Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  VISITOR: “… want to be on your side. But I can’t be unless you’re on mine…”

  MARCUS: (voice growing steadily louder) “… you wanted, I did. Everything!”

  VISITOR: “… have to spell this out for you, Marshall? ‘Grieving financier kills self at Manchester residence’?”

  I pushed the door open and entered the office. Marcus was sitting behind a long glass desk heaped with papers.

  Leaning back in the visitor chair was David Schechter.

  58.

  “Nickeleh!” Marcus exclaimed. “What are you—didn’t Smoki take you to a conference room to—”

  “He was eavesdropping,” Schechter said. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Heller?”

  “Absolutely. I heard everything you said.”

  Schechter blinked at me. “As of this moment, your services are no longer required.”

  “You didn’t hire me,” I said.

  “Schecky, let me talk to him,” Marcus said. “He’s a mensch, he really is.”

  Schechter rose, straightened his tweed blazer, and said to Marcus, “I’ll expect your call.”

  I watched him leave, then sat in the chair he had just vacated. It was still warm.

  Behind Marcus was a glittering picture-postcard view of the Atlantic, red ochre in the dying light.

  “What kind of hold does he have over you?” I said.

  “Hold…?”

  I nodded. “You hired me to find Alexa, and I can’t do that unless you level with me. If you don’t, you know what’s going to happen to her.”

  His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, with heavy pouches beneath them.

  “Nicky, you need to stay out of this. It’s … personal business.”

  “I know how much you love Alexa—”

  “That girl means everything in the world to me.” Tears came to his eyes.

  “It took me a while to understand why in the world you’d withhold the one thing that could get her back. Schechter is blackmailing you. He’s keeping you from cooperating with the kidnappers. And I think I know why you hired me.”

  He turned around in his chair and stared out the window, as if he were looking to the sea for answers. Or at least avoiding my eyes.

  “I hired you because I thought you were the only one who could find her.”

  “No,” I said quietly. “You hired me because that was the only way you could get her back without giving in to their demands. Right?”

  He wheeled slowly back around. “Does that offend you?”

  “I’ve been offended worse. But that’s not the point. From the beginning you’ve been sandbagging me. You lied about calling the police. You didn’t tell me how you were forced to take money from criminals, and you didn’t tell me you’d lost it all. Now they want the Mercury files—they are files, aren’t they?—and you pretend you don’t know what they are. So let me ask you this: Do you think David Schechter really cares if Alexa dies?”

  He looked stricken, but he didn’t reply.

  “Whatever he has on you, is it worth your daughter’s life?”

  His face crumpled, and he covered his eyes like a child as he wept silently.

  “You need to tell me what Mercury is,” I went on. “Then we’ll figure something out. We’ll come up with a way for you to give these kidnappers what they want without facing … whatever it is you’re afraid of.”

  He kept sobbing.

  I got up and walked toward the door, but then I stopped and turned back. “Did you ever do a background check on Belinda before you married her?”

  He lowered his hands. His face was red and wet with tears. “Belinda? What does Belinda have to do with anything?”

  “I’ve come across some information in the course of my investigation, and I’m not sure how much you want to know.”

  “Like … what?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” I said. “But she was never a flight attendant. She never worked for Delta.”

  “Oh, Nickeleh.”

  “She’s not from Georgia either. She’s from New Jersey.”

  He sighed. Shook his head slowly. Was it disbelief? An unwillingness to accept so painful a truth, that he’d been deceived by the woman he loved?

  “She was a call girl, Marshall. An escort. Whether that makes a difference to you or not, I think you should know.”

  But Marcus rolled his eyes. “Nickeleh, boychik. Grow up.” He shrugged, his palms open. “She’s a sensitive girl. For some meshugge reason she’s kinda touchy about people knowing too much about our first date.”

  A smile slowly spread across my face as I headed again for the door. The old bastard.

  From behind me I heard him call out, “Please don’t quit.”

  I kept going and didn’t look back. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t get rid of me. Though you might wish you had.”

  59.

  Dragomir was sitting at the computer in the musty sunroom at the back of the house when he heard the girl’s cries.

  Strange. He’d muted the computer’s speakers. The screams were remote and barely audible, but they were definitely hers. He didn’t understand how he could be hearing them. She was ten feet underground. He wondered whether the solitude was making him imagine things.

  He rose and scraped the old railback dining chair along the floorboards and went to the back door. There he listened some more. The cries were coming from outside. Faint and distant and small, like the buzz of a greenhead fly.

  On the porch he cocked his head. The sounds were coming from the yard, maybe the woods beyond. Maybe it wasn’t the girl at all. Then he saw the gray PVC pipe standing in the middle of the field. That was where it was coming from. The vent pipe carried not just the girl’s exhalations but her cries as well.

  She had a set of lungs on her. By now you’d think she would have given up.

  He was grateful she was buried so deep.

