One-Way Ticket (18 page)

He turned his head and nodded to me.

I ignored him.

I got into my car, backed out of the alley, and headed home.

It hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped it would. I figured I’d probably done more harm than good.

When I got home, I tried to call Evie’s cell phone and got her voice mail. I guessed that by now she was in the hospital with her father, where cell phones are supposed to be turned off.

“It’s me, babe,” I said after the beep. “I’m really sorry I missed your call last night. I’d love to talk with you. My thoughts are with you and Ed today. Please call when you can and tell me how things are going. I miss you. Henry sends his love. So do I.”

Then I went into my office, collapsed on my daybed, and fell into a dark, disturbing sleep.

The ringing of my telephone woke me up in the middle of a confusing dream. By the time I realized where I was and groped my way over to my desk, the ringing had stopped. The digital display on the telephone showed Dalt and Jess Lancaster’s home phone number, and the message light was blinking.

It was ten minutes of five. I’d slept the afternoon away, and I felt worse than before I went to sleep. My thoughts were jumbled and fuzzy, still mixed up with disturbing dream images that I couldn’t pin down, and I had a hangover-type throbbing headache behind my eyes.

I dialed my password for my voice mail. One message. “Brady, it’s Dalt. What’s going on? We haven’t heard from you all day. I’m having horrible thoughts. Please call me.”

I bumbled out to the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. Then I went into the bathroom, took off my T-shirt, filled the sink with cold water, and immersed my face in it. I splashed water on my chest. I wet my fingers and combed them through my hair. I held a wet washcloth against my eyes.

After a few minutes of that, I felt a little better.

When I got back to the kitchen, the coffee was ready. I poured myself a mugful and grabbed the portable kitchen phone, and Henry and I went out to the patio.

I drank half of the mug of coffee before I called Dalt.

“I tried to call you a few minutes ago,” he said. “I’m going crazy here. We all are.”

“I understand,” I said. “Of course you are. You’ve got to hang in there. I don’t have any news. I would’ve told you. Far as I know, Robert’s all right. We’ll be hearing from the people who have him.”

“Every minute that goes by…”

“I know what you’re feeling. So listen. I was going to call you anyway. I want to have a meeting of the minds. You, me, Jess, Teresa, and Adrienne.”

“Sure,” he said. “The minds. Ha. Okay.” He hesitated. “You got an agenda?”

“I want you all to know what I know,” I said. “I don’t want to have to repeat myself, and I want to be sure everybody hears it exactly the same way. And I also want all of you to know what each of you knows. No secrets, no misperceptions, no nuances. Then we can try to identify our options and decide together how we want to proceed.”

“No secrets, huh?”

“This is no time for secrets, Dalt.”

He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “You’re talking about going to the police, huh?”

“That’s one option,” I said. “We need to reconsider it, think about it seriously. Plus, I want to clear the air, make sure we’re all on the same page.”

Dalt paused. Then he said, “Well, yeah, okay. You’re right. We should do that.”

“You set it up,” I said. “Make it happen. Be sure Teresa’s there. This is her son we’re talking about. Make it seven o’clock at my house.”

He hesitated. “I’ve never actually been to your house.”

“Mt. Vernon Street,” I said. “It’s the next left off Charles after Pinckney. Just before you get to Beacon.”

“I know where Mt. Vernon is,” said Dalt.

“I’m halfway up the hill on the right. Number
77.
My green BMW will be parked right in front, and I’ll leave the porch light on.”

“Maybe it would be easier to do it at my house, or my mother’s. Driving into the city, parking…”

“Residents-only parking on my street after six o’clock,” I said. “There will be plenty of spaces at seven. Or are you worried about getting a ticket?”

He laughed quickly.

“My house,” I said, “because I don’t want to be away from my telephone.”

“For when they call again,” he said.

“For
if
they call again.”

A
ROUND QUARTER OF SEVEN
, even though it hadn’t begun to grow dark outside, I turned on the porch light, and Henry and I went out and sat on the front steps. I brought a can of Coke. I still hadn’t recovered from my all-nighter. My body craved caffeine.

