Second Life (Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 4)

by D. F. Bailey

  “My God. Ginny has cancer?”

  “Yeah, it’s really hit him.” She shook her head with a despondent look.

  “Who’s going to run the show?”

  “Fiona. For now, anyhow. I knew all this before I left the office. Sorry, it’s just….” She waved a hand as if to dismiss that part of the conversation.

  “It’s okay. I get it.”

  “So look. Apparently the feds have been pressuring Wally. They even tracked him down in the cancer ward. Can you believe it? He says the FBI wants to see us again.”

  “No surprise. Did he say what they want?”

  He glanced away and held a hand to the back of his neck and massaged the tendons above his shoulders.

  “Maybe they’ve found something new on Jacob Bell,” he said in reply to his own question. He knew he was reaching for answers, anything to unlock this latest puzzle. Then another thought struck him. “So Wally knows we’re here”—his arms swept around the room—“in New York?”

  “He knew I came out here to talk to Alicia. And he said he told the feds that. Basically he had to tell them everything he knows. But he doesn’t know we’re here at the Penn. Within a day or two the FBI will figure that out, too, so we need to prepare.”

  She studied his face for a moment as if she was trying to uncover a new secret. “So … tell me about your meeting with this source of yours.”

  He walked across the room and settled on the sofa beside her.

  “You know Eve, maybe that call from Wally is a sign. Like it was meant to happen. The more I think about what we learned today, the more certain I am that it’s time to go to the FBI with everything we’ve got.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe things are meant to happen. I thought you were my Free Will guy.” She smiled with a look of affection. Her fingers reached up to his forehead and set a curl of damp hair into place.

  “Yeah, well … maybe I’m a believer now. Let me tell you about Kali Rood and Deacon Salter. And Jonestown. You remember Jonestown, Guyana?”

  She shrugged with a disoriented look, as if she’d forgotten a part of her own past. “In South America, where all those people died. They drank the Kool-Aid, right?”

  He released a cynical chuckle. Exactly what he’d said to Simon. Likely everyone said the same thing.

  “Look … even if you find this out on your own, you can never reveal where I got what I’m about to tell you. I will not mention his name, so technically he’s protected under the First Amendment. Do you understand?”

  She pulled away from him and supported her back on the sofa’s armrest. “All right. Go on.”

  By the time he’d finished his story, he could see that Eve had been tainted by the same paranoid affliction that had overcome him since his meeting with Simon. Her eyes were unfocused as she gazed across their empty hotel room.

  “I think you’re right,” she said when she found her bearings.

  “What?”

  “It’s time to go to the FBI. Like right now.”

  “But first I need to write this story and get it to Fiona. Once it’s published they won’t be able to ignore the chain of evidence pointing to Salter and Kali. It’s the one thing I can do to bring this to a boil.”

  She checked the clock radio next to the bed. “How long will it take you?”

  He ran a hand through his hair as he tried to calculate what he needed to write the story and balance it against his rising sense of exhaustion. “An hour, maybe an hour and a half. And two cups of black coffee.”

  She smiled at that.

  “You start typing. I’ll get the coffee.”

  ※

  It was just after midnight when Will finished the story and emailed it to the eXpress. They waited another twenty minutes to confirm that the eXpress had published it on the website. Jeanine Fix had added images of Kali Rood and Deacon Salter just below the headline: Jonestown Survivors Tied to Serial Murders. He’d been careful to write the story without making libelous allegations. On the other hand, most readers could piece together the chain of events. Jayne Waterston’s photo of Deacon Salter’s car. Salter’s past life as a Jonestown survivor. Kali Rood, his childhood companion. Then the links connecting Jacob Bell, Rood’s late personal assistant, to Dr. Martin Fast, the murdered climate science guru.

  Finch smiled as he read the published story on his laptop. “Looks like the team back at the eXpress is working overtime tonight.”

  “And so they should. This is the break we’ve been after for weeks now.” Eve pulled her cell from her purse and began to enter a phone number from a business card. After she tapped the CALL icon, she said, “I’m asking Calinda Cruz to set up a meeting. You all right with that?”

