The driver put down his newspaper.
“Where to?”
“Nutley,” I said. Nick, the driver who had taken my grandparents to the airport, lived in New Jersey, and I was hoping he would have some idea what had gone wrong last night.
“Where about in Nutley?”
I’d been to Nick’s house for his daughter’s First Communion, but I didn’t remember the exact address.
“Walnut Street, I think. I’ll recognize the house. Just hurry.”
“You got it,” he said.
The meter started running, and both Olivia and I ducked down to the floor as the taxi pulled onto Tonnelle Avenue.
“Hey, hey,” said the driver. “None of that in my cab.”
We stayed low until we were a good half mile from the motel, then climbed back into our seats. Olivia gazed out the window at oncoming traffic on the divided highway, a wan expression on her face, as if searching hopelessly for her daughter. I should have let her have time to herself, but something was weighing on my mind.
“Why did it bother you so much when I told you that Burn knew Ivy as ‘Vanessa’?”
Olivia glanced back, seemingly puzzled. “I told you: That’s the name Ivy used after she disappeared.”
“What was her surname?”
Again, she bristled—the same way she had earlier, when I told her that Burn had used the name Vanessa.”
“What?”
“When Ivy became Vanessa,” I said, “what was her last name?”
Olivia continued to fumble—why, I wanted to find out.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She turned her attention back to the passing cars and road signs. I let it go. Her reaction was more telling than anything. Something wasn’t adding up.
I checked Mallory’s smart phone. Back at the motel, calls had come through, but it had been an Internet dead zone. Now I was getting the Web. On a hunch, I linked Vanessa with Olivia’s surname—“Hernandez”—and ran it through the electronic white pages. The result wasn’t promising: “Hernandez,” the search summary told me, was the twenty-second most common surname in America. Slap “Vanessa” in front of it, and the full name was only slightly less popular than “Valerie Clark”—1,950,000 hits. In a last-ditch effort, I typed “Vanessa Hernandez and Ivy Layton” and pressed Search. Only a few hits came up, and I clicked on a link that took me to a photo gallery for “Ivy Layton.” Most of the photos looked to be twenty years old or more. My specific link was to a photograph of two high school girls wearing soccer uniforms. I looked closer. One of them was named Ivy Layton. I didn’t recognize her. The girl next to her was named Vanessa Hernandez, and I froze.
It was Ivy.
Her hair was longer and darker, her face more girlish, but eighteen-year-old Vanessa Hernandez from Gulliver Academy in Coral Gables, Florida, class of 1990, had grown into the woman I knew as “Ivy Layton.”
My head was spinning. Admittedly, I had never known much about Ivy’s childhood. She’d told me that she was home-schooled in Chile. That her mother—Olivia—was from Santiago. Her father, long since deceased, was an engineer in the mining business. Details were sparse; Ivy didn’t like to talk about the past. “Life’s about the future,” she would tell me. She was so full of energy, and I was so in love with her, that her forward focus always seemed healthy to me. Now it seemed duplicitous, perhaps nefarious.
I clicked on the Home button on the menu bar, and I discovered that I wasn’t in just any photo gallery. It was a memorial book—a tribute to Ivy Layton that her friends had created for the tragic no-show at their ten-year high school reunion. She’d died in a car crash. Ivy had not become Vanessa after she’d disappeared from our sailboat. Vanessa Hernandez had become Ivy Layton. For the short period of time I had known her, Ivy—Vanessa—had used the name of a deceased high school girlfriend so that she could become…what?
And why?
“Here you go, buddy,” said the driver. “Walnut Street.”
I looked up. Nutley’s former residents included everyone from Martha Stewart to Little Sammy Corsaro, a Gambino crime family soldier. Nick’s part of Nutley was more along the Little Sammy lines. To my left, a huge willow tree overpowered the small yard, hiding all but the screened-in porch of an old frame house.
I spotted Nick in his driveway.
