Buried Secrets

55.



She was crying again, and I immediately regretted my candor.

“I’ll do everything in my power to find her,” I said. “I promise you.”

She held my right hand in both of hers. Her hands were bony yet soft. She leaned close, her eyes pleading. “Get her back, Nick. Please? Will you please get her back?”

“All I can do is promise I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I ask,” she said, and she squeezed my hand again.

As I got up, the hound from hell growled at me without even bothering to move. As if to remind me that if I disappointed its Master, I’d be facing the wrath of the beast.

* * *



ON THE way out I stopped at Gabe’s room. Stacked in tall heaps everywhere were his favorite graphic novels, including multiple copies of Watchmen, the collected comics of Will Eisner, Brian Azzarello’s Joker.

It was remarkable how much his temporary quarters here had acquired exactly the same funky odor as his room back home in Washington. It smelled like a monkey house: that teenage-boy smell of sweat and dirty laundry and who knows what else.

He sat on his bed, headphones on, drawing in his sketchbook. He was wearing a red T-shirt—a rare departure from his habitual black “emo” attire—with a drawing on the front of a stylized, boxy computer exploding and the word KABLAAM! superimposed over it in a comic font. I took a chair next to his desk, which was dwarfed by a big monitor—probably a gift from my mother—and an Xbox 360 video game module and wireless controller. When he felt the bed move he took off his headphones. I could hear some loud, repetitive electric guitar riff and a screaming vocal.

“Nice,” I said. “What are you listening to?”

“It’s an old band called Rage Against the Machine. They were totally awesome and brilliant. They were all about Western cultural imperialism and the abuses of corporate America.”

“Huh. Sounds fun. Let me guess. Did Jillian turn you on to this?”

He gave me an evasive look. “Yeah.”

“Which song is this?”

“‘Killing in the Name.’ I don’t think you’d like it.”

“No?”

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Is that the song that uses the F-word twenty times in, let’s see, five lines of lyrics?”

He looked at me, startled.

“You’re right,” I said. “Not my kind of thing.”

“There you go.”

“I’m not a big fan of drop D tuning. But see what your Nana thinks.”

“Nana’s a lot cooler than you give her credit for.”

“I’ve known her longer,” I teased.

He hesitated. “Nick, I—I heard what you were saying to her.”

“You shouldn’t have been listening.”

“She was screaming, Uncle Nick. I could hear her through my headphones, okay? I mean, what am I supposed to do, ignore that? Why’d you have to make her cry?”

I doubted he could actually hear anything through that music. He was eavesdropping, plain and simple.

“Okay,” I said. “Listen.”

But he interrupted: “Where’s Alexa?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“She got kidnapped, right?”

I nodded. “Listen to me, Gabe. You have a special role here. You need to be strong. Okay? This is going to be really hard on your Nana.”

He compressed his lips, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Yeah? How about me?”

“It’s hard on all of us.”

“So who’s behind it?”

“We’re not sure yet.”

“Do you know she once got kidnapped for a couple hours?”

I nodded.

“You think it’s the same people?”

“I don’t know, Gabe. We just found out. We still don’t know anything. We’ve seen a video of her talking, but that’s pretty much all we have so far.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“Not yet. I’m working on it.”

“Can I see the video?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I gave him the answer that has infuriated teenagers since the beginning of time: “Just because.”

He reacted exactly the way I expected, with a tight-lipped glower.

“Hey, how about when this is over I teach you to drive.”

He shrugged. “I guess,” he said glumly. But I could see he was trying not to show how pleased he was.

My phone rang. I glanced at it: Dorothy.

I picked up. “Hey, hold on a second.”

“Who’s that?” Gabe said. “Is that about Alexa?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it is.”

I gave him a quick hug and walked out toward my car. “What do you have?” I said.

“I talked to Delta Air Lines. Belinda never worked for them.”

I stopped in the middle of the parking lot. “Why would she lie about that?”

“Because Marshall Marcus would never have married her if he knew her real employment background.”

“Which is?”

She paused. “She was a call girl.”





56.



“Why does that not surprise me?” I said.

“I ran her Social Security number. She’s a failed actress, looks like. Took acting classes for a while in Lincoln Park, but dropped out. Employed as an escort”—I could hear the scare quotes—“with VIP Exxxecutive Service, based out of Trenton. That’s three X’s in Exxxecutive.”

“Let me guess. A high-priced escort service.”

“Are there any other kinds?”

