Buried Secrets (Nick Heller) Read online

  The darkness was absolute. She wondered whether she’d gone blind.

  But maybe she was dreaming.

  It didn’t feel like a dream, though. She remembered … drinking at Slammer with Taylor Armstrong. Something about her iPhone. Laughing about something. Everything else was blurry, clouded.

  She had no recollection of how she’d gotten home, to her dad’s house, how she’d ended up in her bed with the shades drawn.

  She inhaled a strange musty odor. Unfamiliar. Was she at home in bed? It didn’t smell like her room in the Manchester house. The sheets didn’t have that fabric-softener fragrance she liked.

  Had she crashed at someone’s house? Not Taylor’s, she didn’t think. Her house smelled like lemon furniture polish, and her sheets were always too crisp. But where else could she be? She had no memory of … of anything, really, after laughing with Taylor about something on her iPhone …

  She only knew that she was sleeping on top of a bed. No sheets covering her. They must have slid off her during the night. She preferred being under a sheet, even on the hottest days when there wasn’t any air-conditioning. Like that awful year at Marston-Lee in Colorado, where there was no air-conditioning in the summer and they made you sleep in bunk beds and she had to bribe her bitch of a roommate for the top one. The bottom bunk made her feel trapped and anxious.

  Her hands were at her sides. She fluttered her fingers, feeling for the hem of a sheet, and then the back of her right hand brushed against something smooth and solid. With her fingertips she felt some kind of satiny material over something hard, like the slatted wooden safety rails on the sides of her bunk bed at Marston-Lee that kept you from falling out of bed and crashing to the floor.

  Was she back at Marston-Lee, or just dreaming that she was?

  Yet if she were dreaming, would she have such an incredible headache?

  She knew she was awake. She just knew it.

  But she could still see nothing. Total perfect darkness, not even a glimmer of light.

  She could smell the stale air and feel the soft yielding mattress below her and the soft pajamas on her legs … her fingertips scuttled over the soft fabric on her thighs, which didn’t feel like the sweatpants she usually wore to bed. She was wearing something different. Not sweatpants, not pajamas. Hospital scrubs, maybe?

  Was she in a hospital?

  Had she gotten hurt, maybe been in an accident?

  The ice pick was driving deeper and deeper into the gray matter of her brain, and the pain was indescribable, and she just wanted to roll over and put a pillow over her head. She raised her knees to gently torque her body and flip over, slowly and gently so her head didn’t crack apart …

  And her knees hit something.

  Something hard.

  Startled, she lifted her head, almost an involuntary reflex, and her forehead and the bridge of her nose collided with something hard too.

  Both hands flew outward, striking hard walls. A few inches on either side. Her knees came up again, maybe three inches, and once again they struck a solid wall.

  No.

  Fingers skittering up the sides and then the top, satin-covered walls barely three inches from her lips.

  Even before her brain was able to make sense of it, some animal instinct within her realized, with a dread that crept over her and turned her numb and ice-cold.

  She was in a box.

  She could touch the end of the box with her toes.

  She started breathing fast. Short, panicked gasps.

  Her heart raced.

  She shuddered, but the shuddering didn’t stop.

  She gasped for air, but couldn’t get more than a few inches of air into the very top of her lungs.

  She tried to sit up, but her forehead struck the ceiling once again. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t change positions.

  She panted faster and faster, heart juddering, sweat breaking out all over her body, hot and cold at the same time.

  This couldn’t be real. She had to be in some kind of nightmare: the worst nightmare she’d ever had. Trapped in a box. Like a …

  Satin lining. Walls of wood, maybe steel.

  Like being in a coffin.

  Her hands twitched, kept knocking against the hard walls, as she gasped over and over again: “No … no … no…”

  She’d forgotten all about her headache.

  That light-headed feeling that accompanied the hardness in her stomach and the coldness throughout her body, which she always felt before she passed out.

  And she was gone.

  9.

  By the time I got back into the Defender headed down 128 South toward Boston it was after noon. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Marshall Marcus really did have a serious reason to fear that something had happened to his daughter. Something he’d actually anticipated.

  In other words, not an accident. Even if it had nothing to do with the brief abduction a few years back. Maybe it was nothing more than a fight between Alexa and her stepmother, which ended with Alexa making a threat—I’m leaving, and I’m never coming back!—and then taking off.

  Though it didn’t really make sense that Marcus would withhold that sort of thing from me. Even if he was being chivalrous and wanted to shield his wife from the embarrassment of airing the family’s dirty laundry, it wasn’t like Marcus to be discreet. This was a guy who happily discussed his constipation, his difficulty urinating, and how Viagra had improved his sex life even more than JDate. He was the king of “TMI,” as my nephew Gabe would say: Too Much Information.

  Just as I was about to call Dorothy and ask her how we might be able to locate Alexa’s phone, my BlackBerry rang. Jillian, the office manager.

  “Your son’s here,” she said.

  “Uh, I don’t have a son.”

  “He says you two were supposed to have lunch?” In the background I could hear cacophonous music playing way too loud. She’d turned my office into a dorm room.

