Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

“In all honesty.” She repeated his words with desperation in her voice. Her own lack of honesty had brought all of this upon him. She hated herself at that moment.

To her surprise, a man named Marc O’Brien ran the meeting. She didn’t recall having ever met the man, and his attendance reinstalled her sense of violation-that some stranger had, at least in his mind, taken control of her life, was here to dictate to her what had to be done and how to do it. Judging by looks, O’Brien belonged in an Irish pub with a pint in hand to fuel his glowing cheeks and bubble nose. His loud voice supported his demeanor of reckless overconfidence. Here was a man who, on a sinking boat, would announce to anyone who would listen what a great day it was for a swim. His next-in-command, Pahwan Riz, the dark-skinned Malaysian, tracked Liz’s every reaction, her every movement with his crisp green eyes, like a cat watching the family dog.

Lou, John LaMoia, and Daphne Matthews all sat stiffly on the same couch together, Matthews in the middle, lined up like Kewpie dolls at the county fair. Maggie, the infant child under Matthews’s legal guardianship, slept in a car seat propped up between two chairs in the kitchen, turning the new mother’s head that direction whenever an errant sound surfaced. Danny Foreman, looking worse for the wear, two fingers of his left hand bandaged, occupied a needlepoint bench against the wall that fronted the stairs leading to the home’s second floor. Unseen up there, a police officer sat near a window keeping watch. Another indignity she could not get used to: the castle keep. Foreman sat forward, resting on thick forearms that pressed into his thighs. He lifted his head every so often looking as if he might speak, but apparently not finding the strength to do so.

She knew that if he’d had his way, Lou would have kept Foreman out of the meeting. But as he’d explained it to her, he couldn’t block BCI from sitting in on the briefing, and he didn’t have anything more than circumstantial evidence to bring against Foreman, not to mention that one cop charging another cop was fraught with bureaucratic red tape and could not be done without the inclusion of the very highest brass-and Lou wasn’t prepared to go that route, given that he was planning to end-run his own department himself.

Riz announced, “The purpose of this meeting is that at some point in the next twenty-four to thirty hours, we expect that the conversion of funds resulting from the merger will necessitate an attempt to move the embezzled seventeen million out of the bank. That will apparently require your participation,” he told Liz. “Your cooperation.”

O’Brien said, “We believe you will either be contacted or abducted.”

He said this loudly, and in a way that to her sounded grossly impersonal. She felt shivers ripple up her arms.

Riz clearly felt the man’s insensitivity as well. He lowered his voice, looked directly at Liz, and continued, “We don’t know where or when. We don’t know how. Our intel is basically nil on this case. All we have is you, Mrs. B., and it’s time we laid down some ground rules.”

Liz had hoped to sit around as a spectator, a listener, to avoid any direct participation in this meeting, to let Lou do the talking for her. But she felt her mouth move, and out came words. “Yes… well… I don’t know how many of you have ever been on the other end of this kind of surveillance, but I find it claustrophobic, invasive, and oppressive. So the sooner it’s over, the better.”

Riz and O’Brien ran down a number of possible scenarios for her abduction or participation.

Liz said, “You must be aware that there are at least four other people with security clearance to access the IBM AS/ 400s.”

Pahwan Riz said, “Detective Foreman?”

Danny Foreman came awake, like one of Miles’s toys that reacts to sound. Lou had mentioned that Danny had been tortured a second time, but there was no evidence of that. “Liz, BCI has had its eye on those of you with access since the day Hayes was paroled. You and LaRossa are the only two they’ve contacted, and LaRossa is now in ICU and not an option. That is not to say we aren’t paying attention to the others. Of course we are. But the bets are on you.” He sagged his head again, the doll back asleep. He sucked down his coffee as if it were juice.

O’Brien said, “Our play is that you’re their target. Keep in mind that we are substituting one of our people for you, so there is basically no situation in which we see you in any kind of trouble. But we must take precautions. Our primary concern is what actions we take as a group, and specifically you as an individual, if we in fact experience an ACL. To brief you on the various proactive responses at your disposal.”

All Contact Lost. Lou had coached her on some of the abbreviations, all of which she felt sounded childish and unnecessary. The secret codes made it more serious to them but more ludicrous to her-like a bunch of kids up in a tree fort planning a raid. O’Brien had begun the meeting laying out the difficulties of surveillance, of hostage situations, raising the possibility that her surveillance team might lose track of her at some point. The moment he said that, she realized a pawn had no choice but to move where and when the player dictated.

“If I carry one of those tracking boxes, they’ll search me and find it, right?” she asked. “I mean, assuming they realize they’ve got the wrong woman and then somehow get hold of me.”

Riz explained that there were other, smaller devices available that could be rigged inside her bra or in a hem, the toe of a shoe, or even her underwear or “on her person,” which she took to mean a body cavity, and she felt briefly ill.

Riz added, “With the smaller devices transmission distance is considerably reduced.” He made it sound like he was selling her a vacuum cleaner.

“So put one in my clothes. I’m okay with that.”

“Fine,” Riz said.

Lou met eyes with her, admiring her. She appreciated the gesture, but realized that at that moment he had little idea what she was going through.

“Your options include,” O’Brien listed, “your playing by their rules and waiting it out; your attempting to give us some way to locate you; or-”

“Escape,” LaMoia said, interrupting.

“Consideration of escape is not an option,” Matthews said, objecting. “Trying to outrun organized crime single-handedly is simply not an option.”

Again, husband and wife met eyes. Wasn’t this exactly what Lou was proposing to her? Wasn’t this the solution he had planned?

Again words left her mouth. “You’re saying it is not an option.” She made it a statement.

Matthews said delicately, “Thinking about it, focusing on it is not an option. They’ll pick up on it. Hostage situations require the abducted individual to loosen the hold of the keepers. One does this by playing into whatever it is they’ve asked of you. By cooperating, not disobeying. You surprise them by your willingness, your eagerness, to cooperate. This has been proven over and over again to be a hostage’s most effective way to gain enough physical freedom and emotional detachment to invoke a causal action that either reconnects with surveillance or provides an opportunity for intervention.”

“Taking a phone off the hook, for instance,” Riz said. “If we suspect a general area you’ve been taken to, we’ll look for that kind of thing: a phone line left open for a minute or more.”

O’Brien added, “You can ‘accidentally’ turn a stereo or television on too loudly. If they’ve got you in a car, you might bump the emergency flashers, might even turn them off yourself, apologizing.”

Riz said, “Activate the rear wiper if it’s not raining. Toss litter from a window. All these things are potential helpers.”