Vanished

by Joseph Finder

“That kid, I swear-”

  She stopped short when she saw my face. “Jesus, Nick, what happened?”

  I shrugged.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, and smiled.

  “Yeah, I get the reference. How’d that happen?”

  “Lauren, I overheard you talking to Gabe.”

  She sat at the end of the same couch I was sitting on. “You call that ‘talking’? More like screaming. He just knows how to push every single one of my buttons.”

  “Why are you telling him to keep the faith? What’s the point of assuring him that Roger’s alive?”

  “Why?” Her eyes flashed. “Can you imagine what it’s like to have your father disappear suddenly, not knowing whether he’s…” She faltered, seeing my expression, realizing.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I can imagine.”

  “Why did I never see the parallel?”

  “What makes you think there’s a parallel? My father took off in the middle of the night. My mother told us he was on the run. We knew that he was out there somewhere, hiding from the authorities.”

  She said softly, “Maybe Roger is, too. Something like that-I want to believe that’s what happened.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and I described the surveillance video I’d just seen: the apparent abduction, the Econoline van, the gun.

  She looked stricken, then closed her eyes for five or ten seconds. “Can I see it? Do you have a copy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Someone grabbed it from me. That’s how I got this.” I pointed to my bruised nose and split lip. “So I just went back and made another one.”

  ***

  I PLAYED the DVD for her on her computer, and she responded the way I expected she would: shock, disbelief, then immense relief. And then puzzlement: What did it mean? Roger hadn’t been killed in the attack, but he had been abducted. But by whom, and why?

  “This means he’s alive,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said carefully. “It certainly means he survived the attack. That much we know for sure. As for whether…”

  “He’s alive,” she said. “These people have him.”

  “Could be.”

  She pointed to my face. “Who did that to you?”

  “Probably the same people who abducted him.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll be the first to know when I find out,” I said.

  She nodded, compressed her lips. “Nick, you were able to get into Gifford Industries today, right?”

  “I was, yes. And I met with the librarian.”

  “The librarian-?”

  “Roger’s e-mail, remember-he said something about saying good-bye to a librarian. ‘The librarian’ turns out to be Roger’s nickname for a lawyer colleague of his named-”

  “-Marjorie something. Right! I’d totally forgotten. So what did she say?”

  I told her about how protective of Roger she’d been, her unwillingness to provide details beyond the fact that Roger had discovered something “troubling” in the books of a company they were acquiring.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be so hard to figure out which company she’s talking about. We’ve only acquired one in the last three or four months, a power company in Brazil.”

  “She wouldn’t say whether it was a company Gifford acquired or was considering acquiring.”

  “Is she covering something up?”

  “That wasn’t my sense.” I paused. Thought for a second. “I walked around Georgetown a bit. Retraced the route you and Roger took the night you were attacked. So let me ask you something.”

  “Sure.”

  “Roger parked his car on Water Street. Quite a ways down the hill from the restaurant. I don’t get that.”

  “What don’t you get? Oji-San doesn’t have valet parking.”

  “But there are parking garages a lot closer than where he parked. And it was a rainy night-not the kind of night you’d want to stroll around Georgetown.”

  “I… I suppose I never thought about it.”

  “It didn’t strike you as somehow strange?”

  “No, not really. What are you getting at?”

  “I don’t have a theory. It’s just that it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sense? I mean, Roger’s parked there before. It’s free, it’s easy to get in and out of. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  “Okay.”

  “What, you think he deliberately parked there for some sinister reason?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  I spoke carefully. “I just wonder how well you know him. How much you know about him.”

  “How well I know Roger? What are you talking about? If you’re hinting at something, why don’t you just come out and say it?”

  I hesitated, blew out a lungful of air. “Did you know Roger was having an affair?” I asked gingerly.

  “Stop it.”

  “Did you know?”

  “Just cut it out.”

  “You had no idea?”

  “That’s just not true. Now you’re listening to Gabe’s crazy ideas?”

  “I’m not asking if it’s true. I’m asking if you knew about it.”

  She shook her head. “Stop it.”

  I got up, closed both living-room doors. “What do you know about Candi Dupont?” I asked.

  Lauren blinked a few times. “Candy…?”

  “Candi Dupont is a woman. Candi with an i. A woman that Roger was having an affair with.”

  She flushed, looked as if she’d just been slapped. Closed her eyes again.

  “Seven months ago-” I began.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she interrupted. “If he started seeing her again, I don’t want to know about it.”

  “So you did know.”

  “What does this have to do with what happened to him?”

  “It’s an important lead. She might know where he is.”

  “Or not.”

  “Or not,” I agreed.

  “Nick, we went through a-a difficult time in our marriage a few years ago.”

  She looked at me, but I just nodded silently.

  “Sort of a crisis, I guess you’d call it. He’d met some woman on a business trip to Boston. We’d had some big fight before he left, and I guess he was angry at me, and he said he was in the bar at the Four Seasons, and in a moment of weakness…”

  “Candi Dupont.”

