by Sarah Atwell
Just before noon I looked up to see Chas coming into the shop. “Hey there. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
“You ordered a shipment of cullet, right? I was headed this way anyway, so it worked out good. But, listen, I haven’t worked with you before, so can you check the order, make sure I’ve got the right stuff?”
I looked around the shop: no customers. The street outside was all but empty, well before the lunch rush. “Sure. Where are you parked?”
“Around back. That’s where you said you wanted deliveries, right?”
“That’s right. Okay, I’ll meet you in back.” When Chas left, I made sure the cash drawer was locked, then cut through the studio to open the back door for him.
He was waiting beside his truck, its back doors open, the lift gate at its raised position. I peered into the dark interior. “What did you want me to check?”
Chas looked distracted. “The stuff’s at the front. Climb on in and I’ll show you. Need a boost?”
“No, thanks.” I hopped up onto the lift, then entered the back of the truck and spied a couple of barrels strapped against the wall nearest the cab. I heard Chas jump up behind me. “Is that what—”
I felt a tremendous blow to the back of my head and pitched forward, and then things went dark.
I woke up sometime later with a raging headache. Shit, shit, shit, ow. How stupid was this? How had I wandered into a bad movie? Knocked out and hauled away from my own back door? I tried to move, and things got worse. Well, duh: I was tied up. Or more precisely, bundled up. From what I could feel, I was wrapped in a padded mover’s blanket, which covered me from head to toe, and which was strapped on the outside. I felt like a larva in a cocoon, or did I mean pupa? Not that it mattered, since either way I was completely helpless. Not surprisingly, there was tape over my mouth. Of course—if this was a kidnapping, they wouldn’t exactly want me making noise, would they?
Who were “they”? The only person I remembered seeing was Chas, who had been behind me. I hadn’t seen anyone else lurking in the van of the truck. Okay, so Chas had whacked me over the head and trussed me up like a sausage and driven off in his truck to . . . where?
I would have shaken my head to clear it, except that I couldn’t move it, and from the way it was feeling, I didn’t think it would improve things much. I lay still and tried to figure out where I was. In the truck, apparently, and it was moving, fairly rapidly. Highway, then—the I-10 that ran through the middle of town. And that brilliant observation exhausted what information I could collect while immobile, blind, and mute.
Well, I was just going to have to think, since there wasn’t a lot else to do. Fact: Chas had kidnapped me. Why? Chas was a trucker. Someone had needed a trucker to move the stolen art. Circumstances now suggested that Chas was that man. Very good, Em. Keep up the good work! Fact: Chas was Maddy’s trucker. Maddy was linked to both Peter and Ian. Draw a line between the points, Em.
But why grab me? The one nobody would tell anything? Apparently I knew something—something that someone else thought I shouldn’t know, or figured could make trouble, if I ever did find someone who would listen to me. Well, they didn’t know I hadn’t been able to tell anyone this important something that I knew, mostly because I wasn’t sure what it was, and nobody was listening to me anyway. What did I know?
I tried to ignore the pain in my head and the bouncing of the truck—which could really use some new shocks—and work out what I knew that might threaten anyone. Maybe there was no one event that had triggered my abduction, but somebody had put together enough pieces to believe that little Em was a threat. My seemingly innocent questions, my connection to Peter, my link with Matt, the appearance of Nat on the scene—somebody was getting panicky. But what were they going to do with me? They couldn’t just make me disappear, could they? They weren’t doing a very subtle job of it so far. To all appearances I had walked out of my shop today, leaving no note or message. I didn’t have my wallet or my keys. How long would it take for anyone to notice I was gone? Allison would be in after lunch, and she would worry. What would she do? Check upstairs, check the phone for messages—and find nada. And then . . . would she call Cam? Matt? And what would they do?
I tried to figure out how long I had been out of it after Chas had hit me, and decided it couldn’t have been very long. It would probably be two hours before Allison arrived at the shop and did anything—and I could be a long way from Tucson in two hours. Or dead. Would whoever was behind this be willing to risk killing me?
Of course they would. They had killed Peter, and Peter was a heck of a lot more important than a small-time artisan like me. There was no hard evidence to connect my disappearance to Peter’s death. Had anyone seen Chas take me? Most likely not: Nobody paid any attention to the alley behind the shop, and the delivery truck would not have looked out of place. It might have been a simple plan, but the simple ones usually worked best, right?
So why wasn’t I dead already? Maybe Chas was going to take me out into that very convenient desert and dump me. If he was smart and picked a good place, I might never be found. There was a lot of desert, and people—mostly illegal immigrants—disappeared there all the time. Even if my corpse was found, how would the authorities identify me? The desert wasn’t exactly kind to bodies, and I had no ID on me. No, wait, my fingerprints would be on file with the police—they had taken them to eliminate me as a suspect in a previous investigation. Take that, Evil Mastermind—you didn’t count on that, did you? Still, neither option was particularly appealing. I forced my mind away from all the unlovely ways that Chas could kill me, none of which required technology or even a lot of force. I was alive right now, and I’d just have to take things one step at a time.