“Well, she did good for herself. Married up. She’s not southern, is she?”

“Southern Jersey. Woodbine.”

My BlackBerry emitted two beeps, its text-message alert sound. I glanced at it.

A brief text message. It said only, “15 minutes,” and gave the precise polar coordinates of what looked like a 7-Eleven parking lot .73 miles away.

The message was sent by “18E.” No name, no phone number.

But he didn’t need to use his name. An 18E was a U.S. Army occupation code for a communications sergeant in the Special Forces.

George Devlin was an 18E.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I have to see an old friend.”

* * *



“HOW DID you know I was close enough to make it here in fifteen minutes?” I said. “You knew where I was?”

George Devlin ignored my question. Like it was either too complicated or too obvious to explain. He had his ways, leave it at that. He was preoccupied with angling a computer monitor so I could see it. The screen glowed in the dim interior of his mobile home/office and momentarily illuminated the canyons and rivulets and dimpling of his scarred face, the striated muscle fibers and the train-track stitches. There was a vinegary smell in there, probably from the salve he regularly applied.

A greenish topographical map of Massachusetts appeared on the screen. A flashing red circle appeared, about fifteen miles northwest of Boston. Then three squiggly lines popped up—white, blue, and orange—each emanating from the flashing red circle. One from Boston, two from the north.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“If you look closely,” he said, “you’ll see each line is made up of dots. The dots represent cell tower hits from the three mobile phones belonging to Alexa Marcus, Mauricio Perreira, and an unknown person we’ll call Mr. X.”

“Who’s what color?”

“Blue is for Mauricio, as we’ll call him. White is for Alexa. Orange is for Mr. X.”

“So Mr. X came down from close to the New Hampshire border, it looks like.”

“Right.”

“Mind if I ask where you got this data?”

He inhaled slowly, making a rattling sound. “You can ask all you want.”

I leaned forward. “So they all met fifteen miles northwest of Boston in … is it Lincoln?”

“That’s right.”

“Were they all there at the same time?”

“Yes. For only five minutes. Mauricio and the abducted girl arrived together, of course. They were there for seventeen minutes. Mr. X stayed for only four or five minutes.”

They’d met in a wooded area, I saw. Near Sandy Pond, which was marked as conservation land. Remote, isolated after midnight: a good place for a rendezvous. So Alexa’s iPhone went from Boston to Lincoln and then north to Leominster. Which was where it was discarded.

Now I could see the pattern. Mauricio took her from the hotel to Lincoln, twenty minutes from Boston, where he handed her off to “Mr. X.”

While Mauricio went back to Boston—actually, to his apartment in Medford, just north of Boston—Mr. X was driving Alexa north. He tossed her phone out as they passed through Leominster. Presumably she stayed in the vehicle with him.

Then they crossed the border into New Hampshire.

“So the route stops in southern New Hampshire,” I said. “Nashua.”

“No, Mr. X’s mobile phone goes off the grid in Nashua. That could mean that he shut it off. Or it lost reception, and then he shut it off. Whatever, he hasn’t used it since.”

“Sloppy for him to keep his cell phone on,” I said.

“Well, to be fair, he assumed it was untraceable.”

“Is it?”

“No, actually. But there’s a difference between untraceable and untrackable. It’s like following a black box on the back of a truck. We don’t know what’s inside the box, but we know where it is. So we can’t determine his identity, but maybe we can find his location. Understand?”

“He’s in New Hampshire. Which means she probably is too. Maybe in or near Nashua.”

“I wouldn’t assume that. Mr. X might have passed through New Hampshire on his way to Canada.”

“That’s not a logical route if you’re driving all the way to Canada.”

He nodded in agreement.

“They’re in New Hampshire,” I said.





57.



The offices of Marcus Capital Management were on the sixth floor of Rowes Wharf. I gave the receptionist my name and waited in the luxuriously appointed lobby, on a gray suede couch. The floors were chocolate-brown hardwood and the walls were mahogany. An enormous flat-screen monitor on the wall showed the weather on one half of a split screen and financial news on the other, with a stock crawl at the bottom.

I didn’t have to wait even a minute before Marcus’s personal assistant appeared. She was a willowy redhead named Smoki Bacon, a stunningly beautiful, elegant young woman. This didn’t surprise me. Marcus had a reputation for hiring only beautiful women as admins, beauty contest winners, former Miss Whatevers. My mother, who’d been lovely and attractive in her prime, was the sole exception. She never looked like a runway model. She was more beautiful than that.

