The Brookline Pharmacy was just a few blocks from Harvey’s house. I spent so much time there picking up Harvey’s prescriptions that I had gotten to know everyone well, including the pharmacist. Kelly always asked about Harvey, whom she had known when he was still doing his own pickups.
“I need your help,” I said to her. “Harvey has taken a turn for the worse, and I need to find his ex-wife, Rachel.”
“Oh, no. How can I help?”
“Has she been in recently?”
“I haven’t seen Rachel for months. Hold on.” She tapped into her computer and stared at the monitor. “We moved her prescriptions to a Walgreens in Quincy. They can probably get in touch with her for you.” She jotted what I assumed was the phone number for Walgreens on a scratch pad, ripped off the page, and tried to hand it across the counter to me.
“Would you mind calling? They won’t give me information over the phone, and I’m not sure we have enough time for me to drive down there.”
“It’s that bad?”
I gave her a concerned sigh. She called right away and spoke to a fellow pharmacist. I heard her recite the address of the empty duplex in Quincy. No help there. But she also got two phone numbers, neither of which was the same as any of the ones on Harvey’s Rolodex card. She hung up and handed me the notes.
“I hope Harvey’s going to be all right.”
“Me, too.”
Back in the car, I called the first number. Disconnected. I tried the second. When it started to ring, I closed my eyes and squeezed the phone and willed someone to answer.
“Gary Ruffielo.” I opened my eyes in disbelief. Hoping and wishing and pure strength of will hardly ever worked. But before I could speak, the voice of the ubiquitous computer woman interrupted. “-is not available to take your call. Please leave your name, number, and the time of your call, and-”
I hung up. Disappointing, but at least it was something to follow up later.
Felix was next on my list. I started the ignition, checked my blind spot, and pulled out into the flow of traffic. I had been trying to cut back on my use of Felix Melendez, Jr., and his black-bag cyberspace skills, but desperate times called for desperate measures. I’d met him on a case in Miami several years before. He’d been trying to fulfill his ambition of working for an airline by taking a job as the breathtakingly underemployed acting general manager at an airport hotel. He helped me on my case, and I got him hired by Majestic Airlines in Miami.
But the airline business went bad, and Felix was a casualty of the cutbacks after September 11, 2001. When I asked Dan to talk to him about working in Boston, Dan had flatly refused. He had neither the inclination nor the authority to hire someone in the days of bankruptcies and billion-dollar losses. I introduced the two of them anyway. Dan liked Felix so much he built a job for him, but it was only part-time hours. That was good with Felix. As long as he was still in the business, he didn’t care where he lived or how many hours he worked. It was good with Dan. He had a part-time employee who worked as hard as three full-timers. But it was best for me. I got to use Felix, the smartest hacker in the world, on a contract basis when I needed him. I needed him now. When I got to the next red light, I turbo-dialed his cell phone.
“Hey, Miss Shanahan. What’s up?”
Even answering the phone, he sounded optimistic, as if he just knew there would be good news at the other end of the line. It was always good to hear his voice. “How are you, Felix?”
“Great. I’m fixing some handheld radios for the crew chiefs.”
“I didn’t know you did that kind of thing.”
“I don’t. I mean, I didn’t, but we can’t buy any new ones because of the budget, so the only way I could figure out how to have communication on the ramp, which, you know, we really, really need, was to fix the ones that were broken, and that was just about all of them, so I found this site on the Net with, like, diagrams and stuff. Anyway, I’m getting pretty good at it.”
That had to be an understatement. Given how fast Felix learned about all things electronic, he could probably build his own radio at this point, if given the tools and the parts. Or maybe just given the parts. He was pretty good at fashioning his own tools.
“I need you to run down a plate for me.”
“Right now? Because I’m working a double this afternoon and tonight, and-”
“I already spoke to Dan. He said it was all right.”
“Outstanding. What’s the plate number?”
“Give me a second. The light just changed, and I have to drive the car again.” I dropped the phone into the seat next to me so I could free up a hand to unzip my backpack and get out my notebook. I balanced the little spiral pad on my thigh and flipped through the pages until I found the one I needed.
“Hold on, Felix,” I yelled in the general vicinity of the cell phone. I was heading into the short tunnel under Mass Avenue. That little stretch of Commonwealth Avenue required two hands, mainly because the road was nothing but a field of gigantic potholes but also because cabbies liked to fly through it, and they weren’t picky about whose lane they did it in. I emerged unscathed on the other side, stopped at the light at Gloucester, picked up the phone, and read off the plate number.
The keys clacked on his end as he took notes the way he always did: straight into his laptop. “The usual time frame?” he asked.
“As fast as you can. Harvey’s missing.”
“He is? Wow, that’s a bummer. What happened?”
I filled him in. “I think his ex-wife might have something to do with it, and I’m trying to track her down. The guys with the plate I just gave you were watching her house.”
“Ex-wife? Harvey had a wife? No way.”
“Way. Her name is Rachel, and they divorced a few years ago. I met her this morning.”
“Whoa. If she had something to do with someone taking him, that is harsh.”
Harsh was a good word for it. Leave it to Felix to state the situation in the simplest, most powerful terms.
“Does she have a cell phone? Because I could totally track her that way.”
“How could you do that?”
“There’s a chip inside all cell phones. Most people don’t even know it’s there, and unless you know specifically how to turn it off, if your phone is on, the chip is on. All it is is GPS technology. Piece of cake.”
“How does it work? Caller turns on phone…”
“…Chip transmits signal to satellite. Satellite transmits location to receiver. Simple.”
“Where’s the receiver?”
“At the phone company, but that’s not a problem. My friend on the network can access what we need.” That was the hackers’ network he was talking about, a pretty powerful group of guys.
“What you’re saying is you need her cell-phone number.”
“Big time. Unless she’s using a burner. People who know what they’re doing usually use those phones you buy at the Store 24. No way to trace those.”
Rachel didn’t seem like the Store 24 type to me. If that was true, we had another option. “All right, Felix, here’s what you do. Query the Walgreens Pharmacy database, and find out what medicine Rachel is taking. Her last name is Ruffielo.” That was code for Please hack in and steal the information. “Once you get that, call this number.” I read Gary Ruffielo’s phone number off the note the pharmacist had given me. “That’s Rachel’s husband. His name is Gary.” I spelled Ruffielo for him. “Tell him your name is Kelly and you’re the pharmacist at Walgreens in Brookline. It’s urgent that you get in touch with Rachel because her medicine, whatever it is, has been recalled. Ask him if he’s got a number where we can reach her.”
“Heh. Sly, Miss Shanahan. Get someone else to do the legwork. I like it.”
“Leverage, Felix. It’s all about leverage. Call me when you have something on that license plate.”