Buried Secrets (Nick Heller)

by Joseph Finder

  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.