Kidnapped at Christmas

by Maggie K. Black

  “There was a second intruder in the building,” she said after they’d cleared a few blocks. “He was short with a square jaw. Again, nothing about him reminded me of the two men who’d abducted me. He was in Olivia’s office. He looked kind of like this.” She turned the tablet toward him. The light turned yellow ahead and there was a black sports car tight on his bumper who probably wanted him to push through. But he eased to a stop anyway and then looked down at the sketch.

  “You drew that?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, did you see him? Do you know if he was arrested?”

  “No.” He didn’t much like the idea that she could’ve been hurt by somebody else while he was busy sitting on Hermes. “But I was pretty much focused on our graffiti artist and then being questioned by police.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him before,” she said. “Or at least a picture of him. But I don’t know where. I wondered if he was from some rival media company. But that’s just a guess.”

  The lights changed. He started driving again. The black sports car stayed so tight on his bumper, he’d probably hit them if Joshua braked quickly. He hated downtown driving.

  “Did he hurt you?” Joshua asked.

  “No, I’m fine.” She shook her head. “He didn’t even touch me. He just tried to steal my tablet, but I kicked him hard and he ran. He wasn’t much of a fighter. I hope police got him.”

  “Why would he want to steal your tablet?”

  “I don’t know. Like I told you, my laptop was refusing to work for me, so I just picked this up to access the Torchlight online server. Looked like he tried to hack into Olivia’s computer but couldn’t figure out her password.”

  “Is it possible that somebody intentionally damaged your laptop?”

  “You mean like someone intentionally tricked me into downloading a virus? Or that somebody hacked my laptop and damaged it?”

  “Either.” He could see the police station up ahead on the right now. The black sports car was still tight on their tail. He took a sharp left and dodged quickly but smoothly between two approaching vehicles. Then he headed down a block, cut right and accelerated through a yellow light before it turned red. The black sports car kept pace. Samantha’s hand brushed his arm as her eyes rose to the rearview mirror.

  Yup, they were definitely being followed.

  SIX

  Joshua scanned the mirror. The man’s face was hidden under a baseball cap. Something inside the soldier’s chest burned to lead the trailing vehicle somewhere away from innocent bystanders, then pull over, confront the man and find out exactly what he wanted. But there was no way he’d put Samantha in that kind of danger. No, the smartest thing to do was pull directly into the police parking lot and find out if the man following them was foolish enough to challenge them there.

  “Obviously we’ve got a guy on our tail,” he said, “and he’s really persistent. I’m going to pull in at the station.” Joshua circled the block, put his turn signal with plenty of forewarning and then pulled in to the police station. The black car hesitated, then drove past. Joshua got a glimpse of a short man, a square jaw and a red hat. “Recognize him?”

  “Yup.” Samantha let out a long breath then sat back against the seat. “Same guy who was rummaging around Olivia’s office and tried to steal my tablet. Well, there goes the hope that he was arrested. But at least now I’ve got a license plate and car model to report. Are you going to wait it out here and see if he comes back around? I’m probably only going to be in the station for a minute.”

  “No.” Not that he was a fan of the idea of letting the man get away either. He switched off the rental car. “I’ll come in with you.”

  Did she know that Daniel had asked him to be her unofficial bodyguard? If not, how should tell her? He waited just inside the front entrance of the police station while she collected her belongings—and lodged a report about the man in the black car. So much for a quick ride home.

  When they finally exited, he noticed that Samantha’s bag was bright blue, leather and looked like something that might’ve been sold in the sixties. Maybe it had been. She held it on her lap and looked through it as they drove to her apartment. He followed her directions into a narrow maze of back alleys that ran behind buildings. Between the parked cars, garbage cans and Dumpsters the lines of sight were terrible. If these were the alleys that Samantha had walked through to get to work long before the sun was even up, he could see a dozen ways someone could have grabbed her and forced her into a van without being seen. She directed him to a small but crowded grid of spots behind a gabled, four-story building that looked like it had once been a sorority house. Then they sat in the car with the motor running and heat pouring out of the vents.

