Antenna Syndrome (3 page)

Chapter 4

I hadn’t been out to Long Island in ages so I took
the Southern State Parkway for a change. With so many residents
having fled the area, traffic was light. Mostly it was vans and
trucks – day-strippers from outside the five boroughs – visiting
the suburbs for a day of salvage. Armed with reciprocal saws, a
crew could strip an abandoned house clean of its copper plumbing
and wiring in a day. Scrap copper was worth a fortune. Urban strip
miners, at least those who stayed one step ahead of the police,
were the new entrepreneurs of the era.

En route to Long Island, I kept the speedometer at a
steady 60 mph, and not just for the sake of fuel economy. Every
licensed vehicle was fitted with electronic VIN, and roadside
transponders made it virtually impossible to speed without getting
ticketed in real time. Progress sucked. Although new cars featured
automatic road control, my 10-year-old Charger wasn’t one of them.
I didn’t care to give up control to a cluster of chips and software
anyway.

I switched my iFocals to audio and ran a search on
Harris Jordan to find anything else on him that I hadn’t already
been spoon-fed by the media. I listened to a biography I found on
Wikipedia. It was all squeaky clean, as perfect a
curriculum
vitae
as any mayoral candidate could ask for, something his
staffers had probably posted just before he’d declared his
candidacy.

After Harvard Law School, Jordan had worked his way
through a series of mandates: non-profit organizations, municipal
government, the state legislature in Albany, Wall Street, a stint
in Iraq with the State Department, a few years in Washington, then
back to municipal government and an increasingly public profile,
first as a city councilor and then as financial controller.

On the personal side, he’d been married only once,
in 1999 to Patricia Dunning, whom he’d met at Harvard. They’d had
one daughter, Natalie, in 2001. They’d divorced in 2006, his
ex-wife reclaiming her maiden name, taking custody of the daughter
and moving to Florida. The Wiki article offered no other details of
his personal life.

However, thanks to an attempted character
assassination by a political rival last year, I knew there’d been
rumors of adultery at the tail end of his marriage. That rumor had
later found its way into the digital news network, but Jordan had
promptly slapped the publishers with libel suits, and the story had
been withdrawn before gaining traction.

But online, nothing ever really disappears. It just
sinks into the background, waiting to be dug up by a search engine.
Eventually I found what I was looking for. Rumor was, Jordan had
formed a relationship with a state legislature intern named
Jennifer Teale. Perhaps more than an affair, maybe more like the
love of his life, he’d been with her almost two years during his
stint in Albany. But for some reason, the relationship had come to
an abrupt end.

After more searching, I found an obituary notice.
Jennifer Teale had died on June 17, 2006. The date rang a bell.
Marielle’s birth date!

Now it fell into place. Marielle’s mother had
probably died giving birth to her. Because Jordan had loved Teale,
and Marielle was their daughter, he’d adopted her. That probably
hadn’t sat too well with his wife, hence the divorce.

I closed the search engine and tuned into some hard
rock on satellite radio, rewarding my research productivity with a
few puffs on my personal vaporizer. Cigarettes were now outlawed
everywhere in America, although a lively black market continued to
service those still nostalgic for the good old days, when inhaling
a burning cloud of carcinogens seemed a relatively romantic way to
kick sand in Death’s face.

But a combination of brutal fines and safer
alternatives had convinced most people to switch to personal
vaporizers for the chemical hit of choice. PV cartridges could be
charged with nicotine, cannabis, alcohol or any combination of
natural or homeopathic ingredients. Occasionally I enjoyed a blend
of cannabis and gotu kola, which made me seem both hip and smart,
or at least I thought so. Lately, however, I’d been troubled by
recurring anxieties, and now favored something called KavaKat,
which steadied my nerves with no side effects on the job.

I exited at the Seaford Expressway, rode it south to
the end and took Merrick Road into East Massapequa. I drove into an
area of what used to be multi-million-dollar homes, until
Hurricanes Sandy in 2012 and Boris in 2023 had had their way with
some of them. They were large houses on double-size lots, but some
lawns looked like feed lots, and a few properties were gated shut,
looking like they’d been closed for more than a season. I found the
address and drove through a stone portal and up a birch-shaded lane
to a large house on a rise overlooking Oyster Bay.

