That Touch of Ink (19 page)

It wasn’t an everyday lie. No self-respecting OU grad would don a Texas Tech sweatshirt. Their rivalry was legendary.

I ran to the phone and called my studio. Nobody answered. I knew if Tex was still at my desk, he would hear my message through the machine.

“Tex, it’s Madison. You need to get here, now. There’s a woman who lives in my building. Mrs. Abigail Young. She showed up here right after Brad sent me the five thousand dollar bill. I’m going to the place where I was last night. I think I’ll be safe there because nobody knows about it but you.”

I hung up the phone, distracted by a corner of the new hardwood floor that was uneven from the rest. It wasn’t like that two days ago. I’d marveled at the near perfect job that Brad’s team had done in such a short amount of time. But what if the decorating job was a cover for something else? A clever hiding place?

I lowered myself to the floor and pried at the wood with my fingertips until I freed the uneven plank. I pulled it up and stared at a row of James Madison five thousand dollar bills, each tucked inside individual sandwich-sized plastic baggies.

And under the row of sandwich baggies were the uncut sheets of paper I’d found in the trunk of Brad’s car.

Their money. That’s what the man on the phone had called it. Stanley Mann’s kidnappers weren’t looking for a ransom. They were looking for these bills that had been hidden in my apartment.
This
was their money.

THIRTY

But even without proof, I already suspected that most of the bills were fake. The only one that seemed real was the one Brad had sent me from Pierot’s Interiors. The rest did little more than downplay the value of the real one by making them all seem common.

A door shut in the hallway. I froze. Was Mrs. Young on her way over? She had maintained a nosy neighbor-style interest in my new living room. Was she was keeping watch on the money? I knew there were still questions I didn’t have answered, but I didn’t care. What I did know was that I had to get out of there before Mrs. Young had a chance to discover what I’d found. I knew the money wasn’t safe at my apartment. I had to figure out a way to get it out and get it to Tex.

I moved to the bathroom and found half a roll of surgical tape relegated to the flotsam bin after my knee had healed. I pulled off my tunic and pressed the plastic baggies against my stomach, then wound the tape around me several times. I pulled my tunic back on, grabbed Tex’s keys, and left out the back door, driving Tex’s Jeep back to Mad for Mod.

Tex had set a standard for breaking speed limits. I decided to follow his lead. I would have welcomed a set of flashing lights in my rear view mirror as I drove back to the studio, but the lights never appeared. A white Lexus was pulling out as I pulled in. Tex was driving.

“Listen to me. The ransom call was code. The kidnappers don’t want cash, they want the fake five thousand dollar bills.”

“Get out of my way, Night,” he said.

“I think the next door neighbor is in on it. She’s been trying to get into my apartment since Brad renovated it and I found the money hidden in the floor.”

“Where’s the money now?” he asked.

“It’s safe.”

The back door to Mad for Mod opened and Grant walked out. “Ms. Night? I warned you to stay out of this.”

He climbed in the shotgun seat. Tex glared at me, his forehead drawn, his eyes cloudy. He drove past the Jeep and left me standing in the parking lot.

I stormed into my studio and pulled the door shut behind me. I dialed information and asked for the Dallas Police department. A few seconds later I spoke to a dispatcher.

“My name is Madison Night. There’s been a kidnapping and I have information that can help you.”

“Where are you located?”

“Mad for Mod on Greenville Avenue.”

“Stay there. I’m sending an officer. Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t show you identification.”

I hung up the phone and paced around the office. I didn’t know if I’d done the right thing, but if Tex wouldn’t listen to me, then I didn’t have any other options. I stood inside the studio and paced between the furniture, and then went to my office to wait. Within minutes I heard a car pull up to the front curb.

A fist pounded on the door. “Madison Night? I know you’re in there. Come out now.”

I knew the voice. It was Mrs. Young. She must have followed me. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled from the office to the studio.

“Madison, this is no time to screw around. I’ll explain everything after you come out.”

I crawled across the floor, staying behind sofas and end tables that were staged for walk-in customers. The bills taped to my torso made it difficult to move. I peered out from behind a couch near the door and looked up. Mrs. Young’s face was pressed against the glass. She was looking for me, but she hadn’t seen me.

I grabbed a canister of pepper spray that I’d bought a few months ago and pulled the pin. My left hand gripped the keys to Tex’s Jeep. I started a silent countdown and stood slowly. On three, I whipped the door open and hit the nozzle on the pepper spray. Mrs. Young screamed and put her hands to her face. I pushed her out of the way, yanked the door shut behind me, and ran around the side of the building to where I’d parked the Jeep.

