Worst Case

  The room they entered had a low ceiling and a long stainless-steel counter that ran the length of one wall. She came to a clanking stop.

  “I didn’t—,” Chelsea said, shaking now. “I d-d-didn’t do anything.”

  “Exactly,” her abductor said from behind her. “Maybe you should have. Have you considered that? Have you considered what you have failed to do?”

  As she watched, the man went over to the sink. He lifted an orange five-gallon Home Depot bucket from underneath it and opened the tap.

  “Now, I want you to take a little test,” he said as he filled the bucket. “The subject is water. Did you know that one-point-one billion people worldwide lack access to fresh drinking water? That’s a lot of folks, wouldn’t you say? Now, my question is this: How much clean water does it take to wash your Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt and Dolce and Gabbana jeans?”

  I am having a nightmare, Chelsea thought, staring at the man as he turned off the tap and stepped back, holding the heavy bucket easily in his left hand.

  I am Alice, and I have dropped down the rabbit hole and eaten the wrong slice of cake.

  Chelsea finally lowered her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said in an almost whisper.

  Without warning, the man grasped the bottom of the bucket and swung it forward. The water that hit her full in the face was frigid. If she thought she was cold before, she was out of her mind. She was Arctic Sea–cold now. Deep space–cold.

  “It takes forty gallons!” the man in the ski mask screamed. “In the villages of rural Cambodia and northern Uganda, two to three hundred people struggle daily to share one hand pump in order to get the water they need to survive. Families die for water. The only time you give it the foggiest thought is when a waiter asks you if you want yours sparkling or not!

  “Now, question number two: How many thousands of children die every day throughout our world from water-related illnesses, like cholera, dysentery, and hepatitis?”

  Chelsea was no longer listening. She was too cold to hear, to think. It was like a glacier was moving through her body now, petrifying her muscles and tendons and bones. It would reach her heart soon, she thought, and the cold would make it seize up like a frozen engine.

  The man went back to the sink with the bucket. He began whistling the theme from final Jeopardy! as he squealed open the tap again.

  Chapter 20

  A MIGRAINE HEADACHE woke Emily Parker at the ungodly hour of six a.m. Now that’s what I call a wake-up call, she thought, wincing as she sat up. She’d been suffering from migraines on and off ever since she was in college. The pulsating, stabbing sensation was always in the same place, above her left eye, as if something were trying to dig its way out of her skull with an ice pick.

  Sometimes it was so bad, it made her vomit. Sometimes, for some inexplicable reason, it made her extremely thirsty. Before he left, her New Age husband, John, had suggested that it was the price for her investigative skill, the price for her ability to make intuitive leaps that saved people’s lives.

  Or maybe it was the stress brought on by my no-good husband, she wished she could tell him now.

  She found her bag and fished out an Imitrex, her headache prescription. Swallowing it dry, she saw a flashing image of Jacob Dunning dead in the South Bronx boiler room.

  What was she still doing here? she thought. Her boss told her to hang tight up in New York, at least until the results from the medical examiner were in, but she wasn’t sure. Thirty-five was definitely too old for this shit in the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. She found herself missing her cozy beige cubicle and cinder-block walls. Or maybe she should get out altogether and try to get a teaching job. Something that coincided with Olivia’s schedule. Give some fresh, young world beater the chance to go after these monsters, deal with these poor families.

  She was shaking another Imitrex into her palm when her cell went off.

  “Hey, it’s Mike,” Bennett said. “Sorry to wake you up.”

  She found herself smiling. His calm voice was like a lifeboat against the nauseating waves of tightness in her skull. She remembered dinner, his crazy kids. At least that had been fun.

  “Tell me something good, Mike,” she said. “The media coverage jogged someone’s memory?”

  “I wish,” he said. “I just got off the phone with my boss. Looks like we got another missing kid. Her name is Chelsea Skinner. She’s seventeen, and her father is the president of the New York Stock Exchange. Friends let her out of a cab on the corner of her street early this morning, but she never made it home.”

