Criminal Enterprise (31 page)

T
OMLIN LAY
AWAKE
through the night, listening to Andrea Stevens as she slept. Occasionally, the girl would moan something, or whimper through her gag, and once she sat straight up in the bed, straining at her bonds and looking wildly around the room, before sinking back onto the sheets.

He lay awake until sunrise, feeling his wound throbbing, listening to the girl breathe. He pictured the look on her face when he finally broke her, when he’d destroyed that confidence, that improbable courage. Better yet, he pictured the look on her father’s face when he realized he was too late to save her.

The dawn finally broke, and Tomlin found his way to the bathroom by the dim edges of cold winter sunlight seeping around the curtains. He pissed and then splashed cold water on his face before studying himself in the mirror.

He’d aged at least a decade since the layoff. No longer did he look boyish and charming and handsome. He looked worn-out and beaten, and when he tried to smile at the mirror, he couldn’t conjure playful and confident anymore. Only scary. Grotesque. He looked like a mug shot. Or a corpse.

Soon enough.
Tomlin dried his face and walked out into the room, his wound sending spikes of pain through his body. He walked to Andrea’s bed and shook her awake. “Up and at ’em, princess,” he told her, savoring the way her eyes widened when she looked at his face. “You’ve got a big day ahead of you.”

—

T
HE NIGHT CLERK
woke with a start. He looked around the motel lobby, wiping the drool from his chin, and saw that he’d fallen asleep on top of his book. In the corner, the TV was blaring some spastic infomercial, and the clerk dug out the remote and turned the thing off. Blinking, he surveyed the lobby. Checked the time. Nearly nine in the morning.

He stood to make himself a fresh pot of coffee. Glanced out the window and saw a big SUV waiting to turn from the parking lot into the road. Must have come from one of the units, he realized. It had woken him up as it passed the lobby.

The clerk rubbed his eyes and stared out at the truck. It was a big blue hulk with some serious body damage. Like it had been chewed up by a giant puppy. The clerk looked closer and shook his head.
Holy shit,
he thought.
Those are bullet holes.

The Summit Hill guy was supposed to be driving a shot-up Lincoln Navigator, a blue one, he remembered. That was a big blue Lincoln Navigator out there. And those were definitely bullet holes.

The clerk watched the truck pull out onto the street, headed southwest, and then he hurried back to the front desk, where he picked up the phone and called 911. “Yeah,” he said, when the dispatcher answered. “I think I just found that Summit Hill psycho.”

S
TEVENS SAT
ON
his living room couch with Nancy asleep on his shoulder. He watched the cops clustered around the house, making coffee in the kitchen and talking in hushed voices out in the front hall.

Triceratops, the big German shepherd, came padding through the living room. He paused in front of Stevens and regarded him briefly with big, concerned eyes, before ambling off to insinuate himself among the Saint Paul city cops in the hallway.
Let the dog play host,
Stevens thought.
I don’t have the energy.

He hadn’t slept, not at all. Couldn’t do it. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Andrea’s face. Nancy’s. She hadn’t accused him of anything, but the way she’d looked at him last night, she didn’t have to.

I could have prevented this. Tomlin wasn’t even my case.

He’d spent the night wide awake and sick with worry, Nancy’s face pressed to his shirtsleeve. He’d passed the time talking to the cops who’d drifted through the room, and when that got old, he sat back and simply stared at the walls, the telephone, feeling damned helpless and imagining the worst. What if Andrea tried to stand up to Tomlin? What if she tried to escape? What if Tomlin was some kind of pervert, some sicko with a thing for teenage girls?

Tim Lesley had stopped in overnight. He’d left just after dawn to wake up Singer’s young wife and deliver the bad news. He’d hugged an exhausted Nancy and then regarded Stevens, his normally severe features now creased with compassion. “We’ll find her,” he said.

We’ll find her.
The night’s rallying cry. Stevens, though, was finding it tough to believe the hype. Carter Tomlin was a psychopath. He killed like he enjoyed the act, unlike Arthur Pender, who’d killed out of necessity, a survival mechanism. Negotiating with Pender in Detroit, Stevens had felt like he’d at least known the rules of the game. He’d known Pender wouldn’t kill his hostage unless his own survival was in jeopardy. Tomlin was unpredictable. Evil.