  “Whoops. Right. He’s my nephew. Not my son.” I’d promised Gabe I’d take him to lunch, but I’d forgotten to put it on the calendar.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “We just had a long talk, Gabe and me, and I just assumed he was your son, and he never corrected me.”

  “Yeah, well.” He wishes, I thought. “Thanks. Tell him I’ll be there soon.”

  “Cool kid.”

  “Yeah. That your music?”

  There was a click, and the music stopped. “Music?”

  “Could you put me through to Dorothy?” I said.

  10.

  Gabe Heller was my brother Roger’s stepson. He was sixteen, a very smart kid but definitely a misfit. He had hardly any friends at the private boys’ school he attended in Washington. He dressed all in black: black jeans, black hoodies, black Chuck Taylors. Recently he’d even started dying his hair black too. It’s not easy being sixteen, but it must have been particularly hard to be Gabe Heller.

  Roger, my estranged brother, was a jerk, not to put too fine a point on it. He was also, like our father, in prison. Luckily, Gabe was genetically unrelated to his father, or he’d probably be in juvie. I seemed to be the only adult he could talk to. I don’t know what it is about me and troubled kids. Maybe, the way dogs can smell fear, they can sense that I’ll never be a parent, and so I’m safe. I don’t know.

  Gabe was spending the summer at my mother’s condo in Newton. He was taking art classes in a summer program for high school students at the Museum School. He loved his Nana and wanted to get away from his mother, Lauren—who was no doubt relieved not to have to deal with him after school was out. My mother was hardly strict, so he was able to hop on the T and go into town and hang out in Harvard Square when he wasn’t in school, and I’m sure he enjoyed feeling like a grown-up.

  But I think the main reason he wanted to be in Boston was that it gave him an excuse to see me, though he’d never admit it. I loved the kid and enjoyed spending time with him. It wasn’t always easy. Not everything worthwhile is easy.

&n
bsp; He was sitting at my desk, drawing in his sketch pad. Gabe was a scarily talented artist.

  “Working on your comic book?” I said as I entered.

  “Graphic novel,” he said stiffly.

  “Right, sorry, I forgot.”

  “And hey, way to remember our lunch.” He was wearing a black hoodie, zipped up, with straps and D-rings and grommets on it. I noticed a tiny gold stud earring in his left ear but decided not to call attention to it. Yet.

  “Sorry about that, too. How’s the summer going for you?”

  “Boring.”

  For Gabe, that was a rave. “Wanna grab some lunch?” I said.

  “I’m only about to pass out from hunger.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  I noticed Dorothy hovering at the threshold. “Listen, Nick,” she said. “That number you gave me? I’m not going to be able to locate her phone.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you. That sounds … defeatist,” I said.

  “Ain’t got nothing to do with defeatism,” she said. “Nothing to do with my ability. It’s a matter of law.”

  “Like that ever stopped you?”

  “It’s not—oh, hello, Gabriel.” Her tone cooled.

  Gabe grunted. He and Dorothy had a history of clashing. Gabe thought he was smarter than she, which was probably true, since he was an alarmingly brainy kid—and better at computers, which wasn’t true. Not yet, anyway. Still, he was sixteen, which meant that he thought he was better at everything. And that just pissed Dorothy off.

  “Here’s the deal,” she said. “The person whose phone you want me to locate…” She glanced at Gabe in annoyance. She was always discreet about the work she did for me, but she was being particularly careful.

  “Can we speak in private, Nick?”

  “Gabe, give me two minutes,” I said.

  “Fine,” he snapped, and left my office.

  * * *

  “SOUNDS LIKE you’re actually taking the case,” Dorothy said. “Will wonders never cease.”

  I nodded.

  “Couldn’t pass up the money?”

  I replied with sarcasm, “Yeah, it’s all about the money.”

  “You got a problem with money?”

  “No, it’s … it’s complicated. This is not about Marshall Marcus. I happen to like his daughter. I’m worried about her.”

  “Why is he freaking out? I mean, she’s seventeen, right? Drives into town, probably to some club, hooks up with a guy. That’s what these kids do.”

  “You sleep around a lot when you were her age, Dorothy?”

  She gave me a stern look and held up a warning forefinger with a long lilac fingernail. I didn’t understand how she could type with nails that long.

  I smiled. As little as I knew about her sex life, I knew she was hardly the promiscuous type.

  “I don’t get it either,” I admitted.

  “I mean, I understand why the dad could be losing it if this was right after she got snatched in that parking lot. But that was years ago, right?”

  “Right. I think he knows more than he’s telling me.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you need to ask him some direct questions.”

  “I will. So tell me about Facebook.”

  “Tell you about Facebook? All you need to know, Nick, is it’s not for you.”

  “I mean Alexa. She must be on Facebook, right?”

  “I think it’s a legal requirement for all teenagers,” she said. “Like the draft, back in the day.”

  “Maybe there’s something on her Facebook page. Don’t kids post everything they do every second?”

  “What makes you think I know the first thing about teenagers?”

  “See what she has on Facebook, okay?”

  “You can’t do that unless you’re one of her ‘friends.’”

  “Can’t you just hack her password?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll look into it.”

  “So what’s the problem with locating her iPhone?”

