Innocent Hostage (10 page)
His chest heaving, Breck came to a halt. Two people: one man, one woman. Numberplate AC2431. The woman had hunkered low in the seat. She hadn’t looked much like Tania. For starters, her hair was different. Of course, Tania often changed her hair color and style. The Tania he knew wouldn’t hide from view. She liked to be seen. Except it seemed he
hadn’t
known Tania at all, and a getaway driver sure would not want to be seen.
The guy was in his forties, balding and a little on the tubby side. He’d worn a grey sweater and grey trousers beneath the flasher’s raincoat.
Breck snorted with amusement. Somehow he couldn’t see Tania associating with an older man who wore a plastic raincoat. It reminded him of the coat that serial murderers wore to avoid splashes of blood.
He grabbed a large evidence bag out of his SUV and dropped the coat into it, then made a note of the vehicle’s numberplate. The trouble was—what could he do with this information? He had no more right to be in the house than the two intruders. How could he get the information to Moffat without incriminating himself?
He went back inside the house. What had those two been up to?
After half an hour he was forced to concede defeat. Nothing whatsoever in this house could lead him to Tania and her children. All useful papers such as birth certificates and passports had been removed.
Whatever the intruders were after, they’d made a mess. Downstairs, electrical power bills were mixed up with grocery receipts. Job search downloads on computer paper rubbed noses with recipes cut from newspapers. Upstairs, baby clothes slithered off pyramids of shoes. In the main bedroom, the double wardrobe doors had been wrenched off their tracks.
And nowhere was there a single thing pertaining to Kit. It was as if Kit had never existed as far as the Kerrs were concerned.
He swallowed. It had been three days since he’d managed to wreck their burgeoning friendship. This morning Jace and Abel were winging their way to Russia to finalize their adoption, which left him not only feeling like shit for unloading on to Ingrid the other night, it also left him in a quandary. Today he’d have to negotiate with her to see if Kit could attend preschool for longer hours. To make matters worse, Harley Max had hinted that he’d cut Breck a lot of slack recently, then he’d come right out and asked, “I need someone on standby for the graveyard shift. Can you do it?”
Breck’s heart had shifted sideways. Here it was. He was staring down the barrel of a frightening decision.
“I can’t leave my boy alone at night, sir,” was all he’d managed to choke out.
Harley Max digested Breck’s answer. “I hadn’t realized you had nobody to help out,” Max had said at last. “You don’t have a sister or anything? Parents?”
“No-one,” Breck had muttered, trying not sound like Orphan Annie.
“Well then, forget I asked,” Max replied, and that was the end of the conversation.
But Breck knew it was the end of any advancement for him. He expected soon to be back in an inquiry car, cooling his heels, as his mates leapt up the career tree in front of him.
“Good morning, guys!” Ingrid sang, tickling Kit’s neck.
Well,
someone
was in a good mood today. He’d better strike while the iron was hot. “Ingrid, I have a favor to ask of you.”
She raised her eyebrows and waited, her head cocked to one side.
“May I extend Kit’s preschool hours by one hour a day? I need to drop him off a little earlier and collect him about half an hour later each day.” He was pushing the envelope. On days when Jace wasn’t available he often screamed in the gate as Ingrid was packing up the last of the school equipment. Sometimes Kit was the only child still there.
Instead of answering him straight off, she leaned forward eagerly. He stepped back, smelling soap and flowers and Ingrid. Closing his eyes for a second, he inhaled.
“Oh wow, Breck! That must mean that Jace and Abe have gone to see their child? When did they leave? When are they coming back?”
She fired questions at him like pellets from a shotgun cartridge. Well, at least she was still talking to him. “Yes. This morning. In four weeks.”
She grinned. “How very concise. Now, I don’t know much more than I did before. Are they excited? Is it a daughter or a son?”
And in a flash he recognized something special about Ingrid that he hadn’t understood before. She hadn’t said “girl” or “boy” as most people did. She realized that Jace and Abe were committed to forming a family, that they wanted children of their own. Ingrid didn’t make it sound as if Jace and Abe were buying a child, like some of the squad members thought. She knew what was important.
“We’re going to text each other, so I’ll let you know what happens.”
She gave a little wriggle, reminiscent of a puppy. “I’m so excited for them, and I don’t even know Abe. I bet he’s a nice guy.”
Breck nodded. “The best. Ingrid, about…”
“Yes, of course it’s okay. I’m dying to know about the”—she lowered her voice—“housebreaking.”
