by Ed McBain
“Moving,” Endicott said.
“He told me no tricks,” Loomis said.
Corcoran merely nodded.
“IS THIS PICTURE a mystery or something?” Ollie asked.
“No, not at all,” Patricia said. “It’s Shakespeare, I told you.”
“Because it’s called Looking for Richard, you know,” Ollie said, “which sounds like a sort of mystery, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe so.”
“Like a missing person or something, you know?”
They were sitting watching commercials on the screen, eating popcorn and waiting for the movie to start. Ollie had bought two big cartons of popcorn with extra butter, and two Diet Pepsis because a person couldn’t be too careful, and two big bars of Hershey’s chocolate with almonds in case Patricia was still hungry after she finished her popcorn. It bothered him that he had to sit here and watch commercials for restaurants and clothing stores, as if he hadn’t paid for the tickets and was getting something free.
It also bothered him that he didn’t know exactly what this movie was about. If it was about a missing person, he’d had some experience along those lines, you know, and could relate to the movie more easily. But if it was about Shakespeare, the way Patricia said it was, then why had they named it Looking for Richard, which made it sound as if somebody had been kidnapped or something?
“Are you sure this is going to be Shakespeare?” he asked her.
“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s about doing Richard the Third.”
“Ah-ha!” he said. “It is a mystery!”
“It is?”
“You just said it’s about doing Richard the Third.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean ‘doing’ in that sense. I meant performing the play. Doing Richard the Third.”
“So why are they calling it Looking for Richard if there’s no ticking clock?” he asked. Reminded, he looked at his watch. It was seven-forty-three and the movie was scheduled to start at seven-forty-five. So where was it? Why did they have to sit here watching a commercial for an antiques store, as if anyone would want to buy old used furniture and stuff?
“I’m really excited about seeing this again,” Patricia said, and suddenly reached over for his hand and squeezed it.
“Me, too,” Ollie said dubiously.
His hand was sticky with butter.
Which was okay because her hand was, too.
THE GRACE WAGNER School of Design had once been called William Howard Taft High School, after the twenty-seventh President of the United States. Back then, it was a so-called academic high school, which meant that its students took subjects to qualify them for college entrance. But that was the good old days.
Nowadays, it was a vocational high school for kids looking for easy entrée to the world of high fashion. If you could maintain a C-average and draw a straight line, you were admitted to Grace Wagner, which incidentally had been named after a woman who’d served on the Board of Education and played flute.
A bronze statue that looked like a huge bolt of lightning striking an oversized soccer ball stood on the patchy front lawn of the school. By the time Loomis pulled the Lincoln up in front of the statue, Endicott and Lonigan had already driven twice around the school’s surrounding blocks. They had seen no one suspicious lurking about, but there was a light burning in one of the school’s top-floor windows, and they thought they’d seen shadows moving past.
Endicott reported this to Corcoran now.
“May be using the same M.O. they did in The Wasteland,” Corcoran suggested. “Take the high ground, cover the area through binocs.”
“I’ll wait for the second car to show,” Endicott said. “We’ll go in the back way, try to surprise them up there.”
“Don’t do anything to jeopardize the girl’s safety,” Corcoran warned.
Loomis figured this was for his benefit.
Besides, his phone was ringing.
“HELLO?” he said.
“We see you,” Avery said. “Get out of the car, both of you. Leave the money on the back seat. Leave the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition. Walk toward the school entrance. Now! Do it now!” he said, and hung up.
“He wants us to leave the money and get out of the car. He wants us to walk toward the school. Wants it unlocked with the keys in it.”
Corcoran stabbed at his cell phone.
“Endicott.”
“They’re trying an end run,” he shouted. “Get around to the front of the school! Quick!”
“What?” Endicott said.
The car phone rang again.
Loomis picked up.
“Yes?” he said.
“I said now!” Avery said, and hung up.
“Let’s go!” Loomis said. “Please!”
Both men got out of the car. Corcoran looked up the street, to where he could see a green SUV moving swiftly toward the parked Lincoln.
“Here they come!” he said, and reached under his jacket into his shoulder holster.
“Don’t!” Loomis shouted.
IT ALL HAPPENED so fast that later none of the agents or detectives could reconstruct it in proper sequence. It was rather like one of those movies directed by someone fresh out of film school, with jump cuts and flash forwards and four or five stories unreeling at the same time.
The first story was Barney Loomis wetting his pants the moment all those guns opened fire. Actually, there was only one gun at first, and it was in the right hand of Detective-Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran and he opened fire the moment the two men got out of what he now could see was a green Montana, and climbed into the black town car waiting at the curb in front of Grace Wagner. The Lincoln’s engine roared into life an instant later, and the car pulled away from the curb just as its rear window slid down and a second gun opened up, a rifle this time spewing automatic fire, which is when Loomis wet his pants because he could actually hear bullets whizzing past his right ear.