  When Dragomir had first come up with the idea of putting her in the ground, it seemed a stroke of pure genius. After all, the Client’s intelligence had turned up a psychiatrist’s file indicating the target was afflicted with a debilitating claustrophobia.

  Of course, the terror of being buried alive was deep-seated and universal and held a coercive power far beyond any conventional kidnapping technique.

  But that wasn’t his real reason.

  Buried ten feet down she was safely beyond his reach.

  If the girl had been under his direct control and easily accessible, like some irresistible pastry in the refrigerator, he wouldn’t have been able to restrain himself from doing things to her. He would rape her and kill her as he’d done to so many other pretty young women. He’d never have been able to stop the impulse. That wouldn’t do at all.

  He recalled the puppy he’d been given as a boy, how much he loved its softness, its fragility. But how could you truly appreciate such fragility without crushing its tiny bones? Very nearly impossible to resist.

  Burying her deep was like putting a lock on the refrigerator.

  He was listening so hard, with such fascination, to the mewling, faint as a radio station that hadn’t been fully tuned in, that he almost didn’t hear the far louder crunch of a car’s tires on the dirt road out front. If that was the neighbor again, still looking for his damned mongrel, he would have to do something about it finally.

  Back in the house, he strode to the front and looked out the window. A police cruiser, dark blue with white lettering: PINE RIDGE POLICE.

  He didn’t know the town even had its own police force.

  A gawky young man got out and gazed at the house with apprehension. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He was tall and scrawny with ears that stuck out like jug handles.

  By the time the policeman rang the door buzzer, Dragomir was wearing a long brown mullet wig.

  He suspected the policeman was here about the dog. He stood on the front porch, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his long spindly arms hanging awkwardly at his side.
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  “How’re you doing?” he said. “I’m Officer Kent. Could I ask you a few questions?”

  60.

  In the late afternoon, when I returned to the office, Jillian was on the floor packing boxes for some reason. I didn’t want to get involved. She looked up as I entered. Her face was red and sticky with tears.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Heller.”

  It took me a moment. I had my mind on other things. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Before I leave, I wanted to apologize.”

  “About the clothing? Don’t be silly.”

  “That e-card.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone e-mailed me a greeting card and I opened it at work.”

  “That’s why you’re leaving?”

  “Dorothy didn’t tell you?”

  “Did she fire you?”

  “No, I’m leaving.” She lifted her chin in pride, or maybe defiance. “And I was even starting to think that, like, for corporate America, this really wasn’t too sucky a job.”

  “Nice of you to say. Now you want to tell me what happened?”

  “I guess that e-card had some kind of software bug in it, like spyware or something? Dorothy says that’s how people got into our server and your personal files and got the codes to your home security system?”

  “It was you?”

  “I … thought she told you,” Jillian stammered.

  “Well, Jillian, I’m sorry, but you picked a bad time to quit, so you can’t. Unpack your boxes and get back to answering phones, please.”

  She looked at me questioningly.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Back to work.”

  As I was headed over to Dorothy’s office, she called after me. “Um, Mr. Heller?”

  “Yes?”

  “I heard you guys talking about that owl tattoo?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I might be able to help. My brother used to work—”

  “In a tattoo parlor,” I said. “Yes, I remember. You know what would be a really big help?”

  She looked at me eagerly.

  “How about reading the office phone system manual?”

  61.

  The more I thought about Marshall and Belinda Marcus, the more I was sure something wasn’t right.

  I knew a cyber-investigator in New Jersey named Mo Gandle who was very good—when I was with Stoddard Associates in D.C., I had used him on a couple of cases—and I gave him a call.

  “I want you to check on the dates of her employment by VIP Exxxecutive Service in Trenton,” I said. “And I want you to trace her back as far as you can.”

  I FOUND Dorothy sitting at her desk, chin resting on the palms of her hands, staring at her computer screen.

  On the monitor, Alexa was speaking, her eyes sunken, her hair matted. “I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy!”

  The image froze, then broke up into thousands of tiny colored squares, like a Chuck Close painting. They scattered and clumped irregularly.

  And then as the image redrew, she went on: “… They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I—I don’t know what that means. They said—”

  “I unfired Jillian,” I said.

  She hit a key without glancing at the keyboard, and the same few seconds of video played again: Alexa speaking, the picture freezing and then breaking up into jagged geometric detritus, and then reforming into a coherent image.

  Dorothy murmured distractedly, “I didn’t fire her.”

  “Well, I told her she can’t quit. What are you doing?”

  “Cracking my head against a brick wall, that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Yeah. Fire my ass.”

  “You too? Nope.”

  “Then I quit.”

  “You’re not allowed to quit either. No one’s allowed to quit. Now tell me what’s up.”

  Dorothy replied quietly and slowly, and I saw she was baring a part of herself she’d never shown before. “I’m not going to quit, you know that. I never quit. But I’m not earning my salary. I’m not doing what you pay me to do. I’m failing at the most important job anyone’s ever given me.”

  Tears gleamed in her eyes.

