Caged (34 page)

‘No,’ Saul said, ‘but she said she’d be going in to thank the guys for what they did last night.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ David said.

‘What?’ Saul paused. ‘Dad,
what
?’

‘OK,’ David said. ‘Son, I want you to stay home and call Cathy and tell her she is
not
to go to the café.’

‘Why not?’ Saul was bewildered.

‘Just
tell
her she must not go near those people.’ David was sharp, clear. ‘I have to make a call. You stay there, try to reach Cathy, tell her to phone Sergeant Alvarez at the station right away.’

He cut off his son, his hands trembling as he made the new call, and he looked across at Mildred, grateful for her silence, for her realization that he needed to act first, fall apart later.

Alvarez took his call swiftly, listened, absorbed.

‘Jesus,’ he said after a moment, softly.

‘Oh, my God,’ David said. ‘You think I’m right.’

‘I guess I do,’ Alvarez said. ‘You said Saul is trying to reach Cathy?’

‘As we speak.’

‘Hold on, please.’

David waited.

‘OK, Dr Becket.’ Alvarez was back. ‘Cathy’s already on the phone, she’s OK, and we’re bringing her in to the station.’

‘Thank God,’ David said, relieved.

And then he remembered that Sam and Grace were still missing.

ONE HUNDRED AND SIX

‘
O
h my God, Sam,’ Grace said. ‘Look at the wall.’

He followed her gaze to the wall to her left, the one with the screen.

Took it in for a moment, and then, in his flattest deadpan, said:

‘Whaddya know, dinner
and
the movies.’

‘It’s us in the café, isn’t it?’ Grace said.

She knew that because she was wearing the blouse she’d only ever worn once previously, a silky ice-blue in reality, distinctive even in black-and-white.

And anyway, it made sense to her now.

She felt sick, felt like screaming, but she wouldn’t do that to Sam.

Wouldn’t do it for
them.

Sam stood up, trying to spot anything he might have missed embedded in the padding on the wall to his right, maybe something as tiny as one of those new pico projectors he’d read about, and he wouldn’t have picked Dooley as a hi-tech man, but then he hadn’t picked him as a goddamned monster either, and he’d always been highly organized at the café.

He could hear a low hum, but there was nothing visible.

The series of clips played over and over in a loop: the two of them enjoying the ‘special’ evening that Dooley and Simone had helped Cathy set up. The hidden camera – and now Sam wondered where the hell that had been – zooming in on their closeness, the moments when their eyes met and when they touched, and though neither of them were big on public displays, they did like to hold hands, to lean close and, now and then, to brush cheeks.

It was all there now on the screen on the wall, real up-close-and-personal, silently repeating, and Sam imagined this was what the other couples had endured, tried to analyze, rather than watch, and was it that, was it the closeness that
they
hated about couples? Though he’d seen tenderness between Dooley and Simone; they’d appeared to have feelings for each other, had not seemed obviously emotionally stunted. So what
was
their particular shtick, their problem with happy couples?

If this had turned out to be a solo killer, they might have been examining the triad theory – neurological problems, perhaps caused by disease or injury, paranoid thinking and a history of abuse; nature, nurture, neurology – but with a
pair
of monsters like these . . .

He tried thinking back to other ‘team’ killers, but the list he’d brought to the squad meeting two Sundays ago had been so long that now it felt like a jumble of horror in his head. There were files and books crammed with homicidal histories of friends, married couples, mothers and sons, siblings, strangers thrown together, all kinds of killing partnerships fed by drugs or greed or lust or mutual insanity, or sheer, unadulterated evil.

‘Sam?’

Grace’s voice was soft, gentle, as if she realized that his thoughts were too much for him, as if she wanted to stop them for a little while, to heal him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Let’s talk for a bit, about good times, while we still can. Is that OK?’

He felt something in his chest, a sensation like a fiery ball of love, so real and solid and hot that he thought it might be able to squeeze out everything else for a little while.

So he let it, sat down again.

