The Trophy Wife (16 page)

“Sweet Jesus!”

Childs fell like a discarded rag into one the chairs beside the desk. He sat silently, staring at the detective as he waited for him to come up with an answer.

“This doesn't make any sense. Not one bit of sense. We're dealing with a pro for a hundred million and all of a sudden
some jerk is willing to settle for fifty thousand. It just doesn't fit …”

“That was Emily's voice,” Walter whispered. And then he nearly screamed, “He has Emily.”

“I know. I know. The man is genuine.” Hogan lowered his face into his palms. “Give me a minute. Let me think,” he mumbled.

He had thought he knew the answer the instant he heard the voice. The caller was another one of the absurd thugs. The disgraced lawyer. The two racetrack regulars. One had delivered the note. The other two had done the kidnapping. This had to be the person hired to mind Mrs. Childs; the owner of the van where she had been deposited, unconscious and wrapped in a shower curtain. But it couldn't be. The others had been harmless punks, obviously determined
not
to hurt their victim. This guy was making dangerous threats.

It had to be an outsider. Someone the mastermind behind the scheme had never figured on. Someone who had found out about the kidnapping and was trying to pick up some pocket money for himself, unaware that he was about to screw up a $100 million payoff.

“My first instinct is to ignore the man. His threats to harm Emily are probably empty.”

“Harm her?” Walter interrupted. He pointed at the cassette player. “He's talking about selling her into white slavery.”

Hogan nodded impatiently. “I heard him. It's a ridiculous threat. And just dealing with him could prove dangerous. If the fool got himself killed, Emily might be left tied up in a closet or someplace where we would never find her.”

“Jesus,” Walter interjected with complete despair.

Then Hogan reversed himself. “But there are also good reasons for treating him seriously. He may be the best link we're going to get to Emily's whereabouts. If he were caught, he might not know the other people involved. He probably wouldn't be able to identify the computer-generated voice. But he most certainly would know where your wife could be found. Hell, he got her to record the message to you.”

Walter was pleading. “Andrew, I don't know what to do…”

“I think we have to follow up with this guy,” Hogan concluded.

“What about the other ransom?” Walter still seemed bewildered.

“We follow up on both of them. Treat each one of them as if it were the only deal you've been offered.”

“We pay both of them?”

Andrew smiled. “No, we don't pay either of them. What we do is make each one of them
think
he's getting paid. Then we follow the money. If I'm right, both trails should lead to the same place.”

Walter came out of his trance.
“If
you're right. That's not good enough. It could get her killed. We have to pay the money they're demanding.”

Andrew stepped around Walter and put a hand on his shoulder. “We can't do that, Walter. Remember what we agreed right at the start. If you're thinking of transferring a hundred million dollars, then I'll have to take everything I know to Hollcroft. I'm trying to catch these people. I'm trying to save your wife. But I'm not cutting a deal with kidnappers. And neither are you.”

Emily stood behind the bed, holding the headboard crossbar in both hands, rocking it quietly back and forth. She had started late at night, when the squeaking of floorboards and the banging of doors over head had subsided and the only sound was the nighttime settling of the house. At first she had used all her strength, trying to break the joint between the headboard and the corner post. But when she pushed hard, the bed had moved, its legs scratching across the cement floor like fingernails digging into a blackboard. To prevent the noise, she had to hold the bed steady with one hand while she forced the bar with the other. The process had quickly become exhausting.

Instead, she had settled for a rocking motion that wiggled the tapered ends of the bar and rungs in their sockets. It had
been early morning when she saw the first signs that she might be getting somewhere. The varnish at the joints had cracked and chipped away.

Now, there was brown sawdust forming at the joints. The motion was causing the finials and sockets to grind away. Eventually, the structure would become wobbly, giving her the opportunity to push out on the corner posts and pull the bar free. But she couldn't go on. Once she freed the bar, she doubted whether she would be able to force it back to its original position. She didn't want any sign of her work to be visible when Rita brought down her breakfast or, God help her, when Mike came down.

