Chapter Four

12: 48 p.m. Monday 16th

"Suicide? Jim? No way." Tom was adamant. "He's enjoying life too much to contemplate suicide."

"What do you mean, Detective Selway, when you say enjoying life too much?" the sloppy white bread man with terminal bad taste asked. He licked the end of his pencil and prepared to make notes.

Tom grimaced, disgusted, but answered easily. "Jim's newly divorced, his wife left him oh, about a year ago and he's been, you know, enjoying the field of roses." He looked from the fat boy to the one who looked like a mortician's dream corpse.

"You mean he's been promiscuous?" the corpse asked.

"Well, no, I wouldn't put it that way. I mean he never saw more than one woman at a time, so far as I know."

"But he's blind, how does he ..?" Fat Boy obviously didn't understand anything about charisma and spoke over his partner in his haste to understand.

"Could you provide a list of names of these women?" Corpse Man said in a monotone, as if his partner hadn't even opened his mouth.

Tom stopped, his mouth hanging open. Jim and he had compared notes, but names weren't always part of the notes. With Jim, even the basics of description weren't always part of the notes. Tom couldn't help smiling. "I'll jot down what I can remember but, your best bet would be the phone numbers from his cell dump." His grin was almost irrepressible as he thought of the list he would make. The girl who screamed when she came. The one with breasts so big Jim needed his cane to find his way around them. The little one he couldn't invite to his apartment because every time she opened her mouth, Jim imagined a twelve year old. The black girl, Jim said he could tell by her voice and her mouth. But when Tom had finally met her, she'd been as white as the First Lady.

No, his list wouldn't help these two at all. Tom seriously doubted any of these girls would want to hurt Jim. He'd met a few, they'd all looked lovingly into his face. The partings usually came after a couple of weeks. They'd realize a long term commitment to a man who couldn't see, and a workaholic cop weren't their idea of romance after all. Jim seemed happy. He wasn't interested in settling down again. He gloated about having his apartment the way he liked it after all these years, and the joy of knowing nothing in it ever moved unless he moved it. There had been a girl or two who had threatened to stick around a little longer. They seemed to take it in stride that he couldn't see and assured him the cop thing wasn't a problem. Jim had his own methods of helping them see the light. A few stepped on toes, a couple of inappropriate comments within earshot of someone else, and these two bowed gracefully out of the picture.

"It seems to us, that these continual short term relationships could indicate a deep seated insecurity and depression," the corpse summed up. "Thanks for your information, you've been most helpful."

Tom left, hoping these two were on vacation if he ever went missing.

1: 24 p.m. Monday 16th

Marty's interview took two minutes. He took one look at the dead beat and the prick and knew they wouldn't be any help. Their first question proved that was the case.

"No. Dunbar wouldn't suicide. He is too fucking stubborn and he fought too hard to get where he is. Besides, he lives for his job." Marty sat forward and looked around him as if to make sure no one else was listening. "I'll deny it if you quote me, but truth is, he solves more than his fair share of the cases that come out of this squad."

The MPU detectives just looked from Marty to each other and thanked him for his time.

1:50 p.m. Monday 16th

"Detective Bettancourt, Jim's partner," Fisk introduced Karen. "These are Detectives Wainright and Saunders, Missing Persons Unit."

Karen shook their hands and sat in the empty chair between the two men. They were opposites in every way. Wainright was a tall thin black man, with a severe visage and unnerving stare. His age could have been anywhere between twenty five and fifty. He wore a dark suit, dark tie, and immaculately shined shoes. He sat straight in his chair and once his eyes caught Karen's, they never left her face. Saunders was well over fifty, soft, like a dinner roll and overflowing his pale brown casual pants. He wore a collared polo shirt with a tie incongruously knotted at the neck and tucked into his pants. His elbow patched jacket looked like it had been hunting recently. There were no socks inside his boat shoes. He stuttered and missed when he reached to shake her hand and landed back in his chair with a depreciating grunt, as if he'd just attempted and failed a high jump.

These were the men who were going to find Jim? Karen itched to get out of there and go searching the streets. She turned to the Boss. "Canvass?"

"Started. All our available patrols." Fisk smiled for the benefit of the two men, "The Detectives have some questions."

The bumbling MPU detective smiled over his thick lenses, "Ah, Lieutenant, do you suppose we could speak to Detective…" he looked toward his note pad, "Bettancourt, alone for a few minutes?"

