Walter’s next remark was as much for their benefit as to persuade the bank’s security officer. “Andrew, you have no idea what it’s like to make a mistake with a woman you love and know you’re going to live to regret it. If you can muster up an ounce of human feeling, I want a free hand for the next twenty-four hours.”
He listened, nodded, and then said, “Thank you.” When he turned back to his children he thought he saw a faint flickering of respect.
Sunday
EMILY’S FACE WAS GLUED to her pillow by a paste of dried blood. She lifted her head slowly, wondering why the pillowcase was pulling at her skin. Then she remembered the hot slash of the knife. She was about to scream at the image of horror she recalled, but she stopped the sound in her throat and instead prayed, Oh Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, what have I done?
She remembered that she had freed the crossbar of the headboard and had been able to slide the locked handcuffs off. She could have bolted into the ceiling and began her crawl to freedom. But they were still walking back and forth right over her head. They would certainly hear her pulling down the ceiling tiles. She had decided to wait until they went to bed.
Then she had heard Mike leave, banging the door angrily behind him. Maybe this was her chance. Maybe she should slam down one of the ceiling tiles and make a racket by knocking over the table and chair. That would bring Rita charging into the room. Emily was just as big as the other woman and probably a lot stronger. She would have the element of surprise working in her favor. She could overpower her jailer and then simply escape out the front door. But suppose Rita had a gun? Then there would be no struggle. All she would be able to do was watch helplessly while she was reshackled to something more durable than the bed frame. Maybe the water pipes under the bathroom sink. Then there would be no possibility of escape. Once again, she had made a terrible mistake in judgment. She had decided to wait.
Emily had realized the enormity of her mistake when Mike returned and Rita left the house. Now she was alone with the man who had promised to ravage and mutilate her. She had no doubt that he soon would be coming down the steps to deliver on at least part of his threats. That was when she had formulated her plan. Lie still. Pretend she was still tied to the bed. Do something to distract him so that he wouldn’t notice that the chains were hanging freely. Then, when he got close, crack his skull with the bedpost and lock him in the basement
It had been a good plan. It had come within one footstep of succeeding. But in the end, it had failed awfully. She had paid a terrible price.
Emily sat up slowly. Her jaw ached. Her ear was throbbing. Her knees and elbows were skinned from her fall down the stairs. She lifted each arm and kicked each leg to make sure that the muscles were still working. Lastly, she felt for her ear, and recoiled at the touch. It ended abruptly in a ridge of dried blood that was attached to her hair. There was a small mirror in the bathroom, but she was afraid to see how badly she was damaged. She had to keep focused on her escape.
She listened carefully. The house was completely quiet. There were no footsteps nor rumbles of water running through the pipes. Her keepers were asleep, probably two floors above her head.
She tied the torn corners of the nightgown into a knot, keeping the ripped neckline from falling down around her arms. The gown almost fit, giving her freedom to move. She folded the legs of the table, carried it into the bathroom, and set it up directly under the ceiling tile that she had been able to pop out so easily. Then she went back for the folding chair and used it like a step stool so that she could climb silently up onto the table.
When she raised her hands, the free ends of the shackles swung together, rattling like the rumble of an anchor chain. She paused with her hands over her head, listening for any response from upstairs, and then breathed in relief when there was none. You’re panicking, she chastised herself. The sound had been hardly audible, amplified by her own fear. She looped the chains around her arms and then pulled the sleeves of the nightgown over them to keep them silent. The ceiling tile moved away easily.
She was staring into heavy darkness. Far ahead there was a faint trace of ambient light; probably a distant streetlight shining through the window that had illuminated her goal during the day. Emily waited a few seconds until her eyes adjusted enough for her to make out the edges of the rafters. She reached as far forward as she could and dragged herself up into the narrow channel. When her waist reached the edge of the ceiling opening, she let her weight settle on the top of the tiles. The suspended ceiling groaned under her, but she didn’t sense that it was sagging. It was going to hold up.
She started forward, but the neck of the nightgown pulled her to an abrupt halt. When she pushed backward with her knees, she was pulling the gown back instead of forcing herself ahead. Emily lifted up and pulled the hem up to her thighs. The tiles were like sandpaper against the welts left by her fall.
In a matter of seconds, she was breathless. The space was much too small for her to get to her hands and knees. Instead, she had to twist her body completely just to edge her knee or elbow ahead a faction of an inch. The effort was exhausting, particularly in the hot, dead air that was trapped under the floor. She was able to twist her head back and catch a glimpse of the space that she had climbed through. It was only a few inches beyond her toes. It had taken all her effort to move just the length of her body.
She gulped down air and then pushed ahead. She tried to find a productive body rhythm. Press herself hard against the right rafter, advance her left knee and elbow until they were grinding against the splintery wood, and then roll to her left as she pushed forward with the knee and elbow. But there was no way she could find a pace. Her knees had to be fitted carefully over each of the ceiling frames. Otherwise, she would be cutting herself to shreds. The rafters were rough-hewn. Splinters gripped the fabric of the gown and stuck into her bare skin. Every movement had to be executed slowly and precisely. There was no way she could hurry, nor any alternative to the exhausting effort.
