Joseph Finder - Vanished

The pickup area was jammed with SUVs pulling in and out, jousting with one another like some high-end monster-truck rally.

The tap of a car horn. A blue Toyota Land Cruiser had pulled up alongside her. The window glided down.

“Lauren?”

Kate Vaughan. A pretty blond woman, very jocky, who wore her hair in a ponytail. A major squash player. Lauren had heard that the Vaughans had had a squash court built in their home. She had three sons, two of them at St. Gregory’s, all three serious squash players, the eldest one nationally ranked. Four boys were in the back two rows, tussling and arguing.

Lauren looked up, waved.

“I got your message about Gabe. You guys going somewhere?”

“No, just-boss is out of town. Did you see Gabe up there?”

“Haven’t seen him, sorry. Are you okay? I heard you were in an accident.”

“Oh, I’m fine, thanks.”

“And, um… Roger? Do they know anything more?”

Lauren shook her head.

“God, Lauren, you must be so worried. ” A huge black Cadillac Escalade behind Kate’s Toyota was trying to lumber by and honked loudly.

“I am.”

Kate’s son, Kip, in the front seat, said something to her, and she swatted him away. “Will you chill, kids, okay? God, Lauren. You know, I once heard about something called wandering amnesia? It’s like a… fugue state? It’s triggered by stress-you just all of a sudden forget who you are, and you could be wandering around, and-”

The Escalade blasted its horn.

Kate flipped the bird out the window at the Escalade’s driver. “Sheesh, can you believe this guy? All right, I better move it. Keep me posted, okay? I’m sure it’s totally nothing. But God, it’s so scary, huh?”

“I will. Thanks.”

Hers was one of the last cars to reach the pickup spot. The crowd of boys waiting there, laughing and shoving and shouting to one another, was thinning, and she didn’t see Gabe.

Her forehead was throbbing, and she felt a tightness in her chest.

Maybe he hadn’t gotten the message that she’d be picking him up.

Unlikely. Mrs. Jordan, the school secretary, was a hundred percent reliable. St. Gregory’s was scrupulous about keeping track of its students’ whereabouts at all times. The sons of some very rich and important people-senators and Supreme Court justices and presidents of foreign countries-went here. The parents had to be assured that their kids were safe.

Gabe tended to be pretty spacey, though. He could easily have forgotten she was coming. But then he would have gotten into Kate Vaughan’s car, and she’d have told him to wait for his mom.

The car in front of her pulled away, and she drove up to the curb, and there was no one there.

No Gabe.

She called his cell phone.

It rang four, five, six times, then went to voice mail. Or what ever you called that blast of hideous music that she didn’t have the patience to get through before his recorded voice came on.

Maybe he’d forgotten to carry his cell phone. That was very Gabe. He didn’t use it much, often left it at home or in his locker at school.

She switched off the engine and got out. You weren’t supposed to park here, but she didn’t care. She ran up the concrete path to the Middle School building, heart thudding.

A small pile of backpacks in the foyer, and three boys were sitting on the floor, one of them showing the others something on his iPod.

“Any of you kids seen Gabe Heller?” she asked.

They shrugged. They weren’t in his grade, didn’t know who he was. She kept going, up the big stone staircase to the school secretary’s office.

Mrs. Jordan, a handsome middle-aged black woman, was on the phone, smiled at her, nodded, put the phone on hold.

“Mrs. Heller, why are you-?”

Lauren, trying to sound casual, trying not to sound like the crazed neurotic mom, said, “Have you seen Gabe?”

Mrs. Jordan, who monitored all the students’ absences and late arrivals and early departures from her command post, looked perplexed. “He got picked up half an hour early, like you told me.”

Lauren shook her head. “No, I said to tell him that I was going to pick him up today. I didn’t say anything about coming early.”

“Right, but then you called back to say the police needed to talk to him.”

“The police -?”

“A couple of policemen stopped by just like you said, and I sent them over to his En glish class to get him and-”

The room seemed to revolve.

“I never called-”

Lauren turned around, her legs feeling wobbly, lurching out of the office.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Heller? What you said was-”

But Lauren, running toward her car, heard no more.

When my Delta flight landed at Reagan National, I switched my phone and my BlackBerry back on. I had five voice messages on my cell. Three from Lauren.

Gabe had gone missing.

My first thought, before I returned her call, was that Gabe was probably just acting out. After all, he was upset, under pressure, worried sick about his dad. On top of his problems at school. And… well, just being Gabe.

But when I finally reached her, she told me he’d been picked up by a couple of uniformed D.C. cops, and she’d been unable to reach him on his cell phone. She was terrified. I tried to calm her down, assured her it was very likely Lieutenant Garvin or his guys, and that I’d give him a call.

But then she told me about an anonymous e-mail she’d gotten at the office-a video clip of Gabe asleep in his bed, clearly a surveillance video taken by a concealed camera in his bedroom.

At that point I knew something was very wrong. I reached Garvin on his cell phone and asked him whether he’d sent uniformed officers over to St. Gregory’s School to talk to Gabe for some reason.

He hadn’t. They weren’t from Violent Crimes, or he’d know about it.

I asked him to check the radio runs to see if any police officers had been dispatched to Gabe’s school for some other reason. None had.

I drove to Chevy Chase at top speed.

LAUREN LET me in. Her face was flushed and her makeup was smeared and she’d obviously been crying.

“We’ll find him,” I said.

She shook her head, sniffled, rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She was still dressed in work clothes, still as gorgeous as ever, but she looked gutted.

“He’s here,” she said.

“He’s been here the whole time?”

She shook her head again. “They brought him home. They picked him up at school and brought him home.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know. It just sounds totally bizarre. It doesn’t make sense to me… Just, can you talk to him, Nick?”

“What happened?”

“Maybe he’ll talk to you. He won’t talk to me.”

“Is he okay?”

“ He’s fine. But we can’t stay here anymore. It’s just not safe.”

“Lauren.”

“I’m taking Gabe, and I’m getting out of here. Go stay with my sister, maybe.”

“Lauren,” I said. “Let me talk to him.”

Icould hear the tinny rasp coming from Gabe’s iPod earbuds even before I opened the door. He was lying on his bed, wearing a black Nightmare Before Christmas T-shirt, reading a paperback. On the cover was some guy in a Roman-gladiator outfit holding a gleaming sword and flying through the air. No doubt one of the sci-fi/fantasy series he devoured along with every comic book ever published.

He didn’t look up.

I sat down on the side of the bed. “Hey,” I said.

He kept reading. Maybe it was a generational thing, but I didn’t understand how he could read at the same time he was listening to music like that. I couldn’t.