Brooke had managed to find a seat to herself on the train, and now she struggled to catch a nap. She’d snuck out the door this morning without waking Terri. Terri had her parents’ number and her cell phone number if she needed to get ahold of her for any reason.
She put her head against the window, feeling the cool glass against her forehead.
In a way, she was glad she’d found a way out of Darla’s party tonight. After all, these were people she saw day in and day out, and she had no desire to see them every moment of her downtime. Besides Darla, there was Barry, Joyce, Lipton, Connor, Jill, and Lesley. They were her team, and she loved them to death, but please…enough was enough. She shifted in her seat, searching for a comfortable position that simply did not exist.
It was just now 9A .M., though it seemed like they’d been traveling forever.
The train was packed, with the exception of maybe three or four empty seats. Brooke said a silent prayer of thanks that no one had asked to slide in beside her for the long trip north. Her guilt for bailing on Darla faded with every passing mile. Every mile the train put between them and New York City was another mile closer to Wyatt and her folks.
21
IN A RESTAURANT AT THEWALDORF-ASTORIA,JOEL ATE Abig breakfast.
He hadn’t realized how hungry he’d been. It seemed now that he’d been running primarily on nerves and adrenaline. He’d slept like the dead in his plush room. He woke recharged and ready to roll. He sipped from his coffee, and spooned eggs and hash browns into his mouth as fast as he could chew.
He had stared at the ceiling late into the night, debating what his next move should be. Whether he lost her now, or not, he had to bring it down a notch and exercise some good judgment.
A certain level of peace had settled over him last night as he lay in bed, listening to the sounds of the city. Either he’d find her or he wouldn’t. The rest was out of his hands. He could sweat blood day and night, and not draw any nearer to her. If she was still in New York, if she was or had been at the Waldorf, he’d reach her step by step.
With the peace had come a plan. Nothing elaborate, but a place to start. Last night, for the first time, he’d entertained the idea of hiring a private detective. New York was a huge city, and in the few days in which he’d stumbled about in the streets, he’d felt terribly overwhelmed. Maybe a PI would get quicker results. Today he planned to give that option some serious thought.
He’d get to it after breakfast. He buttered a biscuit while a waitress topped off his coffee mug. She smiled at him, and he blushed slightly. She was cute. He didn’t see a ring on her finger. He’d leave her a generous tip.
The thoughts she aroused in him reminded him of how long his life had been on hold. But just maybe things were beginning to change for him. In seventy-two hours his universe had been tipped on its head. Simplypondering what the next seventy-two might have in store for him scared him to death.
Shelby sipped his coffee and kept his face down. The table was in a corner in the rear of the little coffee shop, where it was darker and where there was less foot traffic. Even with the British driving cap and the pair of tinted Oakley glasses on his face he still felt terribly visible. The coffee shop was in Little Italy, not an area of New York where his face would exactly stand out. But he was still the president’s attorney and might be recognized.
He pulled the bill of his cap down and stared straight down the aisle. The piece in theTimes had him on the ropes. They’d expected the news to break, but they’d also hoped to control theflow of news a little better. This development simply meant they had to mobilize and get matters resolved before they escalated out of control.
They had to find the videotape. If they were right in their assumptions, the contents of the tape would put them all away for the rest of their lives. Shelby dabbed his brow with a paper napkin, beginning to perspire simply thinking about it. The address they’d found at Beagle Run led to a postal box at a post office in Manhattan. The box was registered to Inez Mulkey. Some quick legwork last night had uncovered the fact that Inez Mulkey was deceased. She’d been dead for eleven years and had lived in Utah for the five years previous to her death. Why the postal box had never been taken out of her name had stumped them for a while, but not long.
It turned out that Mulkey was the name of hersecond husband. Her first marriage ended with the death of her spouse, Frank Donovan, from a heart attack. That marriage produced one child, a daughter named Darla. It hadn’t taken long to piece the puzzle together and determine who Darla Donovan was. This revelation caused much activity in Shelby’s chest cavity.
