The Professionals (5 page)

T
erry Harper was a bulldog of a man, a round ball of indignation who would not be calmed despite the presence of the state police and the best efforts of his wife and daughter, both of whom had given up by this point and slunk, defeated, to the margins of the room.

Stevens stood in the living room doorway, watching him pace and feeling his own stomach churn. He’d stopped for Taco Bell on the way over and the molten cheese and low-grade beef weren’t playing nice with his digestive tract. He swallowed a burp and fixed his eyes on Harper. “Give it to me from the beginning,” he said.

Harper didn’t break stride as he launched into his story. He had been walking home from work, he said, just before dusk. He was turning onto his block when a young woman called to him by name. No, he did not see the woman; she was behind him. Though he may have caught a glimpse of brown curls. She was, he believed, white.

Before he could notice anything else, he was wrapped up and tossed in the back of a van, his arms tied, his eyes blindfolded, and his mouth gagged. He was driven to some sort of compound—an apartment, it seemed like—where he was instructed to phone his wife and then beaten by an assailant.

There were probably three kidnappers, he thought, including the girl, and he had talked to one of them during the night. “The guy didn’t sleep,” said Harper. “Kept pacing the room. Changing channels on the TV.”

Ultimately, Harper slept, and spent the morning listening to the television before being tossed in the back of the van again and driven to a McDonald’s parking lot. No, he didn’t get a good look at the van. It was blue. Navy. The make? No idea.

“They said they were watching the house,” he said. “And we shouldn’t talk to the police.”

Sandra Harper eyed Stevens and stepped forward. “They said they’d come for Alice,” she said.

“They’re not coming for your daughter,” said Stevens. “Your family is safe.”

“I know we’re safe,” said Harper. He stopped pacing and fixed Stevens with a glare. “I’m not afraid. I’m
mad
. I want you to do your damn job. Find them.”

Stevens sighed to himself. You’d almost wish a guy like this would stay kidnapped, he thought. “These people,” he said. “Two men. One woman. All white?”

“Far as I could tell.”

“Weapons?”

Harper shrugged. “I was blindfolded. Maybe a handgun.”

“How old were they?”

“Young.” He started pacing again. “Late twenties, early thirties.”

“Catch any names?”

“No. Everything was tight. No wasted words. Everything quick.”

“Tell him the other thing,” said Sandra Harper. “The money thing.”

“Sixty grand,” said Harper. “Kind of small, don’t you think?”

“Sure.”

“You’d think, you’re kidnapping someone, you ask for more money. Big money. I’ve got it. I told the guy straight up. He could have asked for a million, and he would have got it.”

Stevens scratched his head. “What did he say?”

“Didn’t say anything. Told me go to sleep. But I figured they wanted me in and out, quick, before anyone else caught on. Twenty-four hours.”

“You figured, hey?”

“Why else would they aim so low?”

Maybe they were junkies, thought Stevens. Addicts looking to make a quick score. But junkies would be sloppy and desperate. They would make mistakes. If these kids had made a mistake, it wasn’t showing through yet.

A woman with curly brown hair. A blue panel van. A low ransom demand and a quick turnaround. A hit-and-run job.

Agent Stevens could count the number of kidnappings he’d worked on one hand. And they’d all been easy compared to this: a couple jealous parents playing musical kids, a drug dealer snatching his rival off a street corner. The kids came back overdosed on ice cream, and the rival came back in a block of concrete. Not exactly whodunits. Nothing like this job.

But he had to start somewhere. Kids in an apartment. A bunch of students, maybe, having a laugh. An elaborate senior prank. Minneapolis had a number of universities. Get a detail of Metro uniforms to canvass the campuses, ask around.

The McDonald’s may have had a security camera. And there was the blue van. Had to be hundreds in the Twin Cities, but it wouldn’t hurt to put out a notice, get people looking around. The phone records might work, too. Figure out where the calls were coming from and you get your kidnappers’ geography. The more Stevens figured, the better he liked it. Maybe it wasn’t such a dead end after all.

Stevens turned to Harper. “You have any enemies? Anyone who’d want to hurt you?”

Harper gave him a withering look. “I’m no asshole, buddy. I play the goddamn stock market.”

“These days,” said Stevens, “that might just make you an asshole.”

T
hey drove over the top of northern Michigan, stopping for the night at a deserted roadside motel just north of the Straits of Mackinac. In the morning it snowed, a few flakes of dandruff and a bitter wind off the lake. It took Sawyer ten minutes to scrape the frost from the van’s windows.

It was a nice little spot, Pender thought, the cold notwithstanding. Would be amazing in the summer. Fishing, boating, maybe some swimming. A little chunk of heaven.

They slept in that morning, Sawyer and Mouse in one room and Pender and Marie in the other.

Marie woke first and when Pender opened his eyes he saw her, curled up in a baggy university sweatshirt and her nose in a paperback novel. She smiled at him when he sat up, her frizzy hair an explosion and her eyes still bleary. He leaned over and kissed her. “Getting ideas?” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s a romance novel.”

“What do you need with a romance novel?” He kissed her again. “You have me.”

She smiled again and kissed him back, and then she sank back into the sheets and stared up at the ceiling. “It’s nice here,” she said.

“Would be better in the summer.”

“I was thinking,” she said. “It would be nice if we could stay.”

He watched her. “Yeah?”

