by Steven James
I’m caught in the middle of three mysteries.
Petra’s kidnapping.
Malcolm’s disappearance.
My own recent blurs.
Three completely different puzzles.
Yet, as varied as they are, I can’t shake the feeling that they’re all related, and that somehow each of them holds the key to unlocking the others.
“Petra’s visions started soon after my marriage to her mother ended four years ago,” Senator Amundsen explains. “Petra was seventeen at the time. My ex-wife was going through some difficult personal issues and Petra ended up in my custody. What else can I tell you? Petra hasn’t had an easy go of it either. She takes antipsychotic meds.”
He mentions the name of the drugs and I recognize them from when I was researching medications last year. The doctors had wanted me to take them too. Pretty powerful stuff.
“She needs them every day.” He looks at us urgently. “I’m not sure how going without them for these last few days will affect her.”
Alysha has put on her dark sunglasses. I’m not sure why. “Have there been any news reports about her disappearance?”
“No. The kidnappers were very clear—no media. No one else besides the driver that I sent to pick you up knows she’s gone—well, and Malcolm. She was taken on Friday night. She’d just left the hotel where she works as an accountant. She was walking to her car when . . . Well . . .”
He loses his train of thought for a moment and stares off into space.
Obviously, thinking about his daughter’s abduction is hard for him.
However, overall, he seems remarkably poised and clear-headed for a man who’s going through something like this.
At last, he goes on. “I had one of my staff members obtain the security footage from the hotel’s exterior camera. The angle isn’t quite right and the camera must be old because the image is grainy and black and white, but you can at least see what happens.” He scrolls across his tablet. “Here, I’ll pull it up.”
Though Alysha can’t see him, she sits directly facing him, no doubt zeroing in on where he is by the sound of his voice. “Is there sound?”
“I’m afraid not.”
He finds the file and opens it.
In the footage, Petra approaches a car, then crosses the street to where a woman is standing beside a minivan. It looks like she’s calming down a baby that she has in her arms.
The woman hands Petra the child, and while she’s distracted, the minivan’s side door whips open, and a man grabs Petra.
As he drags her backward and she struggles to get free, she drops everything.
The woman picks up Petra’s purse, and what is now obviously a doll that was wrapped in the blankets, before closing the minivan’s door.
Soon, the minivan pulls away and the woman takes off in Petra’s car.
Because of the shadows and angles, it’s impossible to see the face of either of the two kidnappers.
We watch it a second time and I explain to Alysha what’s happening.
Suddenly, it hits me. “That’s the same minivan.”
“What do you mean?”
“The minivan they’re using. It’s the same one that was in the parking garage next to where Tane found Malcolm’s phone. The plates. They match.”
She gasps. “But you don’t think they had Malcolm in it while we were there? I mean, do you?”
I don’t know what to say.
It’s a terrible thought—that we might have been that close and missed our chance to help him.
In anger, Tane smacks the arm of his chair.
I turn to the senator. “I know you’re not supposed to contact the police, but do you have anyone who could check the parking garage to see if that minivan is still there?”
“Absolutely.”
I verify that he has the correct location and he makes the call. When he’s done, I ask him if he can rewind the video.
“To where?”
“To just before Petra was taken. I want to see when those people drove up, how long they were waiting for her.”
He has to back it up ten minutes to find when the minivan rolls to a stop beside the curb. The woman gets out and wraps that doll in the blanket. A moment later, the man steps out as well and speaks with her briefly before climbing back in to wait for Petra.
This time, though, I can see the guy’s face, and, apparently Tane notices the same thing I do. “Daniel, that’s the guy who was shooting at us by the elevator, isn’t it?”
“It sure looks like it.”
Senator Amundsen glances at us curiously. “What are you talking about?”
“After Malcolm disappeared,” I tell him, “a man—that man—came after us, tried to kill us. Senator, when did you first realize Petra had been kidnapped?”
“It wasn’t until the middle of the night. I’d flown back from D.C. to do some work here at the house for an important Senate inquiry. I arrived home at just a little after ten. Rather than get her own place, Petra stays here at the estate, over in the east wing of the house.”
He gestures toward where that is. “Since I haven’t been home much in the last few months, I was hoping to say hi to her, but in the end, I was exhausted and went to bed around eleven. Sometime before dawn, my phone rang and woke me up. The call came from her number, but when I answered it, it wasn’t her. A man’s voice told me to check my email—that’s it, that’s all—then he hung up. When I opened my email, I found the video, the one with their demands.”
As he explains all this, he begins staring at the screen on the wall, an empty look shadowing his eyes.
“I tried calling back to her number but no one answered. Her car is still missing. No texts. No messages. No more emails. I contacted the phone company and they told me there haven’t been any outgoing calls from her phone since that one was made in the middle of the night. I tried to track her cell through one of those locate-your-phone apps, but I couldn’t find it.”
