"Who?"
Leggett told him who it was and Justin heard his own sudden intake of breath.
"Where?" he said. "When?"
"I can't give you any details over the phone. Just get back here."
"All right," he told the chief, glancing over at Byron Fromm. "I just need about half an hour here to-"
"No half hour," Leggett cut him off. "I've been ordered to get you back ASAP."
"You've been ordered?" Justin asked. "Ordered by who?"
"By me," a strange voice said over the phone. Justin could hear the receiver being wrested away from his boss.
"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.
"Special Agent Leonard Rollins. FBI. And that's the end of your little Q and A, Detective. Get your ass back here. Now."
Justin heard the receiver at the other end of the line click off. His cell phone went dead. He stared at the pale, overweight man standing in front of him. A harsh rock song blared into his head. Nick Cave. Is there anybody out there, please? It's too quiet in here and I'm starting to freeze. Under fifteen feet of clear white snow…
The words and music felt as if they were going to smother him. It was exactly the way he felt: freezing and isolated, buried under an unbearable weight.
"Something wrong, Detective?" Byron Fromm asked.
"Yeah," he told the building manager, and he thought the man looked a little too gleeful, as if whatever information had just been transmitted over the phone had somehow gotten him off the precarious hook he was on in his shabby-and-getting-shabbier suburban sanctuary. "Life's about as wrong as it can possibly be."
12
Before leaving the Weston mall, Justin went into a Barnes amp; Noble, strode over to the magazine rack, and stared at the rows of new magazines. By his count, eight of them had a picture of Maura Greer on the cover. Maura Greer, the onetime East End Harbor townie turned Washington intern who'd been missing for over three months. The girl whose body, according to Justin's frantic boss, had just been found floating in East End Bay.
Justin flipped through several of the magazines, read a page of Dominick Dunne's theorizing in Vanity Fair, checked out what Mark Singer had to say in The New Yorker. He bought them both, along with a copy of Jump magazine. He drove back to the ferry and, as it cruised across the sound back to Long Island, he read the piece in Jump. Then he read it again. And then a third time.
And he began to wonder if East End Harbor would ever again be the quiet little town it had been just forty-eight hours before.
by Leslee Carter Reese On the day her daughter Maura disappeared, Rachel Greer had a psychic experience.
It had never happened to her before, not like this. Before this particular Thursday it was just the usual I-knew-who-was-on-the-phone-the-moment-it-rang or I-was-just-thinking-about-you-exactly-when-you-called kind of thing. But on February 23, at four-fifteen in the afternoon, she felt a chill sweep through her entire body. The feeling was both disturbing and enthralling. It was as if a ghost had plunged inside her, filling her with the frigid sensation of death and the glowing power that she is now convinced came with her brief foray from this world to the next and back again.
There is little question in her mind that a ghost did, in fact, plunge inside her.
There is also little question in her mind that the ghost was her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Maura Devon Greer.
Maura, who has been living in Washington, D.C., for the past eighteen months, interning at the Food and Drug Administration, has been missing for three months. She has, in essence, disappeared off the face of the earth, and her disappearance has not only caused scandal, it has disrupted the political landscape in a way not seen since the emergence of Monica Lewinsky or Chandra Levy. It has stirred widespread national debate from both the left and right about the nature of the media. In our post-September 11 world we were all going to be focused on the serious and pressing issues that swirl around us. The emphasis on celebrityhood was over, as was our obsession with scandal, sex, and frivolity. Yet, since this young Jewish girl disappeared, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio call-in shows seem to have done little but speculate about the sordid details of Maura Greer's life and presumed death.
It is essential to the well-being of the United States and our efforts to cope with the potential threat of biological warfare that the secretary of Health and Human Services, Frank Manwaring, function without distraction. Instead, the search for Maura Greer has damaged Secretary Manwaring's credibility, possibly beyond repair, and put a stranglehold on his effectiveness.
But most of all, Maura's disappearance has caused heartache for her family. In the midst of our global obsession with terrorism, it is easy to forget that there are other, smaller tragedies in life. Unless, of course, you happen to be living in the middle of such a tragedy.
Maura Greer left her one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., at approximately four o'clock in the afternoon on Thursday, February 23. It is presumed that she went to pick up her car, a three-year-old silver Honda Accord, in the underground garage beneath her apartment building. Although she was not spotted there, the garage was vandalized and the attendant, Hector Diaz, has also been missing since that day. (For a time, Mr. Diaz was a suspect in the disappearance, but police have since ruled out that possibility.) According to a neighbor who saw her in the hallway on her way out, there was nothing about Maura's demeanor that struck him as strange. He did say that she was dressed rather provocatively, but Maura usually dressed provocatively. She had never been a shy girl, and that aggressiveness carried over to her sexuality. She was never afraid to voice her opinions or take over a room with her personality or use her body to give her an advantage. There was only one area of her life about which Maura seemed to turn inward, reticent to reveal details even to her closest friends: her relationship with the current man in her life.
"For the longest time, she would talk about it only in vague generalities," said her best friend since childhood, Gay Chilcott. "I'd ask her who she was seeing and she'd get this beatific smile on her face and say things like, 'You'll meet him soon,' or 'It's going really well but I can't talk about it yet.' It didn't take a genius to figure out she was going out with a married man. From a few hints that she dropped, it was pretty obvious it was also an older married man. Then, about two weeks before she died…I mean, disappeared… she became a little more open. Started revealing a few details. She told me that he was fifty. And that he was a great lover. She also told me he was very important and she made it pretty clear he was with the government. One of the last times I talked to her on the phone she said that there was a decent chance she'd get to go to the White House and meet the president soon."
According to friends and family, Maura's affair had been going on for at least six months, probably closer to eight. Those who knew about the affair also knew that she expected her lover to leave his wife-and marry Maura.
"She was certain that she was going to be the winner in this relationship tug-of-war," Chilcott says. "I told her that men do sometimes leave their wives-but I sure as hell wouldn't count on it. But people believe what they want to believe in situations like that. And Maura believed that everything would end up happily ever after."
So far, things have ended up anything but happily. Whether that unhappiness is forever depends on two things. Will Maura Greer turn up alive? And what will happen to her married lover-our current secretary of Health and Human Services, Frank Manwaring?
Manwaring has denied any role in Maura's disappearance. For weeks he also denied that he and the young intern had been having an affair, but recently, as incontrovertible evidence of the affair was publicly released by the Greer family, the secretary made a televised confession and apology. Maura's parents do not believe the confession went far enough. And they most certainly do not accept the apology.