“You think he knows but he’s not telling us?” she said.
“Yep.”
“Even if it gets his daughter killed?”
For a long time I said nothing. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“You know him,” she said. “I don’t.”
“No,” I said. “I thought I knew him. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Hmph,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh, man, this can’t be true.”
“What?”
“Oh, dear God, please don’t let this be true.”
“What are you talking about?”
For a quick second I took my eyes off the road to glance at Dorothy. She was staring at her BlackBerry. “That crazy stuff Alexa was saying? ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”
“Yeah?”
“I Googled it. Nick, it’s a lyric from a song by a rock group called Alter Bridge.”
“Okay.”
“The song’s called ‘Buried Alive.’”
29.
By the time I’d dropped Dorothy off at her apartment in Mission Hill, it was almost nine at night.
My apartment was a loft in the leather district, which may sound kinky, but actually refers to the six-square-block area of downtown Boston between Chinatown and the financial district, where the old red-brick buildings used to be shoe factories and leather tanneries and warehouses.
I found a parking space a few blocks away, cut through the alley into the grim service entrance and up the steel-treaded back stairwell to the back door on the fifth floor.
The loft was one large open space with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The bedroom was in an alcove, on the opposite side of the apartment from the bathroom. Bad design. In another alcove was a kitchen equipped with high-end appliances, none of which I’d ever used, except the refrigerator. There were a lot of cast-iron support columns and exposed brick and of course the obligatory exposed ductwork. The place was spare and functional and unadorned. Uncluttered.
I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that I was reacting against my upbringing in an immense mansion in Bedford, New York, stuffed with precious antiques. My brother and I couldn’t run around inside without knocking over some priceless Etruscan vase or a John Townsend highboy.
But maybe I just hate clutter.
The comedian George Carlin used to do a great routine about “stuff,” the crap we all go through life accumulating and shuffling around from place to place. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it, he said, a place to put your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. I have as little stuff as possible, but what I have is simple and good.
I went straight to the bathroom, stripped, and jumped in the shower. For a long time I stood there, feeling the hot water pound my head, my neck, my back.
Unable to get the image of poor Alexa Marcus out of my head. The raccoon eyes, the abject terror. It reminded me of one of the most harrowing Web videos I’ve ever seen: the beheading of a brave Wall Street Journal reporter some years ago by monsters in black hoods.
And that association filled me with dread.
I wondered what she meant by “buried alive.” Maybe she was locked in an underground bunker or vault of some kind.
When I shut off the water and reached for the towel I thought I heard a noise.
A snap or a click.
Or nothing.
I stopped, listened a moment longer, then began toweling myself off.
And heard it again. Definitely something.
Inside the apartment.
30.
I stared out through the halfway-open bathroom door, saw nothing.
In such an old building in the middle of a city at night, there were all sorts of sounds. Delivery trucks and garbage compactors and screeching brakes and car doors slamming and buses belching diesel. Car alarms, night and day.
But this was coming from inside my apartment for sure.
A scritch scritch scritch from the front of the loft.
Naked, still wet, I let the towel drop and nudged the bathroom door open a bit wider. Stepped out, dripping on the hardwood floor.
Listened harder.
The scritch scritch scritch even more distinct. It was definitely inside the loft, at the front.
Both of my firearms were out of reach. The SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic pistol was under my bed. But to reach the bedroom alcove I’d have to pass them first. I cursed the idiotic layout of the place, putting the bathroom so far from the bedroom. The other weapon, a Smith & Wesson M&P nine-millimeter, was in a floor safe under the kitchen floor.
Closer to them than to me.
The wooden floors, once scarred and dented, had been recently refinished. They were solid and silky-smooth and they didn’t squeak when you walked on them. Barefoot,