Vanished (6 page)

12.

W
hen I got to my office, which was about a quarter the size of his, I saw that my voice-mail light was blinking. All calls came through our main switchboard and were answered by Elizabeth, the British receptionist. Most callers just left a name and number and she e-mailed me the message. Sometimes I missed those old pink “While You Were Out” message slips that used to stack up when I worked at McKinsey & Company. But once in a while, especially if the matter was confidential, or the caller didn’t want to leave a name, she’d put them right into my voice mail.

I played the messages over the speakerphone while I sat in my desk chair and spun it halfway around to stare out the window at K Street. A pretty young girl in an orange shirt came out of the restaurant across the street and knelt in front of the menu easel on the sidewalk. She kept tossing back her long brown hair while writing the day’s specials on the chalkboard in a neat cursive hand.

One of the messages was from an old army buddy about our weekly basketball game. Another was from a woman I’d been seeing on an extremely casual basis.

But nothing from Lieutenant Garvin of the Washington Metropolitan Police. I’d left him two messages. So I tried him again, got his voice mail, left him a third message.

In the meantime, I had a few other phone calls to make.

Jay Stoddard had explicitly told me to stop asking questions about Traverse Development, but that was like waving a red flag at a bull. I’ve never liked following orders, which was one of the reasons I was happy to leave the army, then the government. I’ll admit, though, that this didn’t make me an ideal employee.

In any case, I wasn’t asking questions about Traverse Development, whatever that was. I was asking about the almost one billion dollars in cash that Traverse was shipping, and technically that was a different matter. Hairsplitting, maybe, but whatever works.

The plastic wrapping on the bricks of currency had identified it as being from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in East Rutherford, New Jersey. That was the location of the largest cash vault in the country. They had people there whose entire job was to analyze the movement of cash around the world—which is probably one of those jobs that sounds more interesting than it actually is. I called the international cash operations unit of the East Rutherford Operations Center and identified myself by my real name and firm and told them that, in the course of an investigation, I’d found a small bundle of cash in a briefcase belonging to a suspected drug trafficker. I gave the woman one of the serial numbers.

It took her more than five minutes to return to the phone. She had all sorts of questions for me. Where exactly was this drug trafficker based? How much cash? What was the range of serial numbers, and were they sequential?

I told her the serial numbers on the hundred-dollar bills all began with DB—at least, the ones I had looked at.

“Well, sir, the first letter, D, means that it’s the 2003 series. And the second letter—B?—that means it was issued by the New York Fed.”

“Well, that helps,” I said. “But what I want to know is, was this part of any bulk shipment of cash?”

“I can’t tell you that, sir.” The woman’s voice had gone from bored-but-friendly to officious-and-stern.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Because when the Fed won’t help law enforcement recover cash that’s stolen from one of their shipments, that’s serious indeed. Just the sort of thing that my buddy, the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, would love to sink his claws into. You know how they love scandals like this. How do you spell your last name, again?”

If there’s one thing a bureaucrat fears more than having to work past five o’clock, it’s having to testify before Congress.

By the time I hung up, I’d confirmed my suspicions. Sure enough, the cash on that plane was part of the famous nine billion dollars that had gone missing in Baghdad a few years back.

But I still hadn’t cracked the mystery of who or what Traverse Development was, and that wasn’t going to be easy to do out of this office. Not with Jay Stoddard looking over my shoulder. And not without asking questions about it, as I promised Jay I wouldn’t do.

I had an old friend named Walter McGeorge, who was an expert in TSCM, which is the industry shorthand for Technical Surveillance Countermeasures. In simple terms, Walter was a bug-sweeper, the best I’d ever met.

Walter had been a communications sergeant on my Special Forces team. He’d been trained in all the usual stuff—radio equipment and wire communications, burst-code radio nets, and so on. Everything from encrypted satellite transmissions to old-fashioned Morse code. Somewhere along the line, “Walter” had become “Hognose,” because of his passing resemblance to Porky Pig, and then “Merlin,” as he earned the admiration of his teammates. He was recruited to the same Pentagon intel team as me but survived longer. When he finally decided he wanted out, I got him a job doing bug sweeps for a TSCM firm in Mary land. He’d done a number of projects for me since Stoddard Associates didn’t have TSCM specialists on staff: That was a specialized skill these days. All the big investigative firms outsourced those jobs now.

I reached him on his cell. The connection was crackly, and I asked whether I’d disturbed him on a job.

“Yeah,” he replied crankily. “A job involving bluefish.”

Merlin was a serious sport fisherman and kept a small boat in the Harbour Cove Marina on Chesapeake Bay.

