Chapter 2

Lt. Steve Sloan sat at his desk at the police station, going through the pile of paperwork that always accompanied the end of a case. His phone rang, and he answered it quickly, grasping at any excuse to avoid the boring task.

"Lt. Sloan… Oh, hi, Jesse, what's up?" Steve leaned back in his chair as he recognized the voice of his friend.

"Hey, Steve, did Mark say anything about not coming in today?" asked Dr. Jesse Travis, who was also a colleague of Mark's at Community General Hospital.

"Actually, I didn't see him this morning, Jess," responded Steve. "I was on a stakeout last night – I only stopped home this morning for a quick shower and change. Dad was already gone when I got there; I figured he'd left for the hospital."

"Well, he's not here," Jesse said. "He missed rounds and his weekly lecture to the med students."

Steve's brow creased. "I assume you tried calling him?"

"I've tried his cell phone, the house, and his pager," responded Jesse. "He doesn't answer any of them."

Steve sat up, abandoning his relaxed posture, as he assimilated this information. It was totally unlike his father to fail to show up for work without calling in. Even if an emergency had arisen first thing this morning, he would have left a message; if he didn't have time to call the hospital, he would at least have left word at home for his son.

"When was the last time you talked to him?" he asked his friend.

"When he left the hospital last night," Jesse replied.

Steve felt the first cold tendrils of anxiety start to grip him as he realized that, since he had been out himself, he didn't even know for certain that his father had been home at all last night. He forced himself to think.

"Wasn't he going to visit his friend Tom Russell last night?"

"That's right," confirmed Jesse. "You think something might have come up and he decided to stay there?"

"Maybe," said Steve without conviction. "Although I'd still have expected Dad to call if he wasn't going to be able to make it in to work. But I'll call Tom and see what I can find out."

"Call me back and let me know he says," said Jesse.

Steve hung up and looked up the phone number for his father's friend. By the time he got off the phone with Tom, those tendrils of anxiety were tying knots around his stomach. He called Jesse to report that Mark had never arrived at Tom's house the previous night. Tom had tried to call Mark when he failed to show up, but had gotten no answer. He had assumed that something had come up at the hospital, and that Mark had simply been too involved to be able to call; he'd figured Mark would call him some time today to explain. So now Steve was left with the alarming realization that nobody had seen his father since he'd left the hospital the previous evening. He cursed the miserable timing that had him out on a stakeout all night. If he'd been home, at least he would have noticed his father's absence sooner. He decided to go back to the beach house to see if he could find any sign that Mark had returned there at some point. Before leaving the station, however, he put out a missing person alert on his father and his car.

Back at the house, Steve was still searching for anything he might have missed when he heard the doorbell ring. Going to answer it, he found Jesse and Amanda standing outside.

"Did you find anything?" Jesse asked without preamble.

Steve didn't even express surprise at their presence; actually, he felt none. These two friends were too close not to be as concerned as he was over Mark's unexplained absence. He let them in, shaking his head in response to Jesse's question.

"Nothing," he replied. "It doesn't look like he came back here at all. His hospital ID, cell phone, and medical kit are all gone, and as near as I can tell, nothing's been moved since yesterday morning."

"There were no messages, nothing on the answering machine?" asked Amanda, knowing that Steve had undoubtedly already checked those possibilities, but unable to refrain from asking anyway. As she had expected, he shook his head again.

"Nothing," he repeated. "No notes anywhere, up here or in my apartment. And the only message on the answering machine is the one from Tom Russell wondering where Dad is and asking him to call when he gets a chance."

They stared at each other in silence, searching for something to say. There was no point in pretending that there might be a simple, harmless explanation for Mark's disappearance. There had been too many threats, kidnappings, and other scares in the past; Mark would never have gone off for so long without contacting one of them – unless he was physically unable to do so.

As they were trying to decide what to do next, Steve's cell phone rang. He answered it briskly, hoping against hope that it might be his father. His face hardened as he listened. He snapped the phone shut and met his friends' anxious gazes. "They found Dad's car," he told them, heading for the door without further ado. Jesse and Amanda were right behind him.

Steve pulled his car up behind the black-and-white patrol car, and quickly approached the officer waiting for him. He looked over at the stripped-down remains of his father's car.

"We found it like this early this morning," the officer told him. "They stripped the plates, along with everything else, but when we got the description of the car you're looking for, we matched the VIN numbers."

Steve stared at the skeletal car before him; everything that could be removed had been – even the wheels were gone, the car left stranded on cinder blocks. Coming up behind him, Amanda found her gaze riveted to the violated vehicle, an unreasoning sense of dread gripping her. She looked at Jesse and saw that he, too, seemed affected by the sight of the car. Somehow, the image of the car in that damaged condition seemed to give physical form to their fears about the status of its owner.

Steve was the first to pull himself out of this trance-like silence. "Did you find anybody who saw the driver?" he asked.

The officer shook his head. "My partner's out asking around now," he said. "It looks like the car's probably been here all night. So far, we haven't found anyone who admits to seeing anything."

"Interview every person in this neighborhood if you have to," Steve said grimly. "You should have gotten a picture by now – take it door to door and show it to everyone of any age and see what they know. Get the word out that I don't give a damn who did what to the car, but I want any information anybody has on the driver. And I want to know everything that happened in this area between dinner time last night and the time this was found."

The officer nodded, and turned to get started. The odds of finding anybody who had actually seen anything were only slightly better than the odds of getting anyone to admit it, he thought. But you'd have to be deaf, blind, and stupid to point that out to the Lieutenant in his present mood.

As the officer left, Steve looked at Jesse and Amanda to see the worry writ plainly in their faces.

"What would Mark be doing in this neighborhood at night?" Amanda asked.

"I don't know," was the only reply Steve had.

"Maybe he wasn't here," suggested Jesse. "Maybe somebody just planted the car here to focus our attention in the wrong spot."

Steve just looked at him. That was part of the problem, he thought. They still didn't know anything – not even whether they were dealing with a deliberate attack on his father or just a terrible mishap. He looked back at the wreck of Mark's car. Oh God, Dad, he thought, where are you?