Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery (32 page)

Out on the street, cold air slapped her in the face, feeling good. Like a tortoise withdrawing into its shell, Claudia pulled her woolen scarf over her nose, shoved her hands into her pockets, and turned left from the hotel. Sunday morning; the streets were teeming. People going in and out of restaurants, people riding bicycles, people filling the sidewalks, walking, Rollerblading.

As she started walking up the block she spotted a black town car that was parked across the street pull away from the curb and merge into traffic, driving slowly. The car pulled ahead of her, then moved to the side of the road. Nobody got out. Maybe the driver was waiting for someone to come out of a building. Maybe he was waiting for her.

Moving quickly past the town car, Claudia darted a look, but the tinted windows blocked her view. She passed a Thai restaurant, hurried to the end of the block and crossed at the light. At the right edge of her vision, she could see that the car was back in traffic, going through the intersection, still with her.

At Seventh Avenue she turned left toward Central Park and started walking faster. The avenue was a one-way street and she was walking against traffic. The black car couldn’t turn with her.

She passed the bagel shop where she and Susan had breakfasted a few days earlier. Someone was walking close behind her. Too close for comfort. Stories of muggings filled her head.

Moving close to the wall of the nearest building, she stopped and pretended to look for something in her purse, waiting for whoever it was to pass her by. A gaggle of teenage girls and boys shuffled past, teasing one another, and Claudia laughed at herself for her attack of nerves.

Across the street from Carnegie Hall now, only a block from Central Park. She entered a construction scaffolding shed that covered the sidewalk—there seemed to be construction on every other block in this town. Puddles of water dripped from above the poorly lit shed, and she was glad to come out the other side.

With a jolt of recognition Claudia saw a black town car. It was driving toward her, traveling in the far right lane, on her side of the street. She started to cross the street, but the traffic was heavy and fast.

The town car stopped beside her and a man in a dark Windbreaker jumped out. He wore a baseball cap and reflector sunglasses, but she recognized Marcus Bernard’s driver, Mike.

“Ms. Rose!” Mike strode over to her.

“Hey, Mike. What—?”

“Mr. Bernard sent me to pick you up.”

Claudia’s stomach cramped in fear. “I don’t have any appointment with Mr. Bernard this morning.”

“He’s with the baroness. She wants you—”

“I don’t think so, Mike. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

He nodded, not at her, but past her.

After that, everything happened fast. Someone coming up from behind. Turning to see . . .

And all at once: a buzz like a bug zapper; the world exploding in a lightning bolt of pain; every muscle in spasm; an involuntary cry.

She dropped to her knees and started to topple. Before her face could hit the ground, she was grabbed by the arms, hoisted up. A man’s loud voice said something about a seizure. Powerless, she was aware of being carried a few feet, then shoved without ceremony into the waiting car.

Chapter 32

As her brains gradually unscrambled, Claudia became aware that she was sprawled across the backseat of Marcus Bernard’s town car. Mike was driving and another man was in the passenger seat—big, beefy, with a bull neck and a crew cut. Security. The one behind the stun gun.

She must have groaned out loud because Beefy turned and looked at her over his shoulder. “Hey, Mike, look who’s back.”

“That was quick,” Mike said. “I thought she’d be out longer.”IT

Beefy huffed. “Toldya the battery was low.”

“How ya doing back there, Ms. Rose?” Mike asked.

“Like . . . beaten . . . baseball . . . bat.” Her mouth felt stuffed with cotton and the words were coming out jumbled. She wasn’t sure whether the men up front understood what she’d said, but she was pretty certain that neither of them gave a rat’s ass how she was doing.

Little by little, the neurological activity that had been interrupted by the stun gun began to return to normal, allowing her brain to regain control of her muscles. One at a time, she stretched her limbs, felt the pain burn along every nerve ending, a massive case of pins and needles.

“Gimme your phone,” said Beefy, reaching his hand behind his head and waggling his fingers. When she was slow to respond, he said, “Pull over, Mike. Lemme juice her again.”

