“Yes, I got them, Miss Cole,” he said, “and thank you so much for your assistance,” turning on the charm and wondering if he should read a little T. S. Eliot to her. “Miss Cole, I wonder if you can help me here again,” he said. “I need a home number for a Margaret Holmes, as in Sherlock Holmes, somewhere in Russell County, I don’t have a specific town, do you think you can help me? I would so appreciate it.”
“Hmm,” Miss Cole said.
But then she said, “One moment, please.”
THE NUMBERMiss Cole gave him rang four times before someone picked up.
“Hello?” a woman said.
“Miss Holmes?”
“Mrs.Holmes, yes?”
“This is Detective Carella of the Eighty-seventh Squad? In the city?”
“Yes, Detective?”
“Are you the Margaret Holmes who runs Margaret Holmes Realty in South Beach?”
“I am,” she said.
“Mrs. Holmes, we have an Avery Hanes calling you some six times this past month. Is that name familiar to you?”
“It is.”
Carella took a deep breath.
“Did you rent or sell anything to him?” he asked.
“I rented him a house on the beach,” she said. “Why? What’s he done?”
THE PLAN WASto drop the girl off just anyplace. Give her some change to make a phone call, let her find her own way home, she was a big girl now. That was the way Ave had explained the plan to her.
They’d drop the girl off just anywhere on their way to the airport. Cal was supposed to be going to Jamaica, but they didn’t care where he went, they didn’t care if they ever saw him again as long as they lived. Ave was heading for London first, while Kellie herself flew to Paris where he would meet her later. It was a swell plan. Paris. Lah-dee-dah.
There was only one problem.
The girl had seen Kellie’s face.
Tamar Valparaiso still didn’t know who was behind those Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat masks, but she sure as hell knew that George W. Bush was a redheaded Irish girl with green eyes and freckles.
“You know,” Kellie confided now, “we’re supposed to set you free as soon as they get back.”
“Promises, promises,” Tamar said.
“No, really. That’s the plan. We leave here and drop you off someplace.”
“That would be nice,” Tamar said.
“Well, that’s the plan.”
“Good,” Tamar said.
She ached all over. Her face, her body, everywhere he’d hit her, but especially below, where he’d brutally entered her. Cal, she thought. His name is Cal. And the other one is Ave. You’ll pay, boys.
“You saw my face,” Kellie said out of the blue.
Tamar looked at her.
“You know what’s behind this mask.”
“Well, don’t worry…”
“You know what I look like.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Tamar said. “Really, you’ve been good to me. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.”
“Because I wouldn’t want to lose all this, you know,” Kellie said reasonably.
“You don’t have to worry, really.”
“We worked hard for this,” she said reasonably.
“I know you did. But, really, you don’t have to…”
“You can describe me.”
“I hardly remember…”
“You know what I look like,” Kellie said again.
“Lots of girls look like…”
“Lots of girls didn’t kidnap you,” Kellie said, and raised the AK-47 onto her hip.
“Don’t…just be careful with that thing, okay?” Tamar said and reached out with her free hand.
Kellie backed away a pace.
The rifle was on single-shot. She fired three times. Two bullets entered Tamar’s face just below the left eye, and the other took her just below the nose. The three shots blew off the back of her skull and splashed gristle and blood all over the radiator behind her.
Wow, Kellie thought.
14
IT WASeighty-forty-five on the squadroom clock.
“The address is 64 Beachside,” Carella told the detective in the South Beach Police Department. “There may be a kidnap victim there, so proceed with extreme caution.”
Out there in Russell County, they used more paramilitary rank designations than they did here in the big bad city. Detective-Sergeant James Cody asked if there was likely to be anyone armed and dangerous in that house.
Carella said, “Yes, that’s likely.”
“We’ll be careful then,” Cody said.
There was no need.
The only person in that house was a dead girl chained to a radiator.
Everyone else had driven off five minutes ago.
MISS COLEwas getting used to phone calls from Detective Stephen Louis Carella.
“Yes, Detective?” she said almost cheerfully.
“Miss Cole, I’m sorry to bother you again…”
“Oh, it’s no bother at all,” she said.
“On this list of calls made from those two addresses I gave you…”
“Yes, Detective?”
Almost cooing the words.
“There were almost daily calls listed to an unpublished number. Now, I know it’s telephone company policy not to reveal…”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “This is a kidnapping. Just give me a minute.”
She came back in three.
“All those calls were made to the same party,” she said.
“And who was that, Miss Cole?”
“A man named Barney Loomis,” she said. “At 583 South Thompson. Is that helpful to you, Detective?”
“THEY HANDED USa beaut,” Detective-Sergeant James Cody told the County Medical Examiner.
It was five minutes past nine that Tuesday night and the house at 64 Beachside was swarming with men wearing blue windbreakers, the word “POLICE” lettered in yellow across their backs. The dead girl was in one of the bedrooms. Her wrist was still handcuffed to the radiator.
“Christ, look what they did to her,” the ME said.
Cody nodded. “Can’t find the key anyplace,” he said. “We were waiting for you to get here, see do you want us to saw through the cuffs or what. I figure they got out of here in one hell of a hurry. Left her behind all chained up that way.”
There were three spent cartridge cases on the floor, presumably spewed from the murder weapon.
“Shot her in the face at close range,” Cody said.
“Looks like,” the ME said.
The equivalent of South Beach’s Crime Scene Unit was busy dusting for prints and vacuuming for fibers and hair. One of the technicians glanced toward the dead girl and muttered, “Fuckin animals.”
In one of the other bedrooms, they found three masks. Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat, and George W. Bush.
“Three of the world’s great leaders,” Cody said dryly.
Just about then, Detectives Carella and Hawes were knocking on the door to Apartment 22C at 583 South Thompson.
AT NINE-FORTY-FIVEthat night, just as Air France’s flight #23 for Paris was about to take off, Ollie and Patricia came out of the movie theater into a fairly decent rain. He took off his jacket, and over her protests draped it over her shoulders.
“You’ll get allwet! ” she told him.
“Tut tut,” he said. “Would you care to go for some pizza?”
Patricia said she wasn’t hungry, but she’d be happy to join him.
Over his third slice, he told her he had learned a lot from that movie.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like it ain’t only about a ticking clock,” Ollie said.
CARELLA DID NOTlearn that Tamar Valparaiso was dead until he and Hawes got back to the squadroom with Barney Loomis in tow. It was now ten o’clock. Flight #23 for Charles de Gaulle airport had been in the air for ten minutes already, and Avery Hanes was waiting in British Air’s lounge to board flight #82 to London’s Heathrow. Sergeant Murchison behind the muster desk told them that Mr. Loomis’ attorney was waiting in the lieutenant’s office.