The Nightmare Thief
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Meg Gardiner
Also by Meg Gardiner
JO BECKETT NOVELS
The Dirty Secrets Club
The Memory Collector
The Liar’s Lullaby
EVAN DELANEY NOVELS
China Lake
Mission Canyon
Jericho Point
Crosscut
Kill Chain
DUTTON Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, July 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Meg Gardiner
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gardiner, Meg.
The nightmare thief / Meg Gardiner.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54324-5
1. Forensic psychiatrists—Fiction. 2. Women psychiatrists—Fiction.
3. California—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.A725N54 2011
823’.92—dc22 2011009426
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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For Nancy Fraser
1
The young trader stumbled from the trees like a scarecrow running on legs of straw. Her suit was muddy, her blouse torn, her sleek Asian hair matted with pine needles. She ran into the street directly in front of Autumn Reiniger’s BMW.
Autumn braked. “Oh, man.”
The trader glanced at her but didn’t break stride. With one arm she clutched a battered lockbox. The other arm she cradled to her chest, protecting what looked to Autumn like a broken wrist.
This was the place. Fun city.
The trader ran across the street to the driveway of Peter Reiniger’s palatial home. She was the last to emerge from the eucalyptus grove at the edge of the Presidio. The others huddled on the driveway. Beside them, Reiniger sat on the tailgate of a Mercedes SUV.
Autumn got out of her car. She took a step, but Reiniger gestured for her to stay put.
The trader swayed to a stop. Nakamura, that was her name—Autumn recognized her from one of her father’s glossy corporate brochures. Chest heaving, the woman dropped to her knees.
She set down the lockbox. After long seconds she raised her gaze to Reiniger.
Her silence made Autumn’s skin tingle. Nakamura was controlling pain and raw emotion. And she was unintimidated—it was stirring. She knelt on the driveway, black hair falling across her face, and she held Peter Reiniger’s gaze. With her good arm she fumbled open the lockbox. Inside, hundreds of multi-carat stones glittered like tears.
“I win,” she said.
A hush pressed upon the street. Birdsong, wind through the trees, traffic down the hill along the San Francisco waterfront, all ebbed. Reiniger climbed off the tailgate.
“And?” he said.
She dug her hand into the stones and clutched a fistful. “Ransom my team.”
The people huddled around the SUV cheered. Nakamura let the stones—cubic zirconia, playtime diamonds—cascade back into the box.
Reiniger pulled her to her feet. “You okay?”
She wobbled, but smiled. “You owe me a raise.”
A medic jogged up. “Let’s take a look at that arm.”
Her colleagues thronged her. Autumn grinned and applauded. The woman was tough. From the roof of the Mercedes SUV, a cameraman panned the scene, catching their glee.
And . . . cut. Cue the music from Chariots of Fire. Autumn strolled toward her dad, hands in the back pockets of her jeans.
The game runner got to Reiniger first. “We’ll edit the video and burn copies for everybody.”
Reiniger nodded. “We’ll stream it at our board meeting.”
The game runner, a black guy with the hard fitness of a running back, poured antiseptic on a gauze pad and handed it to Reiniger. “Clean up.”
Cleaning up was what Edge Adventures did. Absolutely. Reiniger pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Scrapes covered his elbow. This kidnap scenario looked to Autumn like it had been rowdier than most.
She took the gauze pad from him and dabbed at the scrapes. “Mes
sy.”
“Realistic,” he said. “The screaming’s all part of the game.”
Only at team-building weekends run for Reiniger Capital.
“It’s how I find out what my people are made of,” he said.
Autumn had heard it from her dad before: Running a hedge fund could be risky and stressful, but Edge Adventures helped people find what was really inside. Toughness. Spirit. His staff now clustered around a cooler, beer bottles in hand, exhausted and proud. Two of them grabbed the lockbox and poured the fake diamonds over Nakamura’s head, as if dumping a bucket of ice on the winning coach at a football game.
Edge Adventures didn’t simply sell excitement. They showed clients the light.
Edge created urban reality games, role-playing scenarios that took clients into an imagined demimonde of crime and rescue. They threw people in the soup.
