Vanished (4 page)

6.

H
ey,” she said hoarsely, when the cops had left.

“Hey.”

Tears in his eyes, she saw. In the last year her sweet boy had become a remote and often surly teenager. But once in a while there were flashes of the adoring son he’d once been and would, she hoped, be again. Her love for him swelled in her chest, like a physical object, expanding her ribs, her collarbones.

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious. They shouldn’t be here.”

She noticed the dark circles under his eyes. They appeared whenever he was sick or overtired or just worried. Which was often. More than a few pimples on his cheeks, which hadn’t been there two months ago.

In his right hand he was clutching his beat-up school notebook, spiral-bound,
ST. GREGORY’S
on the cover. The notebook had nothing to do with school, though. She wasn’t allowed to look at it, which made it all the more tempting, though she never had. All she knew was that it contained some epic-length comic book he’d been working on for a year or more. She’d caught a glimpse once before he snatched it away and was astonished at the quality of the drawings.

“Thanks for lending me Jaffee,” she said. She reached out a hand, held his. He squeezed her hand back. That was about as much affection as he ever showed her anymore. He hated being kissed or hugged, tended to shrink from her caresses as if she had some grotesque infectious disease.

“Your blood pressure is really bad,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“That machine keeps beeping.”

“It’s supposed to do that. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I look worse than I feel.”

“Lot of flowers,” Gabe said.

“From Lee.”

She meant Leland Gifford, the CEO and son of the founder of Gifford Industries. He’d find someone to cover for her, of course—likely Noreen, who worked in the same executive suite as Lauren but was underemployed as the admin to the CFO and lusted after Lauren’s job. She was a disaster, though: not too bright, not very detail-oriented, not half as competent as she thought she was. Now Lauren had something else to worry about. Leland ran a multibillion-dollar corporation, but he barely knew how to send e-mail.

Half to herself, she added, “Somebody must have told him what happened.”

Gabe shrugged. “I e-mailed him from your computer at home.”

“You e-mailed him?”

“What, I’m not supposed to e-mail your boss?”

“No, it’s—I’m impressed, that’s all. Thank you.” She fumbled with the bed’s controls, raised the head of the bed so she was finally upright. She murmured, mostly to herself, “I’ve got to get myself released from this place. I’ve got to get back there.”

“Mom, you have a serious concussion, and you just woke up from being unconscious for twenty-four hours. Leland Gifford will be fine for a while without you.” Abruptly, he added: “Okay, Mom. Where is he?”

“Who?”

“You know who I mean. Where’s Dad?”

She hesitated for a few seconds while she tried to think. Her brain was operating at half speed. She blinked, silent for a beat too long. What had they told him? She tried never to lie to him. Even if she wanted to, he was too smart to lie to.

The kid scared her sometimes, he was so smart. She wondered where he inherited it. Not from her gene pool, that was for sure. Richard, her first husband and Gabe’s father, was smart enough but no genius. She also wondered from time to time whether being so precocious made him an outcast at his private boys’ school. It couldn’t be easy.

“He went on a business trip,” she finally said. “Sort of an emergency. A last-minute thing.”

Now Gabe’s eyes went flat. “Don’t, Mom. The cops came to the house yesterday looking for him.”

“You—you were alone, Gabe?”

“Of course I was alone. I’m fine. I’m fourteen.”

“Oh, God, Gabe.”

“Chillax, Mom, okay? It’s all good.”

“ ‘Chillax’?”

“I’m just freaked out about Dad, that’s all. They wouldn’t tell me anything, but . . .”

“But you overheard what they were saying to me.”

He nodded.

She bit her lower lip, shook her head, and after a few seconds, she said, “Look, I don’t know where he is.”

“Did he—did he, like,
go
somewhere?”

She finally returned his gaze with a look that was equally fierce, yet also sorrowful and compassionate at the same time. “It’s possible he got hurt in the attack—”

“Like he’s lying somewhere bleeding to death?”

She shook her head. “The police assured me that he’s not in any hospitals or . . .”

“Or morgues,” he added.

“Which is a huge relief, Gabe. That means that he’s—he’s probably fine, just—”

“He’s dead. You know he is.” He swallowed, blinked rapidly, tears flooding his eyes.

“No, Gabe. No, he’s not. Don’t think that way.”

“How do you
know
he’s not?”

“Gabe, there’d—there’d be . . .” She couldn’t continue.

“Do you think it’s possible these guys who hurt you grabbed Dad or something? Like, kidnapped him?”

Finally, she replied, defeated, “I don’t know what to think.”