The light ahead seemed a bit brighter, perhaps because she was getting closer, but probably because her vision was acclimating to the environment. She could see the open rafters where the ceiling ended, giving her plenty of space to drop down into the other room. Just that flicker of encouragement was enough to keep her struggling forward.
There was a sudden roar, starting far off and tumbling toward her like an approaching train. Water was running in the drainpipes. One of them was awake and Emily tried to listen through the cascade for the sound of footsteps. There was an instant when all was quiet again. Then the floorboards directly above her head groaned.
She lay perfectly still, holding her breath as if even the slightest movement of air would give her away. Footsteps shuffled above her. The refrigerator door creaked as it swung open and then seemed to explode as it was slammed shut. There were more footsteps; his, she thought. In her mind, she plotted his route back and forth across the kitchen, tensing when he seemed to be moving in the direction of the basement door. If he came down the stairs, there would be no escape for her. He could beat her to either end of the tunnel in which she was now trapped and be waiting in rage when she finally lowered herself out of the ceiling.
The refrigerator creaked open again and once more there was the loud slam when it was closed. Footsteps sounded directly over her head and then diminished as he climbed back up the stairs. Emily let herself breathe normally for a few seconds. She blinked the perspiration out of her eyes. Then she wiggled ahead, gaining an inch at a time toward the faint fight ahead. Her shoulders ached. The muscles in her legs were verging on spasm. She could feel fire where her skinned knees had been rubbed raw.
Slowly, painfully, she was approaching her goal and now she could begin to weigh the problems she would face when she reached the other room and the ceiling that was supporting her came to an end. She would enter the open space head first, with no room to turn herself around. That would mean dropping from the ceiling height to the floor with nothing to br
eak her fall but her outstretched arms.
She thought of alternatives. Perhaps, when she reached the end, she could lift out the last ceiling tile. Then, if she could manage to cross the open space with just the framing for support, she would leave herself room to lower her feet and get herself turned around. Or maybe the top of the wall that framed out the space she was escaping would give her a handhold. Then she would have something to hang from while she dragged her feet out from the narrow space over the ceiling. She couldn’t be sure what she would find, but just thinking of the possibilities was a distraction from her agonizingly slow passage. Emily figured that she had been in the ceiling for about half an hour and was still only halfway to her destination.
Again and again she paused, stretching the pain out of her limbs and gasping down swallows of the still, dusty air. At one point, she exploded with a sneezing fit and then lay absolutely motionless while she listened to hear if her keepers had been aroused. At last, her outstretched fingers locked over the framing that held the last tile in place. She was able to drag her head out into the open.
She was peering down into a small room, bounded on one side by the studs of her framed-out prison and on two other sides by concrete walls that she took to be the foundation walls. The fourth side was a metal fire door.
Directly below her was a small heating unit. Hot water pipes rose from its boiler and disappeared through the flooring above. Directly across from her was the source of the sunlight she had seen during the day and now the hazy moonlight that had been her goal for the past hour. A small window, high on the wall, opened out to a window well. It looked to be about two foot wide, and maybe eighteen inches deep; plenty of room for her to wiggle through if it could be opened and if she could find something to stand on so that she could raise herself up to the sill.
She stretched out to the heating pipe and found it warm but not too hot to touch. Clutching it in both hands, she dragged her body across the last ceiling frame. She dropped one leg and then let the other slip off the edge. Her body cartwheeled, tearing her hands from the pipe and sending her crashing down to the floor. He legs buckled and she sprawled out onto her back. She lay still for a moment, taking inventory of her pain. Then she smiled. A nasty fall, but not much worse than many of the dives she had taken on the tennis court. Nothing was broken and she had escaped from her cell.
Emily eased to her feet. She listened to make sure that the sound of her fall had gone unnoticed. Then she went to the door and gently grasped the knob. But it wouldn’t turn. The door was locked from the other side.
She bent low and looked for the locking mechanism in the minute crack between the door and the frame. Then she dropped down to her raw knees to look under the door. But there was nothing to see. There was no trace of light from the other side. The lock seemed heavy. She wouldn’t be able to wiggle the door open.
She felt herself beginning to tremble and had to struggle to get hold of her nerves. Then she waved her arms through the darkness until she made contact with a pull cord that was hanging from an overhead bulb. The light would certainly shine through the window and, even with the well, would be visible from outside. But her jailers were probably still asleep. And even if one of them were awake, the odds were that their bedroom would be on a different side of the house. Emily had to know exactly where she was and what she had to work with. She pulled the string and light flooded the room.
It was a furnace room, accessed from outside by the locked door that probably led to the garage. There was the small, squatting furnace and a tall, thin water heater, surrounded by a maze of cross-connected copper pipes. An oil line came out of the concrete floor and bent into the face of the burner. A round, sheet metal flue disappeared through the wall a few feet over the door. Other than that, the room was empty. There was nothing she could use to pry at the door jam. No tools that she might use to knock the bolts out of the door hinges. Worse, there was nothing that she could climb on. No workbench, nor cartons, and certainly not a ladder. When she went to the window, she could just manage to curl her fingertips over the sill. With such a weak handhold, Emily couldn’t even lift her toes from the floor.
