SHE CALLED back five minutes later.
“Margaret O’Connor is seventy-nine years old, a widow for fifteen years, and has owned the house since 1974. The other four rent. One’s a recent graduate of the college who works for Amnesty International. Two of them are Tufts graduate students. The fourth is our guy.”
“Which one?”
“Perreira. His full name is Mauricio da Silva Cordeiro-Perreira, and yes, I pulled up his pic. It’s the same guy from the hotel surveillance tape.”
“Taylor called him Lorenzo.”
“He gave her a fake name.”
“His surname’s on his doorbell. So even if she didn’t know his true first name, she knew his last name. What’s his connection to her?”
“Here’s what I found out: Thirty-two years old. Born in São Paulo, Brazil. Rich family-we’re talking major money. Daddy’s with the UN in New York.”
“Huh. What does his father do?”
“Probably not much. He’s a member of Brazil’s permanent mission, and those guys don’t do anything, far as I can tell. Mauricio grew up in a gated compound in Morumbi, on the outskirts of São Paulo. Our boy went to a bilingual school-Saint Paul’s, then Universidade de São Paulo. A member of the Harmonia tennis club and the Helvetia polo club-”
“So how’d a rich boy like that end up living in a crappy walk-up apartment in Medford?”
“Looks like he did a few lazy years as a grad student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. But he didn’t spend much time at Tisch Library. He’s a dealer-mostly coke and weed, some meth.”
“Now it gets interesting. What do you have on that?”
“A couple years ago there was this joint DEA/ICE investigation on the theory that the kid was using his father’s diplomatic pouch to bring in controlled substances.”
“Dad must not have been too pleased with that,” I said.
“Wouldn’t surprise me if Daddy disowned him. He’s been busted a couple of times, but nothing sticks. Sounds like the kid knows how to game the system.”
“If his dad’s at the UN, he’s protected by diplomatic immunity.”
“That covers a diplomat’s grown kids?”
“All family,” I said.
“They can’t get arrested for drugs?”
“They can’t get arrested for murder,” I said.
“Man, I picked the wrong life. I shoulda been a diplomat. What I’d give for a loaded gun and ten minutes of diplomatic immunity.”
“Now this is starting to come together,” I said. “Taylor has a record of drug problems, and Mauricio is probably her dealer.” His wealthy family background gave him entrée to the right social circles. It probably lent him an air of panache, an ease with well-off college kids, who’d never be caught dead associating with some clocker from Revere.
Not just college students. Also prep school kids like Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter.
“Daddy disowns him, there goes the trust fund,” Dorothy said. “And the diplomatic pouch. Supply drops, money stops gushing in, it gets hard to pay the rent. Or keep up the car payments. Guy like that might get desperate for money. Take on a high-risk job like kidnapping a rich girl.”
“Or maybe he was hired because he was Taylor’s dealer,” I said. “Made it easy.”
“Hired by who?”
“Well, Mauricio is from Brazil, from a rich, well-connected family. One of Marcus Capital’s unhappy investors is Juan Carlos Guzman.”
“Who is…?”
“Colombian drug lord who lives in Brazil.”
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh, sweet Jesus. A drug cartel has that girl? And you think you’re gonna get her back?”
“With your help I have a chance.”
“Nick, there’s no way I or anyone else is gonna trace that video feed. I’ve talked to everyone I know, including some people who’ve been at this a whole lot longer.”
“You told people what we’re working on?”
“Of course not. We were talking IP traces and algorithms. Digital forensics. We’re not going to find them that way.”
“They went to a lot of trouble to send Marcus a ransom demand,” I said.
“You think our guy’s still in that apartment, or do you think he took off after Taylor warned him?”
“I don’t know. If he’s in there, he was just the courier-he just picked Alexa up and handed her off to someone else. He wouldn’t have driven her out to Leominster and back here.”
“Maybe he dumped her phone there to set up a fake trail. So people would think she’s out there instead of right near Boston.”
“That’s too complex. Much smarter to just destroy her phone and have no trail at all. Also, he was driving a stolen car. Not worth the risk of getting caught with a broken taillight or an out-of-date registration sticker. Or just having some ambitious local cop run the plates.”
“What if he’s not there?”
“I’ll ransack his apartment and see what I can find that might lead me to Alexa. Bills, scraps of papers, computer files, anything.”
“Well, if he is there? Don’t forget, rich boy or not, he’s a dealer. He’s gonna be armed. Please don’t get yourself killed before our ten o’clock.”
“Ten o’clock?”
“The governor? Hello? You wanted me around in case they had technical questions you couldn’t answer because you’re only the ‘big picture’ guy?”
She was talking about a long-scheduled meeting with a former governor of a large state who’d been forced to resign over a bribery scandal. Everyone on the inside knew he’d been set up.
“Tell Jillian to cancel it,” I said.
“Cancel it?” she said incredulously. “These lawyers flew up from New York for this meeting. You can’t just cancel it.”
“Last I checked, I’m still the boss. Tell Jillian to cancel it. And ask her to clear my calendar for the rest of the week. Everything. I’m not doing anything else until I get this girl home.”
“The rest of the week?” she said. “You think this is only gonna take you a couple of days, you got your head up your butt. Anyway-”
“Talk later,” I interrupted, and I clicked off and got out of the car. Walked around to the side of the apartment building where Mauricio Perreira lived.
Drug dealers tend to live in a state of permanent paranoia. He probably had a gun close to the bed. Not under the pillow, which isn’t very comfortable. But under the bed or behind the headboard.
The only workable plan was to take him by surprise.
39.
Unless you pick locks for a living, knowing how doesn’t mean doing it well. I once hired a professional locksmith to give me lessons, though I’d already learned the basics from a repo man I’d met as a teenager, hanging out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors in Malden.
I also kept an assortment of tools in my car’s glove box, including a professional locksmith’s set of lock picks and tension wrenches. But an old-fashioned lockpick set requires finesse, time, and patience. And I was short on all three. I grabbed my SouthOrd electric pick gun, a sleek stainless-steel instrument the size of an electric toothbrush, which is quicker and easier, though noisier, than any hand tool. But the batteries were dead. So I reached for the EZ snap gun, a good old manual lock pick, originally developed for police officers who didn’t have time to learn the fine, slow art of lockpicking.
Unfortunately, lockpick guns aren’t particularly quiet. They make a fairly loud snap. But they’re quick.
I mounted the apartment building’s side stairs, which provided exterior entry to the separate units. A short cement flight of steps led to a narrow porch with a gray-painted wooden railing. From there on up, the stairs were painted wood. Keeping my tread light, I ascended to the top level, sidled along the railing for a few feet, and assessed.
A small window, curtains drawn, next to the apartment door. A simple pin tumbler lock. Not Schlage or some high-security brand, which would have been a challenge. Some no-name brand. That was a relief.