Taken (18 page)

The TV is on, with the sound off. One of the shopping channels, hawking jewelry.

As Shane’s long arms flail, the coffee table staggers away, bumps up against my shins. “Gah!” he groans. “No, no!”

The man who doesn’t sleep is having a nightmare.

I kneel by his head. At the touch of my outstretched hand his body goes still.

“Jean?” he says, his mouth muffled by the rug.

“It’s Kate,” I tell him. “Kate Bickford.”

“Gah!” he says, spitting rug.

“It’s okay,” I say, and give his bristly head a pat.

“Oh, God.” He rolls over, breathing heavily.

“You were dreaming.”

“Not dreaming,” he says thickly. “Hallucinating.”

He glances at me in the sheet, then quickly looks away.

“Sounded like you were fighting,” I tell him. “I thought the man in the mask was here. In the house.”

Shane leans against the sofa, knees drawn up, still breathing heavily. Face slick with night sweats and his eyelids twitching. Careful not to look at me in the sheet, although I’m perfectly decent. Underwear, a full sheet, what could he see? But covers his face with his trembling hands, groans softly and says, “I’m really sorry, Kate. For scaring you.”

“Don’t be.”

“Really sorry,” he repeats, sounding mournful if not humiliated. “Look, I’m okay. Go back to bed, you need your sleep.”

“This is what I’m going to do,” I say, rising from the floor and adjusting the sheet. Very togalike, really. Almost formal. “I’m going to get dressed and then I’m going to make us breakfast.”

“Okay,” he says.

And that’s what happens.

C
ramming a body into a steel drum is hard work, Cutter discovers. If the victims had happened to be small or slight of build, no problem, but Hinks and Wald are both solid men. Not giants, by any means, but well muscled, heavy of sinew and bone, and they seem to resist going into the barrels. It’s like pushing huge lumps of stiffening taffy back into a tube. Grunt work of the worst kind. Digging shallow graves would, in hindsight, have been much less effort, but he’s already committed to the barrels.

At one point Cutter has to take a break and get his breath back, toweling the slick of sweat from his hands and face. He had the foresight to cover their heads with plastic garbage bags, so as not to make eye contact with the dead, but the whole process is exhausting, both physically and mentally.

Putting the paunchy police chief into the home freezer in Mrs. Bickford’s basement was a piece of cake compared to this. And the chief’s death had been accidental, almost, a case of wrong place, wrong time.

Until quite recently, Cutter had never considered himself to be a killer. Certainly not capable of cold-blooded murder. He’d been a soldier doing his duty, and that meant killing the enemy when necessary. But for the last three weeks or so he’s been taking the lives of civilians, American civilians, and the toll is starting to add up. One in Rhode Island, one in New York, and now a total of three in good old suburban Connecticut, with at least two more to go before the mission is completed. Could be even more, if Mrs. Bickford’s rangy investigator sticks his nose in the wrong crack.

The dead have gathered in a pile in the dark corner of Cutter’s brain and at some point they will, he assumes, demand a reckoning. Scratching like frantic bird claws against the windowpane of his soul. Hard to take, even for a trained assassin. Maybe he’ll let slip his sanity and join Lyla in her twilight world. But no, he can’t allow that to happen, not if the plan works, not if he manages to get his own son back home. He’ll have to find another way to deal with it, another way to silence his victims.

Start by not thinking of them as victims. Think of them as unfortunate casualties. Collateral damage.

“Hear that, Hinks? You’re collateral damage.”

Talking to a dead guy stuffed in a barrel. Pretty funny really. It gets him laughing so hard he has to shove a hand in his mouth to make it stop.

Much to my surprise there’s an unexpired packet of yeast hiding in a dry corner of Shane’s refrigerator, behind the butter dish. The yeast, along with a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, a little melted butter and a few cups of King Arthur flour is all that’s needed to make a simple loaf of bread. Making good on my impulse to shed flour on the counters, and also provide us with something fresh and wholesome for breakfast.

