24 Hours (25 page)

As a doctor, Will had often speculated about the worst disease. Was it ALS? A lingering cancer? Soldiers pondered wounds the same way. Was it a Bouncing Betty in the balls? A disfiguring facial wound? But in truth there was no worst wound, or worst disease. The worst wound was the one
you
got. The worst disease was the one that got you.

But among all the evils of the world, there was one worst thing, and he had always known what it was. It grew out of a single image: a child hunched in the dark, alone and in pain, whimpering for help where no help would come. That child had a thousand faces, plastered on bulletin boards in the entrances of Wal-Marts, on milk cartons, on desperate flyers in the mail.
Have you seen this child?
The abandoned. The kidnapped. Runaways. But worse than being that child crying in the dark was being the parent of that child. Pondering forever the moment you let your attention wander in the mall, or that you’d said yes to that out-of-town trip, conjuring scenes of cruelty beyond Goya himself, living and reliving them in the everlasting torment of self-inflicted damnation.

Lying on the couch in his luxury suite, Will knew he was one step away from that eternity of guilt. He could not have known, of course, that someone like Hickey waited in the wings to take away everything he had during a convention weekend. Yet on some level, he had. He had always known. Yeats had said it long ago:
things fall apart.
It was the human version of the entropy that powered the universe as it ticked down toward cold death. Just as some people always built things, organized, nested, and planned, there were those serving the function of chaos: stealing, tearing down, killing. It was a paranoid worldview, but at the deepest level Will had always embraced it. Only recently had he become soft. Complacent. Lulled by material success. He had let down his guard, and now chaos had ripped into his life like a tornado.

He had to respond, and forcefully. He had never believed that by simply letting events take their course, things would work out for the best. That view was held by people who accepted whatever fate handed them and called it “the best” in a pathetic attempt to cope. Will Jennings
made
things come out for the best. His father’s failures had taught him the necessity of that attitide.

He had to detach himself from the situation. Karen always said that his instinct was his most valuable asset. But instinct, he believed, was integrally bound up with emotion. And emotion had no place in solving a problem like this one. What he needed now was logic. Pure reason.

Of course, there
were
situations in which doing nothing was the wisest response. Any doctor could tell you that. But when doctors chose the option of “inaction,” they were actually choosing to get out of the way of an immune system perfected over millions of years. For Will, on this night, doing nothing meant relying on a system created by Joe Hickey, a man he did not know or remember, yet who harbored a deep resentment of him and all he stood for. He could not do that. In spite of Cheryl’s assurances that waiting out the night was the way to get Abby back, he was certain she was wrong. He would trust his instinct that far.

The washrag on his eyes had gone cold again. The QVC hawker’s voice floated in from the bedroom, where Cheryl was watching a presentation on “faux sapphires,” whatever they were. He threw the cloth on the floor and sat up on the sofa. He needed more information. Cheryl claimed this kidnapping was exactly like all the others, but it wasn’t. What made it different? Was it something Cheryl herself did not know? Or something she did not know she knew? With a groan of pain, Will got up and walked into the bedroom.

In downtown Jackson, Dr. James McDill was working his way through police mug books, sliding his hand down each page to isolate the lines of photos. Tired of the claustrophobic interrogation room, he and Margaret had moved out to the squad room, with the late homicide shift. Agent Chalmers had been working the NCIC computer but hadn’t come up with anything yet. The number of “Joes” who had committed crimes in the South was astounding, and most had compound names. Chalmers had shown Margaret photos of Joe-Bobs, Joe-Eds, Joe Dees, Joe Jimmys, Joe Franks, Joe Willies, and even a Joe DiMaggio Smith. But none brought even a flicker of recognition to Margaret’s eyes. McDill had asked his wife to lie down on the Naugahyde sofa by the wall, but she refused. She sat at another empty desk, doggedly searching through book after book. Her eyes had a strange glint, and McDill was glad to see it. Perhaps, after the long year in purgatory, that light signaled a return to the world of the living.

He took a sip of cold coffee and looked down at the book before him. Female offenders, harshly lit. The smug grins of check kiters. The gaunt, pocked faces of coke whores. None was nearly as attractive as “Cheryl.” In his memory, the woman who had forced him to sit all night in the Beau Rivage looked like a high school prom queen. He knew he must be exaggerating her beauty, yet his mental picture was as clear as the room he was sitting in now. He was sure of one thing. If “Cheryl” was in one of these books, she would stand out like a rose in a field of garbage.

He rubbed his eyes and turned another page. As he scanned the photos, Agent Chalmers’s voice intruded into his concentration. The FBI agent was talking to the black JPD detective named Washington about the McDills’ experience. Chalmers had enough tact not to mention the rape with Margaret in the room, but he seemed very impressed by the kidnappers’ plan.

“There
is
no ransom drop,” he was saying. “Not in the classic sense. See? The ransom is low enough so that it’s liquid. The target can get it without any trouble. Two, the husband’s out of town when it goes down. The kid vanishes, poof, and the mother finds herself stuck with one of the kidnappers for the night. A female member of the team hits the husband on the coast, while the kid’s with a third member at an unknown location. From then on, the thirty-minute check-in calls work like an unbreakable net. It wipes out the classic model. I mean, it
neutralizes
the risk. In the morning, pretty as you please, the wife goes down to her bank and wires the ransom to her own husband. Ba-da-bing, it’s over. Jackpot.”

Detective Washington nodded thoughtfully. “You’re dealing with a smart son of a bitch. What you gonna do if you find out who he is? That thirty-minute thing has you boxed. Anything you do could kill the hostage before you even figure out where he is.”

“We have to go high-tech, all the way. If we can confirm that this thing is going down, Frank Zwick is going to get a chopper, GPS homers, the works, everything by dawn.”