Edge offered kidnappings, manhunts by bounty hunters, and even a night locked in a morgue—all in all, the chance to face your demons and to act out fantasies of crime and danger. Today, Edge had grabbed Peter Reiniger’s team off a street in downtown San Francisco for a simulated heist scenario.
Coates, the game runner, checked Reiniger’s elbow. “It’s fine.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask for a discount,” he said.
Autumn saw a quick jab of anxiety on Coates’s face, and thought: And he’s not going to sue you.
“We’re cool,” Reiniger said. “This was what my daughter here calls sick fun.”
Autumn rolled her eyes.
Coates slapped Reiniger on the back. “As always, we’re happy to have your business.”
“However, I do want to speak to you about our run-in with the police. See me inside in five minutes.”
Frowning, Coates went to help the Edge staff load their gear into the SUV—ropes, emergency flares, and replica firearms that looked mean as all get-out.
Reiniger turned to Autumn. “You’re half an hour late.”
“My car isn’t working right. There’s a light on the dashboard.”
“Which light?”
“The one that tells you it’s time to buy a new car.”
“You mean ‘Service’?”
Laughing, she stretched and kissed his cheek. “Joking, Dad.”
“Sure you are.”
Autumn was a month shy of turning twenty-one. She bounced on her toes, knowing he would get the message. Big birthday. Better think big gifts.
She nodded at the scene on the driveway. “You wanted me to watch the grand finale why, exactly?”
“To see how things work.”
“Work? You’re playing Ocean’s Eleven. And Name That Phobia.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t deny it.”
“I don’t.”
“But you wanted me to sit on the sidelines. And what, cheer?” She crossed her arms. “Put Band-Aids on their boo-boos?”
He crooked his index finger and beckoned her to follow him. Inside, the house was gauzy with sunshine. The view through the living room to the terrace showed windswept Monterey pines and the blue waters of the bay.
Reiniger said, “Hold out your hand.”
Lightness, anticipation, winged through her. About time. She raised her hand. And Reiniger slapped a heavy manila envelope into her palm. She eyed him uncertainly.
“Open it,” he said.
Autumn tore open the envelope. Inside was a memo. It was stamped, in red, CLASSIFIED.
From: Edge Adventures
To: Autumn Reiniger
Re: Your assignment
“Welcome to adulthood,” he said.
“You bought me a game?”
OUTLAW is an urban reality scenario that offers a variety of roles for you and your closest friends. Crime syndicate boss, bounty hunter, prison escapee. Edge employees will take other roles and run the scenario.
“A three-day weekend, for six of you.” Reiniger smiled. “It’s a designer crime spree.”
Her confusion began to clear. Ultra-deluxe. Outlaw. Prison break.
“Oh my God. Do we get a speedboat?” she said.
“If you want one.”
Helicopter rescue.
“Dad—is this for real?”
Hunt down the crime boss, or BE the boss and escape the long arm of the law.
“And this is totally plush, right? No team building. No ‘get in touch with your inner hero.’” Her voice turned hard. “No ‘fight your demons.’ Just fun. And five star. Right?”
He pointed to the location of their syndicate headquarters: the Mandarin Oriental.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.
As Autumn hugged him, a Corvette revved into the driveway. Reiniger patted her on the back. “Go on.”
It was her boyfriend. She ran outside, smiling like a cat that had just cornered a mouse.
Fight your demons.
She would know about phobias, Reiniger thought. Too bad hers didn’t include fear of shopping.
His daughter was adorable: quick, clever, winning. And such a pretty girl, with the tumbling brown curls of a Victorian aristocrat. He’d never been able to deny her anything. She always wore him down. Her relentlessness was a quality he admired. So why did he get a nagging feeling of unease when he gave in?
Because he had acquiesced to assuage her heartbreak when he and her mother divorced. And to salve her grief when her mother died. He had lavished her with gifts. And what did that get him? Demands for more.
Autumn had the BMW. She had an apartment he’d bought her in the city. She had a spot at the University of San Francisco, a college to which he gave generous donations. And she regarded classes as a hindrance to her tanning schedule.
