By lunchtime I had a little more data on the jewelry store brothers. Zachary Silk had gone to Harvard Business School, earning an MBA and a job at McKinsey for a few years before teaming up with his brother Jonathan, an ex-Marine who’d done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, on an entrepreneurial run.
Their first business together, the game shop, sold board games, Dungeons & Dragons modules and dice, computer games and accessories, and hosted D&D nights and other gaming activities.
It failed after 18 months. Their other businesses hadn’t done much better—the longest any had survived, a Hooters-style bar, was four and a half years. How did they keep going? Maybe their family was ridiculously wealthy. Maybe they were copying Donald Trump’s business model of lying and cheating their way up the ladder to success.
All the businesses were located in Skokie or surrounding suburbs. I looked closer at the disappearances I’d noticed yesterday. Rachel was right—most of them looked routine. Kids running away, crooks jumping bail, husbands leaving wives and vice versa, people fleeing debts, and so forth.
But a handful didn’t fit the pattern. A man from Evanston in his 30s who never came home from work; an older woman in Wilmette who stopped answering her phone until a relative discovered she’d been gone from her apartment for weeks; a retired teacher who went for a walk and never returned home. No bodies found. A missing credit card turned up in a convenience store, a wallet was dumped in a trash can. Friends and relatives posted signs for some of the missing; others were forgotten almost immediately.
I called the Skokie police department and got connected to a detective. She actually tried to be helpful, which doesn’t always happen to me. The Chicago PD generally hates my calls because I usually want to talk about vampires and monsters. This detective listened.
“Yeah, I remember that woman in Wilmette a few years ago,” detective Grayson told me. “Credit card in the 7-11? It had a few random purchases on it, but nothing we could trace. Probably stolen, or someone found it in the street, and left it when the cashier got suspicious. I talked to someone over there, and they didn’t get anywhere with it. These things just happen, you know? It’s tough for the families, but there isn’t always anything we can do after a while.”
“Yeah.” I was grateful for her attention. “Is there anything new on the Veronica May disappearance?”
I heard fingers clicking keys. “There was a necklace in her purse the daughter couldn’t identify. There was a receipt from the jewelry store in the mall, but the clerk we talked to doesn’t remember her. We communicated it to your client.”
Jewelry store again. “Okay, thanks.”
“And some pills from a store in the mall. They’re supposed to be recalled. The store denies selling them to her, and the detective didn’t find any in the store.”
“Right.” Did the pills mean anything? Or the jewelry store? Or was I just driving down dead ends? “Thanks.”
I searched around and found a phone number for Silk Enterprises. I called, asked the receptionist for either Zachary or Jonathan Silk, and a moment later I heard, “Zachary Silk, what can I do for you?”
“Mr. Silk? My name is Tom Jurgen. I’m a private detective working for Ginny May. Her mother disappeared in the shopping mall where you recently had a jewelry store—”
“Right, the cops called us about that. What was her name? I don’t know anything. I talked to all my people there, they don’t remember her.”
“Are you familiar with the necklace she bought?”
“Yeah, the, uh, cops told me. It’s one of our signature pieces. Silver chain, star-shaped pendant with an opal in the center. Specially designed for us.”
He remembered the necklace but not the woman who bought it? “How much did it cost?”
“Uh, eight hundred dollars. Sometimes we negotiate a little, but that’s the standard price.”
Expensive. “Did you have many in the store?”
“Just the one. It’s a special piece. We’d pay to get it back. Not eight hundred, but something reasonable.”
“And no one remembers selling it? For eight hundred dollars? A specialty piece?” I didn’t hide my skepticism very well.
“Well, we remember selling it. Jon, I mean,. My brother Jonathan. He just doesn’t remember the woman very well.”
“The detective I spoke with said the police talked to a clerk there.”
“Jon was there when she rang it up.”
I said nothing for a moment. This guy had fast answers, which made me suspicious.
Finally he said, “Is that all?”
“What happened with the store? You had to close.”
“Malls are dying everywhere. We couldn’t break even. Jewelry’s expensive. Times are tough.” It sounded like a well-rehearsed list of excuses.
“You and your brother have started a lot of businesses, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. I mean, we’re ambitious. One of these days we’ll score big. In the meantime, it’s fun. Building up a business from the ground up. It’s the challenge.”
“How have you managed to keep it up? Your businesses haven’t lasted more than a few years. Family money?”
“We have . . . resources. Look, what’s this all about? You’re looking for that old lady, or are you just poking around for some kind of payout from us?” His voice rose. “We’re legitimate businessmen, me and Jon. We’re honest.”
“You’ve been sued. Twice.” I’d found that while looking the brothers up.
“Who hasn’t? You run a business, you get sued. We settled both times. Everyone was happy. Look, Mr.—Jurgen, right? I don’t have any more time to talk to you. We’re working on something new here. So unless you have something about Veronica May to ask me directly—”
“No, that’s fine. Thank you for your time.” I hung up before he did.
Unless you have something about Veronica May—but I hadn’t mentioned her name. And Silk had said he didn’t remember her name. It could have come to him as we talked, of course, but our chat seemed to make him defensive. Like he was hiding something.
Or just pissed off by my questions. I do that to people.
I called Ginny May. “I just talked to one of the owners of the jewelry store. He says the necklace your mother bought cost eight hundred dollars. Does that sound like something she’d do?”
“Eight hundred—? That’s crazy.” She laughed, then stopped. “Do you think maybe those pills made her, I don’t know, lose her judgment?”
“Maybe. I’m more suspicious of them, though—the brothers who owned the place. It might be nothing related to your mother, but I’m going to dig into them a bit more.”
“Okay.” She sounded doubtful. “I really think those pills might be the thing, though.”
She had a point—maybe the bluejacket root had sent her on a shopping spree that ended badly. “I’ll look at both.”
“Thanks.”
I looked at the email image of the bluejacket bottle again, zooming in, though that didn’t work the way it does on TV. Still, I could see that Veronica May had taken more than one or two pills. Which suggested she probably didn’t buy it the day she disappeared, unless she’d downed a handful right away. Which seemed unlikely.
But carrying it around in her purse meant she was probably taking it regularly. I looked it up online again. The instructions said to take “two tablets up to three times daily, with food.” So maybe she was popping them throughout the day? And the hallucinations or whatever had kicked in while she was at the mall?
Even so, it didn’t tell me what had happened to her. And I was still suspicious of the Silk brothers.
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