The two Mercurys came around the corner at that very moment, Endicott and Lonigan in the lead car, Feingold and Jones in the second. Corcoran had sprinted to the curb by then, and was flagging down the blue Merc. Loomis had thrown himself flat to the ground the way he’d seen them do in better movies than this one, even though there were no bullets flying at the moment.
At the moment, in fact, and even before Corcoran jumped into the blue Merc like somebody about to yell “Follow that car!” the black Lincoln Town car had raced out of sight like the Enterprisezooming off into a star-filled void.
Where it was zooming off to was a spot a mile away, where they had parked the very last of the stolen cars.
THEY HAD LEFT 8412 Winston Road in Calm’s Point at seven-thirty, had encountered heavy traffic coming over the bridge, and did not get back to the squadroom till a minute past eight. A minute after that, Carella was calling the number he had for telephone company Special Assistance.
The Joint Task Force’s hi-tech triangulation had ended in something like strangulation, and their Trap-and-Trace routine had proved futile in the face of stolen and disposable cell phones. So it got down to a weary detective sitting behind a cigarette-scarred desk in a grimy squadroom making a good old-fashioned phone call. In many ways the good old telephone company was always reliable if not always courteous. Even dealing with a so-called Special Operator assigned to helping law enforcement agencies working so-called important cases, the civility level was barely acceptable.
“Here’s what we’re looking for,” Carella told a woman named Miss Young. She had no first name. Just Miss Young. “We’ve got an Avery Hanes living at 8412 Winston Road in Calm’s Point, for the year prior to this April first. And we’ve got…”
“Was that Winston as in Winston cigarettes?” Miss Young asked.
“As in Winston Churchill, yes,” Carella said. “And we’ve got a man named Calvin Wilkins, living at 379 Parrish Place in Calm’s Point, from just before Thanksgiving to around the same time, April first. That’s Parrish with a double-R.”
&nb
sp; “And what is it you’re seeking, Detective?”
“List of phone calls made from each of those numbers in March. I want phone numbers, names and addresses.”
“You’ll need a court order for that.”
“That’s not my understanding. We’re not looking to put a pen register on those lines. In fact, the numbers are probably no longer in service. All I want is the numbers called and the names and addresses of the parties called. I’m sure you have those. If for billing purposes alone.”
“It’s my understanding that a court order…”
“Miss, we’re dealing with a kidnapping here. Any assistance you can give us…”
“One moment, please,” Miss Young said.
Carella waited.
“Miss Cole,” another voice said. “How may I help you, sir?”
Carella told her how she might help him.
“We’ll need a court order for that,” she said.
“There’s a certain urgency here,” Carella said.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“I’ll get back to you,” he said, and hung up.
It was now five minutes past eight. It would take him forty minutes to get downtown and another forty minutes to shake a judge out of a tree at that hour. By then, Tamar Valparaiso might be dead. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he had for the Joint Task Force downtown.
“Task Force,” a voice said.
“This is Carella,” he said. “Who’s this?”
“Special Agent Jakes.”
“I need some help, Jakes.”
THEY PULLED THE Lincoln in alongside and slightly to the rear of the Grand Cherokee Laredo they’d parked there earlier today. Cal threw up the hood of the Jeep and jump-started the vehicle. They were on their way again in three minutes flat, leaving the Lincoln with the key in the ignition in a neighborhood where “Your Money or Your Life” was a nursery rhyme. Avery figured if they had a little luck with traffic, they’d be at the beach house in half an hour or so. Then they’d return the girl and that was that.
End of story.
They never once considered the fact that an armed and dangerous person was in that house, and she was only twenty-four years old, and she had never in her life fired an AK-47.
“DETECTIVE Carella?”
“Yes?”
“This is Miss Cole again.”
Carella looked at the clock on the squadroom wall. The time was eight-fifteen.
“I just got a call from an FBI agent named Randall Jakes,” Miss Cole said. “He faxed me a copy of a court order that would seem to cover the request you made. Do you have a fax machine there?”
He gave her the fax number.
Five minutes later, he had on his desk two separate lists of the calls Avery Hanes and Calvin Wilkins had made from their respective telephones during the month of March. Not surprisingly, many of the calls had been from Hanes to Wilkins or vice versa. From Wilkins’ number, there were half a dozen calls to Air Jamaica and American Airlines. From Hanes’ number there were a dozen or more calls to American, British Air, Virgin Atlantic, Delta, and Air France. There were calls to Capshaw Boats, the marina from which they’d rented the Rinker presumably used in the kidnapping. There were calls to a person named Benjamin Lu, whoever he might turn out to be. Almost every day in March, Hanes had called a party listed only as “Unpublished.” An asterisk at the top of the page explained: “AT THE CUSTOMER’S REQUEST, THIS NUMBER IS UNPUBLISHED.” In the month of March, Hanes had also made seven calls to a real estate agent in Russell County.
Carella pulled the phone to him and began dialing again.
