Narimanov and I parted after hashing out some details and exchanging contact numbers. It was going to take him a few days to assemble his data, which was fine by me. Assuming Alex could explain why Theresa had picked this particular moment in time to seek me out, and persuade me that she was a credible source, I’d likely need at least that much time to make a stab at parsing her information. I wondered if I was right to think Alex hadn’t been completely honest about her, and-if so-whether it had anything to do with how upset he’d been the previous day. One possibility was that Walter had leaned on Alex to further whatever agenda he had regarding Senator Simpson. I knew how vulnerable Alex was to Walter’s demands, but it still pissed me off to suspect that he might have tried to use me.
I found a sealed envelope in my center desk drawer when I arrived back at my office, and a note from Kate inside. She’d successfully transferred and encrypted the files from the iPod and written down the password for me. I refolded the note and stuck it in my shirt pocket, the professional buzz I’d felt in Narimanov’s car fading as I was reminded of my conversation with Kate. I rubbed my forehead with both hands, trying to decide what to do next. Claire was at Sloan-Kettering all afternoon, and would be attending a concert at Carnegie Hall with Kate later that evening. Better I get her by herself somewhere quiet than rush into a conversation when she was distracted. Maybe a night away this coming weekend. There was an inn we’d gone to in Connecticut a few times when the kids were little. And the delay would give me time to figure out what I was going to say to her. Fragments of my talk with Kate ricocheted around my brain. What if Kate was wrong and Claire had a very specific plan mapped out? One that didn’t involve me?
My news screen beeped, and I glanced at the flashing headline. A German wire service was reporting that the French and Russians were mobilizing special forces troops. There wasn’t any detail, and no one else had reported it. The markets gapped lower on the story and began trading skittishly on light volume. I picked up my phone, tempted to call Narimanov and ask him if he’d heard anything. I tapped the handset against my palm, hesitant. I hated to call as a supplicant. Better I have something of value to share with him first-which brought me right back to the Saudi data. The French and the Russians would have to wait, I decided. There was nothing more important than figuring out exactly what Theresa had really given me.
“I’ll be in Alex’s office,” I told Amy, as I walked by her desk.
“You’ll be alone. I heard from Lynn that he called to say he was taking the afternoon off.” She lowered her voice meaningfully. “Evidently, he’s not feeling well.”
I sighed. Nothing shy of a kidney transplant was supposed to keep you out of the office when the market was moving. Holing up with a hangover was an invitation to an ass-kicking from Walter, or worse.
“Try him on his cell again, please.”
“Will do. You’ve been getting a lot of calls. Do you want me to start putting people through?”
The core dilemma of my business was that my clients paid me to be responsive, but the more time I spent talking to them, the less time I had to work, and hence the less I had to say of value.
“No, but let me know if anyone’s really insistent and I’ll try to get back to them. Were you able to get in touch with Rashid?”
“I just heard back. You’re on for breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel tomorrow morning. His room at eight-thirty.”
“Thanks.”
I headed back to my desk and sat down again, half wishing I could curl up in the knee space and hide. I had too much going on, and too much to worry about. The best cure for anxiety was to stay busy, I reminded myself. Pulling Kate’s note from my pocket, I set to work decrypting the files she’d copied from the iPod. Absent a conversation with Alex, my sole option was to slog through the information as best I could, and to hope like hell I wasn’t on a snipe hunt.
• • •
Seven hours later, I’d just about managed to assemble the data into an intelligible order. The sheer quantity was overwhelming, let alone the complexity, and a handful of the key technical reports were written in French. Alex hadn’t called back. It was lucky that Claire and Kate were out at the concert-it meant I could work through dinner without feeling guilty. Amy had ordered in some pizza for me before she left, and the cold remains were sitting in a box on my credenza.
Theresa had cautioned me not to believe any of the management information, and the raw data were way too granular for me to reach any off-the-cuff conclusions, so my next step was to employ a multivariate model of oil field decline that an acquaintance at the Colorado School of Mines had written a few years back. Loading the model was tricky, painstaking work that involved a number of easy-to-screw-up volume and density conversions. I was copying figures between spreadsheets when my cell phone rang, the caller ID blocked. I ignored it. My office phone flashed a few seconds later, and then the cell phone rang again. I picked up, thinking it might be Alex calling from the bar at Pagliacci.
“Mark Wallace.”
“It’s Reggie. How you doing?”
“Not bad,” I said, taking off my reading glasses and rubbing my eyes. Reggie Kinnard was the NYPD detective who’d been working with us on Kyle’s disappearance since day one. He checked in every couple of months to let me know that he’d updated this or that database, but mainly, I suspected, simply to let me know that he hadn’t forgotten. We usually had a drink somewhere, or a cup of coffee. I liked him, and was grateful to him for his continued efforts. It mattered to me that he was still trying. “How about you?”
