The Last Good Guy

5

Alchemy 101 was in a strip mall in Oceanside on the inland side of Interstate 5. Oceanside is home to some one hundred and seventy thousand souls: Anglos, Hispanics, African Americans, Luiseño Indians, Asians, Pacific Islanders. Marines, ex-Marines, and veterans of all the branches. Surfers, anglers, motorcyclists, and a diverse beach-hugging citizenry too quirky to categorize. There’s the California Surf Museum, the Oceanside Museum of Art, a good public library, and the Supergirl Pro Jam — the largest women’s surf competition in the world. Oceanside is not one of your plush Southern California beach towns. Not enough mansions or gated neighborhoods. More woodies than Teslas, more wheelchairs than Segways. It’s got street cred.

It was early evening by then, the western sky hanging orange and blue beyond the power poles. Alchemy 101 was in the middle of the mall, flanked by Reptile Republic and Blondie’s Scooters. The mall’s anchor store was a Dollar Tree. I noted Coast Donut, Discount Military, and Frank’s Surf Shop.

Alchemy 101 had a neon Celtic-script sign in the entrance alcove and densely smoked windows. The sign was on, throwing its hot red letters against the darkened glass. At the booth I paid my ten bucks, got my right tamped with a red A. The sign said teens paid five. The cashier was a pleasant girl with pink hair and steel studs embedded the length of her right eyebrow who said, “Welcome to Alchemy 101, man.”

I noted a ticket-booth decal saying that these premises were protected by SNR Security. The company graphic was a round blue emblem with an eagle gripping lightning bolts in its talons.

Interesting.

Inside, Alchemy 101 was larger than I’d expected. Well lit, the smells of incense and coffee. A stage at the far end, a dance floor, and booths along two walls. A snack bar and kitchen, and one entire wall of screens playing music videos, old TV shows, and what appeared to be Thoroughbred horse races from around the world.

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 actual: 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.

A family portrait taken just months before their deaths showed two wholesome, still-young parents and their two daughters, a teenager and a four-year old. They all looked loved. Mom and girls were conspicuously radiant.

However, I did have some questions for my employer — older sister Penelope — who was claiming to have married a man who didn’t seem to have a history. None at all. And I had other questions for her little sister, Daley, who had just yesterday been seen willingly getting into a car with probable murderers and had not been home since. I looked at that family portrait again. A tingle came from the scar on my forehead — an old boxing injury that acts up from time to time. Sometimes a tingle, sometimes a chill, sometimes an itch or a burn. An expressive scar with a mind of its own. Always trying to tell me something. I wondered what.

An Internet search told me that SNR Security was a privately held, San Diego — based company now two years old, specializing in “Armed and Unarmed Personal, Workplace, and Job Site Protection.” SNR Security was a member of the Better Business Bureau and the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and endorsed by the Southern California Christian Business Association. I found two workplace racial discrimination suits, both dropped. No other complaints, controversies, or litigations involving the company.

I watched the young dancers, enjoyed the music. I might have been in a place like this twenty-something years ago. Partying like it was 1999. Even back then I liked to dance. A large but not completely graceless young man. I was twenty years old that year. Two years through a San Diego State University degree in history. I surfed and fished and had a steady girlfriend. Why history? Because when I read the papers and watched the news I couldn’t make any sense of the world at all. Figured I needed some background. Soon as I had gotten a little, I joined the Marines and stepped from the pages of history into history itself. Fallujah. Where so much went wrong.

Alone there in Alchemy 101, I let the hours set their own pace. We widowers learn to do that. I scanned the newspaper on my smartphone. Nations rising and nations falling. Find the nuke. Our great American divide. The scandal du jour. All the heat and so little light.

Dinner was good, soup and a sandwich. I watched the customers on their way into the club. At 9:04 p.m. a silver Expedition SUV pulled into the handicap-only space out front, not ten feet from where I sat. The emblem on the door said SNR Security, and showed an eagle holding two lightning bolts. The driver got out, locked up, and knocked on the glass of the ticket-seller’s booth, smiling at her on his way past. When he came inside I saw a sturdy guy, thirty or so, dressed in slacks and duty boots and a dark blue uniform blouse with a badge on it. A Sam Browne belt with Mace and a flashlight attached, no sidearm. He moved through the crowd to the coffee bar and started talking to the barista.

He accepted his drink in a to-go cup but didn’t pay for it. He sipped it and slowly worked his way between the dancers and the standing audience, all the way along the full-wall video screen, which was now showing a hugely magnified, real-time Tin Lenses. The guard slipped backstage through a black curtain.

The orange-haloed girl in the singlet and shorts was giving the song her all. Boots planted, arms out, swaying in rhythm. The bass player watched her closely, his fingers tied to her movements as firmly as a puppeteers’. Through the amplified music, her voice rang clear and true.

Ten minutes later, the security man came back through the black curtain, sipping his coffee, making his way toward the exit. I bellied up to the bar and bought a double espresso in a to-go cup, timing my return trip for a brush with the guard. He bumped past me, raising his cup to Dreadlocks as his badge glimmered in the brightly flashing strobe lights: Adam Revell.

I spotted him a few steps, then hooked around and followed him out. Gave him my back as I walked to my truck, digging the fob out of my pocket. Casual PI Ford, in no hurry and happily careless in the world. I saw Adam Revell behind me, reflected in my window, standing on the running board of the Expedition and waving goodbye to the ticket-seller in the glass booth.