Three Women Disappear

by James Patterson

  Lowering his hands, Broch took a quick step forward, but stopped short when I swung my head back and cocked his revolver. The truth is, I wanted to shoot him. I was done being afraid of violent men. I didn’t want to kill him: I wanted to cripple him in a way that would keep him from ever hurting anyone again. But the giant was afraid of me now. He threw his hands back up in the air, retreated until his shoulders hit the wall.

  My ears popped as if I was on a plane that had just cleared twenty thousand feet, and I heard Sarah’s aunt playing negotiator.

  “No one needs to get hurt here,” she said, “so how about you all just set your weapons on the table?”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Defoe said. “Tell the cook and the maid to put their weapons down, and I won’t kill the widow and the aunt.”

  I heard my voice before I knew it was me talking.

  “How about you put your gun down or the maid kills your partner with his own gun? He makes a nice, big target.”

  Defoe laughed, and not for effect. He laughed as though the idea that he might care if his partner lived or died was his new favorite joke.

  “Drop it, Sarah,” he said.

  “No,” Anna said. “Don’t. Take the shot.”

  Defoe’s smile turned to a snarl.

  “Don’t play around, little girl,” he said. “This is my world, not yours.”

  Lindsey, her voice shaking, said, “Please, do what he asks.”

  “Take the shot,” Anna said.

  “One,” Defoe said.

  “Shoot,” Anna said.

  “Two.”

  “Shoot, goddamnit.”

  “Three.”

  I felt the floor shake beneath me, saw the chandelier swinging above me, and then everything went quiet again.

  Chapter 44

  Sarah Roberts-Walsh

  NOW I’D killed two men. I glanced around the room. Serena, lying on her back on the floor, held Broch at bay with the gun she’d taken from him. Anna sat at the head of the table, trembling, wiping Defoe’s blood from her face and neck with a handkerchief. Defoe’s corpse lay on the floor behind her. I wasn’t ready to look at him. None of us were.

  I couldn’t look at Aunt Lindsey, either. Not after what she’d just seen me do. Me, her niece turned daughter. I remembered what she had said when I was caught cheating on a math quiz: “You can be anything you want in this life, except a disgrace.” I thought she’d say a lot worse now, but she slipped right into take-charge emergency room mode.

  “For God’s sake, wake up, people,” she said. “Sarah, go find a knife and cut us free. Serena, if that brain-dead Aryan so much as twitches, give him one right between the eyes. We’ll just dig the grave a little deeper. Anna, stick the cash back in that bag. Come on, now. No time to waste.”

  The marching orders were a blessing, a chance for me to cruise on autopilot while the shock died down. I limped into the kitchen, set the rifle on a counter, and started opening drawers. By the time I returned with a serrated steak knife, the cash was packed away and Serena was sitting upright.

  It was Anna who asked, “So what now?”

  “Now we end this,” I told her.

  “End it how?”

  I turned to Broch.

  “Let’s ask him,” I said. “What was supposed to happen next?”

  He told me what I could do to myself in no uncertain terms. It wasn’t that he was grieving Defoe: he just didn’t like being bested by a handful of women.

  “Shoot him,” Aunt Lindsey said.

  “Shoot him?” Anna asked.

  “Aim for the kneecaps. That’ll get him talking.”

  “Let me do it,” Serena said.

  She sounded like a kid on line for the Ferris wheel. Anna and I exchanged a quick glance: coming from Serena and my aunt, this bloodlust was something new. It made me wonder how Vincent’s men had treated them.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Aunt Lindsey said. “I’m old. My eyesight’s bad. I might miss and hit him in the crotch.”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” Broch said.

  “They always have such snappy comebacks in the movies,” my new aunt Lindsey said. “This one’s a disappointer.”

  She took the oversize revolver from Serena, lifted it in both hands, and aimed for Broch’s right knee.

  “Go pee if you have to, honey,” she said to Serena. “They weren’t exactly generous with the bathroom breaks.”

  “I don’t want to miss this,” Serena said.

