Gina Takes Bangkok (The Femme Vendettas) (40 page)

Eighteen years later

Lindsay sat alone in Captain Monroe’s small, drab office and tried not to be sick all over his desk, a mishap that might not have mattered much since it already looked as if raccoons had been set loose on it. The fluorescent lighting flickered, emitting that mosquito-like frequency as it prepared to burn out, though it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the death rattle coming from the computer hard drive. On the printer sat a delicately balanced styrofoam cup of cold coffee, perched there like a bad deodorizer. She might’ve opened the window with its view over the slate gray waters of the Hudson River, except he doubted that would be appreciated given the freezing temperatures that had gripped the East coast during the past week.

Deep down she knew it wasn’t her environment that was making her nauseous. It was why she had to be there. Her eyes drifted, as they did every time she visited, to the maps plastered on the walls. Faded from long years of use, they were, except for the one of the New York subway, all byzantine in their complexity. They depicted tunnels and sewers, air ducts and water mains, forgotten train lines and long-sealed garbage pits. There were maps of cable, gas and steam lines, each representing vast labyrinths buried deep beneath the streets, systems that joined and overlapped, multiplying their complexity.

If that were not enough, many of them were incomplete, inaccurate or both, rendering navigation in some sections of the city’s bowels virtually impossible. She’d learned as much from several private investigators, all of whom had turned down her case.

After an eternity, Captain Monroe entered, steaming cup of coffee in hand, and sat across from her without a word of greeting. She bit back the urge to tell him about the precarious position of the abandoned cup. She wasn’t here to regulate his coffee consumption.

“Thank you for seeing me, Captain,” she said as evenly as she could. “Again.”

He grunted, and began shuffling through the papers on his desk, clearly searching for something. “You here for an update?” His dismissive tone made it clear he wanted her out the door as quickly as possible.

She tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Yes. I’d like to know why nobody is searching for her.”

Monroe examined a sheet, frowned, tossed it back and kept rooting around. Lindsay itched to jump in and make square corners and open spaces on his desk.

“Ms. Sterling, do you know how many miles of tunnels there are beneath New York?”

“No. I don’t.”

Monroe squinted at another scrap of paper. “Neither do I, or anybody else. They run for hundreds of miles, and go down as deep as twelve stories. What I do know is how many men I have to patrol those tunnels, and that number is exactly thirty.”

There was a stapled sheaf of papers suspended over the edge of the desk, and the way the Captain was bulldozing around it was going to slide off. “Nevertheless, it’s your duty to search for missing persons.”

He pinned her with a look no doubt reserved for punks and do-gooders. “I don’t need you to remind me of my job. I’ve been on the force for thirty-four years. I know my responsibilities.”

Clearly being nice wasn’t going to work. “Then, why aren’t you doing anything?”

“Ms. Sterling, how many times do I need to repeat myself before you get it? The people down there are not like the people up here. Most of them are drug addicts. Many have extreme psychological problems. Unless we get some kind of solid lead on this investigation, I’m not sending my men down in a blind search. It’s too dangerous.”

“But you’re the police!”

The captain’s face reddened in anger. “Last year we had an officer knifed to death down there. Another one was beaten so badly he’ll never walk again, and do you know what he was beaten with? His own nightstick. And that’s in subway and maintenance tunnels we regularly patrol, not in the lower levels. We’d need an army to conduct a thorough search, and—surprise, surprise—we don’t have one. I explained this to your niece before she went down. She decided she knew better.”

Lindsay sucked in her breath to snap back, and then slowly released it. If she was going to find Seline, she needed his cooperation, no matter how unwilling he might be to give it. She rescued the slipping report and set it safely on his desk. He peered at it, then snatched it up.

“Well, at least you found something that you were looking for,” she commented with emphasis. “Look, I understand my niece was no great friend of the NYPD. I understand she was conducting her research despite your warnings, and despite
my
warnings, to be frank. I understand that you’re undermanned and don’t want to place your men in danger. But Captain, I can’t just forget about her. There must be something we can do.”

Monroe stared coldly across at her. She held it. “Ms. Sterling, I really don’t think I can help you…” he began, but his eyes darted to a battered old Rolodex tucked against his computer. She pressed for the advantage.

“Please, Captain,” she pleaded, “if you can think of anybody who could find her, anyone at all, I need to know.”

Monroe stared back, setting his jaw as if weighing his options. “There is one guy,” he said after a moment, though by his expression he was already regretting his words.

“Who is he?”

“His name is Jack Cole. Used to be a professor.”

Lindsay froze, went as stiff as the bodies of the homeless that turned up every day now on the city’s icy streets. “Did you say Jack Cole? Jack Andrew Cole?”

Monroe’s hand hovered over the Rolodex. “You know him?”

“Yes,” she replied, fond memories softening her initial shock. “We used to be best friends back in high school. I haven’t seen him in”—she did the math—“eighteen years. He’s a…a scientist?”

“Anthropologist. Expert in urban subcultures.” Monroe set the Rolodex in front of him and began flipping. “Did a lot of work around the world. London, Paris, Rome, Moscow and here in New York. Nobody knows more about the underside of cities.”

Lindsay shook her head in wonder. “That’s the kind of work he always said he was going to do. He could find Seline, couldn’t he?”

