of what he’d done with him, weighing on his conscience, making him the man he was. Until Bree had died, he’d managed to suppress his guilt, though, had managed to convince himself his motive had been pure.
But God had seen into his heart and had known the truth—and made him pay. He was still paying. That punishment he could bear. What he couldn’t bear was knowing Bree had also paid when she was totally innocent. Just like his daughters—totally innocent. A memory flashed into his mind, him wild with grief, telling Juliana the day before Bree’s funeral, This is my punishment. God is punishing me, but she paid the price.
And if anything happened to Linden and Laurel because of him...he wouldn’t be able to bear it.
Vanessa, Chet and Patrick all stared at Dirk strangely, but Vanessa spoke first. “What do you mean...they’re dead?” she asked in a halting, choked voice. “They can’t be dead. That’s—” She broke off suddenly.
Dirk’s brows drew together in a question, but the sound of the suite’s doorbell distracted him. Patrick turned to answer the door, but Dirk was faster. He yanked the door open, then stared in incomprehension at the beautiful, dark-haired Eurasian woman standing there. The woman in the red dress from two weeks before. The woman who’d haunted his dreams. Mei-li Moore.
“Yes?” He had no idea why she was there, but he strove for patience. “Can I help you, Miss Moore?”
“I think it’s the other way around, Mr. DeWinter,” she replied with a smile intended to put him at his ease. “My cousin said you need my assistance.”
Patrick was right beside Dirk, and now he said, “Mei-li! Thanks for coming so quickly.” He reached around Dirk and tugged her inside, then closed the door.
Dirk hadn’t been expecting Patrick’s cousin to be a woman. That’s all he could think of to account for his sudden inability to process what he was seeing and hearing. That, and his emotional turmoil over the kidnapping and the mention of Terrell Blackwood’s name. He wasn’t sexist. He really wasn’t. But when Patrick had said his cousin was a private investigator and a ransom negotiator, he’d immediately envisioned a man. Especially here in Hong Kong, where even now women were struggling for equality in many professions. It wasn’t as bad in Hong Kong as it was on the Chinese mainland, but women here still had a long way to go to achieve even what the women in the United States had.
And since Hong Kong had a stringent restriction on firearms possession—the three bodyguards he’d brought with him from the States had been forced to leave their weapons behind—many private investigators didn’t even carry guns, the great equalizer between men and women.
All those thoughts flashed through Dirk’s brain in less than a minute. And at the same time he realized this could actually work to his advantage. If the kidnappers were watching him—as the threats voiced to Vanessa indicated—they might not suspect Mei-li was a private investigator working the kidnapping case.
Assuming his daughters weren’t already dead.
That brought him back around to his immediate reaction to hearing Terrell Blackwood’s name. And it didn’t take him any time at all to realize that if Blackwood was involved, ransom probably wasn’t the sole motive for the kidnapping. Far from it.
“Mr. DeWinter?”
The strong, cultured voice belonged to Sir Joshua Moore’s daughter. “I need to find out everything you know as quickly as possible,” Mei-li continued. “Patrick couldn’t tell me much over the phone, just that the kidnappers warned you not to call the police, and you haven’t done so. Is that still the case?”
“Yes.”
“I think that’s wise at this stage.” She pulled a pen and notebook out of the capacious handbag slung over one shoulder, then indicated the sofa and chairs in the living room. “Can we sit down? I’d like to hear everything that happened from the beginning.”
It didn’t take long for Chet to disclaim any knowledge of the kidnapping since he’d been unconscious, and for Vanessa to reveal what little she knew. While she was telling her story, Dirk tried to marshal his own thoughts into some kind of order. He needed to tell Mei-li about the phone call from one of the kidnappers. About Terrell Blackwood. And why Blackwood had reason to want revenge.
* * *
Mei-li listened carefully to what Vanessa said—and what she didn’t—following her usual routine. She had questions, a whole slew of them, but sometimes you got the most answers just letting people talk. Especially when there was nothing but silence, and the person telling the story felt he or she desperately needed to fill that silence...with something. Sometimes the most amazing revelations were blurted out, and Mei-li never broke the flow.
But eventually Vanessa’s story petered out. Mei-li waited patiently until Vanessa said, “That’s it. That’s everything I remember.”
Mei-li knew the odds were against Vanessa’s statement. Witnesses—even cooperative witnesses, as Vanessa seemed to be—rarely told everything they remembered. They tried their best to recount what they thought were the important things, not realizing sometimes it was the little details that broke a case. Then again, sometimes witnesses remembered something important long after the fact. Especially if they weren’t required to repeat their story countless times, so that the story as they told it became their memory of the event.
Mei-li took copious notes in her own cryptic shorthand and asked a few questions when she needed clarification. She jotted Vanessa’s answers down as well, then said, “Would you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Would you close your eyes? Sometimes events can be clearer in our minds if we close our eyes and think about them.”
A nearly imperceptible hesitation was followed by, “Okay.”
Mei-li noted the hesitation but didn’t comment on it, just filed it away for the future. “Thank you.” She waited until the other woman’s eyes were closed, then asked, “Where were the girls when Chet answered the door?”
“In the bedroom. They were...they were taking their afternoon nap.”
Mei-li’s sharp eyes glanced around the room, and she wrote a couple of things in her notebook. “So walk me through everything that happened the minute the door was opened.”
“I couldn’t really see the front door from where I was standing. One of the men must have struck Chet in the head, because I heard him cry out and saw him fall right at the base of the sculpture in the foyer. Before I could react both men were in the living room. One of them had a gun. He put it to my head and demanded to know where the girls were. He told me he’d kill me if I didn’t cooperate—and I believed him.”
Mei-li made another cryptic notation, but said in a matter-of-fact tone, “So you saw their faces?”
“No, oh, no,” Vanessa replied after a second. “Only their eyes. They both wore black ski masks.”
“But you could tell one of them was Chinese and one wasn’t,” Mei-li prompted.
“Right. Their eyes. You know, the shape. I could just tell.” Vanessa cleared her throat. “Well, one was Asian. I assumed he was Chinese, but...anyway, Asian.”
Mei-li’s voice retained its calm, reassuring tone.
