“I don’t suppose they noted the license plate.”
“No, and they’re not even sure whether it was black or blue. One thinks it was a Ford. The other is sure it was a Dodge Caravan.”
Andrew scratched his head. “Do you think the people behind this are intentionally hiring idiots? Maybe making sure that they’re jerks who would never get any ideas of their own? Either that, or they’re amateurs themselves. It could be that whoever is running the show is picking his people off the post office wall. But what infuriates me is that it’s working so well. We’ve nailed half of the people involved and still we’re no closer to finding Mrs. Childs or the people who wanted her lifted.”
“Not so,” Helen said, smiling at the delicious secret she had been holding back. “Guess what the last entry on both of their rap sheets was?”
He looked suitably bewildered.
“Breaking and entering,” Helen told him. “At a home less than a quarter of a mile from the Childs residence.”
“What?” It was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a connection.
“And guess who rushed in to provide the two lads with defense counsel?”
Hogan smiled. “The Urban Shelter. Walter Childs’ favorite charity.”
“Bingo!” Helen told him. “That damn charity is the link between the messenger, the kidnappers, and the victim. And the person it ties in to all three is the cheating husband.”
They sat for a moment staring at each other. Then Hogan said, “Why? He doesn’t need to do this. He can have his trophy wife for the price of a divorce settlement. Expensive, but he can afford it. Why would he risk everything? Why would he associate himself with small-time crooks?”
“Maybe so he can show the directors just how much he loves the bank,” Helen said, reminding Hogan of a motive that he had dabbled with himself. “Maybe he’s found the sure path to the top.”
Hogan allowed the possibility, but he didn’t think any sane man would put everything in jeopardy just to get the edge in a race for the chairman’s chair. “Unless,” he allowed, “the lovely Angela was getting tired of waiting. Could she be having second thoughts?”
“No way! Remember, I read all her computer mail. This lady wants the gold ring.”
“So then why does Walter Childs play games with his wife’s safety?”
They fell into a morose silence. Then they began a meticulous, step-by-step review of the other possible suspects.
Angela came first. It was certainly possible that she had heard Walter talk about the disgraced lawyer who was involved in his charitable work and about a burglar who had been caught on his street. Small talk, to be sure. But if someone was thinking about accomplices in a kidnapping, it could be information that she would have noted carefully. And there was no doubt about her motive. She wanted to become Mrs. President of the Bank and wife of the world’s most brilliant financial light. Suppose Walter was dragging his feet about throwing over the mother of his children. Might she have not decided that he needed a little assistance? The fact was that Angela had the most to gain if Emily should turn up dead.
“We’re forgetting the most obvious motive,” Andrew warned his friend. “There’s a hell of a lot of money involved here. Let’s, just for the minute, forget sexual favors and boardroom politics. Let’s look at this as an uncomplicated kidnapping where someone is hoping to collect a record ransom.”
“Our tennis star,” Helen filled in. “He certainly has cased all the rich ladies in the neighborhood. So maybe he got tired of balling for dollars. He’s counting on Emily Childs getting a big divorce settlement so that they can live happily ever after. And then Emily tells him that she’d rather spend the money herself, thank you!”
“Yeah,” Hogan said. “For a while, he was the obvious choice. But I can still see his face when we told him that she had been kidnapped. His jaw damn near fell off. He certainly looked surprised to me.” But then he added, “On the other hand, he probably gets a lot of acting practice pretending that he’s madly in love.”
Helen got up to refill their coffee cups. She was thinking out loud when she returned to the table. “What about the other banker, Childs’s rival for the presidency?”
“Mitchell Price,” he filled in.
“He was at the restaurant where Childs signaled that he’d pay the ransom,” Helen reminded him. “And Walter seems to think that Mitchell would do anything for the top job.”
That was true, Hogan admitted. Price, according to insiders, was slipping behind in the race. It might be that he would have absolutely no intention of harming Emily and no thought of ever collecting the ransom. He would simply count on his rival violating bank policy to save his wife, which would knock Walter out of the running. “What makes Price a reasonable suspect is the ransom note,” Walter told her. “The kidnapper was positive that he would know instantly if Andrew called in the police. Price is one of the few people who would have that kind of access to top-level information.”
“What he doesn’t know is that Walter might prefer the top job to his wife,” Helen interjected.
Andrew shook his head. “Who could figure a guy acting that way?”.
He noticed that Helen quickly broke off eye contact, busying herself with her purse and briefcase. And then he realized what he had just said. Once, many years ago, he had put his career ahead of the woman he loved. She was sitting right next to him. He had broken off their affair because of the risk to his professional reputation. He could have told the department to go to hell. He could have found another fine of work. But he had picked his career in preference to her. Wasn’t that the root of Walter Childs’s dilemma?
They parted company in the street, Andrew hailing a taxi that would take him crosstown to the bank and Helen headed toward the New Jersey hills and her meeting with Amanda Childs.
