Page 34 of Nobody's Fool

“Yeah, I know.”

The elevator dings and opens.

“Kierce?”

“What?”

“You’re a great cop. If Grayson is indeed the killer, you’ll find that out, so I’m not sure I see the problem with”—Arthur makes quote marks with his fingers—“‘helping’ him investigate.”

The elevator is empty. I’m thankful for that. I step in and let the door close on me without another word.

CHAPTER NINE

The first PowerPoint slide reads:The Kidnapping of Victoria Belmond.

The Pink Panthers start us off. We are in our public-bath classroom. The lights are out. Golfer Gary brought some kind of fancy projector in, and the three Pink Panthers are using it now against the grayish white of the concrete wall.

The head Pink Panther is an exceedingly tall, thin woman named Polly. She sports a Ticonderoga-yellow pantsuit. Match that up with her short-n-spiky gray hair colored pink, and the overall effect is that Polly looks something like a giant Number Two pencil. Pink Panther Polly could be Pencil Polly.

I’m big on thinking in terms of nicknames.

Polly has a good, clear speaking voice. My guess is, she has done a lot of presentations in the past. “Victoria Belmond, daughter of the Belmond fortune, was a seventeen-year-old high school senior when she vanished from a New Year’s Eve party on December thirty-first, 1999. She and a bunch of high school friends rented out a space above McCabe’s Pub in the East Village.”

Lenny interrupts: “Hey, I threw up in that place once.”

“Me too,” Gary says. “Freshman year. Projectile vomit. Hit the jukebox.”

“Guys,” I say.

Polly is unfazed by the interruption. “The last time Victoria was seen was on a CCTV camera leaving the bar at 11:17 p.m.”

One of the other Pink Panthers—I don’t remember her name—clicks the mouse. We all have our eyes on the concrete wall as a blurry black-n-white still comes up. The angle, like seemingly all CCTV images, is from way above her head.

“Pretty bad quality,” Golfer Gary says.

“The technology used was old,” Polly says. “This image was taken from a VCR security tape. Some theorize it may not be her at all.”

“Can’t see the face,” Lenny says.

“No,” Polly says, “but that’s what she was wearing. That’s her hairstyle. That’s the right height. Her friends identified her, so the police seem pretty certain that this is the last sighting of Victoria Belmond before she vanished.”

Golfer Gary raises his hand as though waiting to be called on. I frown in his direction, and he puts his hand down. “This bothers me,” Gary said.

“What bothers you?” I ask.

“Okay, first off, it’s not just a New Year’s Eve party—it’s a New Millennium’s Eve party.”

“Right, so?”

“Do you remember what that night was like?”

The young influencers look at us blankly, as if we are discussing the Eisenhower presidency.

“I mean, it was such a big deal,” Gary continues. “The end of the 1900s. The end of the 1000s, really. The start of not only a new century but a whole new millennium. Y2K and all that. Like Prince sang, we’re gonna party like it’s 1999. The buildup was huge. Everyone was ready for the party of a lifetime.”

“So?” I say to get us back on track.

“So,” Gary continues, “Victoria Belmond and her richfriends—most of them probably underage—rent out a space above a bar so they can party their brains out and watch the ball drop in a once-every-thousand-years event. And what does Victoria do?” Gary points to the projected image. “Forty-three minutes before the big countdown, she just leaves on her own. Doesn’t anyone else find that weird?”

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