Allison calls as many of Rey’s friends and family members as she can get hold of, but she can find no one who has spoken to him in the last two days. At home, she searches the house for anything that might give her a clue. She notices that Rey left his toothbrush behind, and the retainer he wore to straighten his teeth, which makes Allison think he wasn’t originally planning to stay out all night.
After spending Tuesday looking for Rey, talking to his friends, and calling the local hospitals, Allison realizes she needs to file a missing persons report. This report, filed on Wednesday, May 17, 2006, at three p.m., states that Rey Rivera is a thirty-two-year-old Hispanic male, six feet five inches tall, weighing two hundred and sixty pounds. He has a scar on the right side of his face, his teeth are crooked, and he is believed to be wearing thick-rimmed black glasses. He’s taking no medications, has no medical or psychological problems, and has never gone missing before. He’s lived in the city for two years and two months, and he’s registered with a dentist but not with a doctor. Allison doesn’t know his blood type.
If the FBI gets involved with a missing persons case, it’s because the individual is obviously endangered, and the disappearance clearly involuntary. The majority of these “severe and urgent” cases involve young children. But in ordinary busy police departments, where budgets are limited and resources spread thin, missing persons cases are a low priority. This is because the vast majority of such cases turn out to have nothing to do with law enforcement.
The missing people turn out to be travelers who return home later than planned, or seniors with dementia who’ve wandered off; they may have stormed out after an argument, or not returned home after a drink or drug binge. And, of course, a number of people “go missing” by choice, skipping town deliberately to escape bad debts, an unhappy marriage, or a web of lies that’s starting to come undone. Perhaps the police assume Rivera is someone like this. No crime has been committed; somebody’s husband hasn’t come home. No doubt the cops assume the couple are involved in some kind of domestic dispute, especially since Rey’s wife is out of town and there is another woman staying in their home.
When I first read about the case, I have to confess, I, too, blithely assumed that “female houseguest” implied “cheating husband.” But after Tuesday, May 16, Claudia exits stage left, leaving an empty space where she once stood. She is merely an extra in the plot.
The days pass. There is no sign of either Rey Rivera or his wife’s SUV. There’s been no new activity on his cell phone. As word of his disappearance spreads, friends and family members arrive to help with the search. His brother, mother, and sister come to town from Florida; Allison’s parents arrive from Colorado. Everybody says that for Rey to disappear without a word is completely out of character. They all say he’s the kind of man who will tell you not only where he’s going, but why, and for how long, and exactly when he’ll be back.
The case is still not high priority, but it is not low priority, either. The fact that so many people turn up to help gives it significance. The subjects of low-priority missing persons cases have no friends or family to put the pressure on: they may be transients, shut-ins, or senile elders with no living relatives. They may be people with high-risk lifestyles—drug addicts, alcoholics, illegal immigrants, exinmates, sex workers, heavy gamblers—or who have disappeared before, especially if they suffer from mental illness.
Sometimes, when people go missing, friends and family discover they have a secret life. They may turn out to have been involved in complicated relationships or to have been hiding addictions, debts, diseases, pregnancies, or problems with the law. But nothing like this seems to be true of Rey Rivera. Everything points to the fact that he is exactly what he appears to be: an upstanding citizen. He is a married homeowner with a steady job, a stable mind, a substantial income, and a close network of supportive friends. No skeletons emerge from any closets. Still, this is not enough to spur the police into action. For that, the case has to involve concrete evidence of foul play.
I hear nothing more about Rivera until the following Tuesday, May 23, 2006, when, suddenly, his name is all over the news. His wife’s car has been found. That afternoon, Rey’s in-laws had decided to recheck some of the parking lots close to his former place of employment. The first lot they visit is on St. Paul Street, four or five blocks from the brownstone in the Mount Vernon neighborhood where Rivera used to work. Here, they find their daughter’s black Montero, undamaged. The lot attendant, who’d gone home at six the evening before, did not recall the Montero entering the lot, but he’d seen the car—had given it a parking ticket, in fact— on the morning of Wednesday, May 17, almost a week ago.
Has the Montero been parked there for six days, right in the middle of the very neighborhood that is being searched so carefully by Rey’s friends and family? On either side of the parking lot, the streets are still plastered with missing posters. But the posters show a photograph of Rey Rivera, not of a Mitsubishi Montero. The vehicle could easily have been overlooked while in plain sight, like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same name. Poe’s detective, Auguste Dupin, the connoisseur of the obvious, sees what the police have overlooked precisely because it is right in front of their eyes.
As soon as she recognizes the vehicle, Allison’s mother calls her daughter; then she phones the police, who say they’ll have to impound the car and then bring Allison and her parents in to headquarters for questioning. When Allison gets the call from her mother, she’s just gotten out of the shower and goes into a state of panic, grabbing the first items of clothing she sees. She asks a friend to take her to the parking lot, as she is in no state to drive, and gets into her friend’s car wearing a tank top, cutoff jean shorts, and no shoes. Her hair is still wet. At police headquarters, Detective James Mingle of the Missing Persons Unit interviews her for more than eight hours. Television trucks are on hand to cover the story. Now that the car has been found, the case has become high priority.
When it comes to missing people, the first day or two after they have gone, it is as though they have left a door open behind them, and they can still turn around and come back. But after five or six days, you get the sense they have crossed all the way over. All that remains, if you’re lucky, is a vague glimpse, caught on tape somewhere, of a pixelated ghost.
When I was at college, I answered an advertisement on a university notice board placed by a retired psychoanalyst offering treatment free of charge. Dr. B. was a tall, elderly, white-haired gentleman with time on his hands. He always wore sweaters or cardigans with house slippers. He’d decided to continue to treat one or two students who would not normally be able to afford his fees. I saw him twice a week for two years.
I sought help from Dr. B. because I’d started to feel invisible. Other people didn’t seem to notice me, or, if they did, they didn’t remember me when they saw me again. I’d talk to someone in a bar or coffee shop, eat lunch with them on the library steps; then a week later they’d sit next to me in a lecture and ignore me, or walk past me in the street without a glimmer of recognition. I didn’t seem to be even slightly familiar to them. I appeared to be completely forgettable. To make matters worse, I’ve been cursed with an infallible memory for faces and names. For someone so easily forgotten, this is not an enviable gift. It makes me feel even more invisible.
One day, during our session, Dr. B. seemed to suddenly grow impatient. He told me that my analysis was going nowhere. I was too inhibited, he said.
He told me I was like a snail whose antennae were attuned to pick up the interest and attention of others, and when I sensed none, I immediately withdrew. I could tell at once when people didn’t register my presence. Dr. B. said that I suffered from “paranoia with a minus sign.” Instead of believing that everyone was plotting against me, I felt that nobody ever paid the least bit of attention to me at all.
He told me I had to overcome this problem. Fortunately, he said, he knew a technique that often worked in such cases.
“Close your eyes,” he said, cracking his knuckles.
I heard him moving his chair closer to the head of the couch. Then he placed one finger gently between my eyebrows and began slowly running his fingertip down the length of my nose. I could feel his hot breath on my face. He repeated the action five times before I asked him to stop. I told him it was