Gone, Baby, Gone Read Free Page B

her arms were propped on the desk and her sapphire eyes were holding mine.
    “Mr. Kenzie, you can find her.”
    “No,” I said softly. “Not if she’s hidden well enough. Not if a lot of people who are just as good at this as we are haven’t been able to find her either. We’re just two more people, Mrs. McCready. Nothing more.”
    “Your point?” Her voice was low again, and icy.
    “Our point,” Angie said, “is what help could two more sets of eyes be?”
    “What harm, though?” Beatrice said. “Can you tell me that? What harm?”

2
    From a detective’s perspective once you rule out running away or abduction by a parent, a child’s disappearance is similar to a murder case: If it’s not solved within seventy-two hours, it’s unlikely it ever will be. That doesn’t necessarily mean the child is dead, though the probability is high. But if the child is alive, she’s definitely worse off than when she went missing. Because there’s very little gray area in the motivations of adults who encounter children who aren’t their own; you either A , help that child or, B , exploit her. And while the methods of exploitation vary—ransoming children for money, using them for labor, abusing them sexually for personal and/or profit concerns, murdering them—none of them stems from benevolence. And if the child doesn’t die and is eventually found, the scars run so deep that the poison can never be removed from her blood.
    In the last four years, I’d killed two men. I’d watched my oldest friend and a woman I barely knew die in front of me. I’d seen children desecrated in the worst possible ways, met men and women who killed as if it were a reflex action, watched relationships burn in the violence with which I’d actively surrounded myself.
    And I was tired of it.
    Amanda McCready had been missing for at least sixty hours by this point, maybe as long as seventy, and I didn’t want to find her stuffed in a Dumpster somewhere, her hair matted with blood. I didn’t want to find her six months down the road, vacant-eyed and used up by some freak with a video camera and a mailing list of pedophiles. I didn’t want to look in a four-year-old’s eyes and see the death of everything that had been pure in her.
    I didn’t want to find Amanda McCready. I wanted someone else to.
    But maybe because I’d become as caught up in this case over the last few days as the rest of the city, or maybe because it had happened here in my neighborhood, or maybe just because “four-year-old” and “missing” aren’t words that should go together in the same sentence, we agreed to meet Lionel and Beatrice McCready at Helene’s apartment in half an hour.
    “You’ll take the case, then?” Beatrice said, as she and Lionel stood.
    “That’s what we need to discuss between ourselves,” I said.
    “But—”
    “Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, “things are done a certain way in this business. We have to consult privately before we agree to anything.”
    Beatrice didn’t like it, but she also realized there was very little she could do about it.
    “We’ll drop by Helene’s in half an hour,” I said.
    “Thank you,” Lionel said, and tugged his wife’s sleeve.
    “Yes. Thanks,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound real sincere. I had a feeling that nothing less than a presidential deployment of the National Guard to search for her niece would satisfy her.
    We listened to their footfalls descend the belfry stairs and then I watched from the window as they left the schoolyard beside the church and walked to a weather-beaten Dodge Aries. The sun had drifted west past my line of sight, and the early October sky was still a pale summer white, but wisps of rust had floated into the white.A child’s voice called, “Vinny, wait up! Vinny!” and from four stories above the ground there was something lonely about the sound, something unfinished. Beatrice and Lionel’s car U-turned on the avenue, and I watched the puff