Directly into the arms of a man in a black ski mask.

THIRTY-ONE

He dropped a bag over my head and spun me around. Handcuffs clamped onto my wrists, and I was pulled backward. I tripped and fell. Someone yanked on the handcuffs until I was back on my feet. I was picked up, carried a few feet, and dropped. My left shoulder and hip slammed onto a slightly padded surface. I tried to unbend my legs but my feet hit something. I heard a door slam. I was inside a trunk.

I kicked my feet against the interior. It didn’t do any good. The car started to move. I screamed. I didn’t know if anyone could hear me. The only hope I had was that the officer who was coming to get me would discover I was missing and would put out an APB or whatever they put out for missing people.

The car occasionally turned left or right, shifting me in the small space. My head bounced when we drove over something—a speed bump, I’d guess—and a couple of sharp right turns pushed my back into the depths of the compartment. The bag on my head smelled like onions. My empty stomach convulsed with nausea. I’d neglected my hunger for days but was thankful that there was nothing in me to come back up. I thought about the speed bumps and the succession of right turns.

The car slowed down. It glided over another set of bumps, twice, stopped for a couple of seconds, then started moving again. A few seconds later, the engine turned off. I braced myself for the worst. A car door slammed. I heard the key enter the trunk. I felt the fresh air against my right arm seconds before I was lifted out, set on my feet, and pushed forward.

I stumbled again, tripping over my shoe. I kicked the shoe off and hobbled awkwardly, the pace dictated by the person holding my arm. I felt gravel under my bare foot, then carpet. Fingers clamped around my left wrist. I balled my hand up into a fist. My arms were yanked behind my back, and the cold metal pressed against my wrists. I tried to pull away but couldn’t.

The onion bag came off my head as suddenly as it had been dropped on. Light bit through my vision. I pinched my eyes shut, then blinked rapidly against the assault of light. Almost instantly, the lights went out, leaving dots in place of my vision. I barely made out a figure in a black ski mask leaving the room. There were no threats, no confessions.

“Who is that?” said a raspy male voice. Until that moment, I thought I was alone. I twisted around and slowly made out the figure of a man handcuffed to the metal leg of the desk.

“Madison Night.” I said. “Who are you?”

The man coughed. “Stanley Mann.”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness in the office, I noticed movement from behind the file cabinet.

“Madison?” asked a female voice.

“Officer Nast?” I asked, surprised. “Is that you?” I blinked a few times to try to see better. “What are you doing here?”

Nasty ignored my question. “Where did you come from?”

“I was jumped outside of my studio. Somebody threw me into the trunk of a car and brought me here. Are we at Turtle Creek Luxury Apartments?”

“Yes.”

Nasty squatted next to Stanley and unlocked his restraints with her police-issue handcuff key. I heard them click open. Stanley rubbed his right wrist with his left hand for a couple of seconds then switched. I hadn’t thought much about how long he’d been trapped.

“Are you okay?” I asked him, my voice barely above a whisper.

I looked at him. A faded brown baseball hat was on his head. Dark circles, purplish-brown, stood out under his eyes. His skin was sallow. “My dog—I need to check on my dog. He’s alone at my store. He’s probably starving,” he said. Tears welled up in his eyes.

“Your dog is okay, Mr. Mann. He’s at my house,” Nasty said.

“You have his dog?” I asked with surprise.

She didn’t answer my question. “Does Tex know you’re missing?”

“No. He sent me home.”

“And you didn’t listen. Figures. I bet you think he’s going to bust through those doors and rescue you.”

I ignored her and turned my attention to Stanley. “The police know everything. This is almost over.”

The man’s head hung low, his shoulders protruding up and out like a vulture. I wondered what this past week had been like for him. He coughed again, this time repeatedly. I looked around the office for a refrigerator or bottle of water. A pack of Orangina sat next to the printer. One bottle had already been taken from the pack.

Nasty followed my stare. She uncapped one of the bottles and held it up to Stanley’s lips. A trickle of orange drink dribbled down his chin while he swallowed.

“Officer Nast, someone demanded a ransom for this man. Tex and a Secret Service agent are operating under the assumption that the kidnappers want cash, but they don’t. They want the James Madison bills. I found them—I have the money. When Tex wouldn’t listen to me to me, I called the station.”

“You know about Agent Bonneville?”

Her reaction surprised me. She knew about Grant? She knew he was Secret Service?

“Tex doesn’t know about this case,” she said. “I was assigned to help Agent Bonneville but to keep the investigation confidential. I have the situation under control,” Nasty continued. “You being here complicates everything.”

