Vendetta

by Nancy Holder

  Not any more. He’s got it under control, Cat told herself firmly.

  Cat didn’t go so far as to pity Hallie DeMarco but she made a mental note to check into her history. And to see what they could discover about Angelo’s mother. There was a lot going on beneath the surface of the DeMarco compound, that was for sure.

  “Sir?” said a voice, and Cat, Tess, and the two agents all turned to see the dark-skinned woman from the recovery unit hovering in the doorway with a matchbook in her hand. Cat hadn’t even seen her enter the bedroom.

  The tech was excited. “I just found this under the vic’s bed.”

  “You mean Angelo DeMarco. He has a name,” Robertson growled. His eyes flashed with fury as he advanced on the young woman and grabbed the matchbook. “I said that Special Agent Gonzales and I would personally search his room.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I—I didn’t hear that,” said the crestfallen woman.

  “No matter. The damage is done now.”

  Damage, Cat noted. She knew Tess was listening just as hard.

  Tess and Cat gathered next to Robertson. The front cover of the matchbook was gray, and the word turntable was printed in smeared black letters.

  “That’s a club,” Tess said. “For people into vinyl records. You know, the classics.” Cat blinked in surprise that Tess would know such a thing. “J.T. took me there.” Her cheeks reddened and Cat forced away a grin. A real date. That she had not yet heard about. That was something to look forward to.

  “That’s the kind of place he liked to go,” Mrs. DeMarco said.

  Liked. Past tense again.

  “Does he have any friends there, people he meets on a regular basis?” Cat asked, ignoring Robertson’s baleful looks. She wasn’t going to stand there and do nothing, for heaven’s sake. She had sworn an oath to protect and serve, not to avoid offending the FBI. In fact, if anything, the FBI owed her big-time.

  “No clue.” Hallie DeMarco glanced over at Robertson. Clearly she was unwilling or unable to respond in his presence.

  “May I?” Cat asked the tech, who looked flustered as she took the matchbook and examined it. There was a string of seven numbers written in blue ink on the inside flap. Could be a phone number without an area code. She let Tess take a picture of it with her phone, then positioned the cover for another picture. Robertson practically snatched it out of her hand.

  “We’ll take care of that,” he said, thrusting it back at the tech. Then he turned to go back into the bedroom. Gonzales followed. After a couple of seconds, Mrs. DeMarco went inside, too.

  “No kidding this is an inside job,” Tess muttered.

  Together the two detectives walked through Angelo DeMarco’s guitar museum. Nearly all the instruments were electric, except for a very few that were displayed in the cases the farthest away from the door. Then in the very last case sat a child-size guitar, which was painted shocking pink and decorated with periwinkle-blue flowers.

  “I saw guitars like this for sale when I was in Cancun with Gabe,” Cat told Tess. “A street vendor had a souvenir cart filled with them, and maracas and castanets.”

  “Cancun. Gabe. Stop. You’re making me shudder,” Tess said. “I know, right? Gabe.” Cat couldn’t believe she’d ever slept with Gabe either. Repeatedly. They’d taken that trip when Gabe had pretended be dead so they could flush out Sam Landon, the man who had created new beasts to take out the “Masters of the Universe,” the ultra-hush-hush organization of the rich and ruthless that had backed Muirfield.

  In Cancun there had been massages and lovemaking and convincing herself that Vincent was nothing more than a memory. Just thinking about it made Cat grimace. Gabe was her bitterest enemy now, although he didn’t see himself that way. He believed he was her white knight. He had made her life a living hell so that he could protect her.

  The same as my father, she thought. And now my father is missing. Until that very moment, she hadn’t allowed herself a single second to dwell on that, and now, just as agony had ruptured Mrs. DeMarco’s mask, thoughts of him crashed through the wall she had erected so she could do her job. It infuriated her that she was being jerked around by Robertson and Gonzales instead of looking into her father’s disappearance.

  “And… we’re back from Mexico,” Tess murmured pointedly.

  “Sorry.” Cat opened the case and took out the pink guitar. “Why would he have this?” she asked. “Did it belong to someone famous? Shirley Temple?”

