Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  After he was wounded in Afghanistan, and his VA therapy ended, however, he told us to stop calling him Romeo and start calling him George.

  I MET him in the enormous white RV, bristling with antennas, that served as his combination home and mobile office. He’d parked it in an underground garage in a Holiday Inn in Dedham. That was typical for him. He preferred to meet in out-of-the-way locations. He seemed to live his life on the lam. As if someone were out to get him.

  I opened the van door and entered the dimly lit interior.

  “Heller.” His voice came out of the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could see him sitting on a stool, his back to me, before a bank of computer monitors and such.

  “Hey, George. Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

  “I take it the GPS tracker was successful.”

  “Absolutely. It was brilliant. Thank you.”

  “Next time please remember to check your e-mail.”

  I nodded, held out the Nokia cell phone I’d taken from Mauricio’s apartment. He swiveled and turned his face toward me.

  What was left of his face.

  I’d never gotten used to seeing it, so each time it gave me a jolt. It was a horrible welter of ropy scar tissue, some strands paste-white, others an inflamed red. He had nostrils and a slash of a mouth, and eyelids the army surgeons had crafted from patches of skin taken from his inner thigh. The stitch marks were still prominent.

  Fortunately, Devlin was able to breathe without too much pain now. He was able to see out of one eye.

  But he was not easy to look at. He’d become a monster. I suppose there was some sort of irony in the fact that his physical appearance, which had defined him for so long, defined him still.

  “I assume you know how to retrieve numbers from the call log,” he said. He spoke in a raspy whisper, his vocal cords ruined, and his mouth often made a wet clicking noise, the sound of tissue in the wrong place.

  “Even I know how to do that.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “The only phone number on here, dialed or retrieved, is for a mobile phone. That’s probably his contact—whoever hired him to abduct the girl. If anyone can locate the bad guy from his phone, it’s you.”

  “Why didn’t you ask the FBI for help?”

  “Because I’m not sure who I can trust there.”

  “The answer is no one. Why are you working with them, anyway? I thought you left all that government crap behind.”

  “Because I need them. Whatever it takes to get Alexa back.”

  He breathed in and out noisily. “No comment.”

  He despised all government agencies and viewed them with extreme paranoia. They were the enemy. They were all too powerful and malevolent and I think he blamed every one of them for the Iraqi IED that had detonated his Humvee’s gas tank. He didn’t seem to credit the heroic army plastic surgeons who’d saved his life and given him at least some semblance of a face, grotesque though it was. But who could blame him for being angry?

  He tilted his head in a funny way to inspect the phone. He preferred to work in low light, even near-darkness, because his eye had become hypersensitive to the light. “Ah, a Nokla 8800. This is no ordinary burner.”

  “You mean Nokia.”

  He showed it to me. “Can you read, Nick? It says NOKLA.”

  He was right. It said NOKLA. “A knockoff?”

  He punched out a few numbers on the phone. “Yep, the IMEI confirms it.”

  “The what?”

  “The serial number.” He slid off the back cover and popped the battery out. “A Shenzhen Special,” he said, holding it up. I leaned close. The battery had Chinese characters all over it. “Ever look on eBay and see a special sale on Nokia phones—brand-new, half price? They’re all made in China.”

  I nodded. “If you order mobile phones over the Internet, you don’t have to risk going into Walmart or Target and having your face show up on a surveillance camera,” I said. I immediately regretted the choice of words. What he’d give to be able to walk into a Walmart without encountering the averted looks, the squeamishness, the screams of children.

  Devlin abruptly turned to look at one of his screens. A green dot was flashing.

  “Speaking of tracking devices, do you have one on you?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to take precautions coming here?”

  “I did.”

  “May I see your handheld?”

  I handed him my BlackBerry. He peered at it, set it down on the narrow counter, popped open its battery compartment. Lifted out the battery, then wriggled something loose with a pair of tweezers. Held it up and looked at it aslant. Devlin was no longer capable of facial expressions, but if he were, he’d probably have displayed triumph.

  “Someone’s been tracking your every move, Heller,” he said. “Any idea how long?”

  48.

  I had no idea, of course, how long I’d been followed. But at least now I knew how they were able to track me to Mauricio Perreira’s apartment in Medford. Some “confidential informant.”

  “Looks like the FBI put a tail on you. And I thought you were cooperating. Did anyone have an opportunity to meddle with your BlackBerry without you noticing?”

  I nodded. I remembered checking my BlackBerry at the FBI’s reception desk in Boston, not once but twice.

  “Now even I’m starting to get paranoid,” I said.

  He turned to look at me. Instinctively I wanted to look away from that face, so I made a point of meeting his eyes.

  “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” he said. In the dark still interior of his van, his whisper gave me goose bumps. “I believe I’m quoting Nick Heller.”

  “Not original to me.”

  “In any case, you’re absolutely correct about the Chinese knockoffs. Buying them over the Internet reduces their risk of exposure, yes. But there’s an even better reason. Something only the best bad guys know about.”

  “Okay.”

  “The IMEI. The electronic serial number. Every mobile phone has one, even the cheapest disposables.”

