The Narrows

Joseph O'Leary, 55, of Berwyn, PA, disappeared May 15 of last year from the Bellagio where he was staying with his wife. Alice O'Leary left her husband in the casino playing blackjack while she went to spend the day at the resort's spa. Several hours later her husband failed to return to their suite. O'Leary, a stockbroker, was reported missing the next day.
    – Rogers Eberle, 40, of Los Angeles, disappeared Nov. 1 while on a day off from his work as a graphic designer at the Disney Studios in Burbank. His car was found parked in the lot outside the Buffalo Bill's Casino in Primm, NV, just across the California border on the Interstate 15 freeway.
    Investigators say there are few leads in the investigation. They point to Rockland 's rental car as possibly being the best clue they have. The car was returned 27 hours after it was picked up by Rockland. It had been driven 328 miles during that period, according to Hertz records. Whoever returned it to the Hertz airport center dropped it off without waiting for a receipt or to speak to a Hertz clerk.
    "They just pulled in, got out of the car and walked away," Ritz said. "Nobody remembers anything. They process about a thousand cars a day in that center. There are no cameras and there is no record but the rental record."
    And it is those 328 miles that Ritz and the other detectives wonder about.
    "That is a lot of miles," said Detective Peter Echerd, Ritz's partner. "That car could have gone a lot of places. You figure a hundred and sixty-four out and a hundred and sixty-four back in and you've got a hell of a big circle to cover."
    Nevertheless, the investigators are trying to do just that, hoping their efforts will uncover a clue that makes the circle smaller and possibly leads to the answers to the six missing family men.
    "It's tough," said Ritz. "These guys all have families and we're doing our best for them. But at the moment we have lots of questions and not any answers."
    The article was nicely drawn with the Times's signature method of finding larger significance to a story than the story itself. In this case it was the theorizing that the disappearance of these men was symptomatic of the newest permutation of Las Vegas as an adult playground. It reminded me of a time I was working a case in which a man who owned an auto garage cut the hydraulic lines on a lift and a seven-thousand-pound Cadillac came down and crushed his longtime partner beneath it. A Times reporter called me up for the details for a story and then asked if the killing was symptomatic of the tightening economy in which money woes turned partners against partners. I said, no, I thought it was symptomatic of one guy not liking his partner screwing his wife.
    Larger implications aside, the story was a plant. I could tell that. I had done the same thing with the same reporter in my time. Ritz was trolling for information. Since half the missing men were either from or going to Los Angeles, why not call the Times, plant a story with the cop reporter and see who and what pops up?
    One person who popped up was Terry McCaleb. He obviously read the story on January 7, the day it was published, because his first set of notes on the file flap was dated as such. The notes were short and cryptic. At the top of the flap the name Ritz and a phone number with a 702 area code had been jotted down. Beneath this, McCaleb had written: 1/9-
    call back-png 2/28
    Zzyzx-possible? how?
    miles

    Written along the side border of the file were two more phone numbers with 702 area codes. These were followed with the name William Bing.
    I reread the notes and looked at the clipping again. I noticed for the first time that McCaleb had circled two things on the newspaper article, the mention of the 328 miles found to have been put on the rental car and the word circle in Echerd's comment about the circle of the investigation being 164 miles in any direction. I didn't know why he had circled these two things but I did know what most of the notes on the flap meant. I had spent more than seven hours reading through McCaleb's files. I had seen notation after notation in file after file. The ex-agent used a shorthand of his own invention but one that was decipherable because in some files he spelled out what he chose to abbreviate in others.
    Immediately recognizable to me was what he meant by the use of "DD." It meant "definitely dead," a classification and conclusion McCaleb made on the wide majority of the missing cases he