by Brad Parks
“Sure,” I said.
The terrain had finally leveled out. We were on top of the mountain now. We entered the large loop that fronted the house and drove around it counterclockwise before coming to a stop near the main entrance.
It was a beautiful home, though I couldn’t begin to appreciate the details. I was too focused on Plottner, who invited us inside with breezy hospitality.
The very sight of him brought yet another wave of nausea. But I was determined to play this straight, so as not to tip off Plottner as to the real reason for our visit.
“Where’s Lee?” I asked, looking around for Plottner’s massive slab of a bodyguard.
“He’s running an errand,” Plottner said. “Come on in.”
He led us into a grand living room that was too big for the amount of furniture in it. Plottner invited us to take a seat, and we did so.
“Can I offer you anything to eat or drink?” he asked. “I’ve got a chef who can whip up just about anything and the bar is fully stocked. I know the detective here is on duty, but I’m betting you could use something, Mrs. Bronik. A glass of wine, perhaps? Something stronger?”
At the moment, I would have rather drunk bleach, but I simply said, “No, thank you.”
“Very well,” Plottner said. “So, what can I do for you?”
I launched into a series of questions about the potential conditions of my husband’s employment, as if I was seriously considering the possibility. It wasn’t difficult to feign engagement in the answers—for all I knew, this would end up being our only option.
At every turn, Plottner had answers. Plottner Investments had an HR person who would tackle this concern, an IT person who could handle that one, a staff counsel who could set me at ease about another thing. Matt would sign a contract. Yes, it could be for multiple years, to give him some more stability. Yes, it was possible Matt could stay in Hanover, if that proved to be a sticking point, as long as he was willing to visit New York now and then. Yes, Plottner Investments had generous 401(k) matching and a no-deductible health care plan.
Once I had run through everything that came to mind, Plottner took one more chance to reassure me.
“I understand you have concerns, but I think Matt will find I’m a very reasonable man to work for,” he said. “My management philosophy is pretty straightforward. It comes from my father, who got it from his father, so it’s time tested: You get good people, then you treat them well. That’s it. I’m sure if anything else comes up, we can work it out.”
I offered a polite smile and said, “Thank you.”
“We’ve got a deal, then?”
“I’m still thinking things through.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “Perhaps Sheena will come through. I take it she’s at the lab, working hard?”
He said it innocently enough, like he expected nothing else. I looked toward Emmett, unsure of how to answer.
“Actually, we’re not sure where she is,” Emmett said cautiously.
Plottner’s forehead wrinkled. “Oh?”
“She ran off a little while ago,” Emmett said noncommittally.
“Well, I’m sure she’ll be back,” Plottner said, as if it were that simple. “You know these millennials. I have a few working for me and it’s just drama, drama, drama, all the time. If it’s not one thing, it’s something else.”
“Right, of course,” Emmett said. Then he added, like it was an afterthought: “Oh, and as long as we’re here, I was hoping you could clear up something pertaining to you that my Crime Scene Unit tripped across in Professor Bronik’s lab.”
Plottner’s face immediately spread into a wide smile.
“Uh-oh. I don’t need my lawyer, do I?”
Like this was all a joke.
Because wasn’t that how the man who was gifted millions and turned it into billions thought of everything? Like the world was one big joke, and he might or might not let the little people in on it?
Whatever the punch line was in Plottner’s mind, Emmett didn’t bite. He just plowed ahead: “They found your fingerprint on the door handle to the refrigerator that holds the virus samples.”
I watched Plottner’s response intently. The smile dimmed perhaps a shade and a half.
“Well, isn’t that something? I would have thought that’d be long gone by now,” he said. “That must be from the day I visited Professor Bronik’s lab.”
“You haven’t been back since?” Emmett asked.
“No. There was nothing there I really needed to see again.”
“How did your fingerprint wind up on the door? I can’t imagine that’s something most visitors wind up touching.”
“Professor Bronik was carrying a tray with both hands. He asked me to open the door for him so I—”
Plottner pantomimed opening a refrigerator.
“Weren’t you wearing gloves?” Emmett asked. “Professor Bronik’s lab is biosafety level two. I thought everyone had to wear gloves.”
Plottner held up both hands and wiggled his fingers. “I’m allergic to latex. It’s the strangest thing. Disposable lab gloves make me break out into a rash. I even have to use cloth bandages. Professor Bronik said the virus he was working with wasn’t dangerous to people, and since I wasn’t going to be touching anything vital it was no big deal to skip the gloves.”
The fingerprint, smoothly explained.
Other than the way his smile had momentarily lost a small amount of luster, there hadn’t been a hitch in his performance. I was sure it would have slithered through any lie detector without any deception indicated.
So why didn’t I believe him?
Was it his smug, self-satisfied air?
Or that Sheena’s disappearance benefited him, because it meant Matt’s best chance of rescue was gone too?
Or because I didn’t believe anything he had to say?
Emmett stood. “Thank you. Glad we cleared that up.”
