Anonymous Rex (10 page)

“Nice couple,” I say. “Marriage is so cute.”

Mrs. McBride replaces the picture. “Certainly.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, though it clearly is not—“Are you married, Mr. Rubio?”

“Lifelong bachelor.”

“Does that mean you’ve been a bachelor all your life or you plan on being a bachelor for the rest of it?”

“The first one, I hope. I’d like to find me a nice female Raptor one of these days. Like Ms. Holden there.”

“If you want a Raptor,” says Mrs. McBride, her lips twitching as if she’d just ingested a bit of sour wine, “Jaycee Holden wouldn’t be your girl. She’s a Coleophysis.”

This just keeps getting better. “I thought you said they were engaged.”

“They were.”

“They didn’t want kids, then?”

“They did.”

I blink. I have forgotten to write all this down—it’s bound to come back to haunt me later—but now I’m intrigued. Casually dating members of other dino-races is common, as is marriage if the couple isn’t interested in reproducing and furthering the species. But the simple fact is this: mixed dino marriages cannot successfully produce children, and there’s no ten ways about it.

This limitation on our reproductive abilities is not a social constraint as it is in the human world, where people argue about the matter to no end—on national television, no less. We are not, as a species, that insufferably priggish. With us it’s a simple matter of physiology: A Velociraptor daddy plus a Velociraptor mommy make a litter of Velociraptor babies, while a Velociraptor male plus a Coleophysis female, while it may make for a fun night, will never, ever make a baby Velociphysis. Except … except …

“Dr. Emil Vallardo?” I ask.

Mrs. McBride is impressed. “You know of his work?”

“I’m on the Southern California Council,” I explain. “That is … I used to be—”

“Used to be?”

“Rectification.”

“Ah. I see.”

“It’s not what you think,” I explain. “I misused some funds, abused a little power.” Actually, I misused about twenty thousand worth of funds and a good deal more than that in power, intimidation, and throwing around the reputation of the Council like it was my own weight. But it was all in the name of Ernie, and I’d do it again in a blink.

“So yes,” I continue. “I know Vallardo’s work.”

“He’s a good man,” she says, and I shrug. The last thing I want to do is get into a philosophical discussion on the nature of interracial children; this is the kind of topic that kills dinner parties in seconds flat, and I can’t imagine what it would do to an interview.

“About Mr. Burke—I gather it didn’t work out. With him and his fiancée.”

After a time, she answers. “No, it didn’t. Donovan and Jaycee were no longer a couple well before he left for California.”

“Did they break it off because of Dr. Vallardo?”

“I really don’t know—I don’t think so,” she says. “He was there to help them.”

“Did he?”

“Help them? I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Donovan and Jaycee were very much in love, but infertility can change a couple in ways you can’t imagine.”

I spin the subject. “Why did Mr. Burke go to California?”

“Again, I don’t know.”

“Did he have personal problems? Was he into drugs? Gambling?”

Judith sighs again, and I wonder if she’s preparing to end our talk. “You ascribe to me a great deal of knowledge, Mr. Rubio. I am rarely able to catalog the ins and outs of my own life—how am I expected to know the details of Donovan’s?”

“You were his boss, as I understand it. Bosses notice things.”

“I try not to meddle in the personal affairs of my employees.”

I should have her give Teitelbaum a call. “I understand there were some … creative differences?”

“If you’re referring to my working relationship with Mr. Burke, yes, we had some hard times at the Pangea. I felt it was my duty to guard my husband’s interests in the nightclub.” She’s getting uppity now, and I’m back on solid ground. Self-righteous I know how to deal with.

“So you let him go.”

“We came to an agreement.”

“An agreement that you would let him go.”

Judith McBride purses her lips, and the age comes flooding back, wrinkles spotting her cheeks and forehead like engraved cobwebs. Impressive move—she must have one of those new Erickson guises from Sweden, the ones with specialized capillaries for Super Flush Action. “Yes,” she says finally. “I fired him.”

