sources plotted those numbers along with Alexa’s phone number on a map of cell phone towers and was able to chart the route they traveled.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “How the hell did he get a map of cell phone towers?”
“Don’t ask. Bottom line, the path seems to point up north to New Hampshire.”
“Meaning what? The kidnapper came down from New Hampshire?”
“Yes, but more important, it means he’s probably got her up there now.”
“Where, specifically?”
“That’s all we know—New Hampshire. Somewhere in New Hampshire.”
“Well, that helps, I guess,” Diana said. “But we’re going to need more data points than that. Otherwise it’s a lost cause.”
“How about the tattoo?”
She shook her head. “Nothing came back on that from any of our legats.”
“Well, I’ve got an excellent source in Moscow who’s making some calls for me right now.”
“Moscow?”
“That owl is Russian prison ink.”
“Who’s your source on that?”
“Actually, my twenty-four-year-old militant-vegan office manager.”
She gave me a look.
“I’m serious. It’s complicated. That owl tattoo identifies members of Sova, a gang of former Russian prison inmates.”
She took out a small notepad and jotted something down. “If Alexa’s kidnapper is Russian, does that mean he’s working for Russians?”
“Not for sure. But I’d put money on it. My source in Moscow says Sova members are often hired by Russian oligarchs to do dirty work when they need plausible deniability. He’s helping me narrow down the pool of suspects. Meanwhile, I want to find out what David Schechter’s role in all this really is.”
“How’s that going to help find Alexa?”
I told her about the exchange I’d overheard between David Schechter and Marshall Marcus.
“You think Schechter is controlling Marcus?” she said.
“Clearly.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe his wife’s shady past has something to do with it.”
She cocked a brow, and I explained what I’d found out about Belinda Marcus’s last profession. “I have a PI digging into it right now,” I said. “To see what else he can find. But I don’t think that’s it. It’s too recent and too trivial.”
“Then what’s the hold Schechter has over him?”
“That’s what I plan to find out.”
“How?”
I told her.
“That’s illegal,” she said.
“Then you didn’t hear it from me.”
“It doesn’t bother you that you’d be committing a crime?”
I shrugged. “As a great man once said, in certain extreme situations, the law is inadequate. In order to shame its inadequacy, it is necessary to act outside the law.”
“Martin Luther King?”
“Close. The Punisher.”
She looked confused.
“I guess you don’t read comic books,” I said.
67.
Dragomir drove out to the main road, relieved to pass only a lumber truck. Not someone from the town who might notice a police squad car coming out of the Alderson property and gossip about it later, maybe ask questions.
He knew where to go. Earlier, he’d driven around the area, scouting escape routes in case it came to that, until he’d discovered a deserted stretch of narrow road that would do well. A place where the road curved sharply on the lip of a ravine.
Of course there was a guardrail. But not on the long straight stretch leading into it, where the plunge was just as steep.
He pulled over at a point where he could see the traffic in both directions. There wasn’t any. Then he drove a bit farther down the road until he was about twenty feet or so from an edge where there was no guardrail.
Glancing around again, he opened the trunk of the police cruiser, lifted Officer Kent’s body out, and quickly carried it around to the open driver’s door. There he carefully positioned the body. Then he lifted the black plastic trash bags from the floor of the trunk.
An autopsy wasn’t likely. Mostly likely they’d see a police officer killed in a tragic car crash and it would end there. Anyway, by the time any autopsy was done, he’d be long gone. He only cared about what might be found in the next twenty-four hours.
Before he pushed the car into the ravine he put it in drive. If the gear selector were in neutral when the crash was discovered, any skilled investigator would immediately figure out what had really happened.
He didn’t make that kind of mistake.
68.
At a few minutes after nine at night, the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston, was an obsidian monolith. A few lighted windows scattered here and there like a corncob with not many kernels remaining. Some of the building’s tenants were open round the clock.
But not the law offices of Batten Schechter, on the forty-eighth floor. No paralegals toiling frantically through the