Authors: Richard Doetsch
Mia was gone.
F
RIDAY
, 7:00
A.M
.
S
TANDING IN THE KITCHEN
, as the realization that Mia must have been kidnapped washed over him, an even worse thought stabbed at his heart.
“Where are my girls?” Jack spat out, his voice desperate. He raced past Frank, up the stairs again, into their bedroom, looking around. Everything was in place; he checked the drawers, the closets, as if he would find some clue. He had no idea what he was looking for as he searched under their beds. He stopped and looked at the innocence around him, their toys, their books, the stuffed animals on their beds.
With all of his focus on the night before, on Mia, Jack had forgotten about his daughters, always thinking them safe, out of harm’s way. His mind filled with panic, the feeling a parent gets when a child is hurt or in pain, when a child gets momentarily lost in the supermarket, but this was far worse.
Frank arrived upstairs. Standing in the doorway, he looked at Jack, with no answer but a face filled with equal panic.
The sound of a closing door broke the moment. Jack looked out the front window to see a dark blue car at the curb, and a man walking up to the front door.
“Where did you park?” Jack quickly asked.
“In the back,” Frank said as he peered out the window. The two raced down the stairs and into the kitchen, looking out the side window at the dark-haired man.
“Reporter?” Jack asked as the man arrived at the front door.
“No way. Looks like law. Just not sure which side he might be on.”
The knock at the door was loud.
Jack and Frank didn’t make a move. Waiting.
The knock was louder this time, pounding. And the doorbell rang.
There was no more knocking; the moment seemed to draw out. And then the door opened.
With unspoken understanding, Jack and Frank stepped from the window and quietly slipped into the powder room. Through a crack in the door, they could see the man enter the house. He stood in the hallway, listening, eyes shifting around … and he disappeared. Frank slowly drew his gun.
Jack could hear the man walking around, into the kitchen, opening the garage door. They saw him again, back in the hallway. He stepped into the den. Jack could hear him tearing open the drawers of his desk, opening the armoire and the file cabinet, papers rustling, things falling off the desk and the shelf. Then the room fell silent.
And the man burst out of the den, heading upstairs.
Jack and Frank stepped from the powder room and silently walked through the kitchen. Out of sight, they crouched on either side of the stairs. Waiting.
The intruder came down the stairs, carrying something in each hand.
Without waiting, Jack tackled the man hard into the wall, driving his fist into the man’s gut. The man dropped what he was carrying and drew back his fist, but Frank’s fist caught him first, square in the jaw, knocking him to the ground. Frank shoved his gun into the man’s face, ending any further struggle.
Jack glared at the intruder, but his eyes were quickly drawn to what he was carrying. The file was thick, notations in varying pen and pencil covered the outside, and the header was labeled
Keeler
.
Jack snatched it up.
“What is that?” Frank asked.
“Nothing.” Jack headed into the den and put the file away.
“Interesting file,” the intruder said. “Keeping secrets from people?”
“What’s in the file?” Frank asked again.
“Nothing,” Jack said. “Just personal stuff.”
But the file was quickly forgotten as Jack saw the other two things the man was carrying.
“Why the hell would you take these?” Jack yelled at the thief.
They lay there in all of their innocence on the floor. And Jack’s blood began to boil. He had bought them almost a year earlier, they were “just because” gifts, simple yet filled with meaning. Hope and Sara loved the two stuffed bears. One blue, one brown, they always brought smiles to their faces.
Jack grabbed the man, hoisting him up. He slammed his head into the wall. “Why?”
“They’re for your girls,” the intruder said. “To make them happy. To comfort them, give them something to play with.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The intruder stared at him.
“Where are my girls?” Jack pulled the man in close, doing everything he could to restrain himself from killing him.
“Why, did you lose them?” The man smiled, taunting him. “Misplace them?”
“Where are they?” Jack pulled him closer, face-to-face. “Did you take them? Who took them?”
Frank stepped toward him, his gun aimed at the man. He placed his hand on Jack’s arm, the action calming him, getting him to back off.
