Fifth Victim (4 page)

Every kidnap victim reacted differently, but all too often there was guilt at the sacrifices made by the family, resentment at their own helplessness, and an overwhelming general sense of fear at going out and doing normal things again. Feelings that could last for weeks or even years after the event. Some former hostages never fully recovered.

‘Sure,’ Parker said, and there was satisfaction in his dry tone. He had me hooked, and he knew it. ‘And that’s why they’re all turning out for a birthday party aboard a million-dollar yacht, huh?’

I opened my mouth and shut it again, acknowledging defeat. ‘Good point. Well made.’

‘I thought so.’ He smiled out loud then, creasing the corners of his eyes and taking years off his face, and added casually, ‘Mrs Willner wants you on duty first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I had nothing else planned.’

‘You were organising logistics for Paraguay …?’

‘All in hand. I emailed my report to Bill Rendelson before we left this morning.’

‘That was fast work.’

‘Ah well, I try constantly to disappoint Bill with my unexpected efficiency.’ It was better than admitting I didn’t sleep much these days, either.

Parker sighed. ‘You don’t have anything to prove, Charlie,’ he said quietly. ‘If anyone ever thought you were just along for the ride, they kinda revised that opinion a long time ago.’

‘Even Bill?’

‘Even Bill,’ he agreed gravely.

Bill Rendelson ran Parker’s office with an iron fist inside an equally iron glove. Invalided out of active duty after the loss of his arm, his only pleasure now, it seemed, was in dissatisfaction with the rest of the staff – and me in particular. I’d only seen one brief flash of humanity from him, gone so fast it might have been a trick of the light, never to be repeated since.

But if I’d been about to comment, it was cut short by Parker’s cellphone ringing from its hands-free cradle on the dashboard. He had, of course, switched it off while we were at the Willners’ and the calls began to pile in now.

He talked on the phone almost constantly for the remainder of the journey onto Manhattan Island, swapping easily from one subject to another, going over itineraries without pause for thought or recollection, smooth, unflustered and professional. An ideal boss.

He’d proved an ideal friend, too, over the past three months, when the shock and pain and all-consuming sense of loss had sometimes threatened to overwhelm me. Sean was, as Parker had once pointed out, my soulmate.

I expected Parker to go directly to the office in midtown, but to my surprise he continued north, eventually pulling up outside the front entrance of my apartment building on the Upper East Side.

Strictly speaking, the building was Parker’s – or some wealthy relative of his at any rate. It was in a prime location and should have been financially way out of reach, but the heavily subsidised rent had been another of the incentives that lured Sean and me to New York in the first place.

As I reached for the door handle, Parker put his hand up suddenly and I stayed put, waiting for him to tie up the last call. The Navigator sat idling by the kerb, sporadic traffic passed, the sun came and went behind high cloud. An elderly lady, wearing a huge amount of make-up and swaddled in furs, tottered by dragging a small shivering hairless dog by its diamanté-studded collar and lead. She was a regular fixture of the neighbourhood and I’d never seen her without the fur – or the dog with any – even in the height of summer. Life with all its oddities, staying the same and moving on.

After no more than a minute or so, Parker hit the End button and removed his sunglasses.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Look, Charlie, I want you to keep in close contact on this one. If you need help, call me – day or night – OK?’

‘O … K,’ I said slowly. ‘What are you not telling me?’

He shrugged. ‘You know as much as I do.’

‘So why the fuss?’

‘I’m worried about how you’re holding up, that’s all,’ he said at last. He put his hand on my arm, lightly, saw my surprise and lifted it away again. ‘You’re looking tired, Charlie. You should get some rest.’

‘I will – later,’ I said. I opened the door and climbed out, glanced back to find him still watching me, narrow-eyed. ‘After I’ve been to see Sean.’

He smiled briefly, put the car into gear and drove away, and as I watched him go I wondered what he’d
really
been about to say.

CHAPTER FIVE

When I walked into Sean’s room, he was lying on his right side in the bed, with his back to the doorway.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said softly. ‘I brought you coffee.’

