Vanished Read online

  From here, they could have driven right onto the Key Bridge. But they could have also taken the Whitehurst Freeway. As I turned my head, I noticed something on top of the convenience store: another security camera.

  A weatherproof bullet camera, as it’s called, attached to the steel arm of a mounting bracket. It was aimed at the cash machine.

  37.

  The gas-station attendant stood at a cash register in a booth behind thick bulletproof Plexiglas. He was changing the paper tape in the cash register. He was a small, squat, dark-skinned man in his fifties. Indian or Pakistani, maybe, with jet-black hair and steel-framed aviator glasses and a serious scowl. He wore a tie. I concluded he wasn’t merely the attendant but probably the owner. A black name badge pinned to his white shirt said MR. YOUNIS.

  Mr. Younis. This was a man who demanded respect.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Younis,” I said.

  He glared at me, suspicious. “Yes?”

  “I wonder if you could help me.” I kept my tone matter-of-fact. “A couple of days ago I was mugged over there by the ATM. Couple of thugs took my cash, my wallet, everything.”

  He shook his head, turned away, went back to changing the register tape. “I know nothing about this.”

  Right, I thought. He’s afraid he’ll somehow get ensnared in a crime that had nothing to do with him, just because it took place on his property. Was the ATM in fact on his property? The ATM belonged to Wachovia Bank. The brick wall was the side of the old car-barn building and probably belonged to Georgetown University, which was the big landlord around here. So why did he have his own surveillance camera pointed in that direction?

  The graffiti, I guessed. Kids with cans of spray paint, defacing the wall he looked at every day. Probably made his already high blood pressure shoot up to dangerous levels.

  “The cops won’t do a damned thing,” I said. “They can’t be bothered.”

  He grunted, fiddled with the register-tape roll, pushed it into its slot.

  “Know what they said?” I went on. “They said forget it. They couldn’t care less. There’s a damned crime wave in this city, and the police just sit there on their fat asses.”

  He shook his head, and his scowl deepened. He closed the cash-register-tape compartment and looked up. “It’s a disgrace,” he agreed.

  A man who installed such an elaborate security system was not someone who had a great deal of faith in law enforcement. He was also a guy with a lot of pent-up resentment.

  He was putty in my hands.

  “These thugs just run wild around here,” I said. “Do whatever the hell they want. They know they’ll get away with it. Like all that graffiti on the wall over there.”

  Some little sprocket of anger clicked into place in the guy’s head. He looked up at me. “These vandals—they call themselves ‘taggers,’ and they call this vandalism ‘art.’ And the police, they tell me if they have no documentation, they can do nothing. So I put in cameras.”

  “It didn’t stop them, huh?”

  “No! Nothing! One of the police even told me this is freedom of expression, this ‘tagging’!” He folded his arms.

  “Easy for them to say. They don’t have to live with it.”

  “It is an outrage!”

  “But it looks like a terrific surveillance system you’ve put in. High-res, infrared—”

  “—Yet it does me no good! None! Thousands of dollars, and these taggers are still doing their ‘art’!”

  “Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if your system got some video of my mugging, couple of days ago? Hell, might even be the same guys who keep writing on your wall. Let’s see the cops try to wriggle out of that, huh?”

  He looked at me, his eyes narrowing.

  “Do you know how to operate a digital recorder?” he asked. “I have to stay behind the counter.”

  MR. YOUNIS KEPT his security equipment in a locked supply closet next to a shelf of beer. On a wire shelf was a low-end digital recorder, eight-channel, a black oblong box. The video images were stored on a computer hard drive. On top of the DVR was a cheap fourteen-inch color monitor. He showed me how to search by date and time, and he returned to his Plexiglas booth to wait on a couple of college kids who wanted to buy a pack of Marlboros and a case of Budweiser.

  The supply closet was shallow, so I stood half-in, half-out. It took me five minutes to locate the night I wanted. I pushed PLAY. The recorder was set to take one picture every two seconds until it detected motion, at which point it kicked the recording speed up to a full thirty frames per second. Cars entered the frame and turned and backed up. People walked up to the ATM, alone or in couples, a few groups of three, their movements jerky, then suddenly smooth. I fast-scanned until I reached 11:00 P.M.

  At 11:06, a white panel van entered the frame, nosed in against the brick wall a few yards to the left of the cash machine. A bulky guy in a hooded gray sweatshirt got out of the driver’s side, slammed the door, then walked around the back of the van to the passenger’s side. It was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like he had a gun in his left hand. When the guy turned slightly, I was able to catch a glimpse of his profile: beefy face, mustache. Late thirties or early forties. With his right hand, he unlocked the front passenger door. He pocketed the keys, switched the gun to his right hand, then pulled the door open.

  And Roger stepped out.

  The hooded guy raised his gun a little, waved it back and forth. Roger nodded. He looked panicked. His tie was out of place, his suit rumpled.

  The guy in the hooded sweatshirt grabbed Roger with his left hand, and the two of them looped around the back of the van. They stood there for a few seconds.

  “Dude.”

  I looked up. A kid with tattoos and a silver barbell through his nasal septum was standing there.

