by Amelia Autin
“That night...the night it happened,” he finally said, “it was a beautiful evening in May, unusually warm for Minnesota, and the AC in my old beater of a car didn’t work. I’ve often wondered...” Back then he and Bree had thanked God for the warm night, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been driving with the windows rolled down. Wouldn’t have heard...
“Lyon must have stalked Bree for weeks, must have known she always went to the library on Wednesday and Friday nights, the nights I worked. I was supposed to be working that Friday, too, but my manager asked me at the last minute to switch shifts with another pizza-delivery guy who needed the following night off—I don’t remember why. I said sure and headed to the library to meet up with Bree—I thought I’d surprise her, take her to the movie we’d planned to see on Saturday.”
Dirk vividly remembered the rest of that night as if it had happened yesterday. “When I got to the library, the girl at the checkout counter told me I’d just missed Bree. So I hopped in my car and started for her house.” His pulse kicked up a notch and his breathing quickened. “There was an elementary school along the way. That time of night, the school yard was deserted, but as I drove past I heard what sounded like a scream. I stopped the car to listen and heard it again. Definitely a scream. And I knew it was Bree. I don’t know how I knew... I just...did.”
Fear had gripped him, but instead of paralyzing him, it had given his feet wings as he dashed from the car toward the sound of Bree’s last, desperate, choked-off scream, which had emanated from the parking lot behind the building. When the sound stopped, fear had turned to terror.
“When I found them, Lyon had Bree down on the ground, a knife to her throat as he tried to rape her.” He shuddered at the rage sweeping through him now, just as it had then, and his hands formed fists. “She wasn’t screaming anymore, but she was trying to fight him, despite the knife. When I pulled him off her, he turned his knife on me. We fought. He had hatred going for him, and the memory of the beating I’d given him the last time. And he had a weapon. But I’d seen what he’d tried to do to Bree. I had fury going for me, and a determination that—”
He broke off, and after a moment Mei-li touched his arm. “Then what happened?”
“We struggled for possession of the knife,” Dirk rasped, “and I killed him in self-defense.” He paused and took a deep breath. “At least...that’s what Bree testified to at my murder trial, and the jury believed her—they acquitted me.”
“If it was self-defense, why was there even a trial?”
“The police took me into custody that night—they pretty much had to, because Lyon was dead at my hands. And I’d had a few run-ins with the law the year before. Nothing major, just the usual teenage stupidity—staying out past curfew, getting into fights, stuff like that. It might have all come to nothing, but Lyon’s multimillionaire father, Terrell Blackwood, had political connections. He maintained I had it in for Lyon—he pointed to the fight we’d had before as proof.”
Dirk made a gesture of frustration. “I’d been arrested for that at the time, but Lyon had refused to press charges despite his father’s insistence. Even though the charges had been dropped, however, the arrest was still on my record. And the prosecution didn’t hesitate to use it against me. But, as I said, I was acquitted at trial. The judge announced I’d been exonerated, and—” his voice turned bitter “—I was leaving the court without a stain on my name.”
He waited, but Mei-li didn’t react at all, just stared at him with that same expression comprised of patience and compassion. “And?” she prompted.
Dirk didn’t know why, but he wanted to shatter her composure. Wanted her to know the very worst about him so she wouldn’t look at him that way. Compassion wasn’t pity—he’d been on the receiving end of enough of both after Bree died to know the difference—but he didn’t want either from Mei-li. And the reasons were as complex as the totally unexpected emotions she’d triggered in him two weeks earlier.
But he wasn’t quite ready to reveal all his secrets. “And Terrell Blackwood tried to kill Bree and me when I walked out of that courtroom a free man. Came damn close to doing it, too,” he said grimly. He slid a hand inside the unbuttoned collar of his polo shirt and tugged until the scar he carried over his heart was visible. “The surgeon said if the bullet had been an inch to the right it would have been game over for me. As it was, I spent three weeks in the hospital recovering, but it was worse for Bree. She was gutshot.”