He didn’t respond. It was warm in there and the sheet was rumpled around his waist. Above it, I could see the steady rise and fall of his ribcage as he breathed, the bones forming a series of ridges under the skin like sand along the tideline.

He was thinner than he’d been at Christmas, the visible shoulder angular and pointed where once it had been as sleekly clad in muscle as Dina’s white horse. Just as graceful, and just as dangerous to underestimate.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, gripping the frame and uttering the usual silent prayers. That this time it would be different.

It wasn’t.

Carefully, as if afraid of waking him, I moved round to the other side of the bed. He had always been a light sleeper, almost catlike in his reflexes, but his face was soft in total relaxation. I reached out a hand, hesitant, and stroked the pale skin of his upper arm. Under my fingertips, I felt a little quiver of response and I watched his face minutely, as I always did. His eyelids, with their ridiculously long dark lashes, remained resolutely closed, as I had known they would. But, inside my own chest, something twisted.

Sean’s coma had lasted since his near-fatal gunshot injury in California, a hundred days ago. After the shooting, he’d been airlifted to the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center. The surgical team there had spent seven painstaking hours removing the shattered fragments of skull from his brain and repairing the damage caused by the path of the single 9 mm round. It had been a glancing blow rather than full penetration, but that had been enough.

In the several weeks that followed, it was to LA that Sean’s mother had briefly flown to weep with quiet dignity by his bedside. A calm, sad woman who’d known her share of grief, she’d talked of Sean in the past tense as if he were already lost to her.

My own parents offered to make the trip but I’d refused – to, I suspect, their secret relief as well as my own. My father might have retired from his own speciality as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, but he would have cut to the heart of the medical jargon with a little too much clinical precision for me to stomach back then.

The doctors had been initially dubious that Sean would survive at all, but he’d defied their gloomiest prognoses. He’d responded well after surgery, to the point where they were able to remove him from the ventilator and allow him to breathe unaided. Sometimes he reacted to touch, moving under my fingers, and sometimes to speech, turning his head towards the sound of my voice.

But he didn’t wake up.

The fact that the guy who’d shot him had been caught – that
I
had caught him – was no consolation, I’d found.

As soon as Sean was stable enough to travel, Parker had chartered a private flight and brought him back to New York, to a specialist neurological rehabilitation centre where they were experienced in dealing with long-term coma patients. Here they fed him, kept him hydrated and gave him passive physio to keep his joints in working order, even if his muscles were wasting. I’d been coming every day since then.

I flipped the lid from the coffee and put it down on the side cabinet, close enough for the aroma to reach his nostrils, and dragged the visitor’s chair closer to his bedside. Out of habit, I glanced at the cardiac monitor, wired to patches on his chest. I was no medical expert, but I’d grown to know the rhythms of his body well enough to recognise there had been no change.

Sean’s hair was longer than he would probably have preferred, falling dark and straight over his forehead. I pushed a lock of it back from his temple, revealing the narrow scar that streaked back into his hairline from the corner of his left eyebrow. If he continued to wear his hair in a style less military to the one he’d always favoured, I realised, it was likely people would hardly notice. The surgeons had made a neat job of putting the pieces back together. Time alone would tell how much was missing on the inside.

A nurse appeared in the doorway, a motherly figure in brightly patterned scrubs. Nancy. She lived across the river in New Jersey and enjoyed the reading time offered by her daily commute. Her husband was in the construction industry and she had two sports-mad teenage sons who drove her to affectionate distraction. I’d come to know a lot about Nancy.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ she said, her voice slow and musical, as always. ‘It’s time to turn him.’

I helped her shift Sean onto his back, his limbs slack under our careful hands. He had to be moved every few hours to prevent sores and Nancy was often the one who did it. She had a gentle touch and bottomless compassion and it seemed to me that if Sean made one of his apparently random physical responses – a twitch or a turn of his head – it was for Nancy that he moved most often.

