“That’s fascinating.”
“Gotta be easier today, with scanners and Photoshop and all that.”
“I wouldn’t know. You just buy one from a friend.”
We crossed over to West Cedar down a tiny alley called Acorn Street, paved in cobblestones dredged from the Charles River a long time ago. This was a real street, and it was charming, but I doubted the Defender could fit through it. Also, the cobblestones would have done a number on the suspension.
“So why didn’t your dad want you to talk to me?”
She shrugged.
“No idea?”
“Why do you think?” she said bitterly. “Because he’s the senator. It’s all about his career.”
“Senators’ daughters aren’t allowed to have a good time?”
A mirthless laugh. “From what I’ve heard, he did nothing but have a good time before he met my mom.” She paused for dramatic effect. “And plenty after too.”
I ignored that. I’m sure the rumors were true. Richard Armstrong had a reputation, and not for his legislative work. “You two went to Slammer together,” I said. I waited a long time for her response-five, ten seconds.
“We just had a couple of drinks,” she said finally.
“Did she seem upset? Pissed off at her parents?”
“No more than usual.”
“Did she say anything about getting out of the house, just taking off somewhere?”
“No.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“No.” She sounded hostile, like it was none of my business.
“Did she say she was scared of something? Or someone? She was once grabbed in a parking lot-”
“I know,” she said scornfully. “I’m like her best friend.”
“Well, was she afraid that something like that might happen again?”
She shook her head. “But she said her dad was acting weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Like maybe he was in trouble? I really don’t remember. I was moderately lit at that point.”
“Where’d she go after Slammer?”
“How should I know? I assume she went home.”
“Did you two leave the bar together?”
She hesitated. “Yeah.”
She was so obviously lying that I hesitated to call her on it outright for fear of losing any chance of her cooperation.
Suddenly she blurted out, “Did something happen to Lexie? Do you know something? Did she get hurt?”
We’d stopped at the corner of Mount Vernon Street, waited for a couple to pass out of hearing range. “Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I need you to tell me everything.”
She threw down her cigarette on the buckled brick sidewalk, stubbed it out, pulled another from her handbag. “Look, she met a guy, okay?”
“Do you remember his name?”
She shook her head, lighted the cigarette, clearly avoiding my eyes. “Some Spanish guy, maybe. I don’t remember. Their names all sound the same to me. Marco. Alfredo. Something.”
“Were you with her when she met this guy?”
I could see her running through a series of mental calculations. If this, then that. If she said she wasn’t with Alexa, why not? Where was she? Two girls go to a bar, they almost always stay together. They don’t divide and conquer. They protect each other, signal to each other, vet prospects for each other. And compete for a guy sometimes, sure. But for the most part they work as a team.
“Yeah,” she said. “But it was loud, and I didn’t really catch his name. And I was definitely sideways by then and I just wanted to go home.”
“The guy didn’t try to hit on you?”
Her eyes narrowed. Now it was a point of pride. “The guy was so lame,” she said. “I totally blew him off.”
“Did they leave together?” I said.
I waited so long I thought she might not have heard me. When I was about to repeat the question, she said, “I guess. I don’t really know.”
“How could you not know?”
“Because I left first.”
I didn’t bother to point out the contradiction. “You went straight home?”
She nodded.
“You walked?” Louisburg Square was directly up the hill, a fairly short walk unless you were hammered and wearing stilettos.
“Cab.”
“Did you hear anything from Alexa later on that night?”
“Why would I?”
“Come on, Taylor. You girls document every minute of your lives with text messages or on Facebook or whatever. You post something when you brush your teeth. You mean to tell me she didn’t text you to say ‘OMG I’m at this guy’s apartment’ or whatever?”
She looked contemptuous, did the eye-roll thing again.
“You haven’t heard from her since you left Slammer last night?”
“Right.”
“Have you tried to call her?”
She shook her head.
“Text her?”
She shook her head again.
“You didn’t check in with her for an update on how the night went? I thought you guys are, like, BFFs.” Somehow I knew that was chat-speak for Best Friends Forever.
She shrugged.
“Do you understand that if you’re lying to me, if you’re covering something up, you might be endangering your best friend’s life?”
She shook her head, started walking down the street, away from me. “I haven’t heard anything,” she said without turning back.
My gut instinct told me she wasn’t lying about that. Obviously, though, she was lying about something. Her guilt flashed like a neon sign. Maybe she didn’t want to come off as a bad friend. Maybe she’d ditched Alexa for some hot guy herself.
I called Dorothy and said, “Any progress in locating Alexa’s phone?”
“No change. We’re going to need the assistance of someone in law enforcement, Nick. No way around it.”
“I have an idea,” I said.
14.
When your job involves working with the clandestine, as mine does, you learn the power of a secret. Knowing one can give you leverage, even control, over another, whether in the halls of Congress or the halls of high school, in the boardroom or the faculty lounge or at the racetrack.
Most secrets are kept to conceal crimes, abuses, or failures. They can destroy a career or undermine an enemy, and they’ve brought down quite a few world leaders. In Washington, where you’re only as important as the secrets you know, secrets are truly the coin of the realm.
It was time to spend some of that coin.
When I worked at Stoddard Associates in D.C., I did a project for a freshman congressman from Florida who was fighting a nasty reelection battle. His opponent had got hold of a copy of the lease on an apartment in Sarasota he’d rented for his girlfriend, a hostess at Hooters. This was news to his wife, the mother of his six children, and definitely inconvenient for the congressman, given his strong family-values platform. I did some cleanup work and the whole paper trail disappeared. The waitress found new employment in Pensacola. Her landlord had no recollection of renting to the congressman and declared the deed a forgery. The congressman won the election in a squeaker.
It wasn’t a job I was proud of. But now the congressman was the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI. He didn’t owe me any favors, since he’d paid well for Stoddard’s “research services,” but I knew certain things about him, which was even worse. I reached him on his private line and asked him to make a call for me to the Boston field office of the FBI.
I told him I needed to talk to someone senior. Now.
A PARKING space was about to open up on Cambridge Street directly in front of the FBI, which is roughly as common as a solar eclipse. I double-parked and waited for the woman in the Buick, who’d just switched on her engine, to pull out.
But she was taking her time. First she had to touch up her lipstick; then she had to make a phone call. I allowed her ten more seconds before I gave up.