  “Already? My God! Even for a serial, that’s unbelievably fast to do it again,” Emily said. “Should we head to the family’s residence?”

  “No,” Bennett said. “Schultz and Ramirez are already on their way. Our presence has actually been requested at the task force meeting they’re putting together down at headquarters. I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty so we can get our game faces on. You like lox on your bagel? I don’t think the Jewish deli I go to has grits, but I can ask. What are grits, anyway?”

  “Tell me, Mike,” Emily said with a smile. “Are all New York cops wiseasses twenty-four/seven?”

  “Just the good-looking ones with double-digit kids,” Bennett said. “See you in a few hours, Agent Parker.”

  Chapter 21

  THE TASK FORCE meeting was at a brand-new section of One Police Plaza’s tenth floor. They must have pulled out all the stops with Homeland Security money, because it looked like a war room out of Hollywood.

  There were brand-new flat-panel monitors everywhere, state-of-the-art telephone and radio com hookups, and huge PowerPoint screens covering one of the large space’s long walls. You could still smell the chemicals in the new carpet. Or maybe that was just the shoe polish that glossed the expensive wingtips of all the high-powered attendants.

  The mayor was back early, I noticed, with our old pal Georgina Hottinger hovering around him like a scavenger fish around a shark. They were busy conferring with police commissioner Daly and his contingent of white-uniform-shirted chiefs. There was even a group of healthy-looking guys with executive hair whom I could only assume were colleagues of Emily’s.

  Emily went over to powwow with the other Fibbies a moment after we entered. I made myself busy by taking out my cell phone and checking for any updates.

  Right before the festivities were about to begin, Emily returned to where I was sitting double-fisted with coffees.

  “I put a rush on the lab down in Washington for the ashes on Jacob’s forehead. The eggheads are waiting with bated breath,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “I heard back about the phone numbers. It looks like our guy hired illegals to buy the phones in cash from the three different stores. Also, Verizon Wireless pinpointed where his calls were made from. The first came back on the West Side Highway and the second one from the FDR Drive. Apparently, he was on the move the whole time he was talking to us.”

  Ten minutes later, Emily and I went to the front of the room and briefed everyone about Jacob Dunning.

  “Sometime in the early-morning hours of Saturday the twenty-first of February, Jacob Dunning was abducted outdoors by an unknown subject. The subject contacted the family on Sunday. A second call was made a few hours later, during which the abductor requested to speak to us.

  “Proceeding by the abductor’s instruction to two-five-oh Briggs Avenue, a high-crime area of the Bronx, we found Jacob in the basement, shot once in the head with a three-eighty-caliber bullet. The body was found in a child’s school desk in front of a blackboard, indicating a high level of scene staging. There was what appeared to be a cross or an X made probably of ashes on the victim’s forehead. No foreign DNA, latent prints, or ballistic casings were found.”

  I nodded to Emily.

  “In terms of motive, there’s no clear indication as of yet,” she said. “No monetary demands were made. We’re not sure if the kidnapper was about to ask for money but then didn’t
because of police interference. A question-and-answer sequence between the abductor and the victim does seem to suggest some vague political motives.

  “Preliminary voice analysis seems to indicate that the subject is male, over the age of thirty-five, and highly educated. The subject also seems to have known many intimate details about the victim and his family, so some connection to the Dunnings by the suspect remains a distinct possibility. That’s all we have.”

  Chief Fleming stood.

  “For those of you who don’t already know, early this morning, a seventeen-year-old Riverdale resident by the name of Chelsea Skinner was reported missing. Her father, Harold Skinner, is the president of the New York Stock Exchange. Though there’s been no contact from anyone yet, we’re treating this as an abduction by the same person until further notice.”

  There was a lot of shocked head shaking as we returned to our seats. And even more grumbling. Right now, we had no good leads, just about the worst-case scenario for the department in a high-profile media case.

