Now it was his turn to play me.
“Thanks,” I said. “Then I should give the chips to my father.”
The paralegal popped her head out again. “If you’re ready now, Mr. Ramirez will see you.”
We stood up. Maloney stepped in front of me.
“Last chance, Stafford. What’s it gonna be?”
I stared him down. “Where’s my son?”
—
“STAUNTON, VIRGINIA. A Paul Martin used a credit card there when they checked into a motel early this morning. Nobody caught it until this morning.”
Brady was filling us in as we drove uptown. I had agreed to turn over the chips as soon as he walked up and announced that the Kid was safe.
“We dispatched a team from the Richmond office and heard back from the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office. Staunton City Family Services has the boy and the two adults are in custody.”
“When can I talk with him?”
“Our people should be there anytime.”
“Who found them?” Maloney jumped in.
Brady chuckled. “A social worker on her lunch break. She recognized them from the Amber and called her kid brother, who just happens to be a deputy with the sheriff’s department.”
“So they’ll be claiming jurisdiction?” Maloney said.
“Who cares? I don’t!” I threw up my hands. “You guys are all so credit-hungry you make me sick. Give the deputy a medal if that’s what he wants. Just get my son back home.”
Maloney spoke through gritted teeth. “It is not a question of who gets credit, Mr. Stafford, but who has control. If your son was in the hands of the Virginia State Police, we could request that he be turned over to our people, and you would be able to tuck him into his own bed tonight. Right now, your son is in the hands of the child welfare bureaucracy. Will local police back them up or will they listen to us? Will they want to do their own investigation before handing him over? Will there be a hearing? Jurisdiction in such cases can get complicated quickly.”
I thought it over. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m a little stressed. I don’t know much about this kind of thing.”
“I keep telling you. We’re working on it.”
So why didn’t I believe him?
—
WE WERE BACK downtown, sitting outside the federal courthouse. Maloney had taken the box of chips into his meeting with Assistant District Attorney Ramirez. I kept falling asleep, only to jerk myself awake each time, retreating from my stress-filled dreams. Each time, the Kid was in danger and I was stuck somehow, unable to get to him. Each time the setting was different—sometimes surreal, sometimes mundane—but the situation was always the same. Sleeping was more exhausting than staying awake.
Brady’s phone buzzed and he spoke quietly for a moment and rang off.
“That was Maloney. The lawyers say they’ll have a warrant in the morning—maybe late tonight.”
“I’m thrilled.” Wit was beyond me. I was reduced to sarcasm.
“He’ll be out in a minute.”
“The world awaits.”
Brady chuckled. It wasn’t that funny. Maybe he was trying to be nice. I felt myself nodding out again and prepared for another scene of mental torture.
The buzzing of his phone saved me. He answered, and a moment later, handed me the phone. “They’re with your son, now.”
“This is Senior Agent O’Connell. Who am I speaking to?” He had the jarring, flat vowel sounds of South Boston. They must have been loving him in Staunton, Virginia.
“My name is Jason Stafford. I understand you have my son.”
“We are with your son, sir. He is currently being cared for by local social services.”
Legal niceties. “Can I speak with him?”
“He’s not saying much.”
I fought for control. “Would you please put him on the phone?”
There was a long silence and then I heard a shallow, light breath on the other end.
“Kid? Kid, it’s Jason. Your father. Are you okay?”
He moaned slightly.
“Kid, those people are policemen and they are going to bring you home. They will bring you here to me. Do you understand?”
No answer. Damn. What would Heather do? I had no idea. Panic began to strangle me. What would my father say? I was all alone. I opened my mouth and let out whatever sounds were able to scrape their way to the surface.
“I’m sitting in a Town Car,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” he hummed loudly. I stopped talking and waited.
“The Lincoln Town Car?”
“Yes, Kid. A Lincoln.”
“Hmmmm. Signature or Signature L?”
He was okay.
“I don’t know. Listen, Kid. I want to come and bring you home, but I can’t. These men will bring you here.”
“Glade—the welcoming scent of home.”
Less than a day with his mother and he had already slipped back into quoting taglines.
“Yes, Kid. Home to the Ansonia. We’ll go for ice cream.”
“’Nilla?”
“Of course. Now be cool. Listen to the men, okay? Do what they say.”
The silence went on so long I checked the face of the phone to see if we were still connected.
Finally. “’Kay.”
“Very good, Kid. Very good. You are a very brave boy and I am proud of you. Do you understand?”
Another long silence, then, “’Kay.”
That was the best I was going to get—and as much as I could have hoped for.
“Let me talk to the man again. Give him the phone again, will you?”
The Boston voice came back on.
“Are you still there, Mr. Stafford?”
“Yes, thank you.” Relief was overwhelming. At that moment, I would have promised that anonymous voice anything he would have asked for. “Can you tell me what happens next?”
“That will be up to a judge. There will probably be a hearing in Family Court here in the morning.”
I felt an explosion coming on. “But, wait! They kidnapped him!”
