He took a sip of his cocoa. “I mind my own business, Detectives.”
I was doing my best to abide by the mayor’s don’t-strong-arm-the-rich-guy rule, but I could see that Kylie had zero tolerance for stargazing and folksy anecdotes. “Mr. Alden,” she said, “we have reason to believe that your grandson Tripp was abducted yesterday.”
She had his undivided attention. His face went from down-home Norman Rockwell grandpa on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post to steely-eyed tycoon on the cover of Forbes.
It took less than five minutes to give him the whole backstory. He sat quietly till we mentioned Blackstone.
“That little turd—he’s more con man than private eye.”
“Whatever he is,” Kylie said, “your son hired him to find the kidnappers. It’s a serious mistake. Kidnappers always tell their victims’ families not to call the police. And if they set fire to your house, they’d tell you not to call the fire department. The fact is, a kidnapped child has a better chance of survival if the distraught parents bring in trained police professionals as soon as possible.”
“Without a ransom call, none of this is conclusive,” Alden said. “Right now, all you have is some old lady’s testimony and a gut feeling.”
“And my gut tells me there are two young lives at stake, and your son is standing in the way of saving them,” Kylie said. “Sir, we need someone to talk some sense into him.”
He shook his head. “Only two people could ever reason with Hunter. His mother, who passed in 1997, and his wife Marjorie, who died in the North Tower on 9/11.”
“What about you?” Kylie asked.
“Me? Young lady, my son is a grown man, and there is nothing I can say or do to influence his actions or his behavior.” He stood up. “My grandson, on the other hand, is eighteen, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to bed until I know where and how he is. I’ll call you in the morning.”
Chapter 24
Kylie and I were headed south on Fifth when I figured it out. I’m a better than average detective, but I’d completely missed the first clue. That morning, on the steps of Hunter Alden’s town house, Blackstone had asked Kylie about Spence. She had responded with, “He’s on the mend, thank you.”
On the mend? Who says crap like that? The Kylie I know cuts off personal questions from assholes like Blackstone with a quick verbal one-two punch. Verb. Pronoun. Bam—end of discussion.
The second clue was more obvious. As soon as Cheryl called to say she was spending the night in Westchester, Kylie asked me out for a night of wings and beer. Not pizza. Not Chinese. Wings and beer.
And then the clincher. She turned left onto 20th Street, and all the pieces came together. Spence wasn’t on the mend; he was in bad shape, which meant Kylie’s marriage was in worse shape. And we weren’t just going for wings and beer; we were going back to one of the happiest chapters in Kylie’s life—a time when she was a young recruit following her dream and madly in love with a man who wanted to be with her forever. Me.
Wing Nuts was around the corner from the academy, and it was the go-to watering hole for recruits who wanted to eat and drink all night on the cheap. It’s where Kylie and I had dinner the first night we made love. And for the next twenty-seven days, it was our favorite pre- and postcoital haunt.
We walked in, and it looked, smelled, and felt just the way I’d left it. Same menu, same decor, same bartender, same everything. The only thing missing was my after-sex glow.
We ordered a bunch of wings and a pitcher of Brooklyn Blast and found a table as far from the crowd as we could.
Kylie poured two beers. “So what’s going on with you and Cheryl?”
“Nothing’s going on. Everything’s great. We spent New Year’s together, and all of a sudden Fred shows up out of left field. One minute I think he’s going to get married and have a baby; the next minute I find out he’s none of the above, and he wants to lean on Cheryl. You were right. My male ego got in the way. But I’m over it. She’ll be back tomorrow; everything’s cool.”
Kylie gave me one of her signature head tilts, complete with dubious smile and a slow eye roll. She didn’t buy my fairy tale with the tidy little happy ending.
A white-haired waitress showed up with two trays of wings. “Well, would you look at who’s back,” she said.
“Hey, Gladys,” Kylie said.
“Don’t ask me to remember your names, honey,” she said, “but you’re the three-alarm, and your boyfriend is the mild.” She set the wings down and left.
