Vanished (18 page)

47.

I
had plenty of time before my flight left the airport, so I held on to the rental car awhile longer, left the parking lot, and drove around, just thinking. The roads here were broad and newly paved, with far less congestion than Washington, and in a few miles I passed the Colonie Public Library. On an impulse, I turned in.

In the Internet age, public libraries are immensely undervalued as resources. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for books on shelves and old newspapers, even microfilm copies. Far too many local newspapers just aren’t searchable through Google. Even those that have search engines accessible on the Internet are often poorly indexed. Most of the good stuff you have to find the old-fashioned way.

I found a set of indexes for a Michigan newspaper, the
Grand Rapids Press,
and began searching year by year for articles on the reclusive founder of Paladin, Allen Granger. Since his family was from northern Michigan, I figured there was a chance I’d find some interesting local coverage, something that might tell me something that I hadn’t read in
Time
or
Newsweek.

While I leafed through volume after volume, my cell phone rang. The periodicals librarian gave me a look, and I shut it off without glancing at the caller ID. I found quite a few articles on Granger, but almost all of them were wire-service dispatches, and none of them was news to me. Lots of pieces on Paladin and various controversies their employees had run into in Iraq. Articles about Allen Granger testifying before Congress. He hadn’t testified before Congress in a year, though. Neither had he done any in-person interviews, as far as I could tell. An interview in which “Mr. Granger spoke to the Associated Press by telephone from Paladin headquarters in southern Georgia.” In the last year, Carl Koblenz, identified as chief executive officer of Paladin Worldwide, based in Falls Church, Virginia, seemed to have taken over the public-spokesman role. Granger hadn’t been seen in public in over a year.

I had to go back quite a few years before I was able to find any local interviews with Allen Granger. Fifteen years, in fact.

I went to the periodicals desk and requested the roll of microfilm from the
Grand Rapids Press.
Ten minutes later, I was scrolling through the scratchy old microfilm, trying to suppress a wave of motion sickness, and finally located the interview, done by a Grand Rapids reporter, who described Allen Granger as the “handsome scion” of a “waste-management empire” and “former Navy SEAL.” The photo they ran confirmed the handsome part, anyway: He had a clean-cut, blue-eyed, wholesome Midwestern look. Granger told the reporter about how he’d just recently purchased ten thousand acres of pine forest in southern Georgia as a training facility for what he envisioned as “the FedEx of national security,” whatever that meant.

The last line of the interview said, “For Allen Granger, it’s a long way from Traverse City.”

Traverse City, Michigan, was Granger’s hometown.

And Traverse Development? Could that be another one of his firms?

I was thoroughly confused. Why would the president of Paladin Worldwide have hired some guy in a shipping company to steal a billion dollars’ worth of cash from
another
one of Allen Granger’s companies?

Unless Granger didn’t know what Koblenz was doing.

I couldn’t begin to make sense of this.

Stepping outside into the blindingly bright sunshine, I checked my voice mail.

“Heller,” Dorothy Duval said in a quiet voice. “Call me. We got trouble.”

48.

W
hat’s wrong?” I said.

“I didn’t think Stoddard even knew where my cubicle was. He just walked up to my desk and told me that I’ve been abusing office resources.”

“You getting all your work in on time?”

“You know it doesn’t work like that around here. I’m not on the clock.”

“Exactly. You tell him what you do on your own time is your business.”

“First of all, Nick, I’ve never talked to Stoddard that way, and I’m not going to start now. I’m not like you. I’m disposable.”

“You’re the best, Dorothy, and you know it. None of the other forensic techs get invited to the Monday morning meetings.”

“Yeah, well, as far as Jay Stoddard is concerned, I’m one of about a thousand data-recovery specialists out there, most of whom would jump at the chance to work here.” She lowered her voice. “And he’s probably right.”

“He’s not going to fire you for helping me locate my brother.”

“Oh no? He as much as said so. He said if I do any more database searches on Traverse Development or Roger Heller or anything that’s not a Stoddard project, I better update my résumé.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “You know I’ve got your back.”

“Must be why they always get me from the front,” she said acidly. “You don’t have the power to keep him from firing me, Nick.”

“Don’t be so sure of that.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Any luck on that list of office-building tenants I faxed you?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“What are you doing, running every company name to see if they’re subsidiaries of other companies?”

“That would take forever. No, I’m running them against this Traverse Development. But no luck yet.”

“And Roger’s laptop?”

“Looks like it’s mostly personal stuff. E-mails and all that.”

“Can you send it to me?”

“No. But I’ll give you what I got when I see you.”

Call waiting came on, and I saw that it was Garvin. “Dorothy,” I said, “would you mind—?”

“Take the call, Nick.”

“Thanks. You’re the best.”

“I’m glad you appreciate it,” she said. “Because this is the last job I can do for you. See, Nick, I need a paycheck.”

When I clicked over to Garvin’s call, he began abruptly, without even identifying himself: “This is interesting.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I got back a trace on both of those tags—the Econoline van and that black Humvee?” Like most cops, Garvin called license plates “tags.”

“And?”

“And they both trace back to the same owner.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Who is it?”

