The Hunt (14 page)

Iggie chortled. “Dr. Grout told me you’d try to play it cool. That’s why you were avoiding me last night.”

Exasperated, she ran both hands through her hair. “Yes, that’s exactly it. You and Dr. Grout know me better than I know myself. I’m playing it cool. But that’s still not why I’m calling.”

“Okay, I’ll play your game. Why are you calling, then?”

“I’m with some of your old college friends, and they’re trying to find Hilary Banks. She seems to have disappeared.”

“What? Disappeared? Hilarita?” The sulkiness had been replaced by hammy, overemoted surprise. Drama classes obviously hadn’t been part of his Ph.D program.

“Nobody’s seen her since she left the party with you last night.”

“Left the party with me? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. The parking attendants remembered you. Unless someone else is driving a Lamborghini, tipping the valet with hundred-dollar bills, and telling him to buy Igobe stock. Does that sound like someone else to you?”

I could practically hear Iggie’s mind working as he tried to figure out how to wiggle out of this one. “Maybe,” he said, his tone back to sulky. Given the mood swings we’d witnessed during a single phone call, perhaps it was a good thing he had such a close relationship with his mental-health professional.

“Come on, Iggie. Just tell me what happened after you left the party,” said Abigail.

“Nothing happened. Zippo. Nada. Zilch.”

“Then where is Hilary?”

“How would I know? I dropped her off at her hotel, and then I went home. That’s all there is.

End of story. Finito. Elvis left the building and the fat lady sang.”

“Are you lying to me?”

Sulky now gave way to a silky persuasiveness that wasn’t even partially successful. “I’d never lie to you, Big—I mean, Abigail.”

“Sure you would, if it served your purpose. You tried to lie to me thirty seconds ago—you just didn’t get away with it. I need you to promise you’re telling the truth.”

“Okay, I promise.”

“That’s not good enough, Iggie. I want you to swear to me you don’t know where she is.”

“Fine. I swear.”

“That’s still not good enough. Swear on something important. Swear to me on Phyllis.”

There was another long moment of silence on the other end of the phone. “That’s low, Biggie.”

“I need to know for sure you’re telling the truth.”

“All right, then,” he said grudgingly. “I swear on my mother’s honor. I haven’t seen Hilary since I left her at the Four Seasons, and I don’t know where she is. There. Are you happy now?”

Abigail put the speakerphone on mute again. “I have to admit, I sort of believe him,” she said to us. “Iggie has a love-hate relationship with his mother, but he takes her honor very seriously. But I also don’t think he’s telling us everything he knows—he sounds sort of cagey, like he’s holding
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something back. It’s hard to tell without being able to look him in the eye.”

“Let’s get together, Bigs,” suggested Iggie, as if he’d heard what she said. “It’s been too long, and I’ve got to say, I’m completely digging the new you. I never realized you could be so feisty.”

“Feisty?” asked Abigail, taking the phone off mute. Her expression was pained, and I made a mental note not to tell her about the “babealicious” comment the previous evening.

“Like a wildcat.” Then he growled.

Fortunately, Abigail had muted the phone again, because Peter was doing his trying-not-to-laugh choke, and I wasn’t even trying not to laugh. The corners of Luisa’s lips were twitching, and Ben let out a muffled guffaw.

Abigail looked around the room. “This is a really good friend of yours?” she asked, her eyes moving from Ben to me to Luisa. She seemed to be hoping we’d changed our mind about Hilary in the last hour, but we all nodded. Then she looked at Peter. “And she’s important to you, too?”

“She’s important to Rachel, so that makes her important to me,” he said.

She pointed a finger at him. “You may owe me a promotion after this, or at least a raise.” She unmuted the phone, interrupting Iggie as he continued to make what I guessed he considered to be the noises of a feisty wildcat. I was glad we weren’t privy to any visuals that might have been accompanying the sound effects. “What about tomorrow, Iggie?”

He stopped growling. “Tomorrow? Really?”

“Really.”

“We could have lunch. You like lunch, right? I have a personal chef at the office. He’ll make whatever you want. What do you want? You looked like you could use a good meal.” His tone had brightened considerably.

