First Drop (20 page)

They’d expanded since the first ones we’d seen that afternoon. Now they’d linked me to the shooting at the theme park as well.
Jesus, I thought, how many different guns do these people think I’ve got?

“Wow, this is getting wild,” Xander said. He shook his head and looked speculatively at Trey. “Who’da thought it, huh?”

“Shush!”

A new face had appeared on an outside broadcast camera but I’d missed the opening introduction. Not that I needed it to recognise who she was.

“Aw crap,” Trey burst out, “it’s Ms Raybourn!”

“Will you shut up,” I snapped, “and let me listen!”

“. . . more about the missing teenager?” the reporter was asking.

Gerri nodded, her face doing a perfect impression of serious solicitude.

“Sure,” she said. “Naturally, we are extremely concerned at this time for the safety of both the Pelzners – father and son – but particularly so for Trey, who is just fifteen years old. We are appealing to the kidnappers to release the family.”

“I believe you have already had some contact with the kidnappers. Can you tell us anything about their demands?”

Gerri shook her head. “Not at this time,” she said. “Though clearly we are dealing with some very dangerous people and we are really looking forward to writing the bottom line on this without further loss of life.”

“Like hell you are,” I muttered, still reeling.

The outside broadcast cut back to the studio and the beginning of the next story. For a moment none of us reacted.

“Kidnappers?” Scott asked, looking from one of us to the other. “What the fuck do they mean, man – kidnappers?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I don’t know what on earth Raybourn hopes to gain by trying to make out that I’ve kidnapped Trey – or Keith for that matter.”

“
She
was the one who sent Mr Whitmarsh after us at the motel,” Trey said blankly.

I nodded. “Yeah, and they didn’t manage to get us that time, or afterwards, and now with that cop getting killed it’s all got well out of hand.” I looked around at their faces, still and a little pale now. “If I had to guess, I’d say good old Gerri’s trying to make sure she’s got a suitable scapegoat ready to take the blame for whatever it is that she and your Dad are up to,” I said. My lips twisted into a mocking smile. “Looks like I’m it.”

“So, the question is,” I went on, “what exactly
are
they up to?”

Trey shrugged. “Dunno,” he muttered, but I’d seen the way his eyes had nervously scanned across his friends, as though checking they weren’t about to tell me anything he didn’t want me to know.

Time to press him, then.

“Is it something to do with your mother’s disappearance, do you think?” I asked carefully.

“Could be, I s’pose.” He shot me a dark look, but there were no great reactions from the other kids. They clearly knew all about his theories in that direction.

The more I thought about that one, though, the less likely it seemed. If Keith was trying to cover up the murder of his wife, which had apparently passed unnoticed by the authorities for five years, why would he now try to keep it hidden by sending a hitman to kill his son in such a public place?

Surely, if he had the kind of connections Trey had hinted at, it would have been far easier to have arranged a teenage suicide or accidental drowning in the pool at the house. Why the urgency, all of a sudden?

Unless Keith had needed witnesses to the snatch of his son in order to prove its authenticity. Hell, at the time it had seemed pretty authentic to me. But if that was the case, why hadn’t Keith handled his own ‘disappearance’ better? Why let a neighbour see the van he was using to move out, and then give that same neighbour a key for the letting agent?

It didn’t make sense and, worse than that, it was amateurish. And this was the man who had supposedly arranged the murder and disposal of his wife so professionally that nobody had suspected a thing for half a decade.

Or had they?

I glanced at Scott, who was frowning in concentration and clicking the back of the stud that passed through his bottom lip against his teeth. “Can we use the Internet to look up old news stories?” I said.

He looked at me with a touch of scorn, like I’d just asked if we could use a refrigerator to keep milk cold. “‘Course.”

He led the way back up to the computer in the loft, with the others in pursuit. Only Trey was showing any signs of reluctance.

“OK,” I said when we were there, crowded round his chair, “let’s see if you can find any reference to Trey’s mum. Exactly when was it, Trey?”

For a moment he scowled at me, his expression mulish, then he muttered, “Five years last January.”

He gave out information with all the joy of a kid forced to share his last packet of sweets. Scott went onto one of the local newspaper sites and tapped in the full name of Trey’s mother and the area of Daytona where they’d been living at the time.

Nothing came up.

He tried again with other news sources, but each time we drew a blank. It was like the woman had never existed. And the more he tried, the more twitchy Trey became.

“
See
,” he said at last, a little snappy. “Like I told you – she’s dead, OK?
He
made her disappear. What did you think you were gonna find?”

“This doesn’t prove she’s dead,” I said gently. “There’s still a chance that she might have just left of her own accord.”

I’d meant it to appease him but it had the opposite effect. Trey’s face shut down, turning white, then as pink as my hair. He swung round, body rigid like he was ready for a fight.

“Take it back!” he yelled, in my face, shaking now. “She would never have left me! You take it back!”

I didn’t react, didn’t say anything at all, but I didn’t back off, either. After a few moments, some small manifestation of sanity seemed to tap Trey on the shoulder and whisper in his ear that maybe taking me on wasn’t such a good idea. The anger faded into nervousness and his eyes flickered away. He turned and slouched down the stairs into the living room, throwing himself onto the sofa. Aimee pulled a face and went after him.

Xander let his breath out through his teeth. “Phew, you sure know how to go stirring up trouble, Charlie,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “Trey’s real touchy about his mom.”