“I need to send someone a package,” I said. Before he had the chance to make a crack about how he wasn’t my secretary, I went on: “I have the address of a drop site, and I want to send them a GPS tracking device. You think you could send out a FedEx package with one of those letter loggers inside?”

“You looking for historical data?”

“Historical?”

“If you’re talking about the GPS Letter Logger, the one that’s like a quarter inch thick and fits in a number-ten business envelope, well, that just records where it’s been after the fact. It’s not real-time. You have to get it back to download the data. And I got a feeling you’re not going to get it back.”

“I need real-time. I’m figuring the FedEx package will get delivered to the drop site and probably transferred to some actual office, where it’ll get opened.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” I conceded. “Still, it’s worth a try. Once they open it and see a tracker inside, they’re going to destroy it. But at least I’ll get the real location that way.”

“You think so, huh?”

“I hope so. That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Well, here’s the deal. If you want a GPS logger that can broadcast its location in real time, it’s gonna be a little beefier than that Letter Logger device. It’ll send out real-time position data as SMS text messages. Lithium-ion battery. Should stay powered for ten days.”

“Think you can pop one in the mail later on today?”

“Soon as I get back to the office.”

Another call was coming through. I recognized the number, told Merlin where to send the package, and said, “Thanks, man. Good fishing.”

Then I picked up line 2. “Lieutenant Garvin,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

“Good to hear from you, Mr. Heller,” the cop said. “Funny coincidence, actually. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your brother.”

13.

T
he headquarters of the Violent Crime Branch of the Washington Metropolitan Police was hidden away in the back of some dismal shopping center in southeast D.C., off Pennsylvania Avenue. I headed over there right after work. I was buzzed in and entered a dimly lit corridor that smelled of vomit, the stench not quite masked with some deodorizing spray that was almost as bad. I passed an open conference room that had crime-scene tape stretched across the doorway, probably to keep people from accidentally stepping into the mess on the floor.

Detective-Lieutenant Arthur Garvin met me halfway down the hall. He wasn’t quite what I expected. He had an almost professorial appearance: thick steel-rimmed glasses, scraggly white goatee, red-rimmed nostrils. On the way over, I’d called in to the office and asked Dorothy to do a quick backgrounder on the guy. He was sixty-four, with thirty-two years of service, and had gotten a retirement waiver. The police and the fire department had a mandatory retirement age of sixty, but they made exceptions in special cases. Most cops want to retire as soon as they can, I’ve found. The ones who get retirement waivers are the ones who love what they’re doing.

He wore a light blue shirt with a button-down collar, neatly creased; he had his shirts professionally laundered, and they came back in boxes. Not a polyester kind of guy. Neat and orderly, though a large dark grease stain in the middle of his shirt pocket marred the effect.

He shook my hand. His was damp. “Come on back to my office. Ordinarily, we’d talk in the conference room, but it’s undergoing maintenance.”

“Smells like someone couldn’t hold their Jack Daniel’s,” I said.

He scowled. “Nah, something’s going around the office. Some kinda stomach virus.” He sounded congested, kept sniffling.

He didn’t share an office since he was a lieutenant. His was cramped and windowless, with a bad rug and wood-veneer paneling and a lot of framed certificates and awards. It reminded me of a home office in someone’s finished basement.

Garvin sat behind his desk and took a long swig of coffee from a giant mug. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“So, snake-eater, huh?”

I shrugged. He’d checked me out, too.

“Isn’t that what they call you Green Berets?”

No one I knew in the Special Forces ever used the term “snake-eaters.” We all went through a pretty nasty training program called the Q Course, but you didn’t actually have to cook and eat snake. Maybe in the old days you did. No one ever called us “Green Berets” anymore, either. Not since John Wayne.

“Guess so,” I said.

“You’ve been with Stoddard Associates for about three years.”

“That all? Seems a lot longer.”

“Now, I assume you’re here for personal reasons and not on business.”

“Right,” I said.

He sneezed, pulled out a crumpled handkerchief, blew his nose loudly. He sneaked a surreptitious glance at the contents of his handkerchief before crumpling it back up and stuffing it into his pants. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have come in to work today, and now you’re gonna catch this damned thing.”

“I don’t get sick,” I said.

“Bad luck to say that. Now you’re really gonna get hit bad.”

“I’m not superstitious either,” I said. “Where’s your partner? Scorpino? Scardino?”

“Scarpino. Tony’s on another case. He’s been reassigned.”

I knew what that meant. The case had been deemed low-priority. Only one cop on it now.

“Thanks for taking the time to see me,” I said. Cops are overworked and underpaid, overstressed and undervalued, and I always try to let them know I appreciate them. They also tend to be resentful of people who do roughly the same work they do but get paid a lot more. I can’t blame them.

