Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

  “Let’s not rush,” I said. “We can’t go far from your medication right now. We need time to figure out what’s best. Okay?”

  Ruby nodded and looked out the window. “There’s more news trucks out there,” she said. “A lot more.”

  We watched those trucks for a while, kneeling on the futon with our arms wrapped around each other. I shivered even though my body still felt like it was on fire. For some reason, I didn’t mind looking down this time. Normally, I get the shakes glancing out a second-story window. I guess a deeper and far more profound horror had sequestered my acrophobia in some sort of mental lockbox. Hell of a way to find me a cure.

  Twenty minutes later, our apartment phone rang. I knew who’d be waiting for me on the other end of the line.

  Despite every voice inside my head screaming not to do it, I answered the phone.

  CHAPTER 41

  “Quite the scene we’re causing,” Uretsky said as soon as I picked up the phone.

  “What you did to Winnie . . . to us . . . Please, this needs to stop.” I needed the kitchen island countertop to keep myself upright. “You win. You win everything,” I said, pleading with him. “Please just let us go.”

  It was odd to hear myself beg, but beg I did. Desperation seeped from my pores as rivers of sweat. Hopelessness stifled my breathing. I had so much rage welling up inside me, so much hatred, that I was amazed I could put together a coherent thought. All I could do was to plead for some sort of mercy and pray that he might tire of toying with us.

  “You’ve watched the news reports, I trust,” Uretsky said. “Crazy stuff, John. Crazy.”

  “You need to stop this,” I said. “This needs to stop.”

  “You don’t control me,” Uretsky said. “I control me. You can just react to what I do.”

  “You’re going to keep killing,” I said. I meant it as a question, but it came out as a statement of fact.

  “I am,” Uretsky said. “Unless you stop me.”

  “How do I stop you?”

  I hated how weak I sounded. My voice came out pleading, shaken, and defeated.

  Uretsky just laughed. “By winning, of course,” he said.

  “You want me to commit another crime?” I asked. The anger in my voice encouraged me. “What do you want me to do now? Mugging? Carjacking? Drug smuggling? I guess there’s a lot to choose from.”

  “You sound excited, John,” Uretsky said, chuckling. “Are you actually looking forward to what’s next?”

  “How many more?” I asked.

  “Crimes, you mean? Not for you to know. It’s a game, remember?”

  I looked over at Ruby, still kneeling on the futon. If her ashen complexion were any indication, the end of this game was very near at hand. We couldn’t take much more.

  “I’m thinking about turning myself in to the police,” I said. “That means you won’t have me to play with anymore. You’ll be all on your own, and they’ll come looking for you. They’ll come after you with everything they’ve got.”

  “It won’t help,” Uretsky said. “I’m as hidden as hidden can be. They can’t trace any of my communications to you. These calls, the texts, they’re all done through a bunch of anonymous proxy servers and so many Internet hops it’s like the Easter Bunny traveled around the world. I’m untraceable. I can’t be found. But I can be stopped. Are you ready to stop me?”

  I let my apprehension pass through me like a shiver.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  Did I mean it? I didn’t know. But it was what came out of me, because now I wanted to stop him. I wanted to beat him. To be honest, at the most primal level, inside a place I cringed to acknowledge, I wanted to win.

  “Have you ever heard of the Machiavellian Scale?” Uretsky asked.

  “I’ve heard of Machiavelli,” I said.

  “Well, the Machiavellian Scale is an assessment of the lengths one would travel to gain an advantage in interpersonal encounters.”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is that a prince should imitate the fox in cunning as well as the lion in strength. A wise prince should never keep his word when it would go against his interest, because he can expect others to do the same. Those aren’t my words, by the way. That’s from Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s poetry.”

  “Like I said, your point?”

  Ruby was watching me intently, so she probably saw my jaw tightening.