James Ettinger had mailed the videocassette to a producer at NBC News. It was a beautiful setup for her, really. Who knew how long she’d maintained that box, but hats off to her for the ingenuity. Shelby massaged his temples. He glanced at his watch. Desmond was late.
He wondered how long Ettinger had had this little trick up his sleeve. Months? Weeks? Days? Had it been a long-term plan, or had it merely occurred to him in a moment of sudden remorse? Either way, they’d screwed up big-time. They hadn’t thought to check his mail on a daily basis; in hindsight, it seemed obvious. Shelby wadded a paper napkin in his fist and squeezed down on it, his knuckles going white under the strain. They let their guard down, and now they might pay for their apathy. Sure, they’d suspected for a couple of months that Ettinger was getting weak and might crack, and that’s why they’d taken the initiative to have the threat eliminated. And there wassome satisfaction in knowing they’d read the signs correctly, that Ettinger had grown weak and dangerous. But they made their move twenty-four hours too late.
Desmond parked his yellow Ferrari Modena a block and a half from the coffee shop and continued on foot. He wore Ray Bans and a leather bomber jacket. He jerked the glass door open and walked to the rear of the coffee shop, sliding in across from Glen Shelby.
“You’re late,” Shelby said, staring down at his coffee.
“Traffic.”
“Where’s the tape?”
“Good question,” Desmond said, flipping open a laminated menu. He was not really reading it. It just gave him something to do with his hands. “It wasn’t in the postal box by the time we got there. I’ve had my people watching it round the clock since late last night. The box was empty when we found it, and it’s still empty. Given that it’s coming up on Christmas, the postal service is running a tad slower than usual, so there’s every chance it simply hasn’t arrived yet.”
Shelby drummed his fingernails along the rim of his coffee mug. He raised his face slightly, glaring at Desmond from behind his glasses.
“If Ettinger dropped the tape in the mail Monday morning, after he recorded his statement and packaged it up, it most likely went out Monday afternoon,” Shelby said. “Today’s Thursday.”
Desmond nodded.
“Monday to Thursday. Maine to New York. No, it should be here by now. I say it’s been in that box already, and Donovan has picked it up.” Shelby paused to consider his own line of thought, then continued. “Yes, she has it. She may not have viewed it yet, and in that case she doesn’t know what she has in her possession. She likely receives a lot of mail at that box. I imagine she checks it five or six times a week, maybe daily.”
A waitress stopped at the table and topped off Shelby’s coffee. Desmond ordered a cranberry juice and bagel with cream cheese.
Desmond said, “You may be right. But it hasn’t hit the news yet, and you know very well that if she has the tape and has viewed it—if it’s even what wethink it is—it would be everywhere by now. We wouldn’t be sitting here, and Yates wouldn’t—”
“Shut up!”Shelby hissed. “Don’t mention his name. Nothere.” He glanced around the coffee shop. If anyone was paying attention to their conversation, it certainly wasn’t obvious. The coffee shop was only about half full, and no one seemed aware in the least of their presence at the table in the rear.
Desmond shrugged.
Shelby adjusted the bill of his c
ap, shaking his head, clearly on edge.
“Anyway,” Desmond continued, “if the tape comes in at any time now, we’ll be all over it.”
“We’ve got to be proactive,” Shelby said, stabbing his index finger at the table between them. “You can have your people watch the box from now till eternity, but you’d better start sniffing around Donovan. My money says she already has the tape.”
“What if she has it at her office?”
“I don’t know. We’ll look there, as well.”
Desmond took a bite of his bagel, and said, “If she’s got it, we will find it.”
“You’d better have it by noon today, or the walls may begin to crumble,” Shelby said.
Desmond assured him, “If I don’t have that tape in my hand by twelve noon, I’ll be very close, I guarantee it.”
The past ten years, Joel had lived alone. He was a bachelor by both choice and circumstance. For the past seven years he’d made his home in a decent neighborhood in St. Louis. He paid nearly eight hundred dollars a month for two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a single bath, a large front room, and a garage with a tiny utility area.