  “It’s just about impossible unless you’re law enforcement.”

  “I thought there was some way for iPhone owners to track down their lost phones.”

  “We’d need her Mac user name and password. And I’m guessing she doesn’t share things like passwords with Daddy.”

  “You can’t crack it, or hack it, or whatever you do?”

  “Yeah, I can just snap my fingers and I’m in, just like magic. No, Nick, that takes time. I’d have to make a list of her pets’ names and any important dates, and try the ten most common passwords, and that’s a crapshoot. Even if I do succeed, odds are we won’t get anything, because she’d have had to activate the MobileMe finder on her phone, and I doubt she did. She’s seventeen and probably not real big into the technology.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Fastest way is ask AT&T to ping the phone through their network.”

  “Which they’ll only do for law enforcement,” I said. “There’s got to be some other way to find this girl’s phone.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So you’re giving up.”

  “I said not that I know of. I didn’t say I’m giving up. I never give up.” She looked up and noticed Gabe lurking outside my office door. “Anyway, I think your son is getting hungry,” she said with a wink.

  11.

  I took Gabe to Mojo’s, a bar down the street that served lunch. This was a typical Boston bar—five flat screens all showing sports or sports news shows, lots of Red Sox and Celtics memorabilia, a foosball table in the back, pub food like wings and nachos and burgers, a sticky wooden-plank floor. They served good cold beer as well as the infamous local brew, Brubaker’s, which even I had to admit was pretty bad. The patrons were a democratic mix of stockbrokers and cabdrivers. A local reviewer once compared Mojo’s regulars to the cantina scene in Star Wars: that collection of weird-looking intergalactic creatures. Herb, the owner, liked that so much he had the article framed and put on the wall.

  “I like that new girl you hired,” Gabe said.

  “Jillian?”

  “Yeah, she’s cool.”

  “She’s different, that’s for sure. Now, tell me: Is Nana abusing you?”

  “Nah, she’s cool.”

  “How about Lilly? How’s Lilly treating you?”

  Lilly was my mother’s dog, a shar-pei/English mastiff mix she’d rescued from the pound. Lilly was not only the ugliest dog in the world but also the worst-tempered. She’d been abandoned multiple times and I could see why.

  “I’m really trying to like her,” Gabe said, “but she’s … I mean, I hate that dog. Plus, she stinks.”

  “She’s the hound from hell. Don’t look into her eyes.”

  “Why not?”

  “The last person who did dropped dead on the spot. They say it was a heart attack, but…” I shrugged.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You miss being home?”

  “Miss it? Are you kidding?”

  “Life at home not so good these days?”

  “It sucks.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “What’s with the earring?”

  He said, defensively, “What about it?”

  “Does your mom know you got your ear pierced?”

  He shrugged. Asked and answered.

  “I forget,” I said. “Does the left side mean you’re gay?”

  He blushed, which turned his acne scarlet. “No. Left is right and right is wrong, ever hear that?”

  “Aha,” I said. “So being gay is wrong?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  I smiled. Gabe could be insufferable in that know-it-all teenage way, so I considered it my civic duty to keep him off balance.

  Herb took our order. Normally he was stationed behind the bar, but lunchtimes were always slow. He was a large-framed potbellied guy with a heavy Southie accent. “Yo Nick
y,” he said. “How’s the accounting business? You got any tips for me, like how to stop paying taxes?”

  “Easy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do what I do. Just don’t pay ’em.”

  He paused, then laughed loudly. It didn’t take much to amuse him.

  “Truth is, I’m an actuary.” The sign on our office door said HELLER ASSOCIATES—ACTUARIAL CONSULTING SERVICES. This was an excellent cover. As soon as I told people I was an actuary, they stopped asking questions.

  “Right, right,” he said. “What’s an actuary, again?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  He laughed again. “Gotta hand it to you, man,” he said kindly, “I don’t know how you do it. Crunching numbers all day? I’d go out of my mind.”

  Gabe gave me a quick, knowing smile. I ordered a burger and fries and asked him to make sure they weren’t the “curry fries,” which were inedible. Gabe looked up from the menu. “Do you have veggie burgers?” he asked.

  “We have turkey burgers, young fella,” Herb said.

  Gabe furrowed his brow and tipped his head to the side. I recognized that look. It was the supercilious expression that got him beat up at school on a regular basis and sometimes even thrown out of classes. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t realize turkey was a vegetable.”

  Herb gave me a sideways glance as if to say, Who the hell is this kid? But he liked me too much to give it back to my guest. “How about a Cobb salad?” he said blandly.

  “Yuck,” Gabe said. “I’ll just have a plate of fries and ketchup. And a Coke.”

  When Herb left, I said, “Looks like Jillian has a new recruit.”

  “Jillian says that eating red meat makes you aggressive,” Gabe said.

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  He refused to take the bait. “Whatever. Hey, Uncle Nick, you know, that was a good idea you had about Alexa’s Facebook.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Alexa Marcus? Her dad is scared something might’ve happened to her?”

  I looked at him for a few seconds, then slowly smiled. “You son of a bitch. You were eavesdropping.”

  “No.”

  “Come on.”