House of Secrets - v4 (32 page)

As predicted by Detective Lamb, a team of FBI officials had arrived at the apartment, and when Andy got in from the airport soon afterward, he had immediately fallen into battle with them over their plan to route all of Christine’s emails to their own surveillance account as well as to maintain an open tap on their phone. Christine had joined the battle, but on the side of the federal agents’ recommendations, and so her and Andy’s first face-to-face exchange concerning the crisis with their daughter had been one of rancor. A bad start.

I
n the absence of any fresh developments concerning Michelle’s abduction itself, the news channels were essentially airing any footage they could scrape up that included either Michelle or Christine. They were running loops about Christine’s childhood as the daughter of Governor Hoyt, her marriage to then-congressman Foster, her career as a photographer (the print Christine had sold to Placido Domingo was clearly slated for some massive overexposure), and, of course, Michelle’s “Little Wizard” moment.

“This is like my very own designer hell,” Christine remarked after the fourth or fifth viewing of footage showing her aiming a pair of thumbs-up as she emerged from a voting booth. “Who are the
freaks
who are watching this crap?” The voting booth clip was replaced by a clip of Andy addressing the Earth Day rally. Christine rose from the couch.

“Stop looking at us!
For Christ’s sake. Get your own goddamned life!”

Andy clicked to a new channel. Michelle was riding atop her daddy’s shoulders. Christine’s mouth dropped open.

“Where the hell did they get
that?”

Andy studied the screen. “Isn’t that Whitney’s seventieth?”

Christine was already fumbling with her cell phone. “That son of a bitch! I can’t believe he—”

“Don’t call your father!” Andy set down the remote. “Chrissie, seriously. I’m sure he didn’t—”

Christine’s arm jerked and she threw her phone across the room, missing the television by several inches. It hit the bookshelf behind the television and clattered to the carpet.

“Michelle!
Please, God. Where
is
she?”

Andy caught his wife before she collapsed to the floor. Her warm tears flooded onto his neck, and he guided her to the small leather couch next to his desk and lowered her onto it. Tears choked in his own throat as he held his sobbing wife. Over the twenty minutes the two sat clinging to each other on the small couch, Christine emerged twice from the voting booth, Michelle appeared three times as a newborn in her proud father’s arms, and Andy’s face flashed across the muted screen too many times to count.

C
hristine offered only the smallest resistance when Andy came into the bedroom rattling the bottle of Tylenol PM. She was dressed for bed, backed up against the pillows. Andy handed Christine a glass of water and shook two tablets into her hand.

“I regret everything,” Christine said, her voice slightly hoarse from her crying.

“Shhhhhh. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I do.”

“Sweetie, you’re exhausted. You’re beat. We’re both beat.”

Christine’s red-rimmed eyes implored him. “Can’t we talk, Andy? We have to talk.”

He touched a finger to the middle of her brow. “It’s late. Neither of us is going to be articulate right now.” He urged her to swallow the mild sedative. Christine popped the tablets into her mouth, washed them down with water, and handed her husband the half-empty glass.

“Why is this happening?”

“Shhhh,” he said again. “This isn’t the time.”

He stripped down to his boxers and climbed into bed next to his wife. She folded her body against his and laid her cheek on his chest.

T
wenty minutes later Andy slipped delicately out of the bed. Christine’s breathing was gentle and deep. In his den, Andy sat at his desk, staring at the slip of paper on which he’d written the phone number of the Mad Russian. They had only spoken that one time, three nights ago, when the blackmailer had laid out his staggering demands. Four days remained until Andy was supposed to be at the ready with half a million dollars. Andy’s thumb remained poised above his cell. The Russian
must
be involved in Michelle’s abduction. He had to be. Andy was convinced that his daughter was being used by the blackmailer to seal the deal. Andy himself might have been willing to accept his sordid behavior becoming public knowledge and his career immolating in a nanosecond, but there was no chance he would allow his very own daughter to suffer as a result of his pathetic indiscretions. Not a chance. The Russian would presume this. Or Aleksey Titov would. Or who-the-hell-ever.

Andy punched the number. It rang and rang and rang. He gave it a full two minutes before cutting off the signal. He sat at his desk another ten minutes, staring a hole into his future. It never became large enough for him to crawl into. At any rate, even if it had, Andy suspected it could only have been a very cold and very lonely and very unforgiving place.

T
he ringing of the phone pierced Megan’s dream. Sweeping out with her arm, she pawed the instrument off the bedside table.

“What.”

The red digits on her bedside clock showed 3:52. Otherwise, blackness draped the room.

“Detective Lamb? It’s Sergeant Friedlander. I’m sorry to wake you.”

Megan croaked, “Who says you woke me?”

“I… It’s four o’clock. I just assumed.”

“What is it, Sergeant?”

“I knew you’d want to know. We’ve got a positive on the vehicle you’re looking for.”

Megan was in a sitting position before she knew it. She pulled the phone onto her lap. “The van?”

“White step van. The one used in the Foster abduction.”

“Hold on.” Leaning sideways, she turned on the bedside lamp. She tugged open the bedside drawer and pulled out a pen and paper. She thumbed the detonator on the pen. “Okay. What do you have?”

“It’s in a parking garage,” Friedlander said.

“Address?” She scribbled down the address the sergeant gave her. She underlined it violently. “Shit. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I just got off the phone with the attendant. The van’s up on the roof. The attendant was moving it out from under one of those bunk-bed slots to get to the car on top and he saw something in the back of the van.”

He paused. Megan stared up toward a corner of her ceiling. “Are you going to tell me what he saw, Sergeant?”