The truck turned off the highway, then turned again. I strained to hear anything. The traffic sounds faded, so we had to be on a secondary road. And a bumpy one at that, I noted, as the truck bounced roughly, bouncing me with it. It stopped, and I heard the cab door open, followed by the creak of a gate or fence being opened. After a moment, the truck began to move again, slowly. Another stop, only this time I heard a metal door go up, then Chas drove through it. The door was rolled down behind the truck, with a definitive clang. We were in a building, one that echoed. Large. A warehouse?
The cab door opened again and the driver climbed out and slammed it. Footsteps: Someone was approaching.
“You got her?” Damn, damn, damn: Ian Gemberling. The rat. My instincts had been right. He’d been stringing me along all the time, trying to figure out if I knew anything. Dangling dreams of glory in front of me in the hope that I wouldn’t look too hard at the theft, the murder—which plainly he had been involved in. And I had almost fallen for it. Almost. Great—I’d been right, but now I might end up dead.
Right now I had to be content just to listen. Not that I had a lot of choice. I didn’t have a handy penknife in my pocket, and my cell phone was sitting at home, doing me no good at all. I couldn’t exactly chew my way through the duct tape and padded stuff that covered me. On the other hand, if they’d wanted me dead, I probably would be already, so either they wanted something from me—like how much I had told anyone else—or they were squeamish. Practically speaking, if they just left me somewhere long enough and did nothing, I’d end up dead eventually. How long was it a person could go without water?
I was jerked from my cheerful thoughts by the arrival of someone else at the warehouse. A door opened, shut. The click of heels: female.
“Ian, what is going on?”
Of course: Maddy.
Chapter 24
I lay very still, trying to hush my breathing, and strained to catch what might prove to be an interesting conversation.
“You call me, tell me to drop everything and rush over here. I’m missing the lunchtime shoppers. What’s so important—”
Ian cut her off. “Madelyn, shut up. We have a situation here.”
Ooh, Ian was getting testy!
“What? I thought eve
rything was on track. Nobody’s talked to me about Peter’s death in days. The papers have forgotten it. You worked out what to do with his collection. What’s the problem?”
“Your friend Em has been doing a little too much snooping. She’s been asking about shipping.”
“Well, of course she has. She lost her previous trucker recently and needed a replacement. We used the same guy, remember? I found Chas to replace him—that’s how I knew him. I couldn’t very well lie to Em and say I didn’t have anyone, so I gave her Chas’s number.”
Ian didn’t answer for a moment, and when he spoke, his tone was icy. “That is information you might have shared with me earlier.” Ian apparently was one of those annoying types who got cold and sarcastic when he was angry. He sounded angry now, which did not bode well. “That puts things in a different light.”
“Well, you didn’t ask,” Maddy protested. “You said, ‘Find me a trucker.’ I did. What’s the problem?”
More silence from Ian. I could only imagine what was going through his head as he tried to rearrange the pieces. Finally he said, “I found it . . . desirable to extricate Ms. Dowell from the situation, and I asked Chas to assist me again.”
“What do you mean, ‘extricate’? You didn’t . . . I mean, you haven’t . . .”
“She’s in the truck,” Ian said, his tone flat.
“Is she . . . ?” I had to strain to hear Maddy’s response.
“Not yet. But it may become necessary.”
“You can’t!” Maddy’s voice rose to a near shriek. “Good God, Ian, she’s dating the police chief! You think he’s not going to notice if she turns up dead?”
If I hadn’t been the potential victim here, I would truly have enjoyed Ian’s misery right now. Obviously he had thought I was expendable—he hadn’t counted on my link to Matt. Although it was a little unsettling to know that our semiromantic relationship—or was it a romantic semirelationship?—was common knowledge, except to out-of-towners like Ian. The question remained, what impact did this turn of events have on Ian’s plans?
In the interim, Maddy was working herself up into a nice hysterical snit. “Ian, what are we going to do? I never thought something like this would happen. What are you doing, kidnapping people? What are you going to do with her? You can’t just kill her! It’s bad enough that Peter died, but that was an accident. This is different. Ian, you . . .” The rest of whatever she had been going to say was muffled, apparently by someone’s hand. Ian had had enough, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. If I was planning a crime, Maddy would not be my first choice of accomplice. She was rapidly becoming a liability.
“Madelyn,” Ian said, his voice tightly controlled, “your caterwauling makes it impossible for me to think. It might be best if you calmed down before we discuss this any further. Chas—would you open the back of the truck for me? I seem to have my hands full.”
Chas was still here? He’d been awfully quiet. But the truck doors opened and what I presumed was Maddy landed with a heavy thud in the truck. The doors slammed behind her, and when silence fell I could hear her sniveling. I contemplated my options: Let her know I was awake, or lay low and see what happened next?
Then I heard Ian say, “Chas, come with me. I want to discuss something with you.” Ian wasn’t stupid: He knew Maddy could still hear him, and he didn’t want to let her in on his nefarious plans, whatever they were. I wondered just how fed up he was with Maddy’s whining, and what he would do about it. Poor Ian: He now had two inconvenient females on his hands.
