Champagne Deception (18 page)

*****

Ignoring every stop sign and street signal, Lorenzo rolled furiously on his Vespa, combing every inch of land for some clue to lead to Coretta.  The sedan had escaped nearly an hour ago, maybe two hours ago.  He had no concept of time as he scoured Milan for the woman he loved.  Siren lights blinded him from behind as he squinted, struggling to see the road.  In a blur, the police officer ordered him to pull over to the side of the road.

I can’t get a speeding ticket
now!  I can’t stop!
  Impetuously, Lorenzo pounded the pavement even harder in an attempt to lose the police officer.  But his motor scooter was no match for the police vehicle.  Cursing outrageously, he jumped off his bike and pushed it onto the shoulder lane.

Slowly, authoritatively, the officer strutted over to him
and instructed him to put his hands behind his back.  In disbelief, Lorenzo shouted, “You’re arresting me?  For what?  I’m not drunk!  I know I was speeding, but this is an emergency, please listen---“

“You didn’t obey police orders.  You drove even faster.  Put your hands behind your back,” the officer said in a monotone as though he’d spoken the words a million times before.

“Officer, please, a woman has been kidnapped from an art reception at our gallery, LoCo.  I’m Lorenzo Fiatti, the sculptor.  I was trying to chase after the car that snatched her.  Please, you have to help me find her.  Coretta Nicholas, she’s about 5’6” tall and---“

“Now you are resisting arrest.  If a woman was kidnapped, why didn’t you notify the police?  Put your hands behind your back.  That’s your final warning.”

“I didn’t have time to call the police!  Sometimes you have to get things done on your own,” he muttered, exasperated.  But Lorenzo obeyed the officer’s orders, hoping desperately that the lieutenants who had come to his house the night of the rock incident would be at the police station.  They would listen to him, wouldn’t they?

*****

Coretta writhed inside the ropes, trying to twist herself into freedom.  But the more she moved, the tighter the
ropes knotted together.  She couldn’t stay in this ditch.  The nightmare scenarios were becoming louder in her brain no matter how hard she tried to drown them out with thoughts of Lorenzo.  Reality was coarse and painful like the ropes that scraped mercilessly against her flesh.  Persistently, she wriggled around, ignoring the red welts that were forming on the thin skin of her wrists and ankles.  She inched herself towards the door.  If she could get her mouth free, maybe she would be able to maneuver the lock with her teeth.

Heaving a few mighty exhalations, she ejected the foul rag from her mouth.  Thirsty for fresh oxygen, she breathed heavily through her mouth, stretching her jaw to release the tightened muscles.  Determinedly, she wriggled over to the door and clenched her teeth around the sliding lock, pushing it fruitlessly a few times before getting a proper grip.  The lock slid open as Coretta
tackled the next challenge of opening the door.  The door was too heavy to open with her mouth, and the ropes still constrained her limbs.

As she sat on the edge of the seat furiously brainstorming, the sound of footsteps alerted her to a human presence.  Footsteps had been the cause of so much fear in the past month, but this time she felt relieved.  Someone had seen the car in the ditch.
Someone had come to save her.  But as she parted her lips to speak, the menacing figure of Jonathan in the ski mask stopped just outside the window.

Chapter Sixteen

Peering through the glass, he saw that her gag was gone.  Swiftly, he
jerked the door open, picked the rag up from the floor and tried to stuff it in Coretta’s mouth.  But she kept her lips stubbornly pursed, refusing to be gagged again.  Using brute force, he tried to pry her jaw apart, but Coretta was stronger and braver than he realized.  Clamping her mouth shut, she looked up at him venomously, telling him with her eyes that she was onto his plan.  She shamed him with her gaze, communicating how he was the epitome of a coward the way he used his physical strength as a weapon.

She opened her mouth long enough to shout, “I know it’s you Jonathan!  So take off the damn mask!”

