Loyalty (2 page)

“Is her car in the garage?”

“Nope.”

Fina tucked the notebook into her bag and pushed herself out of the chair. “I’ll be in touch.” She stopped at the door and turned to face her brother. “How are things with you two? Any worse than usual?”

Rand’s face was blank. “Nothing to report.”

Nobody said anything.

“Got it,” Fina said, and left.

He couldn’t bring himself to pack the junk drawer in the kitchen. Everybody has one—the drawer that holds batteries and extra keys, sunglass repair kits and Scotch tape. His also held a hospital ID, a Phillips-head screwdriver, and refrigerator magnets with pictures of sushi. It was all the stuff you always need and never need, but he couldn’t foresee the day when he would wrap a present or bring a remote control back to life. He definitely wouldn’t need the hospital ID. Even if they let him back, who would want to see him?

He left the junk drawer open and wandered into the now empty living room. He slid down the wall onto the floor and stared at the indentations left in the carpet by the furniture.

They had taken everything.

Bev congratulated herself every time she approached the condo. It was a stroke of genius buying a place smack-dab between two college campuses; no one questioned the young ladies who stopped by her place on a regular basis.

She climbed the broad staircase leading to the front door and slipped her key into the lock. Once inside, she followed the hallway toward the rear of the building and let herself into unit 1B. She glanced in the mirror hanging next to the front door and ran a hand through her silver hair. It was layered and fell to her collar, more short than long. Bev didn’t think long hair was appropriate on women over fifty.

Satisfied with her appearance—that frosted apricot lipstick really was lovely—she proceeded into the condo. It was small, but the high ceilings and period details gave the space a sense of airiness despite its square footage. The living room area had a large fireplace and butter-colored walls. Yellow-and-white houndstooth fabric covered the club chairs and pillows on the white couch, and elaborate sconces flanked a large seascape painting on the wall. The bay window overlooked the parking area, but beyond, the green of the Esplanade peeked through. The galley kitchen led to a small bathroom and a bedroom that Bev had set up as an office. The only window in the office looked out on the alley, but Bev was glad for the privacy.

And the setting matched her high-end product: pleasure provided by beautiful, sophisticated women for discerning gentlemen. Bev would have been happy confining the business to the one enterprise and the one office, but these days, Prestige wasn’t paying the bills. At least not the medical bills. Luckily all the new technology in the industry promised a wealth of opportunities, and Bev diversified and headquartered her new endeavors in a larger, cheaper space. She didn’t involve herself in the details of the operation; no need to offend her delicate sensibilities. She knew what was going on in the basement of the main office—every good manager should know what their employees are up to—but she didn’t dwell on it. Instead, she spent her time tweaking her business models and grooming the young ladies who worked for Prestige. She had no interest in the girls who worked for Gratify.

Except, that is, for one.

A couple years back, Nanny, Fina’s paternal grandmother, sold her house in Natick and moved into Fina’s parents’ house in Newton with disastrous results. Fina wasn’t surprised that an eight-thousand-square-foot house wasn’t big enough for Nanny and her mother, Elaine, to peacefully coexist; Elaine was a challenging personality on her best days. Out of desperation, Carl bought a condo overlooking Boston Harbor and shipped Nanny to the big city. He even provided a high-powered telescope, and she spent most of her waking hours watching the boat traffic in and out of the harbor and the air traffic in and out of Logan. Her floor-to-ceiling windows were the modern-day equivalent of a front porch—minus the interaction with the neighbors—and her purview was more global than local; if British Airways flight 238 to London was running late on any given morning, Nanny knew it.

But Nanny had died six months ago, and Elaine hadn’t packed up the condo. When Fina’s lease ran out on her cramped, furnished apartment in Back Bay, she grabbed a duffel bag and some boxes and made the move.

After leaving Ludlow and Associates, Fina drove home and plopped down at Nanny’s maple dining room table with her phone and her computer and started the search for Melanie. Everybody leaves a trail in their wake as they navigate the world on a daily basis. You fill up your car with gas, which leaves a receipt and maybe a brief interaction with the attendant. You drive through a toll booth, which captures your license plate and transponder number. Maybe you stay home all day, but renew your library books online. It takes work to move through the world undetected.

Fina had an advantage in this search since Melanie wasn’t a stranger. First she left a message for Haley and then called her sister-in-law Patty, who generated a list of Melanie’s friends and their contact info. From those contacts, Fina identified her frequent haunts: the gym, nail salon, favorite stores and restaurants. She left a message for Frank Gillis asking him to keep his ear to the ground, and Rand’s secretary provided credit card and banking information, car registration, and cell phone accounts. Some of this information Fina could track legally, and some required her to dip into the shady world that always operated under the surface of everyday life.

