by Brad Parks
“Nice to meet you,” I said quickly. “Did Sheena say where she was going?”
“She seemed like she was upset about something. She said she was going down to the second floor for a second to talk to . . . someone.”
“Beppe Valentino?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“I just came from that way. She wasn’t there.”
Markham’s brow furrowed, but she didn’t speak.
Emmett Webster walked in. “What’s going on?”
“Have you seen Sheena?” I asked.
“Yeah, she passed by and said she was going down to talk to Beppe.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Ten minutes? Fifteen? I didn’t really pay attention. She said she’d be right back.”
I immediately pulled out my phone and dialed Sheena’s number.
It rang.
And rang.
Five interminable times.
Then it went to voice mail.
I hung up, then sent a quick text.
Where ru? Call me.
Then I redialed Sheena’s number.
Same result.
“Maybe she just stopped in the ladies’ room on her way back,” Emmett suggested.
“Let me check,” I said.
I exited the lab and turned left, toward the nearest bathroom.
It was dark. The light only turned on when I swung the door open.
“Hello? Sheena?”
But, of course, that was ridiculous. Sheena wouldn’t just be sitting in blackness.
When I came back out, Emmett was in the hallway, looking at me expectantly.
I shook my head and said, “Let me check downstairs.”
Emmett followed. I must have been confused about which office was Beppe’s. Sheena was probably down there, right now, and I was getting myself worked up about nothing.
Except when I reached the office whose nameplate very clearly read VALENTINO, B, the door was closed. No light escaped from the crack underneath.
I tried the handle.
Locked.
“Let me check the bathroom down here,” I said.
It was just a bit farther up the hall.
But also empty.
Since I was already down that way, I went to the postdoc office, a small room shared by three people. It, too, had no sign of life.
“Sheena?” I called out. “Sheena, are you down here?”
The ancient corridors of Wilder Hall offered no response. I felt at least twice as crazy as the look Emmett was now giving me.
“Maybe she’s back upstairs by now,” I said hopefully. “We just missed her somehow.”
I resisted—barely—the urge to run back upstairs and only managed to do so because Emmett was still trailing me.
When I arrived at the lab, it was the same.
Three crime scene techs.
Still no Sheena.
“I’ll call Beppe,” I said. “Maybe she’s with him and they just, I don’t know, stepped outside for a breath of fresh air.”
When the temperature was in the teens.
And the wind was gusting.
Whatever.
I dialed Beppe’s number.
It went straight to voice mail. Like his phone had been shut off. I didn’t know if Beppe texted or not, so I left a message to please call immediately.
Now fully frantic, I tried Sheena again.
Still no answer.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“Just take a few deep breaths,” Emmett said. “She’s obviously somewhere. Let’s go ask Steve Dahan. Maybe she and Beppe went to grab some coffee or something.”
We trooped down the stairs and back out into the cold. Dahan climbed out of his car when he saw us descending the front steps.
I let Emmett take the lead.
“Did you see Sheena and Beppe?” he asked.
Dahan cocked his head. “You mean when they came in?”
“More recently. The last ten minutes or so.”
“No. Why?”
“Something weird is going on,” I said.
“They’re not answering their phones,” Emmett told Dahan. “And they don’t seem to be anywhere inside.”
“Well, they didn’t come this way,” Dahan said.
“Does this building have any other exits?”
“Yeah, in back. I locked it, so you can’t get in that way. But you can get out.”
“Think that’s what they did?”
“We can find out,” Dahan said. “There’s a camera out there. It’s mainly for the parking lot but I’m pretty sure it shows the back of Wilder. Hang on.”
He went back to his car and retrieved a tablet. “Let’s go inside. It’s freezing out here.”
I was barely feeling the cold, so I only noticed the warmth of Wilder so much. Dahan had stopped at the base of the stairs and was swiping at the tablet, talking as he went. I was missing a lot of it, but what I did manage to take in told me he was mostly just rambling.
Eventually, he produced an image showing a stretch of parking lot with just a few cars left in it, bathed in dim sodium halide light. On the left side of the screen, the back entrance to Wilder was visible.
“Let me roll the footage back and see what happens,” Dahan said.
He slid a bar at the bottom of the image to the left. Time wound backward. For a short while, nothing happened.
Then a car entered the lot, then two figures exited the car, then they walked backward across the parking lot, then they entered Wilder. It was hard to make sense of it at high speed, going in the wrong direction.
“Stop there,” I said.
“Let’s go back a little further,” Dahan said.
He slid the bar back, then set it going regular speed.
I concentrated on the screen.
The back door to Wilder opened. First Sheena poured through it, then Beppe.
They descended the steps. Beppe immediately glanced left, then right, in a manner that could only be described as suspicious.
Sheena was walking stiffly, strangely. When she reached the blacktop, she may have stumbled. Or not. She didn’t go all the way down. It was more that she just slowed down.
Beppe, who had been tailing her closely—maybe too closely?—helped her along.
Or was he actually grabbing her?
Maybe even pushing her forward?
Or was I inventing that? Beppe’s intentions were difficult to read. Helpful? Aggressive?
