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Earl gave a sharp bark, his bulbous eyes fixated on her plate. She told him, “When I’m done, okay? You can lick the plate.”
She’d had the pug a little over two years. While jogging one autumn evening, the chubby little dog, with his curled tail, had nearly barreled into her. She’d tripped, recovered herself, then worried he’d dash into the street, so she’d grabbed hold of him, and he’d licked her face as if they were already fast friends. She’d tried to find his owners, going door to door, checking with local vets and nearby rescue organizations, searching online, at the pound, through the police station, everywhere she could think of, but no one had come forward for him. With no tags and no microchip, the dog was an orphan, and he’d claimed her as his, settling comfortably into her apartment, burrowing his way into her heart. He now slept with her. She’d sworn she’d never own a dog—too much responsibility—and she’d seen firsthand how much work they could be, as her stepmother raised service dogs.
Nonetheless, Earl was definitely her dog now.
As the news switched from national to local, her cell phone chirped. She snatched it up and checked the screen. Las Vegas Police Department. She answered to find Detective Lucretia Davis on the other end of the connection.
“I’m sorry to call so late,” Davis said after introducing herself, “but I’m going out of town and saw that you needed some information on the Didi Storm missing person case.”
“Yes, anything you’ve got.”
“Okay. The case about her is old and cold, and I would love to see it finally solved, as I worked it with Detective Kendrick, who retired a few years back. I’ve already asked that the case files be brought out of storage, and when I get back in a couple of days, I’ll send you anything you need. Most of the information is in computer files, though, as we’d just converted to computer data back then, so I’ll send you everything I have digitally tonight.”
“That would be great.” Dani set the plate on the floor, and as Earl started licking any remaining crumbs, she grabbed a notepad and pen from a drawer in the side table nearest the couch.
“The whole thing had us hamstrung. It was a mess. The long and the short of it was that a night or two before she was reported missing, there was a fire, a big explosion in the desert. It lit up the sky, let me tell you. I’d never seen anything like it. Anyway, after the fire department put out the inferno, all we were left with was a burned-out shell of a car—a Mustang—and it had a body in it. Male, probably an inch over six feet, no dental work we could match, never identified. No missing person report that filled the bill.
“The car turned out to be a rental from a small shop in Victorville, a mom and pop operation, but I can’t remember the name. It’ll be in the file. It was rented to a Brandon Hall. He had a California driver’s license and a credit card issued to him—Visa, if I remember right—but other than that, he didn’t exist. And the rental car company didn’t have cameras at that time.”
“That seems strange.”
“Yep, a little, even for back then. Maybe it was the reason he picked that rental company.”
Settler made a note.
“We found where he’d rented a room, here in Las Vegas, at a hotel months before. The hotel was just off the Strip, and a Brandon Hall using the same ID had been there for a few weeks, and that’s where, as far as we can tell, he would have hooked up with Didi. The ID didn’t pan out, was phony. The hotel did have cameras, but he kept his back turned and was always wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, which isn’t all that unusual here—no red flags were raised.”
“Purposely hiding his identity?”
“That’s what we decided. His address was listed as somewhere in L.A., and it was the same address on the fake driver’s license. When we checked, it turned out no one by the name of Brandon Hall had ever lived there, and the picture on the license, as I said, didn’t match with anyone who’d gone missing. A dead end. But then, the whole case was made up of dead ends. If this Brandon Hall was the body in the car, we could never ID him.”
Settler scratched the alias onto the legal pad while Davis continued talking. Losing interest, Earl padded off to his water dish in the kitchen.
Davis said, “So that was mystery number one.”
“There were more?”
“What happened to Didi was the biggest one. According to her kid, she took off the next night, or maybe the next—again, it’s been a while, and I don’t have the details right here, but the kid said her mother was ready to have it out with someone because she thought she’d been scammed. Big-time.”
“I heard,” Settler admitted. “I talked to Remmi Storm today.”
“So she told you about an exchange of money for a baby?”
“And the switch of the babies. The girl for the boy.”
“Well, that’s just the thing,” Davis said, “There was no record of two births, only one. The boy: Adam. Filed with the state by Didi Storm and her attendant, a woman who was supposedly a midwife, Seneca Williams. No second baby was listed or ever reported that we could find. No female named Ariel. Ms. Williams vanished, too, a day or so later, after Didi disappeared. According to Remmi Storm, Seneca Williams took the second baby with her—the boy, Adam—though that’s always been a question as we only know of the one. Did Didi really have twins? Did she take the one with her that first night? If so, what happened to the kid? And what about Seneca Williams? What happened to her? She wasn’t in any of our records, no driver’s license or Social Security number that we could find. Was she an illegal? Or did she have an alias? Witnesses claimed to have seen her, but we couldn’t find anyone really close to her, so who knows?”
“And there wasn’t evidence of a baby in the car that burned?”
“Nothing to confirm that a kid was even there. Which throws more than a little doubt on Remmi’s entire story. Kendrick pointed this out, but Remmi Storm wouldn’t back down from her insiste
nce that she was telling us the truth, and she knows what happened, or most of it, because—get this—she was hiding out in a specially equipped cargo space in Didi’s Cadillac, a space between the trunk and back seat Didi used to hide props for her act. Didi was a showgirl who impersonated, sang, danced, and did a little magic, I guess. I never saw her. Never met her. Didn’t even know about her until Remmi came in and made the report.”
“You didn’t believe her? Remmi?”
Davis paused for a second, and Settler heard the distinctive click of a lighter and a long intake of breath, indicating she was lighting a cigarette. “Not completely. I remember we went ’round and ’round about it back then, trying to figure out what was real, what wasn’t. We might have had one witness, a kid who was riding a motorcycle in the desert that night and got shot, but he left the hospital before we could interview him. His name was Scott something or other . . . no wait, the last name was Scott. And he was in the wind, too. Never found.”
“But he was shot?” This was news to Settler, and she wrote his name down and circled it, to remind herself that Scott would be another witness, just as Earl returned to the living area and cocked his head at her.
