“Did she tell you who her ride was?”

“Just someone from the center. What is it? What happened?”

“Sir, we really need to come down and see you.”

“Oh my God.” A heavy sigh. “Oh Jesus, just tell me what happened!”

“Your address, sir?”

He yielded to pressure. He lived in Mar Vista, not too far from my house. It didn’t make sense to go to his place, only to go back to Koby’s to pick up my car, but I couldn’t keep the man waiting.

Another thirty minutes of riding with Oliver.

I gritted my teeth and pretended that we were one big, happy team.

The brother was stocky, bordering on fat, with gray hair and lots of it. He was my height, but since I was wearing four-inch heels, I was looking over the top of his head. He had on black sweats, open-back slippers on his feet.

It went down like this. Terrance Syracuse was a self-employed personal-injury lawyer and sometimes his work intruded upon his weekends. This was one of those times. He had several cases pending, and really hadn’t thought about hosting Belinda. But because his wife and two daughters were visiting his in-laws in Vermont, he decided to call her up. His wife was tolerant of his retarded sister, but lately his children were getting to that age where Belinda’s presence embarrassed them. As much as he loved his sister, he had no problem choosing his daughters’ needs over Belinda’s because he had grown up with the stigma of a disabled sister. He could deal with it now, he was comfortable with the situation, but he knew that adaptation took time. He didn’t want to force his kids into an artificial relationship that they weren’t equipped to deal with.

“I suppose that won’t be necessary now,” he said, sobbing.

Before he left for the office, he had set Belinda up in front of the TV and told her he’d be back in time to take her out for dinner. He’d done it many times before. Belinda was a good girl, and she obeyed the rules. As far as he knew, she never opened the door for strangers. One time, his wife’s sister had come to the house, but Belinda didn’t know her. His sister-in-law was irate, yelling and screaming, but Belinda held fast and refused to let her in. She wasn’t the type to go off on her own. She was retarded, yes, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew that in the outside world, there were people who’d take advantage of her.

“And you don’t know who took her back to the center?”

“No. But she insisted it was someone she knew. I had no reason to doubt her.”

“We can check phone records,” I told Scott.

“It had to have been someone familiar,” Syracuse insisted. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone.” He gnawed on a raw thumbnail. “What in the world was she doing in that area at that time of night?”