“My pleasure,” Plottner said, also standing. “You’re both welcome to stay here for the evening, if you like. It can get a little hairy going back down that mountain in the dark. We have everything you might need—toiletries, pajamas.”
“No, thank you,” I said, glancing at the time. “It’s almost eight. I need to be getting home. I have a . . . a son.”
I faltered, not wanting to give away what felt like personal information to this man I didn’t trust. Which made no sense. Plottner surely knew we had a child. It was in Matt’s bio.
“Absolutely,” Plottner said. “Bedtime calls.”
He escorted us back to the foyer.
“If you have any other questions—about the job offer, about the fingerprint, about anything—please don’t hesitate to reach out,” he said. “And to give you one less thing to worry about: Theresa has already been in touch with the bank. That five million dollars will be here first thing in the morning. Just in case.”
Right. Just in case.
He had this enigmatic look on his face. It was not quite a grin—that would have been inappropriate. But maybe it wasn’t as somber as it should have been.
After he bid us farewell, and once the front door had closed behind me, I started whispering furiously to Emmett. “He’s lying about the fingerprint. It has to be more recent.”
“What makes you say that?”
“There’s no way that print would have lasted that long. A whole month? No way. Matt used that refrigerator almost every day. So did Sheena. One of them would have rubbed it off.”
“Unless they always wore gloves,” Emmett pointed out. “Fingerprints are made by the natural oils in the skin. If there were no other oils from anyone else’s skin to disturb it, it might have stayed. Or he might have touched the handle in a different place than your husband and Sheena normally did.”
“So you believe him?”
“I’m not saying I do or don’t. I’m just pointing out the possibilities.”
We climbed back into Emmett’s car.
“I just th
ink this whole thing is so convenient for him,” Brigid said. “The kidnappers have only been communicating with him all along. They’re asking for an amount of money that we could never come up with. And then he looks like the good guy by coming up with the reward. In the end, he gets what he’s wanted all along, which is Matt to come and work for him.”
Emmett didn’t answer. He just started driving.
CHAPTER 51
Emmett concentrated on the switchbacks as they wound back down the mountain.
Next to him, Brigid had settled into a quiet stew. She obviously suspected Plottner was more than just a nice rich guy who was being liberal with his checkbook, but was there really any evidence?
The fingerprint was inconclusive. It’s not like the thing came with a time stamp.
Beyond that? It was interesting that the ransom demand had come to Plottner directly, but it was by no means incriminating. After all, Plottner was the one who had brought money into the picture when he first offered the reward.
They were at the bottom of the mountain, back on a state road headed toward Hanover, when Brigid’s phone rang.
She looked at the screen and announced, “Sorry. It’s home. I have to take this.”
“No problem,” Emmett said.
“Hello? . . . Hey, buddy!”
Thus began a conversation between Brigid and her son, then between Brigid and her sister, Aimee.
When the call was over, Brigid stuffed her phone back in her pocket. “Sorry about that.”
“No problem,” Emmett said. “Your sister seems like a handy woman to have around.”
“Oh God, she’s a lifesaver. She’s beyond my best friend. We have this thing we say to each other. She tells me she’d take a bullet for me, and I tell her I’d walk through fire for her. But I seriously would. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“What does she do when she’s not taking bullets for you?” Emmett asked.
“She’s a forensic accountant and pretty much the best aunt in recorded history. Morgan adores her. She doesn’t have any kids of her own, which is too bad. She would have been a terrific mom. But I guess it’s for the best. The guy she married seemed great except that he was a lying sociopath. He traveled a lot for work, and it turned out he cheated on her constantly. But she didn’t catch him at it until about two months after the wedding. Then he tried to claim he was a sex addict.”
Emmett made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a grunt. He never bought into the nonsense that men were somehow incapable of monogamy, that they had an imperative to spread their seed.
Whatever the biology was, it had nothing to do with that.
It was about your word.
If you made a promise to someone, you kept it.
Brigid continued: “Oh, my thoughts exactly. She actually caught the jerk because he—”
She was interrupted by Emmett’s phone ringing. It was from 603 area, which was of course New Hampshire, and 643 exchange, which was Hanover; but, otherwise, he didn’t recognize it.
He accepted the call and said, “Webster here.”
“Yes, Detective, this is Professor David Dafashy.”
His refined, almost-English accent poured through the car’s speakers, which were connected to the phone via Bluetooth.
“What can I do for you, Dr. Dafashy?”
“Sheena Aiyagari is a fraud,” he blurted.
“Come again?”
“She has a boyfriend,” Dafashy said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Are you really that thick? Don’t you get it? She’s lying. She tells everyone she has a fiancé in India and the whole time, she’s polishing some other guy’s knob. Some Tuck student named Scott Sugden.”
“How do you know?”