It’s been a while since I’ve kneaded dough entirely by hand, without the help of commercial kitchen equipment, and I find it comforting. The world can’t be entirely crazy, or completely evil, if you can make bread with your own hands, and fill a kitchen with that wonderful smell.

“I could go out for doughnuts,” Shane offers, watching me sift the flour through my fingers.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Just seems like a lot of trouble,” he says, indicating the mixing bowl, the flour dust.

I suspect the idea of a woman baking in his kitchen makes him a little nervous. “Don’t worry, I promise not to move in,” I assure him, keeping it light.

The very idea makes him blush. “No, no,” he protests. “It’ll be great. I love bread right out of the oven. It’s been years.”

“I could thaw out the chicken potpie if you prefer.”

“Might be dangerous by now,” he admits. “That’s just for emergencies.”

“Like nuclear attack. Relax, Randall. I enjoy doing this.”

“Right,” he says. “The catering business.”

“I loved cooking and baking long before I went into business,” I say, setting the pan in the preheated oven. “What time is it getting to be?”

“Five in the morning.”

“The sun is up,” I notice. “Time to milk the chickens.”

Shane ignores the lame joke. “Look, Kate, I wanted to apologize. You say it’s not necessary, but I think it is. You’ve got enough on your plate without having to deal with my demons.”

“Oh,” I say, trying to keep it light. “Are they really demons?”

“Sort of.”

“You don’t have to tell me. Not unless you want to.”

He’s obviously been thinking of little else since I found him flailing about on the floor. “Better if you know,” he says with some reluctance. “Not that it’s a big secret. Maria knows. Anybody who knew me at the time, they know.” He forces himself to meet my eyes and says, “I had a family. Wife and daughter. Both killed in an accident.”

That explains the photograph in the drawer, the blank spaces on the wall, and, quite possibly, his obsession with finding lost children.

“I’m very sorry,” I tell him. “It must have been awful. Must still be awful.”

Lame words, but they come from experience. I’d lost a husband and faced losing a child. So I knew something of what he’d gone through, was still going through each day.

“We were driving up from Washington,” he explains, sounding somewhat detached. Finding the necessary distance. “Amy had a project for her world-studies class, I figured it was our chance to show her the Smithsonian. Fabulous museum. We had a great time, stayed longer on the last day than we intended, and then it was time to come home.”

I’d like to know if home was here, in this very house, but don’t want to interrupt him. And figure he’ll make it clear at some point.

“It’s night, heavy traffic,” he says. “We’re on the New Jersey Turnpike when my eyelids start getting heavy. So I pull into a rest area and let Jean take over driving. She’s wide-awake and raring to go. Amy’s in the back, sound asleep. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in a wreck and I’m the only survivor. While I was asleep, Jean got sideswiped by a tractor-trailer and dragged under his rear wheels. Totally his fault.” He pauses, studies the backs of his hands before looking up, eyes incandescent with remembering. “So that’s my story. And yes, the sleep-disorder thing happened afterward. I’m fully aware it has to be related to the accident, to losing my family, but awareness doesn’t make it better.”

My impulse is to give the big guy a hug, but my instincts are picking up a vibe that says a hug is the last thing in the world he wants. It won’t change anything, and it can’t possibly ease the pain. So I let it go and continue to fuss around, cleaning up after myself, making the place tidy again.

“Okay,” I finally say. “You make coffee while we wait on the bread.”

Later, after scoffing down two slices of warm, honey-drenched warm bread, Shane grins at me. “This was a good idea. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Figure we’ve got a busy day ahead of us, right?”

“Absolutely,” he says.

“Care to share?”

He shrugs, takes another slug of strong coffee. “Got several irons in the fire. Waiting for an ID on the vehicle Bruce was driving. Waiting on a list of suspects from my Pentagon source. Waiting on whatever Jared Nichols is cooking up for the state of Connecticut. So while we’re waiting, I’ll try calling around Pawtucket.”