“Is it possible to see the video?” I ask. “The one the kidnappers sent you?”
“Of course.” He taps at the tablet and an image of Petra seated on a cot appears on the video screen. “And for this one, there is sound.”
He presses “Play.”
And the video begins.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
2:00 P.M.
7 HOURS UNTIL THE DEADLINE
A strip of duct tape covers her mouth and her arms are drawn back behind her.
She looks frightened, but also defiant.
The blank cement-block wall behind her has a narrow window near the ceiling.
A man wearing a black ski mask that covers all of his face except for his eyes steps into the frame and says, “You have a lovely daughter, Senator.” He trails his finger along Petra’s cheek, but she draws back in revulsion. “I’d hate to see anything happen to such a pretty face.”
Whoever he is, he must not have been too concerned about the senator recognizing his voice because he didn’t try to disguise it in any way.
It’s impossible to be certain, but it does sound a lot like the guy who yelled for us to stop as we fled into the elevator—right before he shot at us.
He goes on, “Here’s what we want and how you can assure that Petra comes back to you healthy and happy and all in one piece. You’re the head of the Senate’s Judiciary Reform Committee that’s set to begin a probe on Tuesday into some unaccounted for expenditures in the Defense Department. As the sitting chairperson, you have the authority—and the ability—to make sure that the inquiry never occurs. And that’s what you’re going to do.”
Petra stares at the camera and tries to say something beneath her gag. I can’t tell what it is.
The man chuckles, apparently amused by her failed attempt to communicate. “On Monday night at precisely nine o’clock you will send out an email to all of your committee members notifying them that the inquiry isn’t going to happen. Once that’s done, we’ll return Petra to you. It’s that easy. And on
e more thing: You’ll make sure this inquiry never comes up again while you are serving in the Senate because now you know we can get to your daughter and we will come after her again if we need to. That all depends on you.”
Then he gazes at Petra for a long moment, as if to underscore how vulnerable she is and how easily they could get to her in the future if they wanted to.
Finally, he faces the camera again.
“Do this and you can save her life. Fail to do it and we’ll mail her back to you in a dozen boxes. We’ll know if you call the police or the FBI. Don’t risk your daughter’s life by contacting the authorities in any way. The only person you may be in touch with is Sam. Don’t leave your house until we email you again. Don’t contact the media. We’ll let you know when and where you can find your daughter.”
Then he strokes Petra’s cheek one more time as she recoils, trying unsuccessfully once again to say something.
With that, the video ends.
We all sit there in silence.
No one moves.
Finally, after a long moment, the senator says, “Besides sending it to Malcolm, I haven’t shown this to anyone else.”
When we were under Centennial Olympic Park earlier and saw that final video of Jess being rolled away on the gurney, she’d been yelling something about someone named Sam. It seems like too much of a coincidence that Sam’s name would come up in the ransom demands too, unless all of this is somehow connected.
I’m about to ask the senator about it, but Alysha beats me to it. “Senator Amundsen, who is Sam?”
“My way of reaching Malcolm. But I couldn’t get through and I was desperate so I contacted Malcolm personally.”
A bit to my surprise, he leaves it at that.
Questions swarm through my mind: How would the kidnappers know about Sam? Why would they let the senator be in touch? How does this relate to Jess and what she knew?
However, the senator doesn’t seem inclined to share any more about Sam and I figure that since he’s desperate to save his daughter, he would certainly tell us whatever he even remotely thought would help.
As I’m sorting through all that, Alysha requests that he play the video again. “I think I might have heard something.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll tell you when to pause it.”
We all listen attentively as he plays the footage again, but even when Alysha says, “There—stop,” I still have no idea what she might be referring to.
“Go back maybe five seconds,” she tells him. “And turn up the volume a little.”
He repositions the cursor and starts the video again, this time with the volume dialed up.
About two or three seconds later she stops him again. “Right there.”
He pauses it. “What do you hear?”
“There’s a train whistle in the background and a few seconds later, I can make out an ambulance siren. It’s faint, but it’s there.”
He plays it once more. I’m barely able to hear the sounds—I never would’ve been able to identify them without her pointing them out first.
Tane leans forward in his chair. “Those are cement-block walls in the video. The sound of that whistle and that siren wouldn’t have carried very far, would they?”
“So they’re close,” the senator concludes. “The ambulance and train were somewhere near her.”
“It’s very possible, yes,” Alysha says. “Maybe if you can find out when trains were going through areas that also had ambulance calls at the same time of night, you might be able to narrow things down.”
“I’m not sure I can pull that off without contacting the police, but I’ll look into it.”
It might be a long shot, but who knows? Right now we can use any lead we can get.
I figure that with Alysha’s acute hearing, she might’ve been able to distinguish what Petra was trying to say. However, when I ask her about it, she tells me she couldn’t make it out.
Tane looks a little confused. “Senator, this whole request about canceling the meeting—is it really that big of a deal?”
