Need to talk. Urgent, he typed. Same place.
He was trying to settle on a time when someone banged on the bathroom door. “Don’t hog the throne!”
It startled Connor, brought him back to reality. “Almost done,” he responded, before adding to the text: Same time. Tomorrow.
Connor hesitated again before pressing Send and closed his eyes when he did. “Here’s hoping,” he mumbled. He watched the screen for thirty seconds or so for a response. When none came, he slid the phone back into his pocket, flushed the toilet, and ran the tap.
As he stepped out of the bathroom, a bearded, heavyset man hurried in with his hands already working his belt free. He slammed the door behind him.
The crew filmed the intruder entering the house, a cheesy-looking chase scene, and approximations of the actual attacks on his parents. Connor had done his best to answer the director’s questions, since he wanted the scenes to be as accurate as possible, but hid out in his attic bedroom during the filming (just like he had during the actual break-in). He didn’t want to watch another masked man attack anyone in his house, even if the whole thing was staged.
Now he was back downstairs, sitting on the sofa. The actors had cleared out, as had much of the crew. A woman arrived in a sharp yellow suit and took a seat across from him. She introduced herself as Samantha Hawkins, but no introduction was necessary. Connor recognized her from the show.
“Okay, Connor, I just want to prepare you for how this is going to go,” the director said. “Sam’s going to ask you to tell her what she saw and heard, how you felt. That sort of thing.”
As he talked, a makeup artist descended upon Samantha and went to work, fussing over every little thing.
“I didn’t see much,” Connor said. “Like I told you, I was—”
“I know, I know. But we’re going to get it all on film, and we’ll decide what we’re going to keep in post. She’s also going to ask you about your parents’ lives and who they were. We want to paint a picture people can relate to, so be open and be vulnerable.”
“He’s an adult,” Samantha said, barely moving her lips so as not to cause problems for the makeup artist. “He’ll be fine.” She cut her eyes to the director. “Should I ask about the other case?”
“What other case?” Connor said.
“You haven’t heard about it?”
Connor shook his head.
“Mark and Hillary Wilson,” the director said. “They lived over in Westchester. Expensive neighborhood. Big house. The whole deal. Seems a masked man attacked them in the exact same way your parents were attacked.”
“What happened to them? Did they get away?”
“No.”
Connor thought about the two bodies that had been burned in the fire. They must have been the Wilsons. Olivia would put that together eventually, if she hadn’t already. Connor suspected she wasn’t telling him everything she knew, which he decided was fair enough since he wasn’t telling her everything, either.
CHAPTER 16
Olivia loved to watch suspects squirm when she got them into the interrogation room. It was a small space, with cinderblock walls, a steel table and chairs. And, except for the security camera mounted to the ceiling, not much of anything else. It looked exactly like she had imagined interrogation rooms to look before she had joined the academy. She wished she had a reason to get her ex-husband in here.
Aden would have to do.
He was handcuffed to the table, perched upright in the chair farthest from the door, and still naked from the waist up. He hadn’t said a word since Olivia arrested him, hadn’t even asked for a lawyer. That was unusual. Sure, a lot of suspects kept their mouths shut when the cuffs went on, but they almost always asked for a lawyer.
Olivia could tell Aden was angry. His jaw was clenched so tight she could see the thin veins under his chin clearly. His wiry black hair, which had already been a mess when she had arrived at his apartment, was somehow even worse now.
She fingered the keys in her pocket, thought about releasing the handcuffs, but decided against it.
She sat down in the chair opposite him. “Tell me about the bomb.”
Aden smiled. “Is that what you think you saw?”
“Come on, Aden. I’m serious. What the hell were you planning?”
Aden turned his hands over, pulled up on the cuffs as far as he could to make a point. The chain connecting them rattled. “Does it matter?”
“So you’re telling me it’s over?” Aden didn’t strike Olivia as a lone wolf, but she asked the question anyway to see what he would say.
He shrugged.
“The woman in the apartment—does she know what you were up to?”
“Maggie, no. Maggie Magpie is too sweet to do what had to be done. She shouldn’t have even been over at my house tonight. Quite an evening for visitors. You’d think I was the toast of the town.”
“So if she wasn’t supposed to be there, if she was too sweet to do what had to be done, what was she doing inside when I showed up?” Olivia made air quotes around the words “what had to be done.”
“I let her in.”
“Why?”
“I was hoping I might be wrong.”
“Why did you slap her?”
Until now, Aden’s gaze had been all over the place. Sometimes he had been looking at Olivia, other times past her or down at his hands. He fixed his eyes on hers now in a new and deliberate way. “She said she was going to call . . . well . . . you.”
“Me?”
“The police.”
“And what has to be done?”
Aden frowned. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Because it’s not over.”
Another shrug.
“Who else is involved?”
This time, Aden didn’t even shrug.