Stanley’s coughing resumed.

“I was jumped before anybody showed up at my studio. I didn’t want to come here and complicate your investigation, and I don’t intend to stay here, either. I don’t know what issue you have with me, but I can help you.”

“You said you have the money? Where is it?” she asked.

“The money is safe. Right now we have to get out of here.”

Nasty leaned behind me and unlocked one of my handcuffs. “This man’s safety is the most important thing right now.”

A door opened in the hallway before I could respond. In a quick motion, Nasty pulled the open end of the handcuff around the leg of the desk and clamped it back on my wrist. She pulled the hat from Stanley’s head and put it on mine.

“I’m going out there,” she said. “I don’t want you following me. You said the money was safe, right?”

“I said the money was safe.” And it was, at least until I sweat through the surgical tape and a shower of five thousand dollar bills in sandwich baggies dropped out from under the hem of my tunic. “Officer Nast, there’s a woman. She goes by Abigail Young. She was at my studio right before I was jumped. I hit her with pepper spray, but whoever she’s working with caught me when I ran.”

“You’re way off base, Madison.” She pushed Stanley toward the door and cracked it open. I watched her look both ways. She turned back to me. “Wait here and I’ll come back for you.” She and Stanley left me alone in the dark, chained to a desk.

Before I had a chance to figure out what to do next, two sets of footsteps resonated in the hall, headed my direction.

THIRTY-TWO

The footsteps proceeded past the door. Snippets of conversation were muffled. Something about the weather, I thought. When the sound dropped out of range, I started working on my situation. Yes, the handcuffs kept me bound to the leg of the desk, but the desk could be tipped.

I got on my knees, then put my feet underneath me. I was bent at the waist, thanks to the restrictions of the handcuffs. I stood, pulling the heavy metal desk with me.

A sheaf of papers fluttered through the air and fanned out around the carpet. When I got the leg off the floor by about six inches, I heaved it backward. For a moment, it tipped precariously on the back legs, until a firm bump with my hip knocked it over.

The computer and keyboard crashed to the floor. The leg of the desk stood straight out, parallel to the floor. I slipped the handcuff chain down the leg until I was no longer attached to anything but myself. That created a new problem, not as easy to solve.

I brought my hands from behind me to in front of me by stepping over the handcuffs. I looked around the office for something that could help me. The carpet was covered with paper and items from the desk. The trash can had turned on its side, spilling coffee cups, candy bar wrappers, and an empty bottle of hair dye for men. A Hawaiian shirt hung from a hook on the back of the door. It looked vaguely familiar.

I moved to the windows. They were shaded by plantation shutters. I adjusted the vertical bar that controlled the slats enough for me to see outside. Leaves from a tree partially blocked my view, but beyond it I saw a parking lot filled with cars. One of them was a white Lexus.

From a distance, I made out Harry, the valet attendant with the dyed brown hair. Another member of the staff took his place by the gate. They exchanged words, and Harry pulled his phone from his pocket, tapped the screen a couple of times, and walked in the direction of the building.

I needed to get his attention. If only he would look up from the screen of his phone. He tapped his screen a few more times. Before I could act, the door of the small office opened and a man in a black knit ski mask entered. He wore a red valet vest over a white shirt and black pants.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Why did you bring me here?”

He stepped backward, away from me. A dog yipped from the hallway. The masked man stepped into the office and shut the door behind him.

I stepped forward but stopped when I saw his gun. I put my handcuffed hands in front of me and slowly raised them. The masked man didn’t say anything, but I could tell from his eyes that he knew I got the message.

Someone knocked on the door. Through the textured glass pane nestled in the middle of the decorative wooden door I could make out the silhouette of Mrs. Bonneville. 

The man in the ski mask kept his eyes and his pistol trained on me.

“My Gosh, I could have sworn I saw a man in a red vest go in there. Where did he go, Giuseppe? Where did the man in the red vest go?”

Despite my silent pleas that Mrs. Bonneville come in, I knew she wasn’t the type of woman to enter an office that belonged to the service staff. Giuseppe barked twice. The shadow turned around and receded into the hallway.

The man in the ski mask reached up to his head and scratched his hairline through the wool. His sleeve rode up by his wrist and I saw the flash of a Submariner watch.

Slowly, I inched backward, until I was pressed up against the wall. I slid down the wall until my bent knee couldn’t take the pressure anymore, and I fell onto the side. I planted my handcuffed hands on the floor and repositioned myself into a crawling position.

“The police know everything, Brad. Even if you try to run, you won’t get far.”

