Vanished

by Unknown

  “Hello, Kim,” I said. “I’m John Murray, from Security Compliance.” I handed her a business card. That was one of the covers that Stoddard provided its investigators, and it always worked. It identified Security Compliance Partners as a management-consulting firm specializing in security audits of Fortune 500 corporations. It gave the Stoddard Associates address and a phone number there that Elizabeth, the receptionist, would answer the right way.

  Every corporation that did business with the Pentagon, as Gifford Industries did, had to suffer regular visits from outside security auditors, who prowled the halls of the company, meeting with people and checking the facilities and the networks, making sure they were in compliance with all the ridiculous, paranoid security measures the government required of any contractor who did classified work. So Kim Harding was conditioned to be cooperative.

  She glanced at it and said, “Yes, John, how can I help you?”

  “Well, you know, Mr. Gifford has retained our firm to look into certain anomalies concerning someone you work with, a Mr. Roger Heller?”

  She looked stricken, compressed her lips, and looked up at me. For a moment I thought she might ask if we were related. Roger and I didn’t resemble each other much anymore, but women tend to be far more observant than men, and someone like Kim, who’d worked for him every day, might be particularly keen.

  Instead, she said, “I’m so worried about Roger. Do we know anything more—?”

  “I’m not really allowed to go into any of that, Kim, but I’d very much appreciate your help.”

  She blinked a few times. “Yes?”

  “Well, let’s start with something easy. Do you keep records of telephone calls Roger made or received?”

  Kim drew herself up. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled. “The answer’s not going to change no matter how many times you people ask me.”

  “Someone’s asked you about this already?”

  “Just this morning. Mr. Gifford’s office. Why do I get the feeling the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing?”

  “Who in Mr. Gifford’s office?”

  She gave me a piercing look. There was a smudge of lipstick on her teeth.

  “Noreen Purvis. The woman who’s been filling in for Lauren Heller.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ll tell you what I told her.” She held up a pad of pink “While You Were Out” message slips. The kind I knew well. “I write messages on these things and I hand them to the attorneys or put them on their desks, and no, I never keep carbon copies either. You want phone records, talk to the girls in Accounting.”

  “Well, that’s a start,” I said. “And I’m sorry for the duplication of effort. Can you show me to Roger’s office, please? I’m going to need to take a look at his computer.”

  “You people really don’t talk to each other, do you?”

  “Noreen did that, too?”

  “No. She asked about it, and I told her that his computer’s gone. It was removed by Corporate Security, on direct orders from Mr. Gifford.”

  A plain woman with thick wire-frame glasses, wearing a gray business suit, passed by, and Kim held up a pink message slip. The woman took it and said, “Thanks, Kim.” She glanced at the slip, wadded it up, and dropped it in a metal trash basket next to Kim Harding’s desk.

  Then she peered at me. “You’re asking about Roger?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “What’s this about?”

  I handed her my business card and told her about Security Compliance. She shook my hand, firm, like a man.

  “You look familiar,” she said.

  “I hear that a lot,” I said.

  “You want to know something about Roger, you talk to Marjorie,” said Kim Harding, turning back to her keyboard. “Marjorie knows everything about Roger.”

  The woman named Marjorie smiled and blushed. “I do not,” she said. “You make it sound like we were having an affair.”

  “Did I say that?” Kim said to me. “Did I say that?”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said.

  “No, I did not,” Kim said with a slow shake of her head. “But Roger always tells me, if he’s not here, and I need to know anything about a deal he’s working on, go right to Marjorie.”

  Marjorie shrugged and said, “Oh, that’s an exaggeration,” but she was still blushing and smiling with unmistakable pleasure.

  “Come on, sweetie,” Kim said to her. “Roger always says, if Marjorie doesn’t know it, she can always find it out. Why do you think he calls you the librarian?”

  35.

  Why are you so interested in what Roger was working on?”

  “Just doing my job,” I said. Marjorie Ogonowski worked at a cubicle, so we sat in Roger’s office.

  It wasn’t what I expected at all. I’d figured his office at Gifford Industries would have at least some of the pompous décor of his home library. A decent copy of a George Stubbs painting of horses. Maybe even an antique John J. Audubon print of the Brown-headed Nuthatch. But it was a tiny and dismal cubbyhole with no distinguishing features. His desk chair wasn’t an Aeron or anything stylish and emblematic; it looked like overstock from some low-end office-furniture supply house.

  There was no computer on his desk.

  “But why?” she said. “Does this have anything to do with his disappearance?”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “I asked you.”

  I didn’t feel like getting into that kind of standoff, so I said, “That’s the operating theory. What can you tell us, Marge?”

  “Marjorie. If you’re working for Leland Gifford, you know exactly what he was working on.”

  I paused for a moment. She had a point. “Mr. Heller indicated in an e-mail to his wife that if anything happened to him, you’d know why.”

  “He did?”

  I nodded.

  “Can I see that e-mail?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “What did he say about—about something happening to him?”

  “He must have said something to you along the same lines.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what he said?”

  “That’s the problem. He didn’t say. Nothing beyond that. What do you think he was referring to?”

