Buried Secrets

24.



“I met this guy at a Starbucks, okay?” Taylor said. “Yesterday afternoon. And he really, like, came on to me.”

She looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I kept my face unreadable.

“We just started talking, and he seemed like a cool guy. He asked if I wanted to go to Slammer with him, and I … I was sort of nervous, ’cause I’d just met him, you know? I said, okay, sure, but I wanted my friend to join us. So it wouldn’t be so intense. Like not really a date, you know?”

“Alexa knew all this?”

She nodded.

“His name?”

A beat. “Lorenzo.”

“Last name?”

“He might have told me, but I don’t remember.”

“So you two came to the Graybar together, and Alexa met you—where? Upstairs in the bar? Or in front of the hotel?”

“In line, in front. There’s always a line there like a mile long.”

“I see.” I let her continue spinning her tale for a while longer. The surveillance video was fresh in my mind: Alexa joining Taylor in line, no guy with her. The guy had approached the two of them in the bar an hour later. Acting as if he’d never met either one of them before.

So: a total setup. He’d pretended to introduce himself to both girls. Taylor had been part of the arrangement.

“You got a smoke?” I said.

She shrugged, took the pack of Marlboros from her handbag.

“Light?” I said.

She shook her head in annoyance, fished around in her handbag, and pulled out the gold Dupont lighter. As I took it from her it slipped out of my hand and clattered to the cobblestones.

“Jesus!” she said.

I picked it up, lighted a cigarette, handed the lighter back. “Thank you. Now, tell me about Lorenzo.”

“What about him?”

“How old?”

“Thirty, thirty-five.”

“What kind of accent?”

“Spanish?”

“Did he give you his cell phone number?”

“No,” she said.

“How’d you feel when he went home with your best friend instead of you?” I said.

She fell silent for a few seconds. I had a feeling she was thinking about how, if there were cameras outside the hotel, there might be cameras inside too. She said, unconvincingly, “He wasn’t my type.”

I’d deliberately led her down Mount Vernon across Charles Street, then left on River Street. I didn’t want to walk down Charles. Not yet.

“Huh. When you met him at Starbucks earlier in the day, you must have been at least intrigued enough to agree to see him again.”

“Yeah, well, he turned out to be kind of, I don’t know, sleazy? Anyway, he was definitely more into Alexa, and I figured, Hey, you go, girl.”

“Very nice of you,” I said acidly. “A good friend.”

“I wasn’t being nice. Just…”

“Reasonable,” I offered.

“Whatever.”

“So when you met Lorenzo at Starbucks, were you sitting at one of those big soft chairs in the window?”

She nodded.

“He just came and sat down next to you?”

She nodded again.

“Which Starbucks was this?”

“The one on Charles Street.” She gave a wave in the direction of Charles, about half a block away.

“Aren’t there two of them on Charles?”

“The one on the corner of Beacon.”

“And you were just sitting alone?” I said. “Sitting by yourself in one of those big soft chairs by the window?”

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like the way I repeated the bit about the big soft chairs. “Yeah. Just sitting there, reading a magazine. What’s your point?”

“Well, what do … What do you know,” I said. “Here we are.”

“What?”

We’d stopped at the corner of Beacon and Charles. Directly across the street was the Starbucks she was talking about. “Take a look,” I said.

“What?”

“No big soft chairs.”

“Well, but—”

“And see? There sure as hell aren’t any chairs in the window. Right?”

She stared, but only for show, because she knew she’d just been caught in another lie. “Look, he was just going to show her a good time,” she said in a flat, emotionless voice. She took out a cigarette and lighted it. She inhaled. “I was doing her a favor. I mean, she’s never even had a serious relationship.”

“Man, what a friend you are,” I said. “I’d hate to be your enemy. You knew Alexa had been abducted once before and was still traumatized by it. Then you meet a guy, or maybe you already knew him, and you set him up with your so-called best friend. A guy you thought was sleazy. A guy who put a date-rape drug in your best friend’s drink, probably with your full knowledge. And abducted her. Maybe killed her.”