  “I never knew her name. He wouldn’t tell me. But this was three or four years ago, Nick. He begged me to forgive him, and he promised it was over. He swore.”

  “Obviously it wasn’t. Seven months ago Roger paid for a woman named Candi Dupont to have an abortion at a clinic in Boston.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “We haven’t turned up anything on any ‘Candi Dupont’ in the standard databases, which tells me that ‘Candi Dupont’ might be some sort of alias. But whatever her name is, maybe it’s the same woman Roger told you about. Which would mean the affair didn’t end three or four years ago.”

  She grabbed a hardcover book from the coffee table and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall, rattled a picture frame, and fell to the floor. I couldn’t help noticing that the book was called Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames by Thich Nhat Hanh. “Enough!” she cried. “I don’t want to hear about it! If he didn’t stop seeing that… slut… I don’t want to know about it! Don’t you get that?”

  “I do,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

  She got up and retrieved the book, put it back on the coffee table, and sat back down on the couch, but much closer to me. For a minute or so she was silent, and I didn’t say anything either, then she said, “Nick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been lying to you.”

  41.

  Okay,” I said gently. I kept my tone light, casual, nonconfrontational. I wanted her to feel safe about finally opening up to me. “Tell me.”
/>   “Roger did mention something.”

  “About what?”

  “Just that he’d found something he wasn’t supposed to know about. Some kind of corruption, it sounded like.”

  “Which is precisely what Marjorie Ogonowski told me. Did he say whether it involved Gifford Industries?”

  “I don’t know. He said it involved a lot of money, but other than that, he was completely vague about it. The more I pressed him on it, the more he withdrew. He could get that way. He’d retreat into himself.”

  “He didn’t give you any specifics? Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing. But-well, he was afraid that something might happen to him. That he’d gotten threats.”

  “That’s pretty vague, too.”

  “He admitted it sounded paranoid. Like he was some conspiracy theorist. I asked him if he wanted me to talk to Leland-to see if Leland could do something, help in some way. But he told me never to say anything to Leland about it. He made me promise.”

  “And did you keep that promise?”

  “Of course.”

  “And he never said who was threatening him?”

  She shook her head again. “He never said, and I gave up asking. He said he wanted to protect Gabe and me, and the less I knew, the better.”

  “So that e-mail he sent-that InCaseOfDeath thing-that didn’t really shock you, did it, what he was telling you?”

  A beat. Then, ruefully: “No.”

  “So why did you keep this from me?”

  “Ohh, Nick.” She sighed, then hugged herself, shivering as if she were cold. “Because what if he-I don’t know, surrendered.”

  “Surrendered? To whom?”

  “I mean, what if he gave himself up? I mean, they’d threatened him, threatened his family, and he knew he couldn’t unring the bell, you know? He couldn’t pretend not to know whatever it was he found out. So maybe he made a deal with them. These guys, whoever they are, they attacked me and he saw that and he said, in effect, ‘Hey, why her? I’m the one you want. Take me.’ To spare me and Gabe. Do you follow? Am I making any sense?”

  “I think so,” I said. “But what do you think happened to him?”

  Very quietly, she said, “He might have sacrificed himself.”

  She lowered her head almost to her chest, then put her hands on each temple. From the way her head was moving, I knew she was crying. After a moment, she looked up, tears streaming down her face. “You see? Do you understand why I’m so scared?”

  “Yes. I do.” I reached over and held her in a tight embrace, felt her damp heat. “But I’m not going to let anything happen to you or Gabe.”

  “What if that’s beyond your control, Nick?”

  “It’s not,” I said, and I was instantly ashamed because that was a transparent lie. Plenty of things were beyond my control.

  “And you know, just listening to you talk about what happened that night, the night I was attacked-well, maybe you’re right. Maybe there was something strange about it. And then there was that e-mail from him, and now there’s this video, and it all seems to add up to something very different from what I thought it was.”

  I held her for a long while.

  “Lauren,” I said, “did he ever tell you why he talked to Victor so often?”

  “He called your dad? When?”

  “Victor called him, to be precise. Collect calls. Five times in the last month.”

  “He never said anything about that to me. Are you sure about this? I thought he hadn’t talked to Victor in almost a year.”

  ***

  I SAT there for a few minutes in front of the TV set after Lauren went to bed-Kyra Sedgwick in a rerun of The Closer, saying to a bunch of sullen male cops, in a treacly Southern accent, “Why thank you very much, gentlemen”-and then I thought of something.

  I went to the entry hall by the front door. The spare key to Roger’s car-really, a keyless entry fob-was in a green ceramic Japanese bowl on the hall table. His S-Class AMG Mercedes was parked in the garage, black and gleaming. Inside, it smelled like new leather. I started it up, pressed the navigation system button on the LCD touch screen, hit DESTINATION MEMORY, then LAST DESTINATIONS.