  “It’s all here,” she said, finally. “My wallet, my credit cards, my cell phone and the keys to my apartment. Everything. Down to the last bill and coin. They definitely weren’t trying to rob me. Unless they stole my coat. I was kind of hoping police would tell me it had turned up in the garbage too.”

  “What kind of coat was it?”

  “It was beautiful, lined, vintage green wool. I’d picked it up secondhand in Kensington Market.” She unbuckled her seat belt. “I tend to shop secondhand whenever I can. But why steal my coat and leave my wallet?”

  “There might’ve been some kind of evidence on it they wanted to destroy,” Joshua suggested. “Something you’d picked up or gotten on you, like oil, dirt or blood?”

  “It’s possible, but there was no blood on the rest of my clothes or body. And I was walking through the exact same alleys I walk through every day, so there shouldn’t be any kind of unusual transfer. Unless I’d physically been somewhere out of the ordinary before ending up in the back of the van.”

  “Or maybe you’d just taken the coat off before they kidnapped you.”

  “On the street? Why would I randomly take my coat off, in December, while walking to work?” Her voice trailed off as sudden tears rushed to her eyes. She brushed them away before they could fall.

  He turned toward her. “Hey, it’s okay to be scared.”

  “I’m more than scared.” Her eyes flashed. “I’m confused. I’m frustrated. I’m angry. I’m overwhelmed with questions that I can’t begin to find answers to. Starting with why did somebody kidnap me and dump me on Olivia’s doorstep? I’m not the one who goes chasing stories all over town with a microphone and a camera. I’m the one who’s quite happy sitting quietly in the corner of the room, listening to all the loud, gung ho reporters compete over whose stories are going to make it above the fold this week, fully confident that whatever gets picked I’m going to make sure it’s all meticulously accurate. It’s my job to check facts, to verify data, to know things. Here, I don’t know anything.” She pressed the heels of her palms against eyes. “I don’t even know how I got from an alley into a van.”

  “Come here. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay, I promise.” He slid his arm over the back of the seat. Her head tumbled against his shoulder. He hugged her tightly, feeling the warmth of her body inside his arms and the brush of her hair against the stubble on his cheek. “You’re incredibly brave and incredibly strong. You’re going to get through this.”

  She raised her head. But she didn’t pull away. Her face was so close to his he could almost count the flecks of gold in her eyes. Her breath was soft and fast against his skin. He realized just how much he wanted to know what it would be like to kiss her and how very easy it would be to lower his mouth onto hers.

  “You’ll get through this and don’t have to go through this alone.” He could hear his own voice growing hoarse as he spoke, as if everything she was feeling had started to build in his own throat. Her eyes closed. “Look, I never thought I’d be anybody’s bodyguard. I don’t know why. I just had it drilled in me to always serve in a unit and never try to go off alone. But, like I told Daniel, I’m going to do everything I can to have your back.”

  Her eyes opened wide. She slid back.

  “Body
guard?” There was an added question in her words that he couldn’t quite read. But he could feel it, sitting there between them like a trap ready to spring. “You mean, you’re here with me now because my boss’s husband asked you to follow me around?”

  Why was she making this sound like a bad thing?

  “Well, yes,” he said. “They asked me to make sure you got to Theresa’s okay and that you had somebody watching your back.”

  “Of course they did,” she said slowly. “That’s very kind of them, and of you. I haven’t actually decided if I’m going to go see Theresa or just head home to my folks.”

  “Well, you should really think about going to see her,” he said. “Short-term amnesia is really common for people who’ve been through major traumas. Like soldiers and the victims of violent crime. Counseling can help a lot. And Theresa’s really rather wonderful at helping people with your condition.”

