by Dale Mayer
As he stepped across the threshold, Steve glared at him and said, “Don’t think I’ll forget this.”
“Don’t think I’ll forget the two of you being part of this,” Gavin said, his tone harsh. “Your priorities have been stated very clearly.”
At that, Steve had the grace to look ashamed. But Melinda just tossed her hair. “Oh, just get over it. I’m tired. I’m cranky, and I really don’t want to deal with any more of this shit.”
“Fine,” Gavin said. “I want to know exactly what happened from the time you left the hotel to go to the restaurant.”
“Why to the restaurant?” she asked, throwing herself on the couch.
He sat across from her, pulled out his phone, put it on Record, and placed it on the table between them. She rolled her eyes, but she gave a simplified version of how they decided to go a few blocks over to a steak house because her father was a red meat eater and didn’t really consider any other food a proper meal. She laughed at that. “He never was very tolerant of the dietary wishes of other people.”
“So your father is arrogant and self-centered?”
She shrugged. “He’s very successful, and with that comes a certain amount of ego, yes.”
“So, at the restaurant, then what?”
She raised both hands in frustration. “What do you mean, then what? We ate. We enjoyed dinner, and then we left. On our way back, like a couple blocks, we were almost at the hotel. We were right out in front of it actually, when we were attacked,” she said, and she glared at him. “It was really traumatic, you know? I don’t appreciate you bothering me right now.”
“The sooner I ‘bother you,’ as you put it, the sooner we can find out what happened to your parents.”
“You should have gotten them already. I mean, we had to escape ourselves.” She used such a derisive tone that even Steve winced, then sat down on the couch beside her.
“And it’s awesome that you did escape,” Steve said. “But your parents are older and don’t have Rosalina with them.”
“I guess,” she said. She glared at Gavin. “You might be Steve’s friend,” she said, “but I don’t consider you mine. So get on with whatever questions you have and then get out of here, please.”
Gavin barely held back a snort. Talk about a snobby, pissed-off, self-centered female. But he did have more questions, and he worked his way through them, listening to her answers.
No, she didn’t notice anything unusual at the restaurant.
No, she doesn’t think they were followed.
No, she didn’t recognize anybody in Honolulu that she might have known elsewhere.
No, she didn’t have any idea who had done this or why.
Her answers were the same all the way down. When he was finally done, she huffed. “I told you I didn’t know anything,” she said, as she stood up. “Let yourself out.” And, with a dismissing wave of her hand, she walked into the bedroom.
Gavin stared after her in wonder.
Steve immediately rushed in to apologize. “She is overwrought.”
Gavin shot him a look and said, “Sure she is,” but he got up, and he left without saying any more to Steve. Gavin wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say anyway. Offering condolences didn’t seem quite right. The fact that his buddy was hitching his life to that woman was enough to make Gavin question Steve’s judgment. Gavin had thought Steve was a good guy, but, wow, had he ever taken a path in the wrong direction when getting engaged to Melinda.
Gavin made his way to Rosalina’s room, wondering how two daughters raised by the same parents could be so different. And that sent him off on another track with a note to check DNA between them. He walked into her room to see her sitting there, munching away on a treat from the trolley in front of her, sipping a cup of coffee and conversing with Shane. Gavin realized how much easier she was to be around and how positively obnoxious her sister was. She looked up at him and smiled, and it was a genuine smile. Not something pasted on for the moment. He smiled back instinctively. “How is the coffee?”
“Excellent,” she said with feeling. “How is my sister?”
He didn’t answer her right away, until Shane nudged him. “Did you talk to her?”
“If you can call it talking to her, yes,” he said. “Actually no. That’s not a good way to describe it. I talked to her, but did she converse with me? No, not really.”
“Oh, dear. Was she in her Royal Princess Melinda mode?”
“Oh, was she ever,” he said. “I apparently disturbed her, but she hadn’t been sleeping at all, by the way, Shane. That was Steve just giving her some space apparently.”
Shane rolled his eyes. “Of course. No concern for her parents?”
“No. Not only that, she went so far as to say that we hadn’t contributed anything yet because these two had rescued themselves and that I should be looking to find her parents instead of bothering her.”
“Lovely,” Shane said, while he watched Rosalina as she shrugged and took another bite of her treat. “So, you don’t like to talk about your sister?”
She shot him a look. “Doesn’t do any good,” she said. “Melinda is Melinda, and everybody has always given her room to develop into who she is today,” she said. “You can try going against the grain, but it won’t do any good.”
“Interesting,” Gavin murmured. He poured himself a cup of coffee, then sat back down and asked, “Do you share your sister’s opinion that we’re doing nothing?”
“I don’t know what the hell anybody can do under these circumstances with so little to go on,” she said. “I’m still trying to figure out exactly why she was gagged and I wasn’t.”
“So you think that’s important too?” Gavin asked.
“It’s an anomaly,” she said, “and that makes it important.”
