Missing

“Yes, this is Ron’s home,” Avery said, betraying a first hint of impatience. “What’s happened? Why are you here?”

“I’m sorry to tell you, ma’am, that the police in Miami believe Mr. Raven may have come to harm. He’s missing from his hotel room, and the indications are that he has met with foul play.”

“Foul play?” It was Kate who asked the question. “Do you mean—he’s dead?”

“It’s a possibility, miss. I’m sorry.”

“Oh my God, no! Dad can’t be dead! Mom, didn’t you speak to him last night?”

“No, not last night.” Avery stared straight ahead as she answered her daughter’s question. “We spoke on Sunday. Ron called as soon as he arrived in Miami because he knew I was meeting friends for dinner.” Avery relapsed into silence. She fixed her gaze on Lake Michigan, her classically faultless profile containing no hint of what she was feeling.

Frank addressed himself to Kate. “According to the police in Miami, your father hasn’t been heard from since eight-thirty on Sunday night.”

Avery said nothing in response to this information and her face remained a blank mask. Kate, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have perfected the upper-class skill of hiding her emotions. Her cheeks paled before heating to a fiery red and her eyes filled with tears.

“My father was supposed to fly into Mexico City yesterday morning and there haven’t been any reports of a plane crash. He’s probably in Mexico—”

“I don’t believe so.” Frank spoke quietly but firmly. It was best not to leave these women with false hopes. “The police in Miami are quite sure Mr. Raven didn’t catch his flight. Whatever happened to your father seems to have happened here in the United States.”

Avery Raven brought her gaze back from the lake. “How can you be so sure he didn’t catch his scheduled flight, Officer?”

“The police in Miami have liaised with Homeland Security, ma’am. Controls are tight these days, and the authorities are confident that Mr. Raven didn’t board a flight out of the Miami airport anytime in the past forty-eight hours.”

Kate started to protest again, so Frank quickly provided them with details of the wrecked hotel room, the search of local hospitals and the ominous trails of blood, indicating that at least three people had lost traces of blood in Ron Raven’s hotel room. He ended up telling them about the rental car that had been found abandoned in a restaurant parking lot close to a busy marina, the Blue Lagoon, in Coral Gables.

“What’s the significance of that?” Kate demanded. She sounded hostile, which Frank understood. She was keeping her fear and grief at bay by refusing to accept the official explanation for her father’s disappearance.

“The police in Miami believe that whoever attacked your father may have disposed of his body in the ocean, miss, which would be a very convenient way to insure that we never find it. There are forty-eight boats docked at the marina, and several of them were taken out either late last night or early this morning. It seems likely that somebody at the marina will have seen something.”

“Only if my father really was taken out to sea,” Kate pointed out. “What if he never went anywhere near the marina? What if the rental car location is just a red herring?”

“Then we’ll find that out, too, eventually. Right now, the investigative team is checking on any preexisting links between your father and the people who dock boats at the marina. They also need to check whether any of the boats were taken out last night without the owner’s permission—”

“If the owner didn’t give permission, then there’s no way to find out who actually did take the boat out to sea and we’ll be no further forward,” Kate interjected.

Frank was impressed with her logic. Apparently she was one of those rare people able to reason through a problem even when she was stressed. “You’d be surprised at what trained investigators can discover once they generate a few initial leads. For example, there are security cameras at the marina and in the parking lot where the rental car was abandoned, and the tapes from those cameras are already in police custody. That should help a lot. Unfortunately, there’s no magic shortcut for any of us. The detectives in Miami have to follow each line of inquiry until it runs out. It’s going to take a while for them to have an accurate picture of what really happened but we’ll get there in the end.”

Or not. No point in mentioning the percentage of homicides and missing persons cases that went unsolved despite the best efforts of law enforcement.

“Perhaps my father’s been kidnapped,” Kate suggested. Anything, it seemed, was preferable to believing that her father was already dead.

“It’s possible, miss. But kidnappers usually make a ransom demand soon after the abduction. I assume you haven’t received any such demand?”

Reluctantly, Kate shook her head. “No. Nobody’s called. We had no idea my father was…missing.”