Beppe had one hand stuffed in his pocket. His other hand was on Sheena’s elbow.
He led her to his Subaru, herding her into the passenger seat, then quickly walked around and hopped in the driver’s side. His hand never left his pocket.
Because he was trying to keep it warm?
Or because there was a weapon in there?
I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing. I reminded myself I had been under extraordinary stress. My mind’s eye might be taking benign details and filling them with unintended menace.
Beppe Valentino was a theoretical physicist, not an armed kidnapper.
Right?
But Sheena wasn’t answering her phone. Neither was he. And they had left in such a hurry. This, despite her saying she’d be right back.
It didn’t require much imagination to think of how this might have played out in some horrible way. Sheena went down to Beppe’s office, for whatever reason—maybe he even summoned her there—and he took the opportunity to complete the crime that the Chinese men he had hired had failed at.
But Beppe?
Really?
Why?
Beppe had been the one who called me to tell me about Matt’s fits. All three times. Was that a department chair doing his duty or an attempt to establish an alibi?
I was surely being paranoid, yet there had always been aspects about Beppe that seemed a little too extravagant. Like that Maserati convertible, so impractical. Or the wife who spent her winters in an Italian villa.
/> How did he afford all that, anyhow? Or was that just it: he didn’t. Had he gotten himself in a deep financial hole and, understanding the value of Matt’s research—and betting on Plottner’s desperation to acquire it—had he come up with this scheme to cover his debts and fund future profligacy?
The video ended with Beppe backing out of his parking spot, then speeding away.
The whole thing took maybe forty-five seconds.
“What did I just watch?” Emmett asked.
“I’m really not sure,” Dahan said.
I couldn’t summon any words.
“Could you go back to the beginning and zoom in on Sheena’s face?” Emmett asked. “I feel like . . . I want to get a better look at her.”
Dahan did as requested. The resolution on the camera was good enough that there was no mistaking it:
The pained expression. The wet cheeks. The puffy eyes.
Sheena was crying.
CHAPTER 49
Emmett watched the video four more times, asking Dahan to zoom in now and then.
It did little to clarify what may have transpired.
All that could be said for sure was that Sheena Aiyagari was distraught. And then she entered Beppe Valentino’s car.
Whether it was voluntarily or under duress was still an open question in Emmett’s mind.
But he was going to make every effort to figure it out. And quickly. He wouldn’t have believed it twenty-four hours earlier—that a young woman’s mysterious sixth sense would be his best chance to rescue the abducted professor—but this was now his reality.
They needed to find Sheena.
Emmett wanted to check Beppe’s place first. Brigid insisted on joining him, and he didn’t object. It would allow the Crime Scene Unit to continue working the lab undisturbed.
Before long, Emmett was rolling up outside Beppe’s four-bedroom Cape.
There were no lights on, either inside or out.
“Doesn’t look like they came here,” Brigid said.
“Just sit tight a moment, please,” he replied as he left the car.
He rang the doorbell.
No answer.
Was it possible, if you assumed the worst from that video, that Sheena was being held hostage inside? Unlikely. Beppe wouldn’t bring her to his own house, would he?
Emmett returned to the car.
“We should try Sheena’s place,” Brigid said. “Maybe they went there.”
With Brigid navigating, Emmett drove. He was still trying to think about Beppe Valentino as a suspect. Was there anything beyond the video—and his general proximity to Matt and Sheena—to implicate him? Did he have some motive Emmett didn’t yet know about?
In between calling out the turns to take, Brigid was making phone calls—presumably to Sheena and Beppe. Every so often, he heard the tinny start of someone’s voice mail. Brigid wasn’t bothering to leave messages. She had already done so, and the dozens of missed calls would only reinforce the urgency.
When they arrived at Sachem Village, Brigid directed him to a multifamily home and pointed to the unit on the right.
“That’s Sheena’s,” she said.
It looked every bit as dark as Beppe’s place had been.
Emmett left his car running as he rang Sheena’s doorbell. There seemed no point in turning it off when he already knew what was going to happen.
Sure enough: Ring, nothing; ring, nothing.
Except this time, Brigid was out of the car as he came back down the walkway.
“The neighbor was friendly,” she said. “Her name is Lauryn Ward. I talked to her earlier today. She’d probably notice if Sheena showed up, even briefly.”
Brigid was already walking toward the middle unit. Emmett joined her.
There were lights on. The door was answered by a woman with long light-brown hair swept into a haphazard bun atop her head.
“Oh, hi,” she said. She eyed Emmett quickly before looking in Brigid’s direction. “Brigid, right?”
“Yes. Hi, Lauryn. Sorry to bother you again. Can we come in for a moment?”
“Sure. The baby went down early and I didn’t fight him, so it’s only a little bit chaotic around here for a change. I’m sure I’ll pay for it later.”
“This is Emmett Webster. He’s with the state police.”
“Hello,” Lauryn said.
Emmett dipped his head once.
“I was wondering if you had seen Sheena in the last hour or so?”