  “My point is that I’ve always had the advantage in our burgeoning little relationship, and you the disadvantage, and I think it’s high time I tipped the scales a bit more in your favor.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because I want you to succeed,” Uretsky said. “I want this to be a fair fight. I mean, I think you’ve done your dandiest to thwart me, but it seems I’m always one step ahead. No arguing there. So are you ready to take the advantage? Are you ready for that big, bold step toward ending the game?”

  “And if I’m not?”

  My phone buzzed. I glanced and saw that I had received a picture text message. The sender’s name was just a series of numbers, but I knew where it came from. I went quiet, thinking about what to do next.

  “Look at it,” Uretsky said in a hushed tone, that breathy whisper of his.

  I did as requested and saw a picture of a playground and an attractive black woman pushing her young son on a swing.

  “There’s no geolocation information embedded in this image,” Uretsky said. “Nothing to help the police identify my whereabouts. You don’t even know what city I’m in, or what state for that matter. But I’m going to tell you about the woman in this picture, because it’s very important. Her name is Tinesha, and she’s a single mother of three, and if you don’t do exactly as I say, she’s going to be reported missing. You can go to the police. Go right now, but I’ll know if you do, and I promise you, she’ll go missing. I picked her because you know her, John. Is she familiar to you?”

  I studied the picture intently but couldn’t place the face. “No,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised. We interact with so many people on a daily basis, we can’t possibly keep track of them all. But I assure you, the connection to you is there. Now, you can quit playing my game. But I’ll know if you do, and she’ll go missing. The only way for her not to go missing is for you to succeed. Is that understood?”

  “I thought you were tipping the scales in my advantage,” I said.

  “I am,” Uretsky replied. “I just want you to know there are consequences for failure.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to figure out what my next clue means. No crime this time, just your smarts. That should make it easier for you to play along. Do you have a pen and paper ready, John? Get those items now.”

  I found a scratch piece of paper and a pen nearby. My throat had gone dry as I looked at the picture of Tinesha at the park, knowing that I held her life in my hands, and not just her life, but all lives tethered to her.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “Good. Write this down exactly as I say it. I won’t repeat myself. Forty-two, twenty-six, twelve, seventy-one, six, fifty-seven. Do you have it? If so, repeat those numbers back to me now.”

  I was still scratching down numbers, but I was able to repeat the sequence without error. “What does this mean?” I asked.

  “That’s for me to know and for you to figure out,” Uretsky said. “Now remember, for Tinesha’s sake, every minute and every second counts. Text me when you have the answer. Once again, John, best of luck to you. Game on.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Ruby studied the sheet of paper with the numbers scrawled on it.

  42, 26, 12, 71, 06, 57

  “It’s code,” Ruby said. “How the heck are we supposed to crack some code? John, we’ve got to take this to the police. They have experts in cryptography. They can figure this sort of thing out.”

  The look I gave Ruby conveyed my disagreement. “He’d told me he’d know
if we did that,” I reminded her. “He’ll kill the woman in the picture. We know that he will. He picked her because she’s somehow connected to us. We can’t let her down.”

  “We’ve got to get out from this, John!” Ruby said, pulling her hair to show her exasperation. Ruby slumped down on the futon, and Ginger took the opportunity to move in for a little snuggle. Despondent as she was, Ruby couldn’t resist giving Ginger what she needed. The cat purred delightedly while Ruby studied the numbers some more. “How will he know if we take this to the police?” Ruby said. “We tell them it has to be contained. We tell them everything.”

  “I don’t know how he’ll find out, but say that he does. Maybe there’s a leak,” I said.

  “By a leak, you mean Clegg?” Ruby said.

  I shot my wife an angry look. “Are you back on that?” I said. “Do you still believe that Clegg is helping Uretsky?”

  “Think about it, John,” Ruby said. “Who was the guy Clegg arrested the night Rhonda was killed? We don’t know anything about him. Maybe he’s helping Clegg out. Maybe Clegg got a computer guy to set everything up. He’s had time to plan this. I don’t know how Clegg is doing it, but I have a gut instinct about him. You’ve always trusted my gut. Why aren’t you trusting me now?”

