Worst Case mb-3 Read online

  “What’s up, boss?” I said.

  “We have a possible kidnapping uptown. You need to see April Dunning at One West Seventy-second Street, apartment ten B. Her son, Jacob, seems to be missing. Jacob’s father, Donald Dunning, is founder and CEO of-”

  “Latvium and Company, the multinational pharmaceutical company,” I finished for her. “I’ve heard of him.”

  I’d actually read about him in a Forbes magazine at my kids’ dentist’s office. Dunning was a billionaire, and one of the mayor’s golfing buddies. I could see where this was heading.

  “How old is his kid, Jacob?”

  “Eighteen,” the chief said.

  “Eighteen!?” I said. “Jacob’s not missing. He’s eighteen.”

  “I know what it sounds like, Mike. Somebody with City Hall juice looking for their probably party-hearty kid. Be that as it may, I still need you to check it out. Get back to me as soon as you can.”

  I wrote down the time and address on the back of my player list after I hung up. Find somebody else’s kid? I thought. I had trouble enough keeping track of my own. I waved over Seamus, who was booing furiously as one of the St. Ann ’s players hit a three-pointer.

  “Putting me in, Coach, are ya?” my wiseass grandfather priest said in his Guinness-thick brogue. “I keep telling ya I still got game.”

  I shook my head.

  “Listen, Monsignor. I need to check on something, hopefully very quickly. Fill in for me until I get back. On second thought, just stand here and don’t say or do anything. Please.”

  “Finally,” Seamus said, gleefully snatching the clipboard from me and rolling up the sleeves of his black shirt. “Maybe we’ll win one this time.”

  Chapter 4

  One West 72nd Street turned out to be the Dakota, the famous Gothic castle-like building where John Len-non had lived before he was shot in front of it. It was also the place where the lady who gives birth to the devil in Rosemary’s Baby lived, I remembered cheerfully. The good omens just kept on coming this afternoon.

  I passed the building and left my van up around the next corner on Columbus and walked back along 72nd. If in the unlikely case this was a kidnapping, it already could be under surveillance. I definitely did not want to advertise that the family had contacted the police.

  I passed through a wrought-iron gate at the Dakota’s entrance. Its double-wide arched entryway was the very spot where Chapman had killed the ex-Beatle, shooting him in the back before he could get into the lobby entrance up a short set of stairs to the right. The building was a popular sightseeing tour stop. Yoko, who still lived here, had to be overjoyed when she saw people looking around for bullet holes.

  The heavy brass barred door opened as I reached the top. A portly Asian doorman in a hunter green suit coat and hat stood beside an ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED sign.

  “I’m here to see the Dunnings,” I said, discreetly showing him my shield.

  After I was announced, an elderly hall man appeared and guided me through the lobby. The walls had the richest, darkest mahogany paneling I’d ever seen. A massive ballroom chandelier and brass wall sconces softly lit the intricately detailed ceiling moldings and white travertine marble floor.

  The hall man, in turn, passed me off to an elevator man. Upstairs, a diminutive butler waved me in through the open door of 10 B.

  Through the nearly double-height French doors, I could see the whole way through the Dunnings’ apartment to Central Park. The grand rooms were arrayed in the classic enfilade design, allowing more than one way into each room so guests could avoid the servants. The wood floors, like the paneled walls, were Cuban mahogany. They were laid out in a herringbone pattern with what looked like a black-walnut trim.

  A striking black-haired woman came quickly down the long corridor of the apartment. She was wearing a rumpled blue evening dress, and even from a distance, the agony in her fine-boned face was unmistakable. My annoyance at being called in dissipated as my heart went out to her. Even with her elegant clothes and her surroundings, she was just a concerned mom sick with worry.

  “Thank God you’ve come. Detective Bennett, is it?” she said with an English accent. “It’s my son, Jacob. Something’s happened to him.”

