The Bliss Factor (37 page)

She picked up the ledger and set it on her desk, flipping through the pages and frowning, not really sure she was seeing what she was seeing. She took a deep breath, typed in a password, and the file opened up.

Rae started working her way through the files, following the trail, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. “Dammit,” she said as the picture started to form, “dammit, dammit,
dammit
.”

“Something wrong?”

Rae looked up and practically fell out of her chair. “No, Mr. Greenblatt,” she said, her hand creeping to the mouse. “Everything is fine.” She shut the files down and kept clicking, watching the screen in her peripheral vision so she could keep her focus on Morris Greenblatt.

His eyes dropped to the ledger sitting open on her desk, and she knew that he knew she’d found the flash drive.

“You’re really too smart for your own good,” Greenblatt said cheerfully.

“You’re not going to try to convince me I’m wrong?”

“What would be the point? You’ve already seen the files. And you were never leaving here anyway.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, hoping to buy herself a few seconds more. Her phone was on the left side of her desk, away from the door and behind her computer monitor where Greenblatt couldn’t see it. She inched her hand over it and hit the callback, the phone dialing Conn since his was the last number.

She heard Conn’s voice, but Greenblatt heard it, too, and for a small, round man with really short legs he could move pretty damn fast. She lifted the phone to her ear, trying to get out from behind her desk and talk at the same time, not doing either well because Greenblatt got to her first, snatching the phone and shoving her back into her chair. And she didn’t remember what she’d said. Or if Conn had even heard her.

 

 

RAE HAD PROMISED TO LEAVE THE OFFICE. CONN knew her track record with following instructions, which was why he’d climbed behind the wheel of Kemp’s U-Haul and headed straight to Troy. The engine ran rough and loud, but every now and then he heard a thump from the back of the truck when he rounded a corner or stopped short. That would be Kemp. Conn probably should have felt bad about it, but then he could have left the guy tied to a tree.

He tried to call Rae; she didn’t pick up, so he gave it five minutes and tried again. Nothing. He kept calling every few minutes, getting more desperate, almost desperate enough to blow through the next red light. He didn’t, the overused truck shuddering to a stop on bald tires. Kemp started yelling, just as Conn’s phone rang.

He slammed his fist into the back of the cab and shouted, “Shut the fuck up,” as he answered his phone with the other hand.

“Conn,” Rae said, “I’m still at the office. It’s—”

“What?” Conn said, struggling to hear over the engine. “Rae?
Shit
.” The call disconnected, and he panicked. It was a new feeling for him.

He sat at the light, even after it turned green, ignoring the honking horns of the motorists behind him, trying to call Rae back with no luck and then fighting to think. He had to get control, had to put himself back in a cold, emotionally dead place. Otherwise they wouldn’t get through this.

But emotional death was beyond him. He hit the gas, shooting through the light just as it turned red, wringing every bit of horsepower from the moving van, in complete disregard for the speed limit until he got to the highway interchange, then taking the ramp for I-75 practically on two wheels.

Conn forced himself to run the facts like it was any other case.
I’m still at the office.
That’s what Rae had said. She’d been about to tell him the identity of the mastermind when the call cut off, which meant she’d probably been incapacitated in some way.
Dammit
, she should have listened to him—

He cut that thought off, took the anger, and the fear, and forced them under a layer of calm so he could think. If she’d been taken, her captor would have her cell. And Conn’s number was the last one dialed.

He stopped trying to call Rae. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but he put the phone on the seat beside him and waited. It rang, just as the exit sign for Big Beaver Road came into sight.

He flipped the phone open, and a muffled voice said, “I want the plates or the girl dies.”

“Very dramatic,” Conn said, swinging the van off the highway, heading for Rae’s office building because he didn’t know where else to go. “One problem. I hand over the plates and she’s dead anyway. Me, too.”

“Oh, well, uh . . .”

Okay, definitely a man, but not Harry or Joe or Kemp. He had to be talking to the mastermind, Conn thought, working hard again not to lose it at the idea of Rae being held against her will, maybe hurt—“Let me talk to Rae.”