“It’s a body. Female. The throat’s been slashed.”

“Shit. Is it the girl?”

“There’s no ID yet. It’s all still sketchy. The call just came in.”

“No one’s on the scene?”

“Just the attendant. A unit’s on the way.”

“So am I.”

Megan disconnected the call with her finger. The phone remained on her lap. Her eyes traveled again to her ceiling. The image coming to her mind was all too keen and all too unwelcome. A solitary figure, as white as a snowflake, rising up through a pitch-black sky. Megan was sick to death of ascending angels. Truly sick of them.

She lifted her finger and began poking out a number. With each digit she pressed she felt like she was setting off little bombs.

A
pair of early morning jetliners were crossing overhead, reflecting the softly bruised sky so completely as to be nearly indistinguishable from it. Detective Megan Lamb stood at the barrier wall of the rooftop lot, watching the planes and also the windows of the buildings along the New Jersey side of the Hudson igniting with golden light.

She felt like a dope.

The APB from the day before had alerted law enforcement officers in all five boroughs, as well as the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, to keep their eyes peeled for the nondescript unmarked white van used in the abduction of Senator Andrew Foster’s daughter. Of course, Megan would have been a
real
dope if she hadn’t put out the call immediately. This wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that while she had envisioned the van streaking away from the city as fast as it could, she had failed to consider that Michelle Foster’s kidnapper would have driven all of four and a half blocks from the spot where he snatched the little girl and tucked the van into a parking garage. Since yesterday afternoon, the van had been sitting right here on the roof of the garage.

Megan turned her back on the sky and looked over at the van. A person stumbling onto the scene might have thought that a commercial was being shot, or a movie. Two pairs of strong spotlights had been set up, bathing the vehicle in an unreal semblance of noonday brilliance. The morning was light enough now that the illumination was no longer necessary for the technicians to do their work, but nobody had bothered yet to flip the switches.

The van was being thoroughly dusted and fluoroscoped; if so much as a common housefly had landed anywhere on its surface — exterior or interior — its teensy footprints would be noted. Those were Megan’s orders.

The coroner and the photographer had already finished their preliminary work with the body. The blood-soaked mover’s quilts in which it had been wrapped were secured and on their way to the lab. The van’s tires were being scraped for traces of any materials that might suggest where the vehicle’s recent travels had been. In general terms, Megan already knew the story the tires would tell. She had almost told the technicians not to bother. Ninth Avenue and Thirty-second, where the van had been rented. Traces of the West Side Highway. Hudson Street. Perry Street. Possibly — probably — some greased grime from the asphalt of the parking garage. Not a terrifically illuminating story.

The small body remained on a gurney, tucked away in the parking spot previously occupied by the van. It remained covered with a gray blanket. Two men emerged from the stairwell. One was in a suit. The other — the older of the two — wore an open-collared shirt, dark slacks, and a navy blue sports coat. FBI.

“Polly wolly doodle all the day,” Megan muttered to herself, and she crossed the roof and met the two in front of the van. The older agent spoke first. Megan knew that he would.

“Do we need those lamps?”

“We did,” Megan replied. “We were here before the crack of dawn.”

“I would have liked to have been here before the crack of dawn.” The senior agent’s irritation was on full display.

“We were a little busy,” Megan said evenly. “You can probably imagine.”

The agent’s name was Taylor. He didn’t reply immediately. He decided he had made his point. His partner, Brian Armstrong, was practicing his smart-ass smug face. Already, Megan didn’t care for him.

“You might attract a traffic copter with those lights,” Taylor said. Megan shrugged. Who cared about a silly traffic copter? Taylor indicated the van. “So, it was here all along?”

“Appears so. He drove it over here right after he grabbed the girl. It was clocked in here at three twenty-seven. Quick and easy off the street.”

“Sweet,” Taylor said, though there was nothing dulcet about the way he said it.

Megan shook her head. “He boned us.” The word earned a spark of life from the younger agent. Megan wanted it clear between her and the federal agents that she wasn’t a whiner or an excuse maker. She also wanted the word
us
in there. Share the love, share the blame.

She went on, “Of course we all thought he would get the hell out of Dodge. Ninety percent of the time that’s what they do. They scram. We know that. It doesn’t mean he’s smarter than us. He had the luxury of planning. We had to leap.”

We, we, us, we. That should do it
.

Taylor appeared willing to concede the point. “Do you want to show us the vic?”

The three moved over to the gurney. Brian Armstrong glanced overhead at the empty parking rack above them, and Megan explained to the agents the parking choreography.

“Guy came in from the clubs around three. His car was up there, so they had to move the van to get it. That’s when they found her.” She added, “Good thing they moved things around. We might not have caught this for days.”

Taylor frowned. “We need to keep thinking in terms of hours on this, Detective.”

“I’m just saying.”

He indicated the gurney. “Let’s see it.”

As Megan reached for the blanket, the spotlights over by the van clicked off. The effect was something like the opposite of a camera’s flash, everything plunging into a thick darkness for the several seconds it took until the eyes adjusted. Megan took hold of the blanket and pulled it down past the victim’s neck. The neck was where the damage had been done. A deep black slice. There were also several small cuts around the eyes.

Taylor asked, “Any prints anywhere?”

“There’s a pair of eyeglasses. It’s too early to tell for certain. But there looks to be a pretty sizable thumbprint on one of the lenses.”

“A thumb would be nice.”

Megan looked down at the stilled face. “They’re pretty strange-looking glasses. I mean, style-wise. Nothing you’d catch me wearing.”