We’ll see…
I checked the street before ducking into the shadows where there was a chain-link fence. After dropping to the other side, I waited two minutes in case there was a perimeter alarm or a Doberman standing watch.
The house wasn’t a cottage, it was a massive three-story mansion with two-story wings at each end.
As I approached, I could hear the drumming of waves on the beach and the compressor kick of an air conditioner. Even on a flawless winter evening, the gated community types avoid contact with the reality of Florida… except for someone moving on the upper floor of the south wing.
I crouched and watched a woman step out onto a balcony. The moon was three days before full, not bright because of clouds but bright enough. Nelson’s wife? Yes. She was too full-bodied in her silken robe to be the daughter.
Connie Myles walked to the railing, listening to the thumping bass of New Age rock in the room behind her, then lit a cigarette. No… a joint. I had observed Tomlinson’s ceremonial machinations often enough to know. She inhaled several times, then pirouetted in a solitary dance, arms thrown wide, like Wendy in Peter Pan yearning to fly.
I remembered the photo I’d seen in Myles’s office of the wife who had appeared lost and haunted, shrinking ever smaller into the background of her family members’ lives. Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps the woman was simply stoned. For her sake, I hoped it was true.
When she finished smoking and had locked the French doors behind her, I worked my way past a tennis court and a small empty stable to the back lawn. The main house looked deserted, but there was activity in the north wing.
I crossed to the patio, where there was a pool house, a guest cottage and a landscaped deck with a tiki hut and lounge chairs. The pool was unlit, a graphite mirror beneath moon and stars. Lights were on in the kitchen… and Nelson appeared. I watched him open a fresh bottle of scotch and pour a drink.
The man was wearing a dress shirt that would fit if he gained fifteen pounds, suggesting recent weight loss. That, coupled with the scotch, meshed with what Roxanne had told me.
“Two weeks ago,” she’d said, “Nels went off the deep end. It started with a phone call-that much I know for sure. But he wouldn’t tell me what it was about.”
Nelson was going to tell me.
At the edge of the patio was a metal trash can. I imagined the gonging sound the lid would make if raccoons dumped the thing. It was a fail-safe call to duty for a man enjoying a whiskey glow. But the wife worried me, even though she was stoned and insulated by ten thousand square feet of stucco and furniture.
Instead, I scouted the side of the house, where I found a Range Rover parked outside the five-car garage. When I saw the New York plates and a trailer hitch, I felt a hunter’s rush… until I did the math. Even nonstop, the drive from the Hamptons would’ve taken more than twenty hours. It was a different Range Rover.
Will Chaser wasn’t here, unless they’d boxed him into one of those private jets-it was possible.
I wanted to discuss that with Myles, too.
Using my ASP Triad light, I settled on a place to hide, then checked the interior of the vehicle. It was the big luxury Rover, with navigation, and a security system that was sufficiently sensitive. Headlights and horn blared an alert when I forced a burglar’s shim through the door seal.
When Nelson came hurrying out, drink in hand, I waited until he was returning to the house before I surprised him.
I used duct tape, mouth and hands. Appropriate, I hoped. I got a good look at the Skull and Bones ring Myles wore, as I took care to do a professional job with the tape, thumbs out, fingers not locked.
The ring was similar to others I had seen.
Nelson Myles didn’t double the family fortune or run a successful stable or get his jet rating by being easily bullied, so I didn’t expect him to go all weepy once he recovered from the shock of being hijacked in his own vehicle. But I also didn’t anticipate his detached reaction after I’d parked, headlights off, parking lights on, and torn the tape from his mouth.
He said, “Let’s cut to the chase and save us both some time. How much do you want?”
Extortion, the first thing to come to his mind. He was drunk, I realized, in the first articulate stages of a scotch bender. I didn’t reply.