BY EIGHT-TWENTY-SEVEN, he had dialed the number for Margaret Holmes Realty twice, on the off chance she’d been down the hall the first time. Concluding that she was closed for business at this hour, he dialed Information and told the operator he wanted a residential listing for a Margaret Holmes, as in Sherlock Holmes, in the town of South Beach, which was where the real estate office was located. The operator came back to say she had no listing under that name. He asked her to try all the towns in Russell County, and she said she couldn’t do that, she needed a specific town. He told her he was a police officer investigating a kidnapping, and she asked him to wait while she put a supervisor on the line. The supervisor told him he had to have a specific town, did he know how many towns there were in Russell County? It was eighty-thirty-three when Carella once again dialed the number he had for Special Assistance and asked for Miss Cole.
“I already faxed you those numbers,” she said. “Didn’t you get them?”
“Yes, I got them, Miss Cole,” he said, “and thank you so much for your assistance,” turning on the charm and wondering if he should read a little T. S. Eliot to her. “Miss Cole, I wonder if you can help me here again,” he said. “I need a home number for a Margaret Holmes, as in Sherlock Holmes, somewhere in Russell County, I don’t have a specific town, do you think you can help me? I would so appreciate it.”
“Hmm,” Miss Cole said.
But then she said, “One moment, please.”
THE NUMBER Miss Cole gave him rang four times before someone picked up.
“Hello?” a woman said.
“Miss Holmes?”
“Mrs. Holmes, yes?”
“This is Detective Carella of the Eighty-seventh Squad? In the city?”
“Yes, Detective?”
“Are you the Margaret Holmes who runs Margaret Holmes Realty in South Beach?”
“I am,” she said.
“Mrs. Holmes, we have an Avery Hanes calling you some six times this past month. Is that name familiar to you?”
“It is.”
Carella took a deep breath.
“Did you rent or sell anything to him?” he asked.
“I rented him a house on the beach,” she said. “Why? What’s he done?”
THE PLAN WAS to drop the girl off just anyplace. Give her some change to make a phone call, let her find her own way home, she was a big girl now. That was the way Ave had explained the plan to her.
They’d drop the girl off just anywhere on their way to the airport. Cal was supposed to be going to Jamaica, but they didn’t care where he went, they didn’t care if they ever saw him again as long as they lived. Ave was heading for London first, while Kellie herself flew to Paris where he would meet her later. It was a swell plan. Paris. Lah-dee-dah.
There was only one problem.
The girl had seen Kellie’s face.
Tamar Valparaiso still didn’t know who was behind those Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat masks, but she sure as hell knew that George W. Bush was a redheaded Irish girl with green eyes and freckles.
“You know,” Kellie confided now, “we’re supposed to set you free as soon as they get back.”
“Promises, promises,” Tamar said.
“No, really. That’s the plan. We leave here and drop you off someplace.”
“That would be nice,” Tamar said.
“Well, that’s the plan.”
“Good,” Tamar said.
She ached all over. Her face, her body, everywhere he’d hit her, but especially below, where he’d brutally entered her. Cal, she thought. His name is Cal. And the other one is Ave. You’ll pay, boys.
“You saw my face,” Kellie said out of the blue.
Tamar looked at her.
“You know what’s behind this mask.”
“Well, don’t worry…”
“You know what I look like.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Tamar said. “Really, you’ve been good to me. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.”
“Because I wouldn’t want to lose all this, you know,” Kellie said reasonably.
“You don’t have to worry, really.”
“We worked hard for this,” she said reasonably.
“I know you did. But, really, you don’t have to…”
“You can describe me.”
“I hardly remember…”
“Yo
u know what I look like,” Kellie said again.
“Lots of girls look like…”
“Lots of girls didn’t kidnap you,” Kellie said, and raised the AK-47 onto her hip.
“Don’t…just be careful with that thing, okay?” Tamar said and reached out with her free hand.
Kellie backed away a pace.
The rifle was on single-shot. She fired three times. Two bullets entered Tamar’s face just below the left eye, and the other took her just below the nose. The three shots blew off the back of her skull and splashed gristle and blood all over the radiator behind her.
Wow, Kellie thought.
14
IT WAS eighty-forty-five on the squadroom clock.
“The address is 64 Beachside,” Carella told the detective in the South Beach Police Department. “There may be a kidnap victim there, so proceed with extreme caution.”
Out there in Russell County, they used more paramilitary rank designations than they did here in the big bad city. Detective-Sergeant James Cody asked if there was likely to be anyone armed and dangerous in that house.
Carella said, “Yes, that’s likely.”
“We’ll be careful then,” Cody said.
There was no need.
The only person in that house was a dead girl chained to a radiator.
Everyone else had driven off five minutes ago.
MISS COLE was getting used to phone calls from Detective Stephen Louis Carella.
“Yes, Detective?” she said almost cheerfully.
“Miss Cole, I’m sorry to bother you again…”
“Oh, it’s no bother at all,” she said.
“On this list of calls made from those two addresses I gave you…”
“Yes, Detective?”
Almost cooing the words.
“There were almost daily calls listed to an unpublished number. Now, I know it’s telephone company policy not to reveal…”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “This is a kidnapping. Just give me a minute.”
She came back in three.