Look up “tony” in your figurative dictionary (the adjective, not the name) and lush and flush Greenwich, Connecticut, pops up. If you run a hedge fund exceeding a billion dollars, it was pretty much a federal law that you had to live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich had the wealthiest residents per capita of anywhere in the United States, and it looked it.
Detective Schwartz offered Kat a Coke. She accepted it and sat on the other side of his Formica desk. Everything here in the station looked sleek and expensive and unused. Schwartz had a handlebar mustache, complete with the barbershop-quartet waxed tips. He wore a dress shirt with suspenders.
“So tell me how you’re involved in this case,” Schwartz said.
“Brandon came to me. He asked for my help.”
“I still don’t get why.”
Kat was still not ready to tell him everything. “He said it was because you guys didn’t believe him.”
Schwartz gave her skeptical cop eyes. “And he thought, what, a random cop in New York City would?”
She tried to steer him away from all this. “He came to you guys, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you said something on the phone about knowing him from before?”
“Something like that, yes.” Joe Schwartz leaned in a little closer. “This is a small town, you know what I mean? I mean, it’s not a small town but it’s a small town.”
“You’re asking for my discretion.”
“Yes.”
“You got it.”
He leaned back and put his hands flat on the desk. “We in the police department are a little too familiar with Brandon Phelps.”
“Meaning?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“I checked,” Kat said. “Brandon has no record.”
Schwartz spread his hand. “I guess you missed the part where I said this was a small town.”
“Ah.”
“Ever see the movie Chinatown?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He cleared his throat and tried to imitate Joe Mantell. “‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Greenwich.’ Don’t get me wrong. He’s only been arrested for petty crap. He broke into the high school a few times, drives too fast, vandalism, deals a little pot, you get the drift. And to be fair, none of this happened before his old man died. We all knew and liked the father, and the mother, well, Dana Phelps is good people. Salt of the earth. Will do anything for you. But the kid . . . I don’t know. There’s always been something off about him.”
“Off how?”
“No big deal, really. I got a son Brandon’s age. Brandon didn’t fit in, but this isn’t an easy town.”
“But he came to you a few days ago. He told you he was worried about his mother.”
“Yep.” There was a paper clip on his desk. Schwartz picked it up and started bending it back and forth. “But he also lied to us.”
“How?”
“What did he tell you about his mother’s supposed disappearance?”
“He said she met a guy online, that she went away with him, that she always contacted him but hadn’t.”
“Yeah, he told us that too,” Schwartz said. “But that’s not the truth.” He dropped the paper clip and opened his desk drawer. He took out some kind of protein bar. “Want one? I got plenty.”
“No, thanks. So what is the truth?”
He started rifling through a stack of papers. “I put it here because I knew you were . . . wait, here it is. Brandon’s cell phone records.” He handed her the sheets. “See the yellow?”
She saw two texts highlighted in yellow. They’d both came from the same phone number.
“Brandon received two texts from his mother. One came two nights ago, the other early yesterday morning.”
“This is his mother’s cell phone?”
“Yep.”
Kat could feel her face started to redden. “Do you know what they say?”
“When he was here last, I only had a record of the first one. I confronted him about it, so he showed it to me. It said something like ‘Arrived, having a great time, miss you.’ Something like that.”
Kat kept her eyes on the sheet of paper. “How did he explain it?”
“He said his mother hadn’t sent it. But it’s her number. You can see it right there, plain as day.”
“Did you call the mom’s number?”
“We did. No answer.”
“Do you find that suspicious?”
“No. To put it crudely, we figure she’s on some island, maybe getting laid for the first time in three years. Why, you don’t agree?”
“No,” she said. “I do. I was just playing devil’s advocate.”
“Of course, that isn’t the only explanation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Schwartz said with a shrug, “Dana Phelps could very well be missing.”
Kat waited for him to say more. Schwartz waited longer. Finally, Kat asked, “Did Brandon tell you about the ATM charge?”
“Interestingly enough, no.”
“He may not have known about it when he saw you.”
“That’s one theory.”
“You have another?”
“I do. Or let’s say, I did. See, that’s the main reason I wanted you to take the ride up here.”
“Oh?”
“Put yourself in my shoes. A troubled teenager comes to me. He claims his mother is missing. From the texts, we know his story is a lie. We find out some money was taken out of an ATM. So if there was foul play, who would be your number one suspect?”
She nodded. “The troubled teenager.”
“Bingo.”
Kat had thought of that in passing but hadn’t really gone there. Of course, she hadn’t known about the kid’s past—then again, Joe Schwartz didn’t know that Brandon had broken into YouAreJust MyType or her own connection to the case. On the other hand, Brandon had lied to her about the texts. She knew that now. So what exactly was he up to?
Kat said, “You thought that maybe Brandon harmed his own mother?”
“I wasn’t ready to go that far. But I didn’t think that she had vanished, either. So I took the precaution of taking one extra step.”
“What was that?”
“I asked for the ATM surveillance video. I thought maybe you’d want to see it too.” He flipped the computer monitor around on his desk so she could see the screen. Schwartz hit a few keys. The monitor came to life. The video was a split screen, two camera angles. That was the latest technology. Too many people knew about the camera on the front of the machine and would cover it with their hand. So the picture on the left was exactly that—one of those fish-eye views of an ATM machine. The second shot, the one on the right of the screen, had been shot from above, like you see in every convenience store heist. Kat understood that installing a camera near the ceiling was easier, but it was almost always useless. Criminals wore baseball caps or kept their chins tucked. Shoot from below, not above.