Jonathan flinched inside his heavy disguise, surprised that she had recognized him.  For a moment, he tried to keep up the act, still remaining mute.  Then, abruptly, he tore the ski mask off and revealed a face contorted with wrath.  She gasped at the severity of his features.  Even during their worst argument, she had never seen him so enraged.

“It’s been you all along, hasn’t it?” She cried boldly.  “You’ve been terrorizing me since I got to Milan, right?!  You tried to kill Lorenzo on the highway.  You threw the rock at the window. 
You put that bag of black wood chips on the doorstep.  It’s all been you!”

The expression is his eyes was sheer diabolical fury.  He made no effort to deny nor affirm her allegations.  Instead, he just stared her down like a jungle beast, although his inhuman demeanor was far more frightening than
the sharpest teeth of any lion or tiger.

Averting her gaze from those
frigid eyes, she persisted, “Why are you doing this?  Are you jealous that I finally took control of my life and made a change? Do you just have sour grapes because I left you and I’m with someone else now?  Why?  Why are you doing this to me?!” Her voice pierced the air and reverberated eerily up through the ditch.  “Why would you leave your precious Wall Street job and camp out in Milan for a month?  Just to torture me?”

“My job is still rock solid,” he said tightly as she winced, shocked that he was finally verbalizing.  How typical of him that his first words to her would be about his job.  “I’ve been going back and forth to New York as necessary to take care of work.”

So he hadn’t been in Milan the whole time.  That would explain why there had been periods of peace interspersed with the harassing episodes.  She should have known better than to think that Jonathan would abandon his true love: money.  As she challenged his glare, she wished with all her might that her hands were free.  Then, she would throttle the monster in front of her for putting her through such hell.

As he remained as silent as a
cemetery, her fear and anger morphed into stinging betrayal.  All along she had assumed the terrorizer was just an acquaintance, just a strange old janitor named Angelo or an artistic competitor named Declan.  But it was Jonathan Trake, the man she had once hoped to marry.  He was the last person on earth she thought would mistreat her this way.

She shifted her feet uncomfortably inside the rope and kicked a flat object.  Startled, she looked down to see the three water scene paintings she had accused Lorenzo of misplacing.  How could she have treated him so callously before their grand opening?  She should have known
that he wouldn’t be so careless with her art.

“And you stole these from the cellar!” She shouted as he made no reply. 
“What are you going to do to me?” She demanded bitterly.

“I’l
l answer your previous question,” he drawled slowly.  “Why am I doing this to you?  It’s very simple.  Do I want you back? Hell no.  Am I jealous of that Italian lover of yours?  Nope.  At first, I wanted you back, though.”  He was rambling now, and Coretta feared she had unlocked a flood gate of insanity.

Quietly, she listened to him as he hovered over her in the back seat
, fixating his eyes out the window.  “When I called you and found out you were in the airport last month, I was furious.  I took the next plane to Milan to find you.  And it wasn’t difficult to track you down after I hacked into your email and saw that you would be meeting up with that Fiatti fool.”

Coretta glowered at him.  How dare he hack into her private email account!  The betrayal was thickening with every word that oozed from his
chapped lips.

“
So, yeah, I arranged for some incidents to shake things up.  Make you realize that Milan is not the perfect place you’ve made it out to be.  And I wanted to
kill
that new boyfriend of yours on his pansy ass motor scooter.  But I missed.” Jonathan’s lips thinned into a taut line.  “And I threw the rock that night thinking it was his room.  He was the one I wanted to kill, not you.  But now that I see how popular your art is, I realize that I don’t need you back after all.  You see, and here’s the part where I answer your question, why am I doing this to you?  Because you’re worth far more dead to me than you are alive.  In fact, you both are.”

*****

Lorenzo was stewing inside a holding cell, desperately trying to get the attention of anyone who would listen.  So far, he hadn’t spotted either of the officers who had investigated the villa after the murder attempt.  But they were so useless anyway.  He needed an intelligent, reasonable person to listen to him instead of squandering precious moments that should be spent searching for Coretta.

