Snatched Page 26

  His words were an electric shock. Judith jerked back, but he held on. “What two million dollars?” she managed to ask. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.” His gaze never left hers. “He would’ve gone to collect the ransom money straight off, once he was out. And wouldn’t he have been peeved to find it missing.”

  What ransom money? she wanted to demand. How on earth would she know anything about any two million dollars? She couldn’t force the words past the knot in her throat. Shame and dread boiled within her, and she wondered if she was going to vomit.

  In a raw whisper she asked, “Does Will know?”

  Fergus shook his head. “No one but me knows you were involved in his kidnapping.”

  Judith squeezed his fingers so hard, she was surprised he didn’t flinch. “He mustn’t find out, Fergus. Not ever. Promise me you won’t tell him.”

  “You’re the one must tell him, lass, not me.”

  She didn’t bother saying that would never happen, and not just for selfish reasons. She’d been responsible for Will’s terror and pain all those years ago when he was a helpless child. Revealing the truth now would not only obliterate her relationship with her brother and his son, it would revive his grief and add a particularly brutal new dimension.

  Your sister did this to you, Will. Your older half sister who was supposed to love you and nurture you and protect you from bad things.

  She wanted to explain it to Fergus, to make him understand who she’d been back then and that that person had nothing to do with the woman she was now. But she couldn’t even make herself look him in the eye. “How did you find out?”

  “Partly it was the timing. Lynch was picked up for the drug murder shortly after your brother’s kidnapping. Which was when you went from bein’ the life of the party to hardworkin’ single mom, overnight.”

  “‘The life of the party.’” Her smile was sad. “You are kind.”

  “But mostly it’s knowin’ that Lynch is your son’s da.”

  She should have been immune to surprise at this point, yet his words packed a wallop. “What did you do, find a photo of Hal?”

  “His old mug shots. I could’ve been looking at pictures of Mick with long hair and a serious coke habit.”

  “Why do you say the money was missing?” she asked. “Hal stashed it in several banks—it would have to be there as long as he kept paying rent on the safe-deposit boxes, and why on earth would he stop?”

  Fergus rose from his squat, perfectly at ease, it seemed, in his naked skin. “Is that what he told you? That he put it in banks?”

  “Where did he put it? Since you seem to know everything.”

  “Not everything, but I’m getting there. He buried the two million. Five years later, your brother dug it up. I’m dying for a beer—satisfyin’ a woman like you is thirsty work. You want one?” He headed out of the bedroom.

  It took Judith a moment to shake off her slack-jawed astonishment, then she ran after him. “Will dug up the money?”

  “Well, Gabby helped him.” Fergus pulled two bottles of North Rock pilsner out of the fridge and opened them. “He was too young to drive. She drove him around for months, lookin’ for the spot.”

  Judith batted away the beer he held out to her. “Fergus, what are you talking about? My brother never dug up his own ransom money. That’s . . . that’s absurd.”

  “Where do you think all his green stuff came from?”

  “From the residuals. The reruns.” In a weak voice she asked, “Didn’t it?”

  “The reruns never produced that kind of bread.” He took a deep pull of his beer. “Just as well everyone thinks they did, though. Avoids awkward conversations.”

  Judith slumped against the counter, rubbing her temples, struggling to assimilate and organize what she was learning. “If Will knew where the money was buried, why did he wait five years to get it?”

  “He knew, but he didn’t know he knew. He’d been havin’ a recurring nightmare, poor lad, from the day he was returned to his family.”

  After her father finally forked over the ransom, the family waited anxiously for instructions about where to find Will. Dad had been full of bluster and empty threats during those tense hours. If the kidnapper pulled a Lindbergh on him, he’d hunt down the cowardly cocksucker, shoot him in the balls, and watch him bleed to death. After he got his money back, of course.

  It came at three in the morning, one last, brief phone call naming a lonely, winding road in the Catskills about seventy-five miles from New York City. A battery of police cruisers and choppers converged on the location, and within minutes the boy had been spotted, wandering dazed along the side of the road.

