Thursday evening, two cars sat in the dark and expansive grocery store parking lot. The pavement around the cars was shiny. Behind them, the Cooper’s Mill Burger King stood next to Main Street.
The rain that had been coming down off and on for three days had let up momentarily. Only a light mist hung in the air over the two cars, which had been positioned so the driver’s windows faced each other.
Tyler, the man sitting in the police cruiser, spoke first.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“Yes,” the other man said, his face hidden in the shadows. “I’m sure.”
The two drivers spoke quietly, occasionally glancing around to make sure they were not being watched.
The man reached over and passed Tyler the green duffel bag, passing it between the open windows. “There’s your money, plus whatever you get from the second ransom on Saturday. Bad idea, by the way.”
Tyler nodded, taking the money. The bag was heavier than he expected. He put the money in the floorboard.
“Thanks,” Tyler said. “My people are getting itchy. But I don’t think it’s a bad idea—gotta keep Chief King and the others distracted. And this will all be wrapped up by Saturday night or Sunday. And then it will be ‘Buona Sera,’ as my mom used to sing.”
The other guy nodded.
“What are you doing about the girls? I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” the man said. “You promised me.”
“I know,” Tyler said, nodding. “Everything’s going to be fine. But that’s one reason I asked for the second ransom—I need more cash to cover the extra expenses. The little girls have spent time with my contacts and know what they look like. So my people need to leave the area—and I’m leaving, too. After this, my contacts and I are going away for a long time.”
“I just wish you had told me about it first,” the other man said, shaking his head. “I didn’t like hearing about it on the news.”
“Had to be done,” Tyler added. “Besides, Nick Martin and his pretty wife are good for it.”
“What about that new cop?”
“He’s no idiot,” Tyler said, glancing around. “He’s retired PD. Digging into the case, talking to everyone again. Re-interviewing the Martins, going over the evidence.”
The other man shook his head.
“I don’t like it. Do we have to get the second ransom? Why can’t we just wrap this up now?”
Tyler looked at the man. “Hey, you got your money, right? So, I’m just supposed to go away and never bother you again? And my contacts are just supposed to disappear?”
The other man shook his head. “No, but there’s a lot of money in that bag, more than enough—”
“It’s not enough,” Tyler said. “Not by a long shot. So drop it about the second ransom. I’ll handle it, and then we’ll wrap things up. Girls go back to their families, you and I part ways, everyone’s happy.”
The man nodded slowly.
“That would be fine, except for this new guy. What was that he said at the press conference about identifying the kidnappers? That can’t be true, is it?”
Tyler shook his head, but waited a moment before speaking. He loved that look on people’s faces when he had information that they wanted, and he held it back.
“He’s just fishing,” Tyler said. “Looking to stir things up. Getting the press involved was his idea, too—before, Chief King was holding them off.”
The other man shrugged. “I don’t like the attention. Will he find anything?”
“Don’t worry about them,” Tyler said curtly. “Things are moving along. And then ‘There’ll be no next time,’” he said, singing the Louis Prima tune. The song sounded odd and out of place in the dark, but he didn’t care. “But this is it. No more meetings, unless you’ve got more money for me.”
The police radio squawked loudly, announcing an EMT run in progress in Cooper’s Mill. Tyler reached over and silenced the radio.
The other man was quiet for a moment, and then nodded slowly. “OK, no more meetings. What are you going to do with the girls?”
Tyler shook his head.
“Beep boop—like I always say, it’s taken care of. I said don’t worry about it, just like I said don’t worry about that money from the second ransom. I’ll take care of it.”
“Good,” the other man said sharply. “Good luck with the money.”
Tyler nodded.
“Nothing to worry about,” Tyler said.
It was late on Thursday evening, and Frank was back in his hotel room.
He had spent most of the day at the police station, watching the videotaped interviews with the principals in the case. He’d also talked to each of the police officers and investigators in turn, even holding a short and snippy conversation with Deputy Stan Garber, nursing his broken arm. Frank let each one talk, asking questions and trying to find any information that might have been gathered by the cops but had failed to make it into the written reports.
He was trying to stay busy. Every time he slowed down, even for a moment, his hands started to shake and he started thinking about a bourbon on the rocks. Or five.
A solid two hours of the day, after lunch, had been taken up with a long meeting with Agent Shale, going over the finances for Martin Construction again. Frank had been through the financial reports on Wednesday, back at the coffee shop, but this time, he and Shale went through each and every Martin Construction investment—and there were many—and determined who might gain from bankrupting the company. Between both ransoms, Martin was back on his heels.
