Vanished Read online

  “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.”

  “You really think that’s necessary?”

  “I just want you to take precautions.”

  “You really think a home-security system is going to keep anyone out who wants to get in here?”

  “Of course not. But I want to make it as incon ve nient for them as possible.”

  She smiled, but I could see the strain in her face, the tightening of the muscles in her jaw, the lines around her eyes. The yellowing bruises.

  As she turned to leave, I said, “Oh, one more thing. I haven’t been able to find all of Roger’s cell-phone records.”

  “They should all be there. You mean, you’re missing some of the statements or something?”

  “I can’t find any billing records for one of the numbers,” I said, and I read it off to her.

  “That’s not Roger’s cell phone.”

  “It’s a Verizon Wireless account.”

  “That’s not a number I’ve ever heard before,” she said. “Are you sure that’s his?”

  “It’s his.”

  “Sorry, Nick,” she said. “I can’t help you with that. That’s a mystery to me. Roger always paid all the bills, not me.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “But he’d never keep something like that from me. He’d never keep a secret cell-phone number. That’s not Roger.”

  She shook her head emphatically and walked out of the room, and I thought: Maybe you don’t really know Roger.

  22.

  On the way in to work, Lauren listened to her office voice mail in the Lexus, hands-free.

  Most of the messages were from Leland. Whenever he thought of something he wanted her to do, he’d leave her a voice mail.

  It had taken him years to get the hang of e-mail—he used to dictate e-mails for her to type, but finally he’d evolved his own two-finger hunt-and-peck method and liked to do it himself. He’d taken to the BlackBerry right away, even though he complained that his fingers were too thick for the Lilliputian keys.

  But when he was traveling or just on the road, it was a lot easier for him to leave her voice mail. The first couple of messages were apologetic: “I don’t want to overwhelm you on your first day back,” one of them began; and then, “Also—but if you’re not feeling up to it, don’t worry about it, I’ll ask Noreen.”

  Noreen Purvis, the CFO’s admin, worked in the executive suite, too, in the same open bullpen, within shouting distance. She was a disaster, even though Leland was too polite to say as much. She was older than Lauren and had worked at Gifford Industries far longer. She made no secret of the fact that she’d expected Leland to pick her as his admin when Cynthia, Leland’s longtime secretary, had retired more than ten years earlier.

  Leland didn’t like Noreen, though. He considered her disorganized and even slovenly, and he was annoyed by her smoking, even though Noreen never smoked indoors. Plus, he didn’t want to grab someone else’s admin. Instead, he hired Lauren.

  Noreen, of course, had no idea how Leland really felt about her. She’d wanted the job that Lauren got and never failed to let Lauren know, in all sorts of passive-aggressive ways, that she was far more qualified to be the administrative assistant to the CEO.

  The Parkway was choked with traffic, as it always was at this time of the morning, but she didn’t mind.

  She needed time to think.

  She was determined to arrive at work ready to focus on Leland, not distracted by all the trauma in her personal life. She wanted to give Leland her all for the few hours he was in the office.

  Long ago she’d realized that she was, in many ways, like a wife to him, but without the sex. (Then again, she thought ruefully, it wasn’t as if she and Roger had had much of a sex life in the last couple of years either.) In certain respects she knew Leland better than his own wife. But unlike so many marriages where you grow to detest your partner (like her own starter marriage), her relationship with Leland Gifford kept getting better. Her affection and respect for the man had only deepened. She’d come to know all his flaws, and she loved the man despite them all. Maybe even because of them all.

  She couldn’t allow herself to think about Roger just then, about where he might be at that very second. Thinking about what might have become of him gave her a terrible, gnawing anxiety.

  No. She had to put those thoughts out of her mind, at least for a few hours. She had to arrive at the office with a clear head.

  She drove into the Gifford Industries office park and eased the Lexus into a space close to the building. She didn’t have a reserved spot: Those were just for the executive team. But it was early enough that there were still plenty of spaces, and she didn’t have to park half a mile away.

  The soft morning light glinted off the gray-green glass skin of the Gifford building. It was a strange, futuristic-looking tower, a twenty-four-story parallelogram. She couldn’t decide if it was ugly or beautiful. It was a “green” building—ecofriendly, energy-efficient. Built of concrete made from slag. Floor-to-ceiling insulating high-performance glass windows. On the roof, a rainwater harvesting system and a one-megawatt solar array.

  As she walked toward the main entrance, someone called out to her. It was a senior vice president, Tom Shattuck: tall, broad-shouldered, blond.

  “Lauren, I’m so sorry to hear about your husband,” he said with the somber concern of an undertaker.

  She wondered how the word had gotten around so fast and whether everyone assumed Roger was dead.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “If there’s anything I can do, you know I’m here for you.”

  He was always extremely cordial to her, but she knew all about him from his admin. He was a tyrant to the woman who worked for him all day. The admins all talked, of course. Didn’t their bosses realize that?

