Vanished (14 page)

35.

W
hy are you so interested in what Roger was working on?”

“Just doing my job,” I said. Marjorie Ogonowski worked at a cubicle, so we sat in Roger’s office.

It wasn’t what I expected at all. I’d figured his office at Gifford Industries would have at least some of the pompous décor of his home library. A decent copy of a George Stubbs painting of horses. Maybe even an antique John J. Audubon print of the Brown-headed Nuthatch. But it was a tiny and dismal cubbyhole with no distinguishing features. His desk chair wasn’t an Aeron or anything stylish and emblematic; it looked like overstock from some low-end office-furniture supply house.

There was no computer on his desk.

“But why?” she said. “Does this have anything to do with his disappearance?”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“I asked you.”

I didn’t feel like getting into that kind of standoff, so I said, “That’s the operating theory. What can you tell us, Marge?”

“Marjorie. If you’re working for Leland Gifford, you know exactly what he was working on.”

I paused for a moment. She had a point. “Mr. Heller indicated in an e-mail to his wife that if anything happened to him, you’d know why.”

“He did?”

I nodded.

“Can I see that e-mail?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What did he say about—about something happening to him?”

“He must have said something to you along the same lines.”

“You’re not going to tell me what he said?”

“That’s the problem. He didn’t say. Nothing beyond that. What do you think he was referring to?”

She was a plain, mannish woman, with short light-brown hair, straight bangs high on her forehead. No lipstick or makeup of any kind. Even her gray suit was man-tailored. She was immensely smart, no-nonsense, precise in her language and mannerisms.

She blinked owlishly. “He didn’t tell me everything. Despite what Kim said.”

“He must have told you enough to make you worried about his well-being.” That was sheer speculation on my part, of course. She obviously took pride in her special relationship to Roger, which I doubted was sexual—she was defiantly asexual. He might have confided in her, because she was so ferociously competent.

“He told me very little about it.”

“About what?”

“About what he’d found.”

I waited, and when she didn’t go on, I said, “What did he find?”

“Mr. Murray, do you have any idea what Roger did here?”

“John,” I said. “No, not really.”

“We mostly worked on M&A stuff with biz-dev deal teams, checking the books, going over the P&L on current and expected, working on rev-rec issues.”

It had been a while since I’d heard that kind of biz-buzz English-as-a-foreign-language. Not since my McKinsey days, in fact. It took me a few seconds to do a mental translation, and I said, “You guys buy companies.”

“In simple terms, yes. I’m just an associate counsel, so I assist Roger. And I have to say, Roger Heller was the smartest person I’ve ever met. He was a pure structured-finance genius. And he’s never gotten the credit he deserves around here. People far less qualified are always getting promoted over his head. He should be general counsel or CFO. At least he should have become managing director of the global M&A practice. But it was like he was frozen in amber.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Maybe because he’s too smart. He intimidates people.”

“Is that so?”

She nodded, then pushed at the nosepiece of her glasses. “He always says what he thinks. It’s like there’s no filter. I guess I’d say that most people don’t get along with him. They see him as sort of humorless. But Roger and I—we get along great. He expects the best out of everyone he works with, and I give him my best. He expects nothing less than perfection, and I—”

“You gave it to him.”

“I usually don’t make mistakes. He knows he can always turn to me.” She smiled. “I document everything. He used to call me ‘the reference librarian,’ and then just ‘the librarian,’ for short. We always got along great.”

“He trusted you.’

“I think he did.”

“So what did he tell you?”

She’d begun to feel more comfortable with me, I could tell. “He said he’d found something in the books of one of the companies. During the due diligence. Something he said was ‘troubling.’ ”

“What was that?”

“He didn’t say, really. But he said he wished he hadn’t. He said he was afraid for his life. He was terrified.”

“I don’t quite follow. Why would discovering something ‘troubling’ make him afraid for his life?”

“Well, he—he left out a step, obviously. As I said, he didn’t tell me everything. But he sort of indicated that he’d called them on it. He’d let them know what he’d found.”

“Called who on it?”

“The company. The one that was doing—whatever.”

“Doing what?”

“Corruption of some sort, I guess.”

“But why’d he contact them?”

She shook her head. “Obviously, he was upset. But that’s just the way he is, you know? He always has to cross every t and dot every i. I think that’s why we get along so well.”

I was sorely tempted to say something, but I all but bit my tongue restraining myself.