Nick Martin and his company had had their fingers in a lot of pies. Frank had heard that saying from Ben Stone, and it had stuck. And Ben and he had investigated enough cases together to know that somehow, it all fit together, if you did the work. More times than he could count, Frank and other investigators had broken a case wide open by finding a seemingly-pointless gas station receipt or other scrap of information. In one case, the identification of the kidnappers had turned on the mention of a limited financial partnership in an obscure legal document, a document that had been sitting in the case file since the day the investigation started.
Frank and Agent Shale had gone through all the construction projects, finished and unfinished, and made a list of all of the “partners,” or people, that could benefit. It tied into Frank’s newest theory: that, somehow, the entire kidnapping was really a way to put financial pressure on the Martin’s and Martin Construction.
Soon they had a nice short list of business partners and other businesses to look into, and Frank had tasked Shale with running down reports again on all of those people. They’d run credit checks/histories on all of them before, but Frank wanted more information, anything the FBI could dig up. All the other files were stacked up on the table next to the hotel room window, ready to be referenced again, if needed.
But first, he was sketching out the connections, as he remembered them. He was drawing a “map” of the members of the community and how they were connected. He was making visual notes on several sheets of paper, drawing circles with names in them and connecting them to other circles with names in them.
Steve Furrows, the ex-partner who had been such a pain in the ass when he was trying to quit smoking, had used this methodology, called “mind mapping,” to link together everything in the case and make a map of those involved. Steve had said it helped him see the big picture and to trace all the linkages back to the original crime. Frank had found it worked particularly well in cases like this one, with lots of people involved and all of them seemingly connected in one way or another.
So Frank worked, head down at the small round table by the window, drawing on sheets of white paper and taping each of them up on the window. Back in his field days, he would have done this in his office, posting the map in a central conference room where everyone working on the case could see it. Instead, he was working this one by himself, apart from the other cops, at the request of Chief King.
Frank knew that reviewing all the case files again, after spending six hours today reading them, would be overkill—and it might overtax his weary mind—but there was just something off about this case.
On first blush, the case looked like a slam-dunk, but nothing strange had come up in the profiles of any of those people connected to the family. Everything seemed on the up-and-up.
It was going to be a long night.
Frank sighed and muted the TV—he had it on to watch the news when it came around. He wanted to see the press conference and any other press coverage. Frank really didn’t care about how he ended up looking or sounding on the TV—he’d been in enough high-profile cases to get his ugly mug on TV before. But he was interested in how the news stations reported it and what, if anything, would be the reaction in the community to the “news” that the kidnappers had been positively identified.
He tried to ignore the sealed bottle on top of the mini-bar.
Frank had had a nice dinner downtown at “O’Shaughnessy’s.” He’d sat in the bar, and one entire wall of the place was this beautiful, old, exposed brick. Great food, too. But on the way back to the hotel, he’d found himself at the little liquor store located next to a Domino’s.
He’d gone inside and grabbed one of those baskets, filling it up with great stuff, but then ended up putting almost all of it back except for one bottle of Maker’s Mark. Maybe he’d been embarrassed, looking down at the basket. How sad was it that his first reaction to a windfall of cash, something he’d been deeply worried about only last night, was to blow it all on bourbon?
Or maybe he was worried about the promise he’d made to Chief King.
Frank knew that he shouldn’t, but he needed it to think. His brain just didn’t work right without a drink or two. It was the lubrication that made his mind operate, like oil in an engine. He needed to go through all the files again, one by one, making notes and diagrams and staying up as long as it would take. The bourbon would help. His internal debate only lasted a few more minutes before he retrieved the bottle and slowly opened, taking in the rich aroma. Frank poured himself out a measure in a glass, and threw it back.
The warmth spread slowly through him, calming him. Bourbon always made him feel warmer and somehow stretched out, flatter and looser, more mellow. Nothing was out of reach, no puzzle too difficult to solve. He tipped another measure into the glass and drank it quickly, then a third measure went into the glass, and he walked over to the table and sat down, setting the glass next to the stacks and stacks of files.
He looked out the window, past the few sheets of his “map.” The trucks hummed on the highway, racing into the night. The cars and trucks and their drivers were whizzing past the exit to this little town, oblivious to what was happening just a mile away. The people in those cars probably didn’t know about the kidnapping or the botched ransom drop or the bewildering second ransom call from the kidnappers, something exceedingly rare. He’d only heard of it happening a few other times. No one ever went back to the well. It was just too dangerous.
But the people in those cars didn’t know or didn’t care.