“I’ll have lunch with you tomorrow at your office,” she confirmed. “See you then.”

Iggie was still eagerly ticking off a list of potential menu items when Abigail hung up. “Well, that was excruciating,” she said to us.

“I may owe you a raise and a promotion,” Peter said.

She shrugged and flashed the same wry smile. “I wouldn’t turn anything down, but the occasional reminder of just how happy I am not to be married to him is probably a reward in itself.”

We all owed Abigail, but we also felt as if we knew even less now than we did before. If she was right, and if Iggie was telling the truth, then we had no idea what had happened to Hilary once he’d dropped her off at the hotel. We might not have to worry about what Iggie might be up to, but we did have to worry about what person or persons unknown might be up to.

This new level of uncertainty was more than a little discomfiting, especially since we had no additional evidence which would merit calling in the police and practically no leads left to explore except for the lone encrypted file from Hilary’s memory stick. The Che Guevara video might as well be encrypted, too, for all the sense it made, and we still didn’t know if it was linked in any way to Hilary’s disappearance. I liked focus and structure, but there was nothing around which we could organize, no obvious steps to take. It didn’t help that we were all exhausted—none of us had gone to sleep until late the previous evening, and it would have been a long and stressful day even without excessive exercise and the sudden elimination of important stimulants from my diet.

Then I remembered something that had been on Ben’s and Luisa’s to-do list. “What about the doormen? Did either of you get a chance to ask if they saw Hilary leaving last night?” That was one way to check if Iggie was telling the truth, and it might also provide us with some ideas as to what we should do next.

“We spoke to the guys on duty earlier,” said Ben. “None of them was working last night, so they couldn’t help us, but the shift changes at midnight, and they said a couple of guys who worked the late shift last night may be on again tonight.”

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Luisa checked her watch. “It’s ten of twelve now. Why don’t we go downstairs and catch them as they change shifts?”

“You can walk us out,” said Peter. “We can hear what they have to say, but after that we should probably call it a night. I can also check out the other file on the memory stick once Rachel and I get back to my parents’ house. I have some programs on my laptop that might help me decrypt it.”

Otherwise we were fresh out of inspiration, even after a nostalgic but unproductive round of Che Guevara free-association.

16

I t’s not easy to make a quick getaway from the San Francisco Four Seasons, because the lobby’s on the fifth floor. Separate elevator banks lead from the guestrooms to the lobby and then from the lobby to the street, and changing elevator banks requires a trip from one corner of the lobby to another. But as trips go, it’s a relatively painless one, a short stroll in a tasteful setting, and it shouldn’t be particularly dangerous.

Unless, that is, it’s late on a Sunday night. The hotel is a favorite of Wall Street types, and while a day trip to the West Coast isn’t out of the question for those accustomed to traveling in first class when a private jet is unavailable, morning meetings can make an overnight stay inevitable.

And there must have been a lot of meetings scheduled for Monday morning, because the lobby was thick with bankers just arrived from the last flight from New York. It was probably inevitable I’d run into someone I knew, and sure enough, I did.

I was following everyone out of the first set of elevators when I spotted Clay Finch, an acquaintance from a prep course I’d taken years ago for the Series Seven exam, a securities-industry accreditation. Clay was an enormously tall and extremely serious guy with a nonexistent sense of humor, although its absence might have been less noticeable if he hadn’t insisted on wearing bow ties. I thought a sense of humor was a prerequisite for wearing bow ties, both generally and about the bow ties, but either Clay felt differently or he mistakenly believed his sense of humor was present and intact.

I hardly came up to his waist, so it was possible I could slip by unseen, and I briefly toyed with the idea of pretending I hadn’t noticed him. But subterfuge always backfired, at least when I practiced it, and networking was supposed to be important in my line of work. I told my friends I’d meet them downstairs and stopped to say hello.

“Rachel. How nice to see you.” Coming from most people, Clay’s formal greeting and professional handshake would have seemed icy, but from him it was the equivalent of a kiss on the mouth, albeit without tongue.

“What brings you to town?” I asked.

