Vanished (15 page)

38.

I
suppose I could have asked someone at Stoddard Associates to run the plates for me, but I knew that Virginia’s motor-vehicle records weren’t online—some ridiculous state law—and I didn’t want to call in any favors at work that I didn’t have to. Not with Stoddard keeping an eye on what I was doing.

But Arthur Garvin was only too happy to run a trace: This was a serious break on a case that had been confounding him. As I walked back to my car, I read off the number and told him that as soon as I got back to the office, I’d e-mail him some of the video-frame captures of the thug who’d grabbed Roger. He warned me it might take him a day or two, but he promised he’d get the information for me.

My cell phone gave off four beeps, and, as I stood next to the Defender, I checked the text message. Another location report from the GPS tracker in the FedEx envelope.

By then it was in Falls Church, Virginia. About six or seven miles from the drop site in Arlington. An address on Leesburg Pike.

That meant that the package had been moved. Someone had picked it up and was delivering it somewhere else.

I found myself juggling the cell phone and the BlackBerry, which I never liked using as a cell phone, and the DVD copy of Mr. Younis’s surveillance tape, in an old cracked CD jewel case he had lying around. I arrayed them before me on the hood of the Defender, my mobile office.

When I clicked on Google Earth and zoomed in on the flashing red dot on my BlackBerry screen, I could see it was some big V-shaped office building.

Success. Maybe. But at least I knew that someone had picked up the FedEx package and moved it from the mail drop to an office building in Falls Church, and that was something. Or it might turn out to be nothing. I wouldn’t know until I drove out there and took a look. I pocketed the BlackBerry and cell phone and fished out my car key, the DVD in my left hand.

The Defender is as nonautomatic a vehicle as you can get: even the windows crank by hand. No remote starter; no keyless entry. You open it with a good old-fashioned key just like they did a century ago. I inserted the key in the lock and turned it—

And heard the scrape against the pavement an instant too late.

I turned slowly, but suddenly the car window came at me, smashing into my nose and mouth.

While, at the same time, the DVD was wrenched out of my left hand.

Reeling in pain, I spun, hands out, unsteady on my feet. Miraculously, the window glass hadn’t broken, but it felt like maybe my nose had.

Enraged, I took off after my assailant, who was already quite a distance away. A black Humvee came hurtling down the street and slowed for a second. Its passenger-side door came open, and the guy took a running leap into the vehicle.

Once I caught a glimpse of its license plate, I knew it was the same Humvee that had passed me twice before. I’m not the fastest runner, but fueled by adrenaline and considerable anger, I was able to get close enough to the Humvee to thump an angry fist against its left rear quarter panel before it disappeared down the street.

My attacker had been unusually tall, with a steroid-poisoned wrestler’s build and what looked at a distance to be a high-and-tight jarhead recon haircut—shaven everywhere except the crown of his head, like a short Mohawk. He looked like an overweight Travis Bickle.

I felt along the bridge of my nose. It wasn’t broken. No broken teeth either, though my upper lip was bleeding. I felt and tasted the blood.

I took out my cell phone and hit redial, and when Garvin answered I said, “I have one more license plate for you.”

39.

T
he Dean & Deluca’s on M Street in Georgetown sold excellent fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies. I bought a dozen and asked the bakery clerk to pack them for me in a plain white deli box. I placed the box of cookies on the car seat next to me and got onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The entire interior of the car at once filled with the sweet buttery smell of freshly baked cookies.

About half an hour later I turned off Leesburg Pike into a semicircular drive in front of a modern ten-story office building built in the shape of a broad V, with a blue glass skin that mirrored the sky so perfectly it seemed at times to disappear.

The name on the front of the building was Skyview Executive Center. It appeared to be a multitenant office building. Like a lot of commercial buildings in Tysons Corner and Falls Church, there was an underground parking garage. Instead, I parked in the Doubletree Hotel down the block and walked over with my box of cookies.