“Stop!”
The cabbie hit the breaks. Nick looked over. The black suit and cap that he wore as a limo driver were instantly recognizable, but it was odd to see him dressed that way behind the wheel of his own modest Chevy. He was backing out to the street, on his way to work, giving me no time to confront Olivia about Ivy’s real name.
“Go,” she told me, “I’ll cover the fare.”
I jumped out of the cab, ran across the street, and practically threw myself in the path of Nick’s car. He stopped at the end of the driveway and cranked down his window.
“Mr. C., what are you doing here?”
I was about to explain my paranoia about using a cell phone—Ivy’s warning that McVee might be listening—but skipped it. “I wanted to talk to you about last night. Did you get my grandparents to the airport okay?”
My question put him on the defensive. “Yeah, almost two hours before the flight. Something wrong?”
“They didn’t get on the plane. And no one has heard from them since.”
He seemed genuinely shocked. “That’s weird.”
“Did you see anything strange? Anyone at the airport who looked out of the ordinary?”
“Nuttin’ that worried me,” said Nick. “They seemed in good hands when I left.”
“Whose hands?”
“There was a woman who met them at the curb.”
“You mean curbside check-in?”
“No, I dealt with that. She was…a friend, I thought. Good lookin’, too. Anyways, they seemed to know her and were glad to see her—really glad. Like they ain’t seen each other for a long time. I didn’t think nothin’ of it.”
I froze, almost too perplexed to ask. “Did you catch her name?”
“Your grandpa called her Ivy.”
Ivy.
“Mr. C.,” said Nick, breaking my chain of thought. “I know you got a lot on your mind, but I heard about the bankruptcy on the news this morning. I was just wondering about my stock.”
“You own shares of Saxton Silvers?”
“Well, yeah. The wife and me, we been saving for years, but it just wasn’t keeping up with the way tuition was rising. You seemed like a successful guy. So we talked it over and put the kids’ college fund in the market. That’s not gone, is it?”
It felt like a knife in my belly. I wondered how many guys like Nick were out there. “We’ll talk about that,” I said.
My cell rang. Mallory’s cell. I didn’t recognize the number, so I ignored it, figuring that it was probably one of Mallory’s girlfriends trying to reach her. Immediately it rang again—the same caller redialing rather than going to voice mail, as if the message were urgent. I was so out of sorts from what I’d just heard from Nick that I’d momentarily forgotten Ivy’s warning about using the cell phone. I answered it.
“Michael, it’s me.” Her voice was racing.
“Ivy?”
“Shut up and answer this question yes or no: Are you still in New Jersey?”
Suddenly I remembered the eavesdropping, and I was afraid to say. “Why is that import—”
“Stop!” she said. “I don’t care where you are. Get to North Bergen and go to the nearest DQ.”
“What?”
“Focus, Michael. Listen to exactly what I’m saying. Meet me at the North Bergen DQ. How soon can you get there?”
“Well, we just got out of a cab so—”
“Stop it! Less than half an hour or more?”
“Less—I think.”
“Good. Get there as fast as you can. You got that? Go to the DQ. Right now! And take the battery out of Mallory’s phone before you go.”
“What?”
“Just do it! Remove the battery and go!”
The call ended, and she was gone.
Olivia came up the driveway, clearly alarmed by the expression on my face. “Everything okay?”
I slid the battery off the back of the phone, then looked at Nick and said, “We need a ride.”
54
“JUST GOT OUT OF A CAB?” SAID JASON WALD.
Wald was in the back of a white van that was parked in the bus lot across the street from the Tonnelle Avenue motel. Seated in the captain’s chair beside him, wearing headphones, was his tech expert. Between them was a laptop computer. Weeks earlier, Mallory Cantella’s “boyfriend,” Nathaniel, had given them everything they needed to program Mallory’s cell with spy software. Ivy’s conversation with Michael had come through the speakers on the laptop in real time, loud and clear.
