Interference Read online

  “Have they found Daddy yet?” he asked, his brown eyes—identical to Matt’s—searching mine.

  “Not yet, honey,” I replied.

  Aimee added, “I keep telling him Daddy is somewhere. We just don’t know where.”

  “I wish Daddy was the kind of doctor that made people better and not the kind of doctor that does physics,” Morgan said. “Then he’d be able to cure himself.”

  “Me too, honey.”

  Without another word, Morgan climbed onto the sofa and nestled himself against me, his small body squirming until it finally settled. His warmth radiated against me.

  Aimee joined me on the other side, and the three of us spent a few moments like that. It was difficult to say who was comforting whom. Aimee adored Matt too.

  “Do you want to get Harry Potter and I’ll read it to you?” I asked Morgan, reaching for normalcy.

  “No. I don’t want Daddy to miss any of it. We’re just about to get to one of the parts with Grawp. He loves doing Grawp.”

  I squeezed Morgan a little tighter with one hand. With the other, I swiped at my phone, which was on my lap.

  Still nothing.

  Morgan shifted, his sharp elbows digging into my side.

  The grandfather clock ticked some more.

  Then the silence was split by four insistent raps on the front door.

  I vaulted off the couch, hurried over, looked through the peephole. There was a fiftyish white man standing on the front porch. He was graying at the temples. He wore a blue parka and khaki-colored slacks. He was already attempting to wipe the winter grit off his thick boots and onto the bristle doormat, like he anticipated he would shortly be inside.

  He was holding up a gold shield.

  A police officer.

  Come to tell me . . . well, something.

  “Hold on a moment,” I called out.

  I shot a glance at Aimee. Morgan didn’t need to be a party to whatever scene was about to unfold. She read my mind instantly.

  “Morgan, honey,” she said immediately, “let’s go brush our teeth and get our pj’s on.”

  There was a sharpness to her tone—combined with the strain on my face—that sent him scurrying upstairs, his socked feet flying. As soon as he was out of sight, I opened the door.

  “Mrs. Bronik?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Emmett Webster with the New Hampshire State Police. I’m in charge of the investigation. Can I come in, please?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” I said, stepping back into the narrow hallway that served as our foyer.

  He entered, bringing an envelope of cold air in with him, then worked his boots into the small rug that was supposed to catch what the doormat did not.

  “I just have a few preliminary questions to ask,” he said, pulling out a notepad. “I know this is a difficult time. We’re trying to move quickly at this stage.”

  Stage? What stage?

  “When was the last time you saw your husband?”

  “Early this morning.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Around five a.m. He’s an early riser. I saw him getting dressed and I think I mumbled something at him. He came over and kissed me, and that was it. I rolled over and went back to sleep.”

  “Did you hear from him after that?”

  “No. Just the phone call from his department chair at one fifty-seven saying he had been taken away in an ambulance. From there I went to the hospital and, well, I assume Hanover Police told you the rest, right? About his fits and all that?”

  “They did, thank you. Was there anything unusual about today? Did he indicate he expected any kind of disruption in his normal pattern?”

  “No.”

  “Can you think of anyone who would want to harm your husband? Anyone who had threatened him recently or might wish him ill will?”

  I paused, confused. Matt had been plenty of a threat to himself lately, but that didn’t seem to be what this detective wanted to know.

  “No, everyone loves Matt and . . . I’m sorry, why are you asking? Do you know where Matt is or not? Has he come out of his fit yet?”

  Webster tilted his head. Now he was the one who looked confused.

  “Has anyone else from law enforcement talked to you?” Webster asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “No one from Hanover Police called you?”

  “No.”

  “And the K-9 unit didn’t come here?”

  “The K-9 unit?” I asked, as confused as I was alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

  The detective sighed, put away his pad, bowed his head a little.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Bronik. My understanding was that you knew this already. Lyme Police found an ambulance abandoned off a dirt road not far from the Dartmouth Skiway about an hour ago. We believe it was the ambulance that carried your husband, but it was completely empty inside.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The whole time he was talking to her, Emmett Webster couldn’t figure out:

  Why is this lady so calm?

  Why isn’t she more hysterical?

  Does she actually get what’s going on? She seems to be tracking me, but she has those hearing aids . . .

  For a moment or two, he was getting that dreary itch, asking himself if he was actually talking to his prime suspect, wondering if this was another seamy life insurance scam or a woman looking for the cheapest possible divorce.

  Emmett hated those cases. Didn’t they realize what a gift marriage was? And how easily that gift could be taken away?

  Sure, there could be rough times. But you were supposed to put the work in. There was a reason why no wedding officiant ever said, “Do you promise to love each other only as long as it’s easy?”

  Then, once he realized no one had told her what was going on, calm wasn’t the problem anymore. The poor woman went through a heaving, sobbing, no-doubt-about-it meltdown. And it only got worse when her kid came downstairs and asked why Mommy was crying.

  Emmett was patient with the whole thing, of course. Pushing too hard at this point wouldn’t accomplish anything. And, truly, his heart went out to her.

