Ride Away Home Read online

  A month later, I suggested that Jenna start seeing a psychiatrist. He gave her a prescription for depression, and this seemed to help her somewhat, but she was clearly not herself. I suppose I wasn’t myself either. Two lost souls, wandering around in a house that now seemed too big for us, and too empty. The medication didn’t seem to help Jenna that much, and two months later her psychiatrist suggested that she should consider inpatient treatment. He recommended The Sanctuary in McLean, Virginia.

  We lost our beloved daughter on March 1 one year ago. Today, on this sad anniversary of that life-changing event, I’ve chosen to start my journey.

  5

  The story of the disappearance of a female University of Wisconsin student was big news locally and nationally. During the weeks after it happened, Jenna and I appeared on cable and network TV news shows and radio programs, and did interviews with newspapers and some magazines, appealing for help in locating our daughter. All of this was arranged by a Minneapolis public relations firm on retainer to my law firm. This was uncomfortable for us, we were private people, but we’d have done anything that might bring our daughter home.

  Jenna was particularly touched when, during one interview, a pretty, blonde female network news reporter teared up, causing her to tear up too, the camera close on their faces, I saw in a replay later that night. I cynically told Jenna I thought this was staged, then regretted saying it. I believe it was, but why not let Jenna believe that the reporter felt our pain?

  I remembered the photos of missing children that had appeared on the sides of milk cartons—“Have you seen this child?”—and briefly considered legal action to force the Wisconsin Dairy Products Association to bring back the campaign. Lyle Ferguson reminded me that one of the larger dairies in the state was an important client of the firm, so I dropped the idea.

  At first, I returned to Madison every few weeks. After that, it was every few months, and then less often. I would always drive around the campus as if Hope might suddenly appear coming out of the student center or driving by in the yellow Beetle, her high school graduation present. During each trip to Madison, I would visit with Vernon Douglas, who seemed genuinely frustrated at having no progress to report.

  Finally, I stopped coming to Madison, until today. The Madison Police Department, the Wisconsin State Police, and the FBI have had long enough to find out what happened to my daughter. Now it is time for her father to try.

  I’VE LOST track of the time. How long have I been sitting here on the Harley, staring at this apartment building? My wristwatch tells me it’s been nearly half an hour. As I shut down the engine, I’m startled to see Maureen Fox, one of Hope’s former roommates, come out of the apartment building. She must still live here. She’d be a junior now. Short dark hair, tall … But she’s wearing sunglasses, so I’m not certain.

  She heads down the front walk toward me, then abruptly turns and goes back into the building. Did she recognize me? I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to relive such a bad memory by speaking with Hope’s father. But no, she couldn’t have recognized me, not dressed in leathers, sitting on a motorcycle. If I were wearing a golf shirt and khakis, and driving a car, maybe. Maureen, or whoever that was, must have just forgotten something.

  After a while, I hear a car and turn in the saddle to see a Madison Police Department cruiser parking behind me. A female officer gets out and walks over. She wears sergeant’s stripes. Her nameplate says “Sgt. Bradford.” She looks to be in her midthirties, pretty, with short dark hair, and a trim body under her tailored uniform. Maybe a psych major who couldn’t find other employment in this recession, or a single mother working her way through law school. Or maybe just someone who likes police work.

  “Hello, sir,” she says as I slide off the seat and open one of the flaps on the saddlebags, reflexively intending to get my driver’s license and registration.

  She takes a step backward, letting her right hand casually drop to the snap on the strap that secures her pistol in its holster.

  “I need you to step away from the cycle, sir, and show me your hands,” she says.

  Oh, that’s right, I’m an outlaw of the open road. I obey, thinking, here we go again.

  “Hello officer,” I say. “Is there a problem?”

  “We had a call about a man on a motorcycle watching people going in and out of this apartment building. These are student apartments, so we like to keep track of who’s hanging around the neighborhood.”

