by Hal Ross
She half-walked, was half-carried down a flight of stairs. Everything was darkness. A door opened and closed. She felt a whiff of fresh air. A side entrance to the building, she figured.
The stranger’s voice again, instructing her to get into a waiting vehicle. When she hesitated, he pushed her rudely, forcing her inside and onto the floor of what seemed to be a truck or SUV.
Over the course of the ride in stop-and-go traffic, Sidney only spoke to give directions.
A trickle of fear raced inside Ann’s belly. She couldn’t see. Not even a glimmer of light passed through the fabric that was covering her face and head.
Michael Scott, she thought in disbelief, had set her up. For what? Money? A lucrative new account? And who was the third person in this triangle?
She couldn’t even guess.
When they came to a stop, Ann heard Sidney’s voice moving away, then the squeal of a door being opened. A set of hands grabbed her. She thought of kicking out, but her feet had gone numb.
She swore she would not make a sound. She would not give them the satisfaction of knowing she was afraid. Despite her silence, strong fingers clamped across her mouth, causing some of the fabric of the hood to scratch her teeth.
Then the man took hold of Ann’s arm. She tried to shake herself free, but the hold tightened, to the point where it became too painful to struggle.
She was being led inside a building that had a stale smell about it. Was it a warehouse? she wondered. Where was she?
The man beside her paused.
Ann purposely slid to the cement floor. He tried to get her up again, but she willed herself to remain limp. All she could do was try to make this as difficult for him as possible.
He finally gave up the effort but not before shoving her hard. She flew backwards and hit something solid. Her shoulder started to throb where it had made contact. “Who the hell are you?” she asked.
Suddenly, the hood was yanked off her head and she was face to face with her assailant. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the light. Gradually, she could make out her surroundings. She had been right—it was a warehouse. She could see hundreds and hundreds of boxes.
She turned to the man. He was in his mid-to-late fifties. A stocky build with full head of brownish-gray hair. There was something intimidating about him. And something vaguely familiar. He had a gruesome looking scar that ran down the left side of his face. But what struck her most were his dead eyes.
The man seemed to smile, a creepy smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. Her stomach went into spasms.
“Hello, Ann,” he said, looking at her intently. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”
She shook her head from side to side, averting his gaze.
The man’s hand abruptly reached out, cupped her mouth hard and squeezed. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, goddamnit!”
She bit her tongue, felt blood. Please, prove me wrong, she prayed.
But the man’s voice, his scar.
Sweet God in Heaven …
“My friends call me Vincent,” he said. “But your mother named me Mad Dog.”
CHAPTER 59
Pacing back and forth in the same police precinct they had brought Patrick to, Jonathan’s impatience made him want to punch holes in the walls. But all he could do was wait. Detective Rondgrun was tied up. No one could say exactly how long he would be.
Jonathan had rushed back to Ann’s office, arriving just past five o’clock in the afternoon. He’d taken a seat at her desk, tried to make himself believe that she had simply gotten antsy and had decided to cut him loose. This rationalization was his last-ditch effort to avoid the inevitable—the knowledge that something terrible must have happened—and it was up to him to find out what.
Someone most likely had her. But who? He cursed himself for not having figured out well before now what had been going on. Once they had signed the contract with the inventor he had become complacent, wrongly assuming that the menace in Hong Kong would not follow them here. Instead of watching over Ann twenty-four/seven, he had believed that picking her up each day after work and escorting her home would adequately safeguard her.
And now she was gone.
He glanced at his watch for what felt like the hundredth time in the last half hour, and went to talk to Dora, still at her desk. “Are you certain nothing out of the ordinary happened this afternoon?” he asked a little too sharply.
The look on her face told him to calm down. “Sorry,” he apologized. “I know we’ve already gone over this. But I need you to humor me. Tell me again about the sequence of phone calls.”
Ann had always praised Dora’s efficiency. Jonathan hoped desperately that she would now come through with the one missing detail that would help him solve the mystery of Ann’s disappearance.
“Michael Scott,” she said as if by rote. “Followed by your call. Then she must have made nine or ten calls on her own, one after the other, without asking me to put them through for her.”
“Yeah. And who is this Michael Scott again?”
“American Freight Forwarders. They handle our shipping needs from China.”
Jonathan took out his pen and scratchpad and noted Michael Scott’s name and phone number. Standing, he thanked Dora and exited the office.
Think, he told himself. Manage it one step at a time.
Jonthan had taken the information to the police precinct with him, and here he paced, willing the detective to first enter the room, then to see some connection he could not, and finally to come up with the answer that would help him find Ann.
Forty minutes passed. When Detective Rondgrun finally appeared, he shook hands with Jonathan and asked him the reason for his visit. “Your brother again?” he said.
Jonathan started into his explanation, going back to the mystery of Edmund Chow’s disappearance, the discovery at Toy Fair that someone else believed they would obtain the rights to market Baby Talk N Glow, to the phone call Ann received this afternoon that preceded her leaving her office in a hurry.
