Night of the Living Deb

by Susan McBride

  I considered the amended witness list that Brian had taken from the file. Had someone on it wanted Malone out of the way? Had that same person killed Trayla Trash because of what she knew or had seen?

  Was this Oleksiy Petrenko a patron of The Men’s Club?

  More importantly, was he a client of Trayla’s? In particular, was he the elusive boyfriend who’d promised her a ticket to something better?

  Still, I couldn’t figure out why Malone would want to talk to her or why doing so would get him into trouble.

  I could understand why a rich man who was truly guilty of his alleged crimes and afraid of jail time would, perhaps, want to eliminate a player from the opposing team who intended to crucify him on the stand. But why would Oleksiy Petrenko mess with someone from his own defense team?

  It simply wasn’t logical.

  I only wished I’d asked Brian more about the case. He might’ve dropped something about Oleksiy that could shed light on what was going on, if there indeed was a connection.

  There was a lot I didn’t know about Malone’s job.

  Did he like his secretary? Was the coffee good? Did the cleaning people go through his desk drawers? Did his boss treat him like a lackey?

  It was rare for him to bring up a current case with me, as he was fairly close-mouthed about anything ongoing. If he dished at all, it was mainly about successful verdicts or a hard-fought case lost.

  Did that make me a crummy girlfriend?

  Was I supposed to be deeply interested in every facet of his life, including the daily grind at ARGH, even if I found the legal world less than exciting?

  Oh, man.

  I could make myself crazy doing that, torturing myself with the “what ifs” and “wherefores.”

  But I had to stop.

  Second-guessing my past actions wasn’t going to fix things now.

  About to sign off the Internet, I stopped myself and did one last search; this time for Brian Patrick Malone.

  Like magic, related links appeared, and I scanned each one, seeing mostly attorney directories, a listing on ARGH’s Web site, and a few mentions of old cases in the archives of the local papers, as one would expect.

  What I didn’t count on finding was a link to the Dallas Zoo, where Brian was a “zoo parent” to a Bengal tiger. He’d also sponsored several fund-raising efforts by MADD, and had participated in the last Susan Komen run.

  He hadn’t he told me any of that.

  It was good stuff, for Pete’s sake. It would’ve made me think all the more of him. Maybe it was just that he didn’t like to brag.

  Or, perhaps, he needed to keep a few secrets.

  I thought of what Allie had said after we’d gone to The Men’s Club.

  When you think about it, really, how well do we know anyone? Everyone has secrets. Even Malone.

  I hadn’t wanted to believe her then, but I realized she was right.

  In the past twenty-four hours, since Brian Malone had vanished from the face of the Earth, I’d discovered more about him than in the four months we’d dated and talked and kissed and shared the sheets in my bed.

  What was wrong with that picture?

  There was so much more that I wanted learn about him, about his family, his cases, and I was scared witless that I might not have that chance.

  Frustrated tears welled against my lashes, and I brushed my sleeve across my eyes to dry them.

  I would not—could not—fall part.

  The last thing Brian needed was a wimpy girlfriend.

  He was counting on me, and I wouldn’t let him down.

  I shut off the computer, picked up my still-silent cell phone, and left the familiar confines of my childhood bedroom where the gown intended for my debut still hung in the closet: still pristine white, never worn.

  As I headed down the stairs, I heard the click of the front door unlatching. I saw Stephen enter as I descended quickly to the foyer.

  He carried a fat black bag, which he deposited carefully against the wall as he turned to shut the door behind him.

  When he saw me standing and watching him, he nodded grimly and said, “We’re all set, Andy. Let’s sit down, so I can tell you what I’ve done.”

  Mother emerged from the hallway that led to the kitchen, her hands clasped and worry wrinkling her normally smooth brow.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Stephen reached for her and took her hand between his.

  “I’ve got it under control, Cissy, I promise.”

  She looked up at him and smiled, and I could see that she bought every word he’d said.

  I wanted to believe as well. Only trust wasn’t exactly my strong suit.

  “I need to talk to you both,” Stephen said, and jerked his chin in my direction.

  “Shall we go to the den?” my mother suggested.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said, not quite up to polite.

  The kidnappers could call again at any moment, and I wanted to be as prepared as I could get.

  Without another word, Stephen retrieved the satchel he’d set down by the door. It was the size of a bowling bag, though it didn’t look nearly as heavy.

  “What’s in there?” My mother eyed the thing suspiciously, though I figured I knew what it held.

  Two hundred twelve thousand dollars. Cash. Or maybe lots of bundles of plain paper with real hundreds banded on top, like in the movies. For Brian’s sake, I hoped it was the real thing. I didn’t want to mess up and have to live with what happened.

  “I’ll show you after we sit down and chat,” Stephen assured us, and we headed back to the room where we’d previously gathered.

  I glanced at the clock on the mantel as I settled on the sofa, the same spot I’d taken before.

  It was just past four o’clock.

  My mother came up behind me, setting her hands on my shoulders, and I felt grateful for her touch.

  I palmed my cell, willing it to ring, hoping I would do the right thing when it did. I didn’t want to mess up.

  “Andy, you with me here?”