She spent the next fifteen minutes in a frantic search for things that she might put to use. She tugged on the pipes to see if a section could be pulled free. She tried to lift the small firebox door from the boiler. She even tried to tip the hot water heater so that she could free one of the bricks on which it rested. But everything was secure.
Emily stood in the middle of the barren room, battered, barefoot and clad only in the ripped nightgown. She had been clawing her way forward for more than half an hour and yet she was less than twenty feet from the spot where her broken bed stood. She had escaped her prison cell only to lock herself in an another cell. She had freed herself from her tormentor, but all she had really done was given him a new reason for his terrifying anger. She felt herself choking on her own frustration.
One of the handcuffs dropped down from under the sleeve of her gown. Emily stared dumbly at the eighteen-inch length of chain with the closed manacle hanging from its end. She tugged at the other sleeve, freeing the second chain. Her eyes scanned the heavy metal extensions of her arm and she grasped the chains just below the cuffs that fastened them to her wrists. A weary smile crossed her lips and then she pulled the string to douse the light that was shining out into the window well. She wasn’t beaten yet.
Andrew Hogan caught up with Helen Restivo at an all-night diner, where she was having the standard field breakfast of a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
“Just the coffee,” he told the waitress as he slid into the booth.
“Smart call,” Helen told him as she pushed her partly eaten doughnut away. “They get worse with the years.”
She filled him in on the street activity. The State Troopers were doing the most efficient thing by talking with all the street toughs and lowlifes who worked the neighborhood. It made sense that any newcomers would be thoroughly cased as potential burglary victims or as targets for pension check and social security rip-offs. Someone must have noticed them.
Her hirelings were doing the gumshoe work, showing photographs to taxi drivers, gas station attendants, and convenience store managers. The police photo lab had printed up shots of the two that had been arbitrarily retouched. Rita appeared with hair of varying lengths and shades while Mike was in both clean-shaven and bearded versions. It was the clean-shaven Mike, without the moustache, that the owner of the stolen car had recognized. Two people had identified shorthaired versions of Rita.
“We’re going door to door selling magazine subscriptions,” Helen reported. “I feel as if we’re standing right on top of them. It’s amazing that we haven’t had a hit by now.”
“What about the troopers?” Andrew asked as a cup was set in front of him.
“Nothing at all,” she answered. “Apparently our couple are experienced enough not to make waves in a community. As far as the local scum knows, they don’t even exist.”
He glanced at his watch. “Almost six,” he mumbled absently. Then he turned to Helen. “So what do you think?”
“I don’t want to be grim.”
Andrew nodded. “That’s what I think, too. She has to be dead by now. And to tell you the truth, I feel more than a little guilty.”
Helen seemed surprised. Andrew Hogan wasn’t the kind of policeman who let himself get emotionally involved with anyone. In his world, both the victims and the criminals were simply data. With all the suffering he dealt with, indifference was the only way to survive.
He noticed her interest. “I’ve been thinking that if I had left Walter Childs alone, he might well have saved her. He had two chances to pay the ransom. Either one might have brought her. I screwed up both of them.”
“We can’t always succeed, but we have to always try,” she quoted from one of the inspirational speeches he used to give to the troops.
“Mindless idealism,” he answered.
“Besides, if
we’re going to start blaming ourselves, then I have to come in for a share,” Helen told him. “It was my team that missed whoever was waiting in the airport at Grand Cayman. And it was my people who lost the guy in the shopping mall. I’d say that I was more to blame than you.”
“Okay,” Andrew agreed.
“Backstabbing son of a bitch,” Helen accused. They both laughed. The waitress poured seconds on the coffee and picked up the remnants of Helen’s doughnut.
“It’s not that I screwed up,” Hogan went on. “It’s that maybe I didn’t care enough about the consequences.”
“ ‘You can’t let yourself care.’ You must have said that a thousand times.”
“So maybe I was wrong a thousand times.”
Helen’s expression was puzzled. “What’s with you?”
He shook his head. “Nothing important. But I want you to pull your people off Walter Childs.”
“What? You know what he might try to do.”
“Maybe he will. It’s his wife.”
“Probably he will, and it’s the bank’s money. You have to be kidding.”
His expression showed that he wasn’t. “Right away. Get in touch with whoever you have watching the Childs house and tell him to take the rest of the day off.”
She pushed her cup away and took the cell phone out of her purse. “Andrew, why are you doing this?”
He turned his hands up in a gesture of ignorance. “Walter said that I never made a mistake with a woman I loved and had to live my life regretting it. I guess I’m beginning to understand that something like that would be awful.”
Helen shook her head slowly. “Why would you listen to the philosophy of Walter Childs? He’s a heartless bastard. Even if he gets his wife back, he’s going to dump her for this year’s model. For all we know, he’s going to pay the hundred million to himself.”
“Indulge me,” he said, pointing to her telephone. “Make the call.”
She was angry as she dialed. “Maybe you’re letting him send the bank’s money to that tennis stud. He’ll never get his wife back.”
The Trophy Wife Page 26
