by Amelia Autin
Patrick reluctantly concurred. “She could be right, Mr. DeWinter. You don’t know anything about these kidnappers—they might have paid off someone on the police force to notify them if you call in the cops. And do you really want to take that chance?” He bit his lip. “Paying ransom in Hong Kong is a tricky business. It used to be illegal, in fact. But nowadays it’s usually handled by ransom negotiators and almost always done before the police are notified.”
Vanessa struggled to her feet, then put a hand on Dirk’s arm. “The kidnappers said the only way you’ll ever see the girls alive again is to wait for them to contact you and do exactly what they say.”
“They know I’d pay—” Dirk’s voice broke, and he had to stop a moment. “I’d pay anything to get my daughters back. But I can’t just do noth—”
“My cousin is a private investigator,” Patrick said suddenly, interrupting him. “And a ransom negotiator.” He pulled out his own smartphone, his finger hovering over the keypad. “Should I...”
“I don’t think—” Vanessa began before Dirk cut her off.
“Call,” he ordered Patrick after only a moment’s hesitation. No way was he going to go against the kidnappers’ orders and contact the Hong Kong police...not yet. But he was also smart enough to know that paying the ransom demanded, no matter how much, wasn’t a guarantee he’d ever see his daughters again—alive or dead. He had to do something. His life would be over if anything happened to Linden and Laurel.
Dirk gave a hand to help Chet to his feet, then led his daughters’ nanny and bodyguard into the living room while Patrick called his cousin. “What else can you remember about the kidnappers?” he asked Vanessa as he seated her on the sofa. He grabbed a notepad and pen from where they sat beside the phone and handed them to her. “Jot down every detail you can think of while it’s fresh in your mind.”
He turned to Chet, who was hovering beside the sofa, and brusquely indicated he should sit, too. “I know you were unconscious, but do you remember anything before they hit you?”
Chet shook his head as he sat. “I don’t even remember answering the door,” he admitted. “Vanessa says I did, so I must have, but...” He touched the swelling on his forehead, feeling it gingerly. “I just remember coming to on the floor in the girls’ bedroom, bound and gagged beside Vanessa. The twins were already gone.”
Patrick entered the living room saying, “My cousin will take a cab and be here in less than fifteen minutes—assuming they’re still running with the typhoon about to hit soon.”
Dirk glanced at Vanessa. “What have you got for a description so far?” Before she could answer, he turned his attention back to Patrick. “Linden and Laurel don’t like strangers. They’d probably have been crying at the very least, maybe even screaming, so how could the kidnappers get away without anyone noticing and calling the police?”
Patrick shook his head. “I’ll bet anything your daughters weren’t conscious when they were taken out of here. The kidnappers wouldn’t want to take a chance someone would notice them.”
“Chloroform,” Dirk said, a chill of recognition washing through him. “That’s what that smell was when I first walked in.” His anger went from white-hot to ice-cold. “Those sons of bitches chloroformed my little girls for money.”
His iPhone rang suddenly, and he answered immediately, even though the caller’s ID was blocked. “Yes?”
“Mr. DeWinter?” The voice was as American as his own, silky smooth, with menacing overtones.
“Yes?”
“We have your daughters.”
Dirk drew a deep breath, tamping down his sudden, overwhelming rage. “Whatever the price is, I’ll pay it.”
The voice on the other end of the line laughed softly. “Of course you will, Mr. DeWinter. Of course you will.”
“How much?” he demanded. He put a tight clamp on his emotions, trying to force himself to focus, as if this was happening to someone else. His brain was already operating at warp speed when he said, “But you have to give me time. Everything’s closed here—banks, everything—because of the typhoon. I can have the money wired from the States tomorrow, but—”
The cold voice cut him off. “You’ll be contacted with the details—how much, when and where. But don’t worry, you’ll have all the time you need. The only thing you need to know right now is, if you call the police, your daughters are dead.”