He sneezed again. “Ah, Jeez,” he said. He took out his handkerchief and went through his ritual all over again, right down to the furtive inspection.

“I’m grateful for everything you’re doing to find my brother. I want to help anyway I can.”

“You and your brother are pretty close, huh?”

He peered at me for a few seconds over the rim of his coffee mug. The thick lenses of his eyeglasses magnified his eyes, made them look weird, like some space alien’s. If I had been guilty of something, I would definitely have been intimidated. He was probably quite effective in interrogations.

I shook my head. “Not in years.”

“Must be hard, living in the same town and all.”

“We travel in different circles.”

“Uh-huh.” He put down his mug, turned his chair to face his computer monitor. “How about you and Mrs. Heller? Don’t get along with her either?”

“We get along great. I like her kid.”

“
Her
kid? You mean,
their
kid?”

“Well, Roger’s stepson. But Roger’s been his dad since Gabe was two or three.”

“So you’re in touch with her?”

“From time to time. Gabe and I talk about once a week.”

The thought crossed my mind that he might consider me a suspect. Ex–Special Forces, which meant that I was capable of scary stuff. Unmarried and not currently in a relationship. So naturally I must have conspired with my brother’s wife to kill her husband and set this whole elaborate thing up.

But fortunately he didn’t seem to be going down that path. “She ever talk about their marriage?”

“No. She and I don’t really have that kind of relationship.”

“I assume your brother never talked about that sort of stuff with you either.”

“Right.”

“So there could be serious problems between the two of them that you might not know about.”

“Theoretically, sure. But I’d probably have noticed.”

“Any drug use?”

“Not that I know of.”

He tapped at his keyboard. “Do you know if he was involved with bookies?”

“Bookies? Roger? I don’t think he’s ever seen a horse race. Lieutenant, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“What tree should I be barking up, Mr. Heller?”

“My brother was involved in some complicated financial arrangements at Gifford Industries. The stakes are pretty high—business partners, competitors, all that. Wouldn’t surprise me if he made some enemies. Bad actors.”

“He have any enemies that you know of?”

“I don’t want to give you carpal tunnel syndrome.”

“That many, huh?”

“Roger has an abrasive manner. I’m sure he pissed people off all the time.”

“Maybe the wrong people.”

“Could be.”

“People he’d want to run away from.”

“It’s possible.” I watched him tap at the keys for a few seconds, then said, “I assume you’ve flagged all his credit-card accounts.”

He typed a while longer, sniffled, then turned to me. “Huh. Hadn’t thought of that.” His sarcasm was bone-dry. I liked that.

I let it pass. “Nothing popped up, I take it. You ran his name through all the standard databases—NCIC and so on?”

“Another excellent suggestion,” he said. “So glad you stopped by. Wouldn’t have thought of that either.” He sneezed, and blew his nose, but this time he didn’t bother with the examination. “Any other tips for me?”

“How about checking those closed-circuit crime cameras you guys have all over the place?”

“Actually, Mr. Heller, we don’t have a single crime camera in Georgetown.”

That was news to me. “No crime in Georgetown, huh?”

“No budget,” Garvin said. “I think this is what they call backseat driving.”

I ignored him. “Then what about traffic cameras? I’ve seen plenty of them around Georgetown.”

“They don’t record anything. They’re monitored, but only for traffic-related incidents.”

“Like running a red light.”

“Like that.”

“Still, there have to be dozens, maybe even hundreds, of private security cameras in that part of Georgetown. Businesses, embassies, probably some apartment buildings, too. Anyone canvass the area?”

He gave me one of his styptic, space-alien glares. “Maybe we can bring in the National Guard to assist us. I don’t think we put in that kind of effort to look for Osama Bin Laden. What makes you think we’ve got that kind of manpower for a missing-persons case?”

“Of course you don’t,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But let’s speak frankly, Lieutenant. This is probably a homicide.”

“Think so?”

“The odds of my brother being alive at this point are negligible. You know it as well as I do.”

“Hmph. Interesting. Well, you’re the expert.” He sneezed twice, did his handkerchief thing. “Being a high-priced investigator with Stoddard and all.”

“Lieutenant Garvin,” I said, “this is your case, not mine. I get that. I just want to help.”

“Yeah? Then maybe you could explain something to me.”

“Okay.”

“Since you’re so sure your brother was abducted by unnamed ‘enemies’ and probably killed. How do you explain the fact that about half an hour
after
he and his wife were attacked, he went to a Wachovia Bank ATM and made a withdrawal?”

I stared at him.

“Kinda raises the odds of your brother’s being alive, doesn’t it?” he said, and he sneezed again.