Phin does a body inventory checklist, flexing his toes, legs, fingers, arms, neck, and jaw. Nothing seems damaged. But his legs are bound to the chair legs, and his hands are bound behind his back.
He jerks himself to the side, trying to get the chair to tilt or move. It’s secured to the ground somehow. He pulls on his arms, hard, and feels wire bite into his wrists.
This isn’t a good situation.
Phin closes his eyes, which helps him push away the panic. How did he get here?
The last thing he remembers is the forest preserve, toasting to the newly married couple.
Someone had drugged them.
Okay, but why?
Phin has enemies, probably more than his share. But no one knew he was going to that wedding. And during the cab ride to Busse Woods, Phin kept a careful eye on the rearview mirror, a subconscious paranoia that served him well in the past. He hadn’t been followed . . .
That left Jack, Harry, and Holly. Jack was a cop, Harry and Holly private investigators. They undoubtedly had enemies too. Phin might have gotten caught up in someone else’s revenge scheme.
A sound, a low rumble, comes from behind him. Phin can’t turn far enough to see. It comes again, louder.
Snoring.
“Hey! Wake up!”
“I’m awake. I’m awake.”
More snoring.
“Goddammit, McGlade, wake up!”
“Huh? What’s happening?”
“We were drugged at your wedding.”
“I got drunk at my wedding? There’s a shocker.”
“Drugged, McGlade. We were drugged.”
“Is that you, Jim?”
“It’s Phin. Wake up and tell me what you see.”
A long pause. Phin wonders if the moron fell asleep again.
“I’m in a chair, tied up. Looks like some kind of factory or warehouse. There’s a cargo docking bay off to my right, but the door is closed.”
“What else?”
“We gotta get out of here, Phin. If I don’t get this tuxedo returned by tonight, they’re charging me for another full day.”
“Concentrate, Harry. What else is around you?”
“There’s some kind of office in the corner. Door closed, no lights. On my left . . . holy shit!”
“What is it?”
“This has got to be some kind of bad dream.”
McGlade yelled in pain.
“Harry? You okay?”
“I bit my tongue to see if I’m dreaming. I don’t think I am. Or maybe I bit my tongue in my sleep . . .”
“You’re not asleep, Harry. Tell me what you see.”
“I think my tongue’s bleeding.”
“Harry!”
“Okay. I see a long steel table. Got a bunch of equipment on it. And some stuff, new in boxes.”
Phin doesn’t like the sound of that.
“What kind of stuff?”
“A blowtorch. A power drill. A set of vise-grip pliers. And a chain saw.”
This has gone from bad to worse.
“Maybe they’re building a birdhouse,” McGlade said.
“I doubt that.”
“There’s also a big bottle of ammonia, and some paper towels. Spring cleaning?”
“The ammonia is to wake us up when we pass out from pain.”
“Oh. That makes sense. CAN ANYONE FUCKING HELP ME! HEY! HELP! GET ME OUT OF HERE! ”
McGlade screams for several minutes.
“You’re wasting your breath, Harry. No one’s going to hear us.”
McGlade continues to scream anyway.
Phin tunes him out. He wonders where Jack and Holly are. Were they taken as well? Are they at another location?
Are they already dead?
He has no idea how long he’s been out. A few hours? A day? He rubs his chin against his shoulder, feels some facial stubble, but not much. Less than twelve hours.
Harry stops yelling. Phin listens to him grunt and struggle for a while. The sounds eventually stop.
“Man, I’m thirsty.” This from McGlade. “You thirsty, Phin?”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I am thinking about it. How can I not think about it? If I try not to think about something, I think about it even more because I have to think about it to try not to.”
Time ticks away. A plane passes overhead, low and loud. Either taking off or landing. Phin guesses they’re in the northwest suburbs, someplace near O’Hare. Elk Grove has a large industrial section, not far from Busse Woods.
“I gotta pee.”