“Maybe Uncle Nick can find him.”

“I know you love Uncle Nick. Me, too. I just don’t think he can find anything the police can’t. He does corporate work, mostly.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Gabe said. “I called him and he told me he’s on his way home now. He promised me he’d find Dad.”

7.

I
’m not married, even though I’ve come dangerously close a few times, and I don’t have a family of my own. My “family of origin,” as the shrinks say, had been pretty well shattered by my father’s very public arrest and the squalid events that followed. So my nephew, Gabe, means a lot to me. I’m extremely protective of him.

Strictly speaking, I’d finished my work in L.A. anyway. I’d done the job I’d been sent there to do: I’d located the missing shipment. As I waited at L.A.X. for the first flight to D.C. that had an available seat, I got on my BlackBerry and fired off an e-mail to Jay Stoddard with the details. As much as I wanted to stay on and indulge my own curiosity and dig into what had really happened there, that was a luxury I no longer had. I had no intention of dropping it, of course. I never drop anything. But I had to get back to D.C. and make sure that Gabe and his mother were okay.

Because whatever had happened to his father—my brother—didn’t sound good at all. He’d been missing for two days.

The truth was, Roger and I hadn’t been close since Dad’s trial. Maybe that was a euphemistic way of putting it. I didn’t like the guy, and he didn’t like me either. We barely tolerated each other.

But damn it, he was my brother. And maybe more important, Gabe’s stepfather.

And I couldn’t suppress a feeling of gnawing anxiety, of growing disquiet.

The earliest flights were sold out, so I didn’t get to Washington until the late afternoon. In the cab, I called Lauren’s cell, expecting Gabe, and was surprised when Lauren picked up. The doctors were letting her go home. She told me what had happened, in broad outline, anyway. She sounded a little groggy but otherwise fine.

Which was a huge relief. Some of the tension I’d been feeling over the last several hours, like a low-level nagging headache, began to ebb away.

I stopped by my apartment, a loft in a converted warehouse in the Adams Morgan section of Washington. I’d bought it because there was parking in the building, and it came furnished. The agent talked about “hip modern urban living” and its “industrial aesthetic.” A sign out front said, obnoxiously, “You. Are. Here.” To me it looked like what it was, an old warehouse with raw concrete ceilings and a lot of painted ductwork. It had all the charm of an airplane hangar. Gabe thought it was cool, of course. He referred to it as my Fortress of Solitude.

A few hours later I pulled into the driveway of my brother’s house on Virgilia Road in Chevy Chase, a big old Georgian Revival on a leafy street surrounded by other big old houses. It was made of red brick with black shutters and white trim. It was imposing from the front, and even more imposing inside: six bedrooms and seven and a half baths, five fireplaces, a big pool in the backyard that they never used.

Roger once cracked to me that my entire apartment could probably fit in his media room. I replied that his entire house could probably fit in the conservatory of our childhood home in Bedford. That shut him up. We both knew what it was like to have a lot of money. We never thought about it. But after we lost it, I actually felt relieved, like I was taking off tight shoes.

Whereas Roger became obsessed, like Ahab and his damned white whale, with what we’d lost.

I found Gabe sitting on the front steps. He was wearing a black hoodie sweatshirt and frayed black sneakers and had iPod earbuds in his ears. He was drawing in his mysterious notebook, the one he never let anyone look at. He closed it quickly as I approached.

“Hey,” he said, pausing the music on his iPod, yanking the earbuds out. “Thanks for coming.”

“Hey.” I leaned over to give the kid a hug, and he got up only partway, and we embraced awkwardly. Gabe was small for his age. I could feel his bony shoulders and rib cage. “How’s Mom?”

“I don’t know why they let her out of the hospital so soon. She was in a coma for twenty-four hours.”

I shrugged, turned my palms upward. “Was she badly hurt?”

“Enough to give her a concussion.”

“You think she shouldn’t be home?”

He shrugged, palms up, an unconscious imitation. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Ah. No word from your dad?”

“The police were asking Mom if they had relationship problems. They think maybe Dad ran off.”

“That doesn’t sound like your dad.”

He was watching my face closely. “Or maybe he was kidnapped. Isn’t that possible?”

“Kidnapped? I doubt it. Look, we’ll figure this out. I don’t want you to worry, Gabe.”

“Yeah,” he said dubiously. “Sure.”

I turned toward the door, and he said, “Uncle Nick, will you teach me how to use a gun?”

“It’s late. We’d piss off the neighbors.”

“I mean, like, at the range or the gun club or whatever.”

