Worst Case Page 5

  “No!” I yelled, stricken. “No, it’s not possible. How? You threatened to excommunicate the other team?”

  “No, I tried something you wouldn’t know about. Sound coaching techniques. Take that, ya wiseass,” Seamus said. “Now how about introducing me to your lovely friend here.”

  “Emily, meet Father Seamus Bennett, our local pastor, and though I don’t like to admit it too often, my grandfather. We’re working together on a case, Monsignor. Emily’s an FBI agent.”

  “FBI,” Seamus said, impressed, as he shook her hand. “A G-lady in the flesh. Is it true they let you torture suspects now?”

  “Just annoying old men,” I answered for her.

  The kids, finally noticing that there was a stranger in their midst, quieted down and sat staring. Trent, one of our family’s many comedians, stepped over like a four-foot-tall butler.

  “Hello,” he said, offering his hand to Emily. “Welcome to the Bennett home. May I take your coat?”

  Emily stared at me as she shook his hand. “Um…,” she said.

  “How do you do?” said Ricky, getting in on the act. “It’s sooo nice of you to come for dinner, ma’am.”

  “All right, you goofballs. Enough,” I said.

  Just then, Juliana, my oldest girl, stopped as she came in from the kitchen. She pulled out her ever-present iPod earbuds before turning back for the kitchen.

  “Mary Catherine, Dad brought a guest home. Should I set out another plate?”

  Mary Catherine appeared a minute later.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to impose, Mrs. Bennett.”

  “Did you hear what she said?” cried Chrissy. “Hey, everyone. Did you hear that? She called Mary Catherine Mrs. Bennett!”

  “I’m sorry?” Emily said, looking at me, raw pleading in her face.

  “That’s it, you guys. Back off now, and I mean it,” I said. I turned to Emily. “It’s a long story. Mary Catherine and I aren’t married,” I started. I laughed suddenly. “That didn’t come out right. What I mean to say is—”

  “What he means to say is that I work for this crew,” Mary Catherine said. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, shaking Emily’s hand briskly.

  “Oh, my mistake,” Emily said.

  Just then, the saliva-inducing scent of rosemary, garlic, and pepper hit us like a freight train. Emily turned as Juliana placed a massive roasted leg of lamb on the dining room table. It smelled insanely good.

  “On Sundays, Mary Catherine pulls out all the stops,” I explained.

  Emily’s eyes went wide as Brian came in carrying mashed potatoes on a platter the size of a toboggan.

  “You definitely do not have to stay,” I said to Emily. “Don’t let these tricksters fool you with their polite routine. We redefine the term family-style.”

  Socky began rubbing himself on Emily’s shin.

  “But, Daddy, look. Even Socky wants her to stay,” said Chrissy, batting her butterfly-wing eyelids up at Emily.

  Emily knelt down and finally petted the cat.

  “Well, if Socky says I should, I guess I have to,” she said.

  “In that case, here,” I said, pouring Emily a huge glass of red wine. “You’re going to need this.”

  Chapter 17

  TRYING TO KEEP her balance amid the swirl of kids and motion in the bright, warm apartment, Emily Parker sipped her wine and smiled.

  Incredible, she thought. All these children. So many races. They had to be adopted, right? At least some of them did. And was there a Mrs. Bennett? She’d definitely gotten single vibes off Mike.

  She watched as Mike knelt down and lifted up the seven-year-old black boy and softly judo-flipped him over his shoulder onto the couch next to an Asian girl.

  She certainly hadn’t expected this.

  “Hey!” one of the kids yelled. “Check it out!”

  On the TV screen, Emily and Mike were on the sidewalk in front of the Bronx building. The coverage of the kidnapping had already begun.

  The children all started clapping. One of the tween girls put her pinkies in her mouth and whistled like a doorman hailing a taxi. Emily chuckled as she watched Bennett take an elaborate bow.

  “Thank you, everyone. No autographs, please. Enough fame for now, it’s time to eat!”

