“Hello, Officer Fuentes? This is Jennifer Taylor. I filed a missing persons report on my sister last week and wanted to see if you had found anything.”
“What was the case number?” Jennifer shared it. “Okay, this is concerning the disappearance of Anthony Taylor, your transgender brother, who goes by the name of Nanette. I see a set of notes that were added forty-eight hours ago. We checked with the transit authority and found that someone used your broth… er, their Clipper Card to board the Number 19 bus at Atlantic Ave. and 3rd St. We have officers canvassing the route to see if they can determine where this person got off the bus.”
“The Number 19? That was Nanette. That’s how she travels to The City. She gets on BART at Fruitvale. She takes the Blue Line to The Mission where she… spends a lot of time.”
“Great, I’ll put that in the notes and let patrols in The Mission know.”
“Is that it?” Fuentes inhaled sharply.
“Rest assured, we’re doing everything we can to find your… sister. If you think of anything else that might be helpful, give us a call. Often these cases resolve themselves, so let us know if he contacts you.”
“Okay.”
Under normal circumstances, Jennifer would have ripped Officer Fuentes a new one about his misgendering and dead names, but this wasn’t normal. For the first time since Nanette was born, she could no longer feel her presence. It was as if a file in her operating system had been deleted. But what to her was incontrovertible wouldn’t even qualify as evidence for the police.
She was startled by the sound of a short stack of envelopes hitting the floor with a gentle slap. Among them was a Visa bill addressed to Anthony Taylor. The last purchase listed was from Pica Pica Arepa Kitchen on Valencia Street the night Nanette disappeared.
Jennifer called only to find out that the food had been delivered by robot to a walk-up apartment a few blocks away. She called CoCo, the robot delivery company, and they sent her a photograph of the completed delivery. What she saw on the screen made her breath catch with a whimper. A tattooed hand clutched a bag through a cracked doorway. Another hand was clutching the doorpost to the left. It was flexed with exertion as if it were trying to claw its way out. It wore a pink crystal ring that Jennifer had given Nanette on her birthday to match her hair.
Jennifer called Fuentes back and emailed him all of the evidence she had gathered. The man who owned the tattoo did not own the apartment. He had been house-sitting and had offered Nanette a place to stay if she bought him food to eat, according to patrons who overheard them talking at the bar, Mother. His lust had given way to shame that could only be silenced by death, but unfortunately he stilled Jennifer’s heart instead of his own.
Literature in Small Doses 