“You’re gonna let me go?” Mollie’s voice was shaking. She was a mouse staring into the eyes of a snake.
Predator.
Prey.
“The last thing you see.”
A question crossed Mollie’s face, and Astrid said to her, “What do you want it to be? I’ll pull up any image from the world, any picture you like.”
Yes.
Control.
“No.” Mollie’s voice was shaky. “Please.”
Prey.
Astrid stared at her for a moment, then let her gaze drift toward Brad.
He spoke softly, reassuringly. “Mollie, I need to tell you something.” He nodded toward Astrid. “My friend is a persistent woman. She’ll make you choose eventually, but it’ll be less trouble for everyone if you choose something now. Whatever you want. Any picture. Any video. Just say something.”
His acting was almost as good as hers.
Mollie gulped. “I don’t know.”
Brad took over the keyboard and clicked to an Internet search engine. “Think of something calming. It might help. A seashore, maybe? Or a mountain meadow or a sunset? Just tell her something.”
“Please.” She shook her head. “Stop.”
Brad said, “It doesn’t matter what.”
Predator. Prey.
Control over hope.
“Time’s up,” Astrid said.
“No, no, no,” Mollie cried. “Rusty. Okay, Rusty, please.”
And as the woman asked to see the face of the young man she had loved, the man who was already a corpse, Astrid felt sweet excitement, the same frisson of dark pleasure she’d felt last month when the EMS dispatcher kept asking the corpse of Jeanne Styles if it was okay.
“Are you hurt?”
No, hurt is a whole different thing.
Rusty had been in the van with her, tied, gagged, blindfolded, last night. But she hadn’t even known.
Prey.
“All right.” Astrid gestured toward the woman’s computer. “Do you have a picture of him?” The schedule was tight, but she wasn’t willing to give up this part of the game.
A nod.
“Where?”
“My photos.” Mollie sounded frightened, desperate as she nodded toward the computer. “In iPhoto.”
Astrid gestured to Brad, and he opened the computer’s directory to find the files.
Twana Summie.
She was a college student from northern Virginia who attended Gallaudet, hadn’t been seen since Tuesday morning, and her Visa card had been used to book two nights-last night and tonight-at the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
So: a college student booking two nights at a hotel that charges six hundred dollars per night for a room? At a hotel that close to her college?
“Turn around,” I told Doehring. “Get us to the Lincoln Towers Hotel.” It was downtown. Close.
“You have something?”
“I might.” As I told him what I’d found, he whipped the car around and I pulled up Twana’s DMV records to see if she shared enough physical characteristics with Mollie to have been the victim we found in the Gunderson Foundation Primate Research Center.
Astrid found the photos of Rusty and Mollie, and when she pulled up one of the young couple on the beach, Mollie nodded, closed her eyes, nodded again.
It was a quaint picture. A dock with a sailboat in the background. A lightly clouded horizon and blue ocean beyond them-sun and sea and scalloped sky. Rusty’s arm was draped around her shoulder, and she was leaning tenderly against his chest.
“It’s nice.”
“I’ll do anything. Please, just-”
“Shh.” Brad laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder. A nurturing gesture. “Calm down. All will be well.”
Astrid looked at him and loved him and desired him.
She let her finger graze across the picture of Rusty. “He’s very handsome. You made a good choice. To die looking at him.” Then to Brad: “Turn up the volume on the television.”
Yes.
Although Twana was slightly taller than Mollie, she had the same build and hair color.
“That’s it.”
I felt the net tightening.
Twana’s credit card had been used to book a room at the hotel tonight, her abductors might be there… if they brought Mollie.. .
Too many ifs.
The hotel was two blocks away.
I called their number to find out which room Twana Summie was staying in.
And they put me on hold.
Astrid used the cursor to highlight the picture of Mollie and Rusty at the seashore, hit delete, and then emptied the trash so that the picture was gone now and forever. “How did I do?”
Mollie’s fear subsided briefly, turned to confusion. “What?”
“Did I have you convinced?”
“You’re going to let me go?” A glimmer of hope in her voice. “You’re not gonna hurt me?”
“No. I mean did you think I was going to let you look at that picture while you died?”
Astrid noticed that Brad looked as surprised as the woman.
“What is this?” Brad asked.
“I had you too?” Astrid felt a tickle of satisfaction.
“Had me?”
“Believing that I would let her look at something pleasant while you killed her?” She spoke to him as if Mollie were not there. As if she were already dead.
Mollie begged, “No, no…” Terror rising in her eyes.
Brad looked slightly betrayed, and that bothered Astrid. What was his problem? It was all part of the game. “Don’t pout.”
“It wasn’t in the plan.”
“I thought it would be more fun this way. And it was, wasn’t it? It was more fun.” She kept her eyes locked on his until at last he looked away.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It was more fun.”
“Why do you think I had you take the video of Rusty last night?”
Brad was quiet.
“Video of Rusty?” the woman said. “What did you do to him!”
Astrid had a feeling what would happen when she showed Mollie the footage of her boyfriend struggling for breath at the end of the rope.
She picked up the gag and turned to her.
“I’ll show you.”
Doehring and I rushed through the doors of the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
Adrian Lees, the manager, was waiting for us.
Mid-forties. Slim. Tailored suit. Small goatee, neatly trimmed. “I’m the CEO,” he said. “Here at the Lincoln Towers. We checked the system.” He paused at awkward intervals as he spoke, chopping his sentence into odd, bite-sized pieces. “No one by the name of Twana Summie has a room here.”
What?
“No credit card charges?”
He shook his head.
But that’s not possible…
“Take us to your control center,” I said.
His face was flushed. “Is everything all right?”
“No,” Doehring growled. “The control center! Now!”
Lees motioned toward the hallway behind the registration desk. “This way.”
After my initial surprise that there were no rooms reserved in Twana’s name, I realized that the glitch, the inconsistency, was a clue that we were on the right track-but we still had no way to know if our suspects were on-site. As soon as we could confirm My phone rang.
Ralph.
“Yes?” I answered. I was hurrying down the hallway, following Lees.
“The videos. I just got word.”
“Tell me.”
“A cleaning lady-name of Aria Petic. No video of her entering the building either before 5:00 or after 7:00, but she left immediately after the EMTs arrived. We’re looking for her.”
“Do we have her face on tape?”
“Mostly obscured. Only a partial.”
At least we could get her pace, stride, approximate height. “Send it.”
End call.
Game on.
30
Astrid played the two-minute-and-fifty-one-second video chronicling Rusty’s death, first the preparation, then footage of him dangling beneath the bridge, clawing uselessly at the rope cinched around his neck, and the voice of her father, her dead father, spoke to her, With each passing second, the young man became less and less animated. Less frantic. More submissive to the inevitable. The final denouement of his ever-shrinking world.