“You’re the only staff member?”
“The only one who lives in. Two women come to help with the cleaning and the laundry; they’re in the kitchen now. Julia already spoke to them; they don’t know anything. They’ve been with her for over a decade, both of them, and they’re completely reliable. There’s Livia Barradas, who used to be Arielle’s nanny—she still comes to stay when Julia and Chaim are both out of town. Chaim’s PA Wren has a key, but she works out of his office on LaSalle Street.”
He showed me the footage of Arielle’s departure. There were no cameras in the bedrooms, but there were two in the halls. We saw Arielle in cutoffs and a T-shirt, carrying her shoes; the time stamp was 2:03.33. At 2:05.17, she ran down two flights of stairs, stopped in the kitchen, where she put on her shoes and picked up an apple, and went down to the basement. At 2:11.08, she pushed the button that opened the garage door.
“Is there a reason she didn’t use the front door?”
Gabe nodded. “Once the family is at home for the night, I turn on the interior cameras and set the alarms on the doors and windows. If any of them are opened, my phone buzzes me. The garage alarm only rings if it’s opened from the outside. That’s a security lapse which we didn’t think about, but apparently, Arielle did. And it may be that someone else did as well.”
“It’s why you need the police,” I reiterated wearily. “They can interrogate the security company, and the lovers of the women who clean, and the children of Livia Barradas, and so on and on.” I looked at him squarely. “Not to mention your own connections. You’re at the heart of this household; you know all its secrets.”
Gabe’s lips tightened in anger, but he said levelly, “You’re right: you don’t know me, or my history with the family. I’ve been with Chaim since I was a junior in college. I don’t expect a stranger to take my word that I’ve never given a lover access to any security codes or family secrets, but by all means—investigate my past, my friends, my family.”
I nodded, not agreement, just acknowledgment that I would do all of that if it became necessary. “In the meantime, call the cops. Don’t wait for Julia’s okay, just do it!”
The front door rang in the middle of my plea. We both looked at the monitor. It was a tall man, dressed in a suit, despite the heat.
“That’s Thor Janssen.” Gabe released the front-door lock. A moment later, Nia Durango appeared on the monitor at the front gate, accompanied by a middle-aged white woman. Gabe released the lock again, but I sprinted down the hall to the front door, beating the staff from the kitchen as well as Julia.
There was a flurry of confused greetings, the lawyer suspicious, Nia scared, Sophy’s housekeeper unflappable. Gabe arrived a moment later; he and Sophy’s housekeeper sorted us into our component parts. Gabe took the lawyer off to see Julia in the library. Diane Ovech, the housekeeper, accompanied Nia and me to the family room.
“Nia, how were you and Arielle communicating this past week?” I said as soon as we were sitting on the wicker chairs.
Nia looked from Diane to me.
“This has gone way beyond whether you violated your mothers’ orders to separate for two weeks,” I said. “This is about Arielle’s safety. Did you use Facebook?”
When Nia still didn’t answer, Diane Ovech said, “You need to speak.” Her voice was calm but implacable.
“Our moms look at our Facebook pages,” Nia whispered. “We used old-fashioned stuff, like the landlines if our moms weren’t home, but mostly e-mail.”
At any other time I might have laughed to hear e-mail characterized as old-fashioned. “Did Arielle e-mail you that she would be going out last night?”
“No. If she decided at the last second, she couldn’t tell me because we couldn’t text. That’s the trouble with e-mail, you don’t know you’ve got it, not unless you’ve got, like, an iPhone or something, and we just have ordinary phones, they don’t have e-mail, so we have to use our computers.”
“Do you know how to get into Arielle’s computer?” I asked. “Let’s see if someone else was reaching out to her the old-fashioned way.”
Nia admitted that she and Arielle used the same passwords. She led her minder and me up two flights of stairs and down a short hall to her friend’s room. The computer was sitting on a small desk. While Nia turned it on and logged on, I had a quick look around.