  Calinda Cruz and John Vickers. The ever-so friendly agents from the FBI. He rolled his eyes with a look of resignation. “Yeah. Hopefully that’ll be the end of the road.”

  When Eve reached Cruz’s voice mailbox she gave Will a wary look.

  “Agent Cruz, this is Eve Noon from the eXpress. Wally Gimbel said you wanted to talk to me and Will Finch. He said you’re in New York—well, so are we. It’s coming up to two in the morning, and we’re going to your office in the next half hour. We’ve got something you’ll want to hear. Check the eXpress website, you’ll see some breaking news.”

  She closed her phone and they glanced at one another. Was a mid-night phone message enough to alert the FBI?

  “It’s the best you can do,” Will said and slung his courier bag over his shoulder. “All right. Let’s go.”

  “Give me a sec. I’ve got to sort through some stuff.”

  She took a few minutes in the bathroom then gathered her phone, wallet and key card in one hand.

  “Oh, by the way. Here’s your old phone.” She pulled it from the charging cable next to the bed and handed it to him. “Remember you asked me to pick it up from the front desk after you left for Paris? I charged it, too.”

  A look of surprise crossed his face. “Right. I’d forgotten about it. Now I’ve got two of the damn things.”

  He felt the new phone in his pants pocket, then slipped the old one into his bag. With everything sorted away, he opened the front door, cautiously checked the corridor and steered Eve into the hallway. Recalling his earlier anxiety when he rode the elevator up the sixth floor, he led the way to the staircase at the far end of the hall.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about being watched here,” he whispered over his shoulder as they stepped down the passageway. “Let’s take the side door, then grab a taxi on Thirty-third.”

  As they slipped along the corridor neither of them paid attention to the new camera fixed to the wall above their hotel room door. Despite the obvious—that it didn’t match the hundreds of CCTV units arrayed through all the public spaces in the Hotel Penn—nothing about the pinhole spy-cam alerted Finch to its presence. In fact, he didn’t notice it at all.

  ※

  Even at this time of night, Thirty-third was clotted with service vehicles loading goods in and out of the hotel and the Old Navy store across the street. Only one of the three lanes was passable and it was locked up with stalled traffic. Nothing was moving.

  “Damn it.” Finch stood on the curb and craned his neck in search of a taxi. He realized he’d made a mistake. He no longer knew the city as well as he did when he was a student at NYU. “Let’s go down to Seventh. There shouldn’t be a problem there.”

  She followed him along the sidewalk and when they reached the corner Finch felt a surge of relief when he realized the traffic gridlock had loosened. In the distance he could see three or four yellow cabs heading south toward them. One had its dome light illuminated.

  “I see one,” he called to Eve.

  The cab pulled to the curb and they settled in the backseat. Finch took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “We’ve got them beat. This time for sure,” he said, his voice rising with confidence.

  “Yeah, maybe. Maybe you’re right,” she said not quite as confidently, but nonethe
less she drew his hand into her lap and smiled.

  By the time their taxi pulled to the curb opposite the Jacob K Javits tower on Worth Street, Finch’s growing optimism was bubbling. He paid the driver and they stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “The FBI is on the twenty-third floor.” He pointed to the middle of the honeycomb exterior of the federal building. “There better be someone on the desk,” he murmured without looking back at her, only now struck by the thought that they might not be able to access the building in the middle of the night. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Ahead of him two white panel vans were parked in line next to the curb. He stepped in front of the first van onto the asphalt and checked to the right along the street toward Foley Square. No traffic. But where was Eve?

  “Hey! What the fu—”

  As he heard her scream, two pairs of hands gripped his shoulders from behind. When he turned he saw two men tug a black cloth over Eve’s head. She cried out again but her screech was muffled by a hand that covered her mouth under the hood.

  In the seconds before he was overwhelmed, Finch could just make out a man cuffing Eve’s hands behind her back. He saw the narrow scar that cut through his right eyebrow. The blue shoes. The wiry build.

