The hostages sat side by side on the tiled floor, leaning against a long white wall. There were two men and two women. Each was bound at the hands and feet with duct tape. Smaller strips covered their mouths, but what they couldn’t communicate with their voices they communicated with their eyes: terror. One of the men had wet himself.
“They’re fine,” said their captor. He paced, one hand gripping the gun, the other in his pants pocket, reflexively jostling keys and coins. “They’re not in a position to play Twister, but—” he paused mid-sentence and glared at her “—you do know Twister, right?”
Claudia thought. “The game where people bend and twist all over each other, can’t move their feet off the colored circles? That one?”
“Good, good! You’re with me! I like that.” He swiveled back to the captors. “I doubt they’d know that. I doubt they’d see the significance.”
Significance? Claudia didn’t press for details. She recalled Twister as a great game for hyperactive toddlers and drunken college students. She played once as an adult and threw her back out for a week. But the man was already moving on, murmuring about his hostages.
“So my ‘friends’ here aren’t comfortable! Who cares!” he said. “They don’t deserve to be comfortable. I’m not even sure they deserve to live.” His voice dropped to a conversational tone. “I suppose, Detective, that will be up to you.”
Claudia’s mouth felt like she’d been sucking on cotton balls. She cleared her throat. “Who exactly are these people?” she asked. “Who are you?”
“I’m just a simple homeowner. That’s all you need to know for now.”
He gestured with his gun, signaling her to sit again, this time against a wall perpendicular to his hostages. She sat, drawing her knees up toward her chest. Except for a straight-backed chair that the man used, a picnic cooler, a cardboard box, a small bedside lamp on the floor, the fish tank and the cabinet upon which it sat, there was nothing in the room. Heavy drapes across a sliding glass door were drawn, leaving only cockeyed illumination from the lamp.
“Moving in or moving out?” Claudia asked.
Once again, he laughed. “Neither. I’ve been here eighteen months and I’m not going anywhere.” He pointed his gun at each hostage in turn and said “bang, bang!” to each. If not for the restlessness in his posture, the gesture would’ve seemed almost playful. “Of course, they all wish I’d never moved here to begin with. Hungry?” He patted the cooler. “I’ve got sandwiches and cold drinks.”
“No thanks. I have dinner plans for later,” Claudia replied.
“No you don’t.” He looked at his watch. “It’s closing in on five-thirty. You’re just starting your vacation and—forgive me; I’m paraphrasing your daughter now—your plans are to do ‘nothing but vegetate.’”
The terror Claudia had seen in the eyes of the hostages flared up her spine. He saw it and waved his gun dismissively. “Don’t get excited. Your Robin and my Sandi know each other from school. I don’t think they hung out together, but they wound up assigned to the same cabin for camp. Sandi mentioned it last week. She chattered about the camp, about the kids who were going, what they’d be doing, and somewhere in all of that she told me a little about Robin.” He shrugged. “Kids talk about their parents. Robin talked about you. Sandi probably talked to her about me. I can’t imagine parents are favored conversational topics for fourteen-year-old girls, but occasionally we come up. It just so happens that a throwaway comment by you to Robin to Sandi made its way to me. It was a fluke, but a convenient one. So how about that sandwich? We could be here a while.” He looked disappointed when she shook her head. “All right. They’ll still be good when you’re ready.”
The man leaned back on his chair, tilting it on two legs. He lapsed into one of his silences, the gun resting on his thigh but still pointed at Claudia. Physically, he was unremarkable in every way. She put him at his late-thirties to early forties, maybe a hundred and seventy pounds, and a few inches shy of her own six-foot height. His hair was the color of a charred steak, and hinted at the beginning of a widow’s peak. But it was fashionably trimmed and he was clean-shaven. He looked like he’d be more at home holding a pencil than a gun.
