Facade

by Susan Cory

  “Thank you for meeting me,” Xander said. His eyes darted around the room. The waiter hurried over to take their drink order. Iris ordered a “vodka” tonic while Xander made the poor man recite the restaurant's entire selection of wines by the glass.

  “How can I help?” Iris asked. She really did feel badly for him. He looked to be in a lot of pain.

  After a pause, Xander spoke. “On Saturday morning you kindly offered to mention to the police”—here Xander seemed to straighten in his chair as if girding himself for something unpleasant—“that you had seen me on the evening that the girl, Lara, went missing.”

  Iris nodded. “But then you explained to the press that Lara may have discovered you were her biological father. So I thought you wouldn't need my alibi.”

  “It seems now that someone is trying to implicate me in her disappearance.”

  “What do you mean? Who?”

  “That's the problem. I don't know.” He looked around for his drink.

  No sooner were the glasses set down than Xander took a quick gulp of his white Burgundy, then continued. “There have been some developments that may have given the police a mistaken impression about me. My solicitor thinks it might be helpful if you would let them know that you saw me at home that night.”

  “But if I come up with an alibi now, won't that just draw more attention to you? Maybe you're overreacting.” Iris sipped her tonic water. “What makes you think someone is trying to set you up?”

  “I just know,” Xander said, a bit too loudly, then looked embarassed at his outburst.

  “I'm not trying to be difficult,” Iris said. “It's just that if I'm going to get involved, I really need to understand what's going on.” She was trying to set up the dialogue Malone had given her.

  Xander rested his head in his hands.“I'm going to have to tell you something. In confidence.” When he looked up at her, he looked defeated. Even the blue of his eyes had dimmed. “When my house was broken into it looked as if nothing had been taken.” He paused.

  “But something had been?” Iris coaxed.

  “I think my computer password was discovered in the study. I always have to write it down because Nils is always changing it. Someone used my password to open my laptop account and install pornography.”

  Iris cocked her head. “Why would anyone do that?”

  He pursed his lips and seemed to be counting to ten. “Certain pornography sites are monitored by the government to track down the people who visit them.”

  Iris leaned forward and whispered, “Wouldn't that add up to most of the male population?”

  Xander allowed himself a slight smile. “It wasn't regular pornography. It involved young girls.”

  “Oh. Like Lara.”

  “As you say,” he bowed his head. “That action combined with someone sending her to my office makes me look involved in her disappearance, don't you see?”

  She did see. And Xander probably didn't even know yet about the keys to the blue van being found in his house. It had always been Iris' fate to see things clearly from everyone else's perspective. “But who would hate you so much? You would know if you had an enemy like this.”

  “I don't know who's behind this. I just know that I need to try to protect myself.” He surprised her by reaching across the table and taking her hand. “Iris, will you help me?”

  Iris drew back but said nothing. What if Xander was telling the truth? What if he was a victim, too?

  “I think the police searched my house today.” Xander leveled at Iris the most pain-filled look she had ever seen. It was full of more desperation than his words could convey. He finished simply with, “Will you help me?”

  She met his eyes, feeling like a Judas even as she told the truth. “Yes, I'll tell the police what I saw.”

  CHAPTER 38

  In the nightmare, Iris found herself wrapped in a dank bedspread, shackled by one leg to a wall. It was dark in the room but a sliver of light penetrated through a dusty window. Her throat felt sore. She must have been screaming for a long time. Her ankle was chafed raw and her empty stomach ached with hunger. Had she been left here to die slowly of starvation?

  Edging crablike over to the wall, she wrapped both hands on the chain near to the ring and yanked a few times, shoving with her legs as hard as she could.

  She scrabbled back away from the wall and tried pulling again, but there was no solid place to plant her feet. A stab of pain shot up her leg as a splinter of wood jabbed her bare foot. Trapped in the dark, she pounded her fists against the floor in frustration.

