Stone Cold (15 page)

That her captor, or captors, had chosen to conceal her within probably sight of working people was a dash of brazen confidence that unnerved Sheila. A basement, a cellar or some remote farm would have surely been a wiser choice, but instead she was hidden almost in plain sight, the last place anybody would think to look for her.

She had learned to sense when vehicles were driving past, to differentiate them from each other. Some were, she believed, fork–lift trucks, others ordinary cars. That the vibrations from their passing seemed to reverberate not just through her chair but also through the air suggested to her that she was in a confined space. The fact that she had on occasion detected the whiff of diesel fumes when the fork lift passed by hinted that she was on some kind of storage sight.

Anonymous. One of dozens in the city or in any town.

If it was one of the cheaper ones there probably would be limited surveillance, easily disabled or perhaps even avoided. Sheila was used to moving in higher places than the world of storage units, but she knew enough – she had not been born wealthy, instead working her way up the ladder in the art world from an employee of a gallery to a trader to a dealer to a gallery–owner herself. Despite her wealth, Sheila McKenzie had never forgotten her roots.

The silence of her world was shattered by a much stronger vibration that sent zig–zags of electrical signals dancing across the blackness behind her eyes. Shutter doors, she recognised, a rattling motion and a deep thump. Something about the motion was too steady to be human: electrical motors. The motion was reversed, the doors shutting again, and Sheila once more felt the presence of another human being in the unit with her.

The gag between her lips was loosened and the plugs in her ears removed once more. The gag tore at the soft skin on her lips, dried saliva as stiff as glue pulling on them. She winced, and then felt the tip of a bottle pressed to them as water splashed down her neck. Sheila drank gratefully, swallowing deeply and letting the chilled water flow across her tongue like the finest wine she had ever tasted.

‘
Be quiet
,’ the throaty, digitised voice commanded as she drank, ‘
or I will leave immediately
.’

Sheila emptied the bottle, gasped for air as it was removed and another took its place. She drank more slowly this time and smelled the aroma of food nearby, but she dared not speak without being commanded. To her disbelief, she wanted the bastard who had done this to her in the room with her, rather than be alone for countless darkened hours.

Sheila drained the second bottle, and then was fed as her captor cleaned her once more and removed a sheet that had lain across the seat beneath her legs. Like a child who still wet the bed in the night, Sheila was relieved to be clean again and yet humiliated beyond compare.

On impulse, she spoke as her captor finished.

‘Thank you.’

‘Shut up,’
came the reply.
‘You won’t thank me if you’re dead.’

Sheila obeyed, falling silent despite the thousands of voices crying out to be heard in her head. Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? What do you want? She held her tongue, and was awash with relief when she heard the sound of the chair being dragged across to her.

Her unseen captor sat down. For a moment, Sheila could hear their breathing, rough and heavy through the digitiser.

‘You are a very successful woman,’
the voice said.

Sheila tried not to let her fear and grief overwhelm her, but as she thought of the long years of labour she had endured to build up her business, of the sacrifices and the things that she had had to do to ensure her success, she felt tears flood her eyes and her lips quivered as she replied.

‘I’ve worked hard.’

‘Haven’t we all,’
the voice replied.
‘You’re not special.’

‘I’ve never claimed to be.’

‘How much money do you have?’

‘How much do you want?’

‘Answer the question!’

‘I have my house,’ Sheila blurted. ‘The business is failing and doesn’t hold any capital. You’ve abducted the wrong person because I don’t have much money!’

‘How much?’

Sheila sobbed as she tried to calculate how much she could raise. ‘Maybe three quarters of a million, no more.’

‘And your husband?’

‘What about him?’

‘How much does he have?’

‘Nothing, he’s an airline pilot but he doesn’t have much capital either.’

‘How much would he stand to gain if you were to die?’

Sheila felt as though her heart had stopped beating. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps as she thought of her life insurance policy.

‘Four million,’ she whispered. ‘Is that what this is about?’

‘Shut up and answer my questions,’
the voice snapped.
‘How would the money be paid to him? A monthly allowance or a lump sum?’

