Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  When I got out of the elevator on the sixth floor, I saw a huge gold FBI seal on the wall and a Ten Most Wanted poster. In a small waiting area were a metal detector gate and a portable baggage X-ray machine, neither in use. A couple of receptionists sat behind bulletproof glass.

  I pushed my driver’s license into a slot like a bank teller’s, and they made me surrender my BlackBerry. In exchange they gave me a badge that said ESCORT REQUIRED in red.

  One of the women behind the glass spoke into a phone and told me someone would be out in a few minutes.

  I waited. There was nothing to look at but a photo of the president, in a frame that hung askew on the wall, and an array of pamphlets advertising careers in the FBI. No magazines or newspapers. Without my BlackBerry I couldn’t check my e-mail or call anyone.

  I waited some more.

  After half an hour I went back to the lady behind the glass and asked her whether I’d been forgotten. She apologized, assured me I hadn’t been, but gave no explanation.

  When they make you wait ten or fifteen minutes, it’s probably because a meeting is running late. When you’re past the forty-five-minute mark, they’re sending you a message.

  It was close to an hour before the FBI guy emerged.

  He wasn’t what I expected. He was a hulking guy who looked like he spent a lot of time pumping iron. He was entirely bald, the kind of shiny bald that takes work, requires a lot of shaving and waxing or whatever. He wore a knockoff Rolex, a gray suit that was too short in the sleeves, a white shirt too tight at the neck, and a regimental striped tie.

  “Mr. Heller?” he said in a deep and rumbling voice. “Gordon Snyder.”

  He offered me a hand as huge and leathery as an old baseball mitt, and shook way too hard. “Assistant Special Agent in Charge,” he added.

  That meant he was one of the top guys in the FBI’s Boston office, reporting directly to the Special Agent in Charge. I had to give credit to my philandering congressman from Sarasota.

  Snyder pushed the door open, then led me down a blank white corridor to his outer office, where a weary-looking secretary didn’t even look up from her computer as we passed. His office was large and overlooked Cambridge Street. A long desk, two computer monitors, a large flat-screen TV with the sound off, set to CNN. A round glass-topped conference table and a red leatherette couch. Two flags behind his desk on either side, the U.S. flag and the FBI’s light blue one. By government standards, this was an Architectural Digest spread.

  He sat behind his perfectly clean glass-topped desk and hunched his shoulders. “I understand you work in the private sector these days, Mr. Heller.”

  “Right.” I suppose that was his not-so-subtle way of letting me know he’d read a dossier on me.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “I’m helping a friend look for his daughter,” I said.

  He furrowed his brows sympathetically. “What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Alexa Marcus.”

  He nodded. The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

  “Her father is Marshall Marcus. Hedge-fund guy in Boston.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Seventeen.”

  He nodded again, shrugged. “And why’s this a matter for the FBI?”

  “Given her father’s wealth and prominence—”

  “She’s been kidnapped?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Well, is there a ransom demand?”

  “Not yet. But given the circumstances and her own history—”

  “So you’re saying the father’s concerned his daughter might have been kidnapped.”

  There was something strange about Snyder’s expression. A look of confusion so exaggerated it was almost comic. Or maybe sardonic. “Huh. See, what baffles me, Mr. Heller, is why the Boston police never reached out to us.”

  “They sure should have.”

  “I know, right? Normally that’s the first thing they’d do, in a case like this. Kidnappings are FBI business. Gotta wonder why not.”

  I shrugged. “Well, whatever the reason, if you could arrange to ping her phone—”

  But Snyder wasn’t finished yet. “I wonder if the reason they never reached out to us,” he said with careful emphasis, “is that no one notified them about the missing girl in the first place. You think that might explain it?” He clasped his hands, looked down at his desk and then up at me. “See, Marshall Marcus never called it in to them. Interesting, isn’t it? You’d think he’d be all over the police and the FBI to locate his daughter, wouldn’t you? If it was my daughter, I wouldn’t wait two seconds. Would you?” His eyes pierced mine, his upper lip curled in disgust.

  “He called the police,” I said again. “A couple of hours ago. Might not even be logged in yet.”

  He shook his head and said firmly, “Never happened.”

  “You have bad information.”

  “We have excellent information on Marcus,” he said. “We know for a fact that neither he nor his wife placed a call to the police. Not from any of his four home landlines. Neither of his two cell phones. Nor his wife’s cell phone. Nor any landline at Marcus Capital.”

  I said nothing.

  He gave me a long, grave look. “That’s right. We’ve had Marshall Marcus under court-ordered surveillance for quite some time now. As I’m sure he knows. Did he send you here, Mr. Heller?”

  Gordon Snyder’s eyes were small and deep-set, which made them look beady and insectlike. “Please don’t bother trying to deny the fact that you met with Marcus at his house in Manchester this morning, Heller. Is this why you’re here? Acting as his agent? Trying to check up on us, see what we’ve got on him?”

  “I came here because a girl’s life may be in danger.”

  “This is the same girl who had to be sent away to a special disciplinary school because of repeated behavior problems at her private school?”

