Buried Secrets

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes, die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.

– EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE MAN OF THE CROWD” (1840)

1.

If this was what a prison was like, Alexa Marcus thought, I could totally live here. Like, forever.

She and Taylor Armstrong, her best friend, were standing in a long line to get into the hottest bar in Boston. The bar was called Slammer, and it was in a luxury hotel that used to be a jail. They’d even kept the bars in the windows and the huge central rotunda ringed with catwalks, that whole cell-block effect.

She was checking out this bunch of guys behind her who looked like MIT frat boys trying too hard to be cool: the untucked shirts, the cheap blazers, all that product in their hair, the toxic fumes of their Axe body spray. They’d stumble home at two in the morning, puking on the bridge to Cambridge, bitching about how all the girls at Slammer were skanks.

“I’m loving the smoky eye,” Taylor said, studying Alexa’s eye makeup. “See? It looks amazing on you!”

“It took me like an hour,” Alexa said. The fake eyelashes, the black gel eyeliner and charcoal eye shadow: She looked like a hooker who’d been beat up by her pimp.

“Takes me like thirty seconds,” Taylor said. “Now look at you-you’re this totally hot babe instead of a suburban prepster.”

“I’m so not suburban,” Alexa protested. She glanced over at a couple of skinny Euro-looking guys smoking and talking on their mobile phones. Cute but maybe gay? “Dad lives in Manchester.” She’d almost said, “I live in Manchester,” but she no longer thought of the great rambling house she grew up in as her home, not since Dad had married that gold-digger flight attendant, Belinda. She hadn’t lived at home in almost four years, since going away to Exeter.

“Yeah, okay,” Taylor said. Alexa caught her tone. Taylor always had to let you know she was a city kid. She’d grown up in a townhouse on Beacon Hill, in Louisburg Square-her dad was a United States senator-and considered herself urban and therefore cooler and more street-smart than anyone else. Plus, the last three years she’d been in rehab, attending the Marston-Lee Academy, the tough-love “therapeutic boarding school” in Colorado where the senator had sent her to get cleaned up.

Good luck with that.

Every time Taylor came back to Boston on break, she was rocking some different Girls Gone Wild look. Last year she’d dyed her hair jet black and had bangs. Tonight it was the skintight black liquid leggings, the oversized gray sheer tee over the black lace bra, the studded booties. Whereas Alexa, less adventurous, was wearing her ink skinny jeans and her tan Tory Burch leather jacket over a tank top. Okay, not as fashion-forward as Taylor, but no way was it suburban.

“Oh God,” Alexa murmured as the line drew closer to the bouncer.

“Just relax, okay, Lucia?” Taylor said.

“Lucia-?” Alexa began, and then she remembered that “Lucia” was the name on her fake ID. Actually, it was a real ID, just not hers-she was seventeen, and Taylor had just turned eighteen, and the drinking age was twenty-one, which was way stupid. Taylor had bought Alexa’s fake ID off an older girl.

“Just look the bouncer in the eye and be casual,” Taylor said. “You’re totally fine.”

TAYLOR WAS right, of course.

The bouncer didn’t even ask to see their IDs. When they entered the hotel lobby, Alexa followed Taylor to the old-fashioned elevator, the kind that had an arrow that pointed to the floor it was on. The elevator door opened, and an iron accordion gate slid aside. Taylor got in along with a bunch of others. Alexa hesitated, slipped in, shuddered-God, she hated elevators!-and just as the accordion gate was knifing closed, she blurted out, “I’ll take the stairs.”

They met up on the fourth floor and managed to snag a couple of big cushy chairs. A waitress in a halter top so skimpy you could see the flower tattoo below her armpit took their order: a couple of Ketel One vodka sodas.

“Check out the girls on the bar,” Taylor shouted. Models in black leather butt-baring shorts and black leather vests were parading around on top of the bar like it was a catwalk.

One of the MIT frat boys tried to mack on them, but Taylor blew the guy off: “Yeah, I’ll give you a call-next time I need tutoring in like differential calculus.”

Alexa felt Taylor’s eyes on her.

“Hey, what’s wrong, kid? You’ve been acting all depressed since you got here.”

“I’m fine.”

“You think maybe you need to change meds or something?”

Alexa shook her head. “Dad’s just, I don’t know, being all weird.”

“Nothing new about that.”

“But like he’s all paranoid all of a sudden? He just had these surveillance cameras put in, all around the house?”

“Well, he is like the richest guy in Boston. Or one of the richest-”

“I know, I know,” Alexa interrupted, not wanting to hear it. She’d spent her entire life dealing with being a rich kid: having to play down the money so her friends didn’t feel jealous. “But it’s not his normal control-freak mode, you know? It’s more like he’s scared something’s going to happen.”

“Try living with a father who’s a friggin’ United States senator.”

Taylor had started to look uncomfortable. She rolled her eyes, shook her head dismissively, looked around the now-crowded bar. “I need another drink,” she said. She called the waitress over and asked for a dirty martini. “How about you?” she asked Alexa.

“I’m good.” The truth was, she hated hard liquor, especially vodka. And gin was the worst. How could anyone voluntarily drink that stuff? It was like chugging turpentine.

Alexa’s iPhone vibrated, so she took it out and read the text. A friend at some rager in Allston, telling her it was epic and she should come over. Alexa texted back sorry. Then, abruptly, she said, “Oh my God, oh my God, did I ever show you this?” She flicked through her iPhone applications until she came to one she’d just downloaded, launched it, held the iPhone to her mouth. When she talked into it, her words came out high pitched and weird, like one of the Chipmunks: “Hey, babe, wanna come back to my dorm and take off our clothes and do some algebra?”

Taylor squealed. “What is that?” She tried to grab the phone, but Alexa yanked it away, swiped the screen and started speaking in the creepy voice of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings: “Must have preciousssss!”

Taylor shrieked, and they both laughed so hard that tears came to their eyes. “See-you’re feeling better already, right?” said Taylor.

“May I join you?” A male voice.

Alexa looked up, saw a guy standing there. Not one of the frat boys, though. Definitely not. This one had dark hair and brown eyes, a day’s growth of beard, and he was totally a babe. Black shirt with white pinstripes, narrow waist, broad shoulders.

Alexa smiled, blushed-she couldn’t help it-and looked at Taylor.

“Do we know you?” Taylor said.

“Not yet,” the guy said, flashing a dazzling smile. Late twenties, early thirties, maybe? Hard to tell. “My friends ditched me. They went to a party in the South End I don’t feel like going to.” He had some kind of Spanish accent.

“There’s only two chairs,” Taylor said.

He said something to a couple seated next to them, slid a vacant chair over. Extended a hand to shake Taylor’s, then Alexa’s.

“I’m Lorenzo,” he said.

2.

The bathroom had Molton Brown hand soap (Thai Vert) and real towels, folded into perfect squares. Alexa reapplied her lip gloss while Taylor touched up her eyes.

“He’s totally into you,” Taylor said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Like you don’t know it.” Taylor was outlining her eyes with a kohl pencil.

“How old do you think he is?”

“I don’t know, thirties?”

“Thirties? I thought maybe thirty at the oldest. Do you think he knows we’re only…” but another couple of girls entered the bathroom, and she let her sentence trail off.

“Go for it,” Taylor said. “It’s totally cool. I promise.”

WHEN THEY finally succeeded in elbowing their way back to their chairs, the Black Eyed Peas blasting so loud her ears hurt, Alexa half-expected Lorenzo to be gone.

But he was still there, slouching a little in his chair, sipping his vodka. Alexa reached for her drink-a Peartini, at Lorenzo’s suggestion-and was surprised it was half gone. Man, she thought, I am truly wasted.

Lorenzo smiled that awesome smile. His eyes weren’t just brown, she noticed. They were light brown. Tiger’s eye, she thought. She had a tiger’s eye choker her mom had given her a couple months before she died. She couldn’t bring herself to wear it, but she loved looking at the stones.

“If you kids’ll excuse me,” Taylor said, “I really need to get going.”

“Taylor!” Alexa said.

“Why?” said Lorenzo. “Please stay.”

“Can’t,” Taylor said. “My dad’s waiting up for me.” With a conspiratorial sparkle in her eye, Taylor gave a little wave and disappeared into the crowd.

Lorenzo moved to Taylor’s chair, next to Alexa’s. “That’s okay. Tell me about you, Lucia. How come I never see you here before?”

For a moment she forgot who “Lucia” was.

NOW SHE was definitely drunk.

She felt like she was floating above the clouds, singing along to Rihanna, smiling like an idiot, while Lorenzo was saying something to her. The room swam. She was finding it hard to separate his voice from everyone else’s, a cacophony of a thousand individual conversations, little snatches, layer upon layer upon layer, none of them making any sense. Her mouth was dry. She reached for her glass of Pellegrino, knocked it over. Smiled sheepishly. She just stared at the spill open-mouthed, amazed that the water glass hadn’t broken, gave Lorenzo a goofy smile, and he gave that spectacular smile back, his brown eyes soft and sexy. He reached over and dropped his napkin over the puddle to blot it up.

She said, “I think I need to go home.”

“I take you,” he said.

He tossed a bunch of twenties on the table, stood, reached for her hand. She tried to stand but it felt like her knees were hinged. He took her hand again, his other hand around her waist, half-lifted her up.

“My car…”

“You shouldn’t drive,” he said. “I drive you home. You can get your car back tomorrow.”

“But…”

“It’s not a problem. Come, Lucia.” He steered her through the crowd, his arms strong. People were staring at her, leering, laughter echoing, the lights streaky rainbow and glittery, like being underwater and looking up at the sky, everything so distant.

NOW SHE felt the pleasant clear coolness of the late-night air on her face.

Traffic noise, the bleat of car horns, smearing by.

She was lying down on the back seat of a strange car, her cheek pressed against the cold hard cracked leather. The car smelled like stale cigarette smoke and beer. A few beer bottles rolled around on the floor. A Jag, she was pretty sure, but old and skeezy and filthy inside. Definitely not what she imagined a guy like Lorenzo driving.

“Do you know how to get there?” she tried to say. But the words came out slurred.

She felt seasick, hoped she wasn’t going to vomit in the back seat of Lorenzo’s Jaguar. That would be nasty.

She wondered: How did he know where to go?

NOW SHE heard the car door open and close. The engine had been shut off. Why was he stopping so soon?

When she opened her eyes, she noticed it was dark. No streetlights. No traffic sounds, either. Her sluggish brain registered a faint, distant alarm. Was he leaving her here? Where were they? What was he doing?

Someone was walking toward the Jaguar. It was too dark to make out his face. A lean, powerful build, that was all she could see.

The door opened, and the light came on, illuminating the man’s face. Shaved head, piercing blue eyes, sharp jaw, unshaven. Handsome, until he smiled and showed brown rodent’s teeth.

“Come with me, please,” the new man said.

SHE AWOKE in the back seat of a big new SUV. An Escalade, maybe, or a Navigator.

Very warm in here, almost hot. A smell like cheap air freshener.

She looked at the back of the driver’s head. He had shaved black hair. On the back of his neck, a strange tattoo crawled up from beneath his sweatshirt. Her first thought was: angry eyes. A bird?

“What happened to Lorenzo?” she tried to say, but she wasn’t sure what came out.

“Just stretch out and have yourself a nice rest, Alexa,” the man said. He had an accent too, but harsher, more guttural.

That sounded like a good idea. She felt herself drifting off, but then her heart started to race, as if her body realized even before her mind did.

He knew her real name.

3.

“Here’s the thing,” the short guy said. “I always like to know who I’m doing business with.”

I nodded, smiled.

What a jerk.

If Short Man’s Disease were recognized by modern medicine as the serious syndrome it is, all the textbooks would use Philip Curtis’s picture, along with those of Mussolini, Stalin, Attila the Hun, and of course the patron saint of all miniature tyrants, Napoléon Bonaparte. Granted, I’m over six feet, but I know tall guys with Short Man’s Disease too.

Philip Curtis, as he called himself, was so small and compact that I was convinced I could pick him up in one hand and hurl him through my office window, and by now I was sorely tempted to. He was maybe an inch or two above five feet, shiny bald, and wore enormous black-framed glasses, which he probably thought made him look more imposing, instead of like a turtle who’d lost his shell and was pissed off about it.

The vintage Patek Philippe watch on his wrist had to be sixty years old. That told me a lot. It was the only flashy object he wore, and it said “inherited money.” His Patek Philippe had been passed down, probably from his dad.

“I checked you out.” His brow arched significantly. “Did the whole due-diligence thing. Gotta say, you don’t leave a lot of tracks.”

“So I’m told.”

“You don’t have a website.”

“Don’t need one.”

“You’re not on Facebook.”

“My teenage nephew’s on it. Does that count?”

“Barely anything turned up on Google. So I asked around. Seems you’ve got an unusual background. Went to Yale but never graduated. Did a couple of summer internships at McKinsey, huh?”

“I was young. I didn’t know any better.”

His smile was reptilian. But a small reptile. A gecko, maybe. “I worked there myself.”

“And I was almost starting to respect you,” I said.

“The part I don’t get is, you dropped out of Yale to join the army. What was that all about? Guys like us don’t do that.”

“Go to Yale?”

He shook his head, annoyed. “You know, I thought the name ‘Heller’ sounded familiar. Your dad’s Victor Heller, right?”

I shrugged as if to say, You got me.

“Your father was a true legend.”

“Is,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Is,” I repeated. “He’s still alive. Doing twenty-some years in prison.”

“Right, right. Well, he sure got the shaft, didn’t he?”

“So he tells people.” My father, Victor Heller, the so-called Dark Prince of Wall Street, was currently serving a twenty-eight-year sentence for securities fraud. “Legend” was a polite way of referring to him.

“I was always a big admirer of your dad’s. He was a real pioneer. Then again, I bet some potential clients, they hear you’re Victor Heller’s son, they’re gonna think twice about hiring you, huh?”

“You think?”

“You know what I mean, the whole…” He faltered, then probably decided he didn’t have to. He figured he’d made his point.

But I wasn’t going to let him off so easily. “You mean the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? Like father, like son?”

“Well, yeah, sort of. That might bother some guys, but not me. Uh-uh. Way I figure it, that means you’re probably not going to be too finicky about the gray areas.”

“The gray areas.”

“All the fussy legal stuff, know what I’m saying?”

“Ah, gotcha,” I said. For a long moment I found myself looking out the window. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I liked the view. You could see right down High Street to the ocean, the waterfront at Rowes Wharf framed by a grand Italianate marble arch.

I’d moved to Boston from Washington a few months ago and was lucky enough to find an office in an old brick-and-beam building in the financial district, a rehabbed nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory. From the outside it looked like a Victorian poorhouse out of Dickens. But on the inside, with its bare brick walls and tall arched windows and exposed ductwork and factory-floor open spaces, you couldn’t forget it was a place where they used to actually make stuff. And I liked that. It had a sort of steampunk vibe. The other tenants in the building were consulting firms, an accounting firm, and several small real-estate offices. On the first floor was an “exotic sushi and tapas” place that had gone out of business, and the showroom for Derderian Fine Oriental Rugs.

My office had belonged to some high-flying dot-com that made nothing, including money. They’d gone bust suddenly, so I caught a nice break on the price. They’d absconded so quickly they left all their fancy hanging metal-and-glass light fixtures and even some very expensive office chairs.

“So you say someone on your board of directors is leaking derogatory information about your company,” I said, turning around slowly, “and you want us to-how’d you put it?-‘plug the leak.’ Right?”

“Exactly.”

I gave him my finest conspiratorial grin. “Meaning you want their phones tapped and their e-mails accessed.”

“Hey, you’re a pro,” he said with a quick, smarmy wink. “I’d never tell you how to do your job.”

“Better not to know the details, right? How we work our magic?”

He nodded, a couple of sharp up-and-downs. “Plausible deniability and all that. You got it.”

“Of course. Obviously you know that what you’re asking me to do is basically illegal.”

“We’re both big boys,” he said.

I had to bite my lip. One of us was, anyway.

Just then my phone buzzed-an internal line-and I picked it up. “Yeah?”

“Okay, you were right.” The smoky voice of my forensic data tech, Dorothy Duval. “His name isn’t Philip Curtis.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t rub it in.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s a teachable moment. You should know by now not to question me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m stuck. If you have any ideas, just IM me, and I’ll check them out.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I hung up.

The man who wasn’t Philip Curtis had a strong Chicago accent. Wherever he lived now, he was raised in Chicago. He had a rich dad: The hand-me-down Patek Philippe confirmed that.

Then there was the black luggage tag on his Louis Vuitton briefcase. A fractional jet card. He leased a private jet for some limited number of hours per year. Which meant he wanted a private jet but couldn’t afford one.

I had a vague recollection of an item I’d seen on BizWire about troubles in a family-held business in Chicago. “Will you excuse me for just one more minute?” I said. “I have to put out a fire.” Then I typed out an instant message and sent it to Dorothy.

