Buried Secrets (18 page)

I could see the blood drain from his face.

“I hope you know they’ve got your line tapped,” I said. “They probably cloned your cell phone too.”

He shook his head, jutted his lower lip, feigning skepticism, but I could see I’d gotten to him.

“Ever hear what they do to people who betray them?”

“They not gonna kill me.”

“True,” I said. “They like to torture and mutilate first. They like to drag it out. You’ll
wish
they’d kill you, what I hear. They have a saying, ‘You can’t get a positive identification of a body from a torso.’” I paused for effect. “That’s why they like to cut off the hands and feet and head. Of course, they’re wrong. You
can
get a positive identification from a torso. It just takes a little longer.”

Mauricio’s brown eyes had gone flat and dull, and terror was contorting his facial muscles.

“Maybe your daddy can pull in some favors and get them to go easy on you, hmm?” His larynx worked up and down. He was trying to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry.

It looked like a sock was stuck in his throat.

“But you know what?” I said. “Today’s your lucky day. Because I’m prepared to offer you a special deal. Great terms too. You tell us what we want to know, and you’ll never hear from us again. No thank-you notes. No friendly calls. You might even live.” I waited a beat. “It’s all good.”

“What do you want?” he whispered, his voice cracking.

“A name. The name of the guy who hired you to pick up the girl.”

“I told you—”

“A full description. Height. Eye color. How he contacted you in the first place. Where you delivered the … ‘package’… to them.”

“I don’t
know
the name, man,” he whispered. “He was some big dude, real strong. Real scary.”

He was telling the truth now, I was convinced. His terror had yanked away his habitual scrim of dishonesty. He had just one objective, which was to stay alive. Not to protect his employers. He wasn’t going to hold anything back from me.

“Did he tell you why he wanted the girl?”

“He just told me to pick her up and give her this drug and hand her over—” I heard what sounded like footsteps approaching, voices becoming louder. Mauricio heard it too. He froze, looked at the door.

“Where did he take her?” I said.

“The guy’s got eyes on the back of his head,” he whispered. “I can’t say nothing.”

“What do you mean, eyes on the back of his head?”

But then the door came open, and a squat, hulking man in a gray suit with a gleaming bald head stared in.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” came the rumbling voice of Gordon Snyder.

43.

“Hello, Spike,” I said.

“What’s your game, Heller?” Snyder said. “Trying to coach the witness? Or buy his silence?”

Before I could reply, a loud voice came from behind him: “No one is allowed to talk to my client! I made that eminently clear on the phone.”

Someone shoved his way past Snyder into the interview room: a large, elegant man, probably six foot two, broad shoulders. He had long gray hair almost to his shirt collar, deep-set eyes, and acne-gouged cheeks. He was wearing a dark nailhead suit and a burgundy foulard tie and an air of imperious authority. The fabric of his bespoke suit draped snugly along his broad shoulders.

The legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, of course. “Remove this person at once,” he said, his English impeccable, with barely a trace of an accent. “You may
not
question this man. And if there is any recording equipment in here, it must be switched off at once. My discussions with my client must be absolutely privileged.”

“Understood, Mr. Barboza,” Snyder said. His eyes flashed with fury at me, and he leveled a stubby finger, then swiveled it smoothly toward the doorway like a magician wielding a wand.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said.

44.

A dog was barking in the yard.

Dragomir’s first thought was of hunters. It wasn’t hunting season, but that didn’t deter some people. He’d posted NO TRESPASSING/NO HUNTING signs every fifty feet in the wooded part of the property, but not everyone could read, or chose to.

Hunters meant intruders, and intruders meant scrutiny.

People in rural areas were always getting involved in their neighbors’ business.

Especially a stranger who showed up one day with no introduction.

Are you the new owner? Are you an Alderson?

What’s with the Caterpillar backhoe loader out back? Are you doing construction? All by yourself, no crew? Really? Huh. Whatcha building?

He’d bought all the equipment with cash. The backhoe came from a farm supply store in Biddeford, the air compressor from the Home Depot in Plaistow.

