Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“No question. But what makes them say crazy stuff like that, do you think?”

A sullen look came over him. “How do I know?”

“No idea where the kids at school might get that idea?”

“Maybe it’s true.”

Softly, carefully, I said, “You said that before. What makes you think so?”

He looked supremely uncomfortable. “I told you, I just see stuff. I notice stuff.”

“Did he tell you something?”

“No,” he said scornfully. “Of course not.”

“So what did you see? What did you notice?”

“Nothing. It’s just… I don’t know, like, a feeling.”

“A fear, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I have to go to school.”

“Now look who’s concerned with the time all of a sudden,” I said.

While I waited with him for the car pool, I asked, “Gabe, do you use your dad’s laptop?”

“Why would I? I have my own.”

“Any idea why it might have crashed?”

“Crashed?”

“Blue Screen of Death.”

“Oh. He asked me how to do a disk wipe. He said he was planning to get a new one. Maybe he screwed it up. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“He was trying to wipe it clean? Delete its contents?” So much for my theory about someone breaking in to tamper with Roger’s computer. Still, the alarm contacts on the French doors to Roger’s study had been quickly and sloppily disabled; that much I knew. Meaning that someone had made a covert entry for some reason. To snoop around, maybe. Or maybe for another purpose I hadn’t yet figured out.

“I guess.”

“Why?”

“Who knows. Why were you looking at my dad’s computer, anyway?”

“Because I thought there might be a clue there as to what happened to him.”

“Why would he leave a clue on his laptop?”

“He wouldn’t,” I said, but before I could explain, a big blue Toyota Land Cruiser pulled into the driveway.

“See you,” Gabe said.

“Remember what I told you about assholes.”

“Yeah. Never let them rent space in your head. Wish it was that easy.”

He slung his backpack over his shoulder and went out to the car.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that he, like his mom, was keeping something from me.

“Look at you!” Noreen Purvis scolded, getting right to her feet. “You should be home in bed!”

“I’m okay,” Lauren said. “Really.”

“Oh, honey, I mean it. I can take care of things here for as long as it takes you to recover properly.”

“And I appreciate it. But I’m fine.”

Noreen was a big, horsy woman with ash-blond hair that she wore in a short, no-nonsense style-sort of Princess Diana circa 1990. On Princess Di it had looked good.

She was wearing her fake Chanel scarf and a brown pantsuit and a pair of black Tory Burch pumps with the huge gold Tory Burch medallions on the toes. They were probably fakes, too. She reeked of tea rose perfume and cigarette smoke.

“Why is the door closed?” Lauren said, glancing at Leland’s office, which was next to her desk.

Noreen shrugged. “He’s been in there since I got here, maybe twenty minutes ago.”

“Who’s he talking to?”

She shrugged again, began clearing her things off Lauren’s desk. “Well, I should fill you in on the arrangements for Leland’s trip, I guess.”

“I’ll be right back,” Lauren said. “Need to use the girls’ room.”

SHE LOCKED herself in a stall, lowered the toilet seat, sat down, and began to cry.

It was as if a dam had burst. Damned Noreen sitting at her desk, talking about Leland in that proprietary way.

And Roger. She was frightened. She didn’t know what to think. Not knowing about Roger.

My God. Not knowing: That was the worst thing.

She pulled out a length of toilet paper to blot the tears. After about five minutes, she was all cried out. She left the stall and went to the sink and reapplied her makeup. Then she washed her hands in cold water – the taps came on automatically for a few seconds when you waved your hands under them, but not long enough for the water to turn warm. The paper-towel dispenser shot out an annoying small rectangle of perforated brown paper.

Everything was irritating her now. Everything upset her.

She’d been back barely half an hour and already she needed a vacation.

As soon as Gabe got in the car, I called my old army buddy Merlin, the TSCM expert, and asked him for another favor.

I asked him to stop by Lauren’s house later and help me put in a decent home-security system. Granted, asking Merlin to do a security system was a little like asking Bill Gates for tech support on Microsoft Word. Sort of overkill. But Merlin was gracious about it and said sure.

Just as I was backing out of Lauren’s driveway, my cell phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID and said, “Lieutenant.”

“You might want to stop by.”

Arthur Garvin’s voice was hoarse and adenoidal. He sounded even worse than the day before.

“You got the tape?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“I’ll be here until around eleven.”

“I’ve got a meeting in the office,” I said. “Do you think you could courier a copy over to me?”

He coughed noisily for a few seconds. “Yeah,” he said, “why don’t I send my personal courier over. On his mounted steed.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

LIEUTENANT GARVIN turned his computer monitor, an ancient Dell, around so we could both watch. He offered me coffee, and this time I took it.

A fuzzy color image was frozen on the screen. I couldn’t make out anything beyond a couple of indistinct silhouettes on a street. The ATM was, I assumed, located outside. Near a gas station. Cars zipped by in the background.

In the frame around the image were numbers – date code, time sequence, all that sort of thing.

Garvin futzed with the mouse, clicking and double-clicking first the left button, then the right one. Finally, he got it working, and I could see a couple of smeary blobs making funny abrupt movements toward the camera.

“I should warn you in advance,” he said. “The resolution’s lousy.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“And that’s not all. I thought it was video they were sending over. It’s not.”

“What is it?”

“A couple of still photos.”

“What do you mean?”

“This ATM had a recording rate of one frame every ten seconds.”

I groaned. “To save hard-disk space, I bet.”

“Who the hell knows. I don’t know why they even bother.”

It’s sort of ironic that so many banks invest so much money in their security systems, installing high-tech digital video recorders in their automatic teller machines that transmit compressed video signals to a central server. All very fancy and high-end – and then, to save space, they set their cameras to record at the slowest possible rate. Ten to fifteen frames per second is slow. But one frame every ten seconds was little more than a stop-action camera.

Garvin clicked something, and the frame advanced, and I could see a man in a suit leaning forward toward the cash machine’s screen. The face was clear.

It was Roger.

There was no doubt about it at all.

His rimless glasses, his large forehead, the dark brown hair parted at the side. The hair was mussed, and his glasses were slightly crooked. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt and tie, but one lapel of his suit was sticking up and his tie was askew. He looked like he’d been injured. It was hard to see much of his facial expression, but from what I could tell, he looked frightened.

Roger had survived the attack.