One-Way Ticket (23 page)

The harbor, the captain’s caps, the fish, the ocean.

The sound of the wake of a passing boat slapping against a hull. The glow of light shining through a porthole. Robert duct-taped and imprisoned in the cabin of a boat.

The ransom money, tossed off a bridge, then retrieved from the Merrimack River… by somebody on a boat.

If not Paulie Russo’s boat… whose?

Paulie or one of his goons could have borrowed somebody else’s boat to retrieve the bag of ransom money under the bridge, of course. Otherwise, I had no brainstorms.

I picked up the photo of Robert and his friend with their fish and the one of the four adults sitting at a table outdoors by a harbor and took them downstairs.

Teresa was unloading the dishwasher in the kitchen. When I walked in, she stood up, wiped her hands on the fronts of her jeans, and gave me a halfhearted smile. “So? Did you learn anything?”

“Judge Lancaster just called me,” I said. “She spoke to Robert a short time ago. She heard his voice.”

“He’s alive, then.”

“Yes.”

“But they’ve still got him.”

“Yes. But—”

“They’re asking for more money, is that it?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Just like you said they would,” said Teresa.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m a genius.” I told her what Adrienne had told me.

“So she’s going to get the money?”

“She’s going to try,” I said, “but that’s a lot to raise in twenty-four hours, even for her. She’s not sure she can do it.”

“If she can’t…”

“We’ll get more time out of them,” I said. “They’ve got to know they’re being unreasonable. They want their money. We’ll get him back.”

Teresa went over and sat at the table. She looked out the window for a minute, then turned to me. “You really think so? You think we’ll get him back?”

“I do,” I said. I sat down across from her and put the two photos on the table.

She looked at them, then at me. “You took these from his room? How come?”

I pointed at the one showing the four grown-ups sitting at the outdoor table. “Do you have any idea when and where this was taken?”

“Not a clue. You can see that they’re all quite a bit younger. I always wondered why Robert framed it and kept it there on his shelf. He doesn’t have a photo of Sam anywhere.”

“What about this one?” I turned the photo of Robert and his friend with their fish so Teresa could see it better.

She nodded. “That’s Robert with his—cousin, I guess you’d call him. Jimmy. Jessica’s nephew.” She looked at me. “You know what happened to Jimmy?”

I nodded.

“He gambled, too, you know.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure there’s no connection.”

“Gambling
is
a connection,” she said. “Dalt gambled. It wrecked our marriage.” She shrugged. “Robert worshipped Jimmy. He always seemed like a good kid. Jimmy, I mean. He was several years older than Robert, but they got along like brothers. It was tragic, what happened to him. Robert took it very hard.”

“When was this photo taken?” I said. “Do you know?”

“I remember it very well,” she said. “It was a Saturday in September. Robert had just started high school, and it was Jimmy’s first year in college. Robert was thrilled that they were getting together for a day of fishing. He sort of figured that when Jimmy went off to college they wouldn’t see much of each other. He got up around four that morning, and Jimmy and his father came and picked him up.”

“Jimmy and Mike Warner?”

She nodded. “They were going out on Mike’s boat. Up around Gloucester, I think. They had a wonderful day of fishing, even though it was quite stormy.”

“Mike has a boat?” I said.

She nodded. “Yes. Robert went out with him and Jimmy several times.” She hesitated. “Not since Jimmy disappeared, though.”

I touched the two photos. “Do you mind if I borrow these?” She shrugged. “I don’t care. Robert will want them back.” I stood up. “I’ll return them, I promise. I’ve got to get going.” She walked me to the front door and gave me a hug. “Thank you,” she said.

“I haven’t done anything,” I said. “Keep in touch, okay?”

“I promise,” I said.

As I drove back to Boston, three thoughts kept colliding with each other in my brain:

The kidnappers’ CD was filmed on a boat.

The bag of ransom money had been picked up in a boat.

Mike Warner owned a boat.

I
GOT BACK HOME A
little after two in the afternoon, driving in a misty spring rain that had started sometime while I was at Teresa Samborski’s house in Acton. Henry was pretty happy to see me. I scootched down so he could lap my face for a while, then let him out back.