He set the pistol on top of the metal file cabinet and pulled the hat from his head.

“I’m sorry, Madison. I thought I could end this, but I can’t. You’ll never know how far I went to protect you. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”

He left the office. There wasn’t much I could do to get away considering Nasty had left my hands locked together. I pushed my feet around the paper on the floor, trying to come up with a plan. My toe connected with a tape dispenser, and I got an idea.

I reached up under my tunic and tore the surgical tape from my body. One of the sandwich baggies fell to the floor. I pulled the tape dispenser toward me. I freed a piece and stuck it to the baggie.

I put my hands on the floor in front of me and pushed myself up so I could reach the window, then I taped plastic baggie with the James Madison bill to the glass under the plantation shutters. If I was right, and if anybody—
anybody
—walked past that window, they’d see it and wonder. And at this point, getting someone to wonder about was all I could do.

The grating sound of the doorknob turning pulled my attention to the entrance. Slowly the door pushed into the room. I half-crouched, half-stood, frozen in place. Harry stepped into the room. I wanted to hug him.

“Mr. Delbert? Yoo-hoo, Mr. Delbert!” Mrs. Bonneville called out. Through the distorted, textured glass I watched Harry run his hands over his hair and down the front of his vest. He smiled at her.

“Hello Mrs. Bonneville. How’s Giuseppe today?”

The three of them moved down the hallway, outside, and into the parking lot. I watched them between the slats of the shutters. Harry might come back, I reasoned. Or he might notice the currency I taped to the window.

Or neither.

Giuseppe strained forward in Mrs. Bonneville’s arms and sniffed Harry’s fingers. Harry pulled away and balled his hands into fists. Giuseppe barked at him. Mrs. Bonneville tried to calm him but was unsuccessful. Harry stepped away from the woman and her dog and scratched his left sleeve with his right hand. A streak of black stained the white fabric.

I looked away from the window at the Hawaiian shirt that hung from the peg on the back of the door. I remembered where I had first seen it. On the waiter at Trader Josh’s, the night Brad took me to dinner, when I’d called him after finding the body at Paper Trail. Brad had been the one to suggest the restaurant.

I crossed the room and lifted the shirt from the hook. A piece of masking tape was stuck to the fabric above the manufacturer’s label and Harry Delbert was written in blue ballpoint pen. Harry the valet attendant with the shoe-polish hair was Harry Delbert, the gray-haired waiter from the Polynesian restaurant.

I dropped back onto my hands and knees and crawled around the floor, pushing papers out of my way, hoping to find Nasty’s handcuff keys while I had time.

As I sifted through the mess, I pushed stacks of paper under the desk. I could tell from the apartment application paperwork that this was where the building’s landlord kept confidential tenant information. At first, I found it odd that so much of what people preferred to keep private could easily be found on the lease agreement.

But I was a landlord, too. And I knew what I was allowed by law to ask for on an application. Sure, my building paled in comparison to the luxury building I was captive in now, but laws were laws. If people were disclosing this kind of information, there had to be a reason they felt it was okay.

The staff of the building had access to their apartments and to their personal belongings. Harry had been the one to rob Art of the eleven thousand dollars he’d kept in his room.

Harry had used trust to violate these people—both the tenants and his coworkers. His willingness to feed me information about Grant Bonneville, his story about a counterfeit bill that was accepted by the bank. It was a package of carefully planted lies intended to keep me from looking too closely at him. He’d been keeping an eye on me since the night I found Philip Shayne’s body.

I pulled a couple of papers close to my face. The light was fading and it was tough to make out the details, but not so tough that I couldn’t read a request for personal information about a temporary tenant named Philip Shayne.

What was he doing at Turtle Creek Luxury Apartments?

They were in it together.

Brad said Philip Shayne had a partner in Dallas. That partner was Harry.

Everything about Brad’s story made sense. Philip Shayne and Harry Delbert were the two men who had tracked him from Pennsylvania. But when Philip and Harry learned about me, they headed to Dallas. Brad had thought he was free. He thought he’d protected me.

But they put two and two together and came after me. The fight at Paper Trail, while they were holding Stanley hostage. The accidental murder of Philip Shayne, who had four bullet holes in his leg.

The very trouble Brad had hoped to protect me from by lying two years ago had followed him to my door.

I had to get out of the room before Harry Delbert came for me.

I grabbed Brad’s pistol from the file cabinet and moved to the window. Harry stood outside of the valet station. His sweeping gaze scanned the street and the building.

And then he saw the James Madison I taped to the glass.