“How did they get out of the motel without us seeing them?” asked Wald.
It was their job to let Burn know exactly when Michael and Olivia made a move. A wireless camera on the fence was aimed at the motel room door, with either Wald or his tech guy watching the image on their computer screen at all times.
“What does the GPS say?” Wald said.
“For some reason the spyware still isn’t giving me a read from the cell phone.”
“What about Olivia’s car?” Wald had gone over in the middle of the night and planted a backup under the bumper.
The tech guy pulled up the satellite coordinates on the computer screen. “The car hasn’t moved.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” said Wald. “They took a cab. Try getting the GPS reading on the cell phone again.”
“Definitely won’t work now. She told him to take the battery out.”
Wald yanked at his hair, as if trying to pull the answer out of his head. “I just don’t understand how they could get out.”
“I don’t either,” said his techie. “I gave the manager twenty bucks to let me look inside one of the rooms, just like you asked me to. There’s only one way in and one way out—and that’s the front door.”
“This has to be a ruse. They must still be in there.”
Wald flung open the passenger’s-side door, jumped from the van, and ran across the street toward the motel, hurdling over the concrete barrier that separated the divided highway. He stopped at Olivia’s car and laid his hand on the hood. It was cold; the car hadn’t moved since they’d pulled up last night. He went to room 107 and put his ear to the door. Silence.
They can’t be gone!
He wanted to bang down the door and find out for sure, but if it turned out that they were still inside, what would he say when Cantella answered the door? He needed another plan. A maid’s cart was two doors down. He ran to it and found the housekeeper making the bed inside room 103.
“Come quick!” he said. “I think my friend in room 107 is sick!”
She paused.
“Come!” said Wald. “You have to open the door.”
She followed him out to room 107. Wald retreated a few steps and waited in the doorway to room 103, behind the maid’s cart, where he would be out of sight when the door opened. The maid knocked on the door to 107.
No answer.
“Open it!” Wald said, speaking in a hurried whisper.
She knocked again, harder this time. Still no answer.
“Open the damn door!” he said, his whisper even more urgent.
The housekeeper was getting nervous and more than a little suspicious. “I’ll get the manager,” she said.
Wald cursed under his breath as she walked away. Every fiber in his body was telling him Cantella had somehow escaped, but he had to see with his own eyes. He went to the window. The drapes were drawn, making it impossible to peer inside. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He put his shoulder into the door, but it didn’t budge.
The maid’s cart was still in front of room 103. He went to it, grabbed a large bath towel, and pulled the gun from his jacket. With the weapon in hand and his finger on the trigger, he wrapped the towel around it, aimed it at the lock, and fired once. The makeshift sound suppressor reduced the noise level to that of a cap gun, and the lock was destroyed. He pushed open the door and burst into the room. The gaping hole in the back of the closet immediately told the story.
“Son of a bitch!”
He tossed the powder-burned towel aside, tucked away the gun, and dialed Burn.
“Cantella’s on the move,” said Wald. “She called him and said to meet at the Dairy Queen.”
“Which one?”
“The one in North Bergen.”
“What street?”
Wald struggled, no more information. “Hell if I know.”
Wald could hear Burn’s keyboard clacking in the background. It took less than thirty seconds.
“It’s on Kennedy Avenue,” said Burn.
“You want me to meet you there?” asked Wald.
“No,” said Burn, a certain finality in his voice. “I’ve got it.”
55
BECAUSE OF ITS LOCATION ON THE HUDSON RIVER—ON RIVER Road near the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, and major highways—Palisades Medical Center in New Bergen had one of the busiest emergency departments in New Jersey. Nearly thirty thousand patients came each year for lifesaving care.
No one came for ice cream—and neither did I.
