Jeremiah leaned back in his seat. “Tell me everything,” he said, bringing his voice back to a conversational volume.
Kapono cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was your girl.”
Jeremiah didn’t say anything. Better to let him think whatever he needed to in order to get the required results.
An hour later he had eaten his fill and had gotten every last bit of information that Kapono had, even some details the detective probably hadn’t realized were important. Jeremiah took it all in, mind working to connect clues, to see everything. He knew every move Cindy had made that Kapono knew about.
After a promise to be in touch after he had more information, Kapono dropped Jeremiah back at Cindy’s hotel where the rabbi was able to get a room. He needed a base of operations if nothing else. As soon as he stepped foot in his room his phone rang.
It was Mark. He answered.
“Thanks a lot
for the babysitter,
”
he growled.
“Hey, last thing I needed was for you to disappear over there and then I wouldn’t know where either of you were.”
Jeremiah didn’t bother to acknowledge that.
“So, anything?” Mark asked, voice tense.
“Police have officially declared it a kidnapping.”
He heard Mark suck in his breath. “Any leads?””
“A few. It’s not a lot to go on. Apparently on Saturday she found a murder victim and called it in.”
“Of course she did,” Mark said.
“I know. Anyway, the police are tracking down their leads.”
“What are you going to do?”
Jeremiah hesitated. His first instinct was to lie to Mark. The truth was, though, they’d been through some harrowing experiences together and Mark had already bent the rules just to help Jeremiah figure out what had happened to Cindy.
“You don’t want to tell me, do you?” Mark asked quietly.
Jeremiah took a deep breath. “Not particularly.”
“Look. We’ve never talked about what happened up at Green Pastures, when you were on that mountain with the kids. But somehow you got them all out safe even with assassins after you. Clearly you have...skills. I don’t know where they come from and frankly I don’t want to know. What I do want to know is whether there’s anything I can do to help.”
“I’ll let you know if something comes up.”
“Fair enough. And promise me one thing?”
“What?”
“Be careful. I really don’t want to have to go back to the department shrink.”
Jeremiah hung up. He wasn’t about to make promises like that. Not when there was dark work to be done. Not when Cindy’s life hung in the balance.
He closed his eyes and pictured her face in his mind.
Hold on, Cindy, I’m coming for you.
10
“Is everything okay?” Traci asked, yawning as she came into the room.
Mark sat staring at his cell phone. “No, it’s not,” he said finally.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He didn’t want to tell her, but she deserved to know the truth. He looked up. “Cindy’s been kidnapped.”
All the color drained from Traci’s face and she clutched her robe more tightly around her as she sat down on the couch next to him. “Are you sure?” she asked.
He hated the way her hands were starting to shake. He reached out and grabbed her free hand. It had been only half a year since Traci had been kidnapped. It had only been for a few hours but it had been the most terrifying hours of both of their lives. And Cindy had helped save her.
“I’m afraid so. She was on vacation in Honolulu. Jeremiah’s flown over there to help find her.”
“What has she gotten herself into now?” Traci burst out, voice thick with distress.
“Another murder, it sounds like.”
“Why can’t she leave these things to the police? She’s going to get hurt.”
Mark squeezed her hand. He had felt the same way so many times in the past. But if Cindy never got involved, Traci might be dead. A lot more people, too.
“I don’t mean that,” Traci said, hurriedly, as if remembering herself. “I just hope she’s okay.”
“Me, too.”
“Do you need to go over there?” she asked.
He shook his head slowly. “I’d just get in the H.P.D.’s way. Jeremiah’s too, for that matter. Besides, I’m sure my bosses wouldn’t approve.”
“But she’s your friend. They both are.”
He was about to deny it, but then he had to stop and reflect for a moment. Cindy and Jeremiah had started out as citizens in need of his help, his protection. They had quickly graduated to pains in his posterior that needed protecting from themselves. He had grudgingly admitted at last that they were concerned citizens with incredible instincts and a penchant for finding trouble. At some point in there had they become friends? They must have. Otherwise, how else could he explain his behavior two months earlier?