  “My condition.” She frowned. “Of course. It was your idea that I make an appointment with Theresa, because I told you my memory was giving me trouble and you were asked to look out for me.”

  She said it calmly, simply. Not like she thought he’d done anything wrong. More like she was just now realizing the answer to a puzzle and that she wished she’d figured it out before. She got out of the car. He followed. Shades of white and gray now blocked out the previously sunny sky. Thin, skeletal trees grew in a strip of dirt by the back door. Garbage floated in a swamp of water and slush that filled the Dumpster to his right. Dark gray painted over the brick walls, covering what he guessed had probably been graffiti. The narrow building was four stories tall with what looked like two or three apartments on every floor. Despite the weather, a window on the top floor was cracked open.

  “Do you see that?” He pointed up to the window. “Whose apartment is that?”

  “It’s mine.” A flush rose to her cheeks. “When I left this morning, I hardly expected to be out all day. My former neighbor had a cat who still pops by every now and then to cry at my window for food. I think it climbs up a tree and leaps over to my window ledge. Her ex-boyfriend, Eric, found out, felt guilty about it, and so drops by food for it every now and then. So, sometimes I prop my window open a few inches and leave a dish of food on the counter. I’m on the top floor and those trees won’t support a person’s weight. You’d have to be an actual cat to break in.”

  His eyes lingered on the window for a moment. Despite her optimism, there were probably plenty of ways someone could break into her apartment and before he left he’d do his best to find and address each one.

  The keys jangled in her hand. She unlocked the building’s back door, and they stepped into a narrow hallway that led to a large, spotless front entrance lobby. A huge bulletin board by the front door was plastered in layers of photocopied signs, warning against the dangers of everything from not recycling to letting in unidentified guests. He followed her up the stairs past at least a dozen more posters. “Your landlady definitely runs a tight ship.”

  “Definitely.” Her footsteps creaked as they climbed. “Yvonne used to be a dorm mother at some kind of boarding school for troubled kids, years and years ago. Not sure if it’s the kind that kids went to voluntarily or more like a detention rehabilitation place. I guess the tendency to try and overpolice her tenants comes from that.”

  By the time they hit the second floor the posters had sort of blended together in an unending stream of words and color. He could imagine tenants stopped even reading them after a while.

  “Yvonne’s a bit kooky,” she went on. “Very glamorous actually, in her own way. But I’m pretty sure she’s lonely. She’ll make excuses to drop by my apartment to check on one thing or another. Then she’d end up lecturing me on finding a good man, unlike her good-for-nothing ex-husband, or telling me some long-winded sob story about how her darling son doesn’t appreciate all she does for him.”

  “You’re paying rent to live here,” he said. “Even if she owns the building, there’ve got to be limits to the kind of rules she can set.”

  “Oh, there are.” Samantha smiled. “I’ve researched them well and I know Yvonne sometimes pushes it a little. But it’s also a decent, safe, clean apartment that I can actually afford, walking distance from my work. Do you know how impossible it is to find one of those in this city? I’m not about to risk losing it.”

  To be fair, a landlady who had a habit of trying to micromanage her building wasn’t necessarily a bad thing considering everything Samantha had been through. If whoever had kidnapped her had been loitering outside the building, Yvonne might’ve seen it. He’d have to make a point of meeting her. Although, it probably wouldn’t hurt to close Samantha’s window first.

  They reached the top floor. Unlike the others, this one had only two doors, one on each side of the landing. A beautifully delicate wreath of dried leaves, twigs and velvet ribbon lay on the door to their right. A small sparkling gift bag hung on the door handle. Before he could reach for it, she glanced at the card then reached inside and pulled out a small, giftwrapped box.

  “Everything okay?” His eyebrows rose. “Is that something maybe I should take a look at?”