  Judith said, “Ginny, his mother, sent him to therapy. I don’t think it helped much.” She followed Fergus through the sliding doors to the picnic table and chairs shaded by a khaki market umbrella. “Except for one thing. My father had fired Gabby immediately after the kidnapping. He accused her of negligence in letting it happen, even of being in on it herself, though of course, the police never took his ranting seriously. Anyway, Ginny had grown a backbone by then, and when one of the shrinks told her Gabby’s absence was detrimental to Will’s psychological recovery, she defied my father and hired her back.”

  “It was Gabby who finally decided to try hypnotherapy for him.” Fergus set down his beer. “She read an article about it in the Times science section. That’s where she got my name—they interviewed me for the piece. Will was fourteen then.”

  Judith’s eyes grew round. “That’s how you met? You were his shrink?”

  “Number ten or eleven, something like that. None of them had been able to help him. The kid was still a sleepless wreck. Clearly, talk therapy was not the answer.”

  “You’ve known Will that long? I had no idea.” Judith didn’t meet Fergus until several years later when Will bought the property from the church. By that time Fergus had apparently given up the practice of psychiatry. “So you hypnotized him.”

  He nodded. “My Freudian colleagues had taken their best shots at interpreting the dream. The grave, the giant tooth, all of it. Then I put Will under and what do you know—it wasn’t Death in a black cape with a scythe, after all, but a bad man in a rain poncho with a shovel. The giant tooth was a boulder—Lynch’s marker so he could locate the cash again after everything cooled down.”

  “There was a boulder like that in those woods. How on earth did Will manage to see it, tied up like he was, and after all he’d been through?” Judith’s throat clogged with emotion. “What a strong kid. I had no idea.”

  “We figured he was held in some sort of vehicle parked in the woods,” he said. “A truck or camper. Something with a window.”

  “Lots of windows, actually. It was the Puny Earthlings’ tour bus.”

  Fergus got that aha look. “Of course.”

  “How did Will know where to find that boulder, years later? I know for a fact he was driven there blindfolded in a van with no windows.” She knew it because she’d been at the wheel of the van, a detail Fergus could no doubt surmise.

  “Gabby guessed the tooth boulder would be within a few miles of where Will had been released. The two of them drove up there every weekend for months, in all weather, exploring back roads and wooded trails, markin’ off where they’d been on a map. Their route looked like a rough spiral with little branches here and there. They became kind of obsessive about it, turned it into a hobby. Told the family they were fossil-huntin’ or some such.”

  “And they found it. The boulder.”

  Fergus nodded. “They found it on a hot Sunday in August. Finally got to use the shovels they’d been haulin’ around for so long. Gabby invested the money for Will until he turned eighteen.”

  “And the family had no idea.” Judith shook her head in wonder. “Everyone assumed the kidnapper had gotten away with the ransom money. Well, except for me. I figured it would molder in those safe-deposit boxes until Hal croaked behind b
ars and the rental fees stopped. How did Will and Gabby know the cash would still be where he’d buried it?”

  “They didn’t, but they figured it was worth a try. Either way, it was good post-traumatic therapy for Will, takin’ the active role, hunting the kidnapper’s prize, just as the kidnapper had hunted him.” Fergus looked directly at her. “Will said there was someone else in that bus. The nurse, he called her. A kind, gentle lady who gave him shots for the pain.”

  Judith looked down, fighting for composure. She didn’t deserve the luxury of tears. “Morphine,” she said quietly. “It was all I could do. That’s probably why his memories got all muddled—he was high most of the time at that point.”

  “I know that wasn’t your idea, Judith. Takin’ the boy’s finger.”

  “Hal didn’t expect my dad to balk at the ransom,” she said. “Neither did I. I should have, knowing how he was. Hal was the real wild card, though I didn’t know that until it was too late. The whole thing was my fault. I was so . . . stupid.”

