Caged

by Hilary Norman

  He tried thinking back to other ‘team’ killers, but the list he’d brought to the squad meeting two Sundays ago had been so long that now it felt like a jumble of horror in his head. There were files and books crammed with homicidal histories of friends, married couples, mothers and sons, siblings, strangers thrown together, all kinds of killing partnerships fed by drugs or greed or lust or mutual insanity, or sheer, unadulterated evil.

  ‘Sam?’

  Grace’s voice was soft, gentle, as if she realized that his thoughts were too much for him, as if she wanted to stop them for a little while, to heal him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s talk for a bit, about good times, while we still can. Is that OK?’

  He felt something in his chest, a sensation like a fiery ball of love, so real and solid and hot that he thought it might be able to squeeze out everything else for a little while.

  So he let it, sat down again.

  ‘That’s more than OK, Gracie,’ he said.

  ‘We could start with the cruise,’ she said, ‘and work back.’

  ‘The cruise until the last night,’ Sam said.

  Because if they were going to play this game, then he’d be damned if Jerome Cooper was going to destroy that too – though how in hell could he have insinuated himself into their vacation right before this? Or could it be that Dooley and Simone were behind that, too? Might they have known that even the most inconclusive evidence of Cal the Hater’s survival would have been like a direct hit to their Achilles heels?

  ‘Come on, Sam,’ Grace said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘It was the best present anyone could have been given,’ she said.

  ‘Not nearly as much as you deserve,’ Sam told her.

  ‘I don’t need anything except you,’ she said. ‘And our family.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, not able to shift the thought. ‘I have to ask you. Do you think they could have been behind what happened on the ship?’

  ‘It comes to mind,’ Grace said. ‘But I don’t see how.’

  Sam wondered if they’d ever find out.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, gently. ‘Look at the movie. That’s a nice memory, in spite of them.’ She paused. ‘I’ll bet they don’t want us to enjoy looking at it.’

  ‘They can go to hell,’ Sam said.

  ‘I expect they will,’ Grace said.

  ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

  ‘Just to let you know,’ Mary Cutter told David on the phone, ‘that Cathy’s safe here with us, talking to Beth Riley and Sergeant Alvarez.’

  ‘Is she OK?’ David asked.

  ‘She’s very shocked,’ Cutter said, ‘but she’s holding up well.’

  That sounded like Cathy, he thought, except at what point did a young person reach the end of their rope? When did too much finally become just that?

  ‘Has she been able to help?’ he asked.

  ‘Right now,’ Cutter said, ‘every single thing she can share with us is bound to help, Dr Becket.’

  David steeled himself.

  ‘Do you have any idea where they are yet?’ He paused. ‘Truth, please.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Mary Cutter replied. ‘But I’m sure we will.’

  ‘I’d like to come down there,’ David said.

  ‘Best to stay home, Dr Becket,’ the detective said. ‘When Cathy’s done here, we’ll give her a ride either back home or to your house, as she chooses – so long as she’s not alone.’

  ‘Please tell her to come here,’ David said.

  ‘Will do,’ Cutter said.

  They’d caught a small break shortly before Cathy’s arrival at the station from one of the witches, dragged unwillingly from anonymity by Beth Riley’s ongoing and unrelenting pursuit of Allison Moore.

  The witch in question, a twenty-eight-year-old sales assistant named Marcia Keaton, small, round-cheeked and bright-eyed, a physical model of wholesomeness, had told Riley and Alvarez that as she and her pals had been leaving the old gallery, they’d noticed a dark blue van with two people in it – possibly a man and a woman, though she said she couldn’t be certain – waiting near the corner of 81st Street and Collins.

  ‘It freaked me out,’ Keaton had told them, ‘because I thought they might be watching us, and it was still dark, but the licence plate was under a street light, and I don’t know why I wrote it down, but—’

  ‘You have it with you?’ Riley had jumped on it, though she knew the plates were probably stolen, same as those on the van recorded in Elizabeth Price’s road.