I hadn’t gotten any text messages from the GPS tracker in a while, so as I walked I took out my phone and opened the last message I’d received, then clicked on the map. The red dot was gone. That told me that the device had stopped transmitting. Which presumably meant that it had been discovered, then disabled.

I entered the lobby and spent a few minutes inspecting the building directory, one of those big black wall signs with white letters, rear-illuminated. A long list of tenants. Mostly small to midsize firms: healthcare consultants, investment managers, accountants, a lot of lawyers. A couple of government-agency satellite offices. A number of companies with cryptic-sounding names like Aegis Partners and Orion Strategy, which were either lobbyists or defense contractors.

But no Traverse Development. Nothing that sounded even remotely familiar. It didn’t surprise me that this mysterious company wasn’t listed on the building’s directory. But one of the companies in the building had to be connected to them, in some way.

The security guard, seated behind a curved granite counter in the middle of the lobby, saw me staring at the directory board and called out, “Can I help you, sir?” He was in his late fifties, with deep-set eyes and a prominent forehead, a shiny bald head and protruding ears.

“You have a list of the tenants in this building you might be able to give me?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Management company won’t let me hand that out.”

“Rules is rules, huh? Thing is, the wife’s trying to start a chocolate-chip cookie business?” I held up the white bakery box. “I’m helping her with the marketing. Because she won’t let me near the kitchen.”

I smiled, and he smiled back, and I went on, “We want to give out free boxes of cookies to all the companies here, sort of a promotional thing?” I came closer and handed him the box. “Here, these are for you. Try a couple and tell me if you don’t think my wife’s got it nailed.”

He hesitated.

“Go on, try one. If you can stop at one.”

He opened the flaps on the box and pulled out a cookie and took a large bite. “Mmm,” he said. “Soft and chewy and crispy all at the same time. She use dark chocolate chips?”

“Only the best quality chocolate.”

He took another bite. “Man, these are
good.
”

“Thank you.”

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stapled set of papers and gave it to me. “Just don’t tell anyone where you got this, okay?” He winked.

I winked back. “Not a word.”

He peered at me, touched his nose and lip and said, “You get into a fight with the wife?”

For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about, then I remembered that my bruised nose and split lip probably looked pretty bad by then. “Yeah,” I said. “I told her I thought she should use shortening instead of butter. Learned my lesson. I’m sticking to the marketing.”

INSTEAD OF
driving back to the office, I stopped at a FedEx/Kinko’s copy shop and faxed Dorothy the tenant list. Not to some fax machine in the halls of Stoddard Associates, where anyone could see it; instead, I faxed it to her E-Fax account, so she’d get it online. While I was there, I rented time on a computer, checked my e-mail, and found an e-mail from Frank Montello, my information broker.

Whenever he wrote e-mails, he used all capital letters as if he were sending a telegram by Western Union.

ATTACHED YOUR BRO’S PHONE BILLS. BIG FILE. STILL WORKING ON
THAT OTHER CELL # BUT SHOULD HAVE SOMETHING BY TOMORROW.
INVOICE ATTACHED, TOO, PAYABLE WITHIN 10 DAYS AS PER USUAL.

So he still hadn’t located the owner of the emergency contact number that Woody Sawyer had been given, back at the airport outside of L.A. But he had been able to unearth the billing statements for one of Roger’s cell phones, the one whose bills I couldn’t find in his study. The detailed phone records ran for dozens of pages. It wouldn’t have been much fun to read them on my BlackBerry. I printed them all out and skimmed the list while sitting in my car.

Mostly meaningless columns of phone numbers. But then something leaped out at me.

Five calls, all collect, all from a number in Altamont, New York.

“Billed on behalf of Global TelLink,” it said, and gave a phone number with a 518 area code.

The Altamont Correctional Facility, it said.

From Victor Heller, of course.

I hadn’t talked to my father in several years. Whereas Roger had spoken to him five times in the last month.