Avery drew in an audible breath and swallowed a sob, her first overt sign of distress. “Excuse me. I have to leave you for a minute.” She turned and walked blindly in the direction from which she’d appeared earlier.

Kate followed her mother, turning to speak to Frank over her shoulder. “I can’t leave her alone right now, but please don’t go. I have so many questions for you still.”

“I’ll wait, miss.” You don’t know the half of it yet.

“Thank you.” Tears poured down Kate’s cheeks. Fighting a losing battle to stanch her crying, she gestured toward the hallway where her mother had just been. “Oh God, I don’t know how she’s going to bear it if he’s really dead. Dad is her whole life.” She turned abruptly and hurried after her mother.

Just what he hadn’t wanted to hear, Frank thought grimly, pacing the luxurious living room. He suspected that accepting Ron Raven was dead would prove easier for Avery and Kate than hearing the truth about how the bastard had screwed them over. Now that he’d actually met the two women, his sympathies were engaged. He definitely wasn’t looking forward to the next fifteen minutes or so. If only Avery Raven had turned out to be the bitch he’d hoped for. Instead, she seemed like a real classy woman who deserved something better than the piece of crap she’d married. The daughter seemed nice, too. Smart as well as beautiful, which made for a hell of a combination, especially when you considered that the enticing package came wrapped in a comfortable supply of money.

Well, the kid had been rich until now, Frank corrected himself. Perhaps she would be rich again when Ron Raven’s estate finally finished winding its way through the probate courts—except that probating Ron’s estate was likely to take half a lifetime once the opposing sets of lawyers started battling in court. Two things you could say for sure about Ron Raven’s messy death: his family was screwed and disposing of his assets was going to make several members of the legal profession rich.

Frank paced for another three or four minutes. If the two women didn’t put in an appearance soon, he’d have to go get them. The Bulls were up against the Detroit Pistons tonight in a playoff game and he had plans to watch with his son. Besides, cooling his heels in this too-fancy living room was giving him a major case of the creeps. Hopefully Kate would return without her mother. He’d much prefer to deliver the bad news to the daughter and let her pass it on.

Frank caught a break when Kate returned a couple of minutes later, alone. “I wasn’t sure if you would still be here,” she said. Her belligerence had gone, replaced by a control that was visibly fragile.

“I couldn’t leave, miss. I still have important information to pass on to you.”

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. My mother is…We’re both upset, as you can imagine. She’ll be with us in just a little while. Could you give me a phone number so that we can call you later with all the questions we forget? My mother…We’re neither of us thinking too clearly right now.”

“Here’s my card.” Frank had one ready and handed it to her. Kate was likely to have more questions than she could possibly imagine, he reflected wryly.

“Thank you.” Kate tucked the card into the pocket of her jeans. Unlike her mother, she was dressed like a regular person, not as if she expected to share afternoon tea with the First Lady. “Tell me, Detective, exactly how much hope do the police have that my father might still be alive?”

“Not very much,” Frank admitted. “The trouble is, if your father is alive, the state of his hotel room suggests that he’s badly injured. So where is he? Why didn’t he call 911? Or if he’s unconscious, why have none of the hospitals reported a John Doe?”

She nodded, reluctantly acknowledging the logic of his analysis. “On the other hand, if my father’s dead, how did the murderers dispose of his body?”

“As I mentioned, the ocean seems like a real good bet.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I was wondering how they got Dad out of the hotel without anyone seeing them.”

Frank couldn’t see any harm in telling her the truth. “When the Miami police searched the hotel, they found a big steel-framed laundry hamper near one of the service elevators. There’s blood on the canvas bag and the blood matches some of the stains found in your father’s hotel room. For now, the police are assuming the killers used the laundry hamper to wheel your father down to the parking garage.”

“They dumped Dad’s body in a canvas laundry hamper?” Kate’s breath caught and her mouth twisted downward. “That’s like something out of a really bad movie.”

Frank could have pointed out that murderers watched the same movies and TV shows as everyone else and usually demonstrated no originality or creative thinking. Instead, he answered mildly enough. “It might be corny, but it seems to have worked. Nobody saw your father or anyone else leave his room. Unfortunately, guests in a hotel don’t pay much attention to a cleaner pushing a laundry cart.”

