detachment. I don’t know who first came up with the nickname “Romeo,” but it stuck.
After he was wounded in Afghanistan, and his VA therapy ended, however, he told us to stop calling him Romeo and start calling him George.
* * *
I MET him in the enormous white RV, bristling with antennas, that served as his combination home and mobile office. He’d parked it in an underground garage in a Holiday Inn in Dedham. That was typical for him. He preferred to meet in out-of-the-way locations. He seemed to live his life on the lam. As if someone were out to get him.
I opened the van door and entered the dimly lit interior.
“Heller.” His voice came out of the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could see him sitting on a stool, his back to me, before a bank of computer monitors and such.
“Hey, George. Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”
“I take it the GPS tracker was successful.”
“Absolutely. It was brilliant. Thank you.”
“Next time please remember to check your e-mail.”
I nodded, held out the Nokia cell phone I’d taken from Mauricio’s apartment. He swiveled and turned his face toward me.
What was left of his face.
I’d never gotten used to seeing it, so each time it gave me a jolt. It was a horrible welter of ropy scar tissue, some strands paste-white, others an inflamed red. He had nostrils and a slash of a mouth, and eyelids the army surgeons had crafted from patches of skin taken from his inner thigh. The stitch marks were still prominent.
Fortunately, Devlin was able to breathe without too much pain now. He was able to see out of one eye.
But he was not easy to look at. He’d become a monster. I suppose there was some sort of irony in the fact that his physical appearance, which had defined him for so long, defined him still.
“I assume you know how to retrieve numbers from the call log,” he said. He spoke in a raspy whisper, his vocal cords ruined, and his mouth often made a wet clicking noise, the sound of tissue in the wrong place.
“Even I know how to do that.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“The only phone number on here, dialed or retrieved, is for a mobile phone. That’s probably his contact—whoever hired him to abduct the girl. If anyone can locate the bad guy from his phone, it’s you.”
“Why didn’t you ask the FBI for help?”
“Because I’m not sure who I can trust there.”
“The answer is no one. Why are you working with them, anyway? I thought you left all that government crap behind.”
“Because I need them. Whatever it takes to get Alexa back.”
He breathed in and out noisily. “No comment.”
He despised all government agencies and viewed them with extreme paranoia. They were the enemy. They were all too powerful and malevolent and I think he blamed every one of them for the Iraqi IED that had detonated his Humvee’s gas tank. He didn’t seem to credit the heroic army plastic surgeons who’d saved his life and given him at least some semblance of a face, grotesque though it was. But who could blame him for being angry?
He tilted his head in a funny way to inspect the phone. He preferred to work in low light, even near-darkness, because his eye had become hypersensitive to the light. “Ah, a Nokla 8800. This is no ordinary burner.”
“You mean Nokia.”
He showed it to me. “Can you read, Nick? It says NOKLA.”
He was right. It said NOKLA. “A knockoff?”
He punched out a few numbers on the phone. “Yep, the IMEI confirms it.”
“The what?”
“The serial number.” He slid off the back cover and popped the battery out. “A Shenzhen Special,” he said, holding it up. I leaned close. The battery had Chinese characters all over it. “Ever look on eBay and see a special sale on Nokia phones—brand-new, half price? They’re all made in China.”
I nodded. “If you order mobile phones over the Internet, you don’t have to risk going into Walmart or Target and having your face show up on a surveillance camera,” I said. I immediately regretted the choice of words. What he’d give to be able to walk into a Walmart without encountering the averted looks, the squeamishness, the screams of children.
Devlin abruptly turned to look at one of his screens. A green dot was flashing.
“Speaking of tracking devices, do you have one on you?”
“None that I know of.”
“Didn’t I tell you to take precautions coming here?”