Vanished (8 page)

17.

L
auren was standing in front of her computer, hunched over. “Take a look,” she said, swiveling the screen toward me.

I looked, saw nothing unusual. “Yeah?”

“Look again.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Right.” She began scrolling through her e-mail in-box. “It’s gone.”

I leaned over, watched her move her cursor up and down the list of messages she’d received that day. Roger’s e-mail did seem to have disappeared.

“You think you might have accidentally deleted it?”

“No. I’m positive. His e-mail is gone. I don’t understand this.” Her voice rose, approaching hysterical. “It was right
here.
”

“He sent a copy to your work address,” I said. “Can you sign on to your work e-mail from here?”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Then: “Jesus.”

“It’s not there either,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Did you print out a copy?”

“Of course not.”

“Or save it on your computer?”

“Why would I? Nick—” She turned around. “I’m not imagining this, right? You saw it.”

“Maybe there’s a way to get it back. We have someone at Stoddard Associates who’s a whiz at data recovery.”

“It’s like someone reached into my e-mail and just deleted it.” She opened a browser on her computer and went to
InCaseOfDeath.Net
. It was the cyberequivalent of a funeral home—floral bouquets in the borders. Photos of somber people coming up, then fading in flash animation—elderly folks, young parents, and kids—and quotes about death and grieving scrolling across the window. “Never leave anything unsaid!” a banner shouted. “The things you mean to say, the things you haven’t said.”

There was a
MEMBER LOGIN
box, and below that a line: “Forget password?”

We both saw it at the same time. “He must have had an account,” I said. Even before he could finish, she was typing in Roger’s work e-mail address, then she clicked
SEND PASSWORD
.

A line came up in red:

INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED
.

“Try his home e-mail,” I said. She typed it in.

INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED
.

“He must have used some e-mail account I don’t know about,” Lauren said. “Damn. But what could we find out anyway, come to think of it?”

“Who knows,” I said. “When he opened the account. What address he used. Maybe nothing. Maybe we’re just grasping at straws.”

She walked into the living room and sat on one of the giant cushy black leather sofas. I followed her in and sat on another couch facing her. Some entertainment news show was on their huge flat-screen Sony. The sound was off. Paris Hilton or one of those interchangeable Hollywood celebrities dodging the paparazzi.

“So Roger was right,” I said. “He said ‘they’ can intercept e-mail. Whoever ‘they’ are. He called them ‘the people who are trying to stop me.’ ”

“But who’s he talking about?”

“I was hoping you might have some idea.”

She shook her head. “He never said anything about…”

“About people threatening to kill him?”

“It sounds paranoid. Crazy. But his e-mail sounded totally rational, don’t you think?”

“You think he wrote it himself?”

She looked at me, furrowed her brow, gave a skeptical smile. “I hadn’t thought about that. But it sure sounded like him. I’d say it was definitely Roger.”

“I agree. Though it sounds more . . . emotional than I would have expected.”

“Nick, you have no idea.” She sounded annoyed. “I don’t think you ever saw that side of him. The affectionate side.”

“He kept it pretty well hidden.”

“Maybe he was just different with me.”

“No doubt.”

She was quiet a moment. “That was the last thing he said to me, you know.”

“What was?”

“ ‘I love you.’ ”

“Interesting.”

“Why interesting?”

I shook my head, and we didn’t say anything for a while, and then she asked, “But why didn’t he come right out and say what he’d found or who he was afraid of?”

“To protect you, I’d guess. Maybe he figured you’d be safer if you didn’t know anything. Since he thought his e-mails were going to be read.”

“Then what was the point of his sending any e-mail at all?” she said. “I mean, to go to the trouble of signing up with this morbid ‘in case of death’ website so he could have an e-mail sent to me that told me almost nothing—why?”

“But I think it tells you a lot. In ways that other people won’t understand. Like this line he added about a librarian. What do you think he’s referring to?”

“I have no idea. I can’t think of the last time he even went to a library.”

“He didn’t say ‘library,’ he said ‘librarian,’ ” I pointed out.

“Right,” she said. “Librarian.”

“Is ‘librarian’ a code for something?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Or the word ‘library’?”

“I really have no idea.”

“Well, it’s a signal of some sort,” I said.

“What about the police? Did you talk to them?”

I nodded.

“Do they have any leads?”

I thought for a moment. “So far just one,” I said, and I told her about the withdrawal from Roger’s bank account
after
the attack.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “If they stole his ATM card, wouldn’t they need his PIN code to withdraw money?”

I nodded again.

“So it’s possible they forced it out of him? At gunpoint or something? Which means maybe they have him alive?” There was such hope in her face that I felt bad.

“Yes, it’s possible,” I said. The other obvious possibility, which I didn’t want to suggest to Lauren, was that once they got the money from him, they no longer needed him alive. She was too fragile. She might have lost her husband, the stepfather to her child. I didn’t want to make things even worse for her.

“Where does Roger keep his laptop?”

“His study.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s late. I’ve got to be at the office early tomorrow morning.”

