Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

She looked at me, but I just nodded silently.

“Sort of a crisis, I guess you’d call it. He’d met some woman on a business trip to Boston. We’d had some big fight before he left, and I guess he was angry at me, and he said he was in the bar at the Four Seasons, and in a moment of weakness…”

“Candi Dupont.”

“I never knew her name. He wouldn’t tell me. But this was three or four years ago, Nick. He begged me to forgive him, and he promised it was over. He swore.”

“Obviously it wasn’t. Seven months ago Roger paid for a woman named Candi Dupont to have an abortion at a clinic in Boston.”

“Oh, God.”

“We haven’t turned up anything on any ‘Candi Dupont’ in the standard databases, which tells me that ‘Candi Dupont’ might be some sort of alias. But whatever her name is, maybe it’s the same woman Roger told you about. Which would mean the affair didn’t end three or four years ago.”

She grabbed a hardcover book from the coffee table and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall, rattled a picture frame, and fell to the floor. I couldn’t help noticing that the book was called Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames by Thich Nhat Hanh. “Enough!” she cried. “I don’t want to hear about it! If he didn’t stop seeing that… slut… I don’t want to know about it! Don’t you get that?”

“I do,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

She got up and retrieved the book, put it back on the coffee table, and sat back down on the couch, but much closer to me. For a minute or so she was silent, and I didn’t say anything either, then she said, “Nick.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been lying to you.”

“Okay,” I said gently. I kept my tone light, casual, nonconfrontational. I wanted her to feel safe about finally opening up to me. “Tell me.”

“Roger did mention something.”

“About what?”

“Just that he’d found something he wasn’t supposed to know about. Some kind of corruption, it sounded like.”

“Which is precisely what Marjorie Ogonowski told me. Did he say whether it involved Gifford Industries?”

“I don’t know. He said it involved a lot of money, but other than that, he was completely vague about it. The more I pressed him on it, the more he withdrew. He could get that way. He’d retreat into himself.”

“He didn’t give you any specifics? Nothing at all?”

“Nothing. But – well, he was afraid that something might happen to him. That he’d gotten threats.”

“That’s pretty vague, too.”

“He admitted it sounded paranoid. Like he was some conspiracy theorist. I asked him if he wanted me to talk to Leland – to see if Leland could do something, help in some way. But he told me never to say anything to Leland about it. He made me promise.”

“And did you keep that promise?”

“Of course.”

“And he never said who was threatening him?”

She shook her head again. “He never said, and I gave up asking. He said he wanted to protect Gabe and me, and the less I knew, the better.”

“So that e-mail he sent – that InCaseOfDeath thing – that didn’t really shock you, did it, what he was telling you?”

A beat. Then, ruefully: “No.”

“So why did you keep this from me?”

“Ohh, Nick.” She sighed, then hugged herself, shivering as if she were cold. “Because what if he – I don’t know, surrendered.”

“Surrendered? To whom?”

“I mean, what if he gave himself up? I mean, they’d threatened him, threatened his family, and he knew he couldn’t unring the bell, you know? He couldn’t pretend not to know whatever it was he found out. So maybe he made a deal with them. These guys, whoever they are, they attacked me and he saw that and he said, in effect, ‘Hey, why her? I’m the one you want. Take me.’ To spare me and Gabe. Do you follow? Am I making any sense?”

“I think so,” I said. “But what do you think happened to him?”

Very quietly, she said, “He might have sacrificed himself.”

She lowered her head almost to her chest, then put her hands on each temple. From the way her head was moving, I knew she was crying. After a moment, she looked up, tears streaming down her face. “You see? Do you understand why I’m so scared?”

“Yes. I do.” I reached over and held her in a tight embrace, felt her damp heat. “But I’m not going to let anything happen to you or Gabe.”

“What if that’s beyond your control, Nick?”

“It’s not,” I said, and I was instantly ashamed because that was a transparent lie. Plenty of things were beyond my control.

“And you know, just listening to you talk about what happened that night, the night I was attacked – well, maybe you’re right. Maybe there was something strange about it. And then there was that e-mail from him, and now there’s this video, and it all seems to add up to something very different from what I thought it was.”

I held her for a long while.

“Lauren,” I said, “did he ever tell you why he talked to Victor so often?”

“He called your dad? When?”

“Victor called him, to be precise. Collect calls. Five times in the last month.”

“He never said anything about that to me. Are you sure about this? I thought he hadn’t talked to Victor in almost a year.”

I SAT there for a few minutes in front of the TV set after Lauren went to bed – Kyra Sedgwick in a rerun of The Closer , saying to a bunch of sullen male cops, in a treacly Southern accent, “Why thank you very much, gentlemen” – and then I thought of something.

I went to the entry hall by the front door. The spare key to Roger’s car – really, a keyless entry fob – was in a green ceramic Japanese bowl on the hall table. His S-Class AMG Mercedes was parked in the garage, black and gleaming. Inside, it smelled like new leather. I started it up, pressed the navigation system button on the LCD touch screen, hit DESTINATION MEMORY, then LAST DESTINATIONS.

A beautiful car, that Mercedes. A six-liter V-12 engine with 604 horsepower and incredible torque. Invoice price probably around a hundred eighty thousand dollars. And the crappiest navigation system in the world.

But it told me what I needed to know.

Roger had not just talked to Dad on the phone a bunch of times in the last month. He’d also visited him in prison. He’d driven to upstate New York, and at least once he’d used the Mercedes’s navigation system to get him there.

The question was why.

The one person who might know what had happened to Roger was the last person I wanted to see.

The Altamont Correctional Facility had originally been built as a hospital for the criminally insane, a hundred and fifty years ago. The Altamont Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, was a grand Victorian Gothic complex of spires and crenellated towers. Its forbidding red-brick walls were stained dark with soot from a century of internal-combustion engines. Some forty years ago the mental hospital was shut down and converted into a medium-security prison, but it still looked like the sort of place a homicidal maniac escapes from, then terrorizes the nearby summer camp. It also reminded me a little of the high school I’d gone to in Malden.

They’d done some renovation since the days of straitjackets and lobotomies. There was a concrete perimeter wall thirty feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, watchtowers, and banks of high-mast lights. Inside the walls, the old Gothic prison complex was surrounded by a luxuriant green lawn that wouldn’t have been out of place at Pebble Beach.