Read Online Vanished by Joseph Finder - Free Book Online

he said to the speakerphone as he sat behind his desk. He never drank coffee, himself. He said he didn’t need it, which made it hard to trust him. I don’t need a lot of sleep, but this guy was almost an android. He was incredibly energetic. He played squash, I was told, like a Roman gladiator on speed.
    Jay leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk, propping up his head, staring off somewhere behind me. This made him look bored and disengaged.
    He often came off as casual and shambling and loose-jointed, but his desk told you everything you needed to know: It was always perfectly clean. Nothing marred the wide polished expanse of mahogany. He was a Type-A personality, an obsessive-compulsive, a clean freak. He was great at banter, never seemed to take anything seriously, sometimes even appeared to be muddleheaded. But he missed nothing. His mind was a steel-jaw trap: Once you got caught in its teeth, you’d have to chew off your own limb to escape.
    “So you got in to the office early today?”
    I shrugged.
    “Looking into Traverse Development, huh?” he said. His blue eyes seemed to have gone gray.
    “I like to know as much as possible about my clients,” I said. I’d run Traverse Development through our standard corporate registration databases and found nothing. I’d also run a search on the cell-phone number that Woody gave me back in L.A., the emergency contact number for whoever had hired him. But no luck. It came back as “private.”
    Did someone tell Stoddard I’d been searching? Or did my computer search trigger some kind of notification?
    “Maybe not the best use of your time.”
    “Don’t worry, I did it on my own time.”
    He paused. “And?”
    “It doesn’t exist,” I said.
    “Strange,” Stoddard said. He was toying with me. “The check cleared.”
    “No business registration in the city of Arlington. Or Arlington County. Nothing in SearchSystems. The address on that shipment turns out to be bogus—a rented mail drop. A place called EasyOffice, which is one of those business suites you can rent by the hour or by the week. The rent was paid in cash. So obviously it’s a front.”
    “Oh, please. Don’t be so suspicious. Companies use fronts for all kinds of legitimate reasons. Like avoiding taxes.”
    “You know what was in that container, don’t you?” I said. “What was being shipped out of Bahrain?”
    “I didn’t ask.” Jay was too skilled to look evasive.
    “But you know anyway,” I said.
    He laughed. Sometimes talking with him was like fencing. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
    “I think you know damned well what was in those boxes.” I said it in a good-humored way, not wanting to come off as confrontational. Confrontational rarely worked with him.
    He chewed the inside of his cheek, which was always the giveaway that he was trying to decide whether to tell a lie. The “tell,” as they say in poker. Stoddard was practiced in the art of deception, but my skill at reading people is better. I give full credit for this to my father, who was a liar the way some people are alcoholics. He lived and breathed dishonesty. It was a useful education for a kid.
    “If you opened a sealed shipment, Nick, you don’t want to brag about it. You could get the whole firm in trouble. If you’re going to break the law, you do it for the client. Not to work against the client.”
    “It was a messy recovery, Jay. A couple of boxes broke open.”
    “Why do I doubt that? Point is, whatever you found, that’s outside of the scope of our work. They hired us to do a very specific job. Nothing beyond that. In addition to which, as you well know, anything we come across in the course of an investigation that might be detrimental to a client we always keep confidential. Otherwise, we’d go out of business in a week. I don’t need to tell you this.”
    This was one of the things I didn’t love about my job. Often, a client would hire us to investigate some alleged wrongdoing inside the