Phin squeezes his eyes shut. Being tortured to death is going to be bad enough. Being tortured to death alongside this idiot is even worse.
“It’s like someone’s turning a vise on my kidneys.”
“Let’s not talk for a while, okay?”
McGlade is blessedly silent for a few minutes. Phin concentrates on relaxing his shoulders; they’re beginning to cramp up. The wire is tight enough on his wrists to make his fingers tingle. It’s a heavy gauge, about the width of a coat hanger but more pliable. He pumps his fists several times to get blood into his hands.
“If I die in a rented tuxedo, how long to you think they’ll keep charging my credit card?”
Phin rolls his eyes. “Christ, McGlade. Does it matter? You won’t have to pay it.”
“Yeah, but my wife will. If they don’t find my body, she’ll keep getting charged every month. It could run into millions of dollars.” McGlade doesn’t speak for a moment, then says, “I hope she’s okay. Jack too. You think they’re okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe they got away. Maybe they’re on their way to rescue us.”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe they’re bringing cool, refreshing beverages. And a toilet.”
This guy used to be Jack’s partner? Phin can’t understand how she let him live for this long.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, McGlade, but I can’t understand what the hell Holly sees in you.”
“I dunno. Love is blind.”
“Apparently it’s also deaf. And learning disabled.”
“Maybe Holly loves me because I’ve got so many layers. Like a big, sexy onion. I’m an enigma, wrapped in a mystery.”
“You’re an enigma, wrapped in an idiot. Layers? Harry, I’ve only met you twice, and you’re about as deep as a spilled beer.”
“You’re just jealous. Holly and I have something special. We have trust, and loyalty, and commitment.”
“Commitment? What commitment? You cheated on her four times last night.”
“They were midgets. If you add them together it only counts as twice.”
Phin doesn’t answer. This conversation is pointless. They need to think of some way to get out of here. He didn’t undergo months of chemotherapy to suffer and die in this abandoned warehouse.
But much as Phin pulls and stretches and strains, he can’t free himself.
There’s nothing they can do but wait.
Chapter 42
MY STOMACH HURT. I didn’t know if it was an effect of the tranquilizers, or the fact that I was burning up to do something but didn’t have anything I could do.
The Elk Grove police were called, but they really didn’t have much to do either. Our statements were taken. A few pictures were snapped. I explained to a nearly catatonic Holly what I suspected was going on with Bud and Lorna.
“So what now?” she asked. “We just wait around for them to contact us?”
“I’m going into the office, calling Indiana. Maybe they have some sort of idea where they’d go. Got someplace to go?”
“I’m going to stick around. Maybe something will turn up here.”
I looked at the twelve Elk Grove cops, standing around talking sports. Nothing was going to turn up here.
“Call me if you need me, Holly.”
She reached out to hug me, but it was stiff and mechanical; all of her life force had been drained from her. I explained to the un
iforms I was leaving, and when nobody protested I hopped in my Nova and headed back to Chicago.
I spent most of the trip on the phone with the hospital, trying to ascertain Herb’s condition. First he was still in the OR, then he was in Recovery, then there were some kind of complications and they weren’t sure where he was. I asked for Bernice, but she couldn’t be located. By the time I got to the district house I was on my way to a total nervous breakdown, a feeling exacerbated by the two men waiting for me in my office.
“Hello, Lieutenant. We heard from the Elk Grove Police Department that you’d be here.”
“I’m really not in the mood right now, guys.”
Agent Dailey made a face that almost looked sympathetic. “We understand how you must be feeling.”
“I doubt it.”
“We lost two good men in Rosser Park when Lorna Hunt Ellison escaped custody,” Agent Coursey said. “They were friends of ours.”
“I’m sorry.”
Coursey looked at his shoes, which was the most emotion I’d ever seen from him.
“It should have been us. We were assigned to accompany Lorna. But when you cracked the Caleb Ellison case, we were ordered back to Chicago.”
