Gone Cold (11 page)

The Chairman stood from the table and stepped out of the room.

Kinny Gilchrist, who’d sat silently the entire time, shrugged his bony shoulders. “Guess that means meeting’s adjourned. My father’s mates will show you to your rooms.”

Chapter 20

I was too wired to sleep. So was Zoey, though for an entirely different reason, I suspect. Following our discussion with the Chairman, she had gone off to another part of the house with Kinny, who’d hinted at having an ample and varied supply of party favors.

“So,” she said as we sat alone in Gerry Gilchrist’s sizeable library, “we chatted a bit about our adult lives back in Dublin, but neither of us really touched on our childhoods.”

“We reminisced some,” I said, leafing through a hardcover copy of
Madame Bovary
. I was searching for a quote I was fairly certain wasn’t within the pages of any of Flaubert’s works. Despite a poor memory for such things, these words had remained emblazoned in my mind since the day I’d first read them:

“One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.”

“I’m not talking about the part of our childhoods we spent together, Simon. I’m talking about our childhoods after we’d separated.”

I sighed, my eyes pinned to a random page. “When it was just me and dear old Daddy?”

“And me and Mum.”

Her newly pensive tone unsettled me. I’d just gotten used to Zoey as she was, just hours ago completely erased from my mind the sister I’d expected her to be. Now she sounded like someone else entirely. Someone sober, figuratively if not literally. Someone earnest with serious questions that demanded serious answers. And my childhood, my years spent with Dr. Alden Fisk, weren’t something I readily spoke about with anyone.

I glanced at the door, suddenly wishing Ashdown would materialize in its frame. But he was upstairs, asleep by now, or at least close to it. He’d looked exhausted (and more than a little intoxicated) when he wished us good night a half hour earlier.

“Did Daddy ever remarry?” Zoey asked.

I shook my head as I gazed up at the spines of the hardcover classics lining the Chairman’s bookshelves. Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe never failed to remind me of college at American University, of lying in the grass on the edge of campus reading stories alongside Tasha. My favorite had been “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

“How about Mum?” I said

“She had someone for a time. During my primary education. He lived with us for a bit.” She paused. “Was very clingy, like.”

I looked at her and saw the little girl I’d played leapfrog with, the child who used the threat of brute force to persuade me into games of hopscotch and jump rope and tea party and dress-up when none of her darling girlfriends were around to entertain her.

“Not in that way,” she said. “He was affectionate, he was. Not sexually though, not with me. More …
fatherly
, I suppose. More fatherly than Father ever was at least.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t entirely recall. I know he’d done time. I remember us visiting him in the nick. Shortly after you left.”

My brow furrowed. “In prison?”

Since our chat at the Radisson last night I hadn’t thought anything my sister said from then on could surprise me.

“He was a violent man,” she said. “Although, as I recall, I was only occasionally on the receiving end.”

“He beat Mum?”

She winced. “Hit her, sure.”

“Often?”

“Often enough for her to take me and run.”

“Run? Where did you run to?”

She shrugged. “Not far, actually. We remained in London. Mum could never have left London, not in a million years. I guess ‘hid’ is a more accurate term. We didn’t run. We hid. Hid from him.”

“How so?”

“Well, we did move for one.” She rolled her eyes. “To Leyton of all places. And Mum changed our names.”

“
She
did.”

I thought about our exchange outside the Old Soak, when Zoey made a dig about how it wouldn’t be much of a challenge for her to act as though she didn’t know me.

I said, “You know, I tried to find you once.” The words I spoke sounded far more defensive than I’d intended.

“Did you?”

I nodded but said nothing.

“I suppose changing our names didn’t help in that respect,” she said. “When was this?”

Two years ago,
I thought.
Only two years ago
.
And only after a woman I fell in love with, the Warsaw lawyer Anastazja Staszak, convinced me it was “terrible” that I hadn’t searched for my mother and sister before.

I was ashamed to tell Zoey I’d waited all those years, couldn’t bring myself to form the words. So I changed the subject. Or, more accurately, returned to the previous topic, which continued to sting.

