“This is their game, C.A., not mine, and they asked for you.” He tapped his notebook. “I wrote it down. We do it their way, just as they say, and we get Mrs. Graham back.”
“No!” She shouted. “I can’t!” “I can’t go back there” is what she wanted to convey to them, but it already was too late. She already was back—the memory crashed in and washed over her: deep night on a Louisiana bayou. Beaten, bound, gagged, tossed into the bottom of a boat. All senses dulled until the only remaining sensation was that of wanting to die. Of believing that death, indeed, was imminent. And not caring. She remembered as if it were now. Terror caused her legs to tremble.
“Please, C.A.,” Jake whispered.
“Suppose I do something wrong, Jake?”
“I’ve already done whatever there was to do wrong. You can only get Grace back for me. Please, C.A.”
She couldn’t stop shivering. The heat was blowing full blast in the Explorer and she was layered from head to toe. And yet she was freezing. Once again, as they miraculously had been all winter, the weather forecasters were accurate in their predictions and the temperature now hovered at the twenty-degree mark though it was barely six o’clock. But it had been dark since four-thirty. And in the woods of Calvert County, Maryland, dark meant pitch black. It also meant lonely and isolated and roads which, though salted and sanded, still were dangerously icy and required every point of her attention, and she was grateful for the need to focus on something outside herself. To turn inward would be to encounter the fear, the terror—the memory—that roamed there, a marauding bandit capturing all that dared move.
Carole Ann’s gaze constantly shifted between the absolute darkness of the night that stretched ahead of the light projected by the high beams of the truck, and the glow of the onboard computer screen that confirmed that she was still going in the right direction. Paolo had programmed the computer from the directions Grace’s kidnappers had given him over the phone. They were, he said, thorough and clever. They had allowed only enough time for their orders to be followed, and had left no time to put into place a plan of support and protection for the two women. There was a tracking device connected to the truck, and virtually invisible video and audio recording devices; it would take hours of thorough searching to locate them and Paolo didn’t believe the kidnappers would invest that kind of time and energy. But there would be no one close enough to help her if she needed help. There would be backup “nearby,” Paolo had said, people who could get to her in a matter of several minutes. . . .
She refused to allow herself to ponder the things that could happen in several minutes, focusing instead on the ribbon of road that was winding its way deeper into Washington County and toward the Pennsylvania state line. She was due to reach her destination at six-thirty. Normally a drive of less than two hours, they’d allotted three, given the fact that weather and road conditions were notoriously treacherous the closer one got to the Allegheny Mountains of western Maryland. It had been a reasonably easy drive out of D.C., given the normal nature of rush hour traffic. Interstate 270 to Interstate 70 was bumper to bumper but uneventful—no tractor trailer had overturned this day and backed up traffic all the way to Richmond. Leaving I-70, however, to access the state road that would deliver her to her destination, frightened and unnerved her. She fought for control.
Just ahead, according to her instructions, she should expect to see a signal. She slowed almost to a crawl and looked instinctively into her rearview mirror. The darkness was complete and overwhelming. No danger of being rear-ended for stopping in the middle of the road. Impenetrable darkness faced her as she rolled slowly forward. She glanced again at the computer screen and when she returned her gaze to the roadway, there was a shadow beckoning her with a high-beam flashlight. She began shivering again.
She followed the beam of light into a turn-off she’d never have noticed otherwise, then followed the poorly plowed road. She stopped and shifted into four-wheel drive and then continued. The snow was heavy and drifting, but at least it was snow and not ice and the Explorer made steady progress. Carole Ann peered ahead. She didn’t know what she was looking for so she didn’t know what to expect and therefore was startled and unnerved and, finally, terrified by the appearance of three figures in her headlights.
