Gone The Next

by Ben Rehder

  “Just let it keep playing?” Mia asked.

  “Yeah. Let’s see if she gives us a better view of her face.”

  The woman continued talking for quite some time, and now she was getting quite animated, gesturing toward the dryer on the other side of the gate.

  “There’s a goddamn dryer blocking the way,” Mia said, using a high-pitched cartoon voice as she guessed what the brown-haired woman was saying. “Yes, a goddamn dryer. It’s sitting right in the goddamn middle of the goddamn driveway.”

  I was becoming happier every minute that I had come up with this partnership idea.

  After a little more conversation, the woman snapped her phone shut and leaned against the fender of her car, waiting, and giving us a good look at her face.

  “Let’s pause it right there,” I said.

  Mia complied, and I explained how to forward or reverse the video one frame at a time, so we could choose the best possible frame. Then I showed her how to save a still shot, and how to crop it as needed. Now we had a better photo of the woman’s face than the one I’d gotten when she’d arrived on Friday.

  “Okay, let it roll and let’s see what happens.”

  The woman remained against the fender for about one minute, then she looked to her left, which was our right, and she behaved as if someone was coming from the house. She came off the fender and waited.

  Sure enough, here came a man, not wasting any time, walking right past the woman, who followed him to the gate. The man was average height, sort of burly, with black hair and a full beard, closely trimmed. Nothing special about him. Middle-aged, maybe mid-forties. I was trying to decide whether the voice of The Guy matched up with this man. Maybe.

  He unlocked the gate and swung it open enough that he could slip through. Then he walked over to the dryer. Gave it a test push, as if checking to see that it really was just a dryer. Not a Trojan Horse or a nuclear warhead. He opened the dryer door and looked inside. Nothing in there, of course. Then he shoved the dryer out of the driveway, so traffic could pass. At one point, he was more or less facing the camera head-on, so I asked Mia to save a still shot of his face.

  After he moved the dryer, the woman, who had been watching from the other side of the gate, said something. He gave a shrug and a brief reply. Then the woman walked out of the frame, evidently to get into her car. The man went to the gate and swung it all the way open, and the Jetta passed through. The man closed the gate, chained it, and locked it. Then he walked out of the frame, back toward the house. Half a minute later, the camera turned itself off.

  The next action took place nearly four hours later. At that point, the front end of a white Ford F-150 — Pierce’s truck — appeared from the right. Then the man with the beard walked into the frame. He opened the gate, drove through, and left in the truck. Apparently, he was only turning around, because he came right back twenty seconds later. He pulled halfway through the open gate, then stopped, just past the dryer. Then he hopped out and managed to wrestle the dryer into the back of the truck.

  “Must be a pretty strong guy,” Mia said.

  “Well, dryers aren’t really that heavy,” I said.

  The man got back into the truck and pulled all the way through, stopped, locked the gate, then drove away with the dryer, heading toward Pierce’s house. I said, “I can see as how you’d think this is super-exciting.”

  “Beats serving pitchers to drunks who want to bitch about their ex-wives.”

  The last action captured on video was from the previous evening. Of course it was. That’s when I went to retrieve the camera and it didn’t end well. I knew the video wouldn’t show much, because, for obvious reasons, it doesn’t have a flash. It works okay in low-light conditions, but there comes a point when it’s just shooting darkness, more or less.

  In this case, when the video began to play, you could tell that something was happening, and that someone was using a flashlight, but that was about it. The light was coming closer and closer to the camera, and then the light dropped to the ground, illuminating the grasses surrounding it.

  “And that’s when I got ambushed by a gutless coward.”

  Mia didn’t say anything.

  “He sucker-punched me,” I said. “Or maybe I should say ‘sucker-Tasered.’”

  No reply.

  “Not a fair fight,” I said.

  “Don’t get mad,” she finally said. “Get even.”

  25

  We took a break for lunch, and then I told Mia about my fictitious Linda Peterson Facebook account and asked her to log in to it.

  Mia was shaking her head as she tapped the keys. “You are one devious bastard. You friended Pierce?”

  “But of course.”

  “And he was dumb enough to accept?”

  “Hey, Linda’s a hottie. It’s hard to resist her feminine wiles. She also looks marvelous in a swimsuit. She’s no Mia Madison, of course.”

  “I never accept requests from strangers.”

  “You might if Robert Tyler sent you one. He has the chiseled good looks of Matthew McConaughey, without that look of smug self-satisfaction on his face.”

  “That actually works? Women fall for it?”

  “Well, sometimes. Admittedly, men are much less discriminating online.”

  “And everywhere else.”

  “Point taken.”

  Mia had clicked on Linda Peterson’s friends list and was scrolling downward.

  I said, “We’ll go to Pierce’s photos and compare the Jetta woman to some of his friends. I narrowed it down the other day. I’m pretty sure there are four candidates. Maybe you can help me pick a winner. Or maybe she isn’t on there at all.”

  “Fine, but...he’s not here.”

  And he wasn’t. Brian Pierce no longer appeared on Linda Peterson’s friends list.

  Mia laughed. “Dude, I think you’ve been busted.”

