“Those two photos,” Helen continued, pointing to the copies that the troopers had taken from her, “are the people who are holding her. The lady owns the van that the victim was dumped into. The man is the one who drove it to the mall to pick up the ransom. They used to live three streets from here. We figure they’re still in the neighborhood.”
Borelli lifted the pictures from his desk. “These aren’t very good.
“They’re not even accurate,” she told him. “The guy we chased through the parking lot didn’t have a moustache. And the lady is a con artist. She probably has as many looks as she has names.” Then she added, “The problem is that they’re all we have.”
Borelli picked up his phone and dialed an extension. “Get in touch with the photo lab,” he ordered. “We’re going to need a rush job. Super rush.”
“My people?” Helen mouthed softly.
He nodded and then said into the phone, “And tell our cars to leave the freelancers alone for the time being. We can use all the help we can get.”
He disconnected and then dialed another number. “Where’s my call to Andrew Hogan?” he barked. Then his lips curled in disgust. “Of course he’s not in his office. It’s Saturday. Maybe you ought to try his house.” There was another pause and then Borelli’s eyes rolled to the ceiling. “Well now, you ought to be able to find his address. You’re a detective, aren’t you.” He slammed the phone down, embarrassed that a fellow officer had witnessed the exchange.
Helen stood up long enough to write Andrew’s cell phone number on Borelli’s desk pad. “You can get him here,” she said, and then added, “thanks for giving me another chance.”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “But it’s the lady’s chances that I’m worried about.”
* * *
“Payback time!” Mike announced from the top of the stairs. He closed the door behind him and came down the basement steps slowly. “Your old man decided to keep his money and give you away instead. So, I guess you owe me fifty thousand big ones. How are you figurin’ on working it off?” He was chuckling in anticipation of the terrified eyes that would greet him.
“No problem,” Emily’s voice fired back. “It’ll only take a few seconds to give you all you can handle.”
He stopped in midstride. The sneer disappeared from his curled lips. He bent down so that he could see into the room and make certain that she was still shackled to the bed. “Saucy little bitch,” he said, striving to recapture his usual bravado. “I’m goin’ to take my time with you.”
Emily laughed. “Take your time? Little boys like you don’t know how to take their time. You better hurry before you lose it all down your leg.”
His contemptuous cool melted in a blaze of anger. “Keep up the lip, lady. You’re gonna get it good!”
“You’re all talk, sonny. You haven’t got anything!”
His face went red, his eyes narrowing to slits. “You shut your fuckin’ mouth.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is it over already? I hope it was good for you.”
Mike screamed like a soldier leaping out of a trench. He flung himself on Emily, one hand on her throat, the other ripping at the top of her nightgown. His teeth flashed like sabers as they went for her breast.
Emily pulled a wooden rung out of the sprung headboard and whipped it like a forehand smash across the back of his head.
“Ahhh!” Mike’s face came up from her body just in time to see Emily’s two-handed backhand. It hit him squarely under the right eye. He tumbled backward from on top of her and had to grab the corner of the mattress to keep from rolling onto the floor.
Emily pulled her knees up and fired a kick into his throat, launching him over the back of the bed. She jumped up, part of the headboard still chained between her hands. Mike was still rolling on the floor, trying to get his balance while at the same instant trying to stem the flow of blood from his face. She raised her arms and shattered the headboard remnants across his back. Her swing had been awkward and she had not struck solidly. But it was enough to knock him flat on the floor. Emily ran around him and bolted for the stairs.
“You’re dead meat,” his agonized voice screamed behind her. She stole a glance back as she reached the steps. Mike had recovered to all fours and had already begun stumbling after her. When she was at the middle of the stairs, she heard him reach the first step. He was gaining, but that didn’t matter. All she had to do was reach the door and close it in his face. Then she would have all the head start she needed.