  “Zig-Zags,” he said.

  “What about it?” He also had huge silver plugs, easily half an inch in diameter, through his earlobes. I wondered what this kid would look like at age seventy with big droopy holes in his ears and nose.

  “Like, where the hell are the rolling papers?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a glare, “like I know.”

  He hurried away.

  I turned back to the monitor. The beefy guy in the hooded sweatshirt said something to Roger, then turned around, and I got a full-on look at his face.

  No one I recognized, but he was a type—Neanderthal forehead, deep eye sockets, simian features. He could have been any one of a dozen guys I trained with in Special Forces and who washed out before the end. One of those blank-faced muscle-bound cretins who think they’re tougher and smarter than they really are and usually end up working as mall cops.

  I paused the video and zoomed in until I had a good screen capture of his face, then I cut and pasted the image. Not bad for a computer illiterate. When I returned to the normal view, I moved the cursor over until the rear of the van was in the center of the screen. A Ford Econoline E-350 Super Duty van, fairly new. The kind you see everywhere.

  I zoomed in closer and got another screen capture.

  The abductor had been careful to hide his face from the ATM camera. But not being all that bright, he hadn’t counted on another surveillance camera grabbing a very clear picture of his face.

  Or the license plate of the van he was driving.

  38.

  Isuppose I could have asked someone at Stoddard Associates to run the plates for me, but I knew that Virginia’s motor-vehicle records weren’t online—some ridiculous state law—and I didn’t want to call in any favors at work that I didn’t have to. Not with Stoddard keeping an eye on what I was doing.

  But Arthur Garvin was only too happy to run a trace: This was a serious break on a case that had been confounding him. As I walked back to my car, I read off the number and told him that as soon as I got back to the office, I’d e-mail him some of the video-frame captures of the thug who’d grabbed Roger. He warned me it might take him a day or two, but he promised he’d get the information fo
r me.

  My cell phone gave off four beeps, and, as I stood next to the Defender, I checked the text message. Another location report from the GPS tracker in the FedEx envelope.

  By then it was in Falls Church, Virginia. About six or seven miles from the drop site in Arlington. An address on Leesburg Pike.

  That meant that the package had been moved. Someone had picked it up and was delivering it somewhere else.

  I found myself juggling the cell phone and the BlackBerry, which I never liked using as a cell phone, and the DVD copy of Mr. Younis’s surveillance tape, in an old cracked CD jewel case he had lying around. I arrayed them before me on the hood of the Defender, my mobile office.

  When I clicked on Google Earth and zoomed in on the flashing red dot on my BlackBerry screen, I could see it was some big V-shaped office building.

  Success. Maybe. But at least I knew that someone had picked up the FedEx package and moved it from the mail drop to an office building in Falls Church, and that was something. Or it might turn out to be nothing. I wouldn’t know until I drove out there and took a look. I pocketed the BlackBerry and cell phone and fished out my car key, the DVD in my left hand.

  The Defender is as nonautomatic a vehicle as you can get: even the windows crank by hand. No remote starter; no keyless entry. You open it with a good old-fashioned key just like they did a century ago. I inserted the key in the lock and turned it—

  And heard the scrape against the pavement an instant too late.

  I turned slowly, but suddenly the car window came at me, smashing into my nose and mouth.

  While, at the same time, the DVD was wrenched out of my left hand.

  Reeling in pain, I spun, hands out, unsteady on my feet. Miraculously, the window glass hadn’t broken, but it felt like maybe my nose had.

  Enraged, I took off after my assailant, who was already quite a distance away. A black Humvee came hurtling down the street and slowed for a second. Its passenger-side door came open, and the guy took a running leap into the vehicle.

  Once I caught a glimpse of its license plate, I knew it was the same Humvee that had passed me twice before. I’m not the fastest runner, but fueled by adrenaline and considerable anger, I was able to get close enough to the Humvee to thump an angry fist against its left rear quarter panel before it disappeared down the street.

  My attacker had been unusually tall, with a steroid-poisoned wrestler’s build and what looked at a distance to be a high-and-tight jarhead recon haircut—shaven everywhere except the crown of his head, like a short Mohawk. He looked like an overweight Travis Bickle.

  I felt along the bridge of my nose. It wasn’t broken. No broken teeth either, though my upper lip was bleeding. I felt and tasted the blood.

  I took out my cell phone and hit redial, and when Garvin answered I said, “I have one more license plate for you.”

  39.

  The Dean & Deluca’s on M Street in Georgetown sold excellent fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies. I bought a dozen and asked the bakery clerk to pack them for me in a plain white deli box. I placed the box of cookies on the car seat next to me and got onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The entire interior of the car at once filled with the sweet buttery smell of freshly baked cookies.

  About half an hour later I turned off Leesburg Pike into a semicircular drive in front of a modern ten-story office building built in the shape of a broad V, with a blue glass skin that mirrored the sky so perfectly it seemed at times to disappear.

  The name on the front of the building was Skyview Executive Center. It appeared to be a multitenant office building. Like a lot of commercial buildings in Tysons Corner and Falls Church, there was an underground parking garage. Instead, I parked in the Doubletree Hotel down the block and walked over with my box of cookies.