‘Both,’ Sheila replied, struggling to gain control of her wildly flying emotions and start thinking straight, ‘a lump sum of one million and then an annual payment for the life of the policy.’

A long silence followed, only the sound of her captor’s heavy breathing filling the darkness. Sheila bit her lip and asked the question that had bothered her ever since the last visit.

‘Who wants me dead?’

The heavy breathing continued for a moment, and then she heard her captor stand and push the chair back into what she assumed was the corner of the room. Sheila felt the gag against her lips and she opened her mouth to scream.

‘No, please, let me…!’

The gag was fastened into place and her cry choked off. Sheila, tears drenching her blindfold, heard her captor squat down alongside her, heard the heavy breathing close to her ear, and she smelled a waft of something from their skin that she recognised.

Just before her captor spoke, Sheila heard something that she also recognised: above the sound of diesel–powered vehicles outside, she heard the unmistakeable sound of a jet aircraft taking off, loudly enough for her prison to be fairly close to the airport on Great Fall’s south side.

‘Don’t worry, Sheila,’
the voice rasped.
‘This will all be over for you very soon.’

Before Sheila could consider the unthinkable, the ear plugs were shoved back into place and she was abandoned again, alone with the sounds of her own miserable sobs.

***

20

Down to the last twelve hours.

Griffin sat at his desk with his head cradled in his hands as other detectives bustled around him or talked on phones. His eyes ached and itched from a lack of sleep and his brain felt fuzzy and lacking in focus. Think, dammit!

There had been no contact from Sheila McKenzie’s abductors. The detectives monitoring the phone line had confirmed that there had in fact been only three phone calls to the McKenzie’s landline since the tracking equipment had been installed, all of them for Sheila McKenzie from clients interested in works of art for sale and leaving messages asking for her to contact them.

A family targeted for a ransom that they could not hope to pay. No contact from the abductors. No body. Something was missing from the whole equation and for the life of him Griffin could not see it.

He rubbed his eyes and looked down again at a series of old files he had pulled that morning after returning from Dale McKenzie’s home. He was studying them when the aroma of fresh coffee infiltrated his thoughts and he looked up to see Maietta standing in the office doorway, two mugs of steaming coffee in her hands.

‘Figured you could use the boost,’ she said.

Griffin took a proffered cup from her with a brief smile. Maietta returned it as she walked by him to her desk and dumped her handbag and keys there and began shuffling through mounds of paperwork. Griffin watched her. A street–wise kid from the wrong side of the block, Maietta had fought her way through life from her first diaper. Tough, resourceful and proactive, she had joined the force right out of school, determined not to follow so many of her friends into lives of crime, drugs, prostitution and who–knew what else.

It wasn’t often that Griffin found her to act shy of him.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

Maietta glanced up at him. ‘Sure.’

‘You seem a little, y’know.’

‘Y’know,
what
?’

‘Quiet.’

‘Figured you’d like the change.’

‘Nice to get a word in now and again.’

‘Shut your face.’ Maietta smiled as she sipped from her coffee and gestured to his monitor. ‘What you working on?’

Griffin shrugged.

‘Cold cases,’ he replied. ‘One of them kind of reminded me of Sheila McKenzie’s disappearance.’

‘Care to share?’

‘Sure,’ Griffin said. ‘Remember a suspicious drowning from about ten years ago? Young woman found in her bathtub downtown?’

‘Just about,’ Maietta said. ‘I was a patrol officer back then. Coroner said she’d died naturally, probably fell asleep in the bath, right?’

‘That’s the one,’ Griffin confirmed. ‘Detectives working the case found a glass of wine by the side of the tub, no sign of struggle, no history suggesting enemies or vendettas against her. The suspicious side of things was that her bank accounts had been wiped clean that same night, every penny she possessed completely withdrawn.’

Maietta perched on the edge of her desk, still some distance from Griffin. Something had changed, that was for sure. Like any curious cop she’d normally have wandered over to take a look at the screen, refresh her memory. Now she kept her distance from him.

