The Hunt (19 page)

Luisa and Abigail ordered pancakes and an egg-white omelet, respectively, while Peter drank orange juice. I could have chewed off the one arm I didn’t devour earlier for a nice, cold, caffeinated soda, but with less than twenty-four hours to go on my dare I managed to restrain myself and demurely sip a mineral water instead. I secretly hoped I wouldn’t actually end up playing tennis at noon, but if I did I wanted to be able to demonstrate to Peter that my relative level of hydration had no impact whatsoever on my athletic ability—I was useless either way.

Regardless, I’d never thought I’d look forward with such anticipation to a tennis game, especially one in which I personally was expected to play. This anticipation had little to do with my hope that the game might not take place and even less to do with the chance that this would be the day when Peter would see Caro and realize he’d preferred life with her. Instead, it was almost entirely due to how much I was looking forward to ensnaring Alex Cutler.

While Iggie’s story about purposely ditching Hilary hadn’t done much to improve anyone’s opinion of him, it had passed Abigail’s mental polygraph test. But she’d told us in the car she was equally confident he was lying about not knowing the driver of the other Lamborghini.

Which, along with the ACVLLC phone number and vanity plate, further validated our working hypothesis that the driver and thus Hilary’s abductor had been Alex Cutler. At least, this was the working hypothesis of everyone but Peter, who remained unenthusiastic about casting blame in
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Alex’s direction.

“Why else would Hilary have gotten into the second Lamborghini, then?” I asked, reaching my fork over to sneak a bite of Luisa’s pancakes. A couple of hours ago this would have been a perilous maneuver, but now that the nicotine gum had worked its magic, she was tamer than Spot and even pushed her plate closer so I could better help myself. “Hil might not have noticed it wasn’t Iggie at the wheel until she was in the car, but once inside she never would have stayed unless she already knew the driver. She’s too street-smart for that. And you introduced her to Alex yourself.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But it seems premature to jump to conclusions based on some similar initials, a couple of descriptions of a ‘preppie’ guy, and the fact that Alex invested in Igobe. We still don’t even know for sure what kind of car he drives.”

“I know what kind of car he drives,” I said confidently. “I’ll bet you anything he pulls up to the tennis club in a Lamborghini.”

“I don’t want to bet,” he replied.

“Are you sure? Betting is fun. Especially when I win.”

“Rachel, it would be bad enough to find out Alex has done something to Hilary. It would be even worse to find that out and then owe you whatever random thing you’d insisted on betting me for.”

“Why do you think I’d bet something random?”

“Maybe because the last time I lost a bet to you I ended up having to personally prepare every available recipe for pigs in a blanket so you could conduct a scientific taste test?”

“First of all, it was a small price to pay for the advancement of haute cuisine, and second of all, there’s a strong argument to be made that losing that particular bet was a lot like winning.”

“What argument is that?” he asked.

“Now we know for a fact how to make the best possible pigs in a blanket. We never again have to lie awake nights worrying that we’re making inferior pigs in a blanket.”

“By we you mean me, right? Because I don’t recall you doing any of the cooking.”

“It’s simple division of labor,” I said. “You’re better at cooking and I’m better at taste-testing.

My palate is more refined. It worked out perfectly.”

“As you would say, how exactly are you defining perfectly?”

“Well, this is a fascinating discussion the two of you are having, but there may be a way to solve the Lamborghini question before you see Alex,” interjected Luisa.

“What’s that?” asked Abigail, who also seemed happy for discussion of the pigs-in-a-blanket bet to draw to a close.

“Perhaps Ben has heard from the guy he asked for a list of Lamborghini owners in the area. It’s already early afternoon on the East Coast, and his contact should have had time to check by now,” said Luisa.

Ben’s offer of the previous night had completely slipped my mind—it was hard to keep much in there given all the space Alex Cutler, Che Guevara, Petite Fleur and the Rice-a-Roni jingle were hogging up. “That’s a good idea,” I said, “Let’s call him again.” I turned to Peter. “But are you absolutely sure you don’t want to bet Alex isn’t on that list before I make the call? There must be other cocktail-hour finger foods we need to perfect.”