  “Yes, of course,” I tell her. “My daughter lived here when she was a student. Just thought I’d stop by and take a look.”

  Without taking her hand off the pistol, she says, “Okay, sir. But I need to see your driver’s license and registration.”

  I find my wallet in the saddlebags, extract my license, motorcycle learner’s permit, and cycle registration, and offer them to the sergeant, letting her come to me. She takes them and returns to the cruiser. After a few minutes, she gives me back my paperwork, which I put back into my wallet.

  “Okay, Mr. Tanner. Do you have business in Madison, other than visiting your daughter’s apartment building?”

  “I’m a friend of Detective Vernon Douglas,” I tell her. “We’re getting together today.”

  “Detective Douglas? I guess it’s been awhile since you’ve seen him.”

  “A while, I guess,” I tell her.

  “He’s Chief Douglas now, ever since Chief Margulies retired.” She nods toward the Harley. “Road King. Had it long?”

  “One week.”

  “A week. And driving all the way from Minneapolis on a learner’s permit. Well don’t let that bad boy get away from you.” Walking back to the cruiser, she adds, “So long, Mr. Tanner. You be safe now.”

  So far, everyone who finds me driving a motorcycle tells me to be safe. I swing up onto the saddle and start the engine, thinking: I left “safe” behind when I walked into that Harley dealership.

  6

  Icheck into the Madison Concourse Hotel on West Dayton Street, where I always stay when in town. I park the Harley in the hotel garage myself, realizing that I’ve become pro tective of my bike and worried about how the valet would handle it.

  My room has a view of the big domed white-granite state capitol building, which is quite imposing when illuminated at night. I toss the saddlebags onto a chair—the Harley has built-in plastic saddlebags compartments but I also bought a leather one to use as luggage—undress, and take a long, steamy shower, washing away the road grit and easing my aching muscles.

  The shower finished, I find the TV remote and flop onto the bed. MSNBC is headlining a story about the conviction of a thirty-two-year-old female high school English teacher on charges of child molestation and statutory rape for having sex with a fifteen-year-old male student. There is video of the teacher walking into the courthouse with her attorney, wearing a form-fitting black knit dress and black spike heels. She is an absolute knockout: tall and thin, beautiful, long blonde hair, blue eyes. I think what every man must think when seeing this story: Hey lady, you could do better than some pimply high school kid. And also: Where were teachers like that when I was in high school? I know better than to express either of those thoughts to a woman.

  The teacher reminds me of Susan Toth, if you add twenty years. Susan and Henry Toth are neighbors and members of a bridge group Jenna and I belong to. Susan called me a week after I took Jenna to The Sanctuary. Jenna had gone willingly, like a nun entering a convent to be sheltered from the world, it seemed to me.

  I was surprised that Susan knew about this. Jenna had not mentioned it to anyone, as far as I knew. Our vague plan was to say that Susan was traveling to Europe with an old college friend, maybe to attend a cooking school or take art lessons, or some such reason. We’d wing it, depending upon how long she needed to be away, which was entirely unclear when she left. But in Edina, as in most neighborhoods, everyone seems to know everything. Maybe Jenna told someone in confidence, who told someone else in confidence …


  On the phone, Susan told me that the Tanner family was in her prayers, and that, if I ever needed anything, anything at all, I should just let her know—let her know, not her and Henry. Or maybe I was just imagining an inference that wasn’t intended.

  I wasn’t. That night, at dinnertime, the doorbell rang and there was Susan holding a casserole dish covered with aluminum foil, saying it was a tuna hot dish. “Lutheran penicillin,” she joked. Susan is an attractive woman in her early forties with shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes, and a very nice body. She was wearing a tight midriff-baring tee shirt and white tennis shorts.

