“Where are you going?” Mae called after him.
“Work. Nobody called me.”
“Maybe they—”
His broad back disappeared into the upstairs hall. Ten minutes later he returned, dressed in a suit, a muted two-tone tan dress shirt that didn’t match the gray suit, and red tie. He’d never been known as a fashion plate. “I probably won’t get back tonight,” he told Mae on his way out the door. “I’ll call.”
She returned to the kitchen and wrapped up the night’s dinner fixings to go in the fridge. A TV dinner would do that night.
Hatcher went directly upstairs at Metro and was told that Chief Carter was out. He stepped into the street to dial Jackson’s cell, but a half-dozen reporters and a TV crew scotched that plan. Back inside, he found a quiet corner of the main booking room and made the call.
“Jackson.”
“Jackson, Hatcher. Where are you?”
“I’m, ah—Mary and I are with the parents.”
“Why are you with them?”
“Detective Kloss brought us. Look, I can’t talk, Hatch. Can I call you later?”
“You can’t talk? What the hell do you mean by that? Get your ass down here to Metro.”
Hatcher heard a male voice in the background bark, “Can the call, Matt.”
The line went dead.
Hatcher swore under his breath and retreated to the locker room, where he splashed tepid water on his face and looked at himself in the old metal mirror, wishing he’d shaved before leaving the house. He sat on a wooden bench and tried to wedge clear thinking into his congested brain. What the hell was Kloss thinking, taking from him his two juniors? It wasn’t done that way. You didn’t go around raiding other detectives’ squads. The department had been going downhill every year, as far as Hatch was concerned, a bunch of pols running things, turning things upside down and making it tough to do your job—to be a cop—to rid the streets of the lice that come out of their nests at night.
A detective came into the room. “Hey, Hatch, you okay?” he asked.
Hatch, who’d been sitting with his head in his hands, looked up. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He walked back upstairs, where Carter had now come from his office and conferred with two other white shirts.
Hatcher intruded on their conversation. “You got a minute?” he said.
Carter grimaced. “Not now, Hatch.”
“I need to talk to you,” Hatcher persisted.
Carter excused himself from the others and led Hatcher into his office, closing the door behind him with some force. “Maybe you haven’t heard,” the chief said, “but we’ve got a high-profile kidnapping on our hands.”
“Yeah, I heard. That’s why I’m here. I call Jackson and he tells me that Kloss pulled him from me—Hall, too—and has them with the parents of the kid. What gives?”
“What gives, Hatch, is that we’ve got every available cop on this case, and that’s the way it’ll be until it’s resolved.”
“Good. So, get Jackson and Hall back here and we’ll work it.”
Carter shook his head. He was distracted by an administrative officer who entered the office and handed him a file folder.
“You hear what I said?” Hatcher asked after the officer had departed.
Carter sighed. He backed to the side of his desk and perched on its edge. “I talked with Kloss only a few minutes ago,” he said. “The parents—you know who they are.”
“Yeah, the hotshot attorney, Rollins, Colgate’s buddy.”
“Right. Kloss says Mr. and Mrs. Rollins have asked that Jackson and Hall remain with them.”
“Why, for christsake?”
A tiny smile came to Carter’s lips. “Maybe because they’ve bonded with them, Hatch. It happens.”
“Bonded?” he snorted. “That’s a laugh.”
Carter pushed away from the desk. “I have to go, a joint press conference with the Bureau. Stay around. Check in with Eldridge in missing persons. He’ll have something for you to do—without Jackson and Hall.”
The chief slapped him on the arm and was gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
Paul, as he was called, watched television. The kidnapping dominated every news cycle, pushed anything and everything else off the electronic front pages of the cable news channels, and local stations, too. There was little other news to report, each segment rehashing previous ones, talking heads trying desperately to inject fresh insight into the story, to outdo one another, to scoop the competition. One channel had managed to obtain a grainy picture of Samantha from its photo and video morgues and displayed it behind the newscaster’s voice-over.
Paul sat up when Governor Bob Colgate’s face appeared on the screen, caught by camera crews as he exited his Georgetown home. “I have no comment at this time,” he said. “It’s a police matter. I will say, however, to whomever did this, you can make it right by returning Samantha safely to her family.”
“Have you spoken with the Rollinses?” a reporter shouted.
Colgate ignored the question and climbed into a waiting limousine.
Paul left the TV, put on his ski mask, and opened the door to the bedroom where Greta, as she was called, sat on the bed with Samantha. He motioned with his finger for her to come out of the room.
“Anything new on TV?” Greta asked.
“They just had Colgate on. Big nothing. There’s a press conference coming up. The FBI’s been brought in.”
“No surprise, state lines and all.”
“Yeah. No surprise. I hope it stays that way.”
“No word from Y-man?”
“No.”
“So we sit and do nothing until we hear.”
“That’s the drill. How’s the kid?”
“She’s all right. Scared. Keeps asking me why we did this to her.”
Paul’s grin was crooked. “And you told her, of course.”
“I told her it was strictly business, that once the business was over she could go home.”
“She eat?”