“Hanging in there. Where are you?”
“At the office.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“I’m kind of busy.”
“Too busy for a beer?”
“I wish I could. I’m buried.”
I heard the sound of a match being lit, suggesting he’d already had at least one drink. Reggie had been a smoker for as long as I’d known him and was always trying to quit. Liquor was his undoing. He exhaled loudly, and I imagined him enveloped by a blue cloud. Roughly the size of a Division 1 offensive lineman, Reggie was a dark-skinned black guy with a square, immobile face, a graying fade, and a permanently mournful expression.
“Joe Belko retired today,” he said.
Joe was Reggie’s partner, a twenty-year veteran of the major case squad. In the five years they’d been working together, I’d rarely heard Joe talk about anything except fishing. It didn’t surprise me to learn he’d pulled the pin. He and Reggie specialized in abductions and disappearances, usually working in concert with the FBI and the state police. I had the sense that Joe, like Reggie, had seen a lot more than he’d ever wanted to.
“That must be tough. They got someone new lined up for you?”
“Not yet. The guys upstairs want to talk to me about riding a desk. If I were going to sit around with my thumb up my ass all day I’d want to get paid some serious money, like that hot-rod crowd you hang around with.”
I gave him the laugh he was looking for.
“So, can I take a rain check and call you next week?”
He sucked on the cigarette again. I felt bad about letting him down. Childless and long divorced, Reggie didn’t seem to have much of a social life.
“It really would be better if we talked tonight.”
I felt a funny catch in my chest, abruptly aware of how still the office was. The only noise was the buzz of the fluorescent lights, a barely audible siren a dozen blocks away, and Reggie’s muted breathing through the receiver.
“You have something to tell me?”
“It may be nothing. Don’t get yourself too excited.”
I got to my feet and grabbed my suit jacket from the back of my chair.
“I’m coming to you,” I said. “Right now. Tell me where you are.”
The address Reggie gave me was a Second Avenue dive in the low sixties, near the Roosevelt Island tram. I entered the small bar beneath a green neon sign with a flashing shamrock. It was a drinker’s place-no jukebox, no cutesy decorations, no waitresses. Just bare walls, a linoleum floor, and a battered tin ceiling. Half a dozen guys were crowded together near the door, watching a silent hockey game on a flyspecked, undersized television. Reggie stood alone at the far end of the room, wearing a gray three-piece suit and a pale yellow tie. He tapped a knuckle on the scuffed counter as I approached and attracted the attention of a tubercular-looking barman.
“Jimmy and Guinney,” he said. “Times two.”
I pulled out my wallet and dropped a twenty on top of the small pile of money in front of him. The barman served up the whiskey and made change, waiting for the heads to settle on the Guinness. Reggie clinked his glass to mine and we both threw back the shots in a single go.
“So, tell me,” I said, feeling the whiskey smolder in my gut.
Reaching into his breast pocket, Reggie extracted a folded sheet of paper.
“An e-mail,” he said. “Sent directly to me. It came in last night.”
I unfolded the page with shaking fingers and scanned past the detailed header information, hunting for the body of the message. It was only two sentences long:
Kyle Wallace was left in the trunk of a red BMW M5 with diplomatic license plates. The car was last seen in a lot at 125th Street and the Hudson River.
My hands sank to the bar, the page suddenly too heavy to support.
“Jimmys again,” Reggie said, as the barman served up the Guinness. He touched his pint glass to mine, and I automatically lifted the black liquid and took a sip.
“We’ve had tips before,” I said, choking slightly on the bitter beer. “Dozens of them. They never amounted to anything. What makes this different?”
“Maybe nothing,” Reggie said, extracting his Marlboros and lighter from a jacket pocket. He shook out a cigarette and began tapping the filter against the top of the box as the barman poured more whiskey.
“You can’t smoke those in here,” the barman protested with a soft Irish lilt. “It’s against the law.”
Reggie flipped open his jacket and exposed his gold badge.
“We’ll have a right fecking riot, we will,” the barman said, glancing over his shoulder toward the men watching the TV.
“Give it a rest,” Reggie told him, lighting up. “Nobody’s here to get healthy.”
The barman looked as if he might argue and then walked away, muttering beneath his breath.
“Maybe nothing, but maybe something,” I said, keeping my eyes on his face.
He nodded slightly, turning his head to blow smoke away from me.
“Let me explain. The police get tips from four kinds of people.” He stuck the cigarette in a corner of his mouth and began counting on his fingers. “First, the vindictive types. The neighbor’s got a barking dog and they want to get even, so they make up some bullshit story and try to get him in trouble. That doesn’t fit here, because there isn’t any accusation. Second, the wackos. The wackos want attention, so they call on the phone and show up in person and claim that they’re the real Son of Sam, or that they did whatever’s on the front cover of the New York Post. A lot of them we know already, because they keep coming back. But their tips are never anonymous-they want the attention. Third,” he continued, moving on to another finger, “you got your sick bastards. The sick bastards are in it for the fun. They want to confuse the cops or torment the families. Their tips are anonymous, but there’s never anything you can really check out. It’s always that they saw the person you’re looking for on a bus in France, or-”
“You can check out the car,” I interrupted. “There can’t be that many red BMWs with diplomatic plates.”
