by Scott Frost
“But he said nothing about why, or anything about my daughter?”
“He said nothing to me.”
“After you drove away from my house, what happened?”
“He put tape over my eyes and mouth and tied my hands. Then he held something over my nose and made me breathe.”
“And you passed out?”
He nodded. “I think I was in the car for a long time, I remember him walking me back into my apartment.”
“Did he mention the names Breem or Finley or Sweeny?”
“No.”
“How about the name Lacy?”
Again, he shook his head. I took a picture of Lacy out of my wallet and handed it to him.
“Have you ever seen her?”
He stared at my daughter for a long moment, then started to hand the picture back to me.
“Wait.”
My heart seized up as he looked closely at the picture again.
“The TV, the one in the beauty pageant. Is that her?”
I took the picture back and slipped it into my wallet. There was nothing here.
“An artist will be coming in to get a description of Gabriel. Tell them everything you can in as much detail as you remember.”
I got up from the chair and started for the door.
“Is that your daughter?” Philippe asked.
I stopped and turned back to him. His presence barely registered in the room. It wasn’t part of the deal when we’re brought into this world to have explosives strapped to your chest. How could anything, even the simplest acts of living, ever be the same after that? What dreams of rock and roll he had brought with him from halfway across the world were faint memories now. It was as if everything had been taken from him except his own shadow, and even that barely registered. His sunken, exhausted eyes were those of a ghost’s.
“Yes, that’s my daughter,” I said.
“Did he take her?”
“Someone did.”
“She’s very pretty. I’m sorry.”
“Is there anything you can think of that I haven’t asked about, someplace he went, something he said, could be anything, something unimportant he said to you?”
He nodded. “He said everyone will know who he is . . . and everyone will fear him.”
I stepped out of the interrogation room and leaned back against the door and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, Harrison was standing there. “You hear everything?”
He nodded. “Gabriel.”
“He either thinks he’s an angel doing God’s work, or he took the name from the San Gabriel Mountains.”
“It may be something else.”
“What?”
“In Hebrew, Gabriel means ‘strong man of God,’ ” Harrison said.
His eyes held mine for a moment, then he looked away as if in apology for what he had said. I looked around the squad room. Every desk was occupied by a detective or a uniform working the phones. The din of their conversations added together seemed to suck the available air out of the room.
“Send in the artist,” I said.
“On the way.”
“What else have we got?”
“The other clothes in the apartment checked out as he said. They were for someone well over six feet. Two or three inches taller than Philippe. There were no papers, everything was taken just as he said. We’ve put an APB out on his car.”
“Any prints?”
“Just partials on the other box of clothes. That’s it so far, crime scene’s still there. The bomb was clean. The explosives were industrial, nothing exotic, tracing them would be beyond a long shot. The electronics could have been bought at any hardware store. He’s very careful.”
“So we have nothing.”
“A name and a description—that’s something.”
I shook my head.
It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be on record anywhere. There would be no pictures, no fingerprints, school records, nothing. Whatever twisted plans Gabriel had, for whatever reason, whether some form or twisted faith or fanatic political agenda, it was as secret as his true identity.
I started toward my office, but Harrison didn’t follow, so I stopped. Something else had happened. I could feel it the way you feel a storm approaching just over the horizon. My skin felt cold.
“What is it?”
The skin around the corners of his eyes tightened. “There was a call to your house,” he said.
I was suddenly back in Finley’s hallway, the door swinging violently toward me.
“And?” I asked, nearly inaudibly.
“They’ve made demands for Lacy’s release.”
My knees buckled. Then Finley’s door hit me again.
10
THE VOICE ON THE TAPE was devoid of emotion. It could have been reciting a grocery list—demanding milk and bread, corn flakes, Coke, and lettuce, instead of money for the return of my daughter.
“We have Lacy Delillo. She has a small mole on the back of her neck, and one on her left ankle. We want two million dollars or you will never see her again.”
That was it. I listened to it a dozen times, and with each listening she slipped farther and farther from me.
“Two million dollars,” I whispered to myself in disbelief.
My daughter’s life was now attached to a dollar sign. It could have been four million, ten, a hundred, it didn’t matter. Whatever sum was demanded, there was no guarantee I would ever see her again.
After hearing the tape I looked around the conference room, stunned. Harrison stood by the door. Chief of Pasadena PD Ed Chavez was at the head of the table. He had been the only man in the department who believed in me when believing in women cops wasn’t fashionable. He had given me my detective’s shield. He put me on Homicide and eventually put me in charge of it. He also had known Lacy since she was an infant, even thought of himself as her proud Latino godfather. He commanded a room like the aging ex-Marine that he was. You just deferred to him because to do otherwise was unthinkable. He was a year from early retirement with one foot already striking out toward his sailboat at Catalina.
