Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  16.

  Gabe’s room stank of sweat and old laundry. I’d been in monkey houses at zoos that smelled nicer. Dirty clothes were heaped everywhere: on the floor, on his desk, on top of the CD player with the big speakers. Lauren had long ago given up cleaning up after him, and their housekeeper, who came three times a week, refused to enter his room. I could barely make my way to his bed. The only clear spot seemed to be on his desk in front of his computer.

  The walls were painted bright orange, his choice, and an odd assortment of posters hung on the wall. A poster for the movie The Dark Knight with Heath Ledger wearing creepy eyeliner and lipstick; the only word was “Ha,” dripping blood. A movie poster for Watchmen: a guy getting thrown out of a tall building, shards of glass in his wake, a yellow smiley button floating in midair with a splotch of red blood on it. And the words JUSTICE IS COMING TO ALL OF US. NO MATTER WHAT WE DO. His desk was piled high with comic books and a big softcover of the comic-book artist Will Eisner.

  Gabe lay in bed reading a paperback called Joker by Brian Azzarello. The front cover was a grotesque closeup of the Joker’s feral grin, with jagged yellow teeth and smeared lipstick. Gabe was wearing headphones hooked up to an iPod Touch. Music blasted in his ears so loud that I could hear it, tinny and distorted and really awful.

  My thoughts were still careening, still trying to make sense of Roger’s strange and cryptic e-mail. If you get this, that means they finally succeeded, he’d written. So he was expecting to be killed. I’ve taken precautions to protect you and Gabe, he’d said. The means to hold them off. What could that be? Would Lauren know? And what was that bizarre postscript-Please say good-bye to the librarian-supposed to mean? A code, surely, but what?

  I sat on the side of Gabe’s bed, and he pulled the headphones off and hit the PAUSE button on his iPod.

  “Whatcha listening to?” I asked.

  “Slipknot.”

  “Well, obviously. Which cut?”

  “ ‘Wait and Bleed,’ ” he said. “But you knew that.”

  He didn’t smile, but there seemed to be a twinkle in his eye. He enjoyed the game. He knew I didn’t get the emo-screamo stuff he’d started listening to recently, and never wanted to.

  “You call that music?” I said. Just like old farts have been saying to teenage kids for generations. I imagine Mozart’s dad said something like that, too.

  “What do you listen to?” Gabe said. “No, wait, let me guess. Coldplay, right?”

  Busted. But I just gave him a steely stare.

  “And what else-Styx? ABBA?”

  “All right, you win,” I said. “How’s the comic book?”

  “It’s a graphic novel,” he bristled.

  “Same thing, right?”

  “Not even close.”

  “When do I get to see it?”

  He blushed, shrugged.

  “Not for public consumption, huh?”

  He shrugged again.

  “I’d love to read it sometime.”

  “Okay. Maybe. I’ll see.”

  “Anyway. You wanted to talk to me?”

  He wriggled himself around until he was sitting up. I noticed he was wearing a black T-shirt with Homer Simpson looking into the barrel of a nail gun. It said CAUTION: MAN AT WORK. He also had a stuffed animal in the bed with him, a ratty-looking giraffe Beanie Baby he’d named Jaffee.

  Gabe was a strange kid, no doubt about it. He was fourteen, almost fifteen, and had only just entered adolescence. He was a remarkable artist, entirely self-taught, and he spent most of his time-when he wasn’t reading comic books-doing panel drawings with an ultrafine black pen. He was scary-smart, brilliant at math and science, and he affected a world-weary cynicism. But every once in a while a crack would appear in his brittle shell, and you’d catch a fleeting glimpse of the little boy. He didn’t seem to have any close friends. They called him a dork and a nerd at school, he told me once, and I felt bad about what he must be going through. Adolescence was hard enough for a normal kid.

  He wasn’t easy to spend time with, which was why I made a point of spending as much time with him as I could. I’d take him to the Air and Space Museum or the Museum of Natural History or the National Zoo, or just for a walk. When he was younger, I taught him how to throw a baseball, and for one disastrous season I coached his Little League team (at the end of which he decided he wasn’t cut out to be an athlete). We tried fishing once, but we both found it boring. Recently, I’d been taking him to comic-book stores a lot, and once, a year or so ago, he made me take him to a comic-book convention at a Quality Inn somewhere in Virginia, for which I truly deserved a purple heart.

  “That e-mail was about Dad, wasn’t it?”

  I looked at him for a few seconds while I decided how to reply.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I figured it out.”

  “Were you spying on your mom?”

  “Of course not. I don’t have to.”

  “You don’t read her e-mail, do you?”

  “No way.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “Uncle Nick. He left us, didn’t he? He ran off with someone.”

  “Why in the world would you say that?”

  “I can tell. I know things. What did his e-mail say?”

  “That’s between you and your mom. But no, he didn’t run off. Nothing like that.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Uncle Nick.”

  “I won’t. And I’m not.”

  “Are you going to take off, too?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Like Dad.” He said it with a kind of scalding hostility, but that was only to mask the fear, the vulnerability.

