Gone Cold

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FOR JILL

One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm that attracts us.

—G
USTAVE
F
LAUBERT

Prologue

TWO YEARS AGO

KRAKOW, POLAND

“Have you ever thought maybe your daughter could still be alive?”

I felt my lower lip tremble.

“I lost hope that she was alive long ago, and I’d never want that hope back. Not in a million years. Not for one second. But I will forever be looking. In every shop, every café, every open home window in every city or town in every country on every continent. I can’t help myself. I want to know what happened to her and why. And I want to know who took her.”

I shook my head and swallowed hard as I thought about Ostermann knocking Dietrich Braun and Karl Finster out cold in the alley behind SO36 back in Kreuzberg.

“The violence I would do to that man, Ana, it can’t be put into words.”

Part One

THE GHOSTS OF DUBLIN

Chapter 1

“Usual, Simon?”

“Sure.”

As Casey turned to the espresso machine I gazed out the familiar window with the peeling green and gold letters reading
TERRY’S PUB—EST.
1992. Snowflakes continued falling hard as rain on the opposite side of the glass
.
It was another cold one, eight to ten inches expected here in Washington, D.C., a full foot in the suburbs, at least.

“Case,” I said, “mind making that an Irish coffee instead?”

“No problem, Simon.”

I’d been coming to Terry’s for over twenty years. The original owner, Terrance Davies, was a fellow Londoner who had given me my first real job. During my four years at American University, I’d worked my way up from barback to bartender to night manager. And though I’d never really taken to drinking, I found myself returning to Terry’s long after graduation. It was a quiet pub, a place where I could show up an hour or so before closing and nurse a pint or two of Harp while Terry relished me with stories of the home city. London. The “motherland” as he often referred to it.

I watched Casey pour the two ounces of Bushmills, toss in a teaspoon of brown sugar, then combine the steaming coffee before stirring and floating the heavy cream.

He turned, set the mug down in front of me. Casey O’Connell possessed what you’d generously call a beer belly, which stretched the faded black fabric of his Baltimore Ravens T-shirt to its limit in the vicinity of his navel. With his shaggy red hair and matching beard, he looked a bit like Zach Galifianakis of
Hangover
fame, following one of the Wolf Pack’s notorious nights in Las Vegas.

Casey had been working here for the better part of a decade, took over the bartending duties a few years after Terry sold the pub to Nigel Cummings and returned to the UK.

“Any luck?” Casey said.

“Nothing,” I told him.

Casey was one of the few people who knew how I’d spent the previous eleven months. Knew that I’d transformed my studio apartment on Dumbarton Street here in D.C. into a war room.

Currently mounted on my studio’s four walls was every shred of evidence collected by the FBI and D.C. Police in connection with my daughter Hailey’s disappearance twelve years ago. Included were photographs of the house in Georgetown from which Hailey was taken. Witness statements, mug shots, lab reports, news articles, and maps of every major city in the United States and Canada, and a few cities in Mexico, Central and South America, Europe, and Asia as well. Last February I’d made a promise to myself; I would finally discover who took my six-year-old daughter and why, or I would die trying.

Why now? That was what Casey had asked when I first told him last March. The answer was simple: This was the first time in eleven years that I didn’t have to work for a living. After Hailey was taken, I resigned from the U.S. Marshals but quickly began work as a private investigator, specializing in cases involving parental abductions. All too often, an estranged spouse will tear up the court’s custody order and flee with their child to a country that doesn’t recognize U.S. custody decisions. There were a surprising number of such countries. Russia, India, and Japan, just to name a few.

Roughly two years ago, I was heading to Charles de Gaulle when my taxi was pulled over by the French National Police. A cop named Lieutenant Davignon escorted me to a two-story cottage in a quiet, rural village roughly forty kilometers north of Paris, where he made me an offer: help locate a missing young American girl stolen from her parents’ room at the Hotel d’Étonner in Champs-Élysées and he wouldn’t arrest me for kidnapping the young boy I’d just liberated from his abusive mother in Bordeaux. Ultimately, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Taking the case effectively ended my policy of not getting involved in “stranger abductions,” cases in which the kidnapper was unknown and most likely unrelated to the victim.

