Free Vanished in the Dunes by Allan Retzky Page A

sort of thing before. Everything they do seems so routine to Henry, yet he lives on the edge for the next several weeks.
    But time does not solve the problem. Eventually he goes back to the police and plays the cell phone message she left. They seem to pass off his original failure to provide the information as jealousy, which it was. He is advised that a detective named Peter Wisdom of the East Hampton Police still has the case file unless for some reason he’d turned it over to the Suffolk County Police Department, which handles major crimes. In this case, at least so far, there is no evidence yet of anything sinister. They tell him that Detective Wisdom has interviewed all the passengers who live in East Hampton who took the same bus as Heidi that morning. They give him Wisdom’s direct number at work.
    He thinks about this for a few more days and then decides to call the Hampton Jitney bus company directly rather than Wisdom. He wants to speak to the same passengers as well as the bus driver, but they deny him access to the lists. They say it’s confidential information. He calls a lawyer he knows from their undergraduate days at Yale. Judah Cohen greets his call with collegial enthusiasm and arranges for an associate to provide him with an insight into the maze of a legal system that has simultaneously become America’s strength and soft spot.
    Several days later he speaks to Detective Wisdom to confirm that he can access the passenger list if he files a Freedom of Information Act request, called a FOIA. Anyone can do it. A citizen can look into reading Nixon’s Watergate notes, the background behind Lyndon Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution, aged FBI files on a relative or friend sucked into the McCarthy Senate hearings, or possibly even certain CIA communications to President Bush about potential problem weapons in Iraq.
    Wisdom is forthcoming. “We prefer that private citizens not get involved, but to be honest, sometimes you people pick up things we miss. If you find out anything unusual, please let me know. Henryreadily agrees to this and also offers to send Wisdom one of the photos of Heidi in the pink-and-white dress.
    The process is not swift, yet moves along. In ten days he has the list of passengers, more due to Detective Wisdom’s intervention than anything else. He recognizes none of the names. People who live in the New York area. Some of them in the town of East Hampton. He makes a copy of the list. He decides to start with the driver, who lives in a small town on the eastern end of Long Island, but the results are spotty.
    â€œI wouldn’t even have remembered her if the police hadn’t asked some questions,” the driver says. “There’s not much I can add to what I told them. I think she spoke to a few people on the bus, but that was when she was getting ready to leave.”
    He doesn’t really expect anything more. The bus driver clearly spent his time looking at the road ahead and not at the passengers seated behind him. There is also a female attendant who left the bus at an earlier stop, but the young woman remembers nothing. Then he searches for the male names on the listing. There are nine of them. The seventh name on the list is a man named Amos Posner in Amagansett. The name means nothing to him.
    He decides to visit the area, books a rental car and a motel room for one night. He opts not to call anyone in advance, but to take his chance that some of the people will be available. Heidi has been gone for nearly six weeks, and there is no word, sign, or evidence that she was ever there. He has paid her rent for the past two months. He learns that her parents in Austria have already been informed of her disappearance by the NYPD, but a short answer in good English says they are not planning to come at this time. A third party signs the reply. The response confuses him. He wonders what kind of people they are, and immediately speculates what kind