‘That’s more than OK, Gracie,’ he said.

‘We could start with the cruise,’ she said, ‘and work back.’

‘The cruise
until
the last night,’ Sam said.

Because if they were going to play this game, then he’d be damned if Jerome Cooper was going to destroy that too – though how in hell could he have insinuated himself into their vacation right before
this
? Or could it be that Dooley and Simone were behind that, too? Might they have known that even the most inconclusive evidence of Cal the Hater’s survival would have been like a direct hit to their Achilles heels?

‘Come on, Sam,’ Grace said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m with you.’

‘It was the best present anyone could have been given,’ she said.

‘Not nearly as much as you deserve,’ Sam told her.

‘I don’t need anything except you,’ she said. ‘And our family.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, not able to shift the thought. ‘I have to ask you. Do you think they could have been behind what happened on the ship?’

‘It comes to mind,’ Grace said. ‘But I don’t see how.’

Sam wondered if they’d ever find out.

‘Hey,’ she said, gently. ‘Look at the movie. That’s a nice memory, in spite of them.’ She paused. ‘I’ll bet they don’t want us to enjoy looking at it.’

‘They can go to hell,’ Sam said.

‘I expect they will,’ Grace said.

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

‘
J
ust to let you know,’ Mary Cutter told David on the phone, ‘that Cathy’s safe here with us, talking to Beth Riley and Sergeant Alvarez.’

‘Is she OK?’ David asked.

‘She’s very shocked,’ Cutter said, ‘but she’s holding up well.’

That sounded like Cathy, he thought, except at what point did a young person reach the end of their rope? When did too much finally become just that?

‘Has she been able to help?’ he asked.

‘Right now,’ Cutter said, ‘every single thing she can share with us is bound to help, Dr Becket.’

David steeled himself.

‘Do you have any idea where they are yet?’ He paused. ‘Truth, please.’

‘Not yet,’ Mary Cutter replied. ‘But I’m sure we will.’

‘I’d like to come down there,’ David said.

‘Best to stay home, Dr Becket,’ the detective said. ‘When Cathy’s done here, we’ll give her a ride either back home or to your house, as she chooses – so long as she’s not alone.’

‘Please tell her to come here,’ David said.

‘Will do,’ Cutter said.

They’d caught a small break shortly before Cathy’s arrival at the station from one of the witches, dragged unwillingly from anonymity by Beth Riley’s ongoing and unrelenting pursuit of Allison Moore.

The witch in question, a twenty-eight-year-old sales assistant named Marcia Keaton, small, round-cheeked and bright-eyed, a physical model of wholesomeness, had told Riley and Alvarez that as she and her pals had been leaving the old gallery, they’d noticed a dark blue van with two people in it – possibly a man and a woman, though she said she couldn’t be certain – waiting near the corner of 81st Street and Collins.

‘It freaked me out,’ Keaton had told them, ‘because I thought they might be watching us, and it was still dark, but the licence plate was under a street light, and I don’t know why I wrote it down, but—’

‘You have it with you?’ Riley had jumped on it, though she knew the plates were probably stolen, same as those on the van recorded in Elizabeth Price’s road.

‘I kept it in my wallet.’ Marcia Keaton had paused. ‘Is it going to make this trespass crap go away?’

‘If you don’t give us the number,’ Alvarez had told her, ‘you’ll have a whole lot worse than trespass charges to worry about.’

The details were being put through the database now.

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

T
he movie on the wall was still playing when they heard sounds.

Weird sounds.

Creaking, rolling.

Wheels
, Sam thought, and realized that any second now he’d know if the killers had used a gurney or a dolly, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to tell Martinez or Riley . . .

More sounds. Keys jangling. One being inserted into a lock someplace in the darkness beyond the cage.

‘Gracie,’ he said softly. ‘Stay strong.’

‘I love you,’ she said.

The key turned in the lock.

‘I love you too,’ Sam told her. ‘We’ll get through this.’

