Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

But most of all, I thought, she was a really good human being. Totally unself-centered. She’d devoted her life to three difficult men: her husband, her son, and her boss, Leland Gifford. That couldn’t have been easy. Just being the administrative assistant to the CEO of a major company was more than a full-time job; it was more like a marriage. No doubt Roger was jealous of her devotion to her boss. And maybe her boss was jealous of her devotion to her husband.

She gave me a big hug as I entered, and I stared in shock for a few seconds. Even though I knew she’d been hurt, seeing the evidence of that attack was unnerving. She had a bandage on her head, and the left side of her face was scraped up, with yellowish bruising around her eyes.

She thanked me for coming, and I asked how she was doing and told her she looked good.

“I just lost respect for you,” she said with a disappointed shake of her head. “I always thought you were a real straight shooter.”

“You’re right. I lied. You look pretty rough. I’m worried about you.”

She laughed. “Thanks for your honesty. But I do feel better than I look.”

She led me through the marble-tiled foyer and into their huge kitchen, which smelled like gingerbread or maybe pumpkin pie. She handed me a mug of coffee: black, the way I like it. The mug had a shield on it and said ST. GREGORY’S, Gabe’s private boys’ school. She sat on a stool at one corner of the big black granite island, and I sat facing her.

“The hospital let you go home already?”

“The doctor thinks I’m okay as long as I take it easy. And I can’t leave Gabe alone in the house.”

“No word about Roger?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Listen,” I said. “The first thing is, I don’t want you to assume the worst.” She needed me to be calm and unworried, and I did a fairly good job of faking it.

Tears came to her eyes. “I don’t even know what the worst is.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

I listened, asked a lot of questions, and mostly tried not to feed her worst fears. But the more I listened, the stranger it seemed.

A sudden, unexplained attack as they were walking to their car. No blood on the ground, no signs of struggle: nothing to indicate that my brother had been killed or even wounded. The hospitals and morgues had been checked for bodies, and no one matching his description had turned up.

There had been no word from him in the two days since the attack.

It didn’t look good. In the pit of my stomach, I knew that he wasn’t likely to turn up alive. I didn’t want to tell her that. Yet I also didn’t want to mislead her.

“How many of them were there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably just one. But he had a gun.”

“How do you know?”

“I felt it.”

“How?”

“He held something against my temple that felt like the barrel of a gun. And I heard that little click a revolver makes when you cock the hammer.”

“So it was a revolver, not a semiautomatic.”

“You don’t cock a semiautomatic, Nick.”

I just smiled. I didn’t want to get all firearms-geeky on her. Actually, you do cock a semiautomatic when you rack the slide. But the point she was trying to make was basically right: nothing else sounds quite like the hammer on a revolver being pulled. “Male or female?”

“Male, for sure.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I – well, I guess, the strength–”

“There are some awfully strong women around.”

“Maybe I felt arm hair or something.”

“His arms were bare, then.”

“No… I… it smelled like a guy, if you know what I mean. Cologne. Cheap cologne, mixed with cigarette smoke.”

“Did you get the sense that Roger knew the attacker?”

Her eyes roamed the room. “No, I don’t think…”

“Gabe said the cops were wondering if you and Roger were having marital difficulties.”

She winced. “He said that?”

I nodded. “Basically.”

“What does that mean? Like he tried to have me bumped off?”

“I guess.”

“That’s just stupid. If Roger wanted to leave me, he’d just leave.”

“Did he ever talk about that?”

“Not you, too.”

“Nah. Roger’s not the divorce type, I’d say. He’d rather just grind you down.”

She frowned, but not with her eyes. “I know you two have… issues. I realize he can be annoying sometimes, but–”

“Annoying? White guys who call each other ‘dude’ are annoying. Hot-air hand dryers in public restrooms are annoying. I wouldn’t call Roger annoying.” He’s a jerk , I didn’t say. An asshole. In other circumstances I might have said this aloud. But not that day. And the fact was, she loved the guy, and so did Gabe, so who was I to impose my opinion on them? It was irrelevant.

She looked up suddenly, sniffed the air. “Oh, God, the sweet potato.” She ran over to the toaster oven on the counter near the refrigerator (a Sub-Zero, of course, roughly the size of a Humvee) and came back shortly with her foil-wrapped baked sweet potato and a fork.

“Want some?”

“I’m good.”

“You have any supper?”

“You know me. I eat when I’m hungry.”

In their house, the kitchen was normally Roger’s domain. I have a great respect for male friends of mine who can cook. Just not for kitchen fascists like my brother. He always had to have the right high-end appliance or expensive pan, the right cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, the right thirty-year-old balsamic vinegar. Once food becomes that important, you’ve got a problem that Umbrian white truffle oil can’t solve.

“In the hospital, they kept feeding me Jell-O and ginger ale, and all I could think about was baked sweet potato for some reason.”

“Is your boss going to survive without you?”

She smiled fondly. “He’s been great. He told me to take as much time as I need. But I want to go back soon.”

“You’re well enough?”

“Like I said, I only look a train wreck. I’m feeling fine. Gabe has school, and I’ll just go stir-crazy sitting around the house.”

“I assume Leland Gifford knows about Roger’s… disappearance.”

“Of course.”

“You’ve talked to him about it?”

“Just briefly. I called him this afternoon.”

“And?”

“He’s offered to do anything he can. The police interviewed him about Roger.”

“Did he have any theories as to what might have happened?”

“Lee’s as baffled as anyone.”

I nodded. “Do you have any idea what Roger’s been working on recently?”

She paused to chew a big mouthful, looking at me with narrowed eyes. “We rarely talked about work. Sort of house rules.”

“So he didn’t mention anything he was especially worried about.”

She shook her head. “Nothing interesting, as far as I know.”

Of course, that pretty much described all of Roger’s work at Gifford Industries. He structured deals, arranged financing. It would take me pots of black coffee to get through a single one of his mornings without lapsing into a boredom-induced coma. I always had the feeling, though, that Roger regarded himself as overqualified – that he’d never been promoted to a level he considered commensurate with his talents. Not that such a level could ever possibly exist in corporate America.

“Hmm,” I said.

“You’re thinking this had something to do with his job?”

“Not necessarily. Just covering all the bases. It could be anything. But I doubt it was a random mugging. If he was attacked” – I deliberately avoided the word “killed” – “there’d probably be some evidence of that. Something would have turned up by now.” A body , I didn’t say.