She went on, “You know, his father is this famous—you know who the fugitive financier is, Victor Heller? Is, was—I’m not sure. He’s either in prison or he died in prison. But I got a really strong sense that Roger was reacting to his father’s criminality. I mean, that’s just my take on it—he never liked to talk about his father. Once we were in a car on the way to Dulles, and I kind of summoned the courage to ask him about Victor Heller. I guess I thought we’d worked together long enough that we could talk about that kind of thing? And he said his father was a brilliant and misunderstood man, and he should never have gone to jail. Something in his tone told me not to pursue it, so I just changed the subject. And later I realized that I wasn’t really sure what he meant, you know? What did that mean, his father should never have gone to jail? Did that mean that his father shouldn’t have broken the law? Or that his father shouldn’t have gone to jail for whatever he did? I never got that, really. But I couldn’t ask.”

“Hmph,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“And another time he said to me—well, it was sort of an aside, sort of a joke—he was talking about some kind of tricky variable-interest entities he noticed on a company’s balance sheet, and he said, ‘You know, in a good market, this is called financial engineering. In a bad market, it’s called fraud.’ I never knew what to make of that. What he meant, exactly.”

I was sort of lost myself. I said, “Meaning, you couldn’t tell if he approved or disapproved?”

She was quiet for a long time. “I’m not even sure what I mean myself.”

“But he reacted in a very moral way to what he found in that company’s books—what company did you say that was?”

“I didn’t say.”

“What company was it?”

Now she was quiet for even longer. “That I can’t say.”

“It’s extremely important,” I said.

“I understand. But some of the acquisitions we make I’m just not allowed to talk about.”

“So it was a company that Gifford Industries acquired recently.”

“I can’t say.”

“That doesn’t really help us.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I have to follow rules around here.”

Sometimes silence is the most powerful weapon in an investigator’s arsenal, so I looked at her for a long time without saying anything.

But the weapon doesn’t always hit its target. She looked back, then looked down, then back up. Then she said softly, “All I can tell you is, Roger was terrified.”

“I see.”

“You know,” she said, “you really do look familiar.”

36.

B
y the time I reached Georgetown, it was already mid afternoon. I backed into a space on Water Street, along a chain-link fence. A few blocks farther down, Water Street turned into K Street. The banks of the Potomac at that point were not exactly the stuff of postcards. No cherry blossoms here; no gleaming Jefferson Memorial. Instead, there were great mounds of dirt and construction trailers and Porta Potties. The city had been working for years to build a waterfront park in place of the industrial blight, the abandoned factories and the rail yards. They’d turned the old incinerator into a Ritz-Carlton. Maybe someday there’d be a park here. But it was a scraggly, weed-choked, trash-littered mess, in the shadows of the Whitehurst Freeway. Truly an urban failure story.

My cell phone emitted four high beeps, alerting me to a text message.

It was a location report from the GPS tracker that Merlin had sent via FedEx to EasyOffice, Traverse Development’s mail drop in Arlington, Virginia. The GPS device had just been delivered to the mail drop. The text message linked me to a Google Earth map, where I could see a flashing red dot indicating where the tracker was.

That told me nothing. I already had that address.

I walked up the footbridge to Cady’s Alley, crossed over to the restaurant where Lauren and Roger had had their last dinner. A Japanese restaurant on Thirty-third Street called Oji-San.

Then I retraced their route from the restaurant, down Cady’s Alley. Back down the footbridge. Across Water Street to their car.

There I stood for a few minutes, thinking. A black Humvee drove by. We’d used up-armored M1114 Humvees in Iraq as our tactical vehicles, equipped with fire-suppression systems and frag protection and mounts on the roof hatch for machine guns and grenade launchers. The air-conditioning wasn’t bad either. But I never understood the point of driving one of them around the city, even a civilian model. What did they expect, rocket-propelled grenades in Georgetown?

Lauren had said it was raining the night of the attack. Parking was probably in short supply. The restaurant didn’t offer valet parking, but there was a garage nearby. So why did Roger park all the way down the hill on Water Street?

He wasn’t a tightwad. You couldn’t grow up in our house in Bedford and learn to be a coupon-clipper. At the most, you could grow up to be someone who doesn’t much care about money—having seen what it can and can’t do. But my brother, unlike me, shared Victor Heller’s unhealthy fixation on wealth. He liked to show off. He had to have the fanciest car, the most opulent kitchen. This was not a guy who’d happily park his S-Class Mercedes in the squalor of Water Street, in the underbelly of the freeway, amid the vagrants and broken bottles, a long walk away on a rainy night.

