by Blake Pierce
Riley hoped that Ehrhardt wasn’t going to give her similar problems. But she had a bad feeling about him.
From what she remembered, Ehrhardt came from a working-class background and liked to brag about his common roots, his empathy for ordinary Americans. It seemed to Riley that his look didn’t fit his message. She guessed that his haircut alone must have cost hundreds of dollars.
But what do I know about politics? she asked herself.
“Well,” Ehrhardt said, “I take it we’re waiting for a ransom demand.”
Riley was startled by his matter-of-fact, straightforward tone.
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Well, that’s the way these things usually go, isn’t it?” Ehrhardt said. “I mean, my wife and I are famous, we have money. Somebody’s going to demand a ransom sooner or later. I’m new to this kind of a situation. How are we going to handle it? Are we going to pay or not?”
Chief Franklin drummed his fingers on the table.
He said, “Congressman, I’m afraid your wife’s abduction might be of a different nature. We don’t know yet for sure.”
Ehrhardt’s eyes darted back and forth. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Riley, Bill, and the chief looked at each other uneasily.
Riley said cautiously, “Congressman, are you aware of a string of murders that have occurred lately in this part of Delaware?”
Ehrhardt looked rather blankly surprised.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I’ve been busy campaigning.”
Rhonda Windhauser didn’t look surprised at all.
“I read something about it,” she said. “But I’m sure Nicole’s disappearance was completely unconnected.”
Riley was more and more mystified by their casual attitude.
“What makes you think that?” Riley asked.
“Well, those girls were nobodies, right?” the woman said. “Just kids mostly—and thought to be runaways at that. Nicole must have been targeted by somebody different. For a kidnapping, this is really well-timed. Whoever did it knows that Representative Ehrhardt doesn’t want to make a big fuss about it right now. He’s got to get right back on the campaign trail. He’ll be glad to pay a ransom and end this quietly.”
Then for the first time, a slightly distressed look crossed the woman’s face.
“Wait a minute,” she said to Riley. “What did you say your name was?”
“Riley Paige.”
The woman shook her head and said nothing. Riley understood immediately. Rhonda Windhauser must have heard about Riley’s little adventure with the photographer. The man’s complaints had been in the news. So Windhauser probably wasn’t happy to have Riley on the case.
Bill told Ehrhardt, “Given the nature of these recent abductions and murders, we really have no choice but to assume that your wife’s disappearance is part of the same picture. We have to proceed on that basis.”
Ehrhardt exchanged glances with everybody.
“Well, I can’t tell you how to do your job,” he said. “But I’m sure there’s been a mistake here.”
Rhonda patted him on the hand—a little too familiarly, Riley thought.
“Don’t worry, Wyatt. We’ll get a ransom demand any time now. We’ll get all this sorted out.”
It seemed to Riley like a weird reassurance. Since when did the loved ones of abductees look forward to ransom demands?
Rhonda looked at Riley, Bill, and Chief Franklin and added, “I’m assuming that you’ll do everything you can to keep this out from the media.”
“We’ll do our best for now,” Chief Franklin said.
Riley felt a new wave of uneasiness. How long could they keep this new development out of the news? So far, they hadn’t had much luck in that department.
Bill leaned across the table toward Ehrhardt.
“Congressman, do you know where your wife was going at the time of her abduction?”
Ehrhardt shrugged slightly.
“Sure,” he said. “Nicole was on her way down to Dwayne Prentice’s house on the beach.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of Dwayne,” Rhonda put in.
Riley vaguely remembered seeing someone by that name on TV—a political pundit of some sort.
“In fact,” Ehrhardt continued, looking at his watch, “Rhonda and I are expected there too. Dwayne is holding a big strategy meeting tomorrow. We were just getting ready to leave DC when we got your phone call.”
Something about this explanation didn’t quite add up for Riley.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “You just showed up here in a chauffeured limousine. What was your wife doing driving by herself?”