“In a way, you saved our lives, Lieutenant.”
That was a karma debt I really didn’t need.
“Gentlemen, I feel bad for your loss, but I’d really like to be alone right now.”
“We’d like to help.”
“I prefer doing this myself.”
“Kidnapping is a Federal offense, Lieutenant. This is technically our jurisdiction.”
I shot venom out of my eyes. “Do you really want to play fucking jurisdiction games?”
“No,” Agent Dailey said. “We really want to help.”
I collapsed in my chair. I had no fight left in me.
“Fine.” I closed my eyes, tried to rein in some semblance of control. “What have you got?”
“We’ve created a new profile, with Vicky, of Lorna Hunt Ellison.”
“A new profile. Great. Does it happen to mention where she’s holding my friends?”
“Probably someplace close to Busse Woods, or perhaps in the woods themselves. We had a chance to interview Lorna before her escape. She’s a DO offender, impulsive, erratic, very low intelligence. Bud Kork has similar characteristics, plus he’s delusional and psychotic. They couldn’t have planned very far ahead.”
That had been my assessment. Luring victims to your house in the boonies and burying them in your basement, though horrible, wasn’t the work of a criminal mastermind. But escaping from prison, rescuing Bud, then grabbing Harry and Phin took some real intelligence. A DO—disorganized personality type—couldn’t muster that. It didn’t make sense.
“How did Lorna escape? Give me details.”
They ran it down for me.
“We recovered the derringer, and a plastic bag we believed it had been wrapped in. Lorna could have planted it there years ago.”
I didn’t like it.
“Then why wait until now to use it? She’s been locked up for twelve years. Why didn’t she pull this stunt a long time ago?”
Both Coursey and Dailey shrugged at the same time. It was eerie.
“She might have been waiting for the right moment,” said Coursey.
“Or she’d forgotten about it until now,” said Dailey.
“Or”—I reached for the phone—“somebody planted it for her.”
I caught Ms. Pedersen, the assistant superintendent for Indiana Women’s Prison, on her way out the door.
“This is a terrible time for us, Lieutenant. I feel partially responsible. I knew Lorna was capable of violence, but didn’t think she could pull off something like this.”
“None of us did. This isn’t your fault.”
“I appreciate that.” And it sounded like she did. “Can I do anything to help?”
“When I visited you the other day, I asked about Lorna’s visitors. You said she had none. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“How about phone calls? Prisoners are allowed calls, right?”
“Of course.”
“Do you keep records?”
“No. But I can talk to the guards. They’d remember if Lorna had received any calls for the last few days. Can I call you back?”
I gave her my number.
“What if Lorna had help?” I told the Feebies.
“You think she was coached?”
“Maybe someone planted the gun, and gave her instructions on how to grab Bud and kidnap Harry and Phin. The same someone who supplied her with the roofies, or whatever drug they used.”
“Caleb Ellison?” Dailey asked. “He was obviously an organized personality. Sending the videotapes, leaving no evidence—”
“You saw his house, right?”
They each nodded three times. I almost looked up, trying to see the puppeteer.
“It was a mess,” I continued. “Garbage and porn all over. And look at the sloppy way he broke into my partner’s house. How would you profile that?”
“That’s typical disorganized behavior. Clearly Caleb manifested both O and DO traits.”
Maybe, but something bothered me. Some nagging little doubt that made me think I was missing the bigger picture. I gave the Crime Lab a call, surprised that Officer Hajek was still in this late.
“Hi, Lieut, I was hoping you’d call. Get my messages?”
Only now I noticed the voice-mail light on my phone, blinking on and off. Some detective I was.
“What’s up, Scott?”
“Got some results back. That burned bag you brought me? Analyzed the contents. Mostly clothing, and some glass and plastic fragments. I think they were toiletries: toothpaste, deodorant, hair spray, face cream, cosmetics.”
“Cosmetics? You mean makeup?”