  Susan had sort of flirted with me over the years, in that lighthearted, nonspecific way that seems to say, I’m noticing you, you’re in the cohort of men who, under the right circumstances, might interest me. I did the same with certain women, and I assumed Jenna did, too, with some men in our social circle. I didn’t imagine that most people ever meant to go beyond mere flirtation; it was just a form of hardwired mating behavior without any real mating intended. Of course, there were (and are) affairs in Edina, just like everywhere on the planet, but I didn’t actually know of any in our circle of friends. Maybe Jenna did and didn’t mention this to me.

  Now here was Susan Toth on my doorstep. I knew I’d come to one of those life-altering forks in the road which life presents to us all from time to time. Should I thank Susan for the casserole and say good evening, or invite her into the house? Jenna and I hadn’t had sex since Hope disappeared. But without knowing exactly why—loyalty to Jenna, shyness, performance anxiety because I’d been out of the game for a while, all of the above—I took the casserole and said, “This is so nice of you Susan. How’s Henry?” Knowing that the mention of her spouse was unmistakable code for thanks, but no thanks.

  Susan handed me the dish, kissed me lightly on the mouth and said, “Enjoy. Do let me know if you need anything else, Jack.”

  As I watched her walk to her car, and give me a smile and a wave as she got in, I recalled an article in a magazine, maybe GQ or Men’s Health, that said men have an average of X sex partners in their lives and women have an average of Y. I didn’t remember the numbers, but did recall that Y was considerably greater then X. My X was six. I never asked Jenna about her Y.

  I channel-surf to CNN. Wolf Blitzer, who showed Jenna and me kindness and sensitivity during our appearance on his program, has a report about a college boy in Minnesota who disappeared while walking home from a party, one of four such disappearances over the past two years. Jenna and I knew about the others, and felt badly for their families in a distanced sort of way.

  Will Wolf mention the similar case of Hope Tanner? I wonder. He does not. That’s old news by now, a thought that saddens me.

  I turn off the TV and locate tiny bottles of Scotch in the minibar, reflecting that I am grossly overpaying for the alcohol, but I need a stiff drink. Hope is still missing and almost certainly dead. Jenna is in residence at The Sanctuary. And, distracted by all of this, and grieving myself, I’ve been unable to focus on anything, including my job. When my law firm had to begin “downsizing” as clients slashed budgets for outside legal counsel because of the recession, the management committee shocked me by putting my name on the hit list. My billable hours were consistently below the minimum expected of a partner. A month ago, I was unceremoniously fired. Before the recession, you never heard about law firm partners being fired, except in extreme circumstances, such as violating the morals clause in their partnership agreement. I can’t say I would have voted any differently about another partner in the same circumstance as mine.

  It’s nearly six o’clock. I use my cell phone to call Chief Douglas to confirm our dinner. I’m transferred through three levels of gatekeepers, explaining my business to each one, before being put through to Vernon, a sign of his high office. We have a brief, cordial chat. I don’t ask about the case of Hope Tanner because I know that if anything were new, he’d have called me immediately.

  Then I speed dial Pete Dye, the private investigator Hart-field, Miller employs whenever the need arises in service of our (now their) clients. “Pistol Pete” the lawyers call him, because of the big black .45-caliber pistol he wears, visible in a black leather shoulder holster when his suit coat flaps open.

  “I’m a partner in the firm of Smith & Wesson,” he sometimes says, joking but not joking, I think. In my opinion, showing his gun is a marketing tool, meant to communicate the message that he is a serious player in the shadow world of investigation he inhabits. It must work, because Pete’s hourly billing rate is equal to that of a senior partner.

  Pete is an ex-marine, and former Minneapolis police detective. He works out of a small office above a clothing store in downtown Saint Paul. I’ve been there many times since Hope disappeared, employing him myself. The office is right out of a Sam Spade movie: a battered oak desk with two leather club chairs pulled up in front, a bookcase containing a surprisingly eclectic collection of volumes about art, history, psychology, and other academic subjects, along with crime novels by John Sandford, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Bruce DeSilva, Chris Knopf, and other authors. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but was, to learn that Pete Dye graduated from Cornell University.

