by Dete Meserve
I notice how close we are standing. The air between us vibrates with possibility.
His words are soft, almost caressing. “I know what’s at risk. And I want to do this for you.”
I know better than to look at him.
CHAPTER TEN
“Some things hide in plain sight,” I’m telling the reporter on the phone. “We often can’t see or observe them because we’re blinded by the light of other objects. Light is sometimes the enemy. And there can be other invisible but strong forces at play.”
“It wasn’t easy to find, then?” the reporter asks. Jonah is a journalist from AstronomyScience.com. He’s not asked me a single question about Ben being missing. He’s asking about 2010 TK7, the Trojan asteroid.
“Extremely difficult to find. That’s because its location—at Lagrangian 4, the place in space where the gravitational forces of the sun and Earth are equal—is bathed in tons of sunlight. It took a highly advanced heat sensor to pick up its existence through all that blinding light.”
Jonah jumps into another question, but my attention drifts. Blinding light. I wonder if in my search to find Ben I am being blinded by sunlight—by his popularity, his good-guy personality, and what I think I know about him—unable to see what’s right in front of me.
He stops talking and I suddenly realize he’s done asking a question, but I have no idea what it was.
“Would you repeat that?”
“When you spotted it with the space telescope, did you know immediately it was Earth’s first—and maybe only—Trojan asteroid?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I was completely blind to it at first. All of us were. We didn’t recognize the telltale signatures on the graphs. All the evidence was there, but it took days of analysis to realize what we had found.”
My research assistant, Grace, waves at me from my office door. I ask Jonah to hold.
“Shane Russo is in the lobby. He’s not on the list . . .”
I smile for the first time that day. Shane was Ben’s roommate when we were all at UC Berkeley, and the three of us often got together and solved the world’s greatest problems over greasy late-night pizza. Like many college friends, we’d lost track of each other, but we reconnected nine months ago when we found out we were living just a few blocks apart in Brentwood.
Shane and his wife, Diane, were high-level executives in finance—mergers and acquisitions—and their office was less than a mile away from CIT, in Westwood. His wife did a lot of business in Europe, so we rarely saw her, but Shane was around the house a lot lately, helping Ben map out a business plan for the new restaurants he wanted to build or acquire.
“Tell him I’ll meet him there in five.”
No one can visit the research labs at CIT without presenting a government-issued ID and being on a roster that’s authorized by an approval team days before the person is allowed on the grounds. Somehow Shane had talked himself past the security guard at the main entrance and into the lobby. But that’s as far as he’d be allowed to go without prior security clearance.
I finish up the call with Jonah, then rush downstairs to meet Shane. With thick brown hair streaked with gray and dressed in a tailored black suit and burgundy tie, he could easily pass for a NASA boss. Maybe that’s how he talked himself onto the grounds?
“You’ve got some security,” he says. “You think they’d let me go to your office if I submitted to a retina scan and donated a pint of blood?”
“You’re a sight for sore eyes.” I motion to the chairs in the corner of the lobby. “But how did you ever get past security?”
“The guard was busy helping a bus maneuver out of the lot. I told him I was already late for an important meeting with you. I guess I looked like I belonged here because he waved me through.”
Hardly anyone sidesteps security that easily, so even though I smile, I make a mental note to bring it up at our next staff meeting.
“I stopped by your house, and Zack said I’d find you here.” He lays an expensive leather briefcase on the chair next to him. “How are you holding up?”
“Okay, considering. I’m not sleeping much. And I have a perpetual ache in my stomach.”
He looks around the lobby. “But . . . you’re back at work?”
“Not really. I’m only here for an hour to do a quick interview and grab some stuff. We have a proposal due in a week. Megaproposal. Given what’s happening with Ben, my team here is stepping up to handle most of it. But there are still a few parts that I’m not ready to hand over because of where I am in my analysis.”
“And still no sign of Ben?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
I tell him how Ben was traveling in a car with a bodyguard when someone attacked them and the bodyguard was killed, but Shane has already heard this on the news.
“Do they have any idea what happened to him after that? Any clues that he might still be alive?”
“They think he was probably abducted by whoever shot him.”
“Then he might still be alive somewhere. Have you seen any activity on his charge cards? Cell phone?”
I shake my head. “Everything stopped.”
“I guess I was hoping that maybe he had just skipped town for a bit. To get away from the heat of the trial and all. What can I do? How can I help?”
“There are already big search parties . . . people scouring parks and hospitals. Friends posting on social media and flyers on practically every tree and lamppost in LA. Police are looking everywhere. There’s not much else you can do right now.”
“The media is saying that Ben’s partners may have something to do with his disappearance. Is that what police are pursuing?”
I nod. “But that doesn’t stop them from questioning me because they think I have something to gain from his disappearance. Things like life insurance and his inheritance. As if it’s not the twenty-first century and I have my own career and my own savings.”
“You need to tell them that you’ve got a relative who’s a high-powered defense attorney. Like maybe the one who represented Ryan Seacrest a while back. I’ll bet that would make them leave you alone.”