“I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you,” said Clay. Investment bankers were supposed to keep their clients’ business confidential, and his was the standard reply to questions like mine, but it was usually delivered with a smile and a chuckle. Clay didn’t smile much, and he never chuckled.

The conversation quickly dried up from there, and, having satisfied any networking obligations, I started on my goodbyes. “Well, Clay, it was great to run into you—” I was saying when I noticed a familiar-looking envelope tucked into the crook of his elbow, right at my eye level, and my words froze in my mouth.

His arm hid most of the address, but I could see all I needed to see: the tail end of Clay’s last name, INCH, written in large block letters.

I considered accidentally bumping into him in the hope he’d drop the envelope, but that would be like trying to fell a redwood by poking it with a Q-tip. Instead I simply pulled it out from under his arm. Fortunately, Clay was Clay, so if this bothered him it was impossible to tell.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, turning the small package over in my hands. It was another twin to the one in which I’d received my iPod, which I guessed made it the triplet to the one in which my Lincoln Memorial keychain had been delivered, and the handwriting spelling out Clay’s name was unmistakably the same.

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“It was waiting for me when I checked in.”

“Do you know what it is or who it’s from?”

“I have no idea. I wasn’t expecting anything, and, as you can see, there’s no return address. The people at the front desk said it arrived this afternoon, but nobody could remember who made the delivery.”

“Let’s open it,” I suggested, as if opening other people’s mail was the most natural thing in the world.

“Uh—”

“Allow me.” And before Clay could protest, I pulled on the little tab, ripped open the top, and tipped the contents into my hand.

I wasn’t sure if I was hoping for a surprise, but I didn’t get one. Clay’s envelope held a Lincoln Memorial keychain, just like mine. The anonymous mastermind behind this particular scavenger hunt must have gotten a good deal at whichever novelty store he frequented, or perhaps he always bought in bulk.

“Isn’t that strange?” asked Clay, peering down at the keychain. Of course, he hadn’t even received the special Skater Girl treatment. “What do you think I’m supposed to do with this?”

I didn’t known what to tell him, but I didn’t get the chance to say anything anyway, because we were interrupted by someone calling our names at full volume from across the lobby. The shrill voice sounded as if it belonged to a particularly articulate and peppy macaw, but I would have known it anywhere and Clay probably would, too. We’d sat in the same classroom as its owner, Camilla Gergen, during our prep course, and nothing could make a room seem smaller than being trapped in it with Camilla Gergen’s voice.

She joined us with a level of excitement I found excessive given the occasion and the flimsy nature of our prior acquaintance. “Get OUT! I don’t BELIEVE it! What are you two DOING

here?”

“Hello, Camilla,” said Clay. He had no “how nice to see you” to spare for her, but he bent stiffly when it became clear she intended to air kiss him on not one but both cheeks, whether he liked it or not.

“MUH!” she said to one cheek. “And MUH!” she said to the other.

“Hi,” I said, submitting to my own set of air kisses.

“This is SO weird. It’s the weirdest! All of us together again. It’s just like our Series Seven class!”

“Just like it,” I agreed amiably. The class had taken place eight years ago in an office building with thirty other people, an instructor and an overhead projector, but debating its resemblance to this encounter would only prolong it, and I now very much wanted to talk to Clay alone.

“Let’s grab a drink!” said Camilla. “It’s been way too long since I’ve seen you both. I think the lounge is still open.”

I fumbled for an excuse that would involve Camilla shutting up and going away. “Wow, does that sound like incredible fun, but—”

“Oh, my GOD! Did you get one of those, too?” She was pointing at the keychain resting in my palm.

“Too?”

Camilla held up her own padded envelope. CAMILLA GERGEN was printed on the front in the same distinctive handwriting. “I got one when I checked in. I thought it was a gift or something from the hotel, since I stay here so often. But it’s not from the hotel. I don’t know who it’s from. Isn’t that just the weirdest coincidence that you got one, too? What are you going to do with yours? I don’t know what I’m going to do with mine. I have the cutest little keychain already, with my initials on it and a little picture of my pug and me. See? Do you like pugs? Isn’t he just the cutest? Now, how about that drink? They have the yummiest olives in the lounge here.