Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

“He’s busy,” Roberta said.

“It’s urgent.”

“What’s it concerning?”

“The Swanson girl.” He paused, and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Is she there?”

“Why would you think that?”

Gold’s eyes danced while he tried to think of something, and Miles shuddered inwardly. Why would Gold think that? How would he have been tipped off?

Gold decided to go with a version of the truth, since it would sound the most credible. “Cookson called me. The girl’s disappeared. I’m just connecting the dots.”

“Suppose she were here,” Roberta said. “What’s that to you?”

“I wanted to discuss an issue with Jeremy.”

“Discuss it with me.”

Gold took a breath and said, “I need a DNA sample from her. I need to run a comparison between her profile and some others. It’s rather complicated.”

“You think I wouldn’t be able to understand it?” Roberta asked.

“No, no, not at all. But it makes more sense for me to explain it to Jeremy directly.”

There was silence at the other end. Charise and Miles exchanged glances, wondering if maybe the signal had been lost.

But then Roberta spoke.

“You’d have to come here to do this, of course?”

“Yes,” Gold said.

“When?”

“Tomorrow?”

Another moment of dead air. When Roberta came back on, she said, “That would be too late. I’m sorry, Dr. Gold, but we’re not going to be able to accommodate you on this.”

“But you see—”

“Goodbye,” Roberta said.

“Hello? Don’t hang up. Are you there?”

She was not.

“He’s got her,” Miles said.

Charise said, “I’ll bring the car around.”

New York, NY

Rhys and Broderick had each ordered a beer. They’d taken a booth in a bar on Third a couple of blocks north of Bloomingdale’s.

“Been a while,” Rhys said.

Broderick nodded. “We haven’t talked since my legal problems.”

Rhys smiled. “All seems to have worked out okay.”

Then Broderick smiled. “Could have gone another way if it hadn’t been for you. I owe you one.”

“Kinda why I got in touch,” Rhys said. “I’ve had a little trouble recently. You heard of Jeremy Pritkin?”

“That’s like asking if I’ve ever heard of money.”

“Been doing some work for him,” Rhys said. “Big job, not finished. Things went sideways.”

“Like?”

“Lost a partner.”

Broderick smiled. “So what’s the job?”

“Pritkin has two girls at his place. They’re a liability. He can’t release them into the wild, but they think they’re getting their freedom, that they’ve got an appointment with a lawyer to sign some NDAs, walk away with a substantial cash settlement to keep quiet. That way, they leave the building without trying to make a break for it, and it gets them out of there so we can do what we have to do off-site.”

Broderick nodded. “What’s it all about?”

“Do you want to know what this is all about?”

Broderick shrugged. “Curious.”

“Even I don’t know the scope of it. Pritkin’s needed some people to disappear. Completely. No DNA traces left behind. They’re all over. We ran into a problem in Fort Wayne.”

“Fort Wayne?”

“Yeah.”

Broderick moved his tongue around, poking it into his cheek. “Hadn’t thought of Fort Wayne in a million years and now it pops up twice in a very short period of time.”

Rhys waited.

“Met this woman. Had a scheme to get a fortune that should go to her husband, but he got fucked over by his brother. Got her daughter to make nice with this nerd who was going to come into a lot of money, eventually.”

Rhys’s eyes narrowed. “You got a name for this nerd?”

“Travis Roben.”

Rhys leaned back in the booth and shook his head. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“No.”

Rhys said, “That’s the thing that went sideways.” He gave Broderick the bullet-point version. “Small fucking world.”

“Not really,” Broderick said. “Not a lot of people in our line of work. Sometimes our interests overlap.”

“You know what?” Rhys said. “Bringing you in, it was meant to be.” He raised his bottle and clinked it against Broderick’s. “I got a good feeling about this.”

New York, NY

Chloe and Nicky decided to they would do it after dinner, which, as it turned out, was pretty damn good. Veal lasagna and chocolate mousse for dessert.

“This is even better than usual,” Nicky whispered to Chloe. “They probably are getting ready to kill us.”

Their occasional attempts at gallows humor did not mask how scared they were.

Nicky, whispering to Chloe with the television volume turned up, had gone over, several times, how things worked around here. Whenever anyone came to the room, like the maid or Roberta, they couldn’t leave until someone responded to their rap on the door. The man who stood guard at the top of the stairs, a short distance down the hall, would come open it, then return to his station. Like in a prison movie, when the lawyer lets the guard know he’s done talking to his client.

The door was always open for a few seconds. Now that there were two of them, there was a better chance that between them they could keep that door open long enough to escape.

What about the guard? Chloe had asked.

He was big, Nicky said, but that also meant he was slower than them. And the thing was, he wouldn’t be standing where they intended to go.

“You ever play basketball?” Chloe had asked.

“Sure.”

“We fake him out. Look like we’re going one way, he moves to block, we go the other way.”

“He’ll think we’re heading for the front door.”

Chloe said, in a voice loud enough to be picked up by their captors, “Gotta pee.”

She went into the bathroom and closed the door. She grabbed a hand towel, wrapped it around the drinking glass sitting on the shelf above the sink and lightly rapped it on the edge of the porcelain sink until she heard it shatter.

Then she set the towel down in the bottom of the sink and carefully unwrapped the glass, now in several pieces. Chloe examined the shards and picked two larger pieces she believed would suit their purposes. They needed to be large enough to be effective, but small enough to be concealed in their hands. About the size of a book of matches.

She set the two curved pieces next to the taps, then gathered up the rest of the shards in the towel and put them in the garbage receptacle. She wadded up some tissues and tossed them over the glass to hide it. She flushed the toilet, for the benefit of any bedroom listening devices, and rejoined Nicky on the bed.

They were sitting atop the covers, their backs propped against the headboard. Chloe tucked one of the two pieces of glass just under Nicky’s jeaned leg. They were both fully dressed, shoes on.

“It’s sharp,” she whispered.

“Duh,” Nicky said.

The glass briefly caught on the bedspread as Nicky reached down and palmed it. Then, in a normal voice, she said, “I gotta move around.”

She hopped off the bed and began to pace the room, her path taking her close to the door with every lap. The plan was simple. When the maid came back for their tray, Nicky would keep the door from closing while Chloe kept the maid in check by threatening to cut her.

Simple.

Nicky might have tried something like this long before now, but the rest of the escape plan needed Chloe’s skills to be executed.

Nicky, still speaking so that she could be heard, “Tell me again what a DNA agreement is?”