“Maybe.”

She shifted in her seat, adjusted the vent in front of her on the dash. “Wouldn’t it be better to know what he wants? So we know?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t sure. I was still spooked by the notion that he could possibly have been involved with taking Elizabeth. Maybe it was unfair to put him on the list, but from what Rodney had told me about the picture, there was nowhere else to put him. And if he did know that I was close to finding Elizabeth and that it might put him in jeopardy, then all hell could break loose at any moment.

“Maybe,” I said again.

“I think it would be.”

“Tell me why.”

“Because we’d know,” she said. “We’d know. And we don’t have to tell him where we are or where she is. Or we could tell him she’s in Maine. See what he does with that. I don’t know. It just seems to me like finding out what he knows puts us in a better spot.”

I glanced down at the phone. He hadn’t left a voicemail.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say he saw the news report. What do I tell him?”

The phone began buzzing again. I glanced down.

Mike again.

Lauren picked it up and held it out to me. “I don’t know. But you’ll think of something.”

EIGHTEEN

I touched the screen and held the phone to my ear. “Mike. What’s going on?”

“I might ask you the same question,” he said through the line.

“Oh, yeah. Why’s that?”

“Because I just saw some crazy news report about you almost finding Elizabeth,” he said. “Some retired cop in Minnesota.”

“You saw that?”

“Not live,” he said. “But the link showed up in my email ten minutes ago and I just finished watching it. What the hell is going on, Joe?”

Lauren was staring at me, craning her head toward me, trying to listen. It made me uncomfortable.

I looked away from her, out my side of the windshield, trying to focus my thoughts. “It’s been kind of crazy. I haven’t had a chance to call.”

“Catch me up.”

The wheels were spinning in my head. “I’m in the middle of something so I gotta be quick. I found the family in Minneapolis. The family that she ended up with.”

He let out a low whistle. “Wow. Yeah, I think I saw that in the news clip, but I was in such a rush to call you, I think I rushed through it.”

“Right,” I said, realizing this was the first time I had ever talked to him and not believed every word he said to me. “Bazer see it?”

“No idea,” Mike said. “I haven’t seen him yet this morning. Why?”

“Just curious,” I said quickly. “Anyway. I talked to the family. But she’s gone.”

“Gone?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

I hesitated. “She ran. From the family. Before I got there.”

“Dammit,” he said. “Why did she take off?”

I hesitated again. “I’m not sure yet. I’m still trying to find that out.”

“What’s the story on the family? You never said…”

“I can’t talk about it right now,” I said.

I glanced at Lauren. She widened her eyes at me.

“Hang on,” I mouthed.

“Okay.” Mike hesitated. “Any idea where she went? Can I help?”

“We’re still trying to figure out where she went,” I said, still looking at Lauren. “Hoping we can piece it together here today. And I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll do anything you need,” he said. “I’ll run traces on anything you want. I’ll hop on a plane. I’ll call in favors. You name it, I’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Mike,” I told him. “Look, I gotta run. I’ll let you know.”

I hung up and squeezed the phone for a moment before setting it down on the console again.

“You look like you want to throw up,” Lauren observed.

“That’s pretty accurate, yeah.”

“Why?”

“I’ve relied on him all these years,” I said, changing lanes to get around a slow pick-up. “He was my rock. I could bounce anything off of him. I trusted every word he said. I thought he was on my side.”

“He still might be, Joe.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I hate the doubt. I can’t count on him until I know for sure. And let’s say he isn’t involved. Then I’ve totally undercut our friendship and his help. All that trust? Gone.”

“You don’t think he’d understand?” she countered. “If he isn’t a part of it and you explain to him what you learned and why you had to be cautious, you don’t think he’d understand?”

“I don’t know. But it feels awful.”

“So what exactly did he say?”

I relayed our conversation word for word, as best as I could remember.

She thought about it for a minute before she said anything. “I just can’t believe he’d take Elizabeth.”

I nodded. The same thought was gnawing at me. I knew Mike. I knew him. And I’d seen too many things to forget that you never knew as much as you thought you did about people. But it was so difficult for me to look at Mike and think he played some role in my daughter’s disappearance. I wanted to tell him we were on our way to California and to have him make calls and have him go to L.A. and start looking before we got there.

But I just couldn’t take that risk.

“All he saw was the report?” Lauren asked.

“That’s what he said.”

“And he said he hadn’t talked to Bazer?”

I nodded.

“So then one of two things is going to happen,” she said, knocking her fist lightly against the window. “One, he either sits tight and waits for you to call back. Which to me means he’s clean and on our side. Or, two, he digs into the report and finds the Corzines pretty easily. Because that’s where it would start, right? If you had seen that report, that’s where it would have taken you.”

I nodded again. “I’d track the source which would take me to Rodney, who would have no reason not to tell me about the Corzines. So yeah. One or two.”

“I’ll call them,” she said. “Tell them to notify us if they’re contacted by anyone.”

“You think they will?”

“I think you scared the hell out of them and they’ll do whatever we ask at this point,” she said, reaching for her phone. “So I’ll call them and we’ll wait to see what happens.”

I stared at the long stretch of highway in front of us. The red rocks were getting taller and we were close to the Nevada border. Then we’d cruise through Las Vegas and into the high desert of California. Then head toward the ocean and Los Angeles.

We had plenty of time to wait.

NINETEEN

The red rocks in Utah gave way to wide open deserts and then the massive hotels in Las Vegas. After the city, a vast expanse of nothingness greeted us. We drove further, approaching the gateway into the part of California that didn’t look like California. Flat, brown and sandy. Baker and Barstow were about as un-Southern California as you could get, working class cities that housed the people who couldn’t afford the homes closer to the ocean. I’d been through Barstow numerous times in my life, but the only place I’d stopped was the McDonald’s housed in an old passenger train. It was a place you passed through, not a place you stayed and I held to that rule, pushing the rental up to eighty as we flew down the highway.

Our phones stayed silent and that was the most disconcerting part. Sure, no one was calling us with bad news, but no one was calling us with good news, either. We tried small talk, but Lauren and I were both wound too tightly at that point to even fake it so we kept our mouths closed for most of the drive.

We stopped once for food and once more for gas and by late afternoon, our highway speed dropped drastically as we became entwined in the gridlock that was Los Angeles traffic. The wide open deserts morphed into tight pockets of homes, long strip malls and not much open space. Despite having lived in San Diego for most of my life, I hadn’t spent much time in L.A. and it still felt like a foreign city to me. There was a vibe I’d never been able to identify, as if everyone else knew what it was and I was just looking around, clueless as to what I was missing out on.