CHAPTER 17
Connor did his best to give Sam what she wanted during the interview, but his mind kept drifting back to what the director had said about Mark and Hillary Wilson: They lived over in Westchester. Expensive neighborhood. Big house. The whole deal. Seems a masked man attacked them in the exact same way your parents were attacked.
Maybe if he could find out more about them, he would be able to figure out what the attacker wanted from his parents. Connect the dots, so to speak. At the very least, it would give him something to do while he waited for Roland to text him back.
He sat down at his computer in his bedroom. It didn’t take much work to find a news story about the Wilsons on the Westchester Gazette website. (He found no such story on the Times or Post sites.) The headline: COUPLE KIDNAPPED FROM THEIR HOME. It wasn’t particularly imaginative. The story was short and poorly written. Not much more than a recap of the police report, as far as Connor could tell. It included a large photo of the Wilsons’ house and smaller pictures of Mark and Hillary.
The journalist hadn’t drawn the connection between this abduction and his parents’. Likely he didn’t even know about what had happened to Connor’s parents.
He opened another browser window and scoured the web for information on the Wilsons. According to LinkedIn, Mark had been a money manager for Fidelity. And according to Facebook (which, Connor determined, was where the Gazette had acquired pictures of the victims), he liked tennis and soccer. His most recent post featured a selfie of him and Hillary in the stands at a New York City FC game with the caption “Off to Broadway tonight. Would rather be back at another game.”
The photo was close enough to the field that Connor could make out the names on the jerseys of the soccer players behind them.
There weren’t a lot of people buying tickets that close to the field.
Connor had known Mark and Hillary were well off as soon as the director had mentioned the neighborhood they lived in. He had known they were rich as soon as he had seen the house. Now he knew they were even more than that. This was a couple who had money to spare. A lot of it.
But that didn’t get Connor any closer to an answer. He had al
ready ruled out money as a motive. So what was it that connected this family to his? Could they simply have been selected as stand-ins for his parents at the site of the murder?
Connor didn’t think so. The killer seemed to have a plan. He hadn’t taken Connor when he’d found him in the house, which suggested targeted abductions. He hadn’t killed his parents, while he had killed the Wilsons, which suggested he still needed them alive.
So what was the connection?
He continued to scroll through Mark’s Facebook feed until he saw a picture of the couple with a boy about Connor’s age. They were standing beside a sign that read “Princeton Orientation.” All three were beaming. The caption: “He’s staying on campus this summer. Aiming for an early graduation. So proud.”
Connor wasn’t sure whether this was the connection he was looking for, but he did think it was worth finding their kid and talking to him.
He did some more online digging and found the boy’s name—Olin.
Connor suspected he would have come home after finding out his parents had been abducted. Playing the hunch, he got in his car and drove over to Olin’s house.
Olin answered the door almost immediately. He had sharp features, a slim build. He was wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a nondescript blue tee shirt. Both seemed loose on him. The bags under his bloodshot eyes suggested he had not been sleeping (which, from personal experience, Connor figured was probably the case). The short black hair that had been carefully parted to one side in the Facebook photo was now a mess.
“Can I help you?” He kept one hand on the interior doorknob when he spoke, seemingly ready to close the door if he didn’t like Connor’s answer.
“I wanted to talk to you about what happened to your parents.”
“I’m not interested in talking to the press right now,” Olin said, then proved Connor’s assumption right by stepping back and starting to swing the door shut.
Connor put out a hand to stop him. “Wait. I’m not a reporter. What happened to your parents—it happened to mine, too.”
Olin eyed him suspiciously, then eased the door back open. “What?”
Connor sat at a breakfast table that was both big enough and fancy enough to replace the one in Connor’s dining room.
Olin grabbed a pair of glasses and poured two fingers of scotch for each of them. He placed the glasses on the table and sat down across from Connor.
Connor wasn’t old enough to drink, but that had not stopped him from downing an assortment of cheap alcohol at college parties. If Olin, who likewise was not old enough to drink, felt like playing bartender, then who was he to say no?
“Okay, so what do you mean when you say it happened to your parents, too?”
“I mean exactly that. A man in a ski mask driving a blue panel van pulled up to my house—plowed right through the front yard, as a matter of fact—and took my parents.”
“You were at home?”
“I was in the attic.”
“So the kidnapper didn’t see you.”
“Actually, that’s the strangest part. He did see me. Once he had taken my parents outside, I came out of the attic and grabbed the fire poker. I was ready to go right outside after him. I thought I could stab him straight through with the thing if I had to. Whatever it took to get my parents back, I told myself. But then he was back. Seems he had dropped his phone. I didn’t see it until he picked it up because it was by the front door.” Connor shifted in his seat, a little uncomfortable and ashamed of what had happened next.
“And?” Olin asked, filling the silence.
“He had a Taser. He fired it up and I froze. Then he grabbed his phone and left.”
Olin slid his glass of whiskey closer to him. He looked at it for a couple of seconds, took a sip. “I would have stopped him if I’d been here.”
