Annette said, “Why are you looking for Claire? Bert, is Claire in some kind of trouble?”
Sanders had sat down on the edge of the bed and was rubbing his shoulder where I’d given him a shove down the stairs with my foot. “I don’t know,” he said defeatedly. “I’m not sure I have any idea what’s going on anymore.”
“Annette, vouch for me,” I said. “I’m trying to help Bert here, but he doesn’t trust me.”
“Help him with what?”
“I think Claire is in trouble, but Bert either doesn’t think so or doesn’t want to admit it to me. But there’s more reason now to be concerned.”
“Why?” Annette asked. “What?”
Sanders lifted his head. “The Rodomskis’ kid is dead.”
Annette’s eyes widened. “What?”
“She was murdered.” He pointed a feeble finger at me. “You tell her.”
“Hanna Rodomski,” I said.
“I know who she is,” she said, aghast. “I know her parents. My God, this is terrible. They must be devastated.”
I imagined they were, but I hadn’t seen them since discovering their daughter’s body. I felt a pang of guilt, as though I should be at the Rodomskis’ house and not here, but I believed every minute counted now where finding Claire was concerned.
“Does Claire know?” Annette asked. “Bert, does she know what’s happened to Hanna?”
Sanders looked at me. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible, the way kids are all connected these days. Do regular people know yet? Has it been on the news?”
“I don’t think so. But it’s only a matter of time. Like you say, if Claire has access on her phone or if she’s near a computer, this kind of thing will spread like wildfire on social media before it hits the news.” I hesitated. “She should hear it from you.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right,” Sanders said, and turned to look at the phone on the bedside table.
Pick up the goddamn phone and call her, I thought. But it looked like he was heading in that direction.
“She probably has her cell phone turned off,” he said.
“Why would that be?” I asked.
“They can track you, right? If your cell phone is on.”
“What are you talking about, Bert?” Annette asked. “Who’d be tracking—oh God, you’re not serious. You really think he’d do that?”
“Who?” I asked. “Who’d do what?”
Annette gave me a critical look. “Your brother-in-law, that’s who.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, do you have any idea how much trouble I had to go to, to sneak in here tonight?” she asked. “Had to park a block over that way.” She pointed toward the back of the house. “Had to sneak between houses, acting like Catwoman. Could have used some night-vision goggles. Ripped my nylons on some prickly bushes. It’s not like Bert can go anywhere to meet me. They’re watching him all the time, his comings and goings. But I can sneak in through the back way and no one spots me.”
“You’re worried the chief is going to find out you two are having an affair?”
“It’s not that,” Sanders said, his hand resting on the receiver. “Perry’s trying to put the fear of God into me.”
“Bert, yes, Perry’s being a total asshole,” Annette said, “but why would he be tracking your daughter’s whereabouts? I mean, she’s on a school trip to New York. Why would he care about that? And if she doesn’t have her cell on, then get in touch with the teacher or call the hotel where she’s—”
“That’s not where she is,” Sanders said. “She’s not on a school trip to New York. That’s just what I told you.”
Annette Ravelson blinked. I could see she was hurt. Always disappointing when the man you’re cheating on your husband with isn’t honest with you.
“Don’t be upset,” he said to her. “You know I’m living in a fishbowl these days. Everything’s on a need-to-know basis.”
Exasperation overwhelmed him as he said to me, “You heard what my neighbor said. You never know when there’s gonna be a cop car watching this house. It’s all part of Perry’s intimidation campaign to get me to shut up, to let this whole thing about how he runs his department just go. He’s watching me, and he’s got his jackbooted thugs watching me, and up until a couple of days ago, Claire, too. If Perry can walk all over the constitutional rights of everyone else who dares venture inside the town limits, why not the mayor’s? Why not my daughter’s?”
“Claire was feeling the heat?” I asked.
“How could she not?” Sanders said. “She said she couldn’t stand it, the cops watching me like that. She was sick of getting caught up in my battle with them, and who the hell could blame her? She wouldn’t go into specifics, but one night outside Patchett’s a cop stopped her, and another time, more recently, same officer, I think, took her purse from her, supposedly to search for drugs, which there were absolutely none of, and we had to go down to the station to pick it up the next day. Can you blame her for wanting to get the hell out of this town? She figured out a way to do it without the cops knowing where she went.”
“You knew she was doing this thing with Hanna.”
“I didn’t know exactly what she was doing, but she told me she had something all worked out.”
“She must have told you where she was going.”
Sanders’ hung his head in a gesture of admission. “To Toronto. To stay with her mother, my ex-wife. Caroline. Caroline Karnofsky now.”
“Caroline picked her up?”
Another nod. “Claire set it all up with her mother. Claire said if there were any problems, she or her mother would call. I didn’t hear anything, so everything must have gone off just fine.”
I pointed to the phone and mimed a dialing motion with my fingers. “You need to let her know.”
Sanders moved to pick up the receiver, then hesitated.
“This line,” he said. “It might not be safe.”