A long black limousine pulled up to the red light next to us.

I was pushing her hard, and I knew it would get a reaction out of her.

I just didn’t expect the reaction I got.

She blew out a plume of smoke, then flipped her hair back. “All you can prove is that I went to Graybar with some guy. All that other crap—you’re just guessing.”

The rear passenger’s window in the limousine rolled smoothly down. A man I recognized stared at me, a natty fellow in a tweed jacket with a bow tie and round horn-rimmed glasses. His name was David Schechter. He was a well-known Boston attorney and power broker, a guy who knew all the players, knew which strings to pull to make things happen. He was utterly ruthless. You did not want to get on David Schechter’s bad side.

Next to him in the back seat was Senator Richard Armstrong.

“Taylor,” the senator said, “get in.”

“Senator,” I said, “your daughter is implicated in Alexa Marcus’s disappearance.”

Armstrong’s face didn’t register surprise or dismay. He turned to his attorney, as if deferring.

Taylor Armstrong opened the limo door and got in. I made one last attempt to get through to her. “And I thought you were her best friend,” I said.

“I don’t think I’m going to have a problem finding a new one,” she said with a smile, and I felt a chill.

The limousine had a large spacious interior. Taylor sat in a seat facing her father. Then David Schechter leaned forward and gestured for me to come closer.

“Mr. Heller,” said Schechter, speaking so softly I could barely hear him. A powerful man who was accustomed to getting what he wanted without ever having to raise his voice. “The senator and his daughter do not wish to speak to you again.”

Then he slammed the door and the limo pulled away from the curb and into traffic.

I pinched out my cigarette and tossed it into a trashcan. I’d given up smoking a long time ago and didn’t want to start again.

My BlackBerry started ringing. I pulled it out, saw Marcus’s number. “Nick,” he said. “Oh, thank God.” There was panic in his voice.

“What is it?” I said.

“They have her—they—”

He broke off. Silence. I could hear him breathing.

“Marshall?”

“It’s my baby. My Lexie. They have her.”

“You got a ransom demand?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know—”

“It’s just an e-mail with a link to some—oh, please God, Nick, get out here now.”

I looked at my watch. Soon it would be rush hour. The drive to Manchester would take even longer than usual.

“Did you click on the link?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t open it until we get there.”

“Oh, Jesus, Nick, come out here now. Please.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.





25.



There was no day or night. There was no time. There was only the trickle of her sweat down her face and neck. Her rapid breathing, that agonizing shortness of breath, the cold terror that she could never again fill her lungs with air.

The blank nothingness in which her mind raced like a hamster on a wheel.

The wanting to die.

She’d decided she had to kill herself.

This was the first time in her seventeen years that the thought of suicide had ever seriously occurred to her. But now she knew that death was the only way out for her.

When you hyperventilate you will increase the carbon dioxide.

She began panting, breathing as deep and fast as she could. Trying to use up the limited supply of air inside the casket. Panting. She could feel her exhalations settling around her, a warm, humid blanket of carbon dioxide. Keep at it, and maybe she’d pass out.

She began to feel woozy, light-headed. Faint and dizzy.

It was working.

And then she felt something different. A cool ripple of air.

Fresh air. It smelled of pine forest, of distant fires, of diesel and wet leaves.

Seeping in from somewhere. Her right hand felt for the source of the air flow. It was coming from the bottom of the coffin, beneath the metal support bands under the mattress, down where the bottles of water and the protein bars were. She touched the floor of the casket, her fingers tracing the outline of a round perforated metal disc maybe an inch in diameter.

An air intake.

She could hear a distant hum. No, not a hum, really. The far-off sound of a … a garbage disposal? Then something that sounded like a car engine. The regular chugging of pistons pumping. Very fast, far away.

