eyes. Cold gray now.
“Can you—?”
“On what you gave me, no.”
“Then I—”
“Just give me the money,” Wolfe said.
I guessed I’d sent the killer what he wanted. When I opened the next message, he was right back. . . continuing from where he’d left off.
When I returned—allegedly from making a telephone call from some remote location—the child was munching calmly on some cookies, a glass of juice at her elbow, her face half buried in one of the books I had procured in anticipation of her stay. If the restraints bothered her in any way, it was not apparent.
“Did you call them?” she asked, looking up as casually as if I had been a legitimate member of her household who had gone out to perform some mundane task.
“I did,” I told her. “But there will be no response from them for a minimum of forty-eight hours. This whole process will take a certain amount of time.”
“How much time?” That was a reasonable question, especially from a child’s perspective. Usually, I am careful to keep the estimate quite short (bearing in mind, of course, that even the modified form of sensory deprivation attendant to keeping a captive away from all sources of natural light is sufficient to completely blur the concept of “days”), but I sensed that this child was simply asking for information, and not emotionally invested in the response.
“It could be as long as two or three weeks,” I said.
“Is it ever longer?” she asked.
I watched her eyes, aware that innocence is often a mask. Had she deduced my true calling from my prior conversation? Or was she somehow baiting me into revelation? Could she simply be curious? I decided to make no assumptions. . . .
“Why do you ask that? Do you think I have done this sort of thing before?”
“Oh, you must have,” she said, her little face perfectly serious. “You know everything about it. Nobody’s very good at something the first time they try it, are they?”
“Well,” I explained, “there is a difference between talent and skill.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Let us assume you have a natural talent for. . . oh, I don’t know, say painting, all right? Now, you would be quite good at it as soon as you picked up a brush. That is, you would have a natural. . . aptitude for it. But the more you practiced, the better you would become.”
“I have a natural talent,” the child piped up.
“And what is that?” I asked her.
“I can draw.”
“Can you?” I asked, simply to engage the child. Her work on the checkerboard pieces rendered her declaration quite superfluous.
“Yes, I can. I don’t mean trace, or color either. Not like a baby. I can draw.”
“What do you draw?” I asked her, drawing her (pun intended) further away from the potentially frightening aspects of her situation.
“I can draw anything,” she said with the smug confidence of the very young.
This disturbed me. I pride myself on being fully equipped, studying the child I capture well in advance to be prepared for any eventuality. For example, I once took a child who was diabetic. It was greatly reassuring to inform the parents on my very first call that I was aware of the problem and our “nurse” was on hand with all appropriate medications. Improvisation is not my forte, and leaving the hideout to obtain materials was out of the question. Still, I asked the child: “What do you need to draw?”
She looked at me questioningly, but said nothing. Clearly, she required a further explanation.
“What. . . materials?” I asked. “Paper, pencils. . . what sort of implements do you require?”
“Oh!” she said brightly. “I have everything. Right in my backpack.”
A momentary flash of paranoia—that is, paranoia in the classic psychiatric sense, not the functional hyper-vigilance which is the trademark of a successful practitioner of my profession—overcame me for an instant, but then I told her she was free to get what she needed.
“I can’t reach it,” she said.
And I saw she was speaking the truth. Her restraints permitted significant freedom of movement, but I had placed the backpack in a far corner of the basement, and it was, in fact, beyond her grasp. I walked over and picked it up. Professional experience commanded that I search it thoroughly. . . but the finely honed instincts— which are, obviously, not “instincts” at all, being not bio-genetic but actually the synthesis of sufficient experiences so that they surface as quickly as if encoded—developed over those same years caused me to hand it to the child without examination.
She took it from me as though she expected nothing less. Some captives are querulous and demanding. Others are abject and fearful. Some are floridly terrified, others virtually mute. This one fit no such definition. She was. . . at peace. Not with the resignation that comes over an individual when all hope is gone, but with the sense that the future, while immutable, was acceptable.
“Is everything there, Angelique?” I asked.
“My name isn’t Angelique,” she replied, not looking inside the backpack.
“Angel, then,” I offered.
“My name is Zoe,” she said in a voice that brooked no disagreement.
I avoided the usual adult trap of condescension and merely said, “My apologies, Zoe. Now. . . is
