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  “But you had no way to reach him. You needed to reach him immediately, but he didn’t have his cell phone with him. You couldn’t e-mail him on his BlackBerry, because he didn’t have that with him either. Am I right?”

  She hesitated a few seconds before nodding.

  “Strange, isn’t it? A hardworking man like Mr. Heller didn’t have his cell phone or his BlackBerry with him while he was traveling at such a very busy time, when he needed to be reachable at all times?”

  Her eyes slid to one side. Her deception flashed like a neon sign.

  “Yet somehow you reached him. You talked to him. How so?”

  She looked away.

  “I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth,” he said. “But first I want you to see this scalpel up close. I want you to feel how sharp it is.”

  Her eyes widened, filled with tears. She began to shake her head—as if to say, No, please don’t—but then she stopped. She didn’t want him to misinterpret the gesture as an unwillingness to cooperate.

  He came in close, the scalpel in his right hand, and he moved it very close to her right eyeball.

  She closed her eyes, shook her head violently.

  “No sudden moves, please,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself badly.”

  Her eyes remained scrunched closed.

  “Open your eyes, please, or you’ll be hurt much worse.”

  He waited a few seconds until her eyes came open. She squinted, blinked.

  “The skin of the eyelid is less than one millimeter thick. This scalpel will slice through it quite easily. And then the sclera, beneath. The aqueous fluid will leak right out. The damage to your eye will not be reparable.”

  Her blinking became rapid. She moaned.

  “Do you know the term ‘enucleation’?”

  She closed her eyes again, her moaning louder.

  “Enucleation is the surgical removal of the eyeball. Usually it’s done only in drastic circumstances like traumatic injury or a malignant tumor.”

  He could see her jaw working up and down, could hear her trying to shout the word “please” over and over.

  “You’ll still be able to work as an attorney without your eyes, of course,” he explained. “They have screen-reading software now and scanners. You’ll be able to use Westlaw that way, I believe. But you can forget about handwritten notes, and very few websites are accessible to the visually impaired, unfortunately. The adjustment will be onerous.”

  He laid his left hand on her forehead, right above her glasses: an intimate gesture, almost a caress.

  “Now, I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth, and if you make any noise—if you shout or scream or call for help—I’m going to perform some very quick surgery. Are we clear?”

  She nodded, her eyes closed.

  “As soon as the tape comes off, I want you to tell me how you reached Mr. Heller. Clear?”

  She nodded.

  He held the scalpel about a half inch from her eye. With his left hand, he ripped off the duct tape.

  She gasped loudly, gulped air.

  Her words came all in a rush, high-pitched and mewling. “He left me a message on my voice mail. He told me to go to his desk, he had a cell phone in one of the drawers, one of those prepaid phones, and he said it was already activated, and he wanted me to take it and go down to the street and call him.”

  “Call him where?”

  “He gave me a phone number.”

  “What was the number he gave you?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, how can I possibly remember? I didn’t memorize the number, how could I know what the number is? I called from work. I didn’t keep a record. He told me not to!”

  “Of course you don’t have the phone number memorized. But the number you called will be listed on the phone you used.”

  She hesitated, just for a second, but long enough for him to realize that she was inventing a reply. “I put the phone back in Roger’s desk.”

  “No, I don’t think you did. I think you brought it home because he told you to do so.”

  She shook her head. She was trembling.

  “You’re a very loyal colleague,” he said. He’d stopped using her name. He never used their names. “You’re protecting Mr. Heller. That’s commendable. But he’s gone now, and you no longer need to protect him. Right now you face a choice. You will give me that phone, or you’ll undergo some very painful surgery without the benefit of anesthesia.”

  “Please, no.”

  “Where is the phone?”

  After she told him, he went to the dresser. The throwaway cell phone was in the top drawer, just as she said. He nodded, turned back to her.

  Just to be sure, he powered it on, then checked the list of outgoing calls.

  It had been used only once.

  “Very good,” he said.

  “Please,” she said in a whisper, “please, can you leave now? You have what you want, don’t you? I don’t know why you want it or who you are, and I don’t care, but I just want you to leave now, please. I promise you—I give you my word—I won’t talk to the police. I won’t talk to anyone.”

  “I know you won’t,” the Surgeon said, ripping off a fresh length of duct tape from the silvery roll and swiftly placing it over her mouth. “I know you won’t.”

  76.

  Even after all that time, I still knew very little for certain about what had happened to Roger.

  The most I could do was to mull over several different hypotheses. Think them through, turn them over and over and try to calculate which one was the most likely. What I eventually settled on was something like this: my ever-scheming, ever-dissatisfied, megalomaniacal brother had finally discovered a way out of his middle-class purgatory. After his company, Gifford Industries, had secretly acquired Paladin Worldwide, he’d combed through Paladin’s financial records, come across evidence of some mammoth kickback scheme, and made the brazen error of trying to extort millions of dollars from Carl Koblenz, Paladin’s president. But instead of simply buying Roger’s silence, Paladin had come right back at him. Threatened him. Targeted him. Then, one night in Georgetown, grabbed him.