She certainly didn’t carry grudges. She had every right to choke him off, considering how they’d parted. He was thankful that her curiosity had won the day.
He glanced around. Kit was long gone and nobody was in the immediate vicinity. He waved good morning to one of the assistant teachers, and then turned back to Ingrid. “Had a bit of a turn-up with some guy. He got away, and there was a woman driving—”
She clutched his arm, her eyes wide with shock. “Someone was there? You
fought
with him?”
“Yeah. It was the guy who whacked me with his knuckle duster. Or his twin. Same height, balding. Used the same pick-up truck. A woman was driving it.”
She licked her lips. “Was it Tania?”
Breck shook his head. “Not sure. Didn’t behave like her and the hair was different but with Tania, who knows?”
Her hand was still on his arm. He felt the warmth through his shirt.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Gave as good as I got. But Ingrid, there are no useful papers in the house. No birth certificates, no passports, nothing. Maybe the MPU squad took them, but I can’t understand why they’d take some of the more irrelevant stuff.” He wrinkled his nose. “The house reeked of Tania’s perfume. Not sure if that was a red herring or not.”
She smiled and took her hand off his arm. He felt the chill. “What a convoluted mind you have, Mr. Marchant.”
He grinned. “I got the vehicle registration number anyway.” He glanced at his watch. “Shit! Gotta go. I daren’t be late. I’m in enough hot water as it is.” He left her standing there and bolted for his SUV.
****
Ten hours later, Ingrid watched him as he climbed down from the SUV, the only vehicle left in the carpark besides her own. His shoulders sagged and he scuffed towards her, head down. Dog-tired. Must have been a bad one today.
“You had a call-out?” she asked.
He nodded. “Just got through the debrief. Sorry.”
She wanted to help him, but she didn’t know how. Hell, if her heart sank when he’d had a bad day, what did that mean? Was she seguing from Level One attraction to Level Two? She’d been on Level Two before. She knew all about Level Two. It was called unwilling attraction. He’s a
friend
, Ingrid. A
friend
. She inhaled. “What happened?”
“After he’d knifed his wife and baby, he hanged himself. We—”
“Daddy!” Kit trotted towards them, dragging his backpack.
Breck straightened up. “Hi, son! Say thank-you to Ingr—Ms. Rowland.”
“Why don’t you guys stop at my place for dinner on your way home?” Ingrid asked. She blinked. What on earth had made her say that? It was just that he looked so weary and disillusioned. Kit would probably talk him to death and she could be a buffer between them, help to finish Breck’s day on a higher note anyway. Yeah, Level Two was right. Probably already on Level Three. She was in deep trouble.
“It was going to be Macca’s tonight,” he admitted. “I don’t have the energy to argue with tomatoes and cold chicken.”
Kit giggled, swinging his father’s arm. “You don’t argue with chicken and tomatoes, Daddy.”
Breck tried to grin. “I argue with everything in the kitchen, son.”
Ingrid stuffed the next day’s worksheets into her carry bag and turned to extinguish nearly all the lights, leaving only two fluorescent lights on. The bright security lights came on automatically at dusk.
“Come on, guys. You can have Macca’s tomorrow. Tonight you eat healthy.”
She ushered them out the door and set the alarms.
“I hear you had trouble with those at first,” Breck said, nodding towards the alarm panel.
She groaned. “Don’t remind me. For the first six months after they were installed they reacted to extremes of heat and cold, neighborhood cats sauntering by, gusts of wind—you name it. Had to have them adjusted three times. The neighbors do not love me.”
“You need security at your apartment.”
Couldn’t help being a cop, could he? Marla reckoned Ingrid’s father had been like that. Always on duty, even at home. Ingrid wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing.
An hour later she decided it was a good thing. While she and Kit puttered in the kitchen, Breck phoned an acquaintance who was a wholesaler for security products. In ten minutes Breck had sketched the layout of her apartment, scanned it and forwarded it to the security expert. Within an hour they received back an assessment of his recommendations along with the cost. Okay, the cost was scary, but Breck sure got things going. As she dropped meatballs into the tomato and capers sauce, she admitted to him, “The reason I haven’t done anything about security is that I’m not sure how long I’ll be living here. I needed to escape from my parents and this was all I could find in my price range.”
Damn it. How had that all spilled out?
Breck looked at her for a moment then asked, “Is it okay if I put the TV on for Kit?”
“Better yet, there are kids’ games on my laptop. Have a look.” Anything to get him out of the kitchen. He wasn’t the prying sort—not by a long shot—but she’d just opened the door to a cupboardful of secrets she’d rather have kept hidden. For some reason this man had the weirdest effect on her. She kept blurting out things that were best hidden.