Pawtucket. That stumps me for a moment. And then I remember why Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is important. “The adoption agency,” I say. “Where we got Tommy.”

Shane nods. “I tried phoning them yesterday. They’re no longer in business, so we need to check with the city and possibly the state or county, see where the adoption records are being stored. We might have to run up there, I won’t know until I call.”

Eleven years have passed, but the thought of what happened that fine and glorious evening gives me a heart-size pang. Ted drove, of course, while I chewed my nails. He’d tell me nothing, not even the gender of the baby, in case it fell through, like so many of the other attempts had fallen through. And I knew better than to ask, though I longed to know. Which made for a long, near-silent ride. The only reason I could stand it without freaking out was because Ted had seemed so confident, so certain that our long ordeal was over. Confident not in words but in posture, in the way he gripped the wheel, the way he glanced at me and smiled. And I remember thinking, in the midst of a near anxiety attack, that whatever happened I’d always have Ted, and that even if we never got a baby it would be fine, we’d have each other.

Ignorance was a kind of nervous bliss, on that fine day. In the end we hadn’t gone to Pawtucket, where Family Finders was located, but to the airport in Providence. And there in Arrivals we’d been introduced to baby Tomas, scrawled our names on a few sheets of paper and walked out to the parking lot as parents. Ted had hidden a car seat in the trunk, but I insisted on holding the baby. Sitting in the back, in the so-called safe seat, cooing at the beautiful baby and crying and giggling and talking a mile a minute while Ted drove us home. Both of us knowing we’d never be the same, that two had become three. Never imagining that three would become two again. Or that two might, in some terrible way, become one.

“You okay?” Shane wants to know.

“I’m fine.”

Shane checks his watch. “Should be answering the phones at the town offices in another hour or so. We’ll just have to hold tight until then.”

Long before the hour is up, a car pulls into Shane’s driveway. Looking through the drapes, I see Maria Savalo open the door to her BMW, stick out her bare feet and put on her heels. As she takes her briefcase from the seat and makes for Shane’s front door, I’m thinking she doesn’t look happy, but maybe she’s not a morning person.

Wrong.

“Bad news,” she tells me. “You’re going to be arrested.”

C
utter knew what his line was going to be long before the door opened.

“Dr. Munk, I presume?”

Of course, he’d had to flash the NYPD shield at the peephole, also as planned. The badge was a cheap fake, but looked mighty impressive through a fish-eye lens.

He could have written Dr. Munk’s lines, too, because he knew exactly what he was going to say. Peering through the crack in the door with one nervous, twitching eye as he keeps the chain on the lock. “There must be some mistake,” the good doctor manages to say. Sounds like he swallowed a hockey puck, has trouble getting the words out. “My name is, uh, Barnes. Luther Barnes.”

Cutter lifts his coat jacket, revealing a holstered handgun. “Your name is going to be ‘dead body in room 512’ if you don’t take the chain off the hook right now.”

Only two ways it can go from here. Munk will either do as ordered, or he will make a move to slam the door, run to the bathroom and attempt to call the front desk, reporting an intruder. Cutter sees it in his eyes—maybe some doubt about the dime-store shield—and he kicks through the chain before Munk can react.

The guy ends up on his butt, looking astonished as Cutter closes and locks the door and tosses him the broken chain. “Stanley Joseph Munk, M.D.,” he says. “Looking good, Doc. Tell you what, scoot back and you can lean against the wall, make yourself comfortable.”

Munk glances nervously at the laptop computer open on the desk, LCD screen glowing. Catches himself and pretends he wasn’t looking. “Who the hell are you?” he demands without much force. “You’re not a cop. What do you want?”

Munk is an imposing-looking man in his late forties, with curly, salt-and-pepper hair shaped by a stylist to the stars. Strong chin, highly intelligent gray eyes, and the long, elegant hands of a classical pianist. In fact, he does play quite competently, although not professionally. Even on his butt, with his back against the wall, he has a commanding presence. Type A personality, used to getting his own way, and confident that he’s one of the meritocracy, the self-invented masters of the universe. Not as easy to dominate as, say, your average enemy combatant, or your average suburban housewife. Definitely a challenge.

