Fifth Victim (25 page)

‘For all the good it did,’ I murmured with a sigh. ‘I think you’re right, but I get the feeling it goes deeper than that. It’s not quite that they didn’t care who saw it. I think they actually
wanted
Eisenberg to watch them walking away with his money, easy as pie. There was something … I don’t know … almost
gloating
about the whole thing.’

His eyes slid away from the road ahead for a moment. ‘Didn’t count on you running interference, though, did they?’

I gave a hollow laugh. ‘I rather think that you calling my going down under their front wheels “interference” is on a level with trying to bruise someone’s knuckles in a fight by repeatedly thumping them with soft parts of your body,’ I said dryly.

‘These people were pros.’ Parker shook his head. ‘Which doesn’t square with the guys who tried for Dina at the riding club. You said yourself they were amateurs. Not the kinda guys who would know how to manipulate the lights at an intersection, or jam Gleason’s comms network.’

‘So, maybe they’ve called in reinforcements. The guy with the gun definitely wasn’t one of the two at the riding club.’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘And if they’re such pros, why haven’t they released the boy?’ I demanded wearily. ‘I can’t help believing they never really intended to let him go, just like they never intended to run me ragged all over Long Island this morning. I think they were always planning to hit me hard and fast, the first opportunity they got, and it worked like a charm.’

‘Don’t second-guess it,’ Parker cut across me, savage in his softness. ‘If you’d put up more of a fight, you’d have more holes in you now, and some of them might even have gone right through.’

‘I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d avoided the ambush, and the chase teams had closed on my last-known position, and I’d made it to Montauk Point inside the time. I mean, had they even bothered to lay in another rendezvous point from there, or was it all a con from the start? What was so special about the place, by the way?’

Parker opened his mouth to respond, then shut it again, frowning. Before I could go on, he’d thrown the Navigator into an abrupt U-turn. I held onto the door pull and waited until the unwieldy vehicle had wallowed back onto an even course before I risked a question.

‘Jesus, Parker! What the hell are you doing?’

But my boss had his foot hard down on the accelerator, weaving through the sparse traffic like he was on the last lap of a Grand Prix. ‘You asked what would have happened if you’d got to Montauk Point,’ he said, jaw tight with a mix of concentration and anger. ‘But the answer is we don’t know, because after you were hit, Gleason didn’t bother sending anyone there to find out.’

That cold feeling of fear came over me again. ‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’

Parker shook his head, and after that I didn’t ask any more stupid questions, just left him to drive.

Getting to Montauk Point proved easier said than done. Most of the road out there was single-lane in each direction, crowded with trees, and undulating enough to make overtaking almost impossible.

‘There’s no way I could have made it out here in thirty minutes, even on a bike,’ I said, remembering the kidnappers’ deadline. ‘They must have known that.’

Parker nodded. ‘In a perverse kinda way, that should make you feel a little better,’ he said. ‘Knowing this was a set-up from the start.’

It didn’t.

Eventually, we hit the dead-end loop at Montauk, marked by an old-fashioned white lighthouse with a strange brown band round the middle of it. Parker jerked the Navigator to a stop at the base of the shallow incline that led up to the lighthouse itself, ignoring the half-empty parking lot on the other side of the road.

‘What’s here?’ I demanded, aware of an elevated heart rate, a dry mouth. ‘What was I supposed to do when I got here?’

‘Maybe there was no
afterward
,’ Parker said, his voice grim. ‘Maybe this is where you were supposed to find Torquil.’

I snapped him a fierce glance. ‘Was that before or after I disentangled myself from what was left of my bike?’

He didn’t respond to that, just reached for the door. ‘There are two beaches on either side of the point,’ he said. ‘You want north or south?’

I shrugged, still unconvinced. ‘South.’

We parted company. I jogged back along the edge of the road to a path that led through a wooded area, where a sign promised I would find Turtle Cove. It sounded a lot more picturesque than it was, turning out to be a small crescent-shaped beach with a stony shoreline below golden sand.