Meet me at the DQ was a reference to the weird dream I’d shared with Ivy right before asking her to marry me—the one about the SUV running me off the road, forcing me to rush my dog to the DQ for emergency medical treatment. Ivy had conveyed her instructions to me in code, alert to the fact that Mallory’s cell was probably being monitored. “Meet me at the DQ in North Bergen” meant “meet me at the ER,” and the closest one to an actual DQ was at Palisades.
By my calculations, Ian Burn was having a hot fudge sundae as we spoke.
“You came to the right place,” she said.
I was standing by the vending machine in the crowded waiting room when the voice had come from behind me. I recognized it right away, but when I turned in response, the face wasn’t exactly the one I had remembered. She sensed my confusion.
“Rhinoplasty,” she said, turning to show me her profile. “Pretty nice work, no?”
She’d cut her hair and darkened it, too, returning to the color I’d seen in the photograph online—but it was Ivy, and instinctively I grabbed her and nearly squeezed her to death.
It’s hard for me to say how long we stayed in each other’s arms. Long-term memories were powerful forces, and just the smell of her hair seemed to unleash an emotional rush that—for a moment, at least—let me forget the circumstances of our reunion. I was remembering things that I had yet to realize I’d forgotten. The ease of our embrace. The warmth of her face against mine. How good her hands felt on my shoulder blades. The first coherent thought to bring me back to earth was a tinge of guilt—a thought about Mallory, about our pending divorce. I pushed that aside as irrelevant, but the magic was slipping away. I was slowly coming back the to harsh reality of the huge problems at hand.
“Your grandparents are safe,” she said, as we separated.
We were standing face-to-face, her fingers still loosely intertwined with mine, oblivious to the typical ER commotion around us—the boys playing soccer with a balled-up wad of white medical tape, the sneezing and coughing old man in the corner with the vomit bucket in his lap, the moaning construction worker with the bloody rag wrapped around his smashed finger.
“You met them at the airport?” I said.
“Intercepted, I guess, is a better word for it. McVee uses any pressure point he can. Family and loved ones are at the top of his list. I was afraid that if he got hold of your grandparents, you’d be at his mercy.”
“Where are they?”
“The FBI is protecting them.”
“According to your mother, you went into hiding because the FBI couldn’t protect you. Why would you put my grandparents in their hands?”<
br />
“They’re tertiary targets who don’t know anything. McVee won’t go to the same trouble to track them down as he would to find me—or you, for that matter.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
“Plus, this time I have leverage,” she said.
“What kind of leverage?”
“If the FBI screws up, I blow the lid on Mallory’s friend Andrea—who, by the way, is an FBI agent.”
It was clear from her tone that Ivy was expecting a serious show of surprise from me. But I wasn’t so shocked. Little things had always made Andrea seem different from Mallory’s other friends—the way she wolfed down pasta at Carmine’s, the blond-in-a-bottle dye job, the way she’d pressed for names when I told her about short sellers. All along, something about her didn’t meet the eye.
One thing still didn’t make sense.
“How did you know my grandparents were going to the airport?”
She sighed and said, “There’s something you should know about me.”
“You think?” I said with a mirthless chuckle.
She smiled a little, then led me to a quiet corner of the room where her coat was hanging on the back of a chair. She sat me down, pulled her coat back on, and took a seat facing me.
“I’ve been monitoring your limo driver’s wireless communications.”
“What the hell?” I said, shaking my head. “Am I the last guy on earth who doesn’t know how to listen to other people’s cell conversations?”
“Cell conversations, text messages, e-mails—none of it’s private. All it takes is simple spyware that you can buy on the Internet. The more sophisticated programs don’t even require me to touch your phone for setup. I just plug in the number, program it, and I can see every message you send or receive, and listen to every conversation you have. I can even program my device to ring every time you use your phone, so I don’t have to sit around monitoring you. The only way to break the connection is to remove the battery from the targeted phone.”
“Which is why you told me to take the battery out of Mallory’s phone.”
“Exactly. Everyone in the business uses cell spyware now.”
James Grippando Page 26