Outburst (33 page)

But of course she did.

As Rawlins and he
stood just outside Dayton's department store, Todd dialed the hotel on his cellular phone.

A man's voice answered, saying, “Hotel Redmont, how may I direct your call?”

“Yes, I'd like to speak to Mr. Russ … Mr. Russ …” began Todd. “Oh, good grief. I can't believe I've forgotten his last name. He's in Room 469.”

“Let me see,” said the operator, as his fingers apparently flew across a keyboard. “Yes, that would be Mr. Russ Fugle.”

“Exactly.”

“One moment please.”

Todd, however, hung up immediately, slipped his phone back into his shirt pocket, and to Rawlins said, “Russ Fugle—that's our guy.”

“Let's go.”

Darting around a couple of taxis, they half jogged across Seventh Street. As they neared the main entrance of the Hotel Redmont, a towering hotel not yet five years old, a doorman greeted them and pulled open the glass door.

“Thank you,” said Todd.

As if they were guests, Rawlins and he immediately veered to the left, passing through the beige marble lobby and going straight to the bank of three elevators. Stepping into the brass-trimmed lift, they rose to the fourth floor. As they did so, Rawlins reached beneath his sport coat, pulled out his gun, checked it, then slipped the weapon back into his holster.

“Remember, let me do the talking,” said Rawlins.

“Sure, whatever you say, butch.”

Stopping at the fourth floor, the lift opened onto a long hallway void of guests and service people. Brass light fixtures lined either side of the corridor, and Todd and Rawlins wasted no time going down it and turning to the right. Room 469 was third from the end, and they approached it in complete silence.

Zeroing in, Todd watched as Rawlins went right up to the door and placed his ear against it. He stood for a long while, then, apparently unable to hear anything, pulled back and knocked. But there was no response. If he was in there, Russ Fugle didn't call back, didn't even flinch.

Noticing a band of light at the bottom of the door, Todd dropped to his knees and bent down. Spying into the room, he could tell that the curtains were open and that sunlight was flooding into the room. He saw teal carpeting, what looked like a waste-basket, perhaps a dresser, the corner of a bed. But no one quietly moving about in the room.

Rawlins knocked again and said, “Room service.” He pounded harder. “Room service for Mr. Russ Fugle.”

With one side of his face pressed against the carpet, Todd continued to stare beneath the door. He half expected to see the guy standing there as still as a statue. Instead, he saw nothing. Nor were there any sounds of any kind, no running shower, no blaring TV.

“Come on,” said Rawlins, reaching down and nudging Todd on the shoulder. “He's not here.”

Rising to his feet, Todd said, “We need to find out when he checked in and how long he plans on staying.”

“Yeah, it's time to have a little talk with the hotel manager.”

It was a pothole
that woke Janice.

Minnesota was famous for them. Winter and road repairs, those were the two seasons, or so they said, so went the perpetual joke. And so many road cavities had bloomed this past spring that the crews would be working until the first frost trying to patch them with rich, hot asphalt.

As it was, the vehicle hit a craterlike hollow, Janice was thrown slightly into the air. And her eyes opened. Opened but saw nothing, only black.

Oh, my God!

She went to scream, but something was there, tied across her mouth. She cried out anyway, her muffled pleas going nowhere, echoing only in her terrified head. Lying on her stomach, she struggled to move her hands, her arms, but realized she couldn't, for they were strapped behind her back. Nor could she move her legs, for they were bound at the ankles. Lying there on some kind of short carpeting, a tidal wave of panic swept through her, and she tried to roll over, to flop about, to twist, turn.
Jesus Christ, help! Someone!
Her heart flooded with adrenaline, and she kicked and bucked, screamed and cried out. All to no avail. Her stomach started to whirl and heave, but no.
No!
The very thought of it made her crazy, for if she vomited, that would be it, she would drown in a pool of her own fear.

