Vanished (9 page)

20.

I
was lying in bed, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, when there came a soft knock at the door.

I said, “Yeah?”

“Nick?”

Lauren’s voice, hushed and tentative.

“Come on in.”

“You sure it’s okay?”

“Sure.” I sat up, pulled the covers up over my lap. The door opened slowly, squeaking on its hinges, and she looked in.

She noticed my bare chest, and said, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry, I won’t get out of bed.”

She entered. Now she was wearing just the oversized T-shirt, but it was long and roomy enough that it wasn’t immodest. Her hair was tousled. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

She sat in the reading chair next to the bed. “How’s the bed?” she said, concerned.

“It’s great. What happened to your head ban dage?”

“I don’t need it. The cut’s not bad, and it’s healing. It only looks bad.”

Her eyes dropped to my chest, for just an instant, then she quickly looked away. “I meant to leave you a set of Roger’s pajamas.”

“I usually don’t sleep in pajamas. Anyway, they probably wouldn’t fit.”

“True.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “You think Gabe’s doing all right?”

“Hard to tell,” I said. “He’s a teenager.”

“What’d he want to talk to you about?”

I shook my head. “I never rat out my nephew.”

“Gabe scares me sometimes. He sees too much.”

“You should hear what he listens to.”

“He’s always on the computer with his headphones on, listening to that horrible music.”

“Too bad he’s outgrown those video games he used to play all the time—Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, those games where you just try to see how many people you can kill. Healthy stuff like that.”

She shook her head, gave a pensive smile. “And then there’s his notebook. That comic book he’s always working on. Which I’m not allowed to look at.”

“Graphic novel.”

She nodded. “Did he show it to you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You know how much he admires you.”

“I don’t know why.”

“He thinks you’re cool.”

“No. He knows I’m
not
cool.”

“Well, he thinks you’re terrific.”

“Sure, why not? I drop by once a month or whatever, and I don’t nag him to do his homework.”

“No, it’s—it’s like you’re the kind of dad he’s always wanted to have. He once said . . .” She looked embarrassed, seemed to have changed her mind, decided not to say whatever she was about to say. “Don’t get me wrong—Roger is as good a stepfather to Gabe as he can be. He always treated Gabe like his own. But it can’t have been easy for him, marrying a divorced woman with a little kid. And he’s not naturally the most—you know, the warmest…”

Her voice faded, and I said, “Well, our own father might not have been the best role model. My parents’ marriage didn’t exactly inspire imitation.”

“Is that why you haven’t gotten married?”

I shrugged.

She said, “Haven’t found the right woman yet?”

“I’ve found plenty of the right women.”

“So…?”

“Marriage is great—for some people. I just don’t think it’s in my skill set.”

She seemed to be thinking hard about something. She bit her lip. Stared at her hands for a while.

“Lauren,” I said, “why does Gabe think Roger ran off with some woman?”

“What? He does? Oh God, is that what he told you?”

I nodded.

“That’s heartbreaking.”

“What makes him think so?”

“Because he has a rich fantasy life. The comic books are only the tip of the iceberg.”

I smiled, but she wasn’t joking. “I need to ask you something very personal.”

“You mean, was Roger having an affair?”

“It’s really none of my business,” I said. “Unless it has some bearing on what happened to him.”

“I understand, and no, he wasn’t.”

“You’re sure.”

“Am I a hundred percent sure he never cheated on me? Who can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything? But I sure don’t think so, and I think I’d have found out.”

“Not necessarily. He was always really good at keeping secrets.”

“I think women always know. On some level, conscious or subconscious, they just know.”

“And you’ve plumbed the depths of your subconscious.”

“Look, Nick, I know.”

I nodded. “Got it.”

But I was convinced she wasn’t telling me everything.

21.

A
car alarm woke me at around four thirty, and I decided to get up for the day and begin combing through my brother’s files for any interesting leads. I padded downstairs to the kitchen, found the lights, then spent a few moments puzzling over the coffeemaker. I’m good at mechanical things, but since I didn’t go to M.I.T. and wasn’t trained as a nuclear physicist, that one was beyond me. Eventually, I found a switch that lit up a row of green LED lights. Coffee beans started grinding. A minute or so later, coffee started trickling out of a steel tube—espresso, by the look of it. I had no idea where they hid the coffee mugs, but I found a clean one in the dishwasher. Missed the first shot of espresso but figured out how to extract more.

Soon I was sitting in Roger’s study with a large mug of espresso. Somewhere, water was running through a pipe: a toilet flushing. Lauren, I guessed. Probably a much lighter sleeper than Gabe. Particularly after her husband’s disappearance.

I was half hoping that his laptop would have healed itself overnight, but no. It still had the Blue Screen of Death, covered with those hieroglyphics.

Unfortunately, the filing-cabinet drawers I was most interested in—the ones that held Roger’s bank statements and financial records, according to their labels—were locked. They were your standard Chicago pin tumbler locks, the spring-loaded kind that pop out when they’re unlocked. Not all that complicated. A child could pick it—well, a child with unusual manual dexterity and a decent lock-pick set.