Stevens heard the front door open and looked up to see Windermere walk in, carrying a tray of coffee and a paper McDonald’s bag. She handed Stevens the bag and studied his face. “You get any sleep?”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t.”

“Shit.” She gestured to Nancy. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s sleeping, at least.”

“And your son?”

“Upstairs. He’s asleep, too.” And thank God. JJ had stayed in his room the whole night, unaware of the fiasco playing out downstairs.

“We’re going to find this guy, Stevens.”

He sighed. “So they tell me.”

She started to say something else. Then she stopped. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Must be a lot of people blowing smoke up your ass.”

“Even if we find this guy, Carla . . .”

“Yeah. I know.”

Stevens reached into the fast-food bag and unwrapped a breakfast sandwich. He looked at it and realized he wasn’t hungry. “I should be doing something,” he said. “Instead of just sitting here.”

“You are doing something,” said Windermere. “You’re taking care of Nancy.”

At the sound of her name, Nancy shifted on Stevens’s shoulder. Then she sat up, groaning. She looked at him. “Time is it?”

“About nine,” he told her.

“Anything happen?”

Stevens shook his head. Nancy looked around the room, blinking sleep away. Then she sat forward and put her head in her hands. “Oh my God.”

Stevens rubbed her back. “Agent Windermere brought breakfast.”

Nancy looked up and saw Windermere for the first time. “You’re Agent Windermere.”

Windermere nodded. “I’m sorry we had to meet like this.”

“Me too.” Nancy took the bag from Stevens and peered inside. Then she shoved it away. “I’m not hungry, Kirk.”

Stevens set the bag on the floor as Nancy buried her face in his shoulder again. Windermere stood. “I’ll let you two be,” she said, starting toward the front door.

Stevens felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. “Hold up,” he told Windermere, shifting Nancy off him and digging for his phone. He pulled it out and looked at it. Felt his heart shift gears. “It’s Andrea.” He flipped open the phone as Nancy sat up straight beside him. “Andrea?”

Nothing. Stevens stared at the phone. The silence was pregnant, malevolent. Stevens held the phone to his ear again. “Hello?”

He could hear breathing, labored. Cops filled the living room, watching Stevens. “Carter,” he said. “Where are you? Where’s Andrea?”

Another long silence. Then: “I guess your life isn’t so perfect after all.”

Carter Tomlin. His voice was raspy, strained. He sounded more like a cancer patient than a killer. “Carter,” said Stevens. “What do you want?”

Tomlin laughed. Couldn’t hold it. Coughed instead, a terrible racking cough. Stevens wanted to reach through the phone and tear the words from his throat. Windermere was making eyes at him. Mouthed a question:
Where is he?
Stevens shook his head. “Talk to me, Carter.
What do you want?
”

Tomlin coughed again. Swore. “We’re going shopping, Agent Stevens,” he said, his voice high, singsongy. This time he laughed, and it stuck. “Hurry up and come find us before we get bored.”

“Shopping,” said Stevens. “Where—”

Tomlin hung up. Stevens tried calling back. Got no answer. Tried again and still no one picked up. He stared at his blank handset, his pulse pounding in his ears, and tried calling again, feeling his world disintegrating around him.

A
NDREA STEVENS
LAY
in the back of Coach Tomlin’s SUV, fighting with the duct tape and wishing for a drink of water. She felt awful this morning, worse than the time she and Megan stole some of her dad’s vodka and tried out getting drunk. Her mouth tasted like a garbage can, her head hurt, she was thirsty, and she needed to pee. Tomlin had woken her up and bundled her into the back of his truck before she was fully awake, and as she tried to find a comfortable position in the cargo compartment, Andrea cursed herself for not running when she could have.

Tomlin was really hurting now, she could tell. She’d listened to his shallow breathing all night, waiting for him to die or pass out so that she could escape.

No such luck. He’d survived, and now they were driving again, someplace far. She’d been in the back of the truck for a while, struggling with the duct tape and trying desperately not to pee herself.

“Kidnapped Girl Wets Herself, Dies.” Andrea wondered how her friends could take her death seriously if it came out in the news that she’d soaked her pants before the big climax.

