Don't Lose Her (3 page)

Chapter 5

N
ow, she noted a slow turn, the way the van crawled, the screech of worn brake pads beneath her ear, still pressed against the floorboards. Diane had calmed herself. The knee that pinned her down had eased up when she stopped struggling and she'd curled herself up. She felt another inching right turn. The wheels bumped over a small ridge and then she heard the distinctive sound of metal sliding against metal coming from outside the van, the sound echoing. Garage door? Big one. In a large empty enclosure. Warehouse?

Brains not brawn, Diane,
she thought.
You're a 140-pound pregnant woman. You can't fight them. You have to outsmart them.

No one had said a word during the entire ordeal. No shout, no orders or directions given. She had seen two—no, three—men, including the driver, before they'd pulled the cloth over her head. But in her memory there were no distinguishing features. Dark clothes, maybe dark eyes inside the mask on the face of the one she did see. But were they the eyes of a white man? A black man? Asian, Hispanic? She couldn't say for sure. It had all happened so fast; it was insane.

She felt the van stop and heard the sliding van door through which they'd dragged her being opened. Again, hands came up under her arms and dragged her out, this time with two people, one on either side, holding her up. She gained her foothold and stood, realizing for the first time that her shoes were missing. They must have come off when they pulled her into the van. They were flats she'd bought when she was at six months and her ankles had begun to swell. It was a totally bizarre thought, one that came from some involuntary synapse in her brain, but damn, she'd liked those shoes.

The surface she stood on now was cool to the bottoms of her feet, flat and hard like concrete. When the men pulled her forward roughly, she grunted in pain, her belly again feeling heavy, swinging a split-second behind each movement. It felt like it did when she rolled over in bed too quickly to answer the phone, or spun too quickly to catch an elevator door at the last moment.

In the last month, it was as if her stomach was an attachment; the weight of the baby and swollen placenta sometimes seemed independent of her own body. She'd grinned at the feeling the first time she noticed it. She was not grinning now.

They marched her across a hard flat floor, twenty-six paces. She was now counting, paying attention, determined to keep her head working instead of panicking. Then they hesitated a moment, and she could feel the hands under her armpits lift slightly, drawing her up. The top of her bare foot scraped across an immovable object. The hands continued to drag her up. She felt a flat surface, warmer like wood, and she stood on it. They were going up steps.

When she hesitated, the man on her left yanked at her. She moaned, and the gesture of pain seemed to cause the man on the right to stop and ease his grip slightly. She needed to remember the reaction from the one on the right: Was it a sign of compassion?
Keep a focus on him,
she thought.
Try to keep track of him.

It took her a couple more steps up before she caught the rhythm and began to count: one, two, and three … seven. A landing, then a turn to the right, and then seven more.

At the top, they turned left. She tried to see under the hood, but there was nothing but blackness. Maybe the lights were off. Maybe the place was windowless. Maybe there was some sort of loose elastic around the hood and they'd somehow cinched it, but she could feel it around her shoulders.
It's dark, just dark. But these guys are still moving as if they know each step without seeing. Where the hell are we?

It was fifteen paces on another wood surface at the top of the stairs and then the sound of old hinges crying, followed by an abrupt turn to the right. When she was spun and pushed backward roughly, she panicked and thought they might actually be tossing her over the side of some elevated walkway. A bubble rose in her throat. But before she could scream, the backs of her knees hit something soft, and she sat heavily on some kind of chair … no, sofa … no, mattress.

She heard the hinges again and then the clack of a door being closed. Silence. She tried to calm herself on the mattress. She felt the roughness of the fabric beneath her with her fingertips: wool, scratchy, thick wool. She breathed in the air. She could smell the heat, the odor of old wood, stale air, dried cardboard, and a slight, pungent whiff of sweat. Not hers.

She thought of her heartbeat, then of her baby's heartbeat, then admonished herself to focus and went back to her own heart rhythm.
Calm yourself and listen,
she commanded. She breathed deeply several times. Had they dumped her alone in a closed room? Finally, she took in a lungful of air, held it, and concentrated. There was another breath in the room, a most subtle sound of air moving rhythmically, in and out, and in and out. Not far away and to her right.

“Who are you, my keeper?” she suddenly said. “My captor?”

Silence.

“I know you're here,” she said.

She listened again to the nearby breath, but now it was gone or was being held.