Ehrhardt and his aide exchanged glances.
“I assume that nothing we say leaves this room,” Rhonda said.
Riley, Bill, and Chief Franklin all murmured in agreement.
“Well, Wyatt and Nicole have their little differences, like all married couples,” Rhonda said with an artificial smile.
“We had a little spat this morning,” Ehrhardt said. “She got mad and took off on her own without us—without me. You see, here’s what happened—”
Rhonda cut him off before he could say more.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “We’d just rather not make a big deal out of it. Appearances matter a lot, especially when an election looks like it’s going to be this close.”
Riley felt a chill at the way Rhonda said those words.
“Appearances matter a lot.”
So far, Ehrhardt and his so-called aide seemed a lot more concerned about appearances than they did about a woman’s safety—or even her life.
A political marriage if ever there was one, Riley thought.
She remembered some of what she had read and seen on the news about Ehrhardt. Although from a working-class family himself, he’d married into a much higher level of society. In addition to being a well-known supermodel, Nicole DeRose was the heiress to the Vincent DeRose wine fortune.
In Nicole, Ehrhardt had found the perfect trophy wife. She was excellent eye and arm candy, and she had all the money he needed to fund his political ambitions. And what did Nicole get out of it? Well, considering Ehrhardt’s rising political star, maybe she’d get to be First Lady some day.
Ehrhardt and Rhonda Windhauser struck Riley as possibly two of the shallowest human beings she’d ever met. They probably didn’t have a moral principle between them. Was it just possible that Nicole’s disappearance was merely a political stunt gauged to attract voter sympathy in the upcoming election?
Riley couldn’t help but wonder.
“May I see a picture of Nicole?” Riley asked.
“Certainly,” Rhonda said. And from her briefcase, she produced a portfolio full of photos of Nicole, many of them taken during her modeling heyday.
What struck Riley immediately was how unnaturally thin the woman looked. Anorexic or bulimic, she was sure.
The woman in these photos hadn’t lived a happy life, no matter how filled with creature comforts. Riley wondered if Nicole DeRose Ehrhardt was about to meet an even more unpleasant death.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Nicole rubbed the back of her head again. It still hurt from the blow she’d received after she’d gotten into that awful man’s car. When she’d regained consciousness, she’d found herself in this horrible, vile-smelling basement caged alongside a beaten-up teenaged girl. All the space she could see beyond a chain-link barrier was filled with clocks.
The only sense Nicole could make of the situation was that she’d been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. Such episodes were not unheard of in a family as wealthy as hers. During a trip to Mexico, one of her cousins had gotten kidnapped by some kind of gang. Her family had quietly forked over a few hundred thousand dollars for her release. The media never found out about it.
Surely that’s what was going on right now. Nicole wasn’t especially frightened. But she was a bit angry. If Wyatt hadn’t pissed her of
f earlier, she wouldn’t have driven off by herself. They’d argued about this thing he had with Rhonda, that trashy aide of his.
She didn’t mind that he was screwing around. They had an understanding, and she did plenty of screwing around herself. But they’d both agreed to keep it quiet and discreet. Why did he have to flaunt this stupid thing with Rhonda? It was like he wanted everybody to know about it. Did he really want a scandal this early in his political career?
But Nicole knew that it wasn’t practical to waste time worrying about that now. She had to focus on her immediate situation. Who was this other girl, and why was she here? She’d seemed to be asleep ever since Nicole had regained consciousness. Nicole gave the girl a nudge, and she started to wake a little. She weakly lifted her head.
“Who are you?” the girl asked in a barely audible voice.
“Never mind who I am,” Nicole said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Kimberly,” she said. “I’m nobody.”
The girl lowered her head.
“Well, you can’t be nobody,” Nicole said. “I mean, somebody kidnapped you. Your family must have money. What kind of ransom is he demanding?”