As she walked to her car, Helen thought about the one suspect that they hadn’t discussed. Andrew Hogan was sick of his demeaning position at the bank, where he was clearly an employee who would never be admitted to the inner circle. He couldn’t stomach being treated as an inferior. Nothing would give him greater satisfaction than to take one of these movers and shakers to the cleaners and fatten his pension at the directors’ expense. Andrew would be the only one close to the affair who would have access to people like the two lowlifes she had just interviewed. And he spent his days studying all the loopholes in the banks security systems. Helen could imagine the joy that Andrew would have in orchestrating the perfect crime and then putting himself in a position to enjoy its intricacies. She hoped to God she was wrong but, to her mind, Andrew had fallen quite a way from the dedicated public servant who had addressed her graduating class.
* * *
Hogan knew that something was wrong as soon as he reached his office. There was a security guard standing beside the open outer doorway. Inside, his secretary was sitting perfectly upright at her desk, her head twitching toward the open door to the inner office. “Mr. Childs,” she whispered, identifying the subject of her pantomimed warning. “He had security let him in. He was here when I came and then he made me open your office.”
Hogan smirked, and slowly shook his head. “Who can understand people who love power?” he said to the woman, causing her stunned expression to relax into a smile.
But Andrew stopped chuckling when he saw Walter Childs. The man was pacing in aimless circles, his eyes black against the white pallor of his face. He stopped moving when he realized that Hogan had entered the office, but stood dumbly as if Hogan were the last person he expected to find.
“Are you all right, Walter? What happened?”
Walter’s response was to hold out a tape cassette that he had been carrying in his hand. Hogan reached out and took it.
“What is it?” he asked, turning toward his cassette player.
“It’s a phone call I received last night. Emily’s machine copied it while I was listening to it on her extension.”
Hogan snapped on the player and listen
ed impatiently to the hiss. Then the smug, self-assured voice resonated through the office. He felt weak as he listened to the ransom demands and the threats. When Emily Childs’s voice came on, Andrew Hogan collapsed into his chair. “Jesus,” was the only comment he could think of.
“What do we do now?” Walter said, his voice cracking from fear and fatigue.
“Sweet Jesus!”
Childs fell like a discarded rag into one the chairs beside the desk. He sat silently, staring at the detective as he waited for him to come up with an answer.
“This doesn’t make any sense. Not one bit of sense. We’re dealing with a pro for a hundred million and all of a sudden some jerk is willing to settle for fifty thousand. It just doesn’t fit …”
“That was Emily’s voice,” Walter whispered. And then he nearly screamed, “He has Emily.”
“I know. I know. The man is genuine.” Hogan lowered his face into his palms. “Give me a minute. Let me think,” he mumbled.
He had thought he knew the answer the instant he heard the voice. The caller was another one of the absurd thugs. The disgraced lawyer. The two racetrack regulars. One had delivered the note. The other two had done the kidnapping. This had to be the person hired to mind Mrs. Childs; the owner of the van where she had been deposited, unconscious and wrapped in a shower curtain. But it couldn’t be. The others had been harmless punks, obviously determined not to hurt their victim. This guy was making dangerous threats.
It had to be an outsider. Someone the mastermind behind the scheme had never figured on. Someone who had found out about the kidnapping and was trying to pick up some pocket money for himself, unaware that he was about to screw up a $100 million payoff.
“My first instinct is to ignore the man. His threats to harm Emily are probably empty.”
“Harm her?” Walter interrupted. He pointed at the cassette player. “He’s talking about selling her into white slavery.”
Hogan nodded impatiently. “I heard him. It’s a ridiculous threat. And just dealing with him could prove dangerous. If the fool got himself killed, Emily might be left tied up in a closet or someplace where we would never find her.”
“Jesus,” Walter interjected with complete despair.
Then Hogan reversed himself. “But there are also good reasons for treating him seriously. He may be the best link we’re going to get to Emily’s whereabouts. If he were caught, he might not know the other people involved. He probably wouldn’t be able to identify the computer-generated voice. But he most certainly would know where your wife could be found. Hell, he got her to record the message to you.”
Walter was pleading. “Andrew, I don’t know what to do…”
“I think we have to follow up with this guy,” Hogan concluded.
“What about the other ransom?” Walter still seemed bewildered.
“We follow up on both of them. Treat each one of them as if it were the only deal you’ve been offered.”
“We pay both of them?”
Andrew smiled. “No, we don’t pay either of them. What we do is make each one of them think he’s getting paid. Then we follow the money. If I’m right, both trails should lead to the same place.”
Walter came out of his trance. “If you’re right. That’s not good enough. It could get her killed. We have to pay the money they’re demanding.”
Andrew stepped around Walter and put a hand on his shoulder. “We can’t do that, Walter. Remember what we agreed right at the start. If you’re thinking of transferring a hundred million dollars, then I’ll have to take everything I know to Hollcroft. I’m trying to catch these people. I’m trying to save your wife. But I’m not cutting a deal with kidnappers. And neither are you.”
