Back at the turret, I logged on to Google, the electronic nose. I expected to learn nothing of the disguised woman who’d just hired me and wasn’t disappointed. Google reported that Rosamund Reynolds didn’t exist. That was acceptable for the time being; her cashier’s check was existence enough for me for now.
I then Internetted west to Tucson, Arizona. Gary Halvorson was the first name on the list. Satellite photos showed his address to be a small, white stucco ranch in south Tucson but the county assessor’s website listed someone else as owning it. Halvorson was renting the place.
He had no other online mentions. Living under such relentless, giant magnifiers as Google means that making a donation, coaching a kid’s team, signing a petition or simply owning a landline phone gets us posted onto the Web permanently. Even the most careful of recluses gets tagged for something.
Not Gary Halvorson of Tucson. He’d escaped notice completely, perhaps striving for the same anonymity as Rosamund Reynolds. I wondered how she’d found him when I couldn’t.
I had better luck, of a sort, with the second name on the list. David Arlin of Laguna Beach was divorced, had owned a kitchen hardware wholesaler and lived in a four-million-dollar home set on a hill. In dozens of pictures taken at business gatherings and local charitable events he looked to be about forty, with hair so black it might have been dyed, and he had a good tan. He’d not worked at all on becoming invisible.
Except now he was dead. His house had blown up, with him in it, just four days earlier.
I creaked back in the tired red vinyl chair I’d found in an alley. Unlike Halvorson, Arlin was out there, Internet-wise. He’d been involved in his community, visible. And now he was dead. Surely Rosamund Reynolds had known that, yet she’d instructed me to check him out anyway. I doubted I could learn much of anything in the short period of time she wanted.
The last man on the list was Dainsto Runney. As with Arlin, the Internet offered up immediate results. He lived in something called The Church of the Reawakened Spirit, a nondenominational organization in Reeder, a small town along the Oregon coast. There were two pictures of him on the Internet, both taken about twenty years ago, which meant he was about the same age as the late David Arlin.
The first picture showed a short fellow with a pale face pocked by long-ago skirmishes with acne. He was dressed in a red vest and a straw hat and was standing cocked in a song-and-dance man’s pose, a preacher trying too hard to be cool.
The second photo was taken from a greater distance and was even more comical. He was dressed in a flowing white robe, holding his arms outstretched as he blessed, or beseeched, a group of cyclists racing for some charity. Nobody was paying attention to him: not the racers, not the bystanders. He looked like a fool begging for attention.
Rosamund Reynolds had hired me to check out three men. One was invisible, one was dead and one was a preacher in a get-right, private church. They seemed an odd sort of trio for a secretive woman to be interested in.
My phone rang. ‘Anticipating heat?’ Amanda, my ex-wife, asked, though the ‘ex’ part, blessedly, seemed to be diminishing.
‘And, perhaps, even an expensive, programmable thermostat. I’m employed again.’
She laughed. ‘You already told me: Bipsies.’
‘A second client,’ I said. ‘A woman who gave me a fake name. She wants me to head west to Arizona, California and Oregon to chase down three men. One has no Internet presence at all, another just got himself blown up and the third is a preacher in an oddball church who enjoys acting like a jackass.’
‘Sounds like a match to your skill set. Lucrative?’ asked one of Chicago’s richest women.
‘Two grand retainer and another two when I finish the job,’ I said, wishing I were with her so I could pirouette.
‘Huge, indeed.’ Then she said, ‘I have to cancel tonight.’
We were treading cautiously, focusing on our friendship. Careful dinners, only once a week and only in restaurants that had no past romantic associations for us was part of that.
‘Business intrudes?’ I asked, trying not to sound tensed for any worrisome inference in her words.
‘Even worse. Politics. I’ve inherited too many of my father’s friends in the Democratic Party. The elections are less than a month out and nervousness prevails. They’ve called another advisory meeting. We get a make-up dinner or two next week?’
It was a relief. I told her I’d call her from out west, set out my new package of Flintstones bandages and went back to slicing my fingers on tinwork.