Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Jane, carrying Regina, stepped out into the hallway.
    “Where are we going?” asked Lukas.
    “Follow me.”
    Gabriel led the way up two flights of stairs, and they emerged on the apartment rooftop. Here, the building’s tenants had established an exuberant garden of potted plants, but the heat of a city summer and the baking surface of asphalt tiles was starting to wilt this oasis. Tomato plants drooped in their pots, and morning glory vines, their leaves scorched brown by the heat, clung like withering fingers to a trellis. Jane set Regina in her infant seat under the shade of the umbrella table, and the baby promptly dozed off, her cheeks a rosy pink. From this vantage point, they could see other rooftop gardens, other welcome patches of green in the concrete landscape.
    Lukas placed a folder beside the sleeping baby. “Dr. Isles thought you’d be interested in seeing this.”
    Gabriel opened the folder. It contained a news clipping, with a photo of a man’s smiling face and the headline:
Reston Man Found Dead Aboard Yacht. Businessman Missing Since January 2nd.
    “Who was Charles Desmond?” asked Gabriel.
    “A man very few people really knew,” said Lukas. “Which, in and of itself, was what intrigued me about him. It’s the reason I focused on this story. Even though the medical examiner conveniently ruled it a suicide.”
    “You question that ruling?”
    “There’s no way to prove it wasn’t suicide. Desmond was found in the bathroom on his motor yacht, which he kept moored at a marina on the Potomac River. He died in the tub, with both his wrists slashed, and left a suicide note in the stateroom. By the time they found him, he’d been dead for about ten days. The medical examiner’s office never released any photos, but, as you can imagine, it must have been quite a pleasant postmortem.”
    Jane grimaced. “I’d rather not imagine it.”
    “The note he left wasn’t particularly revelatory.
I’m depressed, life sucks, can’t stand to live another day.
Desmond was known to be a heavy drinker, and he’d been divorced for five years. So it made sense that he’d be depressed. All sounds like a pretty convincing case for suicide, right?”
    “Why don’t you sound convinced?”
    “I got that tingle. A reporter’s sixth sense that there was something else going on, something that might lead to a bigger story. Here’s this rich guy with a yacht, missing for ten days before someone thinks to go looking for him. The only reason they could pinpoint the date he went missing was the fact his car was found in the marina parking lot with January second stamped on the entry ticket. His neighbors said he traveled abroad so often, they weren’t alarmed when they didn’t see him for a week.”
    “Traveled abroad?” said Jane. “Why?”
    “No one could tell me.”
    “Or they wouldn’t tell you?”
    Lukas smiled. “You’ve got a suspicious mind, Detective. So do I. It made me more and more curious about Desmond. Made me wonder if there was more to the story. You know, that’s the way the Watergate story got started. A routine burglary case blows up into something much, much bigger.”
    “What was big about this story?”
    “Who the guy was. Charles Desmond.”
    Jane looked at the photo of Desmond’s face. He wore a pleasant smile, a neatly knotted tie. It was the sort of photo that might appear in any corporate report. The company executive, projecting competence.
    “The more questions I asked about him, the more interesting stuff started to turn up. Charles Desmond never went to college. He served twenty years in the army, most of it working for military intelligence. Five years after he leaves the army, he owns a nice yacht and a big house in Reston. So now you have to ask the obvious question: What did he do to amass that huge bank account?”
    “Your article here says that he worked for a company called Pyramid Services,” said Jane. “What’s that?”
    “That’s what I wondered. Took me a while to dig it up, but a few days later I learned that Pyramid Services is a subsidiary of guess which company?”
    “Don’t tell me,” said Jane. “Ballentree.”
    “You got it, Detective.”
    Jane looked at Gabriel. “That name just keeps popping up, doesn’t it?”
    “And look at the date he went missing,” said Maura. “That’s what caught my eye. January second.”
    “The day before the Ashburn massacre.”
    “An interesting coincidence, don’t you think?”
    Gabriel