Mitchell followed in his wake, his expression carefully neutral, while cameras tracked his progress and a barrage of shouted questions assailed him from every angle. …
“Mr. Wyatt, why are you here?”
“Is your nephew Billy involved in this?”
Another reporter scored a direct hit: “Are you Danny’s father?”
Mitchell ground his teeth against the urge to say, “Yes!” He’d grown up wondering who his own father was and overhearing adults speculating about his origins behind his back. Because of Kate, his son was in the same humiliating position now, and the entire city of Chicago was doing the speculating. The only thing that kept him from telling the reporters that he was Danny’s father was fear that it might somehow put his son in more jeopardy.
One of the cops guarding the entrance reached for the ornate brass handle on the heavy wooden door and shoved it open just enough for Mitchell, Calli, and the cop escorting them to squeeze past. It closed behind them, shutting out the uproar outside. In comparison to that, the interior of the large restaurant seemed almost tomblike, but it was far from deserted.
Two long rows of tables had been set up on the far left of the main dining room, and at least two dozen people were seated there, answering ringing phones that were obviously newly installed, their cords strung haphazardly across the floor. A few restaurant employees were keeping coffee cups filled and passing out sandwiches to the task force on the telephones, while other employees looked on in watchful silence, clearly hoping for some indication that one of the people on the phones was getting a good tip.
Pearson and Levinson were sitting at a nearby table with two black suitcases between them, openly eavesdropping on the people manning the telephones.
“Come this way,” the cop told Mitchell, and both attorneys looked around sharply to check out the new arrival. Mitchell nodded at them but continued following the cop, who seemed to be leading him toward a pair of large doors at the rear of the restaurant that opened into a kitchen, where more employees were gathered. At the kitchen, the cop turned to the right, however, and headed down a long paneled hallway lined with offices. At the end of the hallway, a staircase led up to a landing with an open door. The cop gestured toward it, stopped, and stepped aside for Mitchell to pass. “The apartment is up there,” he said.
Mitchell glanced at Calli, told him in Italian to stay downstairs, and continued walking. The back hallway with its staircase leading up to an apartment were the only identifiable characteristics that this restaurant shared with the one Kate had invented and used as a backdrop for her charming stories about her childhood escapades, Mitchell realized.
However, he had no difficulty recognizing the first two men he saw when he strode into the spacious apartment’s comfortable living room. The same detectives who’d questioned Mitchell when he was a suspect in William’s death and who’d photographed him in the islands with Kate were standing in the kitchen area now, watching him. Gray Elliott walked forward, held out his hand, and said with a grim smile, “I’m sorry we’re once again meeting under very difficult circumstances—”
Mitchell ignored his outstretched hand along with his implied sympathy. “Have you heard anything?”
When he said that he hadn’t, Mitchell turned around expecting to see Kate somewhere in the living room, and instead found his view blocked by a stocky man with sandy hair, green eyes, and a Roman collar. “I’m Kate’s uncle, James Donovan,” the priest said, holding out his hand and studying Mitchell’s face. “You’re Mitchell, of course.”
“Of course,” Mitchell agreed sardonically. He shook the priest’s hand and then he terminated the social niceties. “Where is she?” he asked bluntly.
Unfazed by Mitchell’s rudeness and lack of respect, the priest turned and gestured toward a hallway at the far end of the living room. “Danny’s bedroom is the first door on the right,” he said calmly. “Kate is in there.”
The last thing Mitchell had expected to feel when he walked into Danny’s room and saw Kate Donovan was a surge of pity, but pity was exactly what he felt. She was sitting in a rocking chair next to Danny’s bed with her eyes closed and her head tipped back, clutching a big gray flop-eared rabbit to her chest. One bare foot was curled beneath her, the other foot on the floor, gently pushing the rocker back and forth. Other stuffed animals, all of them in seemingly perfect condition, were neatly lined up on the floor behind her, but the faded, scruffy rabbit in her arms looked as if it had been dragged behind a car … or dragged behind a little boy who’d taken it everywhere with him.