The answer came back less than a minute later: a Wall Street Journal article she’d pulled up on ProQuest. I skimmed it, and I knew I’d guessed right. I remembered hearing the whole sordid story not too long ago.

Then I leaned back in my chair. “So here’s the problem,” I said.

“Problem?”

“I’m not interested in your business.”

Stunned, he whirled around to look at me. “What did you just say?”

“If you really did your homework, you’d know that I do intelligence work for private clients. I’m not a private investigator, I don’t tap phones, and I don’t do divorces. And I’m sure as hell not a family therapist.”

“Family…?”

“This is clearly a family squabble, Sam.”

Small round pink spots had formed high on his cheeks. “I told you my name is-”

“Don’t even bother,” I said wearily. “This has nothing to do with plugging a leak. Your family troubles aren’t exactly a secret. You were supposed to take over Daddy’s company until he heard you were talking to the private equity guys about taking Richter private and cashing out.”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

His father, Jacob Richter, had gone from owning a parking lot in Chicago to creating the largest luxury hotel chain in the world. Over a hundred five-star hotels in forty countries, plus a couple of cruise lines, shopping malls, office buildings, and a hell of a lot of real estate. A company valued at ten billion dollars.

“So Dad gets pissed off,” I went on, “and squeezes you out and appoints Big Sis chief executive officer and heir apparent instead of you. Didn’t expect that, did you? You figured you were a shoo-in. But you’re not gonna put up with that, are you? Since you know all of Dad’s dirty laundry, you figure you’ll get him on tape making one of his shady real estate deals, offering kickbacks and bribes, and you’ll be able to blackmail your way back in. I guess that’s called winning ugly, right?”

Sam Richter’s face had gone dark red, almost purple. A couple of bulging veins on top of his scalp were throbbing so hard I thought he was going to have a coronary right in the middle of my office. “Who did you talk to?” he demanded.

“Nobody. Just did the whole due-diligence thing. I always like to know who I’m doing business with. And I really don’t like being lied to.”

As Richter lurched to his feet, he shoved the chair-one of the expensive Humanscale office chairs left by the dot-com-and it crashed to the floor, leaving a visible dent in the old wood. From the doorway, he said, “You know, for a guy whose father’s in prison for fraud, you sure act all high and mighty.”

“You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “Sorry to waste your time. Mind showing yourself out?” Behind him Dorothy was standing, arms folded.

“Victor Heller was… the scum of the earth!” he sputtered.

“Is,” I corrected him.

4.

“You don’t tap phones,” Dorothy said, arms folded, moving into my office.

I smiled, shrugged. “I always forget you can hear. Someday that’s gonna get me in trouble.” Our standard arrangement was for her to listen in on all client meetings via the IP video camera built into the huge desktop monitor on my desk.

“You don’t tap phones,” she said again. Her lips were pressed into a smirk. “Mm-hmm.”

“As a general rule,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “You hire guys to do it.”

“Exactly.”

“What the hell was that all about?” she snapped with a fierce glare.

Dorothy and I had worked together at Stoddard Associates in D.C. before I moved to Boston and stole her away. She wasn’t really a computer genius-there were certainly more knowledgeable ones around-but she knew digital forensics inside and out. She’d worked at the National Security Agency for nine years, and they don’t hire just anyone. As much as she detested working there, they’d trained her well. More important, no one was as stubborn as Dorothy. She simply did not give up. And there was no one more loyal.

She was feisty and blunt-spoken and didn’t play well with others, which was why she and the NSA were a lousy fit, but it was one of the things I liked about her. She never held back. She loved telling me off and showing me up and proving me wrong, and I enjoyed that too. You did not want to mess with her.

“You heard me. I don’t like liars.”

“Get over it. We need the business, and you’ve turned down more work than you’ve taken on.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I said, “but you don’t need to worry about the firm’s cash flow. Your salary’s guaranteed.”

“Until Heller Associates goes bust because the overhead’s too high and you got no income. I am not slinking back to Jay Stoddard, and I am not moving back to Washington.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I’d worked closely with Dorothy, even intimately, but I knew almost nothing about her. She never talked about her love life, and I never asked. I wasn’t even sure whether she preferred men or women. Everyone’s entitled to their zone of privacy.

She was an attractive, striking woman with mocha skin, liquid brown eyes, and an incandescent smile. She always dressed elegantly, even though she didn’t need to, since she rarely met with clients. Today she was wearing a shimmering lilac silk blouse and a black pencil skirt and some kind of strappy heels. She wore her hair extremely short-almost bald, in fact. On most women that might look bizarre, but on her it somehow worked. Attached to her earlobes were turquoise copper-enamel discs the size of Frisbees.

Dorothy was a mass of contradictions, which was another thing I liked about her. She was a regular churchgoer-even before she’d found an apartment, she’d joined an AME Zion church in the South End-but she was no church lady. The opposite, in fact: She had an almost profane sense of humor about her faith. She’d put a plaque on her cubicle wall that said JESUS LOVES YOU-EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, right next to one that said I LOVE MARY’S BABYDADDY.

“I think we need to have regular status-update meetings like we used to do at Stoddard,” she said. “I want to go over the Entronics case and the Garrison case.”

“I need coffee first,” I said. “And not that swill that Jillian makes.”

Jillian Alperin, our receptionist and office manager, was a strict vegan. (Veganism is apparently the paramilitary wing of vegetarianism.) She had multiple piercings, including one on her lip, and several tattoos. One was of a butterfly, on her right shoulder. I’d caught a glimpse of another one on her lower back too one day.

She was also a “green” fanatic who had banned all foam and paper cups in the office. Everything had to be organic, ethical, free-range, fair-trade, and cruelty-free. The coffee she ordered for the office machine was organic fair-trade ethical beans shade-grown using sustainable cultivation methods by a small co-op of indigenous peasant farmers in resistance in Chiapas, Mexico. It cost as much as Bolivian cocaine and probably would have been rejected by a death-row inmate.

“Well, aren’t you fussy,” Dorothy said. “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

“There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts down the block,” I said.

“That better not be a hint. I don’t do coffee.”

“I know better than to ask,” I said, getting up.

The phone rang: the muted internal ringtone. Jillian’s voice came over the intercom: “A Marshall Marcus for you?”

“The Marshall Marcus?” Dorothy said. “As in the richest guy in Boston?”

I nodded.

“You turn this one down, Nick, and I’m gonna whip your butt.”

“I doubt it’s a job,” I said. “Probably personal.” I picked up and said, “Marshall. Long time.”

“Nick,” he said. “I need your help. Alexa’s gone.”

5.

Marshall Marcus lived on the North Shore, about a forty-minute drive from Boston, in the impossibly quaint town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, once a summer colony for rich Bostonians. His house was enormous and handsome, a rambling shingle-and-stone residence perched on a promontory above the jagged coastline. It had a wraparound porch and too many rooms to count. There were probably rooms seen only by a maid. Marcus lived there with his fourth wife, Belinda. His only child, a daughter named Alexa, was away at boarding school, would soon be away at college, and-from what she’d once told me about her home life-wasn’t likely to be around much after that.

Even after you’d pulled off the main road and could see Marcus’s house off in the distance, it took a good ten minutes to get there, winding your way along a twisting narrow coastal lane, past immense “cottages” and modest suburban houses built in the last half-century on small lots sold off by old-money Brahmins whose fortunes had dwindled away. A few of the grand old homes remained in the hands of the shabby gentry, the descendants of proper Bostonians, but they’d mostly fallen into disrepair. Many of the big houses had been snatched up by the hedge-fund honchos and the titans of tech.

Marshall Marcus was the richest of the nouveau riche, though not the most nouveau. He’d grown up poor on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, in the old Jewish working-class enclave. Apparently his uncle owned a casino out west and Marshall had learned to play blackjack as a kid. He figured out pretty early that the house always has an advantage, so he started coming up with all sorts of card-counting schemes. He got a full scholarship to MIT, where he taught himself Fortran on those big old IBM 704 mainframes the size of ranch houses. He came up with a clever way to use Big Iron, as they called the early computers, to improve his odds at blackjack.

According to legend, one weekend he won ten thousand bucks in Reno. It didn’t take him long to see that if he put this to use in the financial markets he could really clean up. So he opened a brokerage account with his tuition money and was a millionaire by the time he graduated, having devised some immensely complicated investment formula involving options arbitrage and derivatives. Eventually he perfected this proprietary algorithm and started a hedge fund and became a billionaire many times over.

My mother, who worked for him for years, once tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t quite get it. I was never good at math. All I needed to know about Marshall Marcus was that he was good to my mother when things were bad.

When we moved to Boston after my father disappeared-Dad had gotten tipped off that he was about to be arrested, and he chose to go fugitive instead-we had no money, no house, nothing. We had to move in with my grandmother, Mom’s mother, in Malden, outside of Boston. Mom, desperate for money, took a job as an office manager to Marshall Marcus, who was a friend of my father’s. She ended up becoming his personal assistant. She loved working for him, and he always treated her well. He paid her a lot. Even after she retired, he continued to send her extremely generous Christmas presents.

Despite the fact that he’d been a friend of my father’s, I liked him a lot. You couldn’t help it. He was gregarious and affectionate and funny, a man of large appetites-he loved food, wine, cigars, and women, and all to excess. There was something immensely appealing about the guy.

His house looked exactly the same as the last time I’d visited: the Har-Tru tennis court, the Olympic-size swimming pool overlooking the ocean, the carriage house down the hill. The only thing new was a guard booth. A drop-arm beam barricade blocked the narrow roadway. A guard came out of the booth and asked my name, even asked to see my driver’s license.

This surprised me. Marcus, despite his enormous wealth, had never lived like a prisoner, the way a lot of very rich people do, in gated communities behind high fences with bodyguards. Something had changed.

Once the guard let me through, I drove up to the semicircular driveway and parked right in front of the house. When I got out of the car I glanced around and spotted an array of security cameras mounted discreetly around the house and property.

I crossed the broad porch and rang the bell. A minute or so later the door opened and Marshall Marcus emerged, his short arms extended, face lit up.

“Nickeleh!” he said, his customary term of endearment for me. He bumped the screen door aside and engulfed me in a bear hug. He was even fatter, and his hair was different. When I last saw him, he was mostly bald on top and wore his gray hair down to his shirt collar. Now he was coloring it brown, with an orange tint, and the hair on the top of his head had magically grown back. I couldn’t tell if it was a toupee or very good implants.

He was wearing a navy blue robe over pajamas, and he had deep circles under his eyes. He looked exhausted.

He released me, then pushed against my chest and leaned back to examine my face. “Look at you-you get more and more handsome each time I see you. Enough, already! You don’t age. You make a deal with the devil, Nicky? Is there a portrait of you looking like an alter kaker in your attic?”

“I live in the city,” I said. “No attic.”

He laughed. “You’re not married, are you?”

“I’ve avoided that so far.”

He put a palm on my cheek and slapped gently. “Punim like this, I bet you gotta beat off the girls with a stick.” He was trying valiantly to feign his customary high spirits, but I wasn’t convinced. He put a pudgy arm around my lower back. He couldn’t reach as high as my shoulders. “Thank you for coming, Nickeleh, my friend. Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“This new?” he said, jerking his head toward my car.

“I’ve had it for a while.”

I drive a Land Rover Defender 110, which is boxy and Jeep-like and virtually indestructible. Hand-cranked windows. Rock-hard seats. Not a very comfortable ride, and pretty noisy inside when you exceed thirty miles an hour. But it’s the best car I’ve ever owned.

“Love it. Love it. I drove one of those around the Serengeti once on safari. Ten days. Annelise and Alexa and me. Of course, the girls hated Africa. Spent the whole time complaining about the insects, and how much the animals stank, and…” His smile disappeared abruptly, his face drooping as if worn out by the effort of keeping up the façade. “Ahhh, Nick,” he whispered, a look of pain contorting his face, “I’m scared out of my mind.”

6.

“When did you last hear from her?” I said.

We sat in the only room downstairs that looked like it got any use, a big L-shaped eat-in kitchen/sitting room, in comfortable chairs covered in slouchy off-white slipcovers. The view was spectacular: the steely gray waves of Cape Ann lapping against the rocky coastline.

“Last night she drove down to Boston-she told Belinda she’d be back later, which Belinda assumed meant, you know, midnight or something. One or two in the morning, if she was having a good time.”

“When was this-what time did she leave the house?”

“Early evening, I think. I was on my way back from work.” Marcus Capital Management had an entire floor in one of the new buildings on Rowes Wharf, which I could see from a corner of my own office. He always worked long hours when Mom was his assistant, and he probably still did. A town car would take him into Boston every morning and take him home to Manchester every night. “She was gone by the time I got home.”

“What was she doing in Boston?”

He heaved a long sigh, more like a moan. “Oh, you know, she’s always partying, that one. Always going out, to discos or what have you.”

Disco: I couldn’t remember when I last heard that word. “She drove herself? Or did she get a ride with a friend?”

“She drove. Loves to drive. She got her permit on the day she turned sixteen.”

“Was she meeting friends? Or was this a date? Or what?”

“Meeting a friend, I think. Alexa’s not dating, thank God. Not yet, anyway. I mean, not as far as I know.”

I wondered how much Alexa told her father about her social life. Not much, I suspected. “Did she say where she was going?”

“She just told Belinda she was meeting someone.”

“But not a guy.”

“No, not a man.” He sounded annoyed. “Friends. Or a friend. She told Belinda…” Marcus shook his head, his cheeks quivering. Then he put a hand over his eyes, squeezing hard, and gave another long sigh.

After a few seconds I asked softly, “Where’s Belinda?”

“She’s upstairs, lying down,” Marcus said, his pudgy hand still covering his eyes. “She’s just sick about it. She’s taking this really hard, Nick. She didn’t sleep all night. She’s a wreck. She blames herself.”

“For what?”

“For letting Alexa go out. Not asking enough questions, I don’t know. It’s not Belinda’s fault. It’s not easy being the stepmother. Any time she tries to, you know, lay down the law, Alexa bites her head off. Calls her the ‘stepmonster’ and all that-it’s not fair. She cares about Alexa like she was her own, she really does. She loves that girl.”

I nodded. Waited half a minute or so. Then I said, “Obviously you tried her cell.”

“A million times. I even called your mom-I figured maybe it got late and she didn’t want to drive and she didn’t want to call us, so maybe she decided to spend the night at Frankie’s. She loves Francine.” My mother’s condo was in Newton, which was a lot closer to downtown Boston than Manchester-by-the-Sea.

“Do you have reason to believe something happened to her?” I asked.

“Of course something happened to her. She wouldn’t just run off without telling anybody!”

“Marshall,” I said, “I can’t blame you for being scared. But don’t forget, she does have a track record for acting out.”

“That’s all behind her,” he said. “She’s a good kid now. That’s the past.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”

7.

Some years back, as a kid, Alexa had been abducted in the Chestnut Hill Mall parking lot, right in front of her mother, Annelise, Marcus’s third wife.

She hadn’t been harmed, though. She’d been taken for a ride, driven around, and a few hours later dropped off at another parking lot across town. She insisted she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and an examination by a doctor confirmed it. She hadn’t been threatened. They hadn’t even spoken to her, she said.

So the whole thing remained a mystery. Did her abductors get scared off? Did they change their minds? It happened. Marcus was known to be very rich; maybe it had been an aborted kidnapping-for-ransom attempt. That was my assumption, anyway. Then her mother left, telling Marcus she couldn’t bear to live with him anymore. Maybe it was precipitated by her daughter’s kidnapping.

Who knows what the real reason was. She’d died of breast cancer last year, so she wasn’t around to ask. But Alexa was never the same after that, and she wasn’t exactly an easygoing, well-adjusted kid before the incident took place. She got even more rebellious, smoking at school, breaking curfew, doing whatever she could to get into trouble.

So one day a few months after it happened, my mother called me-I was working in Washington at the time, at the Defense Department-and asked me to drive up to New Hampshire and have a talk with Alexa at Exeter.

I tracked her down on the stadium field and watched her play field hockey for a while. Even though she didn’t consider herself a jock, she moved with a sinewy grace. She played with immense concentration. She had the rare ability to completely lose herself in the flow of the game.

She wasn’t easy to talk to, but since I was Frankie Heller’s son, and she loved my mom unambivalently, and since I wasn’t her dad, eventually I broke through. She still hadn’t metabolized the terror of the abduction. I told her that was normal, and that I’d worry about her if she hadn’t been so deeply frightened by that day. I said it was great she was being so defiant.

She looked at me with disbelief, then suspicion. What kind of mind game was I playing?

I said I was serious. Defiance is great. That is how you learn to resist. I told her that fear is a tremendously useful instinct, since it’s a warning signal. Fear tells us we’re facing danger. We have to listen to it, use it. I even gave her a book about “the gift of fear,” though I doubt she ever read it.

I told her that she was not only a girl but a beautiful girl and a rich girl, and that those were three strikes against her. I taught her how to look for danger signals, and then I showed her some rudimentary self-defense techniques, a few basic martial-arts moves. Nothing fancy, but enough. I’d hate to be a drunken Exeter boy who tried to push her too far.

