Vanished (10 page)

23.

G
abe’s room was as dark as a cave.

He was asleep under the covers, a barely discernible lump. His crappy music was semiblasting from the speakers on a big black clock/radio/CD player on his desk, his iPod docked into the top of it.

The music was the audio equivalent of needles being stuck in my eyeballs. I flipped on all the lights. He groaned.

“Let’s go,” I said. “You should have been up twenty minutes ago.”

He pulled the blanket over his head, and I said, “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

He made a surly sound and burrowed in deeper.

“You can’t get rid of me that easy. Move it, or you’ll experience firsthand how I flushed those al-Qaeda terrorists out of their caves at Tora Bora.”

His head slowly emerged from the covers like a turtle from its shell. “That’s such crap,” he said. “You guys never even found Osama bin Laden.”

“Hey, don’t blame me.”

He mumbled something vaguely caustic, and I said, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a smart-ass? Turn off the music.”

He did. “What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you get to school. Move it.”

“I’m staying home. I don’t feel good.” He pulled the covers back over his face.

“You sleep with that stuff on all night?”

“No, it’s my . . . alarm.” His voice was muffled.

“No wonder you overslept. The music’s too lulling. Don’t you have anything more strident? Celine Dion, maybe?”

He grunted, unamused. As much as I liked Gabe, he was a difficult kid. Fortunately, he was someone else’s problem, not mine. The thought of having a kid, or kids, gave me the heebie-jeebies, but raising a teenager truly seemed like a horror show. I didn’t understand how people did it, though evidently people did. My mother, for one. (Dear old Dad, smart guy that he was, took off when I was thirteen. He missed out on most of the fun.)

“Come on, kid,” I said. “Get up.”

“You can’t make me.”

“Oh yeah? You didn’t know I have police auxiliary authority? I can have you arrested right now for truancy.” It sounded almost plausible.

Gabe slowly pulled down the covers just enough to peek out at me. He uttered a pretty hard-core curse word.

“I can also have you arrested for obscenity.”

“Is that what Grandpa’s in prison for?” he said.

“You’re quick.”

“I’m staying home today.”

“What’s the problem, Gabe?”

He mumbled something I didn’t understand, and I moved in closer, yanked the covers down. “I didn’t hear you so good,” I said.

He put a hand over his eyes to shield them from the light, and croaked, “It’s like all over school anyway.”

“What is?”

“About Dad.”

“What’s all over?”

He sat up, hung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood. Reaching over to his desk, he ran a finger across the touchpad of his MacBook, and the screen came to life.

It was his Facebook page. His picture in a box at the top and a bunch of other little boxes and things. I said, “What am I looking at?”

He tapped the screen. I looked at where he was pointing, an area of the page called “The Wall,” which had a column of little pictures of what I assumed were junior-high-school kids, mostly face pictures but some weird posed shots. Some of the guys had baseball caps on backwards. Next to each picture was a name and some comment, like “What was English homework??” and “quiz on verbs 2morrow?!” Apparently this was how Gabe and his friends communicated.

On one line was a blue question mark instead of a picture. And the comment:

“hey Gay Gabe, you loser, your dad ditched you, can’t blame him, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

I looked at Gabe, saw the tears in his eyes. “Who wrote this?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a name here. Can’t you just click on it?”

“It’s fake. Someone made a fake Facebook page.”

“You think it’s someone from school?”

“Gotta be.”

“Is this what they call cyberbullying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Back in the day, someone called you names, you’d wait for him after school and beat the crap out of him.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “You went to some fancy private day school in Westchester County. Like, in a limo with a chauffeur.”

“Granted,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have fistfights.”

I came close to telling him how often I beat up kids who made fun of his father, after Victor’s arrest. But I didn’t think he’d want to hear that his uncle Nick had been his father’s defender. Especially since Roger was my older brother.

“ ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself,’ ” he said, bitterly. “Maybe I will.”

“That’ll show them,” I said, then realized that sarcasm was probably a bad idea at this point. “Come on, Gabe. You can’t pay attention to jerks like this. You know what I always say—never let an asshole rent space in your head.”

He sat back down on the side of the bed, resting his head in his hands.

“Move.”

Gabe started getting dressed—jeans so tight he had to squeeze into them, his black hoodie, black Chuck Taylors. He grabbed an already open can of Red Bull and took a long swig.