  She curled up in a fetal position, cocooned in the bedspread, and tried to drift off to sleep when the whirr of a car's engine outside snapped her into awareness. The car stopped nearby, its door clicked open, and then slammed. Iris heard keys scraping in a lock. Heavy footsteps sounded, moving up inside the building. She couldn't stop herself shaking. She realized that there were worse ways to die than starvation. She had no doubt that this intruder was there to violate her, to hurt her in unspeakable ways that would make her eventual death seem like a relief.

  Iris screamed as loud as she could, but as she woke, she heard only the tiniest of strangled-sounding pleas: “Help me, please help me.”

  She sat bolt upright in her bed, breathing hard, her heart thundering. With both hands she touched her chest to feel if it was literally jumping out of her chest. Sheba sat next to her on the bed, whimpering, trembling. She stroked the dog.

  Iris felt the nightmare trying to tug her back. “It's not real,” she repeated again and again.

  She turned on her reading light and waited for the dream to recede as she blinked her eyes and her bedroom came into focus.

  Maybe this was what Lara was experiencing right now— abject terror. And if the police were only focused on Xander, and he hadn't taken her, then they would never be able to find Lara in time.

  CHAPTER 39

  The following morning Russo watched Malone standing before the murder board, studying a map. Malone pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket, consulted it, adjusted the calipers on his compass, and drew a large circle around the city of Cambridge.

  Russo cleared his throat. “I tracked down Crazy-dog, the guy the professor saved in Bosnia.”

  “Yes?”

  “His name is Nils Jensen, an architect from Holland. He's thirty-eight, a little younger than DeWitt. We knew he worked in DeWitt's Amsterdam office, but get this: he's here in Cambridge acting as DeWitt's teaching assistant. He also goes back and forth to Europe to bring things from the office.”

  “Is Jensen here now?”

  “His plane lands a little after one this afternoon.”

  “Bring him in for an interview,” Malone said.

  “I'll send someone to meet him at the airport, catch him before he can speak with DeWitt. By the way, on the tape last night, how did DeWitt know we'd already searched his house?”

  “How do I know? The guy seems totally anal. We probably didn't line his boots back up precisely enough. In any case, he's on his guard. Foster said he didn't budge from his house either before or after the meeting with our Ms. Reid at the restaurant.”

  “Seems like the tape from last night isn't going to do us much good.”

  “I told the D.A. about the girl's visit to DeWitt's office and his lie about the van. I told her about the Feebs finding kiddie porn on his computer. She says we need more solid evidence linking him to the girl— DNA, fibers. You heard what DeWitt said to the Reid woman. He's going to say that someone's framing him. Even Ms. Reid seemed to be on the fence about his guilt by the end of their conversation. Of course it didn't help that he showed up looking like he'd just gone five rounds with Muhammad Ali.”

  Malone's voice was tinged with irritation, big time. Russo knew that he had missed his Tuesday night AA meeting to stake out the rendezvous. He'd exchanged a 'get out of jail free' card to the Sidran woman for getting DeWitt to speak on tape, and he still he had nothing actionable to show for it
.

  Russo tipped his bald head toward the map. “Think we can narrow down the search zone?”

  Malone deliberately traced the wide circle with his finger. “This is the furthest distance the van could have gone in two roundtrips given the distance on its odometer.”

  “How do you know he only made two roundtrips?”

  “I don't. But I figure that's the minimum he could've made. First, to scope out the hidey hole and second, to drop her off. If he's used the van for more trips, he's still inside this circle. This is the farthest he could have gone.”

  “That's a lot of territory to cover. It even crosses the New Hampshire border, up by Manchester.”

  “Yeah. We're going to have to reach out to all the local agencies. We should also find out if our friend Jensen ever rents vehicles. Maybe has a zipcar account. He could be in on this thing with DeWitt. If they're using zipcars to get around, that would completely mess up the map which I've based on the van's milage. Still, what else can we do but start with some assumptions. Got any better ideas?”