Calm down,
she told herself.
You’re not going to die. You’re going to get out of here, and if you wet your pants along the way, at least you’ll be alive, damn it.

First things first: she had to get out of the duct tape. Andrea shifted in the back of the truck, searching for a better angle. Then she found something. A jagged piece of metal, about halfway up the door. Andrea turned her back to it and felt around with her hands. It felt like a bullet hole. Probably from when the police were shooting at the truck.

It just barely missed me,
she thought.
Holy crap.
She considered her luck for a moment. Then she shook her head and focused on getting free. The rim of the hole was a ring of torn metal jutting out just a bit from the door. To reach it with her bound wrists, she would have to prop herself up, and she squirmed, digging in with her feet and pressing down into the carpet with her forehead until her skin burned. She rubbed the tape back and forth, trying to score the thick material, but every time Tomlin hit a bump in the road she lost her balance and fell.

It was a long, frustrating process, made even worse by her swelling bladder. Every time she made progress, Tomlin would turn, or swerve, or bounce over something, and she would fall back to the carpet, wanting to scream. But she gritted her teeth and tried again, and eventually she could feel the tape start to give.

Yes,
she thought, grinning through her gag. The first layer of duct tape came loose, and as she struggled with it, she was able to work her wrist free. She reached up to remove the gag from her mouth, and that’s when she felt the truck start to slow. A moment later, they’d stopped. The engine shut off. Andrea listened to Tomlin wheezing for breath in the front seat.
Crap,
she thought. Then she couldn’t hear Tomlin anymore.
Maybe he died,
she thought.
Just like that.

Andrea sat up and looked around the vehicle. They were in a parking garage somewhere. She glanced at the front of the truck and saw the back of Tomlin’s head. He was holding a phone to his ear—her cell phone. He wasn’t saying anything.

Then he did speak. It was almost a whisper. It sounded painful and scary. “I guess your life isn’t so perfect after all.” He said nothing else, and Andrea wondered who he had called, whose life was supposed to be perfect.
Compared to yours,
she thought,
I guess just about any life looks good about now.

Tomlin coughed like he was dying, and Andrea watched him, bent almost to the steering wheel, his whole body shaking. Then he cleared his throat and sat straighter again. “We’re going shopping, Agent Stevens—”

Dad.
Andrea stiffened.
Come and get me. Hurry.

Tomlin’s voice was a nursery-rhyme nightmare. “Hurry up and come find us,” he said, “before we get bored.”

Dad.
Shopping. What the hell is he talking about?

Then Tomlin put down the phone. She heard him open the door.
Crap,
she thought, ducking back into the cargo compartment.
Crap, crap, shit
.
He was coming around back for her. Andrea fumbled with the duct tape, and managed to re-gag herself. Then she wrapped the tape around her wrists as best she could, hoping Tomlin wouldn’t look too close. She wanted to sit up and grab one of Tomlin’s guns from the backseat, but there wasn’t enough time; he was at the rear of the truck now, opening the back gate, peering in at her like a zombie hungry for brains.

Andrea tried to look innocent as Tomlin stared at her, catching his breath. The garage was crowded behind him, cars everywhere. No bystanders nearby, though. Nobody to help her.

Tomlin was carrying that big army gun, not even bothering to hide it. He looked like he had another couple of guns stuffed in his pants, too, and for the first time, Andrea stopped worrying about herself, and started to wonder just what Heather’s dad had planned. He smiled down at her. “How about a little shopping spree, princess?”

Andrea squirmed. Pretended to protest through the gag. Tomlin reached in and grabbed her. “Let’s go,” he said, dragging her to her feet. “Find you something nice to wear for your daddy.”

All of a sudden, Andrea knew where she was. She’d been here at Christmas, with her mom, trying to pick out something nice and inexpensive for her dad. They’d come in the morning, dodged the crowds for hours, and come out after dark, empty-handed. She’d bought him a book about Michael Jordan instead.

Tomlin wrenched her forward, shoving her through the long rows of parked cars. In the distance, Andrea could see the mall entrance. The Mall of America. She stole another glance at Tomlin’s big rifle, and felt sick as she wondered just what he was going to do.