Out of Mind Read Online Free Page B

setting up a Web site for my series,
     called
Missing People.
The site featured photographs of the missing people I was following and some facts about their situations and invited sightings
     or other news.
    When Melanie disappeared, and days and then weeks passed without a body and with no evidence of murder, I was amazed that
     DCI Coburn considered the possibility that Melanie had vanished of her own free will. Running away seemed so out of character.
     Of course, it’s not unheard of for people to fake suicide in order to start life afresh. In many cases, the people who disappear
     are mentally ill or emotionally fragile. But once in a while someone vanishes who has no apparent reason to leave his or her
     life behind. As I read about these cases, I began to realize that the stories of these people who had disappeared would make
     compelling television. I submitted a proposal to my boss for a series of four programs following the stories of two men and
     two women. I wanted to talk to their families and to their friends and colleagues, to try to reconstruct what had happened
     in their lives to make them leave.
    My boss is Maeve, who is in turn Head of Current Affairs, parens Documentaries comma Television, close parens, or HCA(D, TV).
     She’s never made documentaries herself, but she knows a good idea when she hears one. She oversees the commissioning process
     and is an efficient bureaucrat. Maeve and I have a history. It was Maeve who had failed to stand up for me after Adam’s death,
     and I hadn’t really forgiven her for that. But she’d done her best to make it up to me, and we worked well together. Anyway,
     Maeve liked the idea, and I’d been working on it for the past two months, with the result that families of several of those
     who had disappeared now saw me as their one best hope of finding their missing loved one.
    I looked up. Sal hated it when I didn’t talk to him. He was watching me balefully, puppy-dog eyes waiting for a pat and a
     kind word.
    “I want you to come with me,” I told him.
    “All right,” he said, and hauled himself obediently to his feet.
    We made our way through miles of corridor. We did not discuss Melanie on the way, or indeed why we were making this trip.
     Sal, I suspect, rather liked the idea of a mystery tour, but he never liked to stay silent for long, so we analyzed the various
     colors of carpet that we encountered on our journey.
    “It’s all political,” he said. “Look how faded the reds are, the way the blues seep out of the management offices and leak
     down toward the editors. Look, it’s purple there, where the blue is murdering the red.”
    “Or the other way round.”
    I spotted a yellow, and that had him floored.
    “Perhaps it was on special offer,” I suggested.
    Sal looked disgruntled.
    “So where are we going?” he asked at last.
    I took him to the east wing, following the instructions Max Amsel had given me when I spoke to him on the telephone the night
     before. We came to a halt next to a publicity board. A section of wall about a meter square had been given over to publicity
     photographs, a montage of correspondents all over the world, and a little blurb about how selfless and noble was the Corporation’s
     pursuit of news.
    “Look,” I instructed Sal. “Although God knows why Max was over here, let alone why he was staring at this.”
    “That’s why he stopped to take a look.” Sal pointed to a photograph. There was Max in Red Square, with the spires of the Kremlin
     behind him. A nice shot. Max five years younger and somehow five years taller.
    “And there she is.”
    We both knew who he meant. Melanie, flak jacketed and helmeted, hair drawn back behind her head in a ponytail, lying stretched
     out on the ground in a desert ditch, her camera for an instant removed from her shoulder, her head turned in toward the chest
     of the man whose body shielded her, a man whose stubborn face was contorted in the act, apparently, of