“More activity on Catch Talbot’s MasterCard. The Organic Gourmet in Scotsville just attempted to post a charge.”
Cardozo lifted the receiver and jiggled the cradle till Nynex finally yielded up a tone. He dialed northern New Jersey information and asked for the Organic Gourmet in Scotsville.
“Organic Gourmet, may I help you?”
Cardozo identified himself. “I understand you just posted an order from Catch Talbot?”
“Last Saturday, the twenty-first, Mr. Talbot placed an order for organic venison. It came in today, and now we learn that he’s stopped his card.”
“Was that order a delivery?”
“Yes, it was—72 Turkey Lane, Scotsville. Is this man a criminal?”
“A criminal’s been using his card.”
“Who’s going to pay for the venison?”
“It’ll be taken care of.” Cardozo broke the connection and dialed Bill Benton at the Scotsville precinct. They had a thirty-second discussion. As he hung up the receiver, he realized Mark Wells was blocking his way.
“Did I hear you just mention Toby Talbot?”
“That’s right.”
“Mrs. Bingham and I are coming with you.”
Cardozo shook his head. “Mrs. Bingham’s had a severe shock. You yourself said—”
“Lieutenant,” Anne Bingham interrupted. “I’ve just lost a sister. That leaves me two living relatives left in the world—my father and my nephew. I’m coming with you.”
FORTY-TWO
2:55 P.M.
T
HE STENCILED LETTERS ON
the mailbox spelled
72 Turkey Lane, Sanderson
. Cardozo slowed the car, reached through the driver’s window, and opened the mailbox.
“The Sandersons have been renting through an agent,” Bill Benton said. “The name on the lease is Talbot. He signed Monday the sixteenth—paid cash.”
“Figures.” Cardozo pulled out an ad for a rug-shampooing service, addressed to occupant. He put the flyer back and eased the car into low gear. The driveway needed weeding. The shrubs on either side needed cutting back. They rounded a bend, and there was the house—your basic two-story suburban white clapboard box. Strategically placed green trim and shutters gave an impression of asymmetry.
Cardozo pulled to a stop. He got out and crossed the unmowed lawn. There was a flicker in one of the ground-story windows, and then another in one of the dormers. A shadow approached them in the panes of the door.
“There’s someone home,” Bill Benton said.
“He’s covered the windows in Mylar.” Cardozo pressed the doorbell. “It’s a reflection.”
Something electronic went dingdong inside the house.
They waited. No footsteps, no dog barking.
Cardozo could sense Benton’s nervousness about trespassing. But they weren’t trespassing—yet. It could be an honest mistake, turning into the wrong drive, asking for directions.
He dingdonged again. Silence.
He slipped on a pair of plastic gloves and tried the door handle. Locked.
He walked to the side of the house, shaded his eyes, and peered through the garage window. “No car. Guess no one’s home.”
He went back to the house and hunkered down by a rear cellar window.
“No Mylar,” Benton observed.
“From this point on, we’re in violation.” Cardozo unhooked the flashlight from his belt and rapped the glass sharply with the battery end. The pane shattered.
There was no alarm.
He lifted out the shards. The window was double-hung and there was a second pane of insulating glass. He reached past the weather stripping and rapped again with the flashlight. Glass tinkled to the cellar floor.
He cleared the shards, reached inside, and released the latch. He lifted the window, then lowered himself in feetfirst. “Be right back.”
His feet touched down on concrete. He snapped the flashlight on. The beam swung past the furnace and water heater to a steep, narrow stairway. Wooden steps creaked beneath him.
The Mylar certainly worked. Not a ray of light came through the first-story windows. The flashlight picked out Audubon prints on the hallway wall. The beam found a switch on the wall. He clicked it. A light came on.
To the right of the hallway was a small living room with old-fashioned sofas and armchairs in heavy brocade. The tables were laden with beaded lamps, statuettes, marble eggs—each one upright on its own wooden stand.
He went to the front door and slipped the two deadbolts. Mark Wells’s Mercedes had pulled up in the drive and Wells and Bingham were hurrying across the lawn. He waved them inside.
“Don’t touch anything,” Benton reminded them.
Cardozo led the way up a groaning flight of stairs to the second floor. He opened a door. A narrow bed was tucked into the dormer. A beat-up-looking computer game cassette had been tossed onto the thin white bedspread.