  They could hear Malone's phone ringing from inside his office and they both hurried toward it.

  Malone slid into his desk chair then lifted the receiver.

  Russo listened impatiently to one side of the conversation from the doorway.

  “Yeah, I understand it's only preliminary,” Malone said. “What did you get off them?”

  Russo approached, trying to get his ear closer to the receiver. Malone elbowed him off.

  “You're sure? OK, thanks.”

  Malone hung up and looked grimly at his partner. “Human blood on the boots.”

  CHAPTER 40

  On Wednesday morning Iris opened her copy of the Globe to see, as expected, Budge's front page article about everything that had really happened on the night of Lara's disappearance. He referred to Jasna as “an unnamed friend” and made it sound as if Lara had stopped by Jasna's apartment while running away from her father, and had gotten kidnapped while the “friend” was out. Budge avoided making it sound as if Jasna was helping Lara run away. Iris owed him thanks for that at least. She wondered, though, why the article hadn't mentioned the suspicious blue van or Xander's connection to it. The police had probably made Budge put a freeze on that part of the story.

  Iris already had a message in to Budge saying she'd learned that DeWitt had pulled a muscle, so wouldn't be swimming for awhile but wasn't it good that, thanks to her, he was able to write that front page article about what had actually happened on the day Lara disappeared. Hopefully he would consider all her debts paid.

  Iris' phone buzzed. “Hi, Ellie,” she said noting the caller I.D. “I survived my first wearing-a-wire experience.”

  “Let's hope it's your last. So, what did Xander have to say?”

  “First of all, he'd been beaten up by Lara's barbaric father. He had to spend the night in the hospital.”

  “That's terrible. Is Xander ok? I knew that the father was a brute. His eyes are too close together.”

  “Very scientific. Xander should be ok in a few days. But the reason he wanted to meet was to tell me he thinks someone's setting him up. He said that after his house was broken into, he found porn on his computer. Young girl porn. I have to admit he sounded pretty convincing.”

  “Maybe he downloaded it himself and now that he's being scrutinized by the police he needs to explain how it got there. Did he explain why he lied about having access to the van?”

  “Detective Malone didn't want me to bring that up. They're still hoping Xander will lead them to wherever he's hidden Lara. But here's the thing— I'm not so sure anymore that he's the one who took her.”

  “Why not?”

  “If you had seen the misery in the guy's eyes, you'd question too whether he could be the kidnapper.”

  “But let's think about his possible agenda—why did he want to tell you about this alleged set-up?” Ellie asked.

  “He wanted me to alibi him to the police for that night.”

  “Did you agree?”

  “Yes, I could say in full honesty that I would tell the police what I saw that night.”

  “Our architect superstar sounds a bit paranoid.”

  “On the other hand, he's got so much to lose by getting caught up in a scandal. What if someone really is framing him and the police are zeroing in on the wrong guy? Last night, I had a terrifying nightmare about Lara. It made me want even more for the poor girl to be safe, and for the police to lock up whichever monster took her.”

  “Amen.” There was silence on the line, then Ellie said, “I saw Luc yesterday.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was crossing Mass Ave toward the Paradise and didn't see me.”

  “Did he look like he hadn't been sleeping? He gets these deep shadows under his eyes.”

  “He looked pretty haggard.” Ellie said. “How are you doing?”

  “I have to stop myself from calling him twenty times a day.”

  “Maybe you should call him and see what he has to say. You guys are good together. I can't believe that he doesn't have an explanation for this.”

  “Whatever the explanation is, he should have told me four months ago.”

  “Don't let your pride get in the way here. Life isn't black or white. It's complicated sometimes.”

  CHAPTER 41

  The man sitting in the interview room stroked his goatee nervously and stole the occasional glance at his watch. A messenger bag and rolling suitcase rested on the floor.

  Russo sat shoulder to shoulder by Malone, studying DeWitt's assistant on the other side of the half-silvered mirror.