  “I’m here to help you find him, ma’am,” I said as reassuringly as I could while I took out my notebook. “When was the last time you saw or spoke to Jacob?”

  “I spoke to him three days ago. Jacob lives at school. At NYU. Hayden Hall, right alongside Washington Square Park. My husband is still down there with my father. They’ve spoken to his friends, and no one has seen him since Friday. Not his roommate. No one.”

  Maybe he met a cute girl, I felt like saying to her.

  “Not seeing someone for a few days might not necessarily mean something’s wrong, Mrs. Dunning. Is there a specific reason why you think something’s happened to him?”

  “My husband and I had our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary last night at Le Cirque. We’d planned it with Jacob for months. Jacob’s grandfather flew in from Bordeaux for the occasion. Jacob would not have missed it. He is our only child. You don’t understand how close we are. He would not have missed our special event or the rare chance to see his grandfather.”

  I was starting to understand her concern. What she was telling me did seem strange.

  “Did he say anything to you when you last spoke to him? Anything odd? Someone new he might have met or-”

  That’s when the phone on the antique sideboard beside her rang. She stared in horror at the caller ID number, then at me as it rang again.

  “I don’t know that number,” she said, raw panic in her voice. “I don’t know that number!”

  “That’s okay,” I said, trying to calm her down. I scratched down the number, and let my instincts kick in.

  “Listen, April. Look at me. If it’s someone involved with Jacob being gone-I don’t think it is, but if it is-you need to ask them exactly what you need to do in order to get your son back, okay? And if you can, say that you want to speak to Jacob.”

  Tears were streaming down her face as the phone rang again. She used a shaking fist to wipe them away before she grabbed the receiver. I listened at an extension in the adjacent study. I pressed the phone’s answering machine’s Record button as I lifted the receiver.

  “Yes? This is April Dunning.”

  “I have Jacob,” a strangely serene voice said. “Listen.”

  There was a click and hum on the line and then what sounded like a recording.

  “Question number nine: If you were born in Sudan, what would be your chances of living to forty? And what does that have to do with your cute little red iPod nano?”

  “I don’t know,” a young man sobbed. “Stop. Please stop.”

  The recording clicked off.

  “You’ll receive instructions in exactly three hours,” the calm voice said. “Follow them to the letter or you’ll never see your son alive again. No police. No FBI.”

  The connection was cut. I was hanging up the extension when there was a crash in the hallway. Mrs. Dunning was kneeling on the herringbone floor, sobbing inconsolably.

  “It’s Jacob,” she moaned. “That bastard has my Jacob.”

  The butler arrived a step before me and helped her into a chair.

  I speed-dialed the chief. Unbelievable. This really was a kidnapping. We had no time to waste to get set up. We needed to hustle if we were going to have all our teams in place in three hours. It was going to be close.

  I frowned out the window. Down across Central Park West, a tour bus was disembarking, people checking their cameras as they crowded toward the Strawberry Fields John Lennon memorial. My boss’s phone rang with a painful slowness as Mrs. Dunning’s cries carried through the high-ceilinged rooms.

  “C’mon,” I said in frustration. “Pick up.”

  Chapter 5

  A business jet inbound for Teterboro Airport made FBI special agent Emily Parker duck her copper-colored head as she hurried
across the Enterprise parking lot on Route 46 in New Jersey. She stopped for a moment and watched it streak down the runway toward the sleek Gulf-stream G300 that had just dropped her off.

  She checked her watch after she turned over the engine of her rented Buick LeSabre. It was not yet three. Her boss had called her at twelve-thirty at her home outside Manassas, Virginia. She’d traveled two hundred fifty miles in under two hours.

  Now, that’s what I call a rush job, she thought. Granted, she was used to the pace, having been in charge of the FBI’s northeast regional CARD, or Child Abduction Rapid Deployment, team for two years.

  “The ADIC asked me to put my biggest badass on this one, Emily,” John Murphy, the special agent in charge of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, had said to her. “Guess what. You’re it.”