The bedroom itself had been designed to delight a child and inspire his imagination, Mitchell noticed as he looked around. Bright jungle murals covered the walls, with whimsical animals and colorful birds peeking out from tall grass and frolicking in the branches of lush trees that stretched up to and partway across the ceiling.
On the wall to his right, two rows of long shelves were mounted within child’s reach and filled with toy trucks. On the wall to his left was a small bed with a mock picket fence for a headboard, with carved parrots, macaws, canaries, and parakeets roosting atop the white slats—all of them fast asleep.
Trying to adjust to the reality of being in a bedroom that belonged to a two-year-old son he’d never known existed, Mitchell gazed at the woman who’d conceived his son during an unforgettable night of lovemaking. Clad in jeans and a yellow turtleneck sweater, with her red hair loose around her shoulders and her russet eyelashes lying like curly fans on her unnaturally pale cheeks, she looked painfully forlorn, totally defenseless, and very young …
But then, Kate Donovan’s looks had always been deceptive, Mitchell reminded himself. The proof of her true nature, of her boundless arrogance and audacity, was all around him in the form of a bedroom that belonged to a son he didn’t know, and who did not know him; a son she’d intended to deprive of all contact with his father—just the way Mitchell had been raised. Those thoughts demolished Mitchell’s pity and toughened his tone as he announced his presence with two curt words: “Hello, Kate.”
Her entire body lurched in shock, her eyes snapped open, and she stared at him in utter disbelief; then she gave him a trembling smile and gazed at him with unabashed warmth, her wide emerald eyes shimmering with tears of gratitude and suppressed anguish. “Thank you,” she whispered.
For one of the few times in his adult life, Mitchell’s ability to remain coolly objective and logical deserted him, and he stared at her in distracted uncertainty. With her wounded green eyes lifted to his and her curly red hair lying like a mantle around her shoulders, Kate Donovan reminded him of a heartbroken Irish Madonna who was bravely trying to smile through her tears. …
The same “Madonna,” Mitchell reminded himself cynically, who’d entertained herself in St. Maarten by taking him for a mental and physical roller-coaster ride, and then left him standing on a dock waiting for her like an idiotic, lovesick schoolboy while she flew back to Chicago with Evan Bartlett.
Abruptly, Mitchell disengaged himself emotionally from her and from their past history, and focused solely on the present situation. “What are you thanking me for?” he asked shortly.
Until that moment, Kate had been content to remain in the rocking chair, letting what she thought was a dream unfold in front of her, but Mitchell’s curt tone hit her like a warning slap, jarring her into the reality of his presence and doing so with nerve-wracking suddenness.
Still clutching the rabbit, she stood up in order to more properly convey her respect and gratitude, and she answered his question by saying with earnest formality, “Thank you for lending me the ransom money. I’ve already given your lawyers an IOU and asked them to draw up a formal loan agreement. I told them I’ll put my restaurant up as collateral and pay you back over a twenty-year period—”
She broke off when she realized that the undeniably lenient repayment terms she was suggesting were making him so furious that his eyes were turning to shards of ice and a muscle was beginning to tic
in his jaw. It hit her then that he could still change his mind about lending her the money, and she decided the sooner he left, the better, so long as he left his $10 million behind. “I’ll pay you back in fifteen years, maybe even less than that, and naturally I’ll pay you interest, too,” she added frantically. “I’m solvent and my restaurant is thriving; I’ll agree to whatever terms you want. Just tell your lawyers what terms you want, and I’ll sign the loan papers.” In a last desperate effort to keep matters cordial and to show him gratitude and consideration while simultaneously persuading him to leave, Kate said carefully, “There was no reason for you to come here personally—although,” she lied, “I’m very glad you did. However, there’s no reason for you to stay. You can’t do anything more than you already have—”
Incensed because she had the gall to stand there and treat him as if his kidnapped son’s welfare were none of his business, and that he had no right to be present or involved in anything except “loaning” the ransom money to her, Mitchell gave her a brief, frigid warning. “Don’t thank me and don’t dismiss me. You and I are going to have a very long, very unpleasant, meeting with attorneys present, just as soon as the boy is safely back here.”