  And the dinner, Emily thought as they finally sat, looked incredible. One of the hugest dining room tables she’d ever seen, and set with china, no less. How did they manage that? Looking at the faces of the kids finding their seats, she thought of herself and Olivia eating Lean Cuisines at the kitchen island in her silent town house. Could this be more different?

  They all folded their hands together and closed their eyes as the priest led them in saying grace.

  “Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord, amen,” the sweet old man said. “Now pass the gravy!”

  She didn’t just see that, did she? The setting looked like a lost cover of The Saturday Evening Post, only it was real. The only time she ever had a home-cooked meal like this was on Thanksgiving at her dad’s house.

  The last thing Emily had expected when she was called on special assignment this afternoon was that she’d be eating dinner with some crazy, enormous, happy family. She couldn’t wait to call her daughter and tell her all about them.

  She shook her head as she caught Mike’s eye at the head of the table.

  “And a cat, too?” she said.

  “Ah, he’s just another loafer,” Mike said. “Like the priest.”

  Chapter 18

  AFTER WE ATE, all the kids lined up to say good night to Emily.

  “It was indeed a pleasure to meet you,” Trent said, still hamming it up. “And good night, Father. Do sleep well.”

  “Oh,” I said, tickling him hard enough to make him squeal. “Do sleep well yourself, Sir Hamlet.”

  When we were finally alone, I poured Emily the last of the wine and gave her the short version of my life story. I told her about Maeve, my wife. How we’d adopted our kids, one by one, until we turned around one day and saw that we had ten. I even told her how my wife had passed away. How Mary Catherine and Seamus and I struggled to keep the wheels from falling off.

  “But enough about me,” I said, getting that off my chest. “Fair’s fair. It’s time for you to give me the vitals on Emily Parker.”

  “There’s not much. I have one daughter. Olivia,” she said, taking a picture out of her bag.

  “A cutie,” I said, leaning in close to Emily to see the picture. Like her mother, I almost said. It was amazing how comfortable this was starting to feel.

  “How old is she?” I said instead.

  “Four.”

  “The only age we don’t have in this house,” I said. “What are the odds?”

  Mary Catherine came in with two plates and caught us laughing.

  “Mary, that isn’t what I think it is, is it? Apple pie?” Emily said.

  Mary Catherine dropped the plates loudly on the table.

  “I left the stove on,” she said, quickly turning around. “Will that be all tonight, Mr. Bennett?”

  “Sure… that’s fine, Mary,” I said, a little confused.

  When the kitchen door closed, I lifted the picture of Olivia off the table.

  “So, where’s Olivia’s dad?” I said. I put the picture down. Wow, did I just say that out loud? Real subtle there, Mike. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

  “No, it’s okay. Olivia’s dad is in, um, California. We’ve been divorced two years now. We met in the air force. John was a little rough around the edges, but he was loving and funny and a brilliant natural mechanic. I always thought of him as the impulsive yin to my everything-in-its-place yang.

  “In the beginning, everything was fine. John ran the service department of the Bethesda Mercedes dealership as I got promoted up through the ranks of the Bureau. It was hectic, of course, juggling two jobs and
then Olivia, but we were a team, a real family. Then, two days after Olivia’s second birthday, John announced he needed to redefine himself.

  “First came the tats and the piercings, and then finally, without my knowledge, the purchase of a body shop in California with most of our joint savings.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Yeah, ouch is the word. JonJon’s Rods does custom hot rods for all the stars now, GTOs, Shelby Cobras. California’s actually been really good for him.”

  “And really, really shitty for you and your daughter,” I said.

  Emily finished her wine and placed the glass carefully on the tablecloth in front of her.

  “I should get going before you have to roll me out of here, Mike. I can’t tell you what a nice time I had. Your kids are even more incredible than that meal was. You’re a lucky man.”

  “I’ll get you a taxi,” I said, standing.

  The dining room table was cleared by the time I got back upstairs. I found Mary Catherine in the kitchen, banging dishes into the machine.

