House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  It was another thirty minutes before the heavy stomp of boots sounded on the other side of the door. Stoddard was back from his reconnaissance mission. She heard him say, “All clear. Time to make the call.”

  “You sure this number’s good?” Charlie said.

  “Better be, after what it cost.”

  “So that’s my price.” Jenna’s monologue was still in progress. “A hundred million on top of whatever I’m getting anyway. Plus he signs away his rights to the baby, like forever. He agrees to that, and I’ll tell the cops this was all some big publicity stunt or something. He refuses, and I tell the cops the truth. And you back me up either way. Which, I mean, God, is the least you can do.” She thought a minute. “The thing is we won’t have much time to cut the deal before the cops get here. So you’ll have to do the negotiations. But right after that, you’re fired.”

  Leigh tried to tune her out as she strained to listen through the door. She didn’t understand Charlie’s uncertainty about the phone number. Surely Hunter would have given these men his most direct private line. And what did Stoddard mean, what it cost?

  “You want the girl on or not?”

  “On. He’ll want proof.” Footsteps scuffed. “Hey, mask on,” Stoddard barked.

  Proof? Leigh’s eyes opened wide in the dark. Proof of life—that was a kidnapping term. Her spine snapped straight as it hit her. Those men outside the door—they weren’t Hunter’s henchmen. He hadn’t hired them to bring Jenna home. This was a real kidnapping. Hunter didn’t know where Jenna was, he never knew. It was John Stoddard with his amazing intelligence-gathering skills who knew. He’d been planning this operation for months, tracking Jenna to Arlington, keeping her under surveillance while he worked out how to penetrate her security systems, grooming Leigh to serve as his Trojan horse if he couldn’t. Now Leigh understood the reason for the ski masks—so Jenna wouldn’t see their faces and couldn’t identify them to the police. And that was why they kept Leigh gagged—so she wouldn’t blurt out Stoddard’s name to Jenna before her ransom was paid and she was released.

  But what would stop her from naming him afterward? she wondered, and an instant later, she knew.

  The younger man’s boots approached the pantry door.

  “Hold up,” Stoddard said. “I gotta shut down the jammer.”

  She stopped breathing as his steps moved across the linoleum. He was going to throw the switch on the jammer, and she might have five minutes before he turned it on again. It was her only chance. She hurled herself at Jenna.

  “Hey!” Jenna yelled, rocking back.

  Leigh plunged her face against her chest. She felt the hard chunk of metal hit her cheekbone and moved until it lined up with her mouth.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  There had to be a button, and she felt for it with her tongue. There, a round stone set in the silver. She pressed her tongue hard against it.

  “Come on. Get off me.”

  The stone didn’t move. She couldn’t maintain contact with her tongue. She shifted to her chin, but it wasn’t small enough to penetrate the recessed setting of the stone.

  “Jesus! Get off me, you freak.”

  Leigh moved again until the tip of her nose touched the cold metal. She nudged it into the recess and pressed against the stone, and she could hear—no, feel—the call button click.

  “What is your deal?”

  She rolled away and collapsed against the wall, praying that it worked. That the call was going out this very minute, to 911, to Carrie and Fred.

  “Jeez Louise,” Jenna groused. “Panic much?”

  Stoddard’s footsteps returned. The bolts slid through the hasps, and Charlie opened the pantry door. Stoddard stood across the room, on his feet with a phone in his hand.

  “Let’s go,” Charlie said.

  Jenna glared at him. “Take a look, moron. You think I’m just gonna spring to my feet?”

  He helped her stand, gingerly, and shut the door again.

  Leigh scrabbled across the floor and pressed her ear to the wood. She could hear the beeping tones of a keypad, followed by a long silence.

  “Jeez, he’s not even standing by?” Jenna griped. “He’s like in a meeting or something?”

  “Hello, Mr. Beck.” Stoddard’s voice sounded different, higher pitched and strangely mechanical. He was speaking through a voice distortion device. “You don’t know me, but I got somebody here who wants to say hi to you.”