  Broch growled. Aunt Lindsey ignored him.

  “Now Sarah,” she said, “you go ahead and ask your questions, and if you don’t like his answers, say the word and I’ll put him right.”

  I thought Aunt Lindsey and Doris would get along just fine.

  “You ever fired one of those things, Granny?” Broch asked. “The recoil’ll knock your head off.”

  “That’s it! Show some spunk,” Aunt Lindsey said.

  “So tell us,” I said to Broch. “What was the plan?”

  He blew me a kiss. Aunt Lindsey fired. I think she meant to miss, to scare him, but she wasn’t lying about her eyesight. She grazed Broch’s thigh, sent him reeling and writhing around on the floor.

  “You crazy bitch!” he shouted.

  Meanwhile, he hadn’t been lying about the recoil. Serena and I corralled Aunt Lindsey in our arms, kept her vertical. She was undaunted.

  “Let me try again,” she said, pulling back the hammer.

  “All right, all right,” Broch said. “We were supposed to hold you here overnight, get you good and scared.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Vincent was going to turn up in the morning, give you all a real grilling. After that, I don’t know. No one knows but Vincent.”

  Anna stepped up behind us.

  “Then I guess we pay Uncle Vinny a surprise visit,” she said. “End this once and for all, like Sarah said.”

  “Amen,” Serena said.

  I looked around at my co-conspirators. My friends and family. Maybe this sounds strange or out of place, but I was proud of them. Proud to know them.

  “What do we do with him?” I asked, pointing at Broch, who seemed to be teetering on the edge of consciousness.

  “Oh, I can patch up that flesh wound, no problem,” Aunt Lindsey said. “As long as he doesn’t bite.”

  “We’ll tie him up for you before we go,” Anna said.

  “Good. I’ll keep an eye on him while you girls run your errand.”

  “What about the dead one?” Serena asked.

  “I know where we can leave him,” Anna said. “Though we should probably wrap him up first. There’s a linen closet next to the downstairs bathroom.”

  “We’re going back through that tunnel, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “I haven’t set foot in there in over a decade.”

  “I think it’s changed since then,” I told her.

  Serena pulled out her phone, snapped a photo of Broch with his eyes rolling back in his head.

  “For Vincent,” she said. “In case we need leverage.”

  “All right,” Aunt Lindsey said. “Let’s go, girls. Chop-chop.”

  Chapter 45

  Anna Costello

  GETTING DEFOE into that tunnel was no small task. We wrapped him in black satin sheets, tied his feet together with twine, made a kind of handle by hooking a bungee cord around his torso. For someone so bony, he was damn difficult to lift. Halfway down the basement stairs I felt my hernia coming on. Then it was across the rec room, through the false panel, and into the pitch dark.

  “You think our lives will ever be normal again?” Sarah asked.

  “They were never normal in the first place,” I said.

  Sarah, with her wounded ankle, limped ahead of us while holding up the gas lantern we’d found in Vincent’s shed. I held Defoe by his feet and carried the gym bag strapped across my chest. Serena, walking backward, gripped the bungee cord in both hands.

  I kept thinking Defoe would spring to life, tear
away the sheets, and grab me by the throat. The tunnel would have been the right place for it. Sarah hadn’t been kidding: without functioning lights and air vents, it had all the charm of a tomb—which worked out nicely, since that’s what we were using it for. And to think Anthony and I used to sneak down here for our private rendezvous. Trying to remember that time was like watching an old movie starring two actors I’d never seen before.

  “Where do we leave him?” Serena asked.

  “I’m thinking the midway mark,” I said. “Unless the house gets raided with Vincent in it, no one will ever find him.”

  We set Defoe’s corpse down, rested, picked it up again. Vincent’s tunnel must have been the driest spot in all of Florida, but my blouse was drenched and I couldn’t blink fast enough to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Serena suffered the way she’d always worked: in silence. It wasn’t until later that I saw the deep imprints across her swollen palms.

  “All right,” I said, “this is far enough.”

