Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Jay Stoddard seemed to know something I didn’t. Sure, he was more plugged in than anybody, knew people and things and all the scuttlebutt before anyone else.

But for some reason he wanted me to know that he knew.

I hesitated in the corridor outside his office for a moment, considered storming back in there and grabbing the phone out of his hand and slamming him against the wall and asking him what the hell he knew. But I came to my senses pretty quickly. There were other, better ways to find out.

ONE OF them was a guy in suburban Maryland who’d been in the FBI a long time ago. Frank Montello was sort of a sketchy character, but a useful one to know. He called himself an information broker. Frank used to be the one you’d call when you wanted to get an unlisted phone number and didn’t have the time, or the right, to get a court order. That was back in the day when there was only one phone company. Since then he’d amassed contacts deep inside all the major wireless carriers, too, including T-Mobile, AT & T, and Verizon. I never asked how he got his information; I didn’t want to know.

I’d called Frank as soon as I got back from L.A. and asked him to find out who owned the cell-phone number Woody had given me at the airport. He quoted me an outrageous price and told me it might take a day or two.

So I called Frank again.

“Patience, my friend,” he said in his deep, gravelly voice. “My girl was out of the office yesterday.”

“I’m not calling about that,” I said. “I’ve got another job.”

“Let’s hear it.”

I gave him Roger’s cell-phone number, the one whose billing records I couldn’t find in his study, and asked him to e-mail me the phone bills as soon as he could. I figured that if my brother went to the trouble of hiding his cell-phone bills, there must be something useful in them. Or at least something he wanted to hide.

The price Frank quoted was even higher.

“Don’t I get a volume discount?” I asked, and Frank laughed heartily, meaning no.

I went out to get a cup of coffee, and when I returned, Dorothy Duval was sitting at my desk, leaning back in the chair, her feet up. Peach stiletto pumps with high heels and a cutout at the toe.

“How do I get an office like this?” she said.

“Kiss a lot of ass.”

“Then I guess I’m lucky I got a cubicle,” she muttered. “You know, it’s amazing what you can find out about people these days. I can’t decide if it’s cool or terrifying. Maybe it’s both.”

“You unerased the laptop?”

“Babe, that’ll take hours. A lot of hours. Meanwhile, I did some basic data-mining.”

“Tell me.”

“How about your brother’s medical prescriptions?”

“You serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“How’d you get those?” I said, impressed.

She laughed. “Oh, it’s evil. All the big pharmacy chains sell their prescription records to a couple of companies – electronic prescribing networks, they’re called. Supposed to be for patient safety, but you know what it’s really about.” She rubbed her fingers together in the universal sign of moolah. “Man, everything’s online now.”

“Real protected, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. So, how much you wanna know about your brother?”

“What are we talking about?”

“Well, Viagra, for one.”

“He took Viagra, huh?”

She crossed her ankles. Her toenails were painted with peach polish.

“That may be more than I want to know about Roger and Lauren’s sex life.”

“Might not involve Lauren,” she said.

I folded my arms. “How do you figure that?”

She lowered her feet to the floor, then leaned forward.

“Because seven months ago your brother paid for an abortion.”

I stared at her for a few seconds. “I assume it wasn’t Lauren.”

She shook her head.

“How do you…?” The words died in my mouth. I was in shock.

I didn’t think anything about my brother could surprise me. But that knocked the wind right out of me. More than anything, it made me sad. I thought of Lauren and her admiration for him – her love of him, which I’d never understood. And I thought of Gabe and his suspicions that his father was being unfaithful, and I wondered whether kids just saw things more clearly. As an only child, Gabe probably observed his parents with X-ray vision.

She gave a pensive sigh and spoke quietly. “You know medical records aren’t really private.”

“But abortions… Don’t people sometimes use cash to keep it private?”

“Apparently there were complications. That’s how I found the records – the woman was admitted from a family planning center in Brookline, Mass., to Mass General Hospital in Boston, and your brother’s name was recorded as the accompanying adult.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“It’s a funny name. Candi something?” She looked at her notes. “Candi Dupont. That’s Candy with an ‘i’ at the end.”

“Did you find out anything about her?”

“Not yet.”

“You think that’s a real name?”

“Sounds like a stripper name to me.”

“Can you keep digging on it, see what turns up? The usual databases – Accurint, AutoTrack, LexisNexis – see what you turn up on her whereabouts and her employment background and all that.”

“Come on, Nick, what do you think?”

“I appreciate it.”

“Do you think his wife knows?”

“I doubt it.”

“They’re always the last to know, aren’t they? You going to tell her?”

I hesitated, then shook my head. “I don’t see the point. It doesn’t have anything to do with whatever happened to him.”

“You sure?”

“Her life has already been turned upside down. She might have lost her husband. No need to make things even more painful for her.”

“So should I not have told you about this?”

“Of course you should have,” I said, surprised she’d even suggest it. “I need to know everything about my brother. Even the things I’d rather not know.”

“Nick,” she said, “you can’t know everything about anyone. No matter how good an investigator you are, no matter how many databases you have access to, no matter how deep you dig. You just can never know another person completely.”

“You’re too smart to be working in a place like this,” I said.

For a couple of years during college I was a summer associate at McKinsey, the big management-consulting firm. I shouldn’t have even gotten the job. Those were normally reserved for MBA and JD candidates, not for undergrads. But the partner who hired me probably figured that Victor Heller, the fugitive financier, the storied Dark Prince of Wall Street, might throw some big business her way. Which never happened, of course.

I was put on a team assigned to a troubled athletic-shoe manufacturer, which meant I had to interview everyone I could possibly interview, then, at the end of the summer, do a presentation for senior management. My boss seemed to be a lot more interested in what she called the “gatekeepers” and the “decision makers” at the company than in how lousy their sneakers were. I even had to do a Decision Matrix with all the key players’ names color-coded-green meant they wanted to buy more of our consulting services. Red meant they were violently opposed. When I went over my presentation with my boss, she kept leaning on me to trash this one division chief, highlight all the problems in his division.

I tried to argue with my boss about this. After all, the division chief was perfectly fine. Finally, one of my fellow associates, a lovely dark-haired woman who was studying at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth – and who I was going out with that summer – explained to me what was going on.