Tag Man (27 page)

Nevertheless, she’d started trembling, and she could feel sweat breaking out all over her.

“What do you want?” she whispered plaintively.

He ignored her. “Pick up the phone and open a line. No need to dial. We just want the button to light up.”

She followed instructions again and placed the receiver on the desk.

“Are you paying close attention?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. This is what I want. You get on that computer and you get me the mailing address, phone number, and anything else related to getting in touch with Sally Kravitz’s father.”

Julie couldn’t stop herself. She tried to twist around. “What…”

He pulled her head back by the hair and moved the point of the blade from her throat to her cheek, right in line with her right eye. She gasped in pain and surprise.

“Have I not made myself clear?” the man asked.

“Yes,” she managed to get out.

“Is there a problem, then?”

“No.”

He returned her to her previous position. “Then get to it. Sally Kravitz. Father’s name is Daniel.”

Her fingers jittery on the keys, Julie tried several times to enter the information before succeeding.

“It’s a post office box in Vermont.”

He leaned over her slightly, trying to decipher the abbreviations and general format of the screen before them. “Is there a phone number?”

“It says it’s an answering service. We get that sometimes. Our parents can be very self-protective.”

“You ever had any problems with Kravitz paying his bills?”

She nervously scrolled down the screen. “No. She’s a scholarship student, so most of the tuition has been waived, but he’s always met the deadlines on incidentals. There’s a note here from the academic dean that Sally will be doing some makeup exams later in the summer, due to a family emergency.”

“How does Kravitz pay his bills?”

She checked before saying, “By money order.” Her voice betrayed her surprise.

“Show me the address,” he ordered.

Reluctantly, she reached out and touched the screen—something she hated to see other people do. She generally gloried in the pristine shininess of flat glass before her.

She could sense the man memorizing both the address and the phone number.

“What else do you have on how to reach Kravitz?” he demanded. “Bank accounts, references, next of kin—anything at all?”

She tried shaking her head and then froze, feeling the knife, and answered instead, “Nothing. It all gets entered here.”

“How about in a medical emergency?”

“That’s a different database. There are confidential restrictions.”

“Don’t bullshit me, lady. Money makes the world go around. If the infirmary has better contact information on the parent than you do, it’ll be the first time in history.”

Julie had to concede. “There would be an indicator on our screen. There isn’t one.”

He laughed. “I knew it. You financial people are always the end-all, be-all. Regular sharks.”

Julie didn’t understand his meaning. She merely sat there, frozen, her hands flat out before her, waiting for what might come next.

“How ’bout an e-mail address?” he asked.

She scrutinized the form. “Yes.” She recited it aloud.

“Good. Send him this note. Ready?”

She went to the appropriate page. “Okay.”

“Dear Mr. Kravitz,” he dictated. “We’ve hit a problem in arranging for your daughter’s makeup exams and have mailed the appropriate paperwork to your post office box by express mail. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, if we have not heard from you in the next three days, your daughter’s standing at this school will be compromised. We deeply regret any anxiety and inconvenience this unavoidable imposition may cause.”

Julie proofread what she’d written, struck by its sophisticated wording. She heard all sorts of language used on campus, from the maintenance crew to the richest of parents. If she were to receive such an e-mail herself, she thought, she’d be inclined to believe its contents utterly.

It only further drove home the most confounding of her many questions: Who
was
this man?

The knife left her neck with the warning, “You move, you die.”

She barely breathed. There was a rapid movement behind her, a frightening ripping sound, and then a flash of duct tape passing before her eyes. She felt a broad band being applied to her chest, just under her breasts, pinning her arms and body to the chair. Instinctively, she struggled. He smacked the back of her head hard, making her eyes tear.

“Stupid bitch. I told you not to move.”

A second swath of tape was slapped across her mouth, then a third cut off her vision. Finally, she felt her swivel chair being turned away from the desk, followed by her lower legs being bound to the base of the chair. Instinctively, she clamped her knees together as she sensed him crouching before her to do this.

“Don’t worry, lady,” she heard him say. “I couldn’t care less about that.”