  But there was also part of him that was thinking, Okay, lady, we don’t have time for you to be this hysterical.

  The only thing that really saved it was when the woman’s sister stepped in. Aimee was her name. She projected a sturdy, capable air.

  Emmett took the sister into the next room, so the kid wouldn’t hear, and gave her a quick rundown of what he knew: that the ambulance didn’t belong to Hanover EMS, that it had generic markings and was owned by a company that rented out ambulances, that the abductors may well have been imposters who dressed as EMTs.

  To Emmett’s gratitude, she immediately took charge. An older sister, obviously. She whisked the kid off to bed with promises the police would find his father, then came back downstairs and herded Emmett and Brigid back into the living room.

  Emmett remained standing. Aimee guided her sister onto the sofa, where she held her hands and started speaking in a low, urgent voice.

  “I know this is a nightmare,” Aimee said. “But you have to pull it together. Right now, Matt needs us. The first forty-eight hours are the most critical time, isn’t that right, Detective?”

  “That’s correct,” Emmett said.

  Actually, it wasn’t. No one needed Emmett to start spouting statistics. But three hours was actually the more important window. In 75 percent of cases where an abduction ended in a homicide, the killing was later determined to have happened within the first three hours.

  Fact was, if the people who had taken Matthew Bronik planned to kill him, he was already dead.

  “So we’re going to be strong, okay?” Aimee continued. “We’re going to be strong for Matt. We’re going to do belly breaths, just like Mom used to make us do. Okay? And then we’re going to focus.”

  Emmett watched as the woman counted down from ten, taking a big breath each time, encouraging her sist
er to do the same. And, remarkably, when they got down to one, Brigid was no longer crying.

  “Okay, good,” Aimee said, then stood and faced Emmett. “So what’s going on with the investigation right now? How can we help? Who’s out there looking for him?”

  “We have a K-9 unit searching the area around the ambulance,” Emmett said. “Best-case scenario is he’s still somewhere nearby. A cabin or something. If he is, those dogs will find him. They’re amazing.”

  “And if he’s not nearby?”

  “It becomes more difficult,” Emmett admitted. “Our public relations unit is right now putting out Professor Bronik’s picture. That’ll go on websites, on Twitter feeds, and to the TV stations and newspapers. The more eyes we have looking for him out there, the better.”

  “Can’t you issue an Amber Alert?”

  “I’m afraid that’s only for children.”

  “Okay, what about roadblocks or—”

  “That wouldn’t help us much at this point,” Emmett said. “Professor Bronik was last seen at roughly two p.m. We didn’t find the ambulance until seven thirty. That was our first indication this was something other than a paperwork mix-up at a hospital somewhere. Assuming it took his abductors a half hour to ditch the ambulance and transfer to a new vehicle, they still had a five-hour head start. They could have driven anywhere from New Jersey to Canada during that time.”

  Aimee jammed her fists against her hips.

  “So that’s it?” she asked. “You just hope someone out there sees him by accident and—”

  “No, that’s not it,” Emmett assured her. “That’s not it by a long shot. I assure you this is going to be a very proactive investigation. To begin with, my captain has notified the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Every jurisdiction in the country will have access to information about Professor Bronik.

  “The next thing—and I’ve done this too—is requesting camera footage from Dartmouth Safety and Security. They tell me they don’t have any cameras inside Wilder Hall, but there are some outside that area. They’re poring through the tapes for us right now.”

  “That’s good,” Aimee said.

  “We’ll see,” Emmett said. “If the people who took Professor Bronik did enough planning to rent an ambulance and dress as EMTs, they probably knew there were going to be cameras. They may have obscured their appearance in some way. Still, it’s worth a shot. The Crime Scene Unit is working the ambulance right now to see if it gives us anything. They’ll probably spend the night on that. In the morning, I’ve got them headed to Dartmouth. They’ll dust Professor Bronik’s lab for prints; then they’ll obtain prints from anyone who had a legitimate reason to be in that lab. If there are prints that don’t belong, that could be a lead. Maybe one of these EMTs got careless and left us a present.”

  “What about hair and fiber?” Aimee asked.

  This isn’t an episode of CSI, Emmett thought but kept his expression neutral.

  “Those kind of analyses take weeks, if not months,” he said. “We’ll have fingerprints back in a few hours. That’s more the kind of time span that will be useful to us right now.”

  “Okay, what about, I don’t know, highway cameras, or facial recognition software, or—”

  Again, too much CSI.

  “We’re going to use anything we can, I promise,” Emmett said. “But all that technology, it only starts to become useful when you can find a direction for it. And right now we need that direction. We need to use the computers we were born with.”

  He tapped his skull, then turned to the wife, Brigid. The tissue she had been using to dab her face was now crumpled in her hand.

  “I’m sure your husband is a great guy, and I know it’s hard to think about someone you love in any kind of negative light,” Emmett said. “But the fact is, someone has put a lot of effort into this. There has to be someone who stands to gain from his disappearance. Think hard. Has he crossed anyone lately? Was there someone angry with him for some reason?”