I took her to a dojo outside Boston and introduced her to Bujinkan self-defense techniques. I knew it would be great discipline for her, instill some self-confidence, be a healthy outlet for some of the aggression that had been building up inside her. Whenever I came to Boston and she was home from school, we’d make a point of getting together and practicing. And even, after a while, talking.

It wasn’t the solution I’d hoped it would be, though. She continued doing stuff she knew would get her in trouble-smoking, drinking, whatever-and Marcus had to send her to some kind of reform school for a year. Who knows why she went through such a difficult period. It might have been the trauma of the abduction. But it might just as well have been a reaction to her mother’s running off.

Or maybe it was just being a teenager.

“WHAT’S WITH all the security?” I asked. “It wasn’t here last time I visited.”

Marcus paused. “Times have changed. More crazies out there. I have more money. Newsweek did a story about me. Forbes, Fortune, the cable news-I mean, it’s not like I’m a shrinking violet.”

“Have you received any threats?”

“Threats? Like, did someone come up to me on State Street with a gun and threaten to blow my brains out or something? No. But I’m not going to wait.”

“So it’s just a precaution.”

“What, you don’t think I should be taking precautions?”

“Of course you should. I just want to know if you had any specific warning, a breakin, whatever-anything that inspired you to tighten your security.”

“I made him do it,” a female voice said.

Belinda Marcus had entered the kitchen. She was a tall, slender blonde, extremely beautiful. But icy. Maybe forty, but a well-cared-for forty. A forty that got regular Botox and collagen fillers and the occasional well-timed mini-facelift. A woman whose idea of “work” was something you had done at a plastic surgeon’s office.

She was all in white: skinny white ankle-slit pants, a white silk top with wide shoulder straps that looked like they were made out of origami, a low neckline with seamed cups that drew your eye to her small but pert breasts. She was barefoot. Her toenails were painted coral.

“I thought it was absolutely mad that Marshall didn’t have any guards. A man who’s worth as much as Marshall Marcus? As prominent as he is? We’re just sitting ducks out here at the end of the point. And after what happened to Alexa?”

“They were out shopping, Belinda. A movie, whatever. That coulda happened even if we had a… an armed battalion surrounding the house. They were in the Chestnut Hill Mall, for Christ’s sake!”

“You haven’t introduced me to Mr. Heller,” Belinda said. She approached, offered me her hand. It was bony and cool. Her fingernails were painted coral too. She had the vacant beauty of your classic trophy-wife bimbo, and she spoke with a sugary Georgia accent, all mint juleps and sweet iced tea.

I stood up. “Nick,” I said. All I knew about her was what I’d heard from my mother. Belinda Jackson Marcus had been a flight attendant with Delta and met Marcus in the bar at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead, in Atlanta.

“Pardon my manners,” Marcus said but remained slouched in his chair. “Nick, Belinda. Belinda, Nick,” he added perfunctorily. “Is she not a gorgeous creature, this girl?” A wide, pleased smile: he’d gotten his teeth capped too. That and the new hair: Marcus had never been vain, so I assumed he’d done all this work out of insecurity at having a wife so much younger and so beautiful. Or maybe she’d been pushing him to renovate.

Belinda tipped her head and rolled her eyes, a coy, fawnlike gesture. “Have you offered Mr. Heller some lunch?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Now, what’s wrong with you, sugar?” Belinda said.

“What kind of lousy host am I?” he said. “See? What would I do without Belinda? I’m an animal. An uncivilized beast. How about a sandwich, Nickeleh?”

“I’m good,” I said.

“Nothing?”

“I’m fine.”

Belinda said, “How about I fix y’all some coffee?”

“Sure.”

She glided over to the long black soapstone-topped island and clicked on an electric kettle. Her tight white pants emphasized the curves of her tight butt. She clearly spent most of her time working out, probably with a trainer, with a special focus on the glutes. “I’m not really much for making coffee,” she said, “but we have instant. It’s quite good, actually.” She held up a little foil packet.

“You know, I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I’ve had too much coffee this morning already.”

Belinda turned around suddenly. “Nick,” she said. “You have to find her.” She approached slowly. “Please. You have to find her.”

She was freshly made up, I noticed. She didn’t look like she’d been up all night. Unlike her husband, she looked refreshed, as if she’d just awakened from a long restorative nap. She wore pink lip gloss, her lips perfectly lined. I knew enough about women and their makeup to know that you didn’t roll out of bed looking like that.

“Did Alexa tell you who she was meeting?” I asked.

“I didn’t… she doesn’t exactly tell me everything. Me being the stepmother and all.”

“She loves you,” Marcus said. “She just doesn’t realize it yet.”

“But you asked her, right?” I said.

Belinda’s glossy lips parted half an inch. “Of course I asked!” she said, indignant.

“She didn’t tell you what time she’d be back?”

“Well, I assumed by midnight, maybe a little later, but you know, she doesn’t take it too well when I ask her that sort of thing. She says she doesn’t like to be treated like a child.”

“Still, that’s pretty late.”

“For these kids? That’s when the night begins.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I thought kids under eighteen aren’t allowed to drive after midnight-twelve thirty, maybe-unless a parent or a guardian is in the car with them. If they get caught, they can have their license suspended for sixty days.”

“Is that right?” Belinda said. “She didn’t tell me anything of the kind.”

I found that strange. Alexa would never have planned to do something that might jeopardize her driver’s license, and all the autonomy it represented. Also, it seemed out of character for Belinda not to have stayed on top of all the rules. Not a woman like that, attentive to every detail, who lined her lips before meeting me at a time when she should have been a mental wreck over her missing stepdaughter.

“So what do you think might have happened to her?” I said.

Her hands flew up, palms open. “I don’t know.” She looked at Marcus in bewilderment. “We don’t know. We just want you to find her!”

“Have you called the police?” I said.

“Of course not,” Marcus said.

“Of course not?” I said.

Belinda said, “The police aren’t going to do anything. They’ll come and take a report and tell us to wait until twenty-four hours is up, and then it’s just gonna be file-and-forget.”

“She’s under eighteen,” I said. “They take missing-teenager cases pretty seriously. I suggest you call them right now.”

“Nick,” Marcus said, “I need you to look for her. Not the cops. Have I ever asked for your help before?”

“Please,” Belinda said. “I love that girl so much. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her.”

Marcus waved a hand and said something like “Poo-poo-poo.” I think that was meant to ward away the evil eye. “Don’t talk like that, baby,” he said.

“Have you called any of the hospitals?” I said.

The two exchanged a quick, anxious look before Belinda replied, shaking her head, “If anything had happened to her, we’d have heard by now, right?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “That’s the first thing you want to do. Let’s start there.”

“I think it may be something else,” Marcus said. “I don’t think my little girl got hurt. I think…”

“We don’t know what happened,” Belinda interrupted.

“Something bad,” Marcus said. “Oh, dear God.”

“Well, let’s start by calling the hospitals,” I said. “Just to rule that out. I want her cell phone number. Maybe my tech person can locate her that way.”

“Of course,” Marcus said.

“And I want you to call the police. Okay?”

Belinda nodded and Marcus shrugged. “They won’t do bupkes,” he said, “but if you insist.”

None of the hospitals between Manchester and Boston had admitted anyone fitting Alexa’s description, which didn’t seem to give Marcus and his wife the sense of relief you might expect.

Instead it seemed that the two of them were harboring some deep-seated dread that they refused to divulge to me, that they were holding back something important, something dire. I think that gut instinct was the reason I took Marcus’s request seriously. Something was very wrong here. It was a bad feeling, and it only got worse.

Call it the gift of fear.

8.

Alexa stirred and shifted in her bed.

It was the throbbing in her forehead that had awakened her, a rhythmic pulsing that had steadily grown stronger and stronger, tugging her into consciousness.

Knife-stabs of pain pierced the backs of her eyeballs.

It felt like someone was pounding an ice pick into the top of her skull and had just broken through the fragile shell, sending cracks throughout the lobes of her brain right behind her forehead.

Her mouth was terribly dry. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She tried to swallow.

Where was she?

She couldn’t see anything.

The darkness was absolute. She wondered whether she’d gone blind.

But maybe she was dreaming.

It didn’t feel like a dream, though. She remembered… drinking at Slammer with Taylor Armstrong. Something about her iPhone. Laughing about something. Everything else was blurry, clouded.

She had no recollection of how she’d gotten home, to her dad’s house, how she’d ended up in her bed with the shades drawn.

She inhaled a strange musty odor. Unfamiliar. Was she at home in bed? It didn’t smell like her room in the Manchester house. The sheets didn’t have that fabric-softener fragrance she liked.

Had she crashed at someone’s house? Not Taylor’s, she didn’t think. Her house smelled like lemon furniture polish, and her sheets were always too crisp. But where else could she be? She had no memory of… of anything, really, after laughing with Taylor about something on her iPhone…

She only knew that she was sleeping on top of a bed. No sheets covering her. They must have slid off her during the night. She preferred being under a sheet, even on the hottest days when there wasn’t any air-conditioning. Like that awful year at Marston-Lee in Colorado, where there was no air-conditioning in the summer and they made you sleep in bunk beds and she had to bribe her bitch of a roommate for the top one. The bottom bunk made her feel trapped and anxious.

Her hands were at her sides. She fluttered her fingers, feeling for the hem of a sheet, and then the back of her right hand brushed against something smooth and solid. With her fingertips she felt some kind of satiny material over something hard, like the slatted wooden safety rails on the sides of her bunk bed at Marston-Lee that kept you from falling out of bed and crashing to the floor.

Was she back at Marston-Lee, or just dreaming that she was?

Yet if she were dreaming, would she have such an incredible headache?

She knew she was awake. She just knew it.

But she could still see nothing. Total perfect darkness, not even a glimmer of light.

She could smell the stale air and feel the soft yielding mattress below her and the soft pajamas on her legs… her fingertips scuttled over the soft fabric on her thighs, which didn’t feel like the sweatpants she usually wore to bed. She was wearing something different. Not sweatpants, not pajamas. Hospital scrubs, maybe?

Was she in a hospital?

Had she gotten hurt, maybe been in an accident?

The ice pick was driving deeper and deeper into the gray matter of her brain, and the pain was indescribable, and she just wanted to roll over and put a pillow over her head. She raised her knees to gently torque her body and flip over, slowly and gently so her head didn’t crack apart…

And her knees hit something.

Something hard.

Startled, she lifted her head, almost an involuntary reflex, and her forehead and the bridge of her nose collided with something hard too.

Both hands flew outward, striking hard walls. A few inches on either side. Her knees came up again, maybe three inches, and once again they struck a solid wall.

No.

Fingers skittering up the sides and then the top, satin-covered walls barely three inches from her lips.

Even before her brain was able to make sense of it, some animal instinct within her realized, with a dread that crept over her and turned her numb and ice-cold.

She was in a box.

She could touch the end of the box with her toes.

She started breathing fast. Short, panicked gasps.

Her heart raced.

She shuddered, but the shuddering didn’t stop.

She gasped for air, but couldn’t get more than a few inches of air into the very top of her lungs.

She tried to sit up, but her forehead struck the ceiling once again. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t change positions.

She panted faster and faster, heart juddering, sweat breaking out all over her body, hot and cold at the same time.

This couldn’t be real. She had to be in some kind of nightmare: the worst nightmare she’d ever had. Trapped in a box. Like a…

Satin lining. Walls of wood, maybe steel.

Like being in a coffin.

Her hands twitched, kept knocking against the hard walls, as she gasped over and over again: “No… no… no…”

She’d forgotten all about her headache.

That light-headed feeling that accompanied the hardness in her stomach and the coldness throughout her body, which she always felt before she passed out.

And she was gone.

9.

By the time I got back into the Defender headed down 128 South toward Boston it was after noon. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Marshall Marcus really did have a serious reason to fear that something had happened to his daughter. Something he’d actually anticipated.

In other words, not an accident. Even if it had nothing to do with the brief abduction a few years back. Maybe it was nothing more than a fight between Alexa and her stepmother, which ended with Alexa making a threat-I’m leaving, and I’m never coming back!-and then taking off.

Though it didn’t really make sense that Marcus would withhold that sort of thing from me. Even if he was being chivalrous and wanted to shield his wife from the embarrassment of airing the family’s dirty laundry, it wasn’t like Marcus to be discreet. This was a guy who happily discussed his constipation, his difficulty urinating, and how Viagra had improved his sex life even more than JDate. He was the king of “TMI,” as my nephew Gabe would say: Too Much Information.

Just as I was about to call Dorothy and ask her how we might be able to locate Alexa’s phone, my BlackBerry rang. Jillian, the office manager.

“Your son’s here,” she said.

“Uh, I don’t have a son.”

“He says you two were supposed to have lunch?” In the background I could hear cacophonous music playing way too loud. She’d turned my office into a dorm room.

“Whoops. Right. He’s my nephew. Not my son.” I’d promised Gabe I’d take him to lunch, but I’d forgotten to put it on the calendar.

“That’s funny,” she said. “We just had a long talk, Gabe and me, and I just assumed he was your son, and he never corrected me.”

“Yeah, well.” He wishes, I thought. “Thanks. Tell him I’ll be there soon.”

“Cool kid.”

“Yeah. That your music?”

There was a click, and the music stopped. “Music?”

“Could you put me through to Dorothy?” I said.

10.

Gabe Heller was my brother Roger’s stepson. He was sixteen, a very smart kid but definitely a misfit. He had hardly any friends at the private boys’ school he attended in Washington. He dressed all in black: black jeans, black hoodies, black Chuck Taylors. Recently he’d even started dying his hair black too. It’s not easy being sixteen, but it must have been particularly hard to be Gabe Heller.

Roger, my estranged brother, was a jerk, not to put too fine a point on it. He was also, like our father, in prison. Luckily, Gabe was genetically unrelated to his father, or he’d probably be in juvie. I seemed to be the only adult he could talk to. I don’t know what it is about me and troubled kids. Maybe, the way dogs can smell fear, they can sense that I’ll never be a parent, and so I’m safe. I don’t know.

Gabe was spending the summer at my mother’s condo in Newton. He was taking art classes in a summer program for high school students at the Museum School. He loved his Nana and wanted to get away from his mother, Lauren-who was no doubt relieved not to have to deal with him after school was out. My mother was hardly strict, so he was able to hop on the T and go into town and hang out in Harvard Square when he wasn’t in school, and I’m sure he enjoyed feeling like a grown-up.

But I think the main reason he wanted to be in Boston was that it gave him an excuse to see me, though he’d never admit it. I loved the kid and enjoyed spending time with him. It wasn’t always easy. Not everything worthwhile is easy.

He was sitting at my desk, drawing in his sketch pad. Gabe was a scarily talented artist.

“Working on your comic book?” I said as I entered.

“Graphic novel,” he said stiffly.

“Right, sorry, I forgot.”

“And hey, way to remember our lunch.” He was wearing a black hoodie, zipped up, with straps and D-rings and grommets on it. I noticed a tiny gold stud earring in his left ear but decided not to call attention to it. Yet.

“Sorry about that, too. How’s the summer going for you?”

“Boring.”

For Gabe, that was a rave. “Wanna grab some lunch?” I said.

“I’m only about to pass out from hunger.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

I noticed Dorothy hovering at the threshold. “Listen, Nick,” she said. “That number you gave me? I’m not going to be able to locate her phone.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. That sounds… defeatist,” I said.

“Ain’t got nothing to do with defeatism,” she said. “Nothing to do with my ability. It’s a matter of law.”

“Like that ever stopped you?”

“It’s not-oh, hello, Gabriel.” Her tone cooled.

Gabe grunted. He and Dorothy had a history of clashing. Gabe thought he was smarter than she, which was probably true, since he was an alarmingly brainy kid-and better at computers, which wasn’t true. Not yet, anyway. Still, he was sixteen, which meant that he thought he was better at everything. And that just pissed Dorothy off.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “The person whose phone you want me to locate…” She glanced at Gabe in annoyance. She was always discreet about the work she did for me, but she was being particularly careful.

“Can we speak in private, Nick?”

“Gabe, give me two minutes,” I said.

“Fine,” he snapped, and left my office.

“SOUNDS LIKE you’re actually taking the case,” Dorothy said. “Will wonders never cease.”

I nodded.

“Couldn’t pass up the money?”

I replied with sarcasm, “Yeah, it’s all about the money.”

“You got a problem with money?”

“No, it’s… it’s complicated. This is not about Marshall Marcus. I happen to like his daughter. I’m worried about her.”

“Why is he freaking out? I mean, she’s seventeen, right? Drives into town, probably to some club, hooks up with a guy. That’s what these kids do.”

“You sleep around a lot when you were her age, Dorothy?”

She gave me a stern look and held up a warning forefinger with a long lilac fingernail. I didn’t understand how she could type with nails that long.