She felt an abrupt emptiness then, and realized that his body heat had disappeared, like a radiator being shoved out of the way. She heard a sound by the door, heard it open quietly, and then could only imagine as he turned left and walked down the short hallway, away from the secretary’s open area, toward the private entrance that Julie used when she wanted a little discretion.

She sat there for a moment, assessing the truth of being truly alone. And alive. Even if disheveled and bleeding and taped to her chair.

Then she began to weep.

*   *   *

Lester and Sammie sat side by side in the darkness of the gas station’s back room. They were beside Route 2 in Massachusetts in a place appropriately enormous for the heavy traffic it bore—a combination deli, grocery store, coffee shop, and service station. The nonstop bustle of dozens of people was muted by a heavy, locked door.

Before them was a large flat-screen monitor and a DVD player. Sam was holding the remote.

“What was the time on that printout?” she asked Lester.

He checked the document that J.P. had extracted from the GPS in Lloyd Jordan’s BMW and read off the time stamp opposite the Sunoco’s address.

She uttered something unintelligible, followed by, “I knew I’d screwed it up. Not enough sleep.”

“Emma still working up a storm every night?” Lester asked.

Sam scrutinized the remote as she spoke, trying to decipher which button to hit for fast-forward. “Not a storm. She quiets right down once I’m feeding her, but it’s still every few hours. She’s a peaceful baby otherwise.”

Lester was smiling in the dark, nodding. “My daughter was like that. My son? Hell on wheels. Screamed for weeks. Have no idea why we didn’t murder him. I guess as soon as you’re about to, they do something cute to buy a little more time. Amazing process.”

Sammie was laughing.

“How’s Willy faring?” Lester asked.

With almost anyone else—except Joe, of course—she might have read into the question. But Lester was a nice man, and she took his curiosity at face value.

“Good,” she said, her eyes glued to the screen. “He gets up and brings her to me, changes her diapers, plays with her. He’s a good dad.” She quickly cut him a glance, adding, “And he and I’ll both shoot you if you repeat any of that.”

Les was also transfixed by the whirring images before them. “My lips are sealed, but I’m not even remotely surprised. I always thought Willy was a softy at heart.”

Sam let out a bark of laughter. “You’re an idiot, Les. Willy’s heart is as dark as the bottom of a well. But he loves that child and I guess he tolerates me as her mother.”

She tacked on, “And that goes for me, too, ’cause most of the time, I could kill him.”

Les opened his mouth to answer, but then pointed and said instead, “There.”

She immediately froze the image to reveal Lloyd Jordan standing just inside the gas station’s entrance, looking around. He crossed to the coffee dispenser, poured himself a cardboard mug full, and retired to a small corner table with a direct view of the front door. The time on the screen matched not only what J.P. had discovered from the Bimmer, but one of the receipts that Willy had found in the trash of Leo Metelica’s Lowell apartment. It was that coincidence that had brought them here, accompanied by a Mass state trooper and the warrant he’d prepared for them. The trooper had stepped outside to use the men’s room and get some coffee.

Sam didn’t go to fast-forward again, instead making them wait as long as Lloyd did for his appointment. Lester didn’t speak; neither of them wanted to miss a single detail. Through the following eight minutes, they watched Lloyd nurse his drink, glance at the flow of people coming and going, and occasionally consult the clock on the wall. He seemed relaxed, however, with his legs crossed and his body slightly slouched. For a man about to meet a contract killer, it seemed like just another day at the office. Eventually, he pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket and laid it on the table beside his elbow. He did not open it.

“Ooh,” Lester commented. “Real spy stuff.”

Leo Metelica appeared the same way Lloyd had earlier, stopping at the door and casting about. He saw his contact immediately, of course, but ignored him to continue his survey, eventually also using the coffee machine before ambling over to the table next to Lloyd’s and settling down. He made a show of checking his watch and looking around some more, before at last acknowledging Lloyd with an unheard question. Lloyd pretended to listen politely, pointed to the newspaper inquiringly, and then handed it over with a smile.

Leo took the paper but didn’t actually open it up, placing it flat on his own table and pretending to read the headline facing him.