The casket he’d picked out at a wholesale casket company in Dover. He’d said something about the family burial plot, double deep, his sadly departed uncle the first one in. At a depth of twelve feet, he’d explained, he wanted to make absolute certain it was crushproof.

The sturdiest one they had was sixteen-gauge carbon steel, painted Triton Gray, in the Generous Dimensions line. Americans were increasingly obese, so oversized caskets were strong sellers, and he’d had to settle for a floor model.

Groundwater seepage was always a problem, even in the most well-made caskets, which might cause the girl to drown slowly, before they were done with her, and that wouldn’t do either. Fortunately, the model he’d purchased was equipped with a water-resistant gasket. You turned a crank at the end of the box to seal it tight. A steel bar rolled across the top to lock it down. All of this was standard equipment, as if grave robbers were still a problem in the twenty-first century.

The refitting was quick work, the sort of mechanical job he’d always enjoyed. Using a cobalt drill bit he drilled a hole through the carbon steel at the end where the girl’s head would be. There he welded a quarter-inch brass connector plug in place and attached it to a crushproof hose that ran several hundred feet to the air compressor on the porch. Air would flow in here every time the air compressor went on, which was a couple of minutes each hour, night and day, since it was on a timer switch. He trenched the hose into the ground along with the Ethernet cable.

At the other end of the casket he cut a much larger opening with a hole saw. There he welded the brass bushing to attach a four-inch exhaust line. Now the gray PVC pipe stuck out of the ground in the middle of the dirt field like a solitary sapling. Its end curved down like an umbrella handle. It was the sort of thing used at a landfill to vent the methane gas that built up underground.

So the girl would get a steady supply of fresh air, which was more than his father had when he’d been trapped in the coal mine in Tomsk.

As a young boy, Dragomir used to enjoy watching his father and the other miners ride backward in the mantrip, descending hundreds of meters into the depths. Dragomir was forever asking to ride too, but his father always refused.

Each night his father came home caked in black dust so thick you could see only his eyes.

His coughing kept Dragomir up many a night. He spat black and left the sputum floating in the toilet bowl.

Coal mining, he told once told Dragomir, was the only job where you had to dig your own grave.

Dragomir listened, rapt, to his father’s grim tales. How he’d seen a roof bolter come down on a friend of his and crush his face. Or watched a guy cut in half by the coal car. Someone was once caught between the drums of the coal crusher and smashed into pieces between its teeth.

His mother, Dusya, raged at his father for filling a young boy’s head with such frightening stories. But Dragomir always wanted to hear more.

The bedtime stories stopped when Dragomir was almost ten.

A knock at the door to their communal apartment in the middle of the night. His mother’s high thin scream.

She brought him to the mine to join the crowds gathered there, pleading for any sort of news, even bad news.

He was fascinated. He wanted to know what had happened, but no one would tell him.

He overheard only fragments. Something about how the miners had accidentally dug into an abandoned, flooded shaft. How the water rushed in and trapped them like rats.

But Dragomir wanted to know more. His thirst was unslakable. He wanted details.

He imagined his father and the other men, dozens or even hundreds of them, struggling to keep their heads above the rising black water, fighting over a few inches of air space that dwindled by the minute. He imagined them grappling in the black water, pushing each other’s heads down into the water, old friends and even brothers, trying to survive a few minutes longer, all the while knowing that none of them would ever come out.

He wanted to know what it felt like to realize with absolute certainty that you were about to die and to be powerless to do anything about it. His mind returned to this again and again, the way a child fingers a wound. He was fascinated by the unknown, lured to what repelled others, because it allowed him to draw close to his father, to know what his father knew in those last moments of his life.

He’d always felt cheated somehow not to have witnessed the last seconds of his father’s life.

All he had was his imagination.

THE DAMNED dog would not stop barking. Now he could hear it pawing at the screen door out back. He looked out a window and saw a dirt-covered mongrel, leaping and snarling at the screen. Feral, maybe, though it was hard to tell for sure.

He opened the wooden door, his Wasp gas injection knife at the ready, his new toy. Just the screen between him and the cur.