  A beautiful car, that Mercedes. A six-liter V-12 engine with 604 horsepower and incredible torque. Invoice price probably around a hundred eighty thousand dollars. And the crappiest navigation system in the world.

  But it told me what I needed to know.

  Roger had not just talked to Dad on the phone a bunch of times in the last month. He’d also visited him in prison. He’d driven to upstate New York, and at least once he’d used the Mercedes’s navigation system to get him there.

  The question was why.

  The one person who might know what had happened to Roger was the last person I wanted to see.

  PART TWO

  A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.

  – JOSEPH CONRAD

  42.

  The Altamont Correctional Facility had originally been built as a hospital for the criminally insane, a hundred and fifty years ago. The Altamont Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, was a grand Victorian Gothic complex of spires and crenellated towers. Its forbidding red-brick walls were stained dark with soot from a century of internal-combustion engines. Some forty years ago the mental hospital was shut down and converted into a medium-security prison, but it still looked like the sort of place a homicidal maniac escapes from, then terrorizes the nearby summer camp. It also reminded me a little of the high school I’d gone to in Malden.

  They’d done some renovation since the days of straitjackets and lobotomies. There was a concrete perimeter wall thirty feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, watchtowers, and banks of high-mast lights. Inside the walls, the old Gothic prison complex was surrounded by a luxuriant green lawn that wouldn’t have been out of place at Pebble Beach.

  I’d flown from Washington to Albany, rented a car, and driven a few miles to the outskirts of the town of Guilderland. The nav system was one of those separate portable things that sticks to the dashboard by means of a suction cup. It spoke in an officious, nasal female voice, which might have been tolerable if she hadn’t got me lost for twenty minutes. So I bore her some resentment for making me a little late. Though it wasn’t as if my father was going anywhere.

  I filled out a form, showed a driver’s license, went through a metal detector, then an ion scan, for drugs. I had to empty my pockets, leave cell phone and keys in a paper bag with my name on it. The visitor-control system was fairly automated-they took my picture and printed out an adhesive pass with my photo on it and a bar code.

  After I passed through a second metal cage, I turned to the guard who was scanning my pass with a barcode reader and said, “Pretty high-tech.”

  The guard, a bored-looking, obese black guy with sad eyes and a wide mouth, nodded.

  “Big old scary building like this, I was expecting, you know, one of those huge ledgers and a quill, right?”

  He broke out laughing. It obviously took very little to amuse him.

  “Hey, so I guess that means you keep track of every visitor in your computer.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Anyone can see I visited?”

  “Not unless they have access to the computer,” he said.

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “You visiting Victor Heller?”

  “Right.”

  “Who’s that, your brother?”

  “Father.”

  “Father, huh? Been inside a long time?”

  “A while.”

  “Guess you got scared straight, right?”

  “You could say that.”

  THE VISITORS’ room looked like the cafeteria in my high school-the same molded-plastic chairs, the same greenish linoleum floor, the same high ceiling with stained white drop-in panels. The same smell of ammonia mixed with human sweat and desperation. A long, undulating counter snaked through the room, bisecting it: prisoners on one side, visitors on the
other. On the visitors’ side, a cheery mural was painted on the wall, primitive art depicting the countryside, probably done by inmates. There were maybe half a dozen visitors. A couple of little kids were running around, oblivious to the setting. Only three prisoners.

  Sitting at the far end of the counter was my father.

  In the twelve years since I’d last seen him, I’d aged, of course. But he seemed to have aged at the speed of light. Victor Heller, the Dark Prince of Wall Street, was an old man. His shoulders were stooped. He had a big white beard and looked like an Old Testament prophet. His eyebrows were heavy and unruly, like steel-wool pads that had seen too much use. He was wearing a dark green shirt and matching pants, his prison outfit, which looked like a janitor’s uniform.

  He looked up as I approached. His eyes were rheumy, and he looked lost. His chronic psoriasis had gotten much worse since I’d last seen him: large flakes of skin were coming off his cheeks and forehead. He reminded me of a molting reptile, a snake shedding its skin, as if the scales were falling away to reveal his corrupt inner core.

  But then he smiled when he saw me, and the old familiar glint was in his eyes.

  He waited for me to sit down, adjust my chair, the legs scraping against the linoleum. Then he said, “They must have told you.”

  “Told me what?” I said.

  “About the cancer.”

  “The cancer,” I repeated, then I understood. The reason he and Roger had spoken five times. But why hadn’t Roger said anything to me, or at least to Lauren? Why hadn’t my mother called to tell me the news? The old man was dying. Suddenly, I felt hollow.

  I looked down. “Dad, I-my God, I had-”

  He was laughing raucously, his head thrown back. His beard extended down his neck. That hollow place inside me filled slowly with something ice-cold.

  “Why else would you lay down your arms and come visit your poor old Dad?” he said, his words half-choked by laughter. “No, I’m not dying. But there’s gotta be one hell of a reason why you’re here. I figured you must know something they’re not telling me.”

  “No, Dad, I don’t.”