She shook her head, blew out a lungful of smoke. “Oh, that woman is toxic. Alexa was always complaining about her, and I kept urging her to give Belinda a chance, it’s not easy being a stepmother. Until I met the woman and understood. I think Belinda actually hates her stepdaughter. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“She talks about how much she adores Alexa.”
“In front of others. With Alexa, she doesn’t bother concealing it.”
“Maybe that’s not the only thing she’s concealing. You haven’t complained to Marshall about being cut off?”
“Sure I did. At the beginning. He’d just shrug and say, ‘I’ve learned not to argue.’”
“Strange.”
“I see this sort of thing happen to a lot of married men as they get older. Their wives start taking charge of their social lives, then their friendships. The husbands abdicate all responsibility because they’re too busy or they’d just as soon not take the initiative, and before you know it they’re wholly owned subsidiaries of their ladies. Even rich and powerful men like Marshall … used to be. I think the only person he sees outside the office besides Belinda is David Schechter.”
“How long has Schechter been his lawyer?”
“Schecky? He’s not Marshall’s lawyer.”
“Then what is he?”
“You know how Mafia dons always have an adviser?”
“A consigliere?”
“That’s it. Schecky is Marshall’s consigliere.”
“Advising him on what?”
“I just think he’s someone whose judgment Marshall trusts.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know him. But Marshall once told me he has the most extensive files he’s ever seen. Reminded him of J. Edgar Hoover.”
I nodded, thought for a moment. “Why did Marshall hire you in the first place?”
She smiled. “You mean, why would he hire a woman with no particular skills to run his office?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yes, it is,” she said kindly. “You don’t want to hurt my feelings. That’s all right.” She smiled. “Marshall is a good man. A good person. He saw what had happened to us after your father left. How the government took everything. Was there a part of him that thought, There but for the grace of God go I? Sure, probably.”
“You always said that he was a friend of Dad’s, and that’s why he wanted to help.”
“That’s right.”
“But he didn’t know you, did he?”
“Not really. He knew your father much better. But that’s Marshall. He’s the most generous person I know. He just loves to help people. And that was a time when I needed help, desperately. I was a mother with two teenage sons and no house and no money. We’d gone from that house in Bedford to sharing Mom’s split-level ranch in Malden. I had no income and no foreseeable income. Imagine how I must have felt.”
In the scale of human misery, that barely registered, I knew. But at the same time I truly couldn’t conceive of what it must have been like to be Francine Heller, ripped untimely from her chrysalis of immense gilded wealth, naked and shivering, lost and vulnerable, not knowing who to turn to.
“I can’t,” I admitted. “But you were a hero. That much I do know.”
She gripped my hand in her small soft warm one. “Oh, for God’s sake, not even close. But you need to understand how much it meant to me to have this man step in, someone I barely knew, and offer me not just an income, a way to keep food on the table, but an actual job. A way for me to do something useful.”
She looked so uncomfortable that I felt bad I’d raised the subject. She shifted in her seat, blew out a puff of smoke, stubbed out her cigarette, her face turned away.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Marshall secretly cooperated with the SEC when they were building their case against Dad. In effect helped turn Dad in.” If they were true, though, then Marcus would have hired my mother for one very simple reason: guilt.
“Never. Not Marshall.”
“Well, you know him as well as anyone.”
“I did, anyway. So let me ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think these kidnappers will let her go if they get what they want?” She asked this with such hushed desperation that I had no choice but to give her, dishonestly, the assurance that she, like Marcus, seemed to crave so badly.
“Yes.”
“Why are you saying that?”
“Why? Because the typical pattern in a kidnap-for-ransom situation—”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I mean, why do you think I can’t hear the truth? I know when you’re not being honest, Nick. I’m your mother.”
I’d always thought that I’d gotten my talent at reading people from her. She was, like me, what Sigmund Freud called a Menschenkenner. Loosely translated, that meant a “good judge of character.” But it went beyond that. She and I both had an unusual ability to read faces and expressions and intuit whether people were telling us the truth. It’s certainly not foolproof, and it’s not at all like being a human polygraph. It’s merely an innate talent, the way some people are natural painters or can tell stories or have perfect pitch. We were good at detecting lies. Though not perfect.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they’re going to let her go.”
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.
&nbs
p; 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 w
inners, 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.
Buried Secrets (Nick Heller) Page 18