Just like there are people dying in the hospital while everyone else frets about losing those last ten pounds, there’s a world of morally ambiguous and outright criminal activity that is always pulsing and known to few—just the criminals and the cops and attorneys who orbit their world. Over the years, Fina had built up a network of contacts, and she found it useful to tap into those contacts even if the missing person seemed far removed from that world. She’d learned the steps to a weird dance where she provided tips to shady characters and, in turn, they knocked loose helpful bits of information.

Her investigative tentacles unfurled, Fina stripped down to a sports bra and boy shorts and roamed around the living room waiting for her guest. Nanny had been a doting grandmother, and her love for her grandchildren was evident in the plethora of pictures that decorated the condo. There were baby pictures and graduation photos, shots from weddings and other celebrations. Fina didn’t particularly like living under the watchful eyes of her siblings, but so far she’d been too lazy to do anything about it. She walked over to the sideboard and studied one photo in particular. A baby with shiny brown hair and dimples gazed back at her. Josie, Fina’s sister and the firstborn, had died at the age of two and a half, before Fina was born. Fina had been named Josefina after her, and she was supposed to be her replacement, but that didn’t exactly work out. Children were like NASA rockets: You poured money and time into them, but there was no guarantee they wouldn’t veer off course seconds after blastoff.

A knock at the door brought Fina back. It was one of her regular visitors, someone special enough to be on the doorman’s “send him up and don’t bug the tenant” list.

Fina let her visitor in and spent ten minutes bending, walking, and contorting. Milloy, her masseur and best friend, assessed the situation, after which she hopped up on his massage table and he got to work.

The two had become fast friends during freshman year at Boston University while commiserating about their horrible roommates. Like soldiers in the trenches, they traded war stories of stolen breakfast cereal and hairballs in the sink (Milloy), and noisy couplings on the other side of the room (Fina). They had dated briefly, and now Milloy’s ministrations occasionally concluded with a happy ending for both of them. But not always. Whatever happened, happened. Fina liked a friendship that was free of expectations and disappointment, and the arrangement suited Milloy just fine. He liked his life just the way it was.

An hour later, Fina rolled off the table like a wet noodle.

“You’re a miracle worker.
Masseur
doesn’t do you justice; it makes you sound like a gigolo,” Fina called over her shoulder as she threw on some sweats and went to scrounge up some dinner.

Milloy collapsed the table. “Have you been talking to my mother?”

“Hah! One of these days she’ll come to realize that you’re a healer. I’m living proof.”

In the kitchen, she washed the dirty dishes in the sink and doled out the leftovers she’d unearthed in the fridge. Fina didn’t understand the point of washing dishes, putting them away only to take them out again. Why not wash dishes on an as-needed basis? She wouldn’t have even bothered with dishes, but Elaine had ingrained in her that company called for fancy.

“This place is weird,” Milloy commented when they sat down at the table and started to eat.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s crap everywhere. An archaeologist could dig down through the layers. The first layer is old lady circa 1940, and the second layer is slob circa 2012.” Fina took the same approach to home organization as she did dishes: Why put things away when you would need them again?

“Makes it easier to find things.”

“How’s that?” Milloy surveyed the scene. “It’s a mess in here.”

“Because I can see everything at once. Like there.” She pointed at a small bundle of sheer fabric on the sideboard. “My thong is right there in plain sight.”

“Why would your underwear be on the sideboard anyway?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“You could keep your underwear in a drawer like most people do.”

“Who has the time?”

“Everybody, apparently . . .”

While they ate, Fina filled Milloy in on Melanie’s mysterious absence.

“You don’t seem that worried,” Milloy remarked.

“She’s done this before, stomped off to Canyon Ranch in a fit of pique. If I lost sleep every time someone in my family had a hissy fit, I’d be exhausted.” They continued eating and chatted about the Sox. A year in Boston could be marked by its sports teams.

Fina was happy to leave the dirty dishes in the sink, but Milloy insisted on stacking them in the dishwasher and wiping down the counters. He stretched out on Nanny’s blue velvet couch, and Fina entered her notes into her laptop, keeping one eye on the baseball game. The only addition she’d made to the space, other than her clothes and general mess, was a fifty-one-inch TV with a paper-thin flat screen and a surround sound system that rivaled most movie theaters. There was no way she was going to watch sports on Nanny’s old box.

Her phone rang.

“Any luck?” Carl asked.

“Not yet, but I’m on it.”

Fina could hear ice clinking on the other end. “Just find her.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” Fina said to a dead line.

By Sunday, the Ludlows’ irritation and mild concern had turned to alarm. There was no sign of Melanie—no withdrawals or charges from their joint accounts, no calls to friends. Melanie wasn’t in any of the obvious places. E-mails appeared in her account at the usual rate, but nothing was sent from her outbox.