I laugh. In college, Shane often embellished his background, leaving out the parts about his dad being a construction worker or that his parents didn’t go to college, and focusing instead on a supposed uncle he said was a hedge-fund manager at Goldman Sachs. When some of the wealthy kids bragged about their Porsches or their no-holds-barred spring-break vacations on the other side of the world, Shane would concoct his own big stories, then laugh about it with Ben and me. Because Ben came from a wealthy family, he thought Shane’s stories were a hilarious fake-out on the other rich kids, but I always felt his stories were kind of sad. My roots as the child of schoolteachers are humble, too, and I seriously doubted people would like me any better if I made up an extravagant fairy tale about my life. But Shane disagreed. “If they think you don’t have the right connections or money, they’ll walk all over you.”
“When did you see Ben last?” I ask.
He shifts in his seat. “Friday night. In Manhattan. He was in a good mood until Rebecca started asking about the Aurora lawsuit.”
“Rebecca?”
“Rebecca Stanton. She’s the co-owner of Paragon, the restaurant he’s trying to buy.”
My words are caught in my throat. I want to tell him everything. About the clip where Simone is telling Ben about a man who was seen leaving Rebecca’s apartment on Saturday morning. I want to tell him that Rebecca Stanton is dead.
I don’t.
As far as I know, her murder hasn’t become a big national news story, so I can see why he doesn’t know. Still, it strikes me as odd that Ben didn’t tell him. Or that someone from Paragon didn’t notify him.
My mind is zooming. I have a sense—an instinct—that I shouldn’t talk about anything I’ve seen on that security-system DVR. If the police knew it exists, if they found out I had knowingly kept it from them, I’d be in serious trouble. The kind
that would not only get me kicked off the space telescope project but also might land me in jail.
I cough and pretend to need water. I buy time opening the water bottle I’m carrying and take a long gulp. I’m a bad actress. Shane probably knows I’m uncomfortable, but I’m hoping he’ll just chalk it up to traumatic stress.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Shane says. He mistakes my discomfort for fear that Ben is cheating. Isn’t that what all wives do?
“I’m not—”
“It’s not like that between them. They argue. Last week they were fighting about why she couldn’t get her father to part with his share of the restaurant. When I was in Manhattan a month ago, they were fighting about—” I guess my face must look chalk white because he stops talking. “Look, I didn’t come here to . . . well, this isn’t anything we need to talk about now.”
“What is his relationship with Rebecca?” I know what he’s going to say. Even if he thinks Ben was straying, he’s going to protect his longtime friend. His roommate from college. And he’s going to be careful not to rattle me, especially now.
“She’s just a business relationship. A contentious one. And you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
But the way he says it makes it clear that I do.
My eyes are bloodshot and bleary. I’ve sifted through every drawer in Ben’s desk, scoured his work emails, flipped through the binders in his cabinets, and searched through the contacts on his laptop. I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for, but I’m in a hurry because I’ve snuck into Ben’s office at Aurora over the busy lunch hour, using his key card and a spare key to the back door that he kept on a metal ring with a Lego wizard on it.
Ben is a very organized businessman. What few papers he has are neatly stacked on his desk, and although he has one drawer of old-fashioned file folders, it appears that most everything else that runs Aurora is stored digitally, using a password that I don’t know. I try guessing a few times—Zack’s middle name, our first street address—but nothing works. I can access his email without a password, and while there are thousands of emails, there seems to be an intricate system of filing them, even though I can’t figure out what it is.
I look for indications of Ben’s relationship with Rebecca Stanton, and in all their recent emails, there’s definitely tension between them. “This has got to stop,” Ben said in one email. “Every time I don’t agree to your terms, you always threaten to back out of the deal entirely.” In another, Rebecca accuses him of moving too fast. “Slow down. We don’t have to close this deal today. We’ll get there, but I need time to convince my father. GIVE ME TIME.”
There were a couple of flirty messages, too: “Morning, Gorgeous!” Rebecca wrote. “Saw they snapped your pic at the Vanity Fair party. Wow.” Or another where Rebecca seems to be blurring business with something else. “I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be doing this with. You amaze me every day.” But the one thing I can’t find is evidence that Ben ever returned the compliments. Most of the time he didn’t respond to her flowery emails at all or, if he did, he kept it friendly but professional. “Amaze? I think you mean amuse. Anyway, any idea when your attorneys will have assembled the bank docs?”
I’m also eager to learn more about the private investigator named Simone I’d seen on the security clips. I type “Simone” into the search bar on his contacts list, and two names pop up. One is based in London and represents Guaranty Alliance Bank. Probably not her. And the other is an attorney named Simone. Could this be her? I search his emails for any correspondence from her and find several, but they’re dated four years earlier and related to some trademark applications. It feels like a dead end.
I sit back in his chair, defeated. My eyes drift to a photo on Ben’s desk, and my breath stops in my throat when I realize what it is.
Most people put photos of themselves with their family on their work desks. But not Ben. Sure, he has a cluster of photographs of Zack on his credenza—Zack at six, face sprinkled with freckles, eating a yellow Popsicle. And another of me and Zack when he was around nine and we had ridden the monster roller coaster at Knott’s Berry Farm.
