by Dete Meserve
“But why did he call you when he’s already working with a law firm here in LA?”
He hesitates a moment before answering. “He said he needed an attorney with experience in Manhattan.”
There are a hundred things I know I should do, including getting started on calling Ben’s family, but instead, I wrap the one-terabyte security-system DVR in a beach towel and stuff it in my black tote bag.
I’m certain that the clues to the hours and minutes before Ben’s disappearance have been captured by our cameras at home and are recorded on the drive. If I can recover the data, I hope it will help me understand why there’s a gun in my nightstand, why Ben erased the DVR, and why he asked for a meeting with a New York criminal defense attorney. And I know exactly who can help me unlock it.
Aaron.
I’d watched him do it before when one of our computers crashed at CIT. The engineers were unable to recover the data from the complicated architecture of the array and were about to resort to restoring the backup when Aaron, our lead programmer, came up with an unconventional approach. And it worked.
I sling the tote bag on my shoulder and head out the front door. Although I’d seen the TV news report earlier, I’m surprised at how many reporters and cameramen are camped out on the parkway in front of my house. There are nearly two dozen, and when they see me, they rush forward, pushing cameras and microphones in my direction.
“What can you tell us about your husband’s disappearance?” asks a tall blonde reporter from one of the local TV stations.
I have no idea what to say. “I’m . . . overwhelmed with what’s happened to our family,” I begin. “I appreciate all of your attention and concern for helping Ben. But I’m in no frame of mind to talk to anyone about it right now. I hope you understand.”
The next few minutes are a surreal blur as I slip into the car and slowly maneuver it through a street crawling with reporters and crowded with news vans. I have a sense that the media could help us find Ben, but I have no idea yet how to make that happen.
On the drive to CIT, I call Ben’s mother and tell her the news. Silence meets my words, and I worry that I’ve traumatized her. She had a stroke last month and hasn’t fully recovered. “Oh no,” she says, and I hear her soft Texas accent even though she’s lived in Chicago for forty years.
“Have you talked to him lately?” I say, trying to sound calm.
“Not since Sunday. He talked a lot about the trial. He seemed worried about that . . . and a lot of things.”
I wonder if Ben had confided in his mother about our discussion. He’d often shared things with her that I hadn’t even thought to discuss with my mother when she was alive.
“You may get a call from detectives or other people on Ben’s legal team.” I draw a deep breath. “But don’t worry. We’re going to find him. This is all a big misunderstanding.”
“Oh Sarah. I wish that would be true,” she says, then breaks down crying. They’re a mother’s tears. Deep. Raw.
I listen, knowing there are no words that will make this easier for either of us.
Her voice is barely above a whisper. “Please give him a chance, Sarah.”
Energy shoots through the soles of my feet as I take the DVR straight to Aaron’s office in Building 18, a sprawling, block-long laboratory on CIT’s 168-acre campus that not only houses the Space Systems Laboratory, where Aaron and I work, but also a wind tunnel and a massive indoor flight facility.
I find Aaron sitting behind two large monitors in his office on the top floor. He’s sporting four-day stubble and scanning a screen full of Python code in a program he and his team have been developing. I close the door behind me.
He looks up, puzzled, but then a slow smile slips across his face, remembering last night. “My head hurts. You?”
“Everything hurts.”
I sit in the chair across from him but don’t know where to start. How to explain what has happened in the less than twelve hours since we left together from the airport bar.
I pull the DVR out of my tote bag, unwrap it. “My husband is missing.”
His eyes are gentle. “What? What happened?”
I ramble on about the lawsuit, the gun, the security-system cameras, and the erased DVR, aware that I sound like someone in shock. Last night we were drinking tequila and celebrating a major discovery. Now I must sound like someone who can’t grasp that this is what my life has suddenly become.
He fixes a pair of dark-blue eyes on me. “Let me help. What can I do?”
I lay the DVR on the desk and take a moment to organize my thoughts. “I think the answers to what happened in the hours before Ben disappeared might be on this drive. But I’ve only been able to recover one seventeen-second clip.”
I explain all the utilities I’ve run, what I’ve already tried that didn’t work.
“Do you want me to see what else I can recover?”
“Yeah.” I draw a deep breath and feel the constriction in my chest. “There’s no one better at this kind of data recovery than you. But, it’s probably best if you don’t look at anything you recover.”
He shifts in his chair. “What am I getting myself into?”
I glance down at my hands and see they are clenched into tight fists. “Look, it appears to have been erased by a fairly high-powered scrub utility, which makes me think it was deliberate. Did Ben erase it? I don’t know. But if he did, he must have had a reason. And I need to find out what that was.”
He leans forward and doesn’t say anything for a moment. I look at him then, and that is my mistake.
Sometimes when I look at him, I completely forget I’m a nearly forty-year-old married woman with a teenage son.
It’s not simply that he is attractive, with eyes the color of the night sky. He is enormously talented. He can develop anything in any programming language. Can instantly spot an error in chunks of code and fix it. I write Python fluently, but the other languages didn’t come as easily for me. Aaron is like a universal translator. He can interpret whatever we need to happen and think through the complex steps to do it in whatever program language we are dealing with.