I checked my phone for messages. None. My thoughts flipped to Evie. It was not yet noontime in California. I assumed she’d call me when she knew something.

Henry yipped from the back porch. He didn’t enjoy the rain.

I let him in, gave him a Milk-Bone, then went into my den. I put the two photos I’d taken from Robert’s room on my desk and found a magnifying glass in my desk drawer.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I hoped I’d recognize it if I saw it.

I detected nothing that struck me as significant on the photo of Robert and Jimmy holding up their big striped bass, although when I magnified the fly that was hooked in the corner of Robert’s fish’s mouth, I could see that it was a chartreuse Lefty’s Deceiver. He’d caught it on a fly rod. Good for him.

I turned my attention to the photo of the four adults at the outdoor table. I did it systematically, moving from the bottom, left to right, then back across right to left so that I wouldn’t fail to examine every square centimeter of the photo.

I was trying to figure out where this outdoor bar or restaurant was, and I saw what I’d been looking for in the upper-left corner, in the background. It was a banner flying under the American flag from a flagpole on the wharf that angled across the top corner of the photo. In the breeze, the banner was almost completely unfurled and I could read the fuzzy letters on it: CAY.

There was another letter at the end, but the way the tip of the banner was flapping in the wind, all I could detect was the beginning of the curve of that last letter. The left edge of an O, maybe. CAYO.

Or a G or a Q or a C.

I wrote down each possible combination. CAYO. CAYG. CAYQ. CAYC. I stared at the combinations of letters.

Meaningless.

I blinked. Looked away. Looked again.

Then I saw it. YC.

A harbor in the background. Captain’s caps on the men, bikini tops on the women. Seagulls. Dozens of moored boats. They were drinking at an outdoor table on a veranda or an open-air porch or a patio.

YC. Yacht Club.

If Dalt and Jessica Lancaster and Mike and Kimmie Warner were having drinks at a yacht club, and if Mike owned a boat, chances were this CAYC was the yacht club where he kept it moored.

I Googled CAYC on my computer, then scrolled down through Mr. Google’s seemingly endless list of hits.

The Canadian Association for Young Children.

The County Antrim Yacht Club. I clicked on that one.

County Antrim was in Ireland. Maybe the two couples had this picture taken when they were vacationing in Ireland together.

If so, it didn’t help me.

I kept going.

The Corning Area Youth Center.

The Community Alliance for Young Children.

The Cambridgeshire Association of Youth Clubs.

Then…
aha.
The Cape Ann Yacht Club.

Cape Ann was a bump of land detached from the mainland by the Annisquam River, a peninsula on the northern tip of the curve of Massachusetts Bay. The artsy seaport village of Rockport and the famous old fishing community of Gloucester were on Cape Ann. So was the town of Essex, home of the best clam shacks in New England, on the north side, and Manchester-by-the-Sea, a pretty seaside village on the southeastern side of the cape.

Cape Ann was less than an hour’s drive from Boston, a likely place for somebody living in one of the suburbs to keep a boat moored.

I clicked on this CAYC link. The Cape Ann Yacht Club was located in Essex, about twenty-five or thirty miles south of where the Merrimack River emptied into the sea at Plum Island. In other words, about an hour’s boat ride along the coast of the North Shore and up the Merrimack River to where I threw a quarter of a million dollars off the iron bridge.

The CAYC Web site gave its address and the phone numbers for the business office, the marina, and the restaurant.

The question I needed to answer was: Did Mike Warner keep his boat moored there?

I knew what Gordie Cahill would do. He called it “social engineering.” A delicious euphemism. “Soshing,” in the shorthand of PIs, was the art of manipulating people so that they’d divulge information they weren’t supposed to divulge. Soshing required lying, or at least exaggerating and fudging and distorting the truth. As long as it wasn’t specifically illegal, Gordie said, you did it. You had to do it because everybody else did it. If you didn’t, somebody less scrupulous than yourself would, and pretty soon you’d be out of business.

Effective soshing usually involved what they called “pretexting,” creating a false pretext to explain who you were and why you needed the information you wanted. You wouldn’t impersonate a police officer. That was specifically illegal, and therefore dangerous and stupid pretexting. But there was no law against impersonating a bank officer, or a customer-service representative of the telephone company, or an underwriter from a life insurance company. That was clever and effective pretexting.

