Frame 232 (27 page)

SHEILA’S EYES
fluttered open as she emerged from one of the deepest sleeps she had ever known. There had been no dreams or interruptions, just a lost gap in the timeline of her life. She felt slightly loopy, like she did back in the stress-laden corporate days after taking a hit of NyQuil when she absolutely had to get a good night’s rest.

She lay on a brown leather couch with her head on a small pillow, her hands and feet bound by repeated coils of nylon rope. The room was relatively small and, in spite of being essentially a prison, tastefully furnished and decorated. Aside from the couch, there were a pair of matching chairs on either side of an accent table, two chrome floor lamps, a large area rug that covered all but a narrow margin of the hardwood floor, a selection of framed landscape prints, and a large potted plant of some leafy, semitropical variety. There were no windows, and the only door was shut tight. There was also no clock or any other way to tell the time.

She trained on the ceiling
 
—plain white, with a dome fixture in the center
 
—and tried to figure out where she was. No answers came, and fear began to trickle in. She lifted her head
and saw a man sitting at a small round table on the other side of the room, smoking a cigar and reading a magazine. Then the recognition struck, and several disturbing facts jelled into one horrific realization
 
—he was not only the person who had led her off the train but was also the man who had tried to kill her by blowing her childhood home to pieces, the man who had successfully erased the life of Dr. Benjamin Burdick.

The remaining pieces of the puzzle whirled into place in her mind. After they got off the train, he took her to a car in the parking lot.
A white sedan,
she remembered. Then he handed her something to drink . . .
a water bottle, with the cap already off.
Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t even consider drinking something that had already been opened. But she had taken this without hesitation and downed it like she’d just crawled out of the desert.
Because he told me to . . . just because he told me to.
The world around her had begun to spin away and she had plunged into pure darkness, pure nothingness.
Drugs,
she realized.
He drugged me. First on the train with a needle, then with something else in the car.
She could not conjure any memories after that, and the fear blossomed into breathing terror.
Has he raped me? When I was out cold, did he actually
 
—?

This chilling notion was cut off when her captor looked up from the magazine and took note of the fact that his prisoner was awake. “It’s about time.”

“Let me go,” Sheila said, using the no-room-for-debate voice she unleashed on her employees when she wanted them to jump. It always worked back home, but she doubted its effectiveness here. “Right now.”

The man set down the magazine and rose, unhurriedly. He strolled over, leaned down, and reached for one of the nautical knots he’d tied. For a flicker of an instant, Sheila
thought he was actually going to obey her. Instead, he simply gave his handiwork a tug to make sure it was tight.

“Sorry; I can’t help you,” he said, moseying back to the table. “Orders from the boss.”

“And who’s that?”

“I can’t help you there, either.”

“Then who are you? What’s your name?”

He was standing at the table now with his back to her. “Mickey Mouse,” he said and picked up something she couldn’t see.

“Yeah, well, let me out of here, Mickey, or I swear I’ll
 
—”

He turned, and when she saw the gun, her mouth clamped shut. It wasn’t so much the weapon itself that blew fresh fear into her
 
—at no time did she expect that he wouldn’t have one
 
—but rather that he was casually screwing a silencer onto the end of it.

He came back over and sat down next to her on the middle cushion. Then he gently placed the rounded end of the silencer under her chin and moved it slowly southward, all the while with one finger around the trigger. She was barely breathing now, every inch of her body as cold as if it had developed a layer of frost. She had never known such fear.

“I’m afraid you are not in a position to give orders this evening,” he said emotionlessly. “On the contrary, tonight you’re going to do everything I decree.”

“Don’t bet on it,” she heard herself say, although she had no idea where she was summoning the nerve.

“Oh, I don’t need to bet on it
 
—I know it. Here’s how it’s going to work: I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to give me the answers. All of them.”

“Yeah? And why would I do that? Are you gonna shoot more drugs into me? Is that it?”

“Regrettably not. Truth serums such as sodium thiopental and amobarbital are notoriously unreliable. What I gave you on the train was simply designed to make you more docile and cooperative, and what I gave you in the car was meant to put you to sleep. What I need now is a way to make you talk.”

Sheila snorted a laugh. “I’m not telling you jack.” She nodded toward the gun. “And you don’t scare me with that thing, because I don’t care if I die.”

He leaned in close to her
 
—their noses were just inches apart
 
—and said, “Frankly I don’t care if you die either. But you’ll talk anyway because there are so many things worse than death.”

He pulled away from her panic-stricken face, set the gun on her stomach, and removed something from the breast pocket of his linen shirt. “For example, this.”

It was a standard-size piece of paper that had been folded into quarters. He opened it and showed her a list of seemingly random numbers. Some were broken up by hyphens; others had dollar signs and decimal points.

“See this one?” He pointed to the figure of $8,534.01. “Does it look familiar?”

Sheila felt her face turn white. “No,” she said, already knowing it was pointless to lie.