Nineteen years and the rage was still there—directly, both internally and externally. First Lyon Blackwood attacking Bree twenty years ago, then his father, Terrell, shooting her right after the acquittal. And last but certainly not least, he himself. Every bad thing that had happened to Bree, including what she’d suffered at the hands of the Blackwoods, had been due to him in one fashion or another. “She developed a bacterial infection, despite the best the hospital could do. They were so sure she wasn’t going to make it, they called in a priest to give her last rites.”
But Bree had shocked them all by living. They’d wheeled a seventeen-year-old Dirk into the ICU at his insistence, and with tears running down his cheeks, he’d begged her not to leave him. Bree had always claimed she had no memory of those three days when she’d fought for her life, her temperature spiking to dangerous levels as the hospital staff pumped her full of antibiotics, but Dirk had remembered. They’d been the worst three days of his life...until twenty-one months ago.
Mei-li pulled him out of his introspection. “Last rites...but she lived.”
“Yeah.”
“What else?” she asked.
“Isn’t that enough?”
“I mean, what happened to the man who tried to kill the two of you?”
“Terrell Blackwood went to trial, and despite the best lawyers money could buy, he was convicted of attempted murder. There were more than a dozen witnesses in addition to Bree and me, and forensics had him nailed—the bullets were fired from a gun registered to him, his fingerprints were all over it, he had gunshot residue on his hand—it was an open-and-shut case. But...”
“But?” Mei-li prompted when Dirk didn’t continue.
“He received two sentences of fifteen years to life, to be served concurrently. Not consecutively. The judge took pity on Blackwood because he was a ‘grief-stricken father’ when he gunned us down.” Dirk was silent for a moment. “A few years later I heard they tacked on five years for bribery of prison guards.” He made a sound of disgust. “Concurrent fifteen-year sentences means only seven and a half years for each attempted murder conviction...but bribery got him five years.”
Mei-li’s lips twitched into a ghost of a smile. “I have heard about the...shall we say, inconsistencies...in the America jurisprudence system. Especially when someone has money. It’s not all that different here, Mr. DeWinter.”
“Dirk,” he corrected. “Please.”
She nodded. “Dirk.” Her dark eyes held his. “But if Terrell Blackwood is behind the kidnapping, he must be out of prison.”
Dirk nodded. “He was paroled in January. I was notified about his parole hearing last fall, but I...I didn’t attend. The reasons are complicated.”
Mei-li glanced at the boarded-up windows around them and cocked her head toward the wind and rain raging outside. “We have nothing but time.”
He thought about the best way to put it. “Part of me wanted him locked away forever. I could forgive him for trying to kill me—I’d killed his son, and in his mind I deserved to die. But I can never forgive him for trying to kill Bree, when all she did was tell the truth on the witness stand.”
“But you didn’t attend his parole hearing to give a victim impact statement.” At the look of surprise he couldn’t help but show, she explained, “We have something similar here in Hong Kong—we were a British colony for a long time, remember.” Then she said, “But you didn’t go. Why
?”
“Because by that time I’d become a father,” he said simply, as if that said it all.
A glimmer of a smile returned to her face. “I see.” And somehow he knew she did see. That she understood it hadn’t been fear of the potentially negative publicity something like that would bring, but rather unexpected compassion for the man who’d loved his son so much he’d been driven to take the law into his own hands, to exact his own brand of justice. A father’s justice. The same kind of justice Dirk was envisioning now.
“After Blackwood’s trial, Bree and I headed for California. I legally changed my name from Derek Summers—the name I was born with—to Dirk DeWinter. Not just to leave behind the stigma that still attached to the name, but because my agent, Marty Devens, recommended it. Bree suggested Dirk. My agent suggested DeWinter. Said it was ‘euphonious.’” He laughed abruptly. “I didn’t even know what that word meant back then. He had to explain it to me.”