Dressed in solid-black ski clothes and bathed in the high beams of the truck, the three stood still before her and, as she observed them, she felt herself grow calm. If this were a film instead of her life, she’d consider the scene overdramatic and borderline racist: black-clad evil emerges from the sinister darkness—against a backdrop of peaceful, white snow—to terrify the heroine. “Fuck this shit,” she muttered to herself and, throwing the truck into park and jamming the emergency brake down with her foot, she opened the door.
“Remain as you are, please,” the center figure called out in an almost cheery voice, raising his hand like a school crossing guard to halt her progress, and moving slowly toward her. The other two raised their hands, as well, though in them were weapons she hadn’t previously noticed.
She stopped and waited for the man giving the orders to get close enough that she could hear his instructions over the idling roar of the truck’s engine and the wail of the winter wind.
“Where are the documents, Miss Gibson?”
“Backseat, passenger side,” she answered, her eyes locked on his, the only part of his entire anatomy that was visible. Brown eyes.
“Stand down out of the vehicle, close the door, and turn away from me,” he ordered, and she obeyed. “I’m going to blindfold you,” he said, removing his gloves as he approached her. “If you leave your hands at your sides, I won’t need to handcuff you as well. Understood?”
“Understood,” she replied, and turned her back to him and stood with clenched fists while he covered her eyes. She heard the back door of the truck open and close and nothing more for several seconds. Then there was the sound of a zipper and the rustling of papers. “Where is Mrs. Graham?” she asked. “You have what you asked for—”
“Sshh,” he almost whispered, close to her ear, as if she were a small child he wished would go to sleep.
She whirled around, the terror that had controlled her turned to unbridled fury. “Goddamn you!” Then she stumbled, lost her footing in the drifting snow, and went down on one knee, throwing her arms out before her for support. As she was going down, she angled her head in toward her shoulder and tried to shove up whatever was covering her eyes. At the same time, her—what? captor, tormentor?—reached out to her. To help her, to punish her, she didn’t know. But in a flash of a glimpse, she saw his hand. And the ring on his finger . . . Then she took herself all the way forward, down and face first into the snow.
A powerful grip pulled her up then pushed her forward and into the side of the truck and held her there. “Don’t move again,” he said in the almost-whisper voice. “Not a muscle.”
She stood there against the truck feeling the cold creep into her despite her protective covering; and this time, the shivering produced chattering teeth. Her feet and toes were numb and tingling, as were her hands and fingers. She wondered how long it took for frostbite to occur when the temperature was below twenty degrees. Snot was running from her nose and, she could tell, freezing on her mouth and chin. She was about to ask for permission to wipe her face—the bile rising to her throat at the necessity—when she heard the door to the truck open and then slam shut.
“Get in, Miss Gibson, and sit for exactly five minutes before departing.” He no longer was near her—in fact, he was himself departing as he said the word.
She heard nothing more so she fumbled around, trying to locate the door handle. The combination of the blindfold, gloves, and frozen fingers impeded her progress. Using her left hand, she removed the glove from her right hand and with that hand, the covering over her eyes. She quickly opened the truck door and climbed in. A blindfolded Grace was sitting in the passenger seat.
“Grace.”
“C.A.?”<
br />
Carole Ann reached over and removed Grace’s blindfold and hugged her briefly.
“Are you hurt, Grace? Did they hurt you?”
She was shaking her head. “No. They didn’t bother me. Where’s Jake, C.A.? Is he all right?” All the panic she must have held in all day released itself on those words and she wept. It was a helpless, pitiful sound that Carole Ann wished she had not had to hear. She slid across the seat and gathered the older woman in her arms and held her and searched for words of comfort and consolation. As that comfort and consolation had been provided for her when she needed it . . . She pushed away those memories. With everything in her being she had resisted them; she would not permit their intrusion now, when the task almost was completed.
“Can you hang on for just a few moments longer, Grace, until we get out of here?”
