Free No Hope for Gomez! by Graham Parke Page B

a Dietrich Norton?”
    The name didn’t immediately hit home, but it had a familiar ring to it. I shrugged. “I don’t think so. Sorry.”
    Moran flipped through the notebook, searching for an entry. “Says here he had an appointment with you.”
    I had no idea how to respond to that.
    “Right here,” Moran tapped one of the pages, “4:30 p.m., call Gomez Porter. That’s you, isn’t it?”
    “Well,” I said tentatively, “I’m a Gomez Porter, yes.”
    “You think there are more?” He shook his head. “I checked, there aren’t, not in a thousand mile radius. You’re it. You’re him.”
    “Ah.” That sounded about right. “But,” I said, “what you have there is hardly evidence of an appointment. I mean, ‘call Gomez’? That’s sounds more like a note-to-self.” I tried to peer over the edge of the notebook to get a look at the entry. Detective Moran didn’t move in any way to help or hinder me. “Anybody could write that,” I said, “that doesn’t mean I’d know about it.”
    He gave me a look.
    “I could write, ‘call Buddha’ in that notebook right now,” I said, “doesn’t mean I know the guy. Doesn’t mean he knows all about me.”
    Moran frowned ominously. I was messing up his bad-cop routine, the one where he tried to get me on the defensive in order to get more information. “So,” he said, trying a different approach, “you’re saying you’ve never heard of Detective Norton?”
    “Detective Norton?” I could kick myself for not making the connection. Norton’s odd first name had thrown me. “I’m sorry, I have heard of Detective Norton . He’s working on the Joseph Miller case. I gave him a tip about a strange entry I found on Miller’s blog a few days ago.”
    “Right.” Detective Moran put the notebook away, took out another, presumably his own, and wrote something down. “What exactly was wrong with this blog?” he asked.
    I explained how I’d found an entry that appeared after Joseph Miller passed out. “Norton was going to follow up on that,” I said. “Check some IP addresses, that kind of thing.” I decided not to tell Moran about the calls I’d made. If he didn’t know already, there was no reason to tip him off that I’d been looking to get classified information.
    “So you only know Detective Norton through the Miller case, then?”
    I nodded. “What’s going on, detective? Have there been any new developments?”
    “We’ll get to that in a minute.” He noted something else down. “So, whatever Norton wanted to talk to you about, it had something to do with the Miller case?”
    “I’d assume so, yes.”
    “Any idea what that might’ve been?”
    “Sorry, no.” I offered him another solid shrug. “Maybe he discovered something about the blog entry, wanted to tell me about it. Why don’t you ask him?”
    Detective Moran fixed me with a hard look. “I would,” he said, “if it weren’t for the fact that he’s gone missing.”
    “Missing?” I let this sink in. “Hold on,” I said, “I certainly didn’t make him go missing, if that’s what you’re implying.”
    Detective Moran arched an eyebrow, then wrote something down. “I’m not implying anything,” he said without looking up. “I’m merely gathering facts.”
     
    Blog entry: Moran explained that Detective Norton hadn’t shown up for work two days running. They’d gone by his place, contacted his friends and parents, nobody knew where he’d disappeared to. He lived alone, no wife, no children, no girlfriend, and the only viable tip came from his neighbors. They thought he might’ve gone on holiday. They weren’t sure where to or for how long.
    Moran’s colleagues were happy enough to let Norton blow off some steam for a couple of days, especially so close to the weekend, but Moran didn’t like the look of things. He knew Norton to be punctual and responsible, and didn’t think he’d disappear without letting the department know, even for a few