Sanders hesitated. People usually did that for two reasons. They didn’t want to tell you the real story, or they were buying time while they thought up a good story.
“You saw what went on tonight,” he said.
“That meeting?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re telling me there’s a connection between your daughter and the fight you’ve got going with the Griffon cops?”
He gave me a sly grin that showed off his perfect teeth. “Like you don’t know.”
“You’re losing me,” I said.
“I know your connection. I know what kind of game you’re working here.”
“Connection? You talking about me and Chief Perry?”
Sanders nodded smugly, like he was no fool. “I know he’s your brother-in-law.”
“What of it?”
“Didn’t think I knew, did you? Figured you might get that one past me.”
“I don’t give a damn whether you know or not,” I said. “He’s my wife’s brother. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You think I’m stupid?” he asked. “You think I can’t figure out what’s going on here? Perry doesn’t like losing leverage, does he? Doesn’t like it that he’s got one less person to intimidate. You can tell him I know what he’s doing. You can tell him it’s not working. I don’t care how many cruisers he has watching me, or how many people he thinks he can turn against me. Because that’s what he’s doing, you know. He’s making this an ‘us against them’ kind of town, using fear to turn people to his side. If you’re not with the great Augustus Perry, you’re on the side of the criminals. Well, it’s not gonna work. I’m not backing down. He doesn’t run this town. He may think he does, but he doesn’t.”
“Is the chief trying to scare you? Is he harassing you?”
“Oh, please,” Sanders said. “What’d he think? That he could send you here, trick me into telling you where Claire is?”
“So she is missing. Or hiding.”
Sanders smiled. “She’s fine. There’s the door, Mr. Weaver.”
“Has Claire been threatened? Because of what’s going on between you and Perry?”
He just shook his head dismissively.
“You’ve got it wrong,” I said. “My concern for Claire is genuine. I gave her a lift, and she disappeared on my watch. I have to know. I have to know that she’s okay.”
“Get out.”
“Call her. Just let me speak to her.”
“Get out.”
“All I’m asking is—”
Sanders held his palm up in my face. A strong gesture, betrayed by a tremble.
“Now,” he said.
Sixteen
When she gets home, she sees a sliver of light beneath his door, so she decides to check on him. He could have fallen asleep with the light on, and if that’s the case, she’ll turn it off. But maybe he’s sitting in his chair, reading. He does that sometimes when he can’t sleep.
Once she has the door open, she finds he is, indeed, awake, but not in his chair. No book or magazine in his hands. Just looking at the ceiling, as though some movie is being projected there.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Just thinking,” he says.
“About what?” she asks, although she has a good idea.
“I thought about what we could say.”
“Say about what?”
“About why I’ve been away.”
It’s never been this bad before, she thinks. Him harping on things like this. The events of the last few weeks — that boy’s unexpected visit — have agitated him. He’s not the only one.
“Okay,” she says, since part of her is curious about what he’s come up with. “Why have you been away?”
“I was in Africa.”
“Africa,” she says.
“On a safari. I got lost. In the jungle. In the rain forest.”
“I think that’s in South America,” she says. “I think you’d have a hard time keeping your story straight.”
“We could work on it together so I’d be sure to get it right.”
“You should turn off the light and go to sleep,” she says.
“No!” the man shouts, and the woman recoils. He is usually passive, manageable.
“Don’t you raise your voice to me,” she says.
“I went to the Arctic! I was on an Arctic expedition! And now I’m back!”
“Stop it. You’re getting yourself all worked up. You’re talking nonsense.”
“Or maybe I was in the desert. I was wandering the desert.”
The woman sits on the edge of the bed and places her hand on his clammy forehead. She pats him gently.
“You’ll never get to sleep if you get yourself all wound up,” she says soothingly. “You’re overtired.”
He wraps his hands around her arm and pulls her to him so her face is inches from his. His breath smells like the inside of an old leather bag.
“I don’t blame you,” he says. “I understand. But it has to end. It can’t go on forever like this.”
She’s been thinking that herself for a while now.
Seventeen
As I walked back to my car, I got out my phone, called up the number for my brother-in-law, Augustus Perry, and entered it.
Something didn’t add up. The police were looking for Claire Sanders, but her father claimed she wasn’t missing. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out he was hiding something, lying to me. Claire had to be in some kind of trouble. She’d gone to a lot of effort to outwit someone who’d been following her.
Was it the police? An ex-boyfriend?
Her father?
If I couldn’t get any satisfactory answers from him, best to go back to the police and learn what prompted them to start looking for her. But I didn’t want to talk to Haines or Brindle. It made more sense to go to the top. Not that Augie was naturally disposed to help his sister’s husband. He more or less considered me a horse’s ass.
The feeling was mutual.
We managed to be civil to one another through most family get-togethers, so long as discussions did not turn to politics, religion, or some of the really contentious topics, like the quickest route to Philadelphia, how much it rained last week, or who was getting better gas mileage.
We’d really gotten into it summer before last, at a barbecue in our backyard, when Augie said that if we accepted that certain racial groups were more intellectually superior, from a genetic standpoint, than others, and that if we further accepted that intellectually inferior racial groups were more likely to break the law, then racial profiling wasn’t racism at all because it could be supported by scientific data.
“I’d love to see that data,” I said.
“Look it up,” he said. “It’s on the Internet.”
“So if it’s on the Internet, it must be true.”
“Well, if it’s scientific data, it is.”
“If I saw something on the Internet that said a new study had determined that you’ve got the IQ of a bucket of bolts, would it be true? Because it’s going to be on there in about five minutes.”
His wife, the long-suffering Beryl, had to hold him back.
I had to concede that, attitude aside, Augie wasn’t all bad as a cop. He had good instincts. He was tireless. Before he was a chief, and not spending a large chunk of the day sitting on his butt behind a desk, he’d knock on doors all day and all night if that’s what it took to find someone who might be a potential witness to a neighborhood crime. When we had an eight-year-old boy go missing five years ago, Augie came out from behind his desk and participated in foot searches for six days, getting less than four hours of sleep a night, until he found that kid in the basement of an abandoned mattress factory. The kid had fallen through a hole in the floor and couldn’t get out. Augustus Perry was also skilled as an interrogator. He knew how to get information out of people.