“I don’t believe this,” Munk mutters, shifting on his haunches. Obviously considering his options for some sort of escape mechanism that has not, as yet, presented itself.

Cutter drags over a chair, takes a seat, gives the doc his best stone-cold-killer smile. An evildoer grin that he’s practiced in the mirror until he damn near scared himself. Killer grin that got him through Iraq without a scratch, physically at least. Dr. Munk blanches. The man is shit-scared, but even so he’s desperate enough to be thinking about launching himself at Cutter, wrestling him for the gun.

He’s at a disadvantage, is Stanley, but he’s not without balls.

“Don’t even think about it,” Cutter advises him. “Thing is, even if you manage to take the gun from me—very unlikely—you’ll still have to shoot me. Won’t look good, ‘Famous Surgeon Murders Federal Agent.’”

As intended, his target is confused by the retort. “You said you were a cop,” Munk protests. “A city cop.”

“I lied,” Cutter responds cheerfully. “That was just to get through the door. Here’s my real badge.”

Cutter tosses him the absolutely genuine Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Agent shield, along with the matching photo ID that helps seal the deal. Badge is real but the ID is fake—and a civilian will never be able to tell the difference.

“Take note of the name,” he suggests. “Paul Allen Defield. After our conversation if you decide to file a complaint, they’ll need a name.”

Munk is handling the badge like it’s radioactive. Cutter can almost see the wheels turning in the doc’s big, fast-reactor brain. FBI masquerading as NYPD, what’s the deal here, how bad is it? Can’t be a good thing, that’s for sure. Starting to grasp that the unexpected visit has to do with what’s on the laptop, but not quite believing it. Letting himself hope it’s something else entirely, and not quite believing that, either. Very expressive face, has Stanley, while under stress. Something of the boy showing through, under all those layers of sangfroid and studied confidence.

“Just try and relax, Dr. Munk,” Cutter suggests amiably. “We don’t need no stinking badges, do we? You want to know what this is all about? It’s all about you. You the man, Stan.” He lets that sink in before delivering the zinger. “You’re the man with the sick kink for kiddy porn.”

That does it, Munk’s eyes dim just a little, like he’s lost crucial amperage. And now he knows there’s no hope that the sudden intrusion isn’t connected to what he’s got on the laptop, and what that forbidden connection means to his business, his career, his life.

“Funny thing about secrets,” Cutter says, enjoying himself, taking strength from Munk’s reaction. “Lots of fun when you control the secret, am I right? You’ve been getting a real kick out of your secret life for years. You put on your dress-down disguise, the baseball cap and jeans. Then you saunter over here with your laptop in the briefcase, and once the door is closed, you’re in another world. A world where you and your special friends can openly discuss what, exactly, turns you on.”

“You have no right,” Munk protests weakly.

“In your case, what turns you on is girls between the ages of ten and twelve. Very age specific, your kink.”

“How could you possibly know something like that?” Munk says, his face going even paler. Tiny droplets of cold sweat appear on his forehead, make his eyes blink rapidly.

“I know because it’s all there,” Cutter says, indicating the laptop. “Every sick conversation you’ve had online. Every photo you’ve downloaded, every film clip you viewed.”

“That’s not possible. You’re bluffing.”

“Am I? How about this—you like to joke about a ‘perfect ten’ being ten years old. Your pedophile pals find it very amusing. In fact one of your many screen names is P–10.”

“Oh, God.”

“God has nothing to do with it, Dr. Monk. Blame it on the Child Pornography Task Force. That’s where I come in. I’m the agent-in-charge of the Child Pornography Task Force, New York. Which gives me access to all the hi-tech goodies, including some rather amazing spyware that’s going to put your nuts in a blender.”