  ‘I kept it in my wallet.’ Marcia Keaton had paused. ‘Is it going to make this trespass crap go away?’

  ‘If you don’t give us the number,’ Alvarez had told her, ‘you’ll have a whole lot worse than trespass charges to worry about.’

  The details were being put through the database now.

  ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

  The movie on the wall was still playing when they heard sounds.

  Weird sounds.

  Creaking, rolling.

  Wheels, Sam thought, and realized that any second now he’d know if the killers had used a gurney or a dolly, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to tell Martinez or Riley . . .

  More sounds. Keys jangling. One being inserted into a lock someplace in the darkness beyond the cage.

  ‘Gracie,’ he said softly. ‘Stay strong.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  The key turned in the lock.

  ‘I love you too,’ Sam told her. ‘We’ll get through this.’

  Light penetrated, shaped like a sliver of cake expanding to a wedge, partially blotted by someone entering, then shrinking back on itself again as the door closed.

  Dark again.

  The killers in here now, with them, the gurney still outside.

  The voice came out of the darkness.

  ‘We might have known.’

  Dooley’s voice.

  ‘You two. Making the most of every moment.’

  ‘Every last moment.’

  Simone Regan’s voice.

  ‘Another perfect couple,’ she added.

  ‘The couple,’ Dooley said.

  ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

  ‘So Cathy doesn’t know where they live?’ Martinez said.‘No addresses, so far as I know,’ Saul said. ‘Anyway, everything they’ve told her has probably been lies.’

  Right after Saul had reached Cathy and told her to call Sergeant Alvarez, he’d called Beth Riley direct to find out all he could. She’d shared only the bare minimum, as he’d known she would, and he had made his next decision based on nothing more than instinct.

  Martinez had to know.

  Not that that had been Saul’s only reason for coming to the house on Alton. For one thing, Saul had known he would not be able to take sitting around with his dad and Mildred and the baby, being told to wait and do nothing.

  ‘We have to do something,’ he said.

  The real reason he’d come.

  ‘Damned straight we do,’ Martinez said.

  ‘Riley says they’re getting a warrant to search the café.’

  ‘I’m not waiting for any search warrant,’ Martinez said.

  Saul knew he’d come to the right man.

  ‘So what, are we breaking in?’ he asked.

  ‘Not you,’ Martinez said. ‘Just me.’

  ‘But you’re still sick,’ Saul said.

  ‘You never heard of adrenalin?’ Martinez said.

  ONE HUNDRED AND TEN

  The address at which the van seen by Marcia Keaton was registered was a fake.

  At least, it was a real address, but the present occupants – who had never had a vehicle stolen – had lived there for over eighteen months. And the mail that had kept on coming for the previous residents after they’d moved in had been addressed to some other name which they could not now recall.

  Except it had been Hispanic, they thought.

  Nothing like Dooley or Regan.

&nbs
p; No help at all, just distraction and a waste of time and manpower at a moment when one of their own and his wife were in mortal danger.

  The BOLO – Be On the Lookout For – was still active for Jerome Cooper.

  But the biggest hunt now going on in Miami Beach and beyond was for Matthew Dooley and Simone Regan – and their presumed captives, Samuel Lincoln Becket and Grace Lucca Becket.

  ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN

  ‘Why don’t you come out and show yourselves?’

  Sam’s voice was loud and clear, and it was almost a relief to stop speaking softly, to let it rip – almost a relief, too, that the waiting was over.

  He got to his feet again, tested the shackle on his ankle, but it and the chain held fast, and for an instant his mind went to his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, a slave who’d escaped from Georgia in the 1830s and made it to the Bahamas, and in memory of him, Sam stood a little straighter.

  Their steps were rubber-soled, their breathing audible, and then their shapes loomed out of the blackness into the semi-light just outside the cage bars.

  Both wore black tracksuits, their hands dark-gloved.