“Of course it does. That’s exactly how much you have in your savings account as of this morning. And this one here
 
—” he singled out the nine digits below it
 
—“is the account itself. This is my favorite, though.” It was a four-digit code that Sheila knew all too well, as it was the day and month of her birthday in reverse. “The secret code for your bank card. Not much of a secret anymore.”

He went on to the other figures, many of which were unfamiliar to her. They turned out to be PINs, balances,
and accounts belonging to close friends, home addresses and unlisted phone numbers of extended family members, even Social Security numbers for their children.

When he was finished, he smiled and said curtly, “You wouldn’t want me to make use of any of this information, right?”

In a final gesture of defiance, Sheila refused to respond. It was a decision she would quickly regret. Her captor’s arrogant grin vanished, the muscles in his face tightened, and the eyes darkened with a sadism that eclipsed whatever remaining fragments of humanity he possessed. In that instant, the smooth operator fell away, and the sociopath that dwelled beneath was exposed.

His hand shot forward like a striking cobra and clutched her throat. Then he was in her face again, his lips twisted in a horrific snarl.
“Right?”

She gasped, her eyes bulging.
“Yes, yes! Whatever you want to know, I’ll tell you!”
The tears came in a rush as the last of her emotional resolve disintegrated.

He watched her for a long moment as if savoring his victory. The smile returned. He got to his feet, retrieving the gun from her stomach as he turned away. Even through her grief, albeit in a far-distant corner of her mind, she wondered what chain of events led someone to become such a monster. Then she did what so many do in times of extreme crisis
 
—she promised God anything he wanted if he would just get her out of this alive and in one piece.

“I’m glad you’ve decided to be cooperative,” her captor said. “That’ll make things much easier for both of us.”

He dropped the gun on the table and fished something else out of his shirt pocket. It was a Bluetooth headset, which he set in his ear. Then he took out his cell phone and
tapped in a number. The call was answered right away on the other end.

“She’s ready,” he said.

Noah walked into the kitchen of the main house, still fully dressed in spite of the late hour. He carried an empty plate and a tall, milk-stained glass to the sink. Under normal circumstances he would have put them in the basin and walked away, as Rosetta would be there in the morning to clean up. But tonight he went about washing both by hand, using a little Palmolive and a scrub pad, then setting them in the drainer. After that he scrubbed the sink and rinsed away the soap bubbles with the sprayer. Finally he dried the sink with a hand towel, then hung the towel over the back of a chair.

It occurred to him that his behavior was bordering on OCD; then it occurred to him that he really didn’t care. He had been distracting himself with busywork all night
 
—laundry, dusting, vacuuming. The staff would be puzzled tomorrow, but he would tell them he had been unable to sleep. This wouldn’t be a lie, but it wouldn’t be the full truth, either. Then again, intentionally offering half-truths had become something of a habit of late, and his conscience acknowledged this with growing concern.

The police had grilled him for information about Sheila. Then, as he expected, they had turned their attention to Jason. He answered all questions honestly but volunteered no more than necessary. This intentional sin of omission weighed heavily on his conscience. He heard back from the authorities only once, when they acquired two security videos
 
—one on the station platform in Wilmington, Delaware, and another in the parking lot. They had not yet been able to identify the
man who had apprehended Sheila. They did, however, make the determination that the plates on the white sedan had been stolen, which led them to conclude that the kidnapper was fairly clever. When they sent still photos from both videos to Noah, he immediately forwarded them to Hammond, who confirmed that it was the man who had tried to kill them at Sheila’s mother’s house and who had killed Ben. Hammond grew increasingly agitated on the phone and again had to be talked out of coming home. Police had since spoken with Sheila’s family and friends, but no one had heard from her.

When the media inevitably caught wind of this latest turn of events, they ran with it. The same video stills accompanied lead stories on countless news channels and across the Internet. It was sensationalism at its finest
 
—one member of this underdog team kidnapped, the other valiantly carrying on, and the Hammond estate officially taking the classic “no comment” position. Theories abounded from all fronts, most on the basis that sinister figures in the government must be at work.

Noah followed the broadcasts until he could take no more. He kept both the house and satellite phones clipped to the back of his belt and repeatedly thanked the Lord for the miracle of caller ID.

He stood by the sink, his mind in neutral as he stared at a dim circle of moonlight on the countertop. Then one of the two phones
 
—the house phone
 
—rang. It was a Dallas phone number he did not recognize. The name read
Private Caller
. His first inclination was to ignore it, let it go to voice mail. If Sheila had been with him, safe and sound in the guest room he’d prepared for her, he would’ve done so without hesitation. Current circumstances demanded otherwise, however.

“Hello?”

“Jason Hammond, please.” It was an elderly male, but his voice had a surprisingly energetic, even forceful quality. It also possessed a gentle Southern accent that was not altogether unpleasant.

“I’m sorry; Mr. Hammond isn’t here at the moment. May I
 
—?”

“Then I’d like to speak with Noah Gwynn.”

“This is he. How
 
—?”

“My name is Henry Moore. I’m Sheila Baker’s attorney.”