He wished he could walk away. Why had he allowed himself to get caught up? He hated himself for being so weak, but, at the same time, the case was helping his mind—even if it was baffling, at least his mind had something to work on for the first time in a long while.
Frank shook his head and looked back at the files. He knew he could just stare out the window for hours, watching the cars whiz by and relaxing into the warmth in his belly. But he needed to be making progress. He needed to find something, anything, that he could add to the map and point him in a new, and fruitful, direction.
He opened the first box of files and set aside the stack of pens, tape, and a pair of scissors resting on top. The first file was one of the red ones, the incident report. It was the first file he’d ever read on the case, only 36 hours ago at the coffee shop, Wednesday morning, when Deputy Peters had dropped the boxes and two of the files had fallen into the bloody water. This would be Frank’s fourth time through all the case files, but he figured he’d better start over, right at the beginning. He took the case file—labeled “Incident Report Scene Investigation”—and flipped it open.
George drove the Corolla down the long, straight country road that ran north out of Troy and into farmland that stretched off into the night. He loved driving at night, the windows down, especially when the weather was excellent and allowed it. And the Corolla wasn’t nearly as nice as the Mustang, which had come and gone from his life, but it was better than sitting at the farmhouse, listening to Chastity complain.
Finally, he spotted the turn and edged the Corolla off the road and around the bend that marked the small paved road that led up a low hill to the farmhouse. The boss had called and needed George to run a couple of errands, and George had jumped at the chance.
She was still waiting up when he got back to the farmhouse.
He saw her standing on the porch, her arms crossed, when he parked the beat-up Corolla out front. He always wondered why she didn’t get colder when she was outside. She never seemed to be wearing much.
“Puddin’—this isn’t working!” Her voice was so shrill—it carried out into the night, and he closed the door behind him. He hoped the barn-owl shrieking didn’t wake the girls upstairs. He walked past her on the porch and headed inside.
“Chas, I’m back, but I’m tired. What’s wrong?” he said.
She nodded.
“I don’t hear you talking about getting more money. Plus, they just said on the news that they’ve identified us!” Her arms were crossed, and she looked tired, so tired. He wondered what she’d been doing this whole time. He could hear the TV on in the living room, so she must’ve stayed up.
George shook his head.
“No, the boss said it was bullshit. They don’t have a clue about us, just a vague description. He said the cops were just trying to spook us. You didn’t need to wait up,” he said. George felt dirty and tired and the only thing he wanted in the world right now was a shower.
Chastity shook her head.
“I waited up because this whole plan is bullshit. We need to get our money and leave. Or just leave,” she said, looking up the stairs. “What if the boss and this other guy just take off, and we’re stuck with those girls? What happens then?” she yelled, pointing up the stairs. “What?”
He didn’t know what to say and only shrugged. “The boss said this was it.”
She laughed, that sharp, cold laugh that he hated.
“They are going to screw you over,” she said. “You and me. Either they leave us holding the bag, or something bad happens to us,” Chastity said.
George shook his head. “Chas, nothing bad is going to happen. The boss has never—”
“You see what I did?” she shouted, pointing at the door. “You need to do the same.”
He looked. There was a packed bag by the door and another smaller bag that looked like toiletries next to it. Her curling iron and that little golden sewing kit she loved so much were sticking out of the top.
“We have to get out of here—at this point, I don’t even care about the money,” she said. Her eyes were wild, panicked. “Puddin’, I know, it sounds like crazy talk. And you know I pushed you into this deal. But I just have a bad feeling this is going to go south, and quick.”
George looked at the bags. The boss had never screwed him before, but Chas was right—this was different. The boss had been acting weird lately, not dropped by the farmhouse at all to check on the setup beyond that one visit early on. And the boss hadn’t been around to get the next shipment of bricks, which were just piling up in the garage, in the empty area where that old Mustang had been parked.
“You might be right,” he said, nodding. “I trust the boss, but it’s weird that this has gotten delayed and delayed.”
Chas nodded. “Right? I saw on TV that someone is demanding more money. Did you see that? Even as close as that ransom pickup was—anything could have gone wrong, and now they’re asking for more? Did the boss ask you to pick that money up, too?”
George shook his head, weary. He started for the stairs. “No, he’s handling that.”
“‘Handling it’—more like he’s cutting us out completely,” she said, laughing again.
George got to the first step and stopped, nodding.
“Look, I’m tired, but you might be right,” he said. “I’m going to shower, and then I’ll pack a bag.”
Chastity nodded, and he could tell she was happy, or at least happier, for having won the argument. It was amazing, and a little sad, at how often he let her win, or have her way, just so he could see that look on Chastity’s face.