So I started with the unlocked drawers and found a long row of folders bulging with credit-card statements. All neatly placed in order by credit card (platinum American Express, various MasterCards and Visa cards) and, within each folder, by date.

I had nothing specific in mind. Mostly I was looking for patterns: recurring charges, unusual charges. Travel, restaurants, or whatever. Anything that might tell me something about my brother that I didn’t know.

Pretty quickly I learned more about Roger than I wanted to know.

Such as the fact that he colored his hair—an itemized Rite-Aid bill that listed Just For Men hair dye along with various purchases like Preparation-H hemorrhoidal suppositories and other things I wish I hadn’t seen. Nothing wrong with a man coloring his hair, of course. But Roger had always bragged that it was his regular cardiovascular activity that kept him looking so youthful.

Nope. Just For Men, Medium-Dark Brown.

And the occasional Botox treatment, I discovered. At Advanced Skin Specialists of Silver Spring. Fifteen hundred bucks a pop.

Apparently my brother was a bit more vain than he let on.

Then I found a couple of recurring charges to Verizon on one of his MasterCard statements. One was for residential landline telephone service, and it listed the phone numbers. Three other charges were to Verizon Wireless, for three different cell-phone accounts.

So I looked for his phone bills and found them pretty quickly in another drawer. Apparently he had two landlines at home. One barely got any use. That was probably the one they used to send faxes on, back in the day when people sent faxes. The other line, their primary home number, listed calls to a whole array of numbers I didn’t recognize. Most frequent were calls to Virginia Beach, where Lauren’s sister, Maura, lived. Second most frequent were calls to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Lauren’s mother lived.

Then, the cell phones. Roger’s main mobile phone account was one of those primo, unlimited-minutes calling plans. He obviously used it for work—there were a lot of calls every day to Alexandria, probably to Gifford Industries corporate headquarters. The occasional call home, a few to Lauren’s mobile number. A second cell-phone account was Lauren’s, with Gabe added on to hers as part of a “family plan.”

But I couldn’t find the billing records for the third cell-phone account, no matter how much I searched. So I made a mental note to ask Lauren about it, then I looked around for the key to the locked drawers containing Roger’s financial statements. Nothing in all the usual places where people hide their keys. So I found a small screwdriver and a paper clip in one of Roger’s desk drawers and set to work picking the lock.

I heard a throat being cleared, and I looked up.

Lauren was standing in the doorway, arms folded, watching me. She wore a beautifully tailored navy suit over a white silk blouse, and she looked amazing. Even with the fading scrapes and bruises.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“Leland’s flying to Luxembourg.”

“Okay.”

“But he always starts early anyway. That car alarm wake you up?”

“Yep.”

“Sorry about that.”

She crossed the room to Roger’s desk and opened the top drawer. “I don’t mean to take the fun out of it,” she said, pulling out a small manila envelope and handing it to me, “but it might be easier just to use the key.”

“Hiding in plain sight,” I said. “I think Edgar Allan Poe wrote something about that.”

“Can I ask you what you’re looking for?”

“Any large withdrawals. Checks. Transfers into or out of any of his accounts.”

“What would that tell you?”

I shrugged. “If he got money from anyone unusual. Or paid any out. Particularly any large amounts. A money trail always helps.”

She nodded. “Well, I don’t know when you have to leave for work, but Gabe gets picked up for school around seven forty-five. Can you make sure he eats some breakfast? I don’t think he eats breakfast. He really should.”

“Sorry. That’s above my pay grade.”

“Well, whatever you can do.”

“No promises. Lauren, did Roger use this computer often?”

“Every day. Why?”

“When was the last time you saw him use it?”

She squinted, tilted her head first to one side, then to the other. “The last morning he was here. Why do you ask?”

“It’s fried. Totally gone.”

“That’s weird.”

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to take it to work with me to see if any of the data can be recovered. And one more thing. Do you usually set the alarm during the day?”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“From now on, I want you to keep it on anytime you’re not here. And when you and Gabe are asleep, I want you to use the night settings. In fact, I want to get someone in here to upgrade the system. Put in something a little more sophisticated.”

“You really think that’s necessary?”

“I just want you to take precautions.”

“You really think a home-security system is going to keep anyone out who wants to get in here?”

“Of course not. But I want to make it as incon ve nient for them as possible.”

She smiled, but I could see the strain in her face, the tightening of the muscles in her jaw, the lines around her eyes. The yellowing bruises.

As she turned to leave, I said, “Oh, one more thing. I haven’t been able to find all of Roger’s cell-phone records.”

“They should all be there. You mean, you’re missing some of the statements or something?”

“I can’t find any billing records for one of the numbers,” I said, and I read it off to her.

“That’s not Roger’s cell phone.”

“It’s a Verizon Wireless account.”

