24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  Detective Washington nodded thoughtfully. “You’re dealing with a smart son of a bitch. What you gonna do if you find out who he is? That thirty-minute thing has you boxed. Anything you do could kill the hostage before you even figure out where he is.”

  “We have to go high-tech, all the way. If we can confirm that this thing is going down, Frank Zwick is going to get a chopper, GPS homers, the works, everything by dawn.”

  “Do you think it’s going down?” Washington asked.

  Chalmers nodded. “I’ve never known a criminal to stop something that was working for him. They always push it till they get bit. That’s their nature.”

  “You’re right about that much.”

  “We just need to catch a break. If we still don’t know who they are when that ransom wire hits the coast in the morning, we’ll be way behind the curve.”

  McDill closed his eyes and tried to shut out their conversation. In Chalmers’s voice, he recognized the sound of a man who believed he could impose his will on the world. McDill knew how illusory that belief was. Every day he cut into the thoracic cavities of human beings, and it was difficult enough to impose his will on simple human tissue. When you brought large numbers of people into a dangerous situation—each acting independently—the best you could hope for was that nobody would die. McDill didn’t just remember Vietnam, as he’d said before. He had served there as a medical corpsman. And he had seen more situations go to hell in a handbasket because of the good intentions of men like Agent Chalmers than he cared to recall. Chalmers was the classic second lieutenant, green and hungry for action. His faith in technology also struck a dark resonance with Vietnam. McDill hoped that the Special Agent-in-Charge had been tempered by more experience.

  He opened his eyes and looked down at the rows of unfamiliar women, then wearily turned another page. His breath caught in his throat. Staring up from the mug book like a graduation portrait was Cheryl’s innocent face.

  “Agent Chalmers! This is her!”

  The FBI agent stopped in midsentence and looked over. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Chalmers walked over and looked down at the photo beneath McDill’s index finger.

  “Who is she?” McDill asked.

  Chalmers took the photo out of its plastic sleeve and read from its back. “Cheryl Lynn Tilly. I’ll be damned. She did use her real name. Maybe the others did too. I wonder why she didn’t pop up on NCIC?”

  He walked over to the computer he’d been using and began typing in the information off the photo. The JPD detective stood behind him with his arms folded. After several seconds, data from Washington began flashing up onto the CRT.

  “She’s got some small-time collars,” Chalmers said. “Passing bad checks, forgery. One prostitution arrest. She did thirty days in a county jail. Nothing violent. You’re positive it’s her?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’ll make a copy of this photo and fax it down to the Beau Rivage. Maybe someone on staff down there has seen her.”

  “What will you do if they have?”

  Chalmers raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. “Call in the troops. If she’s down there this weekend, we have to assume you’re right. There’s a kidnapping in progress. And that is a major situation. Right now, we need to see whether known associates can lead us to the man behind all this.”

  Chalmers turned to Margaret McDill, who was watching them with a look of apprehension. “Are you awake enough to keep helping us, Mrs. McDill?”

  “Whatever you need,” she said softly.

  McDill walked over and put his hands on his wife’s shoulders.

  Chalmers picked up a telephone, then paused. “These people have some nerve. To repeat the same crime in exactly the same place, a year after the fact?”

  “You didn’t talk to them,” McDill said. “They think they’re invincible.”

  The FBI agent smiled. “They’re not.”

  Karen rocked slowly but ceaselessly in her chair, her arms around her shins, her chin buried between her knees. Hickey was still lying on the bed, his eyes glued to Bogart and Fredric March as they played out the final minutes of The Desperate Hours. Karen sensed that she was close to a breakdown. She had been pulling hairs from her scalp, one at time. Externally, she could maintain calm, but inside she was coming apart. The knowledge that Hickey meant to kill Abby to punish Will was unendurable.

  She had to warn him.

  Food was her best excuse to get out of the bedroom, but there was no guarantee that Hickey wouldn’t follow her into the kitchen. For a while she had entertained the hope that the whiskey might put him to sleep, but he seemed immune to its effects. He’d gone into the bathroom twice during commercials, once to urinate and once to check his stitches, but she hadn’t felt confident enough to risk using the phone, much less to try to reach the computer in Will’s study.

  She stopped rocking. She had the feeling that Hickey had said something to her and that she’d been concentrating so hard that she missed it.

  “Did you say something?” she asked.

  “I said I’m starving. Go fix something.”

  She wanted to jump out of the chair, but she forced herself to sound peeved. “What would you like?”

  “What you got?”

  “A sandwich?”

  Gunshots rang from the television. Bogey fell to the ground. “Goddamn it,” Hickey said. “I don’t know. Something hot.”

  “There’s some crawfish étouffée I could heat up.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced over at her, his eyes bleary. “Can you put it in an omelet?”

  “Sure.”

  “What was I thinking? I got Betty Crocker here. Weaned on an Easy-Bake oven, right?”

  Karen tried to laugh, but the sound died in her throat. She got up from the chair and walked toward the door. “Anything else?”

  “Just hurry it up.”

  She nodded and went out.

