“She ain’t due another meal for three hours.”
Lexi couldn’t see the pig’s face, but she could tell he was afraid.
He hissed at her. “One word and I will slit your throat. Understand?”
She nodded.
Agent Andrew Edwards looked at the stack of black-and-white photographs on the table in front of him. It was as thick as a phone book.
“Is this all of them?”
“Yes, sir. That’s every warehouse, hangar and industrial facility within a fifteen-mile radius of where the car was dumped.”
It was eleven days, four hours and sixteen minutes since Peter Templeton had reported his daughter missing. Agent Edwards had played the tape of Peter’s desperate 911 call so many times he could recite it by heart. Nine times out of ten with these child disappearances, the parents ended up being involved. What could you say? It was a sick world. But in this case, Agent Edwards believed the father. Not only did Peter Templeton’s distress seem genuine, but the ransom note left under the child’s pillow bore all the hallmarks of an organized criminal operation: no fingerprints, typed on the most common Lexmark printer paper, succinct, untraceable.
The Blackwell family had two weeks to transfer $10 million to a numbered account in the Caymans. If they involved the police at any point, the girl would be killed immediately.
Agent Edwards was a Scot by birth but a New Yorker by temperament. He had pale skin, watery amber eyes and hair that couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to be blond or red. He loved the Yankees, hated the street gangs and drug dealers that plagued the city and described his yearly vacation to the Jersey Shore as “traveling.”
He sighed heavily.
“There must be three hundred facilities here.”
“Four hundred twenty.”
“Got any good news for me, Agent Jones?”
“As a matter of fact, sir, I do. These”-Agent Edwards’s colleague handed his boss a much-thinner manila folder-“are the derelict or deserted premises.”
“How many?”
“Only eighteen of ’em.” Agent Jones smiled. “I can set up surveillance this afternoon, if you want.”
“No. Not yet.”
“But, sir, we have less than sixty hours. The deadline-”
“You think I don’t know what the damn deadline is?”
Agent Edwards was pissed. What kind of idiots was the Bureau hiring these days? The last thing he wanted was to have every warehouse in New Jersey crawling with feds. If these guys got spooked, they’d kill the kid on the spot.
The Blackwell family had taken a huge risk involving the authorities at all. With their money and connections, they could easily have made the payment quietly and been done with it. Or hired their own private hit men to get these guys.
But they hadn’t. They’d come to Agent Edwards with a case that would either make or break his career. Screwing up was not an option.
Finding the kidnappers’ car had been a coup. Agent Edwards had matched the DNA on hairs found in the trunk to hairs from Lexi’s bedroom pillow. Two voice-distorted phone calls to Peter Templeton’s office were probably made from inside a large, industrial structure. The FBI’s tech team had analyzed the echo, if you could believe that shit.
But it wasn’t enough. Agent Edwards didn’t want eighteen targets. He wanted one.
“Send a chopper up. Not too low. It needs to sound like routine air traffic.”
“Yes, sir. What are they looking for, exactly?”
Agent Edwards looked at his junior witheringly.
“The Emerald City of Oz. Jesus! Tire tracks, shit-for-brains. They’re looking for fucking tire tracks.”
He never wanted to get involved.
He was in a brothel in Phuket when the call came through, enjoying the attentions of a pair of eleven-year-old twins. Pussies so tight they could have cracked hazelnuts, tongues as eager and skillful as any of the high-end hookers he used back home. Bliss.
He loved the Thais. Such an enlightened people.
“Ten million bucks, split three ways. The house has third-world security. Trust me, you’ll be taking candy from a baby. Get in, get the kid, get the money, get out.”
“I don’t need that kind of money.”
Laughter. “You don’t have to need it. You just have to want it.”
“I’m straight now, all right? Find someone else.”
He closed his eyes in pleasure as the girls plundered his body with their tongues and fingers. At home, he paid prostitutes to dress up as schoolgirls. But nothing could compare to the real deal: the smooth skin; the hard, budding breasts; the hairless paradise between the legs…
“You know, the little girl is adorable.”
The voice on the phone wasn’t giving up.
“She’s the spitting image of her mother. Everybody says so.”
He hesitated. An image of Alexandra Blackwell in her youth popped into his mind. He remembered her well. The long, lithe legs tanned a perfect caramel. The cascade of blond hair. The trembling pale-pink lips, parting, smiling.
Hello, Rory. It’s been a long time.
“How old did you say she was?”
One of the Thai twins circled her tongue around his anus. The other opened her mouth, cocooning his balls in a cave of warm, soft wetness. He moaned with pleasure.
“She’s eight.”
Eight years old.
The spitting image of her mother.
Everybody says so.
“All right. I’ll do it. But this is the last-”
He never got to finish. The line had already gone dead.
“Have you found her?”