“Try to keep her on the line longer this time,” Sloate says. “Tell her you’re getting confused, tell her you can’t keep it straight, all this hanging up. She’ll resist, but she’s closer to the payoff now, so she may be getting hungry. And careless. They sometimes get careless.”
With my children, Alice thinks.
And in that instant, the doorbell rings.
Sally Ballew recognizes Sloate at once.
“Hello, Wilbur,” she says, and steps boldly into the house, taking in the living room with a single swift sweep of her dark brown eyes, knowing at once that the Garrity woman wasn’t snowing them about a kidnapping. There’s another dick from the CID here, too, Marcia Di Luca from their Tech Unit, which means they’ve already set up a wire tap and a trace; nobody’s fooling around here.
“Hello, Marcia,” she says. “Catch yourselves a little snatch here?”
“Who are you?” Alice asks at once.
“Special Agent Sally Ballew,” she says, and shows her shield. “FBI. My partner Felix Forbes. We’re here to lend a hand, ma’am.”
It is three o’clock sharp.
Alice is surrounded by law enforcement people.
Yet for the first time since four yesterday afternoon, she really feels in jeopardy.
The telephone rings.
Alice’s hand is trembling as she picks up the receiver.
“Hello?” she says.
“Have you got all the money?” the woman’s voice asks.
“Yes,” Alice says.
“Good. Now listen to what I have to say. I’ll be on for thirty seconds. You can think over what I’ve told you before I call back again. Is that clear?”
Marcia Di Luca pulls a face. Thirty seconds again! Standing beside her, Sally Ballew seems to grasp what’s going on with the trace. She nods sympathetically.
Into the phone, Alice says, “I understand.”
“There’s a gas station on U.S. 41 and Lewiston Point Road. A Shell station. Do you know it? Yes or no?”
“Yes,” Alice says.
“Bring the money to the ladies’ room there. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Have you got all the money?” she asks again.
“Yes,” Alice says. “But—”
“Just listen. There’s only one stall in the ladies’ room. Leave the money in the stall. Ten o’clock. Come alone.”
“I will. But how do I—?”
“I’ll call back,” the woman says, and hangs up.
Sally Ballew thrusts out her chest as if to assert female superiority. It is some chest. All the men in the room are impressed. So is Alice. But she does not need the FBI here now, not when her children are out there someplace with a strange woman and whoever may be her accomplice. Too many cooks, she thinks. Too damn many cooks.
“How long does he stay on the line, average?” Sally asks.
“She,” Marcia corrects. “Twenty, thirty seconds.”
“You’ll never get her.”
“We might,” Marcia says dryly.
The two women do not like each other. This is very clear to Alice.
My children will die, she thinks.
“What are you hoping to accomplish?” Sally asks Sloate.
“Who invited you here?” Sloate asks. “I wasn’t aware a state line had been crossed.”
“I’m asking what you hope to accomplish, allowing this woman to talk directly to the—”
The phone rings again.
Sloate nods to Alice. She picks up. It is going to be the same routine again. On again, off again. Except that this time, she is caught in the crosshairs of inter-agency rivalry.
“Hello?” she says.
“Do you understand everything I told you?” the woman asks.
“Yes.”
“Repeat it to me.”
“Ten tomorrow morning.”
“Yes?”
“Shell station at Lewiston and the Trail.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“The stall in the ladies’ room.”
“Yes. You’ll leave the money there,” the woman says.
“No,” Alice says.
There is a brief silence.
“No?” the woman says. “Listen to me, girlfriend. You ever want to see your children alive again—”
“We make an exchange,” Alice says quickly. “Right then and there.”
Sloate is already shaking his head. Sally doesn’t know what’s going on. Neither does Forbes.
“I hand over the money, you hand over the kids,” Alice says. “A simultaneous exchange.”
“Stay by the phone,” the woman says, and hangs up.
“Thirty seconds on the nose,” Marcia says.
“You just blew it,” Sloate tells Alice.
Charlie gets to the airport Avis desk at ten minutes past three that afternoon. A woman with voluminous blonde hair greets him with a cheery smile, but the moment he asks about who might have rented a blue Chevrolet Impala sometime recently, she tells him she’s not allowed to give out such information.
Charlie tells her what the problem is.
Using the same open infectious smile and innocent guile he used while talking countless susceptible Japanese maidens into bed on R & R in Tokyo during the Vietnam War, he says that he is an artist, and here he shows her several postcard-sized samples of his work from his gallery in Naples. He tells her that his gallery in New York informed him that they were sending an independent contractor down to pick up some of his paintings, but the person never showed up. So when he called New York this morning, they told him a blue Chevrolet Impala from Avis had been rented by the contractor sometime recently…
“What is this man’s name?” the Avis lady asks.
“Woman. It’s a woman. A blonde woman. Hair about to here,” Charlie says, and with his finger shows her the length on his neck. “She’s supposed to pick up four of my paintings,” he says. “I sure wish you could help me, miss,” once again flashing his Come-Hither Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton smile.
“What’s her name, this woman?”
“I have no idea,” Charlie says. “She’s just an independent contractor the gallery sent down.”
“Don’t they know her name?”
“It was arranged down here.”
“Where down here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, where’d they send her from? If she rented a car here at the airport, she had to be coming in on a plane, am I right?”
“I would guess so. Yes, you’re absolutely right.”
“Well, where was she coming from? How can I locate a rental if I don’t have her name, which besides I’m not supposed to give out such information, anyway.”
“I know that, and it’s very kind of you to give me all this time. But if you could check your records for any blue Impalas you may have rented yesterday or the day before, anytime recently…”
“You know how many blue Impalas we rent every day?”
“How many?” Charlie asks.
“Plenty,” she says. “Also, these look like very big paintings here on these postcards. I doubt—”
“You can keep those if you like.”
“Thank you, they’re very pretty. But I doubt if they’d even fit in an Impala,” she says. “Four of them, no less. Are you sure she rented an Impala?”
“That’s what they told me. Miss, I’m gonna lose this sale unless I can locate her.”
“Don’t know how I can help you,” the Avis lady says.
Just try a little harder, Charlie thinks, but she has already turned away and is starting to talk to the next customer in line.
Rafe comes out of the bedroom at three-thirty.
“Don’t believe we’ve met,” he tells Sally, his glance idly coveting her chest.
“Who’s this?” she asks Sloate.