Chapter 5

I parked between a white Volvo station wagon and a
yellow Tesla plugged into a charging outlet. The house was grand,
with pillars flanking the front door, and a giant brass knocker
that I banged gently so as not to wake the dead. At the sound of
the knocker, two Doberman Pinschers came over a three-foot hedge
like jumpers in a horse show.

I retreated to my car as they barked and bared their
canines. A man came through a gap in the hedge and whistled
sharply. The Dobermans stood down and hung their tongues out and
looked at me as if to say,
Had you worried there for a minute,
huh
?

“Can I help you?”

“I’m Keith Savage.” I extended my hand. “Natalie
Jordan asked me to investigate Marielle’s disappearance.”

“Jack Randall.” He gave me a dry hard squeeze.
“These are Hansel and Gretel. They like to chase people, so don’t
run.”

Randall was about fifty, fit-looking with a touch of
grey at the temples, average height. His eyes were blue but watery,
as if he were fighting some allergy. He wore a nylon jacket, denim
jeans and canvas shoes to which some grass trimmings were
stuck.

He opened the door and I followed, trailed by
Doberman escorts. We passed through the foyer and down a hallway,
past a living room, library and dining room, all with twelve-foot
ceilings and hardwood floors that gleamed like bowling lanes.
Scattered throughout were enough paintings on the walls to open a
small art gallery. We entered a large modern kitchen where a woman
was standing at a counter.

“Vivien, this is the investigator Natalie
hired.”

Mrs. Randall, who’d been working over a salad bowl,
wiped her hands on her apron. She was a handsome woman, a tall
blonde in her early forties, with Nordic cheekbones and excellent
teeth. She offered a hand as cold as a North Atlantic herring, but
maybe that was because she’d been rinsing lettuce.

“How long have you folks worked for Mr. Jordan?”

“Sixteen years and three months,” Jack said, making
it sound like a prison sentence.

“This is his primary residence?”

“Yes. He also has a condo in Manhattan and a cottage
in the Catskills. That’s where he is now – Hunter Mountain – with
his campaign manager, developing his strategy.”

“And your duties here?”

“I take care of the property, vehicles, security,”
Jack said. “Viv handles meals, housekeeping and Marielle’s personal
needs.”

“Tell me what happened here on Saturday.”

“About ten in the morning a technician showed up to
service an air conditioning unit,” Jack said. “It was a company I’d
never dealt with before. Virtual Air.”

“So you weren’t expecting him?”

“No, but he had a work order for the second floor
unit, saying it was an introductory offer. Usually I coordinate
maintenance, but company CEOs sometimes offer Jordan freebies,
hoping he’ll favor them for some government contract.”

“You still got that work order?”

“In my office. I’ll make a copy.”

“Did you get the technician’s name?”

“Buzz. It was on a stitched name patch above his
breast pocket.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He was tall and skinny, wore khaki coveralls and
wraparound sunglasses. Close-cropped blond hair, flattened nose, a
long jaw with bulges halfway up his cheeks, like he had a hockey
puck in his mouth. He didn’t say much, and his lips hardly moved
when he talked, like a ventriloquist. Now that I think of it, I
wonder if he had lips at all, or just a slit where the words came
out.”

“Sounds creepy. It’s a wonder you let him in.”

“Well, I had the dogs here. Plus which, I used to be
a bouncer in my younger years, so I can take care of myself.”

I wondered if this was a hint for me, that he was
more than just a handyman, a force to be reckoned with.

“Anyway,” Jack continued, “soon as I let him in, the
dogs went nuts. They usually act up for strangers but a sharp word
from me always settles them down. But with this guy, if I hadn’t
collared them, they would’ve torn him apart. I think he was already
afraid of dogs, and they scared him bad. So I leashed them and put
them in their pen. I took the guy up and showed him the second
floor AC unit. He gave it a quick look and said he’d replace it. We
went back downstairs and he loaded some stuff from the van onto a
dolly.”

