Mistress of the Game

by Sidney Sheldon

  She jabbed a French-polished talon at Peter. He instinctively stepped back, clutching the couch for support. Had Robbie really? He shuddered. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Perhaps your husband was mistaken.”

  His voice was a whisper. Peter knew Ludo Dellal had not been mistaken. And yet he couldn’t admit it, not even to himself.

  Despite years of psychiatric training and decades of practice, Peter Templeton could not accept that his son was gay. How many closet homosexuals had he counseled over the years? Scores, probably. With those poor desperate men, those tortured strangers, compassion had come easily. But with his own son, it was a different matter. He wanted, desperately, to believe that it was this horrible woman’s son who had led Robert astray, and not the other way around. That it was his, Peter’s, child who was going through a phase. His child who would grow out of it, his child who would go on to be a football star at Harvard and have a wife and kids, and look back at these teenage indiscretions as nothing more than a blip. As sexual teething pains.

  He clung to hope like a bare-knuckle climber clutching at a rock face. Robbie wasn’t remotely effeminate. Girls hung around him like fleas on a rat, pestering him for dates. Perhaps he was just shy? A late bloomer? It was possible.

  Your kid was sucking my kid’s dick.

  Mrs. Dellal was leaving, sweeping up her fur coat and Chanel quilted purse like Cruella de Vil.

  “I mean it. If I see your homo son within ten miles of our house, or Dom’s school, I will call the police. And you better pray the cops find your boy before my husband does.”

  The front door slammed shut.

  Silence.

  “Daddy?”

  Lexi stood in the doorway wearing a white muslin dress with butterflies embroidered on the sleeves and a blue bow in her buttermilk hair.

  Peter thought: Look how innocent she is.

  “What’s a pervert?”

  To his great embarrassment, Peter felt himself blushing. “Gee, honey, it’s, erm…it’s a bad word.”

  “Yes, but what does it mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, sweetie.”

  “Oh. Well, what’s a homo, then?”

  For God’s sake. How much had she heard?

  “Why don’t you go on upstairs and play, Lexi. I’ll come up in a few minutes and join you.”

  “I’m bored of playing.” Lexi dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Does pervert mean S-E-X?”

  “Go and watch The Jungle Book. Tell Mrs. Grainger I said yes to TV just this once.”

  Lexi skipped off to the playroom with squeals of delight. Peter sank wearily onto the couch. Oh, Alex. Why aren’t you here? Why is it still so hard? He knew he had to talk to Robbie about the Dellal boy. He just didn’t know where to start.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to. Robbie broached the subject himself. Rolling home at eleven o’clock, drunk as a lord, he found his dad in the kitchen.

  “You’ll be pleashed to hear I’m gunnaway,” he slurred. “Meanmy-frendom.”

  “You’re drunk, Robert. I can’t understand you.”

  “My friend.” The word rolled cruelly off Robbie’s tongue. “Me and my friend Dom are going away. To New Orleans. I’ll be out of your hair for good. Break out the champagne!”

  Raising his hand, as if making a toast, he lost his balance, gashing his head against the kitchen table as he slid to the floor.

  “Oops.” Tears of laughter coursed down his cheeks.

  “Your drinking isn’t funny, Robert.”

  “It’s not? Jeez, that’s strange. Yours was always hilarious.” Contempt blazed in Robbie’s eyes. “Maybe I should pull a gun on you? Liven things up a bit. Would that be funny, Dad?”

  Peter felt like crying. When had the word dad become an insult?

  “Dominic’s mother was here this afternoon. Making threats. She says if you go near her son again, she’ll report you to the police for proselytizing.”

  “Prozshele…what-le-tizing? Man, that’s a new one on me. We’ll have to try that some time. Dom loves to try new things.”

  Peter snapped. “You’re revolting! Do you think this is a game? That boy is barely sixteen years old.”

  Robbie shrugged. “He knows what he’s doing. As a matter of fact, he’s damn good at it.”

  “His parents will prosecute. You could go to jail, Robert, you do realize that?”

  “Not if they can’t find us.”

