Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

The girls also embraced this practice. Elizabeth Pink, I was sure, was not a dead ringer for Lady Gaga. If Patrice Hengle looked like her profile image, then she needed help. She’d posted a photo of a pepperoni pizza slice.

If none of Claire’s female friends whose profiles featured actual pictures of themselves looked like the girl I was searching for, I would come back to these, click on their personal pages and hunt for more representative photos. At least, I would search those whose profiles I could access. If Scott and Claire did not have these friends in common, there was a strong likelihood I wouldn’t be able to get into their personal pages, given that I was signed in as Scott.

All these new opportunities for digging into people’s private lives presented an equal number of obstacles.

Slowly, I scrolled through the list and studied female faces. Many were easy to dismiss immediately. They were too old, or had different hair or skin color. Every time I spotted a blond girl in her teens I stopped, clicked on the pic, and went to the individual’s personal page to view a larger image. When I found it was the wrong person, I went back and repeated the process.

“You’re invading his privacy, you know. I still think those things matter.”

I looked up from the laptop screen to see Donna standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Right now, I’m invading someone else’s privacy,” I said. “It’s kind of how I’ve made my living for some time now in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Let it go.”

“I told you, this isn’t about Scott.”

“It’s about this girl you picked up.”

“Gave a ride to,” I said.

“What did you say her name was?”

“Claire.”

“Claire what?”

“Claire Sanders.”

Donna’s eyebrows went up. “Bertram Sanders has a daughter named Claire. Is that who you picked up?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s missing? That’s who Brindle and his partner were asking you about?”

“That’s right.”

She folded her arms. Concern pushed anger from her face. “That must be so awful for him.”

“Him?”

“Well, his wife — his ex-wife — too, of course. He’s divorced.”

“You seem to know a lot about him.”

“He’s the mayor, and he’s in the station all the time, not that he’s particularly welcome there. He likes to come in and harangue Augie on a regular basis.”

Augustus Perry. The police chief. Someone whose unlisted home number was in my own phone’s contact list, for reasons that were more than professional. I thought back to the item I’d read in the paper the night before, about Mayor Bert Sanders’ fight with the Griffon police over allegations of brutality. Did it make sense that the mayor, who’d pissed off everyone in this town who wore a badge, could reasonably expect the cops to indulge him with a discreet search for his daughter?

Yet that seemed to be what Brindle and Haines were doing.

Maybe Augustus Perry was happy to do the mayor a favor. It could buy him leverage in the future. The chief was good at having people owe him one.

“You think the mayor would go to him directly?” I said. “Ask for help finding his daughter, without making a big official thing of it?”

“A lot of people are willing to swallow their pride when it comes to their kids’ safety,” Donna said. “You think maybe this is something you shouldn’t be sticking your nose into?”

“It’s already there,” I said. I told her, briefly, about the events of the previous evening. How I might be one of the last people to see Claire before she went missing.

“What do you know about Bertram Sanders?” I asked.

“Former professor at Canisius College. Political science. Wrote a couple of books that did okay, I think. One of them was a flattering profile of Clinton. He’s left of center. He could have stayed and taught there a few more years but opted to take early retirement.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Maybe he’d had enough. A woman I work with, she took a course with him ten, twelve years ago. He asked her out a few times.”

“He hit on his students?”

“So they say. Didn’t seem to trouble him that he had a wife, although I suspect it must have troubled her, given that she finally left him. And despite this failing, apparently he’s this big idealist. Believes in something called the Constitution. Doesn’t like Augie’s approach to streamlining the justice system.”

A nice way to put it. Taking a felon behind a building and breaking his nose instead of laying charges was one way to keep the court system from getting too clogged.

A ten-second silence followed as Donna stood there, staring at me.

“What?” I asked.

“This is how it used to be,” she said. “How we used to talk. I remember how, when you’d get home, you’d tell me all about the things you were working on.”

“Donna.”

“This is the most we’ve spoken in weeks.” Another pause. “You remember my friend Eileen Skyler?”

“Who?’

“She was married to Earl — he worked the border at Whirlpool Rapids before it went NEXUS only.”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“Things started to fall apart for them after their daughter, Sylvia, died in that crash at the top of the South Grand Island Bridge when she got cut off by the gas truck and there was a fire. She was thirty-two. Her husband had left her about a year earlier.”

“I remember.”

“It hit them pretty hard, which is no surprise. They were so sad, so heartbroken, that they didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore. The smallest pleasures made them feel guilty. And most of the pleasure they’d found in life had been being with each other. It got to the point where they lived on different floors of their house. Earl came in the back way, right by the stairs, and lived on the top floor, where he set up a hot plate and put in a small fridge. Eileen used the front door, and lived on the first floor. Set up a bedroom down there. They lived in the same house but could go weeks without ever having to see or talk to each other.”

I said nothing.

“So what I keep wondering is, are things going to get better around here, or should I put in a call to Gill?”

Gill Strothers was a carpenter and general handyman we’d used around the house for several small projects, although he had tackled larger ones for other people. Additions, new kitchens. All cash-under-the-table jobs. He did good work.

“Do you want me to call him and ask him if he could put in a set of stairs by the back door there? Is that what you’d like me to do? I’m not saying it’s what I want. I just wanted to get an idea if that’s what you want.”

“Donna,” I said, shaking my head tiredly and looking down, my eyes scanning past the multiple square facial images, “I don’t want you—”

And I saw her. There on the screen. Her head cocked a bit to one side, blond hair cascading across her forehead, tucked behind her ear. It was her. I was sure of it.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

I clicked on the name next to the picture.

I looked up to tell Donna I’d found her, but she’d left.

I got out of Facebook, called up the online phone directory, and found a C. Rodomski at 34 Arlington Street, which was on Griffon’s west side.

I grabbed my keys. Heading out the front door, I called back into the house, “Be back in a bit.” I didn’t know where Donna was, or whether she’d even heard me.

The Rodomskis’ house was a broad bungalow, set back from the street, with an expansive, well-manicured lawn. There was an operating fountain in the center that looked like an oversized birdbath and fit in, on this street, like a Rolls hood ornament on a Kia. The Rodomskis had what looked like the nicest house on an okay street, which I’d learned long ago, from a friend who sold real estate, is not nearly as desirable as having an okay house on a very nice street. Every other home on Arlington was pulling the value of the Rodomski place down.