supple energy- like a coiled spring or a watchful cat. It was in her every fluid motion, and it was even in her voice, in the chords of certainty and confidence of her pleasant contralto. She flexed her fingers, and I watched the muscles shift smoothly in her wrists and forearms.
“And what’s your personal gripe?” I asked.
She puckered her lips, as if she’d tasted something sour. “I guess I don’t like being bullied,” she said.
I thought about that for a while. “It’s hard to imagine anyone trying.”
Jane gave a humorless laugh. “You’d be surprised,” she said. She drained her seltzer, and I poured another glass. “It was a few years ago, when I was running that little biotech in Cambridge. They’d had some problems- with low production yields and a couple of nasty lawsuits- but we’d sorted those out and the worst was behind us, and we were shopping for a new credit facility. We were talking seriously to three big lenders when, one day, I got a call from an analyst- one of the few who covered the company.
“I knew him, of course. He was from a big regional firm, and I’d talk to him a couple of times a quarter at least. He was one of those frat-boy-gone-fat types, but he’d always been friendly and reasonably straightforward. That day, it took him a while to get to the point.
“He started asking about our hunt for new credit, which I had just talked about to a bunch of investors and analysts- including him- two weeks before. I thought he was looking for some inside dope, and I started to explain that I wasn’t going to tell him anything I hadn’t told the group, but he cut me off. That wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, he said, and he started telling me how there were other motivated lenders out there besides the ones we had on our short list. By that point, I was feeling like we were in some very weird territory, but I still had no idea what the guy wanted. Finally, he got to it.
“He asked if I was aware that his firm was in the lending business too. I said that I was, but that I thought we were getting into an inappropriate area. I tried to end the conversation, but he pretty much ignored me. He said he wasn’t sure I’d considered the big picture, and maybe it was because I was a short-timer- just an interim CEO- that I was ignoring a firm that had always been very supportive of my company. He said that if I kept on ignoring his firm, that support could evaporate. I asked him if by support he meant his coverage of the company- his research reports- and he said he’d always known I was a bright girl.”
“Bright girl?” I said.
Jane laughed. “I was stunned- as much by his heavy-handedness as anything else.”
“What did you do?”
“I thanked him for his advice and hung up, and then I called the vice chairman of his firm. I told him what had happened and pointed out that- just for appearances’ sake- he might want his boy to ease off a little. A few days later the firm announced that our analyst had been promoted and transferred, and they assigned a new paunchy frat boy to cover us. He was dumber than the first guy but quieter. End of story.”
“Except that you carry a grudge.”
“I have a long memory.”
“Duly noted.”
“I always knew you were a bright boy.” She smiled and glanced down at her watch.
“You’ve got to get back to the office,” I said. “I’ll put on some clothes and walk you over.” I went into the bedroom and Jane was behind me. She tossed her T-shirt on the bed and stood, backlit, in the doorway. Shadows fell across her small round breasts. Her nipples were dark and hard.
“Not just yet,” she said softly, and she came across the room and pulled away my towel. Her hands were soft and warm on my body, and so was her mouth. She pushed me down on the bed and wriggled out of the rest of her clothes and lay next to me. Heat came off her in waves. It carried the milky scent of her soap and the faint spice of her perfume, and beneath them both, the tang of her. I breathed deeply, and my heart hammered against my ribs.
I kissed her and her tongue played slowly in my mouth. I caught the flavors of mint and curry and cilantro. I slid my hands down her back and sides and along her thighs. She shuddered and rolled against me. I kissed her breasts and her belly, and spread her legs and tasted her.
She said something unintelligible and buried her fingers in my hair and moved her smooth legs against my shoulders. She pressed herself against me, quivering, again and again, and suddenly she twisted out from under me.
“Not yet,” she whispered. She pushed me over on my back and hooked her leg across my hips and slid on top of me. She took me in her hands and slowly fit herself around me and we lay there, barely breathing. And then she began to move.
I came out of the oblivion that had taken me, lying sideways across the bed. Jane was beside me, her dark head on my chest, an arm and a leg flung across me. The room was full of her scent and the heat of her body. In the dim light, I watched the slow rise and fall of her back, the faint flutter of her eyelids, and the tiny random movements of her bow-shaped mouth. I ran my finger lightly along her hairline, just above her right temple, and felt the small ripples there, invisible to the eye- the wake of the bullet that had grazed her last year. Jane opened her eyes and looked at me for a long while before she spoke.
“No harm done,” she said softly. I wanted to believe it.
3
Find the real estate. Find the cars. Look for criminal records and civil suits. Get the phone bills. Check the hospitals. Check the morgues. Every missing persons case is different, but every one begins the same way. It’s like the opening gambit in a game of chess, and if your missing person isn’t actually in hiding- or isn’t any good at itplay can often stop soon after. I spent much of the morning making these moves, and thanks to the marvels of technology and the wonders of outsourcing, I could do it all without leaving home.
I put a Charlie Haden disc on the stereo, filled a mug with coffee, powered up my laptop, and fed Gregory Danes’s name and Social Security number to several of my favorite online search services. For a price, they would make mincemeat of his privacy.
Nina Sachs had already given me the address of Danes’s Upper East Side apartment and his home, office, and cell phone numbers, and she’d told me about the big black BMW he sometimes drove on weekend jaunts, and all of that was helpful. But what I was really interested in were the things she couldn’t tell me about- like any other phone numbers listed in Danes’s name, for example, or any other cars or houses he might own. The search services could find those for me, and a whole lot more. Plane registries, boat registries, criminal convictions, voter registrations, bankruptcies- the vast universe of public records was at their disposal. One service would even find any court cases that Danes had been involved in, and another would scan the SEC’s databases for any complaints or arbitration claims made against him. They weren’t infallible, but they were a good place to start, and a lot faster than doing the legwork myself. And they were legal. Buying his phone bills was another, murkier story.
Telephone bills are not public records, and the online services that deal in them sometimes vanish from the Web without warning, often to reopen- under new names and at new sites- a few days later. Their legality is questionable but not their usefulness, not to someone like me, and I submitted Danes’s home phone and cell numbers to one of them.
Not all the preliminary work could be done online; for certain things, I had to pick up the phone. Simone Gautier is an elegant Haitian woman who runs a small detective agency in Forest Hills. She does mostly personal injury and divorce work, but for a reasonable fee Simone will send one of her many day players out to cruise the hospitals and morgues. We agreed to start in the five boroughs and we agreed on a price. I e-mailed Danes’s description to her and faxed her a photograph.
Results would take some time- hours for the search services, days for Simone, and more days for the phone bills- but Danes’s trail on the public search engines was enough to keep me busy in the meanwhile.
Danes had been more or less invisible lately, at least as far as the media was concerned, but before the bubble burst- and immediately afterward- he had been a very public guy indeed. In the perpetual now of the Internet, his fame lived on. I started clicking on links.
Danes’s biography on the Pace-Loyette corporate Web site was terse to the point of mean. It gave his date and place of birth (July 23, 1962, Maplewood, New Jersey), and told of his undergraduate (BS, Cornell) and