Claudia dragged herself into a seated position on the leather upholstery and took stock of her situation. There seemed to be no choice but to comply. It took some effort to control her trembling hand as she got the cell phone out of her pocket. “Fuck you,” she said, tossing the phone over the seat.

“Tsk, tsk, such a potty mouth,” Beefy sneered over the seat back. He leaned down to pick up the phone from where it had landed on the floor and dropped it into a gym bag at his feet, along with her hopes for getting help.

Mike swung the steering wheel and made a left onto Fifty-fourth Street. He glanced over at Beefy. “Call the boss.”

Beefy nodded and got out his own phone. He punched in a number, waited about fifteen seconds, said, “It’s me—we’re good. Yeah. Done.” Ringing off, he looked over at the driver, jerked his thick neck. “Back to the office.”

Looking out through the darkened windows, Claudia kept a watchful eye on the street signs as they crossed intersections, straining for landmarks, anticipating where they might be headed. Avenue of the Americas, Park Avenue. They were pointed east, traffic crawling now. She thought the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was coming up a little north of their position. If she was right, it meant they were nearing the East River.

They slowed and came to a stop at a red light. Her chance to jump out and run, if she would be steady enough on her feet.

“Ya can’t open the doors from back there,” Beefy said over his shoulder, as if he knew she was studying them for a way to escape. Claudia’s eyes darted over the blocks they passed, committing to memory the streets they were passing, assessing where she might go for help if she could free herself once they exited the vehicle.

The numbers of the avenues got lower the closer they came to the river, and the town car slowed. They were driving in a mixed-use area. Five-story apartment buildings next to skyscrapers. Business and medical sharing space with condos. Starbucks on one corner, a neighborhood grocery on another. A bank, a liquor store. More of the omnipresent scaffolding.

Mike applied the brakes at a padlocked chain-link fence and jumped out to open the gate. New construction. Sunday; nobody would be working. The building exterior was complete, but heavy equipment still sat in the locked yard. It hit Claudia that the office they were going to was the one where Grusha planned to transfer her headquarters. Pollard and McAllister, too.

Somebody else would be signing Pollard’s lease now.

Beefy twisted around and looked at her, his wide face set in a sneer. “Hey, how you doin’ back there? Comfy, huh?”

“Fuck you
and
your mother,” Claudia retorted, fed up with his sarcasm. Faster than she could blink, he was kneeling on his seat, brandishing the stun gun at her. For a man of his size, he moved like a rocket. Her bravado evaporated. She shrank into the corner, her palms slick with sweat, the blood rushing in her ears.

“Yeah, Ms. Smartass, that’s what I thought.” The smug satisfaction in his voice was an added insult.

Mike slid back into the car and looked from Claudia to his partner. He gave an irritable shake of his head. “What the fuck you doin’, dude? Put that thing away.” He put the car in gear and drove into the construction lot, pulling in between a Dumpster and a forklift.

Beefy didn’t turn around. He kept staring into the backseat with remorseless eyes, terrifying in their emptiness, until Claudia had the certain feeling that this guy could cut her head off and smile while he did it.

He smirked at her. “Think I oughta hit her again, Mike? A couple more jolts oughta make her shit her pants.”

“Shut up, asshole. We gotta get her up there.”

Beefy barked a loud laugh and stepped out of the car, slinging the gym bag over his shoulder. He opened the back door and ordered Claudia out, not bothering with any pretensions of courtesy. She pushed herself across the seat, still shaking so badly that she feared she might have trouble standing. Beefy grabbed her arm and dragged her out of the car, and Mike took her other arm. They frog-marched her across the lot and through a revolving door into the building.

The lobby was a repository of carpet rolls and wallpaper, spools of electrical wire and PVC pipe. Mountains of paint cans, stacks of drywall, other construction detritus. A lack of heating made it refrigerator cold.

The men wore soft-soled shoes, but the heels of Claudia’s boots echoed between them as they cut across unfinished concrete, past an empty rectangle frame laid out in the middle of the lobby. A reflecting pool, maybe, with narrower rectangles on either side, eventually to serve as planters.

