24

Grayson glanced in the kitchen. Where had Zoe gone? Her chair stood empty, her crayons scattered on the table. “Zoe?” he called. He walked to the bathroom, in the small hallway leading from the living room to the two bedrooms, and looked in. No Zoe. He even checked behind the shower curtain. And her bedroom was empty, though her toys lay scattered on the floor, like she’d been in there playing.

Grayson’s heart began really pounding now, and he cursed out loud. He went into the room where he and Sandy were sleeping. Nothing. But then a tiny voice caught his ear.

“My name is . . .”

He dove across the bed. Zoe crouched in the corner, his cell phone at her ear. He grabbed it from her hand, clicked it off, and threw it across the room. She screamed. He grabbed her arm and hauled her onto the bed. Zoe kicked and tried to bite him. Her voice pierced his ears! He hit her hard, harder than he should have, across the face. Then he pushed her down with both hands, bouncing her into the mattress. “Don’t . . . you . . . ever . . .” he yelled, “. . . do that again!”

She writhed and tried to push him away. Grayson hit her again. “Shut up. Shut up!” he yelled. Glancing around the room, he grabbed the sashes off the curtains, and flipping her over, he forced her hands behind her back and tied them. Then he tied her ankles together. And when the little girl screamed, he spanked her.

The 911 dispatcher rewound the recording of the last call. The childish voice said, My name is Zo . . . He glanced at his coworker. “We got another kid, playing with a phone.”

His coworker frowned, and shook his head. “Call them back to confirm. Don’t these kids have parents?”

Grayson had just gotten Zoe quiet when his cell phone rang. He picked it up, expecting it to be Sandy. But the caller ID said “Emergency Dispatch.”

What did they want? “Hello?” Grayson said, moving quickly away from Zoe. He forced himself to sound relaxed. “Oh, no trouble, officer.” He managed a chuckle. “My daughter. She just learned about 911 and . . . yes, sir. My name?” His heart raced. “Everett. Bob Everett. Yeah. Everything’s fine here. We just need to teach her when to call.”

Grayson hung up the phone and cursed. That kid! What if the dispatcher didn’t buy his reassurance? How do they track cell phones? How close could they get if they wanted to investigate further?

If he could get on the Internet, he could find out. But he couldn’t. No Wi-fi! Hands shaking, he jerked the battery out of the phone. Walking quickly to the kitchen, he took a meat hammer out of a drawer and began pounding and pounding until the phone was a mess of plastic and metal and tiny pieces. Then, for good measure, he scooped it all into a zippered plastic bag, added a can of soup for weight, took it outside, and heaved it into the pond behind his mother’s house. When he heard the splash as the bag hit the water, he felt instant regret. What if he hadn’t destroyed the tracking part?

By the time Sandy got back half an hour later, Zoe lay asleep in her bed, clutching a stuffed animal, her thumb in her mouth. “How’d you do that?” she asked Grayson.

“You just have to know how to handle them,” he said. Sandy would never know about the restraints, or how Zoe sobbed until she fell asleep and he was able to remove them.

Sandy hesitated, like she wanted to ask him more, but then changed her mind. “You want lunch before you go?”

“Nah. Got to run. I’ll be back later,” and he gave her a peck on the cheek like nothing had happened, grabbed his laptop, and left. “Watch your cell phone!” he yelled as he opened his car door. “Don’t let her get to it.”

First job: Get a replacement phone. One of those disposable ones.

“Here’s the interesting thing,” Kenzie said to Alicia, who was looking over Kenzie’s shoulder. “KickerG’s last posts on these political blogs roughly coincided with the times our suspect was posting on the High Stakes board.”

“Could be coincidental.”

“What are you doing?” The senator stood in the doorway, demanding an answer.

Kenzie looked at him. Grable looked tired, and she wondered if he’d slept at all over the last two days. Grief and anxiety had aged him almost overnight. The suave, handsome senator had disappeared. In his place was a graying older man, drowning in a sea of fear. Instantly, she decided to be up front. “Scott and Crow are in Alexandria, investigating that man the police arrested. I interviewed him, Senator, and I don’t think he had anything to do with Zoe’s disappearance.”

“So what are you doing?”

She moved toward him. “I’m pursuing the Internet leads. More specifically, I’m still looking at Grayson Chambers.” Kenzie brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. “I know you’re having a hard time imagining him as a kidnapper. But you will not direct the course of this investigation.” She looked straight at him, staring at him as a mosaic of emotions crossed Grable’s face. Anger. Fear. Concern. Then finally, resignation. She softened her voice, “As soon as I can clear him, I’ll get off that line of investigation. But until I know for sure he’s innocent, I’m going to pursue it. Because I really want to find your daughter. And I know you do, too.”

