The Collected (A Jonathan Quinn Novel) (15 page)

Quinn read off the number he had for Peter.

“That’s it,” she said, sounding concerned. “Let me check and get back to you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No. I do.”

Quinn knew it didn’t matter who was officially paying her salary, Peter would always be her boss.

“I appreciate it.”

“I’ll call you right back.”

Quinn put on the coffee, and made a bowl of instant oatmeal. He’d only taken two bites when his phone rang.

“I can’t get through to him, either,” Misty told him. “I’m about to head into work, so I’ll swing by his place first and see if he’s even home.”

“If you don’t mind, that would be great.”

It was forty minutes before she called again.

“Quinn, something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Her words came out in a rush. “He didn’t answer his door. I know the code to his place, so I let myself in.”

“Slow down.”

He could hear her take a few deep breaths.

“He’s not here. But his bed’s not made, and his glasses are still on his nightstand. He needs those these days.”

“Maybe he has a second pair.”

“His alarm clock is hanging by the cord over the edge of the stand, and the picture of his wife is on the floor, the glass broken.”

Wife?
Quinn didn’t even know Peter was married. “What about her? She’s not there, either?”

“Who?”

“His wife?”

“She’s been dead for ten years.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

A pause. “There’s more.”

“What?”

Another moment passed before she spoke again. “Some of the things on his dresser are knocked over.” She hesitated. “It looks like there was a struggle. Quinn, what could have happened?”

Quinn made her go through the entire apartment, looking for anything unusual. Other than the disorder in the bedroom, though, nothing else stood out.

“Can you take the day off?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Good. I want you to stay there. I’m going to send someone to you who will give the apartment a thorough going over. Don’t touch anything else, just sit down and wait.”

“No problem.”

“Give me the address.”

Once he finished with Misty, he called Steven Howard.

“It’s Quinn.”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Where are you now?”

“Home.” Home for Howard was Virginia, not far from DC.

“What’s your day look like?”

“I’m open for the next seventy-two hours.”

“Good. I need you to get to DC right away.” He gave Howard Peter’s address and filled him in on what he needed him to do. “Call me the second you’re done.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks.”

As he hung up, Orlando entered the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Was that Peter?” she asked.

He shook his head. “This might be an even bigger situation than we thought.”

__________

H
OWARD CALLED JUST
over an hour later. Using the camera on his phone, he gave Quinn, Orlando, and Daeng—who had joined them fifteen minutes earlier—a tour of Peter’s apartment.

As Misty described earlier, the bedroom definitely showed signs of a struggle. In addition to the items she’d pointed out, Howard discovered spots of blood on the bed frame and in the hallway leading out to the living room.

“It’s not a lot,” he said. “So whatever it’s from, the wound can’t be that big.”

“How long has it been there?”

“Hard to tell. It’s all dry.” The picture moved down toward the carpet, and Howard’s rubber-gloved hand entered the frame. He touched a dark spot about four inches from the wall. The normally loose carpet fibers were stiff. “See? That’s got to be a few days at least. Could be a lot longer, though. A lab might be able to figure it out.”

The picture rose again as Howard stood.

“Something I want to show you in here,” he told them.

He moved down the hall and into the living room. Almost every inch of wall space was covered with overflowing bookshelves. There were even more books stacked on the floor here and there. The furniture consisted of two easy chairs, a love seat, and coffee table. There was no TV.

For a moment, the camera caught Misty standing by the door, looking concerned, then it swung to the right and pointed once more toward the floor.

“See the books?” Howard asked.

While most of the image area was empty, there were four columns of books along one side. The two columns at either end were stacked neatly, but the two in the middle had been shoved back a few inches.

“I think they put him on the floor here,” Howard said. “Look at this.”

The image moved down again until it was just a couple inches above the carpet. Howard’s finger moved back into the frame and rubbed across the surface. As it did, several tiny white spears, no more than an eighth of an inch long, jumped up and down. Howard pressed his finger against one of them, adhering it to the glove, and turned his hand so the spear was visible on the camera.