‘Yeah,’ Maietta replied. ‘I remember now. The money was shifted into another account, then that account was emptied for cash. Nobody was able to trace it and the person who did it was in the wind.’

‘Took the money as cash and hid it well,’ Griffin nodded. ‘Uniforms spent weeks canvassing for information on who might have had a motive to kill the victim and steal her money, but no evidence of foul play was found. It says in the case file here that there was a boyfriend, apparently, that nobody was able to trace. Got a few vague descriptions but it looks like he took off before the body was found. The victim’s friends all said that they had heard of this boyfriend but that he kept himself to himself and hardly any of her friends had met him.’

‘Suspect number one,’ Maietta said. ‘What’s your angle on this and McKenzie?’

‘I decided to look a little further into it, see if I couldn’t find any similar cases, maybe an MO that fit other unsolved homicides. I got lucky.’

‘Yeah?’ Maietta asked, raising an interested eyebrow, but she did not move.

Griffin, finally convinced that Maietta wasn’t going to stand up and join him, grabbed a sheet of paper from his desk and handed it across to her.

‘Three near–identical homicides that occurred in Nevada, one a year for three years,’ he said. ‘Two more girls drowned in the bathtub, the third in a swimming pool in her backyard. No sign of struggle or forced entry in any of the cases, and no evidence on the bodies of strangulation or forced asphyxiation of any kind. They all just died in the water. In each case, their bank accounts were cleaned out around the time of their deaths.’

‘No arrests,’ Maietta said. ‘Not even any suspects.’

‘Except the one guy, a mysterious boyfriend in all of the cases who appears in the victim’s life, hangs around for a while and then vanishes right about when they die.’

‘No names,’ Maietta said, ‘looks like Mr Mysterious hid himself pretty well, avoided being identified and took each of the girls for around thirty thousand.’

‘Hits four women, one after the other about a year apart, and then disappears,’ Griffin related the rest of the case report. ‘How the hell does that make sense? Serial–killers generally escalate their attacks or become increasingly sloppy. Murders for money are generally equally opportunistic and often carried out by spouses and family members eager for a slice of somebody else’s financial pie.’

Maietta looked up at him over the sheet of paper. ‘How does this fit with McKenzie?’

‘I’m starting to like him for the abduction,’ Griffin replied. ‘There hasn’t been any contact from his wife’s abductors and they’re leaving it too long now for this to be a test of wills. These cold cases kind of reminded me of Dale McKenzie because the victims were all orphans and so is Sheila McKenzie.’

‘That’s thin, and besides the MO is different,’ Maietta said. ‘Our case is an abduction, not a homicide, at least we’re fairly sure it still is. If McKenzie was a serial–killer he would hardly have married his damned target. There’s no link here Scott, it’s a totally different case.’

‘But what if maybe McKenzie had found his perfect partner? Maybe he would stop slaying and settle down? Sheila’s wealthy and successful, maybe he figured this time he’d go for the big bucks, y’know? Stop messing around with ten thousand here and there and go for six or seven figures?’

‘I don’t know,’ Maietta said, shaking her head. ‘There’s nothing linking McKenzie to these murders, nothing that suggests he’s even remotely psychotic himself. He’s an airline pilot for Christ’s sake, they take tests for things like that don’t they? Make sure they’re not going to nosedive an airliner full of people into a mountain just because they’re having a bad day.’

‘Maybe McKenzie’s smart enough to pass tests like that? We should put a tail on him, see what it gives us?’

‘Using what manpower?’ Maietta asked. ‘Olsen’s already got every spare hand working cases, including ours, and how the hell do we tail McKenzie if he’s doing five hundred knots at thirty thousand feet? I don’t suppose Nevada’s PD are going to send officers to watch McKenzie’s back based on something as thin as this.’ Maietta set her coffee down and handed the sheet of paper back to Griffin. ‘McKenzie’s not our guy. He’s got a cast–iron alibi and we’ve already checked his financials going back five years or more. He’s clean, Scott. Sure, he’s up–tight and he’s under pressure but that’s hardly surprising.’

‘It was you who said he was hiding something,’ Griffin pointed out.