“I can see you there,” she lied, and tipped her head in the direction she thought the breathing had come from.

“I can see through this stupid hood and I know exactly where we are. Do you really think you can kidnap a federal judge and not have every law enforcement agency in the United States coming after you?

“They'll find me, you know. And it will be very hard on you all. Do you know the penalty for abducting a federal judge?”

This time, she was quiet for several seconds.
You can't hold your
breath forever,
she thought. After what seemed an impossibly long time, she heard it. The breath was louder, no doubt from the effort to hold it in the lungs for so long.

Then Diane heard the creak of wood and the slightest swish of fabric. She thought she actually felt something. Was it her imagination or was that air against her? Was it the actual displacement of the oxygen in the room as her captor moved? She tried to sit up, to get her feet flat on the floor, but the baby made it impossible to use her stomach muscles. And with her arms bound at the wrists behind her, it was a hopeless task. She tried to roll over on her side to aid the effort and heard the structure beneath the mattress creak.

Or was that the floorboards again? Was he moving? Was he nearer? Was he close enough to slap her, strike her with a fist, or kick her swiftly in the stomach? She stopped moving and listened again. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the moisture in the corners.

“Please,” she said softly. “Tell me what you want. Please, let's get this over with so I can take care of my baby. Please.”

Chapter 6

I
left my car near the crime scene and walked to the federal courthouse, using the route I assumed Diane had taken to go to lunch. I knew I would walk it again later, in reverse, the way she would have. And with each step, I would try to put myself in her shoes, to see what she would have seen, to absorb what she would have felt—the wind from the east, the heat rising up off the concrete sidewalks, the sun, higher than it was now, bright on the top of her head at midday.

Had there been any warning? Had she seen it coming, the threat and the menace? Had they tipped their hand, or was she completely surprised by the attack?

Attack
—I didn't want to use that word about Diane in her condition, carrying her and Billy's child low in her eighth month. I'd seen her only a week ago in their penthouse apartment overlooking the Atlantic. She'd been waddling around in the kitchen, making fun of herself, bumping her belly against the marble countertop, mocking herself as she opened the refrigerator door, and backing up while simultaneously making a
beep, beep, beep
noise like a tractor-trailer in reverse.

“Heavy load here, boys!”

Billy stood aside, smiling and looking back over his shoulder at me, gesturing with his palm at his wife: “Poetry in motion.”

They had not come to this moment without hours of discussion, lying in bed side-by-side in the early morning hours and late at night when questions are often laid bare in quiet air.

Billy was my best friend, and even though I had only known him for a few years, a long relationship between our respective mothers in Philadelphia tied us together. We knew each other's demons.

Billy had grown up in the faltering neighborhoods of North Philly, whose streets were lined by boarded-up and decrepit homes stained and wasted by the change from blue-collar factory jobs in the inner city to the concentration of white-collar office and consumer-­oriented jobs downtown. His father left before Billy could know him, a man made angry by his own hopelessness and lack of education­ and the addictions he'd ultimately bowed to.

Billy's mother endured the violence his father visited on her, but never took her eye off the goal of making her only son the beneficiary of lessons learned. Billy had cocooned himself with books and chess and learning and the avoidance of the plague of the streets. He looked back on his own childhood as something endured and to rise above.

My own upbringing as the son of a third-generation South Philly policeman had its own bitter taste. My father, too, was often a raging drunk, a wife beater who succumbed to his anger and need to glorify himself by lording over those he could, most often his family—those closest to him.

Billy's and my own mother had eventually, or maybe inevitably, found each other at a Center City church and borrowed each other's strength to rid themselves of their tormentors. But both Billy and I carried an inevitable question into adulthood: Would I ever bring a child into this kind of world?

Now, in his early forties, with the strength and connection and love of his wife, Billy had come to answer yes to the question.

As I entered the federal courthouse and headed for Diane Manchester's chambers, I cynically wondered if he'd made the wrong decision.

A man dressed in a dark off-the-rack suit and wearing an audio plug in his ear stopped me outside the judge's hallway door. I gave him my name as he eyeballed me.
Federal security,
I thought. He spoke into the wrist-cuff of his suit and then opened the door to let me enter.

