Free Missing Mark by Julie Kramer Page B

and put them in storage. She’d paid a considerable fee to retrieve the items. Now everything her son owned was stored in her garage. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to sort through the boxes.
    All she could imagine were the memories; all I could imagine were the clues.
    Mrs. Lefevre led us to the garage where she opened a squeaky door, fumbling for the light. Malik and I took a quick peak inside. She showed us a wall of boxes stacked neatly against one end. I opened the closest one labeled “Desk” and struck gold in the form of a laptop computer.
    “Have you looked at this?” I asked her.
    She shook her head.
    “Do you mind if I try?”
    I didn’t mean personally. Until recently I didn’t have even the cyber savvy to know how to put that sideways smiley face on the end of my e-mails like everyone else does. I hoped to hand off Mark’s laptop to Xiong and see what computer secrets he could mine.
    “I never even turned it on.” She explained that it seemed too much like snooping.
    “We’re past snooping,” I said. “If your son cared about his computer, he’d have taken it with him.”
    So Mark’s mother let me take the laptop. I wanted to comb through more boxes then, but she had a church meeting so we made plans to come back another day. And despite how we’d ended her interview, she actually did seem to be looking forward to seeing us again.
    “But we have to schedule it around the Amorphophallus titanum,” she said.
    “The what?” I asked.
    “The corpse flower, it’s on the verge of blooming.”
    I wondered if her son got his sense of humor from his mom, but she picked up on my confusion.
    “It’s a rare jungle plant that smells like rotting flesh when it blooms. It’s expected to unfold sometime this week.”
    She explained that flower aficionados were awaiting the botanical wonder at the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in St. Paul’s Como Park. Apparently, only 122 such pungent events have been documented worldwide since the plant was first discovered in the Indonesian rain forests in the 1870s.
    “Minnesota will have a place in floral history.” She clasped her hands together and smiled in anticipation.
    T HAT AN OFFICIAL missing person report had been filed by his mother gave me a reason to hound the cops about Mark Lefevre the next day.
    “We got nothing,” said Captain Walt Shuda as he opened Mark’s file. He wouldn’t let me read the reports because the case was still classified as an open investigation, even though months had apparently passed since anyone in law enforcement had peeked inside.
    “Why does TV care?” He seemed more curious about that development than about Mark’s fate.
    “A bit odd is all,” I answered. “He had a lot to walk away from. And he’s been gone a long time.”
    “You’d be surprised,” Captain Shuda said. “Sometimes the longer they’re gone, the harder it is for them to come back.”
    Because Captain Shuda was head of the Minneapolis Missing Persons Unit, I had to put some stock in what he was saying. Even though Mark was last seen in White Bear Lake, and even though the person making the report, his mother, lived in Wisconsin, Minneapolis police actually had jurisdiction. Unless foul play is suspected, like with missing spring-break coed Natalee Holloway in Aruba, law enforcement where the missing person lives typically has charge of the case.
    “I got a stack of missing person cases I can’t get the media interested in.” The captain gestured to a pile of files stacked in the back of his office. The top one looked dusty. “Think it’s because they’re not young, blond, or pretty?”
    “It’s more complicated than that,” I responded.
    But actually it wasn’t. I knew it. And Captain Shuda knew it. TV gloms on to a few high-profile cases, usually involving attractive women, and the rest are left to sort themselves out. Or not. Without foul play or Mark being a vulnerable adult, his missing person file would sit with the pile