Dark Hope (46 page)

“That’s why he couldn’t find us the other night,” I whispered, horrified.

And that’s why he has no clue where to look for the Key
, Henri added. He laughed, full of spite.
Such a comeuppance for him, don’t you think?

“He must hate me,” I said. I stared at the closed door, suddenly understanding the sarcasm and resentment that had driven him to stalk off. “Surely he knew this would happen before now?”

Apparently not
, Henri responded.
That’s what makes this so delicious. I’m actually surprised he managed to figure it out at all, but I guess he’d have to be in complete denial to miss the signs
.

“Oh, Michael,” I whispered, raising my hand as if I could reach him. “I’m so sorry.”

Don’t be sorry. Now that he knows he cannot search for the Key without you, he has to keep you alive—at least for now. But stay on your toes. He undoubtedly will resent you. If you anger him, there is no telling what he might do
.

“But, Henri, what do
I
do?” I pleaded with my Guardian, thankful that there was someone I could trust watching my back.

Stay one step ahead of him
, Henri whispered.
Find the Key. And don’t let him know that you know
.

twenty-one

“M
rs. Carmichael, you’d better sit down.”

A surge of impatience went through Mona as she heard Agent Hale’s voice. A neat stack of used paper cups sat in front of her on the table, marking the hours she had spent idling at the FBI’s offices the day after Don had mysteriously arrived at her garage. She had been waiting for any news. She wasn’t used to having to wait. She wasn’t used to being told what to do, and it rankled her to feel so useless.

“I’m already sitting,” she said drily, looking up at him where he stood in the doorway.

“Ah, yes,” Hale said, shuffling through a stack of papers before turning his attention to her. “On second thought, why don’t you come out here? It’s probably going to be easier to show you than to try and explain it.”

For a second, Mona thought her heart had stopped beating. She looked up at him, waiting for him to share whatever news he had, but instead he simply gestured toward the sea of computers that
filled the large, open room. She stood up, her bones aching, and followed him out. They wound through the desks in silence.

They stopped at a large station where several agents were huddling. Giant television screens and maps filled the space around the bank of computers. Clayton was standing in the small crowd. He gave her a tiny half-smile, reaching his hand out toward her.

She sucked in her breath and looked at his hand, wondering how bad the news would be. Slowly, she placed her hand in his and he gave it a little squeeze.

“You’ll want to come closer,” he said quietly, pulling her in.

Mona took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Tell me.”

Hale cleared his throat. “We aren’t sure what to make of it, ma’am. But here is what we have. Your husband’s phone signal establishes his location at the time of your conversation as Alabama,
here
,” he said, pointing to the map, “just as he led you to believe. But the last signal we have for your daughter’s phone places her
here
.” His hand swung a big arc across the map, landing on the western half of the United States. “In Las Vegas.”

Mona’s mind came into sharp focus. “When was the signal?”

“A few days ago, presumably at the time you called. Shortly after that, the signal went dead. The phone must have been destroyed.”

“So he did take her,” she whispered, hardly believing it. “But not until after I talked with him.”

“We thought so, too,” Hale interrupted. “But it gets more complicated. When we went through security tape from the airport, we found confirmation of their departure to Las Vegas.”

He picked up a remote control and pressed a few buttons. The television above her head sprang to life and a fuzzy picture started up. The shots were cut together, erratically jumping from scene to scene, but they were clear enough for her to see her daughter, filthy and disheveled, being escorted through various points—the ticket
counter, security line, and gate—her husband, Don, at her side. The footage ended with them in the boarding process.

“I don’t understand,” Mona said sharply. “That is him, clear as day. This proves he did it.”

“Look at the date and time stamp in the corner, Mona,” Clayton said gently.

She looked at the digital numbers flashing in the corner, not comprehending until Clayton broke the silence once more.

“This footage is from almost a week ago. Well before you spoke with Don.”

Her mind lashed out, refusing to accept what the flashing numbers were telling her. “But that doesn’t mean anything. He took her there and he came back,” she asserted, refusing to believe what she was hearing.

“They checked that, Mona. While they can find the credit card charges for the trip out, there are no records of him coming back from Las Vegas, not on any flight.” Clayton pressed her hand, hard, as he spoke, as if willing her to think harder. She looked up at him.

“But—” her voice trailed off. “Maybe he went under a pseudonym?”

Hale shook his head. “We ran every manifest through the computer. Nothing checked out.”

She didn’t know what to think.

“Show her the rest,” Clayton commanded. Hale nodded once, and the agent sitting at the computer began to type furiously. A second television screen sprang to life with another fuzzy image. She watched frame after frame of her husband, standing behind the counter at the Taco Bell, working the drive-thru window, talking to guests.

With a sinking feeling, she looked at the time stamp of the film
and compared it to the one that was frozen in place on the airport footage. They were the same.

“That’s not possible,” she whispered.

They all watched as the restaurant security tapes jumped ahead one more day, then another, then another, accounting for her husband’s presence for every day that Hope had been missing—except, of course, for yesterday morning, when he’d shown up at her house, and today.

Hale pointed his remote control at the television bank and the screens went black. “The time-clock data from the restaurant confirms what we see in the security tapes. He punched in and out every day. Your husband never left Alabama. Not even to come up to Atlanta.”

She felt like she was floating above the scene now, not a part of it but far away, taking it all in so she could process it later when she was at a safe distance. Clayton’s insistent voice pulled her back in.

“Mona, are you listening?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, blinking back the tears that were threatening to come. “I was just thinking about what this all meant. You were saying?”

“There’s one more video. Are you up for watching it?”

