Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  Then Leland came out of his office, and his face lit up.

  “I didn’t think you’d really be back so soon!” he boomed in his Texas accent. Gifford’s father had been a railroad worker in west Texas before starting the family business. Now it had revenues of ten billion dollars a year, managed construction projects in forty-seven countries, and was still in the hands of the Gifford family. Gifford Industries had been headquartered in Austin until Leland had made the wrenching decision to relocate to Washington, D.C., because that was where most of the business had gone. Government, not oil fields anymore.

  She rose as Leland came over to her desk and hugged her. He was tall and rotund, with arched bushy eyebrows and sagging jowls, a large head and rosy cheeks and a white crew cut. Those who met him for the first time found him physically intimidating, and indeed, in repose, he often wore an imperious expression, made even more threatening by his arched brows.

  Then he stopped abruptly. “Boy hidy, I forgot you’re hurt, and here I am crushing the life out of you.”

  “Come on, Leland, I’m not made of glass.”

  He put both hands on her shoulders and fixed her with a stern expression. “Nothin’ new about Roger?”

  She shook her head.

  “They don’t even know if he’s alive?”

  “Right.”

  He closed his eyes. “Why’re you even here?” he said softly.

  “Because I need to be here,” she said.

  “You understand you can take all the time you need, doncha? Weeks, months-whatever it takes.”

  “I need to be here.”

  “You know, I don’t understand half the stuff Roger does, but he’s a valued employee. More important, he’s your husband. If you ever need anything from me, you just say so, you hear?”

  She nodded. “You have to leave in half an hour,” she said. “Twenty-five minutes, actually.”

  She pulled a few magazines from the stack on her desk, handed him a fresh Business Week and a Forbes. Then she turned back around, opened a drawer, and took out a handful of Metamucil packets and handed them to him, too.

  “You think of everything,” he said. “You sweetie.”

  32.

  Loud laughter rang out from Jay Stoddard’s office as I approached. I expected to see Jay in animated conversation with one of his old buddies from the Agency. But he was alone, sitting at his desk, leaning back in his chair, watching his computer screen.

  He glanced at me, then turned back to the computer. He extended his left arm and beckoned me in with a flip of his hand. “Nicky,” he said. “Just the man I wanted to talk to.”

  “Okay.”

  Stoddard was wearing one of his more extreme bespoke suits: double-breasted, double-vented, cut from a hairy tweed fabric. On each cuff four buttons that really buttoned, the last one undone. He looked like he’d just come back from a weekend at Balmoral Castle. My father used to wear suits like that. Before he started wearing orange jumpsuits every day.

  “Oh, dear me,” he gasped, laughing helplessly. “Oh, sweet Jesus. Have you seen this?”

  I entered, leaned across his desk, craned my neck. He was watching a video on the Internet. At first glance it appeared to be porn. Well, it sort of was. An assortment of busty young women in dominatrix costumes were whipping the naked buttocks of a middle-aged man with leather riding crops. One of them was checking his hair for lice. They were shouting at him in bad German. Clearly this was supposed to be a Nazi-themed orgy, though it didn’t look like much fun if you were the guy being whipped.

  “Their German accents aren’t very good, are they?” I said.

  “Do you know who that guy is?”

  “His butt doesn’t look all that familiar, no.”

  Stoddard told me the name of a prominent British political figure. “He wants to know how this video got out. He’s trying to get an injunction to take it down from the Internet. Says his privacy rights have been violated.”

  I looked closer. “Says there it’s been viewed one million, four hundred thousand-”

  “I know, I know. He’s an Oxford man, you know that?”

  “I didn’t. Hal-”

  “Brophy can wrap this one up in his sleep,” he said. Brophy was one of our more senior investigators. “Waste of time, you ask me, but I won’t turn it down.”

  “Maybe Brophy can take on that CEO backgrounder, too.”

  He brought his chair upright. “No, Nicky, you’re our big swinging dick. Don’t tell me you have ethical qualms about this one, too?” He raked his fingers through his silver mane.

  “No. Not if it can wait. I’m taking a couple of personal days.”

  “Oh?”

  “Family business.”

  He looked at me expectantly.

  I just looked back.

  He wanted to know, of course, and I wasn’t going to tell him anything I didn’t have to.

  He looked down pensively at the immaculate surface of his desk, gave a slight shake of his head. “Your family,” he said. “Your father, then your brother… You sure you’re not descended from the House of Atreus?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You gotta wonder if it’s some kind of blood curse.”

  “What do you know about my brother?” I said.

  His phone buzzed, and the voice of Elizabeth, the receptionist, crisply announced a caller who insisted on speaking with him right away.

  I got up as he picked up the phone. His long, tapered index finger hovered over the extension button. “It doesn’t look good, does it?” he said, then he punched the button and took the call.

  33.

  Stoddard’s parting remark felt like a kick to the solar plexus.

  “It doesn’t look good”? Meaning what?

  That the chances of finding Roger weren’t good, I assumed he meant. But how would he know that? And more to the point, who’d told him about Roger’s disappearance?