Past a security guard desk waiting for the finish to be applied. If only a guard were there now whom she could signal for help. Into the elevator, where Mike hit the button for the fifth floor. As the elevator car ascended, its glass walls afforded a view of a half-planted atrium that would one day be a lush jungle. But nobody was interested in the view and they rode in silence. Fear and the aftereffects of the stun gun were making it impossible for Claudia to formulate a plan of action. She couldn’t think beyond
oh god, oh god, oh god.

The doors opened and she found herself being borne along a corridor of offices whose doors had not yet been hung. From one of the rooms, a woman’s frantic screams broke the silence. Grusha Olinetsky.

Claudia balked, the hair on her arms standing straight up.

Beefy looked down at her with a nasty grin, enjoying her distress. “You’re next,” he said.

“Give it a rest, wouldja?” said Mike.

“What, all of a sudden you don’t have the stomach?” The thick-necked thug gave a coarse laugh and pulled Claudia in the direction of the screams.

She told herself she had to stay calm, think rationally; that she’d been in tough spots before. But her mind was reeling like a drunk in an alley. Beefy had her arm in a steel grip with his left hand. The stun gun was in his right, and the look on his face said he’d love nothing more than an excuse to use it on her again.

Like the Elite Introductions loft, the front of the office suite was a large, open space. A semicircular reception desk with a granite top had been installed opposite the front doors. There was no furniture, no carpeting, and the ceilings opened onto HVAC duct-work, as if the building were a skeleton with bits of its skin peeled away.

Beefy put the stun gun in the gym bag and set it down near a workman’s tool chest on wheels. The drawers were closed, but the top was open, revealing an assortment of screwdrivers, a pipe wrench, and a drill. He took Claudia’s phone from the bag. “Here’s your gear, boss. And here’s her phone.”

Clean-cut in a banana yellow polo shirt and mole-skin pants, Marcus Bernard didn’t look like a multiple murderer. But the dark stain on the back of his hand and the rust-colored splotches on his shirt looked like blood, and there was a woman audibly whimpering in another room of the office suite.

Marcus smiled in greeting as if this were just any Sunday morning and he was enjoying his day of rest. He slipped Claudia’s cell phone into the pocket of his pants. “Hey, Claudia. Have the boys been taking good care of you?”

Knowing there was nothing she could say that would improve her present situation, Claudia glared back at him in stony silence. Marcus shrugged indifferently and spoke to his thugs. “Get her secured, then take a hike. Go for coffee or something. I’ll get on the horn when I’m ready for you.”

Mike opened a drawer in the tool chest and produced several plastic cable ties. They were not the thick police plasticuffs she had seen Jovanic carry, but were of the type she’d used before to bundle the electrical wires behind her computer. Once it was locked into place, the plastic tie would be virtually impossible to break.

Mike handed a tie to his partner, who wrenched Claudia’s hands behind her back and started to wrap the plastic around her wrists. She knew she didn’t stand a chance of defending herself that way. Appealing to Marcus for mercy was probably a nonstarter, but it was no act when she cried out, “Hey, that hurts! Do you have to do it like that?”

Marcus’ eyes were bright as they stared at her. From where she stood, the pupils looked enormous, and she guessed he was probably flying. He said, “It’s all right, Ace. You can do ’em in front. She’s not going anywhere.”

Beefy, who now had a name, looked disappointed. He ordered Claudia to put her hands together. “Like you’re praying,” he said, looping the plastic around her wrists. He yanked the tie until it cut into the flesh and she winced. That made him grin.

Marcus watched impassively as Ace shoved her roughly to the floor. With her hands bound she couldn’t break the fall and she landed painfully on her shoulder. Mike pulled her boots off and cinched her ankles with another plastic tie. When they were finished with her, she was lying on her side, only her corduroy jacket and Levi’s between her and the icy cement floor. She’d lost her scarf somewhere along the way.

“Sit her up over there, against the wall,” said Marcus. “The lady and I are gonna have a chat.”

When the two men were gone, Marcus crouched on his heels and grabbed Claudia’s chin, roughly jerking her face to look at him.