Innocent Hostage (23 page)
“Will you be here when I wake up?”
He had to bend down to hear her words because she was mumbling and shivering. “Of course. Are you cold?”
“C-cold, cold.”
“Okay.” He tucked up all the blankets around her and turned on the electric blanket.
And in a heartbeat, she was asleep. He hovered, wondering if he should set his watch to wake her in an hour, in case this was residual concussion. His instinct was to let her sleep, but if he was wrong…
He flipped open his phone and called Jace and Abe and explained his predicament. “They wouldn’t have let her leave hospital if she still had a concussion,” Jace said. “But if she got battered by bloody Tania, she’s probably still feeling sore. Might be emotionally drained too.”
“Yeah. She’s had a helluva week.” Breck was going to explain further, but he heard a baby’s murmur in the background. It was the sort of cry that said, “Hey! I’m waking up. Where are you?” So he just said, “I’ll call you later.” He would stay here beside Ingrid to make sure she was okay. Kit had discovered Ingrid’s stash of resource books and was happily fingering through them, exclaiming now and again when he recognized a word.
An hour later Ingrid was still asleep and Breck was resigned to staying for the night. He prowled around her kitchen, trying to find something suitable to eat. But Ingrid seemed to subsist on pasta and apples and neither appealed to him. “Kit, would you be all right if I went out to buy some dinner? If you don’t like being alone, you could climb up on the bed beside Ingrid. Is that okay?” He was always careful to give Kit options, because when Kit had lived with the Kerrs, he hadn’t had any options.
“S’okay.” Kit was absorbed in a puzzle book and didn’t even glance up as Breck left.
He found a 7-Eleven and stocked up quickly, not giving much thought to his purchases. Time was of the essence, because leaving an invalid and a child on their own was not a great idea. As he braked to a stop in the parking area outside Ingrid’s apartment, he saw that the outside light still shone down on the welcome mat. Everything looked secure. Breathing a sigh of relief, he collected the groceries and juggled them while he fit the key into the shiny new lock.
Inside, the lights were all off. Kit must have crawled into bed with Ingrid. He grinned wryly. So much for buying the makings for dinner. He would be the only one eating.
Flipping on the kitchen light he dumped the paper sacks on the counter and tiptoed into Ingrid’s bedroom so as not to wake the two of them.
But when he went to pull up the covers over the two bumps in the bed, he stopped short, his heart in his mouth. Pillows had been mounded in the bed to look like sleeping figures.
Kit and Ingrid were gone.
****
“Shit!” He grabbed his cellphone and called Raker. “Raker, I’m desperate.”
“What? What’s happened?”
Breck gabbled an explanation. At the same time he feverishly searched the apartment for clues. The quilt on top of the bed had been wrenched off and lay on the floor near the doorway. He picked up the puzzle book that Kit had been working on and it came apart. It had been ripped in two. Worst of all, where Ingrid’s head had lain on the pillow was a large red stain. Either her head wound was bleeding again or…
Please God…please don’t let my maniac ex-wife hurt her. I’ll do anything you want, God; just keep Ingrid safe.
“But how did anyone get in if the door was locked?” Raker asked.
“Good question.” Breck prowled through the apartment and found the answer. The bathroom window was shattered.
But that led to another question. How could Tania overpower two people and hustle them away in the short time available? Sure, Ingrid was sick, and it was possible Kit might have obeyed his mother’s orders, but it was still a stretch for one person. “Raker, she had help.”
“Just thinking that. Be right over.”
Breck rushed out to the parking lot and checked for marks on the fine stone chipwork. Directly behind Ingrid’s Fiesta there was a large pool of oil.
If
it belonged to whoever had taken Ingrid and Kit, then the car was sick. But it might just as well belong to one of the other resident’s cars. Something to check out later.
