The phone on Richard's desk rang, and he waited while Marlene, the new receptionist, answered it. In a few seconds, his phone buzzed, and he snatched up the receiver. "Yes?"
"It's a Mr. Demming for you, Richard." The voice was musical and efficient and cheerful. He knew that what he had been thinking should have made him immune to any thoughts about the new receptionist, but it hadn't. He modulated his voice carefully so it was businesslike, yet friendly.
"Thanks, Marlene." He hit the button that was blinking. "Hi, Steve."
"Richard, I wanted to give you an update on what we're doing."
"I was hoping you were calling to say you had her."
"Not yet."
Richard hated Not yet, but he was sure Demming must remember that he hated that answer, and be saying it anyway. He couldn't afford to alienate Demming now, so he ignored his irritation. "Okay. So what's happening?"
"We've been circulating the pictures of Christine online to people around the country we think will look for her if there's money in it. We've set the payoff at a hundred thousand."
Richard swallowed, but his throat was so dry he swallowed air. "I guess that's okay. I don't actually have to pay anybody, right?"
"Actually, Richard, if they find her for us, you do. If somebody can find her, he can find you. Some of these people aren't anybody you want to fuck around with."
"Look, Steve. I'm not sure if I made this entirely clear. She's not in the same situation as the other girls I asked you to help me with. I really need Christine back here healthy and in a receptive mood."
"A receptive mood?"
"If possible, I'd like her to be happy to see me."
"It's kind of late to worry about her mood. But I'll think about it, and see what we can do."
"Thanks," said Richard. "And I appreciate your keeping me up on everything. I really need to have this work out."
"Good-bye, Richard."
Richard sat there, staring at the phone for a moment. Maybe this extra aggravation was the price for letting Demming and his crew handle personal problems for him. There was a kind of unwelcome familiarity to the way Demming had been talking to him for the past couple of weeks. He seemed at times to think he was indulging Richard's whims. Maybe that was Richard's imagination, but Demming didn't sound like an employee talking to his boss.
Richard decided that he needed to get out of the office. Maybe he would take an early lunch. Maybe he would ask Marlene the new receptionist to go with him.
"There you are." The voice was his father's.
Richard looked up. "Of course I'm here. This is my office, where I work."
"That's why I'm surprised." He came in and sat on the couch. He always sat in the center of a couch and rested both arms on the back, taking up as much space as one human being could. If anybody else wanted to sit, they would have to endure a terrible proximity to him, and only after they actually sat would he move slightly. He looked at the door as though he hadn't seen it before. "Close that door, will you, Richard?"
Richard kept himself from expressing what he felt. He got up from his desk, walked around it to the door and closed it. "What's the occasion?"
"Maybe I'm here to take a close look at what you're doing to my business. Maybe I brought fifteen CPA's and four computer experts to snoop around and see if there's anything being hidden from me. Would that bother you?"
Richard fixed a smile on his face, but he knew it was the sort of smile a man put on when he didn't want to fight an opponent he knew would crush him. "Not unless they wasted a lot of time doing it."
Andy Beale smiled, too, but his smile was more convincing, and to Richard it was chilling. Why would he say that if he didn't think Richard had something to hide? "Well, I'm just here to talk to you about Christine. Have you talked to her since the day we were out on the boat?"
"No."
"Have you even tried?"
"Of course. She left her apartment a month ago and hasn't been back. No one has heard from her."
"That's it? You knocked on her door and talked to her friends?"
Richard took a moment to decide. There were a hundred reasons not to tell him any more than he had to, but there was no way to get rid of him without meeting each of his insinuations with an answer. "I've done a lot more than that. I hired some professionals to develop their own leads and find her for me."
Andy Beale cocked his head as though he had heard a sound in the distance that he couldn't quite identify. "Well, that's interesting. Who?"
"They've done some work for us before, and they've done it well, so I trust them. They're security specialists."
"I didn't ask what they were. I said, 'Who?'"
"The head man is named Steve Demming. He has a crew of three other men and two women."
"Women? That sounds sensible. It ought to reassure her if they find her."
"That's what I think. And they will find her."
"But they don't have her."
"Not yet."
Andy Beale looked at his son with new interest. "So how are they going about it?"
"I just got off the phone with Steve. He's offering a reward and distributing photographs of her. He's also using the Internet to get people to e-mail him if they see her. He has his own sources." He saw the unchanged look of curiosity on Andy Beale's face, and knew what his father was going to say before he said it.
"That's pretty convenient for you, having somebody else do it all?"
"I've been running credit checks on her every day to see if she uses a credit card or anything. So far, she hasn't. There's a skip-tracing company that I've occasionally used to find tenants who skip owing rent. I've got them searching the big commercial databases for any sign of her."
"She's been gone for over a month. How much cash could a girl like that have—a week's worth? After that she couldn't buy a meal or fill up at a gas station without the credit bureaus noticing. She's got to be with somebody."
The conversation had moved from the uncomfortable to the excruciating for Richard, but he could not think of a way to change the subject. He tried retreating behind a haze of vagueness. "Well, we'll see."
"Yeah. You damned well ought to see. Somebody's helping that girl, probably putting her up and paying her bills and signing for things so she doesn't leave a trail. Everything you're doing only works if she's alone, and she isn't. You must have some idea of who the guys are she might know well enough. You were fucking her for six months or so. Who else was?"
Richard felt his cheeks heating up. "Nobody. She was a virgin when she came to work here. And after that I was with her all the time."
"A secretary, about half your age, who had never been with anybody else. She wasn't exactly a difficult girl to impress, was she? Wasn't that a little too easy even for you?"
"She was a pretty, young girl, good-natured and unmarried. I work very long, hard hours, in case your spies hadn't mentioned it. I'm not out very often where I might meet a lot of women."
"Yeah, I know. You're a regular monk. One way or another, you found her and got her to sleep with you. But somebody besides you is taking care of her right now. Don't you think you ought to be curious about who the guy is?"
"It's not a man. It's a woman."
"What woman? Her mother? A sister? Just trace her the way you would Christine."
"My man Steve says it's a pro—a detective or a bodyguard or something. The night they found Christine in Buffalo this woman broke one guy's knee and ran into another one with her car. I don't know much more than that, but we're assuming she's keeping Christine out of sight for now."
"This isn't normal," said Andy. "Are you sure your man Steve isn't just full of shit?"
"He's not. Why would you say that?"
"Where the hell would a girl like Christine get to know somebody like that?"
"We don't know that yet, either."