“This man Mum dated, he was in prison
before
he moved in?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the plush carpet as though in deep thought. I was trying to piece together the timeline, but I needed more, and I could tell she wanted to move on from that particular subject. So I didn’t probe. Instead I viewed her silence as an opportunity to escape the conversation altogether. Cowardly, sure, and I would deeply regret it later. But at the time I seized it like a junkie seizes the chance to get his hands on a fix.

“Speaking of prison,” I said, setting the book down and rising from my chair with a theatrical stretch, “I have an early day tomorrow.”

It was the truth. Kinny Gilchrist had been as good as his word, as Dickens might have said. Immediately after our meeting with his father adjourned, he’d identified the man in the photo with Hailey. Well, sort of.

“I don’t ken
him
exactly,” he said. “I ken his cousin, though.”

“His cousin, then? Who’s his cousin?”

“Cousin’s Rob Roy Moffett, innit?”

“Where can I find him?”

“Naw far. Between here and Edinburgh.”

“Can you take me to him?”

He lifted a bony shoulder nearly to his ear. “Naw tonight, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are naw visiting hours after dark.”

“He’s in hospital?” Ashdown had asked.

The kid shook his head. “HMP Shotts.”

With that the kid had motioned to Zoey, who nodded and followed him upstairs.

I looked a question at Ashdown, who frowned.

“Shotts is a maximum-security prison,” he said.

Chapter 21

TWELVE YEARS AGO

Can’t sleep. Neither can Tasha. Now that we’re lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, it seems foolish to have thought we might drift off.

In the darkness Tasha says softly, “This is the first night Hailey and I are apart. The first night since she was born.”

What do I say to that?

Seconds pass. I know the longer I remain silent, the longer she’ll dwell on that fact and the longer she dwells on it, the more pain she’ll feel.

Hell, maybe that’s what I want.

“We are going to find her,” I try.

I don’t know why I use the word
we
.
We
are not going to find her, not Tasha and I. We’re not even allowed to leave the house. At least that’s how we’ve been made to feel. If anyone’s going to find Hailey it’s Rendell and West or one of their people.

But Rendell and West went home for the day.

They’re sleeping, Special Agents Rendell and West.

I glance at the digital clock on my nightstand. It’s five
A.M.
Rendell and West have been sleeping for hours already. Maybe West had some difficulty. Maybe she rolled out of bed to check on her children once or twice. Maybe woke her husband to do it. Maybe she even invited her youngest into their bed as Tasha is wont to do when either of them is feeling frightened or sad or lonely. Maybe she eventually surrendered and swallowed a pill.

Maybe.

But she’s asleep by now, West is. In her bed. Head sunken into her soft pillow. Maybe dreaming. Maybe warding off nightmares. Nightmares of stolen children like Hailey. Nightmares of the ones she’s found; in her subconscious gone missing again. Nightmares of the ones she never found; in her subconscious found tortured or dead.

“Rendell will find her,” I say in order to silence my thoughts. “Rendell and West, they’ll find Hailey. I know they will.”

Quietly, Tasha scoffs. “They don’t even
know
Hailey.”

I force my eyes shut. “They know their
job
.”

“That’s not enough. They’re looking…”

I open my eyes. “They’re looking … what?”

“They’re looking in all the wrong places, Simon.”

I glance at her in the darkness, probably the first time I turn my head in her direction in hours. I can’t look at her in the light. I hate to admit it, even to myself, but it’s the truth. I can’t stomach to look at her. I can’t stomach to look at my own wife.

“What do you mean, ‘they’re looking in all the wrong places?’”

Not only am I ashamed but I’m afraid. I don’t want to hurt her. But for the first time in my life, I’m not sure I’ll be able to control the words that come out of my mouth. I’ll say something. Something subtle at first. And she’ll catch it because Tasha’s many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. And if she doesn’t catch it, I’ll keep at it, I know I will. In time I’ll openly blame her for Hailey’s disappearance. Because any way you look at it, it’s her fault, isn’t it? It’s Tasha’s fault Hailey is missing. Tasha’s fault my daughter’s not sleeping under my roof tonight. Tasha’s fault Hailey was …

Hailey was what?