  I wasn’t surprised at all when Georgina Hottinger sat herself next to us a few minutes later. Giving her useless two cents seemed to be her favorite hobby.

  “There are to be no information leaks from this task force, and I mean none. Anyone who is thinking of calling their hook at whatever media outlet better think again if they value their jobs. The last thing we need is some media circus.”

  She turned and stared directly at Emily.

  “Am I coming in loud and clear?” she said.

  “Not that clear,” Emily said with her charming southern smile. “But definitely loud.”

  Chapter 22

  OVER THE NEXT hour, a Major Case management setup was hashed out. A command group of all the chiefs would be situated at One PP along with the intelligence coordinators who would be in charge of collecting, processing, analyzing, and disseminating all the different leads and breaks in the case. A rapid-start operations group along with a separate investigative group was put on call to be sent to pertinent crime scenes and victim residences.

  Emily and I, as the lead investigative coordinators, headed directly out to the Skinners’ residence in the River-dale section of the Bronx. We didn’t have to be told twice to get away from all that brass.

  My phone rang as we got on the West Side Highway.

  “Bennett here.”

  “Bennett here, too, Detective,” Seamus said. “I wanted to go over the plans for you-know-who’s you-know-what.”

  He was talking about Mary Catherine. Her birthday was coming up on Wednesday, and we were planning a big surprise bash. I shook my head. I’d better come up with something good. With the funny way she was acting lately, this was pretty much going to have to be the social event of the year or I was doomed.

  “I’m busy right this second,” I said. “I’ll have to call you back.”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re with her right now, are ya?” Seamus said in a conspiratorial tone. “Oh, she’s a cute one, all right. I’d have a crush on her, too, if I was your age. Give me a note, and I’ll pass it to her. You know you want to.”

  I hung up on him.

  “Who was that?” Emily said.

  “Wrong number,” I mumbled.

  Emily shook her head at me with a smile.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you. How do you do it?” she said. “Great cop. Great dad. Head screwed on straight. How does that happen with ten kids? Oh, and a cat. Now that’s just showing off, don’t you think?”

  I laughed as I gunned it north toward the Bronx.

  “You see right through me,” I said. “I rent the cat for atmosphere.”

  Chapter 23

  THE SKINNERS’ HOUSE was on Independence Avenue about a half mile west of the Henry Hudson Parkway near Wave Hill. A stunning view of the Hudson River rolled silently behind the ivy-draped rambling Tudor.

  There was a genteel country air about the landscaped neighborhood. Getting out of the car, I thought about how nice it would be to have a backyard. I imagined the peace and quiet as I sat on warm grass with a cold drink. More like fantasized. Within the confines of New York City, genteel country airs with river views usually go for about eight figures.

  We met Schultz and Ramirez in the horseshoe-shaped gravel drive.

  “Last night around ten, Chelsea snuck out of her house to party downtown with a couple of girlfriends,” Ramirez said, reading his notes. “They said they let her out of a cab here on the corner of West Two Hundred and Fifty-fourth at around two-thirty. They didn’t want to drop her right in front of the house because they didn’t want to wake up her parents. Her mom found Chelsea’s bag with her cell phone in it on the driveway just before six. He must have been waiting for her. Nobody saw any cars or people. Neighbors didn’t hear a thing.”

  “Already checked out the Skinners,” Schultz said. “Parents are clean, but Chelsea got a desk-appearance ticket for drinking on the subway about a year ago. Chelsea, apparently, is a bit of a handful.”

  I counted four luxury cars parked in the Skinners’ driveway as we walked toward the portico. A tall, upset-looking man in a pinstripe suit pulled open the door as we were about to ring the bell.

  “Well, have you heard anything?” he said, staring at my shield. “Have you found Chelsea? I want answers.”

  “Are you Harold Skinner?” I said.

  “No, I’m not. Mr. Skinner is busy dying of grief that his daughter has been taken from him.”