She rearranged the sheet low across his stomach, checking the monitor patches were still firmly attached, and the gastric tube that disappeared into the wall of his abdomen. Initially, they had fed Sean using a nasogastric tube down his nose and through his oesophagus, but that, I was told, could lead to complications. As soon as it became obvious this wasn’t going to be over quickly, they’d inserted something more permanent, through which puréed food could be squirted directly into his stomach.

The thought of it did little for my own appetite. When Sean finally awoke, I thought, refusing to consider another outcome, he would be about ready to kill for a taste of the daily coffee I brought to tempt him.

Nancy smiled serenely and departed. I tucked my fingers into Sean’s open hand and began to tell him about my visit to the Willners, about the recent kidnappings and Dina’s apparent glee at my employ. I sought his opinion, unvoiced, on the wisdom of Dina going to the party she was so keen to attend, and reported Caroline Willner’s own hesitation over the same event. And all the time I wondered if doing this was for his benefit, or my own. Sean always had been a good listener.

‘These three kids who’ve been taken so far all live on Long Island, at least part of the time,’ I said. ‘I say “kids”, but they’re late teens, early twenties, but so far that’s all we know. I suppose this party is a good opportunity to look for patterns, but at the same time, there’s the risk that if someone is watching them – working security for one of the families, maybe – am I exposing Dina to danger by agreeing that she go? We don’t know how the victims were selected, or even how they were taken. They can’t remember much after the initial abduction, apparently, which probably means some kind of pre-med relaxant, like we used in California for that cult extraction – remember?’

I paused. Sean’s head seemed to rock a little in my direction. Involuntary, no doubt, as most of his movements were, but it still felt like he’d reacted with discomfort, as if trying to warn me of something. I’d read about coma victims who were actually locked into their paralysed bodies but totally aware of everything going on around them, screaming silently into the void, sometimes for years. Like being buried alive.

Bearing that in mind, I looked for meaning in every gesture, however pointless they told me that might be.

Sighing, I let my thumb stroke the back of his right hand. Without animation from within, his skin felt different, alien to the touch. And I remembered, with splintered clarity, every moment we’d spent together. Sean was everything I’d ever wanted, even before I’d known what that was. He understood me better than I understood myself, and he would have understood, better than anyone, how this slow limbo was crushing me from the inside out.

‘I need you,’ I said out loud. It sounded stark and craven in the quiet room.

Gently, I let go of his hand and stood up. I shrugged into my jacket, picked up the cooling coffee from the cabinet.

‘Last chance,’ I murmured, waggling the cup slightly. Sean didn’t stir. ‘Maybe tomorrow, hey?’

I walked out of the room and along the corridor, resisting the urge to look back.

We’d talked about death, in a roundabout kind of way. We couldn’t do the job we did without the subject coming up and being faced in advance. Sean had always said, calm and casual, that when his time was up he wanted to go clean, fast, and know nothing about it.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad
.

A sudden dazzling image exploded behind my eyes, the way his head had snapped sideways from the bullet’s impact, the slash of blood, the instant drop.

It didn’t give any comfort that he’d gone down in the line of duty, as he would have seen it. Doing his job. Hesitation had never been a possibility with Sean and it seemed that to hesitate now would be to let down everything he’d stood for. So if it came to it, I thought fiercely, then yes, I would die to protect Dina Willner, as her mother had asked.

And maybe I’d do it just a fraction more willingly than I might have done, a hundred days ago.

CHAPTER SIX

‘Isn’t this just to die for?’

Dina opened the ring box and turned it towards me. Inside was the biggest, ugliest yellow diamond I’d ever seen. It looked like nicotine-stained glass and cost the same as a car.

I held up my unadorned hands with the fingers splayed, and shook my head. ‘I’m the wrong person to ask about jewellery,’ I said evasively. ‘But couldn’t a ring as a birthday present be … misconstrued?’

She coloured slightly, snapped the box shut again and handed it back to the eagle-eyed sales assistant. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed. Her eyes drifted indecisively across the glittering display cabinets. We’d been into a dozen similar high-end stores so far on this street alone, and all that dazzle was starting to give me a bad head.