  “Wait,” Jenna said. Her voice sounded different, too. “What?”

  Then she screamed.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  It was two hours before Shelby came out of the courtroom, and this time she had Kip in tow. They had their jury, she reported. Opening statements would begin right after lunch.

  Britta rushed ahead to meet the sandwich delivery man. There was a cafeteria in the basement, but Shelby had arranged for their party to eat privately, in one of the attorney conference rooms. “Where’s Dr. March?” she asked as Pete and Karen got up from the bench.

  “He had a patient emergency,” Karen said.

  “Will he be back?”

  She flushed. “Probably not?”

  Shelby’s face took on a pinched expression before she turned away to lead them to their lunchroom. Inside was a small conference table surrounded by half a dozen chairs. They shuffled to their seats. Once Kip would have grabbed the seat at the head of the table and made some quip—The reason I called you all here today—but today he took a chair on the side and said nothing.

  Britta joined them soon after with sandwiches and salads in Styrofoam clamshells plus a tray of sushi for Shelby. “I’m going to have to eat and run,” Shelby said, but even if she were planning to eat and stay, she still would have outpaced the rest of them. Pete managed half a turkey sandwich. Karen nibbled at a salad. Kip didn’t eat at all.

  Pete asked about jury selection. “What we expected,” Shelby said, an answer that told him nothing, since he had no idea what to expect.

  A hard knock sounded, and Frank Nobbin stuck his head around the door. He’d been gone for two hours, and his mustache drooped lower than ever. “Excuse me a minute,” Shelby said and stepped out into the hall. She closed the door behind her.

  Pete looked at Kip, who only shrugged in response. He went out into the hall. Shelby and Frank were standing at the end of the corridor, heads bowed together as they spoke in low voices. Frank’s head came up when he spotted Pete, and he turned and walked away while Shelby waited with a look of unhappy resignation.

  “What?” he demanded in a whisper. “What’s going on?”

  “Did you talk to Leigh last night?”

  He squinted at her. “No. Why?”

  “She said she’d be here today. She said she’d testify for us.”

  “Really?” For half a second he felt a wash of pleasure. Until the rest of it sank in. “So where is she?”

  Shelby spread her hands. “She’s not answering her phone, and she’s not at her office or at home. But her car’s in the garage.”

  “Well, then she must be in the house.”

  “Unless somebody else picked her up.”

  He wasn’t following. “Who—?”

  She gave a pointed look down the corridor, and he followed it to Andrea Briggs as she entered a different conference room and shut the door firmly after her.

  The panic button floated on the crest of Jenna’s belly. Its silver casing glinted in the faint light, and over the next half hour it rose and fell with her sobs like the starboard sidelight on a boat at sea. She’d been sobbing uncontrollably from the moment it dawned on her that this wasn’t some grand romantic gesture. It wasn’t even the highhanded act of an autocratic husband. These men didn’t work for Hunter, and if the exchange didn’t go smoothly, her life might actually be in danger.

  Leig
h was in danger regardless, she knew that now. She didn’t know if the panic button had worked. But it was the only hope she had, and she clung to it like debris from a shipwreck.

  When the door opened again, it was Stoddard who stood there. Even behind the ski mask, she could see his calm, appraising expression as he regarded her, as if she were an item on his to-do list. A necessary task to be completed. He reached for her arm and dragged her to her feet and locked the door on Jenna’s shrieks.

  He pulled off his ski mask. His hair was wet and matted under it, and beads of sweat sprayed the air when he shook his head. “Go about one klick north-northwest into the woods,” he told Charlie. “You’ll come to a ravine. Do it there.” He passed something to him, and Leigh’s knees buckled as she saw what it was. A dull black pistol in a carbon fiber holster.

  Charlie took his mask off, too. His gaze shifted between Leigh and Stoddard. “Sarge—”

  “We trained for this, soldier. Mission comes first. Collateral damage stays collateral.”

  The younger man stared at Stoddard’s chest, the bulge of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat.

