Kiss the Girls

of Black Jack and poured stiff drinks of whiskey all around.
    I learned that my twenty-two-year-old niece had been missing in North Carolina for four days. The police down there had waited that long to contact our family in Washington. As a policeman, I found that hard to understand. Two days was pretty standard in missing-person cases. Four days made no sense.
    Naomi Cross was a law student at Duke University. She’d made Law Review and was near the top of her class. She was the pride of everyone in our family, including myself. We had a nickname for her that went back to when she was three or four years old.
Scootchie.
She always used to “scootch” up close to everybody when she was little. She loved to “scootch,” and hug, and
be
hugged. After my brother Aaron died, I helped Cilla to raise her. It wasn’t hard—she was always sweet and funny, cooperative, and so very smart.
    Scootchie was missing. In North Carolina. Four days now.
    “I talked to a detective named Ruskin,” Sampson told the group in the kitchen. He was trying not to act like a street cop, but he couldn’t help it. He was on the case now. Flat-faced and serious. The Sampson stare.
    “Detective Ruskin sounded knowledgeable about Naomi’s disappearance. Seemed like a straight-ahead cop on the phone. Something strange, though. Told me that a law-school friend of Naomi’s reported her missing. Her name’s Mary Ellen Klouk.”
    I had met Naomi’s friend. She was a future lawyer, from Garden City, Long Island. Naomi had brought Mary Ellen home to Washington a couple of times. We’d gone to hear Handel’s
Messiah
together one Christmas at the Kennedy Center.
    Sampson took off his dark glasses, and kept them off, which is rare for him. Naomi was his favorite, and he was as shook up as the rest of us. She called Sampson “His Grimness,” and “Darth One,” and he loved it when she teased him.
    “Why didn’t this Detective Ruskin call us before now? Why didn’t those university people call me?” my sister-in-law asked. Cilla is forty-one. She has allowed herself to grow to ample proportions. I doubted that she was five feet four, but she had to be close to two hundred pounds. She’d told me that she didn’t want to be attractive to men anymore.
    “Don’t know the answer to that yet,” Sampson told Cilla and the rest of us. “They told Mary Ellen Klouk
not
to call us.”
    “What exactly did Detective Ruskin have to say about the delay?” I asked Sampson.
    “Detective said there were extenuating circumstances. He wouldn’t elaborate for me, persuasive as I can be.”
    “You tell him we could have the conversation in person?”
    Sampson nodded slowly. “Uh-huh. He said the result would be the same. I told him I doubted that. He said okay. Man seemed to have no fears.”
    “Black man?” Nana asked. She is a racist, and proud of it. She says she’s too old to be socially or politically correct. She doesn’t so much dislike white people as distrust them.
    “No, but I don’t think that’s the problem, Nana. Something else is going on.” Sampson looked across the kitchen table at me. “I don’t think he
could
talk.”
    “FBI?” I asked. It was the obvious guess when things get overly secretive. The FBI understands better than Bell Atlantic, the
Washington Post,
and the
New York Times
that information is power.
    “That could be the problem. Ruskin wouldn’t admit it on the phone.”
    “I better talk to him,” I said. “In person would probably be best, don’t you think?”
    “
I
think that would be good, Alex.” Cilla spoke up from her end of the table.
    “Maybe I’ll tag along,” Sampson said, grinning like the predatory wolf that he is.
    There were sage nods and at least one hallelujah in the overcrowded kitchen. Cilla came around the table and hugged me tight. My sister-in-law was shaking like a big, spreading tree in a storm.
    Sampson and I were going South. We were going to bring back Scootchie.

Chapter 8

    I HAD to tell Damon and Jannie about their “Auntie Scootch,” which is what the kids have always called her. My kids sensed something bad had happened. They knew it, just as they somehow know my most secret and vulnerable places. They had refused to go to sleep until I came and talked to them.
    “Where’s Auntie Scootch at? What happened to her?” Damon demanded as soon as I entered the kids’ bedroom. He had heard enough to understand that Naomi was in some kind of terrible trouble.
    I have