The house had central air conditioning. Claudia heard it cycle on, then shift to a steady hum. For Florida in the first week of August, it would run almost continuously to maintain whatever temperature the man had set. She guessed at 74 degrees—cooler than most people would set; maybe not cool enough for their captor. He wore pressed jeans and a crisp white shirt rolled at the sleeves, but the shirt was damp under the arms from perspiration. Another bad sign.
“So where are we going with this?” Claudia asked. “Obviously there was never a burglary—”
“Obviously.”
“—which means the call you put into the police station was just a stunt to get me over here for this, whatever ‘this’ is.”
“I don’t like the word ‘stunt.’ It sounds like something you’d find in one of those gratuitous movies where pyrotechnic displays are more important than story. Bang-bang, shoot ’em up. That’s all the film industry seems to produce anymore.”
And then he was off and running again, leaning forward in his chair and lecturing about the decline of the film industry and moving somehow, from there, into an animated discourse on the epidemic of drugs in the United States. He stopped in the middle of a sentence, sat back and smiled. “Ruse. Let’s just call it a ruse, and a damned clever one at that.”
Sally was on dispatch when the call had come into the station at four-thirty on the non-emergency line. The caller, who identified himself as Charles Gottu, said someone had walked into his house and stolen his stereo system. He said he was on his way out of town and needed a detective out now. No, he hadn’t locked his door, but did that make burglary less of an offense? What? No, it couldn’t wait. And no, he didn’t want a patrol officer. His taxes entitled him to prompt and thorough investigation, which meant he deserved a detective. Surely the police department had at least one of those, did it not?
Of course it did. It had at least one. In fact, it had exactly one.
Claudia couldn’t hear the man’s end of the conversation, but knew from Sally’s rising voice that the most standing between “kiss my ass” and a hang-up was maybe thirty seconds. That wouldn’t play well with the chief, so Claudia took the call, jotted directions to the man’s house and told him she’d be out shortly.
“What’re you, nuts?” Sally said. “This guy’s gonna whine to you halfway into next week. You’ll be starting your vacation with a headache.”
“Nah. I’ll catch him on my way home, take a report and tell him to call his insurance company. Fifteen minutes, in and out.”
“I don’t think so. This guy’s looking for a full-scale investigation. Until you have someone in handcuffs he’s not gonna leave his phone long enough to go to the toilet.”
“Then I’ll have to explain the facts of life to him, Sally. It just takes some people skills.”
“You don’t have people skills.”
The phone rang before Claudia could frame a response. She made a face at Sally, then grabbed her jacket and handbag and headed out, little on her mind but seven glorious days of doing nothing. That was an hour ago, and now, instead of peeling off her work clothes and feeding the cat, she was listening to the man carry on about how masterfully he’d baited her.
“The bit about my name—Charles ‘Gottu’—that was an especially nice touch, don’t you think? I mean, you do get it, right? ‘Gottu’? Got you?”
“I get it,” Claudia said. She watched the man nod, satisfied, and it struck her that he wanted her approval, almost seemed eager for it. If she ever got the chance—a big if—maybe she could work it to her advantage.
“Don’t take it too hard, Detective Hershey. What you fell into? It’s all about human nature. Lacking evidence to the contrary, you trusted in the basic goodness of people—in this case, me. I called for help. You responded in goo
d faith. You thought I was what I represented myself to be. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.” He waved his gun toward his captives. “Of course, I’d have never gotten my ‘guests’ over here on a basis of trust. Them I had to lure with greed. It was disappointingly easy. Maybe one day I’ll tell you about it.”
“Why not now?”
He didn’t answer. “They’ve turned me into someone I don’t know,” he said softly. “I’ve become more like them and less like myself. My own daughter wouldn’t recognize me. She’d . . . .” He blinked and shook his head slightly, then turned his attention fully back to her, animated once more. “Amazingly—even with all of this—I find that trust is still important to me. I’m not entirely willing to let it go, not yet. So let me ask you, Detective. Can I trust you?”
