Desperate (28 page)

B
rad was on the phone to his contact at the Brookline building department. Through his plumbing business, Brad knew the town building people in almost every area he serviced, and all of them considered him a friend. He wanted to get detailed building plans of the Longview Storage Company. From there we’d be able to figure out a possible plan of attack.

I wasn’t going to change my mind about calling the police. Roy was a desperate man who felt trapped and cornered, and if he felt threatened there was a good chance Anna would die.

My mission might not have changed, but the facts surrounding it were startlingly different. Nicky Stacks didn’t own Nicky’s restaurant, and Lily apparently wasn’t pregnant. I had to assume she had never even been pregnant. If so, that changed everything. It meant she wanted something from us, and I thought I knew what that was.

Before I could confirm my suspicion, I had to check something else out first.

Brad finished his call. “My buddy at town hall is going to take pictures of the architectural plans and text them to me. I should have them in a little bit.”

I nodded as I sucked down a breath fraught with anxiety. My heart was doing cartwheels in my chest, and it wasn’t from my most recent Adderall fix.

“If she was never pregnant, that means she targeted us,” I said.

“Why you? How would she know you?”

“The ParentHorizon website,” I said. “Our profile was on the site with a lot of personal information about us. What if she checked out our profile before she even told us she was pregnant? What if we didn’t just stumble on her? What if she had cross-referenced our names to our address? She could have been following us, for days, for weeks, who knows, waiting for the opportunity to strike.”

“So she was stalking people who wanted to adopt a baby?” Brad asked.

“Not people who wanted a baby,” I said. “She was stalking us.”

“But why you guys?” Brad asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What about her belly? You said she was showing.”

“Not much,” I said. “Not at first, anyway. And when she did start, it was a little swell. She could have just been gaining weight intentionally.”

“And the ultrasound? Didn’t you tell me that you saw an ultrasound of the baby?”

My eyes grew wide. I sprinted out of the dining room and returned moments later with the ultrasound image Anna kept in a desk drawer in her office. She’d looked at it, occasionally sneaking glances at the picture of an unborn baby, fantasizing about our future, imagining how it would feel to once again call a baby her own, desperate to become what she treasured above all else—a mother.

“Anna brought Lily to her OB/GYN appointment, but Lily told her to wait in the parking lot. Lily said she was nervous and feeling superstitious and preferred to be alone, which made sense to me at the time, but now I’m thinking she had an ulterior motive.”

“Such as?”

“Such as not meeting with Dr. Andrew Hill and not getting an ultrasound from there.”

“If that’s true, where did the ultrasound come from?” Brad asked.

I pulled the sonogram out of its official-looking manila envelope and studied the grayscale image closely. The lima bean shape of the eleven-week-old fetus encased within the blackness of a uterus was easy to see. The fetus appeared to be reclining, with its head, arms, and legs all clearly defined. I didn’t notice anything unusual about the image, no special markings or dates—it was just a picture—which on further consideration I realized was a bit strange. I hadn’t had a lot of X-rays, but Max broke his thumb once and I remembered the image was stamped with a date and time and other details, a code that probably made sense to the medical records folks.

The image seemed small, portrait-sized. I wondered if those special markings had been removed by careful image cropping. I turned the image over in my hand and studied the back.

The paper was made from heavy but pliable material, like photo paper used by a printer. I turned it around in my hands, tracing the edges for anything unusual. Using the nail of my thumb, I flicked at the corners until, after a bit of scratching and prying, one edge lifted up. I tugged at the lifted corner until the sticky white paper came free, like an oversized sticker mounted to the back of the ultrasound image. The sticky sheet rolled into a tubular shape in my hand. Someone had wanted to hide something on the back of this image.

I turned the sonogram over and saw words in gold type and set at an angle in a repeating pattern, much like a watermark. My thoughts whirled as I scanned the words Tiny Body Imaging printed at least a dozen times on the back of the sonogram.

“Lily never had an ultrasound done,” I said to Brad, handing him the image to examine for himself. “She hid it from me and from Anna.”

“What’s Tiny Body Imaging?” Brad asked.

I did a quick Google search on my laptop. “It’s a retail outfit offering recreational medical imaging,” I said. “They’re in malls all over the country.”