  “It’s just a Christmas present from Eric. We were supposed to meet for coffee this morning and he must have come by looking for me.” She slid the bag, note and gift-wrapped box into her skirt pocket without unwrapping it. Crimson brushed the top of her cheeks. “Trust me. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  Right. Whatever was in the box it sure didn’t look like cat food. She’d told him when they’d met this morning that she had no problematic relationships. Now, he was discovering that she sometimes left her window open for visits from a part-time cat, her landlady was odd and she was supposed to have coffee this morning with someone who brought her gifts. But she was already fumbling with her keys and he got the impression that she wouldn’t take it well if he asked to see whatever was in the box.

  There was only one other door on the landing. It had an eviction notice taped to it.

  “So that would be where the cat lady lived?”

  “Her name was Bella.” Samantha was still fiddling with her keys as if she’d momentarily forgotten how to slide them into the doorknob. “And she wasn’t a cat lady. She was in her midtwenties and very beautiful. I think she was a model.”

  He was happy to see that Samantha had both a doorknob that locked and a dead bolt. Bella’s door had an empty hole above the door handle where the dead bolt used to be. Her doorknob looked like someone had picked it. “How long has she been gone?”

  “About two months, I think. She talked to me a bit in passing about wanting to move out, even asked me for advice on movers. But she never gave notice or even turned in her keys. She just left. One day I just saw movers in the hallway and she was gone. Apparently she sent Eric a breakup letter in the mail. He was devastated. They’d seemed really devoted to each other.” She shrugged. “Yvonne eventually stuck the eviction notice up, and then finally got someone to break in. Yvonne’s totally redoing the apartment in the hopes of upping the rent on it. That apartment is a lot larger than mine.”

  Considering the location, an apartment like this would probably go for a premium. Still, he didn’t like knowing the only other apartment on Samantha’s floor was lying empty. It was too...convenient.

  “Welcome to my place.” She pushed her apartment door open. The living room was an open square, with a kitchenette along one side. A futon couch and overstuffed chair draped in handmade quilts shared the space with a coffee table built from half a canoe. A small Christmas tree sat in a metal bucket on a table in the corner of the room. Samantha shrugged his leather jacket off her shoulders and carefully hung it on a wrought-iron hook by the door. Then she went to the small window over the sink and closed it. Besides a small empty cat-food bowl, the counter was spotless.

  He reached to close the door behind him and stopped. Was it his imagination or was there a noise coming from the empty apartment across the hall? Creaking. Shuffl
ing. Like something was trying to creep across old wooden floorboards. Was the cat skulking around its old apartment? Or was there a more human-sized pest? Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like renovations.

  “Hang on. I think I hear somebody in that apartment.” He left her apartment, crossed the landing in two steps and rapped on the neighboring door. “Hello? Anyone in there?”

  No answer.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s empty.” Samantha stood in the doorway to hers.

  “You’re probably right.” He reached for the door handle. “I’m just going to check. Last thing you want is for someone to climb up the fire escape and break in through the empty apartment.”

  “But it’s all right if you break into it?”

  There was a sharpness in Samantha’s tone that made him stop.

  “I’m not breaking into it. If the door’s locked I’m hardly going to break it down. But I will check to see if it’s already been compromised. I promised to watch your back. Now I’m discovering there’s an abandoned apartment on the same floor as yours?” The handle turned easily. Somebody had either broken the lock by picking it or they’d left it unlocked. “Yeah, it’s probably nothing. But I’m going to have a quick peek inside. Don’t worry.”

  He pushed the door open. The smell of dust and old potpourri filled his senses. He took a step over the threshold—just as a baseball bat swung straight at his head.

  * * *

  For a moment everything was happening so quickly Samantha didn’t even know how to understand what she was seeing.

  “Get back!” Joshua shouted. He leaped back, pulling in his stomach just as a baseball bat sliced the air inches from his body. She got a fleeting glimpse of thin hands in black leather gloves. The baseball bat smashed into the door frame. Splinters flew. “Go into your apartment, lock the door and call the police!”