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.
“So this is 9:54 p.m. yesterday,” Sal said. “This is about where the cops had me start it from.” He froze the image. There were two vehicles visible in the lot from this vantage point. A light-colored or white Subaru Impreza and, partially hidden behind it, what looked like a silver or gray Volvo station wagon, although I couldn’t be sure.
“The Soob is mine,” he said.
“Can you fast-forward that until we see some activity?” I asked.
“Sure.” He fiddled with the mouse. At 10:07:43 a black Dodge Challenger, the new model designed to look like one from the seventies, pulled up close to the door. A heavyset man got out, went inside. Three minutes later he was seen leaving, a brown Iggy’s bag in hand. He got into this car, the lights came on, and he was gone.
At 10:14:33 a man appeared from the right side of the screen, limping. He looked like he was in his twenties, but he moved like a much older person. Rail thin, about five five, wearing a jeans jacket.
“That’s Timmy,” Sal said.
“Timmy?”
“I don’t know his last name. He lives just up the street a bit, in that four-story square apartment building? I think, anyway. Works a shift somewhere, gets home about this time, comes by here every night on his way home for a double-patty cheeseburger, large fries, and a chocolate shake.”
“Every night?” I said.
“Yeah,” Sal said.
“He’s, like, a hundred and thirty pounds. Tops.”
Sal shrugged. “Some people handle fast food really well.”
“Every single night?” I asked again.
Sal glanced at me. “You got any idea how many people eat here daily? Look, you’re not gonna catch me knocking our food, but I couldn’t eat this stuff every day of the month.”
“Hang on there for a second,” I said. I raised a finger to the monitor. “Isn’t that exhaust?”
It was coming from the Volvo station wagon parked behind Sal’s Subaru. “That car’s been running the whole time,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” Sal said. “I was waiting to see if you noticed. I didn’t want to ruin it for you.”
“It’s not a movie, Sal. I’m okay with spoilers.”
“Okay. The cops — well, one of them — noticed the exhaust, too.”
“So you’ve already seen all of this? You know what’s coming?”
“Sure,” he said.
At 10:16:13 the door of the ladies’ room opens. It’s Hanna. She darts out the side door. This would have been just before she got into my car. I was probably coming into the restaurant about this time. Seconds later, there I am, holding the bathroom door open, calling inside, then going in.
“Isn’t that you?” Sal asks.
“That’s me.”
“You’re not supposed to go into the women’s restroom, you know.”
“Just keep it running.”
I watched myself come back out of the restroom and head for the front of the restaurant.
The next person to appear is Timmy with the limp, at 10:23:51. He pushes his way out the door, presumably on his way home.
Sal did some more fiddling with the mouse. “Okay. I think this is the part you’re looking for.”
It happens at 10:24:03. Claire Sanders, looking exactly as she had in my car, emerges from the bathroom — she had to have been perched on a toilet seat, since I’d had a look at the stalls and they’d appeared empty — then stands at the exterior glass door, scanning the parking lot. The driver of the Volvo sees her before she spots the car. The lights come on and the car moves forward, just beyond the Subaru.