Emily stood behind the bed, holding the headboard crossbar in both hands, rocking it quietly back and forth. She had started late at night, when the squeaking of floorboards and the banging of doors over head had subsided and the only sound was the nighttime settling of the house. At first she had used all her strength, trying to break the joint between the headboard and the corner post. But when she pushed hard, the bed had moved, its legs scratching across the cement floor like fingernails digging into a blackboard. To prevent the noise, she had to hold the bed steady with one hand while she forced the bar with the other. The process had quickly become exhausting.
Instead, she had settled for a rocking motion that wiggled the tapered ends of the bar and rungs in their sockets. It had been early morning when she saw the first signs that she might be getting somewhere. The varnish at the joints had cracked and chipped away.
Now, there was brown sawdust forming at the joints. The motion was causing the finials and sockets to grind away. Eventually, the structure would become wobbly, giving her the opportunity to push out on the corner posts and pull the bar free. But she couldn’t go on. Once she freed the bar, she doubted whether she would be able to force it back to its original position. She didn’t want any sign of her work to be visible when Rita brought down her breakfast or, God help her, when Mike came down.
She was suddenly aware of movement over her head. One of them had gotten up and was shuffling about. The next thing she heard was the sound of water moving in the pipes that rose somewhere inside the surrounding wall. A refrigerator door slammed. She moved around the corner post, stretching her arm over the top until she was able to slide back onto her bed. She sighed with relief that she would be able to take a few moments of rest. But when she looked behind her, she was shocked to see the evidence of her work. There were traces of sawdust running down each of the verticals, with tiny yellow flakes dotting the pillow. She pulled herself up to her knees and looked down at the floor under the headboard. There was a thin covering of sawdust, like a ghosting of snow over a highway. They’d have to see it. There was no way that they could miss it.
She slid across the bed, raising her arm over the corner post until the handcuff chain was behind the bed. Then she slipped out and rushed behind the headboard. But only one hand could reach the floor. She could brush at the dust, but she couldn’t clamp it between her palms. There was no way that she could pick it up.
Pots banged together in the kitchen over her head. The woman’s voice called through the house, “I’m taking her breakfast down to her.” The man answered from farther off in the distance, “I’ll bring it down.” And then the woman’s voice. “I’m already here. I’ll take care of it.”
Emily was trying to scatter the dust with her free hand. But that only made things worse. She was etching designs where the bare floor showed through the dust. The stain of the yellow powder was even more obvious. She licked her fingers and the palm of her hand and began patting the residue. It stuck to her skin and she was able to pick it up and brush it off against the fabric inside the neck of her nightgown. When she licked her hands again, the sawdust coated her tongue, nearly choking her as she tried to summon up more saliva. She kept patting, picking up bits of the stain and lifting them inside her gown. It was working. The dust was less and less noticeable.
The bolt snapped back and the door swung open. Emily stood for an instant, frozen in fright. Then she moved quickly, pulling the chain to its limit and stretching her arm over the top of the post. She had only one knee on the bed when she heard the footsteps on the stairs. There wasn’t enough time for her to get back under the blanket. She swung her legs around so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her feet dangling down to the floor. She tried to be natural and relaxed, like someone waiting patiently for a meal to be delivered. But when she dropped her arm, the shackle fell outside the corner post. Her hand was pointing around toward the back of the bed, obviously not in the position where she had been left. She looked toward the stairs and saw Rita’s face appearing just under the ceiling line. It was too late. She couldn’t get her arm back to where it had been shackled.
“Your breakfast,” the woman said cheerily, “and a newspaper.” She walked past the bed and over to the table, never looking directly at Emily. “It�
�s yesterday’s paper, but I don’t suppose a hell of lot has happened since yesterday.” She set a plate of dry scrambled eggs on the table and put a cup of coffee beside it.
Emily stood up quickly. “Can you take this damn thing off? I have to get into the bathroom.” She held her arm straight out, so that her hand didn’t seem to be caught up in the chain. The woman fumbled in her pocket as she crossed to the bed. “Sure. I’m sorry. This must be a bitch for ya.” She unlocked the cuff and let it fall idly. It jangled down behind the bed, just as if it had fallen between the vertical rungs of the headboard. The woman never spared it a glance.
“Remember.” It was Rita’s voice following her into the bathroom. “We’re both at the top of the stairs.”
“I know,” Emily answered. “I appreciate your leaving the handcuffs off.”
She ran the water in the sink while she listened carefully for the footsteps on the stairs. The door swung shut, followed instantly by the crack of the bolt. Footsteps moved away from the door and into the room overhead. Emily climbed up on top of the toilet and was able to press one of the ceiling tiles out of its frame. But the opening was too far overhead for her to see into. She looked at the sink, bolted through the wallboard. It seemed sturdy, but would it hold her weight when she stepped on its edge? Directly in front of her was the water tank for the toilet, like the sink, bolted through the masonry. It was built to hold the weight of a couple of gallons of water, so it was probably her best bet. She stood on the toilet seat. When she climbed onto the top of the tank, her head and shoulders reached through the opening into the space above the drop ceiling.
Once again, she was looking down the channel between the rafters. But now she could see daylight at the far end. The channel opened into the ceiling of another room. And the fact that she saw daylight meant that the other room had a window or a door.
The Trophy Wife Page 12