“Don’t call him ‘the boy’,” Kate retorted fiercely. “His—”
“Why not?” Mitchell snapped. “You’ve made damned sure I couldn’t call him my son. Until today, I didn’t even know he existed.”
“I took you off my birth-announcement list when you called me an amoral bitch the last time we saw each other!” Kate flung back with blazing sarcasm. “Furthermore, you divorced the last woman who wanted to have your child—” Her brief spurt of fortifying fury dissolved in the realization that while she was standing there arguing, Danny was in the hands of brutal strangers. She glared at Mitchell through a haze of hot tears. “Go away!” she whispered fiercely, and turned her back on him. “Get out of here and leave me alone!”
Stunned by her indignant attempt to justify an inexcusable, grievous injustice with two feeble excuses for it, Mitchell watched her collapse into the rocking chair and double over, face buried in the rabbit, her shoulders jerking violently. “My baby is gone,” she sobbed. “He’s gone. Oh, God, he’s gone …”
Despite his desire to be completely impervious and to see her only as a shallow, manipulative liar, he found himself standing there, trying to remember the two conversations she’d brought up. In the years since then, he’d eradicated her so successfully and so completely from his consciousness that he had to concentrate in order to recall what he’d said.
Their confrontation at the charity fund-raiser came back to him with surprising clarity, but his only reaction now to the way he’d spoken to her there was the same one he’d had moments after he walked away from her: disgust at his unprecedented loss of control over his temper and at the fact that Kate Donovan had gotten under his skin enough to cause him to do that. The words he’d said to her were the ugly truth, and the fact that she’d denied Mitchell his right to know that he had a son was further proof of it, rather than justification for her action.
However, the realization that he’d also told Kate that he’d insisted on a divorce when his wife wanted to have a baby was difficult for him to overlook. It made it a little less easy to thoroughly despise her for her arrogant treachery, as he’d done since Matt’s phone call. That, combined with the sound of her agonized weeping, was making it impossible for him to continue thinking of her as completely heartless and unprincipled, and it also made it very difficult for him to continue regarding himself as a thoroughly righteous victim of her duplicity. And so he turned his back on her and walked out of the room, exactly as she’d wanted him to do.
He could still hear her shattered weeping as he walked down the hall, but unlike Kate, Mitchell refused to consider the possibility that his son would come to any harm or that he wouldn’t be safely returned tonight, when the ransom was paid. Not once, since that morning, had the thought that he might never see his son alive slipped past his barriers. The possibility was there, though, sinister and hideous—an evil specter crouching in the darkness at the edges of his mind. Despite all his money, power, and influential contacts, he couldn’t do one thing to help ensure the safety or the return of a little boy. His own son.
His jaw clenched with the effort it took to drive out the insidious thoughts and to shake free of the terrible dread trying to wrap its tentacles around his mind. He wasn’t helpless. He had money and power, and knew how to use them. He also had a plan; a simple, effective plan. Last but not least, he was an expert at persuading people to go along with his way of thinking, particularly greedy, desperate businessmen, who were the easiest kind of adversaries he dealt with. Kidnappers were greedy and desperate. And so, when the kidnappers made their ransom call, Mitchell was going to calmly take that call, and instead of agreeing to pay their $10 million ransom, he was going to offer them a much better deal: $20 million. One half would be paid at the first drop-off site they named; the second half would be taken to a second drop-off site of their choosing and handed over simultaneously while someone verified to him that his son was in sight and alive.
With his thoughts on that, Mitchell walked back into the living room, noticed that the priest was openly scrutinizing him, and decided he’d be better off waiting downstairs until the time for the ransom call approached. “I’m going to wait downstairs,” he advised the priest as he started in the direction of the apartment’s door.