I smiled. As little as I knew about her sex life, I knew she was hardly the promiscuous type.

“I don’t get it either,” I admitted.

“I mean, I understand why the dad could be losing it if this was right after she got snatched in that parking lot. But that was years ago, right?”

“Right. I think he knows more than he’s telling me.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you need to ask him some direct questions.”

“I will. So tell me about Facebook.”

“Tell you about Facebook? All you need to know, Nick, is it’s not for you.”

“I mean Alexa. She must be on Facebook, right?”

“I think it’s a legal requirement for all teenagers,” she said. “Like the draft, back in the day.”

“Maybe there’s something on her Facebook page. Don’t kids post everything they do every second?”

“What makes you think I know the first thing about teenagers?”

“See what she has on Facebook, okay?”

“You can’t do that unless you’re one of her ‘friends.’”

“Can’t you just hack her password?”

She shrugged. “I’ll look into it.”

“So what’s the problem with locating her iPhone?”

“It’s just about impossible unless you’re law enforcement.”

“I thought there was some way for iPhone owners to track down their lost phones.”

“We’d need her Mac user name and password. And I’m guessing she doesn’t share things like passwords with Daddy.”

“You can’t crack it, or hack it, or whatever you do?”

“Yeah, I can just snap my fingers and I’m in, just like magic. No, Nick, that takes time. I’d have to make a list of her pets’ names and any important dates, and try the ten most common passwords, and that’s a crapshoot. Even if I do succeed, odds are we won’t get anything, because she’d have had to activate the MobileMe finder on her phone, and I doubt she did. She’s seventeen and probably not real big into the technology.”

“Probably not.”

“Fastest way is ask AT &T to ping the phone through their network.”

“Which they’ll only do for law enforcement,” I said. “There’s got to be some other way to find this girl’s phone.”

“Not that I know of.”

“So you’re giving up.”

“I said not that I know of. I didn’t say I’m giving up. I never give up.” She looked up and noticed Gabe lurking outside my office door. “Anyway, I think your son is getting hungry,” she said with a wink.

11.

I took Gabe to Mojo’s, a bar down the street that served lunch. This was a typical Boston bar-five flat screens all showing sports or sports news shows, lots of Red Sox and Celtics memorabilia, a foosball table in the back, pub food like wings and nachos and burgers, a sticky wooden-plank floor. They served good cold beer as well as the infamous local brew, Brubaker’s, which even I had to admit was pretty bad. The patrons were a democratic mix of stockbrokers and cabdrivers. A local reviewer once compared Mojo’s regulars to the cantina scene in Star Wars: that collection of weird-looking intergalactic creatures. Herb, the owner, liked that so much he had the article framed and put on the wall.

“I like that new girl you hired,” Gabe said.

“Jillian?”

“Yeah, she’s cool.”

“She’s different, that’s for sure. Now, tell me: Is Nana abusing you?”

“Nah, she’s cool.”

“How about Lilly? How’s Lilly treating you?”

Lilly was my mother’s dog, a shar-pei/English mastiff mix she’d rescued from the pound. Lilly was not only the ugliest dog in the world but also the worst-tempered. She’d been abandoned multiple times and I could see why.

“I’m really trying to like her,” Gabe said, “but she’s… I mean, I hate that dog. Plus, she stinks.”

“She’s the hound from hell. Don’t look into her eyes.”

“Why not?”

“The last person who did dropped dead on the spot. They say it was a heart attack, but…” I shrugged.

“Yeah, right.”

“You miss being home?”

“Miss it? Are you kidding?”

“Life at home not so good these days?”

“It sucks.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“What’s with the earring?”

He said, defensively, “What about it?”

“Does your mom know you got your ear pierced?”

He shrugged. Asked and answered.

“I forget,” I said. “Does the left side mean you’re gay?”

He blushed, which turned his acne scarlet. “No. Left is right and right is wrong, ever hear that?”

“Aha,” I said. “So being gay is wrong?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I smiled. Gabe could be insufferable in that know-it-all teenage way, so I considered it my civic duty to keep him off balance.

Herb took our order. Normally he was stationed behind the bar, but lunchtimes were always slow. He was a large-framed potbellied guy with a heavy Southie accent. “Yo Nicky,” he said. “How’s the accounting business? You got any tips for me, like how to stop paying taxes?”

“Easy.”

“Yeah?”

“Do what I do. Just don’t pay ’em.”

He paused, then laughed loudly. It didn’t take much to amuse him.

“Truth is, I’m an actuary.” The sign on our office door said HELLER ASSOCIATES-ACTUARIAL CONSULTING SERVICES. This was an excellent cover. As soon as I told people I was an actuary, they stopped asking questions.

“Right, right,” he said. “What’s an actuary, again?”

“Damned if I know.”

He laughed again. “Gotta hand it to you, man,” he said kindly, “I don’t know how you do it. Crunching numbers all day? I’d go out of my mind.”

Gabe gave me a quick, knowing smile. I ordered a burger and fries and asked him to make sure they weren’t the “curry fries,” which were inedible. Gabe looked up from the menu. “Do you have veggie burgers?” he asked.

“We have turkey burgers, young fella,” Herb said.

Gabe furrowed his brow and tipped his head to the side. I recognized that look. It was the supercilious expression that got him beat up at school on a regular basis and sometimes even thrown out of classes. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t realize turkey was a vegetable.”

Herb gave me a sideways glance as if to say, Who the hell is this kid? But he liked me too much to give it back to my guest. “How about a Cobb salad?” he said blandly.

“Yuck,” Gabe said. “I’ll just have a plate of fries and ketchup. And a Coke.”

When Herb left, I said, “Looks like Jillian has a new recruit.”

“Jillian says that eating red meat makes you aggressive,” Gabe said.

“And that’s a bad thing?”

He refused to take the bait. “Whatever. Hey, Uncle Nick, you know, that was a good idea you had about Alexa’s Facebook.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Alexa Marcus? Her dad is scared something might’ve happened to her?”

I looked at him for a few seconds, then slowly smiled. “You son of a bitch. You were eavesdropping.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Did you know Dorothy has an audio feed on her computer that lets her listen in to everything you say in your office?”

“Yes, Gabe. That’s our arrangement. The real question is, does Dorothy know you were snooping around on her computer?”

“Please don’t tell her. Please, Uncle Nick.”

“So what were you thinking about her Facebook page?”

“You’re not going to tell her, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Okay. I’m pretty sure I know where Alexa went last night.”

“How so?”

“It was on her Facebook wall.”

“How were you able to see that?”

“We’re Facebook friends.”

“Really?”

“Well, I mean, like,” he stammered, his face flushing again, “she has like eleven hundred Facebook friends, but she let me friend her.”

“Very cool,” I said, only because he sounded so proud.

“She came over to Nana’s a couple of times since I’ve been there. I like her. She’s cool. And it’s not like she has to be nice to me, you know?”

I nodded. Beautiful rich girls like Alexa Marcus usually weren’t nice to annoying, nerdy boys like Gabe Heller.

“So where’d she go?”

“She and her friend Taylor went to Slammer.”

“Which is what?”

“Some fancy bar in that hotel that used to be a jail? I think it’s called the Graybar?”

“Taylor-is that a boy or a girl?”

“A girl. Taylor Armstrong? She’s the daughter of Senator Richard Armstrong. Taylor and Alexa went to school together.”

I glanced at my watch, put my hand on his shoulder. “How about we ask them to pack up our food to go?” I said.

“You’re going to talk to Taylor?”

I nodded.

“She’s at home today,” Gabe said. “Probably sleeping it off. I bet you find Alexa there too. Uncle Nick?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Alexa I told you. She’ll think I’m like a stalker or something.”

12.

I found the junior senator from Massachusetts picking up his dog’s poop.

Senator Richard Armstrong’s large white standard poodle was trimmed in a full Continental clip: shaven body, white pom-poms on his feet and tail, and a big white Afro perched atop his head. The senator, in a crisp blue shirt and impeccably knotted tie, was groomed just as carefully. His silver hair was perfectly coiffed, with a sharp part on one side. He leaned over, his hand inside a plastic CVS bag, grabbed the dog’s excrement, and deftly turned the bag inside out. He stood upright, face red, and noticed me standing there.

“Senator,” I said.

“Yes?” A wary look. As a well-known, highly recognizable figure, he had to worry about lunatics. Even in this very posh neighborhood.

We stood in a long oval park, enclosed by a wrought-iron picket fence, in the middle of Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Louisburg Square is a private enclave of long red-brick row houses built in the nineteenth century, considered one of the most elegant neighborhoods in Boston.

“Nick Heller,” I said.

“Ah, yes,” he said, and gave a big, relieved smile. “Sheesh, I thought you were with the association. Technically, you’re not supposed to walk your dog here, and some of my neighbors get quite upset.”

“I won’t tell,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve always thought that dogs should be trained to pick up our poop.”

“Yes, well… I’d shake your hand, but…”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Is this a good time?” I’d reached out to him through a mutual friend, told him what was going on, and asked if I could come by.

“Walk with me,” he said. I followed him to a historic-looking trash bin, where he dropped his little bundle. “So, I’m sorry to hear about the Marcus girl. Any news? I’m sure it’s just a family quarrel.”

Armstrong had a Boston Brahmin accent, which is nothing like what most people think of as a Boston accent. It’s very upper-crust WASP, mid-Atlantic, and it’s dying out. Hardly anyone speaks that way anymore except maybe a few old walruses at the Somerset Club. He sounded like a cross between William F. Buckley and Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. Someone once told me that if you listened to recordings of Armstrong when he was a young man, he sounded entirely different. Somewhere along the way he’d acquired the patina. But he really was descended from an old Boston family. “My family didn’t come over on the Mayflower,” he’d once said. “We sent the servants over on the Mayflower.”

We stood before his house-bow front, freshly painted black shutters, glossy black door, big American flag waving-and he began to climb the gray-painted concrete steps. “Well, if there’s anything in the world I can do to help, just ask,” he said. “I do have friends.”

He gave me his famous smile, which had gotten him, a moderate Republican, elected to the Senate four times. A journalist once compared the Armstrong smile to a warm fire. Up close, though, it seemed more like an artificial fireplace, with faux ceramic “logs” painted red to simulate glowing embers.

“Excellent,” I said. “I’d like to talk to your daughter.”

“My daughter? You’d be wasting your time. I doubt Taylor has seen the Marcus girl in months.”

“They saw each other last night.”

The senator shifted his weight from one foot to another. His poodle whined, and Armstrong gave the leash an abrupt yank. “News to me,” he finally said. “Anyway, I’m afraid Taylor’s out shopping. That girl likes to shop.” He gave me the sort of beleaguered smile guys often give other guys say, Women-can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.

“You might want to check again,” I said. “She’s upstairs right now.”

Gabe was monitoring her incessant Facebook postings and texting me updates. I didn’t know how, since he wasn’t a Facebook friend of Taylor’s, but he’d found some way.

Taylor Armstrong, he’d texted me a few minutes ago, had told her 1372 friends that she was watching an old Gilmore Girls rerun and was bored out of her skull.

“I’m sure she and her mother-”

“Senator,” I said. “Please get her for me. This is important. Or should I just call her cell?”

Of course, I didn’t actually have Taylor Armstrong’s cell phone number, but it turned out I didn’t need it. Armstrong invited me in, no longer bothering to conceal his annoyance. The poodle whined again, and Armstrong snapped the leash. No more election-winning smile. The electric fireplace had been switched off.

13.

Taylor Armstrong entered her father’s study like a kid summoned to the principal’s office, trying to mask her apprehension with sullenness. She sat down in a big overstuffed kilim-covered chair and crossed her legs doubly, the top leg tucked tightly under the lower. Her arms were folded, her shoulders hunched. If she were a turtle, she’d be deep inside her shell.

I sat in a facing chair while Senator Armstrong skimmed papers through half-frame glasses at his simple mahogany desk. He was pretending to ignore us.

The girl was pretty-quite pretty, in fact. Her hair was black, obviously dyed, and she wore heavy eye makeup. She dressed like a rich girl gone bad, which apparently she was: She went to the same rich-girls’ reform school out west where Alexa had spent a year. She was wearing a brown suede tank top with a chunky turquoise necklace, skinny jeans, and short brown leather boots.

I introduced myself and said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Alexa.”

She examined the old Persian carpet and said nothing.

“Alexa’s missing,” I said. “Her parents are extremely worried.”

She looked up, petulant. For a moment it looked like she was about to say something, but then she apparently changed her mind.

“Have you heard from her?” I said.

She shook her head. “No.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Last night. We went out.”

I was glad she didn’t try to lie about it. Or maybe her father had briefed her when he’d gone upstairs to fetch her.

“How about we go for a walk?” I said.

“A walk?” she said with distaste, as if I’d just asked her to eat a live bat, head first.

“Sure. Get some fresh air.”

She hesitated, and her father said, without even looking up from his papers, “You two can talk right here.”

For a few seconds she looked trapped. Then, to my surprise, she said, “I wouldn’t mind getting out of the house.”

FROM LOUISBURG Square we crossed Mount Vernon Street and made our way down the steep slope of Willow Street. “I figured you could use a cigarette.”

“I don’t smoke.”

But I could smell it on her when she first came downstairs. “Go ahead, I’m not going to report back to Daddy.”

Her expression softened almost imperceptibly. She shrugged, took a pack of Marlboros and a gold S. T. Dupont cigarette lighter from her little black handbag.

“I won’t even tell Daddy about the fake IDs,” I said.

She gave me a quick sidelong glance as she opened the lighter, making that distinctive ping. She flicked it crisply, lighted a cigarette, and drew a lungful of smoke.

“Drinking age is twenty-one,” I said. “How else are you going to get a drink around here?”

She exhaled twin plumes from her nostrils like a movie star from the old days and said nothing.

I went on, “I used to forge fake IDs for my friends and me when I was a kid. I used the darkroom at school. Some of my friends sent away for ‘international student IDs.’”

“That’s fascinating.”

“Gotta be easier today, with scanners and Photoshop and all that.”

“I wouldn’t know. You just buy one from a friend.”

We crossed over to West Cedar down a tiny alley called Acorn Street, paved in cobblestones dredged from the Charles River a long time ago. This was a real street, and it was charming, but I doubted the Defender could fit through it. Also, the cobblestones would have done a number on the suspension.

“So why didn’t your dad want you to talk to me?”

She shrugged.

“No idea?”

“Why do you think?” she said bitterly. “Because he’s the senator. It’s all about his career.”

“Senators’ daughters aren’t allowed to have a good time?”

A mirthless laugh. “From what I’ve heard, he did nothing but have a good time before he met my mom.” She paused for dramatic effect. “And plenty after too.”

I ignored that. I’m sure the rumors were true. Richard Armstrong had a reputation, and not for his legislative work. “You two went to Slammer together,” I said. I waited a long time for her response-five, ten seconds.

“We just had a couple of drinks,” she said finally.

“Did she seem upset? Pissed off at her parents?”

“No more than usual.”

“Did she say anything about getting out of the house, just taking off somewhere?”

“No.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

“No.” She sounded hostile, like it was none of my business.

“Did she say she was scared of something? Or someone? She was once grabbed in a parking lot-”

“I know,” she said scornfully. “I’m like her best friend.”

“Well, was she afraid that something like that might happen again?”

She shook her head. “But she said her dad was acting weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Like maybe he was in trouble? I really don’t remember. I was moderately lit at that point.”

“Where’d she go after Slammer?”

“How should I know? I assume she went home.”

“Did you two leave the bar together?”

She hesitated. “Yeah.”

She was so obviously lying that I hesitated to call her on it outright for fear of losing any chance of her cooperation.

Suddenly she blurted out, “Did something happen to Lexie? Do you know something? Did she get hurt?”

We’d stopped at the corner of Mount Vernon Street, waited for a couple to pass out of hearing range. “Maybe,” I said.

“Maybe? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I need you to tell me everything.”

She threw down her cigarette on the buckled brick sidewalk, stubbed it out, pulled another from her handbag. “Look, she met a guy, okay?”

“Do you remember his name?”

She shook her head, lighted the cigarette, clearly avoiding my eyes. “Some Spanish guy, maybe. I don’t remember. Their names all sound the same to me. Marco. Alfredo. Something.”

“Were you with her when she met this guy?”

I could see her running through a series of mental calculations. If this, then that. If she said she wasn’t with Alexa, why not? Where was she? Two girls go to a bar, they almost always stay together. They don’t divide and conquer. They protect each other, signal to each other, vet prospects for each other. And compete for a guy sometimes, sure. But for the most part they work as a team.

“Yeah,” she said. “But it was loud, and I didn’t really catch his name. And I was definitely sideways by then and I just wanted to go home.”

“The guy didn’t try to hit on you?”

Her eyes narrowed. Now it was a point of pride. “The guy was so lame,” she said. “I totally blew him off.”

“Did they leave together?” I said.

I waited so long I thought she might not have heard me. When I was about to repeat the question, she said, “I guess. I don’t really know.”

“How could you not know?”

