The Crossword Connection (19 page)

“Because I'm female?” Belle's voice and jaw were tight.

“Because you probably weigh only a hundred and ten pounds. That's not a lot of beef to throw against a male who's attacking you.”

Belle was quiet for a long minute. “So, what do we do now?”

“Wait until you're recontacted.”

“He won't call if he knows you're here.”

“I guarantee that's not the case.” Al's voice was calm, professional, kind. Belle found herself desperately wanting to believe him. “These sickos thrive on police attention. Trust me.”

Belle closed her eyes, then slowly opened them. “Do you want some coffee, Al?”

“Love some.”

As they headed for the kitchen, Lever picked up the crossword. “How do you do these things?” His manner had a false heartiness that tried to say,
Don't worry. It's going to be okay.

Belle tried to match the tone. “State secret.” She added an equally disingenuous, “I hope you like your coffee strong.”

“You know what they say? If a spoon stands up in it …” Al examined the cryptic. “‘Stand By Your Man' … Oh, I get it, you put the word
man
throughout the puzzle.”

“18-Down,” Belle recited. “MARATHON MAN; 55-Across: MAN BITES DOG; 21-Across: FAMILY OF MAN … I can recite this thing in my sleep—”

“Which you didn't get.”

“Which I didn't get. Are you certain this guy will make another attempt with you here, Al?”

“I'd stake my badge on it. There was nothing you recognized in the man's inflection? A regional dialect? Odd speech pattern?”

“Nothing other than what I already shared with you: a tin ear, and a disconcerting habit of switching from erudite to undereducated language and locution—”

“Which could mean a schizophrenic …”

Belle poured coffee into two mugs and looked at the clock on the stove. “It's after seven.”

“He'll call, Belle. Guys like this can't stay away.”

As if on cue, the phone rang. Al banged his mug on the countertop, spilling a quarter of the black brown liquid on the surface. He held up a hand and motioned for Belle to wait until he reached the office extension.

Three endless rings elapsed before he shouted the all clear, and they picked up the receivers in unison. “Hello?” Belle realized her voice sounded hideously unnatural. If the mystery man didn't already know she had company, he'd certainly guess from her tone.

“Annabella Graham?” The male voice was nervous. Belle had a difficult time pegging it as the self-confident caller of thirteen hours earlier. Schizophrenia, she reminded herself.

“The puzzle's done,” she said, “but I … I … Just tell me what to do with it now.”

A tense pause greeted her. “This is Annabella Graham, isn't it?”

Belle swallowed. “This is she.” She considered asking about Rosco but decided to follow the caller's lead. “This is Annabella Graham.”

“I apologize for phoning so early.…”

Belle stretched the cord as far as she could but was unable to see past the door to the living room and beyond. “That's all right.”

“But working folk have such nasty schedules—”

“Look, mister—”

“Oh! Russ Parrotti, here. I'm sorry; I should have introduced myself right off the bat. Russ Parrotti of the
Boston Sentinel.
Parrotti, not Perot, and Russ rather than Ross.” The man named Russ laughed. Belle did not. “Miss Graham, I'm fact-checking a story on you by one of our contributors, an Elise Elliott—”

“What?”

“I'm a fact-checker with the
Sentinel.
And, again, Miss Graham, I apologize for the inconvenience of the hour, but—”

“Look, Mr. Parrot—”

“Parrotti—”

“Mr. Parrotti. You have to get off this line. I'm expecting a crucial call.” Belle slammed the receiver down without waiting for a response. Lever joined her a moment later.

“Not him?”

She shook her head, then reflexively began mopping up spilled coffee.

“You're sure?”

Belle turned horrified eyes on Al.

“I'm going to trace the call, just in case.” He pounded numbers on the dial pad, wrote down the results, called Boston information, and copied the
Sentinel
's main number. “Looks like Russ Parrotti may be on the up and up.”

“What do you mean, ‘may be'?”

“Crazies often like to exist inconspicuously, working the quietest jobs. It's like camouflage.”

“But Parrotti's in Boston—”

“Which is an hour away, max.”

