A Welcome Grave (32 page)

I
lowered the phone and flipped it shut, my fingers moving from instinct, disconnected from my brain. For a moment I stood still; then I crossed the room to the window, spread the blinds with my hand, and looked out to see the unmarked car still parked on the street.

She’d wanted me to come to her apartment, and I’d declined because the police would have followed. Because the police would have been present and watching all through the night.

“She’s not part of this,” I said, and the apartment didn’t answer. She was part of it now, though. Thanks to me.

There were decisions to be made, but I couldn’t focus on them. The options slid in and out of my brain mixed with snapshots of her, the way she’d looked in that oversized T-shirt and her glasses, how she’d promised to break me out of jail with a grappling hook because it had more style.

It was seven twenty in the morning. Outside, traffic was picking up on Lorain, the day getting started, people who would deal with nothing more critical than a tax form or an oil change today already in motion as I stood frozen in my apartment, listening to them pass by.

“Move, Lincoln.” I said it aloud again, and the words rang loud and foreign through the empty room. “Move.”

I pulled on clothes and tied my shoes, fastened the holster against my spine
and dropped the gun inside. Nothing I touched felt real. Seven thirty now. Fifteen minutes since the call, and I was still at home, nothing accomplished. The desire for speed, for swift action, was building, and I had to make a conscious effort to push it back down. Speed without purpose was useless and would cause mistakes that I couldn’t afford. Even leaving the apartment required pause for thought. If the police saw me leave, they would follow. I couldn’t have that now. I went down the steps and out the back door and found no one waiting. That wasn’t a surprise; to park with a clear view of my small parking lot would have been far too obvious. I crossed the lot and put my hands on the top of the board fence that ran behind my building, got my foot on one of the two-by-four braces, and hopped over, landing in the alley. Across that and over another fence and into a backyard, then out on Chatfield and moving for Joe’s house at a jog.

He was awake, sitting at the kitchen table with coffee, newspaper spread in front of him, a normal morning until I arrived. He’d left the front door open when he went out for the paper, and when I stepped through it he looked up and half-rose from the table.

“Lincoln?”

“They have Amy.”

“What?”

“They have Amy. Doran and his partner. I just got the phone call.”

He started to shake his head, as if he could refuse my news.

“Karen’s supposed to move the money tonight. I’m supposed to convince her to do that.”

“You can’t talk to her.”

“Yeah. I tried to say that. Didn’t help.”

I told him the rest of it, recounting the phone call as completely as I could, and when I was done he shook his head again.

“Lincoln, we’ve got to get help. Call Targent. This is a kidnapping.”

“They’ll kill her, Joe.”

“They may kill her anyhow.”

I looked at him, and he held up a hand and said, “Sorry.”

“No. You’re right.” The numbness that had been lodged inside me melted and turned to fear. “They could kill her anyhow. Even if Karen pays him, they might. The decision we have to make is which option will protect Amy. I don’t think going to Targent is that option, Joe.”

“So what is?”

“We have to at least preserve the idea that Karen will pay. The image that things are proceeding the way they want.”

“This is someone else’s life, Lincoln. This is
Amy
. You want responsibility for the way this works out? You want to go into this alone?”

I could feel the Glock against my back, a hard lump in its holster. The press of it teased and tormented me. I wanted to feel the weight of the gun in my hand, pull the trigger, and watch bullets explode out of the barrel and bury themselves in . . . who?

“It wasn’t Doran,” I said.

“On the phone?”

“Yeah. It was his partner, but not Doran.”

“We don’t even know who he is,” Joe said. “We don’t know who he is or where he is, and we don’t have the time to look. We can get the FBI hostage people involved, have them ready when Karen’s contacted, try to negotiate.”

“Cops screw this up, and Amy . . .” I didn’t say
and Amy dies
. I wasn’t ready to put it that coldly and bluntly, not about her. It was that cold, though. That cold and that real.

“
We
screw this up, and it works out different?”

“I need to talk to Karen,” I said. “That’s where we start. They’re going to contact her, and she needs to know what’s changed before that happens. Needs to know that there’s another life at stake.”

