Buried Secrets (16 page)

Only fourteen hours had elapsed between her abduction and the first time her kidnappers had contacted Marshall Marcus. That included transporting her and then—if her clues were to be taken literally—burying her in some sort of crypt or vault. And setting up cameras that could broadcast over the Internet. An arrangement like that was complicated and time-intensive and must have taken several hours. So they couldn’t have gone too far.

But that didn’t narrow it down much.

I DROPPED Diana off at FBI headquarters. It was barely six in the morning, but she thought she might as well get a very early start on the day. She’d grab the techs as soon as they got in and ask them for a complete workup of Alexa’s phone.

After she got out I sat in the Defender for a while, idling in front of One Center Plaza, and thought about going home to catch a few hours’ sleep, since it was likely to be a very long day.

Until I checked my e-mail.

I found a long series of e-mails not from a name but from a number I didn’t recognize. It took me a few seconds to realize that they’d been sent automatically by the miniature GPS

tracker concealed in Taylor Armstrong’s gold S. T. Dupont lighter.

Well, not
her
lighter, but the one I’d switched with hers when I’d “accidentally” dropped it on the cobblestones of Beacon Hill. I’d bought it at the tobacco shop in Park Square, the exact same S. T. Dupont Ligne 2 Gold Diamond Head lighter. A classic, and ridiculously expensive.

But a lot cheaper, and more reliable, than hiring someone to tail her.

The tiny tracking device had been installed by an old Special Forces buddy of mine we used to call Romeo who had his own business in TSCM, or technical surveillance countermeasures. He complained bitterly about how small the lighter was. He wasn’t sure he had a tracker small enough. He wanted me to steal her cell phone: That would have been a breeze.

It would have been easier to remove one of her kidneys.

But Romeo figured out how to wedge a nano GPS device inside the lighter’s fluid reservoir. Complaining all the while, of course. Romeo, whose real name was George Devlin, was not an easy man to deal with, but he did great work.

He programmed the thing to start sending out location signals only when it was moved more than a thousand feet. Now I could see that, immediately after Taylor and I had our little talk on the corner of Charles and Beacon, she went home—or was driven home in David Schechter’s limousine—and then she drove to Medford, five miles northwest.

So who might she be meeting so urgently?

I had a pretty good idea.

38.

Twenty minutes later I was driving down Oldfield Road in Medford, a pleasant street lined with graceful old trees and clapboard houses. Some were two-family houses, some apartment buildings. Most of them were well maintained, regularly painted, their lawns neatly mowed and shrubs perfectly clipped, their driveways polished ebony. A few looked like they’d been all but abandoned by absentee landlords who’d thrown up their hands in despair at the squalor of their student tenants. The Tufts University campus was a short walk away.

The house where Taylor Armstrong had spent forty-three minutes last night was a white-painted three-story wooden house, one of the nicer ones. At six thirty in the morning, there wasn’t much going on in the neighborhood. A woman running in black-and-turquoise spandex.

A car pulling out of a driveway at the other end of the block. I waited and watched the house.

Then I got out and walked past the house as if I were a neighbor out for a morning stroll.

With a quick glance around, I climbed the front porch quietly, but casually, and saw a stack of five buzzers with a stack of matching names. Five apartments. One was probably the owner. Two apartments each on the upper two floors.

Five surnames. Schiff, Murdoch, Perreira, O’Connor, and Unger. I memorized them, went back to the car, hit a speed-dial button on my BlackBerry, and woke Dorothy up.

SHE CALLED back five minutes later.

“Margaret O’Connor is seventy-nine years old, a widow for fifteen years, and has owned the house since 1974. The other four rent. One’s a recent graduate of the college who works for Amnesty International. Two of them are Tufts graduate students. The fourth is our guy.”

“Which one?”

“Perreira. His full name is Mauricio da Silva Cordeiro-Perreira, and yes, I pulled up his pic. It’s the same guy from the hotel surveillance tape.”

“Taylor called him Lorenzo.”

“He gave her a fake name.”

“His surname’s on his doorbell. So even if she didn’t know his true first name, she knew his last name. What’s his connection to her?”

“Here’s what I found out: Thirty-two years old. Born in São Paulo, Brazil. Rich family—we’re talking major money. Daddy’s with the UN in New York.”