And he shares my obsession with discovery, especially with the search for the Trojan asteroid. The night we confirmed the asteroid with optical telescopes around the globe, he hugged me, and the room spun around as if we had stepped into a kaleidoscope.
I suspect he found me attractive, even though he had never once said anything to give me that impression. So maybe it had been my imagination that his gaze met mine and held it for longer than it should. Or that he smiled at me when I was talking. Scientists and programmers aren’t always known for being the best at social cues. Maybe what I thought was attraction was simply some kind of social tic.
But attraction is purposeful. We are in control over it. Never surprised by it.
So was I choosing to be attracted to Aaron? Or was it how it felt? Inevitable.
“I’ll do it,” he says. “But the results could be messy. The files may have been recorded chronologically, but there’s no telling in what order we’ll be able to recover the data or whether we’ll be able to stitch it together in the way you want.”
“Understood. The data is highly sensitive so—”
“I’ll use my private encrypted server and send you an invitation to sign in, then deliver data dumps if I can retrieve anything.”
I suddenly feel like I have a low-grade fever and decide it’s because I’ve looked at him too long. “Thank you.”
I stand. He’s dressed casually, wearing a black fleece jacket and a white T-shirt. I shouldn’t be distracted by that, but I am. I move my gaze to a diagram on the bulletin board by his desk instead of looking at him.
He picks up the DVR. “Last night was . . . confusing and amazing,” he says in a low voice.
“Yes, to both.”
Then I make the mistake of looking at him again. And now it’s my turn to smile slowly.
It’s all your fault, I think. It’s al
l your fault that I like you too much.
What is wrong with me? My husband is missing and I’m thinking about another man. It’s as if an illness—a madness?—has taken over my brain and body, squelching reason.
I’ve rarely been confronted with a situation I couldn’t handle, and this is the first time that I feel powerless to control my own thoughts. My feelings. I’ve run through all the rational theories—midlife crisis, too much estrogen, too little estrogen, or complacency with my marriage—and rejected them all.
I resolve—no, promise—that I will not think about Aaron again. I won’t let my mind linger back to our time together last night. I will wipe my brain free of him, just like the erased hard drive.
I actually believe I have that kind of willpower.
In the hot sunlight, I head to my boss’s office in Building 37. Steven Webster is a no-nonsense guy with self-professed OCD about organization, and his office reflects that. He has a small stack of reports on his desk, but otherwise every other surface is immaculate and clutter-free. There’s not even a sign that he has a wife and three kids—not a photograph or a crayon drawing anywhere to disturb the minimalist quality of his office setting.
I tell him that Ben is missing, and he immediately encourages me to take whatever time I need to sort it out. The deadline is looming on our twelve-hundred-page presentation to NASA—a proposal for a brand-new two-hundred-million-dollar space telescope that will look for planets orbiting the brightest stars in our galaxy. Even though he talks as though it’s all going to work out, I can see he’s already developing a plan for someone else to take over for me if Ben isn’t found soon.
I don’t tell him that police think this is related to Ben’s upcoming trial against his partners, which include movie star Michael Hayden. CIT is notoriously conservative about such things. With so much government funding in play, they don’t want to be associated with the sensational or anything that might tarnish their upstanding reputation. If Ben’s disappearance causes too much of a media sensation—if I get too much attention for the wrong reasons—I know they will choose someone “less complicated” to lead the next space telescope mission.
I leave his office in a whirl of emotions—confusion mixed with anger and uncertainty. In less than twenty-four hours, my stable and reliable life suddenly feels volatile, careening out of control.
I’m a fizz of nerves as I drive back home, but I try to distract myself from that buzzy feeling by calling Ben’s sister, Julia, from the car.
I explain everything. It’s easier this time, maybe because I’ve had a chance to say it aloud a few times already. But the words still sound surreal as they race out of my mouth.
“Oh my god,” she shouts into the phone. Julia is known for being effusive, but this is loud, even for her. “Did anyone check the hospitals?”
“I’m sure police are checking. Why?”
“Maybe he had another kidney stone.”
“What do you mean another kidney stone?”
She sounds annoyed. “He had one four days ago, didn’t he tell you? How come you don’t know?”
“I was in DC presenting at NASA Headquarters. I didn’t talk to him while I was gone.”
“He went into the ER on Saturday. Called me on the way saying he thought he was maybe having a heart attack. Didn’t he tell you this, either? Didn’t Zack know?”
“Zack was away on a class environmental trip until Sunday night.”
“I told Ben that if he were having a heart attack he wouldn’t be able to call me. I had a kidney stone a few months ago, so I told him that’s what I thought it was. I checked on him later and he said I was right. Kidney stone, wouldn’t you know it.”
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around her story. “Then what happened?”
“Told me he passed the stone and the doctors sent him home. But those kidney stones are wicked. Maybe he’s back in the hospital with complications or something? Could be that’s where he is.”
