Chapter 6
CINDY THOMAS MADE sure to get to the restaurant early. She’d considered bringing another person from the Chronicle to join them but hadn’t seen anyone else at the office she wanted involved in the story. Not even tangentially.
She grabbed a table directly in the line of sight of the cashier. The place was well lit and relatively crowded. A few minutes before noon, Eric Snaff stepped through the front door of the Shake Shack. He glanced around the restaurant, looking for Cindy.
He really is extremely good looking. She noticed a woman do a double take, then stare for a moment. Everyone thought they were surreptitious when they did things like that. There was always someone watching.
Cindy had briefly thought about calling Lindsay to come sit with her when she met with Eric but never even considered asking her husband. Rich was a wonderful man, whom she loved. But no one would intimidate a potential story source like Eric Snaff more than Rich.
Eric saw Cindy, nodded, and headed her way.
Cindy felt a little awkward as he sat down across from her. She didn’t want to spend the whole day here with him, so she got right to the point. “Okay, Eric, what do you have for me?”
“Well, I live in San Julio, near Walnut Creek and a little east of Orinda.”
“I know the area.” Cindy didn’t tell him she already knew a lot of his backstory. She thought of it as “pre-verifying” his comments.
“My daughter, Nicole, is seventeen. She’s a senior in high school.” He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “As I told you last night, she disappeared about three months ago. But she’s not the only one.”
“You have my attention.”
“Just in our little area, three teenage girls are missing, counting my Nicole. The other two girls are Carly Nash and Katie Dharma. They both had been in court-ordered rehab. Carly was in the youth center where I work, but I only met her one time. Katie goes to my daughter’s high school, but they’re not in the same grade. ”
Cindy opened the little notepad she carried around with her and wrote down the names of the three girls.
“Is your daughter, Nicole, troubled in any way?” she asked Eric. She could tell by the long hesitation what the answer would be. She waited patiently until Eric’s eyes met hers.
Finally, he nodded. Then he said, “After her mother left, Nicole and I felt like we could conquer the world together. But as she got older, she grew more distant. At first I just attributed it to the typical teenage attitude. Then she started to stay out all night. Sometimes even a couple of days at a time. Anytime I tried to ask what was going on, she accused me of prying or being overprotective. You know how kids can be.”
Cindy only sort of knew how kids could be. But she felt her heart break a little bit. This man was clearly in anguish.
Cindy said, “What do the San Julio police say?”
“Not much. That’s why I’m coming to you. The police don’t want to hear conspiracy theories about missing girls. They want to clear cases, not create them.”
Cindy said, “Let me look into this a little more. I’ll get back to you early next week.” She didn’t know what she would find, but she couldn’t ignore this either.