Then Dirk shifted gears. “So now you know why Terrell Blackwood wants me dead,” he said. “Now explain to me what you said earlier about Vanessa.”
“Inconsistencies in her story,” she said promptly. “Didn’t you spot them?”
“Not sure exactly what you mean.”
“Several things. First, there was the fact Chet was knocked out and the girls were chloroformed, but neither was done to Vanessa. Bound with duct tape, yes, but that’s all.”
“Yeah. She didn’t have an answer for that when you questioned her.”
“Second, she said she thought it was room service with lunch when the doorbell rang.”
Dirk snapped his fingers. “Right. If it was room service, why wouldn’t they have used the butler’s entrance and not the front door?”
Mei-li said softly, “That wasn’t actually what I meant, but that’s another inconsistency. They’re starting to pile up.”
Dirk frowned. “Then what did you mean?”
“She said the girls were in their bedroom taking their afternoon nap when the kidnappers arrived. But lunch would have arrived before their nap, not during it, so those two statements she made contradict each other—if she was expecting room service, the girls wouldn’t be napping. And if the girls were napping, she couldn’t have been expecting lunch to be delivered. Anyway, didn’t you notice the little tea table in front of the window? One of the chairs was knocked over...the way it might be if the girls were snatched in the middle of their lunch...not from their bedroom.”
“Is that important? Where they were when they were taken?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t like inconsistencies in stories. Vanessa told one lie for sure, possibly two or three. We don’t know why she lied—I’ve had people lie to me for the damnedest reasons, even my own clients.”
“I’m not lying,” Dirk was quick to interject.
“I didn’t say you were, just that some clients do. Sometimes it’s a misguided effort to make themselves seem more heroic than they are. Sometimes it’s because they’re ashamed to admit something, or they don’t see it as relevant to the case. So Vanessa isn’t necessarily lying because she’s involved—her lies could have a perfectly reasonable explanation. But until we know for sure...”
* * *
No, Dirk’s not lying, Mei-li mused as she followed him back upstairs to the Spring Moon Restaurant. Academy Award–winning actor or not, she didn’t think he was acting when he’d told her the story he’d just recounted. But he’s not telling the whole truth, either. She wasn’t unduly perturbed—not about this. As she’d told Dirk, her clients often withheld information from her. But she had the basic facts behind the kidnapping now, understood the motivation of the man who’d engineered it—and that perturbed her.
Kidnapping for ransom—at least in Hong Kong—was a business of sorts, and most kidnappers played by the rules. Rule number one: receive the ransom, release the victim unharmed. That wasn’t to say the initial ransom demand was paid. As with most things in Hong Kong, the ransom amount was negotiable—which was where she came in. She was extremely skilled at negotiating with kidnappers and had an uncanny knack for knowing just how low the price could go before the kidnappers dug in their heels. And while her fee wasn’t tied to how much money she saved her wealthy clients on the ransoms they paid—that was an idea fraught with potential disaster for the victims and their families—bonuses from grateful clients weren’t uncommon.
But kidnapping for revenge was a completely different animal, and something with which she had no experience. There were no rules that both sides adhered to, because the motivation wasn’t money. She’d be flying blind on this case. If she were wise, she’d bow out with her record intact and let Dirk find someone else. Problem was, she couldn’t think of a single ransom negotiator in Hong Kong who had any more experience in this kind of situation than she did. Even worse, the kidnap victims in this case were little more than babies. If you walk away and anything happens to them...
She couldn’t do it. She’d gone into this line of work for a very personal reason, and she couldn’t walk away now any more than she could change what had happened eleven years ago. But she owed it to Dirk to tell him and let him make the decision. She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped as an idea occurred to her. If Vanessa and/or Chet were involved in the kidnapping, a little misdirection could work in her favor. But she needed to warn Dirk of her plan ahead of time.