  Robbie’s head was heavy. After he left Lionel Neuman’s office this afternoon he’d wandered from bar to bar, slowly drinking his way into the numbed, half-conscious state that had become a way of life for him recently. Holding a conversation was like trying to swim through thick, warm soup.

  The truth was he didn’t even care that much about Dom Dellal. It wasn’t like they were in love or anything. But his father’s disgust made him want to lash out. It reminded Robbie of all his own feelings of guilt and self-loathing.

  Just my luck to be the world’s first gay homophobe.

  “I went to see Old Man Neuman today.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. Took myself outta the will.” Robbie dissolved into drunken giggles. “I told him. I said, ‘You can stick your money. I don’ wan’ Kru-gerfugginbren.’”

  Peter sighed. “You can’t simply write yourself out of the will, Robert. There are trusts…it’s complicated.”

  “Not anymore it ain’t. I gave it all to Lexi.”

  Robbie stood up. The room spun like a clothes dryer. Putting a hand to his forehead, he felt the sticky warmth of blood on his fingers.

  Peter thought: Has he really repudiated Kate’s will? Can he do that?

  Out loud he said, “You’re too drunk to talk sense now. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “I won’t be here in the morning.”

  Robbie took an unsteady step forward, squaring up to his father. His eyes glinted with drunken, reckless rage.

  Peter’s stomach lurched. Robbie was so close, he could smell the stale alcohol on his breath. I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid of my own son.

  “I’m going to New Orleans. With Dom.”

  “If you leave this house tonight, don’t bother coming back.”

  The words were out of Peter’s mouth before he knew they were in his head. “Don’t worry. I won’t. Good-bye, Dad.”

  “Good-bye, Robert.”

  Peter watched his son stagger out of the room, blood still flowing from the gash on his head. Seconds later, he heard the front door slam.

  He waited for the guilt to hit him. This is the part where I run after him. Tell him I didn’t mean it. Seconds passed. Then minutes. Peter realized that the feeling swelling inside his chest was not guilt at all.

  It was relief.

  Switching off the downstairs lights, he tiptoed up to Lexi’s bedroom.

  It’ll be just the two of us now, darling. You don’t need your brother. Daddy’ll take care of you.

  He wouldn’t wake her. He’d just kneel next to the bed for a moment. Breathe in her sweet child’s smell. Take comfort from her warm, sleeping, innocent body.

  He pushed the bedroom door open slowly. The room was pitch-dark. Picking his way toward the bed from memory, gingerly stepping past the toy box and over the discarded clothes, Peter knelt down next to the bed and reached out a loving arm.

  A gust of wind in the face caught him by surprise.

  He glanced up. The bedroom window was open.

  Beneath it, in the dim glow of the moonlight, he stared at the empty bed.

  Lexi was gone.

  EIGHT

  THE FIRST THING SHE WAS AWARE OF WAS DARKNESS.

  Total darkness.

  Not the darkness of her bedroom. The thick, cold, suffocating darkness of the grave.

  She tried to scream, but no sound came out. Something had been stuffed into her mouth, a bitter-tasting cloth. She couldn’t breathe.

  Where am I?

  Panic began coiling its way around
her heart like a snake. Was she dreaming? She sat up. Her head cracked painfully against something solid and metal.

  A coffin? No! Oh God, please, no!

  Daddy!

  Again she screamed. Again the cloth choked her, stifling the sound in her throat. Slowly, consciously, she began to inhale through her nose.

  Keep calm. You’re alive. Don’t panic.

  Air filled her lungs. Relax.

  Bedtime stories about her great-great-grandfather Jamie McGregor came flooding into her mind. Jamie had been brave and cunning and resourceful. He’d battled sharks and land mines, escaped shipwrecks and fought off assassins. No situation had been too hopeless for him to figure a way out of it.

  She tried to think logically.

  What happened? How did I get here?

  It was no good. She couldn’t remember. Mrs. Grainger had put her to bed, and then…and then…darkness. The fear returned like a great crashing wave.

  Help me!