Gavin loved that. Because she was thinking seriously like a scientist, and he agreed with her. “Your sister doesn’t remember anything distinctive. Nobody followed you. Nobody may have spent too much time looking at you at the restaurant. Nothing. And yet you were obviously targeted.”
“What are the chances it was random?” she countered, her gaze clear and direct. “What if they just decided to grab an older couple or all four of us on a whim?”
“Motivation?”
“Money,” she said.
“And yet we haven’t had a ransom demand yet.”
“It’s not even been twenty-four hours,” she said, then stopped to look at her watch, “or has it?”
“We’re pretty well there,” Shane said.
“No wonder I’m hungry,” she said, reaching for another muffin. Stopping, she asked, “We should have better food than this, right?”
“Yes, we should,” Gavin said. “I was hoping maybe I could get your sister and Steve to join us, but, on second thought, it’s probably better if we don’t.”
Laughing, she said, “Yeah, probably better.”
“Any forensic information yet?” Shane asked.
Gavin pulled out his phone and checked and said, “I don’t have any messages yet.” He walked over, pulled his laptop from his bag, brought it up, and opened the chat window. He immediately asked for an update on the satellite cameras and the city cameras. Instantly two links showed up.
You could have sent those to me earlier, he typed.
They just came in. Did you question the sisters? Lennox asked.
One’s cooperative. One’s not. Need you to dig into Melinda’s background, as deep as you can. Gavin realized he was typing the message hard and fast. She’s all about herself and doesn’t give a damn about the parents, it seems anyway. Except that their loss might give her a little more attention and possibly more money. I don’t know what the motivation is for the attitude. It’s hard for me to understand, but it’s pretty ugly.
Ugly, ugly as in “killed her parents” ugly?
Gavin had to chuckle. Lennox knew how to cut to the chase with style. No, ugly as in, I’m the prima donna, and everybody else needs to kowtow
to me.
Oh, one of those.
Yeah.
Also still no red flags on the exes. Back in five on the rest.
Gavin checked the two links, while Lennox was off getting information on Melinda. The links had the cameras checking all vehicles going into the parking garage and around the surface of that building, where the sisters had been held. He brought out his notepad and a pen and jotted down a couple interesting vehicles, followed them through, only to realize that they ended up going nowhere. He could spend hours doing this. Hours that these parents most likely didn’t have.
He stopped and looked at Rosalina. “With your parents removed right now, does that stop something from happening at work? Or related to work?”
Her eyebrows came together as she studied him, slightly confused. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
But Shane did. “He’s wondering if your parents had an important meeting or were scheduled to make a speech. It could be anything—a workshop, interview, presentation. Anything where their presence would be of benefit and where their inability to attend would benefit someone else.”
She sat back and studied the two of them. “Well, we are here for a corporate meeting, and my father will obviously be the main speaker.”
“Would it cause any kind of company instability if he didn’t show, for example? Or if people found out that he’d been kidnapped?”
“Well, all bad news will affect the bottom line. That’s pretty standard, I’m sure,” she said. “People are generally vultures, and they’ll jump ship at any sign that their money may take a hit,” she said. “But this is a company board meeting.”
“Wait. I thought you were here on a holiday?” Gavin stated.
“Yes,” she said, “we are, but my father arranged to have several board meetings while he was here.”
“So the board members are here too?”
She nodded. “Didn’t they tell you that?” She looked from Gavin to Shane and back again at Gavin.
“No,” Shane said, “and I spoke directly with the chairman of the board and the CFO.”
Gavin pushed the notepad across in front of her and said, “I need the names, and I need them now.”
She groaned and wrote in a rapid-fire movement that had both him and Shane staring at her, fascinated. Finally she was done. Throwing down the pen, she said, “I can’t believe the other members of the company didn’t say something the minute we all went missing.”
“Maybe nobody knows,” Shane said. “Were these publicized meetings?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, mostly private meetings. He was meeting with the board of directors tomorrow and the CFO last night, I believe.”
“And I know we’ve already asked you this,” Gavin said, “but these meetings, are they unusual?”
She thought about it and said, “Potentially, yes, but I also think it’s a case of my father just trying to combine work and pleasure at the same time.”
“And who doesn’t like to do that,” Shane said.
“I understand the simplicity of my remarks. It’s just a little awkward.” She smiled and said, “My dad is very business oriented. My mother is not. So he probably snuck them in without telling her.”
“Do you get along better with your father or your mother?”
She stared at him steadily, and he wondered what was going on behind that super-pale gaze. “Probably both about the same, I would say,” she said.
But he saw no smile or any other indication that the relationship wasn’t far more formal or colder than most families. He nodded, and just then Lennox came back on the chat.
Doting father and mother apparently bent over backward to make Melinda’s corporate life happen. She’s been in the media a lot, touted as the sweetheart of the company. She’s the face of the company and has done a lot of the modeling in most of the ads. No red flags in her personal life. You already know about her divorce and custody battle, which she won.
