“Your name?”

“Joe Tyler.”

She stared me down for a moment, then picked up the phone. She turned away from me and her voice was muffled as she spoke. She turned back to me and hung up the phone.

“She’ll be down in a moment,” she said. “You can have a seat.”

I nodded and sat down.

“How do you know Ms. Balzone?” she asked.

“We actually just met yesterday,” I said. “I’m helping her with something. And she’s helping me.”

“One of her lost souls?” she asked. “You helping with that?”

“Yes.”

“That girl never sleeps, you know,” she said, resting an elbow on the desk. “Never. Nighttime, she’s out handing out blankets and food and love. Daytime, she’s just preparing for nighttime.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Must be part vampire or something,” she said. “But if you’re helping her, you can’t be all bad.”

“I like to think I’m not.”

“A lot of people like to think that about themselves, but most people are full of crap.”

I smiled. “That is extremely true.”

She studied me for a long moment. “You look tired, Joe Tyler.”

I shrugged. I always felt tired. I never felt rested, never felt like I slept or cleared my head.

Elizabeth was always there.

“Isabel will help you,” she said. “Tess will, too, if she can.”

“How do you know I need help?”

She tugged on her glasses again, readjusting them. “You got that look.”

“What look?”

Her eyes softened for the first time since I’d walked in. “That look that says you’re hurting, Joe Tyler.”

NINE

“Isabel said she asked you to wait,” Tess Gorman said to me.

“I’m not great at waiting.”

I was sitting across from her in a tight, cramped office on the third floor. Her desk was littered with stacks of paper and manila folders, and the bookshelf behind her was filled with the same. Two metal filing cabinets had drawers pulled halfway open and the trashcan overflowed with food wrappers and large Styrofoam cups.

“I called her,” she said. “When Marsha called up and said you wanted to see me and that Isabel gave you my name. She said you were legit.”

“Okay,” I said, not knowing what she was looking for from me.

She leaned back in her chair. She had short blond hair, cut even with her chin, and small green eyes. Long, beaded earrings hung from her ears, almost down to the collar on her red turtleneck sweater. She was small, compact and she’d shook my hand with the grip of a middle-aged man, despite the fact that I put her somewhere in her twenties.

“But she wouldn’t tell me what you wanted,” she said. “She said you should do that.”

“I just met her,” I said. “She doesn’t know everything about…my situation.”

She puffed up her cheeks and let out a long, loud sigh. She folded her arms across her chest. “Okay. Tell me why you’re here.”

I recounted how and why I was in Minnesota. Her eyes flickered as I told her about Elizabeth’s abduction, but otherwise she remained impassive as I spoke. I told her about Jacob Detwiler and how Isabel had given me her name.

“So, what?” she said, when I was done. “You want to know where the Detwiler girl is?”

“That’d be a start.”

“I can’t share info with you,” she said, shrugging. “Privacy laws.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Anything that might’ve happened with the family would be protected unless you were a principal,” she said. “Which you clearly aren’t.”

“I don’t care what happened,” I said. “I wanna know why Bailey Detwiler was sitting with my daughter.”

“I’m not going to have that info.”

“But the girl might. Bailey.”

“She was young then,” she said. “Maybe she won’t remember.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’d like to ask her. Or at least know where to look for her. Or find out anything I can about her.”

“I’m not sure I can help you.”

“Then why did Isabel say you could?”

She looked away from me. I couldn’t read her. She was uncomfortable having me there, that much was clear. But I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t asking to look at files or for privileged information. I just needed some basic info that I would probably be able to dig up on my own. It would just take me more time.

“Look, I don’t know what went on with the Detwiler family and I don’t care,” I said. “I can make some guesses since Isabel said you might be able to help. It wasn’t some simple divorce and custody case if DCFS can help. I’m not dumb. I look for kids for a living now. I can put two and two together.”

She stared at me, her expression blank.

I took the picture out of my pocket and held it out to her. After a moment, she took it.

“Think it’s from about six or seven years ago,” I said. “The girl with my daughter is Bailey Detwiler.”

“Where’d you get the photo?” she asked, her eyes still on the picture.

“Cop in San Diego,” I said. “From some file. All I got with it was Detwiler’s name and address.”

She handed the photo back but didn’t say anything.

“I’m not asking you to turn over the case file,” I said. “But give me something. Some place to start. I know you can do that or Isabel wouldn’t have sent me to you.”

She drummed her fingers on her desk, staring at the wall for a long minute. “Anyone other than Isabel, I’d tell you to get lost.”

“Glad it was Isabel then.”

She smirked. “I honestly don’t remember much about the family and even if I did, I wouldn’t share it with you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Sure you would. If you thought it would help you.”

She was probably right.

She grabbed a sticky pad and pen. She scribbled for a moment, tore the sheet of paper off and handed it to me.

“That’s the name of someone who might be able to help you,” Tess said. “I stress might.”

The name Rodney was written on the sticky along with a phone number. “This is it?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yep.”

“Isabel couldn’t have given me this name?”

Something rushed through her eyes that I couldn’t read and she glanced away before I could figure it out. “No. She actually couldn’t have.”

I didn’t understand. It wasn’t much and I was hoping for more. But I’d learned that even the smallest things could point in the right direction and to take what I could get.

I folded up the small piece of paper and stuffed it in my pocket. “Alright. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Can I ask you one other thing?”

She sighed and shrugged. “Sure.”

“Any way you could just look in some drawer and pull out a file on Bailey Detwiler and let me look at it?” I asked.

Tess Gorman folded her arms across her chest and shook her head, a less than amused smile on her face. “Absolutely none.”

TEN

“She gave me a name,” I said to Isabel. “That was it.”

I’d driven back to the apartment and found her dragging a twin mattress into the place she’d loaned me. I’d helped her carry it into the small bedroom and we dropped it on the box spring she’d apparently already brought in.

She brushed a long wisp of hair from her face and fiddled with the pushed up sleeves of her T-shirt. “I thought she might.”

“I thought she might give me a little more.”

“I didn’t,” she said, smiling. “She’s tough and she plays by the rules.”

“So you couldn’t have saved me the drive and just given me the name she gave me?”

She looked around the room. “I think there’s a small dresser in storage.”

“Isabel?”

She looked at me. “It wasn’t my place to recommend him.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Means what it means,” she said. “Wasn’t my place to recommend him. And maybe if you’d called her, like I told you to, she might’ve just given you the name and saved you the drive. But I also thought there was a slim chance she might give you more. It was worth a shot.”

Had me there and I didn’t have a response.

“Just call him,” she said. “He’ll probably be able to meet you today. And I’ll go with you.”