Buried Secrets (10 page)

She had an elevator phobia, but I doubted she knew where she was.

THE LOBBY camera captured the guy escorting Alexa toward the front door, almost dragging her. In his left hand he held her handbag. She was stumbling. People entering the hotel saw this and smiled. They probably figured the guy’s girlfriend had had too much to drink.

In one of the exterior cameras, Alexa appeared to be almost asleep standing up in front of the hotel’s entrance. The man handed a claim check to the valet.

Five minutes later, an older black Jaguar arrived: an XJ6, it looked like, from the mid-1980s. A classic, but not in very good shape. The rear quarter panel was dented, and there were dings and scrapes all over.

The dealer helped Alexa into the back seat, where she lay flat.

My stomach clenched. The car pulled away and out of the circular drive.

“I need another angle,” I said.

“Certainly, sir,” Naji said. “His face?”

“No,” I said. “His license plate.”

OF COURSE, the plate number would be recorded on the man’s valet ticket, but I wanted to be absolutely certain. A camera directly in front of the valet station had captured his license plate with perfect clarity.

The name on the ticket was Costa. He’d arrived at 9:08, before the girls did.

Naji burned a bunch of still frames of Alexa and Taylor with the guy, including close-ups of his face from several different angles, to a CD. I had him make me a couple of copies. Then I borrowed his computer and e-mailed a few of the stills of Costa to Dorothy.

The Defender was parked in one of the short-term spaces out front. I got in and called Dorothy. When she answered, I gave her a quick recap of what I’d seen. Then I read her the license plate number, a Massachusetts tag, and asked her to pull up the vehicle owner’s name and address and anything else she could get. I gave her the name Costa, warned her it was probably fake, and asked her to check her e-mail. She already had. I told her that the hotel’s security director suspected he was a narcotics dealer.

Then I pulled out of the hotel’s front lot. About three blocks away I suddenly had another thought, and I drove back to the hotel. This time I didn’t bother with the groovy kid with the stubble at the reception desk. I walked straight back and found Naji in the hall.

“Sorry,” I said. “One more thing.”

“Of course.”

“The Jaguar,” I said. “The valet records show an arrival time of nine oh eight.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to see all video from the valet station around that time.” It took Leo no more than a minute to call up the video I wanted: the banged-up Jaguar pulling up to the curb earlier in the evening, and Costa getting out.

Then I saw something I didn’t expect.

Someone getting out of the passenger’s side. A woman.

Taylor Armstrong.

22.

“Alexa,” the voice said, “please do not scream. No one can hear. Do you understand this?”

She tried to swallow.

“You see, when you panic or scream, you hyperventilate, and this only uses up your air supply much quicker.” His accent was thick and crude but his voice was bland and matter-of-fact, and all the more terrifying because of it.

“No no no no no no,”
she chanted in a little voice, a child’s voice. And she thought:
This
is not happening to me. I am not here. This is not real.

“Carbon dioxide poisoning is not pleasant, Alexa. You feel like you are drowning. You will die slowly and painfully and you will go into convulsions as your organs fail one by one.

This is not a peaceful death, Alexa. I promise, you do not want to die this way.” The top of the casket was two or three inches from her face. That was the most horrible thing of all, how close it was.

She gasped desperately for air, but she could only take shallow little breaths. She imagined the tiny space at the very top of her lungs. She thought of the air in her lungs as if it were water steadily rising in some sealed room in a horror movie, the air pocket shrinking to just an inch or two.

She felt her entire body wracked by violent shudders.

She was trapped ten feet underground, under tons of dirt, in this little tiny box in which she could barely move, and the air would soon run out.

Frantically she clawed at the silky fabric directly above her face. Her throbbing bloody fingertips touched the bare cold metal and tore off strips. They hung down and tickled her eyes and cheeks.

Her shuddering was uncontrollable.

“You are listening to me, Alexa?”

“Please,” she whispered. “Please don’t do this. Please.”

“Alexa?” the voice said. “I can see you. A video camera is mounted right over your head.