“I don’t belong to a gun club, and I don’t shoot at a range. In fact, I rarely use a gun. I always prefer to use my hands.”

His eyes widened. “To kill people?”

“For database searches, mostly,” I said.

“I’m serious, Uncle Nick. I want to learn how to use a gun.”

“I don’t think teenagers who wear all black should use guns,” I said. “Bad stuff tends to happen. Don’t you watch the news?”

“I’m talking about protecting Mom. And self-defense and like that.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I opened the front door, and he said, “Uncle Nick?”

I turned.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “For being here, I mean.”

8.

I
’d always thought that the only smart decision Roger ever made was to marry Lauren. She was strikingly attractive—glossy black hair and milky white skin and caramel brown eyes; lips that pulled down at the sides when she smiled. Lauren was a beautiful and elegant woman.

But most of all, I thought, she was a really good human being. Totally unself-centered. She’d devoted her life to three difficult men: her husband, her son, and her boss, Leland Gifford. That couldn’t have been easy. Just being the administrative assistant to the CEO of a major company was more than a full-time job; it was more like a marriage. No doubt Roger was jealous of her devotion to her boss. And maybe her boss was jealous of her devotion to her husband.

She gave me a big hug as I entered, and I stared in shock for a few seconds. Even though I knew she’d been hurt, seeing the evidence of that attack was unnerving. She had a bandage on her head, and the left side of her face was scraped up, with yellowish bruising around her eyes.

She thanked me for coming, and I asked how she was doing and told her she looked good.

“I just lost respect for you,” she said with a disappointed shake of her head. “I always thought you were a real straight shooter.”

“You’re right. I lied. You look pretty rough. I’m worried about you.”

She laughed. “Thanks for your honesty. But I do feel better than I look.”

She led me through the marble-tiled foyer and into their huge kitchen, which smelled like gingerbread or maybe pumpkin pie. She handed me a mug of coffee: black, the way I like it. The mug had a shield on it and said
ST. GREGORY’S
, Gabe’s private boys’ school. She sat on a stool at one corner of the big black granite island, and I sat facing her.

“The hospital let you go home already?”

“The doctor thinks I’m okay as long as I take it easy. And I can’t leave Gabe alone in the house.”

“No word about Roger?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Listen,” I said. “The first thing is, I don’t want you to assume the worst.” She needed me to be calm and unworried, and I did a fairly good job of faking it.

Tears came to her eyes. “I don’t even know what the worst
is
.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

9.

I
listened, asked a lot of questions, and mostly tried not to feed her worst fears. But the more I listened, the stranger it seemed.

A sudden, unexplained attack as they were walking to their car. No blood on the ground, no signs of struggle: nothing to indicate that my brother had been killed or even wounded. The hospitals and morgues had been checked for bodies, and no one matching his description had turned up.

There had been no word from him in the two days since the attack.

It didn’t look good. In the pit of my stomach, I knew that he wasn’t likely to turn up alive. I didn’t want to tell her that. Yet I also didn’t want to mislead her.

“How many of them were there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably just one. But he had a gun.”

“How do you know?”

“I felt it.”

“How?”

“He held something against my temple that felt like the barrel of a gun. And I heard that little click a revolver makes when you cock the hammer.”

“So it was a revolver, not a semiautomatic.”

“You don’t cock a semiautomatic, Nick.”

I just smiled. I didn’t want to get all firearms-geeky on her. Actually, you do cock a semiautomatic when you rack the slide. But the point she was trying to make was basically right: nothing else sounds quite like the hammer on a revolver being pulled. “Male or female?”

“Male, for sure.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I—well, I guess, the strength—”

“There are some awfully strong women around.”

“Maybe I felt arm hair or something.”

“His arms were bare, then.”

“No . . . I . . . it
smelled
like a guy, if you know what I mean. Cologne. Cheap cologne, mixed with cigarette smoke.”

“Did you get the sense that Roger knew the attacker?”

Her eyes roamed the room. “No, I don’t think . . .”

“Gabe said the cops were wondering if you and Roger were having marital difficulties.”

She winced. “He said that?”

I nodded. “Basically.”

“What does that mean? Like he tried to have me bumped off?”

“I guess.”

“That’s just stupid. If Roger wanted to leave me, he’d just leave.”

“Did he ever talk about that?”

“Not you, too.”

“Nah. Roger’s not the divorce type, I’d say. He’d rather just grind you down.”