He went back to the bathroom and pored doggedly over every possible clue. He examined every scratch and nick on the surfaces near to the window and every splinter of glass. He measured where the broken glass had landed and came to the conclusion that because the damage was not extreme, that whatever implement had been used must have been muffled with a blanket or something similar. And because he was so meticulous, his ferocious attention to detail driven by a dread that pressed down on his stomach, he found the blood spot. A mere smidgeon, but definitely a blood spot.
Raker rushed in and they got down to business.
“The only good thing about all this, is that we’ve got the cell phone number she contacted your parents with,” Raker commented as he watched the SOCOs at work. The scene of crime officers didn’t find anything that Breck hadn’t, but one of them painstakingly scraped the blood spot into an evidence bag and hurried off to compare it with the blood types on the preschool records that Ingrid kept on her laptop.
If it wasn’t Ingrid’s or Kit’s blood, then it belonged to one of her captors. Breck hoped like hell that the kidnapper had hurt themselves badly, but the drop of blood was so miniscule there wasn’t much chance of that.
“Looks as though they’ve nicked themselves hopping in through the window,” the second SOCO commented. “They must be mighty small to squeeze in through that little space.”
Breck thought of the school break-in. And he thought of Tania. Perhaps, but it would be a tight squeeze.
Raker interrupted Breck’s frantic thoughts. “Not much more I can do here. I’ll go back to Central and check the coordinates of that phone call your ex made to your parents in case she’s returned to the same place. Another thing I thought of…how about we get Hull to revisit the old lady’s house? Tania might have returned there.”
“Possibly. Must be running out of hidey-holes by now. Are you sure Miss Reynolds really was Tania’s great-aunt?”
“Ninety-nine percent. How about you go along with Hull and see if you can find anything in the house that relates to Tania?”
Raker was giving him a task to prevent him from going off half-cock. Okay. He was wound up so tight his teeth were aching from being clenched. The whole damn fiasco was his fault. He should never have left Kit and Ingrid alone. And after lecturing Billy about the very same thing, too. The only solace he had was that it was unlikely Tania would harm Kit. She wanted to use him as a bargaining tool and anyway, Tania wouldn’t harm a child. Would she? Breck swallowed hard. Once upon a time he could never have envisaged her harming
anyone
, but now…
Ingrid, however, was in deep trouble. Not only was there a history between them, she’d also frustrated Tania’s attempts to grab Kit. Tania would be out for blood, and from the mess on Ingrid’s pillow, she’d already drawn some. Sweet Ingrid who didn’t live life on Tania’s level would be no match for his vicious ex-wife. If only he could work out what had set Tania off on her murderous rampage, they might be able to
do
something. Shit, there was nothing on earth so bloody frustrating than not knowing where to turn. All the time the clock was ticking. Apparently Tania had killed before, so what was stopping her from doing it again?
He sat in Hull’s unmarked Toyota Camry clicking his fingers till Hull murmured, “You gotta learn a few relaxation techniques, Marchant. You’re driving me crazy.”
“Sorry.” His gut churned and burned and he had to do
something
. He resorted to tapping his foot until Hull said with exasperation, “Look mate. You and are I going to have a falling-out if you don’t stop all this twitching. I can’t begin to understand what you’re going through, but you need to chill out.”
“Chill out? That crazy bitch has my son and my—friend!”
“Well, you were married to that crazy bitch for a few years. Do us a favor and think about where she might be. Think of the places she went while you were married.”
Hull was right. Constructive thinking was more use than sitting around tense and fretting. Tony Hull wasn’t unsympathetic. He just told it like it was. The best thing he could do right now for Ingrid and Kit was to explore every possible avenue.
“Well, if we strike out at Billy’s and at the great-aunt’s, then we should take a look at Ingrid’s laptop. She was searching for someone named Angela, a friend of Tania’s. That’s another lead.”
“See. There you go. I understand about Ingrid and young Kit, but once you cut it down to lines to tug on, then you’re helping them constructively. Here we are.” Hull drove into Ms. Reynolds’ driveway and parked the car in front of the garage. The house was old, about sixty years or so, and was constructed entirely of timber. Some of the timber had rotted around the eaves and the garage door did not quite shut. It looked as though sixty summers of sun had warped the timber, and sixty winters of rain had swollen it.