I'd been in Diane's chambers a few times and knew the layout. This was the outer office, typically paneled in cheap government-issued wood and adorned only with the standard displays of the judge's law degrees and official certificates on the walls. There was an equally plain, catalogue-purchased desk where her secretary usually sat taking myriad phone calls from lawyers, bailiffs, bureaucrats, prosecutors, and fellow judges.

But today, her secretary was not in his usual chair. Martin Andrews was instead sitting in one of the waiting area chairs, staring at an empty wall as if transfixed by some minute flaw or stain or perhaps an image of the unthinkable. A man who could have been the outside guard's twin was in the desk chair, working at Andrews's computer, tapping and studying, tapping and studying.

“Marty,” I said to Andrews, who had yet to look away from his wall despite my entrance. The look of recognition came late to his face.

“Oh, Mr. Freeman,” he said finally, and started to rise.

I stepped to him instead and, closing the gap, forced him to stay seated.

“You OK?” I said, extending my hand. He shook it without vigor.

“I'm afraid I'm quite useless,” he said, looking from my face to his own desk.

I shared the glance over my shoulder. “They can do that to you,” I said with a touch of conspiracy in my voice. “Don't take it personally, Marty. They'll need you before long.”

I started to turn, but Andrews reached out to touch my sleeve with his fingertips to stop me.

“She'll be all right, won't she, Mr. Freeman?”

Even the sharp ones will plead for reassurance when they know it's too early and too impossible to know yet.

“Yes, Marty. She'll be all right,” I said, being equally cavalier with the unknown.

When Andrews turned back to the wall, I asked the man at his desk to let Mr. Manchester know I was there. Then I turned to the unmarked and unadorned door to Diane's inner chambers and waited. The man did not take his eyes from the computer display before him as he also spoke into his sleeve. The door opened and another suit motioned me inside.

The judge's chamber was essentially one huge room with three of the walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. There were three doors and no windows. One door led to Diane's courtroom, one to her private bath, and I'd just walked through the third. The dominant feature in the office was a ten-foot-long oak conference table surrounded by chairs and positioned in the middle of the room.

This would be where the meetings with case lawyers and prosecutors and trial participants were usually held. I'd seen the table often strewn with opened law books and documents and case files and half-filled coffee cups and the wrappings and residue of late-night dinners.

Today, there were four men huddled at one end, focused on two laptop computer screens. Newly strung wires ran across the polished surface leading from the computers to the multi-button telephone hub at the center. The device, the size of a small mixing bowl, looked like a kid's computer game handset, with a digital readout display at its center, several color-coded buttons on one side, and a perforated speaker section, all sitting on a raised, three-legged base. It was the hub of all incoming and outgoing office calls, be they private or conference. The FBI agents had obviously tapped into it and were ready to record and feed all information into their own computer database instantly. No one had to say they were waiting for a ransom call.

At the far end of the room, Billy sat at Diane's own broad but far from ornate desk. He looked up when I entered, closed his laptop, and stood. I'd never seen him look so stiff, unemotional, and blank. He was staring at my face as if in assessment. His coffee-colored skin seemed to have lost all lines and texture.

Always dressed in the finest suits, he'd somehow grabbed a plain, dark jacket and slacks that were eerily appropriate for a funeral. He stepped around the desk stiffly, devoid of the easy and athletic movement with which he usually carried himself. I was forced to judge that he was holding it together by pulling inside and showing nothing, neither personal pain nor anger nor panic.

The agents at the table glanced up as I stepped past them. One started to greet me, but hesitated as I headed directly for my friend.

I reached for Billy's unoffered hand and squeezed it in spite of him and pulled him close to me, touching his shoulder with mine. I didn't even try to speak. It would have been an insult to a man of his intellect and experience to toss out a comforting statement like the one I'd given Andrews outside.

“Thanks for coming, Max,” he said, the tone so flat it made me wince.

If there had been even the slightest hint of panic in his first phone call to me, it was now forever gone.

“Mr. Freeman,” a voice behind me said.

I turned to see one of the table men, who had waited an appropriate time for Billy and me to greet each other, and had now stepped forward.

“Agent Duncan,” he said, offering his hand.

I took it.

“Mr. Manchester has requested your presence, sir. And it is, we believe, in our interest to have you here.”

