“Whee!” she squealed, possibly appreciating that he had mixed her drink as a triple and his own as a single.
“Take a few minutes to think about us,” he said, cuffing her left wrist to the headboard. She made an exaggerated expression of concern and said, “Oh, you’re scaring me!”
The liquor glass rolled to a stop.
LaMoia hurried to the closet and returned with two terry cloth bathrobe belts. A moment later the underwear was on the floor and her ankles bound to the bed.
“Something new!” she said excitedly. “Have we done handcuffs?”
“You’ve been rude to me, Sheila. Demeaning.”
“Rank has its privileges,” she fired back at him, waiting for him to undress. “Once you’re captain, I’ll make the drinks. But you’ll still come when I call. And you know why? The twenty-year-olds gratify the ego all right, but not the loin.”
LaMoia tugged the comforter off the bed, then the blanket out from under her and the flat sheet. Hill, naked and writhing, legs bound, one hand in the cuffs, didn’t know what to make of this. She forced a smile, beginning to question his actions. He reached beneath her, and she cooperated, arching her back. He freed the corner of the fitted sheet and also stripped this from the bed, pulling a mattress pad with it. Nothing left with which to cover herself.
“What the hell?” she said.
He showed her the handcuff key as he carefully set it down in plain sight next to the television.
She looked around searchingly, suddenly understanding the game. “No way,” she said, believing it a joke.
“Phone’s in reach,” he said, pointing.
“You will not do this,” she shouted. “I am stark naked!”
He nodded. “And you know something? You’ll call me again-”
“You’re dead you do this!” She squirmed but wasn’t getting loose. Her free arm could not reach her ankle.
He moved toward the door. “And you know why? Because you’ve never had it like this. Those fifty-year-olds just don’t do it for you.” LaMoia pulled the door shut, her insults filling the hall. He wondered how long until she made the phone call to room service.
CHAPTER 45
With the volleyball tossed and hanging in the air, awaiting her open palm, Carlie Kittridge suddenly worried over having left Trudy with a sitter. She knew this stemmed from the pregame discussion about the kidnapper called the Pied Piper that had focused on news stories warning parents not to leave their children in the care of others until the kidnapper was captured.
Carlie caught the ball rather than serve it. Her husband shouted back at her, “Let’s go! Serve ’em up a beauty.”
Instead, Carlie bounced the ball toward Jenny, their weakest player but the only woman on the bench. Conference rules required gender-balanced teams.
Her husband chastised, “What the hell?”
She felt no need to have to explain herself. A mother’s prerogative. She searched for the car keys in the pocket of David’s warm-ups. Possession of those keys lent her a great sense of freedom and relief. “Have Danny drop you off,” she told him.
Her husband’s expression conveyed a sense of treason. “Danny?” he croaked incredulously.
Jenny stepped up to the service line, having little sense of her own inability to play the game. A member of the opposing team complained loudly about the substitution taking too long and demanded a serve.
“At least serve out the game,” David pleaded.
Jenny called out the score and served a lofting floater to the opponent’s backcourt. The resulting bump was a perfect set for the front line. The spike came right at David, who failed to block it. Side out.
Carlie hurried out of the gym.
A stunned and defeated David Kittridge shouted after his wife, far too late to be heard, “Don’t forget it’s damn near out of gas.”
Carlie Kittridge had forgotten. She ran out of gas eleven blocks from home, at the corner of 42nd and Stoneway. Blinded by her fear for her baby, she failed to pull the truck entirely off the roadway, leaving it dead, angled toward the curb and blocking traffic, the lights still on.
She came out of the truck’s cab at a full sprint, already warmed up from her volleyball, came out running like a thoroughbred from the gate. Seattle traffic being what it was, she left most of it behind as if it were standing still, blowing through intersections without looking, without slowing her pace in the slightest, her hysteria feeding off her charged system. The harder she ran, the more convinced she was of the trouble that lay ahead.
Ironically, it was the disabled pickup truck abandoned midlane that brought the police into it, not the abduction of Trudy Kittridge. Fearing a car-jacking, an abduction or simply a vehicle stolen for a joyride, the reporting motor patrol officer requested a black-and-white do a drive-by inquiry at the Kittridge residence-the name and address lifted from his wireless computer terminal that accessed DMV’s mainframe.
As Carlie Kittridge rounded the corner of 35th and Stoneway she was in abject horror and running faster than she had ever run in her life.
She approached the kitchen door already calling out for Gena, a neighbor’s fourteen-year-old daughter in whom Carlie had placed an enormous amount of deserved trust. Gena was fourteen going on thirty. She loved Trudy like a member of the family, and her own mother-a fantastic friend-lived just four houses down the block.
“Gena, it’s me,” she called out loudly, swinging open the kitchen door. Gena lay there on the floor, her clothes torn, her fourteen-year-old body exposed.
Carlie Kittridge’s scream was heard for several blocks.
CHAPTER 46
LaMoia awakened from a comatose sleep, summoned by the irritating beeping of his pager. His first response was anger, his second was a feeling of fear and dread. 8:00 P.M. He had fallen asleep at his kitchen table. He could conceive of very few reasons for the summons, not one of which he wanted to face.
He read the phone number from the device and heaved a sigh of relief. Sheila Hill’s home telephone, an unpublished number. She had decided to talk. He complimented himself for understanding her. She was not an easy keeper.
“It’s me,” he announced over the phone.
“Their name is Kittridge.” Her blank tone of voice and the announcement drained all color from his face. She read off an address. “Handle it.”
She hung up, leaving him with a hollow, panicked feeling.
Another kidnapping.
Within an hour, photocopies of Trudy Kittridge’s face were faxed to airports, train stations, ferry companies, the image being shown to cab drivers, limo drivers, bus drivers. Within the next hour every local television station would cut away to the same photo. Hundreds of thousands of people would see that face, and yet if the Pied Piper lived up to his reputation, no one would see the child.
Daphne awaited him as he pulled up, her face grim, her fists clenched tightly. Her job, to define the Pied Piper in terms of behavior, was taking its toll. She looked exhausted.
LaMoia said, “You take the parents, I’ll take the scene. We gotta work fast. This place’ll be jumping in a couple minutes. We need the head start. We pow-wow in the kitchen in ten minutes. You believe in miracles?”
“No,” she answered.
“Me neither.”
LaMoia had never smoked. He drank beer, but only socially. He had been blind drunk twice in his life, and had hated the lack of control. But at that moment he envied the habitual, whatever the vice, because it gave the person a preoccupation, an object of distraction. He had only the first officer’s description of the fourteen-year-old unconscious on the kitchen floor to occupy his thoughts. He would have given anything to erase it from his mind. He could visualize her lying there where now there was some litter from the EMT’s medical work and AFIDs from the air TASER. Sight of the AFIDs reminded him of the stonewalling of evidence. Sarah and the others deserved better than this.