  I tried to keep my voice controlled, but it was all I could do not to lose it. “That’s right. After she was abducted. Stuff like that can really screw with your head. You don’t get it, do you? We’re on the same side here.”

  “You’re working for Marcus, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Then we’re on opposite sides. We clear?”

  16.

  Alexa felt her heart thud faster and faster. She could hear it. In the terrible silence, where she could even hear her own eyelids blink shut, her heartbeat was like a kettledrum. She felt a prickly heat and a bone-deep chill at the same time, and she began to shiver uncontrollably.

  “You can hear me, Alexa, yes?” said the tinny voice.

  A wash of acid scalded her esophagus. She gagged, retched, felt as if she were going to expel her stomach through her mouth. A little vomit splashed on her damp shirt, settled back down her throat.

  She needed to sit upright to empty her mouth, but she couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t raise her head more than a few inches. She couldn’t even turn to the side. She was trapped here.

  She couldn’t move.

  Now she was gagging from the vomit that had backwashed down her throat.

  “Please take care of yourself,” the voice said. “We cannot open your coffin if something happens to you.”

  “Coffin…” she gasped.

  “There is no reason for you to die. We don’t want you to die. We only want you to convince your father to cooperate with us.”

  “How much money do you want?” she whispered. “Just tell me what you want and my father will give it to you.”

  “Why do you think we want money, Alexa? And even if we did want money, your father has nothing.”

  “My father is … he has an obscene amount of money, okay? He can pay you anything you want. He’ll give it all to you, everything he has, if you please please please let me out now.”

  “Alexa, now you must listen to me very, very carefully, because your survival depends on it.”

  She swallowed. A lump had lodged in her throat.
<
br />   “I’m listening,” she whispered.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  She tried to speak louder. “I’m—I’m listening.”

  “Good. Now, Alexa? I have already told you how to relieve yourself. Now we must talk about your breathing. Okay? You are listening?”

  She shuddered and moaned, “Please…”

  “I want you to know that you have air in your coffin, but it is not so much.”

  “Not . . so much?” she whispered.

  “Listen closely. If we just put you in the casket and sealed it and put it in the ground you would not last half of an hour. But we know this is not enough time for you.”

  She heard “in the ground” and she bit her lower lip so hard she felt the blood start to trickle. “The ground?” she whispered.

  “Yes. You are in a steel casket far below the ground. You are buried under ten feet of earth. Alexa, you have been buried alive. But I’m sure you already know this.”

  Something exploded in her brain: bright sparkles of light. She screamed with vocal cords so raw that the only sound that came out was a wheezing gasp, but in the darkness and the absolute silence it was thunderously loud.

  17.

  A fluorescent orange parking ticket was tucked under the Defender’s windshield wipers. Damn Snyder. If he hadn’t been playing his power games and kept me waiting so long, the time on the meter wouldn’t have run out. I felt like sending him the bill.

  I had my BlackBerry out, about to call Marcus, when I heard a female voice behind me: “Nico?”

  The nickname that hardly anyone used anymore except a few people I knew in D.C. a long time ago.

  I sensed her, maybe even smelled her, before she touched my shoulder. Without even looking around, I said, “Diana?”

  “You still have the Defender, I see,” she said. “I like that. You don’t change much, do you?”

  “Hey,” I said, and I gave her a hug. For a moment I didn’t know whether to kiss her on the mouth—those days were long gone, after all—but she offered me her cheek. “You look great.”

  I wasn’t lying. Diana Madigan had on tight jeans and worn brown cowboy boots and an emerald green top that emphasized the swell of her breasts and brought out her amazing pale green eyes. Statistically, it turns out that green eyes occur in less than two percent of the global population.

  But that wasn’t the only thing about her that was rare. I’d never met a woman quite like her. She was tough and empathic and elegant. And beautiful. She had a taut, lithe body with a head of crazy wavy hair that obeyed its own laws of physics. It was light honey brown with auburn highlights. Her nose was strong yet delicate, with slightly flared nostrils. The only sign of the years that had passed were the faint laugh lines etched around her eyes.

  We hadn’t seen each other in five or six years, since she was transferred from the FBI’s Washington Field Office to Seattle and declared she didn’t want a long-distance relationship. Ours had been casual—not Friends With Benefits, exactly, but no pressure, no expectations. Not a gateway drug that would lead inexorably to a long-term addiction. This was the way she wanted it, and given how long my work hours were and how much I traveled, I was fine with the arrangement. I enjoyed her company and she enjoyed mine.

  Still, when I got a call from Diana telling me that she’d moved to Seattle, I quickly went from baffled to wounded. I cared for her deeply, and I was surprised she didn’t feel the same. I’m not used to women walking away from me, but this wasn’t just a male ego thing. I was disappointed in myself for having misread her so badly. Until then I’d always considered my ability to read others one of my natural talents.

  She wasn’t the type to insist on a Deep Talk, like so many women. In that way, her emotional architecture resembled mine. So the end of my relationship with Diana Madigan went into my mental cold-case file.

  But I’ve always found unsolved cases irresistible.