  “Even Noklas?”

  “Yes, even Noklas. But by using Shenzhen Specials, your bad guys make it much, much harder to be caught by traditional means.”

  “How so?”

  “Put it this way. If the FBI has the serial number of a real Nokia phone, all they have to do is call Finland and Nokia’s going to tell them where the phone was sold. Bad guys don’t want that. But this baby, on the other hand—who’re you gonna call, some factory in Shenzhen? They won’t speak English and they sure as hell don’t keep records and they probably don’t even answer the phone. Good luck with that.”

  “So these guys are pros,” I said.

  He didn’t reply. He was leaning over the shallow ledge with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers trying to pry something out of the back of the phone. Finally he succeeded and held up a little orange cardboard rectangle.

  “The SIM card,” I said. “Chinese too?”

  “Uzbek. These guys are really smart.”

  “The SIM card’s from Uzbekistan?”

  “They probably buy ’em in bulk online, get them shipped to some drop box, end of the trail. Wow. A Chinese knockoff phone with an untraceable serial number and an untraceable SIM card. Know any FBI agents who speak Uzbek?”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “Some deep digging.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “Why don’t you leave that part to me,” he said.

  “Because my puny mortal mind cannot possibly hope to comprehend?”

  “Here’s your BlackBerry. Clean as a whistle.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “But I’d like you to put the GPS bug back in.”

  “That’s … foolish.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “But first I’d like you to drain the battery on the tracking bug. Can you do that?”
r />   “It doesn’t draw from your BlackBerry’s battery, so sure, that’s not a problem.”

  “Good. I want it to die a natural death in about, oh, fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  He nodded. “So they’ll never know that you discovered it.”

  “Right. I much prefer being underestimated.”

  If he could have smiled, he would have. But I heard it in his voice. “You know something, Heller?” he said. “I think I’ve underestimated you. You’re really quite an impressive guy.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said, “and keep it to yourself.”

  As I returned to the Defender, my BlackBerry was ringing.

  “I thought I’d have heard from you by now,” Diana said.

  “My BlackBerry was temporarily offline.”

  “You didn’t see what I sent you?”

  “What did you send me?”

  “A photograph of our kidnapper,” she said.

  49.

  The town of Pine Ridge, New Hampshire, (population 1,260) had a police force that consisted of two full-time officers, two part-time officers, and one police chief.

  Walter Nowitzki had been the police chief in Pine Ridge for twelve years. He’d been on the force in Concord before that and grabbed the chief’s job when it opened up. He and Delia wanted to move to a small town, and he wanted more time to hunt. The work here was routine and uneventful, and when it wasn’t hunting season, it was downright slow.

  Jason Kent, the rookie, entered his office hesitantly. His cheeks and his jug ears were red, as they always got when he was nervous.

  “Chief?” Jason said.

  “Sam Dupuis keeps calling,” Chief Nowitzki said. “Got a bug up his ass about the Alderson property.”

  “What’s the deal? No one lives there.”

  Nowitzki shook his head. “Something about how his dog ran off, I didn’t quite get it. But now he says he thinks they’re doing work without a permit and who knows what else.”

  “You want me to drive out and talk to Mr. Dupuis?”

  “Just head on over to the Alderson property, would you? Go out there and introduce yourself and see what’s up.”

  “I didn’t know any of the Aldersons even came here anymore. I thought the old man was just, like, an absentee owner.”

  “Sam says it’s a caretaker or a contractor or something, works for the family.”

  “Okay.” Jason rose and was out the door when Chief Nowitzki said, “But keep it polite, would you? Don’t go ruffling any feathers.”

  50.

  I clicked on Diana’s e-mail and waited impatiently as the attachment opened.

  A photograph, muddy and low-contrast. The back of a man’s head and shoulders. The picture looked like it had been taken at night. A surveillance photo, maybe?

  So why was Diana so sure this was the guy?

  I studied it more closely, though on the BlackBerry’s screen it wasn’t easy. I saw what might have been the headrest of a car. The photo had been taken from the back seat.

  The man’s shoulders rose well above the headrest. He was tall. His head appeared to be shaved. But something was obscuring a large area of his head and neck: a shirt with a high collar? No, maybe it was just a dark blotch, a flaw in the photo. As I looked closer, it seemed like the entire back of his head and neck was covered with some sort of hideous birthmark.

  But then, as I continued to study it, I realized it wasn’t a birthmark at all. It was a design, an illustration. It looked like a tattoo, but no one got tattoos on their scalp, did they?

  Wrong.

  It was a tattoo of the head of a large bird, maybe an eagle or a vulture. A line drawing in black or dark blue, highly detailed if crudely executed. Stylized feathers, a sharp beak, erect ears. An owl, maybe, with large, fierce staring eyes. Huge blank circles with much smaller circles at their center, representing the irises.

  They stared at you. They stared at whoever had taken the picture.

  The guy got eyes on the back of his head.

  When Mauricio Perreira had babbled that to me, I’d paid it no attention. It was a figure of speech, part of a long desperate rant by a terrified man, nothing more. I assumed he meant to say, in his broken English, He’s got eyes in the back of his head. Meaning: This man hears and sees everything, has sources everywhere, I can’t give you his name, I’m scared of him.

