computers, which wasn’t true. Not yet, anyway. Still, he was sixteen, which meant that he thought he was better at everything. And that just pissed Dorothy off.
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “The person whose phone you want me to locate…” She glanced at Gabe in annoyance. She was always discreet about the work she did for me, but she was being particularly careful.
“Can we speak in private, Nick?”
“Gabe, give me two minutes,” I said.
“Fine,” he snapped, and left my office.
* * *
“SOUNDS LIKE you’re actually taking the case,” Dorothy said. “Will wonders never cease.”
I nodded.
“Couldn’t pass up the money?”
I replied with sarcasm, “Yeah, it’s all about the money.”
“You got a problem with money?”
“No, it’s … it’s complicated. This is not about Marshall Marcus. I happen to like his daughter. I’m worried about her.”
“Why is he freaking out? I mean, she’s seventeen, right? Drives into town, probably to some club, hooks up with a guy. That’s what these kids do.”
“You sleep around a lot when you were her age, Dorothy?”
She gave me a stern look and held up a warning forefinger with a long lilac fingernail. I didn’t understand how she could type with nails that long.
I smiled. As little as I knew about her sex life, I knew she was hardly the promiscuous type.
“I don’t get it either,” I admitted.
“I mean, I understand why the dad could be losing it if this was right after she got snatched in that parking lot. But that was years ago, right?”
“Right. I think he knows more than he’s telling me.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you need to ask him some direct questions.”
“I will. So tell me about Facebook.”
“Tell you about Facebook? All you need to know, Nick, is it’s not for you.”
“I mean Alexa. She must be on Facebook, right?”
“I think it’s a legal requirement for all teenagers,” she said. “Like the draft, back in the day.”
“Maybe there’s something on her Facebook page. Don’t kids post everything they do every second?”
“What makes you think I know the first thing about teenagers?”
“See what she has on Facebook, okay?”
“You can’t do that unless you’re one of her ‘friends.’”
“Can’t you just hack her password?”
She shrugged. “I’ll look into it.”
“So what’s the problem with locating her iPhone?”
“It’s just about impossible unless you’re law enforcement.”
“I thought there was some way for iPhone owners to track down their lost phones.”
“We’d need her Mac user name and password. And I’m guessing she doesn’t share things like passwords with Daddy.”
“You can’t crack it, or hack it, or whatever you do?”
“Yeah, I can just snap my fingers and I’m in, just like magic. No, Nick, that takes time. I’d have to make a list of her pets’ names and any important dates, and try the ten most common passwords, and that’s a crapshoot. Even if I do succeed, odds are we won’t get anything, because she’d have had to activate the MobileMe finder on her phone, and I doubt she did. She’s seventeen and probably not real big into the technology.”
“Probably not.”
“Fastest way is ask AT&T to ping the phone through their network.”
“Which they’ll only do for law enforcement,” I said. “There’s got to be some other way to find this girl’s phone.”
“Not that I know of.”
“So you’re giving up.”
“I said not that I know of. I didn’t say I’m giving up. I never give up.” She looked up and noticed Gabe lurking outside my office door. “Anyway, I think your son is getting hungry,” she said with a wink.
11.
I took Gabe to Mojo’s, a bar down the street that served lunch. This was a typical Boston bar—five flat screens all showing sports or sports news shows, lots of Red Sox and Celtics memorabilia, a foosball table in the back, pub food like wings and nachos and burgers, a sticky wooden-plank floor. They served good cold beer as well as the infamous local brew, Brubaker’s, which even I had to admit was pretty bad. The patrons were a democratic mix of stockbrokers and cabdrivers. A local reviewer once compared Mojo’s regulars to the cantina scene in Star Wars: that collection of weird-looking intergalactic creatures. Herb, the owner, liked that so much he had the article framed and put on the wall.
“I like that new girl you hired,” Gabe said.
“Jillian?”
“Yeah, she’s cool.”
“She’s different, that’s for sure. Now, tell me: Is Nana abusing you?”
“Nah, she’s cool.”
“How about Lilly? How’s Lilly treating you?”
Lilly was my mother’s dog, a shar-pei/English mastiff mix she’d rescued from the pound. Lilly was not only the ugliest dog in the world