“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.