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 means Rey’s phone battery is dead.
During the drive back to Baltimore, 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