Her hand was on the knob, twisting and pushing. But the door was heavy; a metal-covered fire door mandated by an obsolete building code. It moved slowly. Emily threw her weight against it and began squeezing through the opening as it widened. She was halfway through when Mike’s hand caught the hem of her gown.
For an instant, they hung in balance. One more step and she would be able to throw her weight against the back of the door. Then, if she could just close the bolt, she could leave him holding the gown from the other side. But Emily couldn’t plant the one more step that she needed. She was still in the space between the door and the jamb, and a fraction of an inch at a time she was being pulled backward.
She turned abruptly and punched with her fist, smashing her fingers against the top of his head. She slashed with the chain that hung from her wrist. She tried to kick, but the twisted gown bound her legs. And then Mike’s other hand got a grip on her hair. Her fingers slipped off the doorknob.
She spun around and saw the rage in Mike’s bloody face. And then she was flying. She was lifted off her feet and tossed like a rag doll down the well of the stairs. She hit two steps from the bottom and then she flipped forward, crashing against the painted cement floor.
“I’ll kill you,” Mike screamed as he charged down the stairs toward her. He twisted his fingers through her hair and dragged her to her feet. Emily slashed her fingernails across his face. He howled and then cracked a short, tight punch to the point of her chin. She felt her body go limp and tasted the nausea that she vaguely remembered from the drug. Then her world went black and vanished.
She had no sense of lost time. There was just his voice, which seemed to be echoing from the distance, screaming obscenities. But he couldn’t be at a distance. She could feel his body pressing down on hers. His fingers were locked around her jaw, shaking her face from side to side. Light began to come back into her eyes and there was his face, soft and out of focus, yet distorted and grotesque.
She tried to push him off, but her arms wouldn’t respond. She knew he was on top of her, his weight pinning her down. But that wasn’t what suddenly terrified her. It was that her arms and shoulders had no feeling. They seemed disconnected from her brain. She thought she was paralyzed. “Oh God,” she managed to gasp.
“You like it, don’t ya! Tell me how much you like it, bitch.”
Feeling was coming back into her body. She could feel a tingling in her fingertips.
He shook her face violently. “Tell me you like it!”
Then she realized what was happening. She was in the bed, her legs splayed apart, and he was pressing down between them. The nightgown was bunched up under her chin. She was being raped. “You love it, don’t ya, bitch. It’s what you’ve been wanting since you laid eyes on me.”
Emily began to laugh.
He was ridiculous, trying to look suave when his eye was black and the side of his face was a smear of clown’s rouge. His bouncing made him look more like some sort of dashboard ornament than like a lover writhing in passion.
He stopped moving when he heard laughter. “Tell me you like it!” he screamed into her face.
“I can do better by myself,” Emily taunted.
His eyes went insane. “Oh yeah!” He bounded off her and nearly tripped over the trousers that were down across his knees. She was still laughing at the comedy he was creating as he pulled up his pants. “I’ll take that fuckin’ smile off your face.”
When he turned back to her, Emily saw the flash of the blade that spru
ng out of his hand. Then he was behind her, twisting her face to one side. He pressed down on her temple with the heel of his hand, driving her head into the mattress. There was an instant when the blade felt ice cold. And then, miraculously, it turned white hot. A warm ooze flooded across her cheek and into the corner of her mouth. She tasted her own blood.
“Let’s see you do that by yourself,” he hissed. “Let’s see what your old man thinks when he gets this in the mail.”
Her hand moved. She reached up to touch her face and realized she couldn’t find the top of her ear. The overpowering sickness came back and she drifted back into the peaceful blackness.
Angela bent over the wash basin, combing the brunette coloring through her blonde hair. Then she stood up straight and laughed out loud at the image peering through the steamed-up mirror. Even she couldn’t be sure who she was.
As soon as Walter had left, she had gone into action. She spent a good part of the afternoon erasing all her computer records, reformatting her disks over the files, and then erasing every record from her hard drive. Next she cleaned her file drawers, feeding the pages into a portable shredder and then dumping the shreds into a garbage bag.