Belle's shoulders sagged. She felt on the verge of tears. She was about to answer when the phone rang a second time. Al bolted toward the office extension, but before he was halfway through the living room, Belle grabbed the receiver.

“My number's unlisted. Now, lose the cop.” Then came a loud and final click.

“That's all right. No trouble,” Belle said as Al picked up, adding a falsely serene, “Wrong number” for his benefit.

Then she replaced the receiver in the cradle, affixed a determined smile, and greeted the returning Lever with a pleasant: “You know what, Al? We're both starving, and the cupboards are bare. How about if I sit here by the phone while you visit the mom-and-pop store on the corner and get us some eggs?” She stopped herself as if a truth had suddenly dawned. “Darn it! They won't be open this early. You'll have to drive over to the supermarket—”

“I'm not leaving, Belle. And I'm not hungry.”

“But I am, Al. Look, I won't answer the phone till you get back. How's that?”

Al thought. “Takeout from Lawson's would be easier and faster. Maybe some French toast … a mushroom omelette …”

Belle's smile grew as she counted minutes in her head. Round trip to the café would take twenty to thirty minutes
if
the morning's orders were light. “Sounds good to me.”

“What'll you have?”

“You choose, Al. I've given up making decisions.”

When the phone rang again, Belle was ready.

“I'll try,” she said in answer to the caller's abrupt request. “It's a newspaper, and I'm only the—”

A stream of oaths interrupted her, which was followed by another question.

“I'll do my best. I promise.… But what about Rosco?”

“I'm still thinking, little Annabel Lee …

“‘In her sepulchre there by the sea—

“‘In her tomb by the sounding sea.' Poe, again … You hurry on down to the
Crier,
and then we'll powwow again, Annabel.”

CHAPTER 24

At first meeting, Kit hadn't been sure about Rosco. To begin with, he was the only human being the dog had encountered who'd refused to respond, pro or con, to a friendly face-licking. He'd remained motionless when the puppy had run her wet tongue over his stubbled cheeks; never blinking his eyes or rolling his head to one side, let alone knocking her halfway across the room and shouting, “Get lost, will ya?”

The reason for this comatose state, a reason Kit was unaware of, was that Rosco had been fed a dose of methyl-morphine thirty-six hours earlier. But he wasn't dead; in fact, despite the chill of the basement room, his body had retained its warmth, allowing the puppy to curl up beside him through two cold nights, which was lucky for both of them, as the building had been without heat for some time.

However, by eleven
A.M.,
the sun was again high enough in the sky to begin filtering in through the only link to the outside world: a small, rectangular window at the juncture of the ceiling and wall. Looking up and out through the dirty glass would have required standing on a chair, but its position in the wall didn't impede the welcome light. In fact, it created a pleasant warm spot on the old dirt floor, and since Rosco was proving to be a decidedly dull companion, Kit had opted to take advantage of the radiant heat, curling up in a tight ball beneath the sun's mellow rays. She'd just started to nod off when Rosco finally showed signs of life by letting out an extended and painful groan. Kit leapt to her feet, trotted over to him, and once again began licking his face.

“Arrrgh …” Rosco shook his head and made an aborted attempt to wipe the wetness from his face. The fact that his hands had been bound behind his back with duct tape, and that his ankles were also strapped together made the effort less than successful. Through the dense fog that was his gradually recovering brain, he imagined himself turned into a gigantic and bloated earthworm, one that felt bruised and sore all over. He pictured an enormous fishhook, himself as bait, and the cold plunge in the frigid ocean.

Rosco groaned again, slept again, then slowly reawakened. He rolled to one side, forcing himself to inch his way up the wall until he settled into a crabbed and uncomfortable sitting position. “Okay,” he muttered with his eyes shut tight. “I'm alive. Nice start.”

Kit took the words as a sign of good humor, jumping into his lap, placing her paws on his chest, and licking determinedly his face. Rosco opened his eyes briefly, stared at the dog, then closed them again, trying to remember how he'd come to be tied up in an icy and evil-smelling basement with only a dog for company. The two guys who tried to trash the homeless mission, he finally remembered through the haze, Belle's mystery crossword, the empty rose box … and Freddie Carson. The picture gradually came into focus.