I didn’t get it.

And I thought about what Lauren remembered Roger saying the night of the attack: “Why her?”

Not,
Why?
Not,
Leave her alone
.

But,
Why her?

As in, “Why are you coming after her, when it’s me you want.”

Or something like that.

I checked my watch, and while I continued to puzzle over my brother’s last remarks, I walked along Water Street in the direction of the Key Bridge. I liked that bridge. I liked the rhythm of its five high concrete arches, the open spandrel design. I even liked the irony that, in order to build the bridge named after Francis Scott Key, the guy who wrote the “Star Spangled Banner,” they had to tear down Francis Scott Key’s house. Or maybe it was to build that eyesore, the Whitehurst Freeway.

It took me six minutes to walk to the ATM where Roger had made his withdrawal. It was one of those twenty-four-hour walk-up cash machines, built into a brick wall next to a gas station. Outdoors and exposed. A young woman was using it, a large woman dressed entirely in black with platinum hair sticking up in the front like a rooster’s comb. Tufts of her hair were dyed orange and blue. Either she was doing that whole punk thing, or she was on her way to a costume party. She turned around and glared at me. I was too close. I was making her nervous.

So I backed off a few feet and surveyed the area while I waited. This was a no-name gas station that was open twenty-four hours and advertised fresh pastries and the coldest drinks in town. It sold cigarettes and rolling papers and lottery tickets. The pumps were self-serve.

A black Humvee passed by. The same one that had driven by on Water Street? I wondered whether I was being watched. I noted the license plate.

I assumed that Roger had been trundled into a vehicle at the scene of the attack, then driven over to the ATM. Why, I had no idea. But from here I could see the entrance to the Key Bridge, which took you across the Potomac to Virginia and the Parkway, the Beltway, any number of highways. Not a bad place to stop on your way out of town.

The large woman was taking her damned time at the cash machine. I approached, my shoes scraping against a scree pile of that white granular stuff used to absorb gasoline spills. She turned, glared at me, extracted her card and her cash, and hurried away.

The brick wall was covered in graffiti. I was pretty sure this was one side of the old Georgetown Car Barn, a nineteenth-century building where they used to store the trolley cars. Probably it was now offices or condos.

At the top of the ATM console was the lens of a CCTV camera—the one that had recorded Roger approaching, some guy with a gun at his side. Moving right up to the ATM, I turned around and watched an old Honda drive into the lot and pull up next to a pump. Assuming that Roger and his captor or captors had driven here from Water Street, I figured they must have come up M Street. Water Street was a dead end.

From here, they could have driven right onto the Key Bridge. But they could have also taken the Whitehurst Freeway. As I turned my head, I noticed something on top of the convenience store: another security camera.

A weatherproof bullet camera, as it’s called, attached to the steel arm of a mounting bracket. It was aimed at the cash machine.

37.

T
he gas-station attendant stood at a cash register in a booth behind thick bulletproof Plexiglas. He was changing the paper tape in the cash register. He was a small, squat, dark-skinned man in his fifties. Indian or Pakistani, maybe, with jet-black hair and steel-framed aviator glasses and a serious scowl. He wore a tie. I concluded he wasn’t merely the attendant but probably the owner. A black name badge pinned to his white shirt said
MR. YOUNIS
.

Mr. Younis. This was a man who demanded respect.

“Excuse me, Mr. Younis,” I said.

He glared at me, suspicious. “Yes?”

“I wonder if you could help me.” I kept my tone matter-of-fact. “A couple of days ago I was mugged over there by the ATM. Couple of thugs took my cash, my wallet, everything.”

He shook his head, turned away, went back to changing the register tape. “I know nothing about this.”

Right,
I thought. He’s afraid he’ll somehow get ensnared in a crime that had nothing to do with him, just because it took place on his property. Was the ATM in fact on his property? The ATM belonged to Wachovia Bank. The brick wall was the side of the old car-barn building and probably belonged to Georgetown University, which was the big landlord around here. So why did he have his own surveillance camera pointed in that direction?

The graffiti, I guessed. Kids with cans of spray paint, defacing the wall he looked at every day. Probably made his already high blood pressure shoot up to dangerous levels.

“The cops won’t do a damned thing,” I said. “They can’t be bothered.”

He grunted, fiddled with the register-tape roll, pushed it into its slot.

