The Disappearance Enigma Read online

  The Disappearance Enigma

  Darrell Bain and Mary Ann Steele

  The Disappearance Enigma

  Copyright © 2010 Darrell Bain and Mary Ann Steele

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc. of Markham Ontario, Canada.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Cover art by Deron Douglas

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  ISBN-10: 1-55404-786-2

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55404-786-4

  First Edition October 26, 2010

  Also Available as a Large Type Paperback

  Chapter One

  Duncan Gage sensed a wrongness when he awoke. An absence on the other side of the bed when he'd been expecting to wake up with Marlene Hefter: the woman with whom he'd gone to sleep. Marlene and he had been seeing each other fairly regularly lately. He enjoyed her company and certainly enjoyed the sex. When she stayed over, he could almost predict that they'd wind up in the shower together in the morning and then go back to bed for a while before breakfast. That being the case, the blank side of the bed was as much disappointing as disconcerting. He listened, thinking she might have gone to the bathroom or even begun her shower, expecting him to hear the water running and join her. Then he realized that only the bedroom night light was on. The bathroom door stood ajar, but there was neither sound nor light coming from inside it.

  Reaching out, he flicked on the bedside lamp. He sat up in bed and looked around. Marlene's clothes lay undisturbed just where she'd left them on one of the chairs. Her purse lay on its side atop the chest of drawers, also just as it had been when they'd slid into bed together. Her see-through nightgown lay tangled in the sheets of the bed. More puzzled than alarmed, Duncan slid his feet over the side of the bed and stood up. He pulled on his robe and headed for the kitchen, but slowly, staring in all directions in case Marlene had gotten up and for some reason wandered into another room of the house he'd bought the year before. He found no sign of her.

  Befuddled, he almost automatically went through the motions of getting a pot of coffee in motion. He left it to brew and returned to the bedroom, again gazing around in case she'd fallen or... hell, he didn't know what. Frankly, he just couldn't imagine her getting up during the night and walking away stark naked, leaving all her other belongings including her flimsy nightgown behind. They certainly hadn't quarreled, so there was no reason for her to have left. It didn't make sense. He felt distinctly uneasy but not yet really alarmed. There has to be a logical explanation, he told himself.

  He entered the bathroom, shucked his robe and showered quickly. As he dried himself, he listened for sounds of Marlene stirring about, but he heard nothing. He dressed in jeans and shirt, ran a shaver over his face and combed his mass of black wavy hair into some kind of order. He went into the living room and sat down in his easy chair. He picked up the phone, held it a moment, and then dropped it back into its cradle. He had intended to call the police and report Marlene missing but hesitated, remembering how many times he'd read in detective fiction that adults wouldn't be entered on a missing person's list for three days. After all, he knew what they'd say-if his girlfriend decided to get up in the middle of the night and go somewhere, she was, after all, an adult and could do as she damn well pleased.

  Except that it didn't make a lick of sense. She'd never do anything like that, except under duress. She was level-headed-a senior editor at a major publishing company who, prior to that, had been a tenured professor at the university. She was no more likely to go wandering off in the middle of the night than baby not yet able to walk. Except that she obviously had-and from a home locked from the inside.

  A horrid thought came to mind. Suppose she'd gotten up for some reason-maybe something as mundane as wanting a drink of water-and encountered an intruder with a gun who then silently took her captive. Duncan got up and went to the front door. The chain was still hooked in place. He checked the back door. Same thing. Becoming anxious now, he went around to each window. They were all locked by the little tabs which prevented them from being opened from the outside.

  He returned to the living room, scratching his head. Shit, he thought. She couldn't have gone anywhere! Am I going crazy? Once more, he made a circuit of the house, not that he thought he could have overlooked her. This time, however, he poked into the closets, opened cabinets, got down on his hands and knees and looked under both beds. He even explored in places where she couldn't possibly have hidden, even had that been her intention.

  It was at that point that he began doubting his own memory. He thought for a moment. So far as he remembered, he and Marlene had left work at Prince's Publishing, Inc. and joined June and Les for drinks while waiting for the Denver traffic to die down to something more than a crawl.

  Duncan waited impatiently until fifteen minutes after eight and dialed the firm. He asked for June, who answered promptly.

  Before he could begin to explain, June was off and running in her usual peripatetic style of speech. "Dunc, you and Marly must have had a hell of a night after you left us. You're both late! Better get a move on. The editorial conference starts at nine. And hey, I... "

  "June, I don't know where Marly is. She... she was gone when I woke up this morning, but all her things are still here."

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "She's gone," he repeated. "All my doors and windows were locked form the inside. Her clothes and purse are still here, but she's gone!"

  "Duncan Gage, are you pulling some kind of bullshit joke? I don't think it's funny!"

  "I'm not joking. I tell you, she's gone!"

  A silence ensued on June's end of the line.

  "June? Are you there?"

  "I'm here. You're sure you're not joking?"

  "No, damn it, I am not joking! She disappeared wearing absolutely nothing. All her clothes are here-even her nightgown."