“Yeah. Which goes along with the burned hair sample you gave me. There were traces of spirit gum on it. I think it was a fake beard.”
I pictured the Identikit photocopy; a man with a blond beard.
“So it was part of a disguise kit?”
“It could have been. And that bullet casing you found . . .”
My phone beeped. Call waiting. I told Scott to hold on.
“Lieutenant Daniels? It’s Ms. Pedersen. Lorna received three calls over the last week.”
“Do you know who they came from?”
“No. But the guard I talked to said it was a woman, Midwestern accent.”
“Thanks.” I switched back to Hajek. “Tell me about the bullet.”
“Nine millimeter.”
“Anything off it?”
“Nothing. But I did get something off that message machine I took from the University of Chicago. I digitized the tape and ran it through a filter, did a few comparisons.”
“And you found out it’s a woman’s voice.”
“How did you know that? That was my big surprise.”
A woman had called Lorna, so it made sense a woman left the messages on Mulrooney’s machine. The fake beard could have made a woman look like a man. With the sunglasses, and the hood, it would have been easy to fool the desk sergeant downstairs. And Al the car rental guy—when he greeted me, he didn’t have his glasses on. He couldn’t see a damn thing. Al had also mentioned the man who’d rented the Titanium Pearl Eclipse had a cold.
But it wasn’t a cold. It was a way to hide a feminine voice, by coughing and speaking low.
I asked Hajek to hold on, digging into the pile of papers next to my fax machine, the ones I’d gotten the other day from the Gary Police Department. Dozens of pages on the Kork family. Criminal records and tax records and utility bills and school records and there it was—a death certificate for Bud’s daughter, Alexandra.
“Scott? I need you to do two things for me. Is the Caleb Ellison evidence there yet?”
“Came in this morning.”
“Caleb’s computer?”
“Rogers is working on that right now, one room over.”
>
“Connect me with him. In the meantime, get your hands on the gun used to kill Ellison.”
“You got it.” He transferred the call, and I crossed my fingers, hoping I was wrong.
“This is Rogers.”
“Dan, it’s Jack Daniels. Are you in Ellison’s database?”
“As we speak. It’s filled with both the real names and the made-up names. Not a smart way to make fake IDs. We’ll probably get a few dozen arrests out of this.”
“Check a name for me. Alexandra Kork.”
I heard fingers tap-tap-tap on a keyboard, Rogers humming softly to himself.
“Got it. Made a Detroit driver’s license, a bunch of years back.”
“What’s the new name?”
I held my breath.
“Frakes,” he said. “Holly Frakes.”
Son of a bitch. Harry’s new bride was the killer. It all made sense, in hindsight. I couldn’t believe I’d been so easily duped.
“Put me back on with Hajek.”
“He’s standing right next to me. Here.”
“Lieut? I’ve got an empty nine-millimeter shell from Caleb Ellison’s house. It’s a match.”
I thanked him and hung up the phone.
“Bud Kork’s daughter is going by the name Holly Frakes,” I told the Feebies.
“Where is she?”
“Still in Elk Grove, I think. She called my cell but blocked the number. Can you guys access my call records?”
Dailey looked at Coursey. “Not only that, we can use satellites to triangulate the signal.”
“It’ll take a little while to set up.”
“How long?”
“An hour, if we move.”
“We might not have an hour. If Harry and Phin are somewhere near Busse Woods, she could be with them right now.”
Chapter 43
ALEX KORK, WHO now uses the name Holly Frakes, pulls Harry’s Mustang into the warehouse parking lot. She discovered the place a few days ago, and it’s one of the reasons she insisted on getting married at that stupid forest preserve. Though Alex is a strong girl, hauling a two-hundred-pound man around is hard work, and takes a long time. Privacy is essential.
Here she has plenty of privacy.
This entire area, for several square miles, is industrial. Factories, warehouses, and shipping yards. This building is currently between tenants. And since it’s Sunday night, there isn’t a single person anywhere near here.
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