  Lexi shivered. She realized suddenly that she was freezing cold. She was still wearing the thin cotton nightie she’d gone to bed in. Beneath her back the hard metal floor felt like sheet ice.

  Bump.

  What was that?

  The floor was moving. It vibrated steadily, then every twenty seconds or so, it threw her body upward, like a tossed pancake. Suddenly it dawned on her: A car. I’m in the trunk of a car. I’ve been kidnapped, and they’re taking me somewhere. To their hideout.

  If it hadn’t been happening to her, it would probably have been exciting. Kidnapping was one of Lexi’s favorite games. But this was no game. This was real.

  “Get out.”

  The man wore a mask. Not a ski mask, like bank robbers wore in the movies. A rubber Halloween mask. It made him look like a corpse.

  Too consumed with fear and cold to move, Lexi froze. Her eyes widened with terror.

  Another voice. “Don’t just stand there, man, pick her up. Get her inside before someone shows up.”

  The corpse reached into the trunk and grabbed hold of Lexi’s arms. On instinct, she fought him, kicking and scratching like a wildcat.

  “Fuck!” The corpse clutched at his forearm. Her sharp nail had drawn blood. “Little bitch!”

  Pulling back his arm, he punched her in the face so hard she blacked out.

  Time passed.

  She was in a room with no windows. A low-wattage lightbulb burned constantly. Days and nights became one. At first, the pain in her face where the corpse had punched her was unbearable. But gradually it began to subside.

  There was a bed in one corner, an old-fashioned porcelain chamber pot and a battered cardboard box containing a few desultory books and toys. The walls were bare, the floor smooth, green linoleum. It felt more like an office than a room in a house. The toys and books were all designed for much younger children.

  My kidnappers don’t know much about kids.

  Fear gave way to boredom. There was nothing to do, nothing to break the monotony of the endless, lonely hours. At regular intervals, a masked man would enter, empty and replace the chamber pot and bring Lexi some food. Her captors never spoke to her, or answered when she spoke to them, but occasionally she heard their dim, muffled voices through the walls.

  There were three of them. A leader with a deep voice and a strange, foreign accent, and two others-the corpse and a third man who wore a variety of animal masks, sometimes a pig, sometimes a dog or a snake. It was the third man, animal man, who really frightened her.

  He was standing over her bed. He had the pig mask on.

  “Make a sound and I’ll kill you.”

  No you won’t. If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now. You need me alive.

  Lexi opened her mouth to scream but it was too late. A huge, hot hand clamped over her mouth. He was on the bed, pushing her down. The weight of him squeezed the breath from her body. One hand still covered her mouth, but Lexi could feel the other clawing beneath her nightgown. NO! A sharp pain between her legs brought tears to her eyes. She tried to move, to struggle, but it was hopeless. She was pinned like a leaf beneath a boulder.

  He made strange noises. Deep, guttural groans Lexi had never heard before. The hair on her scalp began to rise with terror. Then suddenly the weight lifted.

  Voices.

  “What are you doing in there, man?”

  It was the leader.

  “She ain’t due another meal for three hours.”

  Lexi couldn’t see the pig’s face, but she could tell he was afraid.

  He hissed at her. “One word and I will slit your throat. Understand?”

  She nodded.

  Agent Andrew Edwards looked at the stack of black-and-white photographs on the table in front of him. It was as thick as a phone book.

  “Is this all of them?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s every warehouse, hangar and industrial facility within a fifteen-mile radius of where the car was dumped.”

  It was eleven days, four hours and sixteen minutes since Peter Templeton had reported his daughter missing. Agent Edwards had played the tape of Peter’s desperate 911 call so many times he could recite it by heart. Nine times out of ten with these child disappearances, the parents ended up being involved. What could you say? It was a sick world. But in this case, Agent Edwards believed the father. Not only did Peter Templeton’s distress seem genuine, but the ransom note left under the child’s pillow bore all the hallmarks of an organized criminal operation: no fingerprints, typed on the most common Lexmark printer paper, succinct, untraceable.

