Free Buried Secrets by Joseph Finder

know you.” She looked away. Embarrassed? Unreadable, in any case. As always, the emotional equivalent of Kryptonite. “My apartment’s in the South End. I was going to take the T.” I opened the passenger-side door for her.

    18.

    “So now the next shift takes over texting your predators?” I said.

    “We can’t do that,” Diana said. “Perps can sometimes sense a change in respondents.
    Even in short message texts there can be subtle nuances in tone and rhythm.” As I drove I caught the faintest whiff of her perfume. It was something I’d never smelled on another woman: rose and violet and cedar, sophisticated and haunting and unforgettable.

    Neuroscientists tell us that nothing brings back the past as quickly and powerfully as a smell. Apparently the olfactory nerve arouses something in the limbic center of your brain where you store long-term memories on your mental hard drive.

    Diana’s perfume brought back a rush of memories. Mostly happy ones.

    “How long have you been in Boston?” I asked.

    “A little over a year. I heard through the grapevine you might be here. Did Stoddard send you here to open a satellite office or something?”

    “No, I’m on my own now.” I wondered whether she’d been asking around about me, and I suppressed a smile.

    “You like it?”

    “It would be perfect if the boss weren’t such a hard-ass.”

    She laughed ruefully. “Nick Heller, company man.”

    “You said Pembroke Street, right?”

    “Right. Off Columbus Ave. Thanks for doing this.”

    “My pleasure.”

    “Listen, I’m sorry about Spike,” she said.

    “Spike?”

    “Gordon Snyder. Spike’s his childhood nickname. He’s spent his entire life trying to make people forget it.”

    “Spike?”

    “Don’t ever tell him I told you. You promise?”

    “I can think of some better nicknames for him than Spike,” I said. “None of them very nice. So how did you know I met with him?”

    She shrugged. “I saw you storm out. Looked like it didn’t go too well.”

    “Did he tell you what we talked about?”

    “Sure.”

    I wondered whether she’d followed me out too. Maybe this meeting wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe she heard I was in the building and wanted to say hi.

    Maybe that was all she wanted.

    I dropped another note into the cold-case file marked MADIGAN, DIANA.

    “So what’s with his fixation on Marshall Marcus?”

    “Marcus is his great white whale.”

    “But why?”

    “Guys like that, the more elusive the target, the more obsessed they become. That may sound familiar, Nico.”

    Tell me about it, I thought. “Well, he seemed a whole lot more interested in taking down Marcus than finding his daughter.”

    “Maybe because he’s in charge of financial crimes.”

    “Aha.”

    “I have to say, I don’t understand why you were meeting with the head of the financial crimes unit if you were looking for a missing girl.”

    I was beginning to wonder the same thing. “That was the name I was given.”

    “Is Marshall Marcus a friend of yours?”

    “Friend of the family.”

    “Friend of your father’s?”

    “My mother worked for him,” I said. “And I like his kid.”

    “How much do you know about him?”

    “Not enough, I guess. Apparently you guys are investigating him for something. What can you tell me about him?”

    “Not much.”

    “Not much because you don’t know? Or because he’s the subject of an FBI probe?”

    “Because it’s a sealed investigation. And I’m on the other side of the firewall.” I pulled up in front of her narrow bow-front brownstone, double-parking in front of a space easily big enough for the Defender to fit.

    “Well, thanks again,” she said, opening the door.

    “Hold on. I need to ask you a favor.”

    “What’s that?”

    “You think you can put in a request to locate Alexa Marcus’s cell phone?”

    “I—that’s a little complicated. It’s not so easy to do an end run around Snyder. What makes you think