Buried Secrets (8 page)

“Why don’t I give you a lift home,” I said.

“How do you know I don’t have my car here?”

“Because you’d have parked in the underground garage like all FBI employees do. Plus, you’d be carrying your car keys in your left hand. Don’t forget, I know you.” She looked away. Embarrassed? Unreadable, in any case. As always, the emotional equivalent of Kryptonite. “My apartment’s in the South End. I was going to take the T.” I opened the passenger-side door for her.

18.

“So now the next shift takes over texting your predators?” I said.

“We can’t do that,” Diana said. “Perps can sometimes sense a change in respondents.

Even in short message texts there can be subtle nuances in tone and rhythm.” As I drove I caught the faintest whiff of her perfume. It was something I’d never smelled on another woman: rose and violet and cedar, sophisticated and haunting and unforgettable.

Neuroscientists tell us that nothing brings back the past as quickly and powerfully as a smell. Apparently the olfactory nerve arouses something in the limbic center of your brain where you store long-term memories on your mental hard drive.

Diana’s perfume brought back a rush of memories. Mostly happy ones.

“How long have you been in Boston?” I asked.

“A little over a year. I heard through the grapevine you might be here. Did Stoddard send you here to open a satellite office or something?”

“No, I’m on my own now.” I wondered whether she’d been asking around about me, and I suppressed a smile.

“You like it?”

“It would be perfect if the boss weren’t such a hard-ass.”

She laughed ruefully. “Nick Heller, company man.”

“You said Pembroke Street, right?”

“Right. Off Columbus Ave. Thanks for doing this.”

“My pleasure.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about Spike,” she said.

“Spike?”

“Gordon Snyder. Spike’s his childhood nickname. He’s spent his entire life trying to make people forget it.”

“Spike?”

“Don’t ever tell him I told you. You promise?”

“I can think of some better nicknames for him than Spike,” I said. “None of them very nice. So how did you know I met with him?”

She shrugged. “I saw you storm out. Looked like it didn’t go too well.”

“Did he tell you what we talked about?”

“Sure.”

I wondered whether she’d followed me out too. Maybe this meeting wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe she heard I was in the building and wanted to say hi.

Maybe that was all she wanted.

I dropped another note into the cold-case file marked MADIGAN, DIANA.

“So what’s with his fixation on Marshall Marcus?”

“Marcus is his great white whale.”

“But why?”

“Guys like that, the more elusive the target, the more obsessed they become. That may sound familiar, Nico.”

Tell me about it,
I thought. “Well, he seemed a whole lot more interested in taking down Marcus than finding his daughter.”

“Maybe because he’s in charge of financial crimes.”

“Aha.”

“I have to say, I don’t understand why you were meeting with the head of the financial crimes unit if you were looking for a missing girl.”

I was beginning to wonder the same thing. “That was the name I was given.”

“Is Marshall Marcus a friend of yours?”

“Friend of the family.”

“Friend of your father’s?”

“My mother worked for him,” I said. “And I like his kid.”

“How much do you know about him?”

“Not enough, I guess. Apparently you guys are investigating him for something. What can
you
tell me about him?”

“Not much.”

“Not much because you don’t know? Or because he’s the subject of an FBI probe?”

“Because it’s a sealed investigation. And I’m on the other side of the firewall.” I pulled up in front of her narrow bow-front brownstone, double-parking in front of a space easily big enough for the Defender to fit.

“Well, thanks again,” she said, opening the door.

“Hold on. I need to ask you a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“You think you can put in a request to locate Alexa Marcus’s cell phone?”

“I—that’s a little complicated. It’s not so easy to do an end run around Snyder. What makes you think something happened to her?”

I was about to answer when she looked around and said, “Look, if you want, you can come up for a sec, explain this all to me.”

I shrugged, playing it cool. “Hell, seems a shame to waste a perfectly good parking space,” I said.

19.

Her apartment, on the second floor, wasn’t very big. It couldn’t have been much more than seven or eight hundred square feet. Yet it didn’t feel small. It felt lush and rich and textured.

