Davignon hesitated, but finally he nodded.
“Fair enough.” He holstered his weapon and removed the walkie-talkie from his belt. “Bring in the Sorkins,” he said into it.
He held the walkie to his ear and listened before speaking again.
“Oui, Bertrand,” he said. “Both of them. Maintenant, s’il vous plait.”
Chapter 3
Vince Sorkin appeared to be in his midthirties, the wear of the previous twenty-four hours already showing on his face in the form of a vacant gaze I knew too well. The same dead eyes often stared back at me from the mirror, causing me to question whether I was still among the living. Both of us continued breathing, both of our hearts continued beating, but both of our little girls were missing and it wouldn’t matter how much time passed. Until and unless his daughter was found alive, Vince Sorkin’s eyes would never burn with life again. Just like mine.
We’d moved into the dining room, with the Sorkins seated across a thick marble table from me and Lieutenant Davignon.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with us, Mr. Fisk,” Vince Sorkin said.
“You’re welcome,” I replied, though I thought thanks were hardly in order. “Now, first things first. Give me a complete description of Lindsay. Height, weight, birthmarks, scars, the works.”
Vince said, “She’s about three feet four inches tall. Approximately forty-two pounds. She has a large birthmark on her big left toe, and a small scar on her right knee from when she took a bad spill off the couch and onto our glass coffee table as a toddler.”
“Blood type?” I said.
Vince glanced at his wife and frowned. “All we remember is that it’s rare. We’d have to contact her pediatrician back in the States.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Davignon said. “What’s her doctor’s name?”
“Richter,” Vince said. “Keith Richter in San Jose.”
Davignon took the name down and motioned for me to continue.
“Now,” I said, “tell me everything that’s happened since you arrived in Paris. Don’t leave out any details.”
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to tell. The family had arrived at Charles de Gaulle only forty-eight hours earlier and immediately took a taxi to their hotel. The driver wasn’t overly friendly; in fact, he hadn’t struck them at all. He was nondescript, spoke barely a dozen words during the entire transaction, all of which were uttered either at the beginning or end of their ride. In front of the hotel he halfheartedly thanked Vince for his generous tip and sped off.
“Did you catch his name?” I said. “It would have been posted somewhere inside the taxi.”
Neither of them had. It had been a long day of air travel, fifteen hours from San Jose with connections in Seattle and Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. They were exhausted and, understandably, Lindsay had been fussing.
“I have men at the airport, making inquiries,” Davignon assured me. “We’ll inform you as soon as we identify their driver.”
“Which leads us to the hotel,” I said.
Vince described Hotel d’Étonner as a six-story luxury hotel with rooms starting at six hundred euros a night. The nineteenth-century mansion was a brief walk from the bright lights of the Champs-Elysées and had been artfully restored to blend small-chateau charm with world-class appeal. They’d booked their stay online.
“How many people did you interact with when you arrived at the hotel?” I said.
Vince turned his smooth, aristocratic face toward the ceiling in thought.
“The desk clerk,” he said, “who was a young female, a brunette, black hair with blue eyes. Her name was Avril, like the pop star. Then the bellhop, a young male, light hair. Seemed more German than French. He also brought our food when we ordered room service. Both he and the desk clerk were friendly enough, but neither seemed to take any particular interest in Lindsay.” He shook his head and frowned. “No one else, at least not that I remember.”
I turned to Lori, who had remained perfectly silent since she entered the cottage.
“Mrs. Sorkin?” I said gently.
Lori shrugged; it was a tired gesture befitting a woman twice her age. The flesh around her eyes was red and puffy from crying and lack of sleep. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded like she’d spent a lifetime smoking, though that probably wasn’t the case.
“I can’t remember speaking with anyone,” she said. “I was preoccupied with Lindsay the entire time. She was upset that we’d left our Yorkie, Lucy, behind.”
