Father And Child Reunion Part 3 (36 Hours Serial Book 6.3) Page 6

The note had been typed on plain white paper. There was no signature. The outside of the envelope bore only his own name and the name of his paper in black block letters.

  Rio closed his eyes, willing himself to concentrate. He knew how to be logical, sensible, calm. That was what he needed to be now. Eve hadn’t run off. In a way, he almost wished she had. At least then he would have known she and Molly were safe.

  Focus, he reminded himself, and somehow, just knowing that Eve hadn’t betrayed him, his senses cleared. A totally different brand of anger kicked in. There was only one person he could think of who wanted him off that story. The same person who wanted him out of his and his sister’s life.

  Lettie Meyers stepped out of her office as he jammed the note into the pocket of his slacks. “You okay?”

  “I’ll let you know,” he muttered, and stormed out the door.

  * * *

  Rio was barely through the double doors of the mayor’s office when Hal’s assistant looked up from the nail she was filing. Berry red lips curved in a smile.

  “Is he in?”

  A quiet, dangerous kind of rage simmered in Rio’s cool ebony eyes. That anger honed his features, tightened his voice and made anyone within twenty feet of him want to back away. From the way Stacy’s smile faltered, she looked as if that was exactly what she wanted to do herself, had there been any place for her to go.

  “He’s on the phone, Mr. Redtree. If you’ll wait a…”

  Stacy didn’t get a chance to finish. Rio was already through the door, his eyes glaring a hole through the back of Hal’s meticulously combed hair.

  The red leather executive chair swung around. With the phone pressed to his ear, Hal furrowed his patrician features in annoyance.

  Leaning across his desk, Rio pressed his finger to the button on the handset and ended the call. He had the negligible satisfaction of seeing Hal’s face turn crimson.

  “Damn it, Redtree!” Eve’s brother slammed down the phone, shooting out of his chair in the same motion. “That was the governor’s office! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Rio leaned closer. “That’s exactly what I want to know,” he said, biting off the words in a voice so cold, so controlled that the other man shrank back. “I don’t care how important you think you are, how connected you might be or what kind of game you think you’re playing, but I don’t deal well with threats against people who matter to me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the tactics you’re using to get me to back off the investigation into your mother’s murder.” Snatching the note from his pants pocket, Rio flipped it onto the desk in disgust. He couldn’t believe how badly he wanted to wipe the imperious glower off Hal’s pretty face as the man’s manicured fingers snatched up the note. “I suspected you were scum, Stuart, but I didn’t think you’d stoop so low as to use your own family. Where are they?”

  For a moment, Hal didn’t answer. The glower left his face, along with most of its color. “Where did you get this?”

  “You had it delivered to me.”

  “No.” His hand was trembling when he shook his head. “No,” he repeated, distress filling his eyes. He set the note away from him on the desk, then pushed at it again to get it as far from him as possible. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You’re telling me you haven’t seen them?”

  “Not for a couple of weeks. Neither one of them.”

  Hal suddenly looked smaller, weaker. Watching him drop into the thronelike chair and fumble for his cigarettes, Rio felt the anger pumping through him begin to slowly leak away. In its place crept a real and harrowing fear. Hal hadn’t sent the note. The man was far too stunned, the look in his eyes far too worried, for him to know what was going on. At least that was the way it seemed to Rio as the enormity of Eve’s and Molly’s disappearance hit. This wasn’t some pathetic attempt on the part of a crooked politician to get a reporter off his tail. Rio’s woman and his daughter truly had been kidnapped.

  “When did you get that?” Hal asked, using the shaky motions of lighting his cigarette to avoid the other man’s eyes.

  “It was delivered early this morning.” Rio picked up the note, his mind racing. It was because of him that Eve and Molly were in danger. “But they’ve been gone since yesterday.”

  He wasn’t sure when they had disappeared…if it had been shortly after Eve picked up Molly, or later that day. He didn’t even know why she would have taken the little girl out of day camp. To his knowledge, she’d never done that before.

  He needed to talk to Stone.

