Interference

by Brad Parks

  Beppe didn’t take long to deliberate.

  “Why don’t you just go, Brigid?” he said. “She might be more comfortable talking with only you anyway. With three people it could feel like an interrogation.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said, eager to get moving. “Call me if you hear from her in the meantime?”

  “Of course,” Beppe said.

  He smiled warmly. I still felt like I was missing something—some knowledge that Beppe and David clearly shared. But I had bigger problems than whatever they were colluding about.

  I thanked Beppe for the coffee, bid them both farewell, and made for the door.

  On the drive toward Sachem Village, I was interrupted by a text with some hopeful news from Aimee: Sean Plottner had offered a million-dollar reward for information leading to Matt’s safe return.

  It was currently rocketing around the internet, moving at the speed that only a trending topic could, and it would surely help motivate any would-be eyewitnesses out there.

  Which was very generous. It was also one more piece of information I couldn’t adequately parse. Matt had turned down the job offer. Why was he still worth some small portion of the Plottner fortune?

  Or maybe that was the thing: it was so small it wasn’t that big a deal to Plottner. To him, a million dollars was just a friendly gesture, a nice donation to his favorite charity.

  There was no time to think about it further. With the aid of Google Maps and the address provided by Beppe, I had arrived in front of a gray-sided multifamily home. It had a two-story section in the middle, with one-story wings on each side. There were three front doors altogether.

  Sheena’s was the one on the right. I walked up a short concrete path and was confronted with a door guarded by one of those numeric keypad locks. Just to the right was a doorbell. I rang it.

  And waited.

  There was no movement inside. It appeared to be a two-room unit, with a living room that flowed into a kitchen in front and a bedroom down a hallway behind. If Sheena was in the back, she might not hear.

  I rang again.

  Still no answer.

  I looked around to see if I could tell whether there was a car nearby that might have belonged to Sheena—something with, say, a Cornell window decal or physics-related bumper sticker.

  There was nothing obvious.

  Of course, it was also possible Sheena didn’t have a car. Campus was less than two miles away—a long walk, but a relatively short bike ride.

  I knocked this time. When that provoked no more response than the bell, I walked back down the path.

  Except when I reached my car, I didn’t feel like giving up just yet. I turned, looked at that multifamily home, and was soon walking toward the middle door.

  Sheena’s neighbor.

  Who might know where Sheena was.

  This time when I rang the bell, the door was opened by a harried-looking young woman with long light-brown hair she appeared not to have brushed yet—likely because of the wide-eyed baby on her hip and the runny-nosed toddler crowding her legs.

  “Hi, can I help you?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m trying to track down Sheena Aiyagari. Have you seen her?”

  “May I ask who you are?”

  “Yes, my name is Brigid Bronik and—”

  The woman’s hand flew to her mouth, and her eyes grew wide. “Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry. I heard this morning on the news and . . . have they found him? Or . . .”

  “Thank you. And no. He’s still missing. That’s why I’m looking for Sheena. She works with Matt. But she’s not answering her phone, so I thought I’d stop by.”

  “I actually haven’t seen her since yesterday,” the woman said. “I’ve been really worried.”

  I felt a chill, like a hard wind had just blown, except the air around me was still.

  The toddler was attempting to go outside to play, forcing the woman to use her legs to block the child’s escape. She looked down and said something I couldn’t hear but could easily imagine.

  Honey, not now, Mommy’s talking to a grown-up.

  Then she looked up again and asked, “Could you actually come inside for a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  The woman planted the toddler in front of Dora the Explorer, then returned to the foyer, the baby still clinging to her contentedly.

  “My name is Lauryn, by the way. Lauryn Ward.”

  “Nice to meet you. Are you and Sheena friends, or . . .”

  “Yeah, I would say so. Do you know her well?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “More through my husband than anything.”

  “Oh, she’s a total sweetheart. We don’t get to spend a ton of time together, because she’s so busy. But she’s been a total godsend. Maybe she just feels sorry for me, I don’t know, but sometimes she’ll just stop by with a cup of coffee and chat a little bit. Or she’ll stay with the kids for a few minutes so I can run out to the store without having to get them all bundled up.”

  “That’s very kind of her.”

  “It’s a lifesaver. Are you a mom?”

  I nodded.

  “So, yeah, you know. Anyhow, Sheena is . . . I mean, I don’t want to sound like I’m a nosy neighbor or something, keeping tabs on her. But I guess I sort of keep a lookout for her. It can get a little lonely here. My husband is doing his residency at the hospital right now, so his schedule is crazy. Our neighbor on the other side is a single guy who acts like family is something contagious he doesn’t want to catch. Sheena is one of the only grown-ups I get to see outside of a doctor’s office or a mommy group. And she’s usually home by nine o’clock at the latest, every night, without fail.”

  “But not last night?”