“Plastic,” he said.

Both Quinn and Orlando had seen similar fragments before. Sometimes when plastic ties where used for handcuffs, the tips of the ridges could shear off, leaving behind spears just like the one Howard was holding.

Howard rose back to his feet, this time turning the camera around so he was looking into the lens. “I figure they surprised him in his bed, hauled him out here, and cuffed him. If it was me, I would have drugged him, too, so he didn’t cause any problems on the way out.”

The fact that they’d even found Peter, let alone broken into his place, was shocking. Peter was secretive even in the least threatening of situations. Quinn knew he had security in place that was at least on par with what Quinn himself employed, probably even better. Of course, even the best systems weren’t perfect, and Quinn’s methods hadn’t always kept people out, either.

“Fingerprints?” Orlando asked.

“Checked the door when I first came in,” Howard said. “It was clean. Spot-checked a few other places, too. Same thing. Could make another pass if you want, but I have a feeling I’m not going to find any.”

Both Quinn and Orlando knew he was right.

“No. Not necessary,” Quinn said. “Is that it?”

“So far. I want to do another look around, then check the building’s common area and out front.”

“Okay. Report back when you’re done. Let me talk to Misty.”

The image whipped around the room as Howard carried the phone over to Peter’s former assistant and handed it to her. Though Quinn had talked to her hundreds of times on the phone, he’d met her in person only twice. The last time had been several years earlier. But it wasn’t those intervening years that made her otherwise youthful face look aged this morning.

“Are you okay?” Quinn said.

“What do you think happened?” she asked as if she hadn’t heard him.

“No way to know yet.”

“You’ll find out, though, right?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

His words seemed to relax her, if only a bit. “If you need me to do anything, you just say the word. I can take some emergency leave. I have plenty of vacation time.”

“Actually, there is something you can help with.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to figure out the last time anyone saw him. Steve can help you. You can ask around there at his building, maybe talk to some of his friends.”

“He doesn’t really have a lot of friends.”

“There’s got to be some people he talks to now and then. Wherever they had him working, maybe.”

She nodded.

“Whatever you do, though, be very careful. We don’t know what this is, and I don’t want you walking into anything that’ll get you in trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me. Just find Peter.”

He gave her a reassuring smile. “Check in with me later.”

“I will.”

Quinn hung up.

“What the hell is going on?” Orlando said. “Nate
and
Peter?”

“Maybe what’s happening to them isn’t related,” Daeng suggested.

Quinn and Orlando looked at him, their skepticism etched on their faces.

Daeng held up his hands defensively. “Or maybe it is.”

Quinn knew Daeng had a point. They couldn’t just assume the two disappearances were connected. The incidents had occurred sixteen hundred miles apart, in different countries, and Nate’s main association with Peter was through Quinn. He’d seldom ever talked to Peter directly.

Then again, if those who’d done the taking thought Nate
was
Quinn…

“Maybe we should see if anyone else is missing,” he said.

__________

T
HEIR SEARCH WAS
handicapped right from the start.

While Quinn and Orlando knew a fairly substantial number of people in the business, there were still plenty of others they’d never met. And pinpointing the current whereabouts of the ones they did know was not the easiest thing to do. It wasn’t like there was some central switchboard operatives reported to, giving updates of their status. Usually if someone was suddenly unreachable, it was assumed they were on a gig.

When they finally took a break at noon, the list of potential missing contained over twenty people.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” Quinn said. “Most of them have got to be out on jobs.” He frowned. “I think we might be wasting our time.”

“No,” Orlando said. “We’re not.” She glanced down the list of names. “Look, you’re right. Most of these people probably are working. But this one…” Her finger stopped two thirds of the way down the list. “Alex Berkeley.”

“What about him?”