Upset, I thought. If so, it could be that she left on her own. Or at least not put up a struggle or screamed when she was taken. If someone overheard that bit about the dog, they could have used it to calm her or even lure her away.
Of course, that was if she had been taken by a complete stranger, which was rare. Far more often, children were abducted by people they already knew.
So I changed direction and said, “Any enemies, Vince?”
He seemed taken aback by the question.
“Enemies?” He shook his head. “No, no enemies. I mean…”
I tried to remain even-tempered. “Let’s start with work. Tell me, Vince, what is it you do for a living?”
“I’m a software developer for Nepturn Technology.”
“Nepturn Technology?”
“It’s a Silicon Valley start-up.”
I asked him to elaborate.
Vince Sorkin sighed, rubbed his eyes. “Typically, military contractors are funded by federal agencies, right? They use taxpayer money to build, test, and sell new weapons designs. Nepturn takes a different approach. We’re funded by private investors. This cuts out the majority of the wait time and bureaucratic red tape.”
“So you design weapons technology,” I said.
Vince didn’t respond, didn’t need to. Instead, Davignon cut in with what he already knew.
“Monsieur Sorkin helped design a remote-controlled automaton that could potentially replace soldiers on the battlefield. It is two and a half feet in height, can travel up to fifteen miles per hour, and it has the ability to blow a one-foot hole through a steel door with perfect accuracy from a distance of five hundred meters.”
In the span of less than a minute Sorkin and Davignon had changed the very nature of what we were dealing with. Chances were, this wasn’t a random abduction perpetrated by an amateur pederast who lived alone or in his mother’s basement. There was now a very good chance that we were playing with professionals. Which meant extortion, the exchange of life for information, quite possibly a ransom demand.
I tried to choose my words carefully. I wanted to do everything I could not to upset Lindsay’s parents any further.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but this isn’t my field. I want to help you find your daughter but, given the circumstances, I’m afraid I can’t. You’re much better off in the hands of the National Police.”
Lori Sorkin, who bore an uncanny resemblance to my beloved Tasha, broke into tears.
“We know the statistics, Mr. Fisk,” she said. “If you’re wrong, if this has nothing to do with my husband’s business, then we’re running out of time. Please…”
I slowly pushed my chair out and stood.
“Mrs. Sorkin,” I said gently, “if time is indeed of the essence, I can’t help but think I’d be wasting yours, and I can’t do that.” I turned to Davignon. “Lieutenant, I promised you twenty-four hours. But given this new information, I think I’d only be hindering the investigation.…”
“I understand,” Davignon said, his eyes locked on the marble table. “But there is nothing to indicate that Lindsay’s abduction has anything to do with Monsieur Sorkin’s employment. There has been no contact whatsoever with the kidnappers, which is rare in matters of extortion.” He finally stood, stared me straight in the eyes. “I have only one more request, Simon. Visit the crime scene in Paris. Perhaps you will see something my men may have missed.”
I shook my head. “Lieutenant, there may be no evidence
Lindsay was taken for Mr. Sorkin’s trade secrets, but there’s also no indication she was chosen at random—”
“But there is,” Davignon said quickly. He lowered his voice to a near whisper. “I am afraid that Lindsay is not the only young girl to be abducted in Paris this month.”
I shuddered despite the warmth of the cottage. Children abducted by estranged parents was one thing; physical harm was seldom done to them. But victims of stranger abductions—the crimes often committed against them were unthinkable. And when more than one went missing from the same region in a short period of time, it eliminated a number of innocuous possibilities. Rarely did such stories conclude with the parents and child happily reunited. Indeed, the odds of recovering the missing in these situations were rather bleak. Tragic endings, from my experience, were almost inevitable.