Fisk was taken aback. If he'd realized they wanted that, he'd have given them an interview room to use. But it would waste time if he moved them now. He had no idea if Dunbar was in danger and if minutes could make a difference.

He nodded and left the office. "Marty, you got that list yet?" he asked the man who was perched on the window sill, his feet on Jim's chair.

"Yep, and all his collars are either in jail or have been in contact with their parole officers. No truants." Marty read the list again.

"Check the paroles. Someone could have snatched him and reported in as required."

Marty nodded. "Like a revenge thing?"

Fisk nodded and Marty considered it.

"Could be. He certainly knows how to piss people off."

Tom dropped the phone he had been on back into its cradle. "Dunbar's cell phone? The hair is female and blonde. Blood is his type."

Fisk nodded. "Anything more from the hospitals?"

"No, Boss." Tom looked over his shoulder at the closed door. "What are they thinking?"

The phone rang and Marty picked it up at Jim's desk.

Fisk shrugged. "Covering all bases I guess." He didn't want to tell his detectives the majority of his time with the MPU detectives had been spent with Fisk explaining Jim wasn't a suicide risk. The two men seemed unable to imagine a blind man could be happy. In fact, judging by the expressions on the fat guy's face and the lack of expression on the skinny one, they didn't believe the Lieutenant when he said Jim was competent. Chances were they were assuming he had either gotten himself lost a few yards from his apartment door, or had finally managed to find the river after three years of searching for it and thrown himself in.

"Boss." Marty's voice broke through to Fisk's attention. "Boss."

"Yeah?" Fisk pulled himself from his angry thoughts.

"That was Watts. He said there was an arrest in Maryland this morning of an escaped convict."

Fisk raised his eyebrows, "And…?"

"Marybeth Desmond. You remember? Killed her husband Carl three years ago. He was from vice and one of the first cases Jim worked with us. Jim broke the partner Eric by recognizing his cologne from the apartment?"

"And she's blonde, like the hair found on Jim's phone," Tom added.

Fisk nodded, he grabbed the phone. "Where is she being held? Get there, fast. I'll call to let them know you're coming."

Fisk sat at Marty's desk where he could keep an eye on his door. He logged into Russo's computer with his own ID and found out where Marybeth had escaped from. Bingo. Escaped Wednesday night, plenty of time to get to Dunbar near his apartment. He closed the window and picked up the phone.

2:07 p.m. Monday 16th.

The dog nudged the man again, and he battered at it like it was a fly. "No, let me rest, Fido. There's a girl." But the shade of the wall where he was slumped was rat territory, and a pair of particularly big ones had refused to be caught. They'd given the dog several bites and roamed, waiting for the guard to fail so they could get to the prize.

2:10 p.m. Monday 16th

Karen shifted uneasily in the chair. The black guy had asked her all sorts of irrelevant questions about Jim. His timetable, his habits, how he operated on a case, how he handled himself at a crime scene, did he ever get lost? She answered them for a while but finally stopped the monotone stream from the man's mouth with a hand in the air.

"This is all very well, but what does it have to do with finding Jim?"

"We need to understand this man if we are to track him down," the old guy, Saunders, answered for the black man, Wainright. "So did he ever get lost?"

"Yes, once. Jim was undercover and Marty and Tom were supposed to follow the car he got into, but they got cut off."

"He went under cover?" Saunders spluttered. This time Wainright took control.

"Thank you. And were there other times when you observed Detective Dunbar disoriented?"

Karen lifted a shoulder and looked around, "Yes, but only for a moment, you know, he'd get turned around in a busy corridor, or we'd be in a new place and …" She didn't want to continue, these were very small things, things the other guys didn't even see and things which she and Dunbar went to lengths to make sure were unnoticed by other cops, brass, and civilians. But, in three, nearly four years together, yes it had happened and would probably happen again. She shook her head, no these were irrelevant.

"The other detectives and the Lieutenant seem to think Dunbar is a competent detective, is that your assessment? As his partner, working with him day in-day-out, do you find you have to carry him very much?"

"Carry Jim? You gotta be kidding!" Karen was outraged.

"My partner doesn't mean literally, Detective, he means - " Wainright tried to calm her.