My brother always got along with our father well—far better than I did. I’d always thought that was because the two of them were so much alike.

But five phone calls in the last month?

More carefully, I went through the previous year’s phone bills and found just one other collect call from my father—eleven months ago. Six collect calls in a year from Dad, five of them in the last four weeks. Just before Roger’s disappearance.

No coincidence.

40.

W
hen I returned to Lauren’s house—after a quick stop at Mr. Younis’s gas station in Georgetown to make another DVD copy of the surveillance video that had been snatched from me—both Lauren and Gabe were home. Her Lexus was in the driveway, and the light in Gabe’s room was on. I unlocked the front door. The security system’s warning tone didn’t sound. They’d disarmed it.

That was not what I wanted. I’d made it clear to Lauren that whenever they were home, they should use the night setting, which would give off a tone whenever someone entered. So I went to find her and explain to her how to use the system.

She wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor was she in the TV room or at the computer in the hutch that served as her home office. I became aware of raised voices coming from upstairs, and I walked toward the staircase, climbed the steps.

Mother and son were arguing. I stopped halfway up the landing, heard Gabe shout, his voice cracking: “—But you don’t
know
that. You don’t
know
that!”

Lauren shouted back, “You listen to me! He’ll turn up. They’ll find him. I promise you!”

“After all this time? He’s dead, don’t you get it? Why do you keep pretending?”

“He’s not dead, Gabriel! You have to think positive. You have to believe. Your father is
not dead
!”

It was too painful to listen to, and anyway, I was eavesdropping on a private moment. I headed back down the stairs.

______

I WATCHED
TV listlessly for a few minutes, changing the channels, not finding anything I wanted to stay on. I heard a door slam, followed by heavy footsteps, then Lauren entered the room.

“That kid, I swear—”

She stopped short when she saw my face. “Jesus, Nick, what happened?”

I shrugged.

“Who did that to you?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, and smiled.

“Yeah, I get the reference. How’d that happen?”

“Lauren, I overheard you talking to Gabe.”

She sat at the end of the same couch I was sitting on. “You call that ‘talking’? More like screaming. He just knows how to push every single one of my buttons.”

“Why are you telling him to keep the faith? What’s the point of assuring him that Roger’s alive?”

“
Why?
” Her eyes flashed. “Can you imagine what it’s like to have your father disappear suddenly, not knowing whether he’s . . .” She faltered, seeing my expression, realizing.

I nodded. “Yeah, I can imagine.”

“Why did I never see the parallel?”

“What makes you think there’s a parallel? My father took off in the middle of the night. My mother told us he was on the run. We knew that he was out there somewhere, hiding from the authorities.”

She said softly, “Maybe Roger is, too. Something like that—I
want
to believe that’s what happened.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and I described the surveillance video I’d just seen: the apparent abduction, the Econoline van, the gun.

She looked stricken, then closed her eyes for five or ten seconds. “Can I see it? Do you have a copy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Someone grabbed it from me. That’s how I got this.” I pointed to my bruised nose and split lip. “So I just went back and made another one.”

______

I PLAYED
the DVD for her on her computer, and she responded the way I expected she would: shock, disbelief, then immense relief. And then puzzlement: What did it mean? Roger hadn’t been killed in the attack, but he had been abducted. But by whom, and why?

“This means he’s alive,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said carefully. “It certainly means he survived the attack. That much we know for sure. As for whether . . .”

“He’s alive,” she said. “These people have him.”

“Could be.”

She pointed to my face. “Who did that to you?”

“Probably the same people who abducted him.”

“Who?”

“You’ll be the first to know when I find out,” I said.

She nodded, compressed her lips. “Nick, you were able to get into Gifford Industries today, right?”

“I was, yes. And I met with the librarian.”

“The librarian—?”

“Roger’s e-mail, remember—he said something about saying good-bye to a librarian. ‘The librarian’ turns out to be Roger’s nickname for a lawyer colleague of his named—”

“—Marjorie something. Right! I’d totally forgotten. So what did she say?”