Lauryn was shaking her head before Brigid even finished the question. “I’m afraid not. I saw her briefly this afternoon, when she was with you guys. I was going to say hello but you were in and out so quickly.”
“That was when we came back here to get her a change of clothes,” Brigid said.
“Of course,” Emmett said. “And before that . . . I believe you told Brigid that Sheena is usually back to her house by nine each night, but you were worried because you didn’t see her last night?”
“That’s right.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what time did you go to bed last night?”
“Oh, gosh. I usually collapse around nine thirty. Maybe last night I made it to nine forty-five?”
“Did you see anyone out of the ordinary hanging around before you went to bed?”
“No, sorry.”
Emmett had been hoping she might have seen the would-be kidnappers, lurking around. Then again, they didn’t make their move on Sheena until after eleven.
Emmett pulled a business card out of his wallet.
“If Sheena comes home, or if you see anyone suspicious near her place, would you please give me a call immediately?”
“Yes, absolutely,” she said, accepting the card.
She inquired about Sheena, and Emmett played it cautiously, walking the line between not getting the woman too alarmed while also impressing on her the gravity of the situation. Then he shut down further conversation by announcing they had to go.
When they returned to Emmett’s car, Brigid asked, “What now?”
Emmett was still trying to decide. This might be an innocent misunderstanding. Maybe Beppe had decided Sheena, frazzled and overly emotional, simply needed a bite to eat. They could right now be in a restaurant, seated in back, in a spot with bad cell phone reception.
Or?
It wasn’t so innocent.
Emmett had no way of knowing. But this was striking him as a time when it was better to apologize later for overreacting, rather than deal with the consequences of underreacting.
“I’m putting out a BOLO for Beppe’s car and telling dispatch to call me as soon as someone finds it,” he said.
Within a few minutes, every patrol officer in the area would be on the lookout for Beppe’s Subaru Outback.
The lab appeared unchanged when Emmett and Brigid returned.
There was no Beppe, no Sheena.
And Haver Markham and her crew were still hard at work.
Or at least Haver was until she became aware Emmett had returned.
“Hey, I was looking for you,” she said. “We got a hit on a print.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It belongs to a Sean Plottner.”
Whose prints were on file because of those long-ago arrests.
“Sean Plottner?” Brigid yelped. “What was he doing in here?”
“You know him?” Haver asked.
“I met him maybe two hours ago. He offered to pay the five-million-dollar ransom for Matt—but only if Matt would come work for him.”
This was the first Emmett was hearing of the offer. It was straight-up strange. The kind of thing that made a seasoned investigator wonder what Plottner’s motivations were.
“Did you say yes?” Emmett asked.
“I told him I’d think about it. I thought there was a chance Sheena was going to come through.”
Emmett looked at Haver. “This print. Where did you find it?”
“Right . . . here,” she said, crossing the room and p
ointing with the tip of a ballpoint pen to the door handle of a small white refrigerator that was resting on top of a counter.
“What’s in that fridge?”
“Samples of some sort. Want a look inside?”
“Sure.”
“That must be where Matt keeps the virus,” Brigid said. “Be careful.”
Haver capped the pen, then used the end of it to open the door so she didn’t have to touch the handle, not even with her gloved fingers.
Emmett walked over and peered in. Even though he was close to it, he didn’t feel much cool air. It reminded him of a hotel refrigerator in energy-saver mode, one whose temperature was set only a few degrees colder than the air conditioner.
Inside, there were rows of slender vials, all of them meticulously labeled with a letter and a four-digit number. The first, in the upper-left corner, was A0032. It went from there all the way down to M0102 in the lower right. Some of the numbers had more than one vial associated with them.
Emmett looked toward Brigid, who was gazing into the refrigerator with something like hunger. She walked closer to it, then stopped herself.
“Why was Sean Plottner opening Matt’s refrigerator?” she asked acerbically.
“I don’t know,” Emmett said. “But I’d really like to ask him.”
CHAPTER 50
The switchbacks—and they seemed to be endless—were making me nauseous.
Or, I should say, more nauseous than I was already.
As Emmett drove, I was thinking about the fingerprint on the refrigerator. How had it gotten there? Even if Plottner was involved in this somehow, it wasn’t like he had done the kidnapping himself. He would have just been the guy who paid those three fake EMTs.
Had he come back to the lab later to steal a sample so that Matt could be forced to work on it? No. Gary Evans and the Department of Defense would have stopped him.
Besides, Plottner wouldn’t want forced labor. He wanted the public recognition and lasting fame that would come from Matt’s breakthrough, and he couldn’t get that with Matt hidden away.
So what was the fingerprint about?
We made yet another hairpin turn up the mountain.
“I can’t believe one person owns all this,” I said.
Emmett mumbled something indistinct. By the time I caught up to what he was saying, he was midsentence: “. . . nice and casual about this. I’m sure Plottner’s a smart fellow. I’d rather see if we can catch him off guard. So this is your visit. Not quite social, but not all business either. Ask him a few questions about himself, about the job he’s offering your husband. I’ll tack on my part at the end. Does that sound okay?”