I stood for a moment, shading my eyes with a hand. The breeze was brisk, crashing the ocean onto the rocks that surrounded the base of the lighthouse. There were a few hardy souls fishing from them, casting out into the surf like they were trying to whip back the sea. Apart from that, I had the beach to myself.

I tried to jog along the beach, but the sand was soft and heavy. I justified my lack of energy with the excuse that I’d crashed and been shot already today.

I only found the bucket because I was looking at the shoreline and I damn near tripped over it. A child’s red plastic bucket, like they use for sandcastles, upturned high above the tideline. It rattled against something when I kicked it, and when I bent and lifted it up, I found a length of grey pipe sticking out of the sand beneath.

‘Oh shit,’ I whispered, fumbling for my cellphone. Parker answered almost before it had time to ring out, and when I spoke, my lips seemed numb. ‘Parker, get over here. I think I’ve found something …’

I snapped the phone shut again without waiting for his reply, grabbed a piece of nearby driftwood, and began to dig.

It was just after six-fifteen, the evening warm but with a sharpening wind. Almost fifty-seven hours after Torquil had been kidnapped.

Dig, twist, throw
…

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

‘Torquil’s dead,’ I said.

The words sounded curiously flat and emotionless, even to my own ears. I had just walked into the living area at the Willners’ house, soiled and ragged from hours spent with numerous cops and medics and crime scene techs. If the Eisenbergs had tried to avoid the authorities before, they were neck-deep in them now.

The local and state police had been quickly followed by men in aggressive suits with aggressive haircuts and equally aggressive personalities, who were probably FBI agents or something similar. They’d told me, no doubt, but after a while the IDs they waved under my nose all began to blur together.

Not for the first time, I was glad of Parker’s calm presence. When it came to dealing with people like that, he had played the game for a long time.

I needed a very long, very hot shower, and to crawl straight from there into bed, but by the looks of it I was a long way from either.

Now, a small collective intake of breath greeted my news, but by then they must have been expecting the worst. By the time I reached the Willners’ place, with every outside light blazing, it was dark – way on the wrong side of midnight and almost back round into morning again.

I confess I’d harboured a vain hope that the household would be safe asleep by the time I got in, and I could put off the whole wretched business of explanations until the morning. I was so tired my vision had started to shimmer around the edges, and it was easier to list the parts of my body that didn’t hurt, rather than those that did. I should have known I was onto a losing streak.

Parker had tried to convince me to go back to Manhattan with him for what remained of the night, make the return trip out to Long Island when I’d had a few hours’ sleep – maybe even take a day to myself. Reading between the lines, I knew he was trying to save me from having to be the one who broke it to Dina, and though I appreciated the gesture, I couldn’t shirk that responsibility.

As it was, I ended up with everyone else’s share of it, too.

Dina wasn’t alone in the living room. She was sitting in the chair her mother favoured with its back to the view. After today, I might be joining her in not wanting to face that expanse of sandy beach.

Opposite Dina, on the leather sofa Parker and I had shared during our first visit, was Manda Dempsey, with Benedict sprawled alongside her. Hunt and Orlando were together on another sofa, which had been arranged at rightangles to make chatting easier. They didn’t look like they’d been doing much of that.

So, the gang’s all here
.

As soon as I came in, everybody got to their feet and watched me approach with varying degrees of apprehension. Perhaps there was a little disgust thrown in there, too. I was filthy and I stank, and I recognised that I was not likely to be at my tactful best. Hence my opening statement, and their reaction to it.

Maybe I should have taken Parker’s advice after all.

Nevertheless, I skimmed their faces out of habit, seeing expressions of shock and surprise, but there was something just a little off about them. Maybe, if I hadn’t been so bloody tired, I might have worked out what that was.

The security personnel who habitually accompanied the various members of this group had positioned themselves in the outer reaches of the room, maintaining a perimeter. They eyed me, coldly assessing, judging my abilities purely on the results I had obviously failed to achieve.

Over in the far corner by the edge of the windows, Joe McGregor stood quietly, inconspicuous and self-contained. He appeared to be taking absolutely no notice of whatever stilted conversation had been going on in that room before I turned up, but I knew I’d get the full rundown from him later. He made eye contact and gave me a fractional nod – of condolence or support, I wasn’t sure which.