“I haven’t called them.” He thanked God that Vanessa and Patrick had stopped him.
Then everything else was driven from Dirk’s mind when the other man said, “Very good, Mr. DeWinter. Or should I say...Mr. Summers?”
All the strength went out of Dirk’s legs, and he sank into the nearest armchair. “What do you mean?” he whispered.
“Terrell Blackwood sends his regards.” Then the phone went dead.
Dirk’s eyes squeezed shut. “They’re dead,” he said under his breath, trying to take in the reality. “Oh, God, they’re dead.”
A long-ago memory surfaced, Terrell Blackwood screaming at him across the courtroom, “You’ll pay for this, Summers! You’ll pay in blood!”
He’d already paid, every day of his life. The scar on his body was nothing compared to the scar on his soul. He’d carried the knowledge of what he’d done with him, weighing on his conscience, making him the man he was. Until Bree had died, he’d managed to suppress his guilt, though, had managed to convince himself his motive had been pure.
But God had seen into his heart and had known the truth—and made him pay. He was still paying. That punishment he could bear. What he couldn’t bear was knowing Bree had also paid when she was totally innocent. Just like his daughters—totally innocent. A memory flashed into his mind, him wild with grief, telling Juliana the day before Bree’s funeral, This is my punishment. God is punishing me, but she paid the price.
And if anything happened to Linden and Laurel because of him...he wouldn’t be able to bear it.
Vanessa, Chet and Patrick all stared at Dirk strangely, but Vanessa spoke first. “What do you mean...they’re dead?” she asked in a halting, choked voice. “They can’t be dead. That’s—” She broke off suddenly.
Dirk’s brows drew together in a question, but the sound of the suite’s doorbell distracted him. Patrick turned to answer the door, but Dirk was faster. He yanked the door open, then stared in incomprehension at the beautiful, dark-haired Eurasian woman standing there. The woman in the red dress from two weeks before. The woman who’d haunted his dreams. Mei-li Moore.
“Yes?” He had no idea why she was there, but he strove for patience. “Can I help you, Miss Moore?”
“I think it’s the other way around, Mr. DeWinter,” she replied with a smile intended to put him at his ease. “My cousin said you need my assistance.”
Patrick was right beside Dirk, and now he said, “Mei-li! Thanks for coming so quickly.” He reached around Dirk and tugged her inside, then closed the door.
Dirk hadn’t been expecting Patrick’s cousin to be a woman. That’s all he could think of to account for his sudden inability to process what he was seeing and hearing. That, and his emotional turmoil over the kidnapping and the mention of Terrell Blackwood’s name. He wasn’t sexist. He really wasn’t. But when Patrick had said his cousin was a private investigator and a ransom negotiator, he’d immediately envisioned a man. Especially here in Hong Kong, where even now women were struggling for equality in many professions. It wasn’t as bad in Hong Kong as it was on the Chinese mainland, but women here still had a long way to go to achieve even what the women in the United States had.
And since Hong Kong had a stringent restriction on firearms possession—the three bodyguards he’d brought with him from the States had been forced to leave their weapons behind—many private investigators didn’t even carry guns, the great equalizer between men and women.
Al
l those thoughts flashed through Dirk’s brain in less than a minute. And at the same time he realized this could actually work to his advantage. If the kidnappers were watching him—as the threats voiced to Vanessa indicated—they might not suspect Mei-li was a private investigator working the kidnapping case.
Assuming his daughters weren’t already dead.
That brought him back around to his immediate reaction to hearing Terrell Blackwood’s name. And it didn’t take him any time at all to realize that if Blackwood was involved, ransom probably wasn’t the sole motive for the kidnapping. Far from it.
“Mr. DeWinter?”
The strong, cultured voice belonged to Sir Joshua Moore’s daughter. “I need to find out everything you know as quickly as possible,” Mei-li continued. “Patrick couldn’t tell me much over the phone, just that the kidnappers warned you not to call the police, and you haven’t done so. Is that still the case?”