“Seriously?” I said. “You think the chief has your line tapped?”
“It’s crossed my mind. Sometimes I think I hear clicks. You know what they say. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean—”
I waved my hand. “I know. But, Jesus, he wouldn’t . . .” But I knew that over the years Perry had done surveillance work. And he’d have people in his department who’d know how to do that sort of thing.
“If you really believe that,” I said, “for all we know, the whole house is bugged. Someone could be listening to what we’re saying right now.”
Annette’s look of horror was immediate. “What? You mean someone could have heard what—someone could have been listening to us in this room, like, just a little while ago?”
She was no doubt replaying in her head the things she’d said in the throes of passion. Sanders appeared to be doing the same.
“If someone recorded that . . .” She didn’t bother to finish. I could imagine what she was thinking. If someone had all this on tape—okay, more likely a digital recording—and played it for her husband, well, that couldn’t be good.
“I don’t suppose you’d want Kent hearing that,” I said.
Annette didn’t like it when I said her husband’s name. “Don’t even joke about such a thing,” she said.
I had bigger things to worry about than Annette Ravelson’s infidelities becoming public. I entered the bathroom and called out, “Annette, come get your clothes.”
She came in, scooped everything out of the tub, and grabbed her purse, too. “I’ll go get dressed in Claire’s room.”
I pulled the curtain back across the tub, then turned the cold tap on full blast. I yanked the knob that turned the shower on. Streams of water hit the plastic curtain, creating a low-level background noise like rain on a tin roof. I waved Sanders to come in, and handed him my cell phone.
&nbs
p; “If your phone, or this place, is bugged, this should keep anyone from hearing.”
Sanders entered a number into my cell and put it to his ear.
“It’s ringing,” he said. Then, “Caroline, it’s me . . . I know, I know this isn’t my number. I’m using someone else’s phone.”
I leaned in, my head nearly touching Sanders’, so I could hear both sides of the conversation.
“Is everything okay?” Caroline asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I just—”
“Where are you? What’s that noise? Are you standing in the rain?”
“I’m in the— Don’t worry about that. Caroline, I need to talk to Claire. Is she there? Can you put her on? I’ve got some bad news for her.”
“Claire’s not here. Why would Claire be here?”
“It’s okay, it’s safe to talk,” Sanders said. “There’s no way they could be listening in on this phone.”
“Bert, Claire isn’t here.”
“When will she be back?”
“Bert, you’re not hearing me. She’s not staying with me. She’s not supposed to be coming to see me for another couple of weeks.”
Sanders’ voice went up. “But—but you picked her up last night. Here. In Griffon.”
“Bert, I did no such thing. Where’s Claire?”
Panic was creeping into both their voices.
Sanders said, “Claire set it up. She said you were picking her up. Last night. At Iggy’s. She has to be with you.”
“Listen to me, Bert,” Caroline said, sounding nearly breathless. “Claire is not here. Claire hasn’t been here in weeks. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
THIRTY
“I’m going to have to call you back,” Sanders said to his ex-wife. He ended the call and handed the phone back to me. The color had drained from his face.
“She said—”
“I heard.”
I turned off the cold water still streaming down from the showerhead. “Claire told you her mother was going to pick her up?”
“That’s what she said.”
“What kind of car does your ex-wife drive?”
“Um, one of those little convertibles. A Miata.”
“Not a Volvo wagon.”
Sanders shook his head. “No, she doesn’t have one of those. Neither does her husband.” He looked imploringly at me. “Where the hell could she be?”
“Looks like she accomplished exactly what she set out to do,” I said. “She didn’t just give whoever was following her the slip. She gave everybody the slip. You think this war between you and Perry was really enough to make her want to disappear?”
No hesitation. “Absolutely.”
“That’d suggest Claire doesn’t even trust you to keep her whereabouts secret. Does that make sense?”
He raised his hands in frustration. “Christ, I don’t know.”
Annette crossed the hall and came into the bedroom in a pair of killer heels. She was wearing a scoop-necked black dress that showed off her ample cleavage, plus a hint of a lacy push-up black bra that was assisting the process. A sexier getup than when I’d seen her outside the furniture store. “What’s going on? Did you tell Claire? Did you tell her about Hanna?”
“She’s not with her mom.”
“Well, then, where is she?”
Neither Bert Sanders nor I said anything.
“You don’t know?”
“We don’t know,” I said.
“Oh shit,” she said.
Sanders met my eye. “What do I do now?”
I felt like telling him to pray that Claire hadn’t met the same fate as Hanna, but I’m not a particularly religious man. Plus, it would have been a pretty shitty thing to say. So I came up with something else.
“Start calling around. Her other friends, boyfriends. Teachers.”
“I’ll ask Roman,” Annette said. For my benefit, she explained, “My son went out with her for a while. Maybe he has an idea where she might have gone.” She bit her lip. “Although I kind of doubt it. It’s not like they’ve been talking that much.”
“They used to go out,” I said.
“Yeah. But she broke it off. Roman took it hard.”