“It might not appear so at first, but I have reason to believe that someone in the Department of Defense is funneling money into black ops programs that aren’t in the budget. This is the same type of thing that was happening when waterboarding was being used. I’m concerned that there might be torture occurring at some of our military’s clandestine sites. If my sources are correct and I were to cancel this inquiry, dozens of people might be tortured. But if I do nothing, Petra dies. I don’t want to give in to their demands, but I can’t let them hurt my daughter.”
“Alright,” I say. “Then we just need to find her before nine o’clock.”
The senator gets a message from his people that the minivan is gone from the parking garage. They weren’t able to track it after it left Centennial Olympic Park.
I suggest that we take a look at the wing of the house where Petra lives, but before we can, there’s a rap on the door from the kitchen.
It’s the cook, bringing us a large tray of sliced fruit and chicken salad sandwiches.
I’d almost forgotten about the food, but when she drops it off, I don’t complain.
The senator urges us to go ahead and eat while he makes a few calls regarding the possible link between the train whistle and the ambulance siren. “Then I’ll walk you through my daughter’s living quarters.”
The blaring horn startled Kyle so much that he almost swerved into the car that was zooming past him on his left.
Mia was sitting beside him. “Babe, you alright?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “Man, they’ve created synthetic chromosomes, made cameras small enough to fit in your bloodstream, and transplanted orangutan hearts into human beings. You’d think they could design a sideview mirror without a blind spot.”
“So you’re good, though? You’re sure?”
“I’m good.”
Nicole, who was in the backseat studying a map on her phone, announced that they were almost halfway to North Carolina.
Mia looked confused. “I thought we were going to Tennessee?”
“We are. We just need to scoot through a corner of North Carolina first. Don’t worry, it’s only a—”
Her phone rang, she glanced at the screen and immediately answered it. “Hello?” Then she said urgently, “So did you find him?” Leaning away from the phone, she exclaimed, “It’s the cop from campus security!”
Back on the line, she told him that her friends were there with her. “Can I put you on speakerphone?”
When she did, they all heard the officer: “As I was saying, this is Officer Webster from the Northern Georgia Tech Campus Security Services.”
“But you didn’t find Daniel?” Nicole reiterated.
“Not yet. No. I’m calling to let you know that I’ve been in touch with the coaches running the camp this week and none of them have seen your friend. However, the Berringer Hall director does recall that Daniel was in bed right around nine this morning when he was doing room inspection. So that’s a good sign. It means—”
“Um,” Kyle interrupted him. “That was me.”
“You?”
“I was . . . That’s when I was looking for Daniel.”
“In his bed?”
“I didn’t want the dorm guy to know I was . . . Never mind. But it was me.”
“Okay.” The officer sounded annoyed that things weren’t going to be solved so easily. “Has Daniel contacted any of you?”
“Uh-uh,” Nicole answered.
“I’m going to need to give his parents a call. However, his registration form is missing from the files in the field house and it appears his emergency contact information was never entered into the system. Do you have a phone number I can use to reach them?”
“Um. Hang on.” She muted her cell for a moment. “What should I tell him? If he calls Daniel’s parents, they’re going to worry. And they’ll be mad too, that we didn’t contact them e
arlier.”
“I guess they have a right to know at this point,” Mia granted. “I suppose we shouldn’t really be keeping it from them that he’s missing.” Then she added somewhat morosely, “Especially if something bad has happened.”
“What do you think? Should we call ’em or should I let the cop do it?”
“He’s heading up the search back in Atlanta,” Kyle replied. “Let him go ahead and contact them first. We can always follow up afterward.”
Nicole pulled up Daniel’s dad’s number, got back on the line with the officer, and told it to him.
After he hung up, she said, “Now what?”
“Now we wait,” Kyle said. “Give it some time, then we’ll call them.”
“They’re not going to be happy.”
“No. They’re not.”
After a quick lunch, the senator takes Tane and me to Petra’s wing while Alysha stays behind in the living room with the tablet computer to re-listen to the videos.
Senator Amundsen explains that when Petra’s visions started, he had her visit a counselor, and then a hypnotherapist in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. “Actually, the hypnotist was her idea,” he clarifies. “He’s one of the best in the country and it’s not a long helicopter flight up there from here. But, well . . .”
“Did it help?” Tane asks.
“Hard to say. I believe he did help her tap into her subconscious more, but in her last session she had a pretty terrifying vision. She didn’t want to see him again after that.”
As the senator shows us around his mansion and I peer into Petra’s room, I feel a little intrusive—especially since I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for.
Nothing really jumps out at me, apart for the title of a book beside her bed: Chinese Folk Tales for the Ages. There’s a bookmark in the middle of it, and when I flip to that page, I find the story about the farmer and his son, the one about blessings and curses, the one Malcolm told Jess when she first arrived at the center.
I’m not sure what to make of that, except that Malcolm might’ve heard the story from Petra.