“If my father really is dead, the person who killed him must have planned ahead,” Kate said. “He couldn’t just hope to find a laundry cart conveniently left in the right place. And how did he know which car my dad had rented, or where it was parked?”

Frank nodded his agreement. “That’s true. The Miami police are working on the theory that your father’s murder was premeditated.”

Although, in Frank’s opinion, that theory raised almost as many questions as it answered. If the murder had been planned in advance, why had it required so much brute force to kill Ron Raven? Why hadn’t he just been shot with a single bullet to his head while he slept? The police had retrieved blood samples from three different people. Presumably at least one sample belonged to the killer. If that was the case, the killer—already injured?—had risked a lot to move Ron’s body. Why? Would an autopsy have revealed clues to the killer’s identity? Frank could only thank God that he didn’t have to find answers to these questions. The cops down in Miami had his sincere sympathy. This case was a mess—and that was before anyone addressed the possibility that Ron had been the killer, not the victim.

Kate gulped in air. “I don’t understand why anyone would want to kill my father.” She leaned toward him, her hands clenched tightly enough for her knuckles to gleam white in the late-afternoon sun. “Who in the world would have a motive for killing him?”

Frank shook his head. “I’m sorry, miss, we’re still waiting for details of the case to come through from Florida. But your father was a businessman who spent the past thirty years making highly profitable deals. Where there’s a lot of money, there’s always the chance of corruption and double-crosses.”

“Not my father,” Kate protested. “Raven Enterprises is renowned for the integrity of its deals. And as far as the personal side of my father’s life is concerned, he leads a boringly normal life—”

“Not quite.” Frank had to stop her there, although the detective in him was intrigued to see how completely Ron Raven had fooled this branch of his family. He wondered if the folks in Wyoming were equally clueless.

“As I mentioned, there’s more information I need to pass on to you, miss. I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a tactful way to deliver the news, and I’ve decided there isn’t one. So I’m going to be blunt. Here goes. We have reason to believe your father was a bigamist.”

“A bigamist?”

“Yes, miss.”

“As in having two wives? My dad?” Kate stared at him, eyes wide with disbelief. She gave an uncertain laugh. “You’re joking, right?”

“I’m afraid not. Your father seems to have had two wives and two sets of children. You and your mother here in Chicago and another wife and two more children living in Thatch—apparently that’s a small ranching town in Stark County, Wyoming.”

“My father has two more children as well as another wife?” Kate’s voice spiraled into an incredulous squeak. “Of course he doesn’t! That’s absolutely crazy.”

“Having two wives at the same time is criminal, miss. It’s not necessarily crazy.”

“My father isn’t a criminal.” The realization that her father might have committed a crime seemed to stun Kate even more than the suggestion he had another wife and two more kids. She shook her head vehemently. “No, it’s impossible. Apart from the craziness of committing bigamy in this day and age, how could Dad have kept a second wife and family secret? He couldn’t possibly have spent time with them without my mother finding out.”

She had a good point, Frank thought ruefully, although he’d seen plenty of situations where seemingly upright citizens got away with living secret lives for years. Ron Raven had apparently been one of those talented deceivers who could lie with the ease of an accomplished con artist. Although, come to think of it, what was a bigamist if not a con artist supreme?

“You would know better than I do how your father managed to keep you and your mother in the dark. Perhaps all those business trips he took weren’t actually for business. I couldn’t say. But he has two other children, that I know for sure. A son and a daughter, according to the sheriff of Stark County.”

Kate made little pushing motions with her hand, as if to hold the astonishing news at bay until she could assimilate it. “What are their names? How old are they? Are they little kids?”

“No, they’re grown-up, but I don’t have any more details. I’m sorry. We’re waiting for the sheriff in Wyoming to fax us documentation. Normally, we’d have held off notifying you until we had more complete information, but in this case we decided it was important to warn your mother before reporters get wind of the story. We didn’t want your mother to turn on the TV and hear the news of Ron Raven’s death that way. Especially the part about him having two wives.”