  “You came up with the idea to kidnap your brother?”

  Judith nodded miserably. She reached for Fergus’s beer bottle and took a healthy swig.

  “You just went up to your boyfriend Hal one day and said, here’s a way we can make some easy cash.”

  “Well, no, of course not,” she said. “He knew I was concerned, though. Ricky was getting all the attention, and I was such a screw-up. I was pretty certain Dad had cut me out of his will.”

  “So how did you broach the subject to Lynch?”

  “I . . . it wasn’t exactly like that. Why are you harping on this? I’m not one of your neurotic patients, Dr. Dowd. I’ve had a long time to mull this whole thing over from every possible angle.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Yeah, right.” She drained his beer.

  “You weren’t the first girl to gripe to her boyfriend about her family. But it’s the rare boyfriend who suggests kidnapping and ransom.”

  “What can I tell you?” Judith said. “I know how to pick ’em.”

  “So it was Lynch’s idea.”

  She gave an exasperated sigh. “Okay, technically? Hal was the first to voice the thought. I know what you’re trying to do, Fergus. You’re trying to absolve me of responsibility so you can persuade yourself you’re not banging a felon.”

  “I appreciate your thoughtful analysis, Doctor Drinkwater, but allow me to offer my take on it. You’ve spent the past twenty-five years floggin’ yourself over a criminal deed you neither initiated nor executed. Lynch recognized an opportunity. He exploited your weaknesses and manipulated you into thinkin’ it was all your idea, thus ensuring you’d have a stake in seeing the thing through to the end and not squealin’ on him. It’s what sociopaths do. Well, that and maim innocent children. See, they don’t have that pesky conscience tellin’ ’em not to.”

  Judith opened her mouth to rebut his statement, but the words refused to form. Instead she said, “It didn’t work.” At his perplexed expression, she explained, “If that’s what Hal was trying to do, to get me so inextricably involved I’d never blow the whistle, then he miscalculated.”

  “But you didn’t blow the whistle. Not about the kidnapping, anyway.”

  “No, but he knew I was prepared to,” she said. “It was after he cut off Will’s finger. I had no doubt he was capable of worse. He even threatened to kill him. If you hurt my brother again, I said, just one little scratch, I’ll have the cops on you before you can blink.”

  “But then he’d just turn around and squeal on you,” Fergus said.

  “Sure, I’d go to jail, too, but at that point I was beyond caring, and he knew it. All I wanted was for Will to go back home and for neither of us ever to see Hal Lynch again. I didn’t want the money. The very thought of that money sickened me.”

  “You saved your brother’s life.”

  “Oh, Fergus, please.”

  “You were willing to risk a kidnapping conviction to protect him.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if Hal hacked up that poor drug dealer out of frustration over not being able to . . .” To do the same thing to Will. She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “Anyway, I saw my opportunity to put that monster away and I took it. I didn’t think twice and I’ve never regretted it.”

  “Nor should you.”

  She leaned forward. “But now he’s out. And the money’s not where he left it. Fergus, I know this man, I don’t care how many years have passed. He’s not going to throw his hands up and say, oh well, these things happen, and walk away.”

  “That’s why you’re not goin’ home,” Fergus said. “Not until I’ve had a chance to track down Lynch and make sure he’s not a threat to you. I’ll grab the next flight—”

  “Of course I’m going home.”

  “Judith—”

  “Do you think I could sit here twiddling my thumbs while that maniac is running around loose, looking for me, looking for . . .” She grabbed his arm. “Fergus, what about Mick? If Hal comes looking for me . . . one look at Mick and he’ll know he’s his son. I was counting on them never meeting.” She didn’t say the rest, about how immature and impressionable Mick was, and how dangerous his father was. She didn’t have to.

  Fergus stood. “Does your cell have a charge?”

