The Hunt (5 page)

“Are you blushing?” I blurted out.

The flush tingeing her olive skin deepened. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous. You’re bright red. And you didn’t answer my question. Why are you still here?” With Hilary gone, I seemed to have stepped into her role as the blunt one. It might also have had something to do with the increasingly unmistakable onset of caffeine withdrawal.

“I overslept and missed my flight,” she said.

Not only did Luisa not blush, she didn’t oversleep. Moreover, she hated feeling rushed in airports, so she insisted on arriving no less than two hours before the designated departure time of any flight she took. But she ignored my expression of disbelief and led us into the living room where Ben was already waiting.

Luisa may or may not have overslept, but Ben looked as if he hadn’t slept at all, and based on the way he’d been hitting the Scotch at the party, he probably was hungover, too. He gratefully accepted a bottle of ginger ale from the mini-bar, and Peter took Luisa up on her offer of a juice. She passed me a Diet Coke without asking, and, exercising tremendous self-control, I passed it back. “No thanks,” I said, although my hand tingled where it had briefly touched the coolness of the can.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just not in the mood.”

“You’re never not in the mood.”

“Well, you never oversleep,” I snapped. Withdrawal was definitely setting in, and not only was it making me blunt, it was making me cranky to boot.

“I dared Rachel to go forty-eight hours without caffeine,” Peter explained to Luisa.

“Which hour is it now?” she asked.

“We’re in hour three,” Peter said. “Only forty-five more to go.”

“It’s going to be a long forty-five hours,” she said.

“I’m just beginning to appreciate that,” he said. They shared a hearty chuckle.

“Could everyone stop talking about me like I’m not here and could we instead talk about the reason we’re here, which is that Hilary’s not?” I said. It was unclear to me why they should find my pain so hilarious.

“A very long forty-five hours,” said Luisa to Peter. But she took a seat on the sofa next to Ben, and Peter and I sat down across from them.

We all turned to Ben. After all, not only was he Hilary’s boyfriend, however new and ill-fated that particular relationship might be, he was an FBI agent. We were fortunate to have a trained professional with us at a time like this—surely he would know exactly what to do. We could just sit back and follow his expert direction.

But Ben sat staring into space, absent-mindedly peeling the label from his bottle of ginger ale and apparently unaware of our eyes on him, much less our expectations. If we were waiting for expert direction from him, it looked as if we’d be in for quite a wait.

“So,” I said, since Ben didn’t, “when did everybody last see Hilary?” I wasn’t an FBI agent, but I did watch a lot of crime shows on TV, and this seemed like a reasonable place to start.

“You and I saw her at the buffet around ten with Iggie,” said Peter. “And then they sat down at a table with Caro and Alex. But I don’t remember running into her after that.”

“The last time I saw her was a little after eleven,” said Luisa. “She was outside, dancing with
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Iggie.”

“So we have her in the tent with Iggie at eleven. What about you, Ben? When did you last see her?” I asked.

“Huh?” he said, dragging his attention away from his soda label as I repeated the question. “Oh.

At about the same time, I guess, dancing with Iggie. I went back inside, and then I looked for her around midnight, when the party was starting to wind down. I couldn’t find her anywhere, and she didn’t answer her cell. That’s when I gave up and assumed she’d left without me.”

It seemed undiplomatic to comment on that. “Which means she probably left between eleven, when she was last seen, and midnight, when you couldn’t find her,” I said instead. Ben nodded.

“When did you start thinking something might be wrong?” Peter asked him in a gentle tone.

This had to be awkward for Ben—nobody could enjoy being ditched at a party by his significant other.

He ripped off a long strip of the label. “This morning, when Luisa called.”

“You mean, you couldn’t find her at the party, then she didn’t show up all night, and you didn’t think anything was wrong?” I asked. I tried to sound gentle, too, but withdrawal was wreaking havoc with my already limited interpersonal skills.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We broke up. At the party. Around ten-thirty.”