When it became apparent from the rubbish accumulated in every room that a thorough search could take days, Hull called for more manpower. They didn’t have days to spare.
Two hours into the search, Breck discovered the first clue. In a desk stuffed full of legal papers and memorabilia, he spied the corners of some photos sticking out. He tugged at them and they came loose and fluttered to the floor. As he bent down to pick them up, he felt a tingle down his spine. The top photo was of two young women—two Tanias. The photo looked to have been taken about ten years ago. The women were not quite identical, but to a casual observer, they looked alike. Attached to the photos were a couple of pieces of paper.
“Fraternal twins,” Breck muttered to himself. Hull!” he yelled.
Hull charged down the stairs, looking like an eager bloodhound. “What? What? Hope you’ve got something. There’s nothing upstairs.”
Breck held out the photo then shuffled through the papers that were attached to it. Birth certificates for Tania and Angela Bedloe. Bedloe? He thought he’d married a woman named Tania Davidson, a woman whose parents and sister had been killed in a car crash when she was a baby. Perhaps she’d been married before she met him and just hadn’t wanted to mention it. He leaned against the desk. This was Alice in Wonderland territory. Natasha had read that book to him and he’d often wondered how Alice coped with life after Wonderland. Did she come out the other side okay, or did she live the rest of her life questioning reality?
Hull grabbed the pile of photos and the birth certificates from him. “Holy shit! Guess the old lady was her great-aunt after all.”
“This explains why I found no birth certificates at the Kerr’s house.”
“Uh, huh. But like you, I can’t understand what all this is about. Why does a perfectly sane woman suddenly go off her tree and start murdering her relatives, set up others to take a fall, and end up kidnapping people? It’s bizarre.”
“I’m wondering a hell of a lot more than that. I’m wondering who I married. Tania or Angela?”
Hull leaned against the desk beside Breck. “Uh, Marchant, all I can say is…holy shit! What a hell of a conundrum.”
He was about to say more when his cell phone warbled like a thrush’s early evensong.
“Yeah? Cool. Send two of ’em here to the old lady’s place and we’ll meet the others…where?” He turned to Breck. “Been given another four staff. So now we’ve got a real task force. Where d’you think we should go next? I’m thinking we should—”
Breck interrupted. “I’ll return to Ingrid’s place. Did anyone check her laptop yet?”
“There,” he said softly, pointing to the attached résumé. “An Angela Briscoe approached Ingrid’s assistant about a job at Rowlands four months back. Looks as though Ingrid has dug further. I’ve got Stella’s private number because we had to liaise over the vandalism repairs. I’ll give her a call.”
Stella was kicking up her heels at a noisy pub and he had to shout to get her attention. The background noise receded as she searched for a quiet corner. She freaked out when she heard that Ingrid and Kit were missing but proved to be an excellent witness. She remembered clearly what Angela looked like, how she spoke, what she said and even what she’d been wearing.
“How come you remember all this?” Breck asked. “Not that we’re not grateful, but few people remember details like this.”
“Because she said she’d trained with Ingrid and was a friend of hers, so I was extra careful. But there were no teaching positions available so I filed it and just mentioned it in passing to Ingrid. Hey, I tell you who she looked like. Like that Tania bitch who’s causing all the trouble. Looked a little like her, but she was much nicer.”
“Nicer?”
“Yeah. Polite. Not aggro like Tania. And she was shorter than Tania.”
It was interesting that there was no photo with the résumé. Many people forwarded a photo of themselves when applying for a job, but Angela had not. But why had Angela approached Rowlands? Why would she want to teach at a preschool where her likeness to Tania would at once be noticed? It was as if one twin was pulling one way; and the other twin was pulling in the opposite direction. One wanted to be noticed; the other needed to stay hidden.