  Moments later she was listening to her groggy son berate her for waking him; it was nearly noon, New York time. She grilled him on whether anyone had come looking for her, and got a lot of whaddaya means and how the fuck should I knows in return. She thought he sounded evasive, but how to distinguish between evasion and Mick’s customary apathy and insolence?

  “Listen to me, Mick. There’s someone . . . there’s a man who might show up. He’s not a friend. Well, he used to be a friend.”

  “What kind of friend?” Insolence edged out apathy in his voice.

  Judith’s fingers tightened around the cell phone. “He’s not to be trusted. He’s about my age, a little older. Don’t let him in the house. Let me know immediately if he shows up.”

  “Does this former friend have a name?” Mick asked.

  Judith hesitated. Fergus signaled her to give him the phone. She shook her head and turned away. “His name is Hal Lynch. Harold. He might, um . . .” She swallowed hard; her hands trembled. “He might use a different name, though.”

  “What did this guy do that’s got you so freaked?”

  “I can’t get into it right now. I just need you to watch out for him, okay? And if you could—”

  “I gotta take a leak.”

  “Goddammit, Mick, listen to me.” Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. “This is not a game. This person could be . . . He’s dangerous, okay? I’ll be home as soon as I can. I promise I’ll explain it all when I see you, but in the meantime I also need you to keep an eye on your uncle Will’s place in case Hal shows up there. Don’t, um, don’t discuss it with Will, though—no sense alarming him.” She took a deep breath. “I’m trusting you to do this for me, Mick.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I won’t open the door to strangers.” Mick yawned. “I’ll look both ways and cross at the light.”

  Judith slumped in defeat. Fergus snatched the phone from her and growled into it, “Listen, Mick, you haven’t a clue what you’re dealin’ with if this fella shows up.”

  Judith shook her head violently and mouthed, Let me handle it. She tried to commandeer the phone, with no success. Mick said something that made the vein bulge in Fergus’s forehead, and she knew it was about Fergus and her.

  “You’re quite the brave lad when you’ve an ocean at your back. Here’s a bit of free advice, you mouthy piece o’ shite. If you drop the ball on this one, don’t be around when I get back.”

  Chapter 24

  IT WAS NO longer about the money. Wesley flipped up the collar of his dark gray trench coat against the misty drizzle as he made his way from the little parking strip past the duck pond to the band shell at the rear of the park. It hadn’t been about the money since the moment
he connected Will Kitchen to Ricky Baines and the unsolved kidnapping that had nagged at him for twenty-five years. During the six days since he’d encountered Kitchen and that parrot, the case had dominated his thoughts.

  Not that he’d forgotten about the two million. He was still curious about what had become of the ransom money, but only insofar as a means to solving the most frustrating unsolved case of his police career. As to how the cash might have ended up with the kidnap victim, Hal had promised to enlighten him on that point during this meeting. With any luck, Wesley would come away with enough new information to persuade the NYPD to reopen the cold case.

  He still had a couple of buddies on the force, stand-up guys who never gave a shit about his sexual orientation, guys who’d stood by his side after he’d been outed. Friends like that, you don’t burn off, and Wesley had kept in touch over the years. He’d been to Larry and Cliff’s weddings, to their kids’ first Communions and their weddings. And next December in Lowell they’d be watching him and Joe tie the knot at long last. And he’d get to tease Larry for squirting tears the way he always did at weddings, get to call him a big old girly-man.

  The big old girly-man had come through. Just yesterday Wesley had been able to paw through the old case file and physical evidence in the Baines kidnapping. It was all just as he remembered it, but forensic science had advanced by leaps and bounds in the past quarter century. As Wesley stood in the police warehouse staring at the contents of that evidence box, specifically at the spots of crusted human blood on the towel he’d used to subdue Quint, the next step was obvious.

  His stride slowed as he approached the ugly concrete band shell. He scanned his surroundings. The small public park was deserted; no surprise considering the shitty weather. It was just him and a few glum-looking geese who probably wished they’d waited another week or two before hauling their asses up here from Fort Lauderdale or wherever it was they spent the winter.