About five minutes later a new-looking sand-colored Nissan Murano came creeping up the hill. It stopped in front, and I saw that the driver was Teresa, Robert’s mother. I remembered that her husband was a Nissan dealer. She rolled down the window on the passenger side and leaned over to peer at me.

I lifted my hand. “This is the right place,” I said.

She pulled up in front of my car, parked there, got out, and came up the brick-paved path. She was wearing blue jeans and sandals and an orange jersey. The jeans fit her snugly. She looked good.

She lifted her hand and tried out a smile, which didn’t quite make it. “Hello,” she said.

I said hello. Teresa sat on the steps beside Henry, who was sitting beside me.

She let Henry sniff her hand. “I hope you’re going to tell me what’s going on,” she said.

“I want to wait till the rest of them get here,” I said. “I’d rather tell everybody at the same time. Did Dalt call you?”

“He said you gave them the money,” she said. “He said you talked to Robert afterward. I said thank you for keeping me informed. That was about it. Dalton and I don’t have long conversations.”

“That’s really all the news there is,” I said. “Can I get you a Coke?”

“I’d love a Coke,” said Teresa.

I stood up, then looked down at her. “I don’t know your married name.”

She shrugged as if it hardly mattered. “Samborski,” she said. “My husband is Adolph. Everyone calls him Sam.”

“He couldn’t make it tonight, huh?”

Teresa gazed out at the street. “He works a lot,” she said.

I went inside, fetched another Coke, and brought it out to Teresa Samborski, and about ten minutes later a big boat of a silver Chrysler nosed into the parking space behind my little green BMW. Dalt got out from behind the wheel. Jess climbed out of the passenger side, then opened the back door and held it for Adrienne.

The three of them stood on the sidewalk and looked around. The judge wore dark tailored slacks and a matching jacket over a white silk blouse. She looked stern and strong, pretty much like a judge. The Chrysler, I guessed, was hers.

“This way,” I called to them, and waved them up.

The three of them came up the path. Dalt and Jess were holding hands. Teresa and I stood up. Henry held his ground until everybody patted his head.

Then we all went inside.

The four of them took seats in my living room, Dalt and Jess side by side on the sofa, Teresa in one of the easy chairs, and Adrienne in the rocker. I offered coffee and Cokes. Dalt and Jess asked for coffee, milk, no sugar. Adrienne said she didn’t want anything. Teresa already had her Coke.

I fetched the two mugs of coffee, then sat on one of the side chairs and looked at the four of them. “I want to tell you everything that’s happened so far,” I said. “We need to figure out what to do. Okay?”

They nodded.

Adrienne said, “What I want to know—”

“Let’s do it my way,” I said.

“But—”

“This isn’t your courtroom,” I said. “I’m in charge here.”

Her smile contained neither warmth nor humor. “Of course, Attorney Coyne.”

“Friday a week ago,” I said, “I had coffee with Robert. That’s when he told me that he’d piled up a big gambling debt with the Russo family. Robert’s debt was why you got beat up, Dalt. Russo was holding you responsible for your son. So Robert promised me that he’d talk with you”—I waved my hand, taking in all of them—“his family, clear the air, and work out something.” I raised my eyebrows at Dalt.

He shook his head. “I never heard from him. Last time I talked to Robert was that night at the hospital.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “So on Saturday, Robert’s girlfriend, a girl named Becca Quinlan, a student at BU, called me. She was worried about Robert, hadn’t seen him for a few days. She’d gone to his apartment. His roommates hadn’t seen him, either. I met with her and we talked. She told me that she and Robert hadn’t been together very long. There’s an ex-boyfriend named Ozzie who’s a friend of Robert’s. Anyway, on Sunday morning in the
Globe
on your doorstep, you found that cell phone and the CD that we looked at. I want to look at it again.”

I stuck the disc into the DVD player on my living-room television. Robert’s duct-taped image appeared. The four of them watched as Robert read his appeal, and I watched their faces.

Dalt was clenching his jaw.

Jess sat beside him staring at the screen.

Teresa blinked at the tears that brimmed her eyes.

Adrienne scowled.

The whole thing lasted about three minutes.