The sentiment stung. It was easy to think you would be a hero under the right circumstances. Connor had always thought he would be. But that’s not always who you were when the time came to prove it.
“How did you hear about my parents?” Olin asked.
“You know that show Uncovered?”
Olin nodded.
“They were at my house today, doing a spot on the abduction. I thought maybe it would help. Anyway, the director—he told me about it.” Then it occurred to Connor that Isaiah Cook had probably been by to see Olin as well, and so he asked.
“Yeah, he came by here. I told him to take a hike. I said let the police do their job. Didn’t see how it would do much good to put the story all over the television.”
“Well, that’s how I felt at first, too, but my parents have been missing for a month.”
Olin’s glass was halfway between the table and his lips when Connor made the comment. He returned it to the table. “That long? Who’s working your case?”
“Olivia Forbes. You?”
“Don’t remember his name. I’ve got his card upstairs. But he’s not a woman. Obviously, I guess. Yours from Yorktown?”
“NYPD.”
“All the way up here?”
“I don’t live in Westchester,” Connor said.
“Still.”
Connor shrugged.
“Do you think they know about each other’s case?”
“Different departments. I don’t know.”
“We should tell them.”
“We probably should.” Connor finally took a sip of the scotch. He didn’t care for it. He set the glass down, got to his feet, started a slow pace to one end of the kitchen and back. On the drive over, he had weighed whether he should tell Olin about the email he’d found, the text he’d sent. He had been unable to come to a decision. He had told himself he would know what to do when he arrived, but standing here, listening to Olin talk about turning everything over to the police, he still wasn’t sure.
Just then, his father’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out to have a look. There was a message from Roland: See you then.
To hell with it, Connor thought. He needed an ally, and Olin had every right to know what was going on. He placed the phone down on the table, with the screen still lit up and the message visible.
“I’m going to tell you something, but I want you to keep this to yourself for now, okay?”
“What is it?”
“I’ve been doing some digging on my own. The day my parents were abducted, my dad met with someone. I don’t know why, so it’s probably nothing, but I want to find out for sure. I sent him a message from my dad’s phone asking to meet tomorrow. He just responded.” Connor gestured toward his father’s phone, and Olin read the message.
“I could use some backup, you know, just in case.”
Olin’s expression shifted to something that was both doubtful and intense. “Why don’t you tell the detective about it? They should have all the information we can give them, right?”
Connor wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want to tell Olin he thought Olivia had dropped the ball with the first lead she’d had. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to undermine Olin’s trust in his own detective. Even though the guy’s parents were likely dead, there was no reason for Connor to chip away at Olin’s hope. So he said instead, “I will. If it’s something. I just want to check it out myself first. Like I said, it’s probably nothing. And I don’t want the police wasting resources when every second matters.”
Olin leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and looked down at the floor. He stayed like that for a long time. When he looked back up at Connor, his eyes were glassy. “Okay, I’ll help you. You’re right, we don’t need them wasting resources if it’s nothing. But if it isn’t nothing—”
“We’ll tell them.”
CHAPTER 18
Connor and Olin agreed to meet the next day at Deerfield Park an hour before Roland was scheduled to arrive. There was nothing else for Connor to do now but wait. He paced the first floor of his house, nervous energy catapulting him from room to room in an endless loop. Living room to dining room to
kitchen to foyer. Living room to dining room to kitchen to foyer.
The days he spent alone in the house weren’t too bad, but the nights were still hard. Perhaps it was because, no matter what he told himself, he still worried the killer might come back.
He looked out the window. The cul-de-sac was empty.
The TV was on for company, blasting a rerun of Modern Family loud enough that the neighbors could probably hear it.
He checked the wall clock. It was ten p.m.
He thought about taking another Ambien—he was still taking them most nights—but was doing his best to resist the urge. Although they helped him sleep, they also left him feeling groggy the next day. And even when that passed, there seemed to be a fog that hung over his thoughts, left him feeling not quite as sharp as he normally did.
That wouldn’t do tomorrow. He had to be on his A-game when he confronted Roland. Earlier, he had reasoned that if Roland agreed to meet, he wasn’t involved in his parents’ abduction. But since getting the text from him, Connor had realized the flaw in that logic. Roland might just want to see who was using Frank’s phone. If that was the case, the meeting could be even more dangerous than he had imagined.
He willed himself to sit on the sofa, to try to calm the nervous energy. He tried to focus on the sitcom, tried not to think about the killer coming back or the meeting tomorrow. He hoped that if he could just clear his mind, relax, he could get some good, natural sleep. But it was useless. His mind just kept spinning. As long as he stayed in this house, the Ambien was the only way he was going to get any rest.
He did have another option though, didn’t he? Austin had insisted twice now Connor stay with him. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.
He muted the TV, pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, and placed the call. As it rang, he looked again at the wall clock, which now read 10:30, and wondered if it might be too late. But Austin sounded wide awake when he answered.
A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust Page 7