“Because I left first.”

I didn’t bother to point out the contradiction. “You went straight home?”

She nodded.

“You walked?” Louisburg Square was directly up the hill, a fairly short walk unless you were hammered and wearing stilettos.

“Cab.”

“Did you hear anything from Alexa later on that night?”

“Why would I?”

“Come on, Taylor. You girls document every minute of your lives with text messages or on Facebook or whatever. You post something when you brush your teeth. You mean to tell me she didn’t text you to say ‘OMG I’m at this guy’s apartment’ or whatever?”

She looked contemptuous, did the eye-roll thing again.

“You haven’t heard from her since you left Slammer last night?”

“Right.”

“Have you tried to call her?”

She shook her head.

“Text her?”

She shook her head again.

“You didn’t check in with her for an update on how the night went? I thought you guys are, like, BFFs.” Somehow I knew that was chat-speak for Best Friends Forever.

She shrugged.

“Do you understand that if you’re lying to me, if you’re covering something up, you might be endangering your best friend’s life?”

She shook her head, started walking down the street, away from me. “I haven’t heard anything,” she said without turning back.

My gut instinct told me she wasn’t lying about that. Obviously, though, she was lying about something. Her guilt flashed like a neon sign. Maybe she didn’t want to come off as a bad friend. Maybe she’d ditched Alexa for some hot guy herself.

I called Dorothy and said, “Any progress in locating Alexa’s phone?”

“No change. We’re going to need the assistance of someone in law enforcement, Nick. No way around it.”

“I have an idea,” I said.

14.

When your job involves working with the clandestine, as mine does, you learn the power of a secret. Knowing one can give you leverage, even control, over another, whether in the halls of Congress or the halls of high school, in the boardroom or the faculty lounge or at the racetrack.

Most secrets are kept to conceal crimes, abuses, or failures. They can destroy a career or undermine an enemy, and they’ve brought down quite a few world leaders. In Washington, where you’re only as important as the secrets you know, secrets are truly the coin of the realm.

It was time to spend some of that coin.

When I worked at Stoddard Associates in D.C., I did a project for a freshman congressman from Florida who was fighting a nasty reelection battle. His opponent had got hold of a copy of the lease on an apartment in Sarasota he’d rented for his girlfriend, a hostess at Hooters. This was news to his wife, the mother of his six children, and definitely inconvenient for the congressman, given his strong family-values platform. I did some cleanup work and the whole paper trail disappeared. The waitress found new employment in Pensacola. Her landlord had no recollection of renting to the congressman and declared the deed a forgery. The congressman won the election in a squeaker.

It wasn’t a job I was proud of. But now the congressman was the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI. He didn’t owe me any favors, since he’d paid well for Stoddard’s “research services,” but I knew certain things about him, which was even worse. I reached him on his private line and asked him to make a call for me to the Boston field office of the FBI.

I told him I needed to talk to someone senior. Now.

A PARKING space was about to open up on Cambridge Street directly in front of the FBI, which is roughly as common as a solar eclipse. I double-parked and waited for the woman in the Buick, who’d just switched on her engine, to pull out.

But she was taking her time. First she had to touch up her lipstick; then she had to make a phone call. I allowed her ten more seconds before I gave up.

In the meantime, I called Marcus. “Marshall, what did the police tell you?”

“The police? Oh, you know, the usual nothing. If she hasn’t turned up by tonight, I can file a missing-persons report.”

“Well, we’re not waiting.”

“Do you know anything?”

“No,” I said flatly. “I’ll tell you as soon as I do.”

I gave up on the woman in the Buick and drove on.

15.

The FBI’s Boston field office is located in One Center Plaza, part of the hideous Government Center complex, which some architects praise as “imposing” but most Bostonians consider a blight, a concrete scar on the face of our beautiful city. The only positive thing I can say about Government Center is that it once inspired a decent song by the proto-punk band the Modern Lovers.

When I got out of the elevator on the sixth floor, I saw a huge gold FBI seal on the wall and a Ten Most Wanted poster. In a small waiting area were a metal detector gate and a portable baggage X-ray machine, neither in use. A couple of receptionists sat behind bulletproof glass.

I pushed my driver’s license into a slot like a bank teller’s, and they made me surrender my BlackBerry. In exchange they gave me a badge that said ESCORT REQUIRED in red.

One of the women behind the glass spoke into a phone and told me someone would be out in a few minutes.

I waited. There was nothing to look at but a photo of the president, in a frame that hung askew on the wall, and an array of pamphlets advertising careers in the FBI. No magazines or newspapers. Without my BlackBerry I couldn’t check my e-mail or call anyone.

I waited some more.

After half an hour I went back to the lady behind the glass and asked her whether I’d been forgotten. She apologized, assured me I hadn’t been, but gave no explanation.

When they make you wait ten or fifteen minutes, it’s probably because a meeting is running late. When you’re past the forty-five-minute mark, they’re sending you a message.

It was close to an hour before the FBI guy emerged.

He wasn’t what I expected. He was a hulking guy who looked like he spent a lot of time pumping iron. He was entirely bald, the kind of shiny bald that takes work, requires a lot of shaving and waxing or whatever. He wore a knockoff Rolex, a gray suit that was too short in the sleeves, a white shirt too tight at the neck, and a regimental striped tie.

“Mr. Heller?” he said in a deep and rumbling voice. “Gordon Snyder.”

He offered me a hand as huge and leathery as an old baseball mitt, and shook way too hard. “Assistant Special Agent in Charge,” he added.

That meant he was one of the top guys in the FBI’s Boston office, reporting directly to the Special Agent in Charge. I had to give credit to my philandering congressman from Sarasota.

Snyder pushed the door open, then led me down a blank white corridor to his outer office, where a weary-looking secretary didn’t even look up from her computer as we passed. His office was large and overlooked Cambridge Street. A long desk, two computer monitors, a large flat-screen TV with the sound off, set to CNN. A round glass-topped conference table and a red leatherette couch. Two flags behind his desk on either side, the U.S. flag and the FBI’s light blue one. By government standards, this was an Architectural Digest spread.

He sat behind his perfectly clean glass-topped desk and hunched his shoulders. “I understand you work in the private sector these days, Mr. Heller.”

“Right.” I suppose that was his not-so-subtle way of letting me know he’d read a dossier on me.

“So what can I do for you?”

“I’m helping a friend look for his daughter,” I said.

He furrowed his brows sympathetically. “What’s the girl’s name?”

“Alexa Marcus.”

He nodded. The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

“Her father is Marshall Marcus. Hedge-fund guy in Boston.”

“How old is she?”

“Seventeen.”

He nodded again, shrugged. “And why’s this a matter for the FBI?”

“Given her father’s wealth and prominence-”

“She’s been kidnapped?”

“Possibly.”

“Well, is there a ransom demand?”

“Not yet. But given the circumstances and her own history-”

“So you’re saying the father’s concerned his daughter might have been kidnapped.”

There was something strange about Snyder’s expression. A look of confusion so exaggerated it was almost comic. Or maybe sardonic. “Huh. See, what baffles me, Mr. Heller, is why the Boston police never reached out to us.”

“They sure should have.”

“I know, right? Normally that’s the first thing they’d do, in a case like this. Kidnappings are FBI business. Gotta wonder why not.”

I shrugged. “Well, whatever the reason, if you could arrange to ping her phone-”

But Snyder wasn’t finished yet. “I wonder if the reason they never reached out to us,” he said with careful emphasis, “is that no one notified them about the missing girl in the first place. You think that might explain it?” He clasped his hands, looked down at his desk and then up at me. “See, Marshall Marcus never called it in to them. Interesting, isn’t it? You’d think he’d be all over the police and the FBI to locate his daughter, wouldn’t you? If it was my daughter, I wouldn’t wait two seconds. Would you?” His eyes pierced mine, his upper lip curled in disgust.

“He called the police,” I said again. “A couple of hours ago. Might not even be logged in yet.”

He shook his head and said firmly, “Never happened.”

“You have bad information.”

“We have excellent information on Marcus,” he said. “We know for a fact that neither he nor his wife placed a call to the police. Not from any of his four home landlines. Neither of his two cell phones. Nor his wife’s cell phone. Nor any landline at Marcus Capital.”

I said nothing.

He gave me a long, grave look. “That’s right. We’ve had Marshall Marcus under court-ordered surveillance for quite some time now. As I’m sure he knows. Did he send you here, Mr. Heller?”

Gordon Snyder’s eyes were small and deep-set, which made them look beady and insectlike. “Please don’t bother trying to deny the fact that you met with Marcus at his house in Manchester this morning, Heller. Is this why you’re here? Acting as his agent? Trying to check up on us, see what we’ve got on him?”

“I came here because a girl’s life may be in danger.”

“This is the same girl who had to be sent away to a special disciplinary school because of repeated behavior problems at her private school?”

I tried to keep my voice controlled, but it was all I could do not to lose it. “That’s right. After she was abducted. Stuff like that can really screw with your head. You don’t get it, do you? We’re on the same side here.”

“You’re working for Marcus, right?”

“Yeah, but-”

“Then we’re on opposite sides. We clear?”

16.

Alexa felt her heart thud faster and faster. She could hear it. In the terrible silence, where she could even hear her own eyelids blink shut, her heartbeat was like a kettledrum. She felt a prickly heat and a bone-deep chill at the same time, and she began to shiver uncontrollably.

“You can hear me, Alexa, yes?” said the tinny voice.

A wash of acid scalded her esophagus. She gagged, retched, felt as if she were going to expel her stomach through her mouth. A little vomit splashed on her damp shirt, settled back down her throat.

She needed to sit upright to empty her mouth, but she couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t raise her head more than a few inches. She couldn’t even turn to the side. She was trapped here.

She couldn’t move.

Now she was gagging from the vomit that had backwashed down her throat.

“Please take care of yourself,” the voice said. “We cannot open your coffin if something happens to you.”

“Coffin…” she gasped.

“There is no reason for you to die. We don’t want you to die. We only want you to convince your father to cooperate with us.”

“How much money do you want?” she whispered. “Just tell me what you want and my father will give it to you.”

“Why do you think we want money, Alexa? And even if we did want money, your father has nothing.”

“My father is… he has an obscene amount of money, okay? He can pay you anything you want. He’ll give it all to you, everything he has, if you please please please let me out now.”

“Alexa, now you must listen to me very, very carefully, because your survival depends on it.”

She swallowed. A lump had lodged in her throat.

“I’m listening,” she whispered.

“I can’t hear you.”

She tried to speak louder. “I’m-I’m listening.”

“Good. Now, Alexa? I have already told you how to relieve yourself. Now we must talk about your breathing. Okay? You are listening?”

She shuddered and moaned, “Please…”

“I want you to know that you have air in your coffin, but it is not so much.”

“Not.. so much?” she whispered.

“Listen closely. If we just put you in the casket and sealed it and put it in the ground you would not last half of an hour. But we know this is not enough time for you.”

She heard “in the ground” and she bit her lower lip so hard she felt the blood start to trickle. “The ground?” she whispered.

“Yes. You are in a steel casket far below the ground. You are buried under ten feet of earth. Alexa, you have been buried alive. But I’m sure you already know this.”

Something exploded in her brain: bright sparkles of light. She screamed with vocal cords so raw that the only sound that came out was a wheezing gasp, but in the darkness and the absolute silence it was thunderously loud.

17.

A fluorescent orange parking ticket was tucked under the Defender’s windshield wipers. Damn Snyder. If he hadn’t been playing his power games and kept me waiting so long, the time on the meter wouldn’t have run out. I felt like sending him the bill.

I had my BlackBerry out, about to call Marcus, when I heard a female voice behind me: “Nico?”

The nickname that hardly anyone used anymore except a few people I knew in D.C. a long time ago.

I sensed her, maybe even smelled her, before she touched my shoulder. Without even looking around, I said, “Diana?”

“You still have the Defender, I see,” she said. “I like that. You don’t change much, do you?”

“Hey,” I said, and I gave her a hug. For a moment I didn’t know whether to kiss her on the mouth-those days were long gone, after all-but she offered me her cheek. “You look great.”

I wasn’t lying. Diana Madigan had on tight jeans and worn brown cowboy boots and an emerald green top that emphasized the swell of her breasts and brought out her amazing pale green eyes. Statistically, it turns out that green eyes occur in less than two percent of the global population.

But that wasn’t the only thing about her that was rare. I’d never met a woman quite like her. She was tough and empathic and elegant. And beautiful. She had a taut, lithe body with a head of crazy wavy hair that obeyed its own laws of physics. It was light honey brown with auburn highlights. Her nose was strong yet delicate, with slightly flared nostrils. The only sign of the years that had passed were the faint laugh lines etched around her eyes.

We hadn’t seen each other in five or six years, since she was transferred from the FBI’s Washington Field Office to Seattle and declared she didn’t want a long-distance relationship. Ours had been casual-not Friends With Benefits, exactly, but no pressure, no expectations. Not a gateway drug that would lead inexorably to a long-term addiction. This was the way she wanted it, and given how long my work hours were and how much I traveled, I was fine with the arrangement. I enjoyed her company and she enjoyed mine.

Still, when I got a call from Diana telling me that she’d moved to Seattle, I quickly went from baffled to wounded. I cared for her deeply, and I was surprised she didn’t feel the same. I’m not used to women walking away from me, but this wasn’t just a male ego thing. I was disappointed in myself for having misread her so badly. Until then I’d always considered my ability to read others one of my natural talents.

She wasn’t the type to insist on a Deep Talk, like so many women. In that way, her emotional architecture resembled mine. So the end of my relationship with Diana Madigan went into my mental cold-case file.

But I’ve always found unsolved cases irresistible.

“I look like a wreck, and you know it,” she said. “I’m just getting off the night shift, and on my way home.”

“Since when do you work nights?”

“I’ve been up all night texting predators, pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“Yeah? What a coincidence. Me too.”

“This one sicko is fifty-one,” she said, ignoring me. Her work was something she never joked about. “We arranged to meet at a motel in Everett. Will he be surprised.”

“So you’re still working CARD?”

“Believe it or not.”

CARD stood for the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment unit. It was heart-wrenching work. The things she saw: I never knew how she could keep doing it. I thought by now she’d have burned out.

She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and I could only assume she didn’t have kids either. I wondered whether she ever would, having seen what could happen to them.

“Why don’t I give you a lift home,” I said.

“How do you know I don’t have my car here?”

“Because you’d have parked in the underground garage like all FBI employees do. Plus, you’d be carrying your car keys in your left hand. Don’t forget, I know you.”

She looked away. Embarrassed? Unreadable, in any case. As always, the emotional equivalent of Kryptonite. “My apartment’s in the South End. I was going to take the T.”

I opened the passenger-side door for her.

18.

“So now the next shift takes over texting your predators?” I said.

“We can’t do that,” Diana said. “Perps can sometimes sense a change in respondents. Even in short message texts there can be subtle nuances in tone and rhythm.”

As I drove I caught the faintest whiff of her perfume. It was something I’d never smelled on another woman: rose and violet and cedar, sophisticated and haunting and unforgettable.

Neuroscientists tell us that nothing brings back the past as quickly and powerfully as a smell. Apparently the olfactory nerve arouses something in the limbic center of your brain where you store long-term memories on your mental hard drive.

Diana’s perfume brought back a rush of memories. Mostly happy ones.

“How long have you been in Boston?” I asked.

“A little over a year. I heard through the grapevine you might be here. Did Stoddard send you here to open a satellite office or something?”

“No, I’m on my own now.” I wondered whether she’d been asking around about me, and I suppressed a smile.

“You like it?”

“It would be perfect if the boss weren’t such a hard-ass.”

She laughed ruefully. “Nick Heller, company man.”

“You said Pembroke Street, right?”

“Right. Off Columbus Ave. Thanks for doing this.”

“My pleasure.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about Spike,” she said.

“Spike?”

“Gordon Snyder. Spike’s his childhood nickname. He’s spent his entire life trying to make people forget it.”

“Spike?”

“Don’t ever tell him I told you. You promise?”

“I can think of some better nicknames for him than Spike,” I said. “None of them very nice. So how did you know I met with him?”

She shrugged. “I saw you storm out. Looked like it didn’t go too well.”

“Did he tell you what we talked about?”

“Sure.”

I wondered whether she’d followed me out too. Maybe this meeting wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe she heard I was in the building and wanted to say hi.

Maybe that was all she wanted.

I dropped another note into the cold-case file marked MADIGAN, DIANA.

“So what’s with his fixation on Marshall Marcus?”

“Marcus is his great white whale.”

“But why?”

“Guys like that, the more elusive the target, the more obsessed they become. That may sound familiar, Nico.”

Tell me about it, I thought. “Well, he seemed a whole lot more interested in taking down Marcus than finding his daughter.”

“Maybe because he’s in charge of financial crimes.”

“Aha.”

“I have to say, I don’t understand why you were meeting with the head of the financial crimes unit if you were looking for a missing girl.”