“Do you think it’s going down?” Washington asked.

Chalmers nodded. “I’ve never known a criminal to stop something that was working for him. They always push it till they get bit. That’s their nature.”

“You’re right about that much.”

“We just need to catch a break. If we still don’t know who they are when that ransom wire hits the coast in the morning, we’ll be way behind the curve.”

McDill closed his eyes and tried to shut out their conversation. In Chalmers’s voice, he recognized the sound of a man who believed he could impose his will on the world. McDill knew how illusory that belief was. Every day he cut into the thoracic cavities of human beings, and it was difficult enough to impose his will on simple human tissue. When you brought large numbers of people into a dangerous situation—each acting independently—the best you could hope for was that nobody would die. McDill didn’t just remember Vietnam, as he’d said before. He had served there as a medical corpsman. And he had seen more situations go to hell in a handbasket because of the good intentions of men like Agent Chalmers than he cared to recall. Chalmers was the classic second lieutenant, green and hungry for action. His faith in technology also struck a dark resonance with Vietnam. McDill hoped that the Special Agent-in-Charge had been tempered by more experience.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the rows of unfamiliar women, then wearily turned another page. His breath caught in his throat. Staring up from the mug book like a graduation portrait was Cheryl’s innocent face.

“Agent Chalmers! This is her!”

The FBI agent stopped in midsentence and looked over. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Chalmers walked over and looked down at the photo beneath McDill’s index finger.

“Who is she?” McDill asked.

Chalmers took the photo out of its plastic sleeve and read from its back. “Cheryl Lynn Tilly. I’ll be damned. She
did
use her real name. Maybe the others did too. I wonder why she didn’t pop up on NCIC?”

He walked over to the computer he’d been using and began typing in the information off the photo. The JPD detective stood behind him with his arms folded. After several seconds, data from Washington began flashing up onto the CRT.

“She’s got some small-time collars,” Chalmers said. “Passing bad checks, forgery. One prostitution arrest. She did thirty days in a county jail. Nothing violent. You’re positive it’s her?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll make a copy of this photo and fax it down to the Beau Rivage. Maybe someone on staff down there has seen her.”

“What will you do if they have?”

Chalmers raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. “Call in the troops. If she’s down there this weekend, we have to assume you’re right. There’s a kidnapping in progress. And that is a major situation. Right now, we need to see whether known associates can lead us to the man behind all this.”

Chalmers turned to Margaret McDill, who was watching them with a look of apprehension. “Are you awake enough to keep helping us, Mrs. McDill?”

“Whatever you need,” she said softly.

McDill walked over and put his hands on his wife’s shoulders.

Chalmers picked up a telephone, then paused. “These people have some nerve. To repeat the same crime in exactly the same place, a year after the fact?”

“You didn’t talk to them,” McDill said. “They think they’re invincible.”

The FBI agent smiled. “They’re not.”

Karen rocked slowly but ceaselessly in her chair, her arms around her shins, her chin buried between her knees. Hickey was still lying on the bed, his eyes glued to Bogart and Fredric March as they played out the final minutes of
The Desperate Hours.
Karen sensed that she was close to a breakdown. She had been pulling hairs from her scalp, one at time. Externally, she could maintain calm, but inside she was coming apart. The knowledge that Hickey meant to kill Abby to punish Will was unendurable.

She had to warn him.

Food was her best excuse to get out of the bedroom, but there was no guarantee that Hickey wouldn’t follow her into the kitchen. For a while she had entertained the hope that the whiskey might put him to sleep, but he seemed immune to its effects. He’d gone into the bathroom twice during commercials, once to urinate and once to check his stitches, but she hadn’t felt confident enough to risk using the phone, much less to try to reach the computer in Will’s study.

She stopped rocking. She had the feeling that Hickey had said something to her and that she’d been concentrating so hard that she missed it.

“Did you say something?” she asked.

“I said I’m starving. Go fix something.”

She wanted to jump out of the chair, but she forced herself to sound peeved. “What would you like?”

“What you got?”

“A sandwich?”

Gunshots rang from the television. Bogey fell to the ground. “Goddamn it,” Hickey said. “I don’t know. Something hot.”

“There’s some crawfish étouffée I could heat up.”

“Yeah.” He glanced over at her, his eyes bleary. “Can you put it in an omelet?”

“Sure.”

“What was I thinking? I got Betty Crocker here. Weaned on an Easy-Bake oven, right?”

Karen tried to laugh, but the sound died in her throat. She got up from the chair and walked toward the door. “Anything else?”

“Just hurry it up.”

She nodded and went out.

As soon as she cleared the door, she sped to a silent run. In the kitchen, she slid a skillet onto the Viking’s large burner, switched the gas to HIGH, then opened the refrigerator and took out three eggs, a bottle of Squeeze Parkay, and a Tupperware dish half-filled with seasoned crawfish tails in a roux. The eggs went into the pocket of her housecoat, the étouffée into the microwave, and a glob of margarine into the skillet. Then she grabbed the cordless phone off the wall and punched in the number of Will’s office.

“Anesthesiology Associates,” said the answering service operator.

“This is Karen Jennings. I need to—”

“Could you speak up, please?”

She raised the volume of her whisper. “This is
Karen Jennings.
I need to get a message to my husband on his SkyTel pager.”

“Go ahead, ma’am.”

“You’ve got to do something. They’re going to . . .”

“Just a second. Is that the message?”

“Yes—no, wait.” She should have thought this out more carefully. She couldn’t simply state the situation to a stranger. The operator was liable to call the police herself. With shaking hands she broke the three eggs and dropped the yolks into the skillet. “The message is, ‘You’ve got to do something before morning. Abby is going to die no matter what. Karen.’ Do you have that?”