Kidnapped

Frank Hardin studied his injured hand as the blood washed away. He had scraped the back of his right knuckles on the framing in the hidden room, and the soap stung as he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. It would pass for the aftereffects of a bare knuckles fight. He nudged the water off with his elbow and picked up a towel.

  The automatic garage door opened. Frank glanced through the dining room windows to see a white van pull into the driveway. It disappeared into the spacious garage.

  “I told you he would be back right on time.” Ronald rose from the table at the bay window.

  “Billy’s a liability. He talks too much.”

  “He’s young, eager.”

  Frank glared at his friend. “He’ll have to be dealt with.” He wasn’t going back to jail because some guy hired to drive liked to talk too much.

  Ronald hesitated, but reluctantly nodded.

  Frank tapped out his cigarette. He scanned the list on the counter. Months of planning had come down to today. Someone else might be paying his fee, but this job was personal. He wanted more than just to hurt Luke Falcon; he wanted the man afraid.

  If he couldn’t shake the man hunting him, he could make Falcon permanently regret it. “Let’s get this underway.”

  Ronald picked up the box with a roll of duct tape and three ski masks. Frank followed him to the garage.

  Chapter Three

  Sharon had married into money. Caroline knew it but rarely experienced it to the degree she was today. She slipped a grilled cheese sandwich onto her plate and shut off the burner. Cooking in this kitchen with its black marble countertops and shining appliances made her nervous.

  Mark Falcon’s condominium in Atlanta, which took the entire eighth floor of a brownstone building, was much like an upscale hotel. Carpets were plush, furniture new, and the kitchen well stocked. He had lived here before marrying Sharon and still had a housekeeper come in three times a week to keep it ready on a moment’s notice for guests. Caroline wished there was something out of place so her arrival would feel less disruptive.

  The phone rang and Caroline turned in a full circle to isolate the sound. She found the cordless phone in the side cabinet beside the refrigerator. “Falcon residence.”

  “Good, you’re there. Did you by any chance see my baseball glove at your place?” Benjamin sounded a little panicked.

  Caroline poured her soda over ice. “Remember the church baseball game Sunday afternoon? You put your glove in the trunk of your mom’s car beside your shoebox of spare baseball cards.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Thanks.”

  “Where are you, Benjamin?”

  “We’re finally leaving the clinic. Mom says we have to stop by the house to—” A clatter cut off his sentence.

  “Benjamin?”

  Caroline heard a jumble of sounds and static before it finally cleared. “Sorry. Some van cut Mom off. I dropped the phone.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “She owes the glass jar two quarters for swearing.”

  Benjamin sounded impressed. Caroline smiled. “Tell your mom to drive safe.”

  “Mom, she says to drive more carefully.”

  Caroline took her plate into the dining room where the table was set for six. She moved aside good china to set her plate down.

  “We’re going to stop by the house so Mom can finish packing, then we’ll be on the way. An hour and a half and we’ll be there.”

  “More like two hours,” Caroline replied, thinking about the traffic already building, “but soon. I’ll start dinner and have it waiting for you.”

  “What are you going to fix?”

  “Your favorite, Italian beef.”

  “Awesome! I’m already starved. See you soon.”

  “Love ya, Benjamin.”

  Caroline glanced at the time as she set down the cordless phone. 3:50. Sharon and Benjamin should easily be here before six. Mark was out at a construction site for a new home he had designed and promised to be here by seven.

  Caroline bowed her head before beginning her meal. Jesus, You understand what I’m feeling in this place, not quite belonging, just a little out of my element. Thank You for sending Sharon a wonderful husband and Benjamin a great father. Please handle the details of this weekend so I can look back on this time and be glad I came. She lifted her head.

  Caroline picked up her sandwich. She’d enjoy the weekend for all the uncertainty. She would smile at Luke and wait for him to start the conversation. It worked every time.

  After eating, Caroline settled in the living room and turned her attention to her schoolwork. Teaching at a Christian school allowed her to have a Bible class, and it was one of her favorite subjects.

  She started the school year by giving her students a week to answer an essay question, one that tried to make the Bible personal to each student. Last year the essay question had been God loves you unconditionally. How does that impact your life?

  Caroline drew circles on the page as she thought about this year’s essay question:

  Jesus taught that a firm foundation based on living what He taught would allow a person to survive great trouble in life. What did you learn from the Sermon on the Mount that will change how you live?

  Before the weekend was over, she would take up pen and paper and write her own answer to the essay question, for tradition dictated she share her own perspective with the class.

  She picked up her Bible from the floor, the cover worn and the pages stuffed with notes she used in her class. She found the summary passage for the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:24–29 and read it again.

  “Every one then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”

  She had chosen the essay question partly because of the events she had lived through last fall—the phone calls, notes, and flowers from an unknown sender. They had arrived as a sudden storm of trouble and had rocked her life hard. She’d come through the experience with a damaged sense of her own security. God was still her rock; unfortunately she’d just made the mistake of putting some of her trust in things that had shown themselves to be sand. Hopefully she’d learned that lesson.