“I thought this was going to be wrapped up by now,” Carl complained to Fina in his office that afternoon. There was no such thing as a weekend to Carl.

Fina looked at him.

“Well?” he asked. His jewel-tone tie was tucked into his shirt so as not to be spotted by the soy sauce accompanying his sushi.

“Well, what do you want me to say? If she were easily found, I would have found her.”

“What the hell is going on, Fina?”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“Any news on her car?”

Fina shook her head. Carl drummed his fingers on his desk.

“This doesn’t mean we won’t find her,” Fina said. “It just means—”

“It means she isn’t off somewhere getting her toenails painted.”

“Exactly. We need to call the police.”

Carl scowled.

“This is a legitimate missing person’s case. We need to call them before they call us.”

“Too late,” Rand said as he walked into the office.

“What?” Fina asked.

“Risa reported Melanie missing to the cops, and they want to talk to me. They’re starting to poke around.”

“Goddamnit,” Carl said.

Fina shrugged her shoulders. “It was bound to happen. I don’t think the cops are a bad idea.”

“Of course the cops are a bad idea,” Rand exclaimed. “When has anything ever been improved by the cops?”

“They have resources, and from a PR perspective, you don’t want to be seen as stonewalling the cops when your wife is missing. You know that.”

“They don’t give a shit about Melanie. They’ve just got a hard-on for me because of who I am. If I were some poor schmuck from Southie, they wouldn’t hassle me about my missing wife.”

Fina felt the color rise on her face. “Yeah, your missing wife. Don’t forget about her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Rand said. “She’s just doing this to make my life miserable.”

“Right,” Fina said. “Let me know what happens with the cops. In the meantime, I’m going to track down Risa. And Haley. I need to talk to Haley. She still hasn’t called me back.”

“Call her cell.” Rand waved his hand dismissively and left the room.

A quick conversation with Risa’s housekeeper revealed that Risa was out for her daily constitutional at the reservoir. Fina made the trip in her usual efficient driving style; speed limits were really just suggestions as far as she was concerned. Her 2008 Chevy Impala was a nondescript, forgettable car, which was completely the point. She couldn’t tail people or run surveillance in a flashy car. As long as her vehicle performed (hence the custom V-8 engine), it didn’t bother Fina if it was ugly. Elaine couldn’t wrap her head around the idea that her car was a tool of her trade, not a reflection of Fina’s worth. Her mother often urged Carl to buy Fina something better, like a luxury SUV with room for her imaginary grandchildren.

At the reservoir, she squeezed the Chevy into a barely legal parking space. She walked over the grassy embankment to the path that circled the water and searched in both directions. Three women who fit the bill—designer tracksuits and highlighted hair—were rounding the curve on her left. Fina sat down on a nearby bench and watched them approach. With their arms and jaws pumping, they called to mind a venue of vultures.

“Risa,” Fina said when the women were about to pass her.

“Fina? What are you doing here?” She stopped walking and dropped her arms to her sides. “I suppose this is about Melanie.”

“Could we talk?”

The other women were marching in place—interested in the gossip, but unwilling to fall below their optimal heart rate.

“Go ahead, girls. I’ll call you later,” Risa said.

After they had moved on, Risa spoke. “If your brother sent you to scold me, don’t bother.”

“I’ve been calling you for days. Since Thursday. Didn’t you get my messages?”

Risa was silent. She tracked her companions as they climbed a set of stairs leading back to the street.

“I was calling about Melanie. Rand has been worried.”

Risa snorted. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Really?” Fina parroted. “Risa, we all know they’ve had some rough patches in the past, but he’s genuinely concerned.” In his own unique Rand way.

“I just find that hard to believe given what I witnessed at Grahamson.”

“Why were you at Grahamson? There’s no way Jordan’s in trouble.” Risa’s children were polite and well behaved. She and her husband ran a tight ship.

“Of course not. I’m on the auction committee; we had a meeting.”

“So what did you witness?”

“A fight.”

“Between Rand and Melanie? What were they fighting about?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t close enough to hear.”

“So how do you know they were fighting?”

Risa wagged her finger at Fina. “You know better than to play lawyer with me. I was close enough to know that Melanie was upset. We were supposed to have dinner that night, but after Rand drove off, she told me she couldn’t. Then she took off like a bat out of hell.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Nope, but she was upset.”

“And now you’ve contacted the police?”

“Yes, when I couldn’t reach her, and when it became clear that Rand wasn’t going to. I told them about the fight and her disappearance. Something’s wrong, Fina.”

“I know that now.”

“And you can’t be objective about this.” Risa tugged on the waistband of her tracksuit jacket.