Startled, the dog backed away, bared its teeth, gave a low snarl.

He called to it softly in Russian, “Here, pooch,” and opened the screen door. The dog lunged at him, and he plunged the blade into the beast’s abdomen.

With his thumb he slid the button to shoot out a frozen basketball of compressed air.

The explosion was instantaneous and satisfying, but he realized at once he’d done it wrong. He was spattered by the animal’s viscera, red and glistening, slimy scraps of skin and fur, a rainburst of offal.

Once in a while he did make mistakes. Next time he would make sure to plunge the knife in to the hilt before flicking the gas release.

It took him half an hour to sweep the ruined carcass into a trash bag and haul it into the woods to be buried later, and then hose down the blood-slick porch and screen door.

He took a shower in the small pre-fab fiberglass stall on the second floor and got into clean jeans and a flannel shirt, and then he heard the doorbell ring. He looked out the bedroom window, saw a Lexus SUV parked in the dirt road out front. He put on a baseball cap, backward, to conceal the tattoo, and casually came down the stairs and opened the front door.

“Sorry to disturb you,” said a middle-aged man with no chin and thick wire-rim glasses.

“My dog ran off and I was wondering if you might have seen it.”

“Dog?” Dragomir said through the front screen.

“Oh, now, where’s my manners,” the man said. “I’m Sam Dupuis, from across the road.” Then the man paused expectantly.

“Andros,” Dragomir said. “Caretaker.”

Andros was a Polish name, but it also sounded Greek.

“Good to know you, Andros,” the neighbor said. “I thought I saw Hercules run down your driveway, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Very sorry,” Dragomir said with a smile. “Wish I could help. Hope you find him soon.”

45.

I found Diana in a break room, sitting by herself, the
Boston Globe
spread out on a round table before her. It didn’t look like she’d cracked it, though. The sections were arrayed but unopened. She was just waiting.

“Your coffee,” she said, holding out a cup. “Walk with me.” I followed her out. “They found Alexa’s purse under his bed,” she said. “He’d taken all her cash but was probably afraid to use her credit cards. The stolen Jaguar was found in a Tufts University garage.”

“That give up any location information?”

“It’s too old to have air bags let alone a nav system. But they did find trace quantities of a white powder.”

“Coke?”

“
Burundanga
powder. It’s an extract of the
borrachio
plant—also known as Colombian devil’s breath. A naturally occurring source of scopolamine.”

“An herbal date-rape drug.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard that half the admissions to Bogotá’s emergency rooms are caused by
burundanga
. Criminals spike their victims’ drinks with the stuff at nightclubs and brothels. It’s tasteless, odorless, and water-soluble. And it turns the victims into zombies, basically. Lucid, but totally submissive. A complete loss of will. So their victims will do what they’re told—they’ll withdraw cash from their ATMs and hand it over without arguing. And when it wears off, they have no recollection of what happened.” On the way to the stairs we passed the legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, the guy with the long gray hair and the expensive suit. Black curly chest hair sprouted out of his open shirt collar. He was walking briskly but seemed lost in thought, his head down.

As we climbed the stairs, I said, “Any phone records in his apartment, cell phone records, any of that stuff?”

“They’ve collected everything and they’re working it. Nothing so far.” As she opened the door to the seventh floor, I stopped. “Wasn’t that guy wearing a tie?” She looked at me in the dim light of the stairwell, then whirled around, and we went back down the stairs at a fairly good clip.

When we reached the interview room where I’d talked to Perreira, Diana opened the door, and she gasped.

I can’t say I was entirely surprised by what I saw, but it was grotesque all the same.

Mauricio Perreira’s body was twisted unnaturally, his face horribly contorted, frozen in a silent, agonized shriek. His lips were blue and his eyes bulged, the sclera mottled with blood from the burst capillaries. The classic signs of petechial hemorrhaging.

Fastened tightly around his neck like a tourniquet, like some kinky fashion statement, was the legal attaché’s burgundy silk necktie. It was only slightly darker than the bruising on his throat above and below the ligature.