Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Turned out this particular manager was a “red name.” He was an obstructionist. He thought consultants like us were a monumental waste of time. My boss wanted him defanged.

So I did what I was told. I did my PowerPoint, dredging up every mistake he’d ever made, every wrong decision.

Shortly afterward, the guy got fired.

Problem solved.

That was when I decided that consulting wasn’t for me. But acting and talking like a consultant – well, that turned out to be a skill set that had come in handy on more than one occasion.

I called Lauren and arranged for a visitor’s pass to be left for me at the concierge desk in the lobby of Gifford Industries. I was a management consultant with Bain & Company, or so the paperwork said.

That was enough to get me upstairs and wandering around unsupervised.

I DIDN’T arrive at the swanky Gifford Industries headquarters building until the early afternoon. I’d hoped to get out of the office much earlier, but work kept intruding. I couldn’t just drop the cases I’d been working; I had to pass along the files to others at Stoddard, brief them on my progress and the outstanding issues. I had to make phone calls to clients I’d been working with to let them know that I’d be taking a few days off for family reasons, which I didn’t explain, and assure them they’d be in good hands; and I had to write and reply to a bunch of e-mails. E-mail: the curse of modern office life. I don’t remember what we did before it.

I was still reeling from what Dorothy had learned about Roger. The fact that he’d been having an affair and had taken his lover to an abortion clinic. The fact that my brother had been unfaithful to his wife, a woman he was beyond lucky to have found. He wasn’t exactly Brad Pitt or George Clooney. I felt the way I often did when I read some Hollywood gossip item about how some supermodel’s husband was caught cheating on her: What do you want, guy? You’re married to one of the most desirable women in the world. What else can you possibly want?

As a single male, I admit I understood the impulse. My brother and I used to tell a joke when we were kids that went something like this: Hey, did you hear Playboy just came out with a magazine just for married men? Yep. Every month the centerfold’s the exact same woman . But being attracted and acting on it were two very different things.

I think that on some deeply buried, subconscious level I was hoping that by investigating my brother’s disappearance I’d discover a side of him that I’d never seen, which would make me finally appreciate him.

I didn’t expect to find out things that would make me dislike him even more.

Roger worked in the special-projects group of the corporate development division of Gifford Industries. There were three attorneys and just one administrative assistant for all of them. You could tell just by looking at their offices that the special-projects group was sort of a ghetto in the company. It didn’t seem to be very special at all. It was hidden in a distant corner of the Legal Department, on the fourth floor, in a warren of identical offices with nothing on the walls except the sort of mind-numbing signs you see in every corporate office in the world-stern notices about floating holidays and how if you don’t give sufficient notice you lose them, something about the blood drive, about keeping the kitchenette clean (“We are not your mothers!” it said). My tie suddenly felt too tight around my neck.

The admin for the special-projects group was named Kim Harding. She was shy and bookish, in her early fifties, with hyperthyroidic eyes behind oversized tinted glasses. She had short curly brown hair and small prim lips painted with dark red lipstick. She looked like a scared rabbit.

“Hello, Kim,” I said. “I’m John Murray, from Security Compliance.” I handed her a business card. That was one of the covers that Stoddard provided its investigators, and it always worked. It identified Security Compliance Partners as a management-consulting firm specializing in security audits of Fortune 500 corporations. It gave the Stoddard Associates address and a phone number there that Elizabeth, the receptionist, would answer the right way.

Every corporation that did business with the Pentagon, as Gifford Industries did, had to suffer regular visits from outside security auditors, who prowled the halls of the company, meeting with people and checking the facilities and the networks, making sure they were in compliance with all the ridiculous, paranoid security measures the government required of any contractor who did classified work. So Kim Harding was conditioned to be cooperative.

She glanced at it and said, “Yes, John, how can I help you?”

“Well, you know, Mr. Gifford has retained our firm to look into certain anomalies concerning someone you work with, a Mr. Roger Heller?”

She looked stricken, compressed her lips, and looked up at me. For a moment I thought she might ask if we were related. Roger and I didn’t resemble each other much anymore, but women tend to be far more observant than men, and someone like Kim, who’d worked for him every day, might be particularly keen.

Instead, she said, “I’m so worried about Roger. Do we know anything more–?”

“I’m not really allowed to go into any of that, Kim, but I’d very much appreciate your help.”

She blinked a few times. “Yes?”

“Well, let’s start with something easy. Do you keep records of telephone calls Roger made or received?”

Kim drew herself up. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled. “The answer’s not going to change no matter how many times you people ask me.”

“Someone’s asked you about this already?”

“Just this morning. Mr. Gifford’s office. Why do I get the feeling the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing?”

“Who in Mr. Gifford’s office?”

She gave me a piercing look. There was a smudge of lipstick on her teeth.

“Noreen Purvis. The woman who’s been filling in for Lauren Heller.”

“I see.”

“I’ll tell you what I told her.” She held up a pad of pink “While You Were Out” message slips. The kind I knew well. “I write messages on these things and I hand them to the attorneys or put them on their desks, and no, I never keep carbon copies either. You want phone records, talk to the girls in Accounting.”

“Well, that’s a start,” I said. “And I’m sorry for the duplication of effort. Can you show me to Roger’s office, please? I’m going to need to take a look at his computer.”

“You people really don’t talk to each other, do you?”

“Noreen did that, too?”

“No. She asked about it, and I told her that his computer’s gone. It was removed by Corporate Security, on direct orders from Mr. Gifford.”

A plain woman with thick wire-frame glasses, wearing a gray business suit, passed by, and Kim held up a pink message slip. The woman took it and said, “Thanks, Kim.” She glanced at the slip, wadded it up, and dropped it in a metal trash basket next to Kim Harding’s desk.

Then she peered at me. “You’re asking about Roger?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What’s this about?”

I handed her my business card and told her about Security Compliance. She shook my hand, firm, like a man.

“You look familiar,” she said.

“I hear that a lot,” I said.

“You want to know something about Roger, you talk to Marjorie,” said Kim Harding, turning back to her keyboard. “Marjorie knows everything about Roger.”

The woman named Marjorie smiled and blushed. “I do not,” she said. “You make it sound like we were having an affair.”

“Did I say that?” Kim said to me. “Did I say that?”