“Please,” Nic said. “It could be useful.”
“She was still sleeping when I left,” Wayne said. For a second, he stopped pacing. A shudder ran through his body. “I didn’t even get to say good-bye to her. I never got to tell her I loved her one last time.”
“Don’t say that,” Valerie ordered, uncovering her face. “We don’t know that.” She turned to Nic and took over the story. “Katie didn’t get up until after her sister went to school. I would have thought she would have been wide awake, given the three-hour time difference between Portland and New York, but she had the pillow over her head and she didn’t want to get up.”
Nic remembered those days, when she was fifteen or sixteen and could have slept half the day and then not gone to bed until two in the morning. She had a feeling Valerie wouldn’t stand for either of those things.
“She had Life cereal for breakfast and read the newspaper,” Valerie continued. “She’s not like most kids, who don’t read the paper at all, or only read the comics and the celebrity gossip. Katie is interested in national news, international news.” She pressed her lips together until they turned white. “Then she took a shower and got dressed. Around eleven, I left for my volunteer work—I run the clothes closet at a local outreach center. We help women getting off the street who don’t have a working wardrobe. We give them the clothes they need to look presentable again. When I got back around four, I found a note from Katie saying she had taken Jalape?o for a walk. I started calling her cell phone about a half hour later. It was already getting dark. But she never answered.”
“What route does she normally take?” Nic was careful to use the present tense. She would never promise that Katie was alive, but she wouldn’t rest until the girl was found. What would it be like to lose Makayla? It was a thought she kept coming back to, like a tongue probing a sore tooth.
Valerie tipped her head to one side, thinking. “She likes to window-shop. I’m guessing she went up Twenty-third and came back on Twenty-first.”
It was the same good news–bad news answer Katie’s parents had earlier told the locals. The two streets were probably the busiest in Portland, with plenty of foot traffic. Cops had already walked the same route, done a neighborhood canvass, talked to every person along the way. Nada. But it wasn’t surprising. Would one girl, bundled up against the cold, walking a nondescript dog, have attracted any attention among hundreds of shoppers intent on finding the perfect Christmas gift?
Wayne clenched his fists. “It’s like she went out that door and stepped into a black hole.”
“Has Katie seemed any different since she came home?”
“She’s seemed lost in thought. I’ll say something to her, and she won’t answer me until I ask it a second time.”
Valerie nodded. “I think she’s depressed. She’s been sleeping a lot and only picking at her food. I thought maybe she was just missing school and her friends in DC. But when I tried to ask her about it, she said nothing was wrong.”
“Have you looked to see if anything is missing?” Nic asked. “Her purse? Her keys? Any kind of backpack or bag?”
Valerie massaged the space between her eyebrows. “Just the things you would think she would take. Her cell phone and her keys.”
“This might seem insensitive, but we need honest answers to help us find her. Does Katie drink or use drugs that you know of?”
Valerie stiffened. “That we know of! She’s not some latchkey child. We make it our business to know what Katie is doing and with whom. She doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t drink, and she most certainly does not use drugs. We’ve already discussed these things with the other policemen. Why are you wasting time asking the same questions over and over?”
The woman was like an injured dog, biting anyone who tried to help.
“Please, just bear with me. Does Katie have a boyfriend?”
“No,” Wayne said. “Katie knows we don’t want her to date until she’s out of high school.”
What the parents wanted and what the kids did could be two very different things.
Watching Valerie pinch her lips together, Nic asked, “And who would you say her friends are?”
Valerie said, “Her best friend is a girl named Lily, but I don’t know if they’ve been in touch since Katie came home. They’ve known each other since preschool, but Katie has kind of outgrown Lily, if you know what I mean.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Oh, Lily’s turned into one of those Goth girls, all dressed in black. She wasn’t brought up that way, but she’s a bit of a rebel. Not like Katie. Katie has, has—goals.”
“She’s so focused,” Wayne said, his voice cracking. “So focused and smart and funny. And now some sick creep has taken her.”