  “Long enough?” Russo said.

  “Let's find out.”

  They strolled into the adjoining room. Russo flipped the wall switch to start the recording system and listened to Malone start with the basics.

  “My name is Nils Jensen. I live at Binnengasthuisstraat 27, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I work as an architect for Co-op dWa. I am in Cambridge assisting Professor DeWitt with teaching a studio at Harvard GSD and keeping him up to date with office matters.”

  Nils' voice was high and raspy. His albino-fair hair, held back in a pony-tail, and his slender frame gave him a feminine look.

  “We've asked you here, Mr. Jensen, to see if you can help us understand some of the particulars of Professor DeWitt's life here in Cambridge.”

  Nil's eyes darted between the two detectives. “Have you asked Professor DeWitt your questions? Why are you asking me?”

  “We know how it works with these big honchos.” Malone said. “The assistant is the one who does all the work behind the scenes—am I right? Putting together slides for his talks, organizing his schedule, setting up his living arrangements. You probably even buy his coffee and cereal, don't you?”

  “Yes, of course I do those things. The professor is a busy man. His favorite muesli and coffee must be carried here from Amsterdam in my luggage. He wouldn't have a clue how to shop in an American grocery store. But I don't understand why you want to know about this.”

  Malone paused a moment and replied thoughtfully, “That's right—the professor is a busy man. We don't want to disturb him if you can answer some simple questions for us. Then you can be on your way and we won't have to interrupt the professor's work. For example, can you tell us what his teaching schedule is?”

  Russo noted how artfully Malone walked the assistant through twenty minutes of innocuous questions until Nils Jensen finally lowered his shoulders and relaxed back into his chair. Then Malone threw the ball to Russo. “Anything else?”

  Russo appeared to think for a minute then asked, “How does the professor get around?”

  Nils smiled indulgently. “He has a bicycle. That is how we Europeans navigate around our cities. Not everyone needs a car.”

  Russo continued, “But what if he needs to get out of the city? Do you ever rent cars for him, or does he maybe borrow a car from a friend?”

  “No, I don't think he has needed a car s
ince he's been here.” Nils appeared to ponder the question. “No, wait. I did rent us a Zipcar when we went up to New Hampshire a few weeks ago. The professor wanted to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Zimmerman House. It was a Saturday when he wasn't teaching.”

  Russo jotted down a quick note to check on Zipcar accounts under Jensen's name, then asked, “Where is this Zimmerman house located?”

  Nils frowned. “It didn't take too long to drive there, an hour or so. I did the driving of course. We went up in the morning and had lunch at a diner nearby. The diner had a tree in its name, I remember. I think the town is called Manchester—does that sound right?”

  “Yes,” said Malone, the corners of his mouth turning up. “That sounds just right.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Iris had come to Jasna's desk at GSD during studio time, ostensibly to give her a desk crit, only to find her student visibly unsettled.

  “The police came to my apartment and dragged me down to the station house. It took forever to get out. You said that I wouldn't get into trouble.” Since Sunday, Jasna's eyes had become enormous and her body looked even more shrunken than usual. Her oversized sweater and leggings made her look like a child.

  “You're not in trouble. I don't want you to worry. The important thing is that the police now know all the relevant information so they can track down Lara. I sent my brother to make sure you were all right. Did he explain that no charges are going to be filed against you? That Globe reporter is also going to keep your name out of the story.”

  Jasna looked at her skeptically.

  “It's out of our hands, Jasna. The police are the ones equipped to follow the leads,” Iris said. “Now I need you to focus back on your schoolwork. I understand how worried you've been, but this master's program requires students to work night and day. You don't want to get an incomplete and jeopardize your student visa. The final jury is in a little more than a month and your project is way behind. You can catch up, but you need to put your full attention on it. And remember what I said about cutting yourself. You should go to Harvard Health and see what they can do to help.”