“Yes.”
“I think that’s wise at this stage.” She pulled a pen and notebook out of the capacious handbag slung over one shoulder, then indicated the sofa and chairs in the living room. “Can we sit down? I’d like to hear everything that happened from the beginning.”
It didn’t take long for Chet to disclaim any knowledge of the kidnapping since he’d been unconscious, and for Vanessa to reveal what little she knew. While she was telling her story, Dirk tried to marshal his own thoughts into some kind of order. He needed to tell Mei-li about the phone call from one of the kidnappers. About Terrell Blackwood. And why Blackwood had reason to want revenge.
* * *
Mei-li listened carefully to what Vanessa said—and what she didn’t—following her usual routine. She had questions, a whole slew of them, but sometimes you got the most answers just letting people talk. Especially when there was nothing but silence, and the person telling the story felt he or she desperately needed to fill that silence...with something. Sometimes the most amazing revelations were blurted out, and Mei-li never broke the flow.
But eventually Vanessa’s story petered out. Mei-li waited patiently until Vanessa said, “That’s it. That’s everything I remember.”
Mei-li knew the odds were against Vanessa’s statement. Witnesses—even cooperative witnesses, as Vanessa seemed to be—rarely told everything they remembered. They tried their best to recount what they thought were the important things, not realizing sometimes it was the little details that broke a case. Then again, sometimes witnesses remembered something important long after the fact. Especially if they weren’t required to repeat their story countless times, so that the story as they told it became their memory of the event.
Mei-li took copious notes in her own cryptic shorthand and asked a few questions when she needed clarification. She jotted Vanessa’s answers down as well, then said, “Would you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Would you close your eyes? Sometimes events can be clearer in our minds if we close our eyes and think about them.”
A nearly imperceptible hesitation was followed by, “Okay.”
Mei-li noted the hesitation but didn’t comment on it, just filed it away for the future. “Thank you.” She waited until the other woman’s eyes were closed, then asked, “Where were the girls when Chet answered the door?”
“In the bedroom. They were...they were taking their afternoon nap.”
Mei-li’s sharp eyes glanced around the room, and she wrote a couple of things in her notebook. “So walk me through everything that happened the minute the door was opened.”
“I couldn’t really see the front door from where I was standing. One of the men must have struck Chet in the head, because I heard him cry out and saw him fall right at the base of the sculpture in the foyer. Before I could react both men were in the living room. One of them had a gun. He put it to my head and demanded to know where the girls were. He told me he’d kill me if I didn’t cooperate—and I believed him.”
Mei-li made another cryptic notation, but said in a matter-of-fact tone, “So you saw their faces?”
“No, oh, no,” Vanessa replied after a second. “Only their eyes. They both wore black ski masks.”
“But you could tell one of them was Chinese and one wasn’t,” Mei-li prompted.
“Right. Their eyes. You know, the shape. I could just tell.” Vanessa cleared her throat. “Well, one was Asian. I assumed he was Chinese, but...anyway, Asian.”
Mei-li’s voice retained its calm, reassuring tone. “Okay, you’re in the girls’ bedroom, where the kidnappers forced you to go. What next?”
Vanessa’s eyelids flickered, but she didn’t open her eyes. “They pushed me down on the floor and bound me with duct tape, then they taped my mouth.”
“Who did what?”
“The Asian man had the duct tape. The other man—the one with the gun—held me down.” Her face scrunched as if she were trying to remember every detail. “They left and came back a minute later dragging Chet. He was still unconscious, and I...” This part was obviously difficult for her. “I couldn’t even be sure he was alive.”
Vanessa took a deep breath, composed herself and continued. “They duct taped him, too, then the man with the gun rolled Chet over with his foot. He wasn’t...he wasn’t very gentle about it.”
Mei-li waited, but nothing more was offered, so she asked, “You’re on the floor, bound, but you can see the men. And you can hear them. Who was in charge?”