She frowned, but not with her eyes. “I know you two have . . . issues. I realize he can be annoying sometimes, but—”

“Annoying? White guys who call each other ‘dude’ are annoying. Hot-air hand dryers in public restrooms are annoying. I wouldn’t call Roger annoying.”
He’s a jerk,
I didn’t say.
An asshole.
In other circumstances I might have said this aloud. But not that day. And the fact was, she loved the guy, and so did Gabe, so who was I to impose my opinion on them? It was irrelevant.

She looked up suddenly, sniffed the air. “Oh, God, the sweet potato.” She ran over to the toaster oven on the counter near the refrigerator (a Sub-Zero, of course, roughly the size of a Humvee) and came back shortly with her foil-wrapped baked sweet potato and a fork.

“Want some?”

“I’m good.”

“You have any supper?”

“You know me. I eat when I’m hungry.”

In their house, the kitchen was normally Roger’s domain. I have a great respect for male friends of mine who can cook. Just not for kitchen fascists like my brother. He always had to have the right high-end appliance or expensive pan, the right cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, the right thirty-year-old balsamic vinegar. Once food becomes that important, you’ve got a problem that Umbrian white truffle oil can’t solve.

“In the hospital, they kept feeding me Jell-O and ginger ale, and all I could think about was baked sweet potato for some reason.”

“Is your boss going to survive without you?”

She smiled fondly. “He’s been great. He told me to take as much time as I need. But I want to go back soon.”

“You’re well enough?”

“Like I said, I only look a train wreck. I’m feeling fine. Gabe has school, and I’ll just go stir-crazy sitting around the house.”

“I assume Leland Gifford knows about Roger’s . . . disappearance.”

“Of course.”

“You’ve talked to him about it?”

“Just briefly. I called him this afternoon.”

“And?”

“He’s offered to do anything he can. The police interviewed him about Roger.”

“Did he have any theories as to what might have happened?”

“Lee’s as baffled as anyone.”

I nodded. “Do you have any idea what Roger’s been working on recently?”

She paused to chew a big mouthful, looking at me with narrowed eyes. “We rarely talked about work. Sort of house rules.”

“So he didn’t mention anything he was especially worried about.”

She shook her head. “Nothing interesting, as far as I know.”

Of course, that pretty much described all of Roger’s work at Gifford Industries. He structured deals, arranged financing. It would take me pots of black coffee to get through a single one of his mornings without lapsing into a boredom-induced coma. I always had the feeling, though, that Roger regarded himself as overqualified—that he’d never been promoted to a level he considered commensurate with his talents. Not that such a level could ever possibly exist in corporate America.

“Hmm,” I said.

“You’re thinking this had something to do with his job?”

“Not necessarily. Just covering all the bases. It could be anything. But I doubt it was a random mugging. If he was attacked”—I deliberately avoided the word “killed”—“there’d probably be some evidence of that. Something would have turned up by now.” A body, I didn’t say.

“Then what are you suggesting?”

“We can’t rule out some sort of abduction or kidnapping.”

“A
kidnapping
? You’re not serious.” Her voice got high-pitched, scornful, as if to mask her fear. “The cops said the same thing. But who’d kidnap Roger? We’re not rich. That’s crazy.”

My eyes slid toward the humongous hulking stainless-steel eight-burner Vulcan commercial range that threw off enough BTUs to serve a good-sized restaurant. I knew they’d dumped a quarter of a million bucks at least into redoing their kitchen to Roger’s maniacal specifications. “No doubt,” I said.

“I mean, sure, we’re well-off, but Roger and I both work for a living.”

“I know.” Once Victor Heller’s considerable assets were seized, Roger and my mother and I were left without any money. But Roger, at least, inherited Dad’s genius for making it and investing it. Just one of many ways he and I were different.

Lauren had been Gifford’s admin, a divorcée with a young child, when she met Roger, and she’d made it clear from the outset that she loved her job, loved working for Leland Gifford, and would never give it up. She continued working because she wanted to, not because she had to. Roger made enough to support them, and he invested well.

“Anyway, if he’s been kidnapped, wouldn’t I have gotten a ransom demand by now?”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes they wait, just to increase the desperation level. But I agree, that’s not likely.”

“Then what
is
likely?”

“Just a theory, here, but maybe he stuck his nose into something he shouldn’t have. Got into trouble with the wrong sorts of people.”

“Like who?”

“Your company’s involved in gigantic, billion-dollar construction projects around the world. Maybe he ran up against some organized-crime syndicate that thought they had some project nailed but lost out to Gifford Industries. Maybe Roger helped elbow them out. Something like that.”

“You make Gifford Industries sound like some sort of two-bit Mafia-owned New Jersey garbage-hauling company.”