  Jay Stoddard seemed to know something I didn’t. Sure, he was more plugged in than anybody, knew people and things and all the scuttlebutt before anyone else.

  But for some reason he wanted me to know that he knew.

  I hesitated in the corridor outside his office for a moment, considered storming back in there and grabbing the phone out of his hand and slamming him against the wall and asking him what the hell he knew. But I came to my senses pretty quickly. There were other, better ways to find out.

  ONE OF them was a guy in suburban Maryland who’d been in the FBI a long time ago. Frank Montello was sort of a sketchy character, but a useful one to know. He called himself an information broker. Frank used to be the one you’d call when you wanted to get an unlisted phone number and didn’t have the time, or the right, to get a court order. That was back in the day when there was only one phone company. Since then he’d amassed contacts deep inside all the major wireless carriers, too, including T-Mobile, AT &T, and Verizon. I never asked how he got his information; I didn’t want to know.

  I’d called Frank as soon as I got back from L.A. and asked him to find out who owned the cell-phone number Woody had given me at the airport. He quoted me an outrageous price and told me it might take a day or two.

  So I called Frank again.

  “Patience, my friend,” he said in his deep, gravelly voice. “My girl was out of the office yesterday.”

  “I’m not calling about that,” I said. “I’ve got another job.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  I gave him Roger’s cell-phone number, the one whose billing records I couldn’t find in his study, and asked him to e-mail me the phone bills as soon as he could. I figured that if my brother went to the trouble of hiding his cell-phone bills, there must be something useful in them. Or at least something he wanted to hide.

  The price Frank quoted was even higher.

  “Don’t I get a volume discount?” I asked, and Frank laughed heartily, meaning no.

  I went out to get a cup of coffee, and when I returned, Dorothy Duval was sitt
ing at my desk, leaning back in the chair, her feet up. Peach stiletto pumps with high heels and a cutout at the toe.

  “How do I get an office like this?” she said.

  “Kiss a lot of ass.”

  “Then I guess I’m lucky I got a cubicle,” she muttered. “You know, it’s amazing what you can find out about people these days. I can’t decide if it’s cool or terrifying. Maybe it’s both.”

  “You unerased the laptop?”

  “Babe, that’ll take hours. A lot of hours. Meanwhile, I did some basic data-mining.”

  “Tell me.”

  “How about your brother’s medical prescriptions?”

  “You serious?”

  “As a heart attack.”

  “How’d you get those?” I said, impressed.

  She laughed. “Oh, it’s evil. All the big pharmacy chains sell their prescription records to a couple of companies-electronic prescribing networks, they’re called. Supposed to be for patient safety, but you know what it’s really about.” She rubbed her fingers together in the universal sign of moolah. “Man, everything’s online now.”

  “Real protected, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah. So, how much you wanna know about your brother?”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “Well, Viagra, for one.”

  “He took Viagra, huh?”

  She crossed her ankles. Her toenails were painted with peach polish.

  “That may be more than I want to know about Roger and Lauren’s sex life.”

  “Might not involve Lauren,” she said.

  I folded my arms. “How do you figure that?”

  She lowered her feet to the floor, then leaned forward.

  “Because seven months ago your brother paid for an abortion.”

  I stared at her for a few seconds. “I assume it wasn’t Lauren.”

  She shook her head.

  “How do you…?” The words died in my mouth. I was in shock.

  I didn’t think anything about my brother could surprise me. But that knocked the wind right out of me. More than anything, it made me sad. I thought of Lauren and her admiration for him-her love of him, which I’d never understood. And I thought of Gabe and his suspicions that his father was being unfaithful, and I wondered whether kids just saw things more clearly. As an only child, Gabe probably observed his parents with X-ray vision.

  She gave a pensive sigh and spoke quietly. “You know medical records aren’t really private.”

  “But abortions… Don’t people sometimes use cash to keep it private?”

  “Apparently there were complications. That’s how I found the records-the woman was admitted from a family planning center in Brookline, Mass., to Mass General Hospital in Boston, and your brother’s name was recorded as the accompanying adult.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “It’s a funny name. Candi something?” She looked at her notes. “Candi Dupont. That’s Candy with an ‘i’ at the end.”

  “Did you find out anything about her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You think that’s a real name?”

  “Sounds like a stripper name to me.”

  “Can you keep digging on it, see what turns up? The usual databases-Accurint, AutoTrack, LexisNexis-see what you turn up on her whereabouts and her employment background and all that.”

  “Come on, Nick, what do you think?”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Do you think his wife knows?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “They’re always the last to know, aren’t they? You going to tell her?”

  I hesitated, then shook my head. “I don’t see the point. It doesn’t have anything to do with whatever happened to him.”

  “You sure?”

  “Her life has already been turned upside down. She might have lost her husband. No need to make things even more painful for her.”

  “So should I not have told you about this?”

  “Of course you should have,” I said, surprised she’d even suggest it. “I need to know everything about my brother. Even the things I’d rather not know.”

