“A tag? What is a tag?” Asha asked.
“It’s a little printed label that you sew into clothes when you’re going to go to camp or to a boarding school,” Gregor said. “It’s usually done for children.”
“Mikel is not a child,” Asha said.
“Of course not,” Russ said. “But sometimes—” He looked at Asha’s face and gave it up. “Let’s get started calling hospitals,” he said. “There aren’t that many of them. If we don’t find him, we’ll think of something else.”
The first thing Gregor thought of was the morgue, and he knew better than to say anything about that.
3
Three quarters of an hour later, they had found no trace of anybody who might be Mikel Dekanian at any of the hospitals, and they had also not found any trace of him at the morgue. Gregor had taken care of the morgue himself, going into a room where Asha couldn’t hear him and getting a deputy coroner out of bed. The deputy coroner got two other people out of bed, and one of those finally found the woman who had access to the records they needed. No body brought into the morgue for the last twenty-four hours fit the description of Mikel Dekanian, even vaguely.
By then it was after five o’clock in the morning and the first traces of sun were coming up on the horizon. Gregor felt jet-lagged, and Russ looked it. Asha Dekanian was shaking in her chair.
“He has disappeared into thin air,” she said. “He is lying dead somewhere and we will never find him.”
“Don’t go on like that,” Gregor said. “There are still a lot of things that might have happened, and all of them are more likely than that he’s lying dead somewhere. I think the next thing we need to do is to notify the authorities and get them to issue a silver alert—”
Russ shook his head. “You’re not going to get them to do that today, no matter what you do,” he said. “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. As far as the police are concerned, he isn’t even a missing person yet.”
“I thought the point of the alerts was to start looking for missing people earlier,” Gregor said.
“It is,” Russ said, “but you’ve got to look at it from their point of view. He’s a grown man, in good health, and in his right mind as far as anybody can tell. He’s got an absolute right to go where he wants to go and to inform people of that or not as he wants. If they put out a silver alert for him right away and bring in the resources to go looking for him and it turns out he’s just gone off to visit a friend in Sheboygan—”
“What is this Sheboygan?” Asha demanded.
“If it turns out he’s gone off for some reason of his own,” Russ went on, “they’ve not only wasted a lot of time and resources, but they’re also stuck with the bill.”
“Are you telling me Mikel would have gone away without telling me?” Asha demanded. “For what purpose? To see a woman? You think Mikel has run away with a woman?”
There was a sudden stream of vigorous and infuriated Armenian. Neither Gregor nor Russ knew what it meant, but they both winced.
“I don’t think that’s the likely explanation either,” Gregor said, although there was a part of him that could see why it might be very likely indeed. “And I don’t see why it would hurt to ask the authorities to put out an alert. If they say no, they say no. If he wanders in on his own, there’s been no harm done even if they’ve said yes—”
“Except to the finances of the City of Philadelphia,” Russ said.
“And let’s face it,” Gregor said, “we’ll all feel a lot better. So let’s get that done, and let’s get Asha here back to her children, and then I’m going to go to the Ararat and have breakfast. I think sleeping is not very likely on this particular morning.”
“All right,” Russ said. “I’ll go call in the alert.”
Asha Dekanian hesitated. “I will return to my house,” she said. “I will send Mrs. Demarkian back home. But Mikel is not somewhere with a woman. Mikel would not ever go away with a woman.”
Gregor didn’t think Mikel Dekanian had gone off with a woman either, but he wasn’t sure why he didn’t. He ushered Russ into the living room to make the call and bundled Asha Dekanian up to send her home and wished he didn’t feel as tired as he did.
He’d just got Asha out into the morning when Russ came out of the living room, looking like hell.
“I take it you can’t go back to sleep any more than I can,” Gregor said.
Russ shrugged. “It’s not like I’m sleeping all that well anyway,” he said. “This is a hell of a mess. It really is.”