  “No. I get my daughter down around eight-thirty or eight forty-five, then I tidy up the kitchen before I go to bed. That’s normally when I see Sheena’s headlights swinging in, if she isn’t home already. But I didn’t see them last night. And then this morning when I woke up and I didn’t see her car, I seriously thought about calling the police. I didn’t even realize she worked with your husband . . . do you think it’s connected somehow?”

  My heart was thumping too hard for me to respond. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. But it was becoming increasingly clear:

  Sheena had been abducted too.

  CHAPTER 21

  Emmett watched Matt Bronik’s abduction video three times, then stared at the still photos for a while.

  If, by some chance, he came across these men again, he wanted to be able to identify them as quickly and as surely as possible.

  The trick he had developed for doing this with suspects was to focus on one unusual feature, something he was unlikely to find in anyone else, and memorize it—almost like he was taking a picture of it with the camera in his brain.

  In this case, one of the men had very distinctive eyebrows, shaped like sickles. Another man had a forehead with a sharper-than-normal slope to it. Like he was a Neanderthal. The third man was the easiest. On the front of his throat, peeking just above his collar, there was a tattoo. It appeared to be a dragon.

  These were the men who had Professor Bronik. They were already ten steps ahead of Emmett and were, if anything, currently extending that lead.

  Emmett had to close the gap somehow, and he had to do it with his own government handcuffing him. How was he supposed to find these men if he couldn’t even get access to the place where they had committed their crime?

  And if it was some foreign entity, what was he, a New Hampshire State Police detective, supposed to do about it? He didn’t even have a current passport.

  It used to be when Emmett started feeling hopeless about a case, he would talk to Wanda. And Wanda, with all her positive energy, would know exactly what to say.

  Wasn’t that one of the secrets to a lasting marriage? When one person was down or doubting themselves, the other person lifted them up, made them believe.

  Made them better than they would be alone.<
br />
  Now all he could think about was what Wanda would have said, then try to give himself the same pep talk.

  She would have told him to keep his head down, keep working the case, keep chasing down every lead. She would have reminded him what he was so ultimately good at: that plodding persistence of his. If he kept turning over shovelfuls of new information, he’d eventually dig down to the truth.

  So. One scoop at a time. He still had to reach out to the company that owned the ambulance. It was a place that specialized in renting out emergency vehicles and other large equipment to rescue squads and municipalities whose original vehicles needed repair or were out of service for some reason.

  He made the call, identified himself, and was soon on the phone with a manager. After he read off the vehicle identification number from the Crime Scene Unit’s report, she pulled up the record and informed him that the truck had been rented by a Yiren Jiang of 12 Badger Street in Nashua, New Hampshire. He had used a New Hampshire driver’s license—probably a fake—as identification. The deposit had been paid in cash. The rental had started the previous Wednesday, and he had picked it up on Monday.

  Unfortunately, her office didn’t have any cameras. But she did have originals of the paperwork, which Jiang may have touched. Emmett said he’d send a trooper over to collect it as evidence, then ended the call.

  Emmett next dialed Captain Angus Carpenter. He wanted the captain to send troopers to the ambulance-rental place and to 12 Badger Street.

  “Carpenter.”

  “Hi, Captain. It’s Emmett Webster.”

  “I know, Detective. We have caller ID, remember?”

  Such warmth between them.

  Emmett plowed forward: “I tracked down that ambulance. It was rented from a business in Manchester by a man with a Chinese name who—”

  “Slow down, Detective, slow down. Could you just send this to me in an email instead?”

  Email. Why was it nothing seemed to exist these days unless it appeared in a damn email?

  But Emmett said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Thanks. I was actually about to call you. I just talked with the colonel about the Dartmouth situation.”

  Emmett’s sense of foreboding was immediate. He couldn’t think of a single time when this particular colonel had been anything but bad news.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “We’re off the case.”

  Emmett took a deep breath before responding.

  “And why is that, sir?”

  “The colonel wants this turned over to Major Crime. He feels this isn’t a missing persons case anymore. It’s a homicide, and we need to start treating it that way.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, we don’t know that yet. And I think it sends a bad message to the family, like we’ve given up hope.”

  “The family will be fine. Major Crime has more resources than we do. And this case is going to need it. Some rich guy just posted on Facebook that he was offering a million-dollar reward for anyone who had information about the good professor, and the crackpots are already coming out of the woodwork.”

  “What rich guy?” Emmett asked.

  “Sean Plottner. He’s some investing guru.”

  He might be a lot more than that, Emmett thought but did not say. He wasn’t ready to start spitballing theories of this case when Carpenter was just going to allow it to be taken away.

  “Anyhow, email me whatever leads you have and I’ll make sure they’re followed up,” the captain continued. “Otherwise, you’re done.”

  “We found blood in an ambulance. That’s not the same as finding a body,” Emmett said.

  “Sorry. Colonel’s mind is made up. I don’t like it either. But when the colonel gives an order, I follow it. This is now a homicide. Unless you can prove him wrong?”