Just relax, she told herself, trying to calm her gut and trying to slow her heart, which was in fact shooting along, desperately hunting for some hoped-for peaceful destination. You're alive. Yes, you are. You've been taken. Someone has kidnapped you—dear God in heaven, Kris?—and you're in some kind of car.

No, not a car.

It was a vehicle of some sort. They were moving. She could hear the road, the rolling of wheels. The rumble of a paved road gone sour. But this was much too large a space. Right. She rolled onto one side, then back on the other. She wasn't in a car. Or was she? Oh, shit. A trunk. Had she been knocked over the head, tied up, and tossed in the trunk of her Accord? Now her heart churned like a water balloon, welling and nearing explosion. Locked in a trunk and no way to holler out? No way to crawl out? She'd rather drown, her arms scrambling, legs kicking. She'd rather go down in a plane crash, smashed in the mayhem. Just not closed in. Just not boxed in. Anything but her nightmare of nightmares: buried alive.

She began to cry. The tears, though, had nowhere to roll, no way to wick themselves away. Her eyes were covered with plastic. No, tape. Sealed. And she felt the salty water puddling against her, damned in and building. That was when she turned her head. That was when she saw it. The light. Nothing direct. Just brightness. And not a little pinprick of it either. But a full swath of powerful, beautiful sunlight burning through the translucent tape.

Okay. Relax. You're not locked in a trunk. You're not boxed in some little, cramped space. This is no coffin on wheels. You're not even in your Honda. This can't be it. Your car's not nearly this big.

It was some other kind of vehicle. Again she felt the short nubs of a carpet against her cheek. So this wasn't a truck. No, the sounds from outside were muffled, which meant she was in some kind of enclosed space. The back of some sort of car? Yes. A station wagon of sorts. Moving her bound legs as one, she swung them from side to side. Then hit something metal. Probing it dumbly and blindly with her feet, she realized it was the base of a seat. That meant she wasn't in a station wagon. That could mean only one thing: This was a van. She was in the back, thrown on the floor.

While it didn't make any sense, just getting some semblance of the present reality soothed her, stilled her tears, slowed her heart, calmed her stomach. And in her typical, orderly way, she made a mental list of what she knew. She was in the back of a van. On the floor of said vehicle.

Wait a minute. Hadn't there been a dark-blue van next to her car when she'd come out of the coffee shop? Yes. But what about Kris? Where the hell was she? Behind the wheel and now driving or …

Okay, one stolen van. And her eyes were covered with some kind of plastic tape. Plastic packaging tape that allowed some light in. A rag or T-shirt was tied across her mouth. Her hands were strapped behind her back, most likely with tape too. And her feet as well. And the vehicle was moving, for Janice could hear the roar of the engine, sense the pocked complexion of the Minnesota road. Exactly. And even as she thought that, she felt the van slow, sway to one side. Then churn and groan as it accelerated. The speed seemed to increase. And increase. The vehicle seemed to be rising. The pavement smoothing into a steady hum.

A highway, realized Janice. They'd just sped up a ramp and had entered one of the freeways. But which? Had they merely gone south on Lyndale and proceeded onto 35W South, or had they turned another way and were headed west on 62? Or was it 94? Could they be on their way to St. Paul? Or had Janice been unconscious for hours and were they somewhere in Wisconsin or Iowa?

With no other cues—no roar of a jet from the airport, no toll of a bell from the Basilica, no sounds of bikers in the park—there was no way of telling. And, no, she thought as she twisted her wrists ever so slightly, there would be no breaking loose anyway.

If she was going to free herself, it wasn't going to be by force. No, the only way she was going to get out of this was the way she got out of everything: talk. Big talk. Big stupid, lawyerly talk. But to do that she was not only going to have to get the gag out of her mouth, she was going to have to understand what was happening. Which meant she was right back at square one: What the hell was going on? Just please, she prayed, don't let it be Kris who has done this. It can't be. Kris isn't that stupid, that desperate.

