Worst Case

  Former employee? I wrote on the pad. Disgruntled? Personal vendetta?

  There was a pause, and then a strange sound started. At first I thought that I heard laughing, but after a second I realized the kidnapper was sobbing uncontrollably.

  I don’t know what I had been expecting, but it definitely wasn’t tears.

  Unstable, I scribbled on the pad.

  “What is it?” I said after a little while. “What’s making you so upset?”

  “This world,” the kidnapper said in a choked-up whisper. “How messed up it is. The greed and rampant injustice. There is so much we could do, but we just sit by and let it all go down the drain. Dunning could save twenty lives with what he pays for his shoes. Latvium stock rises on the corpses of the world’s poor.”

  “Don’t they also create drugs that save lives?” I said. Rule number one in negotiating is to keep the person talking. “I thought a lot of big drug companies actually give drugs away to Third World countries.”

  “That’s just bullshit for the multimillion-dollar marketing campaign,” the kidnapper said wearily. “The donated drugs are crap. Often expired. Sometimes deadly. In reality, the most common way Latvium interacts with Third World citizens is when it uses them as guinea pigs. The cherry on top is the way it launders its profits through offshore banks, using copyright laws and shell companies to avoid paying American taxes. Look it up, Mike. It’s common knowledge. Congress looks the other way. I wonder why. Can you say lobbyists? Can you say institutional corruption?”

  The kidnapper sighed.

  “Are you that dense? Latvium is a multinational company. The sole purpose of multinational corporations in every industry is the production of fabulous wealth for its upper management. National responsibility and human lives are asides to men like him. Always have been. Always will be.”

  He did have something of a point, I thought. He was actually kind of persuasive. His voice sounded cultured, like an academic’s. Intelligent, I wrote on my pad.

  “But the wind is blowing in a different direction now,” he continued. “The hand of destiny knocks upon the door. That’s why I’m doing this. To wake people up. To make them rethink the way in which they conduct themselves. Because these wings are no longer wings to fly but merely vans to beat the air. The air which is now thoroughly small and dry. Smaller and dryer than the will. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.”

  God, now he was talking gibberish. I underlined Unstable. Beside it, I wrote, Drugs? Schizophrenic? Psychotic? Hearing voices?

  “Now getting back to Jacob,” I said. “Could we speak to him?”

  He let out a deep breath. Then he gave me by far the largest shock of our conversation.

  “I’ll do better than that. You can have him back, Mike,” he said.

  I stood holding the receiver, stunned.

  “You’ll have to come for him, though,” the voice continued. “Give me your cell phone number. Get in a car. I’ll call you in ten minutes.”

  He hung up after I gave him my number.

  “It’s over?” Dunning said happily, with surprise. “He’s going to give him back? I guess he changed his mind, is that it? He must have realized how crazy this was. April! Honey! Jacob’s coming home!”

  I watched Dunning run out of the room. He was grasping at any hope now.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t as optimistic. The individual who’d taken Jacob seemed highly organized. He wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to just give him back.

  What was filling me with even more dread was the way he kept changing the subject when I asked about Jacob.

  I could tell by the skeptical look on Parker’s face that she was thinking exactly the same thing.

  Chapter 10

  AN UNMARKED BLACK Impala was gassed and waiting in the cold rain around the corner on Central Park West. In the front seat, I handed Parker one of the Kevlar vests draped across the dashboard and slipped into the other.

  We would be the lead car, with Schultz and Ramirez loosely tailing us. Aviation had been called, and a Bell 206 was en route from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn for high-altitude covert surveillance.

  “What was that about the wings?” I said to Parker as we sat there waiting for the kidnapper to call back.

  “I think it was a poem. It’s on the tip of my tongue. My college English professor would kill me.”

  “Where’d you go to school?” I said.

  “UVA.”

  “Virginia. So that explains the down-home accent.”

  “Accent?” Emily drawled. “Y’all Yankees are the ones with the accent.”

  An FBI agent with a sense of humor, I thought, listening to the drumroll of rain on the roof. What were the odds?