  “You wish,” I said. “But sorry. You can’t get rid of me that easy.”

  He smiled despite himself.

  From downstairs I heard Lauren calling, “Nick?”

  “All right,” I said, standing up. “Good night. Don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll find your dad.”

  “Nick?” Lauren said again, her voice distant and muffled.

  Gabe hit the PAUSE button on his iPod and put his headphones back on.

  I closed his bedroom door behind me.

  “Nick?” Lauren’s voice echoed in the stairwell. Something in her tone made me quicken my pace. “Can you come here?”

  17.

  Lauren was standing in front of her computer, hunched over. “Take a look,” she said, swiveling the screen toward me.

  I looked, saw nothing unusual. “Yeah?”

  “Look again.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Right.” She began scrolling through her e-mail in-box. “It’s gone.”

  I leaned over, watched her move her cursor up and down the list of messages she’d received that day. Roger’s e-mail did seem to have disappeared.

  “You think you might have accidentally deleted it?”

  “No. I’m positive. His e-mail is gone. I don’t understand this.” Her voice rose, approaching hysterical. “It was right here.”

  “He sent a copy to your work address,” I said. “Can you sign on to your work e-mail from here?”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Then: “Jesus.”

  “It’s not there either,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Did you print out a copy?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Or save it on your computer?”

  “Why would I? Nick-” She turned around. “I’m not imagining this, right? You saw it.”

  “Maybe there’s a way to get it back. We have someone at Stoddard Associates who’s a whiz at data recovery.”

  “It’s like someone reached into my e-mail and just deleted it.” She opened a browser on her computer and went to InCaseOfDeath.Net. It was the cyberequivalent of a funeral home-floral bouquets in the borders. Photos of somber people coming up, then fading in flash animation-elderly folks, young parents, and k
ids-and quotes about death and grieving scrolling across the window. “Never leave anything unsaid!” a banner shouted. “The things you mean to say, the things you haven’t said.”

  There was a MEMBER LOGIN box, and below that a line: “Forget password?”

  We both saw it at the same time. “He must have had an account,” I said. Even before he could finish, she was typing in Roger’s work e-mail address, then she clicked SEND PASSWORD.

  A line came up in red:

  INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED.

  “Try his home e-mail,” I said. She typed it in.

  INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED.

  “He must have used some e-mail account I don’t know about,” Lauren said. “Damn. But what could we find out anyway, come to think of it?”

  “Who knows,” I said. “When he opened the account. What address he used. Maybe nothing. Maybe we’re just grasping at straws.”

  She walked into the living room and sat on one of the giant cushy black leather sofas. I followed her in and sat on another couch facing her. Some entertainment news show was on their huge flat-screen Sony. The sound was off. Paris Hilton or one of those interchangeable Hollywood celebrities dodging the paparazzi.

  “So Roger was right,” I said. “He said ‘they’ can intercept e-mail. Whoever ‘they’ are. He called them ‘the people who are trying to stop me.’ ”

  “But who’s he talking about?”

  “I was hoping you might have some idea.”

  She shook her head. “He never said anything about…”

  “About people threatening to kill him?”

  “It sounds paranoid. Crazy. But his e-mail sounded totally rational, don’t you think?”

  “You think he wrote it himself?”

  She looked at me, furrowed her brow, gave a skeptical smile. “I hadn’t thought about that. But it sure sounded like him. I’d say it was definitely Roger.”

  “I agree. Though it sounds more… emotional than I would have expected.”

  “Nick, you have no idea.” She sounded annoyed. “I don’t think you ever saw that side of him. The affectionate side.”

  “He kept it pretty well hidden.”

  “Maybe he was just different with me.”

  “No doubt.”

  She was quiet a moment. “That was the last thing he said to me, you know.”

  “What was?”

  “ ‘I love you.’ ”

  “Interesting.”

  “Why interesting?”

  I shook my head, and we didn’t say anything for a while, and then she asked, “But why didn’t he come right out and say what he’d found or who he was afraid of?”

  “To protect you, I’d guess. Maybe he figured you’d be safer if you didn’t know anything. Since he thought his e-mails were going to be read.”

  “Then what was the point of his sending any e-mail at all?” she said. “I mean, to go to the trouble of signing up with this morbid ‘in case of death’ website so he could have an e-mail sent to me that told me almost nothing-why?”

  “But I think it tells you a lot. In ways that other people won’t understand. Like this line he added about a librarian. What do you think he’s referring to?”

  “I have no idea. I can’t think of the last time he even went to a library.”

  “He didn’t say ‘library,’ he said ‘librarian,’ ” I pointed out.

  “Right,” she said. “Librarian.”

  “Is ‘librarian’ a code for something?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Or the word ‘library’?”

  “I really have no idea.”

  “Well, it’s a signal of some sort,” I said.

  “What about the police? Did you talk to them?”

  I nodded.

  “Do they have any leads?”

  I thought for a moment. “So far just one,” I said, and I told her about the withdrawal from Roger’s bank account after the attack.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “If they stole his ATM card, wouldn’t they need his PIN code to withdraw money?”

