The Hunt (23 page)

“How should I know and why should we care?” asked Luisa, but I was already using the phone on the desk to dial the hotel operator.

“Hi,” I said when the operator picked up. “I was wondering, could you tell me if I made any calls from my room Saturday, yesterday or today?”

Just as Natasha had been trained not to show shock when a guest showed up looking like the victim of an overzealous round of collagen injections, the operator had been trained not to let on whether he found a question stupid. If I’d been on his end of the phone, I would be wondering why I couldn’t remember my own calls. “If you’ll hold on for a moment, I’ll pull up the records,” he offered instead. There was a brief, mercifully Muzak-free pause, and then he came back on the line. “Nothing Saturday, and nothing yesterday except a call to hotel security, but you placed several calls today. In fact, just a couple of hours ago. All to local numbers.”

“A couple of hours ago?” That wasn’t good.

“Yes, ma’am. A couple of hours ago.”

“Could you give me the numbers and the exact time of each call?”

“Sure,” he agreed, without commenting on what could only be interpreted as either amnesia or a propensity for blackouts on my part. As he read them off, I motioned for Luisa to hand me the slip of paper. Each number he gave me was on the list, and he read them in the exact same order as Ben had written them. The final number was one toward the end of the list. It had been dialed only an hour and thirty-six minutes earlier, and on closer inspection I could make out a faint check mark alongside. “That’s it,” said the operator, even though there were still a few numbers left on the piece of paper we’d found.

I thanked him profusely, wondering as I did if he was going to use me as an example the next time somebody asked him about guests’ strange requests, and hung up the phone.

“What does that mean?” asked Luisa after I shared what the operator had told me.

“It means he wasn’t planning a romantic outing to pop the question,” I said. “At least, not anymore. He made these calls well after Hilary broke up with him and went missing.”

“But then why would he still want to rent a boat?” she asked.

“Because now he might have something far less romantic in mind,” said Peter. “That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“I think you’re right to be worried,” said Abigail. She’d pulled a chair over to the closet while we were talking, apparently to reach something she’d seen on the uppermost shelf. Now she stepped down lightly from the chair, and I saw she was holding another box, but this one was covered in leather, not velvet, and it was considerably larger than the one I’d found. “If this is what I think it is, and if it’s as empty as it feels, then he definitely had something less romantic in mind,” she said.

She set the box on the desk and lifted the top. If we’d been hoping to discover another piece of jewelry, perhaps a necklace to match the ring, we were out of luck. The box was empty, but the molded indentations of the inner padding clearly indicated what it usually housed, and its very emptiness was cause for alarm.

It looked as if Ben had decided to take his gun with him on his little maritime jaunt.

25

A ll but one of the calls Ben had made were to marinas right in the city. The exception was the
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last phone number, the entry with the check next to it. This had been for the Bayside Yacht Club, a marina near Coyote Point in San Mateo, roughly halfway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. That Ben had selected a relatively out-of-the-way location couldn’t be a promising sign, and it also seemed logical to assume that it was the last number Ben had dialed because he learned this marina could meet a need the other marinas could not. And while none of us wanted to think too hard about precisely what need it met, we agreed that the best course of action would be to get to Coyote Point as soon as possible.

Maddeningly, the highway we’d taken back from Palo Alto passed right by Coyote Point, and, even more maddeningly, the brief window when there wasn’t rush-hour traffic in the Bay area had closed while we’d been searching Ben’s room and tracing his phone calls. Soon we found ourselves sitting again in the Prius, stuck once more in heavy traffic and heading south at a plodding pace over ground we’d already covered twice that day. We were learning from experience just how good the hybrid’s gas mileage was.

“Ben can’t be that far ahead,” said Peter, who’d been trying to reassure us ever since we found the empty gun case. “First of all, if he’s smart, he’ll wait until dark, when there’s less of a chance anyone will see him doing anything out of the ordinary. And even if he doesn’t wait, it’s not like he could take a taxi or public transportation if he’s trying to move Hilary from wherever he had her hidden to the marina. He probably had to rent a car, which meant finding a rental agency and then dealing with the paperwork. That must have added at least half an hour and probably more like an hour to his trip, and then he still had to pick her up. Who knows? We might even beat him there.”

