Joseph Finder: Vanished

The first book in the Nick Heller series, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Lauren Heller’s husband disappeared at a few minutes after ten thirty on a rainy evening.

They were walking to their car after dinner at his favorite Japanese restaurant, on Thirty-third Street in Georgetown. Roger, a serious sushi connoisseur, considered Oji-San the best, most authentic place in all of D.C. Lauren didn’t care one way or another. Raw fish was raw fish, she thought: pretty, but inedible. But Roger-the Mussolini of maki, the Stalin of sashimi-never settled for less than the best. “Hey, I married you, right?” he pointed out on the way over, and how was she supposed to argue with that?

She was just grateful they were finally having a date night. They hadn’t had one in almost three months.

Not that it had been much of a date, actually. He’d seemed awfully preoccupied. Worried about something. Then again, he got that way sometimes, for days at a time. That was just the way he dealt with stress at the office. A very male thing, she’d always thought. Men tended to internalize their problems. Women usually let it out, got emotional, screamed or cried or just got mad, and ended up coping a lot better in the long run. If that wasn’t emotional intelligence, then what was?

But Roger, whom she loved and admired and who was probably the smartest guy she’d ever met, handled stress like a typical man. Plus, he didn’t like to talk about things. That was just his way. That was how he’d been brought up. She remembered once saying to him, “We need to talk,” and he replied, “Those are the scariest four words in the English language.”

Anyway, they had a firm rule: no shop talk. Since they both worked at Gifford Industries-he as a senior finance guy, she as admin to the CEO-that was the only way to keep work from invading their home life.

So at dinner, Roger barely said a word, checked his BlackBerry every few minutes, and scarfed down his nigiri. She’d ordered something recommended by their waiter, which sounded good but turned out to be layers of miso-soaked black cod. The house specialty. Yuck. She left it untouched, picked at her seaweed salad, drank too much sake, got a little tipsy.

They’d cut through Cady’s Alley, a narrow cobblestone walkway lined with old red-brick warehouses converted to high-end German kitchen stores and Italian lighting boutiques. Their footsteps echoed hollowly.

She stopped at the top of the concrete steps that led down to Water Street and said, “Feel like getting some ice cream? Thomas Sweet, maybe?”

The oblique beam of a streetlight caught his white teeth, his strong nose, the pouches that had recently appeared under his eyes. “I thought you’re on South Beach.”

“They have some sugar-free stuff that’s not bad.”

“It’s all the way over on P, isn’t it?”

“There’s a Ben & Jerry’s on M.”

“We probably shouldn’t press our luck with Gabe.”

“He’ll be fine,” she said. Their son was fourteen: old enough to stay home by himself. In truth, staying home alone made him a little nervous though he’d never admit it. The kid was as stubborn as his parents.

Water Street was dark, deserted, kind of creepy at that time of night. A row of cars were parked along a chain-link fence, the scrubby banks of the Potomac just beyond. Roger’s black S-Class Mercedes was wedged between a white panel van and a battered Toyota.

He stood for a moment, rummaged through his pockets, then turned abruptly. “Damn. Left the keys back in the restaurant.”

She grunted, annoyed but not wanting to make a big deal out of it.

“You didn’t bring yours, did you?”

Lauren shook her head. She rarely drove his Mercedes anyway. He was too fussy about his car. “Check your pockets?”

He patted the pockets of his trench coat and his pants and suit jacket as if to prove it. “Yeah. Must’ve left them on the table in the restaurant when I took out my BlackBerry. Sorry about that. Come on.”

“We don’t both have to go back. I’ll wait here.”

A motorcycle blatted by from somewhere below. The white-noise roar of trucks on the Whitehurst Freeway overhead.

“I don’t want you standing out here alone.”

“I’ll be fine. Just hurry, okay?”

He hesitated, took a step toward her, then suddenly kissed her on the lips. “I love you,” he said.

She stared at his back as he hustled across the street. It pleased her to hear that I love you, but she wasn’t used to it, really. Roger Heller was a good husband and father, but not the most demonstrative of men.

A distant shout, then raucous laughter: frat kids, probably Georgetown or GW.

A scuffling sound from the pavement behind her.

She turned to look, felt a sudden gust of air, and a hand was clamped over her mouth.

She tried to scream, but it was stifled beneath the large hand, and she struggled frantically. Roger so close. Maybe a few hundred feet away by then. Close enough to see what was happening to her, if only he’d turn around.

Powerful arms had grabbed her from behind.

She needed to get Roger’s attention, but he obviously couldn’t hear anything at that distance, the scuffling masked by the traffic sounds.

Turn around, damn it! she thought. Good God, please turn around!

“Roger!” she screamed, but it came out a pathetic mewl. She smelled some kind of cheap cologne, mixed with stale cigarette smoke.

She tried to twist her body around, to wrench free, but her arms were trapped, pinioned against the sides of her body, and she felt something cold and hard at her temple, and she heard a click, and then something struck the side of her head, a jagged lightning bolt of pain piercing her eyes.

The foot. Stomp on his foot-some half-remembered martial-arts self-defense class from long ago.

Stomp his instep.

She jammed her left foot down hard, striking nothing, then kicked backwards, hit the Mercedes with a hollow metallic crunch. She tried to pivot, and-

Roger swiveled suddenly, alerted by the sound. He shouted, “Lauren!”

Raced back across the street.

“What the hell are you doing to her?” he screamed. “Why her?”

Something slammed against the back of her head. She tasted blood.

She tried to make sense of what was going on, but she was falling backwards, hurtling through space, and that was the last thing she remembered.

LOS ANGELES

It was a dark and stormy night.

Actually, it wasn’t stormy. But it was dark and rainy and miserable and, for L.A., pretty damned cold. I stood in the drizzle at eleven o’clock at night, under the sickly yellow light from the high-pressure sodium lamps, wearing a fleece and jeans that were soaking wet and good leather shoes that were in the process of getting destroyed.

I’d had the shoes handmade in London for some ridiculous amount of money, and I made a mental note to bill my employer, Stoddard Associates, for the damage, just on general principle.

I hadn’t expected rain. Though, as a putatively high-powered international investigator with a reputation for being able to see around corners, I supposed I could have checked Weather.com.

“That’s the one,” the man standing next to me grunted, pointing at a jet parked a few hundred feet away. He was wearing a long yellow rain slicker with a hood-he hadn’t offered me one back in the office-and his face was concealed by shadows. All I could see was his bristly white mustache.