She was suddenly aware of movement over her head. One of them had gotten up and was shuffling about. The next thing she heard was the sound of water moving in the pipes that rose somewhere inside the surrounding wall. A refrigerator door slammed. She moved around the corner post, stretching her arm over the top until she was able to slide back onto her bed. She sighed with relief that she would be able to take a few moments of rest. But when she looked behind her, she was shocked to see the evidence of her work. There were traces of sawdust running down each of the verticals, with tiny yellow flakes dotting the pillow. She pulled herself up to her knees and looked down at the floor under the headboard. There was a thin covering of sawdust, like a ghosting of snow over a highway. They'd
have
to see it. There was no way that they could miss it.

She slid across the bed, raising her arm over the corner post until the handcuff chain was behind the bed. Then she slipped out and rushed behind the headboard. But only one hand could reach the floor. She could brush at the dust, but she couldn't clamp it between her palms. There was no way that she could pick it up.

Pots banged together in the kitchen over her head. The woman's voice called through the house, “I'm taking her breakfast down to her.” The man answered from farther off in the distance, “I'll bring it down.” And then the woman's voice. “I'm already here. I'll take care of it.”

Emily was trying to scatter the dust with her free hand. But that only made things worse. She was etching designs where the bare floor showed through the dust. The stain of the yellow powder was even more obvious. She licked her fingers and the palm of her hand and began patting the residue. It stuck to her skin and she was able to pick it up and brush it off against the fabric inside the neck of her nightgown. When she licked her hands again, the sawdust coated her tongue, nearly choking her as she tried to summon up more saliva. She kept patting, picking up bits of the stain and lifting them inside her gown. It was working. The dust was less and less noticeable.

The bolt snapped back and the door swung open. Emily stood for an instant, frozen in fright. Then she moved quickly, pulling the chain to its limit and stretching her arm over the top of the post. She had only one knee on the bed when she heard the footsteps on the stairs. There wasn't enough time for her to get back under the blanket. She swung her legs around so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her feet dangling down to the floor. She tried to be natural and relaxed, like someone waiting patiently for a meal to be delivered. But when she dropped her arm, the shackle fell outside the corner post. Her hand was pointing around toward the back of the bed, obviously not in the position where she had been left. She looked toward the stairs and saw Rita's face appearing just under the ceiling line. It was too late. She couldn't get her arm back to where it had been shackled.

“Your breakfast,” the woman said cheerily, “and a newspaper.” She walked past the bed and over to the table, never looking directly at Emily. “It's yesterday's paper, but I don't suppose a hell of lot has happened since yesterday.” She set a plate of dry scrambled eggs on the table and put a cup of coffee beside it.

Emily stood up quickly. “Can you take this damn thing off? I have to get into the bathroom.” She held her arm straight out, so that her hand didn't seem to be caught up in the chain. The woman fumbled in her pocket as she crossed to the bed. “Sure. I'm sorry. This must be a bitch for ya.”
She unlocked the cuff and let it fall idly. It jangled down behind the bed, just as if it had fallen between the vertical rungs of the headboard. The woman never spared it a glance.

“Remember.” It was Rita's voice following her into the bathroom. “We're both at the top of the stairs.”

“I know,” Emily answered. “I appreciate your leaving the handcuffs off.”

She ran the water in the sink while she listened carefully for the footsteps on the stairs. The door swung shut, followed instantly by the crack of the bolt. Footsteps moved away from the door and into the room overhead. Emily climbed up on top of the toilet and was able to press one of the ceiling tiles out of its frame. But the opening was too far overhead for her to see into. She looked at the sink, bolted through the wallboard. It seemed sturdy, but would it hold her weight when she stepped on its edge? Directly in front of her was the water tank for the toilet, like the sink, bolted through the masonry. It was built to hold the weight of a couple of gallons of water, so it was probably her best bet. She stood on the toilet seat. When she climbed onto the top of the tank, her head and shoulders reached through the opening into the space above the drop ceiling.