  I put my phone on speaker and was adjusting the no-hands microphone when it rang. It was yet a different number, I noticed, a Long Island 516 area code, the third number so far. Maybe our kidnapper owned a cell phone store, I thought as I folded it open.

  “Listen to my instructions. Go exactly where I say,” the kidnapper told me. “Take the Central Park traverse to the East Side.”

  I took a breath as we pulled out. It started to rain harder. Against the gray sky, the bare trees atop the park’s stone walls looked black in the rain.

  A few minutes later, I said, “I’m coming up on Fifth Avenue now.”

  “Keep going to Park Avenue and make an uptown left.”

  I sped out of the park down two tony East Side blocks and screeched through the red light.

  “I’m on Park Avenue,” I said.

  “Welcome to the silk-stocking district, Mike,” the kidnapper said. “Holy one-zero-zero-two-one. Did you know you’re now driving through the highest concentration of wealth in the richest country on earth? In the salons above you, more money is paid over to both of our sham political parties than in any other place.”

  We drove on. The only sound in the car was the windshield wipers. I didn’t see any salons. All the buildings outside were just gray smudges.

  The last high-profile kidnapping Major Case had handled involved a garment factory owner who was kidnapped back in ’93. They’d pulled him, filthy and starving but, thankfully, still alive, out of a hole in the ground along the West Side Highway. I wondered what kind of hole Jacob was in now. Most of all, I hoped the eighteen-year-old was still alive when we pulled him out of it.

  “Where are you?” the kidnapper said.

  “I’m at One Hundred and Tenth and Park.”

  “Spanish Harlem,” he said. “See how quickly it all turns to shit? When Park Avenue ends, head over the Madison Avenue Bridge into the Bronx.”

  The tires slipped for a gut-wrenching second as we sped over the wet, rusting bridge. The Harlem River beneath was brownish green and looked almost solid, as if you could walk across it.

  “I’m in the Bronx now,” I announced when I reached the other side of the river.

  “Take the Grand Concourse north.”

  We slid past project after project. We were passing alongside a lot the size of a city block, filled with stacks of old tires, when the kidnapper started in with more commentary.

  “Did you know that the Grand Concourse was supposed to be the Park Avenue of the Bronx?” he said. “Look at it now. At the burned-out, marble-trimmed windows. At the granite facades painted over with graffiti memorials for slain drug dealers. How did we let this happen, Mike? Have you ever asked yourself that? How did we let the world become what it is?”

  Soon the area became wall-to-wall decayed tenements. We were in the Forty-sixth Precinct now, I knew. “The Alamo,” they called it. It was the smallest, but the most drug-infested, precinct in the city.

  As I stared out at the inner-city blight, flashes of Jacob’s room came to mind. The cross-country-running trophies he kept in the back of his closet, the Dave Matthews Band ticket stubs on his dresser, the shiny Les Paul guitar that hung on his wall. Despite his age, he was a kid, really. I gritted my teeth. This was no place for a
ny kid.

  “I’m coming up to One Hundred and Ninety-sixth,” I said.

  “Good work,” the kidnapper said. “You’re almost there, Mike. Go right onto One Hundred Ninety-sixth. You’re really close now. Make a left onto Briggs Avenue.”

  I cupped the phone mic.

  “What are you packing?” I said over to Parker.

  “Glock forty-caliber,” she said.

  “Unsnap your holster,” I said.

  Chapter 11

  A HARD-LOOKING BLACK kid in a new North Face jacket twirled a Gucci umbrella on the corner. Behind him down the block at regular intervals, more menacing figures in dark hoodies stood on the thresholds of the rundown brick buildings. Apparently even the rain couldn’t put a damper on Briggs Avenue’s open-air drug market.

  “Whoop, whoop,” came the warning cry as I turned the car onto the avenue, and my unmarked was immediately made. “Five-oh,” one teen spotter hollered down the block helpfully to his coworkers through cupped hands. “Yo, Five-oh!”

  I scanned the gloomy block uncertainly. The narrow cutout of the avenue extended for at least another two blocks without a cross street.