After a moment, he said, “Talk to me. I have more money than patience. Come up with a figure. If it’s reasonable, I won’t get the police involved. It has nothing to do with keeping my word, or any of that noble bullshit. I have too much on my plate right now to deal with police. So your timing couldn’t be better.” He paused, suspicious. “Or maybe someone tipped you off. Was it a woman?”
That was unexpected. He was thinking of Roxanne-also a surprise. Well… he knew her better than I did.
I sat looking at him, letting my eyes adjust to the dash lights, hearing the vehicle’s cooling engine and the wind in melaleuca trees outside my open window. The man was working his lips, trying to get rid of tape residue, but didn’t offer eye contact. I was a hired hand, beneath his station-my impression.
He said, “With a phone call, I can have forty thousand cash within half an hour, anyplace you say. If you want more, we’ll have to wait until the banks open. That’s risky, in my opinion. More chance of something going wrong. But it’s your decision.”
After two minutes of silence, he added, “Personally, I’d take the cash.”
After another minute, he said, “Think it over.”
After another thirty seconds, he said, “While I’m waiting, open the door, I have to pee.”
I was going through the fanny pack, letting him watch from the corner of his eye as I removed a lab towel, the ASP light, then surgical gloves, finally a pistol.
The pistol was a recent acquisition. It was a. 32 caliber Seecamp, a precision-made firearm not much larger than a candy bar. I’m not a gun aficionado, so I had done a month of research and fired a lot of weapons before deciding that the Seecamp was the finest phantom pistol on the tactical market.
Close my fingers around the little gun, it disappeared in my hand
… phantomlike.
I did that now, closing my hand, then opening it, letting Myles fixate on the gun. He was a shrewd guy. The workmanship, the articulate density of stainless steel, were more persuasive than any threat I could make. A weekend thug or a drug hustler would flash a big, showy knife, not a scalpel. Nelson Myles was looking at a scalpel.
“If you think you’re going to intimidate me with that, you’re mistaken,” he said, sounding nervous for the first time.
I popped the magazine and thumbed out six high-impact rounds before replying, “Why would I care? It all pays the same.”
I let him watch me snap on the surgical gloves before toweling the steering wheel, then each bullet, clean. I reloaded two rounds into the magazine and killed the dome light. When I opened the door, he made a reflexive, mewing sound as he inhaled, then recovered by clearing his throat.
Now the man was looking at me. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing? You get some kind of power rush playing the hard-ass? If you want to negotiate, let’s negotiate. We can come to an agreement. There’s another friend I can call. I can guarantee you sixty thousand-no, seventy thousand-cash. No questions, no risk. I’ve got my cell on me. Cut my hands loose and I’ll have the money waiting.”
I replied, “I’ve already been paid,” then pushed the door closed. I walked to the passenger side, hoping to hell police didn’t choose now to cruise this dirt utility road, with its detritus of garbage and beer cans, close enough to Interstate 75 to hear the wake of traffic. No combination of lies could explain kidnapping a Who’s Who millionaire. My own distaste for what I was doing would probably have given me away before I tried. In psychological warfare, tactical cruelty is just another arrow in the quiver.
I told myself that if I was right, what I was doing might save the boy. If wrong, Myles was tough enough to recover, then deal with it along with his long list of other per
sonal problems.
I opened the door, grabbed the man behind the neck and tumbled him onto the ground, hearing him say, “Why is this happening to me?,” his voice shaky. He repeated it several times, a sign he was going into shock, then yelled, “Say something! You’re driving me crazy with the damn silence. Tell me what I did wrong. Give me a name, for godsakes.”
I cracked the slide, chambered a round, then stood over him holding the gun. Parallel to the barrel, I was gripping the ASP light, but it wasn’t on. “They said you won’t talk. So they hired me.”
“Talk? About what? Jesus Christ, ask me anything, I’ll tell you.”
I said, “I don’t get paid to listen,” then extended my arm, pistol a foot from his head. A moment later, I clicked on the ASP light. In the laser-white scintillation, Myles’s eyes widened as if about to be hit by a car. He jerked his head away. “You’re blinding me!”