  I hadn’t gotten any text messages from the GPS tracker in a while, so as I walked I took out my phone and opened the last message I’d received, then clicked on the map. The red dot was gone. That told me that the device had stopped transmitting. Which presumably meant that it had been discovered, then disabled.

  I entered the lobby and spent a few minutes inspecting the building directory, one of those big black wall signs with white letters, rear-illuminated. A long list of tenants. Mostly small to midsize firms: healthcare consultants, investment managers, accountants, a lot of lawyers. A couple of government-agency satellite offices. A number of companies with cryptic-sounding names like Aegis Partners and Orion Strategy, which were either lobbyists or defense contractors.

  But no Traverse Development. Nothing that sounded even remotely familiar. It didn’t surprise me that this mysterious company wasn’t listed on the building’s directory. But one of the companies in the building had to be connected to them, in some way.

  The security guard, seated behind a curved granite counter in the middle of the lobby, saw me staring at the directory board and called out, “Can I help you, sir?” He was in his late fifties, with deep-set eyes and a prominent forehead, a shiny bald head and protruding ears.

  “You have a list of the tenants in this building you might be able to give me?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Management company won’t let me hand that out.”

  “Rules is rules, huh? Thing is, the wife’s trying to start a chocolate-chip cookie business?” I held up the white bakery box. “I’m helping her with the marketing. Because she won’t let me near the kitchen.”

  I smiled, and he smiled back, and I went on, “We want to give out free boxes of cookies to all the companies here, sort of a promotional thing?” I came closer and handed him the box. “Here, these are for you. Try a couple and tell me if you don’t think my wife’s got it nailed.”

  He hesitated.

  “Go on, try one. If you can stop at one.”

  He opened the flaps on the box and pulled out a cookie and took a large bite. “Mmm,” he said. “Soft and chewy and crispy all at the same time. She use dark chocolate chips?”

  “Only the best quality chocolate.”

  He took another bite. “Man, these are good.”

  “Thank you.”

  He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stapled set of papers and gave it to me. “Just don’t tell anyone where you got this, okay?” He winked.

  I winked back. “Not a word.”

  He peered at me, touched his nose and lip and said, “You get into a fight with the wife?”

  For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about, then I remembered that my bruised nose and split lip probably looked pretty bad by then. “Yeah,” I said. “I told her I thought she should use shortening instead of butter. Learned my lesson. I’m sticking to the marketing.”

  INSTEAD OF driving back to the office, I stopped at a FedEx/Kinko’s copy shop and faxed Dorothy the tenant list. Not to some fax machine in the halls of Stoddard Associates, where anyone could see it; instead, I faxed it to her E-Fax account, so she’d get it online. While I was there, I rented time on a computer, checked my e-mail, and found an e-mail from Frank Montello, my information broker.

  Whenever he wrote e-mails, he used all capital letters as if he were sending a telegram by Western Union.

  ATTACHED YOUR BRO’S PHONE BILLS. BIG FILE. STILL WORKING ON

  THAT OTHER CELL # BUT SHOULD HAVE SOMETHING BY TOMORROW.

  INVOICE ATTACHED, TOO, PAYABLE WITHIN 10 DAYS AS PER USUAL.

  So he still hadn’t located the owner of the emergency contact number that Woody Sawyer had been given, back at the airport outside of L.A. But he had been able to unearth the billing statements for one of Roger’s cell phones, the one whose bills I couldn’t find in his study. The detailed phone records ran for dozens of pages. It wouldn’t have been much fun to read them on my BlackBerry. I printed them all out and skimmed the list while sitting in my car.

  Mostly meaningless columns of phone numbers. But then something leaped out at me.

  Five calls, all collect, all from a number in Altamont, New York.

>   “Billed on behalf of Global TelLink,” it said, and gave a phone number with a 518 area code.

  The Altamont Correctional Facility, it said.

  From Victor Heller, of course.

  I hadn’t talked to my father in several years. Whereas Roger had spoken to him five times in the last month.

  My brother always got along with our father well—far better than I did. I’d always thought that was because the two of them were so much alike.

  But five phone calls in the last month?

  More carefully, I went through the previous year’s phone bills and found just one other collect call from my father—eleven months ago. Six collect calls in a year from Dad, five of them in the last four weeks. Just before Roger’s disappearance.

  No coincidence.

  40.

  When I returned to Lauren’s house—after a quick stop at Mr. Younis’s gas station in Georgetown to make another DVD copy of the surveillance video that had been snatched from me—both Lauren and Gabe were home. Her Lexus was in the driveway, and the light in Gabe’s room was on. I unlocked the front door. The security system’s warning tone didn’t sound. They’d disarmed it.

  That was not what I wanted. I’d made it clear to Lauren that whenever they were home, they should use the night setting, which would give off a tone whenever someone entered. So I went to find her and explain to her how to use the system.

  She wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor was she in the TV room or at the computer in the hutch that served as her home office. I became aware of raised voices coming from upstairs, and I walked toward the staircase, climbed the steps.