The Hunt

“Of course,” I answered, equally smoothly. I handed her the piece of paper and prepared myself to lie about not having any identification with me. But the good news was Natasha didn’t ask for it. Instead, she led us to a discreet side door and used a pass to buzz us into an interior room.

At which point we encountered the bad news. Instead of a big vault of the sort you see in movies about bank heists, there were several rows of small safes mounted on a wall. Each of the safes had a digital keypad for a password the guest could set his or herself. And Hilary hadn’t bothered to write down her chosen password and leave it with the receipt in the secret compartment, which I considered a serious lapse in planning for the possibility that her friends might need to rescue her from a billionaire with personal-boundary issues.

“Here you are,” Natasha said, checking a number on the receipt and indicating one of the safes about halfway down the row second from the top.

“Could we have a moment alone?” I asked her. In the movies, they always left people alone with their safe deposit boxes when they went to retrieve their Nazi artifacts, incriminating documents or unmarked bills from Swiss banks.

Natasha didn’t seem to expect that—I guessed most people just entered their passwords, collected their things and left—but she agreed readily enough. The door closed behind her with a soft click.

We looked around the room. The hotel’s management had posted a notice outlining its policy for items left in the safes on the wall to one side. They’d also posted instructions for setting passwords for the safes, advising users to choose a code consisting of between four and six numerals.

“Do you have any idea what her password could be?” I asked Ben.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t even know she locked anything up in the first place. Why would I know her password?”

Because you’re her boyfriend, I started to say, but I managed to catch myself before the words left my head and came out of my mouth.

I turned and contemplated the keypad on the safe Natasha had indicated, wracking my brain for memories of Hilary at the ATM, Hilary at the computer, or Hilary doing anything else that would have required her to enter a personal code, but nothing came immediately to mind. I ran through the usual sorts of considerations that guide people’s password choices, but Hilary hadn’t lived in the same place for more than a few months at a time since we’d graduated, she didn’t have any pets, and she had never cared much about birthdays—in fact, she’d been twenty-nine for several years now. Her twin passions were work and men, and these two interests tended to occupy the majority of her waking hours.

While this line of thinking didn’t offer any brilliant insights, thinking about Hilary’s passions and her interest in men, specifically, did remind me of last night’s conversation about Party of Five. Which gave me an idea.

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Here goes.”

I punched in five numbers and pressed the pound key. There was a pause, and I waited for an alarm to blare out and for Natasha to come running, armed with a stun gun or something like that. Instead, a small light flashed green and the word “OPEN ” appeared on the screen above the keypad.

I breathed out with surprise and relief. I really hadn’t expected that to work.

“What was the password?” Ben asked.

“It’s 9-0-2-1-0,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Dylan’s zip code.” Ben looked confused, but this was no time to explain Hilary’s long-standing crush on Luke Perry in his career-defining role—he probably wouldn’t appreciate that the only guy ever to hold her interest on a sustained basis was a figment of Darren Star’s imagination. I twisted the latch and opened the door to the safe.

Inside, zipped into a clear plastic bag, were two items: a pen and a photograph.

“Everything all right in here?” asked Natasha, poking her head through the door.

“Everything’s great,” I said. I withdrew the bag and slipped it into my purse, and we followed her out of the room.

Peter, Ben, and I huddled on one of the sofas in the lobby, studying the photograph. It was of three people in their mid-to-late twenties, two men and a woman, standing on steps that led up to the columned portico of a stone building. The man in the center we all recognized easily—it was Iggie, back in the days when he still wore thick glasses, cut his own hair, and dressed without the assistance of an overly adventurous stylist. The Lasik and the professional haircut were definitely an improvement, but I was less sanguine about his updated wardrobe.

“That’s probably Biggie on the left,” I said, then explained to Ben about Iggie’s ex-wife and Caro’s and Alex’s comments the previous night. The image in the photo matched their description perfectly: a heavyset woman with big brown eyes and masses of brown hair shielding much of her face.