  “Well, crap. Go up to the search bar and let’s see if we can find him that way.”

  She did. A lot of Brian Pierces showed up in the results, but not the one we were looking for.

  I said, “That means he not only unfriended me, he might’ve blocked me.”

  “Hold on,” Mia said. She logged out, then logged in to her own account. She searched again for Brian Pierce — and there he was, confirming that he had blocked me, or rather Linda Peterson.

  “Damn it,” I said.

  “Should I send him a friend request?”

  “I don’t think so. Not right now. He might figure out that you’re connected to me.”

  “How?”

  “Because you have all those photos of me in your albums. Typical obsessed female.”

  She elbowed me. “I think I have three photos of you.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, let’s not. I can’t think of anything to gain by risking it. I could try sending a request from Robert Tyler, but I think we should hold off on that, too, until we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “Isn’t this pretty good proof that the guy who Tasered you is working for Pierce? He caught you watching Pierce, so now Pierce is suspicious about everything, including new Facebook friends?”

  “Maybe, but it could also be that Pierce accepted the friend request, then checked out Linda Peterson’s page and decided he didn’t know her, or that she’d mistaken him for another Brian Pierce. Either way, it seems like something is going on with Pierce.”

  “But what?”

  “No idea. Luckily, when I sorted through Pierce’s friends list the other day, I screen-captured the profiles of the four women who sort of look like the woman in the Jetta.”

  I directed Mia toward the folder containing the profiles, and she opened them, one at a time, and compared them to the photo of the woman in the Jetta.

  “Definitely not her,” she said immediately about the first one.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Cheekbones are totally different. And the eyebrows.”

  She moved on to the second one. “No. This wom
an has a much higher forehead.”

  She opened the third one. “For god’s sake, Roy, are you kidding me? This woman looks nothing like the Jetta girl.”

  “Well, if you squint...”

  “Not even a little bit. For starters, this woman looks Hispanic. The woman in the Jetta is about as Caucasian as you get. Very fair-skinned.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  That left one remaining photo. Mia opened it and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then, “Yep. This is her.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely. See the shape of the eyes? And the nose? Plus, look at that mole on her chin. Same on both photos. Didn’t you notice that? It’s pretty big.”

  “Uh...”

  “She has a different hairstyle now, but it’s her.”

  “Erica Kerwick,” I said. “Let’s check her out.”

  Mia found the woman’s Facebook profile, but her privacy settings were tight. She lived in Austin and was born on February 17, and that was about all we could see of her profile. We couldn’t view her wall, her photos, or her friends list.

  But here’s the thing many people don’t understand or simply forget about Facebook: The privacy settings you place on your own wall don’t apply to your posts elsewhere on the site. So if you make a comment on someone else’s wall, and that person has looser privacy settings than you do, your comment is visible to more people than you might like. If your privacy settings are “Friends Only,” but you post a wild party photo on the wall of someone whose privacy settings are “Everyone,” the photo can be seen by anyone with a Facebook account.

  Which often makes it a lot easier to poke around and learn things about people like Erica Kerwick.

  “Go to Google,” I said. “Now click on that little gear thingy in the upper right. Okay, select ‘advanced search.’ Where it says ‘this exact wording or phrase,’ put ‘Erica Kerwick.’ Now, down lower, limit the search to Facebook dot com.”

  “I didn’t know you could do this,” Mia said, typing away.

  “Yeah, and the good news is, I doubt there’s another Erica Kerwick on Facebook, so we won’t have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant junk. It’s always easier when the person has an uncommon name.”

  Mia hit return and we got hundreds of results. Apparently, Erica Kerwick was quite the busy little Facebook user, and lucky for us, she had some friends whose privacy settings allowed us to see their Facebook content.

  One comment from Erica Kerwick said: Happy birthday, Jane. Wow, you are still so gorgeous! Let’s catch up the next time you’re back in town!

  Another comment, on a page started by a new restaurant: The chiles rellenos were outstanding. Can I get the recipe for the salsa!? ;)

  On another friend’s wall, in a thread about some B-list celebrity I had never heard of, Erica Kerwick had written: That outfit was ridiculous. Doesn’t she have a wardrobe person that’s supposed to warn her against wearing anything that ugly?

  There were dozens of other comments like that. Tedious. Mundane. Boring. Trivial. Useless. That’s how it goes.

  And then, if you’re damned lucky, out of the blue, with no real skill on your part, you hit paydirt. You see something so unexpected that it takes a moment to even comprehend what you’ve just learned. That’s what happened now.

  Erica Kerwick had left a comment under the status update of a young man who had recently graduated from high school. The graduation part was obvious, because the kid was wearing a cap and gown in his profile photo, and because he had said, ‘Done with high school!’ So you can understand how I pieced it together.

  The comment from Erica Kerwick read: I am so proud of you! We all love you and know you have a bright future ahead! xoxo Aunt Erica

  But it wasn’t the outfit or the comment that caught our attention. It was the kid’s name.

  Curtis Hanrahan.

  26

  “Wow,” said Mia.

  “Yep.”