Taken?

“All this bullshit,” she says softly, “about the abductor being someone we know, someone who lives in the area, it’s just statistics, right? And for the feds that’s just a safe zone. What else are they going to say? I mean, the abductor being someone we know, that’s the only way we’ll possibly get her back, isn’t it? If it’s someone we don’t know…” Her voice cracks mid-sentence. “If it’s a complete stranger…”

She doesn’t finish the thought. Doesn’t need to. Stranger abductions are a completely different animal. We both understand that.

She’s right,
I think.
It’s no one we know.
Because I’ve thought of everyone we know and ruled out each of them, one by one.

“They never reached your father,” Tasha says, seemingly out of the blue.

It takes me a moment to catch her meaning. “They talked to a nurse at his practice,” I say. “He’s away on vacation.”

“Which is oddly coincidental, don’t you think?”

I turn toward her a second time, maintain the calm in my voice. “No. No, I don’t think. It’s May, for Christ’s sake. He always goes away in May. He hates crowds, he hates heat.”

He hates everything,
I think but don’t say.
Everything and everyone.

Tasha digs in. “And the fact that his nurse says he went to Virginia Beach?”

“He owns a timeshare,” I tell her. “He goes every year.”

Is she serious, I wonder, or is she grasping for straws?

Or is she trying to get under my skin?

“Besides,” I add, “Virginia Beach is over four hours from here.”

She hesitates. “They weren’t able to reach him at the timeshare either.”

“Not yet,” I say as casually as possible. “Which means nothing. He works hard all year, he takes a week off, remains in complete isolation.”

“He’s a doctor.”

“So?”

“He can’t be reached in case of an emergency?”

“He’s not that kind of doctor, Tash. He’s not a cardiologist or a neurosurgeon. He has a general practice and he has another doctor covering for him. A doctor he’s known for more than eleven years.”

She’s quiet for a moment, then: “I don’t believe in coincidences, Simon.”

She
is
serious.

“Well then, you should pay more attention.” My voice rises despite my efforts to control its volume. “Because the world’s fucking full of coincidences.”

There it is,
I think. I said it. Subtly. Out of context.
You should pay more attention.
I knew it would happen.

From the resulting silence, I know she’s caught it.

In the immediate aftermath, I ponder why the hell I’m lying here defending my father anyway. Why?

Because Alden Fisk’s a complete waste of Rendell’s time.

A complete waste of Hailey’s time.

A complete waste of mine.

“My father is a piece of shit,” I say, “but he’s not a kidnapper.”

Silence, and I think that’s the end of it. I close my eyes. Listen to the twittering of the first birds of morning. Their chirps are soon drowned out by the huff and puff of a sanitation truck laboring up the street.

Once the truck’s chugging is reduced to a faint grumble, Tasha mutters something under her breath. Three words, each as sharp as knives—and true.

“He kidnapped you,” she says.

Chapter 22

Ordinarily, visiting an inmate in a maximum-security prison wouldn’t have proven much of a hassle, at least not for me. As a U.S. Marshal, I’d spent plenty of time escorting violent prisoners to and from federal courthouses for their hearings or proffer sessions, their depositions or trials. But here in Scotland, I had a bit of a problem. Well, two problems actually.

For one, I was wanted by the Scottish Police for questioning in the deaths of Ewan Maxwell
and
Sean Turnbull, the late friend of Kinny Gilchrist whose body had been found splattered along the sidewalk near the alley on Mollinsburn Street.

Secondly, there was the issue of Tavis Maxwell, the so-called Last King of Scotland, who’d apparently put a contract out on my head worth one million British Pounds Sterling, which worked out to roughly $1.6 million U.S.

But I wasn’t about to let any of that stop me from talking to Rob Roy Moffett at HMP Shotts this morning. Because finding Hailey continued to be a race against the clock. Last time Ashdown had spoken to D.I. Colleen MacAuliffe in Dublin, she’d told him that the Guards had positively identified the victim at the Stalemate as Elijah Welker and that visits to his home and office in London were imminent.