“Does it come with a moon roof and CD player?”
“This is no joke. It’s done by e-mail to a group of specialists selected by me. Each of my contacts around the globe is strategically located to enhance the flow of energy from one to the next. At a predesignated moment, each of them opens the e-mail and reads the exact same message: ‘I know where Matthew Rey is.’ The timing is critical. It sparks their collective mind power. If it’s done right-and this is where my expertise comes in-I guarantee that someone in that group will know where Matthew Rey is.”
“Yeah, probably last seen with Elvis.”
“Please, I understand your skepticism. But only after your father returns home safely will you realize that this was the best five thousand dollars you’ve ever spent.”
I nearly laughed in his face. “Five thousand dollars? For what?”
“For my connections to the very best minds in their field. I have a woman who has helped law enforcement officers locate missing children all over the United States. There’s a guy in the U.K. who gets patients through major surgery without anesthesia. An aboriginal tribe member in Australia can snap a butter knife in half using only her powers of concentration.”
“I came here thinking you knew where my father was. You’re lucky I don’t snap you in half and kick your ass all the way to Colombia to go look for him.”
“No need to kick me anywhere. The mind is all-powerful. I’ve been invoking the message for two days now. Don’t be at all surprised if you experience a telepathic communication very soon.”
I rose to leave. “You’re a crackpot.”
He glared, as if I’d just hurled the ultimate insult. “Your mother didn’t think so.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“Yes,” he said smugly. “I saw her on the television news last week. She finally agreed to speak to me this morning. I just about had her sold on the deluxe power package, and then she backed off and said it was up to you.”
“Well, the answer is no.”
He sipped his coffee, unfazed. “For now, maybe. But a month from now, or two months from now, as this drags on with no end in sight, she’ll turn to me. With or without your approval, she’ll cough up the money. Probably more than once.”
“You scum.” I shot from my chair, ready to grab him by the shirt.
“Sergeant!” he shouted.
His dog leaped from the floor, up on its hind legs, and pinned me against the wall. It was growling in my face, mouth wide open, its long white canines an inch away from my carotid artery. One more command from its master, and I was a dead man.
“Release!” he shouted.
The dog retreated obediently to its master’s side. “You’ve got thirty seconds to leave peacefully. After that, Sergeant drags you out by the throat.”
“Where’s your conscience, man? This family is suffering.”
“I want my money.”
“You talk as if we owed it to you.”
“Wow. You must be psychic.”
He was being coy, but he seemed to be saying exactly that. We did owe it to him.
“You’ve got ten seconds to be on the other side of that door,” he said.
The dog growled. This was no time to pick a fight. I walked down the hall and let myself out. Halfway to my Jeep, I heard him say, “Hey.”
I stopped and turned. He was standing inside the house behind the closed screen door.
“Tell your sister that Jaime Ochoa sends his regards.”
He spoke as if the name should mean something to me. It didn’t. “Sorry. I don’t know where my sister is.”
“I do,” he said, his eyes narrowing into a piercing stare that chilled me.
I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing, and he didn’t give me a chance to ask. I stood there and watched, confused, as he closed the door and retreated into the house.
15
I called Alex for lunch. I figured it was time to level with my consultant.
We met at Scotty’s Landing, a waterfront patio-style restaurant, where the specialties were grilled mahi-mahi sandwiches and bowls of delicious conch gumbo, served cold, like gazpacho. The place was essentially an open hut with a bar and a kitchen, flanked by a wood deck eating area with little round tables, plastic chairs, canvas umbrellas, fresh sea breezes, and nice views of the bay. It wasn’t exactly in the heart of Coconut Grove, but to me the sign posted at the entrance captured the old Grove spirit. PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR NEXT AVAILABLE TABLE, it read, followed by separate, smaller signs in increasingly smaller print: IT DOESN’T SAY WAIT TO BE SEATED. SEAT YOURSELF.IF NOT UNDERSTOOD, START AGAIN.
We seated ourselves at the table nearest the water. Alex sat with her legs crossed, which I naturally noticed because the sundress and sandals she was wearing made her legs highly noticeable. It was actually the toe ring that had caught my attention, a little gold band around the middle toe, her longest. Feet like a ballerina, or so I recalled from the day Lindsey had come home from ballet crying because her teacher said it would be harder to stand on point if your first toe was your longest toe. She gave up dance and took up hell-raising.
“You like my toe ring?” she asked.
“What?”
“The ring,” she said, wiggling her toe with the slender ankle flexed. “It seems to have caught your fancy.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
She smiled. I looked away, embarrassed. We both knew I’d been staring.
The waiter brought us water and took our order. While waiting for our food, I told her all about Jaime Ochoa, which prompted the obvious question.
“Do you think he really knows where your sister is?”
“Probably in much the same way he knows that at age sixty-three Julia Roberts will give birth to triplets.”
“You think he’s ever met Lindsey?”
“My guess is that she probably stiffed him on payment for psychic readings somewhere along the line. When he saw Mom on television last week talking about the kidnapping, he decided to rip off the family as payback.”
“Nice guy.”
“I love my sister, but she has a habit of mixing it up with deadbeats, usually about as far away from home as she can get. She likes to think it’s part of her adventuresome journalistic spirit, very Ernest Hemingway. One of her old J-school professors once told her that if you want to write a story about sewer rats, you don’t interview swans. I wish he’d also pointed out that to write a story about suicide, you don’t have to kill yourself.”
“So, you think she met Jaime Ochoa doing research for a story?”
I looked away, then back. I wasn’t a good liar, and there was no point pulling punches at this point. “That’s what I’m hoping. But I’m starting to get a little worried.”
“Where is she now?”
“Last time we talked, Nicaragua. Even though she and Dad are kind of on the outs, I always took some comfort in knowing that they were at least in the same country.”
“How long’s it been since you last heard from her?”
“A while. It’s always a while. She calls when she’s broke. But to be honest, it’s a little different this time, now that Dad’s missing.”
“That’s true. But I’d have to say that the odds are pretty low that both of them would be kidnapped at the same time in different countries.”
“Unless the kidnappings are related.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
I noted that she didn’t totally dismiss the possibility.
The server brought our food and left. I popped a french fry in my mouth, then said, “I’ve been thinking of going down there. I need to check on Dad’s business anyway. Maybe I’d do a little checking on Lindsey, too.”