The walls were painted various shades of chocolate brown and earth tones. It was furnished with what looked like stuff from flea markets. But every single piece of furniture, every object, every strange iron lamp or tapestry-covered pillow or copper picture frame, had been carefully selected.

She pointed me to a big overstuffed corner sofa while she made coffee for me—freshly ground beans, a French press—and served it in a big mug that looked hand-painted. It was dark and strong and perfect. She didn’t have any, though, because she needed to sleep. She fixed herself a glass of sparkling water with some lime squeezed into it.

She had music playing softly in the background, a simple and infectious tune, a gentle guitar, highly syncopated. A smoky female voice singing in Portuguese and then English, a lilting song about a stick and a stone and a sliver of glass, the end of despair, the joy in your heart.

The lilting voice was singing in Portuguese now:
É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho
…

um pouco sozinho
. I didn’t know what the words meant, but I liked the way they sounded.

“Who’s singing?” I said. She’d always loved female vocalists—Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Judy Collins. All the greats, all of them different.

“Susannah McCorkle. ‘The Waters of March.’ It’s an amazing rendition, isn’t it? The more you listen to it, the more its layers unfold. It’s casual and easygoing and then it just gets deeper and deeper and more soulful.”

I grunted agreement.

A woman invites you up to her apartment, you usually know what to expect. But not in this case. We’d both moved on. We’d gone from Friends With Benefits to Just Friends.

I had plenty of friends. But there was only one Diana.

And being Just Friends didn’t change the way I felt about her. It didn’t make her any less attractive to me. It didn’t keep me from watching her from behind, appreciating the curve of her waist as it met her shapely butt. It didn’t make me admire her less or find her any less fascinating. It didn’t diminish the strength of her magnetic field.

The damn woman had some kind of built-in tractor beam. It wasn’t fair.

But we were here to talk about Alexa Marcus, and I was determined to respect the implicit boundaries. I told her what little I knew about what had happened to Alexa, and about Taylor Armstrong, her Best Friend Forever.

“I hate to say it, but Snyder has a point,” she said. “It hasn’t even been twelve hours, right? So she met a guy and went home with him and she’s sleeping it off in some BU dorm.

That’s entirely possible, right?”

“Possible, sure. Not likely.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, it’s not like a girl her age to go dark, go off the grid. She’d have checked in with her friends. These girls are constantly texting each other. They work their little mobile phones like speed typists.”

“She’s an overprotected girl with a troubled home life, and she’s testing the limits,” Diana said. She was sitting in an easy chair set at a right angle to the matching couch, her legs crossed. She’d removed her cowboy boots. Her toenails were painted deep oxblood red. The only makeup she had on was lip gloss. Her skin was translucent. She took a long drink of sparkling water, from a funky handblown blue glass tumbler.

“I don’t think you really believe that,” I said. “With the kind of work you do.” The shape of her mouth gradually changed, so subtly that you’d have to know her well to see it. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was playing devil’s advocate. Maybe trying to see it the way Snyder sees it. Given what the girl’s gone through—that attempted abduction a few years ago—she’s not likely to go home with a strange guy no matter how much she’s drunk.

She’s always going to be nervous.”

“It wasn’t an
attempted
abduction,” I said. “She
was
abducted. Then released.”

“And they never found out who did it?”

“Right.”

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“No ransom demand.”

“None.”

“They just … grabbed her, drove her around for a few hours, and then released her? All that risk of exposure with no payoff?”

“Apparently so.”

“And you believe this?”

“I have no reason not to. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Alexa about it.” She leaned back in her chair, looked up at the ceiling. Her jawline was sharp, her neck swanlike. “If her father secretly paid a ransom and didn’t want to tell anyone, would she really know?”

She was smart. I’d forgotten how smart. “If he had a reason to keep it secret, maybe not.

But that was never the sense I got.”

“Maybe he doesn’t tell you everything.”

“Maybe there’s something
you’re
not telling.”

