Silver Justice

by Russell Blake

  Chapter 17

  When Richard and Silver turned the corner onto her street, they were jarred out of their exhausted glow by the harsh flashing lights of the squad cars gathered in front of her building. Richard pulled to the curb, double parking in the red zone.

  A uniformed officer approached him, waving him on.

  “Hey, buddy. Move. You can’t park there.”

  Richard held out his badge.

  “What’s going on?” Silver demanded from the passenger seat, holding up her badge as well.

  “Robbery, assault, kidnapping-”

  “What? In my building?”

  The cop leaned down and gave her a long look. “You live here?”

  Something about his tone chilled her. She swung the door open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Police were milling around, and a crime scene van pulled up behind them as Richard was getting out of the car. Badge aloft, she pushed through the gathered officers and moved into the familiar ground-floor lobby, increasing her pace as she got to the stairs, taking them two at a time. Richard struggled to keep up, until their way was blocked on the third floor by a tall man in a cheap jacket and rumpled slacks.

  “Sorry, lady. Crime scene. You can’t come any farther.”

  “I live here. Who are you? And what the hell is going on? What apartment got hit?”

  He gave her a hard look. “I’m Detective Aaron Baker. Who are you?”

  She held up her badge. “Assistant Special Agent in Charge Silver Cassidy. FBI. Now are you going to answer my questions?”

  The detective’s face fell. “Cassidy? I think you should probably have a seat over here-”

  Silver’s eyes were already looking past him at the crime scene tape across her door. Sarah was seated in the hallway on a chair, a blanket over her shoulders, an ice bag on her face, as another detective spoke with her and a paramedic dabbed at her head.

  “What happened?” Silver’s voice had climbed in pitch and had the distinctive edge of panic now. “Someone tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  Detective Baker took her arm and led her towards her door. “There’s no easy way to say this, so out of professional courtesy I’m going to level with you. About an hour and a half ago, someone broke into your apartment and robbed it at gunpoint, assaulting the young lady over there,” he gestured at Sarah, “and then kidnapped the girl she was watching. I’m assuming that’s your daughter.”

  The world tilted for a second, then Richard’s arms caught her. She felt him steady her as she fought to process the words she was hearing.

  “That’s impossible. My daughter? Someone kidnapped my daughter? But she’s only a baby. No. No, you must have it wrong.” Silver began glancing around frantically. This was a mistake. Some kind of horrible mistake. Kennedy couldn’t have been kidnapped. That was ludicrous.

  “Agent Cassidy, I know how hard this must be for you. Believe me. I wish it was a mistake. But I’m afraid it isn’t. The girl there has been hit pretty hard and injected with some sort of sedative, so she’s out of it. But we have this right. I’m sorry, but your daughter has been kidnapped.”

  Silver grabbed for the wall to steady herself. She heard the words, but inside her head a deafening howl of fear and despair swept through her consciousness.

  Richard nodded at the cop, and he stepped back, allowing them to approach the apartment doorway. Silver looked past the little foyer to the computer desk in the living room, where Kennedy would normally have been planted…

  She fought to understand how any of this made any sense, but came up empty. “I…why would anyone want to kidnap my daughter?”

  They were interrupted by the sound of the forensics techs stomping up the stairs.

  “Good evening, Detective,” the female tech said, ignoring Silver and Richard. “Sammy’s downstairs processing the lobby door. I presume the tape is the crime scene?”

  “Yes. We’ve tried to keep everyone out. I was inside, as well as the two uniforms downstairs, and the girl over there. Oh, and this is the mother of the kidnap victim,” Baker added as an afterthought. “Special Agent Cassidy, FBI.”

  The tech nodded, already losing interest, anxious to get to work in the apartment. Cassidy’s phone rang in her little clutch purse and she fumbled with dead fingers to answer it.

  “Silver. It’s Brett. Where are you?”

  “I’m at my flat.” Her speech sounded wooden.

