Vanished by Joseph Finder Page A

Black-capped Gnatcatcher? I wasn’t sure I understood the excitement.
    I powered up the laptop, and while I waited, I did a quick walk around his office. He had several framed pictures of Mom and Dad together, one at home and one in a banquette at a nightclub. A photo of Dad in his office on the top floor of the Graystone Building in New York, wearing a three-piece suit, the Manhattan skyline behind him.
    Built-in cherrywood file cabinets were neatly labeled—bills, taxes, investments, and so on. I pulled open a couple of drawers and saw that he kept paper copies of his phone bills, which made things easier for me.
    I checked out the French doors that opened to the backyard, tried them, and was satisfied that they were securely locked. I knelt, noticed the rudimentary security system in place—the magnetic contacts wired into an alarm system, so if someone tried to force the doors open, the alarm would sound.
    Something about it looked wrong, though.
    But before I could give it a second look, I heard a high-pitched tone coming from Roger’s computer.
    It didn’t look good. The screen was deep blue and covered with incomprehensible text—white letters and numbers, garbage that made no sense to me except for one line that I understood quite well:
A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer
    It was what computer geeks called the Blue Screen of Death.
    Roger’s computer was dead. It had either crashed or—more likely—it had been wiped.
    I had a theory how that might have happened—how someone might have gotten into his study to do it—and I went back to the French doors and knelt again.
    Sure enough. One of the magnetic contacts on the doorframe looked like it had been hastily screwed into place. As if someone had unscrewed the contact switch, pulled out the connected wire, then jumpered the switch before screwing it back in—sloppily. In other words, someone had disabled the magnetic contact so the alarm wouldn’t go off when the French doors were opened.
    Meaning that someone had probably already done a covert entry.
    Someone had slipped into Roger and Lauren’s house. To search, perhaps. Or for some other reason.
    And maybe was planning to do it again.

19.

    I spent the next forty-five minutes circling the perimeter of the house, looking for evidence of any other intrusions, using a little LED pen-light I found in the kitchen that someone had gotten at a trade show. The usual stuff: disturbances in soil patterns, broken shrubbery, jimmied locks, wood shavings, and the like. But I didn’t find anything else. No surprise there: Whoever had broken into the house through Roger’s study didn’t need any other way in. What did surprise me was how primitive the security system was. That would have to change.
    I didn’t see any point in telling Lauren about the break-in. Not yet, anyway. There was no need to frighten her more.
    So I went upstairs to get some sleep.
    The guest room was midway between the master bedroom and Gabe’s room. It was furnished in classic WASP-grandmother style—oval braided rug, little bedside tables with tiny reading lamps. Hand-colored antique wood engravings of birds on the wall, in little gold frames. An old-fashioned white bedspread made out of that tufted, nubby fabric called chenille. I think.
    On top of the toilet in the guest bathroom was a wicker basket that held a little travel-size tube of Colgate toothpaste, a shrink-wrapped travel-size toothbrush, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, small hand soaps from Crabtree & Evelyn. I brushed my teeth, undressed, and hung my clothes up on the mahogany valet.
    I got into the bed, naked. Found myself staring at some of the weirder-looking birds on the wall—the Ruffed Bustard, the Sacred ibis, the Balearic crane—and wondering if they were extinct, or found only in Madagascar or some Amazonian jungle.
    I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the unaccustomed sounds of a strange house.