Joseph Finder - Vanished

She thought for a moment. The thing looked suspicious. Possibly dangerous.

She checked the sender line and saw that it was blank. Which was strange-she was certain there’d been something there a few seconds ago.

But the sender’s name was gone.

There was only the video-player window. The big white triangular play button taunting her.

After a few seconds, she couldn’t resist any longer. She clicked on the triangle. The gray rectangle came to life: a streaming video image began to move. Black-and-white. Fuzzy and indistinct at first. Shadowy shapes. She couldn’t make anything out.

But then the video became sharper, as if the fog had cleared, and there was something eerily familiar about the scene she was watching. Something she couldn’t put her finger on, but familiar all the same. A white-shrouded figure, shifting slowly, which became a lump beneath rumpled bed sheets. Someone asleep in bed. There was a voyeuristic, quasi-porno quality to the movie she was watching. But what was it? Why was it so familiar? She clicked the full-screen button, and the video took over her entire monitor. The resolution wasn’t great; the contrast was harsh, as if it had been shot at night, using infrared light or something.

The restlessly sleeping figure turned over, and she recognized the long eyelashes, the curly hair. Her head swam, and her heart skittered as the camera zoomed in and held tight on Gabe’s face.

Her son, asleep in bed.

She gasped aloud.

Suddenly the video stopped playing, and the dark gray window shrank back to the size it had been at first, the white triangle at its center. With unsteady fingers, she fumbled for the computer mouse and tried to click the play button again, but the dark gray square was gone. It had vanished, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

Leaving not a trace.

As if it had never been there.

Ihad plenty of time before my flight left the airport, so I held on to the rental car awhile longer, left the parking lot, and drove around, just thinking. The roads here were broad and newly paved, with far less congestion than Washington, and in a few miles I passed the Colonie Public Library. On an impulse, I turned in.

In the Internet age, public libraries are immensely undervalued as resources. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for books on shelves and old newspapers, even microfilm copies. Far too many local newspapers just aren’t searchable through Google. Even those that have search engines accessible on the Internet are often poorly indexed. Most of the good stuff you have to find the old-fashioned way.

I found a set of indexes for a Michigan newspaper, the Grand Rapids Press, and began searching year by year for articles on the reclusive founder of Paladin, Allen Granger. Since his family was from northern Michigan, I figured there was a chance I’d find some interesting local coverage, something that might tell me something that I hadn’t read in Time or Newsweek.

While I leafed through volume after volume, my cell phone rang. The periodicals librarian gave me a look, and I shut it off without glancing at the caller ID. I found quite a few articles on Granger, but almost all of them were wire-service dispatches, and none of them was news to me. Lots of pieces on Paladin and various controversies their employees had run into in Iraq. Articles about Allen Granger testifying before Congress. He hadn’t testified before Congress in a year, though. Neither had he done any in-person interviews, as far as I could tell. An interview in which “Mr. Granger spoke to the Associated Press by telephone from Paladin headquarters in southern Georgia.” In the last year, Carl Koblenz, identified as chief executive officer of Paladin Worldwide, based in Falls Church, Virginia, seemed to have taken over the public-spokesman role. Granger hadn’t been seen in public in over a year.

I had to go back quite a few years before I was able to find any local interviews with Allen Granger. Fifteen years, in fact.

I went to the periodicals desk and requested the roll of microfilm from the Grand Rapids Press. Ten minutes later, I was scrolling through the scratchy old microfilm, trying to suppress a wave of motion sickness, and finally located the interview, done by a Grand Rapids reporter, who described Allen Granger as the “handsome scion” of a “waste-management empire” and “former Navy SEAL.” The photo they ran confirmed the handsome part, anyway: He had a clean-cut, blue-eyed, wholesome Midwestern look. Granger told the reporter about how he’d just recently purchased ten thousand acres of pine forest in southern Georgia as a training facility for what he envisioned as “the FedEx of national security,” whatever that meant.

The last line of the interview said, “For Allen Granger, it’s a long way from Traverse City.”

Traverse City, Michigan, was Granger’s hometown.

And Traverse Development? Could that be another one of his firms?

I was thoroughly confused. Why would the president of Paladin Worldwide have hired some guy in a shipping company to steal a billion dollars’ worth of cash from another one of Allen Granger’s companies?

Unless Granger didn’t know what Koblenz was doing.

I couldn’t begin to make sense of this.

Stepping outside into the blindingly bright sunshine, I checked my voice mail.

“Heller,” Dorothy Duval said in a quiet voice. “Call me. We got trouble.”

What’s wrong?” I said.

“I didn’t think Stoddard even knew where my cubicle was. He just walked up to my desk and told me that I’ve been abusing office resources.”

“You getting all your work in on time?”

“You know it doesn’t work like that around here. I’m not on the clock.”

“Exactly. You tell him what you do on your own time is your business.”

“First of all, Nick, I’ve never talked to Stoddard that way, and I’m not going to start now. I’m not like you. I’m disposable.”

“You’re the best, Dorothy, and you know it. None of the other forensic techs get invited to the Monday morning meetings.”

“Yeah, well, as far as Jay Stoddard is concerned, I’m one of about a thousand data-recovery specialists out there, most of whom would jump at the chance to work here.” She lowered her voice. “And he’s probably right.”

“He’s not going to fire you for helping me locate my brother.”

“Oh no? He as much as said so. He said if I do any more database searches on Traverse Development or Roger Heller or anything that’s not a Stoddard project, I better update my résumé.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “You know I’ve got your back.”

“Must be why they always get me from the front,” she said acidly. “You don’t have the power to keep him from firing me, Nick.”

“Don’t be so sure of that.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Any luck on that list of office-building tenants I faxed you?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“What are you doing, running every company name to see if they’re subsidiaries of other companies?”

“That would take forever. No, I’m running them against this Traverse Development. But no luck yet.”

“And Roger’s laptop?”

“Looks like it’s mostly personal stuff. E-mails and all that.”

“Can you send it to me?”

“No. But I’ll give you what I got when I see you.”

Call waiting came on, and I saw that it was Garvin. “Dorothy,” I said, “would you mind-?”

“Take the call, Nick.”

“Thanks. You’re the best.”

“I’m glad you appreciate it,” she said. “Because this is the last job I can do for you. See, Nick, I need a paycheck.”