“That would be a mistake.”
Surprise made Mitchell pause and turn toward him. “Why?”
“Because despite whatever Kate said to you just now, you’re Danny’s father. As his father, you have a right—and a responsibility—to be here and support his mother in this terrible time.”
Mitchell hesitated, walked over to a chair, and sat down.
“While it’s on my mind,” the priest added, “how is it that a man and woman who only knew each other three days could end up being so agonizingly disappointed in each other that neither of them can get over it even now, after three years?”
“I have no idea,” Mitchell said shortly.
“I have a very clear idea,” the priest said implacably, but he didn’t offer an explanation, and Mitchell didn’t ask for one.
Chapter Forty-nine
FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT IN A CHAIR FACING THE doorway, Mitchell contemplated the apartment Kate had talked about in Anguilla. It was nothing like the small, dark space he’d envisioned, but it was evident that the whole dwelling had recently undergone expansion and renovation. Everything was fresh and bright, including the woodwork and mullioned windows that marched along three sides of the apartment and were partially concealed by airy draperies that were pulled back at the sides and held in place with ties.
The floor plan was a large rectangle that occupied one entire end of the building from front to back. A modern kitchen with the latest appliances and granite countertops was separated from the living space by a large island counter with four stools. The living room was spacious enough for a pair of leather sofas, which faced each other across a coffee table and were positioned at right angles to the big easy chair in which Mitchell was sitting. Beyond the living space was a large play area with a table and chairs at a child’s height, a chalkboard, and what Mitchell assumed were long toy boxes disguised as window seats. A hallway that was parallel to the stairs led from the play area to what Mitchell knew were bedrooms.
Mitchell picked up a copy of Gourmet magazine from the end table beside his chair and leafed through it, partly to avoid giving the priest an opportunity to bring up scriptures, morality, and other topics of interest to the clergy, and partly to stop himself from looking at the kitchen and trying to imagine an old wooden table there with a seven-year-old girl draped across it, as she pretended it was a piano.
The room lapsed into silence, and Mitchell struggled against a sudden impulse to get up and go over to the play space to look at his son’s things. A minute later, all th
at changed. MacNeil came trotting up the staircase, looking tense but excited.
He went directly to Gray Elliott for a whispered conference, then nodded and hurried out of the apartment. Elliott got up and walked over to Mitchell, and to Mitchell’s initial surprise, he directed his remarks to him rather than Kate’s uncle. “I think we have very good news. The parents of a young woman who is in group counseling with Billy Wyatt saw the amber alert tonight. Their daughter has been in their guesthouse today babysitting a little boy as a favor to a friend. They went to have a closer look at the little boy, and they’re sure it’s Danny. We have cars on the way there right now, and we’ll know for certain if it’s him in ten minutes or less. Until we do, I don’t think we should risk raising Kate’s hopes. She’s very fragile right now. We have two hours before we’re supposed to receive the ransom call. I’d like to sit tight for a few minutes with no unusual activity in here. If we’re wrong about Billy’s involvement, then for all we know the real kidnappers are watching us now through the windows from another building.”
Father Donovan nodded, but Elliott waited for Mitchell’s response. Mitchell hesitated, hating to subject Kate to ten more minutes of the agony he’d witnessed in Danny’s bedroom, but in the end, he deferred to Gray Elliott. “That’s probably the best plan,” he said. The moment Gray Elliott had mentioned the connection between Billy Wyatt and the emotionally troubled babysitter in the guesthouse, Mitchell knew in his gut that the little boy with her was Danny, and his relief that Danny was probably safe was so immense, so overwhelming, that he could ignore for now the fact that his maniacal nephew was likely the kidnapper. Later, he would deal with that, but right now, he wanted nothing to intrude on his forthcoming meeting with his son. Then, because he couldn’t resist the temptation anymore, he walked over to Danny’s play area.
Every Breath You Take Page 36