She packed carefully, selecting only essential clothes that would fit into one small overnight travel bag along with her jewelry box. The designer knockoffs and fashionable casuals that hung in her closet got only a brief, nostalgic glance. She could replace them with designer originals if she wanted.
Next, she had taken the scissors to her hair, raising the length up from her shoulders to her ears and thinning out the top. And then she had applied the hair coloring, working it down to the roots and rinsing it until the water in the wash basin ran clear. The results were hysterical. Her perfect face seemed suddenly too wide and the color of her eyes no longer seemed appropriate. Nothing worked with the wild hair that stood out from her scalp like fire-scorched grass.
Angela attacked with a curling brush and her hair dryer until she had a neat, if casually offbeat coiffeur. The new color, combined with an entirely different makeup palette, gave her a vastly different appearance. Walter could pass her in the bank lobby and would probably walk on for a few more steps before he made the connection. Andrew Hogan’s Keystone Kops, who had met her only briefly, wouldn’t recognize her at all.
The next step was the picture. She put her Polaroid camera on the edge of the kitchen counter, set the timer for ten seconds, and then ran around to look into the lens. By trial and error she finally got a photo of herself where her head was about the size of a postage stamp. She held the photo against the window, ruled the back, and then cut out a passport-size photo of the young brunette with short hair. This fit perfectly onto the first page of a Canadian passport just above the name Susan Schwartz. Angela slipped the passport into the outside pocket of her travel bag.
She gathered up her trash—the stained cloths, the empty hair coloring bottle and package, the paper towels that had wiped the basin, the film boxes and wrappers—and stuffed them into a paper bag. She added this to the sack of shredded files and carried them out to the incinerator drop chute.
The apartment had to have a lived-in look. Certainly, the full wardrobe of clothes, the cosmetics and toiletries still in the medicine cabinet, and the clothes in the hamper combined to give the impression that she was still living there, and would be back shortly. Now Angela added other touches. She filled two pots with soapy water and left them in the sink. In the refrigerator, she uncapped the milk jug and left a half stick of butter on a desert plate. She spread the Times, with the pages opened to the crossword puzzle, across her unmade bed When she looked around for her final survey, she could hardly believe herself that this was the last time she would ever see the apartment.
Finally, she slipped on a denim jacket, added a colorful scarf at the neck, and threw the strap of her travel bag over her shoulder. She locked the door behind her and took the elevator down to the first floor. There, she shifted over to the fire stairs and let herself out the back door.
Angela went around the building, crossed the street, and walked past the front of her apartment building on the opposite side of the street. Helen Restivo’s man was behind the wheel of a parked car directly across from her doorway. In the light of a streetlamp, she noticed him raise his glance as she approached, and run his eyes appreciatively over her full length. Then, as she reached the car, he turned away, resuming his vigil of the front door. The woman he was waiting for would never appear.
She walked to Park Avenue, crossed to the downtown side, and signaled to a passing taxi. “Kennedy Airport. International departures,” she told the driver. He dropped the flag on his meter.
Walter’s living room was like a funeral parlor, with the deceased there in spirit if not in person. He sat hunched on the edge of a soft chair, his head sunk down between his shoulders and his eyes fixed on the pattern in the oriental carpet. Amanda sat back into the cushions of the sofa, her attention focused on the blank surface of the ceiling. Alex had turned a straight-back chair around so that he could straddle the chair back and lean his folded arms across the top. His attention was fixed on the telephone, willing it to ring.
Their conversation consisted of random phrases, unrelated to one another, but all concerned with their wife and mother. “They’ve got their pictures,” Walter had announced. “Somebody must be able to recognize them.” Then, after a ten-minute silence, Amanda had contributed, “Mother is a very strong person. She’ll come through this all right.” Five more minutes had passed and then Alex had commented, “There must be some way they could keep us posted on their progress.”