“I’m allowed one phone call!” He shouted in Italian through the bars.  “You can’t deny me my basic rights!”

Long minutes later, a guard sauntered over to unlock the holding cell and release Lorenzo to make his one permitted phone call.  Following the guard into the next room, he scanned the intake desk for a familiar face but saw none.  Daringly, he veered off in the opposite direction of the phones, heading towards an administrative office.

“This way!” The guard commanded, grabbing Lorenzo’s arm.

“Please, instead of a phone call, could I speak to a deputy or someone in charge here?  I’ve been trying to tell you that a woman has been kidnapped!  She could be dead right now!” He shuddered violently at the prospect.

Something in the sculptor’s plea had resonated as truthful with the guard, and he led Lorenzo into a back office, knowing this was going against police procedure.  Inside the office sat two officers, one of whom Lorenzo recognized immediately from the villa incident.

“Officer! It’s me, Lorenzo Fiatti!  I’m sorry, you didn’t give me your name that night, but I know you came to my house!” He cried desperately.

The officer nodded in recollection.  “
The name is Officer Menini.  What are you doing in our jail, Signor Fiatti?”

“That’s what I’d like to know!  I was speeding on my
bike, I admit that.  But instead of giving me a ticket, this cop arrested me for resisting,” he said, rage pouring through his veins.

“Were you resisting?”
Officer Menini asked pointedly.

“Just for a moment! But there was a
very good reason.  The woman you saw at my house that night, Coretta Nicholas, she’s been kidnapped!” Lorenzo hissed the words as Officer Menini and the others finally took notice.

“She was kidnapped from your house?”

“No! She was kidnapped from our art gallery, LoCo.  And I have a feeling I know who did it,” Lorenzo informed.

“And who would that be?”

“Declan Wainwright,” he said definitively.

*****

“You’re going to kill u
s?” She gulped with dread.

“Not yet.  First, we have some financial matters to take care of.” He rubbed his hands together avidly.  “Move over, fat ass.”

He climbed into the back seat of the car, pushing her to the passenger side as her hip banged painfully against the door opener.  She seethed with more fury than the twisted rage his face had displayed a short time ago.  “You’re not going to get away with this!” She screamed.

“Shut up before I put that gag back in your big mouth,” he commanded.  “Now, we have a phone call to make.  What’s your boyfriend’s number?” He asked bitterly.

Seizing a bargaining chip, she said, “I’ll tell you his phone number if you untie my wrists and ankles.”

“Oh no.  I’m not making any deals with you.  Just tell me the number or---“

“Or what?  What will you do to me?” She challenged, feeling victorious as he squirmed.  “What will you do to the woman who loved you for ten years?” She pressed.

He gulped as a
lump formed in his throat.  The modicum of compassion quickly evaporated, replaced by a mask of bitterness.  “Don’t get all sentimental.  You’re the one who left me.  Now give me his damn phone number!”

“Untie my hands and legs!” She shot back stubbornly, knowing he could torture the information out of her if he wanted to.  But as much as a beast as Jonathan had proven himself to be tonight, he wasn’t a completely unknown entity, and she doubted he would inflict more pain on her.  Already the fact that he was talking to her was a hopeful sign.  She truly believed his desire for money was the source of this whole nightmarish
kidnapping.

He looked into her big brown eyes for a heartbeat, then hastily turned away.  Grumbling under his breath, he loosened the ropes and set her limbs free.  “Don’t even think about running away or hitting me!” He warned.

Coretta rubbed her sore muscles and nodded in compliance.  She had taken a comprehensive self defense course when she moved to New York City, but she wouldn’t draw on that knowledge just yet.  Her self defense skills were a secret weapon that she could channel later on when he wasn’t expecting it.

“Now what’s the phone number, damn it?!”