Trouble was, he wasn’t the only one with money. If that was all she wanted, there were plenty of overnight millionaires in his line of work. Did she love him for him? Or for the life he provided her?
She’d never shown signs that it was anything but the former. And yet, that wasn’t enough for him to stop torturing himself. To wonder if maybe she wasn’t enjoying flaunting it just a little too much. So now he wanted her to dial it down a notch, tone down the hot stuff. Wear a skirt that was short, okay, but not one that was hiked so high it flashed the Brazilian when she took a tumble off the Christian Louboutins.
“You’re making me crazy, you know,” she said, flinging clothes, ninety percent of them black, across the rod. “Maybe I dressed that way to get your motor running, not anybody else’s. You ever thought of that? Where the hell are those pants?”
“You’re sending off signals,” he told her. “And even if you don’t mean to be, believe me, other guys are picking them up.”
She took a hanger off the rack, inspected the pants, put them back. “Shit, where are they?”
“Are you listening to me?”
Rochelle stopped and glared at him. “No, I am not. Because you’re losing your fucking mind.” She squeezed past him and out of the closet. She went to her bedside table to pick up a cell phone, and said, “I need some space, away from you. I’ll be out on the patio if you decide you want to tell me you’re sorry about being a total jerk-off.”
He plopped down onto the edge of the bed as she walked out of the bedroom. Still couldn’t take his eyes off her ass. That was the one bonus when she got mad at him; he got to watch her walk away.
“Stupid,” he said, and he wasn’t talking about his wife. “Fucking stupid.” He knew, in his heart, that possessiveness would produce the exact opposite result of what he wanted. He’d seen it with some of his friends. The harder they tried to keep a woman, the more she tried to get away.
He sat there for ten minutes, then twenty, wondering whether to go find her and apologize, or just walk out the front door, get in his Ferrari, and drive around for a couple of hours. No, maybe go out in the car, but buy some flowers, or something a lot better. Hit the Magnificent Mile, come home with something expensive and sparkly. Around ten grand. Accidentally leave the receipt someplace where she’d find it.
He’d waited a good three quarters of an hour when he decided he was ready to swallow his pride, tell her he was sorry, tell her if she wanted to dress that way, fine, but she had to know that—
His cell went glink! Not a phone call, but an incoming text. He got off the bed and grabbed the phone and was greeted with a picture under the name “Rochelle.”
Rochelle had texted a photo to him.
A very strange photo.
It was a picture of a woman—not only was Kyle pretty sure it was a woman; he was pretty sure it was his wife, judging by the red T-shirt and jean shorts—but it was difficult to be sure, what with the plastic bag that was wrapped tightly about her head. Her chin, lips, nose, eyebrows—they were a relief map of her facial features.
And while the picture didn’t show her entire body, he could just make out her arms, and something silvery on them. Was that tape? Holding her into a chair? Not a patio chair, because this shot was not taken outside. Wasn’t that one of the chairs from the basement?
“What the hell?” he said.
What kind of crazy game was this?
“Rochelle!” he shouted.
As he started heading for the stairs, the phone made another noise in his hand. Not a text, but an actual call.
Again, from Rochelle’s cell.
“Hey,” he said. “What the hell was that picture you—”
“Mr. Billings.”
“Huh?” A woman’s voice, but it didn’t sound like Rochelle.
“Mr. Billings, you need to stop and listen.”
“Rochelle?”
“This is not Rochelle. And you need to listen very carefully.”
He was halfway down the stairs when he stopped.
“Your wife can still breathe, just,” the woman said. “But if I tighten the bag any further, it will cut off all her oxygen.”
“Who the hell is this? What the fuck is going on? I’m coming down—”
“If you come down here, she will die. Are you listening, Kyle? She will die.”
He stopped at the base of the stairs, not far from the front door. “Who is this? What do you want?”
“You must listen, Kyle,” the woman said calmly. “You must. Or Rochelle will die.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he felt his legs weakening. He clutched the banister with his free hand.
“Everything is going to be fine so long as you listen and do exactly what you’re told.”
“I have money,” he said quickly. “I can get you money.” And then he thought, Shit, it’s Sunday. But he could find a way. He knew there’d be a way. When you had the kind of money he had, the bank was open whenever you wanted it to be open.
“This isn’t about money,” the woman said.
“What, then? The cars? You want the cars? Take them. But please, please don’t hurt Rochelle. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“I don’t want anything of yours. I want you to do something for me. First, the ground rules: You will not call the police. You will not inform anyone in any way about what is transpiring. If you do anything to alert anyone to what’s going on, your wife will run out of air and she will die.”
“I get it. I get it. What is it you want? What is it you want me to do?”
“You’re going to find for me another picture very similar to the one you got a minute ago. And then you’re going to get rid of it.”
Then Nicole got specific.
“DON’T normally see you here on a Sunday, Mr. Billings,” the security guard at the Whirl360 front desk said as Kyle strode across the lobby.
“Hi, Bob,” Kyle said. “Just popping in for a second.”
