She couldn’t move.
Now she was gagging from the vomit that had backwashed down her throat.
“Please take care of yourself,” the voice said. “We cannot open your coffin if something happens to you.”
“Coffin…” she gasped.
“There is no reason for you to die. We don’t want you to die. We only want you to convince your father to cooperate with us.”
“How much money do you want?” she whispered. “Just tell me what you want and my father will give it to you.”
“Why do you think we want money, Alexa? And even if we did want money, your father has nothing.”
“My father is… he has an obscene amount of money, okay? He can pay you anything you want. He’ll give it all to you, everything he has, if you please please please let me out now.”
“Alexa, now you must listen to me very, very carefully, because your survival depends on it.”
She swallowed. A lump had lodged in her throat.
“I’m listening,” she whispered.
“I can’t hear you.”
She tried to speak louder. “I’m-I’m listening.”
“Good. Now, Alexa? I have already told you how to relieve yourself. Now we must talk about your breathing. Okay? You are listening?”
She shuddered and moaned, “Please…”
“I want you to know that you have air in your coffin, but it is not so much.”
“Not.. so much?” she whispered.
“Listen closely. If we just put you in the casket and sealed it and put it in the ground you would not last half of an hour. But we know this is not enough time for you.”
She heard “in the ground” and she bit her lower lip so hard she felt the blood start to trickle. “The ground?” she whispered.
“Yes. You are in a steel casket far below the ground. You are buried under ten feet of earth. Alexa, you have been buried alive. But I’m sure you already know this.”
Something exploded in her brain: bright sparkles of light. She screamed with vocal cords so raw that the only sound that came out was a wheezing gasp, but in the darkness and the absolute silence it was thunderously loud.
17.
A fluorescent orange parking ticket was tucked under the Defender’s windshield wipers. Damn Snyder. If he hadn’t been playing his power games and kept me waiting so long, the time on the meter wouldn’t have run out. I felt like sending him the bill.
I had my BlackBerry out, about to call Marcus, when I heard a female voice behind me: “Nico?”
The nickname that hardly anyone used anymore except a few people I knew in D.C. a long time ago.
I sensed her, maybe even smelled her, before she touched my shoulder. Without even looking around, I said, “Diana?”
“You still have the Defender, I see,” she said. “I like that. You don’t change much, do you?”
“Hey,” I said, and I gave her a hug. For a moment I didn’t know whether to kiss her on the mouth-those days were long gone, after all-but she offered me her cheek. “You look great.”
I wasn’t lying. Diana Madigan had on tight jeans and worn brown cowboy boots and an emerald green top that emphasized the swell of her breasts and brought out her amazing pale green eyes. Statistically, it turns out that green eyes occur in less than two percent of the global population.
But that wasn’t the only thing about her that was rare. I’d never met a woman quite like her. She was tough and empathic and elegant. And beautiful. She had a taut, lithe body with a head of crazy wavy hair that obeyed its own laws of physics. It was light honey brown with auburn highlights. Her nose was strong yet delicate, with slightly flared nostrils. The only sign of the years that had passed were the faint laugh lines etched around her eyes.
We hadn’t seen each other in five or six years, since she was transferred from the FBI’s Washington Field Office to Seattle and declared she didn’t want a long-distance relationship. Ours had been casual-not Friends With Benefits, exactly, but no pressure, no expectations. Not a gateway drug that would lead inexorably to a long-term addiction. This was the way she wanted it, and given how long my work hours were and how much I traveled, I was fine with the arrangement. I enjoyed her company and she enjoyed mine.
Still, when I got a call from Diana telling me that she’d moved to Seattle, I quickly went from baffled to wounded. I cared for her deeply, and I was surprised she didn’t feel the same. I’m not used to women walking away from me, but this wasn’t just a male ego thing. I was disappointed in myself for having misread her so badly. Until then I’d always considered my ability to read others one of my natural talents.
She wasn’t the type to insist on a Deep Talk, like so many women. In that way, her emotional architecture resembled mine. So the end of my relationship with Diana Madigan went into my mental cold-case file.
But I’ve always found unsolved cases irresistible.
“I look like a wreck, and you know it,” she said. “I’m just getting off the night shift, and on my way home.”
“Since when do you work nights?”
“I’ve been up all night texting predators, pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl.”
“Yeah? What a coincidence. Me too.”
“This one sicko is fifty-one,” she said, ignoring me. Her work was something she never joked about. “We arranged to meet at a motel in Everett. Will he be surprised.”
“So you’re still working CARD?”
“Believe it or not.”
CARD stood for the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment unit. It was heart-wrenching work. The things she saw: I never knew how she could keep doing it. I thought by now she’d have burned out.
She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and I could only assume she didn’t have kids either. I wondered whether she ever would, having seen what could happen to them.
“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.”