Blindside(30)

She immediately started to pack up her iPad and slip it into her purse.

I leaned back in the chair and let her think I didn’t care. Finally I said, “Are you going back to your apartment above the casket warehouse?” That one caught her by surprise. Now she knew I was serious. I had to keep going. “I’m not looking to cause you any grief. I’m just looking for a missing girl. That’s it. I swear to God.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I’m a good Catholic. My grandfather is even a priest.” I waited. That one usually killed with a slightly older group. I had no idea how millennials viewed Catholicism. They sure didn’t care much about cops one way or the other.

“What’s the name of the girl you’re looking for?”

“Natalie Lunden. I just want to make sure she’s safe.”

“So you’re really not looking to arrest anyone?”

“I didn’t say that. If Natalie is being held somewhere against her will, then whoever took her has to pay the price. As well versed as you are in criminal procedure, you probably understand the street law as well.”

She settled back into her chair. “I haven’t seen Natalie in almost a month.”

“No one has. Her mother’s frantic.” I didn’t know if Jennifer knew who Natalie’s father was.

Jennifer looked around the room quickly. She was suddenly jumpy.

“What’s wrong?”

“Another one of my friends is missing. He’s not answering his phone or anything.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tommy Payne.”

She didn’t know her friend was dead. I wasn’t sure this was the right time to tell her, but I couldn’t build any kind of trust by starting out with a lie.

“I’m afraid your friend Tommy is dead.”

She looked stricken. She choked back some tears and managed to ask me a couple of questions. Just simple ones. The kind a family member of a murder victim usually asks. “How?” “When?” “Are there any suspects?” I answered all of them quickly, and she seemed to handle it reasonably well.

I gave her some time to gather her thoughts. She pulled a tissue from her designer purse and blew her nose. She sniffled for a little while until she was ready to talk. Then she leaned in across the table and said in a very clear and determined voice, “Is there anything I can do to help you catch whoever killed Tommy?”

“I’m not the detective on the homicide. I’m just looking for Natalie. But I can think of something that will help both me and the homicide detective.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell me about Estonia.”





CHAPTER 41


I PULLED OUT a small notebook and settled in to hear Jennifer Chang’s story. Like most people about to talk to the police, she paused for a moment. She looked around the room as if she was conducting countersurveillance.

She said, “If Natalie’s in Estonia, she’s with a hacker named Henry.”

“Henry.”

“His real name is Endrik. Endrik Laar. Henry’s just the Anglicized version of his name he prefers. I’m pretty sure he’s from Estonia originally. He’s there now, at any rate.”

“Who is he? What’s he look like?”

Jennifer thought about it for a moment. These computer people didn’t just spout off. They considered questions and the best way to answer. Finally she said, “I guess Henry is about thirty. He’s a little on the short side. Not even five eight. He used to be as skinny as a rail, but now he’s muscular. I mean absolutely ripped. Part of it is because he trains with some former Olympian from Germany. Part of it is steroids. I think that’s what changed his personality. He used to be the typical funny, nice, young computer guy. But he’s changed.”

“How so?”

“It started with his moods. As he brought in more and more money, it was like he realized how much power he had. Then he hired people specifically as enforcers. They were the ones who kept all the programmers from talking to the police. I think it’s worked pretty well. To my knowledge, he’s never been arrested.”

“Why would Natalie be with Henry? Are they an item?”

“That’s a complicated question. Henry had relationships with all three of the female programmers during the time I worked with him, here in New York. A girl from Latvia named Svetlana. Natalie. And me.” She stared at me to see if I was shocked or would offer any judgment.

I said, “I remember what it’s like to be young. I don’t care about any consensual relationship. But I am trying to get a handle on if Natalie was forcibly taken or ran away to be with her boyfriend.”

Jennifer said, “It’s hard to say. Natalie was into Henry for a while. When we first started working with him, we thought we were doing something special. Exposing secrets. Forcing businesses to admit when they were cheating people. But pretty quickly Henry figured out the real money was in essentially blackmailing retailers. He’d knock out their website for an hour, then tell them to pay some outrageous sum or he’d knock out the website for three days.”

“But he couldn’t knock it out permanently.”

Jennifer gave me a flat stare. “Amazon does more than six hundred million dollars in sales a day. Do you think if some hacker who proved he could knock them offline asked for five million dollars to leave them alone they wouldn’t go for it? Henry does it all the time. And by setting up his bank accounts in money havens like Belize, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands, it makes it impossible to find him.”