  Hal was on his feet again, looking as unsteady as he sounded. “Where are you going?”

  “Where do think I’m going?” Rio shot back. “I’m going to the police.”

  Had Rio not already been out the door, he would have seen the fear wash over Hal’s face. But Hal was saved that humiliation. He might have even felt grateful for it, had he not been so busy trying to calm the roiling sensation in his stomach.

  Frightened for his sister and her child, he grabbed the bottle of antacid he kept in his bottom drawer and swilled a mouthful on his way across the room to close the door. He nearly shut it in his assistant’s face, but he couldn’t worry about having offended her. He’d deal with damage control later. Right now, he needed to know why an agreement had been broken.

  “Hold my calls,” he barked into the intercom a moment later, then punched through for an outside line.

  He was pacing a trench in the carpet by his desk, the phone cord limiting his distance, when the man he needed to reach deigned to take his call.

  “For God’s sake,” he hissed, keeping his voice low. “My sister and her kid aren’t supposed to be involved in any of this!”

  “Now, now” came the placating voice. “You couldn’t get that reporter to drop his investigation, so we had to do something, didn’t we?”

  “I’ll work on him. I’ll think of something. Just let my sister and the kid go.”

  “Not until the reporter realizes we mean business about him dropping his story. And by the way,” the man added, his tone turning ugly with chameleonlike ease, “forget about going to the authorities yourself. You’re the one who said your mother was getting too close to us. So the way I see it, it’s your fault she’s dead. You’re in this up to your eyebrows, pal. I can leak the dirt on you and your family, I can make you look like the murderer, or we can just keep things running on the old status quo. You choose.”

  There was nothing else to say. With a click on the other end, the line went dead.

  Hal’s hand was shaking when he hung up the phone, but it took only a couple of minutes for that to pass. He had a helluva headache, though. Opening the door, he gave Stacy a contrite smile and asked if she had any aspirin. If he played it right, maybe he could get her to rub his temples.

  * * *

  It was Stone Richardson’s day off, but when Rio called him from the Herald’s office, told him that Eve and Molly had been kidnapped, and asked him to meet him at the station as a personal favor, the burly detective was there in minutes.

  Rio waited at Stone’s desk and watched his friend weave his way through the noisy, open room filled with desks, ringing telephones, cops and their captives. Ignoring the controlled chaos, he extended his hand the moment Stone stopped in front of him.

  The bigger man clasped his hand in a solid grip, popped him on the shoulder with his free hand and muttered, “What the hell’s going on?”

  There had never been any discussion between the two men about Rio’s relationship with Eve. There was little now as Rio related what had transpired in the past hour. Any question Stone might have had about why the journalist was taking such a personal interest in the disappearance of the former mayor’s daughter and granddaughter was answered just by watching his friend. Though his tension was leashed, Rio couldn’t have masked the agitation etched in his features if he’d tried.

  As a man whose life had recently b
een impacted by a member of the gentler sex, Stone could well imagine the horrors going through Rio’s mind. He could also understand the quiet fury causing Rio’s jaw to work. Anger, fury, rage. They were all easier for a man to deal with than fear.

  “They have her daughter, too, you say?”

  “Our daughter. Molly is mine.”

  The detective’s eyebrows arched. “We’ll have to celebrate that one later.” More fully appreciating the worry taunting his friend’s formidable control, he nodded to what Rio held. “Let me see what you’ve got there.”

  The desk looked neater than usual. Instead of the entire top being obliterated, only half of the gunmetal gray surface was cluttered with files and paper cups. Holding the bag by the corner, Rio set it on the coffee-ringed blotter. He held the note by the corner, too, and dropped it on the bag.

  “You’ll find my fingerprints on that,” he said, indicating the note after Stone had read it. “And Hal Stuart’s.”

  “Why his?”

  “Because I went off half-cocked and threw it at him. I thought he was behind this…that he was holding them at his house or something.” He could still remember the look on Hal’s face, the disbelief, the apprehension. “He wasn’t.”