“No.”

“I hear her voice in the next ten seconds,” Conn said, “or I call my handler and turn over the plates, and the printing press. And Kemp. How long do you think it will be before he talks?”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“He knew enough for me to narrow my search down to your firm.”

“What firm?”

“Putnam, Ibold, and Greenblatt. I know Harry Mosconi went there for a check to fix the glass in his Honda, and since Rae said Ibold has one foot in the grave it must be Putnam or Greenblatt.”

The call disconnected.

“Shit.” Conn redialed.

No answer.

He wheeled the U-Haul into the parking structure drive, realized at the last minute that it wouldn’t fit inside, and slid it to a stop across the two lanes comprising the entrance and exit, barely missing a Buick that slipped out in front of the U-Haul at the last second. A Lexus pulled up at the exit, the driver giving the horn a brief little hey-you’re-blocking-the-exit toot. When Conn jumped out of the van, the Lexus’s window whirred down and a sour-looking woman peered out.

“I’m going to call the police,” she said.

Conn kept walking, throwing, “You do that,” over his shoulder as he passed her car by.

He hit the elevator, hands on the door so when they parted at Rae’s floor he was through before they’d opened all the way. He shoved through the glass doors etched with P.I.G., skirted the receptionist’s desk and worked his way through the suite. Until he came to Rae’s office. He stopped there, caught by the light, fresh scent of her perfume on the air, seeing her in the little touches. Rae considered herself a number cruncher, cool, all business. But she was also a woman who hung brightly colored sun-catchers full of dried flowers in her window, and draped a swatch of what he assumed was one of her father’s woven textiles over the file cabinet in her office. She was a woman who’d taken in a complete stranger who needed help, and wanted her parents to see her as the person she’d become, not the child they’d raised. And she was a woman who’d been let down by all three of them.

Conn couldn’t speak for Annie and Nelson, but he sure as hell wasn’t letting her down again. He put his feet in motion, finding four women of various ages gathered in the front of the suite. They drew back a little when he came toward them.

“Any of you know where Rae Blissfield is?” he asked them. “Is there anyone around besides secretaries?”

One of the women drew herself up, clearly insulted. “We’re not secretaries,” she said.

“We’re administrative assistants,” another chimed in helpfully.

“You can call yourself Topsy and spin in circles for all I care, I just want to know where Rae Blissfield went.”

“Oh,” the helpful administrative assistant said. “She left with Mr. Greenblatt about ten minutes ago. He said they had a meeting.”

Conn didn’t bother to ask where. He slammed through the doors, took the elevator back down, and found a Troy police officer talking to the Lexus driver.

“There he is,” she crowed.

The cop straightened away from the car window, putting himself in Conn’s path.

Conn flipped his badge out of his pocket and flashed it at the cop. “FBI,” he said, giving the cranky old bat in the Lexus a dismissive glance.

The officer hooked a thumb in the general direction of the U-Haul. “Is there somebody in the back of that thing?”

“Yeah.” Conn took the keys out of his pocket, stripped one off the ring, and flipped it to the cop. “Hang onto him for me, would you?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, going around the truck and getting into the police cruiser. The officer followed him, his hand hovering over his sidearm.

“You gonna shoot me?” Conn asked him.

The cop blew out a breath. “No, but I’ll need an explanation for my squad commander.”

Conn gunned the engine. “My mission is classified. But I’ll try not to hurt your car.” And he took off, tires squealing, half his focus on the road, the other half on the computer, looking up Morris Greenblatt’s address.

It wasn’t far, and he didn’t expect to find Rae there. But he had to look, just like he had to check out Harry Mosconi’s place—no Rae, but it wasn’t empty, either. A woman answered the door, late thirties, pretty, a couple of kids in the ten-to-fifteen age bracket behind her, all three of them staring at the police cruiser but keeping their curiosity to themselves.

As soon as he saw her he knew Rae wasn’t there. Mosconi’s wife screamed PTA, home-baked cookies, and bedtime stories. The kids were well-behaved, the house was neat as a pin, hell, even the dog sniffed him politely then sat and wagged its tail.