  “Think about your kids,” Stoddard said more softly. “Think about their lives now versus when you have millions of dollars to spend on them.”

  Charlie didn’t answer, but after a second, he checked the load in the gun and strapped the holster to his hip.

  Stoddard grabbed his rucksack off the floor. “What?” he said at Leigh’s glare. “Why’s a nice guy like me doing something like this? I’m a national hero, right?” He smirked. “But you know what? Those medals don’t come with a cash prize. Or even a decent paycheck.”

  He went outside, and Charlie nudged Leigh out the door after him. Flies landed on her wrists. The cable ties had cut into her skin, and they were there to lap up her blood.

  “But if it’s any consolation,” Stoddard said as he headed for the Jeep, “this isn’t the way I wanted it to go down. If you would have told me the sheikha’s suite number, I coulda gone that route instead. Or if I’d had more time to work around the girl’s security system— But that million-dollar reward blew a hole in my plans. I had to move now, before some civilian found her.”

  She stopped and stared at him as the final pieces fell into place. Stoddard was a highly skilled soldier, a tactician trained to recognize opportunities and exploit them. Jenna’s split from Hunter was all over the news, and he saw his chance. He invented a child custody case—probably invented the child—to get close to her lawyer, and even though Leigh had no idea where Jenna was, it wasn’t a wasted effort, because then she handed him a backup opportunity: kidnap the wife of a wealthy diplomat instead. She even did the legwork for him by infiltrating the embassy and installing Devra in a hotel. If only he hadn’t made the mistake of bribing the wrong waiter for her suite number. So back to Plan A. He tracked Jenna to Arlington and used Leigh again to infiltrate the fortress and extract the target. Hunter Beck was by far the richer man, so this was by far the better outcome. The only downside was that now there was a witness to neutralize.

  Charlie pushed her along the path past Stoddard, where he stood by the open door of the Jeep. The sun filtered through the leaves of the sycamore and lit up a small patch of white at his throat. It was the Nike logo at the neck of his athletic shirt. She stared at it as Charlie gave her another shove. There in the shadows as Stoddard climbed into the black SUV—that flash of white looked exactly like a priest’s collar.

  She stopped, so abruptly Charlie slammed into her.

  Stoddard started the engine and took off down the dirt road, and Leigh watched him go with the blood congealing on her wrists. The mission came first. That was his guiding principle, and it must have been guiding him the night of the accident, too. The night he stopped at the scene of an accident before he drove on to do recon outside Jenna’s bedroom window. His mission was his priority, and he wasn’t going to jeopardize it by staying until the police arrived or by coming forward afterward. He left the scene and never looked back.

  “Let’s go,” Charlie said.

  She tilted her head up to the sky. It was a clear, piercing blue. The sun wasn’t yet overhead—incredibly, it was still morning. Hot, though. A steamy August day. The kind of day meant for the beach or the pool. So many days like this the children begged her to take them to the beach. She regretted every single day she went to the office instead. She had so many regrets.

  “Let’s go,” he said again.

  She stumbled through the weeds. A lifetime of regrets heaped upon regrets, and the greatest of these was Kip. He was telling the truth about the roadside priest, the whole time he was telling the truth. And what did she do but turn him out of his home and call him a liar?

  Don’t be mad at Kip! It wasn’t his fault! The dog ran right out in front of us. There was nothing we could do!

  We. Even Chrissy tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t hear it.

  She wasn’t a saint. She did one selfish act. She let Christopher take the blame.

  Fourteen people sat in the jury box, twelve plus the two alternates. White, black, and brown. Nine women and four men. Kip’s peers, supposedly, but they were all two or three times his age. Meanwhile a dozen spectators had settled into the rows across the aisle, all men, who looked like they were four times Kip’s age.

  “Who’re all the old-timers?” Pete whispered across the rail.

  It was Frank Nobbin who turned to answer him. “Professional ­watchers.”

  “Huh?”

  “This is what they do. Spend their days sitting in on trials.”