I looked into the freshly shaved face of a senior agent whose words did not match the look in his eyes. I guessed him at near sixty. He'd been red-haired once. Now, the gray was filtering back from his temples, and deep crow's-feet stamped the corners of his eyes. A familial balding pattern had left his scalp exposed and a veined and red-splotched nose exposed his dependence on too much liquor to salve the grinding visions of ugly human deeds he'd seen over a career.

“I understand that you have some law enforcement experience,” he said. “And will thus be familiar with the jurisdictional parameters under which we work.”

He was telling me that he was the boss. The FBI was in charge. Don't get in the fucking way, and don't even think about doing anything either active or overt.

But I am nothing if not active and overt when the safety of my friends is at risk. I had been a cop in Philadelphia for several years, had been in the detective bureau for a short time before the stink of bureaucracy sent me back to working the streets. Then one night while responding to a Center City holdup, someone's bullet pierced my neck and my return fire blew the heart out of a thirteen-year-old child.

I'd come to Florida to get away. But some things never leave you. I had a head full of such things. And one of them was the inability to sit still when someone needed me.

“I fully understand,” I said to Duncan, meeting his eyes, giving him my best “sir, yes, sir,” attitude.

He motioned me to the table.

“We have tapped into all the communications and computer lines here in the judge's office in anticipation that whoever is responsible for Judge Manchester's disappearance will make telephonic or digital contact,” Duncan said.

“We are also coordinating with all local law enforcement on a BOLO for the white van observed leaving the scene. And there is another team tracing all possible routes from that scene to access any additional video from both government and private security cameras.”

Duncan looked up at me. “But as you might guess, that will take some time.”

Perhaps the agent was trying to discern how long I'd been off the job: whether I'd been brainwashed by the movie and television depictions of the government's Big Brother access to every mounted camera on every street corner and shop entrance and satellite lens in existence.

I knew it didn't work that way, even if it was in the interest of law enforcement to have the average citizen and especially the idiot criminal element believe it. It might be a deterrent, but it wasn't true. Few of those cameras are monitored, or even maintained to ensure that they're working. And there is no overwhelming computer net that links them all together. That fantasy has been around since Patrick McGoohan starred in the television series
The Prisoner
, and it isn't any more a reality now than it was back then in 1967.

The government net is increasing, and such surveillance might be scrapped together in a matter of weeks, but it wasn't going to happen during a commercial break.

Duncan stood at ease, as if his required update was finished. He waved a hand in Billy's direction.

“If you would like to join Mr. Manchester in putting together a list of possible contacts, you are welcome to stay on as long as you wish.”

I looked at Billy, who had returned to Diane's desk.

“What about the State Department?” I said to Duncan.

The man raised his eyebrows.

“You already know the judge was working on the Escalante extradition,” I said. “The kidnapping of judges and journalists in South America is a well-known byproduct of the drug wars there. Would the idea that they might adopt the same techniques here not be an immediate summation of motivation?” I said, adopting the agent's galling use of technical lawyer-ese.

I watched Duncan's eyes. The man was a rock. He didn't give a single “tell.” No twitch, no crinkle of facial skin, no flit of an eye—a formidable poker player.

“That, Mr. Freeman, is not my purview,” he said, and turned away to his telephonic-digital-whatever-it-was that his team was focused on.

“Thus the State Department,” I said. But it could have been a statement to the wall. I went back to join Billy.

He had reopened his laptop and was tapping away at keys in a way I had no chance of keeping up with.

“He threatened her, Max.”

“What?”

“Marty Andrews said Escalante made a veiled threat in open court this morning by commenting on her health and the health of our baby.”

I stayed silent because I could feel the warm spark of anger flaring behind my eyes.

Finally, I glanced over at the gathering of the feds.

“These guys know that?”

“Of course,” Billy said, not looking up from his computer. “They've sent someone down to the lockup cell to speak with him. But I've got my own Wi-Fi set up here and I'm pulling together some contacts I have in Colombia. Businessmen, but very connected businessmen. Word gets passed very quickly among the moneyed class. This kind of thing will have ripple effects.”

I noted that Billy was not using Diane's name. He was going impersonal, probably as a coping mechanism, but it was jarring to hear.

I also noted the lack of any stutter in his speech. Billy is a face-to-face stutterer and has been since childhood. Whether it was from the physical abuses by his father or Billy's own penchant to avoid people and find comfort in books and computers, he'd developed a stutter that occurred only when he talked face-to-face with others.