Alan reached into his wallet. “This is all I have. It was taken her sophomore year in high school, just before she got kicked out and went on the lam.”
He handed me a dog-eared, well-thumbed color photo, one that he’d obviously been carrying around in his pocket for all those intervening years. It was a headshot, the kind used in school yearbooks everywhere. The dark-haired teenage girl in the picture looked decidedly unhappy, but there was something disturbingly familiar about her, and it took a moment for me to figure it out. She looked just like Kelly—just like my daughter, who also looks a bit like me.
Holy crap! I thought as a hard knot formed in my gut. Did Jasmine ever notice? Did Alan?
“She was what age when this was taken, fifteen or so?” I asked quickly, trying to conceal my discomfort.
Alan nodded. “About that, I guess.”
“You don’t have any more recent photos?”
“Nope.”
I used my iPad to copy the photo and then handed it back to Alan, hoping he didn’t notice how much my hand shook as I did so.
“You’re sure you don’t need this?” he asked before returning it to his wallet.
“For the time being, no,” I told him, “but I reserve the right to change my mind.”
I know for a fact that Harborview has all kinds of security cameras. They cover the entrances and exits, the waiting rooms, the hallways, and the lobby areas. There might even be video footage showing exactly when Naomi left the hospital and how. That would be one of the first things I did. If you’re not a cop working a case, laying hands on security-camera footage isn’t easy, but it can be done.
“Have you reported her missing?”
Alan shook his head. “Obviously Naomi’s heavy into drugs,” he said. “She may have gotten herself into all kinds of trouble trying to feed her habit. For all I know, there might be a trail of arrest warrants out there waiting for her from Jasper to here. I need to find her long enough to give her sign-off on the paperwork. I don’t want to land her in even more trouble.”
At that point I didn’t want Naomi Dale in more hot water either, but there was also a new reason for concern. There might be a much more current photo of Naomi Dale to be found in Seattle PD’s collection of mug shots. Again, those would all be readily available to cops but not necessarily to former cops turned PIs. And there was another possibility as well, a far grimmer one at that. Athena was born addicted to methadone. As I’d mentioned to Alan, it’s a drug that is often used when addicts are trying to get clean. The problem is, once you go off hard drugs for a time, if you happen to suffer a relapse, what might have been a safe dosage prior to treatment may well prove fatal after someone has been clean for a while. It occurred to me that there was a good chance Naomi’s body was lying unclaimed and unidentified in the King County M.E.’s Office.
As soon as that idea crossed my mind, I dismissed it. If Naomi had been living rough on the streets and doing drugs for a decade and a half, she was bound to have had more than one run-in with the law. Had the M.E. entered her prints into AFIS, they would have led straight back to her family in Jasper, Texas—to her father, to Alan Dale. No, if Naomi was dead, Alan Dale most certainly would have heard the news by now.
This was yet another piece of information that I couldn’t share with my new client, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was holding back as much as I was. I doubted it. I was the real liar here, make no mistake about it.
“All right,” I said finally, setting my iPad aside. “When it comes to finding her, you haven’t given me much to go on, but I’ll do my best.”
“How expensive is this going to be?” Alan asked.
Having seen the family resemblance in that photo, there was no way in hell I was going to charge him a penny. “Sorry, pal,” I said. “There are some things friends can’t buy. Besides, I don’t need the money nearly as much as I need the work.