I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes before your car pool gets here. Your mother wants you to have breakfast.”

He toasted me with his Red Bull. “What do you think this is?”

I shrugged. The last thing I wanted to be was this kid’s authority figure.

“Gabe, why do you think kids at school say that kind of stuff about your dad?”

“Because they’re assholes?”

“No question. But what makes them say crazy stuff like that, do you think?”

A sullen look came over him. “How do I know?”

“No idea where the kids at school might get that idea?”

“Maybe it’s true.”

Softly, carefully, I said, “You said that before. What makes you think so?”

He looked supremely uncomfortable. “I told you, I just see stuff. I notice stuff.”

“Did he tell you something?”

“No,” he said scornfully. “Of course not.”

“So what did you see? What did you notice?”

“Nothing. It’s just . . . I don’t know, like, a feeling.”

“A fear, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I have to go to school.”

“Now look who’s concerned with the time all of a sudden,” I said.

While I waited with him for the car pool, I asked, “Gabe, do you use your dad’s laptop?”

“Why would I? I have my own.”

“Any idea why it might have crashed?”

“Crashed?”

“Blue Screen of Death.”

“Oh. He asked me how to do a disk wipe. He said he was planning to get a new one. Maybe he screwed it up. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“He was trying to wipe it clean? Delete its contents?” So much for my theory about someone breaking in to tamper with Roger’s computer. Still, the alarm contacts on the French doors to Roger’s study had been quickly and sloppily disabled; that much I knew. Meaning that someone had made a covert entry for some reason. To snoop around, maybe. Or maybe for another purpose I hadn’t yet figured out.

“I guess.”

“Why?”

“Who knows. Why were you looking at my dad’s computer, anyway?”

“Because I thought there might be a clue there as to what happened to him.”

“Why would he leave a clue on his laptop?”

“He wouldn’t,” I said, but before I could explain, a big blue Toyota Land Cruiser pulled into the driveway.

“See you,” Gabe said.

“Remember what I told you about assholes.”

“Yeah. Never let them rent space in your head. Wish it was that easy.”

He slung his backpack over his shoulder and went out to the car.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that he, like his mom, was keeping something from me.

24.

L
ook at you!” Noreen Purvis scolded, getting right to her feet. “You should be home in bed!”

“I’m okay,” Lauren said. “Really.”

“Oh, honey, I mean it. I can take care of things here for as long as it takes you to recover properly.”

“And I appreciate it. But I’m fine.”

Noreen was a big, horsy woman with ash-blond hair that she wore in a short, no-nonsense style—sort of Princess Diana circa 1990. On Princess Di it had looked good.

She was wearing her fake Chanel scarf and a brown pantsuit and a pair of black Tory Burch pumps with the huge gold Tory Burch medallions on the toes. They were probably fakes, too. She reeked of tea rose perfume and cigarette smoke.

“Why is the door closed?” Lauren said, glancing at Leland’s office, which was next to her desk.

Noreen shrugged. “He’s been in there since I got here, maybe twenty minutes ago.”

“Who’s he talking to?”

She shrugged again, began clearing her things off Lauren’s desk. “Well, I should fill you in on the arrangements for Leland’s trip, I guess.”

“I’ll be right back,” Lauren said. “Need to use the girls’ room.”

SHE LOCKED
herself in a stall, lowered the toilet seat, sat down, and began to cry.

It was as if a dam had burst. Damned Noreen sitting at her desk, talking about Leland in that proprietary way.

And Roger. She was frightened. She didn’t know what to think. Not knowing about Roger.

My God.
Not knowing:
That was the worst thing.

She pulled out a length of toilet paper to blot the tears. After about five minutes, she was all cried out. She left the stall and went to the sink and reapplied her makeup. Then she washed her hands in cold water—the taps came on automatically for a few seconds when you waved your hands under them, but not long enough for the water to turn warm. The paper-towel dispenser shot out an annoying small rectangle of perforated brown paper.

Everything was irritating her now. Everything upset her.

She’d been back barely half an hour and already she needed a vacation.

25.

A
s soon as Gabe got in the car, I called my old army buddy Merlin, the TSCM expert, and asked him for another favor.

I asked him to stop by Lauren’s house later and help me put in a decent home-security system. Granted, asking Merlin to do a security system was a little like asking Bill Gates for tech support on Microsoft Word. Sort of overkill. But Merlin was gracious about it and said sure.

