Fifth Victim

head sadly. ‘They should have got some serious help for her back then. Who knows how differently she might have turned out?’

‘Some people just don’t want to be helped.’

Parker’s cellphone buzzed and he slotted his Bluetooth headset in place before he took the call. I realised he’d been waiting for it, hence taking the bridge rather than the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, where the signal would have been non-existent.

‘Bill,’ he said shortly. ‘Go ahead.’

He seemed to spend the next few miles listening more than talking, his face growing darker all the while. When he finally ended the call, he took the headset off and chucked it onto the dash in frustration.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m assuming that wasn’t good news.’

‘Bill can’t find anything on Trevanion,’ he said. ‘And I mean anything. Fake name, fake addresses, fake references. No record of him with Immigration. Zip. Looks like he’d created a legend for himself that would stand up to initial scrutiny, but as soon as we dug down a layer, it all collapsed.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah, that’s about the size of it,’ he agreed with a little sideways glance. ‘That’s not all. This guy’s good – good enough to hack into a secure comms network and traffic light control programs. Bill said by digging around he’s triggered some kind of alert in the system.’

‘Shit,’ I said again, with a touch more feeling this time. ‘So he knows we’re onto him.’

He might kill Dina and run, just to cut his losses …

‘There’s ten million at stake,’ Parker said tightly. ‘He won’t cut and run now. This is what he’s been working toward.’

I wished I shared his confidence.

We headed east out of the city, against the traffic and into a fresh sun rising weakly from the ocean as if waterlogged by last night’s storm.

Dina had now been kidnapped for forty-four hours.

The deadline was ten hours away.

I cursed again the chance meeting that had caused me to open up to Hunt. ‘But how did he know where to find me?’ I wondered aloud into the quiet interior of the vehicle, and caught the twitch of Parker’s head in my direction. ‘The more I think about it, the more I can’t believe it was coincidence, him just happening to turn up as I was leaving Orlando’s parents’.’

‘You think he might have slipped a tracker on you?’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ I said. ‘Mind you, he didn’t have to bother doing that with Torquil’s ransom, did he? Gleason had two trackers on me then – one on me and one on the money. If Hunt’s so clever he can interfere with traffic lights, I’m sure he could have hacked into the GPS system and followed me that way.’

Parker’s face was grave. ‘All the company vehicles have on-board trackers in case of theft,’ he said. ‘If he’s activated this one, he knows exactly where you’ve been over the past twenty-four hours, and who you’ve talked to.’

‘There’s one person I didn’t meet at a known location,’ I said. ‘One person Hunt couldn’t know for certain I’ve been in contact with.’ Parker merely raised an eyebrow in my direction. ‘Ross. At least, I bloody well hope he doesn’t know – for all our sakes.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

‘He’s not going to call, is he?’ Caroline Willner said quietly.

We were gathered tensely in the living area at the Willners’ house. Beyond the wall of glass was a dull grey sky, specked with seagulls squabbling over the heaped kelp and general detritus that marked the edges of the tideline.

It was ten minutes past four o’clock in the afternoon. Ten minutes past the deadline the kidnappers had set. Ten minutes past the time we should have received detailed instructions about the ransom drop.

‘With this much cash at stake? He’ll call,’ Brandon Eisenberg said, his voice more confident than his tightly clasped hands would suggest. His wife had stayed away this time, I noticed, although Gleason was in attendance, taking up her usual position just behind his chair.

I wondered if Eisenberg felt guilt or vindication that he’d tried to palm off a paste copy of the Rainbow onto his son’s kidnappers. In the end, it hadn’t made any difference to the outcome. The boy was still dead.

But if they’d got their prize, would they have taken Dina so soon afterwards, and asked so much by way of retribution?

Parker glanced at me and said nothing. He’d spent the day fending off the authorities. I didn’t ask how Eisenberg himself had got them off his back. Made a few calls, probably. A guy like that always had a little black book of the right phone numbers.

When we’d got back to the house earlier this morning, we’d driven the Navigator straight into the garage and checked out the underside. Sure enough, we’d found a small magnetic GPS tracking device attached to the chassis where it was well hidden from our daily inspections. Nevertheless, I’d be beating myself up about missing it for some time to come.

I was beating myself up about so much at the moment that it could take a number.

If she dies, it’s on your head, Fox …

Bill Rendelson was currently trying to backtrack the signal from the tracker, but it was configured to fire off high-speed bursts of information that were almost impossible to follow – unless you were set up for the task.

Hunt, it seemed, had been one step ahead of us all the way.

He’d now had Dina for fifty-four hours, and the clock was still ticking.

I closed my mind to the fact that by the time Torquil had been gone this long, we knew for certain he was already dead.

I admit I was so tense that I jumped when my cellphone rang. I rose with a murmured apology for the interruption, moved across to the window. I didn’t recognise the number on the display, so I answered with a cautious, ‘Yeah?’

‘Uh, hi there, ma’am,’ said a man’s voice, careful and polite, a lifelong Brooklyn accent. ‘I’m tryin’a reach Charlie Fox. He there?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I’m Fox. Who’s this?’

‘Ah … oh,’ the man’s voice said, and I had the impression of his heart suddenly landing in his boots as whatever news he had to impart took on an added element of difficulty. ‘Well, ma’am, my name’s Officer O’Leary, from the Sixtieth precinct. We just picked up a gunshot victim, a young kid, asking for you.’

I said sharply, ‘A girl?’ Aware that Parker’s head had snapped round.

‘Uh, no,’ O’Leary said, caution forming around his words like frost. ‘Guy by the name of … um …’ I heard rustling as he leafed through his notebook, ‘… Ross Martino. You know him?’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly. ‘I know him.’ I reached automatically for the Navigator’s keys, which were still in my jacket pocket. ‘Which hospital? I can be there in—’

O’Leary gave a heavy sigh. ‘There’s no need to rush, ma’am,’ he said, and I heard years of weary experience in his voice. ‘Look, I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but … the kid didn’t make it. It was a real nasty one, and by the time the paramedics reached him …’ I heard the shrug as he broke off. Wasn’t the first time he’d had to make this kind of call and no doubt it wouldn’t be the last.

‘Oh,’ I said blankly, mind reeling. Shit. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t really know him all that well. Can I ask … why are you calling me?’

Without any background to our relationship, O’Leary seemed taken aback.

‘Well, he seemed to think it was real important we contacted you,’ he said, with a note of censure. ‘Look, by the time we got there, he wasn’t makin’ much sense, y’know?’ He paused, obviously reassured enough by my claims of distance from the victim to expand. ‘He’d taken one in the gut. It was kinda messy, if you know what I mean?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I murmured, remembering the shot the masked kidnapper – Hunt? – had aimed squarely into my own body. McGregor, Parker had told us, had lost his spleen and a part of his intestine as a result of his injuries.