The Last Thing She Ever Did(13)

“Please come as fast as you can,” she said, holding the phone with a vise grip. “He’s three. I think my little boy fell into the river.”





CHAPTER FIVE

MISSING: ONE HOUR

Bend Police detective Esther Nguyen was on her third cup of truly terrible office coffee and working through the least favorite part of her job—paperwork—when one of the department’s newest officers, Jake Alioto, notified her that help was needed on a call.

“Boy missing,” he said. “Mom’s pretty torn up.”

Esther set her cup on a stack of papers. “How long?”

Jake was young, with light brown skin that made his white teeth nearly blindingly so. Esther had a hard time not looking at his mouth when he spoke. So white. Perfect. A somewhat struggling goatee accentuated his look.

“Not very,” he said. “An hour at most.”

“Custody issue?”

He didn’t think so. “Dad’s at work. Mom’s home.”

“Where?”

“Riverfront, near the pedestrian bridge by the park.”

Esther went for a light jacket that hung on a peg adjacent to her office door. She was a petite woman, just five feet tall, with black hair that she wore blunt-cut to her shoulders. Silver wire-framed glasses shielded her brown eyes. She wore no jewelry but a slender gold necklace that her father had given her, a pendant in the shape of a sea star from a trip the family had made to California when she was a teenager. When she was agitated or nervous, her fingertips always found their way to the pendant. Its golden surface held a particularly bright sheen where she’d touched it countless times.

“An hour doesn’t make a missing person,” Esther said. “You’re aware of that, Jake, right?”

Esther had an edge that made her good at her job but sometimes difficult to be around. Talk around the office was that she might be somewhere on the Asperger’s continuum. This was just mean-spirited armchair analysis, but it was a fact that Esther could be direct in the kind of unflinching way that can also signal a lack of understanding of social cues.

Jake stepped aside so she could lead the way. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Of course. But I feel sorry for the woman. She’s falling apart.”

“Name?”

Jake, who had a teenager’s ambling gait even though he was twenty-five, hurried to keep up with the detective. “Mom’s Carole Franklin,” he said. “She’s a local. The missing boy is Charlie. She thinks he might have fallen in the river when she wasn’t looking.”

“Did she sound drunk?”

“No, ma’am.”

Esther gave him a look. A familiar one. “Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry,” Jake said. “My bad.”

As they made their way to the cruiser, Esther thought of the case of a little boy in Corvallis, the jurisdiction in which she had started her career. Tommy Walton vanished from his babysitter’s backyard. He’d been missing for days when his mangled body was recovered from an abandoned roller rink. Esther had known that little boys and girls were targets of the evil and the insane—but hadn’t really known it until then.

Esther had worked the case with her partner for six weeks until they arrested the neighbor, a sixteen-year-old boy who’d sodomized and strangled Tommy. He’d done that in the first half hour of the boy’s abduction. Esther never forgot that she and her partner had held out hope that the boy would be found alive, certainly during the first few hours and even days of the investigation.

Esther knew missing-persons case rules were a bit of a myth. There was no twenty-four-hour mandatory wait to get started on a search. A small child or a professional person with a spotless record can earn the support of a search team within a few hours of going missing.



While Jake prattled on about a girl he was dating, Esther drove past a Thai fusion restaurant on Wall Street that had been the location of her first date with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Drew. She’d never be able to eat there again. The restaurant, known for its legendary green curry dish, would forever represent the start of her personal disaster.

Like other professionals their age, Esther and Drew Oliver met online. Drew was handsome and outgoing and had a kind of glib personality that Esther found so very different from other men she’d dated. Those other guys had been interchangeable. Serious. Smart. Most were computer science and technology geeks and more interested in code than in carrying on a conversation. Esther wanted to laugh. She wanted romance. She wanted a little adventure.

Drew understood all of that. He ran a Bend brewery start-up that was making serious headway but was still far from the steady income her parents required of an ideal suitor for their only daughter. The pair dated for nine months, then moved in together. While Esther was in no rush to get married, her mother’s constant refrain that “things don’t look right” beat down on her like a headbanger’s drumstick. When Drew asked her to marry him, she agreed right away, thinking it would get her mother off her back.

That was a miscalculation.

“Money is more important than a good time,” her mother whispered in Esther’s ear on her wedding day. “You will never be able to raise a family. A cop and a beer maker—that’s just not what I’d consider a suitable combination for a successful marriage.”