Bob hit a button, and overlapping Plexiglas panels retracted to allow Billings to pass through. A few yards beyond that, Kyle hit the elevator button. As the doors parted and he stepped into the empty box, he touched his finger to the Bluetooth device clipped over his ear.
“Let me talk to Rochelle,” Kyle said.
The voice in his ear said, “One second. Say hello.”
“Kyle?” His wife sounded like she was several feet away from her captor, as though the woman had held the cell phone up to the air.
“There,” she said. “You’ve heard her. She’s just fine. Took the bag off her head so she could breathe a bit more easily. And that thing with Bob, that was very good. You sounded very natural. You’re doing just fine.”
“Okay, the door’s about to open.”
“That’s fine,” Nicole said. “I’m here if you need me.”
Kyle entered the main office space of Whirl360. It wasn’t like other companies here. Sure, there were dozens upon dozens of workstations throughout the open-plan environment, but few firms ringed the work area with pool tables and foosball and video games. When Whirl360 employees needed a break, they pushed themselves away from their monitors and played a few rounds of virtual golf, battled space aliens, watched some 3-D television. And when they felt recharged, they went back to work.
The office was quiet today. Only a handful of employees were seated at their terminals, entering in new images from Whirl360 cars that were photographing city streets around the globe every second of every minute of every hour of the day.
“Hey, Kyle.”
“What’s happening, Kyle.”
“How’s it going, Kyle.”
Everyone felt they needed to say hello.
He gave each of them a nod, found the computer station where he always worked. No individual offices here. Everyone, no matter where they were placed on the corporate food chain, worked here in the main room.
Kyle wished he could have done what he had to do from home, met the hostage taker’s demands i
mmediately. But Whirl360 had one of the most hacker-proof systems on the planet. Access from beyond the building was impossible.
“I’m at my desk,” Kyle said quietly enough that no one in the office could hear.
“Excellent,” Nicole said. “We’re fine here.”
“I do this thing for you, we never hear from you again,” he whispered.
“That’s right. You erase the image, you wipe it from the system like it was never there, and we’re good.”
“I’ve got your word on that,” Kyle said.
“Of course,” Nicole said.
“Okay, I’m in.” A flurry of keystrokes. “New York…Orchard Street…This shouldn’t take long.”
NICOLE took the phone away from her ear, rested her hand on her thigh. If Kyle had anything to say to her, she’d hear it. She was feeling optimistic. She could tell he wanted this to be done as quickly as possible, that he wanted to please her. He wasn’t going to fuck this up.
“Is he doing it?” Rochelle asked. Just as Nicole had said, the bag was off Rochelle’s head now, but she remained bound with duct tape to the leather Eames chair in the Billings home’s expansive basement. There was everything down here. Billiards table. A bar. Sixty-inch 3-D TV. An elaborate Lionel train set with mountains and buildings and bridges that had to be ten by twenty feet, for Christ’s sake.
“He’s doing just fine,” Nicole said, sitting across from Rochelle in a matching leather chair. She was wearing another ball cap with visor plus a pair of sunglasses to make her face less identifiable. Her hands had been in latex gloves since she’d been in the house. The alarm system hadn’t been a problem. Nicole knew how to deal with these things.
“He’ll do what you say,” Rochelle said. “He will.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“We’ll never say anything to anyone,” Rochelle said. “Promise me you won’t hurt him.”
“I don’t think there’s any need for that,” Nicole said. She could hear something coming from the phone, grabbed it and put it to her ear.
“I’m getting some coffee, Kyle. Want anything?” A coworker’s voice.
“No, no, I’m good,” Billings said.
“You know that Jag I was telling you about? Okay, so we took it out for a test drive yesterday and it drove nice, you know, and it had everything on it, but it was red, and to my way of thinking, an XKE back in the sixties, that would look great in red, but today, I think red kind of screams at ya. Hey, did you go to that thing at the Hyatt last night?”
Nicole said, “Get rid of him.”
Billings said. “Yeah, we did. Got home kind of late.”
“That was the homeless thing, right?”
“Yeah. They raised a lot of money.”
“What’s that you got on your screen there?”
“Nothing, just…doing a test on the fudging. Seeing why sometimes not all plates or faces get totally blurred. A lot of it has to do with the angle. If the software isn’t sure what it is, it’s not going to fudge it.”
“Do I have to tell you again?” Nicole said.
“Listen, nice chattin’, but I got a lot to get done here, but thanks for dropping by.”
“Take it easy.”
“You bet.”
“Is he gone?” Nicole asked.
“Yeah,” Kyle whispered. “I’m good.”
Nicole breathed a small sigh of relief. She noticed that Rochelle was looking at her closely. She’d caught her doing that a couple of times.
“What?” Nicole said, putting the phone down on her thigh again, this time facedown.
“It’s none of my business what you’re doing, or why. I don’t care,” Rochelle said. “Doesn’t matter to me at all.”
“Good.”
“That’s why I want you to know you don’t have to worry when I tell you this. But I just, I just want you to know.”
What was that look Rochelle was giving her? Nicole had seen it before, but not for a very, very long time. The good feeling she’d been having about how things were going was slipping away.
