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.
“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.”