I didn’t have it in me to feel bad for Roman at the moment. My head was still throbbing from where he’d hit me.
“So, anyone you can think of,” I said to Sanders.
And then I felt like slapping my head. “Try her cell,” I said, and handed him my phone again.
He entered a number and listened. “It’s gone straight to voice mail. Claire? It’s your dad. Where the hell are you? I just got off the phone with your mother. We’re both worried sick. If you get this, call me right away, okay? Just call me. Or call Mr. Weaver. I’m using his phone. Please, okay? I love you.”
Sanders handed the phone back to me.
“If it went straight to message, it means the phone is off, right?” he said.
“Or the battery’s dead,” I said.
“This is terrible. I just don’t know what— No, I’ll do what you said. I’ll start asking around.”
I felt, at that moment, some small sense of relief. I didn’t have to carry all the weight of this on my shoulders. Sanders had a better handle on Claire’s friends than I did. He might have her tracked down before I could do it.
What nagged at me was why Claire had lied to him. She’d told him why she wanted to go, but not who it was going to be with. The surveillance video I’d seen at Iggy’s showed she’d gotten into a car with someone.
“Okay, you do that,” I said. “We’ll talk in the morning, see where we are. That sound like a plan?”
Sanders nodded.
Annette had a concern of her own. “You’re not going to tell anyone about us, are you?”
“Tell you what,” I said. “You can buy my silence with a lift home. I’ve had some car trouble tonight.”
* * *
I ran out to the cab, rapped lightly on the window so as not to scare the driver to death, and settled up with her. I scanned the street for cop cars and didn’t see any, although there were a few regular vehicles parked along the curb. I suppose it was possible someone was slunk down behind the wheel of one of those.
Then I walked briskly to the rear of Sanders’ house and mounted the steps to the kitchen door, just in time to see Annette slip out of Bert’s arms. He’d left the outdoor lights off, which meant Annette needed a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness so she could navigate her way across the yard, around the garage, and between the houses that backed onto Sanders’ property.
Luckily, no dogs barked and no motion-sensitive lights flashed on. Annette was, indeed, unsteady on her feet—her heels were three inches at least—going from grass to gravel to sidewalk and taking care to sidestep trash cans, bicycles, and lumber scraps, so I took her hand and led her through the worst of it.
“Why the hell I wore these shoes I’ll never know,” she said. “Well, of course I know. Is there a man alive whose motor doesn’t get a kick start from high heels?”
It struck me as a rhetorical question, so I let it go. Once we’d come out from between the houses and were on the sidewalk of the next street over, I let go of her hand. But she latched onto my elbow and held on until we were almost to her car.
“You’re a nice man, you know,” she said. “I’m sorry for all your troubles.”
We were coming up on a black Beemer sedan. “This one,” she said, taking a remote from her purse and hitting the button. The taillights flashed. “Why were you taking a taxi, anyway?”
“Long story,” I said, and slid in on the passenger side.
There was no need to tell her where I lived. During Scott’s stint at her store, she or Kent had dropped him off several times. Scott wasn’t old enough to drive, so Donna or I usually
chauffeured him back and forth. But when we were occasionally unavailable, he got a lift with friends or coworkers.
“I really appreciate you keeping quiet about me and Bert,” she said as she buckled her seat belt. “I mean, this is probably just a passing thing with Bert anyway.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m a realist. I know Bert. I know what he’s like.”
“And what’s he like?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, putting the Beemer into drive and easing her foot down on the gas. “Like you haven’t heard.”
“He likes the ladies,” I said.
“That’s putting it mildly.” She laughed. “I know I’ve only got a limited amount of time with him before someone else catches his eye. It’s why Caroline left him. He was screwing some other professor at Canisius.” I thought about Donna’s comment, about the woman at work Sanders hit on when she was a student and he was still teaching. “For a while there, he was even doing it with someone else at work.”
“His work?”
“No, mine. Rhonda McIntyre?”
I didn’t know the name.
“Hot little thing, I admit. And about forty pounds lighter. But what she had on me in the youth department I could more than make up for in experience. Bert thinks I never knew about her, but I could tell. The way she looked at him when he came into the store, or if they ran into each other on the street. It was back in the summer. He still believes I think he was only seeing me. Anyway, Rhonda doesn’t work for us anymore.”
“Did you fire her?”
“She quit all of a sudden, couple of months back. I think she actually left town, got a job somewhere else, broke it off with another guy—a cop, as it turned out, who she was finding kind of freaky, and who didn’t know she was seeing Bert on the side. Or on her back.” Annette chuckled. “Just as well she quit. I’d have had to find a way to cut her loose, dropped some hints to Kent that she was taking an extra cut off the top with cash deals, fudging some receipts, something. But in the end, I didn’t have to. It’s bad enough, knowing this thing I’ve got going with Bert has an expiration date, but while I’m still in the ‘best before’ days, I want him to myself. You think there’s something wrong, wanting a bit of excitement in your life?”