His neighbor was a retired draftsman named Howard Tate. They got along well. Mr. Tate was a widower with lots of time on his hands. He was bored with life and invited Joel over for dinner every two days. Mr. Tate collected Joel’s mail for him, and kept his newspapers from piling up in the driveway.
Tate didn’t answer his phone at 8:30A .M., when Joel first dialed him from the Waldorf. He was likely out on one of his half a dozen daily walks around the neighborhood. He had a pug named Cedar, and he and his dog had logged more miles than Delta Airlines. Joel tried again in ten minutes, and again in twenty. Still no answer.
Joel took a cab across town to the hotel where he had stayed previously. He gathered his things from his room, settled up with the clerk at the front desk, and dialed Mr. Tate’s number at a pay phone in the lobby. Maybe Cedar had escaped his leash and was making a mad dash for the Great Wide Open. Joel grinned at the mental image, then stepped out into the cold and waited for a cab to return him to the Waldorf.
Joel was betting that Megan had either gone to the Waldorf on Park Avenue or the apartment building on East Fifty-seventh, and now the fear was building that he’d spent too much time watching one and not the other. That might spell disaster, which was why he so desperately needed to get ahold of Mr. Tate.
An accident up ahead had traffic bottlenecked. Joel sat in the back of the cab, fidgeting with nervous energy.
“I’ll just walk from here,” he said, looking over the seat.
“Suit yourself, bub,” the driver said.
He threw the cash over the seat and crossed a lane of traffic to the sidewalk. He walked quickly, his hands stuffed in his pockets. The wind cut him in half. He noticed a copy shop up ahead. He went in the door and had to wait in line for a few minutes before being helped.
“How much do you charge to receive faxes?” Joel asked the woman behind the counter. She was haggard-looking and didn’t smile at him.
“Three bucks first page,” she said. “Two bucks every page after that.”
Steep!he thought, shrugging it off. “What’s the fax number?”
She handed him a business card from a stack on the counter. “Here,” she said. “It’s on there.”
“You take cash, right?”
Miss Congeniality shot him a look, which reflected her assessment of this man standing before her. She said, “Uh, yeah.”
He thanked her and hurried out the door.
He found a pay phone a half a block down, and dialed Mr. Tate.
Surprise, Mr. Tate answered on the second ring.
“Hey, hey…Joel!”
“Hi, Howard. Everything good with you?”
“You betcha! Me and Cedar, we been out on the town. How about you?” Mr. Tate said.
“I’m good, real good, Howard.”
“Great. I figured you’d be back home by now, Joel.”
“Yeah, me too.” Joel hoped to cut the small talk short, something scientifically impossible to do when dealing with the old and bored. “I’m stuck out on business.”
“Oh, yeah boy. I been there, yessir. I been there.”
Cut to the chase. “Listen, Howard. I have a small favor to ask of you.”
“Anything, my boy!”
“Great. Thanks, Howard, you’re a lifesaver. You know where my key is?”
“Sure, under the air-conditioning unit out back on the cement slab.”
Joel wondered for a moment how many hours Howard Tate had spent roaming through his house. “Good. Okay, in the spare bedroom, in the closet, are several unpacked boxes. In the one on top, should be a picture frame with a photo of a young woman. She has on jeans and a T-shirt. You follow?”
“Got it, boss.”
“Great. Remove the photo from the frame, then run into town to the supermarket and fax it to me.”
“The picture?”
“Yes, Howard, the picture.”
“Won’t it bend it up a little bit going through that machine?”
“That’s okay, Howard. I just need it in a hurry.”
“Whatever you say, boss. I’ll have it to you in a jiffy.”
“I owe you one, Howard.”
Joel read off the fax number for the copy shop, and they hung up. He offered up a short prayer that Howard would find the right photo and wouldn’t somehow botch this one simple errand. The photo was of Ariel, taken a year or so before Megan was born. It was one of the few mementos he had left from their life together, and it might just be the one tool he needed to get his daughter back.