He had to bend down to hear her words because she was mumbling and shivering. “Of course. Are you cold?”
“C-cold, cold.”
“Okay.” He tucked up all the blankets around her and turned on the electric blanket.
And in a heartbeat, she was asleep. He hovered, wondering if he should set his watch to wake her in an hour, in case this was residual concussion. His instinct was to let her sleep, but if he was wrong…
He flipped open his phone and called Jace and Abe and explained his predicament. “They wouldn’t have let her leave hospital if she still had a concussion,” Jace said. “But if she got battered by bloody Tania, she’s probably still feeling sore. Might be emotionally drained too.”
“Yeah. She’s had a helluva week.” Breck was going to explain further, but he heard a baby’s murmur in the background. It was the sort of cry that said, “Hey! I’m waking up. Where are you?” So he just said, “I’ll call you later.” He would stay here beside Ingrid to make sure she was okay. Kit had discovered Ingrid’s stash of resource books and was happily fingering through them, exclaiming now and again when he recognized a word.
An hour later Ingrid was still asleep and Breck was resigned to staying for the night. He prowled around her kitchen, trying to find something suitable to eat. But Ingrid seemed to subsist on pasta and apples and neither appealed to him. “Kit, would you be all right if I went out to buy some dinner? If you don’t like being alone, you could climb up on the bed beside Ingrid. Is that okay?” He was always careful to give Kit options, because when Kit had lived with the Kerrs, he hadn’t had any options.
“S’okay.” Kit was absorbed in a puzzle book and didn’t even glance up as Breck left.
He found a 7-Eleven and stocked up quickly, not giving much thought to his purchases. Time was of the essence, because leaving an invalid and a child on their own was not a great idea. As he braked to a stop in the parking area outside Ingrid’s apartment, he saw that the outside light still shone down on the welcome mat. Everything looked secure. Breathing a sigh of relief, he collected the groceries and juggled them while he fit the key into the shiny new lock.
Inside, the lights were all off. Kit must have crawled into bed with Ingrid. He grinned wryly. So much for buying the makings for dinner. He would be the only one eating.
Flipping on the kitchen light he dumped the paper sacks on the counter and tiptoed into Ingrid’s bedroom so as not to wake the two of them.
But when he went to pull up the covers over the two bumps in the bed, he stopped short, his heart in his mouth. Pillows had been mounded in the bed to look like sleeping figures.
Kit and Ingrid were gone.
****
“Shit!” He grabbed his cellphone and called Raker. “Raker, I’m desperate.”
“What? What’s happened?”
Breck gabbled an explanation. At the same time he feverishly searched the apartment for clues. The quilt on top of the bed had been wrenched off and lay on the floor near the doorway. He picked up the puzzle book that Kit had been working on and it came apart. It had been ripped in two. Worst of all, where Ingrid’s head had lain on the pillow was a large red stain. Either her head wound was bleeding again or…
Please God…please don’t let my maniac ex-wife hurt her. I’ll do anything you want, God; just keep Ingrid safe.
“But how did anyone get in if the door was locked?” Raker asked.
“Good question.” Breck prowled through the apartment and found the answer. The bathroom window was shattered.
But that led to another question. How could Tania overpower two people and hustle them away in the short time available? Sure, Ingrid was sick, and it was possible Kit might have obeyed his mother’s orders, but it was still a stretch for one person. “Raker, she had help.”
“Just thinking that. Be right over.”
Breck rushed out to the parking lot and checked for marks on the fine stone chipwork. Directly behind Ingrid’s Fiesta there was a large pool of oil.
If
it belonged to whoever had taken Ingrid and Kit, then the car was sick. But it might just as well belong to one of the other resident’s cars. Something to check out later.