“Brings back memories,” Kylie said, biting into a wing.
“Beer will do that for you,” I said.
She kicked me under the table. “Come on, Zach. Whatever else happened over the past eleven years, you have to admit we had some good times back in the day.”
Whatever else happened? Spence Harrington managed to kick his cocaine habit just as I was getting into my Kylie MacDonald habit. She took him back, married him, and for ten years they were one of the beautiful couples you see in the Style section of the Times. New York royalty. And then Camelot exploded. A killer that Kylie and I were chasing decided to get back at her by targeting Spence. He survived the attack, but he was no match for the Percocet he took for the pain. He was in and out of one rehab in three days. Last month he flew to Oregon for another shot at recovery.
“Yeah, we had fun,” I said, getting back to her stroll down memory lane. “And look at us now—two hot shit detectives just hanging out in a joint filled with wannabe cops.”
“Yeah, that’s us,” she said. “One kick-ass hot shit team.”
She smiled. The beer was doing its job. This was as good a time as any to see if my trouble-in-paradise theory was right. “So how’s Spence doing?”
The smile vanished. “I spoke to his counselor last week. He said Spence just won’t give himself to the program. Then Spence called me New Year’s Eve. He says he’s fine, but he can’t imagine another ninety days away from home. So me, I immediately go into recovering-drug-addict’s-wife autopilot, and I told him to take it one day at a time. He goes, ‘Oh Christ, Kylie, not you too.’ He said ‘Happy New Year’ and slammed the phone down.”
I responded with a noncommittal nod. “So what are you going to do now?”
“I know exactly what I’m going to do,” she said, waving at Gladys. “I’m going to order us another pitcher of beer.”
We chowed down on wings, and halfway through the second pitcher she was leaning across the table, one hand resting on my arm, and starting every other sentence with “Do you remember when?”
Boy, did I remember. I remembered the first day I looked up and saw the green-eyed, golden-haired beauty walk into my life. I remembered the first kiss, and the tender lovemaking, and the joy of realizing I’d met the woman I wanted to be with forever. And then I remembered the last night we sat in this seedy old wings joint, and Kylie told me she was going back to Spence. “He’s recovered,” she said. “I have to give him one more chance.”
And now it sounded like Spence was as unrecovered as possible.
We talked for two hours. Somewhere along the way, I realized that the crowd had thinned out, and that our third pitcher of beer was dangerously low. Kylie topped off both our glasses, and we asked Gladys for two coffees, one Mississippi mud pie, and two forks.
We dug into the pie like two kids on a sugar binge. Forks dueling, vying for the best chunks of chocolate, and Kylie doing what she always does: play hard to win.
She doesn’t like to lose at anything. Especially relationships. Her parents set the bar low. Their marriage failed. Then her father struck out two more times, her mother once. Kylie’s goal was to get married and make it stick.
But it’s not easy for an ambitious cop to stay married to a drug addict.
We’d played this Mississippi mud wrestling game before, and as usual, Kylie grabbed the last piece. That’s when I had my three-pitchers-of-beer epiphany. This morning I woke up in a penthouse suite with Cheryl and thought, I??
?ve never been happier. Tonight I’m in a Third Avenue dive, getting hammered on Brooklyn Blast with Kylie, thinking, I’ve never been happier.
We were both legally too drunk to drive, and while Kylie loves to break the rules, that’s the one we never even bend. Luckily there’s no rule dictating how long two cop partners can hug when they’re saying good night, because we’d have gone way over the limit.
I put her in the first cab, and she gave me one final hug. “Thanks, Zach,” she said. “I really needed this.”
I was about to say something like “I’m really sorry about you and Spence,” but I kept my mouth shut.
Who the hell was I kidding?
Chapter 25
The room was dark, dank, dungeon-like. Tripp Alden stood spread eagle, his wrists and ankles shackled to iron-forged rings set in the stone wall.
