by Brad Parks
“I’m sorry, this is all happening so fast,” he said. “I just, I didn’t even think about the implications.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“Didn’t Matt tell you?” Beppe asked, then answered his own question: “No, of course he didn’t. He would have kept something like this to himself.”
“Tell me what?” I asked.
“Sheena was going to have one supporting witness, and it was Matt,” Beppe said. “I never felt like it was appropriate for me to ask him about it, but I presume he must have overheard David’s overtures at some point, and that’s why Sheena wanted him to testify.”
I felt myself going as wide eyed as everyone else in the room. The complainant and the lone material witness in a sexual harassment case were now both missing. It pointed a big bright flashing arrow at the person who benefited most from their disappearance.
And, apparently, no one needed to tell Detective Webster to follow it.
“Do you know where David Dafashy is right now?” he asked.
“He was at my house this morning,” Beppe said. “Then he said he was going home for a little while.”
“All right,” Webster said. “I’ll go talk to him.”
CHAPTER 25
According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, David Dafashy lived in Hanover, just off Route 120.
This technically wasn’t Emmett’s case anymore. But that didn’t mean he had turned off being a detective.
Besides, he didn’t have to be back at his desk until noon tomorrow.
While sexual harassment wasn’t Emmett’s area of expertise, criminal behavior was. You always knew you were dealing with an amateur when they tried to talk their way out of things, relying on their charm or your stupidity to allow them to get away with their misdeeds.
Only two kinds of people denied absolutely everything: Hardened criminals, who had already learned that everything they said to law enforcement would be used against them.
Or the truly innocent.
Which sometimes made it very difficult to distinguish one from the other.
Could Dafashy have hired three Chinese men to kidnap Matt Bronik and Sheena Aiyagari? Was Dafashy hoping the looming presence of China—the rival to American supremacy in so many areas, including quantum physics—would be distracting enough that suspicion would never fall on him?
It was an elaborate scheme, though Dafashy surely had the intelligence to plan it out.
He also had the motive. If Dafashy were drummed out of Dartmouth on a sexual harassment charge, he wouldn’t only lose his job. He’d lose his career. The days when universities looked the other way on such malfeasance were over. College presidents now lived in fear of the social media mob turning on them.
In academia, sexual misconduct was the new leprosy. Dafashy would become untouchable.
Emmett was soon parking in front of a modern-looking house set in a cluster of similar structures, each no more than a few feet away.
When Emmett knocked on Dafashy’s door, it was answered by a woman with long dark hair, serious brown eyes hidden behind tortoiseshell glasses, and the kind of facial symmetry normally found on models and high-end restaurant hostesses. She appeared to be in her early thirties.
“Hi, I’m looking for David Dafashy,” Emmett said.
“I’m sorry, he’s not here,” she replied coolly.
“Are you Mrs. Dafashy?”
“I’m David’s wife, yes.”
“Mariangela?”
“That’s right. Mariangela Sechi. Can I help you?”
Emmett introduced himself.
“Missing Persons,” she said. “Is this about Matt Bronik?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you come in?”
“Thank you,” he said, entering an open-floor-plan downstairs area.
On one side of the room there was a sitting area—on the other, a home office. The desk was covered in piles of paper of varying heights. A laptop rested on one of the piles.
Behind the desk, hanging on the wall, were diplomas from a variety of institutions. In the corner, there was a low table covered in pink, purple, and green LEGOs.
“I read about Matt this morning online, and I’ve been in total shock ever since,” Mariangela said. “I wanted to reach out to Brigid just to offer support. But then I didn’t want to bother her and . . . how’s she doing?”
“She’s hanging in there,” Emmett said. “Her sister, Aimee, is with her, so that helps.”
“Oh, thank goodness. I can’t even imagine. Have a seat, please.”
She pointed him toward an armchair and took a spot on the couch, shoving aside a blanket and two stuffed animals, a pair of floppy-eared rabbits. There was a quiet command to her movements. She had a poised, intelligent air.
“You know the Broniks fairly well, then?” Emmett started, just to get her warmed up.
“We’re not best friends or anything, but yeah. There aren’t a lot of people with school-age kids in the physics department, so we kind of gravitate toward each other. My daughter is a few years younger than their son.”
“I think Brigid mentioned your families socialized.”
“Now and then. Once the term gets underway, everyone is usually pretty busy.”
“You look like you’re pretty busy yourself,” Emmett said, nodding toward the paper-strewn desk. “Do you work at the college too?”
“No, I do freelance copyediting for scientific journals,” she said, almost like it embarrassed her.
She cleared her throat. “But I’m sure you didn’t come here to listen to me talk about my boring job. Is there some way I can help?”
“I wanted to ask a few questions about Matt Bronik and Sheena Aiyagari,” he said.
Mariangela’s poise did not survive the mention of the young woman’s name.
“What does she have to do with this?” Mariangela asked, lacing the pronoun with acid.