Once again, she was looking down the channel between the rafters. But now she could see daylight at the far end. The channel opened into the ceiling of another room. And the fact that she saw daylight meant that the other room had a window or a door.

There were footsteps in the room above. The boards directly over her head squeaked as they flexed. She was right beneath them and she could hear them so clearly that she knew they would hear any sound that she made when she she tried her escape. And, if they became suspicious, they would have plenty of time to find her. This would be no quick dash to freedom. What Emily was looking at was a slow, exhausting process of wiggling through a narrow channel, making sure to keep her weight on the metal framework and off the fragile tiles. Even though the light seemed to be only thirty feet away, she had to figure at least fifteen minutes to make
the passage. She would have to wait until they had locked her up for the night and gone up to their bedroom. She eased the tile back into position and stepped down carefully.

The eggs were dry and the coffee muddy, but Emily gobbled it down quickly. She wanted to be sitting in the bed in a nonthreatening pose when the woman came down for the dishes so that there would be no reason for her to refasten the handcuffs. She took the newspaper and pulled the blanket up to her waist.

Angela Hilliard sat in the first-class lounge, her laptop computer open on the desk and her morning coffee raised in her hands. She was connected over a telephone line to the bank's local area network and was going through her mailbox. In a moment, she would download the files she needed for her business trip down to Miami.

Generally, at least one day a week began like this. The limo would pull up at her front door and wait patiently while she packed a few things into an overnight bag. Then she would be whisked over the bridge to La Guardia Airport, sometimes to the marine terminal if she were riding on one of InterBank's three executive jets, sometimes to an airline's first-class lounge if she were flying commercial. Always, she would connect her laptop to a telephone line and then log into the bank's internal information network. She would check her mail for anything that needed an immediate answer and respond in her terse, pull-no-punches style. Then she would download the complete data file on the bank client she was visiting, so she could review all the information that might affect her meeting.

She valued the trips on the company planes because she often found herself riding with important senior executives whom she never failed to impress. But she preferred the commercial flights where she could work without being interrupted by polite chitchat. She could simply ignore the person seated next to her, or if her fellow traveler kept trying to be friendly, call the attendant and asked to be moved. Usually there was no seat available, but even the most persistent talker
would take the hint and leave her alone with her computer.

This time, she would have preferred the company plane. The mousy little guy with the wire-framed glasses had followed her right into the lounge. Apparently, he was going to stay with her all the way to Miami. He couldn't have come aboard the executive jet and she certainly would have been able to spot anyone who tried to tag on to her when she left the private hangar in Miami. Since she was flying commercial, it was up to her to lose him.

He had appeared almost miraculously the instant that Walter had warned her that she was being watched. Probably he had been following her earlier and she hadn't noticed him until she was alerted to look for him. But now he was easy to spot in the reflection of store windows whenever she stopped and racing to the taxi that had pulled in behind the one she had taken.

This morning, he had been sitting in an illegally parked car, a few hundred feet from the door. The car had pulled out behind the limousine and managed to remain behind her on the Triborough Bridge and all the way to the airport. At times it had been so close that she could recognize that her man was riding in the passenger seat with another man driving. He jumped out of the car at the terminal and followed her all the way to her airline's departure area. Angela thought she had lost him when she ducked into the first-class lounge. But within a few minutes he entered the lounge, conspicuously without luggage, and brandishing a first-class boarding envelope.

So it had worked. By ordering her ticket through a different Internet service provider, she had disguised her destination. Andrew Hogan hadn't found her travel plan in the InterBank computer and whoever had searched her apartment hadn't found anything in her usual Internet files. They hadn't anticipated her trip. The man had obviously called his office when he found himself entering the airport and had been instructed to stay with her no matter where she went.