  I thought back to Ruby’s vision board, her penchant for asking the universe for answers. It was true she seemed to always be in the know.

  “So if it’s Clegg,” I said, “then is he helping Uretsky or pretending to be him?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruby said. “We don’t even know what Elliot Uretsky actually looks like.” Ruby correctly judged my expression as one of dismay. “What’s wrong?”

  “I should have asked Ruth Shane what Elliot looked like when we were at Uretsky’s house,” I said, angry with myself. “She’d know. Maybe she even has a picture of him. If we had that, we could have matched it to the mug shot of the guy Clegg busted and we could be done with this debate.”

  “Fine. You should have done that,” Ruby said. “But there was a lot going on, and we’ve got to do something right here and right now. I say we go to the police.”

  I looked down at my phone and once again fixed my gaze on the smiling faces of Tinesha and her son. It was sickening to think that Uretsky was there—hiding in the shadows, watching them from a distance. He took this picture, and he sent it to me for a reason. What did he want us to do?

  Uretsky’s words came back at me like an arrow shot from a bow.

  Are you ready for that big, bold step toward ending the game?

  Ginger leapt off the futon and onto the floor when I sat down beside Ruby.

  “There’s no crime this time,” I said to her. “We just have to solve the clue. We already have Jenna and Rhonda on our conscience. Dr. Adams and your man, too. Do we really want to add a fifth victim to the list? Because that’s what’s going to happen here.”

  I showed Ruby the picture on my phone. Unfair of me, but I couldn’t let Jenna and Rhonda’s fate become Tinesha’s as well.

  Ruby stared at the display screen for a long while. She didn’t pick up on the connection to me, either.

  How did I know this woman?

  “We have nothing to lose by trying,” I said, “And Tinesha has everything to gain. We’ve got to try, Rube. We’ve got to try.”

  In one hand, Ruby held the paper with numbers on it, and in the other, my iPhone with Tinesha’s picture. She appeared to be weighing the two choices, as though her hands had become scales.

  “Do you want to be responsible for what happens to her?” I said. “Because I don’t.”

  Ruby’s gaze fell to the numbers. “Have you Googled them?” she asked.

  “No, but I’ll give it a try.”

  Since Ruby had thrown my laptop against the wall, I used my iPhone to Google the number sequence. I showed her the results, which were pages full of climatological data—sequences of numbers that happened to have all our numbers in it, but not in the order that Uretsky had given them to me.

  “So this is pretty much useless,” Ruby said. “What now? How long do we have to figure this thing out?” Her question made me pause. Ruby didn’t have patience to wait for an answer. “John, I said how long?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t tell me.”

  “He’s always given us a deadline,” Ruby said.

  “Well, this time he didn’t.”

  Ruby looked at me, unblinking. “That’s strange,” she said.

  We spent the next couple of hours trying various cryptographic approaches, many of which I got off the Internet. We tried substituting letters for numbers, but that just yielded a string of gibberish.

  “There’s no key,” Ruby said. “He can’t expect us to solve this without a key.”

  We were working at the dining table, with every inch of available surface covered by our spread of papers, all failed attempts at cracking the code. I found a Web site that listed two dozen different ciphers: Caesarian Shift, Double Transposition, Playfair, and the list went on.

  “We don’t have time to learn all of these,” I said, “let alone apply them.”

  “Time,” Ruby said, her voice trailing off.

  “What?”

  “He didn’t give us a time limit,” Ruby said.

  “You’re back to that,” I said.

  “He hasn’t done that before,” she said. “We had a time limit for the other crimes, shoplifting, armed robbery, prostitution, arson. Only this time we don’t have any limit at all.”

  “Play the part,” I said. “He didn’t give us a time limit for that.”