“He works with a partner most of the time. Tom Benson. You know him, right?”

“Sure. I’ve worked with both of them.”

“I talked to Tom. He said Alex had been hired on something that was supposed to last a week, tops, a surveillance thing that apparently didn’t need both of them. He was supposed to be back a few days ago, but Tom hasn’t heard from him. He’s getting a bit annoyed because they have something scheduled for early next week.”

“His project probably got extended.”

“Probably,” she admitted. “But you’d think Alex would have let Tom know.”

“Maybe,” Quinn said, unwilling to make the full leap just yet.

Orlando circled Berkeley’s name and studied the list again.

“Hold on,” she said. “I have an idea.”

She pushed back from the dining table and went into the kitchen. Drawers and cabinets began opening and closing.

“Where do you keep your Post-its?” she called out a moment later.

“Used to be some in the drawer by the sink,” he told her.

“Well, they’re not here now.”

“Try the pantry.”

As her steps crossed the kitchen, the front door opened and Daeng walked in, carrying several bags.

“Who’s hungry?” he said.

Quinn hadn’t even thought about eating, but the intensifying aroma that preceded Daeng into the dining room was hard to resist.

“I’ve got two spicy chicken
banh mi
, two barbecue pork, some spring rolls, and a couple containers of
pho
we can split.”

“I thought you were getting Thai?” Quinn said.

“I was, but I passed by a couple of those food trucks and wanted to check them out. One of them was Vietnamese food and looked too good to pass up.”

“I’ll take a spicy chicken,” Orlando said as she walked back into the dining area, carrying three different-colored pads of Post-its and a bottle of Sriracha hot sauce.

While Daeng handed out the lunch, she set the hot sauce on the table, wrote
NATE
on a light blue Post-it, and stuck it to the window. Next, she wrote
PETER
on one of the same color, and put his name right below Nate’s. On a yellow note, she wrote Berkeley, and started a new column on the window. Finally, she wrote out individual green ones for the other twenty-two names and gave them a third column.

She touched the glass above Nate’s name. “Assuming Nate and Peter are connected, these are our known missing,” she said. She moved her fingers to the yellow column. “Our possibles.” To the green. “And our pool of potentials. When we can rule someone out, we’ll start a fourth column.”

“And what color will that be?” Quinn asked, an eyebrow raised. “I don’t want to get confused.”

“You only have the three colors, so it’ll also be green, jerk.”

He took a bite of his pork sandwich, and nodded at her makeshift bulletin board. “You’re missing a name.”

She looked at the glass. “Whose name?”

“Mine.”

“Right.” She wrote Quinn on a blue piece, put parentheses around it, and butted the square against Nate’s. She then repositioned Peter’s Post-it so that it was centered beneath them. “Okay, now look at the names. Anything stand out?”

Quinn set his sandwich down and examined the Post-its. “Well, the obvious connection is that I’ve worked with everyone up there, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere.”

“Just concentrate on you and Nate and Peter and Berkeley. Anything you all have in common? Any jobs you may have worked on together? Anything.”

He frowned. “We’ve all worked together over the years. Nate not so much, of course, but sometimes.” He looked at Orlando. “I could come up with a dozen or more connections that might or might not mean anything.”

She turned back to the names and stared at them for several seconds. “We need to narrow down the pool.”

As much as he thought they might be going down the wrong road, he didn’t see what else they could do at this point.

After they quickly finished lunch, Quinn called the next name on his contact list. As he was in the middle of what he realized would be another fruitless call, Orlando yelled, “Quinn!”

He put a hand over his phone and whispered, “What is it?”

“I just got a ping.”

“Sally, I’m sorry,” he said into his cell. “I need to get off the phone. I might call you back later. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine,” the woman told him.

“Thanks.”

He hung up and moved behind Orlando. On the screen of her computer was the program she’d set up to automatically ping Nate’s emergency beacon until it made a connection. Which, according to the display, had finally happened.