“Some. I just hope Y-man doesn’t let this drag out too long. The Virginia cops will be all over it, too.”
“He said two days max.”
“I hope he’s right. Want me to make dinner?”
“I’ll go out and pick up a pizza.”
“Go out?”
“Yeah. Nobody knows who we are or what’s gone down. I’m in the mood for a pie. Besides, I have to make the call.”
• • •
The wait continued at the Rollinses’ house, too, although pizza wasn’t on the menu. Kloss called Metro and instructed someone to pick up Chinese food and deliver it to the house, despite Jerry and Sue’s protestations that they weren’t hungry. The phone continued to ring incessantly, each time causing everyone to tense. The media’s hounding of them intensified.
“Can’t we take that damn thing off the hook,” Sue said.
“No, ma’am,” was Kloss’s response.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. If the kidnapper calls…”
“I understand,” the detective assured.
The food arrived. Jerry Rollins picked at a couple of fried dumplings and poured himself bourbon, neat. Sue ate nothing until Mary convinced her that she had to keep up her strength and she settled for brown rice and steamed vegetables. The two females sat together in the kitchen. Sue said little; Mary tried to keep up a conversation to distract Sue, and succeeded for the most part.
“Mr. Rollins,” Kloss said, “there’s something I want to suggest.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s possible that we won’t receive a call tonight from whoever took your daughter. It’s been my experience that people in these cases often take their time to make contact. They want to think it out before making the call. Obviously, with this all over TV, the perpetrator knows what’s going on here outside the house. They’ll be gun-shy and wait until they’ve figured out how best to reach you.”
“But if they don’t call, h
ow can we ever know what’s happened to Samantha?”
Again, thoughts ran parallel in the room. If the kidnapper was a child molester, a pervert, it was possible that no call would ever be made. He would assault the child and, in all likelihood, kill her. Hopefully, instead, money was the motive. It was the best motive of all, in almost every crime. Money was impersonal. People who kidnapped kids for money weren’t interested in harming them. They wanted to be paid, pure and simple, and as long as funds could be delivered without placing them in jeopardy, they’d be content.
Kloss answered his question. “If this is someone with a grudge against you, Mr. Rollins, it’s possible that they’ll want to make contact away from the house.”
“Away?”
“Yes, sir. Your office, or part of the daily routine having to do with your law practice or involvement in the campaign. What do you have scheduled for tomorrow?”
“It’s Sunday. I mentioned that I’d canceled a meeting with Governor Colgate this afternoon. I told him I’d try to make time tomorrow.”
“All right. What about Monday, Tuesday?”
“My calendar’s in my den. I’ll get it.”
Kloss invited Jackson to join them at the table as they meticulously reviewed Rollins’s upcoming schedule. When they were finished, Rollins asked, “Are you suggesting that I leave here and pretend to go about my usual routine?”
“That may be necessary,” Kloss said, “depending upon whether we hear from the abductors.”
“That doesn’t make much sense to me,” Rollins said. “Whoever took Samantha will know that the police will be following me at every turn. They wouldn’t dare approach me under those circumstances.”
“Not necessarily,” Kloss countered. What he didn’t say was that his gut feeling was that the abduction of Samantha Rollins had something to do with Rollins’s position in town, perhaps his close relationship with Robert Colgate. He had nothing to base that on and admitted as much to himself. But the manner in which the girl was taken, the swiftness of it, the smooth execution of what must have been a plan, buttressed his hunch. A child molester wouldn’t have been brazen enough to attempt to snatch her on a sunny afternoon on the Mall with thousands of people milling about. No, he decided, this was a professional job. Either the girl had been taken for money—or because the kidnappers wanted something from Rollins besides money.
“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Rollins,” Kloss said. “Is it possible that someone has taken Samantha in order to blackmail you, to extort money from you?”
It was more of a snort than a laugh. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to blackmail me. I have nothing to hide.”
“It’s not necessarily a matter of having something to hide, sir. I just thought you might have something in your possession that somebody else would want bad enough to use your daughter as a means of getting it.”
“I can’t think of a thing.”
Jackson had sat silently during the exchange. Rollins’s coolness in the face of what had occurred was impressive to the young detective. He chalked it up to two things: being a shrewd, hardened attorney, and putting up a front for his wife’s sake. But his face changed as Kloss asked his questions. For the first time a modicum of tension crossed it, even nerves. Jackson looked at Kloss to see if the veteran detective had picked up on the same thing. His expression was noncommittal.
As dusk settled over the nation’s capital, Kloss took Jackson and Hall aside to say that the Rollinses had asked that they be retained on the case, at least for the near duration. “But I won’t need both of you here at the same time. I suggest one of you go home, get a few hours’ sleep, pack a bag, and head back.”
“You, Mary?” Jackson asked.
“No, Matt, you go ahead. Mrs. Rollins and I are getting along fine. I don’t want to leave her.”
“Suit yourself,” Kloss said.
As Jackson prepared to leave, he said, “Hatcher called a while ago. That was the call I was on when you told me to end it.”