I thought of a few rejoinders—I’m just wired that way—but I held my tongue.

“Forget the Mafia,” I said. “The criminal underworld’s gone transnational. The Russians, the East Europeans, the Asians—they’ve all gotten sophisticated. Now they invest. They use legitimate businesses to launder their money. They trade commodities. They’re into oil and precious metal and insurance companies and banks. All over the world. What if Roger came across something about one of these organizations while he was negotiating a deal, something they didn’t want him to know . . .”

She looked at me for a few seconds, then her eyes shifted from side to side as if she were reading something off a TelePrompTer. I had a feeling she was thinking that possibility through to its logical conclusion, which wasn’t a happy one.

“You don’t really believe things like that happen, do you?” She sounded almost scornful.

“Not really,” I admitted. “Rarely. But the world’s a dirty place. Who knows.”

“Then what? What do you think happened?”

“Wish I had something to tell you.” I thought for a moment. “Listen, Lauren. When I asked you if Roger knew the guy, or the people, who grabbed you, you hesitated.”

“I did?”

I’d noticed a flash of uncertainty appear in her face; maybe she wasn’t consciously aware of it. “Was there anything in Roger’s face, his expression or whatever, that might have indicated he wasn’t totally surprised by what was going on?”

She was silent for a few seconds, pensive. “You know, I just remembered something.”

“Okay.”

“It’s what he said when we were attacked. The last thing I heard him say.”

“Okay.”

“He said, ‘Why her?’ ”

“ ‘Why her,’ ” I repeated. “Which implies, ‘Why not me?’ ”

“Like he
knew
them. Like maybe he knew who they were.”

I thought for a moment. “I think it tells us something more important.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“That maybe he was expecting this to happen. And the question is why.”

Quietly, a tremor in her voice, she said: “Expecting it? Expecting
what
?”

“Maybe he’d been warned. Maybe it was an attempt to scare him.”

“For what? That’s—that’s too bizarre, Nick.”

“You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that goes on.”

“Try me.”

“Someday I’ll tell you the real reason I got booted out of the Pentagon. Things aren’t always the way they appear from the outside. There’s usually more to the story.”

She shook her head, as if to dismiss the wild speculation. Then she fell silent for ten or fifteen seconds. “You don’t think he’s alive, do you?”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I didn’t believe it either. “Don’t worry,” I said.

“I’m losing respect for you again.”

“Whatever happened to him, I’m sure he’s okay. Keep the faith. I’m here for you guys, you know that.”

“I know. That means a lot. But Nick, I didn’t want to involve you in this. That was Gabe’s idea, not mine.”

“Involve me?”

“You know what I mean. Professionally, or whatever. I told Gabe I doubt you can find out anything the cops can’t.”

“Well,” I said, “truth is, my firm has resources law enforcement doesn’t.”

“You’re not suggesting I hire Stoddard Associates, are you?”

“Jay Stoddard wouldn’t take the case. I’d have to do it on my own. Off the books.”

“That wouldn’t be—I don’t know, complicated?”

I hesitated, but only for an instant. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it would be complicated.”

“I mean, given, you know, the way you and Roger . . .”

“He’s my brother. And your husband. And Gabe’s dad. That’s not complicated.”

“So maybe it would be . . . you know, cleaner . . . if I hired you directly, paid you off the books. If you’re willing to help out, I mean.”

“I won’t take money from you.”

She hesitated. I could see she was struggling. “Roger’s done really well,” she said with a nervous smile. “You were in the army, and then you worked for the government . . .”

Yeah, yeah,
I thought.
I served my country, while my brother served himself.
That was what she meant but would never say out loud. The fact was, I did what I did, chose what I did, in order to escape. In other words, for wholly selfish reasons.

But I’d never say that out loud either.

“Give me the names of the cops who interviewed you,” I said. “I’ll talk to them. Why don’t we start there?”

“Are you sure?”

“Not a problem, Lauren. And maybe you could also give me the names of Roger’s close friends. You know, anyone he might have confided in.”

“Well . . .” She faltered. “You’ve known Roger a lot longer than me.”

“He didn’t really have any close friends, did he?”

“Not really.”

I wasn’t surprised. He’d always been sort of a loner. Going back to when we were kids, he tended to hang out with my friends. Even though he considered us uncool, since we were a few years younger. And even though he was never really the hanging-out type anyway.

“Nick, are you sure this is okay?”

“More than okay,” I said.

She jumped up and threw her arms around me, and after a few seconds she began sobbing.