The girl looked up at her again and emitted a hoarse, grim chuckle.
“A ransom?” she said. “What do you think is going on here? He’s not looking for a ransom. He’s going to kill us.”
The words took Nicole completely by surprise. Not that she believed it. It didn’t make any sense.
“Well, he sure doesn’t plan to kill me,” she said. “I’m worth way too much alive. Don’t you recognize me? I’m Nicole DeRose. I’m sure you’ve seen me in magazines or on TV.”
The girl shook her head tiredly. She didn’t seem the least bit interested in who Nicole was.
“He kills us all,” Kimberly said. “I’ve seen him kill two of us already.”
Now Nicole was starting to worry. But this just couldn’t be true.
“He’s not going to kill me,” she said again, trying to convince herself.
The girl looked her up and down.
“Oh, he’s going to kill you,” she said. “I’ll bet he kills you before he gets around to me.”
Nicole felt a sharp tingle of fear.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you’re even skinnier than I am. He’s been starving me ever since he brought me here, but he keeps saying I’m still not thin enough, I’ve got too much meat on my bones. But you … Well, you’re already as skinny as the others he killed.”
Nicole shuddered. She looked at the girl carefully. Sure enough, as starved as Kimberly looked, Nicole was undoubtedly thinner. She’d been anorexic all her life. She’d never thought of it as an illness, though. She owed her modeling career to her unnatural thinness.
She tried to convince herself that the girl was just talking crazy talk. Why would anyone kill women just because they were thin?
At that moment, all the clocks started ringing and chiming. As they did, a man came into the room beyond the fence. Sure enough, it was the same man who had tricked her and caught her back on the highway.
He didn’t look like a bad sort of guy. He was odd, though. As the clocks kept up their wild noise, he wandered among them, adjusting and resetting them. And he was talking quietly to himself.
She shouted above the din, “Hey, how long are you going to keep me here?”
He didn’t reply, just kept mumbling and fiddling with the clocks. Pretty soon the noise started to die away.
Maybe I should try to make conversation with him, she thought.
It didn’t seem unreasonable. For one thing, she’d grown up around antiques all her life. While a lot of these clocks looked kitschy and tacky, some of them looked like real collector’s pieces.
“I really love these clocks of yours,” she said. “Are those cuckoo clocks real Black Forest originals? And is that tall case clock a genuine Jacob Godschalk? Wow, that must be worth thousands of dollars.”
He turned and looked at her. He started to talk again—but not to her. He seemed to be talking to somebody invisible in the room.
“You’re right,” he said. “She’ll do perfectly.”
To Nicole’s alarm, he picked up a multi-tailed whip off a table and walked toward the cage. He had a threatening look in his eye.
“Look, we need to talk about this,” she said fearfully. “Maybe you don’t know who I am. I’m Nicole DeRose. I’ve been on the covers of lots of magazines. My family owns Vincent DeRose, the wine company. I’m married to Wyatt Ehrhardt—you know, the Minnesota congressman.”
“Shut up,” the man said, definitely talking to her now.
“Now wait a minute,” she said. “You don’t seem to get that I’m worth a lot of money. I’m not just some nobody. And if anything happens to me, you’ll be in real trouble. But there’s no need for trouble. You can get a million or more as a ransom. You’ve really hit the jackpot with me. I’ll tell you who to call.”
The man opened the cage and stepped inside.
“Shut up,” he said again.
Then he lashed the whip toward her face. She turned away, screaming at the searing pain. She tried to run, but there was nowhere to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
When the interview with Wyatt Ehrhardt and his aide ended, a cop met Riley and the other participants outside the room. He looked extremely worried.
“We’ve got a problem—and a big one,” he said. “There are reporters waiting outside.”
Riley’s spirits sank.
Several cops formed a makeshift guard unit around Ehrhardt and Rhonda and ushered them through a door at the back of the building. In a few minutes, the worried cop returned.