She put a hand on his arm to stop him just as he was about to enter the restaurant. “I have to tell you something,” she said in an urgent undertone. “But before I do, how good an actor are you?” She laughed suddenly and hit the heel of her hand against her forehead before he could say anything. “Sorry,” she apologized. “You are an actor—an award-winning actor. I wasn’t thinking of that, honest. I just want to tell you something in front of Vanessa and Chet, and I want you to pretend you don’t already know what I’m going to say.”
One corner of Dirk’s mouth quirked upward in a travesty of a smile. “I think I can manage that. So what are you going to tell me?”
“I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’m the best ransom negotiator in Hong Kong. I’ve never lost a kidnapping victim in all the years I’ve been doing this—not one.” Okay, a couple of times she’d needed an assist, but now wasn’t the time to bring up that detail and go into a long and involved explanation, because that wasn’t her point. “But I’ve never had a case that involved kidnapping for revenge.”
Dirk’s smile faded, replaced by an expression Mei-li had no trouble reading. Desolation. The way a man might look if all hope and light and faith had been extinguished. “You’re withdrawing?”
“Not at all,” she reassured him. “I’m still willing to give it my best shot. But I won’t lie to you—I’ll be relying more on gut instinct than on past experience. If you still want me, knowing that...”
He didn’t hesitate. “I want you on the case.”
“Then I’m in, a hundred percent.”
He frowned suddenly. “Is that what you’re going to say in front of Vanessa and Chet? That you don’t have any experience in cases like this?”
She nodded. “If they’re involved, the more I downplay my credentials, the less likely they’ll worry about what I might uncover. The less worried they are about me, the more likely they’ll let something slip...assuming there is something for them to let slip. See what I mean?”
Dirk’s eyes warmed with admiration. “Damn, you’re good.”
Suddenly there was something more in his eyes, his face, something Mei-li responded to instinctively, and all at once she could hardly breathe. It was crazy—she never got involved with a client. Never. But this man was different, somehow. And the admiring way he was looking at her now contrasted markedly with the way he’d looked at her in the jazz club when she’d first met him two weeks ago. Tearing her eyes away from his eyes now was the ha
rdest thing she’d ever had to do. Hardest. Thing. Ever.
* * *
They slept—if you could really call it sleeping—with hundreds of other guests in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. All the chairs were taken when the five of them finally made their way downstairs from the restaurant. So they selected a corner of the spacious, high-ceilinged lobby and settled down to try to sleep as best they could, given the uncomfortable marble floor and the storm outside. Mei-li shared a pillow and blanket with her cousin Patrick. Vanessa, she noticed with curiosity, shared one with Chet. And though the two of them tried to hide it, it was obvious to anyone who really looked that it wasn’t the first time.
Hmm, she thought, making a mental note for the future, I wonder what that signifies. It could be nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time men and women working in close proximity fell for each other. But it also added credence to her theory that neither Vanessa nor Chet could be trusted...yet. Because if the two were romantically linked, it was highly unlikely Vanessa was involved in the kidnapping without Chet’s knowledge or assistance.
Mei-li turned over, careful not to disturb Patrick, who was already asleep. That’s when she saw Dirk was sitting up, wide-awake, his back pressed against the wall. From time to time he glanced down at his hands, then up again, staring at nothing in particular. She hesitated, not wanting to intrude, but eventually she slipped from beneath the blanket and made her way quietly the few feet to where Dirk sat.
She settled against the wall next to him, and in a voice pitched so low it wouldn’t disturb any of the sleepers, she said, “You really should try to sleep, Dirk.”
The grief-stricken face he turned to her shredded her heart. “I tried.”
She desperately wanted to reassure him that his daughters were safe and sound and would eventually be recovered once the ransom was paid. But they’d both know it was a lie. Dirk didn’t need platitudes, and from the little she knew of him he didn’t want them, either. Only the truth would serve with a man like him. But he didn’t need to hear the unpalatable reality spelled out.