The detective wore a look of skepticism. “So she’s missing what—all of four hours?” he asked. “My God, all you’d need is one major traffic jam in this city to delay you that long.”
“Four hours?” Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t think so. Besides, it isn’t like Ann to rush out of her office without her purse or her cell phone.”
Detective Rondgrun smiled. “It’s not only men that can be forgetful,” he said.
Jonathan hesitated, fighting for control. “Ann doesn’t go anywhere without her personal stuff,” he said forcefully. “This isn’t like her. Something has happened to her.”
“Oh? So what is it that you’re not telling me?”
He racked his brain for whatever else he could say. Then he remembered. “There was an incident in Hong Kong, Two men tried to grab Ann off the street. Somehow, she was able to fight them off. But they hurt her.”
“And how is this related to her going missing today?”
His patience teetered on the brink. He wanted to get out of there. If the detective wasn’t going to help, he wanted to start looking for Ann himself. “Look,” he said. “Call it instinct if nothing else, but I know I’m not wrong. Ann’s in trouble.”
Detective Rondgrun sighed. “We don’t have a whole hell of a lot to go on. Give me the number of this Michael Scott. It was his phone call that seems to have precipitated her dashing out in a hurry. I’ll have a little chat with him, see if he knows something.”
“And?” Jonathan said.
“And we’ll see what he says.”
“But what if he doesn’t have anything new to offer? Then what do we do?”
“Then we sit and wait.”
Jonathan headed for the door. “Please call me after you’ve talked to him.” He looked at his watch. “I guess that won’t be until tomorrow morning?”
“That’s correct. I’ll try to get at it first thing.”
Frustration now fueled Jonathan�
��s anxiety as he fled the precinct. He could not afford to wait for the detective. He would deal with this on his own.
CHAPTER 60
Memory took Ann back to when she was fourteen years old.
Home was the housing project in the worst part of town, nothing more than a two-room flophouse, with plaster-pealing walls and a linoleum floor that stank of mildew and decay.
At night, although she longed for the safety that sweet dreams offered, reality always intruded. Invariably, her eyes would close for a few minutes, then she would wake in a cold sweat. She’d listen to the sounds of her mother and the men who visited her, and she’d pray with all her might that it wouldn’t be him—Mad Dog—coming back for more.
The butcher knife hidden in her mattress offered her some comfort, and she promised herself that she would not hesitate to use it. But when the moment came, when she felt the heat of Mad Dog’s body upon her, she became paralyzed. Again.
Then a powerful sense of loathing swept over her, and when she heard the sound of his pants being unzipped, the knife was already in her hand. As he bent towards her, she plunged it into the closest part of him she could reach, his face.
He let out a petrifying scream.
What happened next was a blur. There was so much blood, a river of it, she had to move away or drown. So she slipped off the bed, onto the floor, snatching up the knapsack that contained her few earthly possessions. And she ran, through the door and outside, looking back to see if she was being followed, not stopping until she was blocks away.
Recalling all of this now as she lay on the bare warehouse floor, Ann realized that while the streets of New York had protected her anonymity for a while, there was still no place she could ultimately hide.
Mad Dog had found her. And this realization sparked a terrible fear in her. She was sure now that Sidney was nothing more than a pawn in Mad Dog’s crazed plan to exact his revenge.
CHAPTER 61
On the street near the police precinct, cell phone to ear, Jonathan dialed his mother’s number.
Cal answered.
Jonathan was reasonably sure that the doctor was all but living at Felicia’s these days. “I’m coming over,” he said. “Brace Mom.”
“Oh, God.” Cal’s voice was almost a groan of despair.
Jonathan realized how his words must have sounded. “No, Ann’s not—” He broke off. What—dead? Who the hell knew? His stomach seized. “I still haven’t found her,” he said instead. “We need to do something.”
“What do you suggest?” Cal asked.
He hesitated. “I don’t know. My mother and I will have to put our heads together.”
“All right. I’ll tell her.”
Jonathan disconnected then hailed the first empty cab to go by. He had called Felicia earlier in the day to give her a heads up without divulging any serious details. Later, he had called back with an innocuous progress report that still revealed nothing. But now he knew he would have to come clean. If anyone could think of a plan of attack it would be his mother.
When he arrived she greeted him herself, explaining that the good doctor was out for a walk. He understood at once that she wanted to afford them some privacy.
Once they were seated on the couch, she took his hands in hers. “I want you to tell me everything,” she said, her voice determined. “Everything, without holding back.”
When he spoke it was as if by rote, reciting the events of the past number of months: the full scope of the initial disaster with the American retailers, Edmund Chow’s duplicity, the attack on Ann in Hong Kong, and the New Yorker who was working against then.
“Tom Carlisle admitted this?” Felicia asked when he finished. She didn’t wait for an answer but immediately nodded to herself. “Yes, he was always a decent man.”
“Yeah, he is,” Jonathan agreed. Then he told her about his afternoon, concluding with his disappointing visit to Detective Rondgrun. Felicia dropped the hold on his hands. “So what do you plan to do about it?” she asked.