“But what if he’d already made arrangements for a car before he made the calls to the marinas?”

asked Luisa. “He might have rented a car days ago, and that’s what he used to take Hilary wherever he took her in the first place.”

She had a point, and it wasn’t a terribly comforting one.

According to the GPS, our destination was less than twenty miles away, but those miles were ticking away far more slowly than the minutes, and the mood in the car was tense. If we’d had any songs stuck in our heads before, this latest turn of events had wiped them clean, though I doubted any of us was able to fully appreciate the lack of a soundtrack.

“I just don’t understand. What can Ben possibly be thinking?” demanded Luisa suddenly, interrupting the silence into which we’d lapsed. “Is he really planning to get Hilary onto a boat, take the boat out to sea, kill her, dump her overboard, and then simply hope nobody either saw him or finds her body? All because she broke up with him?”

“I guess so,” I said. It sounded irrational, but except for the breaking-up part, somebody had tried to do something similar to me just a few months earlier. I hadn’t enjoyed the experience, but now I was wondering if my misadventure was what had given Ben the idea. Realizing I might have served as the inspiration for how my friend would be murdered was more than a little discomfiting.

“Wouldn’t there be all sorts of forensic evidence? In the car and then on the boat?” asked Abigail. “Could he really get away with it?”

“Presumably Ben knows how to cover his tracks. He is a trained law-enforcement professional, after all,” said Peter, who had temporarily forgotten he was trying to reassure us.

“A completely unreasonable one,” grumbled Luisa. “I’m sure the jeweler would have let him return the ring.”

We lapsed back into tense silence after that, inching through the traffic around the airport and continuing south. The sun was still glistening on the Bay, but it no longer looked as cheerful as it had a couple of hours ago, and its deepening slant merely served to remind us that time was passing. I tried to distract myself by counting hybrids, but I gave up in frustration after I reached fifty and discovered we’d traveled only six miles. When the pleasant, authoritative voice of the GPS finally alerted us to our exit, I felt several years older than when we’d started out.

At least traffic was no longer a major obstacle once we were off the highway and onto surface
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streets. A few minutes later we saw a sign for the Bayside Yacht Club painted in blue letters on a white shingle, and the GPS instructed us to turn from the road and into the parking lot before congratulating us on reaching our destination.

The slams of our doors closing echoed in the open air when we got out of the car, and in front of us, beyond the parking lot, water lapped at a narrow beach. A wood-plank walkway connected the beach with four long piers stretching into the bay, each lined with docked boats, but there was an air of weekday desolation to the place, punctuated by the occasional cry of a seagull and the low hum of traffic from the nearby highway. If a person was trying to transport a hostage in broad daylight without being seen, apparently Monday afternoon wasn’t such a bad time to do it. Nobody else was in sight, and there were only three other cars in the lot: another hybrid, an SUV and a lone Ford Taurus in a telltale neutral color. I took a moment to peek inside, and the car was empty, but I could see the rental agreement resting on the dashboard, and I could even make out Ben’s name at the top. Feeling self-consciously sleuthlike, I put my hand on the car’s hood. The metal felt warm, though it was also parked in direct sun.

A small clubhouse stood to one side of the parking lot, and this was where we went first, hoping we’d be able to learn which of the boats Ben had engaged so we could then intervene, ideally before he left the dock and put whatever devious plans he had for Hilary into motion. Of course, what we’d hoped for and what we got were two entirely different things.

“This is a private club,” said the staffer we eventually found, sounding only slightly snotty about it. “We don’t rent boats. The boats here belong to our members and are not available for hire to the general public.” He said general public the way some people say pondscum, and I had a feeling he lumped anyone who did not regularly dress in yachting attire into that category, but I also had a feeling we’d awakened him from a nap, so he was already disinclined toward us. Nor could he recall a man showing up and asking to rent a boat that day, let alone a man who looked like Ben. “Everybody knows this is not a rental facility.”