Kate’s expression darkened from incredulity into horror. “Oh my God. You think there are going to be news reports about this?”

“I’d say it’s a certainty. You’d better be prepared for the media to make a circus out of your family’s private business.”

Kate sent him a pleading look. “There has to be some way to stop journalists from reporting that my father’s a bigamist. That would be slander, wouldn’t it?”

“No, miss. It’s not slanderous to report true facts that emerge in connection with an official investigation of a crime.”

“But you’re assuming my father has another wife and I’m telling you that’s not possible! There’s been a mistake. He adores my mother and she adores him right back. I’d have a hard time believing he’d ever been unfaithful to her, much less that he was married to another woman.”

Frank didn’t attempt to argue with Kate, just reached into his pocket and removed a carefully folded fax. “I don’t have birth records for your father’s other children, but I do have this copy of your father’s marriage certificate. It was sent to us by the sheriff of Stark County. You’ll see the name and the date. Eleanor Mary Horn and Ronald Howatch Raven.”

She took the fax, her hand visibly shaking. He stood in silence, letting the marriage certificate speak for itself.

“Maybe this is a forgery.”

“I doubt it, miss. Like I said, it was the sheriff himself who sent it to us. Besides, there’s other evidence. When the police searched Mr. Raven’s hotel room they discovered two wallets locked in the room safe, and both wallets belonged to your father.”

“The fact that my father owns two wallets doesn’t seem grounds for leaping to the conclusion that he’s a bigamist.”

“The two wallets didn’t cause the police to leap to any conclusions at all, although he did have two completely different sets of family pictures and credit cards in each wallet. Still, the cops in Miami just followed procedure. The driver’s license in each billfold provided a different address, one in Wyoming and the other one here in Chicago. Therefore the detective sergeant in charge of the investigation contacted law enforcement authorities in both locations to ascertain if Mr. Raven had family either in Stark County or in the Chicago area. It was routine police procedure at that point, since there are plenty of law-abiding citizens with two homes. When the request came in to us, we ran the information we were given through our state data systems and reported back to Miami that our records showed that Mr. Raven lived here in downtown Chicago with his wife, Avery Fairfax Raven. Only thing is, Wyoming reported back similar information, except with a different wife.”

“My father owns a ranch in Wyoming.” Kate ignored Frank’s comment about the second wife. “The ranch is an old family property, first bought by my great-great-grandfather, and now run by a professional manager—”

“You’ve been there?”

“Of course I have! I went there two or three times in the summer when I was a kid.”

Frank wondered how Ron Raven had pulled those visits off. There must have been a good bit of juggling and sleight of hand to make sure nobody ever mentioned the other wife and kids. Still, it wasn’t his business to find out how Ron Raven had worked his scam. He just needed to get Kate to accept the truth about her father.

“How about more recently, miss? Have you been to the ranch since you grew up? And how about your mother? Has she visited the ranch recently?”

“We’ve neither of us visited Wyoming in at least ten years.” Kate subsided into a tense silence.

I’ll just bet you haven’t, Frank thought. “Doesn’t that strike you as a bit strange?”

“My mother isn’t the type of person who enjoys spending time on a ranch. She’s not a rural sort.” Kate rushed on, before Frank could make a comment to the effect that her mother’s tastes had nothing to do with the fact that Ron Raven’s daughter had almost never visited a ranch that had been in the family for three generations.

“The point is, I’m not surprised Dad has two separate IDs. Probably it was easier for him to keep his accounts for the ranch separate from the rest of his expenses—”

“Ms. Raven, your father didn’t simply have two separate sets of credit cards and two different driver’s licenses and two different sets of family photos. I’m telling you he had two separate families, as well. And the ranch isn’t run by a professional manager, by the way. It’s run by your father’s wife. His legal wife.”

“His legal wife?” Kate’s voice cracked. “What do you mean?”

Frank grimaced. “Look at the marriage certificate, miss. Your father married Eleanor Horn fifteen years before he married your mother.”

Kate looked again at the marriage certificate and her cheeks lost color. “There must have been a divorce.”

