I liked the store when it was empty and quiet. Of course, there’s no quiet in Brooklyn, ever, not really. Even at this time of night you could hear the buzz of car tires against the roadway grates of the Brooklyn Bridge and the rumble of the subway just up the street. I suppose I mean I liked it when it was peaceful. Tonight, however, there would be no peace, not for me. I locked the door behind me and retreated to the room next to the office.
It was all well and good that I was motivated to do something, but I hadn’t figured out what. I was kind of hoping it would come to me during the drive over. When it didn’t, I hoped staring at the files spread out on the floor might do the trick. I was fresh out of inspiration when I got down on my hands and knees and began wading through the files for the third time. Finally, something-out of desperation, I think-occurred to me to try. Previously, I’d spent my time matching the police file to the work Spivack had done. In other words, I was looking at overlap, looking for names and faces that appeared in both files. If a piece of information turned up in both, I figured it carried more weight.
Maybe because I’d been a member of the NYPD and, in spite of its numerous shortcomings, believed it was the best police department in the world, I had pretty much dismissed the more esoteric pieces of information gathered by Spivack and Associates. Sure, I’d glanced at the surveillance reports on Moira’s professors and the interviews with her sophomore roommates. But I had assumed that Spivack’s own people had gone over all this material several hundred times trying to comb out leads. Now it was my turn. Instead of looking for overlap, I did the polar opposite. I separated out everything-name, photo, document, etc.-that was unique to either set of files. Not unexpectedly, I culled a small mountain of unique information out of Spivack’s files.
I guess it was around four in the morning when I got to the sign-in logs of the community affairs office. Everybody signed in and out of that office or the staff wouldn’t help them. I’d had to do it. I think it had something to do with getting administrative funding from the legislature. The more people you serve, the bigger next year’s allocation. The cops had had some of these logs as well, but the Spivack file had copies of the logs that went as far back as the day Moira Heaton was first interviewed for her intern position. There were thousands of entries.
For example:
SIGN-IN (Please Print) DATE TIME IN TIME OUT STAFF MEMBER Maria Chianese3/29/809:3010:45SotomayorGeorge Matsoukis3/29/809:409:55Abramson
Unless I worked backward from the day she disappeared, I figured to be in that room until the new millennium. Call me selfish, but I wanted to catch at least the last couple of years of the twentieth century. By five I was nearly out of my mind, and I’d only gotten as far back as six weeks before the disappearance. Staring at the same page for a minute or more without seeing anything, my head would drop and I’d startle awake. Punchy as I might be, I sensed that there was something to see, a name maybe, but that I was just too tired to grasp it. It had to be around six when I drifted off.
I don’t think I dreamed. If I did, I didn’t remember. My neck was stiff and my drool had blurred some of the copier toner on the logbook photostats. The chirping phone cared not at all for my neck or lack of sleep or dreamlessness. I trudged into the office to answer it.
“Hello,” I rasped, “what time is it?”
“You sound like shit, Prager.” It was Detective Gloria.
I peeked at one of the promotional mirrors hanging on an office wall. “I look worse than I sound. What time is it?”
“Eight fifteen. I called your house first and your wife told me I might find you at this number.”
“Who says the guys at Missing Persons can’t find their own shoes without a road map?”
“Very funny. You left a message, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I did.”
“About the statute-of-limitations thing.”
“Right, right.” Remembering, my heart began to race.
“We knew about that,” Gloria explained, sounding slightly defensive.
“And …”
“And nothing. Dead end. As far as we can tell it was an innocent question. We got no record of her going to a lawyer or anyone else about it. Apparently, the only one she ever mentioned it to was her father. Like her old man says, she was probably just asking on behalf of someone else or maybe she was just curious.”
So much for that lead, I thought, then said: “But it’s weird.”
“What is?”
“I don’t have a record of that interview in the official files.”
“You don’t, huh?” he asked, his tone changing from collegial to adversarial. “And how the fuck did some swinging-dick private investigator get ahold of police files?”
That was careless of me, mentioning the files to him. If Larry McDonald had been privy to this conversation, he would have been on his way across the bridge to shoot me. Never mind that he’d failed to get me the complete file.
“Look, Detective Gloria, you know the people I’m working for are pretty powerful.”
“You fucking threatenin’ me now, you piece a-”
“No, no, no. Calm down, for chrissakes! All I’m saying is that there isn’t much these guys can’t get me access to if I need it. That’s all, nothing more complicated than that.”
“Okay, all right, ‘cause if you got those files through someone in the department, I’ll sic fuckin’ IA on your inside source.”
My heart rate picked up again. “What did you say?”
There was a brief, confused silence on his end of the line. “I said I’d get Internal Affairs on-”
“No, you said IA, you’d sic IA on them. Hold on, just hold on a second.”
I dropped the phone and ran into the adjoining room. I rummaged through the sign-in sheets I’d been checking over before I passed out. There it was, a name I’d come across four or five times in the weeks leading up to Moira Heaton’s disappearance.
I picked the phone back up. “Gloria, you still there?”
“What the fuck’s this all about?”
“Humor me, okay, just for a minute? Try thinking along.”
“Christ, Prager, you sound like you’re gonna have a freakin’ canary. But go ahead, I’m listening.”
“If crooks had half a brain-”
“-cops would be in trouble,” he finished without my needing to prompt. “So what? I learned that one even before I got on the job.”
“Me, too. In Missing Persons you must see a million aliases, huh?”
“That estimate’s on the low end. Again, so what?”
“You ever go to a motel?”
“Prager, you are outta your mind, you know that? What’s aliases got to do with motels?”
“You fill out a card when you go to a motel, right? You always put down some bullshit name and address, but it’s not so easy to think of that stuff off the top of your head. You’re nervous about getting caught. So if you don’t think it through beforehand and you don’t use John Smith, what name do you use?”
“I think I get you,” he said, relieved he wasn’t going to have to have me committed. “You would use a name that sounds like your name or that has the same initials. You’d think they’d learn, but these clowns do it all the time.”
“Right. If they had half a brain …”
“Okay, Prager, I follow your reasoning, but what’s it got to do with Moira Heaton or anything else?”
“Maybe nothing, Detective, but maybe everything. You know Forty Court Street in Brooklyn Heights?”
“I can find it.”
“Do that. I’ll meet you in the lobby in two hours.”
“Two hours.”
“And Gloria …”
“Yeah?”
“Start praying.”
I ran out to talk to Joey the Gimp at the newsstand and to get a fifty-five-gallon drum of coffee. I had a lot of ground to cover in the next two hours.