A few of the beads were crusted with something dark that was probably blood. Danny dropped it in revulsion.
“That’s right. Consider it a gift from us. You don’t mind if it’s pre-owned, do you? That’s Santa Muerte. Saint Death. A noncanonized saint. South of the border, some people wear it for protection. It’s supposed to bring you luck.”
“I’d say this one’s had sort of a mixed record,” Slocum said.
Yeager chuckled. “It didn’t turn out so well for Alejandro, that’s true,” said Yeager. “But hey-you never know. Maybe Daniel could get lucky.”
And Danny knew then that either they’d been the ones who’d murdered Galvin’s driver in Aspen or they worked with the people who did. The room seemed to tilt.
So who did they work for? A cartel, was it possible?
That e-ticket he’d found: One of them was flying to Mexico, back to the city of Nuevo Laredo, where they’d been fired by the DEA. Was a cartel based there?
“Phil,” Yeager said, “could you cue up the home movies?”
Slocum moved to the desk and tapped away at the laptop. Then he turned it so that it was facing Danny. He hit a couple more keys on the laptop, and a window on the screen opened. It took him a minute to recognize the image.
The blood drained from his face. He felt dizzy.
Lucy wore a pastel blue T-shirt and navy gym shorts, doing something in a room that looked like her own kitchen.
Making coffee. The image was grainy. It looked like surveillance video.
“Want to know why she always smells like smoke?” Yeager said. “Not because of the bums she hangs around, I’m sorry to say. I know, she told you she quit smoking. But I’m afraid your ex-girlfriend is what you call a chipper-she borrows cigarettes from friends, never buys her own. Phil, pull up the next channel, could you?”
Another video window came open on the screen. With terror, Danny recognized the family room of his childhood home. His father was leaning back in his favorite chair, the Barcalounger. His mother sat in her customary place on the plaid couch. Both watching TV.
“It’s cute,” Yeager said. “Mom and Dad go together to Stop & Shop in Orleans twice a week. Your dad insists on buying the day-old bread, and your mom hates it, but she puts up with it. In a long marriage, I guess you gotta make all sorts of compromises, you know?” He cleared his throat. “Yeah, there’s your teenage daughter, too, but we don’t do kids unless we really have to. Which I hope doesn’t come to pass. I have a daughter myself.”
“You son of a bitch,” Danny said, crackling with anger. “You goddamned son of a bitch.”
“So here’s the thing, Daniel. You asked for two hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash by tomorrow morning at ten, and that’s not going to happen. But I appreciate your directness, and I’m going to be just as direct with you. Thomas Galvin keeps all of his account numbers and passwords in one cloud-based encrypted site. Which is locked by means of a single password. That password generates a random key and a random vector initialization and blah blah blah. So you, my friend, are going to get us that password by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Your own deadline. If you fail to give us that password, you’re going to become an orphan. And that will be just the beginning of your troubles.” He brightened. “On the other hand, give us that password, and all of these problems go away. Life becomes good again.”
Danny stared.
“Are we clear?” Yeager said.
Danny nodded. His pulse raced and the room had gone bright. “Yes,” he said. “We’re clear.”
“Good. One more thing?” Yeager said.
Danny turned.
“Please be careful with that gun. You might hurt someone.”
72
His tires squealed as he swung through the Lyman Academy’s wrought-iron gates, barreling past the teacher’s parking lot-Hyundais and Nissans and Ford Fiestas-and careening around the semicircular pickup lane. Two hours before school got out, and his was the only car parked in front of the main entrance. He hummed with anxiety. Everything was too bright and seemed to move like a jagged stop-motion video. Adrenaline pulsed through his bloodstream.
Their assurance that children were off-limits-that was meaningless. What they, or their colleagues, had done to Galvin’s driver in Aspen bespoke a limitless violence. If abducting his only child was the way to force his obedience, they wouldn’t hesitate.
He had to get her out of here, keep her away from all known locations, which included Lyman and his apartment. Wellfleet, staying with his parents-that was out of the question now, since the cartel had them under surveillance.
There was only one safe place right now, and that was the Galvins’ house in Weston. It was a target, yes, but a hardened one. The property was fenced in, and Galvin had assured him he’d brought in private security. Not manpower provided by the Sinaloa cartel, but real security guards. If she’d be safe anywhere, she’d be safe there.
He sprang out of the Honda and raced through the school’s front doors.
Leon Chisholm, the school security guard, looked up from the chair where he was reading the Globe, and said “Hey, Dan-” but Danny kept running through the hall and up the stairs, no time to talk. Mrs. Gifford, the school secretary-receptionist, gave him a perplexed smile that quickly turned into alarm. “Mr. Goodman, is everything all right?”
“Where’s Abby?”
“She didn’t sign out-”
“What class is she in?”
She lifted her reading glasses from their chain around her neck and peered at the computer monitor. “She’s in Mr. Klootjes’s precalculus class. Do you need me to get a note to her? Is there something wrong?”
“Where’s the class?”
“Mather 29, but-”
“Which way?”
“I can send a message, but parents can’t-”
“Thanks,” he said, and he vaulted into the corridor in search of Mather Hall.
In his peripheral vision he saw Mrs. Gifford get up from her desk chair and heard her call after him, “Mr. Goodman?”
His shoes slapped against the terrazzo floor and rang in the hallway. The damned school was a maze of halls and cubbyholes and lockers and short flights of stairs and blind turns.
It took him a good five minutes to locate Mather. Room 29 was a modern-looking classroom, at least by Lyman standards: whiteboard walls instead of blackboards or greenboards, M. C. Escher posters, inscrutable diagrams. Danny stared into the classroom through the window in the door. Fifteen bored-looking students sat in burgundy tablet-arm desks staring dazedly at Mr. Klootjes, an obese bearded redhead with grimy wire-rimmed glasses and a soporific teaching style, scrawling a tangle of digits with green marker on a whiteboard. Danny had met him once, at a routine parent-teacher conference, and understood at once why Abby detested the man.
Abby was in the back row apparently struggling to stay awake. He didn’t see Jenna; maybe she wasn’t in the same math class.
Danny yanked open the classroom door. Mr. Klootjes turned around slowly, squinting. “Um, hi…?”
“Abby, come on,” Danny said, beckoning with an urgent wave.
Abby looked up at the door, alarmed. “Daddy?”
“Let’s go, come on, now!” Fifteen girls were staring at him, a few tittering. He heard one of them say, “Abby’s dad.”
“Excuse me, sir,” said Mr. Klootjes.
“Abby, let’s go, this is important,” Danny said.
Mortified, she slunk out into the hallway. “What’s going on?” she said.
“Let’s go, we’ll talk in a minute.”
“I need to get my stuff from my locker.”
“No time for that.”
“It’s close, it’s just in Burke-”
“We can get stuff from your locker another time.”
“What? What’s going on? What happened?”