Karen interrupted, unable to keep the anger from her voice, "I know exactly what he means and no. First of all, Jim's been a detective for close to fifteen years now, he knows his job inside out. And second of all, the Lieutenant would never sanction anyone who wasn't pulling their weight."

"You seem very upset, Detective Bettancourt," Saunders almost stuttered, trying and failing to look her in the eye as he spoke, "Is there more to your relationship with Detective Dunbar than you have admitted?"

"What?" Karen felt Catholic guilt raising its head somewhere in back of her conscience and gave it a very solid whack. "Why on earth would you ask that?"

"Well, you seem very upset, and you've used his first name on four occasions in a ten minute conversation. That usually indicates an intimate relationship."

"What a load of bull! Jim's my partner I'm worried for his life and you're sitting here questioning his competence rather than looking for him. Upset doesn't even get close."

"Have you ever slept with Detective Dunbar?" Wainright asked the question in his flat tone, overlaid with the authority of his position.

Karen's mouth was small and tight. No one in the squad or the precinct knew. They had been very careful to keep everything under wraps. She didn't know if these guys would end that. "Over twelve months ago, we had a relationship for a short time."

"Who ended the relationship?"

"It was mutual. We decided we had to choose between our job partnership and… the other, and we both chose the job." Her eyes flashed at them to challenge her and she flared as a smile jerked Wainright's lips for a micro second.

Wainright and Saunders looked at each other and then turned back to her. Saunders threw the next question, "How do you feel about your partner's current promiscuity, Detective Bettancourt?"

Oh, no, these guys were complete idiots. They were looking at her now? It was all Karen could do to hold herself in her chair and not storm out the door. "I'm fine with it," she said trying for an off the cuff attitude and hearing the tremble of unrelieved tension in her own voice. Jim could go chase as much skirt off tour as he wanted, she just wanted her partner back and working cases. If these two were going to go suspecting her of getting rid of Jim, it would just steal the time she had to search. She shook her head and lied, "I'm not into short term flings, so it just seems a little silly to me." She gave them a smile, hoping to have led them off that particular wild goose chase.

The two men nodded slowly and in unison. Saunders wrote something on his pad and Wainright asked his next question. "Where did you go after you dropped Detective Dunbar off at his apartment on Friday?"

"I went home, where I live alone. I spoke to my neighbor as I arrived. I did not leave until 10 a.m. the next day when a friend picked me up and we went out."

Wainright kept his eyes on hers, dead eyes she thought, to match his dead voice. "We'd like a short recess, Detective Bettancourt. Would you step outside and return in five minutes?"

Saunders gave her a weak condescending smile as he wiped sweat from his brow. Karen slammed the door behind her.

Karen came back from the rest room. Fisk pulled her aside to brief her, "Russo and Selway-" he began but was interrupted by the MPU detective.

Saunders stuck his head out of the door. "We're ready for you again, Detective Bettancourt."

"Boss, these two…"

He looked her in the eye. "I know. But it keeps Tunney off our back, and, although they don't work the same way as we do, they are the MPU, so give them the benefit of the doubt and your full cooperation."

She sucked in her breath and went in for round two.

2:30 p.m. Monday 16th

Dehydration had cost the man most of his clarity now. He'd lost his coat somewhere and shivered continually. He was finding it increasingly difficult to walk, and his chatter to the dog ebbed and flowed. Every time he sat, he took out his wallet and thumbed through the cards. If he was going to die, he wanted to die at least knowing who he was. Somehow it seemed of utmost importance.

…

His wallet slipped from his hand as he fell. His eyes closed and he dreamed of walking into a bar. Friends waved him over, saying his name, but he couldn't quite catch it. His mother was there, scolding him, and his father held out a glass of beer. The man used every ounce of strength he had left to gain his footing. He stepped toward his father. The man almost cried, reaching for the amber filled glass with trembling hands, not wanting to lose a drop. The wet sides were smooth, and he sloshed some of the precious liquid on his shirt front when his shaking hands lifted it to his mouth. But the beer turned to sand and filled his mouth with foul dryness and he began to retch. His father laughed and laughed.

The man jerked away, his hand went to his shirt front, the beer, maybe he could get some from his shirt, enough to wet his lips at least. But the shirt front was dry and his thirst drew every moment into a long and painful experience. He fell to his knees and looked up at the face of betrayal.