  She smiled, nodded, and kept walking. She waved her badge at the proximity sensor, stepped into the revolving door, and entered the cavernous atrium. Right in the center, surrounded by tropical foliage, was a huge bronze globe, the continents sculpted in sharp relief. On the front of the globe, set at a jaunty angle, was the Gifford Industries logo, which couldn’t have been more hokey: retro squared-off streamlined script that must have looked futuristic when it was designed in the 1930s.

  A couple more people waved at her, flashed sympathetic looks, and she ducked into the express elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. She slid her security card into the slot, and the elevator rose.

  The lights in the executive suite were already on, which surprised her. She was normally the first one in. She passed her prox badge against the sensor until it beeped, then pushed open the glass doors. When she rounded the corner, she saw someone sitting at her desk.

  Noreen Purvis.

  23.

  Gabe’s room was as dark as a cave.

  He was asleep under the covers, a barely discernible lump. His crappy music was semiblasting from the speakers on a big black clock/radio/CD player on his desk, his iPod docked into the top of it.

  The music was the audio equivalent of needles being stuck in my eyeballs. I flipped on all the lights. He groaned.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “You should have been up twenty minutes ago.”

  He pulled the blanket over his head, and I said, “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

  He made a surly sound and burrowed in deeper.

  “You can’t get rid of me that easy. Move it, or you’ll experience firsthand how I flushed those al-Qaeda terrorists out of their
caves at Tora Bora.”

  His head slowly emerged from the covers like a turtle from its shell. “That’s such crap,” he said. “You guys never even found Osama bin Laden.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me.”

  He mumbled something vaguely caustic, and I said, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a smart-ass? Turn off the music.”

  He did. “What are you doing here?”

  “Making sure you get to school. Move it.”

  “I’m staying home. I don’t feel good.” He pulled the covers back over his face.

  “You sleep with that stuff on all night?”

  “No, it’s my . . . alarm.” His voice was muffled.

  “No wonder you overslept. The music’s too lulling. Don’t you have anything more strident? Celine Dion, maybe?”

  He grunted, unamused. As much as I liked Gabe, he was a difficult kid. Fortunately, he was someone else’s problem, not mine. The thought of having a kid, or kids, gave me the heebie-jeebies, but raising a teenager truly seemed like a horror show. I didn’t understand how people did it, though evidently people did. My mother, for one. (Dear old Dad, smart guy that he was, took off when I was thirteen. He missed out on most of the fun.)

  “Come on, kid,” I said. “Get up.”

  “You can’t make me.”

  “Oh yeah? You didn’t know I have police auxiliary authority? I can have you arrested right now for truancy.” It sounded almost plausible.

  Gabe slowly pulled down the covers just enough to peek out at me. He uttered a pretty hard-core curse word.

  “I can also have you arrested for obscenity.”

  “Is that what Grandpa’s in prison for?” he said.

  “You’re quick.”

  “I’m staying home today.”

  “What’s the problem, Gabe?”

  He mumbled something I didn’t understand, and I moved in closer, yanked the covers down. “I didn’t hear you so good,” I said.

  He put a hand over his eyes to shield them from the light, and croaked, “It’s like all over school anyway.”

  “What is?”

  “About Dad.”

  “What’s all over?”

  He sat up, hung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood. Reaching over to his desk, he ran a finger across the touchpad of his MacBook, and the screen came to life.

  It was his Facebook page. His picture in a box at the top and a bunch of other little boxes and things. I said, “What am I looking at?”

  He tapped the screen. I looked at where he was pointing, an area of the page called “The Wall,” which had a column of little pictures of what I assumed were junior-high-school kids, mostly face pictures but some weird posed shots. Some of the guys had baseball caps on backwards. Next to each picture was a name and some comment, like “What was English homework??” and “quiz on verbs 2morrow?!” Apparently this was how Gabe and his friends communicated.

  On one line was a blue question mark instead of a picture. And the comment:

  “hey Gay Gabe, you loser, your dad ditched you, can’t blame him, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

  I looked at Gabe, saw the tears in his eyes. “Who wrote this?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a name here. Can’t you just click on it?”

  “It’s fake. Someone made a fake Facebook page.”

  “You think it’s someone from school?”

  “Gotta be.”

  “Is this what they call cyberbullying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Back in the day, someone called you names, you’d wait for him after school and beat the crap out of him.”

  “Oh, please,” he said. “You went to some fancy private day school in Westchester County. Like, in a limo with a chauffeur.”

  “Granted,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have fistfights.”

  I came close to telling him how often I beat up kids who made fun of his father, after Victor’s arrest. But I didn’t think he’d want to hear that his uncle Nick had been his father’s defender. Especially since Roger was my older brother.

  “ ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself,’ ” he said, bitterly. “Maybe I will.”