“You sure you’re up to it?”

“Yeah, I think so. Leland needs me back there. No matter what he says.”

“You know,” I said, “you may be able to help out.”

“How?”

“Find out what Roger was doing before—before this happened. What he was working on.”

“Ask around, you mean.”

“Be discreet about it. It may help explain things.”

“Or it may not.”

“Agreed. But at this point, we need to sweep up everything. Then we see what we have. Okay?”

“I have to be careful. Being the CEO’s admin and all that.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll do what I can, Nick.”

“Good. You don’t mind me poking around in Roger’s study for a bit, do you?”

“Of course not. Actually . . . would you like to spend the night in one of the guest rooms?”

“No need. Thanks anyway.”

“No, I mean . . . would you mind spending the night here? I’m just feeling really spooked. That terrifying e-mail from Roger, then the way it vanished? That just scared the hell out of me, Nick. I’m scared about whatever’s going on with Roger, and I’m scared for Gabe, and . . . Jesus, Nick, I’m too scared to even think clearly about anything anymore. Would you, please?”

“Of course. Though I’ll have to get out of here early so I can stop at my place and change.”

“I’ll probably be gone by the time you leave. I get to work early.”

“What about Gabe?”

“He gets picked up by his car pool. Don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. He’s used to being alone here in the morning.”

“Roger always left early, too?”

She nodded. “Sometimes we drive in together, unless he wants to get in to work before me.”

I noticed that I’d referred to Roger in the past tense—as if he was dead—and she didn’t catch it.

“Poor Gabe,” I said. “Latch-key child.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, getting up and giving me a quick peck on the cheek. She picked up a couple of remote controls, and switched off the TV and the cable box.

On her way out of the living room, she stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think you know me well enough to know that I’m not, you know, a scaredy-cat. I don’t panic, you know that. But after the last couple of days, when I think of Gabe, and I think—”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I’m scared out of my mind. Okay? I’m just flat-out terrified.”

She turned around quickly, as if she was embarrassed she’d been so open, and she walked toward the door.

“Lauren,” I called out.

She stopped, turned her head.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you guys,” I said.

Lauren whirled around, half walked, half ran toward me, and threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Then just as quickly she let go. “I’ll get your room ready.”

18.

I
never thought I’d see a home office more grandiose than my father’s. Until I saw my brother’s.

Dad’s library made a certain pompous kind of sense, since it was located in a thirty-room mansion built in 1919 on a ninety-acre estate in Bedford, New York. That’s horse country, of course, where women do their shopping in jodhpurs or jeans with holes at the knees and men walk around in flip-flops and everyone gets Lyme disease.

Roger, though, had carved his library out of a far more modest, suburban house. He’d knocked out a couple of rooms on the second floor to create a two-story stage set, complete with a catwalk, and lined with leather-bound books he’d never even opened, probably sold by the yard. Here, my brother got to feel as important, as baronial, as I was sure he didn’t at work, where he no doubt just pissed people off.

I found his laptop right where it belonged, on his ornately carved mahogany desk. It was next to an open copy of a book called
Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America.
Roger was a “birder”: a bird-watcher.

That was a hobby I didn’t get, like most aspects of my older brother. I have no hobbies, but I basically understand why a guy might want to restore vintage muscle cars or brew his own beer or collect sports memorabilia. I know accountants who wield nothing more dangerous than a sharpened number two pencil at work but have workshops in their basements with table saws that could slice off your thumb in half a second. I know mild-mannered pediatric pulmonologists who race remote-control monster trucks or rock out on their Fender Stratocasters by themselves when they get home at night.

But getting up at three in the morning to get pooped on by a Black-capped Gnatcatcher? I wasn’t sure I understood the excitement.

I powered up the laptop, and while I waited, I did a quick walk around his office. He had several framed pictures of Mom and Dad together, one at home and one in a banquette at a nightclub. A photo of Dad in his office on the top floor of the Graystone Building in New York, wearing a three-piece suit, the Manhattan skyline behind him.

Built-in cherrywood file cabinets were neatly labeled—bills, taxes, investments, and so on. I pulled open a couple of drawers and saw that he kept paper copies of his phone bills, which made things easier for me.

I checked out the French doors that opened to the backyard, tried them, and was satisfied that they were securely locked. I knelt, noticed the rudimentary security system in place—the magnetic contacts wired into an alarm system, so if someone tried to force the doors open, the alarm would sound.

Something about it looked wrong, though.

But before I could give it a second look, I heard a high-pitched tone coming from Roger’s computer.

It didn’t look good. The screen was deep blue and covered with incomprehensible text—white letters and numbers, garbage that made no sense to me except for one line that I understood quite well:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer

It was what computer geeks called the Blue Screen of Death.

Roger’s computer was dead. It had either crashed or—more likely—it had been wiped.

I had a theory how that might have happened—how someone might have gotten into his study to do it—and I went back to the French doors and knelt again.