Jack frisked the man, searching under his suit jacket. He found a gun in a shoulder holster, took it, ejected the clip, tossed it aside. He checked his pockets, finding nothing but a cell phone.
He flipped it open, checked the call log, found nothing. He passed it to Frank.
“It’s new,” Frank said. “A onetime phone so it can’t be traced.”
Jack snatched the phone back out of Frank’s hand and violently threw it against the wall, smashing it to pieces. “Who do you work for? Where are my wife and children?”
The man looked at Jack, his dark eyes curious, questioning. “The whole world thinks you’re dead.”
“Answer my question.”
“How did you survive?” the man asked. “When he finds out you’re alive—”
“Who?” Jack screamed in his face.
“—your wife won’t even make it until dawn.”
“What do you mean?” Jack’s voice was unable to hide his fear.
“He’s leaving the country at dawn tomorrow. Why bother keeping her alive when he could have you?”
And Jack suddenly realized that no one could know he was alive, no one could know he didn’t lie at the bottom of the river, or Mia would surely die.
“Who is he?” Jack screamed as he grabbed the man, his rage trembling in his arms.
But the man fell silent and looked away in defiance.
Frank looked at Jack. “We need to turn him over to the cops—”
“We can’t,” Jack snapped as he let the man go. “What if he’s right? We can’t let this guy out in the open, or it will leak to the press that I’m alive. What if whoever has Mia finds out that the papers are wrong? Then what’s stopping him from killing her, even killing my children?”
He turned back on the man with new anger, grabbing him by the lapel of his jacket. “They’re children, how could you?”
“Jack …” Frank said, trying to calm his friend.
“What the hell are we going to do with him?” Jack turned on the man again and raged into his face. “Where are they?”
Frank thought a moment. “We drop him at a friend’s house.”
“What? Who?”
“Someone I trust even more than you. He’ll keep an eye on him until we can figure out how best to use him. And if need be, he’s the type of person who’s had practice at extracting information. If this guy knows where Mia and the kids are, he’ll find out.”
W
ITH THE MAN’S
hands bound together with duct tape, they tossed him into the rear seat of Frank’s Jeep. Before Frank closed the door, Jack flicked the switch of the child lock. He followed suit on the other door and climbed into the passenger seat, and Frank drove off.
The back roads of Byram Hills were vacant in the early-morning hours of the day before Fourth of July weekend, people having headed off either to work or on vacation.
“You truly have no idea what’s going on, do you?” the man asked, his eyes focused out the window.
Jack looked back over the seat. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
The man remained silent.
“Don’t bother,” Frank said to Jack. “We’ll get our answers.”
Two minutes on, they stopped at a red light on a vacant, tree-lined street. As they silently waited for the light to change, time seeming to drag out forever.
Without warning, the man rolled onto his back in the rear seat and kicked out the window; he dove from the vehicle, hit the ground hard, and was up and running. Jack and Frank leaped from the car and raced after him.
The man sprinted down the road, his feet pounding the pavement, his arms awkwardly swinging from his bound wrists. A noise grew as they ran on, soft, growing louder until they were running
across the overpass of a major highway. He was fast, running for his life, but Jack was running for his wife, his children, and couldn’t let his only connection to them get away. His legs drove him faster and he was suddenly upon the man. He tackled him to the hot blacktop, road-rashing their skin. Frank caught up and violently lifted the man, throwing him against the guardrail of the overpass.
“Do that again, and I’ll throw your ass off this bridge.” Frank drew his gun for emphasis, grabbed the man by his right arm, and held on tight. The man finally relaxed, closing his eyes in defeat.
Jack got to his feet, catching his breath. “You sure your friend is going to be able to hold this guy?”
“Yeah. Ben’s not just a good friend, he’s a military friend, tough. He doesn’t suffer fools like this.”
Without warning, the man opened his eyes, tore away from Frank, and leaped over the guardrail, falling feet-first to the rush-hour traffic below.
Jack realized that escape wasn’t his intention. He knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going, he timed it perfectly.