Pretexting, like soshing, required lying, or at least serious deception, which PIs like Gordie rationalized the way deceit has been rationalized since long before Machiavelli institutionalized it in
The Prince:
The ends justify the means.

My end was to figure out if Mike Warner’s boat had been the setting for the ransom video starring a duct-taped boy named Robert Lancaster, or if Mike’s was the boat that had picked up the trash bag containing a quarter of a million dollars from the Merrimack River. Or, most likely, both.

Because I didn’t know whom I could trust, I had to accept the likelihood that the means to my end would require some soshing and pretexting and other difficult and uncomfortable deceptions.

I could justify it.

I was a lawyer. We lawyers, of course, were sworn to uphold the law. But lawyers social-engineered and pretexted all the time, especially with each other. We never called it lying. We called it Doing What It Takes to Win.

Laypeople think we lawyers are sleazy and conniving and bloodthirsty. We are the butt of some truly mean-spirited jokes. We tell some pretty nasty lawyer jokes ourselves. We think they’re funny, although when nonlawyers tell them they’re just mean-spirited.

But we don’t believe them. We lawyers have gotten a bad rap. We’re misunderstood. We’re at least as honorable and lovable as the next guy. Whatever we do, it’s because we’re committed to our clients. Our work is adversarial. That’s how the law in America works. There’s a winner and a loser. Our clients want to win. So do we. Winning is our job.

So we do what it takes, within the bounds of the law. Rarely do our clients think we’re sleazy or bloodthirsty. When we don’t win, in fact, our clients blame us for not being as sleazy and bloodthirsty as we should have been. For lawyers, the clients are the ones whose opinions count.

I sat there at my desk and thought about it for several minutes. Then I took a deep breath, picked up my cell phone, and dialed the number for the marina at the Cape Ann Yacht Club.

A raspy-voiced man answered. “Cape Ann Yacht Club. This is Dave.”

“Hey, Dave,” I said. “It’s Phil calling from Marine Engines over in Beverly? I’m looking at a recall notice here on some engine parts for—hang on—okay, the name is Warner. Michael Warner? My records are showing he’s got his boat docked there?”

“Warner?” said Dave. “Sorry. It’s not ringing a bell. You want to spell it for me?”

I spelled Warner for him.

“I’m looking on my computer,” he mumbled. “Hm, Walter, um, Wexler. Nope. We got no Warner. You don’t mean Walter, do you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s Warner. Well, damn. So now what’m I s’pose to do? I gotta get this recall notice to him, you know? There’s this whole liability thing.”

“You don’t have a home or business number for him?”

“Yeah. He’s not answering. It says Cape Ann Yacht Club on these papers, man.”

“Sorry I can’t help you,” he said.

“I am screwed,” I said. “How could this be wrong? It says right here in black and white. Cape Ann Yacht Club.”

Dave was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Hang on a minute there, Phil. Lemme try something for you.”

I hung on for close to five minutes.

“Hey, Phil?” he said when he came back on the line. “You still there?”

“Still here,” I said.

“Okay,” said Dave, “good luck. I just talked to Peggy, who’s our assistant manager? She’s been here like forever. She remembers Michael Warner. He kept his boat moored here up until a couple years ago. A Bertram, right?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s right. A Bertram.”

“Okay. Peggy says Mr. Warner moved his boat over to the Kettle Cove Marina in Gloucester. That was two years ago last September, before I started working here. What happened was, they did a lot of renovations here? Built all new wharfs, expanded the restaurant, updated the security. Cameras and keypad locks and motion-activated floodlights, hired a night watchman. Fees nearly tripled, and a lot of folks, I guess, went looking for something, um, less upscale. Give Kettle Cove a try. Here, I got their number. You got a pencil?”

“I owe you, man,” I said. “Okay, I got a pencil. Shoot.”

Dave read a phone number to me. “You’ll probably talk to Sandy. She’s a good kid. You can tell her it was me who gave you her number.”

“Next time I’m up your way,” I said, “I’m gonna buy you a beer. You have saved my scrawny butt today.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it. Glad to help.”

After I disconnected from Dave, I let out a deep breath. This pretexting and social engineering was nerve-racking.