Scott gave up on his searches and sat back, staring moodily at the computer screen. “If his dad
is
tied in with some government agency then you wouldn’t expect to, like, find any trace of her,” he said slowly, almost to himself. “They can just wipe anybody off the face of the earth.”

“Yes, OK,” I allowed, “but what’s Keith doing that’s so vital to the US government that they would go to those lengths to protect him?” I looked from one of the boys to the other, but they just shrugged. “He’s just a computer programmer who writes financial software, not anything for the military.”

For a moment the only noise in the loft was Scott clicking that stud against his teeth again. Downstairs, over the drift of MTV I could hear the earnest murmur of Aimee’s voice, giving Trey a pep talk.

I sighed. Keith Pelzner worked in an industry where talent made you rich and the bottom line was that he wasn’t a wealthy man. The house in Lauderdale had been rented by the company who employed him. He’d flashed his cash around but even that had all been provided by them. So what made him important enough for this?

It just didn’t fit together. I couldn’t reconcile a geek like Keith, however talented a programmer he might be, playing any role vital to national security. Nothing that would explain armed men being sent out to try and kill his son, at any rate. I saw again the man in the Buick falling. I pushed it away.

“Try another search for me, would you?”

“OK,” Scott said, sitting forwards again, “but we’ve been through just about everything I can think of.”

“This one’s just for any reports on a man’s body turning up in the last twenty-four hours. He’ll have been shot.”

Scott glanced at me and his eyes gleamed as the realisation hit of exactly who I was looking for. He bent over his keyboard with fresh vigour, his fingers rippling across the keys. He went back and checked most of the same places where he’d just been looking for any sign of Trey’s mother. We came up with the same result. Nothing.

“He’s probably ‘gator food by now, man,” Xander said with a certain amount of relish. “Plenty of places in Florida to get rid of a body, if you know where to go.” He glanced at me sideways. “That’s if you’re
sure
you really wasted him, huh?”

“I’m sure,” I said. I’d known instinctively as soon as I’d shot the man in the Buick that he was dead. There was something about the way he’d dropped, the sound he’d made. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I’d known, nevertheless. Now it seemed that whoever he’d been working for was big enough, or powerful enough, to dispose of the body without leaving a trace.

Did that just make them organised?

Or did it make them federal?

I looked at the boys, found them watching me expectantly. “Maybe,” I said slowly, “we can’t discount some kind of government involvement after all.”

“All right!” Scott whooped, punching the air and grinning. “I just
knew
this was a big conspiracy.”

Aimee reappeared at the top of the stairs at that point, with Trey trailing behind her. He wasn’t quite dragging the toes of his scuffed trainers along the carpet as he came, but it was a pretty close-run thing.

“Hey, man,” Xander said, clapping him on the shoulder, “looks like this is all part of some major cover-up. You know what that means, huh?”

The four of them looked at each other with the air of cartoon characters who are just about to rip off their shirts to reveal they’re all wearing different coloured superhero costumes underneath.

“We need Henry,” Trey said. He even managed to raise a smile.

“Who the hell is Henry?” I demanded.

For a moment none of them spoke, just stood and grinned inanely at each other. The way kids do when there’s an in-joke on the go and you’re firmly on the outside of it.

Finally, it was Scott who took pity on me. Maybe he was just a better judge than the others of how far I could be pushed without exploding.

“Henry’s this really cool guy who moderates a site about conspiracy theories – y’know, who shot JFK, are the government covering up the existence of aliens, all that kinda stuff.”

“Henry will know what’s going on,” Xander put in firmly, “He’s the man.”

I shrugged. I didn’t like it, but
still
there was no word from Madeleine. What other choices did I have?

***

Scott sent a cryptic e-mail to the mysterious Henry asking only if he could shed any light on events currently in the news. Whatever my personal doubts about contacting a stranger, at least he was paying more attention to his e-mail than Madeleine.

A reply came winging straight back. It was misspelt and curiously constructed, but at least it was prompt.

scott, if told u evrything i know about wots going on behind evry news story, wed be hear forevr,
it said.
specifics?!

“Hang on a moment,” I said as Scott reached for the keyboard again. “What exactly do you know about this guy?”

“Oh he’s, like, ex-CIA,” Scott said airily, trying to be ultra casual. “He worked in Iraq and the Middle East and he was in Kuwait during Desert Storm.”

“So says he,” I muttered under my breath. I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind about this. I didn’t know much about the CIA, but I’m sure they at least require their personnel to be able to pass a basic literacy test.

Scott was waiting, expectant, his hands hovering over the keys. “Well?” he said. “Do I tell him, or what?”

Trey flashed me a defiant glance. “Yeah,” he said. “What have we got to lose?”

So Scott typed in,
Trey and Keith Pelzner.

Almost as soon as he’d sent it, Henry was back again.
both been kidnapped
, he’d put,
keiths work v intresting. i no lot of hi up folk love to see him fail. software co in big truble without him!

“See?” Trey said as soon as he’d read the message. “He’s plugged right in, I’m telling you.”

“Not quite,” I said. To Scott I added, “Try telling him that Trey hasn’t been kidnapped. Tell him that he’s right here.”

I glanced at Trey while Scott tapped in the words. The kid was looking even more morose than usual, head down, hands stuffed into his pockets. Mind you, the way Aimee was clinging on to his arm and murmuring in his ear, maybe he didn’t have a reason to drop the troubled teen act.

It took Henry longer to reply this time and when he did his e-mail seemed to have more attention to it.