  After that, well, my hypothesis got even shakier. Had he managed to escape his abductors? That seemed awfully unlikely. Roger was no super-hero. Was he being held prisoner at the Paladin training facility in Georgia in such a lax, loose way that he was actually able to use a cell phone? That was only marginally more likely.

  So maybe he was being used by his captors instead. Maybe they were forcing him to make the calls, to Dad and to Lauren, urging them to cooperate with Paladin, give them what they wanted, so he could win his release.

  Maybe.

  But what my father had to do with it—what my father could have that Paladin might want—I couldn’t imagine.

  So maybe there was yet another explanation entirely, something I hadn’t even begun to fathom.

  Nothing would surprise me anymore.

  I CALLED Dorothy Duval a little later. I tried her work number first, but was put into her voice mail. Then I tried her cell, and she picked right up. A television was playing in the background, loud, wherever she was.

  “Hope I’m not disturbing you,” I said.

  “Oh, no. I’ve got nothing going on.” She sounded down.

  “You okay?”

  “I’ll get by. You wanted to go over today?”

  “The thing is, we have to do this in the middle of the workday, which I realize is a problem for you.”

  “No,” she said. “No problem at all.” There was a grim, yet singsong, quality to her voice.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Heller, I have all the time in the world. Jay Stoddard just fired me.”

  “You? For what?”

  “He said I was misusing company resources.”

  “Meaning that you’ve been helping me out,” I said.

  “He didn’t feel I deserved an explanation. The bad thing is, I’m not goin
g to be able to help you anymore. Because I won’t have any more access to any of Stoddard’s databases.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not right.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s what happened.”

  “No,” I said again. “This is just not acceptable.”

  “Tell me about it. Plus he says he’s gonna blackball me. Make sure I never get a job in this town again.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t bother. I can’t go back there. Not after he fired me. Uh-uh.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “In the meantime, do me a favor. I need you to go into my brother’s laptop and look for something.”

  “There’s not much there.”

  “He has a Hotmail account. You can find out the account’s user ID, right?”

  “If it’s there, sure. But the password—”

  “That’s the easy part. Victor10506.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Long story,” I said. “But 10506 is the zip code for Bedford, New York. Where we used to live when we were kids.”

  “You want me to go into your brother’s e-mail. No problem. But what am I looking for?”

  “I want you to do a search for all e-mails to and from CatLvr74@ yahoo.com,” I said. “There’s going to be a cell-phone number in one of them.”

  “And what am I supposed to do if I find one?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve got an interesting idea.”

  77.

  I found Jay Stoddard at breakfast in the Senate Dining Room with a senator from Virginia who was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and was facing a nasty reelection battle.

  I stormed into the elegant room—yellow walls, patterned red carpet, white tablecloths, the hush of power—wearing jeans and a T-shirt and hiking boots. Stoddard was in one of his finest handmade suits: dove gray, double-breasted, with a crisp pale blue shirt and red tie. Before him were a cup of coffee and a bowl of cornflakes. His second breakfast, I guessed. He’d always told me never to go to a business breakfast without eating first.

  The maître d’ had followed me in, protesting, “Sir! I’m sorry, but jeans aren’t permitted. Sir, I’m afraid you’re going to have to put on a tie.”

  The commotion attracted a lot of attention. A lot of stares. Stoddard glanced around curiously, then did a double take.

  “Heller? What the hell are you—?”

  “We have a little unfinished business,” I said.

  He exchanged a look with the senator—indulge me for a second—and said, “I think this can wait till I’m back in the office.”

  “You didn’t seriously believe you could get rid of Dorothy Duval so easily, did you?” I stood before his table, arms folded.

  Stoddard rose. “Excuse me, John,” he said to the senator. “Personnel matter.” He came around the table, very close to me, and said through gritted teeth, “Heller, get the hell out of here. You’re making a scene. If you want to talk about this, make a goddamned appointment.”

  “Right now works for me,” I said.

  “Damn you, Heller,” he said, and crossed the dining room. I followed him out to the corridor. He stood a few feet away and poked my chest with his index finger. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said, his voice a low, ominous rumble.

  “You want to explain to me why you assigned me to that stolen-cargo case in Los Angeles?”

  “I assigned you because I thought you’d do the job.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No one else in the firm was qualified, huh? So is that the reason you didn’t want me looking too hard at who Traverse Development really is? So I wouldn’t put it together that Traverse is just a Paladin holding company? Meaning that the real client was Leland Gifford?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Heller.”

  “And maybe Leland Gifford figured that I’d have some inside knowledge because of my brother?”

  “Why would your brother know anything about this? You’re not exactly making sense.”

  “Or did you think you’d be able to control me if I found out what was in that container?” I was, I admit, speculating wildly. I just knew it was no accident that I was put on the job.