  “Maybe it was Angelo’s first guitar?” Tess ventured. “Wouldn’t that be weird? I mean, I don’t care that it’s pink, but wouldn’t his so-very-sexist dad?”

  Cat turned the guitar over to examine the back. Something fluttered out of the sound hole and Tess bent to retrieve it. It was a blurry Polaroid of a little redheaded girl. There was something about her that caught Cat’s attention, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Does this ring a bell?” she asked Tess, and Tess considered. She took the photograph and held it closer.

  “Maybe?” Tess said. “I’m not sure.” She pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of it. “I’m tempted to take it.”

  “Then we’re breaking laws and we do that often enough,” Cat said. “I suppose we should show it to the agents.”

  “Show what?” said a voice behind Cat, and she jerked, startled. Agent Robertson had come up behind her. He took the photograph and the guitar. “What’s this?” “The photograph was inside the guitar.” She pointed to the sound hole. “Maybe he hid it there. It could be a family member, or some kind of link.”

  “Naw. It’s nothing,” he replied. “I’m sure he doesn’t know it’s even there.” He stuffed the photograph back in in the guitar and put the guitar back in the display case.

  Finally, Cat lost her temper. “How can you be so sure?”

  He sighed. “I just am. Just leave all this to us. We’re FBI.”

  She said, “We are professionals too.” As soon as she said it, she regretted it. She didn’t want him to know he was getting to her.

  “Last call for clubs in the city is four a.m.,” Tess said. “It’s after three now. There’s a mandatory curfew on businesses but they might be open. Not sure if we could get there before closing with the traffic but we might catch staff.”

  “You wanted to talk to Bailey Hart,” Gonzales said. “I’ll get someone to take you down to him.”

  Cat traded looks with Tess. If they talked to Bailey Hart, they would miss out on the club. But as they say, a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush. And it was doubtful that the club was open.

  “Okay,” Cat said.

  Gonzales said into his phone, “I need someone with a retinal scan in the database.”

  After a couple of minutes, the red-haired female security staffer met them at a freight elevator. Her name was Claudia McEvers. She was stiff-backed and waves of apprehension rolled off her like flop sweat as she was introduced to Tess and Cat. She approached a retinal scanner and the doors opened; then she went inside with Cat, Tess, and Roberston, and used her key card to activate the elevator.

  “So you work for Mr. DeMarco,” Cat said. “Were you on duty when the kidnapping occurred?”

  The woman hesitated. “No. I was called in shortly before you arrived. I’ve given a full statement to the agents.” She made eye contact with Roberston, but barely.

  Either they know each other or something’s up, Cat mused. She’s not going to speak freely in front of him.

  They got to the sub-basement and stepped into a workspace dominated by a wrap-around computer station abutting a vast wall of monitors. Dressed in gray trousers and a chambray shirt rolled up to the elbows, Bailey Hart was an amazing piece of techno eye candy, a man who believed in lifting weights and doing sit-ups as much as Vincent did. He looked like one of the super-hunky firefighters who appeared in the annual FDNY pin-up calendar. Mr… what month was this? This was Mr. Year.

  “Okay, so hi,” he said breathlessly. He was holding a ballpoint pen and he
clicked it a few times. A few more times. It was obviously a nervous habit. On the desk was an ink blotter that he had scribbled and doodled on so much there was no white space left. There were pieces of graph paper, a Styrofoam plate containing some pizza crust, more pens, and a tablet. He glanced at Robertson and completely avoided eye contact with McEvers. “Let me run you through our backup security operation.”

  The monitors revealed different sections of the house, and each screen was packed with people milling around in the rooms. Cat caught a glimpse of Hallie DeMarco in the kitchen, pouring herself another glass of bourbon as she chatted with a young man in an FBI windbreaker. Robertson’s face hardened as he watched her.

  “This is custom, in-house stuff,” Hart said. “I didn’t buy anything off the shelf, and no one who worked on it besides me had access to all the components. The brains are in here.”

