that their love is far more important to them than any disputes over menu or wedding procession. They always find a middle ground.”
“What do you think has happened to her?”
Elena hesitated, and Brandon wondered how she would answer. This too might play across the nation. To his relief, she settled on a message of hope. “I hope she simply wanted a day or two of solitude to regroup. We invest so much emotion in our wedding, as a highlight of our lives and expression of our hope for a perfect future. Yet the reality of planning it—balancing out the guest list, finding the right shoes for the dress, choosing between pecan-crusted salmon and Cornish game hen—robs the event of its romantic sheen. Brides in particular struggle with that. She did seem distracted of late, as if her mind were elsewhere.”
“Distracted by what?”
“Possibly the move. They were going to Ethiopia after the honeymoon for a two-year posting with Doctors Without Borders. Meredith worked in Haiti for a brief stint, but neither of them have ever been to Africa. Perhaps she was apprehensive. Natural enough.”
“Are she and her family close?”
Brandon moved down the stairs. So far, his mother had said all the right things, but he knew she was playing to the jury. He wasn’t sure he trusted her to keep her views of Meredith’s family quite so benign.
She must have heard his footsteps, for she raised her voice.
Warning him, he wondered? “Very. She comes from a lovely family.” She rose to her feet. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I hear—”
“There is no trouble,” Brandon said, striding into the room. He knew he was a sight, still dressed in yesterday’s rumpled hospital garb and sporting a day’s growth. His blue eyes were probably bloodshot and his thick hair plastered in unruly spikes. When the camera swung to him, he faced it square on. A spectacle for sure, but also raw truth.
“You need to get that message across,” he said. “Meredith was not an overwrought bride who got cold feet. She was excited about the wedding and looking forward to working overseas. She has not run off. Something has happened to her. An accident, a slip on the ice that knocked her out. She could be out there somewhere. Buried. In this weather, hypothermia could set in in minutes...” He broke off, quivering.
Elena moved to his side, deftly shielding him from the camera.
“The police are taking this very seriously,” she said. “I believe they have patrol cars on the look-out and are going to search her home for clues.” She glanced outside and allowed herself a small shiver. “We ask for everyone’s help. Check your driveways and the walks in front of your houses. If anyone saw her or has a clue where she might have gone, please call the police. The more eyes we have looking, the sooner we’ll find her.”
* * *
Once again, Green glanced at his phone. Almost eleven a.m. and Sergeant Li from Missing Persons still had not returned his call. He didn’t want to phone again, concerned that his impatience might arouse suspicions. A routine inquiry, that’s all it was supposed to be.
Green loved being interrupted by a real life enigma. By Wednesday, the desk in his little office was awash in memos, updates, reports, and his computer inbox was stuffed with more of the same. As the city dug out from its first major snowstorm of the season, the second floor of Elgin Street Headquarters was eerily calm. Criminals too had been deterred by the weather. It was tricky robbing a bank when the getaway car might get stuck in a snowbank, and sexual assault was much more of a challenge in bone-chilling cold and knee-deep drifts. Only the serious and the desperate were out on the street looking for trouble on days like this.
In the Major Crimes Unit, detectives were using the lull to catch up on paperwork or follow up on existing cases. They hunched over computers or talked on the phone, jotting notes. Green could see Detectives Bob Gibbs and Sue Peters at their adjacent desks, unconsciously leaning towards each other as they worked.
On his desk in front of him, Green had assembled the stack of performance appraisals prepared by his NCOs, and he was trying to make decisions he hated. Who to transfer out, who to keep. Organizational policy required police officers to move at least every five years. He knew all the bureaucratic reasons. In theory, it was to ensure a well-rounded, experienced police service, to allow for fresh perspectives and enthusiasm, and to avoid burn-out in the high stress jobs. In practice, it usually meant that just as an officer became really good at the job and developed a network on the street, he or she was moved out, leaving the supervisors with a continual pool of inexperienced, uncertain staff.
Bob Gibbs was one of the officers he’d been trying to shelter for months. The young detective had always been the most valuable geek in the unit, roaming the vast world of cyberspace with ease to track down bad guys and ferret out information. Now, however, he was finally beginning to gain some confidence and skill as an interviewer. He was a far better detective than he would ever be a front line officer, a paradox Green could relate to. If he himself hadn’t had Jules to rescue him from the uniform division, he likely would have been turfed out of the force within a year. Or quit in a fit of righteous pique.
Yet Superintendent Devine, herself the master of job hopping her way up the ladder without staying long enough in any job to get really good at it, had issued Green an ultimatum after yesterday’s meeting. She had her quota of underlings to move as well and had hinted that Green’s own name could be on the list if he didn’t play the game. He knew that he was well past due for a transfer and stayed at the helm of Major Case Investigations only because she’d decided no newbie inspector would make her look as good. It was a dubious vote of confidence that could be rescinded on a whim. Barbara Devine was famous for whims.
Devine argued that more experience in other areas, particularly in Patrol, was just what Gibbs needed to put the necessary swagger in his step and teach him to make decisions in the span of two seconds. “Not just high-pressure decisions, Mike, any decisions,” she’d said. Green wasn’t so sure. It might make him, but it might also break him.
Mercifully, the phone rang before he had to decide. He pounced on the distraction, expecting the MisPers sergeant, only to hear a slight pause followed by a breathy, little-girl voice from long ago.
“I want her home for Christmas, Mike.”
He felt his jaw clench. How his first wife still had the power to do that was a mystery. She’d walked out on him eighteen years ago, putting a bitter, moribund marriage out of its misery. His second wife, Sharon, had brought him infinitely more joy in the years since then, along with a son who had the dark, curly hair and laughing brown eyes of his mother, but whose stubbornness and intensity was all Green.
Green glanced at his watch. Barely eleven o’clock in the morning, eight o’clock in Vancouver. The crack of dawn for Ashley. She must have been stewing all night.
“Good morning to you too, Ashley.”
“It’s time this nonsense ended. I want to see her. It’s the least you can do, Mike. You don’t even celebrate Christmas!”
“She’s eighteen. I’m not stopping her. She makes her own decisions.”
“She’s done that since she was two years old,” Ashley retorted. “But you could encourage her. Tell her it’s time to mend fences. You have Tony too, but Hannah’s all I’ve got.”
Green heard the catch of well-rehearsed tears in her voice. He could have argued the point. Children were not interchangeable or replaceable, and