He went back to the bathroom and pored doggedly over every possible clue. He examined every scratch and nick on the surfaces near to the window and every splinter of glass. He measured where the broken glass had landed and came to the conclusion that because the damage was not extreme, that whatever implement had been used must have been muffled with a blanket or something similar. And because he was so meticulous, his ferocious attention to detail driven by a dread that pressed down on his stomach, he found the blood spot. A mere smidgeon, but definitely a blood spot.
Raker rushed in and they got down to business.
“The only good thing about all this, is that we’ve got the cell phone number she contacted your parents with,” Raker commented as he watched the SOCOs at work. The scene of crime officers didn’t find anything that Breck hadn’t, but one of them painstakingly scraped the blood spot into an evidence bag and hurried off to compare it with the blood types on the preschool records that Ingrid kept on her laptop.
If it wasn’t Ingrid’s or Kit’s blood, then it belonged to one of her captors. Breck hoped like hell that the kidnapper had hurt themselves badly, but the drop of blood was so miniscule there wasn’t much chance of that.
“Looks as though they’ve nicked themselves hopping in through the window,” the second SOCO commented. “They must be mighty small to squeeze in through that little space.”
Breck thought of the school break-in. And he thought of Tania. Perhaps, but it would be a tight squeeze.
Raker interrupted Breck’s frantic thoughts. “Not much more I can do here. I’ll go back to Central and check the coordinates of that phone call your ex made to your parents in case she’s returned to the same place. Another thing I thought of…how about we get Hull to revisit the old lady’s house? Tania might have returned there.”
“Possibly. Must be running out of hidey-holes by now. Are you sure Miss Reynolds really was Tania’s great-aunt?”
“Ninety-nine percent. How about you go along with Hull and see if you can find anything in the house that relates to Tania?”
Raker was giving him a task to prevent him from going off half-cock. Okay. He was wound up so tight his teeth were aching from being clenched. The whole damn fiasco was his fault. He should never have left Kit and Ingrid alone. And after lecturing Billy about the very same thing, too. The only solace he had was that it was unlikely Tania would harm Kit. She wanted to use him as a bargaining tool and anyway, Tania wouldn’t harm a child. Would she? Breck swallowed hard. Once upon a time he could never have envisaged her harming
anyone
, but now…
Ingrid, however, was in deep trouble. Not only was there a history between them, she’d also frustrated Tania’s attempts to grab Kit. Tania would be out for blood, and from the mess on Ingrid’s pillow, she’d already drawn some. Sweet Ingrid who didn’t live life on Tania’s level would be no match for his vicious ex-wife. If only he could work out what had set Tania off on her murderous rampage, they might be able to
do
something. Shit, there was nothing on earth so bloody frustrating than not knowing where to turn. All the time the clock was ticking. Apparently Tania had killed before, so what was stopping her from doing it again?
He sat in Hull’s unmarked Toyota Camry clicking his fingers till Hull murmured, “You gotta learn a few relaxation techniques, Marchant. You’re driving me crazy.”
“Sorry.” His gut churned and burned and he had to do
something
. He resorted to tapping his foot until Hull said with exasperation, “Look mate. You and are I going to have a falling-out if you don’t stop all this twitching. I can’t begin to understand what you’re going through, but you need to chill out.”
“Chill out? That crazy bitch has my son and my—friend!”
“Well, you were married to that crazy bitch for a few years. Do us a favor and think about where she might be. Think of the places she went while you were married.”
Hull was right. Constructive thinking was more use than sitting around tense and fretting. Tony Hull wasn’t unsympathetic. He just told it like it was. The best thing he could do right now for Ingrid and Kit was to explore every possible avenue.
“Well, if we strike out at Billy’s and at the great-aunt’s, then we should take a look at Ingrid’s laptop. She was searching for someone named Angela, a friend of Tania’s. That’s another lead.”
“See. There you go. I understand about Ingrid and young Kit, but once you cut it down to lines to tug on, then you’re helping them constructively. Here we are.” Hull drove into Ms. Reynolds’ driveway and parked the car in front of the garage. The house was old, about sixty years or so, and was constructed entirely of timber. Some of the timber had rotted around the eaves and the garage door did not quite shut. It looked as though sixty summers of sun had warped the timber, and sixty winters of rain had swollen it.