“Huh. What does his father do?”

“Probably not much. He’s a member of Brazil’s permanent mission, and those guys don’t do anything, far as I can tell. Mauricio grew up in a gated compound in Morumbi, on the outskirts of São Paulo. Our boy went to a bilingual school—Saint Paul’s, then Universidade de São Paulo. A member of the Harmonia tennis club and the Helvetia polo club—”

“So how’d a rich boy like that end up living in a crappy walk-up apartment in Medford?”

“Looks like he did a few lazy years as a grad student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. But he didn’t spend much time at Tisch Library. He’s a dealer—mostly coke and weed, some meth.”

“Now it gets interesting. What do you have on that?”

“A couple years ago there was this joint DEA/ICE investigation on the theory that the kid was using his father’s diplomatic pouch to bring in controlled substances.”

“Dad must not have been too pleased with that,” I said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if Daddy disowned him. He’s been busted a couple of times, but nothing sticks. Sounds like the kid knows how to game the system.”

“If his dad’s at the UN, he’s protected by diplomatic immunity.”

“That covers a diplomat’s grown kids?”

“All family,” I said.

“They can’t get arrested for drugs?”

“They can’t get arrested for murder,” I said.

“Man, I picked the wrong life. I shoulda been a diplomat. What I’d give for a loaded gun and ten minutes of diplomatic immunity.”

“Now this is starting to come together,” I said. “Taylor has a record of drug problems, and Mauricio is probably her dealer.” His wealthy family background gave him entrée to the right social circles. It probably lent him an air of panache, an ease with well-off college kids, who’d never be caught dead associating with some clocker from Revere.

Not just college students. Also prep school kids like Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter.

“Daddy disowns him, there goes the trust fund,” Dorothy said. “And the diplomatic pouch. Supply drops, money stops gushing in, it gets hard to pay the rent. Or keep up the car payments. Guy like that might get desperate for money. Take on a high-risk job like kidnapping a rich girl.”

“Or maybe he was hired because he was Taylor’s dealer,” I said. “Made it easy.”

“Hired by who?”

“Well, Mauricio is from Brazil, from a rich, well-connected family. One of Marcus Capital’s unhappy investors is Juan Carlos Guzman.”

“Who is…?”

“Colombian drug lord who lives in Brazil.”

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh, sweet Jesus. A drug cartel has that girl? And you think you’re gonna get her back?”

“With your help I have a chance.”

“Nick, there’s no way I or anyone else is gonna trace that video feed. I’ve talked to everyone I know, including some people who’ve been at this a whole lot longer.”

“You told people what we’re working on?”

“Of course not. We were talking IP traces and algorithms. Digital forensics. We’re not going to find them that way.”

“They went to a lot of trouble to send Marcus a ransom demand,” I said.

“You think our guy’s still in that apartment, or do you think he took off after Taylor warned him?”

“I don’t know. If he’s in there, he was just the courier—he just picked Alexa up and handed her off to someone else. He wouldn’t have driven her out to Leominster and back here.”

“Maybe he dumped her phone there to set up a fake trail. So people would think she’s out there instead of right near Boston.”

“That’s too complex. Much smarter to just destroy her phone and have no trail at all.

Also, he was driving a stolen car. Not worth the risk of getting caught with a broken taillight or an out-of-date registration sticker. Or just having some ambitious local cop run the plates.”

“What if he’s not there?”

“I’ll ransack his apartment and see what I can find that might lead me to Alexa. Bills, scraps of papers, computer files, anything.”

“Well, if he is there? Don’t forget, rich boy or not, he’s a dealer. He’s gonna be armed.

Please don’t get yourself killed before our ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“The governor? Hello? You wanted me around in case they had technical questions you couldn’t answer because you’re only the ‘big picture’ guy?” She was talking about a long-scheduled meeting with a former governor of a large state who’d been forced to resign over a bribery scandal. Everyone on the inside knew he’d been set up.

“Tell Jillian to cancel it,” I said.

“Cancel it?” she said incredulously. “These lawyers flew up from New York for this meeting. You can’t just cancel it.”