We all tried to look surprised, but only Peter really succeeded. Luisa and I were too familiar with Hilary’s history with the opposite sex to imagine much time would elapse before she acted on the feelings she’d expressed to us earlier in the evening. This breakup had been speedy even by Hilary’s standards, but it was hardly unexpected, and it certainly explained Ben’s passivity this morning.

“So that’s why you didn’t get too concerned when you couldn’t find her,” Peter said.

“Or when I didn’t see her here. I ended up hitting a bar after the party.” Ben gave a sheepish smile. “Drowning my sorrows, I guess. To be honest, I was pretty drunk when I got back, and I probably passed out more than went to sleep. And when I woke up and saw she still hadn’t shown up or even left a message, I was pretty pissed.”

“But then I called,” prompted Luisa.

“I was on my way out the door to head to the airport, but you were so worried that I figured I’d take a later flight and stick around to see how I could help. I know Hilary has the room booked for a few more days.”

That was nice of him, I thought. If I were in his shoes, I would have been on the first plane back to the East Coast. “Do you know if she stopped by the room at all?” I asked. “Before you got back, or maybe while you were sleeping? Are her things still there?”

“I took a look around after I spoke to Luisa, and her clothes and toiletries and stuff are where they were when we left for the party. But I did notice that her laptop was missing. And her notebook, too.”

“Her laptop and her notebook are both gone?” said Luisa.

“Uh-huh.”

Luisa and I exchanged a glance, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. This new piece of information went a long way to clearing everything up, but I wished Ben had mentioned it sooner. It would have saved us a lot of worrying.

“Iggie must have promised Hilary an interview,” I said, telling Ben and Peter about her comments the previous night. “We know she was hoping for an exclusive for her article. She probably talked him into it at the party, and then they would have left together and stopped here at the hotel to pick up her gear.”

Putting this together was a relief for more reasons than one: if Hilary was with Iggie, then she was unlikely to be in any real danger, and if she’d taken her laptop and notebook with her, then her interest in him had remained professional rather than personal. The notion of a Hilary-Iggie hookup was a hard one to stomach, a billion dollars notwithstanding.

“She likely went with Iggie of her own accord, but then perhaps he wouldn’t let her come back,
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and that’s when she texted us,” added Luisa. “She’s probably stranded at his house or wherever he took her. It wouldn’t be easy to overpower her physically, but he might have managed to lock her in somewhere.”

“Why wouldn’t Iggie have let her come back?” asked Peter. “Would he really do something like that?”

Luisa shrugged, something else I’d seen her do far more than I’d seen her blush. “When Iggie’s focused on a goal, he tends to forget about little things like whether or not his actions conform to generally accepted behavior. And remember, he has had a crush on Hilary for well over a decade. Maybe this is his way of acting on it?”

“Or it could be about her article,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t like whatever angle she was taking on Igobe, and he decided he would hang on to her until he could persuade her to change it. It seems extreme, but Iggie always did have a complicated relationship with reality.”

“At least if she’s with Iggie we don’t have much to worry about,” said Luisa. “I know Hilary wouldn’t have sent the SOS unless she needed our help, but I can’t picture Iggie doing anything particularly dangerous or evil. Can any of you?”

We couldn’t, but although being reasonably confident of Iggie’s relative harmlessness tempered the urgency we’d initially felt, neither Luisa nor I would be able to completely relax until we’d located Hilary and made sure she was all right.

“Why don’t we just give Iggie a call?” Peter asked. “Or drop by his house?”

“I wish it were that easy,” I said. “But Iggie’s obsessed with privacy. I asked him for his home address when I wanted to send him the invitation for the engagement party, and instead I got a lecture about how he keeps his personal information personal. He wouldn’t even give me a phone number or e-mail address. According to him, a guy with as much money as he has—even if most of it’s only on paper at this point—has to worry about being a kidnapping target, not to mention the people hoping to hit him up for handouts. The only way I know how to reach him is through his office, but it will be closed for the weekend.”

“What about the police?” asked Peter. “Can’t they help us?”

Again, we all looked to Ben, and this time he seemed to be paying attention. He shook his head.