When it became apparent from the rubbish accumulated in every room that a thorough search could take days, Hull called for more manpower. They didn’t have days to spare.
Two hours into the search, Breck discovered the first clue. In a desk stuffed full of legal papers and memorabilia, he spied the corners of some photos sticking out. He tugged at them and they came loose and fluttered to the floor. As he bent down to pick them up, he felt a tingle down his spine. The top photo was of two young women—two Tanias. The photo looked to have been taken about ten years ago. The women were not quite identical, but to a casual observer, they looked alike. Attached to the photos were a couple of pieces of paper.
“Fraternal twins,” Breck muttered to himself. Hull!” he yelled.
Hull charged down the stairs, looking like an eager bloodhound. “What? What? Hope you’ve got something. There’s nothing upstairs.”
Breck held out the photo then shuffled through the papers that were attached to it. Birth certificates for Tania and Angela Bedloe. Bedloe? He thought he’d married a woman named Tania Davidson, a woman whose parents and sister had been killed in a car crash when she was a baby. Perhaps she’d been married before she met him and just hadn’t wanted to mention it. He leaned against the desk. This was Alice in Wonderland territory. Natasha had read that book to him and he’d often wondered how Alice coped with life after Wonderland. Did she come out the other side okay, or did she live the rest of her life questioning reality?
Hull grabbed the pile of photos and the birth certificates from him. “Holy shit! Guess the old lady was her great-aunt after all.”
“This explains why I found no birth certificates at the Kerr’s house.”
“Uh, huh. But like you, I can’t understand what all this is about. Why does a perfectly sane woman suddenly go off her tree and start murdering her relatives, set up others to take a fall, and end up kidnapping people? It’s bizarre.”
“I’m wondering a hell of a lot more than that. I’m wondering who I married. Tania or Angela?”
Hull leaned against the desk beside Breck. “Uh, Marchant, all I can say is…holy shit! What a hell of a conundrum.”
He was about to say more when his cell phone warbled like a thrush’s early evensong.
“Yeah? Cool. Send two of ’em here to the old lady’s place and we’ll meet the others…where?” He turned to Breck. “Been given another four staff. So now we’ve got a real task force. Where d’you think we should go next? I’m thinking we should—”
Breck interrupted. “I’ll return to Ingrid’s place. Did anyone check her laptop yet?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“There,” he said softly, pointing to the attached résumé. “An Angela Briscoe approached Ingrid’s assistant about a job at Rowlands four months back. Looks as though Ingrid has dug further. I’ve got Stella’s private number because we had to liaise over the vandalism repairs. I’ll give her a call.”
Stella was kicking up her heels at a noisy pub and he had to shout to get her attention. The background noise receded as she searched for a quiet corner. She freaked out when she heard that Ingrid and Kit were missing but proved to be an excellent witness. She remembered clearly what Angela looked like, how she spoke, what she said and even what she’d been wearing.
“How come you remember all this?” Breck asked. “Not that we’re not grateful, but few people remember details like this.”
“Because she said she’d trained with Ingrid and was a friend of hers, so I was extra careful. But there were no teaching positions available so I filed it and just mentioned it in passing to Ingrid. Hey, I tell you who she looked like. Like that Tania bitch who’s causing all the trouble. Looked a little like her, but she was much nicer.”
“Nicer?”
“Yeah. Polite. Not aggro like Tania. And she was shorter than Tania.”
It was interesting that there was no photo with the résumé. Many people forwarded a photo of themselves when applying for a job, but Angela had not. But why had Angela approached Rowlands? Why would she want to teach at a preschool where her likeness to Tania would at once be noticed? It was as if one twin was pulling one way; and the other twin was pulling in the opposite direction. One wanted to be noticed; the other needed to stay hidden.
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