He was curious about what she’d said, no doubt about it. He kept flicking sideways glances at her. But he was polite enough to respond to her attempts to steer the conversation on to innocuous topics. From time to time the serious grey eyes searched her face, but fortunately he looked too beat to worry overmuch about her comment. The man had his own problems.
“I can’t continue like this,” he said as they perched on kitchen stools to eat their meatballs and spaghetti. “Either I’m short-changing Kit or I’m short-changing my employers but whichever way I look at it, it’s a problem that isn’t going to go away. Between AOS call-outs and shift work, I just can’t manage.”
“What about this Natasha you told me about?”
“Nobody knows where she is. God knows I’ve tried to find her. One day she was working for my parents. The next day she disappeared.”
“Internet search?”
“Nothing. It’s as if she never existed, but she was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Kit had already finished his dinner and had rushed back to play more computer games. That was something Breck Marchant had done for his son, Ingrid mused. Kit no longer hung back and waited to see which way the wind blew before he acted.
Breck chased the last tendril of spaghetti around his plate. “It’s terrifying, but I might have to rethink my career.” His voice died away. It seemed he could not put into words the catastrophic problems he saw looming ahead.
“Oh, no! It can’t be that bad, surely?” Ingrid laid her hand over his where he jabbed with his fork at the offending spaghetti. She looked into his face and saw raw despair. He looked like a man in shock, his skin pale and his mouth drooping at the corners. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. It
is
as bad as that, isn’t it?” She kept her hand over his. “I wish there was something I could do, but short of having Kit stay with me as much as possible, I can’t see how I can help.”
Breck shook his head. “He’s my kid. It’s my responsibility.”
From his tone he may as well have said, “So butt out.”
Some perverse gene in her makeup forced her to continue. “Have you considered another branch of police work?”
Listen to yourself, Ingrid. What the hell would you know about police work?
Fleetingly she thought it was a pity she’d lost contact with her father. He might have helped. He’d definitely still be a cop, probably in the top echelon too, if her mother was to be believed. Then again, over the years Ingrid had come to realize that her mother’s recollections of her first husband had gotten a little skewed. Her father might not have been as wedded to the job as Marla insisted. Perhaps he’d used work as an excuse to avoid confrontations at home. God knows, Ingrid had learned to use similar excuses. And then had to listen to: “You’re just like your father.”
hadn’t
known Tania at all, and a getaway driver sure would not want to be seen.
The guy was in his forties, balding and a little on the tubby side. He’d worn a grey sweater and grey trousers beneath the flasher’s raincoat.
Breck snorted with amusement. Somehow he couldn’t see Tania associating with an older man who wore a plastic raincoat. It reminded him of the coat that serial murderers wore to avoid splashes of blood.
He grabbed a large evidence bag out of his SUV and dropped the coat into it, then made a note of the vehicle’s numberplate. The trouble was—what could he do with this information? He had no more right to be in the house than the two intruders. How could he get the information to Moffat without incriminating himself?
He went back inside the house. What had those two been up to?
After half an hour he was forced to concede defeat. Nothing whatsoever in this house could lead him to Tania and her children. All useful papers such as birth certificates and passports had been removed.
Whatever the intruders were after, they’d made a mess. Downstairs, electrical power bills were mixed up with grocery receipts. Job search downloads on computer paper rubbed noses with recipes cut from newspapers. Upstairs, baby clothes slithered off pyramids of shoes. In the main bedroom, the double wardrobe doors had been wrenched off their tracks.
And nowhere was there a single thing pertaining to Kit. It was as if Kit had never existed as far as the Kerrs were concerned.
Chapter Ten
He swallowed. It had been three days since he’d managed to wreck their burgeoning friendship. This morning Jace and Abel were winging their way to Russia to finalize their adoption, which left him not only feeling like shit for unloading on to Ingrid the other night, it also left him in a quandary. Today he’d have to negotiate with her to see if Kit could attend preschool for longer hours. To make matters worse, Harley Max had hinted that he’d cut Breck a lot of slack recently, then he’d come right out and asked, “I need someone on standby for the graveyard shift. Can you do it?”
Breck’s heart had shifted sideways. Here it was. He was staring down the barrel of a frightening decision.
“I can’t leave my boy alone at night, sir,” was all he’d managed to choke out.
Harley Max digested Breck’s answer. “I hadn’t realized you had nobody to help out,” Max had said at last. “You don’t have a sister or anything? Parents?”