Somewhere here, there was a right answer. She didn’t know what it was, who he was, what he wanted. If she told him sure, he could trust her, he wouldn’t believe her. If she told him no, he might admire her for her honesty but secure her like the others. Either way, there seemed no win-win in a direct answer, so she cranked her neck a bit and winced, giving him a little theater right back instead.
“That’s not a fair question,” she said. “You tricked me into coming here. You hit me on the head. You’re holding a gun on me. Now I’m pragmatic enough to recognize that you must have good reasons for what you’re doing, so I’m prepared to trust you, but how about leveling the playing field?”
He smiled. “That’s not an answer, but it’s a good response.”
“Best I could do under pressure.” She smiled back. He wanted her to like him. “So? You ready to tell me who you are and what’s going on? What you want?”
The man stretched. “Sure. Why not.” He glanced at his hostages. “It’s not like they don’t already know.” One of the men looked at him. The other captives studiously avoided eye contact. “Who I am is Steven Hemmer and what I want is to get my house painted.”
Chapter 2
No one would mistake Indian Run as a vacation destination. That’s not to say the town didn’t have some impressive characteristics, of course. In its own quiet way Indian Run put a lot of Florida towns to shame, what with its huge trees weighted by Spanish moss, wide-open spaces, a lake teaming with perch and bass, and a sky so free of pollutants you could almost see your reflection in it. But it didn’t have sandy beaches or two-story shopping malls or even a single multiplex movie theater. No glitz. No glamour. None of that, not at all. What Indian Run had instead were cattle ranches, citrus groves, sod and vegetable farms, and light businesses that saw to their needs. Oh, sure. There were some distinctions here and there. Indian Run was home to a dwindling group of psychics and mediums that attracted some attention back in the ’70s—and then again in the late ’90s when one of them got killed—and it also boasted one of the finest boot makers in the entire state, an enormous man whose custom work would embarrass competitors in Texas. Still and all, it took little more than a glance at the Chamber of Commerce’s outdated brochure to see that Indian Run was primarily about cows and corn and washboard roads.
Most of the town’s eight thousand residents had actually been born and raised here, which always seemed to surprise the odd traveler who occasionally took a wrong turn into Indian Run on the way north to Disney World, just outside Orlando. Indian Run wasn’t all that close to Orlando; it really wasn’t close to much of anything. Still, the center of the state was vast and its roads less clearly marked than the superhighways in Florida’s coastal areas. Getting lost wasn’t easy but it likewise wasn’t hard, and as long as mistaken visitors had their cup of coffee and then drove on, Indian Run’s residents looked upon them with amused benevolence. The same, though, could not be said of visitors who liked the quaint feel of Indian Run and came back to stay. Their numbers had grown and in the last six years Indian Run had seen a downright infiltration that bloomed into an exclusive community called Feather Ridge. The people in Feather Ridge didn’t seem to understand just how unpopular they were, but that might’ve been because they insulated themselves from the very aspects of Indian Run that originally attracted them. They didn’t raise cattle or corn in Feather Ridge. They raised a private airstrip and a private school, and they installed a lush golf course that hid many of their six-figure homes from prying eyes. They were happy. They worked up tans in the winter months, and when most of them retreated to the north during the hot summer they enjoyed telling their friends they’d discovered one of the rare, still-pristine areas of Florida.
But as intolerable as Feather Ridge remained even now to many of the town’s lifelong residents, it was nothing compared to the most recent insult—a gated community that in little more than two years had foisted two-hundred and forty concrete-block houses on the opposite end of town. Florida couldn’t get enough of gated communities and a developer running out of space to build more of them in South Florida eventually discovered new potential in the central part of the state. He couldn’t expect the same asking price for homes far from beaches, but he flourished anyway because land was cheaper and so was construction labor. He gave Indian Run what he’d given South Florida: zero-lot-line single-family houses in mocha, peach and off-white shades. What that basically meant were homes with virtually no yard, spaced about ten feet apart. He had no trouble selling any of them. People loved Florida, and they loved their gates.
