Buried Secrets

48.



I had no idea, of course, how long I’d been followed. But at least now I knew how they were able to track me to Mauricio Perreira’s apartment in Medford. Some “confidential informant.”

“Looks like the FBI put a tail on you. And I thought you were cooperating. Did anyone have an opportunity to meddle with your BlackBerry without you noticing?”

I nodded. I remembered checking my BlackBerry at the FBI’s reception desk in Boston, not once but twice.

“Now even I’m starting to get paranoid,” I said.

He turned to look at me. Instinctively I wanted to look away from that face, so I made a point of meeting his eyes.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” he said. In the dark still interior of his van, his whisper gave me goose bumps. “I believe I’m quoting Nick Heller.”

“Not original to me.”

“In any case, you’re absolutely correct about the Chinese knockoffs. Buying them over the Internet reduces their risk of exposure, yes. But there’s an even better reason. Something only the best bad guys know about.”

“Okay.”

“The IMEI. The electronic serial number. Every mobile phone has one, even the cheapest disposables.”

“Even Noklas?”

“Yes, even Noklas. But by using Shenzhen Specials, your bad guys make it much, much harder to be caught by traditional means.”

“How so?”

“Put it this way. If the FBI has the serial number of a real Nokia phone, all they have to do is call Finland and Nokia’s going to tell them where the phone was sold. Bad guys don’t want that. But this baby, on the other hand—who’re you gonna call, some factory in Shenzhen? They won’t speak English and they sure as hell don’t keep records and they probably don’t even answer the phone. Good luck with that.”

“So these guys are pros,” I said.

He didn’t reply. He was leaning over the shallow ledge with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers trying to pry something out of the back of the phone. Finally he succeeded and held up a little orange cardboard rectangle.

“The SIM card,” I said. “Chinese too?”

“Uzbek. These guys are really smart.”

“The SIM card’s from Uzbekistan?”

“They probably buy ’em in bulk online, get them shipped to some drop box, end of the trail. Wow. A Chinese knockoff phone with an untraceable serial number and an untraceable SIM card. Know any FBI agents who speak Uzbek?”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“Some deep digging.”

“Of what sort?”

“Why don’t you leave that part to me,” he said.

“Because my puny mortal mind cannot possibly hope to comprehend?”

“Here’s your BlackBerry. Clean as a whistle.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “But I’d like you to put the GPS bug back in.”

“That’s … foolish.”

“No doubt,” I said. “But first I’d like you to drain the battery on the tracking bug. Can you do that?”

“It doesn’t draw from your BlackBerry’s battery, so sure, that’s not a problem.”

“Good. I want it to die a natural death in about, oh, fifteen or twenty minutes.”

He nodded. “So they’ll never know that you discovered it.”

“Right. I much prefer being underestimated.”

If he could have smiled, he would have. But I heard it in his voice. “You know something, Heller?” he said. “I think I’ve underestimated you. You’re really quite an impressive guy.”

“Do me a favor,” I said, “and keep it to yourself.”

As I returned to the Defender, my BlackBerry was ringing.

“I thought I’d have heard from you by now,” Diana said.

“My BlackBerry was temporarily offline.”

“You didn’t see what I sent you?”

“What did you send me?”

“A photograph of our kidnapper,” she said.





49.



The town of Pine Ridge, New Hampshire, (population 1,260) had a police force that consisted of two full-time officers, two part-time officers, and one police chief.

Walter Nowitzki had been the police chief in Pine Ridge for twelve years. He’d been on the force in Concord before that and grabbed the chief’s job when it opened up. He and Delia wanted to move to a small town, and he wanted more time to hunt. The work here was routine and uneventful, and when it wasn’t hunting season, it was downright slow.

Jason Kent, the rookie, entered his office hesitantly. His cheeks and his jug ears were red, as they always got when he was nervous.

“Chief?” Jason said.

“Sam Dupuis keeps calling,” Chief Nowitzki said. “Got a bug up his ass about the Alderson property.”

“What’s the deal? No one lives there.”

Nowitzki shook his head. “Something about how his dog ran off, I didn’t quite get it. But now he says he thinks they’re doing work without a permit and who knows what else.”

“You want me to drive out and talk to Mr. Dupuis?”

