A Tap on the Window

Fifty-one

On the way back to Griffon, I got out my phone. It had rung once while I was tied up in the trunk. I had one message.

“Hey, Cal. Augie. Call me when you get a minute.”

He could wait.

I tried to give Tony some cash when we got back to my house. It was a feeble gesture, I know. Kind of, “Hey, you saved my life, here’s forty bucks.” I had my wallet out, ready to give him the two twenties that were in there, but he refused.

“Think of it as gas money,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Just do that thing for me.”

“Okay,” I said. “But it’ll have to be in person. I can’t do it over the phone. So it might be a couple of days. I’ve got some other things to wrap up.”

Tony nodded his understanding. As he drove off, I glanced down the street and saw Donna’s car turn the corner. I waited, watched her pull into the drive, moved over by her door, pulled it open for her.

“Hey,” she said. “Did you order the pizza?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Whaddya been doing? I’m starving.”

“This and that,” I said.

“What the hell have you done to your clothes? You been playing football or something?”

Rather than answer, I pulled her into my arms and held her tight.

“What’s going on?” she said, her voice suddenly full of worry. “Tell me everything’s okay.”

“You remember what you said, the other night? I agreed with you, but now I’m not so sure.”

“What, Cal? What are you talking about?”

“Right now, at this very moment, I’m happy.”

She buried her face in my chest and wept.

Donna had questions. She saw the bruise on my face, the handful of painkillers I swallowed, the way I winced when I moved certain ways.

“I had a run-in with someone,” I told her. “No big deal.” I grinned. “You should see the other guy.”

“You don’t want me to know,” she said.

I smiled. I couldn’t tell her what had really happened. She couldn’t know how close she had come to losing me. Not now. Maybe not ever.

She ordered the pizza. While we waited, she said, “I’m going to start researching the trip tonight. If I find something, should I go ahead and book it?”

“Give me a week to wrap things up. Anytime after that.”

“Okay.”

The pizza took forty minutes to arrive. We opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio. After dinner, she worked for a while on her charcoal sketches of Scott. Took three of them out back onto the deck, held them at arm’s length and gave them a shot of the fixative. She spread the drawings on the kitchen table after.

“They’re good,” I said.

She was silent for a moment. “I haven’t got it yet. I have to do this. I want to get it right. Before we go away.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Enough for now,” she said. “Where’s the laptop? I’ve got work to do.”

Even though Augie had called, it was Bert Sanders I phoned when I went to my office.

“God, what’s going on?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

“If I’d found Claire, I’d have called, believe me. Did you find out anything?”

The mayor said no. “Not much, and I don’t know who else to call. Nobody knows where she might have gone, but Dennis’ name came up a few times.”

“Yeah. I went to see his father today. He’s not talking. I’m—”

The call-waiting beeped.

“I have to go,” I told him. “If I hear anything, I’ll call.”

“But—”

“I’ll call.” I hit the button, thinking I might have waited too long, that I’d lost the other caller. “Hello?”

“Jesus, you don’t return messages?”

Augustus Perry.

I said, “You were next on my list.”

“Yeah, sure, I believe you,” Augie said. “I talked to Quinn. Got his ass down here.”

“And?”

“He denies it.”

“Which part?”

“Quinn says he never told officers Brindle and Haines to take your car in.”

“Somebody’s lying,” I said.

“Thank you, Cal,” Augie said. “You’re good at this.”

“Have you talked to Brindle and Haines?”

“Can’t raise either of them. Haines is off sick.”

“So you’ve only talked to Quinn. You believe him?”

Augie hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve never been high on him. Something about the guy. Don’t know what it is. But someone wanted your car brought in. I want to know whose decision it was.”

“It wasn’t touched,” I said. “Everything was in its place.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Looking for Claire.”

Augie grunted. “When you’re talking to Bert, tell him I said he could kiss my ass.”

“You should have called earlier. I just got off the phone with him. You’ll have to call him yourself.”

Augie hung up without saying good-bye.

I sat there, thinking.

Why would someone take my car in if they didn’t want to search it?

Something Tony had said to me at the bar popped into my head.