“Sheena is missing too. No one has seen her since late yesterday afternoon, not long after Professor Bronik was taken.”
Mariangela took a beat to absorb this information. Her face, so hard at the first mention of Sheena, had melted into confusion.
“Sheena too?” she asked. “And you think it’s connected?”
“It’s a theory we have to pursue,” Emmett said, aware he sounded too much like a cop. “I assume your husband told you about the accusation Sheena made against him?”
“Yes. He denied it, naturally. But David denies a lot of things.”
“You don’t believe him?”
Mariangela grabbed one of the plush rabbits she had earlier cast aside and settled it in her lap.
“Sometimes I think I don’t believe anything about David anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
She blew out a big breath and looked up at the ceiling. “This is really hard to talk about. I’m sure you heard about the circumstances under which David and I met?”
“I did.”
“Yeah, so . . . I was a PhD candidate. And when I got pregnant, I wanted to have an abortion. I knew once I had a baby there’d be no way I’d finish the program. David was the one who talked me into keeping the baby. And part of the reason I allowed him to convince me was . . . this sounds stupid now, but I had never wanted anything the way he seemed to want us. He was so adamant that we would be together, and we would be this beautiful family, and I let myself believe the fairy tale. I had always wanted to be a mother anyway—not at that point, but eventually. And there are certainly worse things than being the wife of a Dartmouth professor. So I decided to speed up ‘eventually.’ We got married, I had the baby, and I started to get ready for happily ever after.”
She let loose a derisive chortle. “And then came Leonie.”
“Who’s Leonie?”
“Leonie Descheun. She was a postdoc. From France. She actually sort of looks like me—a little geeky, dark hair, except hers is curly. Anyway, the baby was fourteen, eighteen months, maybe? I was pretty
deep in that and David was obviously distracted by something, but whatever. Then we were at the department holiday party and it was just so obvious—the way he was following her around, the way he looked at her. I don’t know if he actually slept with her or not. But he so clearly wanted to that I was . . . shattered, really. Obviously I wasn’t as special as I thought.”
“Sometimes affairs of the heart are worse than real affairs,” Emmett interjected.
“Oh, I know. The only thing that saved our marriage is, thank God, she went back to France. As soon as she was out of the picture, David kind of returned to normal. And I thought, ‘Okay, that sucked. But we survived.’
“Then came Sheena, and . . . I don’t know. It was like, is this what my life is going to be? Is there always going to be another Leonie, another Sheena, another skirt he’s going to chase until either his libido cools down or he gets himself fired? Can I really deal with that?”
“So you believe Sheena,” Emmett said.
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“Because from what I was told, he was hot to take her to the Quantum Sensing Gordon Research Conference.”
“In Montreal?”
“Yeah,” she said.
She breathed out sharply again before announcing: “That’s where David and I slept together for the first time. He was even trying to take her to the same restaurant, Les Jardins. It was this very fancy place—white tablecloths, people to scrape away bread crumbs for you, every bottle of wine seventy-five dollars or more. Definitely not the kind of place you take a colleague. It’s like, ‘Jesus, David. Couldn’t you come up with new moves?’”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault I’m stupid.”
Emmett looked down at the carpet. He didn’t really understand men like David Dafashy. Sure, Emmett could look at another woman and see that she was attractive. But he never had a desire to take it further. Once he got with Wanda, he had all he ever needed.
Mariangela ended his brief reverie by saying, “I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with Matt.”
“Apparently, he was going to testify at Sheena’s hearing.”
“Oh,” she said, looking away. And then, as the realization of what this could mean reached her, she turned toward Emmett sharply. “So you think David—”
She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I’m looking into a lot of theories at this point,” Emmett said, still cop-like. “But, yes, I have to ask: Do you think it’s possible David had Matt and Sheena abducted so he wouldn’t have to face this sexual harassment charge?”
Mariangela had worked her hand inside her glasses and was rubbing her eyes as she shook her head.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know,” she said in a moan.
“Do you know where David was yesterday afternoon?”
“I assume at his office. But I couldn’t tell you.”
“What about last night? What time did he get home?”
She resettled her glasses back on her nose. “This isn’t his home anymore. He hasn’t been living here for a little while now. After I heard about Sheena, I told him I couldn’t stand to look at him. He denied it and pleaded with me to reconsider but . . . I guess you could say we’re separated, on our way to divorce. He’s renting a room in Hanover. The last time I saw him was Sunday. He took our daughter ice-skating and returned her around three thirty or so.
“But as for yesterday afternoon? Or last night? Or this morning? Sorry. I can’t help you. As far as I know, he could have been anywhere.”
CHAPTER 26
My vow to keep moving was being tested now that I had nowhere to go.
Detective Webster was off chasing after David Dafashy, which left . . . what, exactly?
“Are you sure there’s no way to get into Wilder?” I asked Beppe, who was mostly just staring into the remains of his coffee. “I know it’s probably a waste of time, but I keep thinking, I don’t know, that I’ll see something.”
