Inherit the Dead

recent?”
    “Norman Loki had a Rolex swiped last summer, a break-in. Description of the suspect was white male, twentyish. Never turned up.”
    “What about Julia Drusilla? You said she also turns up as a complainant?”
    “Nothing quite as exciting as Mr. Loki’s break-in, I’m afraid. Her parents died in a car accident a decade ago, and the reconstruction investigators for the New York State Police questioned her for background. Nothing came of it, though.”
    “Why an investigation?” Perry asked. “Was the accident considered suspicious?”
    Watson shrugged. “Seven o’clock at night. Dad driving, mom in the passenger seat. Car swerved into the wrong side of the road on I-684. T-boned into an eighteen-wheeler. No drugs or alcohol in either tox screen.”
    “So why’d they talk to Julia Drusilla?” Julia had told Perry that her parents died in a car accident, but never mentioned an investigation or being questioned by State Police.
    “You’d have to ask them,” Watson said. “My gut? You’ve got two dead bodies with a Park Avenue penthouse address in a three-hundred-thousand Maybach.”
    “What’s a Maybach?”
    “If you gotta ask . . . ” Watson grinned. “A car . German. Started before the war, after the war, I’m not sure. But a real status symbol. They just stopped making them—too expensive—soon to be collector’s items.”
    Perry got the picture.
    “Rich couple like that, State Police are going to cross the t ’s, dotthe i ’s, and whatnot. They called around. Tried to see if they were missing anything. The daughter—what’s her name, Julia—was upset but wasn’t able to offer any relevant information. They figured the old man fell asleep. So what gives on these people?”
    “Hmm?” Perry was still thinking about the death of Julia’s parents and didn’t register his friend’s question.
    “When I was running the names, I was reminded of those tests back in school: How do these three things go together? A thug like Hyde; a socialite like Julia Drusilla; and this Norman Loki, out at the beach. What ties these three together?”
    Perry told Watson about the disappearance of Angelina Loki and her relationship to each of the three people Perry had asked Watson to run through the system. “If I find her by her twenty-first birthday, she stands to inherit a big chunk of her grandfather’s estate.”
    “Grandfather, as in the dead guy in the Maybach?”
    Perry nodded.
    Watson let out a whistle. “Major bank. Seems like a good reason for the girl to want to be found.”
    “If only I were so lucky.”
    Perry had looked into the source of Julia’s family’s money. Her father, Antonio, had come from modest beginnings, the son of a father who worked as a dressmaker in the Garment District and a mother who taught piano in their Forest Hills apartment. But Antonio had more ambitious plans. Thanks to his first marriage to an heiress more than twice his age, by thirty-five years old, he was a widower in control of a $100-million inheritance. Through leveraged buyouts and other investments, he managed to turn that comfortable little sum into a fortune that landed him on Forbes magazine’s annual list of billionaires for more than the last decade of his life.
    “Well, good luck with the case, man. It’s really great to see you. Been way too long.”
    “I don’t want to press my luck,” Perry said, “but any chance I can hit you up for one more favor? That deadline of Angel’s twenty-first birthday is almost here, and it’s not looking good. Plus, I think someone tried to follow me back from Long Island last night, so I’m starting to think she could be in real trouble. Any chance you can track her cell phone for me?”
    Perry still marveled at how much more information law enforcement could gather now than when he was on the job. Thanks to technology, police could find out what Web sites people frequented, who they e-mailed, and what books they bought, usually without even having to get a search warrant. By pulling a few strings with Angel’s cell phone company, Watson would be able to determine not only whether Angel was receiving or making phone calls, but also her possible location. A phone’s pings to cell phone towers for service used to give police an area of a few square miles to narrow down a search. Now, with the proliferation of towers and a little bit of luck, cell phone tracking could put you within a city block of the person you were looking for—or at