“Leonie Descheun called me and told me. She was worried why the police were asking about me and so she checked in on me, because we have a professionally. Cordial. Relationship. She knows all about Sheena and her little games. They used to be quite close until Leonie learned what Sheena was really about. Then Leonie distanced herself. She said she didn’t want to be friends with someone who could be so mendacious. I’m seriously thinking about flying Leonie back over so she can testify at the hearing. That ought to clear my name.”
Emmett took a deep breath. “How so?”
“Because Sheena is lying! She’s cheating on her fiancé.”
“Even if that’s true, cheating on your fiancé doesn’t insulate you from being sexually harassed. That’s like saying someone who shoplifted could never have her purse stolen. One has nothing to do with the other.”
“Oh, right. Of course you would choose to see her side of it.”
Emmett didn’t have the brainpower to guess at what other game Dafashy might be playing here.
“There are no sides to this. A man has been kidnapped. The only side that matters is getting him back.”
“And yet you waste your time investigating me when you really ought to be investigating her,” Dafashy spat. “This is police malpractice. Your conduct is opprobrious. Opprobrious!”
“Sir, I’m merely—”
“Good night, sir!” Dafashy spat, then hung up.
Emmett looked over at Brigid, who seemed to have heard enough of the words that she was as mystified by the call as he was.
“That was strange,” she said.
“I know,” Emmett said. “I think I liked it better when he was invoking his right to counsel.”
CHAPTER 52
After the weird phone call from David Dafashy—and the spurt of adrenaline it gave me—I could feel myself crashing as Emmett drove me home and dropped me off.
His final words were about getting some rest, because tomorrow would be a big day.
As I trudged up the front steps to the house, the weariness seemed to have invaded every part of my being.
My feet throbbed. My knees felt like someone had replaced the cartilage with glass shards. My back ached. My stomach was a pit of acid, my head a repository for mud.
Sleep deprivation. It was like being simultaneously drunk and hungover.
It was closing in on nine o’clock. I hadn’t truly slept for nearly forty hours, since the previous morning. Before long, my body wasn’t going to give me much choice. Every part of it was shutting down.
I barely even glanced at my CRV, which was sitting in the driveway, having been delivered just as Plottner promised. I just climbed the front steps. It took most of my concentration to get the house key in the lock, turn it, shove open the front door, which seemed to have doubled in weight since I last opened it.
The first thing I saw, resting on the small table by the door that served as a crash pad for mail and other objects entering the house, was the key to my Honda. I wondered how it had even gotten there.
Then my attention was diverted to Aimee, who came in from the kitchen.
“I put him down maybe fifteen minutes ago,” she whispered. “I told him you’d kiss him good night when you got home.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s fine. I think he’s more worried about you than Matt. I told him Daddy would be back tomorrow and Mommy would be better once Daddy was home.”
That was sure true.
I let out a long breath and said, “Thanks, Aim.”
Aimee closed in, giving me the hug she knew I badly needed.
“We’re going to be okay,” she said. “Now go kiss your son and then let’s call it a night. I’m beat.”
I turned toward the stairs and trod up them, one deliberate step at a time. Morgan’s door was the first on the left. I eased into the lightless room, picking my way across the minefield of LEGOs, cars, games, and stuffed animals—the detritus of prepubescence, which I had navigated in the dark many times before.
When I reached the bed, I didn’t even see Morgan at first. It took a few seconds to pick out the small blond head, bobbing in the sea of covers.
I needed another moment to re
gister the faint sound of his breathing, slow and tranquil. Morgan had been born a few weeks premature, just enough that his lungs weren’t quite fully cooked. It required a brief stay in the neonatal intensive care unit, which was mostly terrifying for the front-row seat it gave me to all the things that could have gone wrong with my pregnancy—those babies born at twenty-seven or twenty-nine weeks gestation, hooked to ventilators, their grip on life as fragile as their tiny bodies.
After that, I promised myself I’d never, ever take Morgan’s breathing for granted.
I sat on the bed. I should have just leaned over, given him a quick peck on the head, and gone off to my own room.
But I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes the maternal drive felt less like a suggestion and more like a command. I stretched out beside Morgan, draped an arm over him, and snuggled as close as I could.
“Hey, my baby,” I cooed, wondering if he would wake up and talk to me, hoping he would.
But his breathing was steady, somnolent.
I let myself melt into the bed, feeling its softness, sure that sleep would drag me down any moment. Truly, other than after childbirth, I had never been more exhausted.
And then . . .
My knees.
My back.
My stomach.
My head.
The very things that made being awake so unpleasant were now, cruelly, making sleep impossible. A dull pain radiated from my spinal cord down my arm. My hip barked at me.
Maybe if I readjusted my position, I’d be better. But I didn’t want to disturb Morgan.
Once my brain realized the other parts weren’t going to cooperate with its plan to sleep, it fired back to life and started throwing a succession of images at me. David Dafashy, sipping coffee. Sean Plottner, his enigmatic not-quite-smile. Sheena Aiyagari, crying.
I tried to ward them off, to think about the bed, or Morgan’s breathing, or something not related to the forty hours since I last slept soundly, but the images kept coming.