  I hired him to supplement the police investigation into Hope’s disappearance. When the official investigation wound down without result, I changed his assignment to providing periodic reports on the whereabouts and activities of Slater Babcock, whose father, Pete learned, had more than once bought his son’s way out of juvenile-delinquent, spoiled-rich-kid sorts of trouble. At the University of Wisconsin, Pete told me, the only items on Slater’s “rap sheet” were participating in the kidnapping and head shaving of a rival school’s lacrosse captain (Slater played varsity midfielder), covering trees at the headmaster’s house with toilet paper during one exam week, and allegedly taking part in the break-in of a history professor’s office in search of exam questions. It’s a big leap, Pete emphasized, from stuff like that to murder.

  Once it became clear that Slater would not be charged with any crime related to Hope’s disappearance, Pete reported, he dropped out of school and spent a few months traveling in Europe, then settled in Key West, where daddy bought him a bar and a house.

  “I’m not convinced that Babcock is responsible for Hope’s disappearance,” he told me. “Of course, there’s a first time for everything. A murderer isn’t a murderer until his first kill. Even if Babcock is responsible, maybe it was a mistake, some sort of accident, a drug overdose or alcohol poisoning from binge drinking, that harmed Hope, and caused Babcock to panic and cover it up until he was in too deep to admit it. Not that this would excuse his behavior. But you’ve got to understand that we might never find out what happened that night, unless Babcock, or someone else, finds Jesus and confesses.”

  “The police have no other suspects,” I said, a fact he, of course, already knew.

  “True. But they didn’t have enough to arrest him, so there’s nothing we can do about him except keep track of his location and activities, as I’m doing. If he’s really a bad guy, he’ll do something else, they always do, and I’ll find out. Then we’ll have him.”

  After Hope’s disappearance, while her story was still big news, well-intended citizens and cranks had called the Madison Police Department with Hope sightings all over the country and the world. She was seen walking with a man in a mall in Cleveland, apparently willingly. She was spotted at LAX boarding an overseas flight with a man wearing sunglasses and a trench coat who was gripping her arm tightly, and she seemed drugged. A couple vacationing in Gstaad saw her alone on a ski lift just ahead of them, then taking off down a double black diamond slope. Hope did not ski.

  Pete ran down the few leads that had some chance of validity, finding all of them to be false. One involved a psychic with a nationally syndicated radio show who said she knew positively that Hope had been abducted by a South American crime cartel that sold girls into sex slavery. Hope had been taken and was now in
a brothel on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, the psychic claimed. She had managed to call the radio show, collect, from a pay phone. How Hope got the phone number was not explained. The tape of this call was aired repeatedly for two weeks, which just happened to coincide with a network ratings period. On the tape, a young woman’s voice, barely audible through static and her sobbing, seemed to say, “Oh God please help me, help me mommy and daddy, they’re hurting me …”

  I knew my daughter’s voice, and that was not it. But at Jenna’s insistence, and with my reluctant approval because of my wife’s delicate mental state, Pete flew to Curaçao and toured the brothels. He did not find Hope, but he did locate a sixteen-year-old girl who had gone missing from her bedroom in the middle of the night two years earlier in Fort Collins, Colorado. Her stepfather was a suspect in her disappearance.

  Pete, posing as a customer, examined the brothel’s lineup of girls, and remembered that girl from photos of her that were shown on TV news programs and printed in the newspapers. Instead of shooting his way out with her, he offered the proprietor ten thousand dollars cash from his wallet for the girl. Sold. The girl’s father reimbursed Pete, of course. After that, Pete himself was on all the talk shows, which was very good for business.

  “Hello, Jack,” Pete says, answering on the first ring.

  “Hey Pete. Just checking in.”

  “From where?”

  “Does it matter?”

  I’ve called him from the office, from home, and while I was on business trips all over the country, but he’d never asked my location before.

  “Your house is all buttoned up, your car is in the garage, no one seems to know where you are. At least no one I’m in touch with. I’m just curious about what’s up.”