“The guy in the black pickup. He was keeping an eye on you today. But he’s good. He was able to stay way back where you’d never, ever see him. What’d you do? You tell him where you were going to be?”

I got out of my chair and went back down to the kitchen. Donna looked up from the laptop. “What about walking the Golden Gate Bridge? You up for that?”

I breezed through. “Sure.”

I grabbed my car keys, went outside, hit the button. Interior lights came on as I opened the trunk and all four doors, like I was getting ready to vacuum it. Then I stepped back and stared at the car.

Looking for anything that seemed different.

My sunglasses were still in the storage compartment in front of the console shift. The cord I used to recharge my phone off the cigarette lighter was there. The wig Hanna wore was on the floor of the backseat.

I looked in the trunk. All my stuff appeared to be in order.

I got down on my knees by the right front tire and felt inside the fenders. If someone were going to attach a GPS device, this would be a good spot. It could be fitted with a magnet that would allow someone to reach under and attach it to a car in seconds. I reached into all the wheel wells, felt around.

Nothing.

It would have been easy to slap on a tracking device under a fender without hauling the car into the garage. So maybe one had been tucked away in a much better hiding spot.

Coming up to the open driver’s-side door, I got on my knees and reached in under the seat. I ran my hand over the carpet, then reached up into the springs of the upholstery.

Donna had come outside and was watching me.

“It’s always the last place you look,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What, exactly, did you lose?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I’d gone back to the open trunk. Could someone put a tracking device right into a spare tire? It was tucked away under the trunk floor. I cleared things out of the way enough to lift up the access hatch and get a look at the spare. Without X-ray vision, I really couldn’t tell, but it struck me as unlikely. Suppose I got a flat and had to put on the spare? The tracker would be spun to death. It’d throw the wheel off balance.

I thought about that scene in The French Connection where they dismantled that Lincoln Mark III, searching for heroin, finally finding drugs in the rocker panels that stretched along the frame beneath the doors. (That was the one thing I never figured out in that movie — how they’d put the car back together so quickly, and so perfectly, before they returned it to the unsuspecting Frenchman. Had they replaced the car with an exact duplicate? And if so, how did they get one that fast? And did the NYPD really have the money to buy replacement Lincolns?)

I went around to the open front passenger door, looked at the rocker panel. If someone had ripped out the plastic molding and bored into the metal with a jackhammer, surely there’d be some evidence. I ran my hand along the top and felt nothing out of the ordinary.

Maybe I was being paranoid. I stepped back from the car again and stared. Donna stood and stared as well.

I looked at the wig.

Something about the wig.

When I’d been with Sean, and found it, I’d tossed it onto the backseat of the car. But now the wig was on the floor. Nothing else in the car appeared to have been touched. Of course, the wig could have just fallen off the seat. But it got me thinking that there was another spot worth searching.

I got into the car, tossed the wig to the other side of the center hump, and put my knees on the floor so I could dig my fingers into the crack between the seat and back cushions, like I was looking for lost change in a couch. I moved my fingers across the entire width of the seat and found nothing.

So I reached deeper into the crack with both hands, got hold of the seat cushion from the inside, and tugged. The entire seat tipped forward, revealing the car’s frame and various wires snaking their way back toward the rear taillights.

And something else.

A GPS transmitter, held in place on the frame with a strip of duct tape. I ripped it off, freed the transmitter, and got out of the car holding it delicately in both hands. A small red light pulsed silently at one end.

“What is that?” Donna asked, standing now by the open front door on the passenger side.

“GPS,” I said. “So someone knows where I am at all times. So they don’t have to follow close.”

She blinked. “Who put that in there?”

“That’s a good question,” I said, holding the device and studying it as though it were some ancient artifact.

Donna glanced down at the rocker panel I’d just been investigating. At least that’s what I thought she was looking at. She reached down between the doorsill and the passenger seat, grabbed hold of something, and held it up for me to see.

“You been looking for your phone?” she asked.

I put the GPS device on the roof of the Honda and patted my jacket for my phone. I felt it, but reached in to be sure and withdrew it.

“I have my phone,” I said.

“Well, this isn’t mine,” Donna said.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.