  I nodded again.

  “So it’s possible they forced it out of him? At gunpoint or something? Which means maybe they have him alive?” There was such hope in her face that I felt bad.

  “Yes, it’s possible,” I said. The other obvious possibility, which I didn’t want to suggest to Lauren, was that once they got the money from him, they no longer needed him alive. She was too fragile. She might have lost her husband, the stepfather to her child. I didn’t want to make things even worse for her.

  “Where does Roger keep his laptop?”

  “His study.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s late. I’ve got to be at the office early tomorrow morning.”

  “You sure you’re up to it?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Leland needs me back there. No matter what he says.”

  “You know,” I said, “you may be able to help out.”

  “How?”

  “Find out what Roger was doing before-before this happened. What he was working on.”

  “Ask around, you mean.”

  “Be discreet about it. It may help explain things.”

  “Or it may not.”

  “Agreed. But at this point, we need to sweep up everything. Then we see what we have. Okay?”

  “I have to be careful. Being the CEO’s admin and all that.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Nick.”

  “Good. You don’t mind me poking around in Roger’s study for a bit, do you?”

  “Of course not. Actually… would you like to spend the night in one of the guest rooms?”

  “No need. Thanks anyway.”

  “No, I mean… would you mind spending the night here? I’m just feeling really spooked. That terrifying e-mail from Roger, then the way it vanished? That just scared the hell out of me, Nick. I’m scared about whatever’s going on with Roger, and I’m scared for Gabe, and… Jesus, Nick, I’m too scared to even think clearly about anything anymore. Would you, please?”

  “Of course. Though I’ll have to get out of here early so I can stop at my place and change.”

  “I’ll probably be gone by the time you leave. I get to work early.”

  “What about Gabe?”

  “He gets picked up by his car pool. Don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. He’s used to being alone here in the morning.”

  “Roger always left early, too?”

  She nodded. “Sometimes we drive in together, unless he wants to get in to work before me.”

  I noticed that I’d referred to Roger in the past tense-as if he was dead-and she didn’t catch it.

  “Poor Gabe,” I said. “Latch-key child.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said, getting up and giving me a quick peck on the cheek. She picked up a couple of remote controls, and switched off the TV and the cable box.

  On her way out of the living room, she stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think you know me well enough to know that I’m not, you know, a scaredy-cat. I don’t panic, you know that. But after the last couple of days, when I think of Gabe, and I think-”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I’m scared out of my mind. Okay? I’m just flat-out terrified.”

  She turned around quickly, as if she was embarrassed she’d been so open, and she walked toward the door.

  “Lauren,” I called out.

  She stopped, turned her head.

  “I’m not going to let anything happen to you guys,” I said.

  Lauren whirled around, half walked, half ran toward me, and threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Then just as quickly she let go. “I’ll get your room ready.”

  18.

  I never thought I’d see a home office more grandiose than my father’s. Until I saw my brother’s.

  Dad’s library made a certain pompous kind of sense, since it was located in a thirty-
room mansion built in 1919 on a ninety-acre estate in Bedford, New York. That’s horse country, of course, where women do their shopping in jodhpurs or jeans with holes at the knees and men walk around in flip-flops and everyone gets Lyme disease.

  Roger, though, had carved his library out of a far more modest, suburban house. He’d knocked out a couple of rooms on the second floor to create a two-story stage set, complete with a catwalk, and lined with leather-bound books he’d never even opened, probably sold by the yard. Here, my brother got to feel as important, as baronial, as I was sure he didn’t at work, where he no doubt just pissed people off.

  I found his laptop right where it belonged, on his ornately carved mahogany desk. It was next to an open copy of a book called Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America. Roger was a “birder”: a bird-watcher.

  That was a hobby I didn’t get, like most aspects of my older brother. I have no hobbies, but I basically understand why a guy might want to restore vintage muscle cars or brew his own beer or collect sports memorabilia. I know accountants who wield nothing more dangerous than a sharpened number two pencil at work but have workshops in their basements with table saws that could slice off your thumb in half a second. I know mild-mannered pediatric pulmonologists who race remote-control monster trucks or rock out on their Fender Stratocasters by themselves when they get home at night.

  But getting up at three in the morning to get pooped on by a Black-capped Gnatcatcher? I wasn’t sure I understood the excitement.

  I powered up the laptop, and while I waited, I did a quick walk around his office. He had several framed pictures of Mom and Dad together, one at home and one in a banquette at a nightclub. A photo of Dad in his office on the top floor of the Graystone Building in New York, wearing a three-piece suit, the Manhattan skyline behind him.

  Built-in cherrywood file cabinets were neatly labeled-bills, taxes, investments, and so on. I pulled open a couple of drawers and saw that he kept paper copies of his phone bills, which made things easier for me.

  I checked out the French doors that opened to the backyard, tried them, and was satisfied that they were securely locked. I knelt, noticed the rudimentary security system in place-the magnetic contacts wired into an alarm system, so if someone tried to force the doors open, the alarm would sound.