“If we weren’t always in such a hurry.” She sighed. “I just wish we could be normal sometimes.”

“In a couple more years, we’ll be done with this stuff. We can be normal the rest of our lives.”

She sat up again. “I’m just kind of tired,” she said. “Motel rooms and minivans and stuff. I feel dirty, Pender. Unhealthy. This isn’t really what I had in mind when I thought about seeing the world.”

He reached out to her and ran his hands over her hip and her side. Slid his hand underneath her sweatshirt and along the contours of her body. “You look pretty healthy to me,” he told her.

She sighed again. “We need exercise, Pender,” she said. “Maybe we should start doing yoga or something.”

“I have a better idea.” He pulled her closer and kissed her long and hard, loving the way her body curved to fit his. He tugged at her sweatshirt and she sat up to pull it over her head, casting a sideways look down at him.

“This is your idea of exercise?” she said.

He grinned at her. “It’s better than yoga. No offense.”

She swatted playfully at him and then he pulled her back to him. He admired her for another long minute, and then he closed his eyes and kissed her some more.

They stayed in bed until noon. Then the phone rang and it was Mouse and Sawyer, ready to go. They showered and dressed and ate breakfast with the guys in an empty diner down the road, and then they piled back in the van and drove on.

They made Detroit by the middle of the afternoon, swooping down on the I-75 into the city’s grimy suburbs under a sky as bleak as the surroundings. They found a Super 8 off the highway and paid cash for two double rooms. When they got in and got settled, Mouse booted up his computer and started looking for prospects.

“This is good,” he said, staring at a map on his screen. “Looks like we’re pretty close to a lot of rich neighborhoods.”

“Rich?” said Sawyer. “Who the hell are we going to nab in this broke-ass town?”

“No kidding,” said Marie. “If we take the president of GM, they’ll make us pay to give him back.”

They had a point, Pender thought. He worried a little about the target possibilities in this part of the country. The whole southern half of the state looked like a fallout zone, and Detroit itself wasn’t exactly millionaires’ row these days. It almost felt wrong taking money from the people around here.

But Mouse was confident, and he was good. By next morning he had pulled up three worthy candidates, none of whom seemed to have suffered at all in the recession. By noon, Pender had made his decision.

The target was Sam Porter, a forty-two-year-old executive with an agricultural engineering firm headquartered outside the Detroit city limits. Porter lived with his young family in Royal Oak, an affluent bedroom community and an easy highway drive from the Super 8.

“House is worth about a million, and he’s got stock,” said Mouse. “Must have got in early with his company and rode it north. He’s perfect.”

The target acquired, they settled in to the work. There was plenty of it. Burner phones to buy and a car to rent. Routines to establish and intelligence to gather. The team was at its best with a job to do, Pender believed, himself included. With tasks at hand, he could forget about the bigger worries and throw himself into the grind. And he did. They all did, enjoying the anticipation of a job coming together, another D-day just two days away.

F
or all of Agent Stevens’s initial enthusiasm, the Harper job didn’t exactly hightail it out of the gate. There were few leads to start with, and none of them seemed to be leading to much.

The drop site McDonald’s did indeed have a security camera, but whoever had taken Harper had gone to great lengths to stay out of the shot. Stevens had watched Harper stomp over to his Infiniti eight or nine times, peering at the edges of the frame for any hint of the kidnappers’ ride, but to no avail. Shit outta luck in that regard.

SOL university-wise, too. The Minneapolis PD had canvassed the U of M campus as well as the North-Central, Capella, Walden, and St. Thomas schools. Nobody was saying anything about any kidnapping, and as for girls with curly brown hair, well, there were only about eight thousand of them.

Stevens left word with the Minneapolis PD and the various campus police forces to watch out for kids who were throwing money around and had even hauled one sophomore in a Hummer down to the BCA for questioning. But the kid was a basketball player and the Hummer was a loaner from a booster—a clear violation of NCAA rules, but not something the BCA was looking to prosecute.

He still doubted his perps were addicts, but just to be on the safe
side, Stevens asked the knockos at the Minneapolis PD to keep an eye out for blue vans and rich junkies in the poorer neighborhoods.

Blue vans. Every time Stevens saw a blue van, he had to resist the urge to pull it over. It happened probably five or six times a day. Still, he looked close at every van he saw, hoping for that perfect combination, praying for a brown-haired girl in the driver’s seat.

The phone records weren’t much help, either. The kidnappers had made two calls to the Harper residence, one each from a pair of T-Mobile pay-as-you-go cellular phones. Simple. Only the phone company wouldn’t give up the locations of the calls without a warrant.

Lawyers, Stevens thought. It’s a kidnapping case. These are the kidnappers calling with ransom demands. There’s obvious probable cause. The company has to know we’ll come back with a warrant. They’re just slowing down the process with this bullshit insistence on protocol. Meanwhile, the case is getting colder by the minute.

The phone company did, however, allow that the phones had been purchased from the T-Mobile kiosk at Mall of America on the Monday before the kidnapping. A clerk named Aziz had made the sale.

Earlier in the day, Stevens had driven over to the Mall and searched out Aziz and the T-Mobile kiosk. The guy looked barely out of high school and half stoned besides, but Stevens tried it on anyway, asking Aziz if he remembered anyone coming in and buying two burners last Monday afternoon.

The results were predictable. Aziz shrugged. “Lots of people buy phones.”