  The Blackwell family had two weeks to transfer $10 million to a numbered account in the Caymans. If they involved the police at any point, the girl would be killed immediately.

  Agent Edwards was a Scot by birth but a New Yorker by temperament. He had pale skin, watery amber eyes and hair that couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to be blond or red. He loved the Yankees, hated the street gangs and drug dealers that plagued the city and described his yearly vacation to the Jersey Shore as “traveling.”

  He sighed heavily.

  “There must be three hundred facilities here.”

  “Four hundred twenty.”

  “Got any good news for me, Agent Jones?”

  “As a matter of fact, sir, I do. These”-Agent Edwards’s colleague handed his boss a much-thinner manila folder-“are the derelict or deserted premises.”

  “How many?”

  “Only eighteen of ’em.” Agent Jones smiled. “I can set up surveillance this afternoon, if you want.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “But, sir, we have less than sixty hours. The deadline-”

  “You think I don’t know what the damn deadline is?”

  Agent Edwards was pissed. What kind of idiots was the Bureau hiring these days? The last thing he wanted was to have every warehouse in New Jersey crawling with feds. If these guys got spooked, they’d kill the kid on the spot.

  The Blackwell family had taken a huge risk involving the authorities at all. With their money and connections, they could easily have made the payment quietly and been done with it. Or hired their own private hit men to get these guys.

  But they hadn’t. They’d come to Agent Edwards with a case that would either make or break his career. Screwing up was not an option.

  Finding the kidnappers’ car had been a coup. Agent Edwards had matched the DNA on hairs found in the trunk to hairs from Lexi’s bedroom pillow. Two voice-distorted phone calls to Peter Templeton’s office were probably made from inside a large, industrial structure. The FBI’s tech team had analyzed the echo, if you could believe that shit.

  But it wasn’t enough. Agent Edwards didn’t want eighteen targets. He wanted one.

  “Send a chopper up. Not too low. It needs to sound like routine air traffic.”

  “Yes, sir. What are they looking for, exactly?”

  Agent Edwards looked at his junior witheringly.

  “The Emerald City of Oz. Jesus! Tire tracks, shit-fo
r-brains. They’re looking for fucking tire tracks.”

  He never wanted to get involved.

  He was in a brothel in Phuket when the call came through, enjoying the attentions of a pair of eleven-year-old twins. Pussies so tight they could have cracked hazelnuts, tongues as eager and skillful as any of the high-end hookers he used back home. Bliss.

  He loved the Thais. Such an enlightened people.

  “Ten million bucks, split three ways. The house has third-world security. Trust me, you’ll be taking candy from a baby. Get in, get the kid, get the money, get out.”

  “I don’t need that kind of money.”

  Laughter. “You don’t have to need it. You just have to want it.”

  “I’m straight now, all right? Find someone else.”

  He closed his eyes in pleasure as the girls plundered his body with their tongues and fingers. At home, he paid prostitutes to dress up as schoolgirls. But nothing could compare to the real deal: the smooth skin; the hard, budding breasts; the hairless paradise between the legs…

  “You know, the little girl is adorable.”

  The voice on the phone wasn’t giving up.

  “She’s the spitting image of her mother. Everybody says so.”

  He hesitated. An image of Alexandra Blackwell in her youth popped into his mind. He remembered her well. The long, lithe legs tanned a perfect caramel. The cascade of blond hair. The trembling pale-pink lips, parting, smiling.

  Hello, Rory. It’s been a long time.

  “How old did you say she was?”

  One of the Thai twins circled her tongue around his anus. The other opened her mouth, cocooning his balls in a cave of warm, soft wetness. He moaned with pleasure.

  “She’s eight.”

  Eight years old.

  The spitting image of her mother.

  Everybody says so.

  “All right. I’ll do it. But this is the last-”

  He never got to finish. The line had already gone dead.

  “Have you found her?”

  Peter Templeton clutched Agent Edwards’s hand so tightly he nearly cut off the circulation.

  Agent Edwards thought: Poor bastard. He’s aged ten years in the last two weeks.