Revenge is Sweet (A Samantha Church Mystery) (6 page)

Sam had spent the last two nights at her grandmother’s ranch sitting with her in front of a roaring fire that Howard had built for them both evenings after dinner.
They talked of the ‘Old Country’ and Feltre, a small mountain town in the Dolomites, a mountain range in the northern Italian Alps, where Nona was born. She arrived in America, the day of her seventh birthday and came to the two hundred and eighty acre ranch that her father had purchased on the west side of Interstate 25 just outside of Denver. The ranch, about twelve miles from where the pavement turns to gravel, at the end of a rugged county road, had been her home for the past seventy years.

The memory warmed her and a small smile spread over her lips. The loneliness lifted slightly at the thought.

She found herself desperately missing the smells of her grandmother’s cooking, standing next to her and watching her as she cooked. Yesterday, Nona had fixed her usual Sunday afternoon feast of polenta smothered with chicken and gravy and fresh spinach. Sam was full from dinner, but still her mouth watered. She glanced around her living room, thinking of the rent she had just paid for February. It still wasn’t too late to give notice that she would move out at the end of the month. Howard had asked her in the hospital what was taking so long to move to the ranch. She knew they both would be as happy to have her, as she would be to come.

She would do that first thing in the morning. She smiled, the emptiness around her falling away. There is something about having a place to call home. Home-cooked meals and the comfort of having someone near.

Sam stared up into the darkness.

The only light in her bedroom came from the illumination of her clock on the nightstand. She tried not to look at the numbers. It would only tell her how much of this night she had not slept. The minutes had been folding into hours since just after midnight.

She had been thinking of movie plots where someone was kidnapped. How everything seemingly wrapped up in a nice, neat package in just two hours. How those waiting to hear from the kidnappers did, their demands met and the hostage released. Sam wondered why just this once it couldn’t be that easy in real life.

Despite no word from the kidnappers, Sam had eliminated the idea that Wilson was being held anywhere but in a residential setting. Not in a cave. Not in a warehouse. Sam had made a visit to the warehouse that she and Rey Estrada had staked out one night while she worked the drug smuggling story. She remembered the chilly night she and Rey shared a thermos of coffee and a conversation about Robin as they waited for activity to occur at the warehouse. In the darkness of her bedroom, she could see herself as they stood in a nearby stairwell snapping countless photos of men dressed in black, taking drugs off the s
emi that had come from Mexico; photos that were published alongside her stories, which were picked up by newspapers across the country.

Yesterday, she visited the building and talk
ed with the manager. She told him the Perspective was doing a short follow up on her drug smuggling stories. He offered to give her a tour of the warehouse and she accepted.

Frances and Howard, however, had insisted she not go alone.

“I’ll be going in broad daylight. Nothing’s going to happen,” Sam said, sitting at Nona’s kitchen table and looking at them over her coffee.

But they wouldn’t hear of it.

“I’d feel so much better, Sammie, if Howard went with you,” Nona said.

“Nona,” Sam said shaking her head. “Howard doesn’t always have to be my guardian angel.”

The look, however, in Nona’s eyes, melted Sam into submission.

“I sure couldn’t ask for a better angel,” Sam said to Howard as they waved goodbye to Nona and left the ranch in Howard’s car.

The manager met Sam and Howard at the main doors of the warehouse. “We have nothing to hide, Ms. Marino and Mr. Skinner,” the manager had told them as they walked from floor to floor. “I have cooperated with the authorities fully on this matter.”

Sam couldn’t put much else together because she had been unconscious most of the time, but when she was awake and talking with Wilson, he told her he was certain they were being held in a house-type setting. He kept talking about a peculiar odor. She knew Wilson wasn’t being held in the house in Grandview where the meth operation centered. It was still under police watch.

It has to be a home, but where? In this big, big city, where?