“I showed this disc to a friend of mine,” I said when it was over. “He pointed out that a bedsheet is draped behind Robert, most likely to make it impossible for us to draw any conclusions about the room he’s in. But my friend did notice a light source behind the sheet. He guessed from its location high up on the wall and its apparent size that it might be a basement window. He also was able to tinker with the audio so that we could hear half a minute or so of some kind of rhythmic slapping sound in the background. Neither he nor I could identify the sound.” I paused. “I’m telling you this because the disc was designed by the kidnappers to contain no clues, and they did a pretty good job. But there may be clues in it nevertheless, and I aim to look into them further.”

“They’re keeping him in a basement, then?” said Teresa.

“It’s likely,” I said.

“Otherwise,” said Dalt, “we don’t have a clue.”

“That’s about right,” I said. “So to continue our chronology, on Monday Adrienne got the money in the exact numbers and denominations they asked for. I picked it up from her that evening. The kidnappers called on the cell phone they left for me a little after midnight Tuesday, which was last night. This morning, actually. They told me to take the bands off the money and dump all the bills into a plastic trash bag, then to put that bag into another bag and tie the tops. They kept me on the phone and told me to begin driving. They gave me directions along the way. They followed behind me so they could see where I was and what I was doing. I figure they probably were watching me all the time, starting from when I got into my car, but I didn’t notice them right away, which means they were pretty good at it. They directed me over some back roads and told me to drop the bag of money off a bridge into the Merrimack River in Salisbury, which I did. They had a boat under the bridge to pick it up. They also told me to throw their cell phone into the river, and I did that, too. Then they followed me all the way home.”

“What about Robert?” said Adrienne.

“I asked to speak to him, of course,” I said. “Repeatedly. I asked when he would be released. I threatened not to give them their money until they delivered Robert, or at least let me talk to him. They refused. They only said that I would be hearing from them. I thought about disobeying them, but I decided I’d better do what they said. As a result, they have the money, and we don’t have Robert. I’ve been second-guessing myself all night.”

“You talked to one of them on the phone,” said Dalt. “You didn’t recognize his voice?”

I shook my head. “He disguised it. He—or she, for all I know it was a woman—he spoke precisely. I didn’t notice anything about his speech. No accent. No quirks at all in his language or diction that I could tell.”

Dalt started to say something.

I held up my hand. “Let me finish. A little while after I got back home this morning my house phone rang. It was him. The same disguised voice that had been giving me instructions. He put Robert on the phone, and we had a very brief conversation. He said he was okay.”

“That was when?” said Adrienne.

“Around quarter of six.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

I nodded. “It was Robert.”

“That was over twelve hours ago,” she said.

“So by now he might be dead,” said Dalt. “Right? I mean, maybe that’s why they called. So we’d relax and give them time to—”

“We don’t know anything like that.” I drained my can of Coke. “Those are the facts of it. I’ve been thinking about how they planned it out, and I can’t find a flaw in their scheme or in their execution of it. I might have screwed the whole thing up, but if I did, I can’t think of anything I’d do differently if I had to do it over.” I hesitated. “Except for one thing. We should have gone to the police the minute we got that CD.”

I looked at Adrienne. She looked steadily back at me.

“Of course,” I said, “I could’ve just disobeyed them. I might have saved Adrienne a quarter of a million dollars, but I don’t see how I would have saved Robert’s life.”

“We should have gone to the police,” said Teresa. “I should have spoken up before.” She looked at me. “You said that’s what we should do, Brady. I agreed with you, but I was too intimidated to say anything.”

“You had your chance,” said Dalt. “You can’t sit there now and blame us.”

Teresa snapped her head around and glared at him. “Don’t you think for even one minute—”

“Whoa.” I waved my hand. “We can all second-guess ourselves,” I said. “I’m very good at that myself. You guys can blame each other, too, if you want, but I don’t see what good it’ll do. I’d rather focus on trying to figure this out so we can decide how to proceed. Okay?”

I looked at each of them, and all four of them shrugged and nodded and mumbled “Yes” and “Okay.”

“Good,” I said. “All right. I have assumed from the beginning that the man behind the kidnapping is Paulie Russo.”

“It was Russo’s mobsters,” said Adrienne, “who encouraged Robert to go into debt to them as a way of getting leverage with me.” She paused. “When I recused myself from their case, they lost their leverage and decided to go after the money. Isn’t that right, Attorney Coyne?”