  “Oh God. I just got the call. I’m en route. Stay put. I’ll be there within half an hour.”

  Silver cleared her throat, struggling for composure. “Does anyone know what happened?”

  “The details are thin, Silver. But we’ll know more shortly.”

  Silver hung up and forced herself to detach and become clinical. After a few minutes regaining control of herself, she approached Baker. The initial shock of adrenaline was wearing off, and she was starting to function again.

  “Officer, what do you know about this? Give me the rundown. Who found them? How long do you estimate the kidnapper has been gone?”

  “One of your neighbors heard screaming from inside and eventually worked up the courage to knock on the door and see if everything was okay. She tried the knob, and it was open. The babysitter was cuffed on the couch, unconscious. Your neighbor immediately called the police, and the first respondent arrived within twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes? Are you kidding me? It took twenty minutes to get a car here?”

  “Look. I’m just telling you the chronology, okay? The guesstimate is that the kidnapper left over an hour ago.”

  “What about traffic cams?” Silver demanded.

  “They’re being analyzed. Should have something shortly. But you know how busy the streets are — there are a lot of cars that went through those intersections. On a quick scan, it’s a needle in a haystack unless we know what we’re looking for. Sorry.”

  Sarah yelped from the other end of the hallway as the paramedic probed the gash in her head with his fingers, and Silver’s attention was drawn to her. She moved down the gloomy corridor until she was standing in front of her.

  “Sarah. It’s Silver. Are you okay?”

  Sarah peered up at her with glazed, unfocused eyes. “I’m sorry, Ms. Cassidy. We never stood a chance. It all happened so fast…”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Silver asked gently.

  “We were hanging out in the living room, and then suddenly this guy was standing in the room with a gun — we never heard him come in. He said he was going to rob us and tried to inject me with something, but I fought him, and then he hit me. That’s all I remember. When I woke up, your neighbor, Mrs. Lee, was with me. I’m sorry…there was nothing I could do…”

  “We need to get you to the hospital and get an X-ray of your head,” the detective said, “make sure you don’t have a concussion.”

  “No. I can’t. I don’t have insurance.”

  Sarah was eighteen, an aspiring actress who worked around the corner at a coffee shop. She’d dropped out of school in her native Virginia when she was sixteen and thumbed her way to New York, where she’d been living hand-to-mouth ever since. Cassidy knew her from the restaurant — she was always sweet, if not particularly bright.

  “Don’t worry about it. This one’s on the City of New York,” he assured her.

  “What did he look like?” Silver asked Sarah.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I know it was a man, but I don’t know much else. He had pantyhose over his head, like one of those robber movies. Kind of freaky looking.”

  “What about his clothes? Pants? Jacket? Shoes?”

  “He was wearing some kind of construction boots, I think. Those tan kind? And jeans. Baggy jeans…and a brown windbreaker jacket. Kind of cheap-looking stuff, you know? Like thrift shop cheap.”

  Silver continued interrogating her, but it quickly became apparent that she didn’t know much more than she’d initially said. Something was nagging at Silver as she listened, though, and she st
opped the girl midway through a sentence.

  “How did he get in the apartment?” Silver asked. “You said he just appeared there?”

  “Yeah. I have no idea. One minute we were alone, and the next he was standing in the hall pointing a pistol at me.”

  Silver exchanged glances with Richard, and they walked over to the front door of the flat. Silver squatted down and peered at the locks. Sure enough, there were telltale scratches on them.

  “He jimmied the locks. That’s fairly sophisticated. And ballsy at that hour. There are still people circulating,” she observed.

  “Which tells me he knew what he was doing. But why Kennedy?” Richard asked.

  Silver didn’t say anything. She walked to the far end of the hall, and Richard followed her. She was trying to hold it together, but when she thought about her baby girl, kidnapped, she began sobbing quietly, her frame shuddering. Richard put his hand on her shoulder, and she shrugged it off, then turned and fell into his arms. He held her while she cried, her tears of helplessness and loss staining his shirt.