  We counted to three and let go. The thud resounded like concrete landing on concrete. We kept going and didn’t look back. Without a dead man weighing us down, we might have been walking on air.

  At a little before midnight we pulled up to the security gates outside Vincent’s McCastle, me behind the wheel, Serena in the passenger seat, and Sarah nursing her bum ankle in the back. Not one of us had said a word during the drive.

  “Hello?” I shouted into the little black box. “Anybody home?”

  Two stocky guards hit Pause on their card game and came sauntering out of their little cabin to look us over. I didn’t recognize either of them.

  “You sure we shouldn’t have brought the guns?” Serena asked.

  “Listen to Annie Oakley,” I said. “You think we’d win a shoot-out with Vincent’s army?”

  Huey and Dewey wore black slacks and navy-blue windbreakers with the initials V. C. stitched across the chest. They each carried a gun on one hip and what looked like a Playskool walkie-talkie on the other. The one sporting a knit cap leaned in while his cohort walked the periphery of the car.

  “Good evening,” Knit Cap said. “You ladies lost or something?”

  He looked more like a camp counselor than a first line of defense, but then the guys out front were mostly for show. Whatever they knew about Vincent’s business they’d read in the papers. Vincent kept the heavy hitters inside, circled around their master.

  “Nope, we’re in the right place,” I said. “I’m Vincent’s niece. Or niece-in-law, if that’s a word. Anthony was my husband.”

  He mumbled something about being sorry for my loss, then backed out of earshot and spoke into his handset. Meanwhile, his partner kept walking in circles around our car.

  “We could take them,” Serena whispered. “I mean, if we had to.”

  My onetime maid hadn’t just busted out of her shell: she’d shattered it. I only hoped she wouldn’t get us killed.

  Knit Cap finished up his conversation and came padding back.

  “Mr. Costello says he knows you, but not your friends. We’ll have to do a quick search if you want to go in. Your persons and your vehicle. Sorry about that, but it’s standard—”

  “Oh, no worries.” I smiled. “We’re used to it.”

  They frisked us, pored over the car’s interior, then spent a long time digging around inside the trunk.

  “What’s this?” Knit Cap asked, holding up the gym bag. Of course he’d already discovered what was inside.

  “A repayment,” I told him. “To Vincent. He’ll be very unhappy if any of it goes missing.”

  “And this?” his partner asked. He’d found Sarah’s insulin kit.

  “I’m diabetic,” she said.

  Guard number two looked confused. I couldn’t tell if he’d never heard of diabetes before, or if he thought Sarah was lying, trying to smuggle heroin into Vincent’s mansion, which would have been a first.

  “I’ll prove it to you,” she said. “I’m due a dose. It’s been a busy day. I forgot to inject myself, and I’m starting to feel a little woozy.”

  She took the kit from him. He stepped back, as if maybe she was La Femme Nikita and would drive that needle into his neck. Up close, you could see he was just a kid. A kid who’d watched too many movies.

  Sarah gave herself a fifteen-unit shot.

  “Now watch closely,” she said. “If I nod off, feel free to shoot me.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. Meanwhile, Sarah’s cheeks looked a little rosier than they had before.

  At long last, we piled back into the car and waited for the gates to part.

  “You ladies have a nice evening,” Knit Cap called, waving us through.

  I steered the rental down yet another ridiculously long and meticulously landscaped Costello driveway, then parked under the very modern glass and steel porte cochere Vincent had stuck on the front of his Tudor mansion. A half dozen more men stood in line to greet us. These guys weren’t in uniform because they didn’t need to be: they were the real deal.

  “You think they’re planning to kill us?” Serena asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Vincent will want to talk to us first.”

  “Talk, or torture?” Sarah asked.

  The leader of our welcome party signaled for us to get out. His name was Nigel. He was Defoe’s cousin. I’d forgotten all about the family tie until he stepped into the light and the resemblance became glaring: same razor-thin lips, same sunken, pockmarked cheeks, same walleyed gaze. I hoped he wouldn’t ask us how our evening had been so far.

