“If you look closely,” he said, “you’ll see each line is made up of dots. The dots represent cell tower hits from the three mobile phones belonging to Alexa Marcus, Mauricio Perreira, and an unknown person we’ll call Mr. X.”
“Who’s what color?”
“Blue is for Mauricio, as we’ll call him. White is for Alexa. Orange is for Mr. X.”
“So Mr. X came down from close to the New Hampshire border, it looks like.”
“Right.”
“Mind if I ask where you got this data?”
He inhaled slowly, making a rattling sound. “You can ask all you want.”
I leaned forward. “So they all met fifteen miles northwest of Boston in … is it Lincoln?”
“That’s right.”
“Were they all there at the same time?”
“Yes. For only five minutes. Mauricio and the abducted girl arrived together, of course. They were there for seventeen minutes. Mr. X stayed for only four or five minutes.”
They’d met in a wooded area, I saw. Near Sandy Pond, which was marked as conservation land. Remote, isolated after midnight: a good place for a rendezvous. So Alexa’s iPhone went from Boston to Lincoln and then north to Leominster. Which was where it was discarded.
Now I could see the pattern. Mauricio took her from the hotel to Lincoln, twenty minutes from Boston, where he handed her off to “Mr. X.”
While Mauricio went back to Boston—actually, to his apartment in Medford, just north of Boston—Mr. X was driving Alexa north. He tossed her phone out as they passed through Leominster. Presumably she stayed in the vehicle with him.
Then they crossed the border into New Hampshire.
“So the route stops in southern New Hampshire,” I said. “Nashua.”
“No, Mr. X’s mobile phone goes off the grid in Nashua. That could mean that he shut it off. Or it lost reception, and then he shut it off. Whatever, he hasn’t used it since.”
“Sloppy for him to keep his cell phone on,” I said.
“Well, to be fair, he assumed it was untraceable.”
“Is it?”
“No, actually. But there’s a difference between untraceable and untrackable. It’s like following a black box on the back of a truck. We don’t know what’s inside the box, but we know where it is. So we can’t determine his identity, but maybe we can find his location. Understand?”
“He’s in New Hampshire. Which means she probably is too. Maybe in or near Nashua.”
“I wouldn’t assume that. Mr. X might have passed through New Hampshire on his way to Canada.”
“That’s not a logical route if you’re driving all the way to Canada.”
He nodded in agreement.
“They’re in New Hampshire,” I said.
57.
The offices of Marcus Capital Management were on the sixth floor of Rowes Wharf. I gave the receptionist my name and waited in the luxuriously appointed lobby, on a gray suede couch. The floors were chocolate-brown hardwood and the walls were mahogany. An enormous flat-screen monitor on the wall showed the weather on one half of a split screen and financial news on the other, with a stock crawl at the bottom.
I didn’t have to wait even a minute before Marcus’s personal assistant appeared. She was a willowy redhead named Smoki Bacon, a stunningly beautiful, elegant young woman. This didn’t surprise me. Marcus had a reputation for hiring only beautiful women as admins, beauty contest winners, former Miss Whatevers. My mother, who’d been lovely and attractive in her prime, was the sole exception. She never looked like a runway model. She was more beautiful than that.
The curvaceous Smoki gave me a dazzling smile and asked if I wanted coffee or water. I said no.
“Marshall’s in a meeting right now, but he wants to see you as soon as it’s over. It might be a while, though. Would you like to come back a little later?”
“I’ll wait.”
“At least let me take you to a conference room, where you can use the phone and the computer.”
She showed me down a corridor. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said as we rounded a bend and passed by what was once the trading floor. There were thirty or forty workstations, all empty. All the computers were off. The place was as quiet as a tomb. “I just can’t tell you how worried sick we’ve all been about Alexa.”
“Well,” I said, not knowing how to reply, “keep the faith.”
“Your mom used to babysit for her sometimes, you know. She told me that.”
“I know.”
“Frankie’s the best.”
“I agree.”
“She calls me every once in a while just to check up on things. She really cares about Mr. Marcus.”
At the threshold to an empty conference room she put a hand