  “She’s related to a kid named Hanrahan. No way that’s a coincidence.”

  “Absolutely not.” I could feel my pulse beginning to pick up speed. This was big news.

  Mia said, “So, what, is she Patrick Hanrahan’s sister? Kerwick is a married name?”

  “I don’t know. Could be Kathleen Hanrahan’s sister.”

  “Or, if either of them — Patrick or Kathleen — has a brother, Erica Kerwick could be married to him.”

  I said, “If she was married to Patrick’s brother, her last name would be Hanrahan. Assuming he doesn’t have a half-brother.”

  “Or unless she kept her maiden name.”

  “Right.”

  “Does it really matter?” Mia said. “We know it has to be one of the above.”

  “True, but it’s always nice to have all the facts when you can. Let’s check the kid’s wall.”

  “It’s called a timeline now.”

  “Whatever.”

  The kid — Curtis Hanrahan — had created a “Family” section on his wall. A lot of people don’t bother with this feature, but some do, and it can be useful.

  Mia said, “The kid doesn’t list any uncles with the last name of Hanrahan. Or any uncles at all, for that matter. And no other Kerwicks at all.”

  “Could mean nothing more than they aren’t on Facebook. It appears neither Patrick or Kathleen has an account, or they’ve set them to be unavailable to the general public.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I know you can fix it so you don’t show up in results for Google and other search engines.”

  “But can you set it so you don’t show up in Facebook search results?”

  “I think so.”

  We explored the Help section of Facebook for about ten minutes, trying to answer this question, but it wasn’t as easy to find the information as it should have been.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s just assume I’m right — ”

  “Big mistake — ”

  “Smartass. And go back to Curtis Hanrahan’s profile. I just want to confirm that he’s related to Patrick and Kathleen Hanrahan, and if we learn how Erica Kerwick is related to them, too, that’ll be a bonus. We just need to make that connection, that’s all. Verify that the kid having the last name of ‘Hanrahan’ isn’t the most unlikely coincidence either of us has ever experienced.”

  Mia had bookmarked Curtis Hanrahan’s page, so it took just one click to return to it. She said, “Seems like the easiest thing to do is just check all his relatives, one by one, and see what we can learn. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  There were about twenty family members listed, with many of them identified as cousins, and those cousins all looked to be close to Curtis Hanrahan’s age. Youngish people, anyway, rather than a generation older. Seeing a list of relatives like this made you realize how many different surnames one family might have.

  “I’ll start with the middle-aged people,” Mia said.

  “Good idea.”

  She clicked on the first middle-aged person listed: Craig Marks, an uncle. He didn’t have a Family section, so Mia went straight to Craig’s photos, which is what I would have done. Craig had plenty of albums to sort through, but he was one of those people who, when he was uploading a collection of photos all at once, simply let the date serve as the name for the album. But first in the list of albums was Craig’s past and present profile photos, which Mia skipped, clicking instead on Craig’s album called “Wall Photos.”

  “See, they’re still calling it a ‘wall,’” I said.

  She gave me a dismissive snort as the album opened into a page full of thumbnail photos. Lots of people at parties and eating in restaurants. At the lake. Dogs. Children. Somebody had bought an expensive-looking sports car. Nothing helpful. Mia scrolled downward. There were literally hundreds of thumbnails on the page. Craig liked his camera. Liked snapping photos of just about anything.

  “Here we go,” Mia said.

  She was right. We’d just reached a photo of yet another gathering
of some sort. A backyard, near a pool. Group shot. Everybody smiling.

  There was Craig.

  There was Erica Kerwick.

  There was Kathleen Hanrahan.

  The caption read: Pat and Kathleen’s place in South Padre.

  “Bingo,” I said.

  “Really? That’s what you say in these situations? Bingo? I always wondered.”

  “Save that photo,” I said.

  She dragged it to the desktop, creating a copy.

  We kept going and found Kathleen Hanrahan in several other photos, and we eventually found Patrick Hanrahan in a couple, all taken in or around a nice beachfront home. We didn’t ascertain how everyone was related, but that probably wasn’t too important. Right now, it was enough to know that the Hanrahans knew Erica Kerwick, and obviously Erica Kerwick knew Brian Pierce.

  And I was back on the see-saw, convinced once again that I had in fact seen Tracy Turner at Pierce’s house five days ago. Hell, at this point, it was virtually undeniable. But it felt great. Honestly, I was totally buzzing with vindication.

  “What are you thinking?” Mia asked.

  “There aren’t many possibilities. First theory that pops into my head is that Erica Kerwick and Brian Pierce kidnapped Tracy Turner and they will eventually ask for ransom.”

  “But wait — how would that work? Later, when they released Tracy, wouldn’t she identify Erica Kerwick as one of the kidnappers?”

  “That’s assuming they are going to release her.”

  “Oh, man I don’t even want to think about that.”

  “Or they aren’t letting Tracy see her aunt, so she can’t identify her.”

  “But they are letting her see Pierce.”

  “Evidently.”

  “It just seems so cold-hearted. One of Hanrahan’s own relatives kidnapped his daughter?”

  “It happens. Desperate people do desperate things.”