“The last time I thought of them, treated them as friends, I ended up torturing a suspect and nearly destroying us,” he whispered. It was still so hard to admit, to discuss, even with Traci who had been there with them, who had helped save him when he didn’t think he was worth saving.
It was her turn to squeeze his hand. “Whatever you need to do, I’ll support you.”
That was his Traci. Always there for him, his rock. He pulled her close and held her until they both fell asleep there on the couch.
~
After hanging up with Mark Jeremiah left his room and made his way up to the next floor. The door to Cindy’s room was barricaded with yellow police tape. Once he had used the keycard he had lifted off of Kapono he ducked under the tape and entered the room, quickly closing the door behind him. The police had been thorough, but he needed to examine everything for himself.
The detective had said that when he and Cindy were out to dinner she had been wearing a black dress and sandals. He quickly searched through the closet and the drawers and discovered a nightgown but no dress. He also found a pair of tennis shoes but there was no sight of the sandals either.
Which confirmed the suspicions he’d had earlier when he’d seen the room key partially under the bed. She had been grabbed pretty soon after she got back to her room before she had a chance to change. Most likely it had been immediate since she hadn’t had a chance to put the room key away. That helped. It meant she had for sure been taken that night as opposed to later in the evening after going to a store or in the morning returning from breakfast.
Whoever had kidnapped her had been waiting in her room while she was at dinner with the detective. Although it was possible someone had seen them together at dinner and kidnapped her in some sort of revenge scheme against Kapono it was unlikely. No clear message had been sent to him and the kidnappers would have already had to know which hotel she was staying at.
He had already dismissed Kapono as not being involved. The man was an honest cop and his concern for Cindy was genuine. He couldn’t have hidden either of those things from Jeremiah. He had always been able to read people incredibly well.
Ironically it was a skill he had worked hard to suppress once he had come to America and became a rabbi. Ordinary people lied all the time, everything from the polite, white lies about things as mundane as whether a dress made someone look fat to the big, life shattering lies. They lied to themselves every day. They lied to him because they didn’t want him to know what they’d been doing on the Sabbath instead of reflecting on G-d. They also lied to him in therapy which was the saddest of all because only the truth could set them free.
So, he worked hard to ignore the lies and the half-truths that people in polite society told so that everything would remain nice and neat and polite in their little worlds. When he wanted to, though, the ability was still there, just a thought away. He had to be ever vigilant about using it at inappropriate times but when he needed it, he could count on it.
That was how he knew Kapono was telling him everything he knew. He grabbed a pair of gloves out of his pocket. He had gotten them from a box Kapono kept in his car. It was important that he look through everything and he needed to do so without leaving evidence of his visit.
He found all the receipts that were scattered around the room. He studied each of them carefully, memorizing where she’d gone and the order in which she’d gone to them. The night of her arrival she’d had breakfast in the hotel. Unless her kidnappers were other hotel guests it didn’t make sense that there was any problem there.
And if her kidnappers had seen her at dinner or breakfast the next morning what could she possibly have done or said that would lead to her being kidnapped? No, the logical answer was that her kidnapping had something to do with the body she’d found in the restaurant.
The restaurant had been her second stop of the day. Kapono had told him that she had walked there from Pearl Harbor, a fact that surprised the detective. It would have made more sense for her to have taken a taxi off base. Cindy walking through a military base when it wouldn’t have been normal for a person to do so was definitely something he should investigate, the first abnormal thing she had seemingly done since arriving in town.
He pieced it all together through the conversation with Kapono and the receipts that he rifled through. He should be able to recreate her Saturday and Sunday from Pearl Harbor up to the moment she was kidnapped.
Ideally he would have started in the morning after the sun was up and people were awake. He wanted to wait until the exact time of day that Cindy had done each thing, just to detect if there were any patterns or things that were time occurrences that she might have witnessed. He didn’t want to wait that long, though, to get started.