But right now I was in no mood to do nothing. “Maddy!” I tried to say, except that it came out “Mmp-pheee.” Still, I made enough noise to attract Maddy’s attention, if she could just stop feeling sorry for herself for a moment. To drive my point home, I wriggled as hard as I could.
Maddy’s mewling stopped, thank goodness. “Em?” she whispered.
“Mmphh!” I said as forcefully as possible. “Ubbeee!” I hoped she could translate that to “untie me.”
For several seconds she did nothing. Did she really believe that if she just calmed down and played nice, Ian would let things go on as before? I didn’t for a moment believe that. Maddy now officially knew too much, and she was definitely a weak link. I’d have to ask her about that Peter dying part when I got a chance. If I got a chance. I breathed a sigh of relief, as far as the musty wrapping would allow, when she crawled over to me and started tugging at whatever held the wrapping in place. It took a damnably long time for her to make any headway, during which time I contemplated methods for strangling her.
Finally she managed to unwrap the bulky padded blanket, then peeled the tape off my mouth. “Are you all right, Em?”
I swallowed my first response—how stupid a question was that?—as I stretched the kinks out of my cramped muscles. I stood up quietly and brushed myself off, then sat down again and leaned toward Maddy. “Keep your voice down! Ian and Chas haven’t gone far, and I’d rather they didn’t know I’m awake. I’d like to retain some element of surprise here.”
Maddy nodded and whispered, “Oh, right, of course. So, what do we do now?”
I listened for a moment, but whatever plans Ian and Chas were hatching, it was taking time, and they were doing it out of earshot. “Figure out how to get out of this.” I refrained from asking her if she had any ideas, since clearly she didn’t.
What she did have was a severe case of self-pity. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. “This is all my fault. Ian knew he could talk me into anything, and I just went along, like always. Except when I killed Peter. He hadn’t planned on that, and he was so angry at me! But he said he’d take care of it, and he did—at least, I thought so. But then you started poking around, and look what happened. Why did you have to stick your nose into this, Em? Were you sleeping with Peter?”
The twists and turns of this woman’s logic continued to amaze me. Was I sleeping with him? Was she? What did it matter? Whoa, wait a minute: She had said she had killed Peter. I’d save that bit for future examination. Right now, Peter was dead and we weren’t—yet. But we were likely to be shortly if somebody didn’t do something practical now, and I nominated myself as that somebody. It was a short election and I won. I hoped Maddy would be as biddable for me as she had been for Ian.
“For the record, no. Never mind that for now, Maddy. Did Ian steal the glass pieces?”
She nodded.
“What’s he done with them?”
She gulped down a sob. “When Peter . . . died, the schedule got screwed up and he had to hurry things up. I think he’s still waiting for the truck to move them to LA.”
My brain was working overtime trying to process new information. She had said there was a schedule? “Hang on—you mean you and Ian had planned the theft?”
She nodded. “Yes. I know it was wrong, but Ian—”
“Never mind. Are you telling me that the glass panels haven’t left Tucson? They’re here?” Wherever the heck “here” was.
“Maybe. Probably. Oh, I don’t know!”
I fought the temptation to shake some sense into her. “Maddy, focus. You set Peter up for the theft?”
“Ian made me. He wanted me to use my ties with Peter to get access to the house.”
“But his death wasn’t part of the plan?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes, at least as far as I could tell in the dim interior of the truck. “No. Em, I’ve loved Peter almost my whole life. But he never paid me any attention. Then when he moved here, and he got in touch with me, I thought, ‘Finally!’ But it turned out that our mothers sweet-talked him into doing me a favor and letting me work with his collection. Em, don’t look at me like that! I know I don’t have a whole lot of talent, but I needed the money, and it meant I’d get to spend time with Peter, so I just kept my mouth shut and took his charity. I didn’t even mind when he wanted to bring you in. I just thought that at last I’d have a chance to be alone with him, and maybe he’d see the real me and come to car
e for me.” She sniffed. “But then you came in and the two of you hit it off, always talking about the art—all that highbrow stuff. And he ate it up! I saw the way he looked at you. I knew you were going out to the house when I wasn’t there.”
More sobs threatened. I was torn in about six different directions. My head hurt, I was straining to hear if our captors were coming back, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from Maddy, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I didn’t think we had a lot of time before Ian hatched a new plan. “Maddy, what the hell are you talking about? Sure, we talked about the art—that’s why he hired me. I’m with Matt, remember? I don’t sleep around, and I wasn’t interested in Peter.”
This statement threatened to set off a new storm of tears. “That’s what he said, but I didn’t believe him! All these years, and then I thought it was all happening at last, and then he starts paying attention to you. We had this huge fight, and he threatened to fire me, no matter what his mother said, and I just got so mad . . . .”
“That you stabbed him with the first thing that you could grab.” At least that made sense, in a strange way.
She nodded vigorously. “Yes. I’d been showing him some glass samples, for color. And then we got to arguing, and he said awful things to me, called me a hack, and . . . the next thing I knew, I had stabbed him, and then he fell down and he wasn’t moving, and there was blood, and I got all panicky, and I called Ian on his cell phone and he said he’d be right over, and I shouldn’t touch anything, or do anything.” Her words tumbled out, faster and faster.
