thought they were going to twist a scream of pain from Holly again, to emphasize how powerless he was to protect her. He said, “Don’t.”
Instead of Holly, he heard two taped voices, clear against a faint background hiss. The first voice was his own:
“I’ve never seen a man murdered before.”
“You don’t get used to it.”
“I guess not.”
“It’s worse when it’s a woman… a woman or a child.”
The second voice belonged to Detective Taggart.
The kidnapper said, “If you had spilled your guts to him, Mitch, Holly would be dead now.”
In the dark smoky glass of the oven door, he saw the reflection of a face that seemed to be looking out at him from a window in Hell.
“Taggart’s one of you.”
“Maybe he is. Maybe not. You should just assume that everybody is one of us, Mitch. That’ll be safer for you, and a lot safer for Holly. Everybody is one of us.”
They had built a box around him. Now they were putting on the lid.
“Mitch, I don’t want to leave you on such a dark note. I want to put you at ease about something. I want you to know that we won’t touch her.”
“You hit her.”
“I’ll hit her again if she doesn’t do what she’s told. But we won’t touch her. We aren’t rapists, Mitch.”
“Why would I believe you?”
“Obviously, I’m handling you, Mitch. Manipulating, finessing. And obviously there is a lot of stuff I won’t tell you—”
“You’re killers, but not rapists?”
“The point is that everything I have told you has been true. You think back over our relationship, and you’ll see I’ve been truthful and I’ve kept my word.”
Mitch wanted to kill him. Never before had he felt an urge to do serious violence to another human being, but he wanted to destroy this man.
He was clutching the phone so fiercely that his hand ached. He was not able to relax his grip.
“I’ve had a lot of experience working through surrogates, Mitch. You’re an instrument to me, a valuable tool, a sensitive machine.”
“Machine.”
“Hang with me a minute, okay? It makes no sense to abuse a valuable and sensitive machine. I wouldn’t buy a Ferrari and then never change the oil, never lubricate it.”
“At least I’m a Ferrari.”
“When I’m your handler, Mitch, you won’t be pressed beyond your limits. I would expect very high performance from a Ferrari, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to drive it through a brick wall.”
“I feel like I’ve already been through a brick wall.”
“You’re tougher than you think. But in the interest of getting the best performance out of you, I want you to know we’ll treat Holly with respect. If you do everything we want, then she’ll come back to you alive… and untouched.”
Holly was not weak. She would not easily be mentally broken by physical abuse. But rape was more than a violation of the body. Rape rended the mind, the heart, the spirit.
Her captor might have raised the issue with the sincere intent of putting some of Mitch’s fears to rest. But the sonofabitch had also raised it as a warning.
Mitch said, “I still don’t think you’ve answered the question. Why should I believe you?”
“Because you have to.”
That was an inescapable truth.
“You have to, Mitch. Otherwise, you might as well consider her dead right now.”
The kidnapper terminated the call.
For a while, Mitch’s sense of powerlessness kept him on his knees.
Eventually a recording, a woman with the vaguely patronizing tone of a nursery-school teacher not fully comfortable with children, requested that he hang up the phone. He put the handset on the floor instead, and a continuous beeping urged him to comply with the operator’s suggestion.
Remaining on his knees, he rested his forehead against the oven door once more, and closed his eyes.
His mind was in tumult. Images of Holly, tornadoes of memories, tormented him, fragmented and spinning, good memories, sweet, but they tormented because they might be all that he would ever have of her. Fear and anger. Regret and sorrow. He had never known loss. His life had not prepared him for loss.
He strove to clear his mind because he sensed that there was something he could do for Holly right here, now, if only he could quiet his fear and be calm, and think. He didn’t have to wait for orders from her kidnappers. He could do something important for her now. He could take action on her behalf. He could do something for Holly.
Humbled against the hard terra-cotta tiles, his knees began to ache. This physical discomfort gradually cleared his mind. Thoughts no longer blew through him like shatters of debris, but drifted as fallen leaves drift on a placid river.
He could do something meaningful for Holly, and the awareness of the thing that he could do was right below the surface, floating just beneath his questing reflection. The hard floor was unforgiving, and he began to feel as if he were kneeling on broken glass. He could do something for Holly. The answer eluded him. Something. His knees ached. He tried to ignore the pain, but then he got to his feet. The pending insight receded. He returned the telephone handset to its cradle. He would have to wait for the next call. He had never before felt so useless.
Although still hours away, the approaching night pulled every shadow toward the east, away from the westbound sun. Queen-palm shadows yearned across the deep yard.
To Mitch, standing on the back porch, this place, which had previously been an island of peace, now seemed as fraught with tension as the webwork of cables supporting a suspension bridge.
At the end of the yard, beyond a board fence, lay an alleyway. On the farther side of the alley were other yards and other houses. Perhaps a sentinel at one of those second-floor windows observed him now with high-powered binoculars.
On the phone, he had told Holly that he was in the kitchen, and she had said I know. She could have known only because her captors had known.
The black Cadillac SUV had not proved to be in any dark power’s employ, imbued with menace only by his imagination. No other vehicle had followed him.
They
