Plenty of customers here already, young people sitting and standing around raised tables, mostly boys with boys and girls with girls. I noted some older customers — my age and more. Maybe they liked the alcohol-free bar scene. Maybe they liked young people. Maybe they were taking a look at the place where their children wanted to go after school or evenings, as Penelope Rideout had.
A band was setting up on the carpeted stage, a tall teenage boy facing an amplifier, tuning a yellow bass. The singer took her microphone from a case and slid it into its front-stage stand. Her hair was a downy orange halo and she wore a black sequined singlet, denim short shorts, black leggings, and red cowgirl boots. I did a quick surveillance, saw that SNR Security had salted the room with cameras.
I carried a tumbler of iced coffee to a stool by the entrance and sat with my back to the glass for a good view of the room. Used my phone to log in to the IvarDuggans.com site. IvarDuggans.com is the best of several big-bore online investigative services to which I subscribe, at some expense, and use often. Snoops ’R Us. If there’s a Big Brother watching you, it’s not the government, yet, but IvarDuggans.com and services like them. Their main customers are banks, collection agencies, insurance companies, and law enforcement. Their databases are massive and growing by the second; their engines are fast. IvarDuggans is especially good because they have twice the number of photos and videos that the other security sites have.
I came up with five Daley Rideouts nationwide. One in California. There she was, recognizable as the girl in Penelope’s pictures but much younger. Longer hair, but curly like her sister’s. A pleasant face. Three of the images had been plucked from Daley’s Facebook page before vigilant Penelope had closed it down. At that time, Daley was eleven years old. The same for @onthemovedaleyrideout on Twitter, her last tweet being three years ago. On the move? Her posts and tweets were chatty and vague. In my small notebook I wrote down some of the names of her most consistent network friends.
Because of her age, IvarDuggans.com didn’t have much on Daley Rideout. Born August 26, 2005, in Denver, Colorado, to Carl and June Rideout, deceased. Residences since Denver were Salt Lake City, Boise, Reno, and Eugene. The Rideouts had moved four times in the four years between Daley’s birth and the deaths of Carl and June in a one-car traffic accident in Eugene in 2009. Following that, Penelope had become Daley’s legal guardian and the Rideout sisters had lived five more years in Eugene. They had moved to Prescott, Arizona, in late 2014. Three years later, Daley and Penelope had moved to Phoenix. Then Oceanside.
I wondered about those years of frantic moving while Carl and June were alive. Work-related? Wanderlust? I was curious to see if Penelope’s profile would have answers. As for Daley, unsurprisingly, she had no vehicle registrations, professional licenses, fictitious business names, tax liens, watercraft, or aircraft registered in her name. No known associates. And no criminal record, though even dogged IvarDuggans can’t unearth sealed juvenile court, adoption, medical, or gun license records.
I looked down the list of categories left blank, pleased that not every bit and byte of information about young Daley Rideout was available to anyone willing to pay for it.
Oddly enough — very oddly — the same was true of Penelope: Her IvarDuggans biography was spotty.
Born October 14, 1990, in Mobile, Alabama, to Carl and June. Fourteen years later, the Rideouts moved to Denver, where the three Rideouts became four. After that, Penelope and her family lived in the aforementioned succession of homes — Denver through Eugene, four moves in four years — until the deaths of the mother and father. Annoyingly, IvarDuggans.com had the same long blanks for Penelope between Eugene, Prescott, Phoenix, and Oceanside — three moves in five years.
Penelope Rideout’s education and employment histories closely paralleled her moves — and lack of them — around the country.
Elementary and two years of junior high school in her native Mobile. Mentions in both The Mobile Daily and The Alabaman of young Penelope’s success at hunter-jumper youth competitions.
Then the southern girl skipped eighth grade and went west to Denver for her first year of high school. IvarDuggans provided no extracurricular news for that year.
She did her second year of high school in Salt Lake, her third year in Boise, one semester of her senior year in Reno, and her final semester in Eugene. Her graduation picture from Eugene High School showed a contained and pretty girl, with the same calm, adjudicating eyes that I had seen for the first time less than twelve hours ago in my Fallbrook office.
Penelope had graduated from the University of Oregon with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. In her graduation photo she looked composed.
Then part-time employment as a technical researcher/writer in Eugene, through 2011.
The year she married Richard Hauser.
Although IvarDuggans.com had no record of that union. Neither did TLO or Tracers Info. Very unusual. Information peddlers as sophisticated as these don’t often miss things the size of marriages.
So I called him, Hauser, at the number that Mrs. Rideout had given me. Got one Suzanne Delgado, who had never heard of Richard Hauser and hung up. Checked Facebook and got eleven men with the same name, two of them approximately the right age but neither even slightly resembling the Marine colonel in the picture.
Went to the bar for another iced coffee. The band was doing a sound check. Nice and loud. I asked the boy-faced, dreadlocked barista about them and he told me they were a San Diego — based psychedelic garage band called Tin Lenses. I asked him if SNR was still in charge of security here, and he said yes, they stopped in every night.
Back at my stool, I tried to dig up the strangely overlooked Richard Hauser and found two such men who had been U.S. Marines in the last four decades, but neither was still active. Not colonels, not pilots.
I called an old Marine friend now stationed at Miramar, Master Sergeant Tyson Songrath. We spent a few minutes catching up, and when I asked about Richard Hauser, Ty had never heard of him. He certainly would have, if Hauser was actuaclass="underline" Songrath worked in aircraft maintenance and knew every pilot who’d come through Miramar in the last five years.
As soon as I hung up, the band kicked into its first song. Good timing. Fast chords crashed through the room. The singer’s voice cut through them, high and clear.
Still online with my shameless snooping confederates, I quickly tracked down the basics on Carl and June Rideout (née Donegan). Carl had been a pleasant-faced, bespectacled man, an aerospace publications director, and she was a nurse, who looked very much like her daughters. He was a Mobile native, while June hailed from the Alabama hill country. Both from big families. He was a deacon in a non-denominational church; June taught Sunday school there. Carl had been ten years older than June, who had had their first child when she was twenty-one and their second at thirty-five. I wondered why they’d waited so long between children. Trouble conceiving? Trouble taking to term? A purposeful pause? They were middle-class people, old-school southern Democrats with a hint of prosperity via the Mobile Oaks Country Club.
A collision reconstruction report completed in March 2009 concluded that the single-car crash had happened on a stormy night, on northbound I-5, heading into Eugene. Carl had lost control of the minivan, crashed through a guardrail, and rolled the vehicle down a slope and into a creek running high with rainwater. No excessive speed. No alcohol or drugs involved. However, the right front tire of the van had blown out, and in all likelihood, the front-wheel drive, high winds, and rain-drenched highway had conspired to hydroplane the slightly top-heavy vehicle off the road and down the embankment. Carl was dead when the Oregon State Police arrived; June died that night in a hospital.