  He was scared. But it wasn’t a metaphor. He meant it literally, almost. There were eyes on the back of the man’s head.

  DIANA ANSWERED on the first ring.

  “Who took the picture?” I said.

  “Alexandra Marcus. This came from her iPhone, taken the night she disappeared.”

  “When?”

  “At 2:36 A.M. Apparently all iPhone photos are encoded with metadata that tell you the date and time. And something called a geotag, which gives you the GPS coordinates of the phone at the time the picture was taken.”

  “Leominster?”

  “Straight down the road about a mile from where you found it.”

  “That’s an owl.”

  “Right. I wasn’t sure whether you’d be able to make it out on your BlackBerry. But if you enlarge the photo it appears that the tattoo covers his head and neck and probably a good portion of his upper back as well.”

  “You already searched NCIC?”

  “Sure. One of the fields in the database is for scars and marks and tattoos. No hits.”

  “Did you send it to your Gang Intelligence Center?”

  “Sure. But no luck.”

  “Isn’t there some central database of criminal tattoos?”

  “There should be, but there isn’t.”

  I thought a moment. “Ever see the Latin Kings tattoos?” The Latin Kings were the biggest Hispanic street gang in the country.

  “It’s a five-pointed crown or something?”

  “That’s one of them. There’s also a tattoo of a lion wearing a crown. Sharp teeth, big eyes. Some gang members get it tattooed on their backs. It’s huge.”

  “You think he’s part of a Latino gang?”

  “Some kind of gang, anyway.”

  “I’ve sent the photo to our seventy-five legal attachés around the world. Asking them to run it by local law enforcement. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said dubiously. “You’d think a guy with an owl on his head and neck would be fairly memorable. People aren’t likely to forget a sight like that.”

  “That’s not smart. Owls are supposed to be smart.”

  “Your average street pigeon is ten times smarter than the smartest owl. It’s not about smart. It’s about scary. In some cultures, an owl is a symbol of death,” I said. “A bad omen. A prophecy of death.”

  “Where? Which countries?”

  I thought for a moment. “Mexico. Japan. Romania, I think. Maybe Russia. Ever see an owl hunt?” I said.

  “Oddly enough, I haven’t.”

  “It moves its head side to side and up and down, looking and listening, triangulating on its prey. You really can’t find a more perfect, more ruthless killer.”

  51.

  “Hi, Mr. Heller,” Jillian Alperin said as I entered the office. “Dorothy’s looking for you.”

  “You’re allowed to call me Nick,” I said, for what must have been the twentieth time since she’d started working for me.

  “Thank you, Mr. Heller, but I’m not comfortable with that.”

  “Right,” I said. “Then just call me El Jefe.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I noticed the butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder. She was wearing some kind of lacy tank top that bared a few inches of her midriff. Her navel was pierced. “What does that mean, the butterfly?” I asked.

  “It’s a symbol of freedom and metamorphosis. I got it when I stopped eating flesh.”

  “You used to be a cannibal? I didn’t see that on your job application.”

  “What? I mean, I used to eat meat. I have a ‘meat is murder’ tattoo on my lower back, want
to see it?” She stood up and turned around.

  Dorothy’s voice rang out as she approached. “Jillian, you can show your tramp stamps after work and on your own time. Also, you and I need to have a talk about appropriate office attire.”

  “You said I didn’t have to wear high heels.”

  Dorothy shook her head. “I got that picture you sent,” she said to me. “I’ve been Googling tattoos, but no luck so far.”

  “My brother worked in a tattoo parlor in Saugus,” Jillian said.

  “How about you replace the toner cartridge like I asked,” Dorothy said.

  IN MY office, I said, “Remind me why you hired Jillian again.”

  “She’s a very, very smart young woman.”

  “That escaped me.”

  “I admit she’s taking a little longer to catch on to the clerical stuff than I expected—”

  “Isn’t her job all about the clerical stuff?”

  “Give her a chance,” she told me sternly, “or you can hire her replacement. Now, if we can please move on. I found spyware on our network.”

  “What kind of spyware?”

  “Well, a molar virus. It burrowed into our intranet, injected code, and opened a back door. For a couple of days now it’s been scanning all volumes for protected files and then sending them out.”

  “That’s how they got my security system codes,” I said. “Where did it send to?”

  She shook her head. “Proxy servers so many times removed that it’s just about impossible to find. But I rooted it out. It should be gone.”

  “How did it get onto our system in the first place?”

  “I’m working on that. I—”

  My intercom buzzed, and Jillian said, “You have a visitor.”

  I looked at Dorothy, who shrugged. “Name?” I said.

  “Belinda Marcus,” Jillian said.

  52.

  “I’m worried sick about Marshall,” Belinda said. “I think he’s going to have a heart attack.” She was wearing a light brown scoop-neck linen top with sequins around the neckline. It sort of belled out at the midriff. She threw out her thin arms and embraced me. Her perfume smelled like bathroom deodorizer.