He didn’t know what to say.
“And what else are you not telling me,” she continued.
“Huh?” Jonathan looked up in surprise.
“You’re in love with Ann, aren’t you? And have been for as many years as I can remember.”
“Mother—”
“So why don’t you tell me the full story, including the part you’ve been holding back. The part that includes your brothers.”
He was genuinely surprised. It was obvious what Felicia was referring to. How she knew, or thought she knew, was another story. “I don’t see how any of this can help Ann,” he started to say, trying to bide his time.
“I’m not referring to her,” Felicia jumped in. “We need closure, Jonathan. Lord knows, this can’t stay hidden forever.”
Jonathan stared at the wall, anywhere but at her face. Then he mustered the strength to deal directly with her questions. “You’d lost Matthew,” he said. “That was enough.”
“When have you ever known me to be weak?”
She was right, of course. Even now, it was only her body that was wasted. “It sincerely was an accident,” he said.
He tried to gather his thoughts, to remember again what had happened that night. She’s using you, Matt! Patrick had said. Ann took a one-week sickbay stay and rolled it into years. Now she’s running out of options! She struck out with me and Jon! Shouting it into the wind, Jonathan thought. Shouting the lie about them both having been with Ann. They had all been straining to be heard over the engine and the noise of a fierce wind. Pat had taken a hand off the wheel of the boat to take another swig of beer.
Felicia already knew the details of Matt’s death—that he had been thrown free at impact, right into the piling, that his neck had snapped. But what she did not know—what no one knew—was that Pat had been swilling beer all night, that Jonathan had sought to protect him, and that after the impact he had heaved Pat into the back of the boat, then taken the wheel himself, waiting as the flames licked over the water, until the authorities arrived.
“Matt had asked Ann to marry him earlier that same week,” he said to his mother now. “She … couldn’t bring herself to hurt him. Had to figure out a way to tell him no, to let him down gently. So a couple of days passed and Matt … I think he took her silence to mean she was going to say yes. I guess we all thought that. So Pat … Patrick lied. Trying to jolt Mattie off her, I think, to make him change his mind. Pat’s heart was in the right place, but his methods left a lot to be desired.”
“There is never a good reason for a lie, or for that kind of interference,” his mother interjected.
Jonathan nodded stiffly. “Mattie went nuts, went after him. Pat was at the wheel of the boat. We were at full throttle. When Pat left the wheel to get to Matt, we hit the piling.”
Everything about Felicia sagged. “And for fifteen years, you have let everyone believe that it was you behind the wheel?”
Because it hadn’t all been Pat’s fault, Jonathan thought. “He was saturated drunk, Mom. I shouldn’t have let him get behind the wheel in the first place.”
“Jonathan, you are not responsible for the whole world.”
That startled him. “It was Matt, mom. Matthew was the one always trying to save people.”
One corner of her mouth tucked up. “No, my dearest, it is you.”
“He brought home broken birds…”
“And you collect and protect souls.”
He couldn’t help it. He gave a harsh bark of laughter.
“Jonathan, once someone makes it into your inner circle, you’d die for them. You were the role model for Matthew. Where do you think he learned it? You’ve kept this secret for fifteen years in order to protect your brother, to protect Ann, to protect me.”
It rocked him back. To protect Ann? Yeah, he thought, because he’d known—he’d always known—that the truth would be too hard for her to take. She’d blame herself for not speaking soon enough. She’d take it all on her
own shoulders. In truth, her peace of mind had been the most important single thing that had influenced his decision to say nothing.
Jonathan let out his breath and rubbed his face with his hands.
For a long while, Felicia was so quiet he thought their conversation was over. Then she gently cleared her throat. “If not for these extraordinary circumstances, I might have gone to my grave with this secret. But there are some things you need to know about Ann, Jonathan, to get you through this night or however long it takes until you find her. You need to understand why Ann tries to push you—to push everyone—away. You can’t let her do that once I’m gone.”
Jonathan suddenly felt short of breath, as if something had constricted in his chest.
“Whoever has her,” she said, “whatever has happened to Ann, you must understand that she is a survivor, that she will not allow herself to be destroyed.” Felicia paused and looked Jonathan in the eye. “Do you know how it was that I found her on the street? Has she explained any of that?”
Jonathan shook his head. Of course she had told him nothing about her past, it resided beyond one of the many walls she constructed to keep him at a distance.
Felicia gave him a half-hearted smile. “Well, I suppose if she wanted you to know she would have told you by now, but circumstances are such that…” Then she seemed to cave in on herself. “I’ll surely be cursed for betraying her confidence. But I’m willing to live with that for your sake, and hers.”
“You’re meddling.”
“Yes, of course, I am. Ann’s mother was a heroin addict who prostituted herself to support her habit. Ann never knew her father.”
Jonathan winced.
“While Ann was still living with her—she was barely fourteen years old—one of her mother’s clients raped Ann. The second time he tried it, she fought him off and ran. This is why she was living on the street when I met her.”
“She was raped?” Jonathan said, barely getting the words out.