Rosco opened his eyes. “How are ya, Kit?” He blinked several times and shook his head in an effort to calibrate his thoughts. His head pounded fiercely. “I don't suppose you have any coffee around here? Or a couple of aspirin?”

Again, she licked his face.

“A cell phone would be too much to ask, right?”

Kit responded with a low whimper, while Rosco's chin dropped suddenly toward his chest. A wave of nausea attacked him, then receded little by little.

“How about a knife? Straight razor? Or maybe you could chew this tape from my wrists?”

Kit skipped from his lap, crossed back to the sunny spot, and barked, suggesting it might be a better place to spend the day.

Rosco groaned for a third time; his mouth, he realized, felt as if a dentist had padded it with wads of cotton and left them there. “You wouldn't have any idea how to get out of here, would you, Kit?”

He looked around in an attempt to get his bearings, but nothing about the place seemed remotely familiar. Old stone walls, an open-timbered ceiling, a hard-packed dirt floor that had probably been there for a hundred years. He could have been on Ninth Street or in Alaska for all he knew. Rosco twisted his hands to the left side of his torso and peered at his wristwatch. It took a beat for the date and time to register in his conscious thoughts. “It's Wednesday …? What happened to Tuesday?”

Kip barked again.

“Have you been here since Tuesday, too?” Rosco studied the room, noting for the first time the many bowls of half-eaten kibble, the water left in mismatched pots, the newspapers serving as dog toilets. “I guess we've both been consigned to the dungeon.…”

He placed his feet flat on the floor and began working his back up the wall until he was standing: wobbly and in pain but erect. His head felt worse than it had when he'd been sitting. His first instinct was that someone had clobbered him. He moved his jaw from side to side; the ache in his temples increased, and another spasm of nausea attacked him. Rosco let it pass, then hopped to the door, turned around until his hands reached the doorknob, and grasped it. It wouldn't budge. He yanked hard, but the door was locked, its movement so restricted, he assumed it was bolted from the other side.

“What do you think, Kit, if I scream my head off, the cops will be here in no time?”

The puppy cocked her head to one side, producing a look of confusion.

“Never mind, it was a rhetorical question.”

Rosco moved slowly back across the room and attempted to look up through the window. He saw metal grating and sky but nothing else that would indicate whether the basement's locale was in some deserted part of Newcastle, the burbs, or deep in the country. He noted there was no exterior noise, or if there was, it was too faint to hear. By the absence of sirens, grinding bus gears, and irate horn blasts, he guessed city living was no longer a consideration.

“Well, Kit, looks like we're here for a while. I don't suppose you have a deck of cards?”

Since Kit had no tail to speak of, the act of wagging what there was only served to make her hindquarters jounce around like a kite in the wind. But she seemed very happy; Rosco wasn't such a dud after all.

CHAPTER 25

Belle stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor of the
Crier
building and, as usual, the offices were chaotic: editors racing from door to door, barking brusque questions about their reporters' abilities to fill pages intelligently or their combined reluctance to drop a well-chosen line of text, grilling fact-checkers, muttering about possible lawsuits, and hollering out deadlines. “Check the clock, people, check the clock!” was the favored dictum on this particular Wednesday. The maelstrom was the reason Belle preferred to create her cryptics at home; silence was not one of the luxuries afforded by the
Crier
workplace.

“‘Stand by Your Man.'”

Belle snapped her head sharply to her right and stared at the person who'd spoken. “What did you say?”

“‘Stand by Your Man.' The Tammy Wynette song? That's what you were humming on the elevator. A little touchy for the bride-to-be, aren't you, Belle?”

It took her a beat to recognize the speaker as Wally, one of the pressroom runners. She forced a careless smile. “Sorry, Wally, you're right. I guess I am a little over-stressed with the party details. I didn't even know who was talking to me.…”

“Hey,
no problema,
I felt the same way walking into my wedding day … but, hey, five years and still going strong.” Wally tapped his wedding ring and winked.
“Buona fortuna, Bellissima!
Gotta run.” He trotted down the hallway and ducked through the glass-paneled door of the pressroom.