The fifteen-ton tractor-trailer never even locked up its brakes. The driver didn’t see the man falling into the path of his seventy-mile-an-hour truck until it was too late.
F
RIDAY
, 7:05
A.M
.
R
IDER’S
B
RIDGE WAS AWASH
in emergency vehicles, while scores of people had gathered, lining the bridge rail, watching the search unfold. News trucks lay in wait at the bridge entrance, their cameras fixed on the arrival of an enormous crane. Two ropes were tied to and disappeared off the bridge edge, stretching down into the roiling waters below. A team of scuba divers held tight to the ropes, fighting the rushing current before slipping beneath the surface to continue their search.
A limousine arrived on the bridge, and all eyes turned. News cameras swarmed it. And what little noise was in the air fell away. All waited and watched. After three minutes, Sam Norris exited the rear of the car, accompanied by FBI director Lance Warren. The two tall men had always exuded power and leadership, but today they exuded only sorrow and pain.
They stared at the small numbered evidence markers along the roadway, the black skid marks that led to the missing guardrail. Without a word, they walked to the bridge edge, as everyone gave
Mia’s father and Director Warren a wide, respectful birth. As Norris watched the activity below, he clenched his jaw, holding back his emotions. He knew what he would see. He knew it had been best to leave Pat at home; she was already inconsolable with grief.
Warren laid his hand on Norris’s shoulder. He had called him with the news, sparing his friend from learning about it from a newspaper or a cheery reporter on TV.
A man arrived at Warren’s side. Warren walked away with him so that Norris wouldn’t overhear.
“They found the vehicle.”
“But no bodies?” Warren asked.
“No, sir.” The man was young, efficient, and direct. “The dive team says with the heavy current, the search grid is large, it could take twelve or more hours.”
“What do we know on the bullet?”
“We don’t know yet. Everyone is working on possible scenarios.”
“How do we know they were in the car?”
“At least one airbag is deployed, the driver’s side. They don’t blow unless someone is in the seat.”
“Anyone think this was a hit? Because it’s looking that way, and if that’s the case … These were real good people, Sheldon.”
“I know, sir,” Sheldon said, nodding.
“If they were in the car, what are the chances they survived?”
Sheldon looked at Warren and shook his head.
Warren looked over at Norris, whose eyes were fixed on the dive team in the river. “Double our efforts.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Sheldon, Mia and I discussed an evidence case that had gone missing, a bureaucratic screw-up. Let’s be sure it was the bureaucracy and not something worse. Find out what cases she was working on. Hook up with Keeler’s office, find out what was going on with him. Call Deputy Director Tierney. I want him to handle this personally. If this was murder, I want the bastards found.”
Warren walked back over to Norris and looked out at the raging river. In unspoken understanding, the two men turned as if leaving a funeral. All eyes followed them. The press remained silent, microphones held down at their sides in respect. Warren held the door for his friend and got in behind him, and they drove away.
F
RIDAY
, 7:15
A.M
.
I
F THAT GUY PREFERRED
jumping off a bridge into a tractor-trailer, if that was the only alternative in his mind …” Frank said, but he never finished stating what Jack was already aware of.
“I know,” Jack said, more to himself than to Frank. They were back at his house, trying to regroup. With the death of the man on the bridge, they were thankful no one had seen them.
As much as the man’s suicide scared Jack, his fear for his children was far worse. He had lost the only link to them, the only link to Mia.
Standing in the foyer, he looked at the cell phone he had smashed in anger, wondering if he had destroyed a crucial piece of evidence that would have led him to her. He leaned down and picked up the blue bear. He remembered giving it to Hope last October. He had been working late on a racketeering case for weeks, spending most of his weekends in the office. He had missed them terribly but knew they missed him even more. When the trial finally ended in victory, he had stopped at the toy store and grabbed the blue and brown bears. After arriving home after ten to find Mia
sound asleep, he crept into the girls’ room and sat in a desk chair watching over them. He had missed them as if he hadn’t seen them in months. Knowing that the next day would only bring more routine—school, work, dinner, bedtime—he had leaned over Hope and kissed her cheek, then quickly turned and kissed Sara.