Moonlight Mile (Kenzie & Gennaro 6)

Something groaned below us, something mechanical, and then we heard the heat begin venting from the baseboards.

“I’m sorry,” Angie said. “I missed something. You made your daughter’s food and shelter conditional on her going on a diet?”

“It’s hardly that simple.”

“Then I’m missing a complicated wrinkle?” Angie nodded. “So, okay, what is that wrinkle, Brian?”

“The issue was not whether I would withhold certain things if—”

“Food and shelter,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It was not about withholding those things if she refused to diet. It was about threatening to withhold those things if she didn’t regain her self-respect and live up to our expectations. It was about turning her into a strong, proud, American woman with worthwhile values and authentic self-esteem.”

“How much self-esteem do you gain living on the streets?” Angie asked.

“Well, I didn’t think it would come to that. Obviously, I was wrong.”

Angie looked off at the kitchen, then to the foyer. She blinked several times. She slipped her bag strap back over her shoulder and came off the couch. She gave me a helpless smile, her lips tight against her teeth. “Yeah, I just can’t. I can’t sit here anymore. I’m going to go out front and wait for you. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

She offered her hand to a baffled Brian Corliss. “A pleasure meeting you, Brian. If you see smoke floating past your window, don’t call the fire department. It’s just me having a cigarette in your driveway.”

She left. Brian and I sat in her wake, the heat hissing its way into the house.

“She smokes?” he said.

I nodded. “Loves cheeseburgers and Cokes, too.”

“And she looks like that?”

“Like what, dude?”

“That good? She’s, what, mid-thirties?”

“She’s forty-two.” I won’t deny I enjoyed the look of shock on his face.

“She’s had some work done?”

“God, no,” I said. “It’s just genes and a shitload of nervous energy. She bikes a lot, too, but she’s no fanatic.”

“You’re saying I’m a fanatic.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s your job and it’s your life choice. Good for you. I hope you live to a hundred and fifty. I just notice people sometimes mistake their life choices for their moral ones.”

We said nothing for a moment. We each took a drink of water.

“I kept thinking she’d come back.” His voice was soft.

“Sophie.”

He stared at his hands. “After a few years of her acting up while we tried to raise a toddler? I just thought, you know, I’d get back to old-school logic. In the old days, kids didn’t have eating disorders and they didn’t have ADHD and they didn’t talk back or listen to music that glorified sex.”

I gave that a bit of involuntary frown. “I don’t think the old days were all that, man. Go listen to Wake Up, Little Susie or Hound Dog and tell me again what they were singing about. ADHD, eating disorders? Do you remember eighth grade? Come on, Brian. Just because it wasn’t treated doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

“Okay,” he said. “What about the culture? You didn’t have all these magazines and reality TV shows that glorify the stupid and the craven. You didn’t have ’Net porn and instant, viral communication—without any context whatsoever—of the most insipid ideas. You weren’t sold the concept that not only could you become a superstar of something, but you were entitled to. Forget the fact that you have no idea what that something is, and shelve the uncomfortable fact that you possess no talent. So what? You deserve everything.” He looked at me, suddenly forlorn. “You have a daughter? Well, let me tell you something, we can’t compete with that.”

“That?”

“That.” He pointed at his windows. “The world out there.”

I followed his gaze. I considered mentioning that the World Out There didn’t kick her out of her own home, the World In Here did. But I said nothing instead.

“We just can’t.” He let loose another gargantuan sigh and arched his back against the couch cushion to reach for his wallet. He rummaged around in it and came out with a business card. He handed it to me.

ANDRE STILES

Caseworker

Department of Children & Families

“Sophie’s DCF worker. He worked with her up until recently, I think, when she turned seventeen. I’m not sure if she still sees him, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Where do you think she is?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you absolutely, positively had to guess.”

He gave it some thought as he returned the wallet to his back pocket. “Where she always is. With that friend of hers, the one you’re looking for.”

“Amanda.”

He nodded. “I thought, at first, she was a stabilizing influence on Sophie, but then I discovered more about her background. It was pretty sordid.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it was.”

“I don’t like sordid. There’s no place for it in a respectable life.”

I looked at his white-on-white living room and his white Christmas tree. “You know anyone named Zippo?”

He blinked a few times. “Is Sophie still seeing him?”

“I don’t know. I’m just compiling data until it makes sense.”

“That’s part of your job, eh?”

“That is my job.”

“Zippo’s name is James Lighter.” He turned his palm up toward me. “Hence the nickname. I don’t know anything else about him except that the one time I met him he smelled of pot and looked like a punk. Exactly the type of boy I would have hoped would never enter my daughter’s life—tattoos everywhere, droopy pants with the boxers exposed, rings in his eyebrows, one of those tufts of hair between his bottom lip and his chin.” His face had torqued into a fist. “Not a suitable human being at all.”

“Do you know of any places your daughter and Amanda, and maybe even Zippo, any places they hang out that I might not know about?”

He thought about it long enough for us both to drain our water bottles.

Eventually, he said, “No. Not really.”

I flipped open my notepad, found the page from earlier in the day. “One of Amanda’s and Sophie’s schoolmates told me Sophie and four other people went into a room. Two people in the room died, but—”