Less than a year later I found myself at the multimillion-dollar estate of a movie mogul named Edgar Trenton. Edgar’s teenage daughter had been taken during a violent home invasion in Los Angeles while Edgar was attending a film festival in Berlin. At the time, I’d felt I owed Edgar Trenton. Years before, he’d agreed to nix a movie adaptation of the book about my own daughter’s kidnapping. He’d paid well for the rights, yet turned them over to me for free when I asked. I’d have taken on his case for free too but he’d insisted on paying me and paying me well. Later, when I was able to recover the $8.5 million ransom from a
mara
in Panama City, he’d given me a significant bonus. Enough to sustain me for at least a few years and to fund my search for Hailey, wherever and however long it took me.

I took a sip of the Irish and savored the warmth on the back of my tongue before swallowing it down. The alcohol struck me straightaway and only then did I realize I hadn’t eaten a thing in eight hours.

Over the past three months I’d been losing weight. It wasn’t the type of weight loss people pointed out and complimented you on. It was the type of weight loss people looked away from, tried to keep themselves from staring at, wondering all the while whether you were sick or doing too many illicit drugs or both.

I’d lost muscle in my arms and chest because I’d quit going to the gym. My cheeks were a bit sunken in and I was constantly pale, even this past summer, which was one of the hottest on record, not just in D.C. but on Earth.

To make matters worse, I couldn’t sleep. Oh, I’d get the occasional two or three hours here and there, but I couldn’t seem to get on any type of schedule, and I seldom dreamed. The days simply ran into one another, and the Beers of the Year calendar hanging over the register here at Terry’s was the only thing I could count on to keep me grounded. That and the abrupt change in weather were the only reasons I knew I’d been at this for nearly a year.

Even though by now it felt as though I’d never done anything else. Ever.

As I sat there I felt the BlackBerry grumbling in my right pants pocket. I fished the device out and stared at the screen for several seconds before finally registering that I’d received an e-mail not a phone call.

Something that looked like a lightning bolt flashed in the upper left-hand corner, alerting me to a low battery. I thumbed the mouse and opened the e-mail client.

It was a message from Kati Sheffield, a former FBI computer scientist who now stayed at home caring for her three children while working on the sly for people like me. The message read,
Finder
(her codename for me),
open the two attachments and call me right away.

Call you?
I glanced at my watch. It was too damn late to call her; I’d wake the kids, not to mention her husband, Victor, a detective with the Connecticut State Police, who was suspicious enough about her online activities as it was.

I scrolled down to the first of the two attachments, clicked on it. The screen went blank and a blue bar crawled across the top where the time banner would normally be. As I waited I drank down most of my coffee, savored the heat in the pit of my stomach. Drew a deep breath and took in the blended fragrance of hard booze and polished wood that complement most Irish pubs in the District.

Just before the blue bar reached its final destination a red light blinked and suddenly I was staring at the logo for Verizon Wireless.

Casey said, “Everything okay, Simon?”

“Battery went dead.”

“You can use the house phone if you want.”

I shook my head. “It was an e-mail, Case.” I dug into my pocket and pulled out a twenty, laid it on the bar. “Thanks for the drink,” I said.

“See you tomorrow then, Simon.”

“See you tomorrow.”

I pushed open the door and threw my arm up against the fierce wind, heavy flakes of snow still slapping me full in the face.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t see Casey tomorrow.

In fact, I would never see Casey O’Connell again.

Chapter 2

By the time I reached the door to my apartment building on Dumbarton, I was frozen, the exposed flesh on my face burned raw. I dug into the pockets of my jacket searching for my keys, but came up empty. Like a drunken teenager, I cursed and kicked at the door. Clenched my scarlet hands into fists and punched at the brick until my knuckles opened, dripping crimson down my fingers, spotting the newly fallen snow.

Christ
.

To top it all, I was suddenly struck with the awful headache-nausea combination that often accompanies drinking on an empty stomach.

I folded myself into a ball and dropped onto the top step, leaning my back against the black iron rail. My neck ached like hell—a cervical herniated disc exacerbated by stress. I packed some snow on my wounded knuckles to keep them from swelling. Then closed my eyes and wished I would drift off. For a few days at least. Maybe for good.

Forty-one years old. At least half my life gone and no cause but a twelve-year-old cold-as-ice case to find the person who took and murdered my daughter. After eleven months I knew damn well that it was an impossible mission, yet I couldn’t let go. Even if I could, there was nothing to move on
to
. Searching for the stolen—whether mine or other people’s children—was something I simply couldn’t do anymore. Something inside me had withered and died this winter, something had all but extinguished the flame that had been keeping me alive—the desire to find Hailey’s killer.