By the time I climbed stiffly into the front passenger seat of one of the agency Navigators alongside Parker, I was feeling thoroughly beaten up.
It was five-thirty in the evening. Torquil had been missing fifty-six hours and counting.
When we left the house, there had still been no word from the kidnappers with the boy’s location. Nicola Eisenberg had thrown a fit of hysterics and had to be sedated. Her husband didn’t look in much better shape.
The GPS tracker had led the chase teams to the still-burning wreck of the Dodge, two miles from the scene of the ambush. It was highly unlikely that the men responsible had gone to all that trouble to grab the necklace, only to set it alight shortly afterwards. We had to assume they’d found the tracker and abandoned it with the car.
‘They’re not going to release him, are they?’ I said as Parker steered us out onto the main road.
He glanced over at me quickly, as if to judge how badly I was likely to take it.
‘No,’ he said, voice flat. ‘I don’t think so.’
I absorbed that one in bitter silence for a moment, then asked, ‘Who knew about the ransom arrangements?’
Parker shrugged. ‘Gleason, her staff, the Eisenbergs, possibly their household staff, too. Hell, apparently Mrs Eisenberg kept her appointment with the pro at the tennis club yesterday afternoon, just so’s no one suspected there was anything out of the ordinary going on. For all we know, she could have let it slip to half the membership.’ He put out a gush of breath, frustrated to be involved in such a peripheral role, with no influence over major decisions. ‘Just about everyone at the meeting yesterday knew you’d agreed to be the courier. Doesn’t take much to work out you’d be leaving the house with a priceless object.’
‘They went to a lot of trouble – so why didn’t they disable the traffic cameras?’
‘Pride, would be my guess,’ Parker said. ‘They thought they could get away with it, quick and slick, and they didn’t care who knew about it after the fact. They both had masks on, the car was stolen and on fake plates. I reckon they planned on torching it when they were done anyhow, even before you shot out the coolant system.’
‘For all the good it did,’ I murmured with a sigh. ‘I think you’re right, but I get the feeling it goes deeper than that. It’s not quite that they didn’t care who saw it. I think they actually wanted Eisenberg to watch them walking away with his money, easy as pie. There was something … I don’t know … almost gloating about the whole thing.’
His eyes slid away from the road ahead for a moment. ‘Didn’t count on you running interference, though, did they?’
I gave a hollow laugh. ‘I rather think that you calling my going down under their front wheels “interference” is on a level with trying to bruise someone’s knuckles in a fight by repeatedly thumping them with soft parts of your body,’ I said dryly.
‘These people were pros.’ Parker shook his head. ‘Which doesn’t square with the guys who tried for Dina at the riding club. You said yourself they were amateurs. Not the kinda guys who would know how to manipulate the lights at an intersection, or jam Gleason’s comms network.’
‘So, maybe they’ve called in reinforcements. The guy with the gun definitely wasn’t one of the two at the riding club.’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘And if they’re such pros, why haven’t they released the boy?’ I demanded wearily. ‘I can’t help believing they never really intended to let him go, just like they never intended to run me ragged all over Long Island this morning. I think they were always planning to hit me hard and fast, the first opportunity they got, and it worked like a charm.’
‘Don’t second-guess it,’ Parker cut across me, savage in his softness. ‘If you’d put up more of a fight, you’d have more holes in you now, and some of them might even have gone right through.’
‘I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d avoided the ambush, and the chase teams had closed on my last-known position, and I’d made it to Montauk Point inside the time. I mean, had they even bothered to lay in another rendezvous point from there, or was it all a con from the start? What was so special about the place, by the way?’
Parker opened his mouth to respond, then shut it again, frowning. Before I could go on, he’d thrown the Navigator into an abrupt U-turn. I held onto the door pull and waited until the unwieldy vehicle had wallowed back onto an even course before I risked a question.
‘Jesus, Parker! What the hell are you doing?’
But my boss had his foot hard down on the accelerator, weaving through the sparse traffic like he was on the last lap of a Grand Prix. ‘You asked what would have happened if you’d got to Montauk Point,’ he said, jaw tight with a mix of concentration and anger. ‘But the answer is we don’t know, because after you were hit, Gleason didn’t bother sending anyone there to find out.’
That cold feeling of fear came over me again. ‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’
Parker shook his head, and after that I didn’t ask any more stupid questions, just left him to drive.
Getting to Montauk Point proved easier said than done. Most of the road out there was single-lane in each direction, crowded with trees, and undulating enough to make overtaking almost impossible.
‘There’s no way I could have made it out here in thirty minutes, even on a bike,’ I said, remembering the kidnappers’ deadline. ‘They must have known that.’
Parker nodded. ‘In a perverse kinda way, that should make you feel a little better,’ he said. ‘Knowing this was a set-up from the start.’
It didn’t.
Eventually, we hit the dead-end loop at Montauk, marked by an old-fashioned white lighthouse with a strange brown band round the middle of it. Parker jerked the Navigator to a stop at the base of the shallow incline that led up to the lighthouse itself, ignoring the half-empty parking lot on the other side of the road.
‘What’s here?’ I demanded, aware of an elevated heart rate, a dry mouth. ‘What was I supposed to do when I got here?’
‘Maybe there was no afterward,’ Parker said, his voice grim. ‘Maybe this is where you were supposed to find Torquil.’
I snapped him a fierce glance. ‘Was that before or after I disentangled myself from what was left of my bike?’
He didn’t respond to that, just reached for the door. ‘There are two beaches on either side of the point,’ he said. ‘You want north or south?’
I shrugged, still unconvinced. ‘South.’
We parted company. I jogged back along the edge of the road to a path that led through a wooded area, where a sign promised I would find Turtle Cove. It sounded a lot more picturesque than it was, turning out to be a small crescent-shaped beach with a stony shoreline below golden sand.
I stood for a moment, shading my eyes with a hand. The breeze was brisk, crashing the ocean onto the rocks that surrounded the base of the lighthouse. There were a few hardy souls fishing from them, casting out into the surf like they were trying to whip back the sea. Apart from that, I had the beach to myself.
I tried to jog along the beach, but the sand was soft and heavy. I justified my lack of energy with the excuse that I’d crashed and been shot already today.
I only found the bucket because I was looking at the shoreline and I damn near tripped over it. A child’s red plastic bucket, like they use for sandcastles, upturned high above the tideline. It rattled against something when I kicked it, and when I bent and lifted it up, I found a length of grey pipe sticking out of the sand beneath.
‘Oh shit,’ I whispered, fumbling for my cellphone. Parker answered almost before it had time to ring out, and when I spoke, my lips seemed numb. ‘Parker, get over here. I think I’ve found something …’
I snapped the phone shut again without waiting for his reply, grabbed a piece of nearby driftwood, and began to dig.
It was just after six-fifteen, the evening warm but with a sharpening wind. Almost fifty-seven hours after Torquil had been kidnapped.
Dig, twist, throw …