The curvaceous Smoki gave me a dazzling smile and asked if I wanted coffee or water. I said no.

“Marshall’s in a meeting right now, but he wants to see you as soon as it’s over. It might be a while, though. Would you like to come back a little later?”

“I’ll wait.”

“At least let me take you to a conference room, where you can use the phone and the computer.”

She showed me down a corridor. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said as we rounded a bend and passed by what was once the trading floor. There were thirty or forty workstations, all empty. All the computers were off. The place was as quiet as a tomb. “I just can’t tell you how worried sick we’ve all been about Alexa.”

“Well,” I said, not knowing how to reply, “keep the faith.”

“Your mom used to babysit for her sometimes, you know. She told me that.”

“I know.”

“Frankie’s the best.”

“I agree.”

“She calls me every once in a while just to check up on things. She really cares about Mr. Marcus.”

At the threshold to an empty conference room she put a hand on my shoulder. She leaned close and said through gritted teeth, “Please get that girl back, Mr. Heller.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

* * *



BUT INSTEAD of waiting, I decided to wander down to Marcus’s office.

His assistant, Smoki, sat guard at her desk outside his office, I remembered. I also remembered that Marcus had a private dining room next to his office. When I’d had lunch with him there once, the waitstaff came and went through a back hallway.

It didn’t take long to find the service hallway. One entrance was next to the men’s room. It connected a small prep kitchen to the boardroom and Marcus’s dining room.

His dining room was dark and tidy and bare. It looked like it hadn’t seen much use in quite a while.

The door to his office was closed. But when I stood next to it I could hear voices raised in argument.

At first I could make out only fragments. Two men speaking, I was sure. One, of course, was Marcus. His voice was the louder, more emotional one. Easier to make out.

The other was soft-spoken and calm and barely audible.



VISITOR: “… to go all soft now.”



MARCUS: “Wasn’t that the point?”



VISITOR: “… pretty much to be expected…”



MARCUS: “If she dies, it’ll be your doing, you understand me? It’ll be on your conscience! You used to have one of those, didn’t you?”



VISITOR: “… damnedest to keep you alive.”



MARCUS: “I don’t care what you people do to me now. My life is over. My daughter is the only—”



VISITOR: (a lot of mumbling) “… years you’ve been the guy with all the solutions … they decide now you’re the problem?… what their solution will be.”



MARCUS: “… on my side!”



VISITOR: “… want to be on your side. But I can’t be unless you’re on mine…”



MARCUS: (voice growing steadily louder) “… you wanted, I did. Everything!”



VISITOR: “… have to spell this out for you, Marshall? ‘Grieving financier kills self at Manchester residence’?”



I pushed the door open and entered the office. Marcus was sitting behind a long glass desk heaped with papers.

Leaning back in the visitor chair was David Schechter.





58.



“Nickeleh!” Marcus exclaimed. “What are you—didn’t Smoki take you to a conference room to—”

“He was eavesdropping,” Schechter said. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Heller?”

“Absolutely. I heard everything you said.”

Schechter blinked at me. “As of this moment, your services are no longer required.”

“You didn’t hire me,” I said.

“Schecky, let me talk to him,” Marcus said. “He’s a mensch, he really is.”

Schechter rose, straightened his tweed blazer, and said to Marcus, “I’ll expect your call.”

I watched him leave, then sat in the chair he had just vacated. It was still warm.

Behind Marcus was a glittering picture-postcard view of the Atlantic, red ochre in the dying light.

“What kind of hold does he have over you?” I said.

“Hold…?”

I nodded. “You hired me to find Alexa, and I can’t do that unless you level with me. If you don’t, you know what’s going to happen to her.”

His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, with heavy pouches beneath them.

“Nicky, you need to stay out of this. It’s … personal business.”

“I know how much you love Alexa—”

“That girl means everything in the world to me.” Tears came to his eyes.

“It took me a while to understand why in the world you’d withhold the one thing that could get her back. Schechter is blackmailing you. He’s keeping you from cooperating with the kidnappers. And I think I know why you hired me.”

He turned around in his chair and stared out the window, as if he were looking to the sea for answers. Or at least avoiding my eyes.

“I hired you because I thought you were the only one who could find her.”

“No,” I said quietly. “You hired me because that was the only way you could get her back without giving in to their demands. Right?”

He wheeled slowly back around. “Does that offend you?”