The FBI was present—a special agent named Hicks, who was in charge of an antiterrorism task force. He looked like the prototypical FBI agent. Polished, not a hint of doubt in his demeanor. I envied that confidence. To be without doubt. I couldn’t remember a moment in my life when it wasn’t present. Was the absence of doubt a gift men got when they were born, or was there just some genetic coding in them that didn’t allow them to acknowledge its presence? Whichever it was, Hicks was its poster boy. Each hair on his head appeared to have been cut with a razor and assigned a place from which it would not move. A forty-year-old hotshot with a master’s degree. He would have been just as at home in a corporate boardroom as he was in a police investigation. At the other end of the table, detectives North and Foley rounded out the room.
We reran the tape again then sat back and tried to put whatever pieces of the puzzle we had together.
“I think it’s the same voice that called my home and made the threats to Lacy before,” I said.
Chief Chavez looked at me and then turned away when tears welled up in his eyes.
“We can run a match on it,” Hicks said.
“Where was the call made from?” the chief asked.
“A phone booth on Colorado in Old Town. We’re checking to see if any security cameras picked up anything, and we’re watching it in case they use the same phone again.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I’m not,” I said.
Chavez sat back in his chair, the muscles in his square jaw flexing. “So where do we stand?”
“We’re looking for two suspects for questioning in the killing of Finley: his partner, Breem, and an employee named Sweeny.”
“I understand you saw Sweeny,” Agent Hicks said.
It was a loaded question.
“Yes, he hit me with a door.”
Hicks glanced at the report in front of
him. “And he said he was sorry? Why do you think he did that?”
I wasn’t in the mood to play any passive-aggressive games with the FBI. He wasn’t here to assist in an investigation; he was here to take control of it.
“I’m taking him at his word that he felt bad about it.”
“What about Finley’s business partner, Breem?” Chavez asked.
“He left the house before dawn and hasn’t been seen since.”
“The body of the Mexican major in the casting pool?”
I turned to North, who sat upright in his chair and cleared his throat.
“We just got the prelim from the ME. The victim’s blood-alcohol level was six times the legal limit. His prints were all over a bottle of tequila found at the scene. Water was present in sufficient quantity in the lungs to result in death. The guy got smashed, smacked his head, then staggered into the pool and drowned. End of mystery.”
“We’re still trying to determine if he brought explosives across the border. The Mexican army has been less than helpful.”
“I may be able to expedite that,” Hicks said. He began tapping his index finger on the report in front of him. “Does your daughter belong to a radical environmental group, Lieutenant?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“But she did interrupt the proceedings at the pageant with an act of environmental political protest.”
“I think she acted like a seventeen-year-old.”
“You understand I have to ask this?”
“I understand.”
“Is there any reason to believe that your daughter would be in collusion with a radical group to fake her own kidnapping to obtain funds?”
“No.”
“But she did keep her acts at the pageant secret from you?”
“A spray bottle is a far cry from faking a kidnapping.”
“I’m just following an obvious thread, Lieutenant.”
“You track those groups. Do you have any reason to believe there’s one operating in Pasadena?” I countered.
“We’re checking that.”
I glanced over at Chavez. His eyes were pleading with me not to do what I was about to, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“Is there any reason to believe that the FBI screwed up by not having Gabriel on a terror watch list?”
Hicks at least had the grace to smile at the question. “If he was on a watch list, someone messed up.”
“Tell me about Gabriel,” Hicks said.
“He’s a white male, probably American, may have spent the last few years in Europe. He’s highly competent with explosives and the means to deliver them, which could indicate a military background. If he is self-trained, then that would indicate a very high level of intelligence, and possibly education.”
“It could also mean he was trained overseas. We’ll look into that,” Hicks said.
“The fact that he’s taken the name Gabriel indicates he sees himself as very powerful. He told Philippe that everyone will know his name, and everyone will fear him.”
“Is there anything that directly links Lacy’s kidnapping to the bombing this Gabriel carried out at Sweeny’s, and the attempted one in the apartment belonging to this Frenchman Philippe?” Chavez asked.
What the chief was doing was easing me into the idea that the FBI would be taking over the hunt for Gabriel.
“Finley’s partner, Breem, made at least three phone calls to Lacy.”
“I understand he called all the contestants,” Hicks said.
“Lacy was the only one he called more than once, including the night of the pageant.”
“Three phone calls from a florist to a beauty pageant contestant is not a connection to acts of terrorism.”
“A car similar to Philippe’s was seen leaving the scene of Lacy’s abduct—”
“A white car was seen—no make, no model.”
“Gabriel had Philippe stop his car outside my house. That puts him outside the house of a kidnap victim; that sounds like a connection to me.”
“If Gabriel was responsible for attempting to kill you and your partner with the first bomb, then wouldn’t it make sense that he appear at your house? You had already been a target once. I think he was watching you, not your daughter.”
“I don’t think he was trying to kill Traver and me. I think the bomb was intended for Sweeny.”