She didn’t know what it was, but she knew it had something to do with this new influx of air. A fan? But more mechanical and sort of bumpy than that.

Air was being circulated.

The Owl had been watching her pathetic efforts. Saw what she was trying to do. And was defeating her.

She couldn’t help herself: She gasped deeply, drank down the cool fresh air as gratefully as she’d swallowed the water from the bottle. The fresh air was keeping her alive.

She couldn’t asphyxiate herself. She couldn’t kill herself.

He’d deprived her of the only power she had.





26.



I picked up Dorothy at the office. We made better time than I expected and got to the security booth at the perimeter of Marcus’s property just before six.

“Whoa,” she said softly as we walked up the porch steps, goggle-eyed at the spread. “And I was just starting to be happy with my apartment.”

Marcus met us at the door. Ashen-faced, he thanked us somberly and showed us in. Belinda rushed up to me in the dimly lit hallway and threw her arms around me, a display of affection I’d never have expected. Her back was bony. I introduced Dorothy. Belinda thanked me profusely, and Marcus just nodded and led us to his study. His house slippers scuffed against the oak floor.

His study was a large, comfortable room, not at all showy. The shades were drawn. The only illumination was a circle of light cast by a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. It sat in the middle of a massive refectory table that served as his desk, carved from ancient oak. The only other objects on the table were a large flat-screen computer monitor and a wireless keyboard, which looked out of place.

He sat in a high-backed tufted black leather chair and tapped a few keys. His hands were trembling. Belinda stood behind him. Dorothy and I stood on either side and watched him open an e-mail message.

“As soon as this came in, I told him to call you,” Belinda said. “I also told him not to do anything until y’all got here.”

“This is my personal e-mail account,” he said quietly. “Not many people have it. That’s the weird thing—how’d they get it?”

Dorothy, wearing red-framed reading glasses on an ornate beaded chain, noticed something else.

“They used a nym,” she said.

“A who?” I said.

“An anonymizer. A disposable anonymous e-mail address. Untraceable.”

The subject heading read “Your Daughter.” The message was brief:



Mr. Marcus:



If you want to see your daughter again, click here:



www.CamFriendz.com



Click on: Private Chat Rooms



Enter in search box: Alexa M.



User name: Marcus



Password: LiveOrDie?



Note: case-sensitive.



You may log in only from your home or office. No other location. We monitor everyone who signs in. If we detect any other incoming IP addresses, including any law enforcement agencies, local or national, all communications will be severed and your daughter will be terminated.



He turned around to look at us. There were deep hollows under his eyes. “Belinda wouldn’t let me click on the link.” He sounded depleted and resigned.

“What’s CamFriendz-dot-com?” Belinda said.

“It’s a live video site,” Dorothy said. “Social networking. Mostly for teens.”

Marcus said, “What should I do?”

“Don’t touch the keyboard,” Belinda said.

“Wait a minute,” Dorothy said. She took out her laptop and hooked in the back of his computer. “Okay.”

“What are you doing?” Belinda said.

“A couple things,” she said. “Screen-capture software so we can record anything they send you. Also, packet-sniffing software so I can log network activity remotely.”

“Are you mad?” Belinda cried. “They say if anyone else tries to look at this, they’re going to cut off all communication! Are you trying to get her killed?”

“No,” Dorothy said, patiently. “All I’m doing is setting up in effect a clone of this computer. I’m not logging in. No one’s going to detect it.”

“Well, you can just look at Marshall’s computer,” Belinda said. “I will not have you compromise Alexa’s safety in any way.”

“They have no way to know what I’m doing,” Dorothy said. I could see her patience was beginning to run out. “Also, we need to make sure they’re not trying to infect this computer with malicious code.”

“What’s the point of that?” Marshall said.

“To take control of your computer,” Dorothy said. “May I?” Her fingers were poised over his keyboard. He nodded, wheeled his chair back to let her at it.