  “I believe Professor Bronik is still alive, yes.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because Bronik isn’t a heavily guarded head of state or some elusive figure,” Emmett said. “He’s a college professor. If someone wanted to kill him, they could have just knocked on his door and shot him. But whoever did this went through a lot of trouble to abduct him instead. And they wouldn’t have done that if all they intended to do was put a bullet behind his ear.”

  Carpenter absorbed this silently for a moment.

  “That’s a fine theory,” he said after a pause. “But it’s nothing more than a theory.”

  “So is the colonel’s belief that this is a homicide. The difference is, I’ve been working this case, so my theory is actually based on something.”

  Carpenter sighed noisily. “Look, you want to finish up your shift chasing down what you have? Fine. You’re already out there. But unless you come up with some kind of evidence that Bronik is still alive, your time on this case is done. I want you to pass your notes along to Major Crime, and then I want you back in here at noon tomorrow, behind a desk, with your ass in a chair. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’ll send me that email?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.”

  That was how the call ended.

  Because he was Emmett, he showed little reaction.

  That’s not what Wanda would have done. She would have hung up, then given Carpenter a one-finger salute.

  CHAPTER 22

  For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I found myself reporting someone missing.

  I made this call to Detective Webster, because I suspected all the Hanover Police would have done is pass it on to the state police anyway. He took it in without much commentary.

  He then said he had pictures of the people who took Matt, and asked if we could meet somewhere so I could look at them. I suggested my house.

  On my way back home, I called Beppe, told him my fears about Sheena, and about the mugshots I was about to see. He asked if he could see them, too, and of course I said yes. The more eyeballs, the better.

  That was how, thirty minutes later, everyone converged at my house.

  Aimee immediately took charge of the hosting. Already that morning, she had found some overripe bananas and worked magic on them, baking them into a bread whose delectable fragrance still lingered in the kitchen.

  As Beppe and Detective Webster arrived, Aimee hung up their coats and directed them toward the dining room, where we had a large farm table that had been made out of reclaimed lumber—Matt’s favorite piece of furniture in the house, bought with the proceeds of an undergraduate teaching award he had won a few years back.

  She then insisted we have a hot beverage with our fresh banana bread, and generally lorded over us the way only Aimee could.

  When you’re a man, they call this taking initiative. When you’re a woman, they call it being bossy.

  Whatever. I was just thankful—and not for the first time—for my incredible sister, whose simple acts of hospitality put air into a room that otherwise might have lacked it.

  Detective Webster seemed to appreciate her, too, nodding as Aimee set down a plate in front of him, then taking a large bite.

  “This is delicious,” he gushed. “I haven’t had anything this good since my wife died.”

  I felt an awkward smile stretch across my face. Webster seemed too young to have lost a spouse.

  The next thought crashed into me: Is that what people are going to say about me someday?

  Webster cleared his throat and set his laptop on the farm table, getting us down to business by loading a video and pressing play.

  I was soon assaulted with the shocking sight of my husband being abducted, which I watched with my hand clutched to my throat. Mostly, it was just surreal, seeing these men carry my inert husband out of Wilder Hall—and out of my life—with no more apparent difficulty than two guys carrying an empty dresser.

  After the video was done, Webster clicked on close-ups of the three suspects and told us how he had started thinking of them. They were, in order: a man with sickle-shaped eyebrows, a man wit
h a Neanderthal-sloped forehead, and a man with a dragon tattoo on his throat.

  “Do any of these men look familiar to either of you?” he asked. “Have you seen them around? Do you know who they are?”

  I stared hard at the screen, looking at the men who had turned my existence upside down, feeling an ample measure of revulsion but not the least shred of recognition.

  “No,” I said. “Should I?”

  “Probably not. But I have to ask.”

  Beppe took his turn studying the pictures next, and similarly came up blank.

  From behind us, where she had been watching silently, Aimee said something. I didn’t catch the beginning, but I turned in time to see her say, “Something that’s been bothering me.”

  “What’s that?” Webster asked, turning toward her.

  “Beppe, you saw Matt being carried down the stairs. And it looked like he was having one of his fits, right?” Aimee said.

  “That’s right,” Beppe said.

  “And on that video, he certainly appears to be out of it. So how did those fake EMTs know to arrive when Matt was spazzing out? The last two times he’s had a fit, there’s been no warning. Even he didn’t know he was about to have one. So how did those guys know?”

  She finished the question with an emphatic point at the screen. The room fell silent.

  “Great question,” Webster said after a pause. “It’s possible his abductors knew about Dr. Bronik’s medical problem and used it to their advantage. They drugged him, knowing that when they carried him out, everyone would just assume he was having another attack.”

  “So it’s an inside job, then,” Aimee said. “Only people in the physics department knew about Matt’s fits.”

  “Not necessarily,” Beppe said. “There are students who have seen him carried out too. And they’re not all physics majors.”

  “Still, an inside-Dartmouth job,” Aimee said.

  No one had anything to say about this for a moment or two.

  “Maybe they just got lucky and drugged a guy who was already having a health problem?” Webster suggested.

  No one responded. The word lucky didn’t seem to belong anywhere near this.