“Sir, the New York office has instructed us to stay on the scene, and act as your son’s advocate until further notice. We will do our utmost to get this resolved first thing. Your son should be on his way home by noon tomorrow.”
Another whole day. I wanted to scream. His routine. The schedules that let him order his world. All were upside down.
“Wait! Listen. What’s he wearing?”
“Sir? Uh, a red shirt and jeans.”
“Good.” Angie must have done something right. “And tomorrow’s Friday, right?”
“Yes, sir. Tomorrow is Friday.” The Fed sounded like he was talking a psycho into dropping the chain saw.
“Black. Pants and shirt. Don’t worry about the socks so long as they’re clean. Make sure they know. It’s important.”
“Yes, sir. Black. Don’t worry, sir, we will take care of it.” He rang off.
I gave Brady back his phone. Brady was my new best friend. He was such a great friend. An FBI friend. He had made it so I could talk to the Kid.
“RIGHT TURN. Fifty feet.” The voice of the GPS jolted me awake again. She sounded like a BBC announcer crossed with a third-grade teacher.
I had slept through the drive up to Darien and I felt almost human—Maloney had made me eat something before we started out. Then he had tried to prep me for confronting Hochstadt, but I kept nodding out while he was talking. Then I nodded out while I was talking. Maloney left me alone after that.
We were deep down a meandering boulevard, drifting through an arboretum of huge spreading oaks and impenetrable ten-foot-tall rhododendron forests. Every so often we passed an entryway, sometimes marked with a pair
of stone gateposts. Far back from the road, lights twinkled through the leaves, giving the only evidence that the area was currently inhabited.
“Pull over,” Maloney said.
He checked the cell phone/transmitter—again. “Just stick to the script and you’ll do fine. No tricks. No improv. Let him take the bait. Don’t push it.”
I tried to remember the script.
“I still say we should have called him first. I just show up at his door? He’s going to be totally panicked.”
“Panicked is good. He’ll start making mistakes. Just don’t make any yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
A second car pulled up beside us—two more FBI agents.
“We’ll be out here. Seconds away. If anything starts to go wrong, sing out. We’ll be all over it.”
I didn’t want to think about what he meant by things going wrong.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said.
Maloney got out and walked to the other car. Brady pulled forward.
A miniature lighthouse doubled as a mailbox. We pulled around it and entered a long straightaway, bordered on one side by a long line of those pine trees you always see bordering fields in pictures of Tuscany. A wide lawn on the other side sloped up a long hill to a grove of three spreading oaks that blocked the front of the house. Brady drove up slowly and stopped the car just past the trees.
“Not the castle I expected,” I said.
The house was a two-story colonial with a built-in two-car garage. It wasn’t small, but neither was it one of the vast mansions we had passed after pulling off the highway.
“It’s got to be the smallest house on the block,” he said.
“Or the county.”
Brady’s phone buzzed. He answered and listened.
“That was my boss, asking why you haven’t gone in yet.”
“Tell him I’m gone.” I got out and followed a wide brick walkway to the front door. I rang the bell. If it was working, I couldn’t hear it. I waited a minute longer and used the heavy brass knocker shaped like a ship’s anchor. The door boomed. Still nothing. I turned back to look at Brady and shrugged my shoulders. He shrugged back.
“There’s no one home.” I spoke loud enough for the transmitter to relay my disgust to Maloney. “Can you take me home, now?”
Just as I started back toward the car, the door swung open. “You must be in a big hurry,” a smoky female voice warned.
The woman must have come straight from the shower. Her hair was turbaned in a mauve towel and the rest of her was wrapped in an ankle-length matching robe. She had the frame of a large woman, but the proportions to carry it off.
“Mrs. Hochstadt?”
“Sorry about all this.” She let her hand flutter over the V in the robe. If she was trying to be demure, it wasn’t working. “I didn’t expect you until eight. I just got in. Come in.” She turned and walked inside, leaving the door ajar behind her. I followed.
“I’ll be back in just a minute. Please go ahead and look around down here.” She disappeared behind a wall and I heard her climbing the stairs.
“Mrs. Hochstadt? Is your husband here?” I called after her.
“No.” She turned it into a laugh. “We don’t need him, do we? You go ahead and get started.”
Whoever I was supposed to be, it wasn’t getting me any closer to interviewing her husband. I decided to wait for her return and then make a quick exit.
The living room had the pristine, unlived-in look of having been prepped for sale. There were no stacks of magazines, no clutter along the top of the waist-high bookshelves, not even a hint of ash in the fireplace. A thick book of Jill Krementz portraits lay on the coffee table as though it had been placed there by a real estate agent. A few low-numbered washed-out prints by artists I had never heard of hung on the wall over the bookcase. Otherwise, the walls were neutral and featureless, save for a big, empty rectangular space over the fireplace, outlined in a faint, grayish smoke residue. It didn’t look like the palace of a hedge fund king; it looked like the pleasant but characterless abode of a moderately successful CPA.