She released Carole Ann and nodded and, leaning forward, opened the glove box and pulled out a handful of tissues, half of which she offered to C.A. They both blew their noses and wiped their eyes. Then Carole Ann looked around, not that she could see much beyond the headlights in front of her, and nothing to the rear. She released the emergency brake, put the truck in reverse, and began to back out the way she’d come in, only then remembering the admonition to wait five minutes.
“Fuck you,” she muttered to herself. Then, “I can’t see a thing,” and she tried to recall how long it had taken her to get up the drive from the main roadway. She did know, though, that it had been a straight shot, so she continued to back up slowly and in a straight line, shifting her eyes from the rearview mirror to the front and back again and keeping the steering wheel steady. She didn’t know that she reached the main road until she felt the shift in the terrain, felt the smoothness of the blacktop highway. She stopped, shifted out of four-wheel drive, and gunned the engine. She had to keep reminding herself to slow down, that there were icy patches on the road.
Her heart was racing and instead of shivering, she now was hot and sweating. She gripped the steering wheel so tightly her hands hurt; so did her shoulders from being hunched up around her ears. Ahead she saw the familiar red, white, and blue shield that signaled the approach of I-70. She heard Grace whisper, “Thank God,” and she increased the pressure on the gas pedal. The truck shimmied just a bit on the entrance ramp to the highway and she rotated the steering wheel to compensate and, to regain complete control, she entered the freeway slowly even though there was little traffic. Then, suddenly, behind her, there was the unmistakable flash of red and blue lights.
First there were too many thoughts in her head. Then there were none. Fear overcame her as one police vehicle sped up to get in front of her, while another pulled up close on her rear. She stopped and waited. Not thinking, not feeling. Terror again was in control and her senses had shut down. So it did not immediately register that there were faces at the windows and that those faces belonged to four Maryland state troopers and to Jake Graham and Paolo Petrocelli. Until Grace screamed out her husband’s name.
One good thing about the Hagerstown Barracks of the Maryland State Police, Carole Ann thought, was that it was warm. Another good thing was that it was near an all-night Dunkin Donuts and one of the troopers had fetched a dozen fresh, warm ones. The barracks coffee, however, was disgusting. She drank it anyway. It was, in its way, preferable to the prodding by the police and the investigator from the state attorney general’s office, all of whom were more than a little angry to realize that a former D.C. homicide detective, a former agent of the FBI, and a member in good standing with all the local bar associations, had failed to notify authorities of a kidnapping, and who, for a while, threatened to bring several levels of charges. Until enough of the lawyer was roused within Carole Ann that she put a stop to those threats. It was not illegal to not report a kidnapping, and none of them had broken any laws in procuring the safe release of Grace Graham.
Carole Ann’s willing return to the lonely stretch of road to search for the exchange point before more snow could fall and eradicate tracks did a lot to ameliorate the hostility that was fueling the police, and finding the spot produced a moment of true euphoria. The investigators would have, she thought, jumped for joy, had they been standing instead of sitting in the cramped trooper vehicle. But they pumped their fists in the air and one of them gave her a hearty “atta girl.” She appreciated what they were feeling but didn’t share it and was relieved when a trooper in a backup car sped her back to the barracks and warmth.
The young trooper quickly spread the good news and his barracks mates re-created the euphoric feeling. It was quickly destroyed by the news that the OnShore Manufacturing buildings were, at that moment, burning to the ground. The Jake Graham who still was a cop emerged from his shell long enough to rattle off a series of questions, which were transmitted from their location at the Hagerstown Barracks to state troopers from the Waldorf Barracks a hundred miles away, on the scene of the blaze: no, there were no vehicles on the premises—no trailers, no cabs, no cars—which led Jake to speculate that the fleet of trucks he’d seen there were rentals. No, there was no danger from the gas pumps—they were dry and had been for years; and no, the fire wasn’t burning so hot because of stacks of cardboard boxes and paper products, but because of the accelerant that was used to set it.