“The building behind them looks sort of familiar, too,” said Peter. “I can’t quite place it, but I think I’ve seen it before.”

But none of us recognized the person standing to the right of Iggie, a bulky but relatively nondescript guy with nearly as much hair as Biggie, and there were no helpful names or dates written on the back of the picture to indicate who he might be.

“So what does this mean?” asked Ben.

For an FBI agent—essentially a professional investigator—sometimes he seemed a little slow to connect the dots, I thought. But then I admonished myself. My withdrawal was making me uncharitable, as well as blunt and cranky, and Ben was not only hungover, he had just gotten dumped. I reminded myself again that a lesser person would have washed his hands of the matter and hightailed it home.

“That Hilary put an old picture of Iggie and his ex-wife in a safe?” I said. “Probably that she thought there was a juicy story about them. And maybe it involved the other guy in the picture, too. And maybe she started asking Iggie about whatever she thought the story was, and he was happier letting sleeping dogs lie. At least, that’s my theory.” I slipped the photo back into the plastic bag for safekeeping and started to return the bag to my purse.

“Wait,” said Peter. “What about the pen?”

“What about it? It’s just a pen.” It was a metallic color and a bit thicker than usual, but without a brand name or any other markings. While it was a step up from a disposable ballpoint, it was hardly a Mont Blanc, or even a Sharpie. I’d removed the cap and even checked that it wrote with ink and not some sort of magic clue-revealing substance, but as far as I could tell that was the extent of its usefulness.

“Then why would Hilary put it in the safe, Columbo?” he asked, reaching over and taking it out of the bag.

“Did you really just call me Columbo?”

But Peter didn’t respond. He weighed the pen’s heft in one hand and examined each end. Then he smiled. “I think it’s more than a pen,” he said. He pulled at its non-writing end, and it came off in his hand, revealing a short metal prong. “Voilà.”

“What is it?” I asked. “A weapon? Does it shoot darts or squirt poison or something?”

“No, but sometimes it scares me to think about how your mind works. This is even better than a poison-squirting pen. It’s a memory stick,” he said.

“How is that better?” I asked, disappointed.

“There could be anything on it,” Peter said. He pointed to the prong. “See, this is where it plugs into a USB port. Hilary could have copied the entire hard drive of her laptop onto here, practically. Documents, pictures, videos—anything. And whatever’s on here, Hilary clearly felt it was important enough to make sure she kept it locked up.”

“Oh,” I said, considering the possibilities with growing enthusiasm. “Could we attach it to Luisa’s computer and see what’s on it?”

“That should work,” said Peter.

“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s go back upstairs.”

“Um, it’s already two-thirty,” said Ben.

“So?” I said.

“So?” echoed Peter.

And then I remembered. “So we’re supposed to meet your mother in half an hour,” I said, glancing at my watch. My heart sank. Finding out what was on the memory stick sounded a lot more interesting than shopping for place settings, not that that was such a high bar. Just about anything had to be more interesting than shopping for place settings.

“Are you sure you don’t want to reschedule?” Peter asked me again. “My mom will understand.”

“She’s not going to have to,” I said. Even if I’d been willing to tell Susan about Hilary’s disappearance, it didn’t seem justified. After all, we still didn’t have any reason to think she wasn’t with Iggie, or that Iggie could pose a serious threat. The interruption wouldn’t take that long, and now that I was normal, I had to make the normal choice, which was to meet my future mother-in-law, as promised, at Tiffany’s.

With admirable restraint, I took the pen-memory stick from Peter and handed it to Ben. “Will you give this to Luisa to check out on her computer?”

“Okay,” he said. “And I’ll see if I can take a look at the tape from the surveillance cameras, too. I told the security guys I’d stop by their control center.”

“Thanks,” I said, although I almost wished he hadn’t mentioned the tape, because it only reminded me of something else that would be far more interesting than shopping for place settings. “We’ll meet you at four-thirty.”

I took Peter’s arm and steered him toward the elevator before my willpower could run out.