It gives infrared light you cannot see. I can also hear you through the microphone. Everything comes to us over the Internet. And when you speak to your father, he will see and hear you too.”

“Please, let me talk to him!”

“Yes, of course. Very soon. But first let us make sure you know what you must say and how to say it.”

“Why are you doing this?” she cried, barely able to talk through the sobs. “You don’t
need
to do this.”

“If you say your lines correctly and your father gives us what we want, you will be free in a matter of hours. You will be free, Alexa.”

“He’ll give you anything—please let me out now, oh God, please, what can I possibly do to
you
?”

“Alexa, you must listen.”

“You can lock me up in a room or a closet if you want. You don’t need to do this, please oh God, please don’t do this…”

“If you do exactly as we ask you will be out of there right away.”

“You are a goddamned
monster
! Do you know what’s going to happen to you when they catch you? Do you have any idea, you sick goddamned
psychopath
?” There was a long silence. She could hear her own breathing, shallow and labored and quick.

She said, “Do you
hear
me, you creep? Do you know what they’ll do to you?” More silence.

She waited tensely for his reply.

Had he decided to stop talking?

Only then did she understand how much she depended on the Owl.

The man with the owl tattoo on the back of his head. The Owl was her one and only lifeline to the world. Its power over her was absolute.

She must never again offend the Owl.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

More silence.

She said, “Please, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.
Please talk to me
.” Nothing.

Oh, God, now she understood that phrase “the silence of the grave.” Absolute silence wasn’t peaceful at all. It was the worst thing in the world.

It was hell.

She shuddered and moaned and cried softly, “I’m sorry. Come back.”

“Alexa,” the voice said finally, and she felt such sweet relief.

“Do you want to cooperate with us?”

She began to weep.

“Oh, I do, I do, please, tell me what you want me to say.”

“Do you understand that it is my decision whether you live or die?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Please, I
do
. Anything. If you let me out of here I will do anything you want. Anything at all. Anything you want.”

But why was he now saying “I” instead of “we”? What did that mean?

“Alexa, I want you to reach under your mattress. Can you do this?”

“Yes.”

Obediently she lowered both hands to the thin mattress and discovered that it rested on a series of metal bands that ran crosswise, spaced a few inches apart and probably running down the length of the casket. Her hands found a space between the bands and plunged into an open area below. How far down did this space go? Her left hand touched an object, a cluster of objects, and she grasped the cap and narrow neck of what felt like a plastic bottle. There were many. She grabbed one in her left hand and pulled it up and through the space between the bands. A water bottle.

“Yes, very good,” said the voice. “You see I have given you some water. You must be thirsty.”

“Yes, oh God, yes, I am.”

Now that she thought about it, her mouth was completely dry.

“Please to drink,” he said.

She twisted the cap with her other hand, and it came off with a satisfying snap and she put it to her parched lips and drank greedily, spilling some on her face and her shirt, but she didn’t care.

“There is water enough to last you a few days,” the voice said. “Perhaps a week. There are protein bars too, but not so many. Enough for a few days. When the food and water run out, that is all. Then you will starve to death. But before that you will suffocate.” She kept drinking, swallowing down gulps of air along with the water, quenching a deep thirst she hadn’t been aware of until now.

“Now you must listen to me, Alexa.”

She pulled the bottle away from her mouth, terrified that the Owl would abandon her again. She gasped,
“Yes.”

“If you say exactly what I tell you, and your father does exactly what I ask, you will be free from this torture.”

“He’ll give you whatever you want,” she said.

“But are you sure he loves you enough to set you free? Does he love you enough?”

“Yes!” she said.

“Does he love you at all, really? A mother will do anything for her child, but your mother is dead. A child never really knows about his father.”

“He
loves
me,” she said piteously.

“I guess you will now learn if this is true,” the voice said. “You will learn the answer very quickly. Because if your father does not love you, you will die terribly down there. You will run out of air and you will be dizzy and confused and you will vomit and you will have convulsions and I will watch you die, Alexa. And I will enjoy it.”