  She had been staring hard at Emmett’s face as he spoke. When he finished, she took a few moments to think it over.

  “Well,” she said finally. “Matt did just turn down a job offer, but—”

  “From whom?”

  Brigid immediately started shaking her head. “That’s not . . . that couldn’t be it. Forget I said it.”

  “Mrs. Bronik, you may think it’s nothing. But everything at this point is something.”

  “If you don’t tell him, I will,” Aimee said.

  “I don’t want to cast aspersions,” Brigid began. “It’s not—”

  “Just tell him!” Aimee demanded.

  “Fine,” Brigid said, then turned to Emmett. “There’s this rich guy, Sean Plottner. He runs an investment company. He tried to hire Matt—”

  “For a million dollars a year,” Aimee interjected.

  “When was this?” Emmett asked.

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “And how did Plottner react? Was he angry?”

  “No. Matt said he was perfectly nice about it. I think Plottner was hoping Matt was going to change his mind. And I don’t think . . . I mean, Plottner is a multibillionaire. Would he really be involved in something like this?”

  Emmett had been a detective long enough to know that people involved themselves in all sorts of things they shouldn’t.

  On a fresh page of his notebook, he printed the name SEAN PLOTTNER in block letters.

  Ask him some questions. Catch him in a lie or two. Tie him to the ambulance rental financially . . .

  “It’s something to look into. Nothing more,” Emmett said. “Are there any other—”

  His phone rang. Emmett recognized the number for Haver Markham, the young, whip-smart head of the Crime Scene Unit.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Brigid. Then: “Webster here.”

  “It’s Haver,” she said. “I’m out with the ambulance. You with the wife right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you ask if she knows her husband’s blood type?”

  Emmett repeated the question for Brigid, whose color was rapidly draining from her face.

  “B negative,” she said.

  Emmett told Markham the answer.

  “Then I got some bad news,” she said. “Whoever was in this ambulance tried to wipe it down, and they did good enough to fool the naked eye but not good enough to fool a blue light. We found blood on the side of one of the floor plates. When we pried up the plate, we found more that had seeped underneath. It was B negative. That’s pretty rare. Less than two percent of the population.”

  Mindful of not wanting to say too much around Brigid and Aimee, Emmett asked, “How much was there?”

  Markham easily picked up on his guarded tone. “If you’re asking whether the guy is still alive, I couldn’t tell you. It depends how much was above it that got wiped up. We found enough under the plate that I didn’t have any trouble collecting samples, but beyond that? Couldn’t tell you.”

  “So it’s a definite maybe?” Emmett asked.

  “Yes, that’s fair. A definite maybe.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Before this, the longest night of my life was when Morgan was born.

  I had felt the first hint of a contraction—a real contraction, not the false-alarm Braxton-Hicks type—around seven o’clock. My birth plan, a carefully constructed document that had gone through six drafts and much anguished consideration, had dictated I labor for several hours at home, peacefully, with music playing and scented candles burning, while easing in and out of a warm bath.

  We had come up with this in the Netherlands, where Matt was finishing up his postdoc at Delft. Our childbirth class was for English-speaking expats from the UK and America, but it was taught by a Dutch woman who assumed we would be completing pregnancy in the Netherlands, where giving birth at home with a midwife—and without an epidural—was a common practice.

  Even though we moved to New Hampshire when I was twenty-four weeks, we
stuck with our Netherlands plan. So when I went into labor at thirty-seven weeks, a little on the early side, we didn’t panic at those first contractions. Matt just drew a bath.

  Then my water broke. And my very American obstetrician ordered me to report to the hospital for a round of antibiotics.

  Still, we were going to stay the course. In addition to the bath and the candles—which were no longer options—the childbirth class instructor said poetry, read aloud by the woman’s birthing partner, could be very soothing, a kind of meditation that relaxed the mother’s brain and helped her maintain a more Zen-like state.

  Matt brought Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Maya Angelou with us to the hospital.

  And as my contractions started coming closer, Matt continued reading.

  Until about three o’clock in the morning. He was working his way through Sonnets to Orpheus when I suddenly clamped his arm in a death grip and, in between breaths, hissed, “Would you shut . . . the hell up . . . and get me . . . some goddamn drugs!”

  It became part of the story we always told about my delivery, not to mention one of Matt’s running jokes: Whatever you do with Brigid, don’t read her Rilke.

  But now? In the dark of this night? Long after Aimee had chased away the television news crews that wanted interviews and ordered me to get some sleep? When the lights were off and I was in bed, except I was so far from slumber I might as well have been lying on coals? When the pillow next to mine was undented by a human head?

  The only thing I wished for in the world was to have my Matty next to me, reading me poetry.

  Detective Webster had departed not long after he had received the call from the Crime Scene Unit. He wanted to be up at what he referred to as “the scene”—with the unasked, unanswerable question being: The scene of what?

  An abduction?

  Or a murder?

  Detective Webster asked me to stay at home, in case the abductors tried to contact us with a ransom demand.