He looked stricken, but he didn’t reply.
“Whatever he has on you, is it worth your daughter’s life?”
His face crumpled, and he covered his eyes like a child as he wept silently.
“You need to tell me what Mercury is,” I went on. “Then we’ll figure something out. We’ll come up with a way for you to give these kidnappers what they want without facing… whatever it is you’re afraid of.”
He kept sobbing.
I got up and walked toward the door, but then I stopped and turned back. “Did you ever do a background check on Belinda before you married her?”
He lowered his hands. His face was red and wet with tears. “Belinda? What does Belinda have to do with anything?”
“I’ve come across some information in the course of my investigation, and I’m not sure how much you want to know.”
“Like… what?”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” I said. “But she was never a flight attendant. She never worked for Delta.”
“Oh, Nickeleh.”
“She’s not from Georgia either. She’s from New Jersey.”
He sighed. Shook his head slowly. Was it disbelief? An unwillingness to accept so painful a truth, that he’d been deceived by the woman he loved?
“She was a call girl, Marshall. An escort. Whether that makes a difference to you or not, I think you should know.”
But Marcus rolled his eyes. “Nickeleh, boychik. Grow up.” He shrugged, his palms open. “She’s a sensitive girl. For some meshugge reason she’s kinda touchy about people knowing too much about our first date.”
A smile slowly spread across my face as I headed again for the door. The old bastard.
From behind me I heard him call out, “Please don’t quit.”
I kept going and didn’t look back. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t get rid of me. Though you might wish you had.”
59.
Dragomir was sitting at the computer in the musty sunroom at the back of the house when he heard the girl’s cries.
Strange. He’d muted the computer’s speakers. The screams were remote and barely audible, but they were definitely hers. He didn’t understand how he could be hearing them. She was ten feet underground. He wondered whether the solitude was making him imagine things.
He rose and scraped the old railback dining chair along the floorboards and went to the back door. There he listened some more. The cries were coming from outside. Faint and distant and small, like the buzz of a greenhead fly.
On the porch he cocked his head. The sounds were coming from the yard, maybe the woods beyond. Maybe it wasn’t the girl at all. Then he saw the gray PVC pipe standing in the middle of the field. That was where it was coming from. The vent pipe carried not just the girl’s exhalations but her cries as well.
She had a set of lungs on her. By now you’d think she would have given up.
He was grateful she was buried so deep.
When Dragomir had first come up with the idea of putting her in the ground, it seemed a stroke of pure genius. After all, the Client’s intelligence had turned up a psychiatrist’s file indicating the target was afflicted with a debilitating claustrophobia.
Of course, the terror of being buried alive was deep-seated and universal and held a coercive power far beyond any conventional kidnapping technique.
But that wasn’t his real reason.
Buried ten feet down she was safely beyond his reach.
If the girl had been under his direct control and easily accessible, like some irresistible pastry in the refrigerator, he wouldn’t have been able to restrain himself from doing things to her. He would rape her and kill her as he’d done to so many other pretty young women. He’d never have been able to stop the impulse. That wouldn’t do at all.
He recalled the puppy he’d been given as a boy, how much he loved its softness, its fragility. But how could you truly appreciate such fragility without crushing its tiny bones? Very nearly impossible to resist.
Burying her deep was like putting a lock on the refrigerator.
He was listening so hard, with such fascination, to the mewling, faint as a radio station that hadn’t been fully tuned in, that he almost didn’t hear the far louder crunch of a car’s tires on the dirt road out front. If that was the neighbor again, still looking for his damned mongrel, he would have to do something about it finally.
Back in the house, he strode to the front and looked out the window. A police cruiser, dark blue with white lettering: PINE RIDGE POLICE.
He didn’t know the town even had its own police force.
A gawky young man got out and gazed at the house with apprehension. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He was tall and scrawny with ears that stuck out like jug handles.
By the time the policeman rang the door buzzer, Dragomir was wearing a long brown mullet wig.
He suspected the policeman was here about the dog. He stood on the front porch, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his long spindly arms hanging awkwardly at his side.
“How’re you doing?” he said. “I’m Officer Kent. Could I ask you a few questions?”
60.
In the late afternoon, when I returned to the office, Jillian was on the floor packing boxes for some reason. I didn’t want to get involved. She looked up as I entered. Her face was red and sticky with tears.
“Good-bye, Mr. Heller.”
It took me a moment. I had my mind on other things. “What’s going on?” I said.
“Before I leave, I wanted to apologize.”
“About the clothing? Don’t be silly.”
“That e-card.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Someone e-mailed me a greeting card and I opened it at work.”
“That’s why you’re leaving?”
“Dorothy didn’t tell you?”
“Did she fire you?”
“No, I’m leaving.” She lifted her chin in pride, or maybe defiance. “And I was even starting to think that, like, for corporate America, this really wasn’t too sucky a job.”
“Nice of you to say. Now you want to tell me what happened?”
“I guess that e-card had some kind of software bug in it, like spyware or something? Dorothy says that’s how people got into our server and your personal files and got the codes to your home security system?”
“It was you?”
“I… thought she told you,” Jillian stammered.
“Well, Jillian, I’m sorry, but you picked a bad time to quit, so you can’t. Unpack your boxes and get back to answering phones, please.”
She looked at me questioningly.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Back to work.”
As I was headed over to Dorothy’s office, she called after me. “Um, Mr. Heller?”
“Yes?”
“I heard you guys talking about that owl tattoo?”
“Yeah?”
“I might be able to help. My brother used to work-”
“In a tattoo parlor,” I said. “Yes, I remember. You know what would be a really big help?”
She looked at me eagerly.
“How about reading the office phone system manual?”
61.
The more I thought about Marshall and Belinda Marcus, the more I was sure something wasn’t right.
I knew a cyber-investigator in New Jersey named Mo Gandle who was very good-when I was with Stoddard Associates in D.C., I had used him on a couple of cases-and I gave him a call.
“I want you to check on the dates of her employment by VIP Exxxecutive Service in Trenton,” I said. “And I want you to trace her back as far as you can.”
I FOUND Dorothy sitting at her desk, chin resting on the palms of her hands, staring at her computer screen.