“The registration on file in both cases seems to be a holding company.”

I waited.

“Something called A.G. Holdings.”

“Is there an address?”

“Just a P.O. box.”

“Okay,” I said. “That helps. That helps a lot.”

I hung up, and a minute later I was talking to Dorothy again.

She cut me off: “I told you, Nick, I can’t do any more work for you.”

“I just need you to look at that tenant list I faxed you.”

“Just look at it?”

“Right.”

“I got it right here.”

“Is there a tenant in that building called A.G. Holdings?”

There was a long pause, a rustling of paper. Finally: “Seventh floor,” she said.

“Nice,” I said.

“What?”

“A.G. Holdings is Allen Granger.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do either,” I said. “But I intend to find out.”

49.

I
t seemed like the more I knew, the less I understood.

Paladin Worldwide and Traverse Development and A.G. Holdings—they were all the same company. Or to put it more accurately, they all shared ownership, which wasn’t quite the same thing. One of them owned the other. Maybe it didn’t make any difference which company owned the other. They were all Allen Granger.

Okay, fine. So one of Paladin’s subsidiaries, Traverse Development, secretly shipped a billion dollars’ worth of cash into the United States, only the cash went missing. Why? Because it was stolen by the security director of the shipping company.

Who’d been hired by the same company that shipped it over in the first place.

So in essence, Paladin Worldwide was stealing from itself.

Or, maybe more to the point, Carl Koblenz was stealing from his own company. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was embezzling money on a grand scale.

Maybe Carl Koblenz had tried to steal a billion dollars, and Roger had found out and tried to extort hush money from him to keep it quiet. And Koblenz had decided it would be easier just to abduct, perhaps kill, Roger.

And Roger had somehow managed to escape their clutches.

Okay. But then why would Paladin—under the name of one of its subsidiaries, or holding companies, Traverse Development—hire my firm to track down the missing cash?

The only explanation that made any sense to me was that Stoddard Associates had been hired not by Carl Koblenz but by Allen Granger. In other words, Paladin’s CEO had no idea that his own president had stolen a billion dollars from the company.

And Roger had stepped into the middle of that mess.

And so had I.

As I returned to the airport parking lot, I called a guy I didn’t know, a friend of a friend who worked for Paladin Worldwide. His name was Neil Burris, an ex–Navy SEAL, and he worked out of Paladin’s Falls Church office in their private-security division.

He didn’t sound very friendly on the phone. But after I identified myself as Marty Masur of Stoddard Associates and told him that Stoddard was interested in possibly hiring him, at a salary at least twice what he was making at Paladin, he warmed up.

We arranged to meet for drinks.

50.

W
ith a trembling hand, Lauren picked up the phone to call Nick.

Her heart was racing. Her mouth was dry. She was nauseated, light-headed. The room seemed to be spinning slowly, and she had the physical sensation of falling through space.

How could someone have taken video of Gabe sleeping? Had someone sneaked in during the night? Was there some sort of hidden camera in his room? Could it possibly be?

And who could have done such a thing?

Feeling as if she were about to vomit, she put the phone down. No. It would be a mistake to call Nick. He’d already unearthed things about Roger and about their family life that she wished he hadn’t. How in the world had he discovered Roger’s affair, that terrible, gut-wrenching thing that had so blighted their marriage? She wished Gabe had never asked Nick to help.

Then she opened the St. Gregory’s website—Harvard crimson, elegant font, the school’s coat of arms—and found the main switchboard number on the bottom of the page. She picked up the phone again and called the school.

She recognized the voice of the woman who answered—the receptionist, Mrs. Jordan—and began speaking all in a rush. “Ruth, this is Gabe Heller’s mom, Lauren Heller? I wonder, do you think you could check to see if Gabe’s in school today?”

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Heller. Is there a problem?”

“No, not at all, I left the house early, and you know how late these boys sleep, and . . .”

Mrs. Jordan chuckled softly. Lauren could hear her typing. She stared at the school’s seal. The Latin motto:
Mens Sana in Corpore Sano
. What did that mean, “A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body”? She wondered what the Latin was for “More Rich Assholes than You Can Shake a Stick At.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“He’s in today,” she said. “I think he’s in science right now. Did you want to get a message to him?”

Lauren let her breath out slowly. “No, I—” She hesitated. “Actually, yes, Ruth. Can you tell him that I’ll pick him up from school today?”

She looked up the cell-phone number of Kate Vaughan, the mom who was scheduled to drive the car pool in the afternoons this week. She called Kate and told her not to drive Gabe home.

She could leave work early today. Leland wasn’t here, and Noreen would be more than happy to hold down the fort.

She needed to see her son and make sure he was all right.

51.

T
hat headache was back.

The same throbbing in her temples and her forehead, the feeling that her head was a lightbulb that could explode at any moment. That sensation of needles jabbing into the back of her eyeballs.

She could barely concentrate on the road. Since she never left work so early, she had no idea how bad the traffic on the George Washington Parkway was in the mid afternoon. It was only two thirty, not even rush hour, and it was already bumper-to-bumper.

And her head was about to explode.

In her mind she kept replaying that video of Gabe asleep in bed, over and over until she wanted to scream.