I said, “I’m doing you a favor,” but then dimmed the little flashlight so only the gun barrel and a wedge of the man’s face were illuminated.
He cracked an eye. “Jesus Christ, I thought you pulled the trigger. It was so damn bright.”
“They say it’s like that.”
“Being shot, you mean?”
“Close your eyes, you tell me.”
He opened his eyes wider. “But you don’t have to kill me now. Seriously, I’ll tell you anything. But I can’t answer unless I know what they want.”
“I’m doing what they want.”
“ Please. At least give me a minute to think this through. Just one minute, I’ll make it right, I swear-and I’ll pay you. An entirely different business deal. Isn’t that fair? I’m wealthy. I can pay you a hundred times more than they paid you.”
I said nothing. After a long silence, he began to cry. The man had pissed his pants, I realized. He pulled his knees to his chest, fetal position, then squinched his eyes closed until he remembered, then opened his eyes wide, as if looking up at me was his only defense. He began to moan, “I’m begging you, please… please. ”
I felt a mounting contempt for myself that was proportional to a rising respect for the man at my feet. He had handled the bullying better than most and taken longer to break than it might have taken to break me under like circumstances. Dying clueless, among garbage, on a dead-end road, is sufficient reason to beg.
But my assessment was premature.
My cell phone had a digital-recorder function. I pressed the RECORD icon and dropped the phone on the ground near the man’s head. “So talk. They won’t believe me unless I get it on tape.”
Myles opened his eyes. “ Sure. What do you want me to say? I’ll tell you anything.” His eagerness to survive, his clinging devotion to hope, summarized our species yet, oddly, also debased it.
“They want the truth.”
“Of course! I’m a cooperative person-you’ll see. But first, I think we’d be more comfortable if-”
I interrupted before he could mention freeing his hands, saying, “They’re looking for a missing kid. That’s all I know. You asked for a minute to figure it out. You’ve got it. So tell me: What’s the question you’re supposed to answer?”
“I don’t know. I swear it, I have no idea.”
I said, “Then we’re wasting time,” and leaned closer with the gun.
“Wait! Maybe I do know something.” I watched his face. When I saw his eyes rotate upward, I knew he was assembling a lie. I touched the gun barrel to his ear. He winced but offered the lie anyway.
“There are always questions when somebody’s kid disappears. No one’s to blame, it’s just the way it is. And let’s be honest, young girls disappear all the time. What I don’t understand is-”
“How do you know it was a girl?” I said.
When he replied, “Well… it’s only natural to assume-” I pressed the pistol into his ear.
He lied again. “You told me it was a girl! ‘They’re looking for a missing girl,’ isn’t that what you said?”
I began counting off seconds-“… thirty-nine… thirty-eight
… thirty-seven…”-and used my foot to pin him to the ground when he tried to wiggle away.
“Stop… stop, I’ll talk! But I need more information. Could be, the people who hired you got the wrong idea about the missing girl-boy-whatever. Did they say anything about finding something? Or about a type of radar-this was on a farm I own in New York where someone used ground-penetrating radar-”
I kept counting-“… thirty-one… thirty… twenty-nine. ..”
“Stop that! I’m trying to cooperate. I think what happened is, someone in that area heard about an incident, but the radar was wrong. False readings are so damn common with that sort of technology. I don’t expect you to understand. But if that’s what this is about, I’m sure the people who paid you-”
“You made me lose count, Nels,” I said. “So we start at ten. Ten seconds.
What’s the question? I won’t understand the answer unless I hear the question.” I was studying his eyes as I counted-“… nine… eight… seven…”
“Please don’t. One more minute…”
I leaned my weight on the pistol, and said, “One? Zero. ”
“No! You win!” He stopped squirming and lay in the sand panting. “I’ll tell you. The question would be… I guess what anyone would want to know is…” I watched his eyelids blink closed, then open. As he thought about it, his eyes rotated downward. “The question,” he said, “might be about a girl named Annie Sylvester. Where is the girl buried? I guess that’s the first question someone would ask.”