I was beginning to wonder the same thing. “That was the name I was given.”

“Is Marshall Marcus a friend of yours?”

“Friend of the family.”

“Friend of your father’s?”

“My mother worked for him,” I said. “And I like his kid.”

“How much do you know about him?”

“Not enough, I guess. Apparently you guys are investigating him for something. What can you tell me about him?”

“Not much.”

“Not much because you don’t know? Or because he’s the subject of an FBI probe?”

“Because it’s a sealed investigation. And I’m on the other side of the firewall.”

I pulled up in front of her narrow bow-front brownstone, double-parking in front of a space easily big enough for the Defender to fit.

“Well, thanks again,” she said, opening the door.

“Hold on. I need to ask you a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“You think you can put in a request to locate Alexa Marcus’s cell phone?”

“I-that’s a little complicated. It’s not so easy to do an end run around Snyder. What makes you think something happened to her?”

I was about to answer when she looked around and said, “Look, if you want, you can come up for a sec, explain this all to me.”

I shrugged, playing it cool. “Hell, seems a shame to waste a perfectly good parking space,” I said.

19.

Her apartment, on the second floor, wasn’t very big. It couldn’t have been much more than seven or eight hundred square feet. Yet it didn’t feel small. It felt lush and rich and textured. The walls were painted various shades of chocolate brown and earth tones. It was furnished with what looked like stuff from flea markets. But every single piece of furniture, every object, every strange iron lamp or tapestry-covered pillow or copper picture frame, had been carefully selected.

She pointed me to a big overstuffed corner sofa while she made coffee for me-freshly ground beans, a French press-and served it in a big mug that looked hand-painted. It was dark and strong and perfect. She didn’t have any, though, because she needed to sleep. She fixed herself a glass of sparkling water with some lime squeezed into it.

She had music playing softly in the background, a simple and infectious tune, a gentle guitar, highly syncopated. A smoky female voice singing in Portuguese and then English, a lilting song about a stick and a stone and a sliver of glass, the end of despair, the joy in your heart.

The lilting voice was singing in Portuguese now: É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho… um pouco sozinho. I didn’t know what the words meant, but I liked the way they sounded.

“Who’s singing?” I said. She’d always loved female vocalists-Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Judy Collins. All the greats, all of them different.

“Susannah McCorkle. ‘The Waters of March.’ It’s an amazing rendition, isn’t it? The more you listen to it, the more its layers unfold. It’s casual and easygoing and then it just gets deeper and deeper and more soulful.”

I grunted agreement.

A woman invites you up to her apartment, you usually know what to expect. But not in this case. We’d both moved on. We’d gone from Friends With Benefits to Just Friends.

I had plenty of friends. But there was only one Diana.

And being Just Friends didn’t change the way I felt about her. It didn’t make her any less attractive to me. It didn’t keep me from watching her from behind, appreciating the curve of her waist as it met her shapely butt. It didn’t make me admire her less or find her any less fascinating. It didn’t diminish the strength of her magnetic field.

The damn woman had some kind of built-in tractor beam. It wasn’t fair.

But we were here to talk about Alexa Marcus, and I was determined to respect the implicit boundaries. I told her what little I knew about what had happened to Alexa, and about Taylor Armstrong, her Best Friend Forever.

“I hate to say it, but Snyder has a point,” she said. “It hasn’t even been twelve hours, right? So she met a guy and went home with him and she’s sleeping it off in some BU dorm. That’s entirely possible, right?”

“Possible, sure. Not likely.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, it’s not like a girl her age to go dark, go off the grid. She’d have checked in with her friends. These girls are constantly texting each other. They work their little mobile phones like speed typists.”

“She’s an overprotected girl with a troubled home life, and she’s testing the limits,” Diana said. She was sitting in an easy chair set at a right angle to the matching couch, her legs crossed. She’d removed her cowboy boots. Her toenails were painted deep oxblood red. The only makeup she had on was lip gloss. Her skin was translucent. She took a long drink of sparkling water, from a funky handblown blue glass tumbler.

“I don’t think you really believe that,” I said. “With the kind of work you do.”

The shape of her mouth gradually changed, so subtly that you’d have to know her well to see it. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was playing devil’s advocate. Maybe trying to see it the way Snyder sees it. Given what the girl’s gone through-that attempted abduction a few years ago-she’s not likely to go home with a strange guy no matter how much she’s drunk. She’s always going to be nervous.”

“It wasn’t an attempted abduction,” I said. “She was abducted. Then released.”

“And they never found out who did it?”

“Right.”

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“No ransom demand.”

“None.”

“They just… grabbed her, drove her around for a few hours, and then released her? All that risk of exposure with no payoff?”

“Apparently so.”

“And you believe this?”

“I have no reason not to. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Alexa about it.”

She leaned back in her chair, looked up at the ceiling. Her jawline was sharp, her neck swanlike. “If her father secretly paid a ransom and didn’t want to tell anyone, would she really know?”

She was smart. I’d forgotten how smart. “If he had a reason to keep it secret, maybe not. But that was never the sense I got.”

“Maybe he doesn’t tell you everything.”

“Maybe there’s something you’re not telling.”

She looked away. There was something. After a moment she said, “I have to tread really carefully here.”

“I understand.” I took another sip and set the mug down on the coffee table, which was old and ornately carved from weathered teak.

“I know I can trust your discretion.”

“Always.”

Her eyes seemed to be focused on some middle distance. They kept moving down and to the right, which meant that she was internally debating something. I waited. If I pushed too hard, she’d close right up.

She turned to me. “You know I’d never divulge confidential details of an ongoing investigation, and I’m not going to start now. No leaks, no favors. I’ve never worked that way.”

“I know.”

“So the speculation seems to be that Marshall Marcus is laundering money for some very bad guys.”

“Laundering money? That’s ridiculous. The guy’s a billionaire. He doesn’t need to launder money. Maybe he’s managing money for some questionable clients. But that’s not the same thing as laundering it.”

She shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I hear. And I should also warn you: Gordon Snyder is not a guy you want for an enemy.”

“Some people say that about me.”

“That’s also true. But just… watch out for the guy. If he thinks you’re working against him, against his case, he’ll come gunning for you.”

“Oh?”

“He won’t break the law. But he’ll go right up to the edge. He’ll use every legal tool he has. Nothing gets in his way.”

“Consider me warned.”

“Okay. Now, do you have a picture of Alexa?”

“Sure,” I said, reaching into my breast pocket for one of the photos Marcus had given me. “But why?”

“I need to see her face.”

She came over and sat next to me on the couch, and I felt my heart speed up a little and I could feel the heat from her body. Another song was playing now: Judy Collins’s haunting ballad “My Father.” I handed her a picture of Alexa in her field hockey uniform, her blond hair pulled back in a headband, cheeks rosy and healthy, blue eyes sparkling.

“Pretty,” she said. “She looks like she’s got fight.”

“She does. She’s had a rough patch, last few years.”

“Not an easy age. I hated being seventeen.”

Diana never talked much about growing up, besides the fact that she was raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, where her father was with the U.S. Marshals Service and was killed in the line of duty when she was a teenager. After that her mother moved them to Sedona and opened a New Age jewelry and crystal shop.

I noticed her body shifting slightly toward me. “You know, I recognize that shirt,” she said. “Didn’t I give it to you?”

“You did. I haven’t taken it off since.”

“Good old Nico. You’re the one fixed point in a changing age.”

“Sherlock Holmes, right?”

She gave me one of her inscrutable smiles. “All right, I’ll put in a request to AT &T. I’ll find a way to push it through.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Look, it’s not about you. Or us. It’s about the girl. As far as I’m concerned, Alexa Marcus is legally a minor, and she may be in some kind of trouble, and that’s all I need to hear.”

“So does this make it officially an FBI matter?”

“Not necessarily. Not yet, anyway. But if I can help out on this, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks.” A long, awkward silence followed. Neither one of us was the type to mull over every slight, to pick at emotional scabs. Yet at the same time we were both blunt-spoken. And there we were, sitting in her apartment, just the two of us, and if ever there was a time to talk about the elephant in the room, this was it.

“So how come-” I began, but stopped. How come you never told me you were posted to Boston? I wanted to say. But I didn’t want it to sound like a reproach. Instead, I told her: “Well, same here. You ever need anything, I’ll be there. Right on your doorstep. Like a box from Zappos.”

She smiled and turned to look at me, but as soon as I met those green eyes and felt her breath on my face, my lips were on hers. They were warm and soft and her mouth tasted of lime, and I couldn’t resist exploring it.

A phone started ringing.

With my hands drifting to her hips, almost involuntarily, I was probably the first to notice her vibrating BlackBerry.

Diana pulled away. “Hold on, Nico,” she said, drawing her BlackBerry from the holster on her belt.

She listened. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right in.”

“What is it?”

“My predator,” she said. “He’s been texting me again. I think he’s getting a little suspicious. He wants to change our meeting time. They need me back at work. I’m-I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” I said.

She was on her feet, looking for her keycard and her house keys. “What the hell did we just do?” she said, not looking at me.

“What we just did-I don’t know, but-”

“I’ll let you know if I get anything back on that iPhone,” she said.

“Let me drive you back.”

Suddenly she was all business. She shook her head and said firmly, “My car’s right here.”

It felt like jumping out of a sauna into four feet of snow.

20.

Next, I drove over to the foot of Beacon Hill and pulled into the circular drive in front of the Graybar Hotel, the last place I knew Alexa had been.

You’d think most people would feel uneasy about spending the night in a hotel that used to be a prison. But the developers of the Graybar had done a remarkable job of converting the old Boston House of Corrections. It was once a grim, hulking, black monstrosity, filthy and overcrowded, the riots legendary. When Roger and I were kids and Mom drove us on Storrow Drive past the prison, we used to try to catch a glimpse of the inmates in their cell windows.

Personally, I don’t believe that buildings store negative energy, but the developers wanted to be safe, so they brought in a group of Buddhist monks to burn sage and chant prayers and cleanse the place of any bad karma.

The monks seemed to have missed a spot, though. The negative energy at the front desk was so thick I felt like pointing a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol at the supercilious front-desk clerk just to get his attention. He seemed to be caught up in a conversation about Jersey Shore with a female desk clerk. Plus the music in the lobby was ear-splittingly loud. Fortunately, my weapon was in my gun safe at the office.

I cleared my throat. “Can someone call Naji, please? Tell him it’s Nick Heller.” Naji was the hotel’s security director.

The guy sullenly picked up his phone and spoke softly into it. “He’ll be up soon,” he said. He had artfully messy hair with a lot of gel in it. His hair half covered his eyes. He had groovy day-old facial stubble. He wore a black suit that was too tight and too short in the arms, with high armholes and lapels about half an inch wide, like he’d borrowed it from Pee-wee Herman.

I stood at the desk, waiting. He went back to arguing about Snooki and The Situation. He noticed me out of the corner of his eye and turned around again, saying with annoyance, “Um, it might be a while?”

So I strolled through the lobby. I saw a sign for Slammer in a brass standing frame holder in front of an ancient-looking elevator. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and looked around. Flat-screen TVs mounted on the brick walls, all tuned to the same Fox News show. Celebrity mug shots on the walls, too-Jim Morrison, Michael Jackson, O. J. Simpson, Janis Joplin, Eminem, even Bill Gates when he was a teenager. Everyone but my father, it seemed.

Leather couches and banquettes. A very long bar. Lights in the floors. A black iron railing around an atrium three stories high. At night this place was probably impressive, but in the unforgiving light of day it was drab and disappointing, like a magician’s stage props seen up close.

There were a fair number of security cameras, mostly the standard low-profile shiny black domes mounted on the ceiling. A few were camouflaged as spotlights-you could tell because the “bulbs,” actually camera lenses, were a different color. The ones behind the bar were there to discourage employees from pilfering cash or stealing bottles. The cameras in the lounge area were more discreetly concealed, probably because the bar patrons might have gotten uncomfortable if they knew their every embarrassing move was being recorded. Though it occurred to me that closed-circuit cameras worked perfectly with the prison décor.

When I returned to the front desk, a very good-looking dark-haired guy was waiting for me. Classic Arab facial features: olive complexion, dark eyes, a prominent nose. He wore the same Pee-wee Herman suit, but he’d shaved and combed his hair.

He smiled as I approached. “Mr. Heller?”

“Thanks for meeting me, Naji,” I said.

“Mr. Marcus is a very good friend of the Graybar,” he said. “Anything I can do, please, I am at your service.” Marshall Marcus was not just a “friend” of the hotel’s but one of the original, and biggest, investors. He’d called ahead, as I’d asked.

Naji produced an oblong key fob with a BMW logo at the center: the keyless entry fob to Marcus’s four-year-old M3. This was the “junker” he’d given Alexa to drive. Attached to the keychain was a valet ticket stub.

“Her car was left in our underground parking garage. If you wish, I will take you there myself.”

“So she never claimed the car?”

“Apparently not. I made sure no one touched the vehicle, in case you needed to run prints.”

The guy was clearly experienced. “The police might,” I said. “Any idea what time she valeted the car?”

“Of course, sir,” Naji said, and he took out a valet ticket. This was a typical five-part perforated form. The bottom two sections were gone, one presumably handed to Alexa when she’d dropped the car off. Each remaining section was time-stamped 9:37. That was the time Alexa had arrived at the Graybar and given her dad’s BMW to the valet.

“I’d like to look at the surveillance video,” I said.

“In the parking garage, do you mean? Or at the valet station?”

“Everywhere,” I said.

THE GRAYBAR’S security command center was a small room in the business offices in the back. It was outfitted with twenty or so wall-mounted monitors showing views of the exterior, the lobby, the kitchen, the halls outside the restrooms. A chunky guy with a goatee was sitting there, watching the screens. Actually, he was reading the Boston Herald, but he hastily put it down when Naji entered.

“Leo,” Naji said, “can you pull up last night’s video feeds from cameras three through five?”

Naji and I stood behind Leo as he clicked a mouse and opened several windows on a computer screen.

“Start from around nine thirty,” I said.

There seemed to be at least three cameras positioned in the valet area in front of the hotel. The video footage was digital and sharp. As Leo advanced the frames at double and triple speed, the cars pulled up faster and faster. Guests zipped out of their cars at a Keystone Kops pace, touching their hair, patting their jackets. At nine thirty-five a black BMW parked and Alexa got out.

The valet handed her a ticket, and Alexa joined a long line waiting to get into the lobby as the valet drove off with her car.

“Can we zoom in?” I said.

I often enjoy looking at surveillance video. It’s like being in an episode of CSI. Unfortunately, in real life, when you enlarge part of a video on a computer monitor, you don’t hear any whooshing sounds or high-pitched beeping.

On TV and in the movies, all techies have an amazing ability to zoom in on a fuzzy image and magically sharpen it using some mythical digital enhancement “algorithm” so they can read the label on a prescription bottle reflected in someone’s eye or something.

Leo wasn’t that good.

He moved the mouse, clicked a few keys. I saw Alexa hugging another girl who was already in line.

Taylor Armstrong.

They began talking animatedly, touching each other’s sleeves the way girls do, occasionally glancing around, maybe scoping out some guy.

“Can we follow her into the hotel?” I asked.

“Of course. Leo, pull up nine and twelve,” Naji said.

From another angle, just inside the lobby, I could see the girls approach the elevator. The image was fairly smooth. Probably the standard thirty frames per second.

Then the elevator doors came open and the two girls got in. Abruptly, Alexa got out. Taylor remained.

Alexa was claustrophobic. She couldn’t bear to be in enclosed spaces, especially elevators.

“Ah,” I said. “I want to see where that one’s going, the one who didn’t get in the elevator.”

From another camera, probably mounted in the ceiling of the second floor, I watched Alexa climb the stairs.

Another camera showed her arriving at the fourth-floor bar, where she met up with Taylor.

“I like to take the stairs too,” Naji said helpfully. “It’s good exercise.”

We continued watching as they found some chairs. For a long stretch, nothing much happened. The bar got increasingly crowded. A waitress in a skimpy outfit, her boobs almost popping out of her low-cut bra, took their order. The girls talked.

A guy approached.

“Move in on this,” Naji said to Leo. Now he was joining the effort.

The guy had his shirttails untucked. He looked to be in his early twenties. Blond, ruddy face, an overbite. He sure didn’t look Spanish. Alexa smiled, but Taylor didn’t look at him.

After a few seconds, he left. I actually felt sorry for the kid.

The girls kept talking. They laughed, and I surmised it was about the guy with the untucked shirt.

“You can fast-forward,” I said.

Leo clicked on 3x mode, and the video sped up. Fast, jerky movements like in an old silent film. Laugh drink, laugh drink, smile. Alexa took out something and held it up. A phone, maybe? An iPhone, I realized. Taking a picture, probably.

No: She held it near her mouth. Taylor laughed. They were playing around. Taylor grabbed it, and she too put it to her mouth. They laughed again. Taylor handed it back, and Alexa put the phone into a front pocket of her leather blazer. I made a mental note of that.