“That worked okay,” he said. “We just rushed them straight out of the building, and their limo was waiting out back. But now reporters have the back door covered too.”
So much for keeping this out of the media, Riley thought.
Whoever was leaking information was staying awfully busy.
She gazed around the police station. Cops and support personnel seemed to be going about their business in perfectly normal fashion. They were at their computers, on their phones, picking up cups of coffee, chatting. Nothing looked suspicious or out of place.
But then, Riley realized, tipping the media might be perfectly normal here. Someone might be getting regular payments or just doing a favor for a friend. After all, hot tips from a small-town police station were not likely to be as big a deal as they were now that a congressman was involved.
The cop who had met them said, “You can go out whichever way you want.”
Bill shrugged and headed for the front door. Riley went along with him.
She could see that even in the still-falling rain, a cluster of reporters with cameras and microphones waited just outside the station. As soon as Riley and Bill stepped though the door, the media gang was all over them.
“What can you tell us about Nicole DeRose’s abduction?” shouted one.
“Was she taken by the ‘clock killer’?” demanded another.
Things were worse than Riley even expected. It sounded like somebody had even leaked her theory that the bodies were arranged like clocks.
“No comment,” Riley shouted.
Riley and Bill pushed their way through the thick crowd of people and cameras, to no avail.
“You’re Riley Paige, aren’t you?” shouted one woman.
“Is it true you got fired from the FBI earlier this year?” yelled a man.
“Are you going to break any more cameras?” screamed another.
The situation seemed hopeless. Their car was parked half a block away. Riley felt her anger rising. She couldn’t imagine how she and Bill were going to get away from these vultures without saying something that really shouldn’t be said.
Suddenly, she heard a car horn honking. She turned and saw Lucy pulling up to the curb in a car. Lucy threw the door open.
“Get in!” Lucy shouted to Bill and Riley.
Bill and Riley scrambled into the car, and Lucy drove them away.
But Riley felt no relief at the rescue. The whole atmosphere surrounding the case had changed. Pressure was mounting by the minute. And Riley knew that it was the kind of pressure that didn’t lead to solutions. It often led to terrible mistakes.
*
Nicole DeRose Ehrhardt had simply vanished. Lucy had organized the usual search teams to cover the area, showing her photo and asking for leads. Riley and Bill had managed to pick up their own car and join the hunt. They found no traces of the woman, no indication whether she had been picked up by a killer or by a more mercenary kidnapper. It was late in the day, and they still didn’t know what kind of case they were working on.
When Riley and Bill found themselves media-free, they located a burger joint and ruminated about the case over burgers and beers. They still had no idea whether Nicole DeRose Ehrhardt was still alive or not. But they knew that the killer who had picked up the other girls had held them for a period of time. If he was holding her, they still had a chance to could find him before he killed again.
“I have to wonder,” Riley muttered, “whether the congressman’s wife staged this herself.”
“You mean she might have gotten herself abducted?” Bill asked. “She couldn’t be doing that to pry money out of him. It’s apparently all her money anyhow.”
“Maybe she just wanted to escape,” Riley said, noting the touch of wistfulness in her own voice. “Maybe she had some charming friend pick her up and whisk her away to a more peaceful life. On an exclusive island somewhere.”
Bill took a bite of his burger, considering the possibility.
“By all accounts she participated in his political career. Hell, she paid for it.”
“I know. She probably paid in a lot of ways. And of course you’re right. She must be as ambitious as he is. I think she’d have to be dedicated, or she wouldn’t put up with him and with his pushy assistant.”
Before they were finished with their meal, Bill’s phone buzzed.
Bill said, “This is an email from Rhonda Windhauser.” He read it aloud. “Congressman Ehrhardt has just had a fruitful conversation with Special Agent in Charge at BAU, Carl Walder. If there are no new developments tonight, we will meet again tomorrow morning to discuss the various options in this situation. Be at the following address—”