  A plump middle-aged woman appeared behind him.

  “Mark,” she said to the man. “You’re my brother and I love you, but would you, please, just for one second, do me a favor and stop?

  “I’m Rachael Skinner,” she said, shaking my hand. “Please come in.”

  About a dozen of Chelsea’s extended family were sitting in the dead silent living room. They were red-eyed and shattered-looking, like mourners at a wake. Another tight-knit family was in agony this morning.

  “Is Mr. Skinner around?” I said. “We’re going to have to speak to him as well.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Skinner said. “He’s resting right now. Sedated, actually. The family physician left a few minutes before you arrived. Tell me something, if you would, Detective. I heard that the other boy who was taken was found with ashes on his forehead. That’s a Catholic thing, isn’t it, with the ashes? We’re Jewish. What do ashes signify?”

  How did she know about that? I thought. We’d kept that out of the media coverage. Someone in the task force must have spilled it. My money was on Deputy Mayor Hottinger. So much for plugging all the leaks.

  “It’s a sign of willingness for Catholics to repent for their sins,” I said. “In addition to abstaining from indulgences like smoking or drinking and eating meat on Friday, it’s a way to symbolically share Christ’s sacrifice during Lent.”

  “I see. Then this person, the kidnapper, is Catholic?”

  “We don’t know what he is,” I told the poor woman truthfully. “We don’t even know that Chelsea’s been kidnapped. Don’t assume the worst, ma’am. Let’s take things one at a time.”

  Chapter 24

  THERE WAS A family-photo wall in the hallway leading to the kitchen. Chelsea was a beautiful black-haired girl with striking light blue, almost gray, eyes. In the latest picture, she was wearing a hoodie with Lifeguard written across the front.

  “Your daughter’s beautiful,” Emily said as Mrs. Skinner guided us to a large, bright kitchen table.

  “Chelsea had a brain tumor when she was six, a medulloblastoma on her brain stem,” the kind woman said quietly as she poured us coffee. “She completely beat it. The operations. The chemo. She’s a fighter. This is nothing compared to that. She’ll get out of this. I know she will.”

  I wished I could have shared Mrs. Skinner’s startling conviction.

  Some PD TARU guys arrived and got up on the Skinners’ wall phones and cell phones. An FBI tech from the New York office showed up as well and installed some e-mail–tracing software,
in case our guy decided to switch tactics.

  Mrs. Skinner showed us Chelsea’s room on the third floor. It had a huge, sloping beamed ceiling and a little balcony that overlooked the garden and the covered in-ground pool. It was sleek with modern furniture. It looked more like a rich thirty-five-year-old’s room than a teenager’s. Jacob’s room by comparison looked unsophisticated, childish.

  There had to be a link between Chelsea and Jacob. They were both only children, both rich. We’d learned that Chelsea attended Fieldston, a nearby expensive private school that was close to Horace Mann, where Jacob had gone to high school. Had they known each other? Maybe there was a teacher who had worked at both places. Was that the connection?

  One thing I was sure of, this guy was definitely not picking these kids out of a hat.

  After Mrs. Skinner left, Emily pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and got on the kid’s laptop. Chelsea’s home page was her MySpace page.

  Over Emily’s shoulder I read parts of Chelsea’s blog. Some of what she was saying was pretty out there. Sexual boastings. Violent fantasies. I was shocked to see that there were some fairly explicit photos of her.

  “Is this what kids are up to now?” Emily said.

  I shook my head alongside her as a photo of Chelsea with mascara-thick eyelashes leered from the screen. Was this what I would have to look forward to when my daughter Julia turned seventeen in three years?

  “God, I hope not,” I said. “Note to self: Become Mennonite and save money for house in the middle of nowhere. I have ten kids. We could learn to farm, right? Get back to Mother Earth, reduce our carbon footprint, and build character all at the same time.”

  “Don’t forget the cat,” Emily said.

  “Socky. Right,” I said. “He could herd the cows.”