  “That’s because we weren’t the drivers for that. Dobson was coming to us. We didn’t go to him. But here he wants us to take action to get an advantage, not wait for it to happen. Just following his own logic, there should be a time limit.”

  “I still don’t see how that helps us,” I said.

  “You need to tell me exactly what he said to you.”

  “He just gave me these numbers. He told me not to go to the cops—that he’d find out if I did. He told me he wanted to tip the scales in our advantage. He said we didn’t know what city he was in, or what state. If we didn’t play along, Tinesha would go missing.” I was talking fast, probably too fast, but I wanted to remember every possible detail, so my mind was free-form thinking and recalling.

  “Not helpful,” Ruby said. “What else?”

  I couldn’t think of anything else that struck me. “He just ended the call by saying that every minute and every second counts,” I said. “That was all.”

  Ruby’s eyes went wide. “John, don’t you get it?”

  “What?”

  “Open your eyes and your mind. He didn’t give us a time limit, but he said the seconds and minutes count? Does that make sense to you?”

  “I don’t see how that helps us with these numbers,” I said.

  Again, Ruby looked at the sheet of paper. Her head was bent low, eyes studying. “Do you remember that climb you did in Colorado when I called your cell and asked where you were?”

  I nodded. It was a long time ago, over eight years, but I never forget my climbs. “I think I said we were going to try for a three-peak day. We’d just climbed Mount Democrat and Mount Lincoln, and Mount Bross was up next.”

  “That’s not what you told me,” Ruby said. “When I asked where you were, you initially gave me your location in latitude and longitude and I laughed, because you were so focused on your climb, you forgot who you were talking to.”

  My eyes went wide, and a tingle swept through my body. “You think these numbers are location coordinates?”

  “Minutes and seconds,” Ruby said. “Longitude and latitude can be expressed as degrees, minutes, and seconds or as decimal degrees. You taught me that. I don’t think this is a code with a key for us to crack.”

  “What do you think it is?” I asked.

  “I think it’s a place that Uretsky wants us to go.”

  CHAPTER 43

  We
stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into a thicket of trees. What secret was hidden here? What did Uretsky want us to find, or worse—to do? The Middlesex Fells Reservation covers over twenty-five hundred acres and is a welcome retreat for city folk seeking a day of hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, or rock climbing. The hilly tracts of rocky land should have been a picturesque sight, but we had a different sort of picture troubling our thoughts—that of a woman at a playground, pushing her son on a swing.

  I listened to the enveloping stillness and heard the forest come alive—the chirping of chickadees and other birds, the rustling of leaves in a light wind. A squirrel scampered up the side of a tall tree, its clawed feet clicking as it climbed out of my sight. The late afternoon, usually pleasing against my face, felt like nothing at all. The dampness of the bark and the moss would have normally brightened my spirits. This was a place of true scenic beauty, great for picnics and exploring. Horrible things weren’t supposed to happen here.

  Maybe Ruby was right. Maybe Uretsky wanted us to commit another crime right here, right now. Maybe it involved Tinesha, but I doubted it. The only thing I believed continued to weigh heavy on my conscience. Tinesha, however we knew her, would become Uretsky’s next victim, unless we intervened.

  At first Ruby had balked about coming here.

  “It’s probably a trap,” she had said.

  I had texted Uretsky after we figured out his clue, and he promptly texted back.

  Go there and see for yourself.

  He didn’t credit me with a job well done. No virtual pats on the back, Johnny old boy. Just a tersely worded “Go there and see for yourself.” I reminded Ruby that we had saved Dr. Adams’s life by robbing Giovanni’s Liquors but had helped to end Rhonda Jennings’s by our own inaction.

  Ruby fell silent. Obviously, she agreed. Still, she couldn’t ignore her gut instinct about what to do next. “We should tell the police,” she said. “They should come with us.”

  “He doesn’t want to hurt us, and he wants us to go alone,” I said.