He cursed softly and walked out of the room.

Scott checked in half an hour later and she told him of her conversation with Grable. “Good job,” he said. “He can’t control this one.”

Then she updated him on the KickerG blog entries, and on her continued inability to identify Grayson Chambers’ location. He gave her a name of a friend in the L.A. office. “Try her,” he said, and Kenzie scribbled down the name. She asked him about Waller and what they’d discovered on their field trip. She half-hoped he’d say it was a dead end and they were coming back. But he didn’t. Instead, he detailed the secret room in Waller’s house, and the macabre things they’d found, evidence of his sordid life. Scott sounded exhausted.

“But no sign of Zoe, right?” she said hopefully.

She heard a long pause.

“No. Not yet. We have evidence techs scouring the place.”

Kenzie resumed her own search. She called L.A., and spoke to Scott’s friend, turning her loose on the hunt for Grayson. Then she laid her head down on the table and shut her eyes. Just for a minute, she told herself, yawning.

Less than two hours later, her cell phone rang—it was her response from L.A. She looked at Alicia, adrenaline racing. “L.A. tagged him,” Kenzie told her colleague. “When Chambers left Washington he went to teach at Bear Canyon College, north of Santa Barbara. He got fired after less than two semesters. Three female students, one of them a thirty-eight-year-old woman, accused him of harassment. They found enough evidence to terminate him.”

“A precipitating circumstance?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Kenzie replied.

“Why didn’t they tell you this? Hadn’t you called that college?”

“When I called, I got a student working in Human Resources. She didn’t bother looking back through their records. She only looked at those currently employed.” Kenzie couldn’t stay seated. She stood up, her heart thumping. “One of Scott’s friends in the L.A. office knew the right person to talk to.”

She dialed Scott and relayed the information she’d received. He sounded encouraged, and when she hung up the phone, she realized the senator had come into the room.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Chambers got fired from his teaching job.”

Grable collapsed into a chair, and groaned.

“It must have been a terrible failure, after all of his success in Washington,” Kenzie said.

Beth Grable appeared and Bruce explained the situation to her. Kenzie expected an explosion, an “I told you so!” moment, but instead, Beth sat down in a chair next to her husband, took his hand, and leaned her head on his shoulder.

“What else?” the senator asked, dispiritedly.

“Getting fired from a job can be a precipitating incident,” Kenzie said, “enough, I think, to make him cross the line and do something crazy. It would certainly bruise his ego. It would be an affront to him. He’d be angry and resentful. His plan didn’t work. His overblown self-image didn’t make it in the real world. But he couldn’t go back to the Hill. That would really be embarrassing. So now he has a problem.”

She paced across the room as she spoke, touching her lip with her forefinger. “The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes how unfairly he’s been treated. First by you, now by this college. And then he comes up with a plan to get back.”

The senator sat slumped in his chair. He looked pale. “How could I have misjudged him?” he muttered.

His wife filled in the blank. “You don’t really see the people around you, Bruce,” she said. Surprisingly, her voice bore no anger. “You see what you want to see, what fits your plan, but you don’t see the real person.”

Grable shook his head. “So where’d he go, when he left the college?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

“So what good does it do to know it could be him, if we don’t know where he is?” Frustration edged his voice.

Kenzie rubbed her neck. “Since you employed Grayson, you must have some records on him, like a Social Security number.”

“Call Louise. She’ll have all the information we ever got on him.”

Kenzie did a public records check and had the last four digits of Grayson’s SSN. Louise provided the other five. Kenzie called those in to an agent at the office, and he began looking for anything they had on one Grayson Chambers.

“No arrest record, not even a speeding ticket,” she told Scott when he arrived back at the Grables’ two hours later.

“I’ll go for a warrant for his bank records including credit card information and any ATM cards he may have. We might be able to track him that way.”

“Will the prosecutor rush that?” Grable asked.

“Absolutely.”

“What about the Alexandria suspect?” Beth asked.

Scott hedged his answer. “We didn’t see any traces of Zoe. He claims he hasn’t been in Georgetown for twenty years. We still have agents going over his house and they may interview him again. We don’t see the link at this time.”

“But what about . . .” Senator Grable began to say. A look from Scott stopped him.

“We’ll keep that line open. But for now, I’m going to go with what Kenzie’s finding.”

They stood in the senator’s backyard, enveloped by heat and humidity, trying to get away from the tension inside. Kenzie’s head still hurt. No wonder: It was five p.m. and she hadn’t thought about eating since breakfast. “Where’s Crow?” she asked Scott.