Sam rolled from one position to the next. When she wasn’t thinking about Wilson, her mind was a hodge-podge of other thoughts, from April to working
on news stories for the next edition to wondering what she was going to do about a car. She wouldn’t be able to keep driving Wilson’s much longer. She wanted to think that soon he would be back to work and everything would be normal again.

She desperately wanted to believe that.

Sam knew it was going to be hard to get another classic Ford Mustang like her old one. Financially she knew she could afford it. But it wasn’t just that. She wasn’t sure she could drive another Mustang without being reminded of what had happened to her last one. Her mind drifted and she started to think of the force of the blast. How it knocked her off her feet. She had lost consciousness briefly and, when she came to, she was staring up into the faces of strangers, a couple standing over her. She could see their mouths moving, talking to her, their brows furrowed with worry, but she could not hear a word they were saying.

Sam turned to look at the clock, three minutes before six. She groaned and threw the covers back. No more. She would not allow herself to think any longer of what had happened that January night. Morrison had been sleeping soundly at her feet, and he only stirred slightly as Sam got out of bed. She wanted to get to the office before eight, hoping that another day wouldn’t pass without word from Wilson’s kidnappers.

One week today, she thought as she moved toward the bathroom.

She showered and dressed quickly in a pair of black slacks, cream-colored silk blouse and matching heels. She fed Morrison and headed out to the Accord, wondering what she was going to do about getting another car.

The Grandview Perspective was dark and the front parking lot empty when Sam arrived twenty minutes before eight. She let herself into the building and slipped quickly down the stairs into the newsroom. The large, open room was quiet and cast in its usual semi-darkness, the way it was before reporters started showing up for work.

Sam was glad that Nick Weeks’ office was still dark. He wasn’t the first person she wanted to see when she arrived. She only glanced briefly toward Wilson’s office as she made her way to her desk and tried to ignore the pang in her heart.

She checked the message light on her telephone first thing. No blinking red light. Sam turned on her computer. The quiet surrounding her made the soft humming noise from her computer seem louder than usual. She checked her e-mail. Nothing. She shook her head in disappointment. She wasn’t sure how the kidnappers would communicate with her. She was just certain that somehow they would soon contact her. It was the only reason they had let her go.

She headed to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. She waited there for it to brew, enjoying the fresh aroma of coffee as it began to filter through the room. It made her think of the weekend at her grandmother’s ranch. Every morning she woke to the rich smell of coffee brewing and to the sounds and fresh inviting smells of Nona’s cooking coming from the kitchen. The rustle of pots and pans. The mixture of flour and butter. She was glad that she had slipped a notice to vacate her apartment at the end of the month in the manager’s mailbox before she left her complex this morning.

She poured herself a cup of coffee knowing that moving to Nona’s ranch would be the only way she could get her life in order. She held the warm cup to her chest and closed her eyes thinking of her daughter, the only thought that seemed to warm her. It was the only certain way to get April home.

Sam returned to her desk and saw the e-mail even before she sat down.

She set the coffee cup on her desk, keeping her eyes fixed on the subject line. It was illuminated in dark blue, signaling it had yet to be opened. She stared at her screen until she became aware that she had been holding her breath. She glanced around the room, still alone. She pulled out her chair and slowly sat down. The subject line contained a single word.

Revenge

“Finally,” Sam said the word as she exhaled deeply. It wouldn’t be hard to get her e-mail address at work, as it was listed at the bottom of every story she wrote.

It was quiet enough that Sam jumped when she heard someone entering the building. She listened a moment before she recognized the voices of Anne Misner and Dee Schaffer. She heard them talking and laughing about baseball. They were Colorado Rockies fans and were excited that spring training would soon be under way.

Sam turned her attention back to her computer screen. Her heart was beating fast and she tried to swallow over the dryness in her mouth. Sam put her hand over the mouse, and noticed it was shaking. She clicked on the word. The e-mail came from an undisclosed location. She knew it would be pointless to hit ‘reply all’ but she did anyway. It had been sent to no one else.