  “Mary Catherine, you didn’t happen to see my slice of pie, did you?”

  “Oh, sorry. I tossed it,” she said without turning around. “I thought you were done.”

  She wiped her hands on a dish towel and opened the back door, heading to her room on our prewar’s top floor.

  “Good night, now,” she said, slamming the door behind her.

  Chrissy came into the kitchen then in her pajamas as I was wrapping my mind around what had just occurred.

  “Daddy, Shawna says that Emily Parker is your new girlfriend. Is that true?” Chrissy said.

  Oh, I thought, staring at the just-slammed door. Okay. Now I got it.

  Like I said, men are dumb.

  Part Two

  FINAL EXAM

  Chapter 19

  CHELSEA SKINNER COULDN’T stop trembling. At first it was strictly because of fear, but after three hours of lying bound on a bone-numbingly cold stone floor, she felt like she was actually freezing to death.

  The only other time she could remember being as cold was when she went skiing in Colorado for the first time, when she was six. Seeing her breath in the backyard of the house that her dad had just built, she’d made her mom crack up as she pretended to smoke an imaginary cigarette.

  Chelsea began to cry through her chattering teeth. That was her problem right there, wasn’t it? Always wanting to be older, always having to push it. Why couldn’t she just be satisfied? It was as if there were a hole inside her, and no matter what she tried to fill it with—clothes, food, friends, drugs, boys—there was always just a little itty-bitty space left that kept her from feeling like a whole person. She practically deserved this. It was bound to happen. It was—

  Stop! she commanded herself. You stop that right now!

  She’d been abducted, and she was getting down on herself? Blaming herself? That had to stop yesterday. This wasn’t therapy. This wasn’t a confidence-building activity at Big Country, the wilderness rehab camp that her parents had sent her to last summer to “get her rear in gear,” as her dad had so cornily put it.

  This was real.

  Fact: Someone had knocked her out in front of her house as she was coming back from a night of dancing.

  Fact: Someone had removed her jeans and T-shirt, and she was now in her bra and underwear.

  Fact: Her hands and feet were bound with giant plastic twist-tie strips, and she was being held against her will in what felt like a crypt.

  All the facts were bizarre, horrible when you got right down to it, but very, very real. She suddenly remembered something that Lance, her Big Country eco-psychologist, had kept stressing. You make your own reality.

  At the time, she’d thought it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard, but now, as she considered it, maybe this was what he meant. When you were in a very bad situation, you could either feel sorry for yourself or you could—

  Chelsea stilled herself as the lights went on. The door to the dilapidated room she was locked in creaked open. The saliva in her mouth evaporated.

  At the threshold stood a man wearing a suit and a ski mask.

  This isn’t happening, she thought as the man stepped in and knelt down beside her.

  “Hey, Chels,” the man said in a polished voice. Then he head-butted her in the face and the world dimmed.

  She gained consciousness to a zipping sound. The man in the ski mask was tightening the last of the straps of the appliance hand truck that she was now lashed to. He rolled her out of the room and bumped her up some steps and whirled her dizzily around a long, tiled corridor.

  The room they entered had a low ceiling and a long stainless-steel counter that ran the length of one wall. She came to a clanking stop.

  “I didn’t—,” Chelsea said, shaking now. “I d-d-didn’t do anything.”

  “Exactly,” her abductor said from behind her. “Maybe you should have. Have you considered that? Have you considered what you have failed to do?”

  As she watched, the man went over to the sink. He lifted an orange five-gallon Home Depot bucket from underneath it and opened the tap.

  “Now, I want you to take a little test,” he said as he filled the bucket. “The subject is water. Did you know that one-point-one billion people worldwide lack access to fresh drinking water? That’s a lot of folks, wouldn’t you say? Now, my question is this: How much clean water does it take to wash your Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt and Dolce and Gabbana jeans?”

  I am having a nightmare, Chelsea thought, staring at the man as he turned off the tap and stepped back, holding the heavy bucket easily in his left hand.