Suddenly—yes, from up front, from the dashboard—there was a click of a radio. The next moment music began to play. Rock. Yes, Alanis Morissette.

And then a hoarse, wispy voice said, “You comfortable back there?”

Stunned, Janice didn't move. Didn't even try to curse or scream out.

“Well, don't worry. We'll be there pretty soon.”

Janice couldn't tell if the voice, so nondescript, so noncommittal, was that of a man or a woman. Christopher or Kris. Or neither?

She lay completely still. She had to think. Had to figure this out before they arrived wherever they were going, because God only knew how long she'd have then.

They rounded a long, arching corner, and Janice heard a nearby thud as something shifted. What was it, a suitcase? A box? Desperate to find out, she started to roll, twisting across the back of the van. It took all of two turns before she collided not with a thing but with the soft folds of another body. Dear God, someone else was back here, and Janice flinched, blurted something through the gag. There was, however, no response. Janice nudged the person with her knees, then with her shoulders, yet she got nothing back, not a muffled plea, nor even a terrified sob. She rolled herself closer, poked at her secret sharer one more time. And again nothing, only a lifeless corpse. Finally, she moved as close as she could and blindly nudged at the other with her nose, sensing first a thin arm, next a smallish breast, then lastly a mass of short hair.

Oh, my God, silently screamed Janice, her heart beating maniacally, wasn't this in fact Kris … and wasn't she dead?

The release of Christopher
Louis Kenney shocked everyone, and the news spread not only up and down the nineteenth floor but through Government Center as fast as e-mail could carry it. No one really understood why Judge Stuart Hawkins had refused to sign the complaint against Kenney.

No one except Douglas Simms.

Disgusted, he'd left his office as soon as he'd heard, and now Simms sat in the basement level cafeteria of Government Center sipping his second large Coke. So what was he supposed to do? How in the hell was he supposed to handle this? He knew perfectly well what had taken place, both back at that fundraiser weeks ago and again today.

Well, fuck Hawkins, thought Simms, slamming down the last bit of Coke. He sucked on the ice cubes, spit them back into the tall paper cup. Then pushing back his chair, he rose to his feet, a rush swirling through his body and a grin crossing his face. There was no way in hell he was going back to work today. Nope. And there was no way he was going back tomorrow or the day after. Letting Christopher Kenney go free today was a mistake that couldn't be made.

Wearing a cheap blue suit, he rode the escalator up one floor, then left the building. The summer air was thick, turgid even, and the temperature was climbing high, the humidity pumping up, covering Minnesota as if with a tropical blanket. Simms glanced into the sky, saw enormous clouds billowing up into the heavens.

There was a wind, sultry yet strong, and Simms knew the heat would soon break. It always did.

His heart pounding—had it really come to this?—Simms jogged across Fifth Avenue and ducked into the parking ramp. He climbed the stairs three levels and, huffing and sweating, made his way up the sloping concrete floor toward his car, a small white sedan. Taking out his keys, he unlocked the door, took off his suit coat, and tossed it in the backseat, then climbed in. A dense, suffocating cloud of heat embraced him. He gasped.

Was he really going to do this, really going to quit? Damn right. He'd wanted nothing more than to be Hawkins's campaign manager, and he'd have been perfect. But there was no way in hell he wanted anything more to do with Judge Stuart Hawkins. Not now. Not after today.

Douglas Simms revved up his car. He'd been ready to blackmail Hawkins, per se—make me your campaign manager or I might be inclined to blab about your young girlfriend—but not anymore. Allowing a murder suspect to simply walk out of here was too gross an injunction.

Nope, there was no way in hell he was going down any kind of political path with Stuart Hawkins.

As they waited for
the hotel elevator on the fourth floor, Todd said, “I'm not sure Janice is going to speak to me ever again. Or you, for that matter.”

“She was that pissed?” asked Rawlins.

“Furious. Bradley and I were standing right outside City Hall when they came out.”