  Where the hell were Schultz and Ramirez? I thought, glancing into my rearview. I felt like a sheriff who’d made a wrong turn into the wrong mountain pass.

  “Stop at two-five-oh Briggs,” the kidnapper said.

  Emily tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a building up the block. I didn’t have time to look for a parking spot. I spun the wheel and bumped the Impala up onto the sidewalk in front of it.

  With swirling architectural embellishments around its entrance, 250 Briggs Avenue, like a lot of old Bronx buildings, had once been a stately residence. Since then, one of the entrance’s Doric columns had been shattered, and there were smoke stains on the brick above most of the boarded-up windows of the third story.

  I got soaked to the bone while I retrieved flashlights from the trunk of the detective car. So did Emily as we walked across the cracked sidewalk and pulled open the building’s broken front door.

  “I’m here. I’m in the lobby of two-fifty now,” I said into the phone. My words echoed eerily back at me as I played the beam over the dim lobby. The walls were marble, but the low ceiling was bloated, pregnant with water stains and mold. A feeling as desolate as my surroundings enveloped me. I had the sudden desperate feeling that time was running out.

  Where are you, Jacob? I thought.

  “Did you know that people actually live here?” the kidnapper said in my ear. “Rats run through the halls. Some of the tenants on the third floor don’t even have doors after a recent fire. Is it any wonder at all that this area has the highest incidence of childhood asthma in the country?

  “The slumlord who bought it last year, along with eighty percent of this block, has let it get like this because he’s trying to force out the rent-controlled tenants. He bought it at a HUD auction, despite his company’s history of thirteen hundred housing-code violations. This is happening here in the richest country on earth, Mike. This is happening right here, right now in America.”

  “Where is Jacob?” I yelled, ignoring his grating litany. “I’m here. I’ve done exactly what you said. Where do I go?”

  “Out back through the courtyard, go through the laundry room door on your left.”

  We found a door at the end of the lobby and went back out into the rain. A cracked toilet lid floated beside half a dozen faded phone books in the courtyard’s standing water. I scanned the surrounding windows for movement. I wasn’t convinced yet that this wasn’t a trap.

  I handed Emily my flashlight as I drew my gun and pulled open the door in the left-hand wall. I found the lights. No Jacob. Just a rusted-through sink beside an ancient coin-op washing machine.

  “Where is he?” I yelled again.

  “The stairs on your left. Take them down.”

  Beyond the washing machine, iron steps descended through a raw concrete stairwell. The beams from our flashlights flickered wildly as we flew down the steps two at a time.

  Dank heat hit me like a wall through the door at the bottom. In the distance, a boiler screamed as if it were being tortured. The basement walls looked like hewn stone, and I felt like we were entering a cave. Or a dungeon, I thought.

  “This is where I’ll have to end our little conversation for now, Mike. Down the hall to your right. Take Jacob away. He’s all yours,” the kidnapper said and hung up.

  Chapter 12

  I COVERED EMILY as she jogged ahead. Even in the dimness, I could see her eyes widen in shock as she stuck her light and gun through the right-hand doorway.

  I arrived a split second behind her. Emily’s flashlight showed a figure slumped over a child’s desk. Something stung my cheek as I raced toward it. It was a pull chain. I wrapped my hand around it and yanked.

  The hanging bulb clicked on and then swung back and forth, heaving shadows of Jacob’s motionless body up and down the raw cement walls.

  No! Damn it! Not like this! I thought.

  Jacob was in his underwear, and his hands were cuffed behind his back. I checked for a pulse. Nothing. I scanned frantically for a wound.

  “His hair,” Emily said quickly behind me. There was a crusted pool of blood at the top of his head. His hair was matted with it.

  A bullet wound gaped at the crown of his skull. I turned away. Wiping the sweat from my face, I glanced at the blackboard, the desk, the naked cement wall, and then back at the body.

  I ripped my phone from my belt, ready to smash it against the wall. The sick son of a bitch had been leading us along, whispering not-so-sweet nothings in my ear, and the whole time the kid had been dead.

