“Yeah. Where are you?”
“You won’t see me tonight.”
He got that answer a lot in response to “Where are you?”
“Do you want me to notify Sydney’s parents?” Jack asked.
“It’s covered.”
“Good. Not exactly two of my favorite people.”
“Which reminds me. Don’t lie awake tonight mulling over your long-shot theory about Celeste Laramore’s biological parents. It went nowhere. DNA tests showed no possible biological connection between Celeste and anyone in the Bennett family-Sydney, her parents, Emma. No one.”
Andie had told him from the get-go that he was getting carried away with the physical resemblance between Celeste and Sydney. “Still don’t understand why she visited Sydney, why she started looking more and more like her.”
“My bet is that Celeste thought she could be related to Sydney, or maybe even wanted it to be true. I hate to speak badly of a young woman in a coma, but frankly I think it was some kind of weird celebrity worship. Granted, Sydney was the worst kind of celebrity, but she was still a celebrity.”
“Maybe,” said Jack.
“I gotta go. I’ll call you.”
“Stay safe,” he said, and the call ended. Jack checked his speed. He was on the downward slope of Miami’s highest bridge, the end of the causeway and the beginning of the island of Key Biscayne and its notorious speed traps. He brought it down to thirty-five m.p.h. and dialed Theo at his bar. Music and crowd noise were in the background.
“How’s Abuela?” Jack asked. Jack hadn’t told his grandmother what he and Andie were up to, but she had still felt uncomfortable staying at the house alone, so Theo told her it was national Take an Abuela to Work Night.
“She’s awesome,” said Theo. “She’s sharing a booth with Uncle Cy and on her third Cosmo-Not.”
Cosmo-Not was Theo’s version of a nonalcoholic Cosmopolitan. Uncle Cy was Theo’s great-uncle, an eighty-year-old relic of Miami’s Overtown and its jazz heyday of the mid-twentieth century. Cy was still quite the saxophone player, with emphasis on player.
“Tell Cy to keep his hands to himself,” said Jack.
“Will do. How did it go tonight?”
“Don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Got it.”
“I’m almost home, and I’m embarrassed to say that I forgot all about picking up Abuela. Too damn much on my mind.”
“No problem. I’ll drop her off.”
“Thanks.”
“Unless she hooks up with Cy.”
“Don’t push it,” said Jack.
Jack ended the call, tucked his cell away, and just drove. The monotonous hum of tires on asphalt was the backdrop for his thoughts. He passed the Seaquarium, home to Flipper the dolphin and Lolita the killer whale. He wondered if they were asleep; and if they were asleep, he wondered if they were dreaming; and if they were dreaming, he wondered if these highly intelligent legless mammals ever dreamed about walking like the trainers who fed them. Then he shook off the silliness and accepted the fact that the old games he played to trick himself were futile. Never in his life-not even as a high-school boy obsessed with the hair and lips of Julia Roberts-had he managed to conjure up a successful diversion from worries and concerns that were certain to keep him wide awake and staring at the ceiling till dawn.
Jack steered into the driveway and killed the engine. The headlights remained on for a few moments, then blinked off. The house was dark, and the porch light was off. The narrow driveway was the only opening in a thick ficus hedge that extended like a castle wall across the front and along both sides of his smallish yard. It was great for privacy, but at ten feet it had grown way too tall, and it made the night seem even darker. He was glad Abuela had decided not to stay behind by herself.
Jack opened the car door, stepped out, and then froze. A man was sitting on his front doorstep. He rose slowly-not a threatening motion, but Jack proceeded with caution as he walked around the front of his car and started up the sidewalk. The man waited, and Jack soon recognized the face.
“Mr. Bennett?”
Sydney’s father answered in a low voice, his tone and body language conveying not so much reluctance, but resignation. “We should talk,” he said.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Merselus killed the lights. His one-room apartment on the Miami River went dark, save for the glow from the LCD of his laptop on the dresser. He closed the laptop and, in the darkness, slid it into his backpack. It fit nicely in the slim and padded pocket-safely separated from the fully loaded Glock 9-millimeter pistol, four extra clips of duty ammunition, and a nine-inch diving knife with a serrated blade. He took the knife, slipped on the backpack, and pressed the serrated blade to Sydney’s throat.
“Come on, come on, come on,” he said in rapid-fire delivery.
Sydney’s wrists were bound behind her waist with plastic handcuffs. A gray strip of duct tape covered her mouth. Her legs were free, which allowed her to walk, but she wasn’t moving fast enough. Merselus grabbed her by the hair and pushed her toward the door.
“I said come on.”
Sydney fell to the floor. Merselus unlocked the door, pulled Sydney to her feet, and spoke right into her face, eye to eye.
“Do what I tell you to do, and nothing else,” he said. He put the knife back to her throat, pressing hard enough this time to draw a drop of blood. “It’s that simple. Nod if you understand.”
It was a shaky nod, but she managed.
“Good girl,” he said. “Now I’m going to take the tape off your mouth, and when we walk out of this apartment, I want you to lean into me. If we pass anyone on the way to the car, you’re just a little drunk and I’m holding you up. You got it?”
She nodded again.
He pulled off the tape, which drew a whimper of pain but not another sound from her. Then she breathed deep, mouth open, as if gobbling up air. He grabbed a windbreaker from the closet, draped it over his hand with the knife, and put his arm around her waist. The windbreaker hid the plastic cuffs on her wrists as well as the knife at her spine. Then he pulled her closer and opened the door.
“Here we go,” he said.
The three-story complex was a converted motel, thirty years overdue for a makeover and a developer’s whim away from being razed for a new high-rise. Each apartment had just one door, which opened to the outdoors, and a single window with a noisy air-conditioning unit that faced the parking lot. Residents rented month to month, or in Merselus’ case, week to week. His apartment was on the second floor, and he guided Sydney toward the external stairwell. They were halfway down the stairs when Merselus spotted a Miami-Dade Police squad car cruising slowly through the parking lot. Just the sight of it confirmed his fears. Somehow he’d taken longer than eight seconds to send the Check the bench text to Swyteck. The cell had emitted not one but two electronic pulses, double the information he had been willing to release to cell towers in the area, just enough data for law enforcement to work with. Some tech agent had done the computations and triangulated Sydney’s iPhone. They had a bead on his location. A degree from MIT, six years in Silicon Valley, twenty-seven patented algorithms for M-rated video games that had allowed him to retire at age thirty-one and never think twice about a hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to one of Sydney’s jurors-and he slipped on triangulation.
Son of a bitch!
He pulled Sydney behind the wall of yellow-painted cinder block at the stairwell’s midlevel landing. The pungent odor of a homeless guy’s fresh urine hung in the air, but they stayed put, out of sight from the passing patrol car. Merselus gave the police a minute to go by. When the squad car reached the far end of the parking lot, he forced Sydney down the stairs toward apartment 102 on the ground floor. Merselus wasn’t friendly with any of his neighbors, but he’d made a point of studying the makeup of the entire complex. He knew that apartment 102 was occupied by a seventy-year-old man who lived alone.