible adult. Then she left me and went to live with someone else. And they created a wholly unfit environment for a child to grow up in, believe me." He looked at both of us, waiting, it appeared, for an indication of agreement.

I gave him my best empathetic nod and commiserating gaze.

"So I sued for custody," he said, "and eventually I won."

"How many years was Sophie with her mother before that?" Angie asked.

"Three."

"Three ..."

"Sophie's mother was addicted to painkillers throughout that time?" I asked.

"Eventually. I mean, she stopped, or claimed she did. For the full three years."

"So what created the unsafe environment?"

He gave us a warm smile. "Nothing I feel comfortable discussing right now."

"Okay," I said.

Angie said, "So you brought Sophie back here when she was ten?"

He nodded. "And at first it was a little awkward, because I hadn't been a permanent fixture in her life for six years, but then, I'll tell you something, we figured it out. We found our rhythm. We did."

"Six years," Angie said. "I thought you said three."

"No, no. Her mother and I separated when Sophie was just turning seven and then I had to fight three years for custody, but the six years I'm talking about were the first six years of her life. I was overseas during most of that. And Sophie and her mother were here."

"So really," Angie said with an edge in her voice I wasn't real keen on, "you missed her whole life."

"Huh?" His open face closed and darkened.

"Overseas, Brian?" I said. "As in military?"

"Affirmative."

"Doing what?"

"Protecting this country."

"No doubt," I said. "And thank you. Sincerely. Thank you. I'm just wondering where you served."

He closed the fridge door and folded and stowed the last of the paper bags. He gave me that warm, warm smile of his. "So you can second-guess the gravity of my contribution?"

"Definitely not," I said. "It's just a question."

After an awkward few seconds, he held up a hand and smiled wider. "Of course, of course. I apologize. I was a civil engineer with Bechtel in Dubai."

Angie kept her voice light. "I thought you said you were in the military."

"No," he said, his eyes fixed on nothing. "I agreed to your partner's description when he said as in as in the military. When you're in the Emirates, working for a government friendly to ours, you may as well be in the military. You are most certainly a target of any jihadist who decides to blow you into meat sc.r.a.ps because you symbolize his c.o.c.keyed idea of Western corruption and influence. I didn't want my daughter growing up in that." the military. When you're in the Emirates, working for a government friendly to ours, you may as well be in the military. You are most certainly a target of any jihadist who decides to blow you into meat sc.r.a.ps because you symbolize his c.o.c.keyed idea of Western corruption and influence. I didn't want my daughter growing up in that."

"So why take the job in the first place?"

"I'll tell you, Angela, I've asked myself that a thousand times, and the answer's not one I'm proud of." He gave us the hapless shrug of a charming child. "The money was too good to pa.s.s up. There. I admit it. The tax break, too. I knew if I worked my tail off for five years, I'd come home with a king's ransom I could put toward my family and toward building my personal-training enterprise."

"Which you obviously did," I said. "And quite well." I was good cop, today. Maybe even kiss-a.s.s cop. Whatever works, says I.

He looked from his kitchen bar at his living room like a modern-day Alexander with no worlds left to conquer. "So, yes, it was not the greatest idea to think I could hold a family together while I was six thousand miles away. And I own that failure. I do. But when I returned, I came home to a wife with substance abuse issues and a value system I found"-he shrug-winced-"distasteful. We fought a lot. I couldn't get Cheryl to see how destructive she was being to Sophie. And the more I tried to get her to see the truth, the more she retreated into denial. One day, I came home to an empty house." Another wince, another shrug. "I spent the next three years fighting for my rights as a father and, eventually, I won. I won."

"You got sole custody?"

He led us into the sunken living room. Brian and I took seats on the sofa, while Angie sat on the love seat across from us. On the coffee table between us was a white copper bucket filled with bottled water. Brian offered us the bottles and we each took one. The labels advertised Brian's weight-loss book.

"Once Cheryl died, I did, yes."

"Oh," Angie said, her eyes wider than usual, her jaw working to mask her frustration, "your wife died. And then then you, uh, won custody?" you, uh, won custody?"

"Exactly. She contracted stomach cancer. I'll go to my grave knowing it was the drugs that did it to her. You can't abuse your body that way and expect it to continually repair itself."

I noticed that the skin closest to his eyes, where the crow's feet should have been, was whiter and tighter than the rest of his face. Circles the size of sand dollars indented the flesh. Like his wife, he'd had work done. Apparently his body didn't repair itself continually.

"So you received sole custody," Angie said.

He nodded. "Thank G.o.d they were living in New Hampshire. If it had been Vermont or here? I'd probably have had to fight another three years."

Angie looked over at me. I gave her my flattest gaze, the one I reserve for situations that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

"Brian, excuse me for jumping to conclusions," she said, "but are we talking about a same-s.e.x-marriage issue?"

"Not marriage." He placed the tip of one index finger on the coffee table and bent it until the flesh turned a pink-lemonade shade. "Not marriage. Not in New Hampshire. But, yes, a domestic partnership of that nature was being enacted in full view of my daughter. If they'd been allowed to marry, who knows how long the custody fight could have worn on?"

"Why?" I asked.

"Excuse me?"

Angie said, "Did your ex-wife's partner-?"

"Elaine. Elaine Murrow."

"Elaine, thank you. Did Elaine legally adopt Sophie?"

"No."

"She ever begin proceedings in pursuit of that?"

"No. But if they had found the right activist judge? And that's not hard around here. Who's to say they couldn't have turned my attempt to regain custody into a test-case to overturn the entire idea of biological parental rights?"

Angie gave me another careful look. "That seems a bit of a stretch, Brian."

"Does it?" He twisted the cap off his water. He took a long swig. "Well, not to me. And I lived it."

"Fair enough," I said. "So once Sophie came to live with you and you two ironed out the b.u.mps, things were good?"

"Yeah." He placed the water bottle on the coffee table and for a moment his face glowed with some distant memory. "Yeah. For about three years, things were very good. Sure, she had some issues over the pa.s.sing of her mother and the move from New Hampshire, but generally? Things were very fine between us. She was respectful, she made her bed every morning, she seemed to take to Donna, she performed well in school."