As I’d thought she might be, Claire Sanders was listed as one of Scott’s friends, but there was no interaction between them beyond that. No private messages back and forth.
But right now, I wasn’t interested in who Scott’s friends were. I wanted to know who Claire’s friends were. So I clicked on her name, went to her Facebook page, and immediately saw that she had more than five hundred of them. This could take a while. But I was confident that anyone she could talk into posing as her was going to be a Facebook friend.
First, I looked at photos she’d posted, but there were only a few, including the one that Haines had shown me on his phone. I found a couple of party shots featuring a girl who looked like the one from my car, but the photos hadn’t been tagged with identifying names.
I clicked on Claire’s friends list and started scrolling through it, looking at all the postage stamp — sized faces, hunting for the girl who’d tried to pass herself off as Claire.
If only it were that simple.
Not only were the profile images small, but many of them were poorly shot, or featured the individual with others. Lots of Claire’s friends, like millions of others on Facebook, didn’t even use a picture of themselves for their profile. They used shots of famous people. For example, one boy, Bryson Davies, was passing himself off as George Clooney. Another, Desmond Flint, was Gort, the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Several kids were animated cartoon characters, like Snoopy, or Cartman from South Park.
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?”