“Maybe not.”

“You’re not going to be able to investigate Melanie’s disappearance if your brother’s the main suspect.”

“Who said anything about a suspect? I think you’re jumping to conclusions.”

“And I think you’re kidding yourself. Think about it: His wife disappears, and he doesn’t want to call the police? It’s suspicious. If I disappeared, Marty would call the cops, pronto.”

Fina watched two mothers walk by with babies strapped to their chests. “You’ve been watching too much
Dateline
, Risa.”

It was true that Rand hadn’t called the police, but that said as much about his personality and history as it did his alleged involvement in Melanie’s disappearance. He hated the cops, not only because of a natural lawyerly distrust of them, but also because he’d skirted the law throughout his adolescence and adulthood. Carl had been kept busy cleaning up after Rand’s “boys will be boys” transgressions, which included wrecked cars, drug possession, and rumored assaults. Rand was convinced the cops were out to get him and rarely factored his responsibility into the equation. He’d stayed out of trouble since joining the family firm—the only firm that would have him—but Fina doubted his feelings about the police would ever change.

“Will you let me know if you hear from her?” Fina asked. “If she wants to be left alone, that’s fine, but we need to know that she’s okay.”

Risa studied her nails. They were buffed with clear polish. Unlike most of her chums, Risa was an avid cook and gardener and used her hands for more than just handing over her credit card. “Of course. I’ll call.”

“Thanks, Risa.”

Fina watched her walk away.

“Josefina Ludlow. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Cristian Menendez asked as he climbed into her car. He’d agreed to meet her in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, a safe distance from his desk at the Boston Police headquarters. Cristian was a detective in Major Crimes, and he and Fina had swapped tips and bodily fluids over the years.

“I was in the neighborhood and couldn’t resist visiting my favorite law enforcement officer.”

“I bet you say that to all the cops.”

“Only the handsome ones.” Cristian was in his early thirties, with cinnamon skin and short, dark hair.

He adjusted in the seat so his gun wasn’t digging into his side. “Broken any laws lately?”

Fina brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “You already know the answer, Cristian.”

He grinned. “Yes, I do.”

“So, you’ve probably heard that Rand’s wife, Melanie, doesn’t seem to be answering her phone.”

“Is that how you describe a missing person’s case?”

Fina shrugged.

“I’ve heard things. Which one is Melanie?”

“She’s Haley’s mom.”

“Ahh. The niece,” Cristian said. “The naughty niece.”

“What have you heard?” Fina asked. Cristian looked at her blankly. “I’m not just asking for my brother. I’m trying to be a good citizen and help the police.”

“This’ll be good.”

“You guys have resources, but you don’t have much latitude when it comes to certain avenues of investigation. You can’t break in somewhere, for instance.”

“Neither can you, technically.”

Fina waved her hand away. “I try not to get bogged down by technicalities.”

“So I’ve noticed. What’s your theory about Melanie?”

Fina looked into the window of Dunkin’ Donuts. People really did eat doughnuts at all hours of the day. “My initial theory was that she and my brother had a fight, she got pissed, and was off having a hot stone massage and a juice cleanse in some small, artsy hamlet.”

“And your current theory?”

“I don’t know.”

“And your brother?”

“What about him?”

“I hear he’s meeting for a chat this afternoon.”

“Cristian, he didn’t do anything to her. He’s an arrogant windbag, but they fight and make up all the time. She’s probably just teaching him a lesson.”

“Your family never does anything on a normal scale, do they? Like give one another the silent treatment for a day.”

“Nope. We’re from the ‘play big or go home’ school of thought.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“It is. Speaking of wives, how are things with the ex?”

“She’s busting my balls, as usual. I think going to court is her new hobby.”

“I always pegged Marissa as the scrapbooking sort.”

“I wish.”

“Did that referral help at all?” Fina had set Cristian up with the meanest divorce lawyer in town.

“Oh yeah. He’s a total prick.”

“That’s terrific. Just what you want in a divorce lawyer. Let me know if you need anything, and in the meantime . . .” She smiled at Cristian. “You’ll keep me in the loop?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Sexual favors or doughnuts, your choice. I’ll keep checking with people on my end.”

Cristian tapped his knuckle against the window. “People like Mark Lamont? You still pal around with him?” Mark was an old friend from high school who made his living in various criminal enterprises. He successfully straddled the legal and illegal worlds, and he’d proven to be an invaluable source of information over the years.

“I don’t pal around with him. We help each other.”

Cristian leaned toward Fina like he was going to share a secret. “He’s dangerous.”

She leaned closer so their foreheads were practically touching. “I know.”

Cristian opened the door and climbed out.

“Don’t be a stranger!” Fina called after him.