Kloss pulled Jackson and Hall into a corner and spoke in low tones. “Matt,” he said, “forget about Hatcher. This case takes precedence over everything. I told Chief Carter that the family wanted you and Detective Hall on the case until further notice, and he whole-heartedly agreed. Don’t sweat it.”
Jackson and Hall looked at each other. “Want anything from the apartment?” he asked her.
“No. I’ll pick some things up at my place tomorrow. Get some sleep. This looks like it could go on for a while.”
• • •
Paul and Greta stood in the living room. He’d removed his maroon sweatshirt and baseball cap, replacing them with a dark blue windbreaker, no hat.
“You have the phone?” she asked.
He pulled a slender cell phone from his jacket pocket. Greta had stolen it from picnickers at the Mall less than an hour before snatching Samantha. Amazing, she’d thought after doing it, how careless people are. The phone was resting in plain view on top of a wicker picnic hamper.
“I’ll drive into the District,” he said, “and call from there, dump the phone, and head back.”
“Take a different route to the city than we took here,” she admonished.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m not a dummy. Not to worry. I’ll hit a pizza parlor on the way back. What you want—pepperoni, sausage?”
“Both. And extra cheese.”
“Yeah, extra cheese.”
He pulled a black Volkswagen Jetta from a one-car garage at the rear of the property, drove away from the house, and stuck to the speed limit. He was aware of the number of state patrol cars on the roads, and listened to an all-news radio station which reported nothing that concerned him. He crossed the bridge into the District and made his way to the Southwest waterfront, where some of the city’s best fish restaurants were located. The parking lot was bustling but he maneuvered the Jetta to a relatively secluded spot alongside the Washington Channel, the body of water that diners feasted their eyes on along with their crabs and lobsters and Chilean sea bass. He turned off the car’s lights, got out, and walked to the edge of the channel. The illuminated keypad gave him enough light to dial the number.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Rollins?” he said.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Your daughter is safe and won’t be hurt, provided you do what we tell you to do.”
“Let me talk to her,” Rollins demanded.
“You’ll hear from us again,” Paul said. He pushed the OFF button, flung the phone far into the channel, returned to the car, and drove away.
TWENTY-SIX
“This is Governor Colgate.”
Mary Hall, who’d been monitoring calls at the Rollins house, had picked up.
“Yes, sir?”
“My wife and I want to visit with Mr. and Mrs. Rollins. I assume that can be arranged.”
“I’ll check,” she said.
Kloss had just returned from home, where he’d picked up a change of clothes and other necessities. “We don’t need more of a media circus than we already have,” he said.
“I’ll tell him no.”
Rollins had overheard the exchange. “What if I go there?” he suggested.
“I’d prefer that,” said Kloss. “One of my men will drive you.”
Rollins got on the line with Colgate. “Bob, it’s inconvenient for you to come here. The detective in charge says I can come to your house. Is that okay?”
“I suppose so. Bring Sue with you.”
“I’m not sure she’ll want to, but I’ll ask.”
Fifteen minutes later, Rollins sat in the backseat of a marked patrol car. His wife had declined to leave, which he understood. There was something strangely, weirdly comforting being close to the phone on which Samantha’s captor might call again. Although Colgate’s Georgetown townhouse was only minutes away, it seemed to Rollins as if he’d traveled to a distant place, out of touch and helpless.
A housekeeper answered the door and
escorted him to Colgate’s office, which overlooked a pristine large yard carefully tended by a team of gardeners. Colgate was dressed casually—jeans, sandals, white button-down shirt he hadn’t bothered to tuck in, and a pale yellow cardigan draped over his shoulders. He got up from behind the desk, came to Rollins, and hugged him. “What a bitch,” he said. “How you holding up, buddy?”
“All right.”
“Sue’s not with you?”
“She didn’t want to leave the phone. She’s there with the detectives.”
“Sit down, Jerry. Coffee? Something stronger?”
“Coffee would be fine.”
Settled, cups in front of them, Colgate asked whether there had been any progress in finding Samantha.
“Unfortunately, no,” Rollins replied. “We received a call last night.”
“From the kidnapper?”
“Yes or so he claimed. All he said was that Samantha was okay and that she wouldn’t be hurt provided I did what they told me to do.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“What does he want you to do?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say. He said they’d be in touch again.”
“They’d? There’s more than one?”
“Evidently. He said that we would be back in touch.”
“Did the police trace the call?”
Rollins nodded and sipped his coffee. “The call was made from a cell phone in Southwest, down by those fish restaurants. The number was traced to a couple who said their phone had been stolen yesterday afternoon at the Mall.”
“Do you think—?”
“No, they had nothing to do with it, Bob. I don’t even know if it was a genuine call or not. The cops say it could be a prankster, a perverted one. I’m hoping they’re wrong.”
Deborah walked into the room. “Oh, Jerry,” she said, going to where he sat and wrapping her arms around his shoulders, “every parent’s worst nightmare. I am so sorry. I’m sure that Samantha will be fine.”
“We’re counting on that,” Rollins said.
Murder Inside the Beltway Page 19
