Stalked (34 page)

“No? I heard you mention your cock, Dan. That always concerns me.”

“Funny.”

“It’s not funny at all,” Lauren said. “What have you done?”

Dan was silent. Lauren turned to Stride with a question in her eyes.

“He’s being blackmailed,” Stride said. “He hired Serena to be the go-between. The blackmailer kidnapped her tonight.”

“Oh, my God.”

“This guy is blowing up all the mines he buried, Dan,” Stride told him. “Mitchell Brandt was paying off your blackmailer over an insider trading scheme, and this guy decided to fuck him. You’re next. Don’t you get it, Dan? Your number’s up. This guy is capable of anything. We think he’s already added rape and murder to his extortion racket.”

“How much did you pay him?” Lauren asked her husband.

Dan didn’t answer.

“
How much
?”

“A hundred and ten thousand dollars.”

“You idiot,” Lauren snapped.

“What does he have on you?” Stride asked.

Dan hesitated and looked at Lauren.

“Tell him,” she said. “Tell
both
of us.”

Dan shrugged. “It was Tanjy.”

“Did you rape her?” Stride asked. “Did you kill her? Is that what this is all about?”

“No! We were having an affair.”

Stride shook his head. “Why was that worth so much money?”

“You know what Tanjy’s fantasies were like. We did things that no one would understand. He had photos of us. It would have been devastating if people found out.”

“Did you kill Tanjy to keep her quiet?” Stride asked.

“No, no, that’s not what happened at all.”

Lauren’s face was a mask of granite. “You realize what this means. This is all going to be in the papers.” She looked at Stride. “Am I right?”

Stride nodded.

“Washington is gone,” she told Dan. “We’re ruined.”

“It was never supposed to come out,” Dan protested.

“Who do you think you are, JFK? Bill Clinton? You think you can get away with anything? I can’t believe what you’ve done to me. It’s all over now, Dan. Do you realize that? You just threw our lives away.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Was it really worth it?” Lauren demanded. “Was
she
worth it?”

Dan stared at her hard, and Stride wondered if it was the first time in his life that he had told her the truth. “Yeah, she was.”

Lauren stalked across the room and slapped him so hard it sounded like a rifle firing. It was an end-of-life slap. End of everything. Lauren and Dan were over the cliff. She turned and marched out of the room, and five seconds later the front door slammed so hard that the old house quivered.

“We need to find this guy,” Stride repeated. “I need to know who he is.”

“I have no idea.”

“Then we’re going to sit here and figure out how he tore apart your life, and how he tore apart Mitchell Brandt’s life, and how he knew about Sonia and the goddamn sex club. And don’t tell me you didn’t know about the club.”

“I knew about it,” Dan admitted. “Look, Stride, I didn’t want to tell you this, but there’s something else. I don’t think it will help us find him, but you should probably know about it.”

“Go on.”

“This guy’s obsessed with Serena,” Dan said. “He was obsessed with her from the very beginning.”

“What do you mean?” Stride asked. He could barely breathe.

“I mean, it wasn’t an accident that I hired Serena to be the go-between. That was part of the deal. Part of the price. He didn’t just want money when he first approached me. He wanted Serena.”

Stride let the silence drag out between them and grow violent. Hostility filled the room like smoke flooding from the air vents. They stared at each other. The computer on Dan’s desk whirred as its fan blew. Somewhere outside, the engine of an expensive sedan raced as Lauren fled from the garage and away from the estate.

“I had no idea anything like this would happen,” Dan said.

“You should have had alarm bells going off in your head, but you just didn’t care. You were trying to save your ass.”

Dan shrugged. “All right, maybe I was.”

“If something happens to Serena, I will destroy you.”

“You’ll have to take a number.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Look, I did
not
think it would go down like this. You know as well I do that most blackmailers aren’t violent. They’re cowards at heart. I thought maybe this guy had a crush on Serena, or hell, I thought they might be in it together. She was new in town. I had no idea who the hell she was.”

Stride didn’t believe him, but it didn’t matter. He shoved his anger aside. “Do you have any clue who this guy is?”