In front of him loomed the tall blond man, dressed only in skintight black leather pants, his golden mane pulled back into a tight ponytail, his bare chest oiled and glistening in the orange glow cast by a pair of torches on the wall.
“Your father cares more about money than he does about you,” he said, unsheathing a curved sword from the steel scabbard that hung at his side. He positioned the blade an inch from the boy’s neck.
Tripp was sobbing. “Please. He’ll pay whatever you want. I know he will. Just call him back. Please.”
A phone rang.
“That’s him,” Tripp screamed. “He’s calling you back.”
“Too late,” the tall blond man said. He grasped the hilt with both hands and drew the sword back, ready to deliver a single deadly strike.
The phone rang again, louder this time, and Hunter Alden snapped awake, slamming his knee on the underside of his desk. He yelped in pain and fumbled for his iPhone. Hutch’s face appeared on the screen.
“Dad? What’s going on?”
“The police were just at my apartment. They think Tripp was kidnapped.”
Hunter forced a laugh. “Dad, Tripp is fine. Go back to staring at the moon, or the planets, or whatever else is up there in the stratosphere.”
“The only thing I’m staring at is your front gate,” Hutch said. “I didn’t ring because I don’t want Janelle to know I’m here. Open up. I’m freezing.”
An op-ed piece in the Times once said that Hutch and Hunter Alden were men of biblical proportions. One was Solomon, a man of wisdom, wealth, and power; the other was the serpent who slithered through the Garden of Eden.
The snake buzzed his father through the gate, shoved the burner phone into his pocket and made his way to the foyer, his mind churning, trying to hash out a plan for dealing with Solomon.
“Dad,” he said, opening the front door. “I was just going to call you.”
Hutch Alden stood there, hatless, gloveless, his parka unzipped. “Where’s Tripp?” he demanded, his breath a white puff of smoke in the cold air.
“Don’t worry about him,” Hunter said. “Come on in. I’ll pour you a drink.”
“What’s going on?” Hutch said as he followed Hunter to the office.
“What’s going on is the cops are driving me crazy. They’re supposed to be looking for Peter’s killer, but they keep coming around asking for Tripp.”
“They said he was abducted. There’s a witness.”
“They came to me with the same bullshit. The truth is the kid was out filming one of his crazy movies, some old lady saw it, and she thought it was for real. It’s not. End of story.”
“Then where is Tripp?”
“Tripp?” Hunter said, pouring from a three-thousand-dollar bottle of Richard Hennessy cognac. “Getting drunk, or shacked up with some girl, or whatever it is eighteen-year-old kids do when someone they love gets murdered.”
Hutch cupped the crystal snifter and slowly swirled the amber liquid around the bowl. “Be that as it may, what does it hurt for him to talk to the cops? Maybe he knows something that will help.”
“Dad, I talked to him. He never connected with Peter. The cops should be interviewing Peter’s drinking buddies, not some kid who knows nothing. And the worst part of it is they keep coming back here. It’s upsetting Janelle. I’m at the end of my rope. But they won’t quit. I don’t know what to do.”
Hutch snapped at the bait. “You should have called me. I know exactly what to do.”
Hunter held up both hands. “I know, I know. I was going to call, but I hated to ask you to use up a chit with the new mayor on her first day.”
“I don’t have to call the mayor,” Hutch said, raising the glass to his nose and breathing in the aroma. “I’ll find out who those two detectives report to, and I’ll talk to their boss.”
Hunter shrugged. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble…”
“Are you kidding? I have enough juice to call the head of Homeland Security or the goddamn president of the United States. How much trouble is it for me to ask some precinct captain to call off his dogs and give Tripp a break for a few days? I’ll take care of it first thing in the morning.”
He took a small sip of the cognac and let it run over his palate. “This is exceptional, but I’m not going to stick around and enjoy it,” he said, setting the snifter down. “You look like hell. Get some sleep.”
“Will do,” Hunter said, leading his father toward the foyer.
The burner phone in Hunter’s pocket rang.