  Nike.

  ※ — TWENTY THREE — ※

  AFTER HE REGAINED consciousness the hammering in his temples fell into a broken, incessant rhythm. He struggled to bring his hands up to ease the throbbing in his head but the handcuffs on his wrists completely restrained him. He cried out and tried to roll onto his belly. Impossible. Despite his whimpering, nothing brought release. He tried to calculate the distance they’d travelled in the panel van, but he knew that he could be a hundred miles off. Moments after he’d been dumped in the back, a hood had been cinched around his neck and a needle had injected something into his left triceps. Was it chloral hydrate? Whatever the poison, it had now morphed into the shattering migraine that pounded above his ears in a manic tempo.

  The van left the smooth asphalt and began to ease over a new surface—gravel or compacted dirt, he couldn’t be sure—and the sound of loose shale squeezing under the tires filled his ears with its soft shushing. Once again he rolled his legs forward hoping that he might make contact with Eve. Nothing. Was she in the same vehicle? He whispered her name, only to end up choking on the dry burning at the back of his throat. When he inhaled he could taste the sackcloth fibers from the hood on his tongue. He tried to spit out the raspy fabric but it clung to the spittle on his lips. He coughed twice before he cleared his mouth and his breathing settled to an uneven wheezing.

  He felt the van gear down as it wound through a long uphill track that curled through a series of switchback turns that rolled him from side to side. On one curve his foot arced forward and caught the shoulder strap of his courier bag. It gave him a sense of reassurance, but what good would it do him?

  He felt certain that they were in the mountains somewhere. The Catskills? After another abrupt turn the van seemed to level out, then dipped through four or five depressions in the road. Finally the vehicle came to a stop. He heard the driver set the parking brake and the front doors open and close. The sound of three or four men walking on gravel toward the rear of the van. The metal-on-metal squeal of rusting hinges as the rear loading doors cranked open. The muffled curse of one man to another.

  “All right, Finch. You’ve arrived.”

  Someone tugged at his heels and he struck back with a wild kick.

  “You want another shot, pal?” The question sounded almost rhetorical. “Cuz if you’re wanting more, Mickey Finn’s right here.”

  He heard a skeptical laugh and decided this was no time to put up a fight. When someone grasped his calf he shuffled backwards until his feet touched the ground. He found his balance and aligned his momentum to the men frog-marching him forward. After ten or twelve paces his shoes struck the base of a stone step and he was led up a set of six stairs to a concrete landing. Somewhere ahead he heard a heavy door open and was pushed toward it by his elbows.

  In the distance he heard another vehicle approaching on the dirt track. Could it be Eve? Before he found an answer, he was shoved into a building and the door closed behind him. The sound of the second van was now drowned by the humming of machinery. A generator? Air conditioners? Some sort of utility room, he assumed, and as he walked past the wheezing machines he entered a corridor, turned left and entered another room with a carpeted floor. He was steered to the left and then stopped. He could feel something touching his right shin. The frame of a chair?

  Then one of the men released his arm while the other held him in place. The first man shuffled behind him and uncuffed his right hand. In the instant of his release, he rubbed his free hand over his left wrist. But his freedom was short-lived. He was pushed downward by the shoulders and forced to sit in an upholstered chair. The loose handcuff was locked to the wood frame. In an effort to fathom where he was, he swept his right hand tentatively in front of his chest and past his thighs. He found nothing but air. Then his right hand and ankles were strapped to the chair frame with duct tape. Next, the handcuff was removed from his left wrist and it too was bound to the arm of the chair with tape. He heard the men take a few backward steps.

  A brief silence followed. Somewhere above or behind him he heard footsteps crossing a bare floor. Two, three people. Maybe more.

  “Were you followed?” A male voice spoke from somewhere just in front of him.

  “No, sir. I’ve seen no other cars since we left the highway.”

  “And their cell phones?”

  “As you instructed, sir. We gave them to the taxi driver and paid him to drive to JFK and drop them in a trash can.”

