Charlie grunts. His body tightens. His lips part slightly and move. She’s never known him to talk in his sleep, and she pauses, waiting for it to happen now, but words don’t follow the gesture. She thinks he must just be on the border of cramping up when his body relaxes, he exhales loudly, and his mouth closes back up.
Maybe this is a mistake, she thinks, still unable to find the blade. This could be fate intervening, the universe telling her to hold off from doing anything stupid. Of course if the universe worked that way, then it didn’t work too well for Kathy and Luciana, and it sure as hell didn’t work well for her last night. Still, she is starting to get some control back. If she manages to cut through her bindings and then Charlie catches her, she’s going to undo all those baby steps. It’s a gamble. This could be her only chance to escape.
Of course no matter how she looks at it, she still doesn’t think he’s capable of murder.
Yesterday she wouldn’t have thought he was capable of kidnapping.
She gets her hand closer to her body. Her wrist hurts as she flexes her hand back toward her arm, but she gets her fingers beneath her body and is able to roll a few inches upward. After a few moments of despair she feels the edge of the blade prick against the pad of her finger. She grits her teeth and holds back the urge to swear. She slips the blade into her fingers and moves it to her fingertips. She twists her hand and touches the blade against the towel. She has to make the decision. Getting to this point has taken longer than she wanted. If she starts cutting, and doesn’t get all the way through, he’s going to know she tried to escape and he will lose all trust in her.
But what if this is her only chance?
She looks over at him. He’s not breathing heavily. The dream he is in isn’t a deep one.
She thinks about the traffic outside and is aware that any altercation out there, a car horn or the shrieking of tires, could be enough to wake him. Or the alarm Charlie set could be about to go off. She can’t see it because it’s angled away from her. It feels like she’s been tied up for ten minutes, but it could have been twenty. Or thirty.
Her indecision suggests she’s already made up her mind. That she’ll hide the blade in her pocket and use it later. Only then she drags the blade across the towel. Once. Twice. Cut or not to cut? That’s the question. And she needs to hurry up and make up her mind.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The roads are getting thick with traffic. Landry hates traffic. Ten years ago he took his wife-no, his second wife-to London. They spent three weeks there. He didn’t like it. It was too busy. You could lose hours in traffic. You could get up in the morning and drive half of the day and only have gone a dozen miles. He remembers coming back to New Zealand and vowing he’d never complain about the traffic here. Or the rain. Only both those promises were left in the dust, along with his second marriage.
He makes it in to work, and now things are working better. His parking spot has opened up. He finds himself a coffee cup that hasn’t broken. He fills out a warrant. It’s a standard form in which he has to fill in the blanks. He writes in the address. He writes in the person of interest. The person of interest is a guy by the name of Desmond Important Person, and they want to search Desmond’s house. It’s not the guy’s real name, but he had it legally changed from Desmond Douglas seven years ago. In the years he’s been known as Desmond Important Person, he’s also seen the inside of a jail cell on three different occasions, once for burglary and twice for stealing a car. Douglas is nowhere to be seen, and unfortunately for him Luciana Young’s car happened to be parked two doors down from his house. With no other suspects on the street, Douglas has become somebody the police need to talk to. Landry knows it won’t lead anywhere-Douglas isn’t their man-but he’s happy with the distraction it will give Schroder and the others. Once he has the warrant, he can get back to doing what he hasn’t done yet-and that’s figure out where Feldman is.
The drive to the courthouse from the police station takes ten minutes. He hands the warrant off to a registrar. He tells him it’s urgent. The normal turnaround for a warrant can be half a day. He tells the registrar he needs it in five minutes. Tells him there’s a woman who’s missing. The registrar, a guy in his early twenties with too much acne and not enough hair and not enough money to buy a nice suit, tells Landry he understands and goes off to find a judge to sign it. Landry spends the time pacing the halls, staring at a whole bunch of bad people who are going to be around long after he’s gone. It takes twenty minutes for the warrant to get signed.
By the time he gets back out onto the street the traffic is so thick he actually uses his sirens just so he can clear a path through town. He switches them back off when he’s in the suburbs. At least the speeding woke him up.
Schroder and the assault team are still where Luciana’s car was parked-only the car isn’t there anymore. It’s been towed down to the station as evidence. He hands the warrant to Schroder, and then he starts coughing, and then he notices his hands are shaking. All of it is real. Schroder notices the same things.
“Look, Bill, you really do look like shit. Are you sure you shouldn’t be home?”
“Maybe you’re right,” he says, coughing into his hand to press home the point.
“We’ll search this guy’s house,” Schroder says, pointing toward Desmond Person’s house. “But, to be honest, burglary and car theft is a big step away from what happened to those two women. At the most you’ll find he probably stole the car and drove it here.”
“His file says that’s what he used to do? Steal cars and bring them home?” Landry asks.
“Well, no. But somebody brought it here.”
From there Landry drives from suburb to suburb, doing what he can to avoid traffic along the way, until finally he’s back at Charlie Feldman’s house. It’s been years since he was last on a stakeout. It was with. . hell, it was with a guy by the name of Theodore Tate, a guy who used to be a cop, but then became a private investigator and then became a real pain in the ass before ending up in jail. For the last year Landry has been convinced Tate is the kind of guy who’s done bad things for what he thinks may have been good reasons, only. .
Only shit. That’s exactly what he himself is becoming. Tate has killed people-more people than he’s let on, Landry is sure of it. Maybe Tate has cancer too.
The idea of becoming Theodore Tate is a miserable one, but one he only has to deal with for six months. Maybe less. That stakeout they went on together was at least ten years ago. Normally stakeouts were boring. They were watching a clown. Quite literally. The circus had come to town, and some poor teenager had become brain dead after buying drugs from somebody that his buddy said worked at the circus. Suspect was a guy by the name of Mortimer Dicky, also known as Beeboop the clown.
He spends a few seconds wondering if this is the right path. The Theodore Tate path. He could find and arrest Feldman and bring him into the station by himself, end his career with the people in this country loving him. And why the hell not? He deserves something other than the cancer for all his years of protecting the innocent, doesn’t he? Or he sticks with the Tate path. Make Charlie Feldman simply disappear. Magic.
He’s always been a fan of magic.
He reaches Feldman’s house. He knocks on the front door. No answer. He goes through the back gate and to the back door, which is open exactly how he left it. He goes inside. He puts on a pair of latex gloves. The living room looks the same. So does the kitchen.