“Why?”
“He’s killing everyone who can identify him.”
“You think that’s why your daughter may have been kidnapped—she saw him?”
“That’s a possibility.”
Hicks shook his head. “That doesn’t track. He could have killed Philippe at the apartment. Why didn’t he?”
“We either got lucky or he’s playing some sort of game.”
“Why the ransom demand? What would be the purpose of drawing more heat on himself? If Gabriel is who he appears to be, he’s here for one reason: to plant a bomb. The kidnapping just doesn’t follow.”
“I think the only thing we can predict about Gabriel is that everything he does will surprise us.”
Hicks glanced at Chavez, who looked back uneasily for a moment, then turned to me.
“You need to find Lacy, Alex—” He paused and sadly lowered his eyes. “We need to find her. Everything else is unimportant.”
“Terrorism is our job,” Hicks said. “I’ll have over a hundred agents working on this by tonight. Double that by tomorrow. If the two cases do intersect, we can help each other and share information. But otherwise, this isn’t up for debate. It’s my job to find Gabriel. You have to find your daughter.”
There was a knock on the door and Officer James stepped in. “We have the likeness, Lieutenant.”
“I’ll take that,” Hicks said.
James glanced at him for a moment, then walked directly to me and handed me the drawing.
“I’ll have copies in a second,” James said, glancing around the room.
Gabriel was clean-shaven with dark, neatly cut short hair. His face was wider than I had expected with full lips and nose. A small scar at the corner of his right eyebrow extended downward in a half-moon curve. And as Philippe had described, he had light, penetrating eyes that even in a drawing had a fierce defiance to them. I held those eyes for a moment, trying to imagine the cold heart behind them. But even in my imagination, it was territory I couldn’t fully grasp. I had arrested countless individuals who had committed almost every act of violence on another human being imaginable and except for the rare occasion, there was often no dark secret inside them, no evil force at work. They were husbands, brothers, wives, parents, or someone’s child who just lost control. Events and emotions—love, hate, and fear—had taken on a life of their own. And when it was over and they looked at the wreckage they had caused, they were like viewers watching a television show, clueless as to how it had happened.
Gabriel didn’t look clueless. And if there was a window into his heart, nothing he had done so far pointed the way. I slid the likeness across the table to Hicks, watched him as his eyes searched over the drawing. If he was surprised by anything, it didn’t register in his face.
“Does he look familiar?” I asked.
He studied it a moment longer, then sat back and shook his head. “I would remember that face.”
With that, Hicks got up and left the room, calling a number on a cell phone as the door closed behind him. The room was silent for a moment, as if we had all just stepped off a plane in a foreign country and didn’t know which way to customs.
“You disagree with Hicks that Lacy is somehow caught up in all of this?” Chief Chavez asked.
His words passed by as if they had been shouted from a speeding car. In my mind I was trying to hold Lacy’s smooth, perfect hand in mine and tell her that I was there, that it would be all right, not to cry, not to be afraid. I was also trying to tell myself the same thing.
“Alex.” A hand reached over and took hold of mine. Chavez had moved around the table and was sittin
g next to me. “Can you do this?”
I nodded. I had to do it; there was no choice. Nothing would stop me from finding my baby, nothing.
“You remember the first thing you taught me about investigation?”
He smiled. “Always promote people who are smarter than you.”
The corner of his mouth tightened. He was holding his heart together with all his strength.
“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” I said.
The muscles in his jaw began to relax. He wanted to ask another question but couldn’t find a way to say it. How could any decent person find a way to say it?
“What about the . . .”
“I’ll pay it. I’ll mortgage the rest of my life if that’s what it takes to get her back.”
“Okay,” Chavez said. “You let me and the department worry about the money. Where do you want to begin?”
There were so many steps to take. But which direction pointed to my daughter? And what if I chose wrong?
“I want taps put on Breem’s and Finley’s phones.”
“I’ll get the court orders myself,” Chavez said.
“I want each of their wives watched.”
North and Foley both nodded.
“And this stays out of the press. Not a whisper, nothing.”
“Not a word,” Chavez said.
I looked at Harrison. “We’ll start in Lacy’s room.”
I needed to know her secrets, and to do so I’d have to break whatever thread of trust there was between us. I stood up from the table and looked over at Harrison as the room began to clear.
“I’ll need a few minutes first.”
Harrison nodded and held back as we walked out of the conference room. Walking across the squad room toward my office, I noticed Hicks and two other FBI agents escorting Philippe toward the door. Philippe glanced in my direction and briefly made eye contact as Harrison stepped up behind me. Philippe should be dead but wasn’t. Hicks had been right about that. If his continued presence among the living wasn’t a result of luck, then it would follow that Gabriel wanted us to make a composite of his likeness. But why? To what end? Philippe smiled at me as if to say thank you, then was led out the door.