  The timer in the kitchen sounded, interrupting her work. Caroline set aside her notebook and headed to the kitchen, pausing only long enough to turn on the TV and increase the volume so she could catch the start of the local evening news.

  As she stirred the Italian beef, the news headlined a murder investigation. That poor lady. The motel and interchange mentioned—she’d passed it on her drive into town. She leaned around to see the TV. She studied the photo of the murder suspect.

  She added more water to the Crock-Pot and, since dinner was close to done, turned the temperature to low. She looked at the clock: 6:05. Getting packed and on the road must have presented a few unexpected challenges for Sharon.

  The salad was ready. The buns were set out to steam. Caroline looked through options for dessert and got out the tapioca. Mark loved it more than a homemade pie. It was a small thing, but it would be appreciated, and she wanted to say thanks for his invitation to join them.

  She fixed tapioca, listening to the rest of the news. Traffic sounded heavy but there were no unexpected delays on the highways, no reported car accidents.

  At 6:40, the tapioca set aside to cool, Caroline picked up the phone and walked back into the living room. She tried Sharon’s car phone and gave up after it rang ten times. She hated to page her, for if Sharon wasn’t in her car, she probably had been called back to an emergency at the hospital. She wouldn’t be late over something trivial. Caroline compromised and called Sharon’s private
number at the clinic, reaching Sharon’s head nurse. “Amy, do you know if Sharon got called back to the hospital or the clinic to see a patient?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Hold on a sec.” Amy went away and came back a minute later. “Kim hasn’t paged her, and for what it’s worth, her car isn’t in her reserved parking space.”

  “Thanks, Amy.” Caroline set the phone on the side table. Car trouble? Forty minutes late was not unusual, but the silence was. If they had returned to the house or the hospital, Benjamin would have called. Where are they?

  Caroline got out the English tests she needed to grade and tried to focus on them while she listened for the door to open or the phone to ring.

  Come on, Sharon, call.

  * * *

  Luke pushed back his headphones, tired of listening to a lot of gossip, recipes, and soap opera discussions. “This is a dead end.” They already had wiretaps on Frank’s family and some of his friends. If Frank Hardin’s aunt had seen him, had heard anything about him returning to town, she wasn’t telling even her best friend. “If Frank had any plans to get in touch with family or friends for cash or help, he would have done it by now.”

  Jackie hung up her phone and marked another hotel on the blown-up map with a red dot. “I don’t think he moved hotels. Most are already booked for the holiday weekend. It’s not easy to walk in and get a room.”

  “He has to sleep somewhere.” Luke shifted his left foot to rest atop a packed box. The Bureau was relocating their offices to larger quarters over Labor Day weekend; the move couldn’t be happening at a more inconvenient time. “What did Frank come back to Georgia to do?”

  “He could have already done it. Since ten last night he’s been missing, and a dead girlfriend suggests he wasn’t planning to stay around much longer.”

  “Good point.” Luke paged down the database of calls being logged at the call center, looking for leads. “We know he likes murder.”

  “Armed robbery, maybe a bank heist, a jewelry store—I can see him going for a lot of cash.”

  “I wonder who he’s traveling with. That would help answer the question. What time was Marsh going on TV?”

  Jackie looked at the clock. “He’ll be live on the local newscasts at ten. If someone has seen Hardin, they’ll be reminded it’s a very profitable phone call.”

  “Someone has seen him. The question is, will they take the risk of reporting him?”

  Jackie shrugged.

  The last one to call in a tip on Frank was now dead. It wasn’t encouraging. Luke sighed and kept scrolling through the call-in reports.

  Chapter Four

  Caroline listened to the clock tick through seven thirty and got up from the couch. Three and a half hours to pack and make an hour-and-twenty-minute drive—Sharon was moving beyond late to troublingly late. Caroline punched in Sharon’s car phone number again, listening to it ring as she walked through the condominium. Surely if the phone were dead it would be a fast busy signal instead of this constant ringing.

  Caroline pulled out the chair and sat at Mark’s desk. She looked at names on the pad of paper. She’d started writing the list an hour ago as a way to control her worry. She couldn’t wait and wonder any longer; she had to know.

  She dialed Mark’s car phone again, and finally hung up after twenty rings. He wasn’t near his car phone, and his cell phone was either out of range or the battery was dead. Mark would walk through that door any minute and he’d know what was best to do. He probably assumed Sharon and Benjamin were already here. He had no reason to suspect otherwise and was himself only half an hour late from his tentative arrival time.

  Caroline knew she tended to see a problem where there was none; ample personal history testified to that. But this late—it was trouble. She took a deep breath and dialed the Benton sheriff’s office, hoping Linda was working tonight. She had taught the lady’s two girls last year.

  She asked for the dispatcher and was forwarded. “Linda, I’m so glad you’re working tonight. Sharon and Benjamin are late, and I’m a bit worried about them. They were driving into Atlanta tonight. Have there been any reported car accidents on I-20?”