Just as I was backing out of Lauren’s driveway, my cell phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID and said, “Lieutenant.”

“You might want to stop by.”

Arthur Garvin’s voice was hoarse and adenoidal. He sounded even worse than the day before.

“You got the tape?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“I’ll be here until around eleven.”

“I’ve got a meeting in the office,” I said. “Do you think you could courier a copy over to me?”

He coughed noisily for a few seconds. “Yeah,” he said, “why don’t I send my personal courier over. On his mounted steed.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

LIEUTENANT GARVIN
turned his computer monitor, an ancient Dell, around so we could both watch. He offered me coffee, and this time I took it.

A fuzzy color image was frozen on the screen. I couldn’t make out anything beyond a couple of indistinct silhouettes on a street. The ATM was, I assumed, located outside. Near a gas station. Cars zipped by in the background.

In the frame around the image were numbers—date code, time sequence, all that sort of thing.

Garvin futzed with the mouse, clicking and double-clicking first the left button, then the right one. Finally, he got it working, and I could see a couple of smeary blobs making funny abrupt movements toward the camera.

“I should warn you in advance,” he said. “The resolution’s lousy.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“And that’s not all. I thought it was video they were sending over. It’s not.”

“What is it?”

“A couple of still photos.”

“What do you mean?”

“This ATM had a recording rate of one frame every ten seconds.”

I groaned. “To save hard-disk space, I bet.”

“Who the hell knows. I don’t know why they even bother.”

It’s sort of ironic that so many banks invest so much money in their security systems, installing high-tech digital video recorders in their automatic teller machines that transmit compressed video signals to a central server. All very fancy and high-end—and then, to save space, they set their cameras to record at the slowest possible rate. Ten to fifteen frames per second is slow. But one frame every ten seconds was little more than a stop-action camera.

Garvin clicked something, and the frame advanced, and I could see a man in a suit leaning forward toward the cash machine’s screen. The face was clear.

It was Roger.

There was no doubt about it at all.

His rimless glasses, his large forehead, the dark brown hair parted at the side. The hair was mussed, and his glasses were slightly crooked. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt and tie, but one lapel of his suit was sticking up and his tie was askew. He looked like he’d been injured. It was hard to see much of his facial expression, but from what I could tell, he looked frightened.

Roger had survived the attack.

For the first time, I knew that for sure. But where he was right now, or even whether he was still alive, I had no idea. The mystery I’d stepped into—or been dragged into—had suddenly gotten a whole lot more baffling.

And probably a lot more dangerous.

26.

T
hat him?” Garvin said.

“That’s him.”

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

“I’ll take it. But for what?”

“You were right about this being an abduction.”

“Was I?”

“Your brother wasn’t acting on his own volition. That’s pretty clear.”

“Based on what?”

“Watch. Check this out. I
think
I know how to do it.” He double-clicked the mouse, shifting the frame to the left. Then he clicked some more, centering in on the figure next to my brother.

It was a guy in a hooded sweatshirt, back turned to the camera. Lieutenant Garvin touched the screen with his index finger, drawing my attention to what looked an awful lot like a gun.

“You get the guy’s face?”

“Nope. The whole transaction lasted a minute ten seconds. Seven frames. And you don’t see the guy’s face on any of them. Not even a partial.”

“I’d like to see all of them, if you don’t mind.”

Garvin nodded. I expected at least a sigh of frustration, but his attitude toward me seemed to have softened a bit. I was no longer the annoying brother of the victim, or the intrusive, competing investigator. Now I was almost a colleague helping him solve a problem.

He clicked the mouse and advanced frame by frame, from the beginning. This time we were viewing just the left half of the image, the part that had earlier been outside the frame. You could see the hooded figure very close to Roger, his back always to the camera. He never raised his weapon. He kept it at his side, pointed at Roger.

“Did Wachovia security say if there was another camera?” I asked.

“This is the only one.”

“Where’s the ATM?”

“Georgetown. M Street, near the Key Bridge.”

I nodded. “Couple blocks from where they were attacked. So whoever grabbed him just wanted cash? Sorry—I still find that hard to believe.”

He shrugged. “They got four thousand nine hundred bucks. His account allowed him to withdraw up to five thousand a day, turns out. That ain’t chump change.”