“I told you, no.”

“Did Serena?”

“If she did, she never told me.”

“How did he contact you?”

“The first time was by phone,” Dan said. “He called me at home.”

“When?”

“Last Tuesday.”

“What did he say?” Stride asked.

“He knew about my affair with Tanjy.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted ten thousand dollars, or he was going to tell the press and Lauren about my affair.”

“Did he say why he wanted Serena involved?”

“No, he just said he knew I wasn’t going to want to handle the dirty work personally, so there was someone who could be our go-between. I don’t know how he knew her, or why he wanted her.”

“How did he know about you and Tanjy?”

“I have no idea.”

“What happened next?”

“I paid him, end of story. Serena handled the drop. A few days later, he gave Serena a very explicit photograph of me and Tanjy in Grassy Point Park. This time the price went way up.”

“How did he get the photo?”

“Like I told Serena, I don’t know. Tanjy took them, but I deleted them from her computer. No way this guy should have been able to find them.”

“Were the photos stored anywhere else? Were they on your computer?”

“No, Tanjy took them on a digital camera, and I uploaded them to her PC for her. As far as I know, that was it. She sure as hell wouldn’t have shared them with anyone else. I got rid of them back in November, after the rape charge blew up and Tanjy and I split.”

“So she could have retrieved them.”

“Tanjy? That girl needed a manual to turn her computer on.”

“Well, someone retrieved them. Unless this guy found them
before
you deleted them.”

“Then why wait to blackmail me?”

Stride nodded. He didn’t understand the logic, but he also realized he was getting close to something important. The blackmailer had to have access to Tanjy’s computer.

“What if this guy is a hacker?” Stride asked. “He could be intercepting e-mails, or breaking in via an Internet connection, or piggybacking on a wireless network.”

Stride thought about everything else the blackmailer knew and felt his adrenaline surging. Mitchell Brandt and his insider trading scheme.
Dates, trades, dollars
, Brandt had said. The sex club and Sonia, who kept detailed records about the club on her desktop. Photos of Tanjy and Dan. Stored on Tanjy’s computer.

“No way this guy got into Tanjy’s machine from outside,” Dan said. “It must be someone who was inside her apartment.”

Stride thought about his first visit to Tanjy’s apartment and then remembered the kid from across the street who spent his days spying on Tanjy from his bedroom window. What the hell was his name? Doug? Duke? If Stride got into her place simply by unlocking a window, how many times had this kid done the same thing? What if he booted up Tanjy’s computer and found a gold mine?

Stride was excited, but then he discarded the thought. Even if the kid had a connection to Tanjy, it didn’t explain how he could have known what Mitchell Brandt or Sonia Bezac were hiding.

He thought about what Dan had just said. “Why are you so sure this guy didn’t hack in from outside?”

“I made sure she installed a state-of-the-art firewall,” Dan replied. “I knew the kind of stuff she was keeping on her system, and I didn’t want anyone swiping it.”

“You said she was hopeless with computers.”

“Sure, she called Byte Patrol. They configured the firewall for her.”

Stride stopped. Everything stopped. “Byte Patrol? Those are the guys in the purple vans, right? And the purple shirts?”

“Yeah, you see them all over town.”

One by one, Stride remembered. The details broke away from the mass of facts in his head and dropped like coins plinking into the metal tray of a slot machine. The cherries lined up, and he cashed out.

He was in Tanjy’s bedroom, and he saw the neon purple folder next to her computer.

He was in Sonia’s living room, and she was telling him about the hacker-proof security system on her computer. Installed by Byte Patrol.

He was talking to Mitchell Brandt and hearing about the research software he used. Designed by Byte Patrol.

He was inside Silk, and Sonia was chewing out a tech in a purple shirt. The guy was like a bear, his giant paws over the keyboard. Stride tried to picture exactly what the man looked like, but all he could remember was the instant where the tech caught Stride’s eye and winked.

The man from Byte Patrol knew exactly who Stride was. He was laughing at his own joke. This was the man who knew everything hidden inside the computers. This was the man who was pulling strings and selling secrets all over the city. This was the man who had raped Maggie.