  Seth appeared on the landing, with Brett following right behind him. They approached Silver, who didn’t register them until Richard cleared his throat. Silver looked up from his chest, tears streaming down her face, then pulled away from him as she tried to wipe away her grief with shaking fingers.

  Nobody said anything.

  Seth studied Richard, his shirt soaked from Silver’s pained reaction, then took in Silver’s dress. Brett regarded them both.

  “Silver. I’m so sorry. You have my word that we’ll do everything possible to get your daughter back safely.”

  Silver began speaking, but her voice cracked and momentarily failed her. She tried again, and it came out stronger. “I know you will. I just don’t understand any of this.”

  “We’ll get to the bottom of it, Silver. I am putting the full resources of the FBI behind finding her and bringing her kidnapper to justice.”

  Seth nodded solemnly, but everyone knew that nothing that was being said would change things or bring Kennedy back. It was just what you said to the family when horror intruded and loved ones were stolen in the night.

  The next half hour went by in a blur, with Silver lost in her thoughts, occasionally racked with desperation and breaking into tears for a few minutes before pulling herself together.

  Detective Baker and Brett squared off over the inevitable jurisdictional issue, but Baker quickly conceded the advantage to the FBI. This was one of their own, and he wanted out of it as soon as possible. By the looks of the number of agents that had arrived since Brett had gotten there, it was going to be a full-court press, and another broken-down NYPD detective wouldn’t be needed.

  As time continued to drag on, Brett pulled Richard aside and had a hushed conversation.

  Richard sat down next to Silver on one of the folding camp chairs the crime scene technicians had put out. “They’re going to be here most of the night, Silver. Let’s get you a hotel room so you can get some sleep. There’s no point staying. We can come back in the morning.”

  She shook her head, dazed, but he was persistent, and she eventually nodded and stood, feeling the eyes of the agents and police boring into her as she squared her shoulders and walked down the hall to the stairs, Richard trailing her.

  Silver knew the statistics on kidnappings as well as anyone and tried to banish the poison thoughts that waited to overcome her — Kennedy, shivering, half-dressed or worse, a shadowy figure looming over her tiny adolescent body, and her captor…her captor a sick, twisted…

  When they arrived at the hotel seven blocks from her flat and checked her in, any chance of sleeping had been destroyed by the vision of her little girl, alone in an ugly, dangerous world where predators routinely did the unthinkable, crying out soundlessly in Silver’s head, begging Mommy to save her.

  Chapter 18

  Silver awoke, disoriented, in a strange bed with her head pounding. She peered at her watch, and then reality came crashing in on her. She must have drifted off to sleep at around four, and now with the alarm sounding at seven-thirty, she was back in a world that was as grim as any she could imagine.

  The realization that Kennedy’s abduction had really happened, and that this was the next day, froze her on the bed. Her limbs were immobilized, and it felt like someone was standing on her chest. She couldn’t breathe for a few seconds, then started hyper-ventilating automatically.

  Calm your ass down, she commanded herself silently. Your daughter needs you functional, not a vegetable. Knock this shit off and get up, take a shower, clean up, and head over to your flat to change into some new clothes.

  She dragged herself off the mattress and stumbled half asleep into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror staring at a stranger’s red, bleary eyes. Steam began rising from above the shower door, and she stripped down and immersed herself under the hot stream, washing away the residue of the prior day’s ordeal.

  As she lathered the hotel shampoo through her hair, she automatically began running a mental checklist of things she’d need to do — they would want to put a trace on her phone lines so when the kidnapper called they could triangulate him. She would have to call Miriam and let her know Kennedy wouldn’t be there, and also contact the school. She’d want to get the transcripts of any interviews they’d conducted last night and also go over the traffic cam footage. She’d need to coordinate with the agent running the Kennedy investigation and see what kind of help she could provide.