  “Hello again, Anna,” he said. “I’ll take you to see him.”

  He showed no interest in Sarah or Serena, probably because he figured he wouldn’t know them for long. We followed him inside. The rest of his crew stayed behind as if maybe their owner hadn’t gotten around to house-training them yet.

  “It’s been a while,” Nigel said.

  He said it with a smile, but really he was rubbing salt in the wound. I’d been unofficially barred on account of the fact that Vincent couldn’t stand me. I’d almost forgotten how tacky it all was. A sea of marble and gold. Gold chairs, gold hope chests, gold picture frames. Gold side tables and vases and lamps and light fixtures. Vincent would have gilded his children if he had any. I wondered what Sarah and Serena thought of the place but didn’t dare ask. Probably they were too anxious to notice much of anything.

  “Here we are,” Nigel said.

  He pulled up short in front of a pair of thick mahogany doors. I knew what was on the other side: Vincent’s lair. The room he prized above all others. A room that reminded me of banquet halls in old movies about English kings and the knights who betrayed them. Stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls. Candelabra chandeliers. Bloodred curtains to block out the light by day and prying eyes by night. This was where he conducted business, where he received guests, where he ate his three squares. He treated the rest of the house like an extension he regretted having built.

  Nigel swung the doors open and I found myself staring across a long and elegant oak table at the man I knew wanted me dead, the man who’d tried to kill me once already and would no doubt try again. His smile was warm and gracious and inviting, and that scared me more than anything. Vincent was always at his most ruthless when he had a smile on his face.

  Chapter 46

  Sarah Roberts-Walsh

  HE HAD three glasses of pinot noir waiting for us.

  “Please,” he said, gesturing to the empty chairs on either side of him, “join me. I’m having a bit of a late-night snack. Or maybe I should say an early-morning snack.”

  His snack was a heaping bowl of coq au vin. I could smell the red burgundy wine simmering off the top. Under different circumstances I’d have asked to meet his chef.

  “I wasn’t expecting you so soon,” he said, “but this is a lovely surprise. It’s lucky for me that I’ve always been a night owl.”

  I have to hand it to him: Vincent was damn robust for a man north of eighty
. His merino sweater clung to pecs and biceps that would have been at home on a much younger man. Still, I didn’t look at him and see the legend who once beat the head of a rival family to death with his bare hands. That Vincent had faded away. Now he let his offshore accounts do the talking, kept his bare hands clean.

  Anna shot me a glance that said, Don’t be fooled. I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be, ever again.

  I sat to Vincent’s left, Serena to his right, Anna to Serena’s right. I guessed she wanted a body between her and her onetime uncle. The muscleheads stationed at either end of the room stood so still they blended in with the decor.

  “Happy as I am to see you all,” Vincent said, “I was anticipating a larger party. Tell me: what happened to your escorts?”

  Serena pulled out her phone, clicked to the photo of Broch, and held it up for our host to see. Vincent made a show of squinting.

  “Well, he seems a bit worse for wear.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Anna said. “We left him in the care of a very capable nurse. I’m afraid there’s not much she can do for Defoe.”

  Vincent set down his fork and knife, appeared suddenly peevish. I thought he’d snap his fingers and have the twin henchmen open fire. Instead, he burst out laughing. His long, rolling guffaws hurt my ears.

  “Well played, ladies,” he said. “Very well played. Maybe I’ll put you on the payroll. First, though, there’s a more pressing matter we must attend to. You’ll find I have a few surprises of my own.”

  He picked up a little bell I hadn’t noticed before and rang it three times. The sound reminded me of the Diner Things in Life.

  “I imagine you’ll enjoy this most of all,” Vincent said, staring straight at me. Just then I’d have given anything to be back in Doris’s kitchen.

  The double doors swung open and Nigel came striding in. At his heels was the man I’d hoped I’d never see again outside of a courtroom: my husband, Detective Sean Walsh. Vincent looked around at our slack jaws, nodded approvingly.