and she enjoyed mine.
Still, when I got a call from Diana telling me that she’d moved to Seattle, I quickly went from baffled to wounded. I cared for her deeply, and I was surprised she didn’t feel the same. I’m not used to women walking away from me, but this wasn’t just a male ego thing. I was disappointed in myself for having misread her so badly. Until then I’d always considered my ability to read others one of my natural talents.
She wasn’t the type to insist on a Deep Talk, like so many women. In that way, her emotional architecture resembled mine. So the end of my relationship with Diana Madigan went into my mental cold-case file.
But I’ve always found unsolved cases irresistible.
“I look like a wreck, and you know it,” she said. “I’m just getting off the night shift, and on my way home.”
“Since when do you work nights?”
“I’ve been up all night texting predators, pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl.”
“Yeah? What a coincidence. Me too.”
“This one sicko is fifty-one,” she said, ignoring me. Her work was something she never joked about. “We arranged to meet at a motel in Everett. Will he be surprised.”
“So you’re still working CARD?”
“Believe it or not.”
CARD stood for the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment unit. It was heart-wrenching work. The things she saw: I never knew how she could keep doing it. I thought by now she’d have burned out.
She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and I could only assume she didn’t have kids either. I wondered whether she ever would, having seen what could happen to them.
“Why don’t I give you a lift home,” I said.
“How do you know I don’t have my car here?”
“Because you’d have parked in the underground garage like all FBI employees do. Plus, you’d be carrying your car keys in your left hand. Don’t forget, I know you.”
She looked away. Embarrassed? Unreadable, in any case. As always, the emotional equivalent of Kryptonite. “My apartment’s in the South End. I was going to take the T.”
I opened the passenger-side door for her.
18.
“So now the next shift takes over texting your predators?” I said.
“We can’t do that,” Diana said. “Perps can sometimes sense a change in respondents. Even in short message texts there can be subtle nuances in tone and rhythm.”
As I drove I caught the faintest whiff of her perfume. It was something I’d never smelled on another woman: rose and violet and cedar, sophisticated and haunting and unforgettable.
Neuroscientists tell us that nothing brings back the past as quickly and powerfully as a smell. Apparently the olfactory nerve arouses something in the limbic center of your brain where you store long-term memories on your mental hard drive.
Diana’s perfume brought back a rush of memories. Mostly happy ones.
“How long have you been in Boston?” I asked.
“A little over a year. I heard through the grapevine you might be here. Did Stoddard send you here to open a satellite office or something?”
“No, I’m on my own now.” I wondered whether she’d been asking around about me, and I suppressed a smile.
“You like it?”
“It would be perfect if the boss weren’t such a hard-ass.”
She laughed ruefully. “Nick Heller, company man.”
“You said Pembroke Street, right?”
“Right. Off Columbus Ave. Thanks for doing this.”
“My pleasure.”
“Listen, I’m sorry about Spike,” she said.
“Spike?”
“Gordon Snyder. Spike’s his childhood nickname. He’s spent his entire life trying to make people forget it.”
“Spike?”
“Don’t ever tell him I told you. You promise?”
“I can think of some better nicknames for him than Spike,” I said. “None of them very nice. So how did you know I met with him?”
She shrugged. “I saw you storm out. Looked like it didn’t go too well.”
“Did he tell you what we talked about?”
“Sure.”
I wondered whether she’d followed me out too. Maybe this meeting wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe she heard I was in the building and wanted to say hi.
Maybe that was all she wanted.
I dropped another note into the cold-case file marked MADIGAN, DIANA.
“So what’s with his fixation on Marshall Marcus?”
“Marcus is his great white whale.”
“But why?”
“Guys like that, the more elusive the target, the more obsessed they become. That may sound familiar, Nico.”
Tell me about it, I thought. “Well, he seemed a whole lot more interested in taking down Marcus than finding his daughter.”
“Maybe because he’s in charge of financial crimes.”
“Aha.”
“I have to say, I don’t understand why you were meeting with the head of the financial crimes unit if you were looking for a missing girl.”
I was beginning to wonder the same thing.