“We can report Hilary missing, but I don’t think it will do much good without proof her disappearance was coerced. She’s an adult, and secret codes between old friends aren’t likely to be cause for concern to anyone except us.”

“And Hilary does have a tendency to strike out on her own without letting anybody know. It would be difficult to convince anyone that this time is different,” said Luisa.

“I think we’re stuck with trying to find them ourselves. Maybe we can retrace their steps from the party,” I said.

“Well, if that’s what we need to do, I can call the valet service my parents used last night,” said Peter. “If Iggie and Hilary left together, somebody must have seen them—her dress was pretty memorable.”

“What there was of it,” said Luisa. She gestured to her own laptop resting on a side table.

“Meanwhile, I’ll log into our online alumni directory. Iggie wasn’t the most popular person on campus, but he must have at least one friend left over from our class who would know how to reach him.” Luisa cochaired the alumni giving campaign and had proven skilled at persuading our former classmates to cough up donations. I attributed her success, particularly with males, to the lasting impact of her freshman facebook photo combined with her phone voice, which was husky and still bore traces of an exotic accent.

“And while you’re doing that, I’ll go through Hil’s things,” I said. I turned to Ben. “We know she was doing research on Iggie and Igobe. She might have left something behind that will give us more information.”

The rest of us springing into action seemed to finally energize Ben. “I can make a few calls to some colleagues. Somebody might be able to tap into a database and find out where Iggie lives—there has to be a record of it somewhere. And we could check the hotel’s security
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cameras, too. They would have caught Hilary coming and going last night, and they might also confirm who was with her.”

“So we have a plan,” I said with satisfaction. I liked plans, and I hoped keeping busy would distract me from my cravings, which were growing more intense with every passing minute.

“When should we get back together?”

“It’s close to one now,” said Luisa. “Three o’clock? But I’ll call you if I find somebody who knows how to reach Iggie before then.”

“Three sounds good,” I started to say before remembering I had a previous engagement.

“Actually, could we say four-thirty instead? In Union Square?”

“We can call my mother and postpone,” Peter offered.

I considered this for a moment, tempted, but then I decided against it. Susan had seemed sufficiently excited about our planned outing that I wouldn’t want to disappoint her, and I doubted ninety minutes one way or another would make much of a difference as far as Hilary was concerned. She was merely being inconvenienced rather than in any real peril—at least, that’s what we thought then.

“Postpone what?” Luisa asked.

“We’re supposed to meet my mother at Tiffany’s to choose things for the wedding registry,”

Peter told her.

Luisa looked at me, amused. It was yet another expression I’d seen more often than a blush and one that appeared especially frequently when I was the topic of discussion. “You’re going to register?” she asked. “You? The woman whose Realtor had to talk her out of buying an apartment without a kitchen? The woman who uses her oven to store her shoes? The woman who can order ‘the usual’ from every take-out place in Manhattan? The woman who—”

“Yes, me,” I interrupted, only a little bit huffy.

“Well,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.”

6

L uisa was already online and searching our alumni directory as the rest of us left the suite and took the elevator down to the room where Ben and Hilary were staying. Ben looked up at the paneled ceiling of the elevator and at the mirror on its back wall as we moved between floors.

“There’s probably a camera hidden in here somewhere,” he said, “maybe behind the mirror. The tape from last night should have captured anyone who got off on our floor.”

I would never have thought of that on my own, and although I knew there were security cameras in a lot of public facilities, it was creepy to consider just how pervasive they were. I recognized they could be useful in combating crime and thwarting terrorism, and I was all for combating and thwarting such nefarious activities, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many times I’d embarrassed myself on camera without realizing someone was watching. It was a reminder of why Iggie’s company was so successful—even if you weren’t doing anything wrong, there was something comforting in knowing nobody else knew what you were up to.

Ben had left the Do Not Disturb sign dangling from the doorknob. He inserted his keycard into the lock, but he paused before opening the door. “I should warn you. It’s sort of chaotic in here.”