  Eyes of unblinking obsidian met eyes of shrewd gray. Stone had never known Rio to go off half-cocked over anything. Rio hadn’t known himself to do it. But today, in less than an hour, he’d jumped to conclusions not once, but twice, and missed both by a mile.

  “Why would you have suspected him?”

  “Because I was making him uncomfortable. I’ll tell you about it later, okay? Right now, Eve and Molly are out there with God only knows who. How are we going to find them?”

  Rio thought for sure that Stone was going to tell him that “we” weren’t going to do anything. But all his friend did was turn his attention to the child’s well-loved teddy bear, the typed note and the envelope Rio wished he’d been a little more careful about opening.

  “I take it that the toy is your daughter’s.”

  Rio’s jaw hardened. “She never goes anywhere without it.”

  His own jaw set a little firmer, Stone grabbed a couple of evidence bags from the next desk. But when he reached for the blue bear, Rio stopped him.

  “Let me keep Ted.”

  “Ted?”

  “The bear,” Rio explained, and held Stone’s glance until the detective caved in.

  “They’d never be able to get prints off that fuzzy stuff, anyway,” Stone said, and refrained from adding what they were both thinking. If the stuffed animal was needed to match fibers with those found at a scene, they’d know where to find it.

  Not wanting to consider what else might be found at a scene, Rio concentrated on pacing while Stone sent the evidence bags containing the note and the messenger envelope to forensics, and had a patrol car dispatched to Olivia’s house to search for any signs of forced entry or foul play. He said those same officers would check with neighbors to see if anyone had seen Eve and her daughter leave. After getting the make and license number of her car from Rio, not wasting time by asking why he happened to know the latter, he had an APB put out on it. Then he had another patrol car head for St. Veronica’s so Mrs. Ankeny, Molly’s camp counselor, could be questioned about whether or not Eve had been alone when she’d picked up Molly yesterday and what her emotional state had been at the time. Had someone been waiting for her in her car, having threatened some sort of retaliation if she didn’t do as she was told, it was a sure bet she wouldn’t have been her normal, friendly self.

  “We should hear back from the patrols in the next ten minutes,” Stone told Rio, motioning for Jack Stryker to join them when he finished his phone calls. “While we’re waiting, I want to know why you thought our acting mayor would have kidnapped his own sister.”

  Hal Stuart was the last person Rio wanted to think about right now. Suspecting Stone was asking as much to keep him from climbing the walls as out of curiosity, Rio rubbed his breastbone as he paced past the man leaning against the desk. Guilt over thinking Eve had betrayed him burned in his chest like acid.

  “I’d been checking out his mining investments as part of the murder investigation,” he began, thinking there ought to be something else somebody could be doing to find Eve and Molly right now. “While I was at it, I came across something interesting about his finances. He hadn’t wanted me to work with Eve on their mother’s case to begin with, and when I started asking him about his income, he made it clear that he wanted me to stay away from anything that had to do with the Stuarts.”

  Stone’s eyebrows merged. “Define ‘something interesting.’”

  Pacing like a caged panther, Rio told him, starting with why he’d been suspicious of Hal’s spending habits and ending with how he’d learned that Hal claimed to be some sort of “consultant” on various businesses owned by Maxwell Brown. Rio also told Stone that he suspected Brown was buying political favors, but he couldn’t prove that. Yet.

  The detective sucked in a slow whistle through his teeth. “How did you come up with this? Never mind,” he immediately added, holding up his hand the moment he saw Rio frown at him. “You have to protect your source. I know. It wouldn’t help us with our current problem, anyway.”

  Stone’s phone rang, bringing Rio to an abrupt halt. From Stone’s end of the conversation, he could tell that the officers in the first patrol car had found nothing unusual at the house. When Stone confirmed that himself, Rio didn’t know if he was supposed to feel encouraged or not. All he knew was that he didn’t care at all for the conclusions he was drawing as he reread the words Stone had copied from the kidnapper’s note.