“Granted. But I doubt money was the primary motivation.”

“Five thousand bucks is plenty of motivation.”

“Sure. But that’s not it.”

“Got a theory you like better?”

“Well, it’s not plain-vanilla kidnapping. Not without a ransom demand.”

“Yet.”

“It’s been long enough. No. You just called it an abduction, and I think you’re right. That I get.”

“How come?”

“Because Roger was expecting an attack of some kind.”

“You know this how?”

“What he said to his wife that night. He said, ‘I love you.’ ”

“So?”

“That’s not like him.”

“Not like him to tell his wife he loves her? Real sweetheart, huh?”

“You don’t want to go there. Point is, he knew he was going to be grabbed. He knew he might not ever see her again. He was saying good-bye.”

“Maybe.” He sounded dubious.

“And then, when he saw they’d grabbed Lauren, he said, ‘Why her?’ ”

“Huh. Like, ‘take me instead.’ ”

“Right.”

“Doesn’t mean he knew them, though.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t.”

“No blood, no trace evidence, no ransom demands. Your theory still doesn’t get us any closer.”

I paused for a moment. One of my abiding principles is never to tell anyone anything he doesn’t need to know. Loose lips and all that. But Garvin and I were, in a sense, partners by then. The only thing that counted was finding my brother, and the more Garvin knew, the more helpful he could be.

So I told him about what looked like an attempted break-in at Roger’s house. And about the InCaseOfDeath.net e-mail.

“He was being threatened,” I said. “Which is why he arranged that e-mail. Because he was afraid they’d try to make it look like he killed himself.”

Garvin sneezed while I was talking, blew his nose loudly. I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a cold but maybe Ebola virus.

“Can I see a copy of this e-mail?” he said.

“It’s gone,” I said, and I explained.

“Well, there’s got to be a copy somewhere.”

I shook my head.

“Gotta be some high-priced computer geeks in your high-priced firm who can bring it back.”

“I can ask.”

“You say he was ‘threatened.’ Over what?”

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Maybe to force something out of him.”

“Like what?”

“My guess? He had some information someone wanted. Or he wasn’t supposed to have. Something business-related. Like a big project he was financing.”

“That’s pretty vague.”

“Like I said, it’s just a guess. I don’t actually know. But he tried to delete everything on his laptop at home.”

“To get rid of evidence?”

“Or to protect his family.”

“How so?”

“Cover his trail. Let’s say he’d been collecting information on his laptop, and he didn’t want these guys to know he had it.”

“You got the laptop?”

“Yeah,” I said vaguely. I had other plans for it. “I think so. I’ll look around.”

“Okay. So now I think I get it.”

“Get what?”

He began tidying things on his desk, moving folders into piles. “I asked our Homeland Security division to check on all flights out of the country. Told them to flag your brother’s passport. That was when I was thinking fugitive, not abduction.”

“And?”

“Turns out your brother’s on the No Fly List.”

“No Fly List?”

“Yep. You know, that new TSDB watch list.”

“TSDB?” I said, but I remembered the new acronym just before he said it.

“Terrorist Screening Database.”

“My brother wasn’t a terrorist,” I said.

“Neither are most of the people on the list,” he said.

I grunted. Like most people who’ve come into contact with the sharp end of the U.S. government since September 11, 2001, I’d seen more than my share of abuses of law enforcement. Things like the USA PATRIOT Act were used to justify all kinds of invasions of privacy.

“You know what bycatch is?” Garvin said.

I shook my head.

“It’s like when commercial fisheries go trawling for tuna, and they end up catching other stuff in their nets, like sea turtles and dolphins. The bycatch.”

“Dirty fishing,” I said. “Isn’t that what it’s called?”

“Right.”

“But that implies catching something you don’t intend to catch,” I pointed out. “You don’t put someone’s name on the No Fly List by accident.”

“Okay,” Garvin conceded. “So maybe it’s no accident. Maybe you’re right. Maybe your brother made some enemies. Maybe whatever he was doing, he got into some kinda stuff he shouldn’t have. National security stuff, maybe.”

“He does finance at a construction company.”

“Gifford Industries is a construction company? Like Home Depot is the corner hardware store. Maybe there’s something about him you’re not telling me.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Then maybe there’s something about him you don’t know,” Garvin said.