This was Jan Jorgenson’s first child abduction. Engaged to the Bureau for eleven months now, she had always assumed that one day she would marry and have children; but now, seeing the father’s pain at the loss of his child, a pain that a billion dollars could not console, she wasn’t so sure. Her question now seemed an awful burden.
“Mr. Brice…”
John stared at the female FBI agent and tried to understand her words. His brain felt fragmented. He couldn’t process what he thought he had heard her say. Why was she asking about Gracie’s “Underwear?”
John turned to the other FBI agents, the ones setting up the recording equipment for when the kidnapper called and demanded ransom-a million, five million, ten million-he didn’t freaking care how much. He would pay it and Gracie would come home. That’s the deal! His eyes darted from agent to agent to agent. They were staring down at their equipment.
“But you said… I thought… I thought it was about money.”
Until that very moment, it had never occurred to John R. Brice that his money might not be the motive for his daughter’s abduction. He suddenly felt sick. A searing heat spread over his face. He thought he might faint. His upper body fell forward until his hands caught his head. He pulled his glasses off his face; the world around him was a blur, but the image inside his head was 20/20 sharp: Gracie… and a man… and…
“Oh, God.”
He started crying. He couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t even try. He gave up the fight.
The doorbell rang again just as Elizabeth entered the study. Five grim-faced FBI agents simultaneously looked at her then quickly averted their eyes. Her husband was sitting between two agents on the sofa. His face was in his hands; he was crying inconsolably. Her body clenched with her greatest fear.
“Is it Grace?” she asked.
The lead FBI agent shook his head. Fear released its grip on Elizabeth’s body. She breathed out a “Thank God.” She then turned to her husband. “John, what’s wrong?”
His sobbing did not abate. Elizabeth went to him and stood over his pitiful figure, debating whether to console him or to slap him senseless for allowing her daughter to be abducted. The agents sitting on the sofa relocated across the room. Over her husband’s slumped head, she asked Agent Devereaux, “What happened?”
Agent Devereaux sighed. “We had to ask, Mrs. Brice. We need a complete description of Gracie’s clothing, including her…”
“Underwear.”
Agent Devereaux nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
Elizabeth’s mind was so chaotic with wild thoughts that she had forgotten she had sent the female FBI agent to John with that question. She put her left hand on her husband’s shoulder.
“John,” she said softly. He looked up at her with red eyes and tears rolling down his face and snot running out of his nose and a trembling chin. He wiped the snot on his shirtsleeve. Her little boy.
John Brice had married her when she needed a husband. And he had been a good husband: he had never embarrassed her in public or crossed her in private; he had always sent flowers to her office on her birthday and their anniversary, not that she had any inclination for romance; and he was a loving father to both children and a genius at math, the perfect skill in a wired world. John R. Brice was a gentle brilliant boy… and utterly useless in a fight. He had nothing but a Ph. D. to fall back on in times like this, no reserve of intestinal fortitude to draw upon when you had to be hard and mean and ruthless; he was not like her-she could easily stick a gun to the abductor’s head and blow his fucking brains out if necessary to save Grace. John Brice was not hard or mean or ruthless. He was just a thirty-seven-year-old little boy, looking up at her like he had just been beaten up by the neighborhood bully and needed mommy to hug him and make it all better. Instead, she slapped him across the face.
“John,” she said through clenched teeth, the rage making a move to escape the darkness, “it damn well better be ransom. Because if it’s not-”
“Eliza-”
She slapped him again.
“Goddamn you! You let him take her!”
“Mrs. Brice,” Agent Devereaux said, “this won’t help.”
It was helping her. Elizabeth raised her hand again, but a black hand grabbed her wrist. The rage turned on Agent Devereaux.
“Let-me-go.”
The phone rang. Agent Devereaux released her and sat next to John. The agent wearing headphones activated the recorder then nodded at Agent Devereaux. The phone rang again.
“Mr. Brice,” Agent Devereaux said.
John remained in the same position she had left him: his hands still cupping his face to block her blows and crying and saying softly, “I’m sorry.”
The phone rang again.
“Mr. Brice, can you take the call?”
Her husband didn’t move. Elizabeth thought, Utterly useless in a fight, then she thrust her hand out to Agent Devereaux.
“Give it to me.”
Agent Devereaux lifted the phone off the receiver and handed it to her. The tape was running. She put the phone to her ear.
“Elizabeth Brice.”
A child’s voice came across. “Can Sam play?”
“ What? No, Sam can’t play today!”
The agents exhaled and rolled their eyes in unison. Elizabeth handed the phone to Agent Devereaux and sighed; the child’s voice had given her pause. Her anger spent, the rage retreated like a tornado into the dark sky and she now gazed down upon the destruction left behind-her husband still sobbing and his face red and welted-and the slightest twinge of remorse tried to ignite her conscience. But she stomped it out like a discarded cigarette.
It’s his damn fault! He let someone take her!
Her respiration spiked. One last glare at her utterly useless husband, then she marched out of the study and down the gallery and was crossing the foyer when the doorbell rang again. She stopped, yanked the front door open, and stared at the man standing on her porch. Anyone who knew his life would have expected a bigger man, a harder looking man. But there he stood, perhaps an artist who painted the West and dressed the part, wearing rugged Santa Fe-style attire that looked so phony on the models in the Neiman Marcus catalog but seemed born to his lean frame with his chiseled facial features and ruddy skin, the ragged blond hair framing his tanned face and setting off the most brilliant blue eyes imaginable. Remarkably handsome for a sixty-year-old man, he could be a middle-aged movie star. Instead, he was a drunk.
Elizabeth Brice turned and walked away from her father-in-law.
Ben Brice stepped inside his son’s home and into the middle of a busy intersection. He quickly retreated as uniformed police and FBI agents and a maid talking into a portable phone and his grandson in a baseball uniform pursued by a young Hispanic woman- “ Senor Sam, the oatmeal, it is ready!”-raced past him.
Beneath his feet was a polished hardwood floor; above his head was a lighted dome painted with a mural. A wide gallery extended off the entry into both wings of the residence. A sweeping staircase rose in front of him to a second-floor landing. Beyond the stairs was a living area with a two-story-tall bank of windows looking out onto a brilliant blue pool with a waterfall. Gracie had said her new home had cost $3 million. At the time, he thought she had to be mistaken; but now, looking around, Ben could believe this place cost every bit of $3 million, maybe more. Which was good: his son could afford the ransom.
Ben had not spoken to John in five years, when he had last come to Dallas for Sam’s birth. He almost didn’t recognize the slight young man who had wandered aimlessly into the foyer and who now found himself caught in the middle of a fast-moving stream of bodies like a bug in a whirlpool; he looked defeated and lost, like the senile World War Two vets at the VA hospital, a blank face in a world no longer recognizable. Ben dropped the duffel bag,