Her theory, as wacky as it sounds, actually takes my anxiety down a notch. “Why wouldn’t the hospital call me?”
“Our whole medical system is messed up, that’s why,” she says. “Don’t get me started about the time I went to the ER with pneumonia.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“No, we’ve checked all the hospitals. He’s not there,” Detective Dawson says. He arrived at my house ten minutes before I got back from CIT and is waiting on the front porch. “Not in the county jails, either.”
“Jails?”
“We got to cover all the bases. Some missing persons end up there.”
He has a thing about the Christmas tree. Sits right across from it this time, staring at it as though it’s a rare artifact in a museum.
“You guys get a real Christmas tree every year?” he says absently, but it feels planned to me.
“It’s been a few years . . . but we had one every year when Zack was little.”
“Not for me. Too much hassle with all the needles and the watering . . . you think a guy who’s getting ready for a big trial wouldn’t have time to do all that . . . and decorate it like this, too.”
I’m not sure what he’s getting at, and I’m tired. “It’s a family tradition. Ever since—”
“How come you didn’t know about the kidney stones until now?”
“Like I told you before, I was making a presentation at NASA. Those meetings are always intense, and given our major discovery, this one was particularly eventful.”
“It’s kind of a big deal. Kidney stones. Is it like him to keep something like that from you?”
I shift in my chair. “What could I have done about it except worry from twenty-five hundred miles away?”
“And your kid—Zack, is it?—he didn’t tell you his father was in the hospital for kidney stones?”
“I’m thinking he didn’t know. He was on a school trip until Sunday night.”
“Did your husband tell you about the 911 call he made Monday night?”
My stomach tightens. “911?”
He looks at his notes. “The call came in at 11:53. Your husband indicated that he had seen an intruder on the property.”
“In the house?”
“In your backyard. By the time officers arrived eleven minutes later, the intruder was gone.”
A chill runs up my spine.
“I talked with Ben’s assistant—Will Wright—and he says Ben took out a seven-million-dollar life insurance policy, naming you as the sole beneficiary, several months ago. What can you tell me about that?”
“I don’t know anything about the amount,” I say. “I don’t know how Will knows something like that, either.”
“That’s a lot of money for someone like you to come into. I’ll bet seven million is more than you’ll make for the rest of your career.”
I stare—actually glare—at him and notice the way he’s looking at me. And realize he’s baiting me.
“You don’t actually think I might be behind his disappearance because he took out life insurance and named me, his wife, a beneficiary?”
“The beneficiary.”
“Statistically, have there ever been women who made their husbands go missing? To get their life insurance money?” He looks at me but doesn’t answer. “Except in the movies,” I add. “Or tabloid TV shows.”
He doesn’t blink. “We haven’t ruled you out.”
“Seriously?”
“You two have a prenup?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“From what I understand from Will, you have a prenup that says that you are entitled to inherit everything only after you’ve been married fifteen years.”
“You’re allowed to ask personal questions like that? And people have to answer?”
“They can if they want. And they usually do. Is it true your fifteenth wedding anniversary was a few months ago? And that your husband is heir to the Mayfield Department Store empire in Chicago?”
“Are you asking
me or telling me?”
He softens his tone. “I’m asking you to confirm you’re now free to inherit one hundred percent of his tremendous wealth if he dies.”
If he dies. What is he talking about? Ben is just missing. He’s coming back. There’s no way he’s dead.
I know where Detective Dawson’s going with his line of questioning. Forget my reputation as an astronomer working on a three-hundred-fifty-million-dollar space telescope for NASA. Forget my groundbreaking discovery of the Trojan asteroid. He’s trying to paint me as a gold digger who stands to get not only my husband’s family fortune but also a seven-million-dollar payout if Ben dies.
Why he’s doing that when there are other suspects puzzles me. Perhaps he thinks I’m in collusion with his embezzling partners? Or maybe he just has to prove—like I do in all my research—that he’s asked every question, examined every piece of evidence, and followed every lead. Even the dead-end ones. Even the stupid ones.
I’m worried he’s going to find out that we had discussed divorce. Maybe Ben told someone. And if he did, the detective seems clever enough to get people to tell him that kind of stuff.
I know what he’ll assume. I know what everyone will assume.
They’ll assume that if a woman is suggesting divorce or spending time with some man who isn’t her husband, that she is also bat-shit crazy. That she’s somehow responsible for whatever tragedy is unfolding. Maybe she also struggles with drugs or alcohol. She’s unreliable. She’ll do dangerous things.
If our kid is in trouble at school, if our husband cheats, if we like someone who isn’t our husband, or if we can’t have children or don’t want children, we are so weak that we have no boundaries for our behavior, no willpower, and we are nearly guaranteed to make atrocious decisions. We become sociopaths-in-training.
His theory plays into the belief that behind the facade of any successful woman, mother, or wife, we are all hiding our shallow, fickle, dumb, gullible, and controlling selves. Not because any of this is accurate or true, but in a crisis like this, assumptions become truth.