But what sits on his desk—what he looks at every day—is a photo of the Perseid meteor shower he took in Indian Cove at Joshua Tree National Park. With two primordial, crooked Joshua trees in the foreground and a sprinkle of silvery stars in the background, he captured a meteor shooting across the sky in one-thirtieth of a second.
Ben is not a photography buff. But I know why the photo is here.
The warm night in August when that photo was taken, we had bundled baby Zack in the car and arrived at Indian Cove just past three in the morning—the best time to view the meteor showers, but also when only the diehard meteor fans remained. I went to work setting up my telescope, like I had done with him dozens of times before. After I punched the longitude and latitude into the computer to track the sky, I needed to type in the date and asked, “What’s today’s date again?”
When he didn’t answer, I glanced up and saw him looking at me. Even beneath the starlight, I could see a faraway look in his eyes.
“What?” I said with a laugh. “Did I already ask that or something?”
He stepped closer and touched his hand to my hair. “No . . . it’s just the way you hold your head when you’re setting up your telescope.”
I pushed my hair away from my face. “I’m a total geek, aren’t I?”
He smiled. “And it’s the way you look at me when you ask me if you’re a total geek.”
And just as he was about to kiss me, one of the Perseid meteors dazzled the skies above us.
“Never change,” he whispered. Then as the meteors rained across the sky, he pointed his camera at the heavens and captured this stunning shot, the silhouettes of the spike-leaved Joshua trees giving the photo a feeling of having been taken at the dawn of time.
“I want to remember this night forever,” he said. “Years from now, when we’re both really, really old, I will make sure you remember it, too.”
“How are you going to do that?” I said, wrapping my arms around his waist.
“I have my ways,” he said slyly, then kissed me.
My eyes well with tears. He did have his ways. The photo was proof of that.
Detective Dawson is bringing me coffee. From some hipster joint called Tail of the Tiger. He’s standing on my front porch, and his hair is neatly combed today. He’s wearing what looks like a new light-brown sport jacket. That can only mean he wants something.
I glance at my reflection in the mirror next to the front door, frustrated with the puffy dark circles beneath my eyes.
He fumbles a little when he hands me the paper cup. Still hot. “You seem like the type that would like a cappuccino.”
“There’s a cappuccino type?”
He shrugs. “They’re usually perfectionists, and they like being in control. Sound like anyone you know?”
“There’s no place for a perfectionist in astronomy.” I take the cup but don’t have the heart to tell him that I can’t stand coffee.
“You have a minute to talk?”
He follows me into the house and then heads straight to the Christmas tree even though the living room is completely dark. I flip the tree-light switch, and the room—and his face—are suddenly bathed in red-and-green glow. He stays standing, looking at the tree, his back to me.
“The sound technicians have analyzed the voice mail from your husband. The cell coverage was really spotty, but we’ve been able to make out two words in the entire clip: ‘summer’ and ‘angle.’ Is that someone’s name? Does it mean anything to you?”
“Summer and angle? No. Were the words close together or separated?”
He pulls out his phone and plays the clip. The sound technicians had taken out the white noise and isolated the voice. It’s a stressed voice—is it Ben’s?—saying “summer” then a white noise beat and “angle.”
“Our team is wondering why someone who had ju
st been shot and had his bodyguard killed in front of him would call his wife and talk about ‘summer’ and ‘angle.’ Think about it. He has seventeen seconds to tell you something. Seventeen seconds. And in that extremely limited time, he works in the words ‘summer’ and ‘angle.’ Why?”
I search the databanks in my brain for any connection to “summer.” There’s the season, of course. And summer solstice.
“I’ve got nothing.”
“Is that some kind of astronomy talk? We looked it up, and you being an astronomer and all, we were wondering if he was talking about the angle of the sun in summer.”
“Why would he be talking about solar altitude after he’s been shot and his bodyguard is dead? Ben’s not even a scientist.”
“But you are.”
“Even astronomers don’t go around talking about the sun’s angle in summer.”
“What is a ‘summer angle,’ then?”
“There really isn’t such a thing. The only thing that comes to mind is that the solar altitude—the sun’s angle—is forty-seven degrees higher at the summer solstice than it is at the winter solstice. But that’s not something anyone would talk about in an emergency.”
“Think about it, Sarah. It could help us get the break we’ve been looking for in this case.”
He settles on the couch and motions for me to sit next to him. Then he clears his throat and riffles through his notebook.
“Just a couple of more questions here, then I’ll let you go. I need you to fill in some blanks about the night Ben went missing. What’s the name of the airport bar where you and your colleague—Aaron, is it?—were Tuesday night?”
I take a seat on the couch, trying to look calm. “I don’t remember.”
“There’s only one in the American Airlines terminal. Was it Angel City Brewery?”
“Could be. I’m not sure—”
“The bartender remembers seeing you there Tuesday night.”
“He does?” I say, but of course the bartender remembers me. I sat with Aaron at the very end of the bar for hours, engrossed in conversation, laughing, tossing back shots of tequila, and chasing them with sangrita. No doubt he remembers that we drank all of their Calle 23 Blanco, so he had to crack open a brand-new bottle.