“Know what they said?” I went on. “They said forget it. They couldn’t care less. There’s a damned crime wave in this city, and the police just sit there on their fat asses.”

He shook his head, and his scowl deepened. He closed the cash-register-tape compartment and looked up. “It’s a disgrace,” he agreed.

A man who installed such an elaborate security system was not someone who had a great deal of faith in law enforcement. He was also a guy with a lot of pent-up resentment.

He was putty in my hands.

“These thugs just run wild around here,” I said. “Do whatever the hell they want. They know they’ll get away with it. Like all that graffiti on the wall over there.”

Some little sprocket of anger clicked into place in the guy’s head. He looked up at me. “These vandals—they call themselves ‘taggers,’ and they call this vandalism ‘art.’ And the police, they tell me if they have no documentation, they can do nothing. So I put in cameras.”

“It didn’t stop them, huh?”

“No! Nothing! One of the police even told me this is freedom of expression, this ‘tagging’!” He folded his arms.

“Easy for them to say. They don’t have to live with it.”

“It is an outrage!”

“But it looks like a terrific surveillance system you’ve put in. High-res, infrared—”

“—Yet it does me no good! None! Thousands of dollars, and these taggers are still doing their ‘art’!”

“Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if your system got some video of my mugging, couple of days ago? Hell, might even be the same guys who keep writing on your wall. Let’s see the cops try to wriggle out of
that,
huh?”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowing.

“Do you know how to operate a digital recorder?” he asked. “I have to stay behind the counter.”

MR. YOUNIS KEPT
his security equipment in a locked supply closet next to a shelf of beer. On a wire shelf was a low-end digital recorder, eight-channel, a black oblong box. The video images were stored on a computer hard drive. On top of the DVR was a cheap fourteen-inch color monitor. He showed me how to search by date and time, and he returned to his Plexiglas booth to wait on a couple of college kids who wanted to buy a pack of Marlboros and a case of Budweiser.

The supply closet was shallow, so I stood half-in, half-out. It took me five minutes to locate the night I wanted. I pushed
PLAY
. The recorder was set to take one picture every two seconds until it detected motion, at which point it kicked the recording speed up to a full thirty frames per second. Cars entered the frame and turned and backed up. People walked up to the ATM, alone or in couples, a few groups of three, their movements jerky, then suddenly smooth. I fast-scanned until I reached 11:00
P.M.

At 11:06, a white panel van entered the frame, nosed in against the brick wall a few yards to the left of the cash machine. A bulky guy in a hooded gray sweatshirt got out of the driver’s side, slammed the door, then walked around the back of the van to the passenger’s side. It was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like he had a gun in his left hand. When the guy turned slightly, I was able to catch a glimpse of his profile: beefy face, mustache. Late thirties or early forties. With his right hand, he unlocked the front passenger door. He pocketed the keys, switched the gun to his right hand, then pulled the door open.

And Roger stepped out.

The hooded guy raised his gun a little, waved it back and forth. Roger nodded. He looked panicked. His tie was out of place, his suit rumpled.

The guy in the hooded sweatshirt grabbed Roger with his left hand, and the two of them looped around the back of the van. They stood there for a few seconds.

“Dude.”

I looked up. A kid with tattoos and a silver barbell through his nasal septum was standing there.

“Zig-Zags,” he said.

“What about it?” He also had huge silver plugs, easily half an inch in diameter, through his earlobes. I wondered what this kid would look like at age seventy with big droopy holes in his ears and nose.

“Like, where the hell are the rolling papers?”

“Yeah,” I said with a glare, “like I know.”

He hurried away.

I turned back to the monitor. The beefy guy in the hooded sweatshirt said something to Roger, then turned around, and I got a full-on look at his face.

No one I recognized, but he was a type—Neanderthal forehead, deep eye sockets, simian features. He could have been any one of a dozen guys I trained with in Special Forces and who washed out before the end. One of those blank-faced muscle-bound cretins who think they’re tougher and smarter than they really are and usually end up working as mall cops.

I paused the video and zoomed in until I had a good screen capture of his face, then I cut and pasted the image. Not bad for a computer illiterate. When I returned to the normal view, I moved the cursor over until the rear of the van was in the center of the screen. A Ford Econoline E-350 Super Duty van, fairly new. The kind you see everywhere.

I zoomed in closer and got another screen capture.

The abductor had been careful to hide his face from the ATM camera. But not being all that bright, he hadn’t counted on another surveillance camera grabbing a very clear picture of his face.

Or the license plate of the van he was driving.