  “Nothing but an overheated engine, and it was a tourist from Kansas. Sharon hasn’t called?”

  “No. And the hospital hasn’t received an answer to their page to her either.”

  “That is odd. I know Lewis is on patrol along I-20 between Benton and Sandy Hill. Sharon is driving her car?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll punch up the DMV records for the license plate info and have Lewis keep a lookout for her car.”

  “Thanks, Linda. I’m at Mark’s condo if you hear anything. I really appreciate it.”

  Caroline hung up and looked again at her list. No matter what scenario she scripted, it didn’t end in silence. There had to be a way to somehow get in touch with Mark. His Benton office automatically transferred to an answering machine with a message about being closed for Labor Day.

  Feeling like she was prying into private matters, she opened drawers in Mark’s desk until she found a personal address book. She started turning pages, looking for the home phone number of one of his partners.

  “Mr. Jenson, it’s Caroline Lane. I’m looking for Mark Falcon. Do you know what house he was looking at tonight, or how I might be able to reach him?”

  “He’s not in Atlanta?”

  “No, and I can’t raise him on the phone. It’s pretty urgent.”

  “He left the house about five thirty after we figured out a problem with the skylight. He mentioned he wanted to stop by the bank before closing and then needed to buy gas, but that should have taken only twenty minutes or so. He was in a hurry to get to Atlanta.”

  “Do I have his phone numbers right?” She read them off her list.

  “Yes. Let me try them from here. If I can’t raise him, I’ll make the drive back to the house and see if he had car trouble or something.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, but I really appreciate it.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  Caroline looked at her list again. She was running out of options. Sharon and Benjamin were somewhere unreachable. Mark couldn’t be found.

  She taught fifth graders. She knew that Murphy’s Law often happened. Their phone had been accidentally left on and the batteries were dead . . . They had remembered something left behind and went back to the house . . . There had been car trouble . . .

  Mark could have easily been delayed by a conversation at the bank over a construction project. Or maybe Sharon and Mark had talked and changed their plans, intending to come into Atlanta together. Every scenario Caroline drew had someone calling to say they would be here late. She could start calling hospitals.

  Jesus, what do I do? Where are they?

  Caroline looked around Mark’s expensive home. She was so far out of her league in this place, for this problem. It was family. She couldn’t let it sit. I’m scared now.

  * * *

  “This is going to be another dead end.” Luke shifted his hand on the steering wheel to hit the turn signal, taking the exit to get them off the highway and out of the bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic. The gas station off of I-20 had cars at every pump and two cars waiting in line.

  “One of the leads will pan out eventually.” Jackie shuffled her paperwork and called to confirm their arrival with the coordinator assigning the leads.

  “Marsh beat us here.” The state cop car was parked to the east of the gas station office, taking the space between the advertisement for tire rotations and the flashing sign for cold sodas. Luke parked beside him and waited until Jackie got out of the car, then locked the doors. He walked past a long display of windshield washer fluid on sale this Labor Day weekend, breathing in gas fumes and stale coffee.

  Jackie held the door for him. “Come on.”

  “I’m relishing the fact this is about the thousandth gas station we’ve invaded in our lives and they all look re
markably the same, down to the gum you managed to step on and are now leaving in strings behind you as you walk.”

  Jackie looked down and studied the bottom of her right shoe. “Great. Why can’t people just take two more steps and toss the stuff in a trash can to begin with?” She scraped what she could off on the concrete step.

  Luke took hold of the door from her. “Ice. You can buy a fountain drink, pour it out because it’s going to taste horrible anyway, and use the ice to freeze that gum fragment off your shoe.”

  “Don’t smile like that, Falcon. I could have gone off duty a while ago and saved my favorite pair of shoes, you know.”

  “You could have,” Luke agreed easily, knowing it was an idle threat. Getting Jackie off this search for some reason other than her kids’ soccer game or the fact her family was out of clean laundry wouldn’t happen. Jackie was married and loved it, but perish the criminal who thought that would give him a little breathing room.

  “I’m thinking you should just keep more shoes at the office now that you’ll have a huge new office to clutter with stuff and won’t have to put your extra pair in my unused bottom desk drawer.”

  “You never actually put something in your desk; you just stack it on top. How you keep your house spotless and yet keep a desk like you do . . .” Jackie headed inside to find Taylor Marsh and the manager who had phoned in the tip.

  Luke picked up a Tootsie Roll as he passed the candy display, offering the clerk a buck and tearing the paper as he waited for his change. Taylor was deep in debate with someone who looked like the store manager, a video punched up on the security monitor. There wasn’t enough room behind that counter for the manager and three cops unless they turned the clerk into a Popsicle. He’d let Taylor and Jackie sort out the first impressions.

  “How’s business been tonight?” Luke asked the clerk.

  “Stick around a few more hours, and maybe I won’t get some flipped-out idiot trying to rip me off tonight.”

  “That good, huh? You’ve worked this corner awhile.”