  She was a plain, mannish woman, with short light-brown hair, straight bangs high on her forehead. No lipstick or makeup of any kind. Even her gray suit was man-tailored. She was immensely smart, no-nonsense, precise in her language and mannerisms.

  She blinked owlishly. “He didn’t tell me everything. Despite what Kim said.”

  “He must have told you enough to make you worried about his well-being.” That was sheer speculation on my part, of course. She obviously took pride in her special relationship to Roger, which I doubted was sexual—she was defiantly asexual. He might have confided in her, because she was so ferociously competent.

  “He told me very little about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About what he’d found.”

  I waited, and when she didn’t go on, I said, “What did he find?”

  “Mr. Murray, do you have any idea what Roger did here?”

  “John,” I said. “No, not really.”

  “We mostly worked on M&A stuff with biz-dev deal teams, checking the books, going over the P&L on current and expected, working on rev-rec issues.”

  It had been a while since I’d heard that kind of biz-buzz English-as-a-foreign-language. Not since my McKinsey days, in fact. It took me a few seconds to do a mental translation, and I said, “You guys buy companies.”

  “In simple terms, yes. I’m just an associate counsel, so I assist Roger. And I have to say, Roger Heller was the smartest person I’ve ever met. He was a pure structured-finance genius. And he’s never gotten the credit he deserves around here. People far less qualified are always getting promoted over his head. He should be general counsel or CFO. At least he should have become managing director of the g
lobal M&A practice. But it was like he was frozen in amber.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Maybe because he’s too smart. He intimidates people.”

  “Is that so?”

  She nodded, then pushed at the nosepiece of her glasses. “He always says what he thinks. It’s like there’s no filter. I guess I’d say that most people don’t get along with him. They see him as sort of humorless. But Roger and I—we get along great. He expects the best out of everyone he works with, and I give him my best. He expects nothing less than perfection, and I—”

  “You gave it to him.”

  “I usually don’t make mistakes. He knows he can always turn to me.” She smiled. “I document everything. He used to call me ‘the reference librarian,’ and then just ‘the librarian,’ for short. We always got along great.”

  “He trusted you.’

  “I think he did.”

  “So what did he tell you?”

  She’d begun to feel more comfortable with me, I could tell. “He said he’d found something in the books of one of the companies. During the due diligence. Something he said was ‘troubling.’ ”

  “What was that?”

  “He didn’t say, really. But he said he wished he hadn’t. He said he was afraid for his life. He was terrified.”

  “I don’t quite follow. Why would discovering something ‘troubling’ make him afraid for his life?”

  “Well, he—he left out a step, obviously. As I said, he didn’t tell me everything. But he sort of indicated that he’d called them on it. He’d let them know what he’d found.”

  “Called who on it?”

  “The company. The one that was doing—whatever.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Corruption of some sort, I guess.”

  “But why’d he contact them?”

  She shook her head. “Obviously, he was upset. But that’s just the way he is, you know? He always has to cross every t and dot every i. I think that’s why we get along so well.”

  I was sorely tempted to say something, but I all but bit my tongue restraining myself.

  She went on, “You know, his father is this famous—you know who the fugitive financier is, Victor Heller? Is, was—I’m not sure. He’s either in prison or he died in prison. But I got a really strong sense that Roger was reacting to his father’s criminality. I mean, that’s just my take on it—he never liked to talk about his father. Once we were in a car on the way to Dulles, and I kind of summoned the courage to ask him about Victor Heller. I guess I thought we’d worked together long enough that we could talk about that kind of thing? And he said his father was a brilliant and misunderstood man, and he should never have gone to jail. Something in his tone told me not to pursue it, so I just changed the subject. And later I realized that I wasn’t really sure what he meant, you know? What did that mean, his father should never have gone to jail? Did that mean that his father shouldn’t have broken the law? Or that his father shouldn’t have gone to jail for whatever he did? I never got that, really. But I couldn’t ask.”

  “Hmph,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “And another time he said to me—well, it was sort of an aside, sort of a joke—he was talking about some kind of tricky variable-interest entities he noticed on a company’s balance sheet, and he said, ‘You know, in a good market, this is called financial engineering. In a bad market, it’s called fraud.’ I never knew what to make of that. What he meant, exactly.”

  I was sort of lost myself. I said, “Meaning, you couldn’t tell if he approved or disapproved?”

  She was quiet for a long time. “I’m not even sure what I mean myself.”

  “But he reacted in a very moral way to what he found in that company’s books—what company did you say that was?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  “What company was it?”

  Now she was quiet for even longer. “That I can’t say.”

  “It’s extremely important,” I said.

  “I understand. But some of the acquisitions we make I’m just not allowed to talk about.”

  “So it was a company that Gifford Industries acquired recently.”

  “I can’t say.”

  “That doesn’t really help us.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But I have to follow rules around here.”

  Sometimes silence is the most powerful weapon in an investigator’s arsenal, so I looked at her for a long time without saying anything.

  But the weapon doesn’t always hit its target. She looked back, then looked down, then back up. Then she said softly, “All I can tell you is, Roger was terrified.”

  “I see.”