  ‘I hope,’ Dooley said, ‘you’re not too uncomfortable.’

  ‘No, we’re just peachy,’ Sam said.

  Grace, who’d chosen not to stand, moved closer to the bars and wrapped her arms around her knees to limit her exposure, depriving them as well as she could of the satisfaction of seeing her nudity, but holding her head high.

  ‘Could you please at least get something to cover my wife with?’

  ‘We could,’ Simone said.

  ‘But we won’t,’ Dooley said.

  Rage rose in Sam, but it was impotent and he knew it, so he took a breath, brought himself back under control. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘Because it would spoil things,’ Dooley said.

  ‘Simone?’ Grace said.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother trying to appeal to Simone,’ Dooley told her. ‘This is her fantasy, not mine.’

  Grace felt bile rise, fought to master it, then asked the question uppermost in her mind, the one that mattered most.

  ‘Are our children all right?’

  ‘Of course they are,’ Simone said. ‘That’s not what this is about, Grace.’

  ‘We suppose,’ Dooley said, ‘you’d both like to understand.’

  ‘A cop and a shrink,’ Simone said. ‘Stands to reason.’

  ‘If you can spare the time,’ Sam said.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother with sarcasm either,’ Dooley told him.

  ‘I’d very much like to understand,’ Grace said. ‘I’m very confused.’

  ‘I expect you are,’ Simone said.

  ‘I thought . . .’ Grace stopped.

  ‘What?’ Simone said. ‘That I liked you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘You said as much, so I believed you.’

  ‘I guess that makes me a liar.’

  Grace was staring at her, struggling to reconcile this person with the capable, kindly woman in the Opera Café, with the weary daughter she’d taken to visit her sick mother. And she realized abruptly that she didn’t even know the nature of her mother’s illness, had assumed it was either a form of dementia or perhaps stroke, had not felt it her place to ask.

  ‘What happened to you, Simone?’ she asked now.

  Psychologists seldom asked questions like that of their patients, but this was no consultation, and Grace found that she wanted, needed, to know, and maybe, in any case, dialogue might buy them a little more time.

  ‘To make me do things like this?’ Simone shrugged. ‘I like it. It makes me feel alive.’

  ‘Don’t tell her anything you don’t want to,’ Dooley said.

  Still protecting her, Sam registered. Not quite everything a lie then.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Simone said. ‘After all, we know it’s going to be over after this.’

  ‘For them,’ Dooley said. ‘Not us.’

  ‘Over for us too,’ she said. ‘At least for now.’

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE

  Martinez and Saul were at the café.

  Too late to break in.

  Black-and-whites everywhere.

  ‘Damn it,’ Martinez said. ‘Drive on.’

  He was pissed as hell on one hand that the guys had beaten him to it, had thought they might focus on the Becket house first, but he had no business being surprised, and he guessed it proved the doc’s point, proved that even mentally he was unfit for work – and it was fine that Sam and Grace’s abduction had brought all hands on deck. Except Martinez badly needed to help, to do something.

  Not here.

  He was glad now that Saul had insisted on driving, and Martinez had griped when he’d seen the old Dodge pick-up Saul was using for business, but now he figured that at least the guys were less likely to spot him than in his own car.

  The last thing he wanted was to be stopped, ordered to go home.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Saul asked.

  ‘Just drive,’ Martinez said. ‘Give me time to think.’

  Except his brain was still mush, home probably the only place he was fit for.

  Not going there yet, no way.

  Over his dead body.

  ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN

  ‘How long have you been together?’ Sam asked.

  ‘A long time now,’ Dooley said.

  Over on the screen on the wall, the silent movie still played, casting shadows over the cage, and Sam had sat down again because it was less confrontational plus he was closer to Grace, and she’d gotten a dialogue going with them, and this was the right way, the only way to go.

  ‘Where did you meet?’ Grace asked.