No team building. No “get in touch with your inner hero.”
But heroism was precisely what he wanted her to discover.
Nothing compared to going out on the rim and facing your deepest fears. And Edge offered a red-in-tooth-and-claw experience, rarely found in twenty-first-century America, of feeling truly, deeply, alive. Its full-immersion adventures were the modern world’s closest equivalent to primitive initiation rituals.
He paid through the nose, but it was worth it.
For years Autumn had asked to take part in an Edge scenario. And, abruptly, Reiniger didn’t want to give her the thrill she coveted. He wanted to give her a wake-up call. She had peculiar fears. She wielded them as a weapon to manipulate him whenever her sense of entitlement was threatened. It was time to quash them.
Coates rapped on the open door. “You got a question about the SFPD?”
Reiniger waved him in. “Yeah. Why did they show up at exactly the wrong moment today?”
Coates was a former Oakland cop. He was Mr. Law-and-Order and always alerted the authorities before a scenario was about to run. If a client was going to be grabbed off the street, Edge wanted the cops to know it was a party, not an abduction.
But the San Francisco police had nearly derailed today’s scenario, right at the start. As Nakamura was being dragged toward the kidnap van, an SFPD patrol car had screeched up, lights flashing.
Coates shook his head. “Pure chance. No way to grab people off the street without being seen.” He eyed Reiniger warily. “They left. I squared it.”
“That cruiser arrived thirty seconds into the kidnap. Almost like they had a heads-up.”
Coates stiffened. “From Edge? No way. We have zero motive to stall a scenario.”
He glanced out the door at Reiniger’s team.
“It wasn’t one of them,” Reiniger said. “They didn’t know when the kidnap was going down.”
“So it was nobody. Like I said—chance.”
Reiniger wasn’t convinced, but let it go. “I want to ask you something else.” He checked that Autumn was out of earshot outside. “I want to add a layer to Autumn’s birthday scenario. It needs to be more than a party.”
“You want us to heighten the scenario’s intensity?”
<
br /> “It will do her good.”
Coates considered it. “We can add a twist to the crime spree. Does she have an issue you want her to work on?”
Reiniger wanted Autumn to learn the value of teamwork. And with her stubborn streak, she would need to be scared into learning it.
“There is something,” he said.
There was a big red button. Push it, and Edge would trigger a childhood loathing that had become a mulish dread.
“You know how some people hate clowns?”
“A not-uncommon childhood fear.”
“Autumn hates cowboys.”
“That’s a new one on me,” Coates said.
“It goes back to when she was little. This guy scared her at a party.”
“Luckily, a cowboy phobia is unlikely to impinge on modern life.”
“But it’s silly, and she’s let it grow out of all proportion. She calls him the Bad Cowboy.”
Reiniger had barely seen him: a staff member at the party venue, corpulent and sweating in his boots and Stetson. He had stopped unruly kids from running in front of vehicles in the parking area.
That, apparently, was the origin of Autumn’s loathing. The man had scolded her. Sharply—which shamed and spooked her. And for a dozen years since, she had complained about it, usually at awkward moments. The Bad Cowboy had scared her. Naughty children got punished, he said. Careless children got hit by cars and killed, he said. He was creepy. Why wouldn’t Dad take it seriously?
Reiniger heard the subtext: Pay attention to me, Daddy. Indulge me.
“Guy was some ex–rodeo rider. Hefty kid with stitching on his shirt that said, ‘Red Rattler.’”
“And he dressed like he was still at the rodeo?”
“Fourth of July party. The staff wore Americana outfits,” Reiniger said. “Here’s my point. If Autumn could confront the Bad Cowboy during the weekend—and defeat him—it would be the icing on her birthday cake.”
“Red Rattler—he was a pro rodeo rider? You got a name for this guy?”
“Doesn’t matter whether you track him down. It’s not the man; it’s the bogeyman he’s become in her imagination.”
“It’s what the Bad Cowboy represents,” Coates said.
“You got it.”