“Just head on over to the Alderson property, would you? Go out there and introduce yourself and see what’s up.”

“I didn’t know any of the Aldersons even came here anymore. I thought the old man was just, like, an absentee owner.”

“Sam says it’s a caretaker or a contractor or something, works for the family.”

“Okay.” Jason rose and was out the door when Chief Nowitzki said, “But keep it polite, would you? Don’t go ruffling any feathers.”





50.



I clicked on Diana’s e-mail and waited impatiently as the attachment opened.

A photograph, muddy and low-contrast. The back of a man’s head and shoulders. The picture looked like it had been taken at night. A surveillance photo, maybe?

So why was Diana so sure this was the guy?

I studied it more closely, though on the BlackBerry’s screen it wasn’t easy. I saw what might have been the headrest of a car. The photo had been taken from the back seat.

The man’s shoulders rose well above the headrest. He was tall. His head appeared to be shaved. But something was obscuring a large area of his head and neck: a shirt with a high collar? No, maybe it was just a dark blotch, a flaw in the photo. As I looked closer, it seemed like the entire back of his head and neck was covered with some sort of hideous birthmark.

But then, as I continued to study it, I realized it wasn’t a birthmark at all. It was a design, an illustration. It looked like a tattoo, but no one got tattoos on their scalp, did they?

Wrong.

It was a tattoo of the head of a large bird, maybe an eagle or a vulture. A line drawing in black or dark blue, highly detailed if crudely executed. Stylized feathers, a sharp beak, erect ears. An owl, maybe, with large, fierce staring eyes. Huge blank circles with much smaller circles at their center, representing the irises.

They stared at you. They stared at whoever had taken the picture.

The guy got eyes on the back of his head.

When Mauricio Perreira had babbled that to me, I’d paid it no attention. It was a figure of speech, part of a long desperate rant by a terrified man, nothing more. I assumed he meant to say, in his broken English, He’s got eyes in the back of his head. Meaning: This man hears and sees everything, has sources everywhere, I can’t give you his name, I’m scared of him.

He was scared. But it wasn’t a metaphor. He meant it literally, almost. There were eyes on the back of the man’s head.

* * *



DIANA ANSWERED on the first ring.

“Who took the picture?” I said.

“Alexandra Marcus. This came from her iPhone, taken the night she disappeared.”

“When?”

“At 2:36 A.M. Apparently all iPhone photos are encoded with metadata that tell you the date and time. And something called a geotag, which gives you the GPS coordinates of the phone at the time the picture was taken.”

“Leominster?”

“Straight down the road about a mile from where you found it.”

“That’s an owl.”

“Right. I wasn’t sure whether you’d be able to make it out on your BlackBerry. But if you enlarge the photo it appears that the tattoo covers his head and neck and probably a good portion of his upper back as well.”

“You already searched NCIC?”

“Sure. One of the fields in the database is for scars and marks and tattoos. No hits.”

“Did you send it to your Gang Intelligence Center?”

“Sure. But no luck.”

“Isn’t there some central database of criminal tattoos?”

“There should be, but there isn’t.”

I thought a moment. “Ever see the Latin Kings tattoos?” The Latin Kings were the biggest Hispanic street gang in the country.

“It’s a five-pointed crown or something?”

“That’s one of them. There’s also a tattoo of a lion wearing a crown. Sharp teeth, big eyes. Some gang members get it tattooed on their backs. It’s huge.”

“You think he’s part of a Latino gang?”

“Some kind of gang, anyway.”

“I’ve sent the photo to our seventy-five legal attachés around the world. Asking them to run it by local law enforcement. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said dubiously. “You’d think a guy with an owl on his head and neck would be fairly memorable. People aren’t likely to forget a sight like that.”

“That’s not smart. Owls are supposed to be smart.”

“Your average street pigeon is ten times smarter than the smartest owl. It’s not about smart. It’s about scary. In some cultures, an owl is a symbol of death,” I said. “A bad omen. A prophecy of death.”

“Where? Which countries?”

I thought for a moment. “Mexico. Japan. Romania, I think. Maybe Russia. Ever see an owl hunt?” I said.

“Oddly enough, I haven’t.”

“It moves its head side to side and up and down, looking and listening, triangulating on its prey. You really can’t find a more perfect, more ruthless killer.”