  As soon as she cleared the door, she sped to a silent run. In the kitchen, she slid a skillet onto the Viking’s large burner, switched the gas to HIGH, then opened the refrigerator and took out three eggs, a bottle of Squeeze Parkay, and a Tupperware dish half-filled with seasoned crawfish tails in a roux. The eggs went into the pocket of her housecoat, the étouffée into the microwave, and a glob of margarine into the skillet. Then she grabbed the cordless phone off the wall and punched in the number of Will’s office.

  “Anesthesiology Associates,” said the answering service operator.

  “This is Karen Jennings. I need to—”

  “Could you speak up, please?”

  She raised the volume of her whisper. “This is Karen Jennings. I need to get a message to my husband on his SkyTel pager.”

  “Go ahead, ma’am.”

  “You’ve got to do something. They’re going to . . .”

  “Just a second. Is that the message?”

  “Yes—no, wait.” She should have thought this out more carefully. She couldn’t simply state the situation to a stranger. The operator was liable to call the police herself. With shaking hands she broke the three eggs and dropped the yolks into the skillet. “The message is, ‘You’ve got to do something before morning. Abby is going to die no matter what. Karen.’ Do you have that?”

  “Yes, ma’am. This sounds like a real emergency.”

  “It is. Wait, I want to add something. Add ‘Confirm receipt by e-mail.’ ”

  “I don’t take many messages like this, Mrs. Jennings. Shouldn’t you maybe call nine-one-one?”

  “No! I mean, that’s not appropriate in this case. This is a little girl with liver cancer. Will’s working with the transplant team, and things are very dicey right now.”

  “Lord, lord,” said the operator. “I know about livers. I got a brother with hepatitis C. I’ll get this entered right away.”

  “It’s got to go to his SkyTel. It’s a brand-new pager.”

  “I’ve got that noted on my screen. Don’t you worry
. If he’s got the pager on, he’ll get the message. I think those SkyTels can even access missed messages.”

  “Thank you.” Another thought struck Karen. “If he doesn’t call you to confirm that he’s received this message, would you call his room at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi and give it to him?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The Beau Rivage. Half our doctors are down there right now.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.” Karen hung up the phone, her hand shaking. The concern in the operator ’s voice had been like salve on a burn. She’d wanted to pour out the whole horrible story to her, tell her to call the police and—

  “That doesn’t smell half bad.”

  Karen froze.

  Hickey was standing in the kitchen door in his bloody towel. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then past her. His eyes went cold. “What are you doing by that phone?”

  She felt a fist crushing her heart. To avoid Hickey’s gaze, she turned and looked at the phone. Tacked and taped around it were greeting cards, photographs, and Post-it notes. She reached into the midst of them and pulled a small photo off the wall.

  “I was looking at Abby’s school picture. I still can’t believe this is happening.”

  The microwave beeped loudly. She went to it and took out the étouffée, then spooned it into the rapidly firming omelet. She sensed Hickey moving closer, but she didn’t look up. With shaking hands she folded the egg over the crawfish.

  His fingers fell on her forearm, sending a shock up her spine. “Look at me,” he said in a hard voice.

  She did. His eyes were preternaturally alert, the eyes of a predator studying its prey.

  “What?” she said.

  Hickey just stared, registering each movement of her facial muscles, every pulse beat in her neck.

  “It’s going to burn,” she said, pulling her arm away and reaching for the spatula. As she slid it under the omelet, he slipped his arms around her waist, as though he were a loving husband watching his wife make breakfast. His touch made her light-headed, but she forced herself to continue the motion, lifting the omelet from the pan and turning to drop it onto a plate. Hickey stayed with her as she moved.

  After the omelet hit the plate, he said, “You’re a little wildcat, aren’t you?”

  She did not reply.

  “I still own you. Don’t forget that.”

  She looked him full in the face at last. “How can I?”

  His expression hardened, and she had a sudden premonition that he was going to push her to her knees. She didn’t know what she would do if he did.

  “Bring the food back to the bed,” he said finally. Then he let his hands fall. “And bring a bottle of Tabasco with it.”

  He turned and limped up the hallway.

  She had no idea how long she’d been holding her breath, but it must have been a while, because after she exhaled, she couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen. Her legs became water. She gripped the counter to hold herself up, but it wasn’t enough. She had to lie across the Corian and grab the top of the splashboard to keep from falling.

  THIRTEEN

  Will sat in the chair by the bed, facing Cheryl. She was still propped against the headboard—gun beside her, QVC chattering in the background—but she had finally slipped on one of Will’s white pinpoint button-downs. For an hour he had probed her about Hickey, but to no avail. She had given him all the biography she felt safe giving, and beyond that she would only discuss her own interests, such as aromatherapy and Reiki.

  Cheryl had somehow got it into her head that the jump from sofa dancing and prostitution to the laying on of hands required in Reiki energy therapy was a natural one. Will tried to lull her into carelessness by telling her about the success of certain alternative therapies with his arthritis, but once he got her on that subject, he couldn’t turn her back to what mattered.

  He changed his tack by asking about Huey instead of Joe, but suddenly something buzzed against his side. He jumped out of the chair, thinking it was a cockroach, but when he looked down he realized it was the new SkyTel. The pager was still set to VIBRATE mode from the keynote dinner.