“He’s back on, trying to identify the Cayman Islands account. He left Alexandria several hours ago and has a team of agents working from WFO.”

“So you both are now thinking that Waller isn’t our man?”

Scott shook his head. “I got to thinking, why did I bring you on this case if I wasn’t confident in your ability to psych this stuff out? I still don’t understand why Waller’s methodology matched this case.”

Kenzie nodded. “But the language . . .”

“Completely different. Absolutely wrong,” Scott said. “Now whether I can convince the director a suspect using ‘ain’t’ is grounds for backing off of a lead I don’t know.”

Kenzie took a deep breath. “I’m going to get Alicia to help me run some of KickerG’s blog entries through some language programs to compare them to our suspect’s postings.”

“Good.”

Crow’s team worked for hours trying to identify recently opened accounts in the Cayman Islands bank and attempting to find an account with an encrypted number that might relate somehow to the Grables. After finally convincing the bank officials to cooperate, he identified the account and had the IT staff setting up a false front for the Out Islands Bank website. The kidnapper would think he had accessed the real bank’s website. In reality, he’d be looking at a phony site being run by FBI computer specialists and a phony two-million-dollar deposit.

“Like those phishing schemes,” Kenzie said, when Scott explained it to her.

“That’s right.” Scott shifted his weight on his feet. “Look, Kenz, Crow is coming back here. We have to work on a plan for when we find out where Grayson is.”

“HRT?” Kenzie asked. The Hostage Rescue Team was based in Quantico, just a few minutes away by chopper. Specially trained for these situations, they remained the Bureau’s go-to guys, especially for a high-profile kidnapping.

“They’re on alert. But there’s a situation in New York they might have to deploy for. So we’ve got to have a back-up.”

“The SWAT team from WFO?” Kenzie guessed.

“Probably.” Scott shoved his hands in his pockets. “It depends on where Chambers is.” He shook his head. “It’s complicated.”

“Where is Grayson from, originally?”

Scott looked at her. “Good question. Why do you ask?”

“His Social Security number starts with two-one-two, which would be a Maryland number.” She ran her finger over her lip. “My guess is he isn’t in California—he’d run from there. He’ll be drawn toward D.C. It’s the place he knows best. But he might not be right in town because people would recognize him. I wonder if he’d come back to some place familiar.”

“His old home?”

“Maybe.”

Scott nodded.

Kenzie began to pace. “I think you should put Crow back in touch with Zoe’s doctor. They should plan out contingencies on what to do depending on what condition she’s in when we find her. HRT has their own medic but just in case they are deployed elsewhere, it would be good for Crow to have a plan, since he’s an EMT.”

“That’s a great idea,” said Scott, and he immediately pulled out his cell phone and called Crow.

“Kenzie!” Alicia called from the dining room. “He’s active again!”

Zoe wouldn’t talk, and Sandy couldn’t figure out why. The little girl seemed listless. All she would do was sit on the couch and watch TV. And she was sucking her thumb! Again!

Kids. Sandy hadn’t realized they were so complex. She busied herself putting a nice pot roast in the oven before she sat down to watch Oprah. Zoe snuggled up to her, and Sandy stroked what was left of her hair. Pretty soon, the little girl fell asleep. Sandy turned her full attention to the TV.

And that’s why she didn’t hear the motorcycles pull up, didn’t hear the footsteps on the porch, heard nothing at all, in fact, before her younger brother Billy and three of his thug friends came striding through the side door.

“Billy! What are you doing here?” Her brother had called her on her cell phone as she drove to the store. Billy hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks, and he said he wanted to check to make sure she was OK.

She knew it meant he needed money. Still, he was her brother, one of her few emotional connections, and foolishly, she’d begun crying and she’d told him about Gray hitting her. Even more foolishly, she’d mentioned the name of the store she was about to go into. By the time she’d finished shopping a half hour later, he was waiting for her in the parking lot. Billy could smell a handout a mile away.

And now, here he was, standing in the kitchen of the Tulip Circle house, bold as life.

“Why are you here?” she said. “You can’t be here!”

“Well, I am.”

“How did you find me?” Sandy asked, her heart drumming.

“That weren’t hard, Sandy. After we seen you at the store, we followed you, then just waited for your friend to leave,” Billy said. His boots were muddy and his jeans were covered with grease. “This the kid?” He leaned to where he could see Zoe, sitting wide-eyed on the couch.

“You can’t come in here!”

“We just did,” one of the thugs said, laughing.

