Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

I didn’t know I’d been spotted sitting in the car. Kate was good. “Yeah, that was me.”

She grinned slyly at her partner. “Didn’t I tell you that was Donna’s husband keepin’ an eye on me?”

“I had a feeling it was you,” I said. “There’s only two women working uniform in Griffon, right?”

“Just me right now. Carla’s been on mat leave for six months.”

I thought of the kid working that convenience store, the one who’d said he’d had his tonsils spray-painted by a woman cop. Kind of narrowed it down for this neck of the woods.

“You stake out Patchett’s much?” I asked.

Quinn, who’d said little up to now, said, “We’d been watching those two ridin’ in on their hogs and were waiting for them to come out, have a word with them.”

Kate nodded. “Plenty of places for them to hoist a few and play pool back where they come from.”

Sean was watching with glazed eyes, like he didn’t even know where he was anymore.

“Were you watching Patchett’s last night?” I asked them. “Around ten?”

Kate didn’t hesitate. “Nope. We were both finishing up with a fender bender south of town around then, weren’t we, Marv?”

Officer Quinn nodded.

“Why?” Kate asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, and turned my focus to Sean. “You gonna be okay?” He shrugged. “You called your parents?”

“These guys are still asking me questions.”

“Call your parents,” I said. “And don’t say another word to these nice officers until they get here and hire you a lawyer.”

Kate Ramsey got her back up. “Cal, what the hell—”

Quinn stared at me. “Butt out, pal.”

I gave the two cops a smile. “Have a nice evening. And you take care, Sean.”

As I was rounding the corner to head back to where my car was parked, I glanced back and saw Haines and Brindle up on the bridge again.

Brindle was looking at me. When our eyes met, he turned away.

While Ramsey and Quinn might not have been watching Patchett’s last night, it was possible some other Griffon cops had been posted outside. And not necessarily Haines and Brindle. If some cop was watching the place for potential troublemakers like those bikers, and noticed a teenage girl getting into a car with a strange man, he might have made a note of my license plate. That could have been what led Haines and Brindle to have a word with me.

It still didn’t explain why they were looking for Claire if no one had reported her missing. I wondered if I’d been onto something when I accused Augie of trying to get some dirt on her to strengthen his position in his fight with Sanders.

Sanders.

I wanted to talk to him again. Much had changed since we’d spoken a couple of hours ago.

A girl was dead.

His daughter’s best friend.

He might not have wanted to talk to me before, but I didn’t see where he had much choice now.

So I pointed the car in the direction of his house. But en route, I noticed Iggy’s up ahead. It was on my mental list of places to stop, too. I figured I might as well go on and get it out of the way, especially considering it would probably be closing soon.

As I was heading toward it, I noticed a small car in my rearview mirror that seemed to be taking every turn I did. When I slowed, it slowed. When I sped up, it did the same.

I wondered whether it would follow me into the Iggy’s lot, but it didn’t. As it kept on going down Danbury, I managed to get a quick look at it. A silver Hyundai. I didn’t have a hope of reading even one number on the plate as it sped off.

I locked the car and went into the restaurant. A tall, thin man in his late twenties looked at me expectantly from behind the counter as I approached.

“Is Iggy around?” I asked. Always start at the top.

“Iggy?” asked the man, who had a name tag that said.

“That’s right.”

“There is no Iggy. At least, not anymore. Iggy — that’d be Ignatius Powell — opened his restaurant on this site in 1961, rebuilt it a couple of times, and then sold it ten years ago to my father. Last year, he died. Iggy, I mean. Not my dad. I manage this place for him in the evenings. Is there a problem with your burger?”

“Nothing like that, Sal,” I said. I showed him my license and told him I was trying to track down a girl who’d been here about this time last night.

“I’m pretty sure she slipped out your back door, and may have met someone in the parking lot,” I said. “I notice you’ve got cameras.”

“Oh yeah, you have to,” Sal said. “Especially at the drive-through window. Go on YouTube, you’ll see a bunch of videos of McDonald’s customers going berserk there. We had this one lady, she said she wanted a Whopper, and Gillian — she was the one on the window — told her we don’t sell Whoppers, that’s Burger King, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer, kept screaming that she wanted a Whopper. Finally, she gets out of her truck and tries to grab Gillian through the window. We had to call the cops.”

“I’m hoping a look at last night’s recordings will show me who might have given this girl a ride,” I said.

It made sense that someone other than Sean was waiting here to drive Claire somewhere, or that she’d arranged to have a car left here for her.

“I guess I can show you, you being licensed and all,” Sal said. “I mean, I’ve already showed the police, so—”

“The police have already been here?”

“Yeah, like, a few hours ago.”

I nodded, like I’d expected this, which, in fact, I had. “Would that have been Officers Haines and Brindle? We’re all working toward the same goal. We just want to find Claire.”

“So you know those guys?”

“We were discussing the case earlier in the evening,” I said.

Sal called over a pimply-faced girl working the counter alongside him who couldn’t have been twenty. “I’ll be back in a bit,” he told her. “You hold the fort.” He motioned for me to follow him to a door at the end of the counter and led me through the kitchen, where one person was working.

I followed him into an office with two monitors, each showing four views of the property. There were live shots of the drive-through, the front counter, the kitchen, another office where the safe was kept, and four of the parking lot.

“We had another nutcase one day,” Sal said. “Came up to the counter wearing nothing but a pair of ratty shorts and flip-flops, a .38 in his hand.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yeah. Hair all sticking out, total whack job. Waved the gun around and said he’d start shooting if we didn’t hand over the recipe for the special dressing we put on our burgers, which is really just mayo with some relish and a couple other things mixed into it.”

“Not exactly the formula for rocket fuel,” I said as Sal sat down in front of the monitors, started moving a mouse around.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “So I wrote it on a napkin for him. Mayo, relish, a pinch of cayenne, like that, you know? And I hand it to him, and he says, ‘No, put down what’s really in it,’ so I said, ‘Okay,’ and just started making shit up. Like dimorixalin diphosphate, and positronic marzipan, even calista flockhart.”

“Good one,” I said.

“I might even have written down plutonium. Anyway, I give him that, and he looks at it and says, ‘Okay, good.’ And I hand him another napkin and the pen and tell him he needs to sign his name. ‘Whenever we give out the special mayo recipe, the person has to sign for it,’ I say.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did. Didn’t take long for the cops to find him. Okay, here we go,” he said, pointing to the screen. It was a shot of the door on the side of the restaurant, near the back, where the restrooms were located. The camera was mounted outside and offered a broad view of the parking lot. But it was also night, so the view wasn’t terrific. The date and time were superimposed across the bottom of the screen.