good health?” Kirill was saying when the static cleared.
The Iridium sat phone was encrypted, so Kirill spoke fairly openly, even though Dragomir never did. He never trusted technology. His reply was curt: “Is there anything else?”
“Nothing.”
He disconnected the call. The setting sun gave a golden cast to the freshly raked soil. His boots sank into the soft earth, the tread leaving precise impressions, like a plaster-of-Paris cast. Some of his footsteps crossed the deep tread of the backhoe loader’s tires.
He had a fleeting memory of the hard dirt prison yard, where sunlight never entered and no grass could grow. He’d liked lawns ever since.
Dragomir mounted the porch, past the air compressor on its long yellow extension cord, and pulled the screen door open. There were holes in the screen, so he opened and closed the wooden back door swiftly to keep out the bugs. The whole damned farmhouse was falling down. But he had no right to complain. The house and the land it sat on, nearly three hundred acres of forest in a remote part of New Hampshire, were owned by an old man who’d moved to Florida. The property hadn’t had a visitor in four years. Not even a caretaker.
So Dragomir had appointed himself the caretaker.
Even though the family trust had no idea.
As he went through the converted sunroom, he could hear the girl’s pathetic mewling over the computer speakers. On the monitor she twisted and clawed and screamed and writhed like some eerie green apparition.
The noise irritated him, so he hit a key to mute it.
42.
An hour later I was on the sixth floor of One Center Plaza with Diana, who looked exhausted, her eyes red-rimmed and bleary. The corkscrew tendrils of her hair were even more Medusan than usual. Yet she was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
She waited for them to hand me my visitor badge, then escorted me in.
“So how’d that happen?” I said quietly as we walked.
Not until we’d passed the row of offices belonging to the assistant special agents in charge did she reply. Gordon Snyder’s door was open, I noticed, but it was angled in such a way that I couldn’t see whether he was there.
“All I was told was, a CI tipped them off.”
A confidential informant. “Whose?”
No reply. We reached a warren of cubicles, most of them empty. It was still early.
Her cubicle was unmistakable.
It was the grade-school photos taped to the cubicle walls that marked it as her workspace: sweet-looking kids who obviously weren’t relatives of hers. And the curling clips from the Stowe (Vermont) Reporter and the Biddeford (Maine) Journal Tribune and the Boston Herald with headlines like SEX OFFENDER CHARGED IN GIRL’S DISAPPEARANCE. A close-up photo of a paisley-patterned bedspread. A photocopy of a note scrawled in block letters, a barely literate hand:
HI HONEY I BEEN WATCHING YOU I AM THE SAME PERSON THAT KIDNAPPED AN RAPE AN KILL ARDEN …
Things a normal person couldn’t bear to look at even once hung before her eyes every minute she sat at her desk.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I’m not cleared at that level.”
I could hear the annoying little snap of someone clipping fingernails at a nearby cubicle. “So who gave the order to roll the SWAT team?”
“The only person who can mobilize tactical is the SAC. But how did you know where to find Perreira?”
“I put a tracker on Taylor Armstrong.”
She smiled, nodded. “Nice.”
“Whoever did this just screwed up our best chance to find Alexa,” I said. “Where is he?”
“Downstairs in a locked interview room.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“You can’t.”
“Because I’m a private citizen?”
“That’s not the only reason. He’s not talking to anybody.”
“He’s lawyering up?”
“He’s invoking diplomatic immunity.”
“Who’s with him now?”
“Nobody. We’re in talks with Main Justice on how to handle this.”
“I know how to handle it.”
She smiled again. “No doubt.”
“Can you sneak me in there?”
“You serious?”
“Completely.”
“The answer is no. A legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate in Boston is on his way in. A man named…” She glanced at a scrawl on a Post-it pad next to her desk phone. “Cláudio Duarte Carvalho Barboza. Until he’s finished consulting with Perreira, no one can even enter the interview room.”
I stood up.
“Do me a favor and show me where he is,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just curious,” I said.
* * *
DIANA LED me down a flight of stairs to a closed, windowless room. A plain white door with a metal knob. No one standing around outside keeping watch.