  He walked them down a flight of stairs into what could only be described as a bunker designed to withstand a nuclear blast. It was guarded by two men in olive-green uniforms who were holding sub-machineguns across their chests. They stood to attention as he presented his eye to a retinal scanner and placed his hand on a print reader. Then he keyed an elaborate code into a shielded box, so that no one else could see.

  A steel door at least two inches thick clicked and slowly swung open. The interior was softly lit, and as he ushered them in, the two guards turned toward them and raised their weapons.

  “This is not cool,” Tess said.

  “It’s all right. It’s just a precaution,” Hart said.

  “It’s not all right,” Cat insisted. “They need to lower their weapons now.”

  “All right. Okay,” Hart murmured. He said to one of the guards, “Alpha niner zulu.”

  Both guards lowered their weapons to their sides. Then they executed a smart half-turn and faced outward once more.

  A small box about the size of a microwave sat on a black pedestal. Hart came forward and stared into another scanner, tapped in more secret code on a keypad, and the box door opened. The unit inside was a very small cube of matte charcoal-gray with no buttons or switches to mar its sleek surface. The magic was in the computer chips, to which Cat and Tess were not privy. They could only take his word that it did what he said. But give that box to J.T., and it would be like unlocking a universe.

  As for what Hart said it could do: it could lock all doors, windows, safes, and computer hard drives, freeze all elevators, and activate motion-sensitive lasers in any or all of the designated “zones” throughout the house.

  “No one should be able to get in or out,” he finished. Click-click, click-click. “But someone did.”

  “And this comes on when the primary security system backup doesn’t activate?” Tess asked.

  He pulled his pen out of his pocket. Click-click. “It’s supposed to. But it didn’t. From what I can figure out, the kidnappers reprogrammed my code so that it thought the primary backup did go on. So that would keep my system from activating.”

  “So what would be a reasonable point of entry,” Tess began, “to reprogram your code?”

  “Well,” he said. “I’ve initiated a debugger, and—”

  “We’re interviewing the entire security staff,” Robertson cut in. “We’ll let you know what we find.” He waved a silencing hand at Cat as she prepared to protest. “Surely you can understand Mr. DeMarco’s reluctance to share the workings of his private security system with New York’s finest, some of whom are not so fine. No offense intended to present company.”

  Because the FBI is so much more ethical, Cat thought. Offense definitely intended to present company.

  Bailey Hart clicked his pen like crazy. He was monumentally uneasy—no; he was frightened. Take the situation and multiply it by DeMarco’s temper, and it was clear why.

  “I’m the only one with direct access to its programming. As you can see, I have a retinal scanner, a print reader, and a secret code when I program it.” He swallowed hard. Of course suspicion now focused on him.

  “There are work-arounds for scans and prints,” Robertson said, as if to reassure him. Cat knew this from personal experience—Tori Windsor had successfully opened a secret vault that had belonged to her father with her retinal scan, which was of course was programmed to recognize his DNA, and Cat had read about cases where criminals had created fake readable fingerprints off glass and other smooth, hard surfaces.

  They left the bunker with its two armed guards and walked back upstairs into what could only be termed Hart’s lair. Cat opened her purse, grabbed a business card, and handed it to him. “Anything you can share with us that you think would be useful, we’d appreciate hearing from you.”

  Looking flustered, Hart glanced at Robertson and murmured, “I’ll see what I can do.” He sat down, his way of ending the interview.

  There’s another dead end, Cat thought. He’s not going to talk to us.

  Suddenly, red lights began to spin and alarms whooped at ear-splitting decibels. Cat, Tess, Robertson, and McEvers all pulled their weapons. Hart was so startled he fell backward in his chair as his pens and papers skittered to the floor. He hit the deck just as the alarms cut off.

  The two guards appeared at the end of the room, weapons out. Tess and Cat raised their hands.

  “Code one-two, code one-two,” Hart cried. “Stand down, stand down! False alarm!”

  “We’re NYPD,” Cat said. “Stand down.”

