Inherit the Dead

daughter: driving from Manhattan to the eastern-most tip of Long Island could take an eternity, and Julia was no spring chicken.
    Passing an ice-cream parlor with a brace of youngsters outside, he thought again of his own precious Nicky. He knew he had no business criticizing Julia Drusilla; he was angry, really, at himself. Nicky was fifteen, and it was his own fault that he hardly ever saw her. True, he could blame her mother, and like a lot of divorced fathers, he often did. But Perry himself was the one who kept missing those rare weekends because of some case. Besides, even if Noreen used their daughter as a pawn, Perry was the one who let her get away with it. For a while their lawyers had argued, but that had been starting to cost serious money. At some point, he had stopped fighting and given in, letting Noreen control his access to his own flesh and blood.
    Had Julia let her husband pull something similar?
    Because for all that Perry might have been reviewing his own life in the front of his mind, out back, as he liked to think of it, the caseitself had never quite left. Forget the parallels. Forget the divorce angle. Line up the facts. The fortune comes to light, and Angel, the heiress, disappears. Julia seems pretty sure that her daughter was unaware of the money, so it’s not likely that she’s gone into seclusion at the local convent to pray for guidance about how to spend it. Three choices: Angel hasn’t vanished at all and is shacked up with a boyfriend and ignoring her mother’s calls; she vanished voluntarily, for a reason having nothing to do with the money; or she vanished involuntarily, in which case a crime has been committed.
    Uncle Jackie used to say at such moments that all you need is a three-sided coin.
    If Angel had gone off on her own, then Perry would find her and tell her that her mother needed to see her urgently but not why. Let the girl make up her own mind what to do. If she was with her boyfriend, or her girlfriend, same deal. But if somebody disappeared her—say, to prevent her from signing the papers—well, then, he should turn the case over.
    In theory.
    A cacophony of horns up ahead shook him from his reverie, the obvious reason for all the traffic. Some fool in a delivery truck had tried to beat the light and wound up in the intersection, and now nothing could move in any direction. While others honked and cursed, Perry, who always had a backup plan, turned right at what looked to others like a dead end, cut through a gas station, and headed down to Hill Street, where he turned left. He would rejoin Route 27 half a mile or so up the road, the jammed intersection behind him.
    The traffic snarl brought to mind a casual conversation with that Columbia economist who had hired him to investigate his boyfriend. Perry had remarked that they should widen the expressway. The professor had laughed and told him that widening roads made congestion worse: “Add more lanes and you lower the effective cost ofdriving. If you make a resource cheaper to consume, people take more of it, not less. The way to cut congestion, narrow the road, or add tolls. Lots of tolls. You have to make it harder, not easier. Then people will use it less.”
    Perry supposed that the same wisdom applied to families, too. If you want to see less of your daughter, let the other parent raise her. There, at least, Perry and Julia were in the same boat.
    Passing through Southampton, he did his best to ignore the past but couldn’t. It had been almost two years since his last trip to the Hamptons, and he had never expected to come back. He was half tempted to head south and join the brave tourists who, even in winter, dawdled along Meadow Lane gawking at the homes of the superrich. If you hit the water and turned right, you headed for even bigger mansions. If you turned left onto Dune Road, you’d pass the weather-beaten St. Andrew’s Dune Church, and beyond the church was some of the most expensive beachfront in the country. The beach was where, on a moonless winter night two years ago, he had cornered mad Derace McDonald; and although Perry had drawn his gun many times, that was the only time in his life he’d fired at another human being.
    Perry rubbed at a sudden pain in his side and drove straight ahead. The events of that night were still a blur, and he saw no reason to jog the memory.
    That was the other reason he hated Long Island, at least the eastern end where the rich people lived. The last time he