  “That’ll show them,” I said, then realized that sarcasm was probably a bad idea at this point. “Come on, Gabe. You can’t pay attention to jerks like this. You know what I always say—never let an asshole rent space in your head.”

  He sat back down on the side of the bed, resting his head in his hands.

  “Move.”

  Gabe started getting dressed—jeans so tight he had to squeeze into them, his black hoodie, black Chuck Taylors. He grabbed an already open can of Red Bull and took a long swig.

  I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes before your car pool gets here. Your mother wants you to have breakfast.”

  He toasted me with his Red Bull. “What do you think this is?”

  I shrugged. The last thing I wanted to be was this kid’s authority figure.

  “Gabe, why do you think kids at school say that kind of stuff about your dad?”

  “Because they’re assholes?”

  “No question. But what makes them say crazy stuff like that, do you think?”

  A sullen look came over him. “How do I know?”

  “No idea where the kids at school might get that idea?”

  “Maybe it’s true.”

  Softly, carefully, I said, “You said that before. What makes you think so?”

  He looked supremely uncomfortable. “I told you, I just see stuff. I notice stuff.”

  “Did he tell you something?”

  “No,” he said scornfully. “Of course not.”

  “So what did you see? What did you notice?”

  “Nothing. It’s just . . . I don’t know, like, a feeling.”

  “A fear, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “I have to go to school.”

  “Now look who’s concerned with the time all of a sudden,” I said.

  While I waited with him for the car pool, I asked, “Gabe, do you use your dad’s laptop?”

  “Why would I? I have my own.”

  “Any idea why it might have crashed?”

  “Crashed?”

  “Blue Screen of Death.”

  “Oh. He asked me how to do a disk wipe. He said he was planning to get a new one. Maybe he screwed it up. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “He was trying to wipe it clean? Delete its contents?” So much for my theory about someone breaking in to tamper with Roger’s computer. Still, the alarm contacts on the French doors to Roger’s study had been quickly and sloppily disabled; that much I knew. Meaning that someone had made a covert entry for some reason. To snoop around, maybe. Or maybe for another purpose I hadn’t yet figured out.

  “I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows. Why were you looking at my dad’s computer, anyway?”

  “Because I thought there might be a clue there as to what happened to him.”

  “Why would he leave a clue on his laptop?”

  “He wouldn’t,” I said, but before I could explain, a big blue Toyota Land Cruiser pulled into the driveway.

  “See you,” Gabe said.

  “Remember what I told you about assholes.”

  “Yeah. Never let them rent space in your head. Wish it was that easy.”

  He slung his backpack over his shoulder and went out to the car.

  And I couldn’t shake the feeling that he, like his mom, was keeping something from me.

  24.

  Look at you!” Noreen Purvis scolded, getting right to her feet. “You should be home in bed!”

  “I’m okay,” Lauren said. “Really.”

  “Oh, honey, I mean it. I can take care of things here for as long as it takes you to recover properly.”

  “And I appreciate it. But I’m fine.”

  Noreen was a big, horsy woman
with ash-blond hair that she wore in a short, no-nonsense style—sort of Princess Diana circa 1990. On Princess Di it had looked good.

  She was wearing her fake Chanel scarf and a brown pantsuit and a pair of black Tory Burch pumps with the huge gold Tory Burch medallions on the toes. They were probably fakes, too. She reeked of tea rose perfume and cigarette smoke.

  “Why is the door closed?” Lauren said, glancing at Leland’s office, which was next to her desk.

  Noreen shrugged. “He’s been in there since I got here, maybe twenty minutes ago.”

  “Who’s he talking to?”

  She shrugged again, began clearing her things off Lauren’s desk. “Well, I should fill you in on the arrangements for Leland’s trip, I guess.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Lauren said. “Need to use the girls’ room.”

  SHE LOCKED herself in a stall, lowered the toilet seat, sat down, and began to cry.

  It was as if a dam had burst. Damned Noreen sitting at her desk, talking about Leland in that proprietary way.

  And Roger. She was frightened. She didn’t know what to think. Not knowing about Roger.

  My God. Not knowing: That was the worst thing.

  She pulled out a length of toilet paper to blot the tears. After about five minutes, she was all cried out. She left the stall and went to the sink and reapplied her makeup. Then she washed her hands in cold water—the taps came on automatically for a few seconds when you waved your hands under them, but not long enough for the water to turn warm. The paper-towel dispenser shot out an annoying small rectangle of perforated brown paper.

  Everything was irritating her now. Everything upset her.

  She’d been back barely half an hour and already she needed a vacation.

  25.

  As soon as Gabe got in the car, I called my old army buddy Merlin, the TSCM expert, and asked him for another favor.

  I asked him to stop by Lauren’s house later and help me put in a decent home-security system. Granted, asking Merlin to do a security system was a little like asking Bill Gates for tech support on Microsoft Word. Sort of overkill. But Merlin was gracious about it and said sure.