“Spyware?” blusters Munk, who clearly understands the terminology and grasps what it implies. “But the firewalls—I thought…”

His voice trails off, unable to complete the sentence, as it all sinks in. “You know the amazing thing?” Cutter says, training the pistol on Munk’s jean-clad scrotum. “Sickos like you always manage to convince themselves that a thirty-nine-dollar piece of firewall software can protect them. What a joke. It’s like using a piece of cheap cardboard to stop a speeding bullet. Our task force uses a spyware program developed by the NSA, on loan to Treasury. You know what the program is called? Creepster. Because it finds creeps like you, Dr. Munk. It finds you and lives in your computer and every time you go on the Internet, Creepster reports directly to me, and makes a record of everything you’ve done and said, everywhere you’ve gone on the Internet, every image you’ve looked at. Every keystroke, every downloaded file. I know your screen names, your passwords. I know every dirty, sick thing about you.”

That isn’t strictly true, about the NSA developing the program, but Cutter figures the doctor has heard of the National Security Agency, and that it will impress him. In actual fact, the spyware had been liberated from a counterterrorist intelligence unit assigned to Delta Force. Payment for the shaft job he’d gotten from the Army Special Operations Force, their ever-so-polite suggestion that he’d be more comfortable as a civilian. In that desperate hour he’d offered to take a drop in rank, or even return to the enlisted ranks, but the offer was declined “without prejudice.” Meaning shut up about what you did and please go away. So he’d burned the very useful spyware program onto a CD and smuggled it out, with the intention of selling it on the black market. Good thing he hadn’t, as it had made everything else possible. No spyware, no mission, simple as that. Spyware that had allowed him to explore every digitized aspect of Stanley Munk’s complicated life and find a way to make him malleable.

The good doctor—and he’s a very good doctor, as far as that goes—is the founder of one of the most exclusive and successful surgical clinics on the East Coast. The clinic rakes in millions in fees, enough to support himself and his five partners in high style—much, much more than any of them could have commanded in the public hospital sector.

Near as Cutter can determine, none of the medical partners is aware of or share in Munk’s sexual proclivities. His trophy wife—third in a line of trim, tiny-breasted little blondes—has no clue. He’s never been arrested, never been reported, never been caught, and when he seeks actual flesh-and-blood victims, he apparently ventures to safe foreign locales like Thailand and Bangkok and the Philippines, where his anonymity can be assured.

Sick bastard is careful but not, as it happens, careful enough.

“What do you want?” Munk asks, managing to sound both plaintive and angry. “Money?”

Cutter leans in, using his killer smile, and is gratified to see the good doctor wince, pressing himself against the wall. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

“What I want,” Cutter says, “is for you to understand what is at stake. I have in my possession, and duplicated on agency files, evidence that links you to possession and exchange of illegal child pornography. If this evidence is introduced into normal channels, you will certainly be arrested. If convicted, you may or may not serve time, depending on the deal your lawyer cuts, but you will be registered as a sex offender. No way to avoid it.”

“Oh, my God,” Munk blubbers. “Oh, my God.” Panting like he’s about to be physically ill, as if he can taste the gorge rising in his throat.

“Luckily, you have a rare skill. One that’s going to make things right for both of us.”

For the first time in the most terrifying five minutes of his life, Dr. Stanley Munk looks hopeful. “What do you want?” he asks.

“An exchange of value,” Cutter says. “We’re going to help each other.”

“I’m listening,” Munk says.

Cutter leans back in the chair, lets the man think about it for a crucial minute or so. Tenderizing his enormous ego, an ego that won’t let him admit that despite being brilliant and successful, he’s allowed his sick sexual deviance to put him in peril.

“I can make all of this evidence disappear,” Cutter tells him, nodding at the laptop. “In exchange, you will arrange for the admission of a new patient at your clinic. You will schedule a certain procedure for the day after tomorrow, and then let your famous hands do their magic. That’s it.”

“New patient?” Munk’s eyes light up, convinced he’s figured it all out. “So that’s what this is all about! You’re the new patient.”

Cutter smiles, shakes his head. “Not me,” he says. “My son.”