  I shifted my gaze from the mantel clock and toward Stephen. He’d set the bulging black bag on the coffee table, and his left hand rested on the zipper flap.

  “Sorry,” I told him. “What’d I miss?”

  “The pay phone number,” he said. “It’s from a booth outside the IHOP on Northwest Highway, near Love Field.”

  “Near the airport,” I murmured, thinking of all the implications, because that’s where Brian’s car was found, and it wasn’t far from the strip club where he’d gone with Matty. “Is there any way to find out who made the call?” I asked, realizing it was a stretch even as I said it. “I have the time of the call on my cell.”

  Stephen shook his head. “I drove out there myself, Andy, after I located the number in the reverse directory.

  But there’s no security camera outside the restaurant that faces the pay phone area. The lighting’s bad besides, and there isn’t a window in the restaurant that gives a clear shot to the phone. I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks for trying,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Listen, honey . . .”

  Whoa, that got my attention, as Stephen had never called me “honey” before, and it reminded me of my dad, the way he used “pumpkin” when he’d address me.

  “. . . I want you to know you’re not alone in this. I’ll be there, every step of the way, keeping an eye on you.”

  Every step of the way?

  But the kidnappers wanted me alone!

  Did he want to jeopardize everything?

  I started to protest, and he must’ve read the panic in my face, as he quickly got out, “Andy, breathe easy. I’ll stay out of sight. No one will know I’m there. Trust me.”

  There he went with that “trust” thing again.

  “Listen to him, Andrea,” my mother said and squeezed my shoulders.

  It was hard to do, but I gulp
ed down my reluctance.

  “Don’t let them see you, Stephen, please.”

  “I’ll be careful, honey, don’t worry.”

  I nodded, but I worried just the same.

  “So what’s in the bag?” Cissy asked without further ado, and Stephen slowly began to unzip it. When he was done, he tipped the gaping belly toward us There they were, in black and white . . . and green.

  Bundles of bills bound with paper wrappers.

  And lots of them, from the looks of things.

  I leaned toward the coffee table so I could peer deeper into the bag. “Is it all there? Everything?”

  “Two hundred twelve thousand, yes,” he said. “Go ahead.

  Touch it, Andy. Tell me how it looks.”

  I set my cell in my lap and cautiously reached forward to dig into the bag’s gaping middle. I withdrew a firm stack of hundreds, sniffed them, and riffled the bills with my thumb like a deck of cards.

  Yep. They looked like crisp Benjamins, only not the new kind with the bigger middle. The older style, but I guessed that was all right.

  “Do they feel okay?” Stephen asked.

  What an odd question.

  Mostly to humor him, I gave the bills a squeeze before I put the bundle back. “Yeah, they feel just fine.”

  “How do they look to you?”

  That was weird question number two.

  “Why? Are they not real?” I asked and squinted at Mother’s beau, wondering what his question implied.

  Were they fakes? Funny money? Forgeries?

  If they were, they were good, to my layman’s eyes, anyway.

  Stephen leaned elbows on knees, gazing at the money bag. “Yes, Andy, they’re counterfeit. I have a good friend who was a Treasury agent for thirty-five years. A couple times, he came across fake bills he didn’t have the heart to destroy. They were works of art to him, and he saved a few for posterity.”

  And some people merely pilfered office pencils.

  “They’re just on loan for tonight,” Stephen explained. “I told him I’d have them back by morning.”

  Unless something went wrong, I thought and swallowed hard.

  “Dan gave me a couple dye packs for the topmost bundles,” Stephen continued, while I listened. “Normally, the device activates when a robber passes through the electroI-magnetic field set up in a bank’s doorway. But these”—he proffered two of the wrapped packs of bills, holding one in each hand—“are activated by a radio transmitter. I’ll give the device to you. You can turn it on when you transfer the money. The dye packs will mark the money and the bad guys.”

  He returned the bundles to the bag, and when I didn’t say anything, he looked straight at me.

  “You worried, Andy?”

  Yeah, I was worried, all right.

  “I’m not sure about this, Stephen,” I said, thinking should’ve gotten the money myself—real money—

  because what if we weren’t dealing with amateurs, as we supposed? What if they were pros and knew a bad bill when they saw it? “What if they realize we’re tricking them?”

  “They won’t,” he said, like it was as simple as that.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I just am.”

  I searched his eyes and his sober expression, looking for cracks, for any sign that he felt doubt. My own mind was whirring with possible trip-ups:

  What if the dye packs went off too soon? What if they didn’t go off at all? What if they didn’t give up Malone, even when they had the money in hand? What would happen then? Would I have cost Brian his life, because I’d tried to outsmart his captors?

  I wet my lips, telling myself that I had to trust Stephen, because my only other choice was to go to the police, and that I couldn’t do.

  “We don’t know who they are, Andy,” Mother’s beau went on, doing his damnedest to convince me. “We don’t know that they really have Brian, do we? We’ve got to outsmart them, and we will.”

  “You’re right,” I told him, letting out a held breath. “I just want Brian back safe.”

  Cissy patted my arm, and I closed my eyes for an instant, telling myself it would all be okay. That, by morning, Malone would be home and the fake bills returned to Stephen’s pal, the former Treasury agent.