She looked away. There was something. After a moment she said, “I have to tread really carefully here.”

“I understand.” I took another sip and set the mug down on the coffee table, which was old and ornately carved from weathered teak.

“I know I can trust your discretion.”

“Always.”

Her eyes seemed to be focused on some middle distance. They kept moving down and to the right, which meant that she was internally debating something. I waited. If I pushed too hard, she’d close right up.

She turned to me. “You know I’d never divulge confidential details of an ongoing investigation, and I’m not going to start now. No leaks, no favors. I’ve never worked that way.”

“I know.”

“So the speculation seems to be that Marshall Marcus is laundering money for some very bad guys.”

“Laundering money? That’s ridiculous. The guy’s a billionaire. He doesn’t need to launder money. Maybe he’s managing money for some questionable clients. But that’s not the same thing as laundering it.”

She shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I hear. And I should also warn you: Gordon Snyder is not a guy you want for an enemy.”

“Some people say that about me.”

“That’s also true. But just … watch out for the guy. If he thinks you’re working against him, against his case, he’ll come gunning for you.”

“Oh?”

“He won’t break the law. But he’ll go right up to the edge. He’ll use every legal tool he has. Nothing gets in his way.”

“Consider me warned.”

“Okay. Now, do you have a picture of Alexa?”

“Sure,” I said, reaching into my breast pocket for one of the photos Marcus had given me.

“But why?”

“I need to see her face.”

She came over and sat next to me on the couch, and I felt my heart speed up a little and I could feel the heat from her body. Another song was playing now: Judy Collins’s haunting ballad

“My Father.” I handed her a picture of Alexa in her field hockey uniform, her blond hair pulled back in a headband, cheeks rosy and healthy, blue eyes sparkling.

“Pretty,” she said. “She looks like she’s got fight.”

“She does. She’s had a rough patch, last few years.”

“Not an easy age. I hated being seventeen.”

Diana never talked much about growing up, besides the fact that she was raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, where her father was with the U.S. Marshals Service and was killed in the line of duty when she was a teenager. After that her mother moved them to Sedona and opened a New Age jewelry and crystal shop.

I noticed her body shifting slightly toward me. “You know, I recognize that shirt,” she said. “Didn’t I give it to you?”

“You did. I haven’t taken it off since.”

“Good old Nico. You’re the one fixed point in a changing age.”

“Sherlock Holmes, right?”

She gave me one of her inscrutable smiles. “All right, I’ll put in a request to AT&T. I’ll find a way to push it through.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Look, it’s not about you. Or us. It’s about the girl. As far as I’m concerned, Alexa Marcus is legally a minor, and she may be in some kind of trouble, and that’s all I need to hear.”

“So does this make it officially an FBI matter?”

“Not necessarily. Not yet, anyway. But if I can help out on this, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks.” A long, awkward silence followed. Neither one of us was the type to mull over every slight, to pick at emotional scabs. Yet at the same time we were both blunt-spoken. And there we were, sitting in her apartment, just the two of us, and if ever there was a time to talk about the elephant in the room, this was it.

“So how come—” I began, but stopped.
How come you never told me you were posted to
Boston?
I wanted to say. But I didn’t want it to sound like a reproach. Instead, I told her: “Well, same here. You ever need anything, I’ll be there. Right on your doorstep. Like a box from Zappos.”

She smiled and turned to look at me, but as soon as I met those green eyes and felt her breath on my face, my lips were on hers. They were warm and soft and her mouth tasted of lime, and I couldn’t resist exploring it.

A phone started ringing.

With my hands drifting to her hips, almost involuntarily, I was probably the first to notice her vibrating BlackBerry.

Diana pulled away. “Hold on, Nico,” she said, drawing her BlackBerry from the holster on her belt.

She listened. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right in.”

“What is it?”

“My predator,” she said. “He’s been texting me again. I think he’s getting a little suspicious. He wants to change our meeting time. They need me back at work. I’m—I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” I said.