St. Gregory’s School was located on a verdant campus off Wisconsin Avenue, near the National Cathedral. It looked like an Ivy League school. It sure cost like an Ivy League school. She drove in past the tennis courts, past the huge new athletic facility, and pulled into a long line of very expensive SUVs. In front of her was a Range Rover. Behind her was a Porsche Cayenne Turbo.

The whole scene felt unfamiliar to her. Yet at the same time sort of nice. Picking your kid up from school—that was something she really missed. Not since Gabe was in first grade had she picked him up from school and taken him home. That was in the early years of working for Leland, and it had been hard to arrange time off, but she’d done it. Seven years ago. Apart from a few days when he was sick, anyway.

There was a time when Lauren knew she could keep Gabe safe. Once she’d been able to pick him up in the palm of one hand. She could still his cries by offering him a bottle or her breast, by patting his back until he gave a tiny burp, by wrapping him up in his blankets as snugly as an egg roll.

But then you send your kid out into the world and anything can happen.

The pickup area was jammed with SUVs pulling in and out, jousting with one another like some high-end monster-truck rally.

The tap of a car horn. A blue Toyota Land Cruiser had pulled up alongside her. The window glided down.

“Lauren?”

Kate Vaughan. A pretty blond woman, very jocky, who wore her hair in a ponytail. A major squash player. Lauren had heard that the Vaughans had had a squash court built in their home. She had three sons, two of them at St. Gregory’s, all three serious squash players, the eldest one nationally ranked. Four boys were in the back two rows, tussling and arguing.

Lauren looked up, waved.

“I got your message about Gabe. You guys going somewhere?”

“No, just—boss is out of town. Did you see Gabe up there?”

“Haven’t seen him, sorry. Are you okay? I heard you were in an accident.”

“Oh, I’m fine, thanks.”

“And, um . . . Roger? Do they know anything more?”

Lauren shook her head.

“God, Lauren, you must be so
worried.
” A huge black Cadillac Escalade behind Kate’s Toyota was trying to lumber by and honked loudly.

“I am.”

Kate’s son, Kip, in the front seat, said something to her, and she swatted him away. “Will you chill, kids, okay? God, Lauren. You know, I once heard about something called wandering amnesia? It’s like a . . . fugue state? It’s triggered by stress—you just all of a sudden forget who you are, and you could be wandering around, and—”

The Escalade blasted its horn.

Kate flipped the bird out the window at the Escalade’s driver. “Sheesh, can you believe this guy? All right, I better move it. Keep me posted, okay? I’m sure it’s totally nothing. But God, it’s so scary, huh?”

“I will. Thanks.”

Hers was one of the last cars to reach the pickup spot. The crowd of boys waiting there, laughing and shoving and shouting to one another, was thinning, and she didn’t see Gabe.

Her forehead was throbbing, and she felt a tightness in her chest.

Maybe he hadn’t gotten the message that she’d be picking him up.

Unlikely. Mrs. Jordan, the school secretary, was a hundred percent reliable. St. Gregory’s was scrupulous about keeping track of its students’ whereabouts at all times. The sons of some very rich and important people—senators and Supreme Court justices and presidents of foreign countries—went here. The parents had to be assured that their kids were safe.

Gabe tended to be pretty spacey, though. He could easily have forgotten she was coming. But then he would have gotten into Kate Vaughan’s car, and she’d have told him to wait for his mom.

The car in front of her pulled away, and she drove up to the curb, and there was no one there.

No Gabe.

She called his cell phone.

It rang four, five, six times, then went to voice mail. Or what ever you called that blast of hideous music that she didn’t have the patience to get through before his recorded voice came on.

Maybe he’d forgotten to carry his cell phone. That was very Gabe. He didn’t use it much, often left it at home or in his locker at school.

She switched off the engine and got out. You weren’t supposed to park here, but she didn’t care. She ran up the concrete path to the Middle School building, heart thudding.

A small pile of backpacks in the foyer, and three boys were sitting on the floor, one of them showing the others something on his iPod.

“Any of you kids seen Gabe Heller?” she asked.

They shrugged. They weren’t in his grade, didn’t know who he was. She kept going, up the big stone staircase to the school secretary’s office.

Mrs. Jordan, a handsome middle-aged black woman, was on the phone, smiled at her, nodded, put the phone on hold.

“Mrs. Heller, why are you—?”

Lauren, trying to sound casual, trying not to sound like the crazed neurotic mom, said, “Have you seen Gabe?”

Mrs. Jordan, who monitored all the students’ absences and late arrivals and early departures from her command post, looked perplexed. “He got picked up half an hour early, like you told me.”

Lauren shook her head. “No, I said to tell him that
I
was going to pick him up today. I didn’t say anything about coming early.”

“Right, but then you called back to say the police needed to talk to him.”

“The
police
—?”

“A couple of policemen stopped by just like you said, and I sent them over to his En glish class to get him and—”

The room seemed to revolve.

“I never called—”

Lauren turned around, her legs feeling wobbly, lurching out of the office.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Heller? What you said was—”

But Lauren, running toward her car, heard no more.