I suddenly found myself in an impossible situation. The reason I didn’t take on cases dealing with stranger abductions was simple: I couldn’t bear to relive the days following Hailey’s abduction. It didn’t matter that Lindsay Sorkin wasn’t my own daughter. I would see this case through Vince’s eyes, watch Lori’s heart tear a little more every moment there was no news. If I became involved to any significant extent and little Lindsay couldn’t be located, I didn’t think my body could make it through the next seven days. My stomach would never mend if this six-year-old girl was found dead. Since Hailey’s abduction, I’d felt as though I was teetering along some imaginary line and I feared this search would finally push me over the edge.
But when I turned back to the Sorkins to apologize one last time, I fixed my eyes on Lori and saw total devastation, the same desolate shell I had faced ten years ago when I stared across the kitchen table at Tasha and tried to explain that there was nothing else we could do to bring Hailey home. Isn’t there, though? she’d shouted. Isn’t there? And that unfathomable weight—that absolute helplessness—that had been pressing down against my chest since the day my daughter disappeared finally caused my ribs to cave in and crush my lungs. In that moment I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and that same pressure was bearing down on me again now as I stared across the marble table, trying to blink away my light-headedness and explain to Lori Sorkin that there was nothing I could do to return her daughter.
Isn’t there, though?
Those three words still held so much power over me.
As I looked into Lori’s moist, pleading eyes, I thought, What if I could do for her what I couldn’t do for Tasha?
And what if I walked? How could I go on, having failed her twice?
What could I possibly say? That I couldn’t get involved? Like it or not, I was already involved and I had no right turning Lori Sorkin and her husband down. No right giving up on Lindsay without making a proper effort. Finding Lindsay alive wouldn’t return Hailey, but at least it would mean there were two less parents in the world walking aimlessly through their own hell on earth. If there was a chance I could spare Vince and Lori Sorkin the burden of losing a child, I had to try, my own feelings be damned.
Chapter 4
In the case of a missing child, the parents are always suspects. Unfortunately, Vince and Lori Sorkin were no exception. Negligent death followed by a cover-up couldn’t be ruled out. Nor could outright murder. But then, I’d been working with parents of abducted children going on eleven years now, and both Vince and Lori Sorkin played the role of frantic parents to a tee. I had a hard time imagining that either one of them was involved.
Entering the Hotel d’Étonner, one would never suspect that a small child had been abducted on the premises less than thirty-six hours earlier. All seemed perfectly normal. A pair of guests stood patiently at the front desk, apparently waiting to be checked in. Carrying luggage through the opulent lobby were two bellhops, neither of whom Vince Sorkin recognized. Of the desk clerks on duty, one was fair-haired and the other was male, so no Avril.
“We’ve questioned both the female clerk and the male bellhop,” Davignon informed me, “and it seems highly unlikely that either of them was involved.”
“You demanded my assistance for a reason,” I told him, “so, with all due respect, Lieutenant, that’s something I’d like to decide for myself.”
Straightaway we went up to the Sorkins’ hotel room, one of eight rooms located on the fifth floor. Actually, it was considered a junior suite, spacious and bright, with a view of the hotel’s lavish patio. The suite consisted of three parts, including an entryway, a sitting room, and a capacious bedroom complete with its own master bath.
“This is where Lindsay slept,” Vince said, pointing to a large roll-out bed in the sitting room.
I hesitated to touch anything but Davignon said that the room had already been gone over with a fine-tooth comb.
“This is more a matter of gaining your perspective,” he said.
I knelt next to the roll-out. From where Lindsay was lying, she wouldn’t have been able to see her parents’ bed.
I looked up at the parents. “The door to your room was open, I assume?”
Lori shook her head. “Even though we were so exhausted from all the traveling, we made love, then fell asleep right away. I don’t know if it was jet lag or being in a strange bed, but something woke me in the middle of the night. When I looked up I noticed our door was still closed. I got out of bed to open it and look in on Lindsay.” She paused to regain her composure, then rushed through the final few words as though saying them aloud somehow made things worse. “But Lindsay wasn’t there. She was gone.”