  She hadn’t been told much. Only that she was to be a special kidnapping adviser to the NYPD on the abduction of some kid named Jacob Dunning. Jacob’s father, Donald Dunning, was actually the one who had sent his Gulf-stream for her, which was about as far from normal procedure as you could get.

  She was beginning to wonder what kind of special assignment she’d just gotten herself into.

  She speed-dialed home as she gunned out of the parking lot. Her brother, Tom, answered his cell on the second ring.

  “Just got off the plane,” she said. “How’s she taking it?”

  “Everything’s fine. We set up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway. That’s so cute that you guys do that every Sunday.”

  “That little fibber,” Emily cried. “A lemonade stand? Near the street!? Oh, that’s just like her. She’s got her hooks into you already. I told her no last week. What about the traffic? Are you there? Right now? Who’s watching her?”

  “Of course I’m here, Em. What do you think, I’m talking to you from a bar?” her brother said. “Me and the Olive are glued together at the hip.”

  Tom had gotten a job with a defense contractor in Bethesda after getting out of the Marines the month before. He was due to start next week. Renting him the basement apartment in her split-level had turned out to be a win-win stroke of genius, a built-in babysitter. Emily grinned, picturing her precious goofball of a four-year-old, Olivia, out by the end of the cul-de-sac in her winter coat, wondering where the customers were.

  “Do we even have lemonade?” she said.

  “I made a command decision and substituted Kool-Aid.”

  “Kool-Aid!? That’s pure processed sugar and dye. Kool-Aid! She can only have one glass. One.”

  “You sound like I’m force-feeding her antifreeze. Besides, she’s not drinking it, she’s trying to sell it. Try not to have an aneurysm, please. I survived Kabul, I think I can look after the Olive. You have any idea how long you’re going to be gone for?”

  “Not yet, but I’ll let you know. Kiss her for me, okay, Tom? I know you can take perfect care of her. I just get nuts leaving ever since… you know.”

  “The D-I–V-O-”

  “Shut up, Tom, would you? She can spell better than you. Good-bye.”

  After her divorce the year before, Emily had taken a transfer to ride a desk at CASMIRC, the Bureau’s Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center, because it had regular hours. The case files that came in for review from every corner of the country weren’t exactly light reading, but when you were a profiler, you had to take the work where you could find it.

  The job was ideal for taking care of Olivia, but to say Emily was starting to climb the beige walls of her cubicle in the basement office at the FBI Academy would be putting it mildly.

  Emily smiled as she dropped the Buick’s hammer up the entrance for the turnpike, cutting off a tricked-out Cadillac SUV. Off to her right, New York City ’s metal-and-glass skyline appeared like a vision over the Jersey swamp.

  Still got it, she thought, keeping the gas on the floor. Gangway, badass coming through!

  Chapter 6

  I don’t think I’d ever been as proud of the NYPD. In only two hours, we’d managed to get everything up and running.

  I, two other Major Case detectives, and a PD tech were stationed at the Dunnings’ apartment. Another team of detectives was busy scouring NYU to find out where Jacob had last been seen. A third surveillance team, made up of undercover Emergency Service Unit tactical guys, was spread around outside the Dakota, especially the Strawberry Fields area in Central Park.

  After Lennon was shot, the building had become a kind of morbid landmark, like the grassy knoll in Dallas. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Jacob lived here, but for the time being, we couldn’t rule out the pull of the place for some unbalanced person.

  An NYPD TARU tech had already spliced recording equipment onto the Dunnings’ line. The phone company had been contacted and was ready with something called a time-stop trace. Its billing computer would zip through its millions of circuits that were operational at the exact second the Dunnings’ phone rang and find the one calling the apartment.

  All we had to do now was the hard part. To sit and wait until four o’clock. Sit and wait and pray.

  My heart rattled like an alarm clock in my chest cavity when the phone rang at three-thirty. It took me a long second to realize that it wasn’t the apartment phone but the building’s intercom buzzer in the kitchen.