  She shut the water off and felt marginally better — the mental exercise had centered her and given her a sense of purpose. But there were still troubling and puzzling unanswered questions, the largest being why Kennedy had been taken. She hoped it wasn’t anything to do with the man who had tried to kill her, but logic said it had to be. There was no other reason to snatch her daughter than to have a hold over her. But whoever had done it was misjudging the amount of weight that would be brought to bear — kidnapping an FBI agent’s child was unheard of and ranked right below kidnapping the president’s in terms of recklessness.

  There was no other reason that made any sense. She wasn’t rich. Far from it, she was probably the worst person in the world to try to extract a ransom from. A broke single mom with a license to carry a Glock. Not smart. Not smart at all.

  Once she was close to ready, she called Richard, and after a quick scan of the room, she took the elevator to the ground floor and signed out of the hotel. She dropped the key off at the front desk and waited in the lobby for him to arrive, watching the crowd move along the sidewalk, oblivious to her ordeal as they went about their early morning business. A few minutes later her phone rang.

  “I’m swinging around the corner right now,” Richard said. “Traffic’s crazy. I’ll pick you up at the curb.”

  The sun momentarily blinded her when she stepped out onto the sidewalk, and then she saw him, trying to force his way over in front of a persistent cabby who wasn’t giving an inch. The power struggle eventually went to the cab, and an angry blast of horns protested as Richard cut off a delivery van and pulled into the drop-off zone.

  She swung open the door and slid in, noting that Richard looked like he’d gotten twelve straight hours of untroubled sleep even though he couldn’t have had much more than herself. He leaned over and kissed her, and she almost lost it as his lips brushed her cheek. He sensed the precariousness of her grip and let her have her space, focusing instead on the relentless stream of cars growling by.

  “Friendly town here. Courteous bunch,” he observed, hitting his blinker and trying to edge back into traffic.

  Silver didn’t respond for a second. “New York is known for that,” she finally replied, her voice tense.

  “How are you doing?”

  “About like you’d expect. I feel like a truck ran me over. You?”

  “Same truck hit me and then backed over me to finish the job. Are we headed to your place?”

  “Yes. I want to be there when the
techs show up. And much as I like wearing my little black dress for days on end, I’m pretty sure I’ll be more useful in something more sensible.” She smiled grimly, trying to hit an upbeat note in the miserable situation.

  Richard slammed on the brakes as a bicycle messenger shot in front of the car, missing the front bumper by a few scant inches. He exhaled and shook his head. Manhattan driving was an acquired taste.

  “You want to stop for some coffee?” he asked. “I didn’t have time to pick any up. Sorry.”

  “Can we? There’s a Starbucks up the block on the right hand side.” She glanced down at her bare legs. “We look like we’ve been out all night and are just getting in…” she trailed off, lost in her thoughts.

  “There are worse things. You look great, by the way,” he offered.

  She grimaced at the transparent lie. “Nice try, and thanks, but they have mirrors at the hotel.” She grabbed his arm and pointed. “Oh, look. There’s a spot out in front. Cut over — you’re clear.”

  He veered to the curb and rolled to a stop, and they made their way inside, waiting patiently in the long line of half-asleep workers buying their five dollar morning jolt of wake-up.

  “Brett wants you to call him once you get back to your flat. You know the drill. They want to monitor any calls that come in.”

  “I figured as much. I’ll have to take the day off, I suppose. Hopefully the task force can fend for itself without me for twenty-four hours.”

  Richard didn’t respond, seemingly engrossed in the pastry possibilities, and then it was their turn to order.

  “I hope they can keep this out of the papers,” Silver commented as they waited for their drinks.

  “So far I haven’t seen anything, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Bad news has a way of traveling.”

  Her cell phone beeped at her. She glanced at the number and contemplated not answering it, but then thought better of it.