He looked at the time stamp for the gift store at Pearl Harbor. He hoped someone there remembered her. It would help if he could get an idea of her moods and actions during the course of those days. Had Cindy found trouble other than the murdered restaurateur?
He picked up her camera and began to look at the photos. There were shockingly few on there and he started to think she might have taken pictures with her phone instead. He finally found the phone behind the curtains. Someone had smashed it and it wouldn’t turn on. He debated about putting it back. It looked like the police had missed it in their search, but he was loathe to risk removing something they might notice.
He shook his head. If they had found it, they would have taken it with them as evidence and tried to find a way to get the data off of it. He slipped the phone in his pocket and returned to the search.
~
Cindy was exhausted and hungry. She had no idea how long she had been awake or even what day it was. She was sitting, tied to a chair, and had been for so long that she’d long ago lost the feeling in her bottom and her feet. She tried to shift but nothing seemed to work.
Every time she felt like she was going to finally drift off and get some sleep a commercial would come on, loud and blaring, and jolt her awake. The muscles in her eyelids spasmed and she gritted her teeth, hating the sensation. She was so tired she could feel her own pulse pounding through her body. It wasn’t fast necessarily but she was hyper aware of it.
Her terror had given away to a dull, mind-numbing feeling of fear mixed with misery. She had given up trying to figure out what her captor was going to do to her. She was actually starting to think he might let her starve to death or go out of her mind with exhaustion.
A news show came on. Apparently it was six in the morning. She swung her head toward one of the windows, but it was still dark outside. She turned back, staring blankly at the television screen, processing very little of what was crossing it.
A picture of a woman flashed up and with a start she realized it was her. Fully alert she listened to the rest of the announcement. The police knew that she was missing. They were searching for her.
Despair filled her. She wasn’t missing, she was kidnapped. Until they got that straight they’d be looking in all the wrong places, like the ocean and hiking trails and places where a tourist could get lost or injured. Tears stung her eyes. Had they gone through her room? Why hadn’t they figured out she had been kidnapped?
She wondered if Kapono was worried and in the next breath she realized that the police had probably called her home. Geanie would have answered the phone, been told that she was missing. Geanie would have called Jeremiah to tell him.
Jeremiah.
She had to get free. She had to see him again. If he could survive assassins trying to kill him and a bunch of teenagers in the woods then she could survive this. She looked around. If only she could find a way to signal to someone, to let them know that she was here and alive and
kidnapped
.
A sudden sound in the hallway caused every muscle in her body to tense so suddenly that half of them cramped. She bit her lip and struggled not to cry out with the pain of it all.
I’m dehydrated
, she realized as the muscles in her left hand continued to spasm before the fingers curled into the palm like claws and stayed there. The pain was excruciating and even worse was the desperate sensation of
wrongness
.
An image darkened the doorway and then the overhead light flicked on. Mr. Black was standing, arms crossed, staring at her. She tried to read his expression but his face was neutral. He stared at her for what seemed like an impossibly long time, as though he was trying to make his mind up about something. Finally, he gestured to the television.
“Someone
finally
realized you were missing,” he said.
She heard the emphasis he put on the word
finally
. He wanted her to think that it was unusual that it had taken so long, that no one cared, that she was unimportant. But she wouldn’t let him do that to her.
“They’ll come for me,” she said. She tried to put as much conviction into her voice as she could. Maybe if he thought people were searching for her, he’d let her go. She knew it was a long shot, but she had to try.
He smiled that slow, creepy smile that made her skin crawl. “I very much doubt that. Oh, I’m sure they’ll look for you. But they’ll never find you. They’ll spend a few days combing Honolulu and then the rest of the island before they give up.”
“They might find me,” she said, hoping she sounded defiant.
“No, they won’t. You’re not on Oahu.”
He might as well have slapped her. She could feel herself reeling from the impact of the revelation. Her worst fears had been realized. She had left the island completely and they wouldn’t know to look for her on a different island.