Kidnapped (32 page)

There wasn't a scrap of paper or piece of trash left to suggest what had occurred here. His car was two blocks away, getting cleaned by one of the best detail businesses in the area. There wouldn't be so much as an unwanted fingerprint left in the vehicle when they were done. He just needed to hide for a few hours.

Jason reached the master bedroom and walked into the closet. Moving to one side the shelves for the shoes, he found the seam in the paneling for the first hidden door and opened it. He tugged out the soundproofing. He lifted the metal plate upward and stuck it in the wooden jambs that held it up. The entryway was too small. He swore softly as he worked his way into the room.

The doorbell rang and someone knocked hard on the front door. His hands slippery with sweat, he turned and leaned back out into the closet, pulling over the outer door and reaching under it to grasp the shelves and rock them back over in place. He yanked his hands in as the outer door closed. Okay. He was okay. The entrance to the room was covered. Unless the shoes had all tumbled off at the movement, he was fine.

“Jason Fromm! This is the police. We have a warrant to search this house!”

He heard the shouts as he frantically pushed in place the soundproofing tiles and then grabbed the wooden jambs to remove them and bring the metal plate down. The weight of the metal plate caught him by surprise, and he just got his fingers out of the way before it slid down and buried itself in the framing. Jason stumbled back into the mess of the room and fell back to sit on the short bed.

He was in. He was fine. If they realized the closet shelves could be moved, if they tapped on the wall, or for that matter kicked at it, all they would hear was solid wall. The steel plate and soundproofing would do their jobs.

He listened to his heart rate slow down and eventually looked around the small room and let out a long breath. What a mess. When Frank had broken in to get the lady out, he hadn't been neat about it. Jason tossed a smashed box of cereal off the bed so he didn't have to share the perch with crushed Cheerios.

He leaned against the wall and looked at his watch. Three hours. He would give them three hours to do their searching, and then he was going to get out of here and vanish for good.

* * *

Luke was a step behind Henry James as they entered the house. The entryway opened onto a great room with vaulted ceilings, moonlight streaming in through tall windows casting shadows across bookcases and plush chairs.

“Search it, basement to attic and every crevice in between.” At Henry's order, officers spread out.

Luke headed toward the garage, Taylor Marsh and Joe right beside him. Luke shoved open the door and found the lights.

The garage was cold and empty.

“Frank was jerking us around,” Marsh said.

“She's here somewhere.” Luke turned to Joe. “I need you back in the air. Circle the area and drop flares, look for where else a white van might be hidden. If Frank abandoned the vehicle around here in a storage building or garage—”

“I'm on it.” Joe headed out.

Marsh looked down the long hallway. “If this is the location of the safe room—”

“Sharon was brought down a flight of carpeted stairs.” Luke headed back down the hall and took the stairs going to the second floor two at a time, Marsh on his heels.

Marsh went down the rooms on the right, his sidearm drawn. “Expensive little place for a banker's guesthouse.”

“I'd check your account in the morning to see if it has any cash left in it.” Luke walked to the window of a guest room to see what options a guy would have going out of a window. One glance ended that idea. They'd be scraping him off the pavement.

The rooms on this floor were huge but odd shaped—walk-in closets and bathrooms and angled storage spaces and even a laundry drop to the floor below. Luke hit walls as he walked around, listening for an echo. A six-by-eight room with a small restroom. That meant plumbing and power. “Sharon described a three-by-three entrance to the room.”

“It's got to be visible if only by walls that don't make sense.”

“This place is an architectural nightmare. What was he doing, trying to avoid a straight line?” If there was missing floor space taken from the rooms, Luke didn't spot it as he tried to calculate angles. “Where's the attic entrance?”

“I'll find it,” Marsh said.

Caroline was here somewhere, probably bleeding to death, and he couldn't find her. Luke headed for the stairs and leaned over the railing. “Henry, what about the other homes this guy owns?”

“Teams are sweeping them now. First reports are like this place—no one home and no sign of a white van. His staff says he left for a meeting in Atlanta.”

“I'll buy that when someone locates him. We need to find that van, Henry.”

“Frank could have been lying.”

“We finish this search, then we grab Frank and those diamonds, and you let me have first crack at talking with him.”

“We'll talk about it.”

“The attic entrance is down here,” Marsh called.

Luke headed back down the hall to meet him. “Someone get me another flashlight!” He'd handed his to the sharpshooter searching the grounds.

* * *

Where are you, Caroline?

Luke crawled on his belly to yet another point along the joining of the rafters and wall, shoving back insulation. Plumbing could not be hidden nor electric and cable wiring. The warrants didn't allow them to break into walls without at least a suspicion they had found the room location, but they could follow the trail of building arteries leading to that room. Luke peered down with the light.

“Anything?” Marsh called.

“No. If they didn't make the easy-to-reach tap-ins up here and drop wires down the existing walls, they had to splice in the wiring somewhere.”

“Henry wants to trip breakers and isolate the wiring to the safe room that way.”

“It would take an electrician hours to prove there's another outlet on the line. It would be faster to prove the cable wiring has been sliced into to add in another TV,” Luke guessed. Both would take time they didn't have. He crawled backwards until he rose to a crouch and walked back to the attic entrance. He walked down the folding stairs.

“Sharon said second floor, but I don't see how they built a room in the attic given the floor plan of this place. It would be crazy for him to keep her at his own home,” Marsh said.

“It's crazy to try and kidnap someone.” Luke used a towel from the guest bathroom to wipe insulation fibers off his arms, the fibers sticking to his sweaty skin driving him crazy with the itch.

“I'm not done with that basement. It's all concrete walls and floor, and they could have built a second false wall down there,” Henry said, joining them. “We can try and chase plumbing from down there.”