Second sister? Gavin asked.
Never seen in the media or on the website. Not even a picture with her online biography.
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“What is?” she asked.
Gavin looked up at her. “No photo in your profile on the company website.”
“Why would I do that?” she asked, a coolness hitting her body language again, showing him just how much she had distanced herself from the public eye and potentially from the company.
“I guess the question is, are you connected to the company because of what you do or connected to the company because of the family?”
“Because of what I do. Haven’t you figured out yet that I have very little connection to the family at all?”
“Yes,” Gavin said, “and I’m wondering how that works when you’re the baby of the family.”
“And I already told you,” she said, with a dismissive wave. “I’m not prepared to dwell on it.”
“Of course not,” he said. He returned his gaze to the laptop.
“Well, I don’t know about the two of you,” Shane said, “but I’ll need to crash at some point in time, and I do need real food. So I’ve just placed an order for room service. Hope you like my choices. Great, if you do. If you don’t, order yourself something else. After I eat, I’ll go for four hours of crash time.” He looked over at Gavin who nodded.
“Good idea,” he said. “We need a lead. We need something.”
“We need to check out the backgrounds of all the men on that list,” Shane said, “but I’m presuming you’ve got the team on it?”
“They’re tearing into the list now,” Gavin said, as he finished typing the last name into the chat box. “It’s a good time to get some food, then crash and burn.”
“And then what do you want to do?” Shane asked.
“Honestly I want to go back to that hostage room,” Gavin said. “I don’t understand why no working cameras can be found anywhere around there.”
“Well, there should be some on the street,” she said. “All I can tell you is, I woke up in that room tied up.”
“No voices in your head?”
She frowned, then closed her eyes, as if trying to remember, and shook her head. “I remember somebody had a hoarse voice, but he might have been disguising it. I don’t know. When we were first kidnapped, all the voices were my mom, my sister, and my father, crying out to be let go. I don’t remember hearing our kidnappers at all.”
“Maybe somebody coughed?”
She thought about it. “On and off. More like clearing his throat all the time.”
“Would you recognize it?”
Her eyes zipped open as she looked at him and nodded. “I don’t know. Maybe but maybe not.”
“Well, that’s something,” he said. “Smells? Was there anything in that van that you might have noticed an odor?”
“I only saw the stuff in the front of me, until they realized that my blindfold had slipped,” she said. “Once they fixed that, I couldn’t see anything else, and the smell was more fear and sweat.”
“Male sweat?” Shane asked.
She nodded again. “Very much so.”
“Like a gym socks smell?”
She thought about it and then shrugged. “Or they were scared and a little bit adrenaline rushed, by what they were doing.”
“No impression on ages? Were they young, or were they old?”
“No, and yes. I did see them slightly, but they had hoods over their faces.”
“How long do you think you saw without your blindfold?”
“Maybe thirty seconds before somebody noticed. No more than that for sure. The kidnapper made an exclamation sound, as if pissed, and tied it back up again.”
“Did you see their hands?”
“They wore gloves. They wore black jeans and black hoodies pulled over their heads.”
“Of course,” he said. “So no help at all. Just what you saw on the van.”
“Which wasn’t much,” she said. “Sorry.�
��
He nodded. He looked at Shane and said, “You need to sleep right away, or do you want to do a rendezvous first?”
“Rendezvous first. I want to go back there too,” he said, tapping his laptop, “because of this.”
Gavin leaned in and took a look.
“Black SUV at the corner.”
“And why does that intrigue you?” she asked.
“Government plates,” Shane said. “What was it doing there?”
“Oh, good. Good call,” Gavin said. “Give me that license number.” He quickly typed it into the chat and sent it to Lennox. It was seen during the hour before the girls escaped outside that hotel. I want to know how and why and who was driving it.
On it, Lennox said.
Just then a knock was at the door. As Shane got up to move the trolley back, Rosalina quickly filled her coffee cup and snagged the remainder of the muffins and croissants, putting them on the side table.
Gavin looked at her and said, “More food coming.”
“I know,” she said, ‘but these will be great in case we’re on the move during the night.”
Damn, he loved that ready-for-anything attitude.
Chapter 5
Rosalina watched as Shane took the trolley to the door and exchanged it for a full trolley with several domed plates. As soon as she was handed a platter minus the dome, she stared at the pasta and chicken with veggies on the side. “This is perfect,” she said in amazement. She looked at the men’s meals to see steak for both of them. “How did you know I liked pasta?”
“It came up in the bio we have on you,” Shane said.
“Interesting,” she said, making a face. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just makes our life a little easier when it comes to things like this, that’s all.”
“I guess so,” she said, “but still feels kind of odd.”
“No,” Shane said. “It just feels invasive for a moment, until you get over it.”
She laughed. “Okay, so we found a government vehicle parked outside the building where we were being held. Why is that important?”