Right now, I’d take whatever I could get.

‘Did he—?’ Dina began, and swallowed, hands to her face. ‘I mean … what did they do to him, Charlie?’

I glanced down at my sweat-stained, dirty clothing. ‘They buried him.’

Dina’s face spiked in horror. ‘
Alive?
’

I hesitated. From what I’d been able to glean by the line of questioning I’d faced, there was some doubt about the time and manner of Torquil’s death. That could just have been me projecting my own fears onto it.

If Torquil was alive when he went into that box, then if I’d been quicker, or we’d put it together faster, he might still be alive. But the moment Parker and I had wrenched that lid loose, had seen the boy’s arms slack by his sides and no sign that he’d tried to scrape his way out through the timber that encased him, I hadn’t needed to wait for a pathologist’s report.

He might have been drugged, I supposed, but in my heart I knew that he’d been dead when they put him into the ground. The plastic pipe – the one I’d mistakenly thought was to provide an air supply – turned out to be little more than a marker post, unconnected to the inside of the box. With a bitter anger, I remembered the care I’d taken digging round it.

But the bottom line was that the sole purpose of this morning’s exercise had been to ambush me for the Eisenberg Rainbow, at a point where the chase teams would be able to do damn all about it. It had taken timing that was military in both conception and execution, and although none of these rich kids had seen service, they were surrounded by people who had.

So, why had it been such a pair of amateurs who’d tried to ambush Dina at the riding club? I recalled again, from the CCTV footage Gleason had shown us, the way the passenger from the Dodge – the one who’d grabbed the rucksack – had flinched when the driver shot me. Had they realised their past mistakes and recruited a real pro in time to snatch Torquil?

And if he was such a professional, why had he killed his victim instead of returning him in exchange for the necklace?

I glanced at the faces again, realised I didn’t trust any of them with these speculations, but wasn’t sure why. I shrugged, said dully, ‘Who knows if he was alive or dead when he went into the ground?’

Dina sank back into her chair as if her legs had suddenly ceased to support her weight. Manda threw me a dark look and moved across to perch on the arm to put a comforting arm across Dina’s shoulders.

‘You might show a little compassion, Charlie,’ she said, eyes filled with reproach. ‘You must know how claustrophobic Dina is.’

There was no right way to answer that, especially to admit I hadn’t known. She’d never mentioned it, and the subject of phobias had not come up. When I thought back, I realised that she’d always taken the stairs or escalator in the department stores we’d visited, if there was a choice, but I’d assumed that was more about personal fitness than fear.

‘Oh, poor Tor,’ Orlando murmured, turning her face into Hunt’s shoulder. He put his arms around her and favoured me a mildly reproving look, also.

So, suddenly he’s your best friend
…
?

It was left to Benedict to voice my cynical thoughts out loud. He made a gesture of bored annoyance and flung himself back onto the sofa.

‘Oh, come on, Orlando, don’t go soft on us now,’ he said, almost jeering. ‘It’s not as if you ever
liked
the guy.’ But there was a little too much studied bravado in his tone. I wondered who he was trying to convince.

Orlando yanked herself out of Hunt’s embrace and whirled on Benedict, tilted forwards, arms rigid and her tiny hands clenched into fists.

‘
How could you?
’ she shouted. ‘He might not have been our
friend
, but he’s still
dead
, isn’t he? Doesn’t that mean
anything
to you?’

Benedict looked momentarily shocked at her outburst, but he recovered his sullen poise quickly enough. ‘No,’ he said with an arrogant stare. ‘It doesn’t. People die every day. That’s life.’

I thought Orlando was going to fly at him, all claws and fury, and was glad it wasn’t my job to intervene. Fortunately, it was Hunt who gently took hold of her arms, turned her so he was between the two of them with his back to Benedict, as if preventing them seeing each other would dispel the anger. If the way Orlando wilted in his grasp was anything to go by, he was right.