stories about people being buried alive—she couldn’t bring herself to finish them. How could anyone?
Why was her fevered magpie mind dwelling on all those awful stories?
After all, she was living her own worst nightmare.
34.
“Her phone’s on and transmitting,” Diana said.
“Where is she?” I said.
“Leominster.” She said it wrong, like most people new to the state. It’s supposed to rhyme with “lemming,” almost.
“That’s an hour away.” I looked at my watch. “Maybe less, this time of night. How precise a location did they give you?”
“They’re e-mailing me lat-and-long coordinates, in degrees and minutes.”
“Okay,” I said. “That could be as big an area as a thousand square meters, the way these things work. But once I’m there I can start searching for likely locations.”
“Give me ten minutes.”
“Go back to bed. Otherwise, you’ll be a wreck tomorrow. I got this.”
“Technically, I put in the request. I’m not allowed to pass on the information to someone outside the Bureau.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll drive, you navigate.”
* * *
I QUICKLY gathered some equipment, including the Smith & Wesson and a handheld GPS unit, a ruggedized yellow Garmin eTrex.
As we drove, I told her what had happened in the hours since I’d seen her last: the surveillance tape at the Graybar Hotel, the guy who’d spiked Alexa’s drink and driven her away. Her “friend” Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter, who’d cooperated in the abduction for some reason I didn’t yet understand. The streaming video. Marshall Marcus’s admission that he’d taken money from some dangerous people in a last-ditch attempt to save his fund, though he lost it all anyway.
Diana furrowed her brow. “Let me check the phone detail records.” She began scrolling through her BlackBerry.
“Yeah, I’d like to know when the last phone call was, in or out.”
“The last outgoing call hit the tower in Leominster at two thirty-seven A.M.”
“Almost twenty-four hours ago,” I said. “How long did it last?”
More scrolling. “About ten seconds.”
“Ten seconds?” I said. “That’s pretty short.”
I heard her scroll some more, and then she said, “The last call was to nine-one-one. Emergency. But it doesn’t look like the call ever went through. It hit the tower, but it must have been cut off.”
“I’m impressed. She must have been pretty spaced-out from the drugs, but she had the wherewithal to try to call for help. What calls did she receive around then?”
“A bunch of incoming, between three in the morning to around noon today.”
“Can you see who they’re from?”
“Yeah. Four different numbers. Two landlines in Manchester-by-the-Sea.”
“Her dad.”
“One mobile phone, also Marcus’s. The fourth is another mobile phone registered to Taylor Armstrong.”
“So Taylor did try to call. Interesting.”
“Why?”
“If she was trying to reach Alexa, that may indicate she was actually worried about her friend. Which indicates she might not have known what happened to her.”
“Or that she was feeling guilty about what she’d done and wanted to make sure Alexa was okay.”
“Right,” I said. For a long time we didn’t talk. There was no quick way to Leominster. No shortcut. I had to take the Mass Turnpike to 95 North and then onto Route 2. Leominster is on Route 2, an east-west highway that winds through Lincoln and Concord and then keeps going west to New York State.
But I wasn’t too concerned about the speed limit. I had a federal law-enforcement officer in the front seat next to me. If ever I had a chance of beating a speeding ticket, this was it.
It had started to rain. I switched on the wipers. The only vehicles on the road at this time of night were trucks. An old tractor-trailer was just ahead of me, rubber mudguards flapping, sheeting water onto my windshield. I clicked the wipers faster and changed lanes.
I began to sense her looking at me.
“What?” I said.
“Why is there blood on your collar? And please don’t tell me you cut yourself shaving.”
I explained about the break-in at my loft. Gave her my theory that Gordon Snyder was behind it. As I talked, she shook her head slowly, and when I was done, she said, “That’s not FBI. That’s not how we work. We don’t do that kind of stuff.”
“Not officially.”
“If Snyder wanted to monitor your e-mail, he’d do it remotely. He wouldn’t send a couple of guys in to do a black-bag job.”
I thought for a moment. “You may have a point.”
We went quiet again. I was about to ask her about what had happened between us—or almost happened between us—earlier in the day, when she said abruptly, “Why is her phone still on?”