With every response, Jake caved in on himself a little more, until he resembled a flat tire. No vestiges of the cop remained. All the joy he’d exhibited at Grace’s return had dissipated. He sat hunched over, elbows on his knees, hands folded between them, shaking his head back and forth, oblivious to all sight and sound. “They got me good,” he said once, to nobody in particular. He displayed emotion only once, when the AG investigator questioned his assertion that GGI no longer had any files pertaining or relating to OnShore Manufacturing or Seaboard Shipping and Containers. “I told you we gave ’em everything. We kept nothing, just like they said. And see,” he pointed toward Grace. “I got my wife back. Just like they said.”
“You wouldn’t mind, then, would you, if we checked your computers? Just to be sure?”
The real Jake Graham surfaced for a brief though impressive moment. “Goddamn right I mind. You’re calling me a liar, you slimy son of a bitch, and I don’t like it when scumbags call me names. You think I’d play games with my wife’s life! They said delete the file, we deleted the file. They said don’t try to find them, we’re not gonna try to find them. They can burn down the whole damn Eastern Shore if they want to. I got my wife back and that’s all I care about, you got that?”
Then he sagged again, out of breath and energy and fire and anger. Grace sat close to him, her arm around his shoulders, and she was as energized and animated as he was apathetic, despite her obvious physical exhaustion. She wanted to cooperate with the police. She wanted to tell them everything she saw and heard and remembered, and the more she talked, the angrier she became. The only problem was that she hadn’t seen or heard very much. She never saw the faces of her abductors, and all she heard were their demands: over and over they told her that if Jake relinquished the complete OnShore and Seaboard files, she’d be released unharmed. They emphasized complete, Grace said, and implied that they would know if any information was retained. They also made very clear—no implication here—that if GGI made any attempt to trace or locate them, they would know about it. “They said to tell you not to doubt them or underestimate them. They said that would be a fatal mistake. Those were their exact words: ‘fatal mistake.’ ”
Carole Ann told them almost everything she saw and knew: three black-clad, ski-masked figures standing at the end of a driveway in a discreet clearing in the woods, two of them pointing automatic weapons at her. She made the decision to withhold the one thing she did see and the one impression she formed until she felt more rational. And since no one asked him, Petrocelli didn’t mention the secreted recording devices in the Explorer.
It was near dawn when she got home, and she had no words to describe how she felt. More than fatigued or exhausted; m
ore than angry and frustrated; she had been more than frightened and terrified. The only sensation that she could adequately and accurately define was the nature of the interaction with the law enforcement officials. She’d been a criminal defense attorney for a good number of years and had cautioned enough defendants to know how to traverse that terrain. As an experience, it already was dimming in her memory, barely a blip on the screen of the horrible days and nights she’d known.
She undressed and uncharacteristically left the pile of clothing in the middle of the bedroom floor. She stood for a long while in the shower, wondering whether she was merely numbed by the events of the day, or whether all her senses had short-circuited from overload and that’s why she had no feeling. She had promised never to place herself in danger again after having been shot and nearly dying in Los Angeles, after having been abducted and beaten nearly to death the year before that in New Orleans. Her promise made after her own mother had accused her of deliberately trying to get herself killed in some kind of bizarre atonement for Al’s death.
Carole Ann, perhaps, at one time, had wanted to die, but no longer; she could live without Al, after all, she had discovered. Not only could, wanted to. Yet she could have been killed tonight and there was nothing she could have done to prevent it. She’d had no choice. She could not have refused to rescue Grace Graham. She thought of what Al would say, of what her therapist would say. Of course she had a choice, they would declare. Why wasn’t she as certain?
Wrapped in a warm wool and cashmere robe, she lay across the bed. No point in getting under the covers. She didn’t think it possible to sleep—too many thoughts were speeding out of control in her head. She tried to slow them, to focus them. Pick one thought: the ring she’d seen on the hand of the man she believed to be the leader of the group. And his voice. Something about it was important but she couldn’t remember what it was. She yawned.
The Step Between Page 8