  Placing my hand on top of hers, I said, “Oh, come on. Whatever happened to the good old arrogant Dorothy I know and love?”

  “She saw the light.”

  “Dorothy,” I said. “You’re frustrated. I get that. But I need you on this full throttle. And I thought you never give up. Remind me what your father says about you?”

  “Stubborn as a mule on ice,” she said in a small voice.

  “Why ‘on ice’ anyway?”

  “How the hell do I know? Nick, do you know how often I think of that girl and what she must be going through? I pray for her, and I keep asking myself who would do something like this to an innocent girl, and I just feel … powerless.”

  “It’s not your job to save her.”

  Her eyes shone, fierce and haunted. “In the Gospel of John it says, ‘We know that we are children of God and the whole world is under the control of the evil one.’ I never got that before. Like, what’s that supposed to mean? That Satan’s in charge of the whole show? But now I’m starting to get it. Maybe there’s just … evil in the world that even God is powerless to do anything about. And that’s the real point.”

  “Why do bad things happen to good people?” I said softly. “I’ve stopped asking the big questions like that. I just keep my head down and do my job.”

  “I’m sorry, Nick. I promised myself never to bring my religion to the office.”

  “I never expected you to leave it at home. So tell me what you’re stuck on.”

  She hesitated only briefly. “Okay, listen to this.”

  She tapped a key, moved the mouse and clicked it, and we were back to that same loop of Alexa speaking. Dorothy raised the volume. Under Alexa’s words a hum grew steadily louder. Then the image froze and broke up into tiny bits.

  “You hear the noise, right?”

  “A car or truck, like we said. So?”

  She shook her head. “Notice the noise is always followed by the picture breaking up? Every single time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thing is, a car or a truck or a train, they’re not going to interrupt the video transmission like that.”

  “So?”

  She gave me the Look: she widened her eyes, lowered her brows, and glowered. The Look could turn a lesser being into stone or a pillar of salt. Our old boss, Jay Stoddard, found the Look so unsettling that he refused to deal with her directly unless forced to. Staring back was pointless. It was like a staring contest with the sun. One of you was going to go blind, and it wasn’t likely to be the sun.

  “‘So’?” she said. “It’s going to tell us where Alexa Marcus is.”

  62.

  “There is some problem, Officer?”

  Dragomir had learned that American policemen liked it when you used the honorific “Officer.” They craved respect and so rarely got it.

  “Well, no big deal, sir. We just like to introduce ourselves, just so’s you know who to call in case you ever need any help.”

  The young man’s ears and cheeks had gone crimson. When he smiled, his gums showed.

  “Is good to know.” Exaggerating his bad English was disarming to most people. It made him seem more hapless. Dragomir had made a habit of studying other people as a butterfly collector examines a specimen.

  The policeman shifted his weight from foot to foot again. The porch floorboards creaked. He drummed his fingertips against his thighs and said, “So you, ah, work for the Aldersons?”

  Dragomir shook his head, a modest grin. “Just caretaker. I do work for family. Fix up.”

  “Oh, okay, right. So I guess one of your neighbors kinda noticed some construction equipment?”

  “Yes?”

  “Just want to make sure there’s no, um, infractions of the buildi
ng code? You know, like, if you’re building an extension without a permit?”

  The youngster projected no authority whatsoever. He was almost apologetic for being here. Not like the police in Russia, who treated everyone like a criminal.

  “Just landscape.”

  “Is that—you’re not doing construction here, or…?”

  “No construction,” Dragomir said. “Owner wants terraced gardens.”

  “Mind if I take a quick look out back?”

  This was going too far. If Dragomir insisted on a search warrant, the boy would be back in an hour with two other policemen and a court order, and they’d search the house too, just to show they could.

  He shrugged, said hospitably, “Please.”

  Officer Kent seemed relieved. “You know, just so I can tell the chief I did my job, right?”

  “We all have to do our jobs.”

  He followed the policeman around the back, onto the field of bare earth. The officer seemed to be looking at the tracks in the hard soil, then the gray vent pipe in the middle of the field, and he approached it.

  “That a septic tank, um, Andros?”

  Dragomir went still. He hadn’t told the cop his name. Obviously the neighbor had.

  This concerned him.

  “Is to vent the soil,” Dragomir said as they stood next to the pipe. “From the landfill, the … compost pile.” An improvisation, the best he could do.

  “Like for methane buildup or something?”

  Dragomir shrugged. He didn’t understand English. He just did what he was told. He was a simple laborer.

  “Because you do need a permit if you’re putting in a septic tank, you know.”

  The cop’s cheeks and ears were the color of cold borscht.

  Dragomir smiled. “No septic tank.”

  Tiny muffled cries from the vent pipe.

  The policeman cocked his head. His ridiculous ears seemed to twitch. “You hear something?” he said.

  Dragomir shook his head slowly. “No…”

  The girl’s cries had become louder and more distinct.

  “HELP GOD HELP SAVE ME PLEASE OH GOD…”