“How did he get in the apartment?” Silver asked. “You said he just appeared there?”
“Yeah. I have no idea. One minute we were alone, and the next he was standing in the hall pointing a pistol at me.”
Silver exchanged glances with Richard, and they walked over to the front door of the flat. Silver squatted down and peered at the locks. Sure enough, there were telltale scratches on them.
“He jimmied the locks. That’s fairly sophisticated. And ballsy at that hour. There are still people circulating,” she observed.
“Which tells me he knew what he was doing. But why Kennedy?” Richard asked.
Silver didn’t say anything. She walked to the far end of the hall, and Richard followed her. She was trying to hold it together, but when she thought about her baby girl, kidnapped, she began sobbing quietly, her frame shuddering. Richard put his hand on her shoulder, and she shrugged it off, then turned and fell into his arms. He held her while she cried, her tears of helplessness and loss staining his shirt.
Seth appeared on the landing, with Brett following right behind him. They approached Silver, who didn’t register them until Richard cleared his throat. Silver looked up from his chest, tears streaming down her face, then pulled away from him as she tried to wipe away her grief with shaking fingers.
Nobody said anything.
Seth studied Richard, his shirt soaked from Silver’s pained reaction, then took in Silver’s dress. Brett regarded them both.
“Silver. I’m so sorry. You have my word that we’ll do everything possible to get your daughter back safely.”
Silver began speaking, but her voice cracked and momentarily failed her. She tried again, and it came out stronger. “I know you will. I just don’t understand any of this.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it, Silver. I am putting the full resources of the FBI behind finding her and bringing her kidnapper to justice.”
Seth nodded solemnly, but everyone knew that nothing that was being said would change things or bring Kennedy back. It was just what you said to the family when horror intruded and loved ones were stolen in the night.
The next half hour went by in a blur, with Silver lost in her thoughts, occasionally racked with desperation and breaking into tears for a few minutes before pulling herself together.
Detective Baker and Brett squared off over the inevitable jurisdictional issue, but Baker quickly conceded the advantage to the FBI. This was one of their own, and he wanted out of it as soon as possible. By the looks of the number of agents that had arrived since Brett had gotten there, it was going to be a full-court press, and another broken-down NYPD detective wouldn’t be needed.
As time continued to drag on, Brett pulled Richard aside and had a hushed conversation.
Richard sat down next to Silver on one of the folding camp chairs the crime scene technicians had put out. “They’re going to be here most of the night, Silver. Let’s get you a hotel room so you can get some sleep. There’s no point staying. We can come back in the morning.”
She shook her head, dazed, but he was persistent, and she eventually nodded and stood, feeling the eyes of the agents and police boring into her as she squared her shoulders and walked down the hall to the stairs, Richard trailing her.
Silver knew the statistics on kidnappings as well as anyone and tried to banish the poison thoughts that waited to overcome her — Kennedy, shivering, half-dressed or worse, a shadowy figure looming over her tiny adolescent body, and her captor…her captor a sick, twisted…
When they arrived at the hotel seven blocks from her flat and checked her in, any chance of sleeping had been destroyed by the vision of her little girl, alone in an ugly, dangerous world where predators routinely did the unthinkable, crying out soundlessly in Silver’s head, begging Mommy to save her.
Chapter 18
Silver awoke, disoriented, in a strange bed with her head pounding. She peered at her watch, and then reality came crashing in on her. She must have drifted off to sleep at around four, and now with the alarm sounding at seven-thirty, she was back in a world that was as grim as any she could imagine.
The realization that Kennedy’s abduction had really happened, and that this was the next day, froze her on the bed. Her limbs were immobilized, and it felt like someone was standing on her chest. She couldn’t breathe for a few seconds, then started hyper-ventilating automatically.
She dragged herself off the mattress and stumbled half asleep into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror staring at a stranger’s red, bleary eyes. Steam began rising from above the shower door, and she stripped down and immersed herself under the hot stream, washing away the residue of the prior day’s ordeal.
As she lathered the hotel shampoo through her hair, she automatically began running a mental checklist of things she’d need to do — they would want to put a trace on her phone lines so when the kidnapper called they could triangulate him. She would have to call Miriam and let her know Kennedy wouldn’t be there, and also contact the school. She’d want to get the transcripts of any interviews they’d conducted last night and also go over the traffic cam footage. She’d need to coordinate with the agent running the Kennedy investigation and see what kind of help she could provide.
She shut the water off and felt marginally better — the mental exercise had centered her and given her a sense of purpose. But there were still troubling and puzzling unanswered questions, the largest being why Kennedy had been taken. She hoped it wasn’t anything to do with the man who had tried to kill her, but logic said it had to be. There was no other reason to snatch her daughter than to have a hold over her. But whoever had done it was misjudging the amount of weight that would be brought to bear — kidnapping an FBI agent’s child was unheard of and ranked right below kidnapping the president’s in terms of recklessness.
There was no other reason that made any sense. She wasn’t rich. Far from it, she was probably the worst person in the world to try to extract a ransom from. A broke single mom with a license to carry a Glock. Not smart. Not smart at all.
Once she was close to ready, she called Richard, and after a quick scan of the room, she took the elevator to the ground floor and signed out of the hotel. She dropped the key off at the front desk and waited in the lobby for him to arrive, watching the crowd move along the sidewalk, oblivious to her ordeal as they went about their early morning business. A few minutes later her phone rang.
“I’m swinging around the corner right now,” Richard said. “Traffic’s crazy. I’ll pick you up at the curb.”
The sun momentarily blinded her when she stepped out onto the sidewalk, and then she saw him, trying to force his way over in front of a persistent cabby who wasn’t giving an inch. The power struggle eventually went to the cab, and an angry blast of horns protested as Richard cut off a delivery van and pulled into the drop-off zone.
She swung open the door and slid in, noting that Richard looked like he’d gotten twelve straight hours of untroubled sleep even though he couldn’t have had much more than herself. He leaned over and kissed her, and she almost lost it as his lips brushed her cheek. He sensed the precariousness of her grip and let her have her space, focusing instead on the relentless stream of cars growling by.
“Friendly town here. Courteous bunch,” he observed, hitting his blinker and trying to edge back into traffic.
Silver didn’t respond for a second. “New York is known for that,” she finally replied, her voice tense.
“How are you doing?”
“About like you’d expect. I feel like a truck ran me over. You?”
“Same truck hit me and then backed over me to finish the job. Are we headed to your place?”
“Yes. I want to be there when the techs show up. And much as I like wearing my little black dress for days on end, I’m pretty sure I’ll be more useful in something more sensible.” She smiled grimly, trying to hit an upbeat