  "I think you'd better call the police, then."

  "They'll think I'm nuts if I tell them that my girlfriend disappeared and left all the locks intact. Even the chain on both doors."

  "Even more reason to call, then."

  He considered for a moment more and then gave up. "Okay, I'll call. Tell Sid I won't be in until late, if at all."

  "Okay, I'll tell him you have an emergency situation. I'll explain to him later. Let me know, huh?"

  "I will. Promise." He hung up. For a long moment, he sat in his chair reflecting, but no momentous new ideas occurred to him. Reluctantly, he reached down to the shelf below the top of the chair-side table and produced the Denver phone directory. He found the number of the police department and held his finger on it while he dialed. Reluctantly.

  Duncan was surprised. His call was handled routinely at first, but after he described the circumstances, the operator asked him to hold and transferred him to someone else.

  "This is Detective Jordon, Mr. Duncan. I'd be interested to hear you describe the circumstances o
f your missing girl friend. Would you, please?"

  "But I just told someone about it!"

  "Yes, but that person wasn't a detective. Please, I really do want to hear what happened."

  Patiently, Duncan again described the circumstances of Marlene's disappearance.

  "Are you at home now, Mr. Duncan?"

  "Yes, I am. I haven't gone anywhere since I woke up and found that Marlene was gone."

  "Fine. Would you mind staying there until my partner and I can get out there? It will take about thirty minutes or so."

  "No, I guess not. But what... "

  "We'll be there in a half hour, Mr. Duncan. Wait for us, please."

  ***

  Caden Jordan stood for a moment after disconnecting. He had the kind of mind that disliked inconsistencies, but on the other hand he loved to root out the source of them. He glanced over to the desk in the precinct homicide division he shared with his partner, William Borders. It was one of several in the open room visible from where he stood. Most were in open-ended cubicles intended to provide a modicum of privacy and abate some of the constant noise. They did little of either. He took a few steps toward their desk. Borders looked up with raised brows as he approached.

  "What we got?" he asked. His voice was slightly gravelly from years of smoking.

  "Another locked-room missing person. Just what we need to make our day."

  "Shit." Borders pulled on his overlarge nose that detracted from his otherwise good looks. "How come missing persons isn't catching it?"

  "Because I told them we wanted the next one." Caden was the senior partner.

  Borders' brows rose again. "You think he whacked her?"

  "Didn't sound like it, but if it checks out, this will be the third case. Person goes missing, taking nothing with them, and is never seen again. That makes the disappearances possible homicides, which means you and your big schnozz get to leave the paperwork and take a ride with me."

  "Does Bond know?" Lt. Bond was the supervisor for their homicide division.

  "Yeah, I already told him I wanted the next weird one."

  "Joy. Let's do it." Borders got to his feet and reached for his jacket.

  ***

  Since Borders liked to drive and he didn't, Caden took shotgun. He cracked the window, knowing his partner would soon light up another cigarette after already finishing one on the way to their car, a reasonably new and reasonably clean Ford.

  "So, what's this, the third?" Borders asked as he pulled out of the parking lot.

  "Yeah. That we know of. There might have been others earlier that we missed. Matter of fact, if this one turns out the same, I think I'll send out a bulletin to some other big cities. See if they've had anything like it."

  "They'll think you're nuts."

  Caden snorted. "Locked Room Mysteries! More likely, they'll think I'm bullshitting or cracking up. Y'know?"

  "Or reading too many detective stories," Borders added with a chuckle.

  "Yeah. That, too." He paused in thought for a moment. "They could be homicides, you know."

  "Sure they could. I think you just got tired of looking at deaders and grabbed these to play with."

  Caden shrugged. "Anyway, some of our regular missing persons might fit the category if we were to re-examine them. Once is a happenstance. Twice a coincidence. Three times and you have a pattern. I suspect there's more than three in the city, if we look hard enough."

  Besides querying other police departments, he intended to set up a computer search of the missing persons files for the last year or so and see what turned up. He hated not being able to explain all the facets of a case and rarely rested until he could. He was the analyst of the team. Borders was the plodder, rarely missing an important piece of data. He and Borders had a great closure rate. He just hoped that a real bad homicide didn't fall on them until he chased this phenomenon down. Regular homicides, no sweat. Husband shoots wife or vice versa. Gangbanger shoots it out with rival drug dealer. No sweat. Break-in homicide. Problem that would probably take time to solve, but still in the category of the routine. Persons vanishing from a locked house... interesting problem: the kind he preferred.

  ***

  An hour later Caden and his partner had gone over the disappearance of one Marlene Hefter in minute detail, right down to walking through the house with Duncan Gage while he showed them how the chains on both the front and back doors were hooked when he made his first tour of the place that morning. He showed them how the windows each had the little tabs turned so that they couldn't be opened from the outside. They would have been turned the wrong way had Marlene exited through a window and then closed it behind her.