“Will you ask her to pay?”

I didn’t answer.

“Lincoln?”

“I don’t know. It’s easier to get money back than a human life, and Karen will understand that.”

“They own you,” he said. “You understand that? They’ve spent days laying the framework to show you’re the one going after Karen, and now they’ve convinced you to actually do that. If you pressure her into paying, do you think that’ll be the end? That Amy walks out unharmed and you sit down and explain the thing to Targent and it’s all over? That won’t happen. They’ll have another play, one that finishes you off.”

“We need to give them the image that things are moving the way they want. That buys us time.”

“Time to do
what
? We don’t have the first idea how to find these guys.”

“I want to talk to her, Joe. They’re going to contact her, and when they do, she needs to understand the situation.”

“We go over there and find out they’ve got a cop watching her place, you’re done. They’ll arrest you for violating that protective order, and you’ll have to try to explain this from jail.”

“I’m going to try,” I said. “Now do you want to drive me, or should I find a car?”

Joe’s face was anguished. He wanted to go through the proper channels, wanted desperately to get the cops and the FBI involved, approach this the way he would tell anyone else to if it weren’t Amy, if it weren’t someone he knew and cared about deeply. Wanting that didn’t mean he could ignore my point, though. He knew the risks on both sides.

“I’ll take you over there, but you’ve got to promise me you aren’t ruling out help, not yet. This is a hostage situation, Lincoln. Okay? We’re not ready to deal with this, not alone. If you’re hoping Karen will pay and we’ll just play it straight up, that’s one thing. But if she won’t, I’m not going to go along with you. We’ll need help, need the best team the police can get out there.”

“Let’s make that decision after we talk to Karen.”

He didn’t like that, but he was kept from responding when my phone began to ring again. In the second before I got it out of my pocket I think we were both sure it would be Doran or his partner. This time the number wasn’t blocked, though.

“Targent,” I said.

“You could answer. Tell him what’s happening.”

“Not yet.”

“He might know something. Why call so early unless—”

“Not yet, Joe. I want to see Karen.”

The long driveway was a problem. We drove the street twice, down and back, and saw no sign of a surveillance team. The driveway was hidden, though, blocked by the trees. If a cop was in the house, we wouldn’t see his car until we were all the way up the drive.

“I don’t think they’d leave someone with her around the clock,” I said. “Twenty-four-hour protection isn’t something CPD does often, and now that she’s agreed to cut me off, they’ll have less reason to watch.”

“Hope you’re right.” He was approaching the driveway again, at slow speed.

“Make the turn,” I said.

He took the driveway, and we rounded the bend and passed through the trees, and the house came into view. No car, no evidence of police. They could
have left one guy inside and driven away, but I trusted my instinct. Without a hostage involved—and nobody else knew there was one—Karen’s situation wouldn’t have been elevated to that sort of police coverage. Not yet.

Joe parked, and I got out of the car fast and went up the steps. The protective order was Targent’s idea, but that didn’t mean Karen wouldn’t take it seriously and call the police when she saw me. I was already knocking on the door when Joe got out of the car. The ornate windowpane beside the door gave a distorted view into the house, but through it I saw Karen approaching. She had the cordless phone in her hand.

“Shit,” I said softly, and then louder, “Karen, it’s Lincoln. You’ve got to talk to me for a few minutes.”

She stopped short a few feet from the door, but she didn’t lift the phone.

“No, Lincoln. You can’t be here. I’m supposed to call the police if I even hear from you. Please leave.”

“They’ve kidnapped another woman,” I said. “It’s bigger than either of us now, Karen. You’ve
got
to let us in and talk about this.”

While I watched, she took another step back from the door, deeper into the hallway.

“I can’t do that. You need to talk to the police, not me.”

“Karen!”

“Leave now, Lincoln. I’m calling.”

