“Who are you again?” Jannie asked, grinning over her eggs at me as I came down from a quick shower.
“I’m the Invisible Man,” I said. “You can call me Ralph E.”
“Hi, Ralphie!” Ali said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Not funny,” Nana said. “You’re going to burn yourself out, right down to the nub. And if you hadn’t noticed, we’ve still got a family emergency on our hands.”
“That’s what I’m doing home, Nana,” I said. I gave her a sideways hug at the stove and stole a piece of her amazingly flat bacon off the paper towel where it was draining. “I’ll drop the kids at school, and then I’m heading out to look for her again. All day if I have to.”
There was no talk of Elijah Creem or Josh Bergman. Bree already knew, and nobody else in the family needed to be worrying themselves about all that. We made sure to leave the TV off that morning, too.
“I want you to make an appointment with Dr. Finaly,” Nana told me, once the kids were in the hall, putting on their jackets. “You need to tend your own garden as well, mister.”
“Funny you should say that,” I told her. “I had the same thought.”
Adele Finaly is the shrink I see from time to time—sometimes more than others. She’s always there when I need a smart, objective opinion about my life, my work, my family—and most of all, about the habit those three things have of crashing into each other. First chance I got, I was going to put my figurative feet up on Adele’s couch. Just not today.
As soon as I dropped Ali and Jannie off for school, I circled back around to touch base with each of the street cops and Vice Unit detectives I’d been working with since Ava disappeared.
Mostly it was an exercise in frustration. There was no new word anywhere. Things were starting to look worse, and I knew it. I told everyone the same thing. If they so much as spotted someone who looked like Ava, they were to put the grab on her and call me immediately. I’d come and take it from there.
The toughest calls were the ones I’d started making on the Prostitution Unit and their outreach teams. Like it or not, there was one very nasty and unavoidable possibility in all of this. With a drug habit, no money, and Ava’s family history, she might very well have started turning tricks by now—for cash, or for the drugs themselves, if she was desperate enough.
It ground me down every time I thought about it. The girl was fourteen years old! Was that unheard of? Not at all. Nobody knows better than me that life on the streets of DC can get pretty damn bleak.
But this was Ava. Our Ava. And nothing I did seemed to get me any closer to finding her.
I was starting to wonder if anything would.
CHAPTER
103
IT WAS A FULL TWO DAYS MORE BEFORE WE FINALLY GOT WORD ON AVA.
I was home for a few hours that Wednesday, just grabbing some time with the family before I headed back out. I’d been alternating day and night, trawling the long list of streets where I thought Ava might turn up.
When the doorbell rang, I got up from the couch with the kids and went to answer. Every ring of the bell those days brought a combined sense of hope and dread—maybe this would be the one that gave us some kind of answer.
And in fact, it was.
When I opened the front door, Sampson was standing there on the stoop. It didn’t take long to read him. Between the fact that he hadn’t come in the back, as usual, and the tears in his eyes, I knew right away why he was there.
It felt like a crater opened up in my chest. My jaw went tight, and some part of me started trying to come up with a different conclusion. Maybe I was misreading Sampson, I thought—even though I knew it wasn’t the case.
He didn’t have to say a word. I stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind me.
“Jesus, John,” I said, choking up.
He pulled me in tight, with his hand on the back of my head.
“I’m so sorry, Alex. I’m so goddamn sorry.”
I’ve been here before. I’ve lost loved ones, and I’ve had to give other people the worst news they could possibly get. Nothing—but nothing—ever makes that easier.
Ava was gone. I knew it for sure now. But even so, it didn’t feel real.
I stood back from John on the stoop. “Where?” I said.