“Unless someone can find the entry door, this search will take too long.” Luke could hear the officers working to find it, moving furniture and tapping on the walls. “Where are Frank and the diamonds?”

“Heading east on I-16 and staying below the speed limit they tell me. The units tracking it by air are hanging two miles back.”

“Let's go get him. He knows where that room is. He knows where Caroline is. He might not want to talk, but I'm willing to bet we can make him talk.”

“Frank isn't going down without a fight. And the tactical units will want to take him down in as remote an area as possible.”

“I'd settle for driving up behind him and slamming into his back bumper.”

“We only get one shot at him, Luke. It would be better to watch him, make sure Caroline is not with him, let him lower his guard and think he got away. The odds improve if we try to take him after he stops to sleep.”

“We don't have that luxury of time. He's our only link to Caroline, and she's been out there too long.” Luke looked at his watch. “Another twenty minutes?”

Henry nodded. “The dogs are searching the grounds now; that will give them enough time to walk the house.”

“I'm going up with Joe to get another look at the area from the air.”

Chapter Forty-Three

L
uke closed his eyes as another flare burst in the air, turning the night brighter than the day for a brief moment. He raised the binoculars again. “Joe, what are we missing?”

“If there is a white van in this area, then it's parked inside a garage or warehouse, or so deeply buried in the woods it's going to turn up when they clear this land to turn it into another subdivision. The officers canvassing the neighbors have so far come up with nothing helpful.”

“This is a dead end.”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Frank spun us a line. Ten million dollars for a lie.” Only Luke would have gladly paid the price to have Caroline back.

“I disagree.”

Luke glanced over, surprised.

“Frank probably told the literal truth,” Joe said. “The guy who hired him owns 8754 Logan Road, and Caroline is in the back of a white van. Only Frank left the white van somewhere else.”

Luke bit back a curse, thinking about Frank's games. “You're probably right.”

“We need to go get him.”

“Set us down. It's time I had a heart-to-heart with Henry on how to proceed.”

“While you caucus, I'll get this bird refueled. Let him know I can take three with me.” Joe set down on the road east of the house on Logan Road. Luke unclipped restraints and stepped out. He waved Joe on and headed toward the house.

He found Henry in the driveway. “Anything?”

He shook his head. “Dogs are still working the rooms, but they haven't alerted for Caroline, and by this point they should have.”

“Let's go get him, Henry.”

He walked over to his car and retrieved his map. “He's still traveling on I-16. The strike team wants to take Frank here, where traffic narrows to two lanes to cross this bridge. They propose causing a traffic jam at the bridge just before he arrives to slow him down and to eliminate the passing traffic. When his car comes to a rolling crawl in the line of cars, they'll come in on both sides of the vehicle to yank him from the car before he realizes they're even there.”

“If Caroline is in the car with him . . .”

“They'll move fast, Luke. Do you want to be there? Joe can get you there with a few minutes to spare.”

What he wanted and what was best were two different things. “Just take him alive. He dumped Caroline somewhere around here, Henry, I'm convinced of that. I'm staying in this area. We just have to know where to search.”

“We'll take him alive.”

* * *

Luke picked up the headset and settled into the copilot seat of the police helicopter. “Joe, head back toward the drop site where Frank picked up the diamonds.”

“You don't want to be at the takedown?”

“What I want is to be on top of where Caroline is when they radio in with where Frank actually left that white van. Henry is sealing this place until tomorrow morning and sending the dog teams on to search the other properties Fromm owns. This area is covered. I think the van is somewhere near that quarry where that red flag was planted. How else would Frank know about that deserted area unless he'd been out there recently?”

Joe nodded. “The drop site it is.”

* * *

Jason couldn't stand to pace in the small room. Hitting his head again on the low ceiling, he punched it with his fist. He shoved back a spilled stack of videos and sat on the short bed again, pulling the nearest plastic tote over and reaching in for the first food item he saw.

The potato chips were stale. He tossed the bag aside and looked at his watch. 2:12 a.m. They had to have left by now. He hadn't heard anything since coming into this room, but surely he could risk opening the door. He couldn't stand to be in here any longer.

He climbed over to the door out of this room and slid his hands across the smooth steel plate to get traction and push it up. He couldn't budge it. The steel plate had dropped into place and wedged itself into the frame.

Jason stepped back and looked at the door, considering the problem. He had to get that metal plate to move, the direction didn't matter, just enough movement to force it up again. He looked around the room for something to pry with and found what would work as a hammer and chisel. He went to work on the corner of the framing.

He scraped his knuckles and drew blood. The wood refused to move. He felt a shiver of dread. Forget the door. He'd get out another way. What had Sharon been doing as she tried to escape? He looked around the small room, stepped into the small bathroom, and realized she'd been chipping away at the tiles beneath the sink, following the pipes. “Great. This is going to be doable in the next decade.”

If he couldn't get the door to open, then he had to get into the walls. He turned and kicked the tiles and the wall, shaking the pipes and getting pieces of the wall to break away. With the fourth kick, the pipe broke, and cold water began to spray across the room.

No one could hear him as he cursed the mess. The water would run through the floor and soak through the ceiling and destroy his art collection in the room below him. If the cops had already left the home, it would be hours until his housekeeper came. They'd find him after the damage was irreversible.

Ignoring the water, he set to break into the wall to get himself out.

Chapter Forty-Four

L
uke tried to search while they flew over the land. The helicopter spotlight illuminated the tops of trees and the open fields momentarily as it passed over them, but outside the circle of light the area was near black. Homes in this stretch of ground were few and far between. “How many flares are left?”

“Twenty-three. I brought along extras.”

“Why don't you head north toward the river.”

Joe nodded and changed directions.