won’t find her alive,” she said.
My tutor was the kindest person I’ve ever known. When I missed my tutorial because I had strep throat, she came to my dormitory, sat down on the bed beside me, and placed her hand on my hot brow.
“The police gave us all the facts about missing people,” she explained. “They said it’s extremely rare that responsible people disappear the way Rachel did, without even taking their purse. But when they do, if they’re not found the same day, they have almost no chance of being found alive. The police said now it’s just a matter of finding her body. They’re about to trawl the river.”
She was right. Rachel’s body was found eighteen days after she first went missing. John, it appeared, had strangled her in a fit of jealous passion. He’d spent hours looking around her house for a place to hide the body. Eventually, he’d found an eight-inch gap at the back of a closet under the stairs crammed with household junk. After emptying the cupboard of its contents, he’d pushed Rachel’s body through the gap into the recess and under the floor. He’d then stretched out on his belly, pushed the dead body in front of him, and pulled himself along through the cavity until he was all the way under the floorboards of Rachel’s bedroom. After eighteen days in this small, hot space, Rachel’s body had partially mummified.
Full urban mummification is not as common as you might think. It requires a particular set of circumstances. Not only does the environment have to be either extremely hot or extremely cold, with low humidity and good ventilation, but also these conditions have to remain stable during the several years it takes for mummification to occur. Urban mummies are formed only when a person dies in a home with the right kind of atmospheric conditions, and only if the death goes undetected for a long time. In one recent case, the mummified bodies of a sixty-three-year-old German woman, her neurologically impaired thirty-four-year-old son, and their German shepherd dog were found preserved in their home in Florida. The cause of death was determined to be an overdose of benzodiazepines. The mother had administered the drugs, dissolved in liquid, first to her son and then to their dog, laying the pair out to die on twin beds beside each other. She left a handwritten note in German, which translated as “God’s perfection now finds expression through my body.” The trio’s mummified cadavers were found four years later. Mother was lying on the kitchen floor, clad in a dressing gown surrounded by insect larva cases, her eyeglasses adjacent to her head, a full brown wig resting gently on her bare skull.
The posters of Rey Rivera multiply. The reward has now been increased to $5,000. Walking down Charles Street in the morning, I point one out to D., who recalls how, as a young boy, he used to hear about men who went out to buy a packet of cigarettes and never came back. They usually turned out to be supporting another family in another town, he tells me. Either that, or they had just walked away from their wife and kids and gone to start life over again in another state. D. says you never hear about men doing that anymore.
I wonder: Why was it always a packet of cigarettes? What if they didn’t smoke?
As soon as you go missing, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, the chances of your survival start to diminish rapidly. Still, there are miraculous exceptions. A small percentage of people who have been missing for years manage to reach out from whatever dark world they now inhabit and leave signs for friends and family to decipher: a garbled, untraceable phone call, a scrawled message on a dollar bill, a note scratched in red nail polish in the restroom of a public eatery. Kidnap victims have been recovered as long as eighteen years after their abduction. Often, they’ve been both here and not here all along, living among us in a locked basement, a converted bomb shelter, a box under someone’s bed.
High-profile missing people are almost always young white women, and on the rare occasions when they’re found, an uneasy feeling seems to be generated around the question of their return. It is almost as if, once people enter the liminal realm of the missing-and-presumed-dead, there’s an unspoken assumption—you might even call it a faith—that they are no longer one of us. Some follow every development in such cases, vowing they’ll never give up hope that missing girls will one day be safely back home with their loved ones. But the same people often express disquiet if, after begging for the public’s help in finding their daughter, sister, or wife, family members suddenly go mute, or request privacy, when the missing woman returns.
When no explanation is offered for a person’s absence, those who have been following the story in the media or online will sometimes feel they have been cheated. In the comments section of newspaper articles and in threads devoted to the case online, there will often be grumbles that the story does not add up, that we are not being given the full picture, that the missing girl might not have been “really” missing but off on a jaunt or drug binge. You will hear the complaint that, since taxpayers’ money has been spent on the search, then we have a right to find out what “really happened.”
In the case of missing women who escape their abductors after having been kept captive for many years, people sometimes believe that anyone who remains so long with her kidnapper must be complicit in her situation, at least to some degree. This incredulity is compounded if it is revealed that, as sometimes happens, the kidnap victim had eventually been allowed to go outside her captor’s house, to do yardwork or accompany him to the grocery store. Our unease and mistrust around the stories of missing people are a defense mechanism that lets us keep the horror at bay; we can reassure ourselves that many missing people aren’t “really” missing, and as for kidnap victims, they must have been weak and gullible enough to fall in love with their captors, something a stable, rational person would surely never do.
Rey Rivera, a freelance video director, is last seen on Tuesday, May 16, 2006, when he’s on a tight deadline. He is working from home, on a quiet street in a middle-class neighborhood. His wife, Allison, a sales executive, is in Richmond, Virginia, on business when Rey goes missing. A work colleague of Allison’s, Claudia, is staying over for a few days.
Around four p.m., according to Claudia, Rey goes into the kitchen and gets himself a snack: a bag of sour cream potato chips and a bottle of sparkling grapefruit juice. Normally, Rey enjoys cooking and is health-conscious, but today he is pressed for time and grabs whatever comes to hand.
Rey is back in his office when Claudia hears his cell phone ring. A very brief conversation follows. She hears him say, “Oh, shit,” and sees him run out the back door as if he is late for an appointment. His office light is still on and his computer running. Then a couple of minutes later he comes back—but just for a moment, as if he has forgotten something. Then he leaves again. He drives off in Allison’s black 2001 Mitsubishi Montero.
At five thirty p.m., Allison calls Rey from Richmond. His phone rings for a while then goes to voicemail. Allison asks him to call back when he has a chance. Before going to bed, around ten p.m., she tries again. Still Rey doesn’t pick up. She calls Claudia, who’s sleeping when the phone rings, to ask whether Rey is home. Claudia says she isn’t sure. “He went out earlier,” she says. She goes to see if he’s back, calling his name, looking in his office and in his bedroom, but there’s no sign of him. Allison apologizes for waking her up and says she’ll try again later.
Rey and Allison Rivera
At five the following morning, Wednesday, May 17, Allison is woken by a call from Claudia. Rey still hasn’t come home. Claudia sounds concerned, but Allison tells her not to worry. At this point, Allison assumes Rey has drunk too much and stayed out all night. After all, she thinks, while the cat’s away . . .
She calls Rey’s phone again. There’s no answer, so she leaves another message asking him to call, then showers, gets dressed, and packs her suitcase. When she calls her husband again and there’s still no response, she starts to realize something must be wrong. Normally, she and Rey talk to each other five or six times a day. It’s not like him to ignore so many calls. But then, Allison does not worry easily. She’s experienced, worldly, and used to dealing with unpredictable situations. At first, she thinks Rey must have left his phone somewhere. She keeps calling. Eventually, her calls go directly to voicemail, which