  “What’s with you?” Cheryl asked.

  “Something crawled over me.” He made a big show of looking under the chair cushion. “A damn roach or something.”

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Hey, this brochure over here says they close the swimming pool at eight p.m. That’s kind of cheap, isn’t it?”

  “They don’t want you swimming, they want you gambling in the casino downstairs.”

  “Yeah.” Her eyes brightened. “You like gambling?” Will was dying to check the pager. He wasn’t on call, so the message had almost certainly come from Karen. The only other people who would be able to persuade his service to page him at this hour would be his partners, most of whom were at the convention. “Not really,” he said, trying to remember the thread of the conversation. “Life’s uncertain enough without that.”

  “Party pooper.”

  “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

  Cheryl shrugged and returned her attention to a display of Peterboro baskets on QVC. “Hey, if you got to go . . .”

  Will walked into the bathroom with the Jacuzzi and closed the door, then whipped the pager off his belt and punched the retrieve button. The green backlit screen scrolled:

  YOU’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING BEFORE

  MORNING. ABBY IS GOING TO DIE NO MATTER

  WHAT. KAREN. CONFIRM BY E-MAIL.

  He scrolled the message again, staring in shock at the words as they trailed past. Abby is going to die no matter what. What did that mean? Was Abby having some sort of diabetic crisis? Karen had given her eight units of insulin in the early evening, and that should hold her until morning. Had Karen learned something new about Hickey’s plan?

  You’ve got to do something before morning. What the hell could he do without risking Abby’s life? But the answer to that question was contained within the message. Abby is going to die no matter what. Karen had learned something. And her meaning was clear: he would have to risk Abby’s life to save her life.

  He looked around the bathroom as though something in it could help him. The only potential weapon he saw was a steam iron. As he stared at the thing, the phone beside the toilet rang. He looked at his watch. 3:00 A.M. Hickey’s regular check-in call. He heard Cheryl’s muffled voice through the bathroom door. A few words, then silence again. Or rather the droning chatter of the television. He turned on the hot water tap and waited for steam to rise from the basin.

  Wetting another washcloth, he wrung it out and pressed it to his face. As the blood came into his cheeks, something strange and astonishing happened. His mental perspective simultaneously contracted and expanded, piercing the fog that had blinded him for the past hours. He suddenly saw three separate scenes with absolute clarity: Abby held hostage in the woods, Karen trapped in their house at Annandale, and himself standing in the marble-floored bathroom. He saw these scenes like a man in the first row of a theater, yet at the same time he saw the relationships between them as though from satellite altitude: visible and invisible filaments connecting six people in time and space, a soft machine with six moving parts. And burning at the center of his brain was awareness of a single fact: he had exactly thirty minutes to save Abby. That was all he would ever have. The thirty minutes between check-in calls. Whether it was this half hour or the next, that was the window of opportunity Hickey had left him.

  He threw the washrag into the basin. He had to know what Cheryl knew. Everything she knew. There was a chance that she’d lied before, that she knew exactly where Abby was being held. But probably she didn’t. None of the previous fathers had dragged it out of her, and he was sure some had tried. How would they have tried? The gun was the obvious tool. But Abby gave Cheryl immunity to the gun, and to everything else. Because the effectiveness of any threat—torture with a steam iron, say—lay in the victim’s belief that his tormentor would follow through. And while they had the ch
ildren, no one could.

  Even if he somehow broke Cheryl, it wouldn’t be enough for her to spill what she knew. She would have to cooperate until Abby was found. Play her role for Hickey during the check-in calls—at least three of them, probably more. What could possibly persuade her to do that? The bruises on her body proved she could take punishment, and God alone knew what horrors Hickey had visited upon her in the past. Yet she stayed with him. She felt a loyalty that Will would never understand. And yet . . .

  Her eyes had shone when she told him about the contact she’d had with Hollywood producers, the contact Hickey had acted so decisively to terminate. And she hadn’t tried to make it more than it was. She admitted the potential roles were soft-core porn, late-night cable stuff. But that had been fine with her. It was a step up, and Cheryl had known it. It was also a step away from Joe Hickey, and on some level she must have known that, too. Known it, and believed she’d been born for more than prostitution and crime.

  But to betray Hickey, she would have to believe she could escape him. And that would take money. Enough to not merely run, but to vanish. To become someone else. She might like that idea. Leaving Cheryl the sofa dancer in the ashes of the past. But by the time Will got his hands on that much money, the final act would be playing itself out, and by Hickey’s rules. Earlier, while Cheryl made a trip to the bathroom, he had called downstairs and asked about cashing checks. The casino used TelChek, and that company had a $2,500 limit over ten days. Given his credit rating, he could probably persuade the casino manager to take a promissory note for a larger cash advance, but only if he intended to gamble that money in the casino.

  “You okay in there?” Cheryl called.

  “Fine.” Maybe he could take the $2,500, max out his credit cards at the ATM, and then parlay that stake into the kind of money he needed—

  “Dumb,” he muttered at his reflection. The only games he knew how to play were blackjack and five-card-stud, and he hadn’t played either since medical school.