She approached the table. 'Y'all gonna try that pie, too?' she asked.
No,' he answered. 'I was just curious about that poster.' He pointed at the paper she'd folded under her arm.
'This?' she said. She handed it over to him, and he spread it out on the table in front of him.
In the center of the poster was a picture of a young black girl, smiling, wearing pigtails. Underneath the picture, in large block letters, was the word MISSING.
This was followed by a message in smaller lettering:
DAWN PERRY, AGE 12, FIVE FEET TWO INCHES, 105 POUNDS,
DISAPPEARED THE AFTERNOON 8,12,90, LAST SEEN WEARING
BLUE SHORTS, WHITE I-SHIRT AND SNEAKERS, CARRYING
BOOK BAG. ANYONE WITH ANY KNOWLEDGE OF HER
WHEREABOUTS CALL 555-1212 AND ASK FOR DETECTIVE
HOWARD.
This message was completed with a large print: REWARD.
Cowart looked up at the waitress. 'What happened?'
The waitress shrugged as if to say that giving information wasn't part of her job. 'I don't know. Little girl. One day's she's there. The next, she's not.'
'Why are you taking the sign down?'
'Been a long time, mister. Months and months. Ain't nobody found that girl by now, I don't suspect this sign's gonna make any difference. And anyway, my boss asked me to yesterday, and I forgot until just now.'
Cowart saw that Brown had started examining the poster. He looked up. 'Police ever come up with anything?'
'Not that I'd know. Y'all want something else?'
'Just a check, Brown replied. He smiled, creased the flyer and slid it onto the table between them. 'I'll take care of this for you, he said.
The waitress walked away to make their change.
'Makes you wonder, doesn't it?' Brown said. 'You get into the right frame of mind, Cowart, and all sorts of terrible things just pop right in, don't they?'
He didn't reply, so the detective continued. 'I mean, you hang close to death enough and unusual things just jump up, like they were so normal and routine you'd ignore them if you weren't thinking so hard about how and when people kill each other.'
Cowart nodded.
Brown leaned back after stabbing at the last few crumbs of pie on his plate. I told you the food would be fresh,' he said. Then he pushed forward abruptly, closing the distance between them.
'Steals your appetite away, doesn't it, Cowart? A little coincidence for dessert, huh?'
He tapped the folded flyer. 'I mean, it probably doesn't amount to anything, right? Just another little girl that disappeared one day. And it probably doesn't fit in, time and opportunity and all that. But it is interesting, isn't it? That a little girl disappears not too far from the highway leading down to the Keys. I wonder if it was from in front of a school.'
Cowart interrupted. 'Fifty miles from Tarpon Drive.'
The detective nodded.
'And absolutely nothing that indicates anything about the cases that happen to concern us.'
'So,' Brown said slowly. 'Why'd you want to see it, when the waitress was pulling it down?'
The policeman crumpled up the flyer into a ball and stuck it into his pocket as he pushed back in his seat and rose to leave the restaurant.
The two men stopped on the sidewalk outside. Cowart looked down toward the toy store at the end of the mall and saw that a blue-shirted man was sitting outside the door, carrying a truncheon at his side. Security, he realized. He wondered why he hadn't noticed the man before. He guessed that he'd been added after the kidnapping, as if the guard's presence would prevent another lightning strike from occurring in the same spot. He remembered that even with the police gathered outside, people had continued to walk into the store, and that a steady stream of adults and children, all carrying large plastic bags filled with various toys, had continued to emerge, ignoring the savagery that had started on the sidewalk.
He turned toward Brown. 'So, what now? We've been to the Keys and all we've got are more questions, Where now? Why don't we go see Ferguson?'
The detective shook his head. 'No, first let's go back to Pachoula.'
'Why?'
'Well, it would be nice to know that Sullivan was telling you the truth about one thing at least, right?'
The two men separated warily shortly after returning to Miami and thick black night had encased them. The day's heat seemed to linger in the air, giving the dark a weight and substance. Cowart dropped Brown outside the downtown Holiday Inn, where he'd obtained a room. The hotel was across from the county criminal courts building, about halfway between the Orange
Bowl and the start of Liberty City, in a sort of urban no-man's-land defined by hospitals, office buildings, jails, and the slums' ubiquitous creep into their midst.
Once inside his room, Brown tore off his jacket and kicked off his shoes. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and dialed a telephone number.
'Dade County Sheriff. South Station.'
'I want to speak with Detective Howard.'
He heard the line being transferred and a moment or two later a clipped, official-sounding man's voice came over the line. 'This is Detective Howard. Can I help you?'
'Maybe. This is Detective Lieutenant Brown, Escambia County…'
'How yah doing, Lieutenant? What can I do for you?' The man's voice instantly lost its military tone, replaced with a simple jocularity.
'Ahh,' Brown said, sliding instantly into the same tones, 'probably nothing more than a wild goose chase. And it sounds pretty crazy, but I'd appreciate a little information about this young kid, a Dawn Perry, disappeared a few months back…'
'Yeah, heading home from the civic center. Christ, what a damn mess…'
'What exactly happened?'
'You got some sort of line on her?' the detective asked abruptly.
'No,' Brown replied. 'To be honest, I just saw the flyer and something in it reminded me of a case I once worked. Just thought, you know, I'd check it out.'
'Hell,' the detective answered. 'Too bad. For a minute I got hopeful. You know how it is.'
'So, can you fill me in a bit?'
'Sure. Not that much to tell. Little girl, not an enemy in the whole wide world, goes off to her swim class at the civic center one afternoon. School's out, you know, so they run all sorts of programs down there for the kids. Last seen by a couple of her friends walking toward her home.'
'Anyone see what happened?'
'No. One old lady, lives about midway down the street – you know, it's all old houses with air conditioners blasting away in every window, makes a damn racket. Anyway, this one old gal can't afford to run the electrics, you know, not so much, so she's sitting in her kitchen next to a fan, and she heard a little scream and then a car pulling away real fast, but by the time she can get out there, the car's already two blocks away. White car. American make. That's all. No plate, no description. Book bag with her swimsuit left on the street. Old lady was pretty sharp, give her that. Calls in what she sees. But by the time a patrol car finds her house, listens to her story, and gets out a BOLO, well, things are pretty much history. You know how many white cars there are in Dade County?' A lot.'
That's right. Anyway, we work the case best we can with what we got. Hell, we could only get one of the television stations to run the girl's picture that night. Maybe she wasn't cute enough, I don't know…'… Or the wrong color.'
'Well, you said it. I don't know how those bastards make up their minds what's news anyway. After we got the flyers out, we took a couple of dozen calls saying she'd been spotted here, there, all over. But none were good, you know. We checked out her family real good, wondered if maybe she'd been snatched by someone she knew, but, hell, the Perrys were good folks. He's a clerk for DMV, she works in an elementary school cafeteria. No problems at home.