Stride thought about Eric talking to Tony Wells.
How can you tell if someone ordinary could be a sexual predator
?

This was the man
, Stride thought,
that Eric went to see that night
.

This was the man who had Serena.

Serena knew she was awake because of the pain. Her skull felt as if someone had punched it in like an eggshell. When she turned her neck, a jolt of agony shivered up her spine and made her whole body jerk. When she opened her eyes, she saw only black but felt the world spin. She tried to move her hands, but they were bound. So were her feet. She was pinned down, a butterfly captured by a collector. The mattress below her felt like burlap and scratched her skin. It smelled of mold and blood. The air carried a waft of gutted fish spilling out roe, bones, and organs. She tried to talk, shout, cry, and scream, but she was gagged, and the taste of wet cotton soured her mouth. Her throat squealed out a sound so pitiful that the wind laughed at it.

The blizzard was a monster inches away, noisy and ferocious. Steel rattled and quivered as the gales assaulted metal walls. She heard hissing, like a thousand snakes, which was the whip of snow, as furious as a tornado. Wherever she was, she may as well have been outside, because there was no protection here from the wind and cold blasting through the walls. The frozen air across her skin told her she was naked. Her bare flesh puckered. Her toes curled, and she tightened her fingers into fists. A drop of water fell on her through the ceiling, tracing an icy trail down her thigh.

She cursed herself for being so stupid. Not telling Jonny. Not watching her back. She was a prisoner now, and she didn’t fool herself with hopes of rescue, and she knew it was going to be bad. The kind of bad when you realized there was no God coming for you. The kind of bad she had been through before.

He was in the room with her. Every few seconds, she heard the screech of wood and nails separating as he shifted in a rickety chair. Without seeing him, she felt his eyes. She wanted him to say something. She wanted it to begin and be over with, but long minutes passed where he let her struggle in her blind, cold world, as if he knew that the waiting was worst of all. She felt like a child in line for a scary ride, her stomach balling up into fear.

She told herself it didn’t matter. It was just pain. Long ago, she had taught herself how to tunnel inside her brain to hide from pain. To switch off her emotions until she felt nothing at all. No hurt. No fury. No love. She tried to remember how she had done it, how she could follow the trail there again, how she could find that place. Even now, she found herself resisting, not wanting to go back. Nothingness was a torture all its own, a soundless room that she had spent decades trying to escape.

She struggled at her bonds, feeling the bed jostle and shake as she tried to free herself, knowing she was wasting her strength. He laughed, the first real sound he had made, and then she heard him stand up. She smelled him getting closer. She tried to wriggle backward, but there was nowhere to go. He bent over her. His breath was in her face. She wrenched her face away, but his fingers grabbed her jaw like a pincer and twisted her back.

“I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said.

She tried to drown out his voice and the odd echoes of terror it awakened in her. She focused on the storm, imagining the burying snow on the other side of the wall, wondering if the wind would pick her up and carry her away.

He dragged something cold and sharp against her skin, starting at her neck, making a line across her throat with what she realized was the point of a knife. He pushed deep enough to make her squirm but not enough to break the skin. The knife explored her like a curious animal. It made a circle around her breasts, and then her aureoles, and then punctured one nipple in the very center, a pinprick that made her shudder and drew a wet, warm drop of blood.

Unbidden, tears streamed down her face.

The knife moved lower, scraping through her navel, detouring to her thighs, pushing up under the bones of her knees, running up the balls of her feet, climbing back up and zeroing in between her legs. He turned the knife and laid the cold flat of the blade along her mound. She tensed and hunted for the faraway place, the nothingness room, but it was lost in her brain, and she didn’t know where to find it.

“I should sign my work,” he said. “That way, when Stride finds you, he’ll know who it was.”

She threw her head back and forth violently, ignoring the pain in her skull, and thrust her body up off the bed at him. Another scream died in the wet cotton in her mouth. He waited until her resistance ran out of force, and she collapsed backward, spent, dizzy.