  Neither of the guards cracked an expression. As robotic as ever, they re-shouldered their weapons but didn’t leave the room.

  Cat bent down to help Hart back up and her business card holder and a couple of pens tumbled out of her purse, which had snapped open. Tess gathered up the scattered belongings while Cat hoisted a shaken Hart to his feet. Their weapons still out, McEvers and Robertson carefully watched. Then their radiophones rang and both of them answered in unison as a landline phone on the wrap-around desk rang as well. Hart grabbed it.

  “Hello, yes, false alarm,” Hart said. “Code seven-foxtrot. Seven-foxtrot. Yes, sir. I think they implemented a time delay. Rather than fool the system into not going off, they programmed it to go off later.”

  Someone on the other end spoke.

  “I don’t know.” Hart thought hard. “Maybe they didn’t mean to. Or they did it to cause confusion.” He looked at McEvers and Robertson, then pivoted and stared at the two guards. “Maybe they were hoping someone would shoot me when it went off. No, sir, I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I’m genuinely afraid here.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” Tess said to Cat as she closed Cat’s purse and handed it to her. Cat slung the strap over her shoulder.

  “Yes, I did take them into the vault. I thought… oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. DeMarco. I thought… yes, of course,” Hart said, hanging up the phone. The blood had drained from his face. “Mr. DeMarco has asked me to terminate the, ah, tour.” His hands were shaking. “So, ah, if you would please…” He gestured to the elevator.

  He showed us more than he was supposed to, Cat thought.

  They went back up to the penthouse level. Cat was glad to see that equipment had been set up to listen in on and trace any calls DeMarco received. Since Angelo had a serious medical condition, it had to be assumed that a call would come in soon.

  “Okay, so now the club?” Robertson prompted. “You want to give it a shot?”

  “Do you have someone out in the field who would be closer?” Cat asked. The longer they took processing the crime scene to develop leads, the colder the trail would grow. It was common knowledge that the first twenty-four hours in a kidnapping investigation were the most crucial.

  “You’re probably our best choice.” He pulled out his business cards and handed one to Cat and one to Tess. They reciprocated. He gave both cards a nonchalant glance and then placed them in his wallet.

  “We’ll stay in contact,” Cat said.

  “You do that.” He fluttered his fingers as if to say, “Off you go,” dismissing them in
the most condescending way possible.

  Cat bit the inside of her cheek to keep from herself from saying anything else she would regret and they crossed back into Angelo’s room. Gonzales was examining another notebook and Cat would have given anything to take a peek at it. Instead she and Tess walked by themselves into the hall, which was still flooded with private security and FBI personnel. Claudia McEvers was among them. She looked left and right, then hailed them over.

  Cat and Tess walked up to her, and she opened a door that led into Mr. DeMarco’s office from the back way. Cat hadn’t even noticed it when they’d been inside the room before. Raised brows and a headshake from Tess indicated that she hadn’t seen it before, either. The place was like a funhouse.

  Or a safe house. There was probably a panic room, too, in case of home invasion. Maybe more than one.

  McEvers murmured, “Watch out for those two Feebs, detectives.”

  “Feebs” was another term for FBI. So this woman didn’t like Robertson and Gonzales either.

  Cat indicated to McEvers that she’d been heard and she and Tess walked into DeMarco’s study. He was sitting alone with an open bottle of a scotch and a half-full glass.

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of working with you before,” he said. “I want you to know what a lot of cops who’ve made my acquaintance already know: if you find Angelo, you will share in my joy. Generously.”

  Bribes, Cat translated.

  “That’s not necessary, Mr. DeMarco,” she said.

  He tsked. “You don’t need to worry. Downtown has given their stamp of approval. I pay my taxes, sure, but a man in my position creates a lot of work for you hardworking city employees.”

  He waited. Cat said nothing more. There really wasn’t anything to say.

  “However.” He held up a finger. “If you do anything to screw up this investigation, you will share in my dismay. Also generously.”

  “No worries,” Tess said.

  “Robertson and Gonzales are good guys,” he went on. “They know what they’re doing. I hope the same can be said of you.”