We hadn’t known it wasn’t a rental facility, so what he said wasn’t strictly true. Still, there was something about the way the man’s nostrils flared when he spoke to us that made me worry I smelled as bad as I looked, regardless of my recent shower. When he yielded no further information we went back out to the parking lot.

“Ben wouldn’t just leave his car—he has to be around somewhere,” I said.

“If he didn’t ask to rent a boat, he must have known he couldn’t rent one before he even got here. Was he planning on hijacking somebody else’s boat?” asked Luisa.

“If he managed to hijack Hilary, I wouldn’t put it past him to hijack a boat,” said Peter, who seemed to have given up on trying to be reassuring.

We quickly decided to split up into pairs and canvass the boats, checking for signs of either Ben or Hilary and asking anyone we encountered if they’d seen people matching their description.

Knowing that Ben was armed made this a scarier proposition than it would have been otherwise, but it was unlikely he’d risk shooting at us here in broad daylight, even if he had been desperate enough to transport Hilary without the cover of darkness. After we all promised each other we would proceed with caution, Abigail and Luisa started on the pier at the northern-most end and Peter and I started on the southern-most end, agreeing to work our way to the center.

It was probably a good thing so few people were around, because I imagined most of the club members wouldn’t appreciate complete strangers jumping onto their boats, checking to see if anyone was on board, and then jumping off. Peter and I made it to the end of the first pier without spotting a single other person, much less signs of either of the individuals we were looking for, although I did catch a glimpse of Abigail and Luisa in the distance speaking to a man lounging on the deck of one of the larger boats in the marina. Judging by his gestures, he was urging them to join him for a drink and potentially a sunset cruise, and judging by his Hawaiian shirt and the daiquiri glass in his hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he had both a waterbed and a disco ball belowdecks.

We advanced to the next pier, but this one also proved empty of humans except for an elderly
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couple guiding a modest craft into its slip. We lost several minutes convincing them that my fat lip was the result of an accident and not because I was unable to extricate myself from an abusive relationship with Peter. We then lost several more minutes helping them tie up, getting an entirely unwanted lesson in knot-making because Peter was too polite either not to help or to let on he already knew how to make the knots. Even so, we still managed to reach the remaining pier before Abigail and Luisa and began checking the boats there. I was growing increasingly worried we wouldn’t find anything at all, and if that were the case, I had no idea what we should do next.

Then, halfway down the pier, Peter froze. He reached out an arm to keep me from moving forward. “That’s weird,” he said softly.

“What’s weird?” I asked, matching his hushed tone.

He pointed to a small white boat a few slips ahead. Everything I knew about sailing I’d learned in the last half hour, but even I could appreciate its graceful lines and gleaming brass-work.

Delicate script on the hull spelled out The Good Sport, San Mateo, CA. The very name should have been enough to tip me off, but I was still surprised by what Peter said next.

“That boat. It’s Caro’s. She must have changed marinas.”

It figured that Caro would name her boat something like The Good Sport, but I could reflect further on that once we rescued Hilary. Instead, I flashed back to our locker-room conversation.

“Caro told Ben she had a boat,” I said, keeping my voice low. “And she also told him she hardly ever uses it. But she probably didn’t tell him where she kept it, and that’s why he was calling around—to locate it.”

“Why would he want to use her boat instead of renting one?” asked Peter.

“This is better. In fact, it’s perfect. This way he doesn’t have to worry about leaving a record. It’s one thing to explain away why you rented a car; renting a boat is a different matter. I’ll bet you anything he’s got Hilary on there.”

“No bets,” said Peter, but he took my arm, and we moved quietly up the pier.

Nobody was on deck, and we couldn’t make out any sounds from the interior cabin, but this was preferable to hearing gunshots. Peter stepped aboard in one smooth motion, and the boat dipped slightly with his weight, but there was continued silence, and wordlessly he helped me up to join him. I followed as he moved with sure steps across the deck, trying not to think about how many times he and Caro must have gone sailing together on this very boat.