  It was hard for her to believe she could go on formulating questions and controlling responses even now, yet if the nakedness was about power, then continuing this was more than just a means to gain information or even of delaying tactics.

  It was a measure of defiance, for now all they had.

  And it seemed, at least for the time being, that the killers wanted to talk.

  ‘We both worked in a restaurant over in Naples,’ Dooley answered. ‘I found Simone in a storeroom late one night after everyone else had gone home. She was hurting herself. Cutting herself with a knife.’ He paused. ‘That’s what they’d done to her.’

  ‘Who?’ Grace asked, and it seemed that Dooley, more than Simone, was the one choosing to talk, either because he wanted to unload or just because it suited him. ‘That’s what who did to her?’

  ‘The perfect couple,’ Dooley answered. ‘Celine and Dougie Regan. Her wonderful parents.’

  ‘They were very gifted,’ Simone said. ‘They ran their own restaurant in Sarasota. Everyone thought they were the most talented, charming couple, and they loved each other and they were beautiful too.’

  ‘So beautiful they used to torture their kid,’ Dooley said.

  ‘Torture,’ Simone said, ‘is a strong word.’

  ‘They used to scald her, burn her,’ Dooley said. ‘Sometimes they just hit her with pots or pans. They always did it together.’

  ‘They hit me so hard once,’ Simone said, ‘I was in the hospital for a while.’

  ‘Weren’t they prosecuted?’ Sam tried not to let cynicism leak into the words, though everything that came out of these two felt like lies to him now, and he wondered how far Alvarez and Riley and the squad had come, and so long as Cathy was OK and able to tell them, they’d know by now who had taken them.

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone they’d done it,’ Simone said. ‘No one would have believed me.’

  ‘Why not?’ Grace asked. ‘I believe you.’

  Simone made a scornful sound. ‘I ran away instead. Took the bus to Naples and learnt to get by.’

  ‘On work and dreams,’ Dooley said, then looked at Grace. ‘I expect you’d like to know what kind of dreams.’

  ‘Only if Simone wants to tell me,’ Grace said.

  Sam knew she was playing their game with them,
was aware she was being toyed with, and yet she was moving steadily on with it, and he was, as he’d so often been, filled with admiration for her.

  ‘My, what a tactful shrink,’ Dooley said. ‘They’re not all as patient as you.’

  ‘I’d like to hear about Simone’s dreams,’ Sam said.

  ‘She didn’t want to tell me about them in the beginning,’ Dooley said, ‘but I was gentle with her, and she began opening up. She said if I really knew her thoughts I’d run, think she was crazy, but I told her that I had “thoughts” too – which was true, by the way, just in case you think I was using her – and I’d never found anyone I could talk to like I could to her.’

  ‘He said we were meant to be,’ Simone said.

  ‘And wasn’t I ever right?’ Dooley said.

  ‘You always are,’ she said.

  That tenderness again, perhaps for real, Sam acknowledged, yet now every to-and-fro between them made his flesh creep.

  He faked a cough, used the small convulsive jolt of his body to take another yank at the chain.

  ‘You pull away, big guy,’ Dooley said. ‘But I bought the strongest.’

  ‘Can’t blame a man for trying,’ Sam said.

  ‘Were you bored?’ Simone asked suddenly, a new sharpness to her tone. ‘Were we boring you with my story?’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Dooley said to her.

  He took two steps closer to the outer bars and Grace experienced a new rush of terror, felt he was going to do something now, enter the cage and punish Sam.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Wasn’t you who faked the cough,’ Dooley said.

  Sam looked through the bars down at the other man’s sneakers and found himself suddenly willing him to come inside, because if the sonofabitch came close enough for him to make a grab, he could maybe tackle him, bring him down.

  ‘I wouldn’t even think about it if I were you,’ Simone said.

  Neither Sam nor Grace spoke.

  Dooley stayed right where he was, smiling.

  ‘You need to take this woman seriously, guys,’ he said.