  “Good. Take off his hood.”

  Finch felt someone untie the cloth at his neck. The hood was snatched away and he had to blink the dull light from his eyes. After a moment he realized that he was sitting in what appeared to be the great room in a century-old hunting lodge. The walls were paneled with shoulder-height wainscoting and topped with a faded wallpaper adorned with dusty landscape paintings.

  At the far end of the room stood a floor-to-ceiling fireplace constructed of polished river rocks. The mortar between the rocks had dissolved in several places, and one of the cornerstones was missing. A massive wood mantle stretched from one side of the fireplace to the other, and on the right side, the corner of the mantle had splintered. Embossed in the middle of the mantle face, in four-inch high letters, a craftsman had carved the words WINDY BLUFF. Above the mantle the head of a bull moose had been fixed to the wall, its palm-shape antlers reaching up toward the vaulted ceiling.

  In front of the fireplace three overstuffed sofas were positioned in a wide U-shape oriented to the fireplace hearth. The fire screen had been set aside and the grate was empty. Opposite the fireplace a row of glass windows banked a pair of French doors that led outside, but in the dark of night it was impossible to distinguish anything beyond the lodge.

  “Mr. Finch. You’ve finally found us.”

  He recognized the voice of Kali Rood. He heard her footsteps squeak against the creaking oak floor boards as she walked in front of the chair where he sat. She turned to face him. She wore a charcoal cotton blouse and capri pants that covered her calves, the sort of stylish attire prescribed by Vogue for summer cottage fashionistas. Finch noticed the ankh dangling from the gold chain below her throat.

  He looked up at her with a sneer. “Where’s Eve Noon?”

  “Ah, Ms. Noon.” Her lips puckered into a frown. “Well, that’s a good sign, I suppose. A mark of loyalty. Perhaps even of affection.” An eyebrow arched into a gesture of mockery. “All in good time, Mr. Finch. All in good time. Have you met my associate?”

  A tall man with weedy, gray hair appeared from behind him. He wore an open cardigan sweater, pressed brown slacks and canvas boat shoes. When he pivoted toward the row of windows, Finch noticed a rough scar that ran from his right ear to somewhere below his shirt collar.

&
nbsp; Finch wondered who else might be hidden in reserve. He turned his head but could see no one, yet he knew at least two others were lingering in the shadows behind him. The men who’d abducted him and dragged him from the van into the lodge. Were others concealed in the back rooms?

  “No, I don’t believe we’ve met.” The sweater man put on a smile, a look of regret to suggest their acquaintance would be short-lived.

  Finch nodded in return. “Don’t tell me. You must be Deacon Salter.”

  Salter’s grin faded.

  “Otherwise known as Danny Pass,” Finch added and waited for a reply. He was pleased to see this bring a pause to the pleasantries.

  “Childhood sweetheart to Ruth Watts,” he continued and looked at Kali to gauge her reaction.

  She took a moment to draw a chair to a spot about five feet from him. She sat and crossed her knees. Finch stared at her high cheekbones, her full, slim figure. She still looked like a femme fatale star from 1950s Hollywood. Lana Turner or Barbara Stanwyck. Seductive, predatory—yet chaste and buttoned-up.

  “It seems you’ve managed to piece together quite a bit on your own.” Kali tipped her head to one side as if she needed to assess him. As if Finch represented an unanswered question that required a solution. “We read your latest article on the eXPress.”

  “In fact, that was what prompted us to make a move,” Salter said. He stood beside her briefly, then dragged a second chair from the wall to the middle of the room.

  Finch calculated the sequence. The article had gone up on the eXpress website and in less than an hour he and Eve had been snatched from the street.

  “Make a move? You mean our abduction?”

  “That’s not the word I’d use. Consider this a friendly visit.” Salter’s scar was more apparent now, a narrow cicatrix that wormed its way from his ear along his neck. Too small to be considered a disfigurement, but a blemish nonetheless. When he noticed Finch’s stare he covered the mark with two fingers and glanced away.