Brad kept his gaze locked on the image of somebody’s baby, someone we didn’t know. “Why would Lily go through all this trouble? What was she doing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to find some answers.” I closed my eyes to gather my composure, and a vision came to me.

I could see the drunk driver in an old, rust-colored Toyota weaving his way down an empty two-lane stretch of road, headed on a collision course—not with Max and Karen this time, but with Anna. Anna stood in the middle of the road, frozen in place like a statue as the car accelerated toward her.

“I’m not going to let it happen again,” I said to Brad. “This time it’s going to be different. I won’t let anything happen to her.”

Again, I checked the time on my watch.

We had less than three hours remaining on Roy’s deadline.

I
was packing what I needed from my condo: a couple suitcases of clothes, our passports, my laptop computer, pictures of Max and Karen, the picture of Kevin and Anna (the one with Edward’s image Photoshopped out), and the little silver locket that hung on my bathroom medicine cabinet. I had no intention of returning to this house, and even with my outstanding achievement award at work, I had no plans of going back to Lithio Systems either. I had as much business working there as Matt Simons.

Anna would have to let her business go. Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d refuse to come with me. It would be her choice, but my plan (hard to even call it that) was to rescue my wife and disappear—go to New York, and from there, catch a flight to a place where Roy wouldn’t have any power over me. Where the murder of a drug dealer couldn’t get me extradited to America.

While I packed, Brad kept glancing at his phone, anxiously waiting for the text messages from his contact at the Brookline Building Department. We needed to study the building plans for Longview Storage to know exactly what sort of distraction to create. I kept trying to focus on the packing and not the time, but it was hard. Every tick of the clock, every new minute, brought me closer to a deadline I wasn’t going to meet.

“Something keeps bothering me,” I said to Brad, zipping my suitcase shut.

“Just one thing?”

I gave him a sideways glance. “On the phone Roy said his middleman was going to come after him because the buyer felt cheated out of a million dollars.”

“Makes sense to me,” Brad said. “You gave Roy sanitized product plans.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Whoever it was, the buyer knew enough about making batteries to know they bought nothing useful.”

“And your point?”

“I’d really like to know who bought those plans.”

Brad was about to respond when the phone buzzed in his hand.

“This is it,” he said. “I got the building layout.” Brad became quiet as he studied the architectural drawings.

I continued to wrestle with my doubts. Should I risk bringing help in the form of the police, or should Brad and I go at it alone? Would he hurt Anna? Gut her, as he so chillingly threatened? What would happen if the choice I made cost Anna her life? I didn’t think I could go on. How could I live with myself if I was once again responsible for the death of someone I loved? My thoughts were a mixed-up mess, a blend of my two lives, the one I lived with Karen and Max and my current life with Anna.

I should never have gone to the Sox game. I should have been the one driving Max to his soccer match. I shouldn’t have kept secrets from Anna. I should have told her everything as it was happening. She would have believed me. I should have trusted her.

I had failed Anna. Now she was Roy’s hostage, and I was terrified of failing her again
.

What should I do?

“I think I can create a diversion,” Brad said. “Something that would draw Roy out.”

“How?”

“I’ll blow up a boiler,” Brad said. “Well, not a huge explosion, but enough to get his attention. We’ll need to go to Bedford first so I can get my van and tools.”

“We can do that,” I said. “What about your gun? Can we get that, too?”

Brad took some time to mull this over. His fingers spread out across the hairs on his mustache—his thinking habit. Eventually he said, “Yeah, we can and should do that.”

For the next several minutes, Brad showed me the plans on his phone and explained his thinking in more detail. We used Google Earth to get a bird’s-eye view of the building.

Longview Storage was actually composed of two buildings, a smaller one constructed of yellow bricks that abutted Station Street, and a larger red brick structure directly behind it. A narrow north–south alley ran between the post office on the corner of Washington and Station Street, and the storage warehouse, and connected with a much larger throughway, something between an alley and a road, probably used as a loading zone, running east–west behind the larger of the two buildings.

Brad switched our focus to the building plans sent to his phone. He zoomed in on the north–south alley, more specifically on a row of basement windows through which he felt we could secretly enter the building.