“Sure,” Lester said again. “That looks normal.”

Lloyd stood up after that, straightened his back, left the eating area without a backward glance, and paid for the coffee on the way out the door.

Leo watched him leave, surreptitiously checked the inner fold of the paper for the envelope Sam and Les assumed was there, and then followed Lloyd’s suit, shoving the paper into his pocket in the process.

“Voilà,” Lester announced, retrieving their copy of the DVD. “That oughtta play well in court.”

Sammie nodded and added, “Not to mention get us a warrant to access the Hummer’s OnStar location finder. I’m looking forward to telling Lloyd that his own pretensions pointed us straight to him.”

*   *   *

Lloyd loved his Hummer. It was huge and gleaming black, trimmed with enough chrome to qualify it as pure bling. As a kid, he’d watched Cadillacs and their ilk purring through the neighborhood, carrying cold-eyed, self-satisfied bigwigs with bodyguards and nervous women. He remembered his mixture of contempt and envy and remembered as well his ascribing the former to youthful ignorance as he became rich enough to buy fancy cars himself.

But he never drove this tank to town. Not the big town, in any case. The BMW was tasteful by Boston standards, but the Hummer? Even Lloyd could still not completely rationalize its use on his old home turf. The part of him that had become what he’d once envied still housed a fragment of the kid who could recognize a male ego in need of toys.

Now, however, he was feeling pretty satisfied with himself. His plan was working to perfection. After a day-and-a-half stakeout—another good reason to have chosen the roomy Hummer—he’d seen Kravitz arrive at the post office and disappear inside just long enough to allow him to stroll down the sidewalk, pretend to fumble and drop a book he was carrying, and stick two separate homing devices onto the rear of Kravitz’s rusty Subaru sedan as he bent down to retrieve it, all in one smooth swoop.

Very sweet.

Back behind the wheel and relocated virtually out of sight, he could train a pair of binoculars on the post office’s front door and see his target cautiously step out, watchful and on edge, all as expected, and reluctantly get back into his vehicle.

Lloyd smiled to himself. Poor bastard. He had no choice. The empty post office box had to have told him that the e-mail was a hoax—a way to get him out into the open. But what to do? He had to return to his darling daughter, wherever she was. She was Dan’s whole life, even if she didn’t have her father’s smarts—all his efforts to be invisible within society blown by a kid who couldn’t stay off Facebook. That’s how Lloyd had discovered where she attended school, and how he’d been able to tip over the first domino in locating his nemesis. Talk about irony.

“What to do? What to do?” Lloyd repeated, watching Dan’s car pull away from the curb.

The trip to Pownal took most of the day. Dan drove around half of southern Vermont, up long hills with spectacular back views of the road behind, along dirt roads capable of throwing dust a hundred feet into the air, down dead ends along which he eventually double-tracked, all to catch anyone potentially tailing him.

And all to no avail. Through every such maneuver, Lloyd merely hung back, following the small blip representing Dan’s car on his video display, and giving the sucker miles of room. He’d even assumed Dan would eventually stop and check for bugs, which is why he’d deposited two of them, and was delighted when his console informed him that the more openly placed of the pair had been removed and thrown to the side of the road. This, Lloyd had calculated, would lessen enough of Dan’s mistrust to make him start thinking about heading home.

And it worked. By mid-afternoon, Lloyd saw the blip representing Dan leave Route 7, cross the railroad tracks at the old Green Mountain Race Track, and come to a stop behind the ancient stadium.

“I’ll be damned,” Lloyd muttered in admiration. “The man does know his rabbit holes.”

*   *   *

As events would have it, however, Lloyd’s pride in his hardware was shared by the trio of Joe Gunther, Willy Kunkle, and Lester Spinney, who were following their success with the BMW’s GPS unit by latching on to the Hummer’s On-Star locator beacon and using it to lead them to precisely the same spot.

But they weren’t the only ones.

Despite Dan’s care and hard work, his efforts to disappear and to offer his daughter shelter ended up merely highlighting the paradox that sometimes those most eager to fade away often became the most eagerly sought.