Dark City

14.

The station stank of stale coffee and the air was swimming with dust motes. The ventilation system had been busted over a week. Phones were ringing off the hooks in the detective bureau with information or inane questions about the Stockton girl.

Carl Scarboro was a stout, wide-shouldered figure whose hard expression appeared to be carved into his face. He was operating unofficially as Captain of the bureau. He had been threatened multiple times, seen his car vandalized, been shot in the shoulder, but he was still bringing hell to the dealers and gangbangers of Monmouth County.

A local Shark River girl had disappeared, and not just any girl, but one with very rich and powerful parents. They were treating this case extremely seriously, even though it had all the signs of a runaway: a family argument and a disappearance in the middle of the night. Hersh, or the bear, as the boys around the station liked to call him, was Carl's first choice to take point on the case. Sergeant Detective Hersh was extremely detail-oriented. Dorn, the bear's scrawnier partner, was known more for tricking people into revealing new information. He talked to victims. He appealed to suspects, got into their heads and convinced them it was in their best interests to talk. Black-haired and tall, wiry and unshaven, the bear and the coyote, these guys closed cases.

In a matter of hours since her parents reported her missing, Hersh and Dorn had already collected the girl's diary, talked to the parents and lined up interviews with her closest friends, including her boyfriend Nathan Stone.

Carl overheard his detectives heading out of the conference room and went to meet them in the hall.

"What'd you get from mom and dad?"

Hersh answered him. "She was last seen when she went up for bed at 10 o' clock p.m. But her mom says she had been yelling at her for a 'flirtation with an older man.' Her words. His name is Liam Cayes, he drives a red Corvette. Maybe she was cheating and Stone got jealous."

"I've known Nathan Stone his whole life. He's a good guy."

"Anything is possible, Lieu."

"Sure, but that's an unlikely scenario. For now I want the kid's cell phone swept, her social media accounts, everything," Carl said.

"We've got to interview your son, LT." Hersh sniffed.

"Tom? He's not even friends with Alex."

"He called us and said he found a hair barrette that belongs to our girl."

"Tom did? All right. But as soon as you're done with that, we need to find this Cayes fellow and bring him in."

Carl called his son down to the station and the detectives took him into an interview room. They chose the room that looked like a cell. The lights didn't turn on all the way. It had a large table that barely fit between the chairs and the pale brick walls. The vents had to be small to keep people from climbing into them and now the room always stank of industrial cleaning fluid.

Carl observed through the monitors, grabbing a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The lava burned his lip and he chewed the bottom of his mustache as he listened closely to the pixelated voices coming through the speakers.

"Got you some water," Dorn said, setting a paper cup on the table.

Tom folded his arms. "I'm not thirsty."

"So Alex is a friend of yours?"

"Yeah... We catch up sometimes when I'm in town."

"Anything else going on between you?"

"No. It's nothing like that. She's like a kid sister."

"Can you give us an idea of what you were up to last night?" Hersh asked, leaning on the table across from Tom.