Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  Something about it looked wrong, though.

  But before I could give it a second look, I heard a high-pitched tone coming from Roger’s computer.

  It didn’t look good. The screen was deep blue and covered with incomprehensible text-white letters and numbers, garbage that made no sense to me except for one line that I understood quite well:

  A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer

  It was what computer geeks called the Blue Screen of Death.

  Roger’s computer was dead. It had either crashed or-more likely-it had been wiped.

  I had a theory how that might have happened-how someone might have gotten into his study to do it-and I went back to the French doors and knelt again.

  Sure enough. One of the magnetic contacts on the doorframe looked like it had been hastily screwed into place. As if someone had unscrewed the contact switch, pulled out the connected wire, then jumpered the switch before screwing it back in-sloppily. In other words, someone had disabled the magnetic contact so the alarm wouldn’t go off when the French doors were opened.

  Meaning that someone had probably already done a covert entry.

  Someone had slipped into Roger and Lauren’s house. To search, perhaps. Or for some other reason.

  And maybe was planning to do it again.

  19.

  I spent the next forty-five minutes circling the perimeter of the house, looking for evidence of any other intrusions, using a little LED pen-light I found in the kitchen that someone had gotten at a trade show. The usual stuff: disturbances in soil patterns, broken shrubbery, jimmied locks, wood shavings, and the like. But I didn’t find anything else. No surprise there: Whoever had broken into the house through Roger’s study didn’t need any other way in. What did surprise me was how primitive the security system was. That would have to change.

  I didn’t see any point in telling Lauren about the break-in. Not yet, anyway. There was no need to frighten her more.

  So I went upstairs to get some sleep.

  The guest room was midway between the master bedroom and Gabe’s room. It was furnished in classic WASP-grandmother style-oval braided rug, little bedside tables with tiny reading lamps. Hand-colored antique wood engravings of birds on the wall, in little gold frames. An old-fashioned white bedspread made out of that tufted, nubby fabric called chenille. I think.

  On top of the toilet in the guest bathroom was a wicker basket that held a little travel-size tube of Colgate toothpaste, a shrink-wrapped travel-size toothbrush, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, small hand soaps from Crabtree & Evelyn. I brushed my teeth, undressed, and hung my clothes up on the mahogany valet.

  I got into the bed, naked. Found myself staring at some of the weirder-looking birds on the wall-the Ruffed Bustard, the Sacred ibis, the Balearic crane-and wondering if they were extinct, or found only in Madagascar or some Amazonian jungle.

  I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the unaccustomed sounds of a strange house. Maybe it was the fifteen-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, or whatever they were, which I wasn’t used to. Too slippery.

  More likely, though, it was because I was on alert for any noises that might indicate someone was trying to break in.

  I found myself thinking about my brother. About our childhood bedrooms, which we insisted on being right next to each other’s. When, given the size of our house, we could easily have been separated by half a mile.

  For most of our childhood, we were best friends. We shared almost everything. We were brought close by the weird isolation imposed upon us by my father’s money. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, by the way my father chose to live, since I’ve known rich people who are vigilant about giving their kids a normal life. They send their kids to public schools, they conceal their wealth as best they can, they drive ordinary cars and live in ordinary houses.

  But not Victor Heller. He was a brilliant wheeler-dealer who rose from a working-class background to rule Wall Street, and he wanted everyone to know it. Hence the estate in Bedford, with the horses and stables and clay tennis courts and the collection of antique roadsters. For years he commuted to and from work in his own Sikorsky helicopter, which landed on a pad in our backyard, until the town authorities took him to court to make him stop.

  Mom was the prettiest girl in his small-town high school, with looks that rivaled Grace Kelly’s, and her early photos confirmed it. Victor Heller won her over by the sheer brute force of his charisma, by his indomitable will, his outsize ambition.

  To the world, she seemed to be the perfect society wife, though she was anything but. She was too smart to play the role he’d assigned her-arm candy and cheerful volunteer for the charities he supported. Her chief pleasure in life was being a mother, yet Victor made sure she wasn’t around much to enjoy it. He insisted she go to all the dinner parties and balls and weekends in Verbier or Mallorca or Lake Como, though she never seemed to take pleasure in any of it.

  As a result, Roger and I spent more time with our nannies and gardener and caretaker and household staff than we did with our parents. This didn’t make for a great childhood, but it did at least bring us together. Roger and I were born less than two years apart-eighteen months, a closeness in age that could have made us intensely rivalrous. Instead, we were more like fraternal twins. We did everything together.

  Our personalities couldn’t have been more different, though. I was the rebel, the troublemaker, and the athlete. Roger was the intellectual, far more bookish, basically a solitary type. Yet he was also a troublemaker in his own quiet way. One of our housekeepers called him Eddie Haskell. We’d never seen that old TV show Leave It to Beaver, but years later when I saw a couple of reruns on late-night TV, I realized that our housekeeper really hadn’t liked Roger. Eddie Haskell was an unctuous, conniving brown-noser. He was the two-faced character who’d politely compliment Mrs. Cleaver on her lovely dress while instigating some evil prank that would inevitably get her son, the Beaver, in trouble.

  Roger wasn’t as bad as Eddie Haskell, though, and I wasn’t the Beaver.

  Still, Roger did enjoy tormenting me with magic tricks. He spent a lot of time at a magicians’ supply house in the city called Tannen’s Magic, and he was as good at sleight of hand as I was at throwing a pass. There was one trick he liked to do that I never figured out. It involved sticking his thumb through a hole that he’d cut into two blue cards stuck together, then sliding a red card between the blue cards like a guillotine, apparently slicing through his thumb. I’d beg and plead, but he’d never tell me how he did it.

  My brother was a skilled amateur magician, but his greatest talent was always keeping secrets.

  20.

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

  I said, “Yeah?”

  “Nick?”

  Lauren’s voice, hushed and tentative.

  “Come on in.”

  “You sure it’s okay?”

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

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

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

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

  “Me neither.”

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

  “You should hear what he listens to.”

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

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

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

  “Graphic novel.”

  She nodded. “Did he show it to you?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “You know how much he admires you.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “He thinks you’re cool.”

  “No. He knows I’m not cool.”

  “Well, he thinks you’re terrific.”

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

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

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

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

  I shrugged.

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

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

  “So…?”

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

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

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

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

  I nodded.

  “That’s heartbreaking.”

  “What makes him think so?”

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

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

  “You mean, was Roger having an affair?”

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

  “I understand, and no, he wasn’t.”

  “You’re sure.”

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

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

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

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

  “Look, Nick, I know.”

  I nodded. “Got it.”

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

  21.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Nope. Just For Men, Medium-Dark Brown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re up early,” I
said.

  “Leland’s flying to Luxembourg.”

  “Okay.”

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

  “Yep.”

  “Sorry about that.”

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

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

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

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

  “What would that tell you?”

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

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

  “Sorry. That’s above my pay grade.”

  “Well, whatever you can do.”

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

  “Every day. Why?”

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

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

  “It’s fried. Totally gone.”

  “That’s weird.”

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

  “Sometimes. Why?”

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