  “I look like a wreck, and you know it,” she said. “I’m just getting off the night shift, and on my way home.”

  “Since when do you work nights?”

  “I’ve been up all night texting predators, pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “Yeah? What a coincidence. Me too.”

  “This one sicko is fifty-one,” she said, ignoring me. Her work was something she never joked about. “We arranged to meet at a motel in Everett. Will he be surprised.”

  “So you’re still working CARD?”

  “Believe it or not.”

  CARD stood for the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment unit. It was heart-wrenching work. The things she saw: I never knew how she could keep doing it. I thought by now she’d have burned out.

  She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and I could only assume she didn’t have kids either. I wondered whether she ever would, having seen what could happen to them.

  “Why don’t I give you a lift home,” I said.

  “How do you know I don’t have my car here?”

  “Because you’d have parked in the underground garage like all FBI employees do. Plus, you’d be carrying your car keys in your left hand. Don’t forget, I know you.”

  She looked away. Embarrassed? Unreadable, in any case. As always, the emotional equivalent of Kryptonite. “My apartment’s in the South End. I was going to take the T.”

  I opened the passenger-side door for her.

  18.

  “So now the next shift takes over texting your predators?” I said.

  “We can’t do that,” Diana said. “Perps can sometimes sense a change in respondents. Even in short message texts there can be subtle nuances in tone and rhythm.”

  As I drove I caught the faintest whiff of her perfume. It was something I’d never smelled on another woman: rose and violet and cedar, sophisticated and haunting and unforgettable.

  Neuroscientists tell us that nothing brings back the past as quickly and powerfully as a smell. Apparently the olfactory nerve arouses something in the limbic center of your brain where you store long-term memories on your mental hard drive.

  Diana’s perfume brought back a rush of memories. Mostly happy ones.

  “How long have you been in Boston?” I asked.

  “A little over a year. I heard through the grapevine you might be here. Did Stoddard send you here to open a satellite office or something?”

  “No, I’m on my own now.” I wondered whether she’d been asking around about me, and I suppressed a smile.

  “You like it?”

  “It would be perfect if the boss weren’t such a hard-ass.”

  She laughed ruefully. “Nick Heller, company man.”

  “You said Pembroke Street, right?”

  “Right. Off Columbus Ave. Thanks for doing this.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry about Spike,” she said.

  “Spike?”

  “Gordon Snyder. Spike’s his childhood nickname. He’s spent his entire life trying to make people forget it.”

  “Spike?”

  “Don’t ever tell him I told you. You promise?”

  “I can think of some better nicknames for him than Spike,” I said. “None of them very nice. So how did you know I met with him?”

  She shrugged. “I saw you storm out. Looked like it didn’t go too well.”

  “Did he tell you what we talked about?”

  “Sure.”

  I wondered whether she’d followed me out too. Maybe this meeting wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe she heard I was in the building and wanted to say hi.

  Maybe that was all she wanted.

  I dropped another note into the cold-case file marked MADIGAN, DIANA.

  “So what’s with his fixation on Marshall Marcus?”

  “Marcus is his great white whale.”

  “But why?”

  “Guys like that, the more elusive the target, the more obsessed they become. That may sound familiar, Nico.”

  Tell me about it, I thought. “Well, he se
emed a whole lot more interested in taking down Marcus than finding his daughter.”

  “Maybe because he’s in charge of financial crimes.”

  “Aha.”

  “I have to say, I don’t understand why you were meeting with the head of the financial crimes unit if you were looking for a missing girl.”

  I was beginning to wonder the same thing. “That was the name I was given.”

  “Is Marshall Marcus a friend of yours?”

  “Friend of the family.”

  “Friend of your father’s?”

  “My mother worked for him,” I said. “And I like his kid.”

  “How much do you know about him?”

  “Not enough, I guess. Apparently you guys are investigating him for something. What can you tell me about him?”

  “Not much.”

  “Not much because you don’t know? Or because he’s the subject of an FBI probe?”

  “Because it’s a sealed investigation. And I’m on the other side of the firewall.”

  I pulled up in front of her narrow bow-front brownstone, double-parking in front of a space easily big enough for the Defender to fit.

  “Well, thanks again,” she said, opening the door.

  “Hold on. I need to ask you a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You think you can put in a request to locate Alexa Marcus’s cell phone?”

  “I—that’s a little complicated. It’s not so easy to do an end run around Snyder. What makes you think something happened to her?”

  I was about to answer when she looked around and said, “Look, if you want, you can come up for a sec, explain this all to me.”

  I shrugged, playing it cool. “Hell, seems a shame to waste a perfectly good parking space,” I said.

  19.

  Her apartment, on the second floor, wasn’t very big. It couldn’t have been much more than seven or eight hundred square feet. Yet it didn’t feel small. It felt lush and rich and textured. The walls were painted various shades of chocolate brown and earth tones. It was furnished with what looked like stuff from flea markets. But every single piece of furniture, every object, every strange iron lamp or tapestry-covered pillow or copper picture frame, had been carefully selected.