“Wait here,” I said, moving toward the bedroom. “When I close the door behind me, Mrs. Sorkin, I’d like you to say my name, Simon, six times, beginning in a conversational tone and increasing in volume with each repetition.”
I stepped into the bedroom and closed the heavy wooden door. I waited thirty seconds but heard nothing, just as I’d suspected. I walked out of the room, shaking my head, then moved on to the front door.
“No sign of forced entry,” Davignon said.
I opened the door. The lock and the dead bolt required a key, not the usual electronic cards you find in most hotels these days.
“Do either of you recall sliding the chain?” I said.
“I was pretty certain I did slide the chain after slipping our room-service trays out into the hall,” Vince said. “But with Lindsay gone, I guess I couldn’t have.”
Don’t be so sure, I thought. “What time was that?”
“After nine,” Vince said. “Probably closer to ten.”
I stood in the narrow entryway, examining the coat closet.
“You stored your jackets and stuff in here?”
“No,” Vince said, “we hung them in the bedroom. That door was locked when we arrived.”
“Did you call down to the front desk for the key?”
Vince shrugged. “Never got around to it. It didn’t seem that important. There’s more than enough closet space in the bedroom.”
“It was still locked when we arrived,” Davignon added. “The hotel manager opened it for us. He said it has a lock because of the hotel’s wealthier clientele. Women customarily store furs and such in that closet.”
“Did the manager inventory the keys?” I said.
Davignon nodded. “None were missing. We printed the two sets they kept downstairs. Both were clean.”
“Clean? As in they’d been wiped?”
“All the keys receive a quick polish before they’re hung back on the rack for the next guest, we were told. We checked just about every key they had down there and didn’t find a single print.”
I stepped inside the closet and examined the back wall, feeling around for seams. The closet was only two feet deep, barely enough room for a man to stand comfortably.
“Do you have a flashlight, Lieutenant?”
Davignon stepped to the doorway of the closet a moment later, holding out a miniature Maglite.
“That’ll do,” I said.
I twisted the flashlight on and studied the cei
ling, then turned the narrow beam to the floor and ran it across the edges. Having spotted nothing, I got down on one knee and ran my finger along the floor, collecting nothing but dust. When I aimed the light on my finger, one lone white speck stood out against the gray-black dirt.
I stood and exited the closet, then walked into the sitting room.
“When room service arrived,” I said, “did the server leave the door open behind him as he brought in the food?”
Vince peered down the entryway. “I don’t know. I opened the door and the server followed me back to the sitting room. I didn’t look behind me, and because of the long hallway, the door wouldn’t have been in my line of vision if I had.”
“Think,” I said. “Do you recall hearing it close?”
He shook his head. “I honestly don’t remember.”
Lori said, “I was in the other room with Lindsay. It was late, I was getting her ready for bed.”
I stared down at the white speck still on my right index finger.
Oh, what the hell, I thought. It’s not going to kill you.
I placed the finger on my tongue.
Bitter. Could be MDMA.
“What have you found?” Davignon said, studying my face.
“Maybe nothing,” I said. “But it seems there was a tiny piece of a tab of Ecstasy lying on the floor in that hall closet.”
“Ecstasy?” Lori said.
“A club drug,” I told her. “A pill that vastly improves the mood, makes you want to hug and dance.”
Her voice caught. “You think they drugged my child?”
“No,” I said. “At least not with this. It could be that someone snuck into that hall closet while your food was being delivered, someone with a key. For most people who slide the chain on a hotel-room door, it’s pure habit, and I’m betting Vince did, just as he thinks. That means someone had to be lying in wait. If so, it’s possible the perpetrator kept himself busy with drugs, either to boost his courage or to kill time until the two of you finished dinner and went to sleep.” I paused. “Then again, this bit of Ecstasy could have been sitting in that closet for ages.”
Good As Gone (Simon Fisk Novels) Page 2