“No-one,” Breck had muttered, trying not sound like Orphan Annie.
“Well then, forget I asked,” Max replied, and that was the end of the conversation.
But Breck knew it was the end of any advancement for him. He expected soon to be back in an inquiry car, cooling his heels, as his mates leapt up the career tree in front of him.
“Good morning, guys!” Ingrid sang, tickling Kit’s neck.
Well,
someone
was in a good mood today. He’d better strike while the iron was hot. “Ingrid, I have a favor to ask of you.”
She raised her eyebrows and waited, her head cocked to one side.
“May I extend Kit’s preschool hours by one hour a day? I need to drop him off a little earlier and collect him about half an hour later each day.” He was pushing the envelope. On days when Jace wasn’t available he often screamed in the gate as Ingrid was packing up the last of the school equipment. Sometimes Kit was the only child still there.
Instead of answering him straight off, she leaned forward eagerly. He stepped back, smelling soap and flowers and Ingrid. Closing his eyes for a second, he inhaled.
“Oh wow, Breck! That must mean that Jace and Abe have gone to see their child? When did they leave? When are they coming back?”
She fired questions at him like pellets from a shotgun cartridge. Well, at least she was still talking to him. “Yes. This morning. In four weeks.”
She grinned. “How very concise. Now, I don’t know much more than I did before. Are they excited? Is it a daughter or a son?”
And in a flash he recognized something special about Ingrid that he hadn’t understood before. She hadn’t said “girl” or “boy” as most people did. She realized that Jace and Abe were committed to forming a family, that they wanted children of their own. Ingrid didn’t make it sound as if Jace and Abe were buying a child, like some of the squad members thought. She knew what was important.
“We’re going to text each other, so I’ll let you know what happens.”
She gave a little wriggle, reminiscent of a puppy. “I’m so excited for them, and I don’t even know Abe. I bet he’s a nice guy.”
Breck nodded. “The best. Ingrid, about…”
“Yes, of course it’s okay. I’m dying to know about the”—she lowered her voice—“housebreaking.”
She certainly didn’t carry grudges. She had every right to choke him off, considering how they’d parted. He was thankful that her curiosity had won the day.
He glanced around. Kit was long gone and nobody was in the immediate vicinity. He waved good morning to one of the assistant teachers, and then turned back to Ingrid. “Had a bit of a turn-up with some guy. He got away, and there was a woman driving—”
She clutched his arm, her eyes wide with shock. “Someone was there? You
fought
with him?”
“Yeah. It was the guy who whacked me with his knuckle duster. Or his twin. Same height, balding. Used the same pick-up truck. A woman was driving it.”
She licked her lips. “Was it Tania?”
Breck shook his head. “Not sure. Didn’t behave like her and the hair was different but with Tania, who knows?”
Her hand was still on his arm. He felt the warmth through his shirt.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Gave as good as I got. But Ingrid, there are no useful papers in the house. No birth certificates, no passports, nothing. Maybe the MPU squad took them, but I can’t understand why they’d take some of the more irrelevant stuff.” He wrinkled his nose. “The house reeked of Tania’s perfume. Not sure if that was a red herring or not.”
She smiled and took her hand off his arm. He felt the chill. “What a convoluted mind you have, Mr. Marchant.”
He grinned. “I got the vehicle registration number anyway.” He glanced at his watch. “Shit! Gotta go. I daren’t be late. I’m in enough hot water as it is.” He left her standing there and bolted for his SUV.
****
Ten hours later, Ingrid watched him as he climbed down from the SUV, the only vehicle left in the carpark besides her own. His shoulders sagged and he scuffed towards her, head down. Dog-tired. Must have been a bad one today.
“You had a call-out?” she asked.
He nodded. “Just got through the debrief. Sorry.”
She wanted to help him, but she didn’t know how. Hell, if her heart sank when he’d had a bad day, what did that mean? Was she seguing from Level One attraction to Level Two? She’d been on Level Two before. She knew all about Level Two. It was called unwilling attraction. He’s a
friend
, Ingrid. A
friend
. She inhaled. “What happened?”
“After he’d knifed his wife and baby, he hanged himself. We—”
“Daddy!” Kit trotted towards them, dragging his backpack.
Breck straightened up. “Hi, son! Say thank-you to Ingr—Ms. Rowland.”
“Why don’t you guys stop at my place for dinner on your way home?” Ingrid asked. She blinked. What on earth had made her say that? It was just that he looked so weary and disillusioned. Kit would probably talk him to death and she could be a buffer between them, help to finish Breck’s day on a higher note anyway. Yeah, Level Two was right. Probably already on Level Three. She was in deep trouble.