  I am Alice, and I have dropped down the rabbit hole and eaten the wrong slice of cake.

  Chelsea finally lowered her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said in an almost whisper.

  Without warning, the man grasped the bottom of the bucket and swung it forward. The water that hit her full in the face was frigid. If she thought she was cold before, she was out of her mind. She was Arctic Sea–cold now. Deep space–cold.

  “It takes forty gallons!” the man in the ski mask screamed. “In the villages of rural Cambodia and northern Uganda, two to three hundred people struggle daily to share one hand pump in order to get the water they need to survive. Families die for water. The only time you give it the foggiest thought is when a waiter asks you if you want yours sparkling or not!

  “Now, question number two: How many thousands of children die every day throughout our world from water-related illnesses, like cholera, dysentery, and hepatitis?”

  Chelsea was no longer listening. She was too cold to hear, to think. It was like a glacier was moving through her body now, petrifying her muscles and tendons and bones. It would reach her heart soon, she thought, and the cold would make it seize up like a frozen engine.

  The man went back to the sink with the bucket. He began whistling the theme from final Jeopardy! as he squealed open the tap again.

  Chapter 20

  A MIGRAINE HEADACHE woke Emily Parker at the ungodly hour of six a.m. Now that’s what I call a wake-up call, she thought, wincing as she sat up. She’d been suffering from migraines on and off ever since she was in college. The pulsating, stabbing sensation was always in the same place, above her left eye, as if something were trying to dig its way out of her skull with an ice pick.

  Sometimes it was so bad, it made her vomit. Sometimes, for some inexplicable reason, it made her extremely thirsty. Before he left, her New Age husband, John, had suggested that it was the price for her investigative skill, the price for her ability to make intuitive leaps that saved people’s lives.

  Or maybe it was the stress brought on by my no-good husband, she wished she could tell him now.

  She found her bag and fished out an Imitrex, her headache prescription. Swallowing it dry, she saw a flashing image of Jacob Dunning dead in the South Bronx boiler room.

  What was she still doing here? she thought. Her boss told her t
o hang tight up in New York, at least until the results from the medical examiner were in, but she wasn’t sure. Thirty-five was definitely too old for this shit in the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. She found herself missing her cozy beige cubicle and cinder-block walls. Or maybe she should get out altogether and try to get a teaching job. Something that coincided with Olivia’s schedule. Give some fresh, young world beater the chance to go after these monsters, deal with these poor families.

  She was shaking another Imitrex into her palm when her cell went off.

  “Hey, it’s Mike,” Bennett said. “Sorry to wake you up.”

  She found herself smiling. His calm voice was like a lifeboat against the nauseating waves of tightness in her skull. She remembered dinner, his crazy kids. At least that had been fun.

  “Tell me something good, Mike,” she said. “The media coverage jogged someone’s memory?”

  “I wish,” he said. “I just got off the phone with my boss. Looks like we got another missing kid. Her name is Chelsea Skinner. She’s seventeen, and her father is the president of the New York Stock Exchange. Friends let her out of a cab on the corner of her street early this morning, but she never made it home.”

  “Already? My God! Even for a serial, that’s unbelievably fast to do it again,” Emily said. “Should we head to the family’s residence?”

  “No,” Bennett said. “Schultz and Ramirez are already on their way. Our presence has actually been requested at the task force meeting they’re putting together down at headquarters. I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty so we can get our game faces on. You like lox on your bagel? I don’t think the Jewish deli I go to has grits, but I can ask. What are grits, anyway?”

  “Tell me, Mike,” Emily said with a smile. “Are all New York cops wiseasses twenty-four/seven?”

  “Just the good-looking ones with double-digit kids,” Bennett said. “See you in a few hours, Agent Parker.”

  Chapter 21

  THE TASK FORCE meeting was at a brand-new section of One Police Plaza’s tenth floor. They must have pulled out all the stops with Homeland Security money, because it looked like a war room out of Hollywood.