A Tap on the Window

Twenty-five

On the way to my car, I stopped to check in on Sean, interrupting an interrogation by Kate Ramsey and Marvin Quinn.

Quinn said, “Excuse me, mister, but we’re working here.”

“It’s okay, Marv. This is a friend of mine, the one I was just telling you about,” Kate said. “How you doin’, Cal?”

“I’ve been better, Kate.”

“I was telling my partner that was you I saw earlier tonight, out front of Patchett’s when we were talking to our biker friends.”

I didn’t know I’d been spotted sitting in the car. Kate was good. “Yeah, that was me.”

She grinned slyly at her partner. “Didn’t I tell you that was Donna’s husband keepin’ an eye on me?”

“I had a feeling it was you,” I said. “There’s only two women working uniform in Griffon, right?”

“Just me right now. Carla’s been on mat leave for six months.”

I thought of the kid working that convenience store, the one who’d said he’d had his tonsils spray-painted by a woman cop. Kind of narrowed it down for this neck of the woods.

“You stake out Patchett’s much?” I asked.

Quinn, who’d said little up to now, said, “We’d been watching those two ridin’ in on their hogs and were waiting for them to come out, have a word with them.”

Kate nodded. “Plenty of places for them to hoist a few and play pool back where they come from.”

Sean was watching with glazed eyes, like he didn’t even know where he was anymore.

“Were you watching Patchett’s last night?” I asked them. “Around ten?”

Kate didn’t hesitate. “Nope. We were both finishing up with a fender bender south of town around then, weren’t we, Marv?”

Officer Quinn nodded.

“Why?” Kate asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, and turned my focus to Sean. “You gonna be okay?” He shrugged. “You called your parents?”

“These guys are still asking me questions.”

“Call your parents,” I said. “And don’t say another word to these nice officers until they get here and hire you a lawyer.”

Kate Ramsey got her back up. “Cal, what the hell—”

Quinn stared at me. “Butt out, pal.”

I gave the two cops a smile. “Have a nice evening. And you take care, Sean.”

As I was rounding the corner to head back to where my car was parked, I glanced back and saw Haines and Brindle up on the bridge again.

Brindle was looking at me. When our eyes met, he turned away.

While Ramsey and Quinn might not have been watching Patchett’s last night, it was possible some other Griffon cops had been posted outside. And not necessarily Haines and Brindle. If some cop was watching the place for potential troublemakers like those bikers, and noticed a teenage girl getting into a car with a strange man, he might have made a note of my license plate. That could have been what led Haines and Brindle to have a word with me.

It still didn’t explain why they were looking for Claire if no one had reported her missing. I wondered if I’d been onto something when I accused Augie of trying to get some dirt on her to strengthen his position in his fight with Sanders.

Sanders.

I wanted to talk to him again. Much had changed since we’d spoken a couple of hours ago.

A girl was dead.

His daughter’s best friend.

He might not have wanted to talk to me before, but I didn’t see where he had much choice now.

So I pointed the car in the direction of his house. But en route, I noticed Iggy’s up ahead. It was on my mental list of places to stop, too. I figured I might as well go on and get it out of the way, especially considering it would probably be closing soon.

As I was heading toward it, I noticed a small car in my rearview mirror that seemed to be taking every turn I did. When I slowed, it slowed. When I sped up, it did the same.

I wondered whether it would follow me into the Iggy’s lot, but it didn’t. As it kept on going down Danbury, I managed to get a quick look at it. A silver Hyundai. I didn’t have a hope of reading even one number on the plate as it sped off.

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.

Claire waves and runs toward the vehicle, veers around the far side and opens the passenger door. The car’s interior dome light comes on for two seconds and goes off.

“Go back,” I said.

Sal backed up the video a few seconds, hit PLAY again.

“Stop it when the inside light comes on,” I said.

It took him two tries to freeze the frame at just the right spot. As best I could tell, the only other person in the car was the driver, but it was impossible to determine anything about him, or her. Nothing more than a grainy smudge.

“It’s hard to see anything real clear,” Sal said apologetically. “The cops were pissed, too.”

“I’m not pissed,” I said. “I appreciate it. Is there any way you can blow up that image, get any kind of look at that license plate?”

“Nope,” he said. “Hopeless.”

“Let it go ahead. I want to see where the car goes.”

Once Claire’s in the car, the Volvo turns hard right, does almost a three sixty, and vanishes from the right side of the monitor.

“You have any other angles that would show it leaving?”

“Nope,” he said again.

“What about arriving? If we go back before where you started.”

He took us back to 9:45:00. There is no car behind his Subaru at that point. He kept moving ahead until 9:49:17, when the car appears from the right side of the monitor, sidles up next to Sal’s car, and stops. The lights go off.

I had him keep running it right up until ten p.m., just in case whoever was in that car decided to come in for a coffee or a burger. No such luck. Whoever was behind the wheel stayed there.

“Sal,” I said, drawing his name out slowly.

“Yes?”

“Can I have a coffee?”

“Sure thing.”

When I went into my pocket for some change, he said, “On the house. Whaddya take?”

“Two creams,” I said.

While he was gone, I dropped into his computer chair and stared at the screen. Thinking it through.

Claire thinks she’s being followed. Gets Hanna to switch places. Now someone’s following Hanna, who’s with me. Hanna gets out and runs. Pitches the wig. Whoever’s been on our tail now knows it’s a trick. Figures out the switch happened at Iggy’s.

Thinks: Maybe Claire’s still there.

Sal returned with a take-out cup of coffee for me. “It’s really hot,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to spill it on yourself and then sue us for millions of dollars.”

I forced a chuckle.

“I want you to take me through the rest of the evening,” I said. “Right up to closing time.”

“Yeah, sure, I guess,” he said. “Same view?”

I thought about that. “No. At least, not to start. Let’s go to the front counter. Yeah, that view, that shows everyone coming in, looking up at the menu.”

“If we get held up, we can get a good look at them from here,” he said. “Where do you want me to start from?”

“Start at ten thirty.” I took the lid off the coffee and blew on it. “Fast-forward through.”

He did. People shuffled in and out comically. Before long, I spotted someone I recognized.

“Stop,” I said.

It was Sean Skilling. He’d said that he’d dropped by here, and Patchett’s, after everything had gone wrong, after the brief, troubling call from Hanna.

In the video, he bypassed the counter, disappeared into another part of the restaurant.

“Can you find him on the other cameras?” I asked, taking a sip of coffee. Still hot, but good.

Sal tapped away. “There he is.”

Sean had poked his head into the ladies’ restroom, just as I had done, but he hadn’t gone right inside. Finding no one there, he returned to the front of the restaurant. Sal found him on the other camera again, and we both watched him leave. The video continued to roll.

“Well,” I said.

“Was that what you wanted?”

“I don’t really know what I want,” I said. “Mostly I just want to go home and go to bed.”

“I should have got you a decaf,” Sal said.

“I don’t think it’ll matter,” I said. “I could be injecting it straight into my veins. When my head hits the pillow tonight I’m— Hello, what’s this?”

The monitor was still displaying the front counter. The time was 10:58:02 and counting.

A heavyset man with brown hair and a moustache had come in. Not in a suit, but nicely dressed in black slacks, a white collared shirt with the cuffs rolled up.

“Pause that,” I said.

Sal clicked. “You know that guy?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I only met him recently,” I said.

Just this evening, in fact. It was Adam Skilling, Sean’s father.