  “Control you? When have I ever been able to control you? I’ve seen the surveillance video of you and Dorothy and some other guy breaking into the Paladin offices.”

  “So you’re singling Dorothy out?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you.”

  “So you were planning to fire me, too, that it?”

  “I cannot have you doing that sort of thing.”

  I took a small metal object from my back pocket and showed it to him. A USB flash drive that held three gigabytes of files and e-mails. “Yeah,” I said. “It would be wrong. Like the illegal wiretap you had us do on the Ogilvie case.”

  “Oh, please,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re growing a conscience all of a sudden.”

  “Your breakfast companion might be interested in hearing about the work you did for his colleague, Senator McBride.”

  He knew just what I was talking about: a senator who’d hired Stoddard to expunge a domestic-abuse charge before it became public. And then a couple of years later, the senator’s opponent hired Stoddard to do a little background research on Senator McBride, and what do you think Stoddard turned up? Lucky for Stoddard that Senator McBride didn’t demand his money back.

  “So what’s this supposed to be, your job insurance?”

  I shook my head slowly. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “You’re quitting, huh?”

  “Before you fire me.”

  “You think anyone’s ever going to hire you in this town?”

  “Nope.”

  “You got money in a piggy bank somewhere, Heller? Money your dad buried under a rock for you in the Alps?”

  I just looked at him. Let him think it. “Know what this really is, Jay?” I wiggled the flash drive in my fingers. “It’s your retirement package. This effectively puts you out of business.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Dorothy doesn’t want to work for you. But you’re going to do everything in your power to get her an even better job, somewhere else. You’re going to give her a sterling recommendation, and you’re going to get on the phone and use that famous Stoddard charm and pull every string you have. I’m talking a really great job. And if you don’t . . .”

  I wiggled the flash drive again. Its brushed-metal case glinted in the light from the chandelier overhead.

  He stared at me, mouth jutting open. Dumbfounded.

  “Don’t disappoint me, Jay,” I said.

  Then I turned to leave.

  “Heller,” he called after me. “I don’t know what you have up your sleeve, but I suggest you not bother. Like Sun Tzu said: ‘All battles are won or lost before they’re fought.’ ”

  “He never said it,” I pointed out. “That’s from the movie Wall Street.”

  “Doesn’t make it wrong.”

  “Well,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.”

  78.

  My cell phone kept ringing while I was accosting Jay Stoddard in the Senate Dining Room and outside of it. When I was finally able to check my voice mails, I found six. Two from Dorothy, confirming that she’d been able to rent all the equipment and uniforms I’d asked for. One was from Lauren. One was from an old friend named Pat Keegan, who now taught explosives at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and sounded very happy to hear from me. One was from an irate client who hadn’t been told that I was on leave from Stoddard Associates. He would not be happy to hear that I most assuredly was not coming back.

  And one was from Lieutenant Arthur Garvin. He’d just gotten a heads-up from Anne Arundel County police about an apparent homicide that might have been connected to one of the cases Garvin was working. He wanted me to meet him at the crime scene in Linthicum, Maryland. At that time of the morning, it was more than an ho
ur’s drive. There was no way I could do it. I had far too much going on that day.

  I called Garvin to extend my apologies.

  But when he told me that the victim had worked at Gifford Industries, I raced to my car.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD was cordoned off. A uniformed patrol officer from the Anne Arundel County Police Department was stopping all traffic. His cruiser was parked perpendicular to the street, its light bar flashing red and blue, the strobes pulsing a glaring white.

  Garvin met me at the barricade and escorted me through, and together we walked the hundred feet. The neighborhood reminded me of my grandmother’s: modest houses set close together, big cars, manicured lawns. The victim’s house was tiny, the smallest on the block. The street on either side was choked with police vehicles; the driveway was crawling with uniformed officers and crime-scene techs. A patrolman was standing at the door to the bungalow, taking the crime-scene log. Radios were crackling. Neighbors were huddled together at a safe distance, talking. Probably neighbors who’d never spoken before.

  “Here’s the deal,” Garvin said. “I don’t know the lead on this case, but he’s an old-timer like me, and he was willing to admit you to the scene on the condition that you don’t move or touch anything. Unfortunately, it’s daytime, so we’ve got everyone and their brother showing up here—all twelve guys from the Homicide unit, the unit commander, the duty official, the ME’s Office, you name it. I told the detective that you’re a buddy of mine, and I trust you.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  “And I told him that you knew the victim.”

  “Barely,” I said.

  “I told him you could be a time-line witness. Guy’s not stupid, he wants any help he can get. So just don’t stir up trouble, and we’ll be fine.”

  I was issued Tyvek coveralls and shoe covers and a polypropylene hair-net. I had to put on a double set of latex gloves before entering the house.

  In the small front room were a couple of easy chairs and a desk with an open MacBook on it: a small white laptop computer. Someone was dusting the window for prints, someone was taking pictures, and someone else was doing a diagram.