But while the conversation was sparse, the atmosphere was burdened with guilt. Walter could feel his son’s moral indignation that his mother had been treated so shabbily by his father. Alex, who had been the reasonable arbitrator between Walter and Amanda, had returned from the tennis club firmly on Amanda’s side. He hadn’t questioned his mother’s affair with the tennis pro. Rather, he had demanded of his father, “How could you have driven her into the arms of that creep?” His voice had been filled with censure and his eyes heavy with disgust.
Amanda could hardly bear the sight of him. She was immersed in the hypocrisy of her upbringing. Bad enough that her entire adult life had been condemned as shabby, purposeless, and immoral. Now she knew that the stinging, hurtful words had come from a figure of righteousness whose sins were far blacker than her own. Her father didn’t disapprove of her sleeping around, he just wanted her to sleep with someone of his own class. To him, Wayne was a greater disgrace than either fornication or adultery. Her judgment was more offensive than her morals.
Walter was trying to keep his problems separated. He clung to Angela’s words that their affair wasn’t the cause of Emily’s kidnapping. Even if that weren’t true, his marital infidelity certainly couldn’t be blamed for the gross threats of the madman who was holding her. When he had decided to go along with Hogan’s plans for catching the kidnappers, he had assumed that Emily would be kept safe. How could he have known that a deranged felon would be willing to mutilate her for what he regarded as pocket change? Walter could almost believe that he wasn’t responsible for his wife’s predicament.
The exposure of his moral failings was another problem. He would have preferred to explain the changes in his life to his children positively and in good time. He knew how devastating it must be for them to have their father’s philandering thrown into their faces, particularly at a time when their mother was in grave danger. But eventually he would have told them, and he had already taken their disappointment into account.
His status at the bank was still a different concern and one that had slipped beyond his control. If Hogan and his lady detective were able to find Emily within the next few hours, then his adherence to bank policy and his refusal to pay the ransom would be seen as extreme devotion to duty. He could order the brass plate with his name for the door of the chairman’s suite. If Hogan didn’t find her, then he would pa
y the bank’s funds as ransom and leave with Angela for the life of a well-heeled exile from the banking industry.
But as he sat brooding under the watchful eyes of his children, it was difficult for him to keep the problems separate. It seemed that his whole world had come crashing down on his head; his wife brutalized, his children traumatized, and his self-worth minimized. His adulterous affair was the root cause of all his problems. He couldn’t help wondering if Angela was suffering as much for their love as he was.
In all his self-loathing and self-pity he had completely forgotten that they were gathered for Emily’s wake rather than his own. And then the telephone rang.
Alex was the first to the receiver, where he exchanged little more than a grunt with Andrew Hogan and handed the phone to his father. Walter nodded gravely as he listened, nodding encouragement to Amanda and Alex who were hanging on his half of the conversation. “I see … I understand … let’s hope so …” Then he asked Hogan to hang on for a second while he told them, “A convenience store clerk recognized them. He thinks he knows the area where they live. And a car was reported stolen from the train station. The owner thinks the man was waiting at the station. Andrew says they could find them at any moment.”
“Sure,” Amanda said sarcastically, turning away from her father. “Andrew couldn’t find them when they were sitting in a bar that he had under surveillance.” Alex went back to his straight-back chair.
“Andrew,” Walter said. “I need you to pull your people off me.” He listened for a few moments, his expression showing his displeasure. “I know what your responsibilities are. I also know that they don’t include snooping into the affairs of senior bank officers.” He listened for a full minute. Then he said, “No, it can’t wait until Monday. On Monday, you can do whatever you want. I need your investigators out of my life now.”
His angry voice had gotten Amanda and Alex’s attention. They suddenly understood that their father was a suspect in their mother’s kidnapping. They exchanged wide-eyed glances.
The Trophy Wife Page 25