  “You know,” she said, “you really do look familiar.”

  36.

  By the time I reached Georgetown, it was already mid afternoon. I backed into a space on Water Street, along a chain-link fence. A few blocks farther down, Water Street turned into K Street. The banks of the Potomac at that point were not exactly the stuff of postcards. No cherry blossoms here; no gleaming Jefferson Memorial. Instead, there were great mounds of dirt and construction trailers and Porta Potties. The city had been working for years to build a waterfront park in place of the industrial blight, the abandoned factories and the rail yards. They’d turned the old incinerator into a Ritz-Carlton. Maybe someday there’d be a park here. But it was a scraggly, weed-choked, trash-littered mess, in the shadows of the Whitehurst Freeway. Truly an urban failure story.

  My cell phone emitted four high beeps, alerting me to a text message.

  It was a location report from the GPS tracker that Merlin had sent via FedEx to EasyOffice, Traverse Development’s mail drop in Arlington, Virginia. The GPS device had just been delivered to the mail drop. The text message linked me to a Google Earth map, where I could see a flashing red dot indicating where the tracker was.

  That told me nothing. I already had that address.

  I walked up the footbridge to Cady’s Alley, crossed over to the restaurant where Lauren and Roger had had their last dinner. A Japanese restaurant on Thirty-third Street called Oji-San.

  Then I retraced their route from the restaurant, down Cady’s Alley. Back down the footbridge. Across Water Street to their car.

  There I stood for a few minutes, thinking. A black Humvee drove by. We’d used up-armored M1114 Humvees in Iraq as our tactical vehicles, equipped with fire-suppression systems and frag protection and mounts on the roof hatch for machine guns and grenade launchers. The air-conditioning wasn’t bad either. But I never understood the point of driving one of them around the city, even a civilian model. What did they expect, rocket-propelled grenades in Georgetown?

  Lauren had said it was raining the night of the attack. Parking was probably in short supply. The restaurant didn’t offer valet parking, but there was a garage nearby. So why did Roger park all the way down the hill on Water Street?

  He wasn’t a tightwad. You couldn’t grow up in our house in Bedford and learn to be a coupon-clipper. At the most, you could grow up to be someone who doesn’t much care about money—having seen what it can and can’t do. But my brother, unlike me, shared Victor Heller’s unhealthy fixation on wealth. He liked to show off. He had to have the fanciest car, the most opulent kitchen. This was not a guy who’d happily park his S-Class Mercedes in the squalor of Water Street, in the underbelly of the freeway, amid the vagrants and broken bottles, a long walk away on a rainy night.

  I didn’t get it.

  And I thought about what Lauren remembered Roger saying the night of the attack: “Why her?”

  Not, Why? Not, Leave her alone.

  But, Why her?

  As in, “Why are you coming after her, when it’s me you want.”

  Or something like that.

  I checked my watch, and while I continued to puzzle over my brother’s last remarks, I walked along Water Street in the direction of the Key Bridge. I liked that bridge. I liked the rhythm of its five high concrete arches, th
e open spandrel design. I even liked the irony that, in order to build the bridge named after Francis Scott Key, the guy who wrote the “Star Spangled Banner,” they had to tear down Francis Scott Key’s house. Or maybe it was to build that eyesore, the Whitehurst Freeway.

  It took me six minutes to walk to the ATM where Roger had made his withdrawal. It was one of those twenty-four-hour walk-up cash machines, built into a brick wall next to a gas station. Outdoors and exposed. A young woman was using it, a large woman dressed entirely in black with platinum hair sticking up in the front like a rooster’s comb. Tufts of her hair were dyed orange and blue. Either she was doing that whole punk thing, or she was on her way to a costume party. She turned around and glared at me. I was too close. I was making her nervous.

  So I backed off a few feet and surveyed the area while I waited. This was a no-name gas station that was open twenty-four hours and advertised fresh pastries and the coldest drinks in town. It sold cigarettes and rolling papers and lottery tickets. The pumps were self-serve.

  A black Humvee passed by. The same one that had driven by on Water Street? I wondered whether I was being watched. I noted the license plate.

  I assumed that Roger had been trundled into a vehicle at the scene of the attack, then driven over to the ATM. Why, I had no idea. But from here I could see the entrance to the Key Bridge, which took you across the Potomac to Virginia and the Parkway, the Beltway, any number of highways. Not a bad place to stop on your way out of town.

  The large woman was taking her damned time at the cash machine. I approached, my shoes scraping against a scree pile of that white granular stuff used to absorb gasoline spills. She turned, glared at me, extracted her card and her cash, and hurried away.

  The brick wall was covered in graffiti. I was pretty sure this was one side of the old Georgetown Car Barn, a nineteenth-century building where they used to store the trolley cars. Probably it was now offices or condos.

  At the top of the ATM console was the lens of a CCTV camera—the one that had recorded Roger approaching, some guy with a gun at his side. Moving right up to the ATM, I turned around and watched an old Honda drive into the lot and pull up next to a pump. Assuming that Roger and his captor or captors had driven here from Water Street, I figured they must have come up M Street. Water Street was a dead end.