Eerie

She nudges him in the dark.
Grant begins, his voice unsteady: “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Paige.”
“Just like me?”
“Just like you. And she had an older brother named Grant.”
“Just like you.”
He blinks through the tears reforming in his eyes.
Fights through the tremor in his voice.
 Don’t cry. 
The mantra for a lifetime.
“Yes, just like me.”
“Did they have parents?”
Everything inside the car is terribly still, but the woods around them have become alive in the silence. Rain pelts the carpet of leaves on the forest floor. Things snap in the darkness. The hoot of a lonesome owl goes unanswered.
The world outside is huge—so many things for a little boy to be afraid of.
“No. Paige and Grant lived in a beautiful house all by themselves, and they were very brave.”
Thirty-One Years Later
Chapter 1
“Where’d you go for lunch?” Sophie asked.
Grant shook his head as he typed Benjamin Seymour and Seattle into the Google query box.
“I’m not playing this game.”
“Come on. Don’t make me go through your receipts.”
“Will my participation in this conversation make it end sooner?”
“The Panda Express at Northgate?”
“Nope.”
“Subway?”
Grant frowned at his partner across the border fence that divided their desks into equal surface areas—two messy inboxes, stacks of files, blank narrative forms, expense reports, a shared, miniature artificial Christmas tree.
“Subway it was.” Sophie scribbled on a pad. She looked good today—a charcoal-colored pantsuit with a lavender blouse and a matching necklace, turquoise with silver fringing. She was of African and Native American descent. Sometimes, Grant thought he could see the Cherokee lineage in her dark almond eyes and hair so purely straight and black it shimmered like the blued steel of his service carry, an H&K P2000. They’d been working together since Benington had transferred to the North precinct two years ago.
“What are you writing down?” Grant asked.
“Keep in mind I haven’t adjusted for wherever you eat on the weekends, but so far this year, I have seventy-nine documented visits to Subway.”
“That’s the best detective work I’ve ever seen you do, Benington.”
“Got a few more numbers for you.”
Grant surrendered, setting his work aside.
“Fine. Let’s hear them.”
“Forty. Three hundred sixteen. And, oh my God, one thousand five hundred eighty.”
“Never mind, I don’t want to know this.”
“Forty is the approximate time in minutes you’ve waited while they toasted your sandwich, three hundred sixteen is the number of cheese slices you’ve eaten this year, and finally, one thousand five hundred eighty little round meat shapes have given their lives during the spicy Italian genocide of twenty-eleven.”
“Where did you get those numbers?”
“Google and basic math. Does Subway sponsor you?”
“It’s a solid restaurant,” Grant said, turning back to his computer.
“It’s not a restaurant.”
On the far side of the room, he could hear the sergeant chewing someone’s ass through the telephone. Otherwise, the cluster of desks and cubes stood mostly empty. The only other detective on the floor was Art Dobbs, the man on a much quieter, more civilized phone call.
Grant studied his search results which had returned a hundred thousand hits.
“Damn,” he said.
“What?”
“Getting no love on my search. Guy was pretty quiet for a big spender.”
Grant appended the word attorney to the string and tried again.
Just twenty-eight hundred hits this time, the first page dominated by Seymour’s firm’s website and numerous legal search engine results.
“Was?” Sophie said. “That’s kind of cold.”
“He’s been missing …” Grant glanced at his watch “… forty-nine hours.”
“Still possible he just left town and didn’t feel like telling the world.”
“No, I spoke with a few of his partners this morning. They described him as a man who played hard but worked even harder. He had a trial scheduled to begin this morning and I was assured that Seymour never let his extracurriculars interfere with work. He’s one of Seattle’s preeminent trial lawyers.”
“I never heard of him.”
“That’s ‘cause he does civil litigation.”
“Still say he went off on a bender. Probably licking his wounds as we speak in some swank hotel.”
“Well, I find it interesting,” Grant said.
“What?”
“That your missing guy—what’s his name again?”
“Talbert.”
“That Talbert has such a similar work hard/play hard profile. Real estate developer. High net worth. Mr. Life-of-the-Party. How long’s he been AWOL?”
“Three days.”
“And you think he’s just off having some ‘me time’ too?”
Sophie shook her head. “He missed meetings. Important ones. We sure these guys didn’t know each other? Decide to run off to Vegas?”
Grant shook his head. “Nothing points that way, but I’m wondering if there’s a connection we’ve missed.”
The roasted earthiness of brewing coffee wafted in from the break room.
The copy machine began to chug in a distant corner.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“This is just a stab in the dark, but what sort of trouble might two wealthy, workaholic playboys such as these get themselves into?”
“Drugs.”
“Sure, but I didn’t get the sense that Seymour was into anything harder than a lot of high-end booze and a little weed. It’s not exactly a life-and-death proposition scoring in this city.”
“Women.”
“Yep.”
Sophie smiled, a beautiful thing.
She said, “So you’re theorizing our boys were murdered by a serial killer prostitute?”
“Not ready to go that far yet. Just saying let’s explore this direction.”
“And this hunch is based on …”
“Nothing at all.”
“Glad to see you don’t let your training get in the way of your job.”
“Can’t train instinct, Sophie. You’re on Facebook, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you call it when you ask someone to be your friend? Other than pathetic.”
She rolled her eyes. “A friend request.”
“Send one to Talbert and Seymour. I’ll call my contact at Seymour’s office and see if they can log into his account and accept your request. You do the same with Talbert’s people.”
“You want me to go through and compare their lists of friends.”
“Maybe we get lucky and they share some female acquaintances. Facebook is the new street corner.” Grant glanced at his watch. “I gotta get outta here.”
He stood, grabbed his jacket.
“You’re just gonna leave all this to me?”
“Sorry, but I have to drive out to Kirkland. Haven’t been in six weeks.”
Sophie’s eyes softened.
“No problem. I’ll get on this.”
Chapter 2
Construction paper ornaments hung in chains along the walls of the empty visiting room where Grant sat. Every season, the patients of the acute psychiatric unit who could handle a pair of scissors without hurting themselves or someone else made Christmas decorations for the less stable residents to paint. The results were all over the map. Some were nebulous shapes with smears of color. Others possessed the compulsive detail of a Franciscan altarpiece.
Grant closed the magazine. He’d lost track of how many times he’d perused it in the last year. Judging by the dates on the stack of National Geographic in front of him, the tradition was safe for the foreseeable future.
“That article on Russian warplanes must get better and better.”