He picked it up.
Spider Man Scrabble
.
“One of Toby’s favorite video games,” Anne Bingham said.
Cardozo lifted the bedspread. “Bed’s been slept in.”
He led the way through a tiled bathroom into a room with a canopied double bed, chaise longue, huge Trinitron TV. The spread had been pulled over the bed without being straightened.
“A man’s been keeping house,” Anne Bingham said.
Cardozo studied the answering machine on the bedside table. He pressed the
replay
button. There were clicks, whirs, a beep. And no message.
He pressed the outgoing message button.
“You have reached area code 201-555-6789.” The woman’s voice had a vaguely Germanic accent. “No one is home at present, but if you wish to leave a message at the sound of the beep, your call will be returned.”
Beep
.
“That’s Juliana,” Anne Bingham said. “Kyra’s au pair.”
Anne took a left turn into the kitchen. At the flick of a wall switch a fluorescent ring sputtered and lit. The dishwasher had been left open. It held dinner service for three, caked with food particles.
Ripping a paper towel from the roll over the sink, she crossed to the fridge, gripped the handle with the towel, and opened it. The shelves held vitamins, mustard, yogurt, celery, bottled water.
As she was closing the door, she dislodged a magnet. A half-dozen pieces of paper glided like a flock of butterflies to the linoleum. She stooped and collected them. They were mostly receipts, but one was a note:
If you come back, we need some rug deodorizer, can buy it myself or you can get it
—
let me know
—
tel
#
212-555-3037
. The seven was crossed, in the European manner, and the note was signed
Juliana
.
“Lieutenant Cardozo,” she called.
Cardozo lifted the kitchen phone and tapped in the New York area code and the number. He held the earpiece so Anne could hear.
There were three rings and then a pickup. “Condom Nation, Henk speaking.” The man spoke the flawless and slightly aristocratic English that they teach nowhere but in the state-funded grade schools of northern Europe. “May I help you?”
“May I speak with Juliana, please?”
“Juliana’s not here, but I can take a message for her.”
“Is there any way I could reach her?”
“You can leave a message.”
“Would you tell her that Catch called—and I have the rug shampoo she wanted?”
“
Rug
shampoo? What is that, code?”
“Just tell her it’s rug shampoo. She’ll understand.”
“Okay. I could tell her that. And how could she contact you, Catch?”
“I’ll be downtown today—I could bring it by your store and maybe you could give it to her.”
“I could do that.”
“What’s your address again?”
The sparkling showcases of the little store on Bleecker Street displayed hundreds of candy-colored designer condoms. Cardozo waited while a customer tried to make up her mind. She had narrowed her options to a salmon mousse-tinted sheath with spearmint-green stripes and a straightforward black latex model.
“Or if you’re in the mood for something minimalist …” The clerk brought out a jeweler’s tray of what seemed to be shower caps for elves. “These require an acetyline adhesive, which we sell.” A tall man with a wedge-shape face, he wore a tricolor ponytail and granny glasses with tinted rose lenses. “The adhesive comes in cinnamon, lemon, and hot ginger.” He winked. “I wouldn’t recommend hot ginger for beginners.”
The woman turned to stare at a shelf of polka-dot dental dams. “Do you ship to Australia?”
“We ship anywhere in the world. Why don’t you take a moment and think about it?” The clerk turned his tanned face toward Cardozo. “Yes, sir?”
“I have a package for Juliana. I phoned.”
“Oh, yes. I’m Henk.” The clerk glided to the end of the counter. He lowered his voice. “Are you sure Juliana is expecting this?”
“She certainly is.” Cardozo slid the package across the countertop. “Urgent.”
Henk looked at his Mickey Mouse watch. “I’ll see she gets it within the hour.”
“Tall guy with granny glasses,” Cardozo said, “and a red-white-and-blue ponytail. Said he’d deliver it within an hour.”
Anne glanced at her watch. It was seven-fifteen and the evening light had faded on the windows of Bleecker Street’s boutiques.
The waitress brought their cappuccinos.
“Have you got a phone?” Cardozo asked.
“There’s one in back.”
“Excuse me.” He pushed himself up from the table. “Have to check my messages.”
Anne ripped open a packet of sugar and stirred it into her coffee.