“Don’t touch that!” Belinda said, alarmed.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” I said to her, and I took her out into the hall. In a low voice, I continued, “I’m worried about your husband.”

“You are?”

“He’d be panicking by now if it weren’t for you. You’re his rock. You did the right thing by telling him to call me and by not letting him click on that link.”

She looked pleased.

“And I hate to impose on you further at a time like this,” I said, “but I need you to go into another room and make an evidentiary compilation for me.”

“An … evidentiary…?”

“Sorry, that’s the technical term for an exhaustive description of all potential evidence that might help lead to her whereabouts,” I said. I’d made it up on the spot, but it sounded plausible.

“What sort of evidence?”

“Everything. I mean, what was Alexa wearing when she left. The make and size of her shoes and each item of clothing, her purse, anything she might have been carrying in her purse. You’re far more observant than Marshall, and men never pay attention to that kind of thing anyway. I know it seems tedious, but it’s extremely important, and there’s no one else who can do it. And we need it right away. Within the next hour, if at all possible.”

“Y’all want me to use a computer or a typewriter?”

“Whatever’s fastest for you,” I said.

I went back in. Dorothy had positioned herself in front of Marshall’s computer, standing. She tapped, moved the mouse, and after a minute she said, “Okay, open the hyperlink.”

In a few seconds a new window had opened. It showed a cheesy-looking website with a banner across the top: CAMFRIENDZ—THE LIVE COMMUNITY!

Within it were lots of moving video windows. In some of them were second-tier celebs like Paris Hilton. In others, teenage girls wearing low-cut tank tops and a lot of eye makeup were making provocative poses, and doing suggestive things with their tongues. Some of them had pierced lips.

“What is this?” Marcus said. “Some kind of pornography site?”

“Teenage girls and guys sit in front of the camera on their computer and talk to each other,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes more than talk.”

Dorothy tapped and moused again, entered some text, scrolled down, clicked and clicked some more.

And then a still photo of Alexa popped up.

A school portrait, it looked like, from when she was younger. Her blond hair cut into bangs, a white headband, wearing a plaid jumper, probably a school uniform. Very sweet and innocent. Before the trouble started.

“Oh, my God,” Marcus moaned. “Oh, my God. They put her picture up here where anyone can see it? What—what are they trying to do?”

Green letters at the top of Alexa’s photo said ENTER CHAT.

“Chat?” Marcus said. “What’s this—who am I chatting with? What the hell?”

Dorothy clicked on it, and a log-in window appeared. She entered the user name and password they’d supplied. For a while nothing happened. She sidled over to her laptop, and Marshall and I came closer to the screen to watch.

Then a big window popped up with another still photo of Alexa.

Only this looked like it had been taken recently.

She appeared to be sleeping. Her eyes were closed, with dark smudges of eye makeup that made her look like a raccoon. Her hair was scraggly. She looked terrible.

Then I realized this wasn’t a still photo at all. It was live video.

You could see slight motion as she shifted in her sleep. The streaming video had all the production values of a snuff film: the camera too close to her face, the image grainy and the focus tight, and the light strange, green-saturated, as if taken with an infrared camera.

Indicating that she was in the dark.

A loud metallic voice: “Alexa, wake up! It’s time to say hello to your father.” A man’s voice. A pronounced accent: Eastern European, maybe.

Alexa’s eyes came open, her eyes staring wide, her mouth agape.

Marcus gasped. “That’s her!” he said, probably because he couldn’t think of anything else. Then: “She’s alive. God almighty, she’s alive.”

Alexa’s eyes were shifting back and forth.

Unsettled. Panicky.

Something about her face looked different, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

She said, “Dad?”

Marcus stood up, shouted, “Lexie. Baby! I’m here!”

“She can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.

“Dad?” Alexa said again.

The amplified voice said, “You may speak, Alexa.”