Nice family,
Conn thought as he headed back to the car. It was a shame Harry was going to jail for the rest of his life.

Harry’s wife supplied Joe’s last name, along with Kemp’s, since they were cousins. The police computer gave him the locations. Conn was on his way when his cell rang. He picked it up, fumbling it a little, before he managed to answer.

“Conn? It’s Annie.”

Even if he’d checked the readout he still would have taken their call. He had no clue what to tell Rae’s parents, but he couldn’t leave them hanging.

“I can’t get Rae,” Annie was saying, a little breathless and nerved up. “She’s not answering her cell or her office phone, and she didn’t meet us—”

“Let me talk to Nelson,” Conn said, her worry too much to handle on top of his own. “There’s a police station not far from the mall,” he said when Nelson came on the line. “Go there and wait for me.”

“But—”

“Don’t go inside. Don’t even get out of the car. I’ll be there in about an hour.” Unless he found Rae. He’d have some major ass-kicking to do then. It would probably delay him a few minutes.

He grinned. Having a target for all the emotional crap jumping around inside him was a nice little fantasy that put him almost back to normal again. Normal being really pissed off, especially when he got to Joe’s house, a little bungalow it took five minutes to search and find deserted.

The same went for Kemp’s hole-in-the-wall apartment, although it proved harder to rule out. The place was a garbage scow, one room of trash and smell, except for the bathroom, and if it was as ill-kept as the rest of the place, and Rae was in there, she’d be screaming bloody murder unless . . .

Conn found himself at the bathroom door with no consideration for whether or not he was up to date on his tetanus booster. The bathroom was empty. Unless he counted bacterial life.

He stood there a moment, struggling with the urge to trash the place, not that anyone would notice. He forced himself to think instead, but there was no reason he couldn’t move, too. He went out to the cruiser and headed back toward Troy, which let him feel like he was doing something even if he wasn’t. That was pretty much where the forward progress ended. Until he made it back to the Troy police station and had a brilliant idea.

He pointed the cruiser toward Rae’s Jaguar, parked in the corner of the lot farthest from the door. Annie and Nelson were out of the Jag before he made it into the next parking space. Conn got out and held up a hand. They stopped in their tracks. He kept walking, across the parking lot, through the front door, only stopping for the cop on desk duty, one Sergeant Melnick, because it wouldn’t help him to piss off the locals.

He held up his badge and said, “I’m here to collect the prisoner you’re holding for me. Kemper Salerno.”

“The guy from the U-Haul?”

“Yeah.”

“The U-Haul my officer had to drive in here because you commandeered his squad car?”

“It was an emergency,” Conn said.

“And here I thought it was just another fed clusterfuck.”

Conn took a deep breath. Even if he could have gotten the words out, an apology would have thrown off the entire federal/local dynamic it had taken decades to establish. “You’ve got no reason to hold him,” he said.

“Guantanamo Bay mean anything to you?”

“Okay, so we have a track record. You gonna hand him over or what?”

Melnick gave it some thought, then gestured Conn to follow him. “Like you said, we got no reason to hold him.”

They went into the bowels of the station, arriving at the holding cells. Melnick instructed the guard on duty to retrieve Kemp. He came back empty-handed.

“Prisoner refuses to come out of the cell,” he said. “Guy says he’ll confess to anything we want as long as we don’t make him go with the fed.”

Conn exchanged a look with Melnick, who said, “You want him, go get him.” The other cop was helpful enough to hold out the key to Kemp’s cell.

Conn took it, consigning Kemp to the lowest level of hell for making him into a laughingstock.

Kemp was huddled on the cot in his cell, completely covered by a gray, industrial-grade blanket that couldn’t begin to camouflage his doughy form.

“Get your ass out of there,” Conn said, unlocking the door.

“No.”

Conn went into the cell, hauled Kemp off the cot, and shoved him toward the door. Kemp fisted his hands around the bars at either side of the door, so Conn pinched the nerves in his shoulders until his hands spasmed and let go, flopping uselessly at the ends of his arms.