  "You see?" he said, speaking to Caden, whom he had identified as the one in charge. "There's just no goddamned way she could have left without leaving a sign of how she did it." His voice had lost some of its assurance by this time. A little while before, he'd had the sudden thought that the detectives might possibly be considering him a suspect. Shit, if he were a detective, he might think he was a suspect, too. The whole thing made no sense, and he was becoming a little unglued.

  The detectives exchanged glances. Both had long experience in picking up on little characteristics people exhibited while lying, and neither had any reason so far to disbelieve the man's story. He was nervous, sure, and becoming more so as time wore on, but he was still sincere and honest, so far as they could tell.

  "Mr. Gage, right now I have to tell you that we don't have a clue as to how this happened. We'll enter Marlene's name on the missing person's list immediately and attach a high priority to it. For the time being, that's all we can do, other than talk to some of your and her friends and acquaintances and see if we can develop any sort of pattern or reason to the... uh, event." Caden took out his holder and extracted one of his personal cards. He handed it to Gage. "Call me if anything else comes up, anything at all. Okay?"

  "I will. You bet I will!"

  "And in the meantime, don't leave town, and notify us if you change addresses or phone numbers."

  "Why would I do that? Shit, I own this home."

  "Of course. Just routine procedure, Mister Gage. We'll be in touch." Each of them shook hands with Gage and departed. Caden had a frown on his face. Borders only looked puzzled.

  "Coffee and something to eat?" Borders asked.

  "Later. Let's get back and do the paperwork on this, silly as it sounds. I can already hear what Bond is gonna say."

  "Yeah. Gage is the perp. That's what he'll say."

  "He'll be wrong, though."

  Borders sighed. "Yeah, I think so, too."

  ***

  "He volunteered to take a lie detector test," Caden told Jules Bond when the Lieutenant questioned Caden and Borders' conclusion that Gage was telling the truth.

  "Can't be," he said. "Vanishing from a locked house occurs only in that Agatha Christie shit. Bring him in and sweat him, why don't you?"

  "He's told us all he knows already, Boss. Look, how about holding off and letting me send a query out to the departments of some major cities and see if they've run across anything like this. Gage's girlfriend wasn't the first, you know. Remember the dude who was a co-owner of that little genetics lab? And his partners still swear he'd never have done it without telling them? He vanished from his bed where he was lying right next to his wife. Never heard from again. Left a wife and a kid behind."

  "That happens a lot."

  "Yeah, but there's almost always precipitating circumstances. And usually the dopes leave a trail a mile wide. Not happening in these cases."

  "All right, all right!" Bond threw up his hands. "Go on, get out of here. Send your queries. And in the meantime, Travers has a body for you. One that hasn't vanished."

  ***

  "Two from Houston. One from Santa Fe. Six from Los Angeles. Two from Denver. A dozen from the East Coast. Another from... "

  "All right, stop. I get it," Bond said from behind the desk in his office. "Now tell me what you're planning on
doing about it in your voluminous spare time? The fucking drug wars are heating up again. The Chief says if another innocent bystander gets caught in the line of fire, someone else is going to, too. Meaning, get busy and make some arrests, if only to get the shits off the street for a few days."

  "I'll make time somehow, Boss. This is some weird shit. I sent back and asked for details of all the missing persons. There's got to be a common denominator." At least, he thought, there must be. Everything has an explanation, if you look hard enough.

  "There doesn't have to be, Jordan. People go missing all the time. You know that as well as I do."

  "The kicker is the way they went in all these cases, Boss. They disappeared into thin air. Even when there were routes they could have taken to leave without being seen, they all left seemingly without any clothes on. What they'd been wearing was found lying on the floor or on a bed. Tell me, where in hell can a nude man, or worse yet, a stark naked woman, go without being noticed? Shit, wives or husbands or significant others would surely know what the missing person had been wearing-or not wearing."

  "All right, goddamnit, you always like the fucking mysterious shit. Work at it, but don't slough off on your regular caseload. Got me?"

  "Got it, Boss."

  "Good. Now get out of here and let me get some work done."

  Caden went.

  Chapter Two

  Police Sergeant Jeffrey Morgan had been in a car accident that injured one of his legs and prevented him from fulfilling his usual patrol duty in the streets of Pittsburgh. Being the type who liked to stay busy, he refused to take his last two weeks of allowed medical leave and asked for limited duty. After a bit of paper shuffling, he wound up in the missing persons department, filling in for an officer on vacation. He thought nothing of the first request from his colleagues in Denver for files of missing persons who had vanished under peculiar circumstances-files where the cases were still open. He was much more concerned, not to say puzzled, when soon afterward a similar request came across his desk from none other than an agent representing the NSA. Knowing better than to cross swords with a subunit of Homeland Security, he provided the data promptly, but he didn't let it stop there. Officer Morgan never had liked puzzles, and two requests for the same data from different organizations presented a puzzle he thought about for a day or so but couldn't solve to his satisfaction. He took the matter up with his supervisor, Lieutenant Goldgreen.