“I don’t mean to upset you.”

“You’re not.”

“Was it an amicable parting?”

“As amicable as a firing can be,” she says. “He understood.”

Where to go with this next one …? I buzz my lips, pushing them in, out, making noises like an out-of-control popcorn machine. Better to be direct. “Did you and your husband help to set him up in Los Angeles?”

“Whatever would give you that idea?” she asks, a little perturbed.

“He found funding for the Evolution Club awfully quickly.”

“Donovan,” says Mrs. McBride, “has always been an excellent salesman. He could find funding for a deep-sea fishing company in Kansas.” She waves a dainty hand at the multitude of work littering the desk. “I would love to answer more questions, Mr. Rubio, but it’s getting late, and as you can see, I still have much to do before lunch. My husband’s death has left me in charge of his little empire, and decisions don’t get made by themselves.”

That’s a cue if ever I heard one. I scoot my chair backward, pulling heavy furrows through the shag piling. I used to have a rug like this in my office, long before I was ever faced with the reality that the bank could actually repossess carpeting.

“I may need to question you again,” I point out.

“As long as you make an appointment this time,” says Mrs. McBride, and I promise her that I will.

At the door, I spin around, having forgotten one last question. “I was wondering if you could tell me where to find Jaycee Holden. I’d like to talk to her.”

Mrs. McBride laughs again, but this one does little to erase the signs of aging. If anything, it adds half a decade. “That’s a dead-end road, Mr. Rubio,” she says.

“Is that a fact?”

“Yes, it is. Don’t waste your time.”

I shuffle my feet, turn back toward the door. I don’t enjoy being told what to do. “If you don’t want to tell me where she is, that’s fine.” I’ve had my share of reluctant witnesses, though they rarely remain lockjawed for long. “I’m sure I can locate the information elsewhere.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you where she is,” Mrs. McBride says. “It’s that I can’t tell you where she is. I don’t know. Nobody does.”

This is where the dramatic music comes in.

“She’s missing?” I ask.

“For the last few years. She disappeared a month or so after she and Donovan broke it off.” She pauses then, a hiccup in her voice. “Lovely girl. Really lovely.”

“Well, maybe I can track her down. I’m supposed to be good at that sort of thing. What was her scent?”

“Her scent?”

“Her smell, her pheromones. You’d be surprised how many missing dinos I’ve nabbed ’cause of their scent. You can guise yourself up however you like, but the smell stays with you. One guy sprayed a stench so strong I tracked him to within a five-block radius ten seconds after I turned off the freeway.”

“I … I don’t know how to explain it,” says Mrs. McBride. “It was difficult to describe. Jasmine, wheat, honey, a bit of everything, really.”

Not useful. “Last known whereabouts?” I ask.

“Grand Central Station,” says Mrs. McBride.

“That’s not a home address, I take it.”

“She and Donovan had just finished an unsuccessful reconciliation lunch, and he walked her down to the station. Keep in mind this was a while ago … I may not be getting this right. From what I remember, Donovan told me that he watched her step off of the escalator and onto an eastbound train platform. They waved good-bye, and a moment later she disappeared into the crowd. Like sugar dissolving in water, he said. There one second, gone the next.”

“And that’s the last anyone’s ever heard of Jaycee Holden?” I ask.

She nods.

Curiouser and curiouser. I thank Judith McBride for her time, her willingness to divulge information, and she sees me out of the office. Do I shake her hand? Do I touch her at all? My usual routine allows for a handshake, but I’m out of my element in all this opulence. She helps me to make up my mind by extending her hand; I grab it, pump, and scurry into the elevator.

I am not shocked when the two bodyguards join me on the sixty-third floor, but this time I’m too busy thinking about my next move to pay much attention to their hulking forms and pungent aroma. They follow me, tracking my every footstep, until I retrieve my garment bag
from the information counter and exit the McBride Building through the lobby’s revolving door.