“What did he bring into the house?”

“Toolbox, gas canister and a new air conditioner in
a box.” Jack held his hands out, measuring about six cubic
feet.

“How long was he here?”

“Less than an hour.”

“That’s pretty fast to change out an AC unit.”

“Turns out he only needed to replace the compressor
and recharge the gas.”

“And where was Marielle during this time?”

“Her third-floor suite,” Jack said.

“And you?” I asked Vivien.

“Doing my Saturday morning grocery run. Rule is,
there’s someone in the house with Marielle at all times...”

I turned back to Jack. “But you left a stranger on
the second floor while Marielle was alone on the third?”

“Yes, but it’s not like he could have gone up there.
There’s no access between the second and third floors.”

“Isn’t that in violation of fire code?”

“Yes and no. You’ll understand when I show you the
layout.”

“Okay. Got any security video?”

Jack took me downstairs. There was an entertainment
room with a sectional sofa facing a huge screen. Audio spheres
clung to the ceiling like wasp’s nests. There was a bathroom,
laundry room, utility room and an office with a computer that
displayed two exterior camera views, front door and back.

On the way to the office I’d counted eight windows
at grade level, all with iron bars mounted. “Ever have any
break-ins?”

“No. The place was vulnerable when I first arrived.
But I advised Jordan to install barred windows, new locks and a
security system.”

“Can’t argue with due diligence.”

Jack sat at the computer. He made me a copy of the
work order and played a video clip of a white delivery van arriving
at the house. Its sidewall decal read “Virtual Air” with a website
and an 800-number. I noted those details and copied the van’s
plates. A tall guy in serviceman coveralls got out of the van and
approached the front door. A few minutes later he returned to his
van, loaded a dolly and wheeled it inside. Fast forward, an hour
later he wheeled it out and drove away.

“Get me a few screen grabs of that guy’s face.”

While Jack was doing that I dialed Virtual Air’s
800-number. I got a message saying, due to a high call volume, my
waiting time would be ten minutes. I didn’t have time to wait. I
called an acquaintance who had access to DMV records. We’d never
met and I knew him only by his avatar name, Finder. In a minute he
told me the van was registered to a numbered company in Brooklyn,
with an address on Neptune Avenue I suspected had been obliterated
five years ago and never rebuilt.

Chapter 6

We returned to the hallway on the ground floor. Jack
opened a pocket door, revealing an elevator with room for four
people if they stood on each other’s toes. “This is the common
access to Marielle’s third-floor suite.”

“Did the technician go up there?”

“No, he only serviced the second floor unit. I was
in the kitchen all that time, drinking coffee and watching the
news.”

We returned to the foyer and started up the stairs
to the second floor. Jack paused at the landing. “I just recalled
something else about that technician...”

“What’s that?”

“Pulling the loaded dolly up these stairs, it was
thumping hard on each step. When I said, be careful, don’t chip the
lacquer, he carried it the rest of the way. Didn’t make a grunt,
just a quick snatch-and-lift and took the stairs two steps at a
time.”

“Maybe he pumps iron.”

“He didn’t look it. All skin and bone, couldn’t have
weighed more than one-fifty. When I heard him move, I thought there
was something wrong with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“First I thought, the tools on his belt were
knocking together.” Jack clucked his tongue. “Climbing the stairs
under load, it was loud, but once he set the dolly down, it was
more subtle. But I think it came from his joints – hips, knees and
elbows - clicking like a cricket. Weird, huh?”

I chewed on that one. Tall skinny guy with
wraparound sunglasses and a slit mouth. Makes cricket noises and
drives the dogs wild. It wasn’t much of a personality profile but I
got the general idea – a total freak!

Jack walked me around the second floor, Harris
Jordan’s private area. The master bedroom and adjoining bathroom
were as big as my condo. French doors opened onto a wooden deck at
the rear. Jack pointed out the AC unit that had been serviced.
There was also a spare bedroom with bath, an exercise room with
some nice equipment, and an office den that smelled like a cigar
humidor.