“I doubt it, miss. My precinct captain heard from the sheriff of Stark County just a few minutes before I came to see your mother. It turns out the sheriff knows Ron Raven personally. He’s an old friend of the family, in fact, and he was as shocked to learn about you and your mother as you are to learn about the wife and children in Wyoming. The sheriff personally confirmed that your father has been married to a woman called Eleanor Horn for thirty-six years. The sheriff was at their wedding, which took place at the local community church in Thatch in front of at least a hundred witnesses and there’s never been a divorce. As far as everyone in Wyoming is concerned, Ron Raven lived at the Flying W with his wife Eleanor, and the only reason he traveled to Chicago was on business for Raven Enterprises.”

“If you’re right, that would mean my mother is just my dad’s…mistress.”

Frank was surprised by the old-fashioned word. But in the rarefied world where Kate and her mother lived, perhaps it wasn’t such an outdated concept. “I’m afraid that’s what seems to be the case,” he acknowledged. “Although I’d advise you to check with a lawyer to find out what your legal rights might be. If your mother genuinely believed she was married, she might have a legal claim to some portion of Mr. Raven’s estate. Not that I’m qualified to be making statements like that.”

Kate stared at him in silence. Clearly, until that moment she hadn’t considered the possibility that there might be financial consequences from her father’s bigamy. Then she laughed, although there wasn’t a trace of amusement in the sound. “Well, I guess that makes the perfect icing on the cake, doesn’t it? You’re saying my mother is going to find herself penniless, along with all her other problems.”

“Hopefully Mr. Raven made provisions, miss.”

Kate gave another short laugh. “Right. Why wouldn’t he, when he’s behaved impeccably in every other detail of his relationship with us?” She bit off another angry comment and walked to the window, staring out over the vast expanse of water, although Frank had a suspicion she wasn’t registering much about the magnificent view.

She finally swung around to look at him again. “How am I going to tell my mother? My God, how in the world am I going to tell her?” She asked the question as much of herself as of Frank.

“How are you going to tell me what?” Avery paused at the entrance to the living room, her hand resting on the back of a silk-covered chair. “Is it more bad news? Have they found Frank’s body?”

“No, nothing like that,” Kate said, hurrying over to her mother.

You had to give the girl credit, Frank reflected. She might flinch, but she didn’t shirk. She took Avery’s hands into a protective clasp and he could see the rise and fall of her chest as she drew in a deep breath to steady her voice.

“Mom, there’s absolutely no way to make this sound less awful than it is, so I’ll give you the straight-up, no-frills version. Detective Chomsky claims that in the course of their investigation into Dad’s disappearance, the police have discovered that he’s a bigamist.”

“A…bigamist?” Avery said the word as if she didn’t quite understand its meaning.

“Yes. They claim Dad has another wife and two children who live in Wyoming.”

“Another wife?” Avery pressed her hand against her chest. “Another wife and two children?”

“Yes. But that’s not all. Apparently Dad married this other woman thirty-six years ago and never divorced her. That means…that means she’s his legal wife. Here’s a copy of their marriage certificate. It seems you and Dad were never really married.”

Avery’s hands tightened their grip on the silk chair back. She glanced down at the fax Kate held out to her but didn’t touch it. “I can’t take it in. Are you telling me that Ron already had a wife when he married me? That my parents invited two hundred guests to witness a fake wedding ceremony?”

“I’m afraid it seems that way.”

The blood drained from Avery’s face, leaving her so pale Frank was sure she would faint. But she was tougher than she looked. He could see the effort she exerted not to pass out.

“Of course the police have made a dreadful mistake,” Avery said, echoing her daughter’s earlier statement. “They’ve confused his name with another Ron Raven, or something like that.” Her eyes made a silent plea for Kate to agree.

“Maybe they have. I hope so. We’ll get our lawyers to check it out, but Detective Chomsky seems quite certain of his facts. He says Dad was definitely married to…to the woman in Thatch thirty-six years ago. It’s a small town…well, you know that already…and the sheriff out there is a personal friend of the family. He was at Dad’s wedding to this woman. The sheriff knows the children, too, and he seems certain that there was never any question of a divorce.”