Third Strike

their way into my mother’s house, threatened her, frightened her, and been prepared to do untold damage to whoever came to her aid. I relaxed, shrugging off the guilt that had been nudging at my shoulder. All things considered, she’d got off lightly.

Vonda. Not a name I’d come across before. It suited her, sort of, although she’d always be Vondie to me.

“When you say she’s one of yours, does that mean she was on an assignment of some kind?” Sean asked, picking his words to be as neutral as possible.

Collingwood winced, as if he’d been hoping for something more reassuring than that. Or at least something different. There was a light sheen of sweat coating his forehead. “Not exactly,” he said. “She’s been on leave for the last couple of weeks. Look, can you at least tell me if she’s still alive or—”

“She was when that picture was taken,” I said, taking pity on his patent distress.

“Well, thank the good Lord for that,” he said, slumping back in his chair, hands dangling. “That shot came down the wire and we thought … I thought …” He stopped, shook his head and added, almost to himself, “Whatever she’s gotten herself into, she didn’t deserve—”

“Just what has she gotten herself into, Mr. Collingwood?” Parker asked, still in that dangerously quiet tone.

“Hm?” Collingwood looked up, distracted, and Parker had to repeat his question. “Well, I can’t go into details—you understand—but we suspect that Miss Blaylock has been doing a little, ah, freelancing, put it that way. Either on the company dime, or on her own. I had a conversation with her about it, gave her the opportunity to come clean.” He looked at the photo again. “She didn’t take it—just put in for vacation time. An internal inquiry was scheduled for when she got back at the start of this week, but she never showed, and all our attempts to locate her have failed—until that arrived.” He jerked his head to the photo. “What happened to her?”

I did.

Rejecting brutal honesty, I said, “She took part in a scheme to blackmail my father, Richard Foxcroft, by kidnapping my mother.” I was watching his face while I spoke to see if any of this was news to him. If it wasn’t, he gave a pretty convincing display of bewildered consternation. “In England,” I added, as though that made it so much worse.

“Are you sure about this?” He looked blankly around us, as if we were all going to crack up and admit that we were joking. “I mean, ah, how reliable is your intel?”

“Very,” I said. “By the time we arrived to, ah, remedy the situation,” I went on, matching my style of delivery to his, “your Miss Blaylock was pretty well dug in and prepared to repel boarders. How else do you think she ended up with her nose splattered all over her face?”

Collingwood wiped a thoughtful hand across his chin and I heard the slight rasp of his fingers against the stubble. The guy had a few tufts of body hair protruding from the ends of his shirt cuffs and just below his Adam’s apple, too. He must have had to shave twice a day just to stop people calling out Animal Control.

“So you took the picture,” he said. “I did,” Sean said. He shrugged, untainted by guilt of any kind. “We wanted to know who she was and who she was working for, and she wasn’t keen to tell us.”

“So all you did was ask, huh?” Collingwood demanded with outright suspicion. “No rough stuff?”

“I may have raised my voice towards her,” Sean said blandly, carefully sidestepping what he’d done to her companion instead. “But the fight was over by then. And I’m hardly a torturer.”

No, he wasn’t, I reflected, but he was a damned good interrogator. Cold, ruthless and utterly relentless. I’d been on the receiving end during my Special Forces training and, even though a part of me had always clung to the shrinking reality that it was all just a game, his innate menace and his aptitude for arrowing in on fear and weakness had terrified everyone who’d had to endure it.

“We reasoned that identifying her would be by far the best way to neutralize whatever threat she presented,” Sean continued, sounding perfectly reasonable.

“And afterward?”

Sean met his gaze straight and level. “We left Ms. Blaylock relatively unharmed.” He always was a better liar than me, too.

“But you’re telling us you had no idea of where she was going, or what she was doing?” Parker asked at that point, deflecting whatever doubts Collingwood might have been about to express. “Do your people normally inform you if they’re traveling overseas, for instance? Are they flagged at Immigration?”

“No—o,” Collingwood said slowly, sounding like he was drawing the word out to give himself time to think. “They’re not obliged to tell us. It was only after she disappeared that we ran checks and found she’d bought a plane ticket to the UK.”

So, he’d known Vondie had left the country long before I’d told him about my mother, I realized. And knowing we knew meant the rules of the game shifted slightly, that now he had nothing to lose by giving us a little more. Collingwood reached for the buff folder again and leafed through it, still careful not to let us get a look at the contents.

“Here you go—she flies into Manchester, England, just over a week ago. After that, we lose her. She just drops right off the grid. According to the Brits, she hasn’t used any of her credit cards or even switched on her cell phone since she landed. She missed her return flight, didn’t turn up at work when she was due. I don’t mind telling you that we’re seriously concerned for her safety.”

“Was she traveling alone?” I asked, trying to keep any inflection out of my voice.

Collingwood ducked his head again, then made a little side-to-side movement, which I took to mean yes/no/maybe.

“She booked and paid for the flight herself, but we pulled the manifest,” he said cautiously, opening his case for that piece of paperwork and handing it over. I took it without comment, leafed through the pages. It came as no surprise to find Don Kaminski on there as well, but I let my eyes drop past his name without a waver, sedately read all the way to the end and put the sheaf down onto the table.

When I looked up I found Collingwood had been watching me closely. But if the disappointed twitch in the side of his face was anything to go by, I hadn’t shown him what he’d been hoping to see.

Where his left hand hung over the arm of the chair his fingers performed an unconscious little dance, rubbing the pad of his thumb across his fingertips, back and forth like he was checking the viscosity of oil, or asking for a bribe. I wondered if he was even aware he was doing it.

“Okay, people—cards on the table time,” he said at last, tiredly. “We believe Agent Blaylock has been working with a guy called Don Kaminski, but I’m sure this information comes as no surprise to any of you—seeing as how you initially sent around a mug shot of Kaminski at the same time as that picture.” He nodded to the blowup of Vondie and allowed himself a wry smile. “I’m assuming from the fact that you stopped asking about him, that means you ID’d him pretty fast. Am I right?”

Parker inclined his head a fraction, a faint encouraging smile on his lips. It was the first movement he’d made since he sat down again. On either side of him, Sean and I were doing our best impersonations of the sphinx at Giza.

Collingwood gave a snort of frustration at our lack of a more emphatic response.

“Look, I know the business you’re in is pretty tight-knit, cliquey, so if you identified Kaminski and the outfit he works for, you’ll already know about his current contract and you’ll understand our, ah, interest?”

If Kaminski was working for the Boston hospital, I couldn’t for the life of me work out how someone like Collingwood might be involved, but I had a feeling if we played this right, we might just be about to find out.

I tried not to hold my breath, tried to force my muscles not to tense. Parker, with heroic restraint, merely gave a polite, almost bored nod, as though this was all information we were well aware of and he wished Collingwood would cut to the chase.

“So, what exactly is your interest, Mr. Collingwood?” he said, his face deceptively placid.

Judging by his weary expression, Collingwood took Parker’s question as awkwardness rather than ignorance. He gave a gusty sigh. “Storax Pharmaceutical, of course.”