Sam pressed her palms down firmly on her desk, bracing herself to read the message.

Your suspicions about being followed were exactly correct, Samantha Christine.

In fact, we have been following you for some time, waiting for the right moment to make our move.

It is too bad that your foolish friend did not take you seriously.

Sam frowned. How’d they know her middle name?

Are you surprised we know your middle name? Shame on you if you were. It was my mother’s name and yours. Perhaps someday I will tell you about the old witch.

I am pleased to see that you have not called the police. You continually surprise me, Christine.

Do not worry about your friend. He is doing as well as can be expected. For the time being.

You will await further instructions from me.

And do nothing, absolutely nothing, until you hear from me.

You wouldn’t want to do anything stupid would you, Christine?

Of course, you want to see your friend again
and we wouldn’t want Wilson to end up like dear old sis now would we? …

Sam closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. She saw Wilson in her mind, remembering how he’d come in each day and made it a point to acknowledge each of his reporters as he passed through the newsroom to his office. She missed seeing him sitting at his desk, with his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, typing in his usual way, pecking away at the keyboard with his index fingers and often a ballpoint pen clenched between his teeth.

Sam had started to enjoy reporting again, working for Wilson Cole Jr. She envisioned him in the office last Tuesday, smartly dressed in a crisp gray suit. He was a tall, handsome man with a thick shock of silver hair, combed neatly away from his face. She remembered the stark white of his shirt that day and how it had deepened the gray in his hair.

Sam thought Wilson Cole Jr. looked like any other businessperson, yet he managed to project something more comfortable.

Perhaps it was his face. At fifty-eight, it had begun to fold softly under gravity’s pull. Perhaps it was his manner, described by those who knew him as very direct, but low key and, most of all, calm. People were attracted to Wilson because his style was thoughtful and methodical. He had tact and knew how, where and when to use it. Being overbearing, rude or callous was not part of his collective personality. Wilson generally liked everyone. He could sit for hours just observing them and could engage almost anyone in conversation.

Best of all, Sam knew Wilson to be placid and slow to anger. Qualities she knew would be valuable when it came to dealing with his kidnappers.

Sam had been so deep in thought she was unaware that other reporters had started to file into the newsroom. She jumped when she felt a hand lightly on her shoulder. Startled, she looked up.

“Sam?” It was David Best. Of all the reporters, Sam liked him the most. He was soft-spoken, tall, easily four inches over Sam’s 5-foot, 6-inch frame and thin with a runner’s build. He was just a few years out of college and Sam guessed him to be about twenty-five. He was always clean-shaven and had a full head of dark brown hair that he kept neatly trimmed. His boyish, mild-mannered disposition had a way of putting her at ease. And, he had defended her on more than one occasion to Nick Weeks. She was grateful for that.

“David, don’t do that! You scared the daylights out of me.” Sam said, her heart thundering in her chest.

He was holding an empty coffee cup and had a genuine look of concern on his face. He was still so freshly showered and his hair still damp that Sam could smell shampoo.

“Sorry,” David said. “I was going to get a cup of coffee and I saw you cover your face. Everything okay?”

Sam nodded and didn’t want to draw David’s attention to her computer screen. She grabbed her cup and pulled him with her to the kitchen.

“I need another cup, too,” she said. “This one’s cold.”

“Boy it is freezing outside,” David said as they entered the kitchen. “I did my usual two laps around Wash Park this morning and it never really did warm up. But I love to run
outside on a cold day.”

He waited while Sam dumped her coffee in the sink and then he poured her another cup.

“Thanks, David,” she said and watched as he poured his own.

“But I sure wouldn’t mind being on whatever beach Wilson’s on now,” he said. “I bet it’s
a heck of a lot warmer than here.”

Sam looked at David over the rim of her cup, considering his comment. She sipped her coffee without saying a word.