The furnishings were all good quality, but straight out of the showroom. There was not one favorite chair, or funny lamp, or antique end table that said anything about the people who lived there. The space felt as cold as an oncologist’s waiting room.
The lady came clacking down the stairs in a pair of backless, low-heeled shoes, black toreador pants, and a scoop-necked fuchsia sweater. Suddenly, the décor made sense. Whenever she was in the room, all eyes would be on her.
“Please, sit. Make yourself comfortable.” She directed me to a surprisingly comfortable swivel chair facing the couch. “I just need to find my glasses.” Her hip brushed my shoulder as she swept past to a closet by the front door. She rummaged through a large handbag. “I am blind without them and hopeless with contacts,” she said as she eased down onto the couch. For a woman with such obvious assets, she was touchingly shy as she turned her head away to put on the glasses. Then she turned to me and her face registered sudden shock.
“Jesus Christ! Jason Stafford? What the hell are you doing here? You are Jason Stafford, aren’t you?”
“I am. I’m sorry to frighten you. I’m here hoping to talk with your husband.”
“The Worm? What would you want with that son of a bitch?”
Did I know this woman? How would I have forgotten her? “Uh,” I stammered. “It’s about work.”
“Of course.” She tossed her hair back and looked down her nose at me. “He’s always looking for people with your talents.”
Whatever those talents were, she clearly didn’t like them.
“Look, I’m sorry to trouble you.” I started to rise. “If your husband isn’t here, I should just leave.”
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Sit down.”
I sat and waited for her to make the next move.
She looked flustered. “I thought you were the appraiser,” she said, with an embarrassed laugh. “I’m selling the house.”
“Ah.” I nodded as though I now understood.
“You don’t remember me,” she said. It was less an accusation than a statement.
“No,” I admitted. “Though I can’t imagine how I would have forgotten.”
She acknowledged my awkward compliment with the kind of look that hinted more than promised, but was still guaranteed to make most men sit up and bark, or roll over and beg for their belly to be rubbed. But it wasn’t a friendly look.
“About ten years ago. You were visiting Case’s London office. I was assigned to be your factotum.”
“I must have been seriously jet-lagged,” I said. And then a face came to mind. A much different face—and body. Lank hair, roseate complexion, a much bigger, wider woman, but with the same green eyes behind oversized glasses. She had efficiently organized two weeks of client meetings, prepping me, guiding me, and even chauffeuring me when necessary. “Wait. I’m sorry. Diane . . . ?”
She nodded. “Havell. I still used my maiden name then.”
“It was good to have a fellow Yank to translate for me.” More memories came back. “And keep me from getting run over every time I stepped off a curb.”
“And find you someplace that served cold beer.”
“But you were . . .” I paused, fumbling for words that would not offend.
“Pregnant,” she said. “Six months.”
“Ah,” I said. I hadn’t suspected.
“I didn’t use the name Hochstadt until our daughter started school. It was just much easier.”
“Ah,” I said again, trying to arrange all the clues into a coherent picture. “I’m flattered you remember me.”
“You were famous.”
Not yet infamous.
“And your daughter? Where is she now?” There was no sign that a child had ever walked into that barren living room.
“She is in school. In Switzerland. I plan to join her as soon as all this”—she waggled her fingers expressively—“is done with.”
“And your husband?”
“Soon to be ex-husband,” she corrected. “The Worm is living in Greenwich. I asked him to move out this spring. He was surprisingly gracious about it. What is it you want with him?”
“I have to ask him some questions.”
“I’m sure,” she said, drawing out the word dismissively. “About Arrowhead, no doubt. All your old crowd.”
I was losing her. We were past pleasant memories and easy rapport.
“I never heard the name until last week,” I said. “You may think you know all about me, but you’re wrong.” Maloney would be champing at the bit, but I thought there was a chance to get some information, if I could keep her talking.
She looked away. “Talk to my husband.” She rattled off his address.
I didn’t bother to write it down—Brady would already be plotting it on the GPS. “Diane, you helped me once. Please, you can help me again. It’s important. Who’s the ‘old crowd’ you’re talking about?”
“Are you asking me to trust you, Jason?”
It was time for cards on the table. Maloney was going to have a conniption. “I’ve been hired by Weld Securities to look into Arrowhead. And what I’ve found so far is going to take a lot of people down. But I need help. Give me names, Diane, please.”
She looked up and glared at me. “I lost my marriage to them. That ex–Case crowd. I was married to a nice guy. A little nebbishy, but he treated me like a queen. He ran back-office operations for a small hedge fund—moving money around the world to avoid the tax collectors. He was good at it. Then he got hired by Arrowhead. They convinced him he was a trader and turned him into the nastiest little bundle of raw nerves you ever saw.”
“The business chews people up,” I said. “Trading’s not for everyone.”
She snorted. “He was no trader. He came home with these stories of crossing big trades between major players, as though he knew the markets better than Rothkamp or Dresden Bank. It was absurd.”
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