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

I pulled my BlackBerry from my bag and dialed Ben’s number, but it went right into voice mail without even ringing. “He must have turned his phone off,” I reported, waiting as his recorded voice told me to leave a message at the tone. I did as instructed, quickly summarizing our talk with Iggie and asking about the Lamborghini owners and Hilary’s receipts.

My message complete, I disconnected and left the BlackBerry on the table, which I generally considered a grave lapse in cell-phone etiquette, but most of the venture-capital guys were doing it and I wanted to have it handy should Ben call back right away.

“What if Alex does drive up in a Lamborghini?” said Abigail. “What happens then?”

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“When Alex drives up in a Lamborghini,” I corrected her. “I guess we start talking about Hilary and how she’s missing, and then we see how he reacts. It’s probably too much to hope that he’ll confess, but he might give himself away somehow. And assuming he doesn’t confess, we follow him once he leaves the club. If all goes well, he’ll lead us to Hilary.”

After some debate, we agreed that Peter and I would drop Luisa and Abigail at a nearby car-rental agency so that they could pick up a separate car. “Call us or text us before you leave the club,” said Luisa. “Then we can trail Alex, as well, just in case you lose him or he realizes what’s happening and tries to lose you.”

This seemed to be as good a plan as we were going to come up with, and it was nice of Luisa to offer to sacrifice her trip to the mall. The nicotine gum seemed to be bringing out the best in her, even if I worried that it couldn’t be healthy to go through nearly two packs of the stuff in as many hours.

It was after noon, so we paid the check and prepared to leave. As I picked up my BlackBerry, I saw that the little red light was flashing, indicating I had a new message. At the same moment, Luisa’s phone started buzzing from within the depths of her oversized handbag.

I peered at the BlackBerry’s screen. The new message was a text, from a number with a four-one-five area code. I recognized it immediately: it was the number from which Hilary had sent her truncated S-O-S early Sunday morning. “Wait!” I called to Peter and Abigail, who were already heading toward the door.

Luisa, meanwhile, was tossing items from her purse onto the table as she tried to locate her buzzing phone. “Aha,” I heard her mutter as she finally pulled it out of the bag along with a silver compact, two pairs of sunglasses, a Spanish-language paperback of Borges essays, a silk scarf, a wool scarf, three lipsticks, a fountain pen, and a Filofax bound in shiny crocodile.

My awe at what Luisa kept in her bag was almost enough to make me forget the message waiting for me on my own phone. I clicked it open.

False alarm. I am in love!!! Hope I didn’t worry you too much. Will explain all later. H

I read the text three times over in disbelief. A false alarm?

Luisa was staring at the screen of her own phone, a furrow of annoyance creasing her usually smooth brow. She muttered something else, and while I had never taken Spanish, I knew enough to recognize it as the sort of word that didn’t get taught in high-school Spanish classes. At least, not the sort of high school in which I’d been enrolled.

Worldlessly, she lifted her gaze to meet my own, and wordlessly, we exchanged phones.

The message on Luisa’s screen was identical to the one on mine.

21

“I t’s a very good thing Hilary hasn’t met with foul play,” said Luisa, “because I’m looking forward to killing her myself.”

“Only if I can help,” I said. I couldn’t remember when I’d last been so exasperated. Between trying to impress Peter’s family, being blindsided by revelations about his romantic history, and worrying that the prized piece of business I’d brought in might turn out to be just the thing to take me permanently off the partner track, I would have had plenty to keep me neurotic over the last couple of days without having to chase around on misguided rescue missions.

To their credit, neither Peter nor Abigail seemed to resent the way we’d been wasting their time.

“It’s been fun,” said Peter with a shrug.

“And I got an extra vacation day out of it,” said Abigail. “And maybe even a raise. Right, Peter?”

Peter hesitated, but not about the raise. “I know I’m the last person who should be bringing this up, but aren’t you two at all worried that the messages came from the ACVLLC phone?”

“We know Hilary doesn’t have her own phone with her, so she has to use someone else’s,” said Luisa reasonably. “The ACVLLC phone must belong to her new man—the one with the
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Lamborghini. Perhaps it was somebody else from the party, and the initials are just a coincidence.”

“And the new man could still be Alex Cutler,” I pointed out. “We were only suspicious of him because he has so much to gain from Igobe’s success. But now that we know Hilary’s all right, there’s no reason to be concerned about him. If anything, we should be concerned for him, given Hil’s track record.”