“It was going to be Macca’s tonight,” he admitted. “I don’t have the energy to argue with tomatoes and cold chicken.”
Kit giggled, swinging his father’s arm. “You don’t argue with chicken and tomatoes, Daddy.”
Breck tried to grin. “I argue with everything in the kitchen, son.”
Ingrid stuffed the next day’s worksheets into her carry bag and turned to extinguish nearly all the lights, leaving only two fluorescent lights on. The bright security lights came on automatically at dusk.
“Come on, guys. You can have Macca’s tomorrow. Tonight you eat healthy.”
She ushered them out the door and set the alarms.
“I hear you had trouble with those at first,” Breck said, nodding towards the alarm panel.
She groaned. “Don’t remind me. For the first six months after they were installed they reacted to extremes of heat and cold, neighborhood cats sauntering by, gusts of wind—you name it. Had to have them adjusted three times. The neighbors do not love me.”
“You need security at your apartment.”
Couldn’t help being a cop, could he? Marla reckoned Ingrid’s father had been like that. Always on duty, even at home. Ingrid wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing.
An hour later she decided it was a good thing. While she and Kit puttered in the kitchen, Breck phoned an acquaintance who was a wholesaler for security products. In ten minutes Breck had sketched the layout of her apartment, scanned it and forwarded it to the security expert. Within an hour they received back an assessment of his recommendations along with the cost. Okay, the cost was scary, but Breck sure got things going. As she dropped meatballs into the tomato and capers sauce, she admitted to him, “The reason I haven’t done anything about security is that I’m not sure how long I’ll be living here. I needed to escape from my parents and this was all I could find in my price range.”
Damn it. How had that all spilled out?
Breck looked at her for a moment then asked, “Is it okay if I put the TV on for Kit?”
“Better yet, there are kids’ games on my laptop. Have a look.” Anything to get him out of the kitchen. He wasn’t the prying sort—not by a long shot—but she’d just opened the door to a cupboardful of secrets she’d rather have kept hidden. For some reason this man had the weirdest effect on her. She kept blurting out things that were best hidden.
He was curious about what she’d said, no doubt about it. He kept flicking sideways glances at her. But he was polite enough to respond to her attempts to steer the conversation on to innocuous topics. From time to time the serious grey eyes searched her face, but fortunately he looked too beat to worry overmuch about her comment. The man had his own problems.
“I can’t continue like this,” he said as they perched on kitchen stools to eat their meatballs and spaghetti. “Either I’m short-changing Kit or I’m short-changing my employers but whichever way I look at it, it’s a problem that isn’t going to go away. Between AOS call-outs and shift work, I just can’t manage.”
“What about this Natasha you told me about?”
“Nobody knows where she is. God knows I’ve tried to find her. One day she was working for my parents. The next day she disappeared.”
“Internet search?”
“Nothing. It’s as if she never existed, but she was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Kit had already finished his dinner and had rushed back to play more computer games. That was something Breck Marchant had done for his son, Ingrid mused. Kit no longer hung back and waited to see which way the wind blew before he acted.
Breck chased the last tendril of spaghetti around his plate. “It’s terrifying, but I might have to rethink my career.” His voice died away. It seemed he could not put into words the catastrophic problems he saw looming ahead.
“Oh, no! It can’t be that bad, surely?” Ingrid laid her hand over his where he jabbed with his fork at the offending spaghetti. She looked into his face and saw raw despair. He looked like a man in shock, his skin pale and his mouth drooping at the corners. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. It
is
as bad as that, isn’t it?” She kept her hand over his. “I wish there was something I could do, but short of having Kit stay with me as much as possible, I can’t see how I can help.”
Breck shook his head. “He’s my kid. It’s my responsibility.”
From his tone he may as well have said, “So butt out.”
Some perverse gene in her makeup forced her to continue. “Have you considered another branch of police work?”
Listen to yourself, Ingrid. What the hell would you know about police work?
Fleetingly she thought it was a pity she’d lost contact with her father. He might have helped. He’d definitely still be a cop, probably in the top echelon too, if her mother was to be believed. Then again, over the years Ingrid had come to realize that her mother’s recollections of her first husband had gotten a little skewed. Her father might not have been as wedded to the job as Marla insisted. Perhaps he’d used work as an excuse to avoid confrontations at home. God knows, Ingrid had learned to use similar excuses. And then had to listen to: “You’re just like your father.”
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