“That’s not a number I’ve ever heard before,” she said. “Are you sure that’s his?”

“It’s his.”

“Sorry, Nick,” she said. “I can’t help you with that. That’s a mystery to me. Roger always paid all the bills, not me.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“But he’d never keep something like that from me. He’d never keep a secret cell-phone number. That’s not Roger.”

She shook her head emphatically and walked out of the room, and I thought:
Maybe you don’t really know Roger.

22.

O
n the way in to work, Lauren listened to her office voice mail in the Lexus, hands-free.

Most of the messages were from Leland. Whenever he thought of something he wanted her to do, he’d leave her a voice mail.

It had taken him years to get the hang of e-mail—he used to dictate e-mails for her to type, but finally he’d evolved his own two-finger hunt-and-peck method and liked to do it himself. He’d taken to the BlackBerry right away, even though he complained that his fingers were too thick for the Lilliputian keys.

But when he was traveling or just on the road, it was a lot easier for him to leave her voice mail. The first couple of messages were apologetic: “I don’t want to overwhelm you on your first day back,” one of them began; and then, “Also—but if you’re not feeling up to it, don’t worry about it, I’ll ask Noreen.”

Noreen Purvis, the CFO’s admin, worked in the executive suite, too, in the same open bullpen, within shouting distance. She was a disaster, even though Leland was too polite to say as much. She was older than Lauren and had worked at Gifford Industries far longer. She made no secret of the fact that she’d expected Leland to pick her as his admin when Cynthia, Leland’s longtime secretary, had retired more than ten years earlier.

Leland didn’t like Noreen, though. He considered her disorganized and even slovenly, and he was annoyed by her smoking, even though Noreen never smoked indoors. Plus, he didn’t want to grab someone else’s admin. Instead, he hired Lauren.

Noreen, of course, had no idea how Leland really felt about her. She’d wanted the job that Lauren got and never failed to let Lauren know, in all sorts of passive-aggressive ways, that she was far more qualified to be the administrative assistant to the CEO.

The Parkway was choked with traffic, as it always was at this time of the morning, but she didn’t mind.

She needed time to think.

She was determined to arrive at work ready to focus on Leland, not distracted by all the trauma in her personal life. She wanted to give Leland her all for the few hours he was in the office.

Long ago she’d realized that she was, in many ways, like a wife to him, but without the sex. (Then again, she thought ruefully, it wasn’t as if she and Roger had had much of a sex life in the last couple of years either.) In certain respects she knew Leland better than his own wife. But unlike so many marriages where you grow to detest your partner (like her own starter marriage), her relationship with Leland Gifford kept getting better. Her affection and respect for the man had only deepened. She’d come to know all his flaws, and she loved the man despite them all. Maybe even because of them all.

She couldn’t allow herself to think about Roger just then, about where he might be at that very second. Thinking about what might have become of him gave her a terrible, gnawing anxiety.

No. She had to put those thoughts out of her mind, at least for a few hours. She had to arrive at the office with a clear head.

She drove into the Gifford Industries office park and eased the Lexus into a space close to the building. She didn’t have a reserved spot: Those were just for the executive team. But it was early enough that there were still plenty of spaces, and she didn’t have to park half a mile away.

The soft morning light glinted off the gray-green glass skin of the Gifford building. It was a strange, futuristic-looking tower, a twenty-four-story parallelogram. She couldn’t decide if it was ugly or beautiful. It was a “green” building—ecofriendly, energy-efficient. Built of concrete made from slag. Floor-to-ceiling insulating high-performance glass windows. On the roof, a rainwater harvesting system and a one-megawatt solar array.

As she walked toward the main entrance, someone called out to her. It was a senior vice president, Tom Shattuck: tall, broad-shouldered, blond.

“Lauren, I’m so sorry to hear about your husband,” he said with the somber concern of an undertaker.

She wondered how the word had gotten around so fast and whether everyone assumed Roger was dead.

“Thanks,” she said.

“If there’s anything I can do, you know I’m here for you.”

He was always extremely cordial to her, but she knew all about him from his admin. He was a tyrant to the woman who worked for him all day. The admins all talked, of course. Didn’t their bosses realize that?

She smiled, nodded, and kept walking. She waved her badge at the proximity sensor, stepped into the revolving door, and entered the cavernous atrium. Right in the center, surrounded by tropical foliage, was a huge bronze globe, the continents sculpted in sharp relief. On the front of the globe, set at a jaunty angle, was the Gifford Industries logo, which couldn’t have been more hokey: retro squared-off streamlined script that must have looked futuristic when it was designed in the 1930s.

A couple more people waved at her, flashed sympathetic looks, and she ducked into the express elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. She slid her security card into the slot, and the elevator rose.

The lights in the executive suite were already on, which surprised her. She was normally the first one in. She passed her prox badge against the sensor until it beeped, then pushed open the glass doors. When she rounded the corner, she saw someone sitting at her desk.

Noreen Purvis.