“Correct.” He flicked some ash to the floor and took another sip of beer. “First thing I did. Makes it easier that it’s an M5-that’s a high-end, limited-production car. Seven years ago, there were exactly four M5s in the entire country with diplomatic plates-three black and one red. The red one was registered right here in the city, out in Queens. It was stolen the same night that Kyle vanished.”
I swayed slightly, my knees weak, and felt Reggie’s arm around my shoulders.
“Steady,” he said. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I straightened and took a deep breath. Everyone in the room except the barman was smoking now, and the air already seemed impossibly close. I’d wanted closure for years, but the possibility of finally learning the truth terrified me. The truth meant the end of illusions.
“The car was registered to a Venezuelan diplomat named Mariano Gallegos,” Reggie continued. “I got a request out for the case file. There might be something in it. And I’d like to talk to him if he’s still in the country, but that could be tricky. Dealing with diplomats is a real pain in the ass.”
“Maybe I can help,” I suggested, hearing my voice quaver. “I’m meeting with a guy from OPEC tomorrow morning. He knows a lot of Venezuelan diplomats. He can probably make a connection for me.”
“That’d be great,” Reggie said encouragingly. “Keep me posted. Slainte.”
We raised our whiskey glasses and shot the second Jamesons. My stomach turned over and I thought I might retch. Lifting the e-mail again, I scrutinized each word. Kyle Wallace was left in the trunk of a red BMW… The word “left” might mean anything.
“You have any thoughts about what might have happened?” I said, afraid to ask the direct question.
Reggie took a minute to scan the room. He looked tired, the way his ex-partner Joe Belko had always looked tired.
“Nothing good,” he answered finally. “I’m sorry.”
My vision blurred as tears welled. Silence built between us and rapidly became unendurable.
“So, tell me about the fourth type of person who tips the police,” I said blindly.
“The fourth type are the people who actually know something. If it’s not about a reward, and it’s not about taunting the cops or the family, then it’s usually about guilt.”
“You think this is from the guy who took Kyle?” I asked, my voice breaking.
“No,” he said, laying a hand on my arm. “I don’t. Guys who commit a crime and feel guilty enough to own up to it almost always apologize. There’s no apology here. So, assuming this isn’t bullshit from some particularly clever sick bastard, my guess is that it’s from someone who found out about the crime secondhand and feels bad about not coming forward.”
“But not bad enough to identify him- or herself, or to tell us who did it.”
He shrugged.
“Yeah. But this isn’t necessarily the end of it-whoever wrote might get in touch again. It happens. The first contact is the hardest.”
I studied the Internet gibberish at the top of the e-mail, my fear of the truth receding. Anything was better than more waiting.
“The FBI or somebody must be able to track this back to wherever it was sent from, right?”
“I wish.” He flicked more ash onto the floor. “I already talked to our tech guys. The e-mail was sent through an anonymous remailer, which is a fancy name for a daisy chain of computers in parts of the world where they haven’t got much in the way of disclosure laws. The particular remailer that sent this message is located on the Isle of Man, but the tech guys tell me that the message might have hopped from the sender to India to Africa to God knows where before it hit the last stop. They’re going to take a stab at running it down, but they warned me not to expect much.”
“So, what’s next?” I asked, refusing to believe that we were at a dead end.
“Next I go looking for a red BMW M5.” He took a final hit from his cigarette, dropped the butt to the floor, and ground it out with his shoe. “Seven years is a long time, but I broke in on auto crime, and I know a few tricks when it comes to finding cars. Farther south, we’d have to worry that it went deadhead on a banana boat to South America. Up north, though, most cars get chopped or reregistered under a fake vehicle identification number. If we find the car, we might be able to track it back to whoever stole it.” He swept the change on the bar toward him, leaving a five-dollar bill. “Come on. I got my wheels out front. I’ll give you a ride home.”
I shook my head, feeling a little dizzy.
“I’d rather walk awhile. I could use the fresh air.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then. But call me if you got any questions. Don’t worry what time it is. I never sleep much.” He hesitated. “You going to tell Claire and Kate about this?”
I thought about it for a second. If Kate was right, and Claire really did want to put the past behind her, a false lead would be the worst possible thing for her, potentially destroying whatever emotional barriers she’d managed to erect. It might even be the final straw persuading her to flee-from New York, and from me.
“Not until we know more.”
“Your call. But don’t wait too long. You don’t want to be carrying this around by yourself, and they’re going to be upset if they discover you were holding out on them.”