“I’ve been offended worse. But that’s not the point. From the beginning you’ve been sandbagging me. You lied about calling the police. You didn’t tell me how you were forced to take money from criminals, and you didn’t tell me you’d lost it all. Now they want the Mercury files—they are files, aren’t they?—and you pretend you don’t know what they are. So let me ask you this: Do you think David Schechter really cares if Alexa dies?”

He looked stricken, but he didn’t reply.

“Whatever he has on you, is it worth your daughter’s life?”

His face crumpled, and he covered his eyes like a child as he wept silently.

“You need to tell me what Mercury is,” I went on. “Then we’ll figure something out. We’ll come up with a way for you to give these kidnappers what they want without facing … whatever it is you’re afraid of.”

He kept sobbing.

I got up and walked toward the door, but then I stopped and turned back. “Did you ever do a background check on Belinda before you married her?”

He lowered his hands. His face was red and wet with tears. “Belinda? What does Belinda have to do with anything?”

“I’ve come across some information in the course of my investigation, and I’m not sure how much you want to know.”

“Like … what?”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” I said. “But she was never a flight attendant. She never worked for Delta.”

“Oh, Nickeleh.”

“She’s not from Georgia either. She’s from New Jersey.”

He sighed. Shook his head slowly. Was it disbelief? An unwillingness to accept so painful a truth, that he’d been deceived by the woman he loved?

“She was a call girl, Marshall. An escort. Whether that makes a difference to you or not, I think you should know.”

But Marcus rolled his eyes. “Nickeleh, boychik. Grow up.” He shrugged, his palms open. “She’s a sensitive girl. For some meshugge reason she’s kinda touchy about people knowing too much about our first date.”

A smile slowly spread across my face as I headed again for the door. The old bastard.

From behind me I heard him call out, “Please don’t quit.”

I kept going and didn’t look back. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t get rid of me. Though you might wish you had.”





59.



Dragomir was sitting at the computer in the musty sunroom at the back of the house when he heard the girl’s cries.

Strange. He’d muted the computer’s speakers. The screams were remote and barely audible, but they were definitely hers. He didn’t understand how he could be hearing them. She was ten feet underground. He wondered whether the solitude was making him imagine things.

He rose and scraped the old railback dining chair along the floorboards and went to the back door. There he listened some more. The cries were coming from outside. Faint and distant and small, like the buzz of a greenhead fly.

On the porch he cocked his head. The sounds were coming from the yard, maybe the woods beyond. Maybe it wasn’t the girl at all. Then he saw the gray PVC pipe standing in the middle of the field. That was where it was coming from. The vent pipe carried not just the girl’s exhalations but her cries as well.

She had a set of lungs on her. By now you’d think she would have given up.

He was grateful she was buried so deep.

When Dragomir had first come up with the idea of putting her in the ground, it seemed a stroke of pure genius. After all, the Client’s intelligence had turned up a psychiatrist’s file indicating the target was afflicted with a debilitating claustrophobia.

Of course, the terror of being buried alive was deep-seated and universal and held a coercive power far beyond any conventional kidnapping technique.

But that wasn’t his real reason.

Buried ten feet down she was safely beyond his reach.

If the girl had been under his direct control and easily accessible, like some irresistible pastry in the refrigerator, he wouldn’t have been able to restrain himself from doing things to her. He would rape her and kill her as he’d done to so many other pretty young women. He’d never have been able to stop the impulse. That wouldn’t do at all.

He recalled the puppy he’d been given as a boy, how much he loved its softness, its fragility. But how could you truly appreciate such fragility without crushing its tiny bones? Very nearly impossible to resist.

Burying her deep was like putting a lock on the refrigerator.

He was listening so hard, with such fascination, to the mewling, faint as a radio station that hadn’t been fully tuned in, that he almost didn’t hear the far louder crunch of a car’s tires on the dirt road out front. If that was the neighbor again, still looking for his damned mongrel, he would have to do something about it finally.

Back in the house, he strode to the front and looked out the window. A police cruiser, dark blue with white lettering: PINE RIDGE POLICE.

He didn’t know the town even had its own police force.

A gawky young man got out and gazed at the house with apprehension. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He was tall and scrawny with ears that stuck out like jug handles.

By the time the policeman rang the door buzzer, Dragomir was wearing a long brown mullet wig.

He suspected the policeman was here about the dog. He stood on the front porch, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his long spindly arms hanging awkwardly at his side.

“How’re you doing?” he said. “I’m Officer Kent. Could I ask you a few questions?”