“All I wanted to say,” Rochelle continued, “is that I thought you were amazing.”
“I’m sorry?” Nicole said.
“At Sydney,” she said. “I watched every minute of the Olympics. But especially the gymnastics.”
“Really,” Nicole said.
“The minute I saw you, even with the glasses on, there was something—I think it was your chin, the way you hold it. Just before you’d make your first jump onto the lower bar, there was this thing you did with your chin. This kind of determined way you set it.”
“No one’s ever pointed that out to me before,” Nicole said. “But, now that I think about it, I know what you mean.”
“I took gymnastics all through high school and even into college, but I was never as good as you. Not even close. I was your biggest fan.” Rochelle forced an admiring smile despite her predicament. “Like I said, I don’t know how you got from there to here, to what you’re doing now, but I’m sure there’s reasons for the way things turn out. Everybody’s life takes a different path, right?”
“That’s true,” Nicole said.
“What I really wanted to say was, you were robbed,” Rochelle said.
Nicole suddenly felt very…what was it? Sad. She felt sad. Sad about what had happened to her in Sydney, all that had happened to her since. Thinking about how her life might have been different, had she won the gold. Where she might be now. Not here, not in this basement in Chicago.
And there was something else she felt.
Touched.
“Thank you,” Nicole said, and meant it. “Thank you for saying that. That’s sort of how I felt, but you don’t say it out loud, because then everyone thinks you’re a sore loser or something.”
“Oh, you showed a lot of class,” Rochelle said. “You held your head up high when they gave you the silver on the podium there. But you know what?”
“What?” Nicole asked.
“I could tell. I could tell, looking at you, that your heart was broken.”
Nicole tapped at the bridge of her sunglasses. Didn’t want Rochelle to see her eyes.
“Well, it was a very emotional moment,” Nicole said, feeling emotional right now.
“I bet, if they did an investigation, I bet they’d find out that the judges took some kind of bribe. The Russian ones, maybe. Or the French.”
“I don’t know about that,” Nicole said. “There was never any suggestion of that.”
“Well,” Rochelle said emphatically, “that’s what I think. Although I guess it would be hard, after all these years, to get them to look into something like that.”
“I think you’re right. What’s done is done,” Nicole said. “No one has ever really said anything like this to me before.”
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I used to do searches of you online, wondering what happened to you. But there haven’t been any stories in years.”
“No,” Nicole said. “I left that life behind. I left…it all behind.”
“I did read stuff about how much everyone expected of you, the pressure that got put on you.”
Nicole smiled, to think that anyone still remembered. “My coach, he was furious with me. And my own father, he wouldn’t talk to me. He disowned me after that.” Nicole paused. “I guess he was living out his dream through me and I blew it for him.”
“You’re kidding,” Rochelle said. “That’s horrible.”
“Well,” Nicole said.
“The whole reason I’m telling you this is, I know it might seem kind of stupid, but you were a real inspiration to me then. I had a picture of you taped to my bedroom wall.”
“My picture?”
“I still have it. Not on my wall anymore. But I save stuff. I have it tucked away somewhere, with lots of clippings about you. I figured you’d want to know, because there’s no way I’d ever say anything that would cause troubl
e for the great Annabel Kristoff.”
It had been her name then.
Nicole’s smile was not a happy one. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me that.” She swallowed to clear the lump that was forming in her throat, then turned over the phone and put it to her ear.
Kyle was in midwhisper. “—there? Are you there? Hello?”
“I’m here,” Nicole said, putting the phone to her ear.
“It’s done.”
“The image is gone?”
“Yes. The head’s been blurred out, and now the window just looks dark.”
“Are there any previous versions that can still be accessed?”
“No. They’re wiped. The database is clean.”
“That’s excellent.” Nicole smiled at Rochelle, who was smiling back and tearing up a little. “Okay, Kyle, I guess we’re done. Thank you for this. You’ll find Rochelle in the basement when you get home.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. Rochelle, say hello.” Nicole held out the phone.
“Hi, honey! I love you! I’m so sorry about this morning.”
“You, too, babe. I’ve been such an asshole. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Nicole pulled back the phone. “Okay, Kyle. Good-bye.”
She ended the call, and tossed the phone, which was Rochelle’s, onto the carpet. And then she just sat there, looking at the floor, resting her elbows on her knees.
Thinking.
“What?” Rochelle asked. “Aren’t you going to go? He did what you want, didn’t he?”
“He did,” Nicole said. “He did.”
Still have to do it, she told herself. Even if she is a fan.
Nicole picked up the plastic bag that had been on the woman’s head earlier.
“What are you doing with that?” Rochelle asked.
It took much longer than she would have liked. The woman fought her hard, harder than most. She thrashed her head violently back and forth for as long as she could before the air ran out. Long enough for a single tear to drop onto the outside of the bag.
When it was finally done, Nicole settled back into her chair and waited for Kyle Billings to come home.
THIRTY-EIGHT
LEN Prentice’s attitude, and comments, had left me shaken.