  “Why?”

  “Beats daytime TV.”

  “Be upstanding,” the bailiff called.

  The judge returned to his perch and made a little canned speech to the jurors. He thanked them for their service and reminded them of their oaths, cautioned them against conversations and contacts outside the courtroom, and pointed out the defendant and his parents. Karen’s hands trembled in her lap when the jurors’ eyes turned her way. Pete tried to reassure her with his own hand over hers, and she gripped tight to his fingers. The jury probably thought they were husband and wife, and for a minute he couldn’t help imagining it. None of this would have happened if they’d stayed married. If they were still a little nuclear family unfractured by divorce. If he hadn’t married Leigh and moved Kip into her house. If Chrissy could still be alive in some alternative universe.

  The judge delivered a few more well-rehearsed remarks about the purpose and limitations of opening statements and yielded the floor to the Commonwealth.

  Seth Rodell leaned back in his chair and gazed at the jurors for a long, dramatic moment before he pushed up from the table. Briggs tried to pass him a stack of note cards, but he brushed her aside and strolled to the jury box with his hands in his pockets. He began by telling the jurors that the Office of Commonwealth’s Attorney was charged with the awesome responsibility of investigating crimes against the people and deciding when and how to charge the culprits and bring them to justice. It was his honor and privilege to carry out that duty here today.

  “This case is about two people,” he said as the jurors sat with impassive faces. “You heard their names during voir dire. Christopher Conley and Christine Porter. You see Christopher there at the defense table. But you don’t see Christine. You won’t. Thanks to Christopher, no one will see her ever again.”

  Pete clenched his fists and struggled to keep his own face impassive as Rodell rambled on about privileged suburban youth, their recklessness, their heedlessness for the rights and safety of others, their sense of supreme entitlement. “You’ve seen them on our roads. In our coffee shops and restaurants. Christopher Conley was one of them, a young man who took the world as his oyster. Reckless, self-involved, utterly heedless of the consequences of his actions.”

  Karen sniffled softly and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue while
Pete gritted his teeth. Rodell was a youth himself, the beneficiary of all his own privileges, and here he was delivering the rant of an old man. You damn kids get off my lawn. These couldn’t be the words of this kid. They had to be written by, or at least for, his boss in his office upstairs. Boyd Harrison, the man who had set all this in motion and couldn’t be bothered to show his face in the courtroom.

  “On a rainy Friday night last spring,” Rodell went on, “Christopher Conley took a vehicle without the owner’s permission, on a suspended driver’s license, and drove to a party. An illegal, underage alcohol and drug party right here in our county.” Ryan Atwood’s party sounded like an orgiastic bacchanalia in his telling, packed with similarly entitled young people who drank alcohol to excess, took drugs, and engaged in sexual acts with random partners. “Christopher Conley drank beer at that party. He drank tequila. He smoked marijuana. Then he got into that vehicle, the one he had no right to drive, and he drove it so recklessly that not three miles later he swerved off the road, across a ditch, and crashed head-on into a tree.

  “Which would be bad enough,” he said. “But sitting in the passenger seat beside him was a fourteen-year-old girl. Christine Porter. A little girl not even in high school yet. A good girl. Her parents’ pride and joy. She wasn’t a guest at that illegal party. She never would have gone there on her own. She only went to get Christopher to leave. She was on an errand of mercy. And what did she get for her trouble? Christopher crashed into the tree, and an artery burst in her brain, and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. Twelve hours later she was dead. A sweet young girl at the very beginning of her life. And now, thanks to the selfishness, the thoughtlessness, the utter recklessness of one entitled, privileged, overindulged young man, that life has ended.”

  Karen followed Shelby’s instructions. She wept silently while up at the defense table, Kip hung his head so low his chin looked welded to his chest.

  Rodell allowed those last words to linger before he picked up Andrea’s note cards from the table. He previewed the Commonwealth’s witnesses and summarized their evidence as if they were housekeeping details, mere footnotes to the main text of his speech. He sat down.