Lynne Heitman: The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“I told you she sent me off on a wild-goose chase.”

“You also said you found them in a clinch this morning. It could be they wanted a little alone time together.”

“He wouldn’t have lied to me like that.”

Ling said nothing, but he wore an expression I had seen before on law-enforcement types, the one that comes from the deep and abiding belief that everyone lies. He wasn’t that old, but he must have seen enough already to know that we were all capable of ghastly things and that lying was the least of them. Maybe so, but…

“Harvey wouldn’t leave the house without telling me.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a fifty-four-year-old man with the body of an eighty-year-old. Because leaving the house is a big deal for him. Because I’m the one who gets him ready. I’m the one who takes him out. I’m the one who makes sure he has food when he’s hungry and medicine when he’s sick. I’m the one who gets him a pillow when he’s sore and a blanket when he’s cold. I’m the one who has been with him a good part of every day for at least the past two years, because there is no one else.”

Ling blinked at me. “You must really care about him.”

“What?” I had somehow ended up out on the edge of the seat.

“You must care about him a lot.”

“I do.” Of course I did. I cared about Harvey. I cared about him deeply. I unballed my fists and sat back. But our relationship was more complicated than that, and it had gotten more so as he’d gotten sicker. From the beginning, ours had been a bargain built on mutual need, but over the years, his needs had grown to dominate both our lives, and even though I fought for him and protected him and, had it come down to it, might have even died for him, we were as far apart from each other lately as we’d ever been, and it was because of me. When it came to Harvey’s emotional needs, he was a black hole, one that grew ever deeper and more fathomless as the disease grew stronger. Sometimes it made me feel cold and unfeeling to keep him distant, but I also knew his emotional needs could swallow me whole. I had to protect myself. Apparently, Rachel didn’t have that problem.

“He wouldn’t have gone out without his chair,” was all I said. “And he wouldn’t have gone out without letting me know. Something’s happened to him.”

The basement door slammed shut. A few seconds later, the second agent came into the office, wiping his hands with a handkerchief. He was taller than Ling. His craggy face made him look at least ten years older, and he had squints for eyes. He was the one who had thrown me facedown on the floor upstairs.

Ling pushed the tea service aside to make space for his laptop on the table. “What’d you find, bro?”

“Nothing.” Southern addressed himself pointedly to his partner, not even looking at me. “The house is empty. No signs of forced entry or struggle.” He spoke in a slow and measured way, every word a sigh of resignation. He cocked his head in my direction. “What about her? Did she give you anything?”

“We were waiting for you. Come on in and join us.”

Southern came into the office but didn’t sit. He ended up leaning against one of the bookcases with his arms folded tight across his long torso. As cold a presence as he was, I was still happy to see him. It meant I was finally about to find out what was going on.

Ling turned his laptop in my direction. “Have you ever seen this man?”

On the screen was what looked like an enlarged photo page from a passport. Pictured was a fifty-nine-year-old man-his birth date was right there-trying to look thirty-five. The face he should have had, the one carved with the chisel of experience and the hammer of time, had been so relentlessly smoothed and polished you could look at it for a long time and never see the man he was supposed to have been. His hair was obviously dyed, his sun-tinted face was remarkably unwrinkled, his teeth were perfect, and he looked out through what were undoubtedly LASIK-corrected eyes.

“I’ve never seen him. Who is he?”

“His name is Roger Fratello. Has Harvey ever mentioned that name?”

“No.”

“What about Stephen Hoffmeyer?”

“No. Who are these people?”

“Possibly the same person. Have you come across any files or records with either name?”

“Never.”

“Does he keep files anywhere else?” Southern lobbed his question in from across the room. “An archive? Extra storage that you might not know about?”

“I would know about anything Harvey was involved in.” I directed my answers to Ling. Southern made me nervous. “I told you, there’s nothing that goes on here that I don’t know about.”

“You wouldn’t have known about this. This all went down before your time.”

“How do you know what my time has been?”

He nodded toward his laptop. “You haven’t exactly kept a low profile since you’ve been in Boston.”

Right. Google, more than a thousand hits, and wi-fi rules, man. “What is it that happened before my time?”

“Roger Fratello was the chairman and CEO of a firm called Betelco.”

“I’ve heard of it.” I felt a tiny bubble of confidence from having recognized at least something. “It was an electronics firm that went bust after the boom.”

“They went bust,” Ling said, “because Fratello embezzled all the firm’s money.”

“I never heard that part.” I thought they were just one more start-up with no real product, no real market, and too much unearned investor confidence.

“Not many people knew the whole story.”

“He raped that company,” Southern said. “Turned it inside out and took everything except the potted plants from the front lobby.”

“It was grim,” Ling said. “We had the guy cold, but before we could indict him, he left the country. He hasn’t been seen since.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Four years.”

“Four years?” I looked at Southern and back to Ling. “Did you get lost on your way over?”

Ling ignored the jab. “About a week ago, we found a safety deposit box in Brussels. Inside was a bunch of stacks of banded U.S. currency. We think it’s some of the money Fratello used to flee the country. His fingerprints were all over it.”

I shrugged at Ling, waiting for the punch line. Southern was the one who dropped it. “So were your partner’s.”

“My partner’s what?”

“Your partner’s fingerprints were right there on the cash with scumbag Fratello’s.”

Ling and Southern both stared at me. It was so quiet I almost longed for the Temptations. “You’re thinking what? That Harvey gave this man money to flee the country?”

Ling looked as if he hoped I could explain it. Southern looked as if he hoped I couldn’t.

“What would his motive be?”

“I was going to ask him that.” Ling turned the laptop back to face him and started tapping offhandedly at the keys. “I thought maybe it had something to do with the ex-wife.”

“Ex-wife?”

“She was Betelco’s auditor.”

“Rachel was Betelco’s auditor?”

“She was the partner on her firm’s Betelco account.” Ling was looking at me now, watching for reactions as he dribbled out his bits of crucial and surprising information in his casually calculating way. His words didn’t come spewing at you like rounds from a machine gun or ripping through the atmosphere like bolts of lightning. They drifted out and bobbed lazily like a raft on a turquoise ocean. If you didn’t watch out, he could lull you to sleep. I stood up and started moving around. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I wanted to start back at the beginning. “Roger Fratello embezzled money from Betelco.”

“That’s right.”