She lifted the phone and turned it so she could see the numbers to dial, and when she did I acted without pause for thought. I stepped back and lifted my foot and drove my heel into the center of the door with everything I had, splintered the wood in the frame and busted the spring lock but didn’t get past the dead bolt. She screamed when I did it, and then I kicked again, and this time the dead bolt failed, tore out of its hasp, and I was across the threshold and into the house as the alarm began to shriek and Karen turned to run.

I caught her at the end of the hallway, grabbed the phone and took it out of her hand, and wrapped one arm around her waist and held her against me so she couldn’t run. Joe stepped through the door then, and when I turned back and got a half-second glance at his face I felt like I was no longer myself. His expression was a mirror image of what he saw before him: I’d just kicked in a door to run down a woman who had a protective order against me, to stop her from calling the police. It was something he’d seen in nightmare situations of domestic violence, and now it was his partner.

“They kidnapped Amy Ambrose,” I said, holding Karen tight against me as she tried to twist her way free. She was facing me, and the suspicion in her face
that I’d seen when we were with Targent had been vanquished, replaced by terror. She was petrified of me. The look hit me harder than any of her physical struggles, and I loosened my grip and she stepped free and ran into the living room. I watched her go, then looked back at Joe standing in front of the shattered door, and I wondered what had happened to my life.

“Turn that off,” I said. The alarm was still wailing, and soon it would summon police. Karen was standing in the middle of the living room, watching warily, waiting for me to move. “Turn it off and listen, Karen. Then call the police if you want to. But give me five minutes. The same people who killed your husband have an innocent woman now. You have to listen to me.”

“Please,” Joe said behind me, and her eyes went to him and found reassurance. She hesitated only a moment and then moved back down the hall—making a wide circle past me—and found the alarm box, punched buttons until it went quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Karen, I’m sorry. But they’ve taken a woman who has nothing to do with this, taken her because she matters to me. This is how they intend to get their money.”

“It’s what they told me would happen. That you’d be the one to ask for the money.”

“Karen, you can’t believe I’m part of this.”

She didn’t say anything, just made another nervous step to the side, moving away from Joe, back toward the stairs.

“We were together for years, Karen. Remember that. Remember me. Then think about what they did to your husband. They
tortured
him, put tape on his mouth and—”

“I know what they did!”

“And you know
me!
” I shouted back at her, and for a few seconds it was silent, the three of us standing like separate points in a triangle, everyone afraid to close the gap.

“Do you believe I could have been involved?” I said. “Honestly, Karen, can you believe that?”

She was starting to cry, but she shook her head. “No.”

“Then you’ve got to listen to what I’m saying. They will ask you for money today, and they’ll tell you things about me, involve me somehow. I need to be able to talk to you. To communicate while we try to get Amy back. I’m going to need your help.”

“The police—”

“If I go to them, it’s a big risk for Amy.”

“That’s not what I meant. The police won’t let me talk with you. They listen to the calls—”

“We’ll leave you my cell phone, or Joe’s, something I can use to talk to you.”

“They’ll be here, Lincoln. The police will be in the house all day. They’re on their way now.”

“What?”

Her chest was still rising and falling fast with fear, fear that I’d put there. She glanced at Joe and then back to me.

“You’re going to be arrested. Detective Targent just called and told me. They’re sending someone here to protect me until they get you.”

“
Arrest
me?”

She nodded, but she also stepped back into the living room, closer to me.

“He told me a man named Donny Ward was murdered. The one you said told you those things about Andy Doran. They found his body last night. There was more money hidden in his house. It had your fingerprints on it.” She paused, eyes locked on my own, and said, “And my husband’s. It had both of your fingerprints on it.”

I looked at Joe. Didn’t say a word. What I’d predicted in our office had just come true. It was Jefferson’s money, and my fingerprints were on it, and now they could arrest me.

“Donny Ward,” he said. “Shit, Lincoln. We were at his house. He might have been inside then, dead. The neighbor saw us.”

I turned back to Karen. I held her eyes and tried to see her as I’d known her once long before, tried to show her myself as she’d known me. I don’t know if you can do that through a desperate look fogged with fear, but I tried.