“The man with the gun seemed to be...he was giving the orders.”
“Did either of them speak a name when they addressed each other? Either when you were in the living room or when you were in the bedroom?” Vanessa’s eyelids flew open, but Mei-li quickly stopped her. “No, don’t open your eyes. Listen to the questions and answer as best you can, but keep your eyes closed so you can visualize what happened.” When Vanessa’s eyes were closed again, Mei-li asked, “Did either of them say a name?”
Vanessa shook her head.
“Did they chloroform the girls in their beds...or did they pick them up first and then chloroform them?”
“Chloroform first.”
“Who picked up which girl?”
Again Vanessa’s eyelids twitched. “The Asian man picked up Linden. The other man picked up Laurel.”
Mei-li waited for several heartbeats, then asked softly, “Why didn’t they chloroform you?”
Chapter 3
Vanessa’s eyes flew open, and she had that startled “deer in the headlights” look on her face, Dirk noticed, as if she hadn’t expected the question and was caught unaware. Mei-li waited a moment, but when no answer was forthcoming, she said, “Or knock you out the same way they knocked out Chet. It doesn’t make sense they’d leave you conscious, does it?”
“I...I have no idea why,” Vanessa stammered. Then she shrugged her shoulders and her voice firmed. “It might not make sense, but that’s what happened.”
Mei-li smiled, and if Dirk hadn’t been watching her so closely he would have been disarmed by that smile, the same way Vanessa was. “You never get all the answers,” Mei-li told Vanessa with a confiding air. “But it’s one of those questions I had to ask.”
She turned her attention to Dirk and started to speak when a tremendous gust of wind buffeted the hotel. As solid as the building was, it swayed, and everyone froze. The room had been darkening steadily as the sky did, but no one had really focused on it until now. Everyone turned toward the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room just as the sky opened up as if a faucet had been turned on full force, and torrential rain slashed against the windows.
Dirk cursed under his breath. He’d momentarily forgotten the typhoon, and now he said, “Those windows make this entire suite vulnerable...and dangerous.” He glanced at Patrick, regret coloring his words. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking of this when I said
you’d be safer here than trying to get back to the island.”
Patrick shook his head. “I’m glad I stayed. Glad I was able to help with...” His hand motion encompassed Mei-li and the others, and Dirk understood what he was trying to say.
The phone in the suite rang suddenly, and everyone froze again. For a heart-stopping second Dirk was sure it was the kidnappers again, and he snatched up the phone. “Yes?”
“Mr. DeWinter?” said a voice with a decided British accent—not the voice of the kidnapper who’d called Dirk on his cell phone. “This is the hotel concierge.”
“Yes? What is it?”
“We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but the Hong Kong Observatory has just issued a T9 warning, indicating increasing gale-force winds. While there is no indication Hong Kong will sustain a direct hit from Typhoon De-De—that would be a T10—we’re asking all our guests to move down to either the lobby or the first floor temporarily...just until the worst of the typhoon has passed. We understand this constitutes a hardship for our guests, but we hope the complimentary meals and drinks we will be providing in any of our fine restaurants will mitigate the difficulty.”
“I understand.”
“We also recommend bringing any medications or other necessities with you, as well as a change of clothes, blankets, pillows—everything you might need in the short term. While we don’t want to anticipate the worst, we want our guests to be prepared, just in case. Should the power go out, it would be a tad difficult to reach your floor without an elevator.”
Twenty-six flights of stairs—yeah, not an easy hike, Dirk thought with a stab of mordant humor, the kind that sometimes hit in tense situations. The British sure have a knack for understatement. To the concierge he said, “Thank you, we’ll be down shortly.”
“Thank you, Mr. DeWinter. Do you and your family need any assistance? We understand this can be a trying situation for families with small children.”
The reminder that his daughters weren’t with him caused Dirk’s heart to clutch momentarily. He cleared his throat. “No, we don’t need assistance, but thanks anyway.”