  All would be right with the world.

  When I opened my eyes again, Stephen was removing what looked like a small black box from his jacket pocket.

  I was almost afraid to ask.

  So Mother did it for me. “What on earth is that?”

  “It’s a GPS tracker.” Stephen lifted the thing, as if weighing it. “I got it for my new truck as an antitheft device.

  Ordered it off the Net. It uses Google mapping.”

  “Dear Lord, I don’t even know what that means,” my mother said.

  But I did.

  Everyone and their dog used GPS these days, mostly to trace vehicles. It was legal, so long as the person in the automobile being tracked was aware of it.

  “You want to track my Jeep,” I said.

  “Sort of,” Stephen replied mysteriously. I watched him slip the black box into the bag with the money, shoving it down the side, toward the bottom. “I want to track the bag, which will be with you until you hand it over to the kidnappers.

  Then I want to track them.”

  “My my,” Cissy breathed. “The things they invent.”

  Stephen cracked a smile. “I’ve got my laptop in my car, so I’ll know where you are. You aren’t in this alone, you know.”

  I stared at the satchel. Goose bumps rose over my arms.

  This was really going down, wasn’t it?

  The zipper whirred as Stephen closed the bag and slapped its side. “All right, then. We’re all set on this end.

  Now we just have to wait for the next damned call.”

  “Did they mention when they’d phone back, sweetie?”

  my mother said, and I shook my head. “You imagine they’ll try before or after dinner?”

  Excuse me? It wasn’t like kidnappers had manners.

  “For Pete’s sake, I don’t know when they’ll call, Mother,” I said, unable to keep from sounding testy. Hell,

  I felt testy.

  “I think someone needs a nap,” Cissy drawled.

  A nap? Like I’d sleep a wink before this ordeal was through.

  I nearly said something snippy back, when, right on cue, my cell rang from my lap, the familiar idiotic music playing in aborted bursts.

  I took a deep breath, thinking, Ding dong, kidnappers calling.

  “Pick it up, Andy,” Stephen said, as if I needed a nudge.

  I grabbed the phone and flipped it wide-open, pressing it hard to my ear and answering with a shaky, “Hello? This

  is Andy Kendricks.”

  “Listen and listen good, because I’ll only say this once,” the mumbling voice instructed, and Mother hastily shoved a pen and pad of paper at me. “Here’s what you do if you want to see your boyfriend alive again.”

  I whispered, “I’m listening.”

  The barely audible voice told me where to go and when, and reminded me that if I didn’t show, if I didn’t do exactly what I was told, or if there were any signs of police involvement, Brian was a goner.

  Then it was over.

  The phone went silent.

  And my heart went, Gulp.

  Chapter 17

  The ransom drop activities wouldn’t begin until 10:45 p.m.

  I was to sit at the bar at a Highland Park restaurant called Patrizio, right before closing as it were, and

  wait for their call.

  They gave me the starting point, but that was all. They planned to direct me from one place to another, and I’d have no idea where I was headed next until they phoned after I’d arrived at each successive spot.

  It gave me flashbacks to childhood scavenger hunts, having to run around the neighborhood accumulating goodies on a list u
ntil you had them all. The first one back with all their items won a prize.

  If I did my part right, I would “win” back Brian.

  Who did these people think they were? Because I was thinking they had a thing for Jerry Bruckheimer action movies, where car chases were more important than plot.

  Stephen said the setup was done to make sure I wasn’t followed; so it worried me all the more that I knew he’d be tailing me, keeping track on the GPS.

  What if they spotted him?

  Would they call the whole thing off? Decide Malone wasn’t worth the trouble and dispose of him, like they had Trayla Trash?

  Stephen swore up and down that he’d keep a ways back, maintaining visual contact but relying on the GPS to know the direction I was headed. That way, he assured me, he wouldn’t have to ride too close on my bumper.

  Trust, trust, trust.

  One of these days I’d get it down pat.

  It was just so danged hard for me, perhaps having to do with my being an only child. I was used to counting on myself, getting everything done solo. No one had ever accused me of being a team player.

  Even in school, I’d taken over group projects, never willing to sit back and let the chips fall where they may. I wasn’t all-fired certain I was much good at sharing, either.

  But this evening I had to play by the rules, both Stephen’s and the kidnappers’. I wanted to save Malone without risking my own neck, kind of like being between a rock and an impossible place.

  If all went well, I would end up at the final drop spot at midnight.

  According to Mr. Mumbles, they’d release Malone as soon as they had the bag in hand and had eyeballed the contents to be sure I wasn’t screwing them over.

  Lovely.

  Who was I to protest? I had nothing else, no other option. Malone hadn’t called again, so how could I not accept that these people were keeping him under lock and key? I still had no inkling how the Paris Hilton dognapping ransom connected with the Oleksiy case, and I had pretty much convinced myself it didn’t matter at this point.

  My only focus was Brian.

  I couldn’t even allow myself to dwell on what would happen once he’d been freed, because it was nearly as frightening to think of him trying to explain to the cops that he had nothing to do with Trayla’s murder.