Billy turned his attention back to his sister. Six feet tall and two hundred thirty pounds, he towered above her. He wore a day’s growth of beard and his hands remained black with grease, perpetually dirty from working on motorcycles, which is what he did for a living. That and deal drugs. Meth. Coke. Pot. He delivered. She’d bailed him out of jail more times than she could remember. He’d bailed her out of several abusive relationships. “The guy we saw, is he the guy who hit you?” Billy asked.

“If he comes back and finds you . . .”

“You sure can pick ’em,” he said.

She reddened.

“This is his kid?”

“I’m helping him by taking care of her.”

“Her? She looks like a him.”

“We had to cut her hair. She got it all tangled.”

One of her brother’s friends walked into the living room, squatted down in front of the couch, and said, “Hey, sweet thing. What’s your name?”

Zoe kicked at him and he reacted and fell backward. The other guys laughed.

“Billy, you can’t stay here. You have to go,” Sandy pleaded.

“Anybody hit my sister, I’m not lettin’ them get away with it. You understand?” He grinned at her. “And besides, we’re hungry.” He rubbed his hand over his greasy T-shirt.

Sandy’s mind began racing. She’d just bought all this food but she couldn’t give it to them! How would she explain it to Grayson? All that food being gone? “Look, I’ll give you some money and you can go to McDonald’s. Or Pizza Hut.” She found her purse on the kitchen countertop and removed a twenty-dollar bill from her wallet. She added a ten and handed it to her brother. “Take it and go. Please. And don’t come back. Honest, Billy, I need you to leave.”

“Honest, Billy, I need you to leave.” One of her brother’s friends mimicked her in a falsetto voice and then laughed and jostled his buddy with his elbow. She had never seen two of the three before, but that wasn’t unusual. Her brother picked up friends like other people picked up trash—whatever was lying around.

He had been the despair of their parents, but then, their parents hadn’t been exactly prize picks themselves. Both were alcoholics, both had, early in her youth, left most of the mothering to Sandy. It was OK until Billy got into drugs and alcohol himself. Now, with two prison terms and a string of trouble behind him, her little brother remained a constant source of stress, stress she hoped to leave behind by going to Jamaica with Grayson. But had he bought her a ticket? “Billy!” she yelled. “I mean it!”

He laughed again. “I got one more favor to ask.”

She crossed her arms. “What?”

“I need some more cash.”

“I just gave you thirty bucks!”

He held up his hand. “I know, Sis, but I need just a little more.”

Sandy cocked her head. “How much more?”

“Fifty.”

“Fifty dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I’m not giving you . . .”

Billy sagged back against the counter and crossed his arms in front of himself. His face became sad, the sad, hurt little kid expression she’d been falling for over the course of thirty years. “Why do you need it?” she asked. She’d intended the question to be a mark of strength on her part, a demand for a rational reason for giving him the cash. But as soon as the words came out of her mouth, she recognized them for what they were: The first signal to Billy that eventually she’d give in.

“My kid needs some stuff for school. A backpack and stuff.”

Sandy grimaced. Billy’s son, Bobby, was an adorable little blond, the absolute spitting image of Billy at that age. And Bobby’s mother, who Billy never even thought of marrying, was smart: You want to see the kid, you show me the money. The only way she or Billy got to be with the little guy was if Billy paid child support, and often whatever else Bobby’s mother demanded.

How could Sandy keep her brother from seeing his son?

Sighing, she dug into her wallet again, and counted out fifty dollars, all that she’d just gotten at an ATM at the shopping center. “There. Now leave, and don’t you dare come back.”

Billy grinned at her. “C’mon guys,” he said, and he pushed his friends toward the side door. “See ya, Sis,” he said, winking. “Thanks for the dough.”

As she stood at the side door and watched their motorcycles roar off, tears came to Sandy’s eyes. What a pain, this brother of hers. But she loved him. Sighing, she turned and as she did, her eyes fell on the kitchen floor and the mud from their boots. Good grief.If Grayson ever knew Billy and his friends were here, he’d . . . he’d . . . well, she didn’t want to think about what he’d do!

She grabbed a couple of paper towels and dropped to her knees. She had to get this cleaned up! She had to!

Only when she had finished and the kitchen floor looked spotless did she think of Zoe. Sandy went into the living room, expecting to see the little girl on the couch. But she wasn’t there. Her heart thumped. She raced back to the bedroom, and sighed with relief when she saw Zoe lying in the bed, curled up, sucking her thumb. She appeared to be fast asleep.

“I have got to relax!” she said to herself, and she poured herself a drink and plopped down in front of the TV.