suddenly, almost in a monotone. “I—I twist and turn in the darkest space and … I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy.”
“Oh, Lord,” Dorothy said.
“Shhh!” Marcus said. “Please!”
There was a low rumble, and suddenly the image pixelated: It froze, turned into thousands of tiny squares that broke apart, and then the screen went dark.
“No!” Marcus said. “Not again! Why is this happening?”
But then the video was back. Alexa was saying, “They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I—I don’t know what that means. They said you will. Please, Daddy, I don’t think I can hold out any longer.”
And the image went dark once again. We waited a few seconds, but this time it didn’t come back.
“Is that it?” Marcus said, looking wildly from me to Dorothy and back. “That’s the end of the video?”
“I’m sure it’s not the last,” I said.
“IR camera for sure,” Dorothy said. Infrared, she meant. The reason for the video’s monochrome, greenish cast. A video camera like that would have its own built-in infrared light source, invisible to the human eye.
“They’re holding her in total darkness,” I said.
Marcus shouted, “My little Lexie! What are they doing to her? Where is she?”
“They don’t want us to know yet,” I said. “It’s part of the pressure, the … cruelty. The not-knowing.”
Marcus put a hand over his eyes. His lower lip was trembling, his face was flushed. He was sobbing noiselessly.
“I really do think she’s lying down,” Dorothy said. “Just based on the appearance of her face.”
“So what happened to the image at the end?” I said. “What caused it to break up?”
“Some kind of transmission error, maybe.”
“I’m not so sure. You notice that low-pitched sound? Sounded like a car or a truck nearby.”
Dorothy nodded. “A big old truck, maybe. They’re probably near traffic. Probably right off a main road or a highway or something.”
“Nope,” I said. “Not a main road. Not a busy street. That was the first vehicle we heard. So that tells us she’s near a road but not a busy one.” I turned to Marcus. “What’s Mercury?”
He lifted his hand from his eyes. They were scrunched and red and flooded with tears. “No idea.”
“And what was all that about ‘I’m too weak and I can’t change’ and ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”
“Who the hell knows,” he said, his voice phlegmy. He cleared his throat. “She’s scared out of her mind.”
“But it’s not the way she normally talks, is it?”
“She’s terrified. She was just … babbling!”
“Was she quoting a poem, maybe?”
Marcus looked blank.
“It sounds like a reference to something. Like she was reciting something. Doesn’t sound familiar at all?”
He shook his head.
“A book?” I suggested. “Maybe something you used to read to her when she was a little kid?”
“I, you know…” He faltered. “You know, her mother read to her. And your mother. I—I never did. I really wasn’t around very much.”
And he put a hand over his eyes again.
* * *
AS WE drove away from Marcus’s house into the gloom of a starless night—away from what I now thought of as Marshall Marcus’s compound, defended as it was by armed guards—I told Dorothy about how Marshall Marcus had lost it all.
She reacted with the same kind of slack-jawed disbelief that I had. “You telling me this guy lost ten billion dollars like it dropped behind the sofa cushions?”
“Basically.”
“That can happen?”
“Easy.”
She shook her head. “See, this is why I’m glad I never went into finance. I’m always losing my keys and my glasses. If you can lose something, I’ll lose it.”
She was multitasking, tapping away at her BlackBerry as she talked.
“Remind me not to give you any money to manage,” I said.
“You have any idea what Mercury is?”
“Marshall doesn’t know. Why should I?”
“Marshall says he doesn’t know.”
“True.”
“Maybe it’s, like, one of his offshore funds or something. Money he’s stashed somewhere.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“If the kidnappers know they lost their whole investment, they also know he’s broke. So ‘Mercury’ can’t refer to money.”
“Maybe they figure he’s got something stashed away somewhere. All these guys hide chunky nuts of money away. They’re like squirrels. Evil squirrels.”
“But why not just say it straight? Why not just say, wire three hundred million dollars into such-and-such an offshore account or we kill the kid?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Well, what’s more valuable than money?”
“A virtuous woman.” Dorothy pursed her lips.
“Some proprietary trading algorithm, maybe. Some investment formula he invented.”
She shook her head, kept tapping away. “A trading algorithm? Guy’s busted flat. Whatever secret