  “Nick,” she said, “you can’t know everything about anyone. No matter how good an investigator you are, no matter how many databases you have access to, no matter how deep you dig. You just can never know another person completely.”

  “You’re too smart to be working in a place like this,” I said.

  34.

  For a couple of years during college I was a summer associate at McKinsey, the big management-consulting firm. I shouldn’t have even gotten the job. Those were normally reserved for MBA and JD candidates, not for undergrads. But the partner who hired me probably figured that Victor Heller, the fugitive financier, the storied Dark Prince of Wall Street, might throw some big business her way. Which never happened, of course.

  I was put on a team assigned to a troubled athletic-shoe manufacturer, which meant I had to interview everyone I could possibly interview, then, at the end of the summer, do a presentation for senior management. My boss seemed to be a lot more interested in what she called the “gatekeepers” and the “decision makers” at the company than in how lousy their sneakers were. I even had to do a Decision Matrix with all the key players’ names color-coded-green meant they wanted to buy more of our consulting services. Red meant they were violently opposed. When I went over my presentation with my boss, she kept leaning on me to trash this one division chief, highlight all the problems in his division.

  I tried to argue with my boss about this. After all, the division chief was perfectly fine. Finally, one of my fellow associates, a lovely dark-haired woman who was studying at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth-and who I was going out with that summer-explained to me what was going on.

  Turned out this particular manager was a “red name.” He was an obstructionist. He thought consultants like us were a monumental waste of time. My boss wanted him defanged.

  So I did what I was told. I did my PowerPoint, dredging up every mistake he’d ever made, every wrong decision.

  Shortly afterward, the guy got fired.

  Problem solved.

  That was when I decided that consulting wasn’t for me. But acting and talking like a consultant-well, that turned out to be a skill set that had come in handy on more than one occasion.

  I called Lauren and arranged for a visitor’s pass to be left for me at the concierge desk in the lobby of Gifford Industries. I was a management consultant with Bain & Company, or so the paperwork said.

  That was enough to get me upstairs and wandering around unsupervised.

  I DIDN’T arrive at the swanky Gifford Industries headquarters building until the early afternoon. I’d hoped to get out of the office much earlier, but work kept intruding. I couldn’t just drop the cases I’d been working; I had to pass along the files to others at Stoddard, brief them on my progress and the outstanding issues. I had to make phone calls to clients I’d been working with to let them know that I’d be taking a few days off for family reasons, which I didn’t explain, and assure them they’d be in good hands; and I had to write and reply to a bunch of e-mails. E-mail: the curse of modern office life. I don’t remember what we did before it.

  I was still reeling from what Dorothy had learned about Roger. The fact that he’d been having an affair and had taken his lover to an abortion clinic. The fact that my brother had been unfaithful to his wife, a woman he was beyond lucky to have found. He wasn’t exactly Brad Pitt or George Clooney. I felt the way I often did when I read some Hollywood gossip item about how some supermodel’s husband was caught cheating on her: What do you want, guy? You’re married to one of the most desirable women in the world. What else can you possibly want?

  As a single male, I admit I understood the impulse. My brother and I used to tell a joke when we were kids that went something like this: Hey, did you hear Playboy just came out with a magazine just for married men? Yep. Every month the centerfold’s the exact sa
me woman. But being attracted and acting on it were two very different things.

  I think that on some deeply buried, subconscious level I was hoping that by investigating my brother’s disappearance I’d discover a side of him that I’d never seen, which would make me finally appreciate him.

  I didn’t expect to find out things that would make me dislike him even more.

  Roger worked in the special-projects group of the corporate development division of Gifford Industries. There were three attorneys and just one administrative assistant for all of them. You could tell just by looking at their offices that the special-projects group was sort of a ghetto in the company. It didn’t seem to be very special at all. It was hidden in a distant corner of the Legal Department, on the fourth floor, in a warren of identical offices with nothing on the walls except the sort of mind-numbing signs you see in every corporate office in the world-stern notices about floating holidays and how if you don’t give sufficient notice you lose them, something about the blood drive, about keeping the kitchenette clean (“We are not your mothers!” it said). My tie suddenly felt too tight around my neck.

  The admin for the special-projects group was named Kim Harding. She was shy and bookish, in her early fifties, with hyperthyroidic eyes behind oversized tinted glasses. She had short curly brown hair and small prim lips painted with dark red lipstick. She looked like a scared rabbit.

  “Hello, Kim,” I said. “I’m John Murray, from Security Compliance.” I handed her a business card. That was one of the covers that Stoddard provided its investigators, and it always worked. It identified Security Compliance Partners as a management-consulting firm specializing in security audits of Fortune 500 corporations. It gave the Stoddard Associates address and a phone number there that Elizabeth, the receptionist, would answer the right way.

  Every corporation that did business with the Pentagon, as Gifford Industries did, had to suffer regular visits from outside security auditors, who prowled the halls of the company, meeting with people and checking the facilities and the networks, making sure they were in compliance with all the ridiculous, paranoid security measures the government required of any contractor who did classified work. So Kim Harding was conditioned to be cooperative.