Light penetrated, shaped like a sliver of cake expanding to a wedge, partially blotted by someone entering, then shrinking back on itself again as the door closed.

Dark again.

The killers in here now, with them, the gurney still outside.

The voice came out of the darkness.

‘We might have known.’

Dooley’s voice.

‘You two. Making the most of every moment.’

‘Every
last
moment.’

Simone Regan’s voice.

‘Another perfect couple,’ she added.

‘
The
couple,’ Dooley said.

ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

‘
S
o Cathy doesn’t know where they live?’ Martinez said. ‘No addresses, so far as I know,’ Saul said. ‘Anyway, everything they’ve told her has probably been lies.’

Right after Saul had reached Cathy and told her to call Sergeant Alvarez, he’d called Beth Riley direct to find out all he could. She’d shared only the bare minimum, as he’d known she would, and he had made his next decision based on nothing more than instinct.

Martinez had to know.

Not that that had been Saul’s only reason for coming to the house on Alton. For one thing, Saul had known he would not be able to take sitting around with his dad and Mildred and the baby, being told to wait and do nothing.

‘We have to do something,’ he said.

The real reason he’d come.

‘Damned straight we do,’ Martinez said.

‘Riley says they’re getting a warrant to search the café.’

‘I’m not waiting for any search warrant,’ Martinez said.

Saul knew he’d come to the right man.

‘So what, are we breaking in?’ he asked.

‘Not you,’ Martinez said. ‘Just me.’

‘But you’re still sick,’ Saul said.

‘You never heard of adrenalin?’ Martinez said.

ONE HUNDRED AND TEN

T
he address at which the van seen by Marcia Keaton was registered was a fake.

At least, it was a real address, but the present occupants – who had never had a vehicle stolen – had lived there for over eighteen months. And the mail that had kept on coming for the previous residents after they’d moved in had been addressed to some other name which they could not now recall.

Except it had been Hispanic, they thought.

Nothing like Dooley or Regan.

No help at all, just distraction and a waste of time and manpower at a moment when one of their own and his wife were in mortal danger.

The BOLO – Be On the Lookout For – was still active for Jerome Cooper.

But the biggest hunt now going on in Miami Beach and beyond was for Matthew Dooley and Simone Regan – and their presumed captives, Samuel Lincoln Becket and Grace Lucca Becket.

ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN

‘
W
hy don’t you come out and show yourselves?’

Sam’s voice was loud and clear, and it was almost a relief to stop speaking softly, to let it rip –
almost
a relief, too, that the waiting was over.

He got to his feet again, tested the shackle on his ankle, but it and the chain held fast, and for an instant his mind went to his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, a slave who’d escaped from Georgia in the 1830s and made it to the Bahamas, and in memory of him, Sam stood a little straighter.

Their steps were rubber-soled, their breathing audible, and then their shapes loomed out of the blackness into the semi-light just outside the cage bars.

Both wore black tracksuits, their hands dark-gloved.

‘I hope,’ Dooley said, ‘you’re not too uncomfortable.’

‘No, we’re just peachy,’ Sam said.

Grace, who’d chosen not to stand, moved closer to the bars and wrapped her arms around her knees to limit her exposure, depriving them as well as she could of the satisfaction of seeing her nudity, but holding her head high.

‘Could you please at least get something to cover my wife with?’

‘We could,’ Simone said.

‘But we won’t,’ Dooley said.

Rage rose in Sam, but it was impotent and he knew it, so he took a breath, brought himself back under control. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because it would spoil things,’ Dooley said.

‘Simone?’ Grace said.

‘I wouldn’t bother trying to appeal to Simone,’ Dooley told her. ‘This is her fantasy, not mine.’

Grace felt bile rise, fought to master it, then asked the question uppermost in her mind, the one that mattered most.

‘Are our children all right?’

‘Of course they are,’ Simone said. ‘That’s not what this is about, Grace.’

‘We suppose,’ Dooley said, ‘you’d both like to understand.’

‘A cop and a shrink,’ Simone said. ‘Stands to reason.’