“The answer?”
It was several seconds before he could make himself say it. “She’s near the Hamptons, Long Island-that’s in New York. Annie is buried in a pasture. A horse farm called Shelter Point.”
25
Nine p.m. I battled the urge to rush as I drove the Range Rover south on U.S. 41 toward Venice Beach Road and Falcon Landing, governing my speed with cruise control and using the blinker to shift lanes. I didn’t know where Will Chaser was. Didn’t know if he was dead or alive, aboveground or below, and I was convinced Nelson Myles didn’t know either. But I now felt sure the boy was somewhere in Florida, probably close to Sarasota. It would be unwise to invite the attention of a traffic cop.
Myles hadn’t told me the whole truth-yet. But I believed him when he said he hadn’t seen the boy and didn’t know where he was. I did not believe him, however, when he said he didn’t know that he’d been helping the kidnappers. Too many holes in his story, too many headlines on the television news.
Myles said he didn’t know the men were Cuban until I told him. They had demanded money, transportation and shelter, no questions tolerated. That included questions about a crate the two men had off-loaded early that morning, after Myles landed them at Falcon Landing in his eleven-passenger Citation executive jet.
“They said they were smuggling illegal weapons. I didn’t ask what. Rocket launchers or an atomic bomb-my God, what do I care? My life was on the line. I didn’t even see their faces. That’s the truth. I didn’t want to see their faces!”
My opinion of the man continued its descent.
During the three-hour flight, Myles claimed he hadn’t opened the cockpit door. The only time he was face-to-face with the men was just before they boarded, but it was too dark to see details.
“The man I’d been dealing with, the one in charge, he was older. Late fifties, early sixties, and very neat. Silver hair, a collar that looked starched. The man with him was twice your size and three times as wide-freakish. He was younger, judging from his voice, in his twenties or early thirties. And he wore a weird knit cap. Pointed, sort of. I got the impression he wasn’t smart-retarded, even-just from the way the boss man spoke to him. But strong-my God, he handled that crate like it was filled with newspaper instead of-”
“Guns?” I chided.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “I swear.”
All other contact was by cel
l phone, Myles told me, or over the Internet.
“The man told me how much money he wanted, where to be, what to do, and I did it. Anyone in my position would’ve done the same. These people have been bleeding me dry for more than two weeks and I’m sick of it! They have no idea how far out of their class they are, but they’ll find out one day. You, too. That’s not a threat. It’s a fact.”
“Poor Nelson,” I replied. “You’ve had it rough, all because of a girl who wasn’t in your class either.”
The man’s story meshed with the bank records I’d found at Shelter House and also with what I already suspected: an interrogator from the Cuban Program had discovered that a wealthy American was a murderer-a story he’d probably heard from an American POW. Torture a man long enough and he will spill his own personal secrets, then volunteer secrets about everyone he knows, hoping to earn a break from pain.
Myles hadn’t yet provided the connection-who was the POW?-but I had a pretty good idea who it was. So I was backing off, letting him get to it in his own way.
Because it was safer to talk in a moving car, I’d been driving for about twenty minutes, making random turns, but gradually traveling southwest toward the Gulf of Mexico and Falcon Landing. Myles tried subtle manipulation to hurry me back to his gated community, implying he might talk more freely when he was close to home. I thought I understood his motivation. But I badly misread his intent.
I stopped only once. Got out of the car, so Myles couldn’t eavesdrop, and telephoned Barbara, then Harrington, finally Tomlinson. No one answered, so I left the same message: “The boy’s in Florida, possibly Sarasota County. Tell the FBI and anyone else who can help. I’m right this time, trust me.”
My determination to find Will Chaser was now fueled by an additional source: my systematic humiliation of Nelson Myles. I’m no actor. A bully within me had surfaced, and the realization added yet another blemish to my already-tattered self-image. The only justification now was finding the boy.
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