Or maybe it was just wanting to feel closer to Matt.
“That seems to be in the hands of the Department of Defense,” Beppe said.
“Do we have any way of forcing them to let us in?”
“I heard back from one of the college lawyers right before I came over,” Beppe said. “She told me that when the government claims eminent domain, like they have here, the onus is on us to make a case as to why the top two floors of Wilder Hall should be unsealed. The matter would be heard in front of a federal judge. We’d be the plaintiff. And merely saying, ‘This is really inconvenient to a bunch of students and professors’ isn’t good enough. We have to prove there is a public interest that would be served by opening the space back up, and it has to be more compelling than the government’s need to keep it closed.”
I doubted my baseless hunch that I’d find something useful in Matt’s office would qualify.
“Oh,” I said.
Aimee, who had been making more tea and trying to force more banana bread on us, had returned to the table.
“I’m just surprised that Matt never mentioned this whole thing about Sheena and David,” she said. “He really never said anything about it?”
“Not once,” I said.
“Obviously, I was never very good at the marriage thing,” said Aimee, whose wedding and decision to divorce had been nearly simultaneous events. “But isn’t that something you’d tell your wife? That you had been asked to appear at a sexual harassment hearing?”
“You know Matt. He detests the rumormongering part of academia. Didn’t Dad ever whip that quote on you about great minds?”
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people,” Aimee said. “I still don’t see how he didn’t tell his wife.”
“There’s a lot in this world we don’t see,” Beppe said cryptically. “The vast majority of it, actually.”
“What do you mean?” Aimee asked.
“If you took the entire electromagnetic spectrum—from short gamma ray bursts all the way to the longest radio waves—and stretched it out between New York and Los Angeles, the part that is actually visible to the human eye would be about an inch long. The other twenty-five hundred miles is invisible to us.”
I didn’t reply. I felt like I was on that cross-country trip right now, and I had already missed the inch I was supposed to see.
“Huh, how about that,” Aimee said. “I wonder what—”
A phone rang. Beppe’s. It had been sitting on the table in front of him.
He looked down at it idly, then did a double take.
“It’s Sheena,” he said sharply.
He practically fumbled his phone before getting it up to his face. “Hello, it’s Beppe.”
I was staring at his mouth, which was slack as he listened to Sheena talk.
Then he said, “We’ve been worried about you. Where are you? Are you okay?”
More listening.
“Slow down, slow down,” he said. “Why are you scared? I don’t—”
He stopped, let Sheena speak, then said, “I’m with Brigid Bronik. We’re sitting in her dining room. Do you know anything about Matt? You know he’s missing, right?”
He was staring straight ahead, looking mostly perplexed by whatever he was hearing.
“Well, we can’t meet at Wilder. That’s been . . . yes, exactly,” Beppe said. “Would you like to come here, or—”
He held perfectly still. The questions were practically exploding inside me, but I kept silent.
Beppe’s side of the conversation continued: “Okay, yes, I understand . . . fifteen minutes . . . I’m sure Brigid will want to come, yes . . . Just relax, everything will be fine . . . Okay, we’ll see you soon.”
Beppe lowered his phone.
“She wants to meet us in fifteen minutes on the seventh floor of the stacks at Baker Library. She said that’s the only place she feels safe.”
“What’s
going on?” I demanded. “Does she know anything about Matt?”
“I think she knows something but she’s not really making sense,” Beppe said. “Mostly, she just sounds terrified.”
CHAPTER 27
In the various profiles that had been done about him—first in business publications; later, after his fortune had grown to sufficient levels, in glossy lifestyle magazines—writers almost always used one word to describe Sean Plottner’s drive:
Obsessive.
And, yes, Plottner had to admit, he obsessed better than most.
His current obsession was seeing just how long Tom O’Day and his fake Facebook account could withstand the scrutiny of Plottner and his rather sizable stake in the company.
He started with his frontline contact at Facebook, a woman from the investor-relations department whose title might as well have been “adult babysitter.” Her basic function was to make sure large shareholders like Plottner stayed happy and didn’t do anything radical that would make life miserable for the CEO or the board.
And, at first, she was failing spectacularly. Because when Plottner told her he wanted to know everything about a user allegedly named Tom O’Day, she had, ridiculously, thrown policy in Plottner’s face.
Specifically, Facebook’s data policy, which it now took very seriously—after getting in trouble for not having taken it as seriously as it should have—which placed tight restrictions on what user information Facebook could disclose to third parties.
Plottner responded by asking if he should instead make his request of Mark Zuckerberg, which made the investor-relations woman sound nervous, but didn’t immediately alter her response.
Policy was policy. They had to follow policy.
Then Plottner asked if he should go live and announce that he had shorted his Facebook shares over deep concerns about the competence of the management team.
At that point, the investor-relations woman said she’d get back to him.
Over the next twenty minutes, Plottner paced and practiced a series of threats and ultimatums that were heard only by his director of security, Lee Michaelides.