Out on the street, I futilely try to hail a cab. I shout, I wave, I yell, and they zip by. Does a light mean they’re on duty or off duty? No matter—they’re equal opportunity ignorers, and I continue to wait at the curb. I wave money over my head—a twenty, a fifty. The yellow blurs still zoom past. It takes a Bruce Jenner leap into the air to finally catch one’s attention, and after I perilously cross two lanes of traffic to enter the taxi, I’m surprised to find that though I have a different cabbie, he miraculously carries the same smell as my old one. Perhaps they, too, constitute a separate species.

We head for City Hall.

P
ublic records are a pain in the ass. I’d much rather skirt the boundaries of the law and sneak a peek at some private files than wait in interminable lines in order to talk to a snotty clerk (do they teach these attitudes in receptionist classes?) who may or may not decide to give me the information I need, depending on whether or not he’s eaten lunch yet and what phase the moon is in. Give me a locked door and a credit card over the Freedom of Information Act any day. I enjoy my little chicanery; if I wasn’t a detective, I’d probably be a fossil-maker, spending day after day in one of the many laboratories scattered deep beneath the Museum of Natural History, coming up with new ways to fake our “extinction” sixty-five million years ago. My maternal great-great-great-uncle was the creator of the first fossilized Iguanodon shoulder blade, placed carefully in a shallow layer of mud in the wilds of Patagonia, and I couldn’t be prouder to have him as a part of my lineage. Deception is fun; human deception is a spectator sport.

So maybe later on today I can get in some real snoop-work, but for the moment, I’m stuck sitting in a hard-backed chair originally constructed for the Inquisition, squinting in the darkness of the Records Room at City Hall, and I couldn’t be grumpier about it.

Approximately three years ago, Jaycee Holden, according to the
documents I am able to procure after five hours of waiting, waiting, and more waiting, pulled a move Houdini would have been proud of. Her name, previously scattered about on credit reports, lease agreements, power bills, court files, Council rosters, and even a few newspaper articles, ceased to appear on any and all documents mere days after she stepped onto that eastbound platform at Grand Central. No funeral was held for the missing Coleophysis, as there was no body, and no actual proof that she was even dead. There was no family to speak of, no one to yell and scream at the authorities to get off their duffs and do something—both parents were deceased, no siblings. Jaycee Holden was an attractive, vivacious young woman who could nevertheless most easily be defined by her association with the Council and her impending marriage to Donovan; such a lifestyle does not readily provide clues to one’s disappearance. According to a one-column newspaper article I found in the back of the
Times
, a small but dedicated effort had been made by Donovan and some friends to search for her as a missing person—flyers, milk cartons, etc.—but it was called off after the private investigators they hired came back with a large bill and nothing to show for it.

People vanish. It happens. But no one vanishes this completely. I’ve tracked missing dinos and humans all my working life, and the one common thread I’ve found is that no matter how thoroughly their previous existence has been eradicated, the paper trail that has followed them all their lives still clings like barnacles to their personas. Junk mail, for example, will continue to arrive at their residences, imploring them to take advantage of This Amazing Credit Card Offer. Unrelenting TV telethon volunteers will call their last known phone numbers, begging for money to help the children, it’s all for the children. And so on. In today’s world, where computers can store your personal statistics until long after the last of your great-great-great-grandchildren have taken up residence in the neighborhood retirement home, no one can just dissolve away anymore. No one.

Jaycee Holden dissolved away. Like Judith said, sugar into water. Her name has been stricken from mailing lists, removed from solicitors’ files. If I had any idea how to access the Internet, I’m sure I would find that Jaycee Holden had long ago taken the closest off-ramp from the information superhighway. She became a virtual
nonentity after that unseasonably warm February afternoon, almost as if she had somehow taken all vestiges of her life with her on her journey into nowhere.