“If I park my van in front of the alley,” Brad said, “it’ll block the view of any pedestrians on Station Street who might see us entering the storage warehouse through those windows. I’ll keep my hazards on so it’ll look like I’ll be right back. Worst thing that can happen is I get a ticket for illegal parking.”

“Where do we create the distraction?”

Brad zoomed in on a section of the basement where the building plans showed the existence of a boiler.

“The boiler room is in the basement near the front of the building,” Brad said. He wasn’t acting agitated or anxious but kept his explanations calm and clear. That energy inspired me. Maybe he acted this way intentionally, sensing my aura needed some serious calming.

“Anna is being held either in one of the storage units above the basement in the smaller building,” Brad said, “or in the units in the much larger secondary structure. Either way, a slight change in pressure will trigger a small blast, powerful enough to get the attention of anybody inside.”

“What about the police? I don’t want them coming while we’re escaping.”

“We’ll want to disconnect the link to the fire department in case the sprinklers go off or the smoke alarms sound, which I should be able to do. I’ll just have to find the box controlling the sprinkler system. Bottom line is we should have enough time to draw Roy out from his hiding place, take him by surprise, and then get him to lead us to Anna. Once we have Anna, we’ll need to secure Roy and Lily inside one of the storage rooms and then vanish out the back. You’ll need to park your car on Washington Street. Then I’ll go get my van.”

If all went according to plan, Anna and I would soon be on our way to New York, outrunning Roy and a potential murder charge.

Brad took hold of my hands, and I pulled them away.

“Relax, Gage,” he said. “I’m not going to connect you, I’m trying to tell you something.”

I nodded, feeling slightly foolish. Brad reached for my hands again, and this time I let him take hold.

“We’re going to have to be strong for Anna,” he said, locking eyes with me. “We’re going to have to be calm and level-headed, like we’re doing a job. Can you handle it, Gage? This is your wife we’re talking about. Can you be detached enough to focus and execute? This is a one-shot deal here, and we can’t fail.”

“I think so,” I said.

Brad continued to hold my hands for several seconds, getting his answer not from my mouth but from someplace deeper inside me—a place he could touch and I couldn’t.

“Okay,” Brad said. “Then we should go.”

Before long, Brad and I were driving west on Route 2, headed for Bedford, not Brookline. I was quiet for the first part of the drive, trying to answer a troublesome question. After a mile or so of drawing blanks, I decided to get Brad’s opinion on the matter.

“Why did he bring Anna there?” I asked him. “Why is Roy holding Anna in that storage warehouse?”

Brad squinted. “It’s safe,” he speculated. “A quiet place, not a lot of foot traffic. He doesn’t have an apartment, right?”

“No, he got kicked out, or at least that’s what Lily said. But why would he go there?”

“Maybe he rented a storage space there?”

“In Brookline? That’s pretty far away.”

“Could he know the owner?” Brad wondered. “Maybe he once had a job there. Maybe he has the keys.”

I nodded because it made some sense.

“Can we check who owns the building?”

“The owner’s name is included with the plans. I’ll look him up.”

“What’s the guy’s name?” I asked.

“Jack Hutchinson,” Brad said.

Using his phone, Brad Googled the name Jack Hutchinson and the keywords Longview Storage Company. It took a bit of digging and searching, because for a few minutes Brad worked his phone and kept his thoughts to himself.

“Got something on this website CorporationWiki.com,” he finally announced.

I looked at him expectantly.

“There’s not too much information specifically on Hutchinson,” Brad continued, “just some details about when he took ownership of the business and a link to his website, a business address and such, but there is a small portrait picture of him.”

“Show me.”

Brad held the phone at my eye level. I risked a quick glance. I had to jerk the wheel hard left to pull the car out of the breakdown lane.

“Whoa!” Brad said, his fingers gripping the dash to keep from body slamming into me. “You okay, buddy?”

My breath came in short spurts, my thoughts a whirlpool.

“Gage, you’re pale. What’s going on?”

“The picture,” I said, breathing hard. “I know that guy.”

“You know Jack Hutchinson?”

The man in the picture didn’t look angry or menacing like the man I knew. He was smiling and wearing a nice suit. Clearly, this was his professional portrait. “I don’t know him by the name Jack Hutchinson,” I said, my voice ringing distant in my ears. “I know him as Nicky Stacks.”