“Don’t answer it,” Hutch said, stopping at the front door. “Whatever it is, they can call back in the morning.”
“Great advice, except it is morning in Japan, and I told this developer in Tokyo to call me now.”
The phone rang again, and Hunter opened the front door.
“Give me a minute. This damn thing is stuck,” Hutch said, struggling with the zipper on his parka.
The phone rang again. And again. And again.
On the sixth ring the old man was still in the doorway, trying to zip up.
Hunter couldn’t wait. He dug into his pocket and yelled into the phone, “Hold on.” He turned to his father. “Dad, I have to take this call.”
Hutch gave up on the zipper and pulled the parka around him for the twenty-foot walk to the curb. Hunter shut the door and pulled the phone to his ear. “Hello, this is Hunter Alden.”
The voice on the other end said only two words, but they were all Hunter needed to hear to realize that his worst fears were about to be realized.
“Hello, Leviticus.”
Chapter 26
Hunter steeled himself. He had known this call was coming, and he had two ways to deal with it. The first was to come on like a freight train. His reputation for bullying, browbeating, and psychologically eviscerating his opponents was notorious. Victoriam terrore. Victory by intimidation.
There was a second way. It went against every fiber of his being, but it was the only way to play it when the other guy had all the cards. Be nice.
“Who is this?” Hunter asked politely.
“Why don’t we keep it Old Testament, Leviticus? Call me Cain.”
“And I’d prefer if you called me Hunter.”
“You’re a hard man to reach, Hunter.” His pitch was flat, his inflection robotic. He was using a voice modifier, and a cheap one at that.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t take your call earlier, Mr. Cain, but the police were here, and while I have no experience in these matters, I felt it wise not to negotiate ransom money in their presence.”
“Good call. Bringing the cops in on this would not be in either of our best interests.”
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you killed my driver. Decapitations have a way of attracting law enforcement.”
“I’m sorry for that. It couldn’t be avoided.”
“And what about kidnapping my son? Could that have been avoided?”
“I’m not sure I follow. I’m holding Tripp for ransom. Logic would dictate that the process begins with an abduction.”
“I beg to differ,” Hunter said. “You’re blackmai
ling me, Mr. Cain. You have—or at least you think you have—information that I don’t want to become public knowledge, and you want me to buy your silence. That’s extortion, plain and simple. So let me repeat the question: why did you take Tripp when all you had to do is negotiate?”
“Oh, I see where you’re going,” Cain said. “Easy answer. I did that to help you.”
“Now I’m not sure that I follow,” Hunter said.
“Simple logic. Paying off a blackmailer has a way of—as you put it—attracting law enforcement. And once their interest is piqued, they tend to start digging into what it is you’re willing to pay to hide. But if you’re paying off a ransom demand, nobody bats an eye. It lets the whole world see you as the loving father, the sympathetic victim, instead of the monster we both know you are.”
Hunter took a deep breath. He’d made his decision. Don’t intimidate; manipulate.
“I appreciate your concern for my public image, but I could have easily paid you in cash if you had asked. Nobody would know about the transaction, and life would go on.”
“I doubt if you have that much cash on hand to meet my price.”
This was it. Let’s get down to business, Mr. Cain. “And how much are we talking about?”
“Ten percent.”
Hunter had been ready for a dollar amount, but this was a punch in the gut. “Ten percent of what?” he asked, but he was afraid that he already knew the answer.
“Of the money you made from that little Bible study group of yours. Let me do the math for you. Project Gutenberg netted you a one-billion-dollar profit. My 10 percent comes to a hundred million.”
Hunter sat down on the foyer steps, barely able to breathe. He’d heard the unhearable. Cain knew the unknowable. Not just the vague notion of Project Gutenberg, but numbers. Real numbers.
Hunter changed the subject. “Let me speak to my son.”
“He can’t come to the phone, but I can assure you he is alive and well.”
“Prove it. Bring him here tonight, and I will pay you five million dollars. No questions asked.”