“No granny glasses …” Mark’s head tipped up and nodded. “But that’s got to be him.”
Anne glanced out the window. Across the street, a tall man with a red-white-and-blue ponytail and a grim face was stepping out of the doorway of Condom Nation. He wore jeans with prefab rips and a maroon
Annie Get Your Gun
national tour T-shirt, and he was carrying the wrapped package of rug cleaner tucked under his left arm.
Anne felt cheated. After a week of courthouse and hotel coffee, she had been looking forward to her cappuccino. “You said an hour.”
“Lieutenant Cardozo said an hour.”
The man looked west through traffic stalled along Bleecker. He grimaced and began walking briskly east.
Anne gulped a mouthful of coffee and grabbed her purse. “I’m going to follow him. You wait for Cardozo. I’ll contact you at your place.” She was up in a single bound, hurrying onto the sidewalk.
The ponytail was already half a block ahead of her, bobbing above a sea of pedestrians. It turned left on 10th Street.
She reached Seventh Avenue just in time to see it duck into a taxicab.
Anne’s hand went up. “Taxi!”
It was one minute after seven-thirty when Anne’s taxi braked to a stop on East 59th Street, under the grimy shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. She caught a glimpse of the ponytail bobbing into the service entrance of a restaurant called Hot Sushi. She thrust a twenty at the driver and didn’t wait for change.
A sumo wrestler in a chef’s hat stopped her at the door. She pointed beyond him at the ponytail cantering past a row of steaming vats and woks. “I’m with him.”
He let her pass.
The kitchen was drenched in smells of ginger and garlic and curry. Juliana stood with a stack of bowls at the salad bar, frowning at a four-ounce container of I Love My Carpet potpourri-scented rug cleaner.
“That’s a present from me,” Anne said.
Juliana’s eyes came around, startled. “I don’t get it.”
Anne opened her purse and took out the note from the refrigerator. “What does this message mean?”
Juliana slipped on a pair of glasses. “It means exactly what it says. I was working for Catch Talbot.”
“How did that happen?”
“That doesn’t concern you.”
“You’re working without a green card. I could phone Immigration.”
Juliana motioned Anne to follow her into a murky storage room. She closed the door. “Catch phoned last week and asked to meet in a coffee shop. He offered me three thousand dollars to leave Kyra and bring Toby to him after school last Friday. But Kyra fired me and told the school I wasn’t to pick Toby up, so Catch had to pick him up himself.”
“And how did Catch manage that?”
“I have no idea. But when I phoned, he asked me to act as a transitional nanny until he got Toby out of the country.”
“Can you describe him?”
Juliana described him. Ultra crew-cut hair. Stocky build. Brown eyes.
“That wasn’t Toby’s father. Catch has blue eyes.”
“How was I supposed to know? I’d never met him before. Kyra never had photos of him. Besides, he showed me plenty of I.D.—with photos.”
“But you knew Kyra had custody.”
“No one’s ever shown
me
any custody papers. And you may not be aware of it, but Kyra’s a pretty casual mother. I told Catch if it meant a decent home for Toby—I’d be glad to help. But I wouldn’t do anything illegal. Catch said it was only going to be for four days. Till the passports came.”
“He was planning to take Toby out of the country?”
“Look, I love that kid like my own little brother, but I can’t get mixed up in this.”
“But you
are
mixed up in it, Juliana.”
“All he told me was—plans had changed—he wouldn’t be needing me. He gave me a hundred dollars and that was that.”
“Back up a moment. When did you last see Toby?”
Juliana screwed up her face, remembering. “Sunday. He was getting antsy. He was tired of reading and tired of his games; and he and his dad weren’t getting along.”
“Don’t call that man his dad. He isn’t.”
Juliana shrugged. “Toby was playing with his modem—he was calling your computer. But Catch said they had to go to the supermarket. Four hours later Catch came back in a taxi, alone.”
“Did he say where Toby was?”
“He wasn’t making sense. He seemed disoriented—he was saying stupid stuff.”
“Stupid stuff like what?”
“He said Toby talked back to him and he had to hand him over to the authorities.”
“
What authorities
?”
“I don’t know.” Juliana began crying. “Catch was screaming and there was blood on his clothes. He asked me to phone a doctor to come pick him up.”