Sure enough. One of the magnetic contacts on the doorframe looked like it had been hastily screwed into place. As if someone had unscrewed the contact switch, pulled out the connected wire, then jumpered the switch before screwing it back in—sloppily. In other words, someone had disabled the magnetic contact so the alarm wouldn’t go off when the French doors were opened.

Meaning that someone had probably already done a covert entry.

Someone had slipped into Roger and Lauren’s house. To search, perhaps. Or for some other reason.

And maybe was planning to do it again.

19.

I
spent the next forty-five minutes circling the perimeter of the house, looking for evidence of any other intrusions, using a little LED pen-light I found in the kitchen that someone had gotten at a trade show. The usual stuff: disturbances in soil patterns, broken shrubbery, jimmied locks, wood shavings, and the like. But I didn’t find anything else. No surprise there: Whoever had broken into the house through Roger’s study didn’t need any other way in. What did surprise me was how primitive the security system was. That would have to change.

I didn’t see any point in telling Lauren about the break-in. Not yet, anyway. There was no need to frighten her more.

So I went upstairs to get some sleep.

The guest room was midway between the master bedroom and Gabe’s room. It was furnished in classic WASP-grandmother style—oval braided rug, little bedside tables with tiny reading lamps. Hand-colored antique wood engravings of birds on the wall, in little gold frames. An old-fashioned white bedspread made out of that tufted, nubby fabric called chenille. I think.

On top of the toilet in the guest bathroom was a wicker basket that held a little travel-size tube of Colgate toothpaste, a shrink-wrapped travel-size toothbrush, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, small hand soaps from Crabtree & Evelyn. I brushed my teeth, undressed, and hung my clothes up on the mahogany valet.

I got into the bed, naked. Found myself staring at some of the weirder-looking birds on the wall—the Ruffed Bustard, the Sacred ibis, the Balearic crane—and wondering if they were extinct, or found only in Madagascar or some Amazonian jungle.

I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the unaccustomed sounds of a strange house. Maybe it was the fifteen-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, or whatever they were, which I wasn’t used to. Too slippery.

More likely, though, it was because I was on alert for any noises that might indicate someone was trying to break in.

I found myself thinking about my brother. About our childhood bedrooms, which we insisted on being right next to each other’s. When, given the size of our house, we could easily have been separated by half a mile.

For most of our childhood, we were best friends. We shared almost everything. We were brought close by the weird isolation imposed upon us by my father’s money. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, by the way my father chose to live, since I’ve known rich people who are vigilant about giving their kids a normal life. They send their kids to public schools, they conceal their wealth as best they can, they drive ordinary cars and live in ordinary houses.

But not Victor Heller. He was a brilliant wheeler-dealer who rose from a working-class background to rule Wall Street, and he wanted everyone to know it. Hence the estate in Bedford, with the horses and stables and clay tennis courts and the collection of antique roadsters. For years he commuted to and from work in his own Sikorsky helicopter, which landed on a pad in our backyard, until the town authorities took him to court to make him stop.

Mom was the prettiest girl in his small-town high school, with looks that rivaled Grace Kelly’s, and her early photos confirmed it. Victor Heller won her over by the sheer brute force of his charisma, by his indomitable will, his outsize ambition.

To the world, she seemed to be the perfect society wife, though she was anything but. She was too smart to play the role he’d assigned her—arm candy and cheerful volunteer for the charities he supported. Her chief pleasure in life was being a mother, yet Victor made sure she wasn’t around much to enjoy it. He insisted she go to all the dinner parties and balls and weekends in Verbier or Mallorca or Lake Como, though she never seemed to take pleasure in any of it.

As a result, Roger and I spent more time with our nannies and gardener and caretaker and household staff than we did with our parents. This didn’t make for a great childhood, but it did at least bring us together. Roger and I were born less than two years apart—eighteen months, a closeness in age that could have made us intensely rivalrous. Instead, we were more like fraternal twins. We did everything together.

Our personalities couldn’t have been more different, though. I was the rebel, the troublemaker, and the athlete. Roger was the intellectual, far more bookish, basically a solitary type. Yet he was also a troublemaker in his own quiet way. One of our housekeepers called him Eddie Haskell. We’d never seen that old TV show
Leave It to Beaver,
but years later when I saw a couple of reruns on late-night TV, I realized that our housekeeper really hadn’t liked Roger. Eddie Haskell was an unctuous, conniving brown-noser. He was the two-faced character who’d politely compliment Mrs. Cleaver on her lovely dress while instigating some evil prank that would inevitably get her son, the Beaver, in trouble.

Roger wasn’t as bad as Eddie Haskell, though, and I wasn’t the Beaver.

Still, Roger did enjoy tormenting me with magic tricks. He spent a lot of time at a magicians’ supply house in the city called Tannen’s Magic, and he was as good at sleight of hand as I was at throwing a pass. There was one trick he liked to do that I never figured out. It involved sticking his thumb through a hole that he’d cut into two blue cards stuck together, then sliding a red card between the blue cards like a guillotine, apparently slicing through his thumb. I’d beg and plead, but he’d never tell me how he did it.

My brother was a skilled amateur magician, but his greatest talent was always keeping secrets.