22
DESMOND PARKED THEFERRARI A BLOCK FROM THE VAN.HEspoke into a handheld radio, cueing his people into action. Two men and a female exited the van and crossed the street to the high-rise apartment building. Desmond walked past the van at a steady clip. He glanced up at the high-rise. It was fifty floors of glass and steel.
He entered an office building that rose from the street corner a few hundred feet from the apartment building. He rode an elevator to the eighteenth floor and followed a hall around to the right, stopping at a locked door. He looked around, saw no one, and took a thin length of metal from his coat pocket, working it in the lock. In less than seven seconds he was inside the office with the door locked behind him. He pocketed the length of metal and strode to the window. The view overlooked the street, and from where he stood he could see the glass and steel high-rise that Darla Donovan called home. They’d had no luck at her office finding what they were after, so it was on to the next step.
Forty-five minutes earlier, Desmond had scouted the area around Donovan’s building. There was a bank branch located directly across from her apartment. That was useless to him. Next to the bank was a catering business. There was space available to rent or lease on either side of the apartment, but he needed to face the building, he had to be able to watch it. He settled on this skyscraper, determined which floor would allow him the best view, and within minutes was on the phone with the property’s real estate agent. She gave him the lowdown on which office units were vacant and available, as well as the lease prices. Desmond thanked her and hung up the phone. All he needed was an empty space where he could set up his equipment and wait.
Desmond removed a handheld radio from his coat pocket and keyed the transmission button.
“Echo-Two, do you read me?” Desmond stood close to the window, watching the reflections in the enormous glass building that his team had infiltrated.
“Affirmative, Echo-One.”
“What is your position?”
“We are in and moving into position,” the man’s voice stated.
“Good. Proceed.” Desmond unzipped the bag he’d carried with him and removed a pair of rubber-armor field glasses. Donovan’s apartment was on the eighteenth floor, just as he was now. Her apartment number was 1840. He knew that her apartment overlooked this street. He would have to wait a few minutes befor
e he found out precisely which one was hers.
The woman who entered the target’s apartment building wore large sunglasses and a brown wig over her blond hair. The earpiece was tucked neatly inside the auditory canal of her left ear. A tiny mike was clipped to the underside of the lapel of her long coat. There would be cameras in the elevators, she knew. She used the stairs. Her name was Carmichael.
Carmichael’s partner, Lewis, found a metal access door that led to a basement-level room. He left the lights off and removed a bulky flashlight from the sleeve of his coat. He thumbed the spring-activated button and the flashlight splashed a broad spot of light onto the wall. The walls were lined with electrical breaker boxes, which supplied power to all the tenants in the building. Also he found where the telephone cables fed in from an outside source. The telephone lines were housed in metal boxes mounted on the walls. Strips of masking tape that had been written on with laundry markers labeled both the breaker boxes and telephone boxes. Each apartment unit had a corresponding set of breakers and phone lines.
He spoke into his lapel mike. “Echo-Four. Thumbs-up on the phone.”
Working quickly, Lewis played the beam of light across the boxes and their strips of tape until he happened across the masking tape labeled 1840. He then took a small wad of putty from his pocket and affixed it to the door of the metal box, marking it for later. He moved to the other side of the room and quickly found the phone lines belonging to apartment 1840. Here too he affixed a wad of putty to the metal door.
“Echo-Four, moving out,” he said, following the beam of his light back to the metal access door.
The second man, Porter, had taken a separate flight of stairs. He wore wraparound sunglasses and a San Diego Chargers ball cap. He and Carmichael met at the door to apartment 1840, and he rang the doorbell. If anyone answered, they would simply apologize for having the wrong apartment number and continue on, regrouping per Desmond’s orders. But no one came to the door. They waited for nearly a full minute before the man worked his wizardry on the bolt lock, and in a flash they were inside.
The Greater Good Page 12