Her words came all in a rush, a high-pitched shriek. “Dad, oh God, please, they’ve got me in this—”

The sound of her voice abruptly cut out and the accented voice said, “Follow the script exactly, Alexa, or you will never talk to your father, or anyone else, again.”

Now she was screaming, her eyes bulging, face flushed, head moving side to side, but there was no sound, and after ten more seconds the window went black.

Marcus said, “No!” and he catapulted himself out of his chair, touching the screen with his stubby fingers. “My baby! My baby!”

“The link’s gone down,” Dorothy said. The video image had once again become Alexa’s school portrait. The sweet little girl with headband and bangs. “She didn’t cooperate. She was trying to tell us something—maybe her location.”

Marcus seemed to bob and weave, unsteady on his feet. Terror rilled his forehead.

“I doubt it,” I said. “Everything about this says professional. They’d never have let her see where they took her.” I glanced over at Dorothy’s laptop, saw a column of white numbers whizzing by on a black background, way too fast to read. “What’d you get?” I asked her. “Can you tell where the signal’s coming from?”

She shook her head. “Looks like CamFriendz is based in the Philippines, believe it or not. That’s where the video feed originated. So that’s a dead end too. These guys probably have a free account. They could be anywhere in the world.”

Marcus began to teeter, and I caught him before he sank to the floor. He hadn’t passed out, not quite. I set him down gently in the chair.

“They killed her,” he said. He stared dully into some middle distance.

“No,” I said. “That’s not in their interest. They need her for ransom.”

He moaned, covered his face with his hands.

Dorothy got up and excused herself and said she wanted to give us some privacy to talk. She took a second laptop from her Gucci bag and went to work in the sitting area off the kitchen to try tracing the IP address.

* * *



“YOU WERE expecting something like this, weren’t you?” I said.

“Every day, Nick,” he said sadly.

“After what happened to Alexa at the Chestnut Hill Mall that time.”

“Right,” he said softly.

“What do you think they want?”

He didn’t reply.

“You’d pay any amount of money to get her back, wouldn’t you?”

Now he just stared straight ahead, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

I leaned forward in my chair and spoke quietly to him. “Don’t. If they contact you and demand money wired to some offshore account, I know you’d do it in a heartbeat. I know you. But I need you to promise me you won’t. Not until you consult with me and we make sure it’s done the right way. If you want to get your daughter back alive.”

He kept staring, his eyes focusing on something that wasn’t in the room.

“Marshall?” I said. “I want your word on this.”

“Fine.”

“You never did call the police, did you?” I said.

“I—”

I interrupted him before he could go on. “You need to know something about me,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to by my clients. I took this job because of Alexa, but if I find out you’re lying, or holding anything back, I’ll walk away. Simple as that. Got it?”

He looked at me for a long time, blinking fast.

“I’ll give you amnesty for anything you did or said up till now,” I said. “But from here on out, any lie, and I’m off the case. So let’s try again: Did you call the police?”

He paused. Then, eyes closed, he shook his head. “No.”

“Okay. This is a start. Why not?”

“Because I knew they’d just bring in the FBI.”

“So?”

“All the FBI cares about is putting me in prison. Making an example of me.”

“And why’s that? Do they have a case?”

He hesitated. Then: “Yes.”

I looked at him. “They do?”

He just looked back.

“If you don’t tell me everything now, I’ll walk.”

“You wouldn’t do that to Alexa.”

“I haven’t done anything to Alexa.” I stood up. “And I’m sure the FBI will do everything possible to find her.”

“Nick,” he said. “You can’t do this.”

“Watch me.”

I walked toward his office door.

“Wait!” Marcus called after me. “Nick, listen to me.”

I turned back.

“Yes?”

“Even if they asked for ransom, I couldn’t pay it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

His face was full of humiliation and anger and deep sadness all at once. A terrible, vulnerable expression.

“I have nothing,” he said. “Completely wiped out. I’m ruined.”