I told her about how protective of Roger she’d been, her unwillingness to provide details beyond the fact that Roger had discovered something “troubling” in the books of a company they were acquiring.

“Well, it shouldn’t be so hard to figure out which company she’s talking about. We’ve only acquired one in the last three or four months, a power company in Brazil.”

“She wouldn’t say whether it was a company Gifford acquired or was
considering
acquiring.”

“Is she covering something up?”

“That wasn’t my sense.” I paused. Thought for a second. “I walked around Georgetown a bit. Retraced the route you and Roger took the night you were attacked. So let me ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Roger parked his car on Water Street. Quite a ways down the hill from the restaurant. I don’t get that.”

“What don’t you get? Oji-San doesn’t have valet parking.”

“But there are parking garages a lot closer than where he parked. And it was a rainy night—not the kind of night you’d want to stroll around Georgetown.”

“I . . . I suppose I never thought about it.”

“It didn’t strike you as somehow strange?”

“No, not really. What are you getting at?”

“I don’t have a theory. It’s just that it doesn’t make sense.”

“Sense? I mean, Roger’s parked there before. It’s free, it’s easy to get in and out of. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“Okay.”

“What, you think he deliberately parked there for some sinister reason?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then what are you saying?”

I spoke carefully. “I just wonder how well you know him. How much you know about him.”

“How well I know
Roger
? What are you talking about? If you’re hinting at something, why don’t you just come out and say it?”

I hesitated, blew out a lungful of air. “Did you know Roger was having an affair?” I asked gingerly.

“Stop it.”

“Did you know?”

“Just cut it out.”

“You had no idea?”

“That’s just not true. Now you’re listening to Gabe’s crazy ideas?”

“I’m not asking if it’s true. I’m asking if you knew about it.”

She shook her head. “Stop it.”

I got up, closed both living-room doors. “What do you know about Candi Dupont?” I asked.

Lauren blinked a few times. “Candy . . .?”

“Candi Dupont is a woman. Candi with an i. A woman that Roger was having an affair with.”

She flushed, looked as if she’d just been slapped. Closed her eyes again.

“Seven months ago—” I began.

“I don’t want to hear it,” she interrupted. “If he started seeing her again, I don’t want to know about it.”

“So you did know.”

“What does this have to do with what happened to him?”

“It’s an important lead. She might know where he is.”

“Or not.”

“Or not,” I agreed.

“Nick, we went through a—a difficult time in our marriage a few years ago.”

She looked at me, but I just nodded silently.

“Sort of a crisis, I guess you’d call it. He’d met some woman on a business trip to Boston. We’d had some big fight before he left, and I guess he was angry at me, and he said he was in the bar at the Four Seasons, and in a moment of weakness . . .”

“Candi Dupont.”

“I never knew her name. He wouldn’t tell me. But this was three or four years ago, Nick. He begged me to forgive him, and he promised it was over. He swore.”

“Obviously it wasn’t. Seven months ago Roger paid for a woman named Candi Dupont to have an abortion at a clinic in Boston.”

“Oh, God.”

“We haven’t turned up anything on any ‘Candi Dupont’ in the standard databases, which tells me that ‘Candi Dupont’ might be some sort of alias. But whatever her name is, maybe it’s the same woman Roger told you about. Which would mean the affair didn’t end three or four years ago.”

She grabbed a hardcover book from the coffee table and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall, rattled a picture frame, and fell to the floor. I couldn’t help noticing that the book was called
Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
by Thich Nhat Hanh. “Enough!” she cried. “I don’t want to hear about it! If he didn’t stop seeing that . . . slut . . . I don’t want to know about it! Don’t you get that?”

“I do,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

She got up and retrieved the book, put it back on the coffee table, and sat back down on the couch, but much closer to me. For a minute or so she was silent, and I didn’t say anything either, then she said, “Nick.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been lying to you.”