Fear gnawed at her stomach. What more could there be that they hadn’t yet told her?

Ignoring the pit in her middle, she nodded. Clayton squeezed her hand again. She looked at him gratefully.

“This last one we’re streaming in from our offices in Las Vegas,” explained Hale. “You’ll have to bear with us.” The agent at the computer again typed furiously, bringing the video feed to the screen.

“This shows someone who looks like Hope walking through one of the casinos,” Hale narrated. She squinted hard. It was Hope, but her daughter was dressed in clothes Mona had never seen
before, and she looked way too grown up. She seemed uncomfortable, tugging at her skirt and wobbling on the high sandals she was wearing. Mona squinted again.

“Her neck. She isn’t covering her Mark,” she mumbled in shock, pointing at the screen. The poor resolution made it hard to see the markings themselves, but Hope’s neck was clearly uncovered, her hair upswept, and she didn’t seem to be attempting to shield the strange tattoo-like pattern from any stranger’s gaze.

Mona leaned in closer to the monitor. At Hope’s side was a man who looked like Don, but who was dressed to the nines and acting way too familiar with the environment, striding confidently between the tables. He didn’t have the humble shuffle that had somehow overtaken Don’s walk over the years. She watched the footage of them winding around the casino floor as Hale narrated what the FBI had learned.

“The Gaming Board has been very cooperative; they want to keep things clean now that they’ve gotten organized crime out of Vegas. Seems your daughter and her companion weren’t staying at this hotel—they were holed up at a much quieter location off the Strip—but they did spend quite a bit of time here gambling. And not just chump change. Our suspect was a real whale.”

He noticed her look of puzzlement and stopped to explain. “That’s industry speak for a big-time gambler. Our guy only went to the high-limit salons and dropped quite a bit of money. You say your husband has no real resources of his own, right?”

She nodded once, never taking her eyes off the ghostly image of her daughter floating on the screen.

“Well, your husband—or whoever this is—seems to have come into some money, then. Casino management tallied his losses for us.”

He handed a slip of paper to Mona. Her jaw dropped.

“There was even more at the place they were staying,” Hale said. “I take it you haven’t had any unusual charges to your credit cards or bank accounts?”

She shook her head mutely, unable to make sense of any of it.

Hale sighed, as if he had been holding out secret hope that Mona’s finances had been wiped out, providing them with at least one clue that might link her husband to the abduction. “I didn’t think you had.”

He nodded to the agent who shut down the computer.

Mona stared at the place on the screen where her daughter’s face had been.

“Ma’am,” Hale pressed her, “is there any chance your husband has a twin? Or a brother who looks a lot like him, who might have cooperated with your husband to take Hope?”

She felt a little bile sneaking up her throat at the thought and swallowed hard to keep it down. “No. He has no siblings. At least that I know of.”

“Is there any chance Hope would have gone willingly with someone?”

“No.” Mona bit off her response with cold fury. Ignoring the faint humming that had taken up residence in her brain, she swung her eyes from the screen to skewer the agent. “You’re wasting my time with your far-fetched scenarios. What are we waiting for? Let’s go get them.”

A quick look passed between Clayton and Hale. Clayton nodded.

Hale arched one eyebrow in response. “Are you sure?” he asked Clayton.

“Yes, I think it best to tell her everything,” Clayton answered.

“What?” Mona demanded.

Hale threw up his hands in frustration. “We can’t go after them,
ma’am. It seems they checked out of their hotel in a hurry yesterday morning. That is,
he
checked out. Alone. Casino management thinks something may have happened to Hope. A doctor was called to their suite a couple of nights ago, but he won’t talk. We’re going to have to bring him in for questioning. But the maids found a bunch of bandages and a used IV drip in their rooms while cleaning, and a snatch of videotape shows your daughter obviously trying to shield her face.”

The humming in Mona’s brain grew to a steady buzz. She dug her fingernails into her palms, hard, willing herself to focus.

“The hotel kept a record of their rental car, so we are trying to track it down as we speak. And we’ve ordered checkpoints at every route in and out of the city,” Hale concluded. “But for right now, we’ve hit a dead end.”

Mona looked at the circle of agents, wondered if they had any idea what was really going on.

“Is my husband here?” She’d been uncomfortable with the whole fact that Don had visited her, upset by the ambivalence she felt toward him more than anything else, so she hadn’t mentioned their encounter yesterday to the agents or to Clayton. She asked the question now, already knowing what they would answer.

“He turned himself in to us this morning. Quite a surprise, I must say. We thought we’d lost him in Alabama. He’s in the interrogation room two floors down.” The men looked at her expectantly.

“Take me to him. Now.”

They rode the elevator in silence. Mona stared at the little digital readout, watching for the instant the floors changed, her mind working furiously to find the logical answer. There had to be one. There just had to be.

She was first out when the doors slid open, surging ahead of Clayton and the agents with the instincts of a homing pigeon. She
came to a stop in front of a windowless room. Not waiting for permission, she reached out for the doorknob.

“Mona,” Clayton said, placing a cautionary hand on her elbow. “He’s pretty distraught.”

“What did you expect?” she asked, her voice dripping with disdain as she shrugged off his hand. “Let me go.”

She pushed her way through the door. Don sat behind a table, his head dropped over folded hands. Just the sight of him made her adrenaline surge.

“Give it up, Don,” she spat, crossing the room to lean over the table. “Spare me your pious act. What have you done with our daughter?”

Don lifted his head slowly and opened his eyes. His face was dark with stubble, his face deeply etched with worry. The shadows under his eyes were almost black. She gasped.