“Last I checked, I’m still the boss. Tell Jillian to cancel it. And ask her to clear my calendar for the rest of the week. Everything. I’m not doing anything else until I get this girl home.”

“The rest of the week?” she said. “You think this is only gonna take you a couple of days, you got your head up your butt. Anyway—”

“Talk later,” I interrupted, and I clicked off and got out of the car. Walked around to the side of the apartment building where Mauricio Perreira lived.

Drug dealers tend to live in a state of permanent paranoia. He probably had a gun close to the bed. Not under the pillow, which isn’t very comfortable. But under the bed or behind the headboard.

The only workable plan was to take him by surprise.

39.

Unless you pick locks for a living, knowing how doesn’t mean doing it well. I once hired a professional locksmith to give me lessons, though I’d already learned the basics from a repo man I’d met as a teenager, hanging out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors in Malden.

I also kept an assortment of tools in my car’s glove box, including a professional locksmith’s set of lock picks and tension wrenches. But an old-fashioned lockpick set requires finesse, time, and patience. And I was short on all three. I grabbed my SouthOrd electric pick gun, a sleek stainless-steel instrument the size of an electric toothbrush, which is quicker and easier, though noisier, than any hand tool. But the batteries were dead. So I reached for the EZ

snap gun, a good old manual lock pick, originally developed for police officers who didn’t have time to learn the fine, slow art of lockpicking.

Unfortunately, lockpick guns aren’t particularly quiet. They make a fairly loud snap. But they’re quick.

I mounted the apartment building’s side stairs, which provided exterior entry to the separate units. A short cement flight of steps led to a narrow porch with a gray-painted wooden railing. From there on up, the stairs were painted wood. Keeping my tread light, I ascended to the top level, sidled along the railing for a few feet, and assessed.

A small window, curtains drawn, next to the apartment door. A simple pin tumbler lock.

Not Schlage or some high-security brand, which would have been a challenge. Some no-name brand. That was a relief.

And a pinpoint LED light: a security system.

But the light was dark. He probably disarmed the system when he was at home.

So maybe he was here. Good.

I didn’t even look around. In case one of the neighbors was up early and happened to see me, I wanted to look like I was supposed to be there.

I worked quickly but casually. First I inserted the tension tool, roughly the size of a straightened paper clip, into the keyhole and worked it a bit. Grasping the snap gun in my right hand, I poked its needle into the keyhole beside the tension tool, careful not to touch the pins, and squeezed the handle.

A loud
snap
.

I had to snap it ten or eleven more times. The sound echoed in the gulley between the houses. Unless Perreira was a sound sleeper, he must have heard it.

Finally I felt the lock turn.

And I was in.

40.

The air was cold. An air conditioner was on somewhere, in another room. I was hit at once by the fetid, festering-swamp stench of old bong water.

Someone was here.

All the curtains were closed. The front room was almost completely dark. In a few seconds, though, my eyes became accustomed, and I was able to make my way through the cluttered room, weaving between an enormous flat-screen TV and an outsize leather couch, the path strewn with discarded beer and wine bottles. Somehow managing not to knock anything over, I approached the loud snoring that came from an open bedroom door. At the threshold I stopped. A lump in the bed, I saw. No, two lumps.

Long blond hair lay atop a pillow as if a lion had coughed up a hairball. I saw the nape of a woman’s neck, her well-defined shoulders. Next to her, mouth gaping, snoring like a buzz saw, was the man I recognized as Lorenzo. The guy from the security video at Slammer. The guy who’d abducted Alexa. No question about it.

I thought for just a second. Ran through my options.

Decided on the simplest one.

I came around to the side of the bed where Perreira lay under the rumpled sheet, half under the blanket. My footsteps were muffled by the wall-to-wall carpet. An old air conditioner rattled and roared like a jet engine. The room was ice-cold and smelled of rancid sweat. His face was turned away, toward the blond girl, the sheet pulled up to his chin.

In my left fist I grabbed the end of the sheet. With a swift jerk I yanked it up and over his head, then under, trapping his head. He began to flail. He cursed and shouted and thrashed his arms and legs. But he was wrapped as tight as a mummy. My right hand gripped his throat and squeezed. His struggles grew more frenzied, his screams muffled by the sheet.