Another guy approached. This one was dark-haired. Mediterranean, maybe Italian, maybe Spanish. This time the girls both smiled. Their body language was open; they looked at him, smiled. They were more receptive. This was a side to Taylor I hadn’t seen-no sullen pout. Lively and animated.

“Is there a different angle on this?” I said.

Leo opened another window on his monitor, and then I could see the man’s face in profile. He zoomed in for a close-up.

Spanish or Portuguese. Maybe South American. In any case, a handsome guy. He appeared to be in his early to mid thirties. Well groomed, expensively dressed.

The guy pulled a chair over and sat down, apparently having been invited. He signaled for a waitress.

“This man, he comes here often,” Naji said.

I turned to him. “Oh?”

“I recognize him. The regular patrons, I get to know their faces.”

“What’s his name?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

He was withholding something.

I turned back to the monitor. The guy and the two girls were talking and laughing. The waitress came, took their drink orders. They talked and laughed some more. The girls seemed to be enjoying his company.

The man was sitting next to Taylor, but didn’t pay her much attention. He was much more interested in Alexa. He kept leaning toward her, conversing with her, barely giving Taylor a glance.

Interesting, I thought. Taylor was at least as pretty as Alexa, if sluttier-looking; Alexa seemed somehow more elegant, pure.

But Alexa’s father was a billionaire.

Yet how would he know that-unless he’d picked out his target in advance?

The drinks came, served in big martini glasses.

They drank some more, and after a while both girls got up. The man remained at the table by himself. He looked around the bar idly.

“Can we follow the girls?” I said.

Leo switched to an already open window, made it bigger. The girls were walking together, holding on to each other, both looking a little tipsy.

“Keep on them,” I said.

Leo made the window on the computer screen bigger still. I watched them enter the ladies’ room.

“No cameras inside the restrooms?” I asked.

Naji smiled. “That’s illegal, sir.”

“I know. But I had to ask.”

Then something in the other computer window caught my eye. The camera in which you could see the Latin man sitting alone.

He was doing something.

In one quick motion, he reached out a hand and slid Alexa’s half-full martini glass across the table toward himself.

“What the hell?” I said. “Enlarge this window, could you?”

Once Leo did so, we could see everything he was doing. The man slipped his right hand into his jacket. He glanced around. Then, nonchalantly, he dropped something into Alexa’s martini glass.

He took the swizzle stick from his own drink and stirred hers, apparently dissolving whatever he’d just put in. Then he pushed her cocktail back in front of Alexa’s place.

The whole process took around ten seconds, maybe fifteen.

“Oh, God,” I said.

21.

“He put something in her drink,” Naji said.

I guess someone had to speak the obvious.

“Betcha it’s Special K,” Leo said. “Or Liquid X.”

In the other window on the monitor, the girls emerged from the restroom, walked down the hall, and returned to their table.

Alexa took a drink.

More laughter, more conversation. A few minutes later, Taylor stood up, said something. Alexa looked upset, but the guy didn’t. Taylor left.

Alexa stayed.

She drank some more, and the two of them laughed and talked.

It was only a few minutes before Alexa began to exhibit signs of serious intoxication. It wasn’t just the alcohol. She slumped back in her chair, her head lolled to one side, smiling gamely. But she looked sick.

The man signaled again for the waitress, then seemed to think better of it. Instead, he pulled out a billfold, put down some cash, then helped Alexa to her feet. She looked as if she could barely stand on her own.

“Cash,” I said, mostly to myself.

But Naji understood. “He always pays in cash.”

“That’s why you don’t know his name?”

He nodded, started to speak, but hesitated.

“You know something.”

“I can’t say for sure, but I think he may be a dealer.”

“Drugs.”

Naji nodded. He quickly added, “But he never deals here. Never. If he ever did, we would ban him.”

“Of course.”

This wasn’t good.

Now the Spanish guy turned back, took Alexa’s handbag from the floor, then walked her toward the elevator. He pushed the button. She hung on his arm. A minute later the elevator arrived and they got in.

She had an elevator phobia, but I doubted she knew where she was.

THE LOBBY camera captured the guy escorting Alexa toward the front door, almost dragging her. In his left hand he held her handbag. She was stumbling. People entering the hotel saw this and smiled. They probably figured the guy’s girlfriend had had too much to drink.

In one of the exterior cameras, Alexa appeared to be almost asleep standing up in front of the hotel’s entrance. The man handed a claim check to the valet.

Five minutes later, an older black Jaguar arrived: an XJ6, it looked like, from the mid-1980s. A classic, but not in very good shape. The rear quarter panel was dented, and there were dings and scrapes all over.

The dealer helped Alexa into the back seat, where she lay flat.

My stomach clenched. The car pulled away and out of the circular drive.

“I need another angle,” I said.

“Certainly, sir,” Naji said. “His face?”

“No,” I said. “His license plate.”

OF COURSE, the plate number would be recorded on the man’s valet ticket, but I wanted to be absolutely certain. A camera directly in front of the valet station had captured his license plate with perfect clarity.

The name on the ticket was Costa. He’d arrived at 9:08, before the girls did.

Naji burned a bunch of still frames of Alexa and Taylor with the guy, including close-ups of his face from several different angles, to a CD. I had him make me a couple of copies. Then I borrowed his computer and e-mailed a few of the stills of Costa to Dorothy.

The Defender was parked in one of the short-term spaces out front. I got in and called Dorothy. When she answered, I gave her a quick recap of what I’d seen. Then I read her the license plate number, a Massachusetts tag, and asked her to pull up the vehicle owner’s name and address and anything else she could get. I gave her the name Costa, warned her it was probably fake, and asked her to check her e-mail. She already had. I told her that the hotel’s security director suspected he was a narcotics dealer.

Then I pulled out of the hotel’s front lot. About three blocks away I suddenly had another thought, and I drove back to the hotel. This time I didn’t bother with the groovy kid with the stubble at the reception desk. I walked straight back and found Naji in the hall.

“Sorry,” I said. “One more thing.”

“Of course.”

“The Jaguar,” I said. “The valet records show an arrival time of nine oh eight.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to see all video from the valet station around that time.”

It took Leo no more than a minute to call up the video I wanted: the banged-up Jaguar pulling up to the curb earlier in the evening, and Costa getting out.

Then I saw something I didn’t expect.

Someone getting out of the passenger’s side. A woman.

Taylor Armstrong.

22.

“Alexa,” the voice said, “please do not scream. No one can hear. Do you understand this?”

She tried to swallow.

“You see, when you panic or scream, you hyperventilate, and this only uses up your air supply much quicker.” His accent was thick and crude but his voice was bland and matter-of-fact, and all the more terrifying because of it.

“No no no no no no,” she chanted in a little voice, a child’s voice. And she thought: This is not happening to me. I am not here. This is not real.

“Carbon dioxide poisoning is not pleasant, Alexa. You feel like you are drowning. You will die slowly and painfully and you will go into convulsions as your organs fail one by one. This is not a peaceful death, Alexa. I promise, you do not want to die this way.”

The top of the casket was two or three inches from her face. That was the most horrible thing of all, how close it was.

She gasped desperately for air, but she could only take shallow little breaths. She imagined the tiny space at the very top of her lungs. She thought of the air in her lungs as if it were water steadily rising in some sealed room in a horror movie, the air pocket shrinking to just an inch or two.

She felt her entire body wracked by violent shudders.

She was trapped ten feet underground, under tons of dirt, in this little tiny box in which she could barely move, and the air would soon run out.

Frantically she clawed at the silky fabric directly above her face. Her throbbing bloody fingertips touched the bare cold metal and tore off strips. They hung down and tickled her eyes and cheeks.

Her shuddering was uncontrollable.

“You are listening to me, Alexa?”

“Please,” she whispered. “Please don’t do this. Please.”

“Alexa?” the voice said. “I can see you. A video camera is mounted right over your head. It gives infrared light you cannot see. I can also hear you through the microphone. Everything comes to us over the Internet. And when you speak to your father, he will see and hear you too.”

“Please, let me talk to him!”

“Yes, of course. Very soon. But first let us make sure you know what you must say and how to say it.”

“Why are you doing this?” she cried, barely able to talk through the sobs. “You don’t need to do this.”

“If you say your lines correctly and your father gives us what we want, you will be free in a matter of hours. You will be free, Alexa.”

“He’ll give you anything-please let me out now, oh God, please, what can I possibly do to you?”

“Alexa, you must listen.”

“You can lock me up in a room or a closet if you want. You don’t need to do this, please oh God, please don’t do this…”

“If you do exactly as we ask you will be out of there right away.”

“You are a goddamned monster! Do you know what’s going to happen to you when they catch you? Do you have any idea, you sick goddamned psychopath?”

There was a long silence. She could hear her own breathing, shallow and labored and quick.

She said, “Do you hear me, you creep? Do you know what they’ll do to you?”

More silence.

She waited tensely for his reply.

Had he decided to stop talking?

Only then did she understand how much she depended on the Owl.

The man with the owl tattoo on the back of his head. The Owl was her one and only lifeline to the world. Its power over her was absolute.

She must never again offend the Owl.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

More silence.

She said, “Please, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Please talk to me.”

Nothing.

Oh, God, now she understood that phrase “the silence of the grave.” Absolute silence wasn’t peaceful at all. It was the worst thing in the world.

It was hell.

She shuddered and moaned and cried softly, “I’m sorry. Come back.”

“Alexa,” the voice said finally, and she felt such sweet relief.

“Do you want to cooperate with us?”

She began to weep.

“Oh, I do, I do, please, tell me what you want me to say.”

“Do you understand that it is my decision whether you live or die?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Please, I do. Anything. If you let me out of here I will do anything you want. Anything at all. Anything you want.”

But why was he now saying “I” instead of “we”? What did that mean?

“Alexa, I want you to reach under your mattress. Can you do this?”

“Yes.”

Obediently she lowered both hands to the thin mattress and discovered that it rested on a series of metal bands that ran crosswise, spaced a few inches apart and probably running down the length of the casket. Her hands found a space between the bands and plunged into an open area below. How far down did this space go? Her left hand touched an object, a cluster of objects, and she grasped the cap and narrow neck of what felt like a plastic bottle. There were many. She grabbed one in her left hand and pulled it up and through the space between the bands. A water bottle.

“Yes, very good,” said the voice. “You see I have given you some water. You must be thirsty.”

“Yes, oh God, yes, I am.”

Now that she thought about it, her mouth was completely dry.

“Please to drink,” he said.

She twisted the cap with her other hand, and it came off with a satisfying snap and she put it to her parched lips and drank greedily, spilling some on her face and her shirt, but she didn’t care.

“There is water enough to last you a few days,” the voice said. “Perhaps a week. There are protein bars too, but not so many. Enough for a few days. When the food and water run out, that is all. Then you will starve to death. But before that you will suffocate.”

She kept drinking, swallowing down gulps of air along with the water, quenching a deep thirst she hadn’t been aware of until now.

“Now you must listen to me, Alexa.”

She pulled the bottle away from her mouth, terrified that the Owl would abandon her again. She gasped, “Yes.”

“If you say exactly what I tell you, and your father does exactly what I ask, you will be free from this torture.”

“He’ll give you whatever you want,” she said.

“But are you sure he loves you enough to set you free? Does he love you enough?”

“Yes!” she said.

“Does he love you at all, really? A mother will do anything for her child, but your mother is dead. A child never really knows about his father.”

“He loves me,” she said piteously.

“I guess you will now learn if this is true,” the voice said. “You will learn the answer very quickly. Because if your father does not love you, you will die terribly down there. You will run out of air and you will be dizzy and confused and you will vomit and you will have convulsions and I will watch you die, Alexa. And I will enjoy it.”

“Please don’t please don’t please don’t…”

“I will watch the last minutes of your life, and you know what, Alexa?”

He paused for a long time, and she whimpered like a baby, a small animal.

“Your father will watch the last minutes of your life too. He will try to look away or turn it off but it is human nature-whether he loves you or not, he will not be able to stop watching his only child’s last minutes on this earth.”

23.

After a brief visit to a great old tobacco shop on Park Square, I made a pit stop at home to do some tinkering. I called a friend of mine and asked him to do a very quick job for me. A little while later, my BlackBerry rang.

Without preface, Dorothy said: “The Jaguar is registered to a Richard Campisi of Dunstable Street in Charlestown.”

“Bingo,” I said.

“No bingo. He reported his car stolen over a week ago.”

“I take it you’ve looked at his photo.”

“Of course. And he’s not Costa. Not even close.”

“So our guy stole the car.”

“Looks that way.”

“So he couldn’t be traced, I assume. This isn’t good, Dorothy. It’s been more than twelve hours since she disappeared. No one’s heard from her. No one can reach her. It’s like what happened to her a few years ago, only this time it’s for real.”

“A kidnap for ransom, you think?”

“I hope that’s all it is.”

“You hope it’s a kidnapping?”

“I hope it’s a kidnap for ransom. Because that means she’s alive, and all her dad has to do is pay money. The other possibility…”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know what the other possibility is.”

I called Diana and asked her to put a rush on her request to locate Alexa Marcus’s phone.

THIS TIME the door to Senator Armstrong’s Louisburg Square townhouse was opened by a housekeeper, a plump Filipina in a black dress with white trim and a white apron.

“The senator not here,” she said.

“I’m here to see Taylor, actually.”

“Miss Taylor… she is expecting you?”

“Please tell her it’s Nick Heller.”

She looked uncertain whether to show me in. In the end she closed the front door and asked me to wait outside.

The door opened again five minutes later.

It was Taylor. She looked dressed to go out, her small black handbag slung over her shoulder.

“What?” She said it the way you might talk to some neighborhood kid who’d rung your doorbell as a prank.

“Time for a walk,” I said.

“Is this going to take long?” she said.

“Not long at all.”

HALFWAY DOWN Mount Vernon Street I said, “The guy Alexa left Slammer with last night-what’s his name?”

“I told you, I don’t remember.”

“He never told you his name?”

“If he did, I couldn’t hear it. Anyway, he wasn’t interested in me. He was, like, hitting on Alexa the whole time.”

“So you have no idea what his name is.”

“How many times are you going to ask me? Is that what you came back for? I thought you said you found something.”

“I just wanted to be sure I understood you right. Does your daddy know you got a ride with some guy whose name you don’t even know?”

For a split second I could see the panic in her eyes, but she covered smoothly with a scowl of disbelief. “I didn’t get a ride with him. I got a cab home.”

“I’m not talking about how you got home. I’m talking about how you got to the bar in the first place.”

“I took a cab.” Then she must have remembered about things like taxicab company call records and the like, and she added, “I hailed one on Charles Street.”

“No,” I said softly, “you arrived with him in his Jaguar.”

She did the disbelief-scowl again, but before she could dig herself in deeper, I said, “It’s all on the surveillance video at the hotel. You sure you want to keep lying to me?”

The look of desperation returned to her face, and she didn’t try to conceal it. “Look, I didn’t…” She started off prickly, defiant, but seemed to crumple in front of me. Her voice was suddenly small and high and plaintive. “I swear, I was just trying to help her out.”

24.

“I met this guy at a Starbucks, okay?” Taylor said. “Yesterday afternoon. And he really, like, came on to me.”

She looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I kept my face unreadable.

“We just started talking, and he seemed like a cool guy. He asked if I wanted to go to Slammer with him, and I… I was sort of nervous, ’cause I’d just met him, you know? I said, okay, sure, but I wanted my friend to join us. So it wouldn’t be so intense. Like not really a date, you know?”

“Alexa knew all this?”

She nodded.

“His name?”

A beat. “Lorenzo.”

“Last name?”

“He might have told me, but I don’t remember.”

“So you two came to the Graybar together, and Alexa met you-where? Upstairs in the bar? Or in front of the hotel?”

“In line, in front. There’s always a line there like a mile long.”

“I see.” I let her continue spinning her tale for a while longer. The surveillance video was fresh in my mind: Alexa joining Taylor in line, no guy with her. The guy had approached the two of them in the bar an hour later. Acting as if he’d never met either one of them before.

So: a total setup. He’d pretended to introduce himself to both girls. Taylor had been part of the arrangement.

“You got a smoke?” I said.

She shrugged, took the pack of Marlboros from her handbag.

“Light?” I said.

She shook her head in annoyance, fished around in her handbag, and pulled out the gold Dupont lighter. As I took it from her it slipped out of my hand and clattered to the cobblestones.

“Jesus!” she said.

I picked it up, lighted a cigarette, handed the lighter back. “Thank you. Now, tell me about Lorenzo.”

“What about him?”

“How old?”

“Thirty, thirty-five.”

“What kind of accent?”

“Spanish?”

“Did he give you his cell phone number?”

“No,” she said.

“How’d you feel when he went home with your best friend instead of you?” I said.

She fell silent for a few seconds. I had a feeling she was thinking about how, if there were cameras outside the hotel, there might be cameras inside too. She said, unconvincingly, “He wasn’t my type.”