“Please don’t please don’t please don’t…”

“I will watch the last minutes of your life, and you know what, Alexa?” He paused for a long time, and she whimpered like a baby, a small animal.

“Your father will watch the last minutes of your life too. He will try to look away or turn it off but it is human nature—whether he loves you or not, he will not be able to stop watching his only child’s last minutes on this earth.”

23.

After a brief visit to a great old tobacco shop on Park Square, I made a pit stop at home to do some tinkering. I called a friend of mine and asked him to do a very quick job for me. A little while later, my BlackBerry rang.

Without preface, Dorothy said: “The Jaguar is registered to a Richard Campisi of Dunstable Street in Charlestown.”

“Bingo,” I said.

“No bingo. He reported his car stolen over a week ago.”

“I take it you’ve looked at his photo.”

“Of course. And he’s not Costa. Not even close.”

“So our guy stole the car.”

“Looks that way.”

“So he couldn’t be traced, I assume. This isn’t good, Dorothy. It’s been more than twelve hours since she disappeared. No one’s heard from her. No one can reach her. It’s like what happened to her a few years ago, only this time it’s for real.”

“A kidnap for ransom, you think?”

“I hope that’s all it is.”

“You hope it’s a kidnapping?”

“I hope it’s a kidnap for ransom. Because that means she’s alive, and all her dad has to do is pay money. The other possibility…”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know what the other possibility is.”

I called Diana and asked her to put a rush on her request to locate Alexa Marcus’s phone.

THIS TIME the door to Senator Armstrong’s Louisburg Square townhouse was opened by a housekeeper, a plump Filipina in a black dress with white trim and a white apron.

“The senator not here,” she said.

“I’m here to see Taylor, actually.”

“Miss Taylor … she is expecting you?”

“Please tell her it’s Nick Heller.”

She looked uncertain whether to show me in. In the end she closed the front door and asked me to wait outside.

The door opened again five minutes later.

It was Taylor. She looked dressed to go out, her small black handbag slung over her shoulder.

“What?” She said it the way you might talk to some neighborhood kid who’d rung your doorbell as a prank.

“Time for a walk,” I said.

“Is this going to take long?” she said.

“Not long at all.”

HALFWAY DOWN Mount Vernon Street I said, “The guy Alexa left Slammer with last night—what’s his name?”

“I told you, I don’t remember.”

“He never told you his name?”

“If he did, I couldn’t hear it. Anyway, he wasn’t interested in me. He was, like, hitting on Alexa the whole time.”

“So you have no idea what his name is.”

“How many times are you going to ask me? Is that what you came back for? I thought you said you found something.”

“I just wanted to be sure I understood you right. Does your daddy know you got a ride with some guy whose name you don’t even know?”

For a split second I could see the panic in her eyes, but she covered smoothly with a scowl of disbelief. “I didn’t get a ride with him. I got a cab home.”

“I’m not talking about how you got
home
. I’m talking about how you got to the bar in the first place.”

“I took a cab.” Then she must have remembered about things like taxicab company call records and the like, and she added, “I hailed one on Charles Street.”

“No,” I said softly, “you arrived with him in his Jaguar.”

She did the disbelief-scowl again, but before she could dig herself in deeper, I said, “It’s all on the surveillance video at the hotel. You sure you want to keep lying to me?” The look of desperation returned to her face, and she didn’t try to conceal it. “Look, I didn’t…” She started off prickly, defiant, but seemed to crumple in front of me. Her voice was suddenly small and high and plaintive. “I swear, I was just trying to help her out.”

24.

“I met this guy at a Starbucks, okay?” Taylor said. “Yesterday afternoon. And he really, like, came on to me.”

She looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I kept my face unreadable.

“We just started talking, and he seemed like a cool guy. He asked if I wanted to go to Slammer with him, and I … I was sort of nervous, ’cause I’d just met him, you know? I said, okay, sure, but I wanted my friend to join us. So it wouldn’t be so intense. Like not really a date, you know?”