The gates in this particular community, Willow Whisper, weren’t really gates at all. They were nothing more than horizontal bars that resembled yardsticks. They operated with remote control devices that would raise or lower them, which made entry to the community inconvenient for thieves, but not impossible. When Claudia made her way to Willow Whisper to take the burglary report at Hemmer’s house, that was one of the possibilities she considered, especially because the bar at the entrance was currently stuck in an upright position. Apparently that happened a lot. It’s what Hemmer was venting about now, telling her that for the eighty-dollar monthly maintenance fee he paid the homeowners association, he was entitled to reliable gates.
Claudia nodded. She knew little about gated communities or homeowners associations, but she could sympathize with paying for something you didn’t get. She’d once had a skirmish with an air-conditioning company that billed her in advance for a routine service call and then made her wait all day for a technician who never showed up. She told Hemmer the story, hoping to nudge him into seeing her as a kindred spirit.
“So how did they resolve it?” he asked. “Did they fall all over themselves with apologies for the ‘inconvenience’? Did they schedule another appointment and discount the bill for a whopping ten percent? Assure you it’d never happen again?”
“Something like that.” As a matter of fact, it was exactly like that.
Hemmer smirked.
“But never mind. It’s nothing compared to what you’ve got going here,” said Claudia. “You said you wanted your house painted. What’s the—”
Hemmer tossed a pen and a spiral notebook at her. “Here. You’ll want to take notes.” He paused while she flipped the notebook open. “I want my house painted. I also want the concrete patio slab out back replaced. And while we’re at it, I want the gate fixed. I want all of it done now. Today. No later than the end of the weekend. The people in this room can make it happen. They already should’ve made it happen. Instead, they jerked me around and now I’m out of patience. They do the job and they all live happily ever after. They don’t do the job and you can guess the ending.” He turned to them and did the “bang-bang” thing again.
The chill in Claudia’s stomach had turned into a flame. She took a deep breath to fight back nausea, reviewing everything she had ever learned about hostage negotiation, and knowing that what she knew was not enough. She tentatively put a hand on the floor to push up, testing him.
Hemmer was at her side in an instant, the automatic at her head. “Hey! What’re you doing?”
“Whoa, whoa.” Claudia froze. “I was just thinking about
the tour you offered. I’ll take that now. You can show me what you’re talking about. Then you can tell me about the people you’ve got here.”
He relaxed and took a step back, but didn’t lower the gun. “All right. Okay. But we take it slow and you don’t move unless I tell you to move. We’re not buddies.”
They started outside, Hemmer cautiously guiding her past the drapes and through the sliding glass doors onto the patio. It had an eastern exposure and looked out onto a woodsy area, which wrapped the south edge of his property line as well. A chain-link fence choked with weedy undergrowth separated it from Hemmer’s manicured yard. To the right, on the north side, a six-foot-tall privacy fence blocked his yard from that of his neighbor.
“Detective, did you know that in a development like my corner lot is considered prime acreage? That and anything on a lake or cul-de-sac.”
Claudia shook her head.
“Sure, sure. It’s all about the view or the privacy, and sometimes both.” Hemmer laughed. “It’s all an illusion, of course. Just like the security of an entrance gate.” He waved toward the woods. “You see a gate there? A guard? Of course not. If people want in, they’ll get in. I disabled my own alarm system first thing when I moved here. They go off when you don’t want them to, and any kind of thief with an ounce of intelligence can breach them, anyway.” He shook his head. “Gated communities. Security. I can’t believe how gullible people are.”
“So why’d you buy in here?”
“A divorce. A death. A daughter—mostly a daughter. It’s a long story and none of it matters now. Point is, I didn’t get what I paid for. Look at the patio.”
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