I’d deliberately led her down Mount Vernon across Charles Street, then left on River Street. I didn’t want to walk down Charles. Not yet.

“Huh. When you met him at Starbucks earlier in the day, you must have been at least intrigued enough to agree to see him again.”

“Yeah, well, he turned out to be kind of, I don’t know, sleazy? Anyway, he was definitely more into Alexa, and I figured, Hey, you go, girl.”

“Very nice of you,” I said acidly. “A good friend.”

“I wasn’t being nice. Just…”

“Reasonable,” I offered.

“Whatever.”

“So when you met Lorenzo at Starbucks, were you sitting at one of those big soft chairs in the window?”

She nodded.

“He just came and sat down next to you?”

She nodded again.

“Which Starbucks was this?”

“The one on Charles Street.” She gave a wave in the direction of Charles, about half a block away.

“Aren’t there two of them on Charles?”

“The one on the corner of Beacon.”

“And you were just sitting alone?” I said. “Sitting by yourself in one of those big soft chairs by the window?”

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like the way I repeated the bit about the big soft chairs. “Yeah. Just sitting there, reading a magazine. What’s your point?”

“Well, what do… What do you know,” I said. “Here we are.”

“What?”

We’d stopped at the corner of Beacon and Charles. Directly across the street was the Starbucks she was talking about. “Take a look,” I said.

“What?”

“No big soft chairs.”

“Well, but-”

“And see? There sure as hell aren’t any chairs in the window. Right?”

She stared, but only for show, because she knew she’d just been caught in another lie. “Look, he was just going to show her a good time,” she said in a flat, emotionless voice. She took out a cigarette and lighted it. She inhaled. “I was doing her a favor. I mean, she’s never even had a serious relationship.”

“Man, what a friend you are,” I said. “I’d hate to be your enemy. You knew Alexa had been abducted once before and was still traumatized by it. Then you meet a guy, or maybe you already knew him, and you set him up with your so-called best friend. A guy you thought was sleazy. A guy who put a date-rape drug in your best friend’s drink, probably with your full knowledge. And abducted her. Maybe killed her.”

A long black limousine pulled up to the red light next to us.

I was pushing her hard, and I knew it would get a reaction out of her.

I just didn’t expect the reaction I got.

She blew out a plume of smoke, then flipped her hair back. “All you can prove is that I went to Graybar with some guy. All that other crap-you’re just guessing.”

The rear passenger’s window in the limousine rolled smoothly down. A man I recognized stared at me, a natty fellow in a tweed jacket with a bow tie and round horn-rimmed glasses. His name was David Schechter. He was a well-known Boston attorney and power broker, a guy who knew all the players, knew which strings to pull to make things happen. He was utterly ruthless. You did not want to get on David Schechter’s bad side.

Next to him in the back seat was Senator Richard Armstrong.

“Taylor,” the senator said, “get in.”

“Senator,” I said, “your daughter is implicated in Alexa Marcus’s disappearance.”

Armstrong’s face didn’t register surprise or dismay. He turned to his attorney, as if deferring.

Taylor Armstrong opened the limo door and got in. I made one last attempt to get through to her. “And I thought you were her best friend,” I said.

“I don’t think I’m going to have a problem finding a new one,” she said with a smile, and I felt a chill.

The limousine had a large spacious interior. Taylor sat in a seat facing her father. Then David Schechter leaned forward and gestured for me to come closer.

“Mr. Heller,” said Schechter, speaking so softly I could barely hear him. A powerful man who was accustomed to getting what he wanted without ever having to raise his voice. “The senator and his daughter do not wish to speak to you again.”

Then he slammed the door and the limo pulled away from the curb and into traffic.

I pinched out my cigarette and tossed it into a trashcan. I’d given up smoking a long time ago and didn’t want to start again.

My BlackBerry started ringing. I pulled it out, saw Marcus’s number. “Nick,” he said. “Oh, thank God.” There was panic in his voice.

“What is it?” I said.

“They have her-they-”

He broke off. Silence. I could hear him breathing.

“Marshall?”

“It’s my baby. My Lexie. They have her.”

“You got a ransom demand?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know-”

“It’s just an e-mail with a link to some-oh, please God, Nick, get out here now.”

I looked at my watch. Soon it would be rush hour. The drive to Manchester would take even longer than usual.

“Did you click on the link?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t open it until we get there.”

“Oh, Jesus, Nick, come out here now. Please.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

25.

There was no day or night. There was no time. There was only the trickle of her sweat down her face and neck. Her rapid breathing, that agonizing shortness of breath, the cold terror that she could never again fill her lungs with air.

The blank nothingness in which her mind raced like a hamster on a wheel.

The wanting to die.

She’d decided she had to kill herself.

This was the first time in her seventeen years that the thought of suicide had ever seriously occurred to her. But now she knew that death was the only way out for her.

When you hyperventilate you will increase the carbon dioxide.

She began panting, breathing as deep and fast as she could. Trying to use up the limited supply of air inside the casket. Panting. She could feel her exhalations settling around her, a warm, humid blanket of carbon dioxide. Keep at it, and maybe she’d pass out.

She began to feel woozy, light-headed. Faint and dizzy.

It was working.

And then she felt something different. A cool ripple of air.

Fresh air. It smelled of pine forest, of distant fires, of diesel and wet leaves.

Seeping in from somewhere. Her right hand felt for the source of the air flow. It was coming from the bottom of the coffin, beneath the metal support bands under the mattress, down where the bottles of water and the protein bars were. She touched the floor of the casket, her fingers tracing the outline of a round perforated metal disc maybe an inch in diameter.

An air intake.

She could hear a distant hum. No, not a hum, really. The far-off sound of a… a garbage disposal? Then something that sounded like a car engine. The regular chugging of pistons pumping. Very fast, far away.

She didn’t know what it was, but she knew it had something to do with this new influx of air. A fan? But more mechanical and sort of bumpy than that.

Air was being circulated.

The Owl had been watching her pathetic efforts. Saw what she was trying to do. And was defeating her.

She couldn’t help herself: She gasped deeply, drank down the cool fresh air as gratefully as she’d swallowed the water from the bottle. The fresh air was keeping her alive.

She couldn’t asphyxiate herself. She couldn’t kill herself.

He’d deprived her of the only power she had.

26.

I picked up Dorothy at the office. We made better time than I expected and got to the security booth at the perimeter of Marcus’s property just before six.

“Whoa,” she said softly as we walked up the porch steps, goggle-eyed at the spread. “And I was just starting to be happy with my apartment.”

Marcus met us at the door. Ashen-faced, he thanked us somberly and showed us in. Belinda rushed up to me in the dimly lit hallway and threw her arms around me, a display of affection I’d never have expected. Her back was bony. I introduced Dorothy. Belinda thanked me profusely, and Marcus just nodded and led us to his study. His house slippers scuffed against the oak floor.

His study was a large, comfortable room, not at all showy. The shades were drawn. The only illumination was a circle of light cast by a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. It sat in the middle of a massive refectory table that served as his desk, carved from ancient oak. The only other objects on the table were a large flat-screen computer monitor and a wireless keyboard, which looked out of place.

He sat in a high-backed tufted black leather chair and tapped a few keys. His hands were trembling. Belinda stood behind him. Dorothy and I stood on either side and watched him open an e-mail message.

“As soon as this came in, I told him to call you,” Belinda said. “I also told him not to do anything until y’all got here.”

“This is my personal e-mail account,” he said quietly. “Not many people have it. That’s the weird thing-how’d they get it?”

Dorothy, wearing red-framed reading glasses on an ornate beaded chain, noticed something else.

“They used a nym,” she said.

“A who?” I said.

“An anonymizer. A disposable anonymous e-mail address. Untraceable.”

The subject heading read “Your Daughter.” The message was brief:

Mr. Marcus:

If you want to see your daughter again, click here:

www.CamFriendz.com

Click on: Private Chat Rooms

Enter in search box: Alexa M.

User name: Marcus

Password: LiveOrDie?

Note: case-sensitive.

You may log in only from your home or office. No other location. We monitor everyone who signs in. If we detect any other incoming IP addresses, including any law enforcement agencies, local or national, all communications will be severed and your daughter will be terminated.

He turned around to look at us. There were deep hollows under his eyes. “Belinda wouldn’t let me click on the link.” He sounded depleted and resigned.

“What’s CamFriendz-dot-com?” Belinda said.

“It’s a live video site,” Dorothy said. “Social networking. Mostly for teens.”

Marcus said, “What should I do?”

“Don’t touch the keyboard,” Belinda said.

“Wait a minute,” Dorothy said. She took out her laptop and hooked in the back of his computer. “Okay.”

“What are you doing?” Belinda said.

“A couple things,” she said. “Screen-capture software so we can record anything they send you. Also, packet-sniffing software so I can log network activity remotely.”

“Are you mad?” Belinda cried. “They say if anyone else tries to look at this, they’re going to cut off all communication! Are you trying to get her killed?”

“No,” Dorothy said, patiently. “All I’m doing is setting up in effect a clone of this computer. I’m not logging in. No one’s going to detect it.”

“Well, you can just look at Marshall’s computer,” Belinda said. “I will not have you compromise Alexa’s safety in any way.”

“They have no way to know what I’m doing,” Dorothy said. I could see her patience was beginning to run out. “Also, we need to make sure they’re not trying to infect this computer with malicious code.”

“What’s the point of that?” Marshall said.

“To take control of your computer,” Dorothy said. “May I?” Her fingers were poised over his keyboard. He nodded, wheeled his chair back to let her at it.

“Don’t touch that!” Belinda said, alarmed.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” I said to her, and I took her out into the hall. In a low voice, I continued, “I’m worried about your husband.”

“You are?”

“He’d be panicking by now if it weren’t for you. You’re his rock. You did the right thing by telling him to call me and by not letting him click on that link.”

She looked pleased.

“And I hate to impose on you further at a time like this,” I said, “but I need you to go into another room and make an evidentiary compilation for me.”

“An… evidentiary…?”

“Sorry, that’s the technical term for an exhaustive description of all potential evidence that might help lead to her whereabouts,” I said. I’d made it up on the spot, but it sounded plausible.

“What sort of evidence?”

“Everything. I mean, what was Alexa wearing when she left. The make and size of her shoes and each item of clothing, her purse, anything she might have been carrying in her purse. You’re far more observant than Marshall, and men never pay attention to that kind of thing anyway. I know it seems tedious, but it’s extremely important, and there’s no one else who can do it. And we need it right away. Within the next hour, if at all possible.”

“Y’all want me to use a computer or a typewriter?”

“Whatever’s fastest for you,” I said.

I went back in. Dorothy had positioned herself in front of Marshall’s computer, standing. She tapped, moved the mouse, and after a minute she said, “Okay, open the hyperlink.”

In a few seconds a new window had opened. It showed a cheesy-looking website with a banner across the top: CAMFRIENDZ-THE LIVE COMMUNITY!

Within it were lots of moving video windows. In some of them were second-tier celebs like Paris Hilton. In others, teenage girls wearing low-cut tank tops and a lot of eye makeup were making provocative poses, and doing suggestive things with their tongues. Some of them had pierced lips.

“What is this?” Marcus said. “Some kind of pornography site?”

“Teenage girls and guys sit in front of the camera on their computer and talk to each other,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes more than talk.”

Dorothy tapped and moused again, entered some text, scrolled down, clicked and clicked some more.

And then a still photo of Alexa popped up.

A school portrait, it looked like, from when she was younger. Her blond hair cut into bangs, a white headband, wearing a plaid jumper, probably a school uniform. Very sweet and innocent. Before the trouble started.

“Oh, my God,” Marcus moaned. “Oh, my God. They put her picture up here where anyone can see it? What-what are they trying to do?”

Green letters at the top of Alexa’s photo said ENTER CHAT.

“Chat?” Marcus said. “What’s this-who am I chatting with? What the hell?”

Dorothy clicked on it, and a log-in window appeared. She entered the user name and password they’d supplied. For a while nothing happened. She sidled over to her laptop, and Marshall and I came closer to the screen to watch.

Then a big window popped up with another still photo of Alexa.

Only this looked like it had been taken recently.

She appeared to be sleeping. Her eyes were closed, with dark smudges of eye makeup that made her look like a raccoon. Her hair was scraggly. She looked terrible.

Then I realized this wasn’t a still photo at all. It was live video.

You could see slight motion as she shifted in her sleep. The streaming video had all the production values of a snuff film: the camera too close to her face, the image grainy and the focus tight, and the light strange, green-saturated, as if taken with an infrared camera.

Indicating that she was in the dark.

A loud metallic voice: “Alexa, wake up! It’s time to say hello to your father.” A man’s voice. A pronounced accent: Eastern European, maybe.

Alexa’s eyes came open, her eyes staring wide, her mouth agape.

Marcus gasped. “That’s her!” he said, probably because he couldn’t think of anything else. Then: “She’s alive. God almighty, she’s alive.”

Alexa’s eyes were shifting back and forth.

Unsettled. Panicky.

Something about her face looked different, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

She said, “Dad?”

Marcus stood up, shouted, “Lexie. Baby! I’m here!”

“She can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.

“Dad?” Alexa said again.

The amplified voice said, “You may speak, Alexa.”

Her words came all in a rush, a high-pitched shriek. “Dad, oh God, please, they’ve got me in this-”

The sound of her voice abruptly cut out and the accented voice said, “Follow the script exactly, Alexa, or you will never talk to your father, or anyone else, again.”

Now she was screaming, her eyes bulging, face flushed, head moving side to side, but there was no sound, and after ten more seconds the window went black.

Marcus said, “No!” and he catapulted himself out of his chair, touching the screen with his stubby fingers. “My baby! My baby!”

“The link’s gone down,” Dorothy said. The video image had once again become Alexa’s school portrait. The sweet little girl with headband and bangs. “She didn’t cooperate. She was trying to tell us something-maybe her location.”

Marcus seemed to bob and weave, unsteady on his feet. Terror rilled his forehead.

“I doubt it,” I said. “Everything about this says professional. They’d never have let her see where they took her.” I glanced over at Dorothy’s laptop, saw a column of white numbers whizzing by on a black background, way too fast to read. “What’d you get?” I asked her. “Can you tell where the signal’s coming from?”

She shook her head. “Looks like CamFriendz is based in the Philippines, believe it or not. That’s where the video feed originated. So that’s a dead end too. These guys probably have a free account. They could be anywhere in the world.”

Marcus began to teeter, and I caught him before he sank to the floor. He hadn’t passed out, not quite. I set him down gently in the chair.

“They killed her,” he said. He stared dully into some middle distance.

“No,” I said. “That’s not in their interest. They need her for ransom.”

He moaned, covered his face with his hands.

Dorothy got up and excused herself and said she wanted to give us some privacy to talk. She took a second laptop from her Gucci bag and went to work in the sitting area off the kitchen to try tracing the IP address.

“YOU WERE expecting something like this, weren’t you?” I said.

“Every day, Nick,” he said sadly.

“After what happened to Alexa at the Chestnut Hill Mall that time.”

“Right,” he said softly.

“What do you think they want?”

He didn’t reply.

“You’d pay any amount of money to get her back, wouldn’t you?”

Now he just stared straight ahead, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

I leaned forward in my chair and spoke quietly to him. “Don’t. If they contact you and demand money wired to some offshore account, I know you’d do it in a heartbeat. I know you. But I need you to promise me you won’t. Not until you consult with me and we make sure it’s done the right way. If you want to get your daughter back alive.”

He kept staring, his eyes focusing on something that wasn’t in the room.

“Marshall?” I said. “I want your word on this.”

“Fine.”

“You never did call the police, did you?” I said.

“I-”

I interrupted him before he could go on. “You need to know something about me,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to by my clients. I took this job because of Alexa, but if I find out you’re lying, or holding anything back, I’ll walk away. Simple as that. Got it?”

He looked at me for a long time, blinking fast.

“I’ll give you amnesty for anything you did or said up till now,” I said. “But from here on out, any lie, and I’m off the case. So let’s try again: Did you call the police?”

He paused. Then, eyes closed, he shook his head. “No.”

“Okay. This is a start. Why not?”

“Because I knew they’d just bring in the FBI.”

“So?”

“All the FBI cares about is putting me in prison. Making an example of me.”

“And why’s that? Do they have a case?”

He hesitated. Then: “Yes.”

I looked at him. “They do?”

He just looked back.

“If you don’t tell me everything now, I’ll walk.”

“You wouldn’t do that to Alexa.”

“I haven’t done anything to Alexa.” I stood up. “And I’m sure the FBI will do everything possible to find her.”

“Nick,” he said. “You can’t do this.”

“Watch me.”

I walked toward his office door.

“Wait!” Marcus called after me. “Nick, listen to me.”

I turned back.

“Yes?”

“Even if they asked for ransom, I couldn’t pay it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

His face was full of humiliation and anger and deep sadness all at once. A terrible, vulnerable expression.

“I have nothing,” he said. “Completely wiped out. I’m ruined.”