  The purpose of the kidnapping was clearly a show of power. But just because the note implied that no harm would come to his “girlfriend” and his “kid” this time, that didn’t mean the kidnapper couldn’t panic and hurt them, anyway.

  He’d obviously come too close for comfort to someone involved with Olivia’s murder. Possibly the murderer himself—or herself. Unfortunately, even with Stone’s frustrated prodding and the intervention of Jack Stryker, who came onto the case with them, Rio couldn’t come up with a single, viable clue as to who that might have been. Except for Hal, who had so obviously known nothing about the kidnapping, Rio couldn’t imagine who would want him to drop his investigation. But clueless or not, whoever had Eve and Molly wanted him to sweat for a while.

  He’d sweat, all right. He couldn’t stand the thought of what might be happening to them, or how terrified they must be. But no way was he going to sit back and wait for the time to pass.

  “Wendy,” he whispered, a possible lead hitting him midpace. Aware of Stone’s and Stryker’s quick and questioning glances, he grabbed the phone on Stone’s desk. “That package was delivered.”

  A minute later, Wendy, the Herald’s receptionist, had given him the name of the local messenger service that had delivered the package that morning. She even gave him the phone number, since it was a service the Herald occasionally used. The gravel-voiced woman at Speedee Towne Delivery was not as cooperative, however. She didn’t care how urgent the matter was, she wasn’t giving a stranger any information about anyone who used their services without the customer’s permission.

  She felt a little differently a short time later when the black-haired, black-eyed, granite-jawed Rio, who was doing his best to remain civil, appeared in front of her with a rugged, broad-shouldered detective who introduced himself as Stone Richardson and flashed his badge.

  “He had a beard. Trimmed close, you know? And kind of an accent, like he was from back East. Oh, and a gold ring. On his pinky.”

  The generously proportioned brunette with the big hair and heavy makeup fiddled with the clasp of her bolo tie. On the phone, Rio had thought she might be nervous about saying anything because she’d been threatened to keep her mouth shut. The ease with which the information flowed in person told him that wasn’t the case at all.

  “Was anyone with him?” Stone as
ked.

  She shook her head, the motion making the copper loops in her ears sway. “He was by himself. In fact, he was waiting here when I opened this morning. He wanted to have his package delivered right away,” she continued. “And he was real specific about when the delivery was to be made. He paid extra to make sure it was the first one.”

  “I don’t suppose he paid with a credit card or check?”

  Stone and Rio exchanged a look that said neither one of them believed there was a snowball’s chance in the South Seas of that happening. But they knew he had to ask.

  “Cash. For both deliveries. He gave me another one that’s supposed to be made at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “May we see it?” the detective calmly asked.

  The woman’s lips pursed. “I can’t do that. We’re like the post office here. When someone pays us to deliver something, it’s like a contract, you know?”

  “May I speak with your boss?”

  “I’m the boss.”

  “Then this all just got simpler,” Stone informed her, politely. “I know you’re protecting your business and you’re being as ethical as you can, but you can either give the letter to me now, or you can give it to me in an hour when I come back with a warrant. My mood will be a whole lot better if I don’t have to go back to the station, do the paperwork, then interrupt a judge to get his signature. What’ll it be?”

  Not caring to mess with his mood, she retrieved the letter. It was in the same sort of padded mailer the stuffed bear and note had been in. Stone opened it by pulling the staples out of the end, rather than tearing the pull tab, and pulled out the single, typewritten half sheet.

  Had Stone not been holding the note so he could see it, Rio knew he would have had to force himself not to rip it out of the man’s hands. As it was he had no trouble reading the terse instructions.

  * * *

  Twenty miles north of town. The end of Logging Road 8 off the old fire service road.

  “I know that place.” It was out beyond Two Falls Lake.

  Answering him with a tight nod, Stone glanced back to the woman quietly watching them. Then, because he didn’t have a warrant and because he didn’t want to jeopardize Eve and Molly in case someone came back to retrieve or change the letter for whatever reason, he asked the delivery service owner to make a photocopy of the sheet and he restapled the original into the envelope.