Page 7 of Lost
It took a moment, but Lysander offered him a tiny smile.
“Only two,” he assured Zack. “If you have any other kids out there, I don’t know about them.”
Zack nodded. He had the boy’s attention, though he didn’t know what to do with it. He cleared his throat again.
“So…what is it that you expect me to do?”
“Whatever you can,” the boy replied without pause. There was a new look in his eyes now. “Can’t you hire a bunch of investigators or something? Somebody who could track Alfonzo down?”
Zack knew he could. He had the funds, and Maria could pull strings if he asked her to. What he didn’t have was evidence of the crime. There was no point in throwing money at something if it really was a case of an accident and a runaway. Tragic as the circumstances may be, you didn’t get rich by being a fool. He nibbled on his lower lip, considering his next words carefully.
“Will you tell me what happened?”
The look that Lysander gave him said one thing very clearly: nobody had bothered to take him seriously and ask for his side of the story. It was a look of hope, of thankfulness, and Zack mentally patted himself on the back. Too many times he’d been the one that nobody would listen to as a child; he wanted to be the kind of parent who listened. Ten points to him.
“You really wanna know?”
“Of course.”
Lysander’s hands came out of his pockets and rested on the table, one finger tracing the grooves of the dark wood. Zack waited patiently. He’d never liked being pushed. Especially by his parents.
“I went out that night,” Lysander said after a moment, “so it’s true I didn’t actually see what happened. But I know my family better than anybody, and what the police are saying…” He shook his head and took a deep breath. “When I got home, everything was too quiet. Mom was usually cooking or watching one of her shows, and Dakota always has music blasting in her room. But there was nothing. I didn’t think much of it then, but…I should have known something wasn’t right.
“When I got to the kitchen, Mom was lying on the floor. And her neck…” Lysander paused. Zack briefly wondered if asking about this had been a bad idea while the boy closed his eyes and took another deep breath. He was just about to stop him when Lysander started talking again. “Her neck was bent at a weird angle. There was an oil spill on the floor, and it looked like she’d slipped and hit her head on one of the counters.” He looked Zack straight in the eye. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Mom wasn’t stupid. If she’d spilled oil, she would have cleaned it up right away. She would have been careful. She was a nurse, for crying out loud!”
“Careful or not, accidents happen,” Zack said. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s true.”
“I know,” Lysander said, “and at first, I thought that was what had happened. I called nine-one-one and asked for an ambulance, and then I went to get Dakota. I figured since she wasn’t with Mom, she obviously didn’t know what’d happened. But when I got to her room, she wasn’t there. The light was on, but she was gone. And that was when I knew.” His gaze was hard. “The police say that she panicked and bolted, but she’s not like that.”
Zack tried to picture the scene. He could imagine what it would have been like if it had happened to him and his sister — he knew Zoe would never have run if she’d found their mother lying on the kitchen floor. But Zoe was a strong woman. She’d been through a lot and come through it in one piece. Zack didn’t know the first thing about Dakota Maverick, so he couldn’t really make that judgement.
“She’s a bit of a neat-freak,” Lysander went on. “And she never,evergoes anywhere without her damn iPod. But I found it on her bed that night. So I don’t care what the police say. She didn’t just run off. Not without her iPod, anddefinitelynot without telling me.”
He sounded so sincere that Zack couldn’t help it: he believed the kid. He didn’t know what it was — the look in his eyes, or the tone of his voice — but in his heart heknew. These weren’t the actions of a crazed fan looking for fame, or somebody wanting money. These were the heartfelt actions of a young man desperate to have his sister back.
“And you’re pointing fingers at...”
“Jacob Alfonzo.”
“Right. Why him?”
“He’s Dakota’s ex-boyfriend,” Lysander explained. “They broke up last August. Their whole relationship only lasted, like, three months. He’d been getting possessive of her, and then one night he hit her, so she ditched him. The next day he showed up at our house and started demanding that she take him back.” Lysander frowned as he added, “I punched him in the face and he ran off. Dakota sorta freaked out after that. She kept telling me that I shouldn’t have touched him.”
“She still cared for him?” Zack asked, raising an eyebrow. “Even after he hit her?”
“No. She cared aboutme. He told her that his family were mafia, and she believed him.”
“Mafia?” Zack repeated. “Do you believe that?”
“I mean, I don’t know anything for sure,” the boy said with another frown. “I don’t think he’s part of any huge crime family or anything, but he and his brothers wish they were. I think they sort of started their own. I’m not worried about it. As far as I’m concerned, they’re a bunch of delinquents. But I wouldn’t have put it past him to push Mom and kill her and make it look like an accident.”
Zack nodded. He could deal with a couple of punks who wanted to rule the world.
“And you have no idea where he is?”
“None. He moved about a month ago. I thought that meant he was gone for good, but I guess I was wrong.”
It sounded simple enough. There was only so far that this idiot could have gone, and there was no doubt in Zack’s mind that a phone call from Maria to the Columbus Police Department would be enough to track him down. And whether Zack knew the girl or not — whether she was hisdaughteror not — it was a good enough cause for him to get behind.