  “He lied to us from the get-go,” I said, desperately trying to throttle the life out of my RAZR phone. “This kid was long dead when he called. God, I want to nail this son of a bitch.”

  “I’ll hold the nails while you swing the hammer,” Emily said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “This is a shock. Maybe we should take a quick breather. Do you want to go up top for some air?”

  You better believe I wanted to take a breather. I wanted to get the hell out of that steaming South Bronx crypt.

  My thumb found my boss’s listing instead.

  “Tell me some good news, Mike,” Chief Fleming said.

  “I wish I could. I’m in the basement of two-five-oh Briggs Avenue. We need the Crime Scene Unit and the medical examiner.”

  “Goddammit,” my boss said. “How?”

  “He blew the kid’s brains out,” I said. “I’d give the notification duty to Georgina Hottinger, if I were you. She likes to play cop with her flashing lights. I wouldn’t want to deprive her of getting all the way in on the act.”

  I met Ramirez and Schultz in the hallway when they finally arrived five minutes later.

  “Canvass everyone you can find in this dump,” I said. “Especially the super. Roust him and the landlord as well. This guy took his time with this kid down here. I want to know why nobody noticed.”

  Chapter 13

  WHEN I RETURNED, Emily had her jacket off and was hovering over the body. She had her blouse sleeves rolled up and was wearing green rubber surgical gloves she’d gotten from somewhere. Her bag probably. I was impressed.

  “The back spatter on the floor here and the lividity in the legs indicate he was killed in the chair,” she said without looking up.

  I probed Jacob’s arm gently with my thumb.

  “Looks like a semi-advanced state of rigor,” I said. “I’d say he was killed sometime early this morning. The handcuff cuts on the wrists and his scraped knees look like he was treated pretty roughly before he was killed. Tying this in with the question-and-answer stuff from the first call, I’d say this looks like a teacher-student domination fantasy or something.”

  “Yeah,” Emily said, waving away a fly. “Welcome to Hell one-oh-one.”

  I peered at Jacob’s face. He had his mother’s dark hair and creamy complexion, his father’s blue eyes.
Those eyes were frozen open forever now, along with his mouth in a rictus of shock and horror. There was a smudge on his forehead that I hadn’t noticed before, a gray mark like a small X.

  “Hey, Mike,” Emily said a second later. She was standing at the other side of the room. “I think you need to see this.”

  I joined her on the other side of the blackboard. On the back, someone had written:

  MEMENTO HOMO, QUIA PULVIS ES, ET IN PULVEREM REVERTERIS.

  “What is that? Latin?” Emily said.

  “It is,” I said, staring at it. “My Catholic high school’s preferred method of torture. Memento means ‘remember,’ I think. Pulvis is ‘dust.’”

  Cold numbed my back like a spinal tap as I suddenly realized its meaning.

  “‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,’” I cried. “It’s what Catholic priests say on Ash Wednesday when you get your ashes. Which must be what’s on the kid’s forehead. He gave Jacob ashes?”

  Emily snapped her rubber-gloved fingers loudly.

  “Wait a second! That’s it. ‘Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.’ The poem is called Ash Wednesday, by T. S. Eliot. What does it mean? How does it tie into the kidnapping?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think the clock just started.”

  I wiped the sweat out of my eyes.

  “Ash Wednesday is only three days away,” I said.

  Chapter 14

  THE SUPER WAS nowhere to be found. The closest occupants to the basement were in a crack house on the second floor, but to no one’s surprise, the strung-out inhabitants hadn’t noticed anything.

  I was happy for the cold rain now as I climbed out of that hot pit. I needed something to wash the smell of death from my clothes, off my skin.

  Despite our attempts to keep things under wraps, I spotted the police reporter from the Post standing behind the police tape among the half dozen Briggs Avenue drug dealers. Once the word was out, reporters and producers would pounce on Briggs Avenue like sharks on chum. A billionaire’s kid getting kidnapped and ritually murdered wasn’t just news, it was the next news cycle.