“If it is Alex, then why didn’t he mention it when I spoke to him?” asked Peter.

“They could be trying to keep things quiet for a while,” offered Abigail. “You know, while they’re in the honeymoon phase of their relationship.”

“Has Hilary ever kept anything quiet before?” asked Peter.

Luisa laughed. “It’s usually radio silence for the first few days when there’s a new man in the picture. I’m surprised we heard from her at all. But she’s never been in love before, either. I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

“Remember when she disappeared with the guy she met on the chair-lift in Colorado? We didn’t hear from her for a week after that,” I said.

“But I don’t know if I really see her and Alex together,” Peter said. “I mean, he just doesn’t seem like her type.” He was understandably reluctant to face the possibility that his planned match for Alex wasn’t going to work out, and while it would be easier for him to win Caro back if she wasn’t involved with somebody else, he still hadn’t admitted to himself that he wanted to win her back in the first place.

“Hilary’s never had a type,” I said. “Other than male. And we don’t know for sure it’s Alex. She could have met Mr. Lamborghini in the elevator at the Four Seasons. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“She’s picked up men in far more exotic locations,” agreed Luisa. “At least this one has good taste in cars, even if it is a bit flashy.”

There was something anticlimactic about this latest development, but I was willing to welcome any anticlimax at this point. It wasn’t as if all of the uneasiness I’d been feeling had completely dissipated—in fact, plenty remained. But now I could focus on my own personal life, and my professional life, too. If I concentrated hard enough over the next twenty-four hours, I just might be able to retrieve my normal status from the Dumpster into which it had been so callously tossed by recent events.

It would have been considerate of Hilary to have sent her message a few hours earlier, because then I would have had sufficient time to invent a reason why tennis was out of the question on this particular day. But it was officially too late to weasel out of the game now, and while the debilitating stiffness I’d felt when I’d first awakened hadn’t worn off completely, it had worn off too well to serve as an excuse. I began mentally steeling myself for what would certainly be both a mortifying and physically unpleasant episode.

Since we no longer needed to trail Alex Cutler it no longer made sense to rent an additional car.

Instead, Peter and I dropped Luisa and Abigail at the mall, promising to pick them up after the game, and headed to the tennis club. The drive from the mall took less than five minutes, but it was still enough time for Peter to start humming again. Even worse, I found myself humming along. At least with the Rice-a-Roni theme, I knew the words, but now I was held captive by this nameless, unknown piece of jazz, and if it didn’t stop soon, an exorcism of some sort might be in order.

The clubhouse was an understated California mission-style building tucked at the end of a narrow road not far from the Stanford campus. Peter and I pulled up to the front of the building and entrusted the Prius to the care of a valet. I was still curious as to just what Alex Cutler would be driving, and the valet assured us that neither he nor Caro had yet arrived, so we decided to wait for them outside. From the courts behind the clubhouse we could hear the ominous thwacks of balls meeting racket strings accompanied by the occasional grunt or shout of a particularly zealous player. Peter seemed to be inspired by this, taking practice swings with his
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own racket as we waited. Meanwhile, I scanned the cloudless sky, hoping for signs of a sudden torrential downpour or locust infestation.

I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I expected of Alex’s and Caro’s respective means of transportation. I probably thought there was still a good chance Alex would drive up in a Lamborghini, although I was also glad Peter hadn’t agreed to bet me on that point. And I was reasonably certain Caro would drive up in a hybrid of her own, in a nice, sporty but feminine color like pale blue or maybe seafoam green.

Of course, I should have known better. When they did arrive, each within a minute of the other, there were no Lamborghinis, nor were there any hybrids. There weren’t even any cars.

They were both riding bicycles.

And not just any bicycles. These were fancy, multi-geared racing bikes, with complicated levers on the handlebars and little slots for water bottles and tire pumps. After Caro embraced me as if I were her long-lost Siamese twin and Alex said hello all around, I endured a lengthy discussion of the bikes’ special features, the best hundred-mile rides in the area, and the relative merits of road biking versus mountain biking. I was almost grateful when Alex pointed out we should hurry if we didn’t want to miss our court time.