  Armando, the butler, rushed to answer it.

  “There’s an FBI agent in the lobby, sir,” he called to Donald Dunning.

  What?! I thought. Who called the FBI?

  “Send her up,” Dunning said. Turning to me, he added, “Did I forget to tell you? I called the Justice Department when I was down at Jacob’s dorm. The attorney general, Fred Carroll, dated my sister in college. He’s sending in his best, he told me. You can work together with the FBI, right?”

  “Sure,” I said, exchanging uncertain glances with Detectives Ramirez and Schultz, the other members of my team. We had everything ready to go. Now the Feds were here? What did that mean?

  We exchanged much happier looks as a tall, auburn-haired woman came through the door two minutes later. Good-looking women, even ones who were turf-invading FBI agents, were always a pleasant surprise.

  She spoke to Donald Dunning and his wife briefly in the foyer before stepping into the study.

  “Emily Parker,” she said, offering her hand. She had a slight southern or maybe midwestern accent. “Mike Bennett, is it? I can see by your surprise that no one told you I was coming. Of course not. My boss is calling your boss or something.

  “I know you guys are as good as we are. I’m not here in any way to take the case away from you. Just here to coordinate resources you guys might not have, get you on the front of the line for databases and such. This is odd, I know, to come all the way up from Washington and-”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “From Washington? Why didn’t they just send someone from Twenty-six Fed?”

  “Because I wanted the best,” Donald Dunning said, coming in behind her. “You solved two. That’s what Freddy told me. You got two kidnapped kids back safely.”

  “It was actually three, but yes.”

  Okay, now I saw where this was going. Dunning was flexing his considerable muscle, using his juice to pull out all the stops.

  He obviously didn’t realize the strange kind of animal that an investigation in New York City is. I’m sure Homecoming Queen Emily Parker kicked ass out in those big square states where they didn’t have things like subways and Brooklyn and eight million people. The NYPD, despite its gruff demeanor, Bugs Bunny accent, and lack of executive hair, was the investigative equal of any law enforcement agency, especially when in its own backyard.

  But I knew if I made some kind of jurisdictional stink, the Feds could invoke the Federal Kidnapping Statute and actually take over the case.

  Instead of ranting and raving, I stood there politely holding my tongue and keeping a stiff smile.

  Chapter 7

  “Mr. Dunning, I’D like to speak to you and your
wife further in a moment,” Agent Parker said. Her demeanor was the perfect mix of directness and caring. “I just need to go over a few things with Detective Bennett first. Will you be in the kitchen?”

  “Oh, of course,” Dunning mumbled before leaving the study.

  That was about as polite a “get lost” as I’d ever seen. I was impressed. Maybe Agent Parker had some chops after all.

  She closed the French doors tightly behind him.

  “Did you check out the Dunnings for any domestic violence complaints or criminal records?” she said.

  I saw where she was going. It had to be verified from the start that it was, in fact, a stranger kidnapping and not a cover-up for a murder or something else. Step one was ruling out the family. I was way ahead of her.

  “Both clean,” I said, nodding. “We’re still checking out the staff. How did the Dunnings’ demeanor seem to you? About right?”

  “The mom seems to be in a dissociative fugue, and the father looks like he’s just chugged a quart of battery acid,” Parker said with a shrug. “In this case, both typical responses. You want me to toss their name at the White Collar Squad just in case? Can’t hurt to check out any recent debt or insurance activity. We could even look up psychiatric history, if any.”

  Wow, I thought. Talk about trusting no one and nothing. I liked that in a cop.

  “Do it,” I said.

  She took a pad from her briefcase and scribbled on it.

  “Any witnesses to the abduction?” Parker said.

  “None,” I said. “A girl in one of his classes has Jacob leaving some shithole in Alphabet City at one o’clock in the morning Saturday.”

  “ Alphabet City?” Parker said.