“If he wanted, though I doubt he will,” Monroe said. “I guess you could say he’s retired.”

“Retired?” Lindsay echoed.

“About three years ago, Dr. Cole went missing in the underground during one of his expeditions. We searched for him as best we could. After a couple of weeks, we simply didn’t have resources to keep it up. He was presumed dead, and that’s the way things stayed till early last year when he finally surfaced.”

“He spent two
years
underground? What happened to him?”

Monroe eyed one of the cards, then shook his head and kept flipping. “He didn’t say.”

“What do you mean he didn’t say?” Lindsay asked. That wasn’t the Jack she’d known. He would’ve popped up, those lion-like eyes of his bright with enthusiasm, and begun telling the world of his adventures.

“I’m saying he didn’t say,” Monroe growled. “End of story.”

Not for her. She’d find him and he’d help her. He wouldn’t let her down. She knew that much about him.

“Yeah, here it is.” Monroe stopped at a card and began patting the papers in the hunt for a pen.

Lindsay produced her own pen and paper.

Monroe smirked as he jotted down the address. It was a few blocks from Gates Avenue, in Bed-Stuy. Though parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant were wonderful places to live, featuring beautiful tree-lined rows of century-old brownstone homes and tight-knit communities, Gates Avenue was infamous for its poverty and crime rate. She didn’t need to be a psychologist to see Monroe doubted that a professional white woman, dressed like she’d stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine, would dare set foot there.

“You have his phone number?”

“No,” Monroe said flatly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do today.”

Lindsay had the address memorized before she reached the door. As she was leaving, the captain called out to her.

“Make sure you go yourself.”

She turned in the doorway. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said you’ll need to go there yourself. Cole isn’t likely to help you, Ms. Sterling. He definitely won’t if you hire someone to go talk to him.”

What did he take her for? Thirty years on the force and he hadn’t figured out that appearances meant nothing. “I learned long ago that if I wanted anything done, I’d have to do it myself. Today you just reminded me of that.”

At that precise moment, the fluorescent light burned out, leaving Monroe in twilight. It was her turn to smirk. “It’s hell being left in the dark, isn’t it?”

* * *

Seline woke to a sudden squeal, letting out one of her own as she bolted upright in the blackness, the sleeping bag provided by her captors twisting around her legs. She unzipped it, the opening of the nylon teeth sawing on her ears. She tried to determine the direction of the noise, or if there had been one, and not yet another hallucination. The chain that stretched from the thick collar around her throat to a concrete pillar clunked and scraped against the floor with her every move, messing with her ability to gauge sound. God, she hated the chain. Early on she’d measured it using her hands and estimated it to be fifteen feet long, not long enough to reach any of the walls in the tiled room, walls she knew existed because if she stretched her legs her feet barely brushed against them. She craved to have a wall at her back.

She sat cross-legged on the bag and breathed deeply, the smell of cold iron and stale air filling her, and willed her racing heart, the beats impossibly loud, to slow. It took longer each time the panic attacks hit, but she calmed herself enough to allow for rational thinking. She’d been down for about a week, though time was fast becoming a shredded concept in this world of perpetual night. She’d tried using the number of times she slept to gauge the passage of days, until she realized that the lack of light and noise made her sleep too often. Or maybe not. All she knew was that she was far from the surface, in the lowest levels of the tunnels, and that despite the silence that surrounded her, she wasn’t alone.

She could only guess how many captors there were. She hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of them before they’d pulled a sack over her head and dragged her through endless passages, her screams muffled. There were at least two of them to start with—one had held a knife at her throat while the other had bound her wrists behind her back. She now sensed that there were more. Many more.

“Hello?” she called, her voice echoing through the chamber. She always called out after waking. It was a way of establishing contact with her captors, of reaching out to possible rescuers, of proving her humanness. She’d heard somewhere that the best thing to do if kidnapped was to try and make friends with your captors. If they saw you as a person, as opposed to just a hostage, it made it harder for them to harm you.

“Hello?” she tried again. As usual there was no response, and it was the silence that made her more afraid than anything. She wished she’d listened to Lindsay, to that Jack Cole, to everybody. They all said the tunnels could kill. She’d gone down before, twelve times, and nothing had happened, not a whisper of anything. And then this. For the thousandth time she thought of Lindsay’s story about when she and Jack went into the tunnels as teenagers. Was she going to be ripped apart like that poor man?

No. No. Against all odds she was alive. They would’ve killed her outright, if the stories were to be believed. Whoever or whatever was keeping her prisoner actually seemed intent on keeping her alive. She hadn’t been beaten or raped. While she slept, the provided bedpan was emptied. A stringy meat stew, palatable after hunger had hollowed her out, was regularly provided along with a bottle of fresh water.

Only they hadn’t uttered a single word to her.

“Listen,” she called out, repeating once again her offer. “If you contact my sister, she’ll ransom me. If you let her know that I’m alive, she’ll pay for my release.”

Silence.

“Her name is Lindsay Sterling,” Seline continued. “You can reach her at Sterling Restorations. Or you can call her home.” She rattled off the numbers.

Behind her she thought she heard the slightest rustle and twisted around.

Blackness.

“Please. I’m no threat to you. I’ll go away and never come back if that’s what you want. I won’t tell anyone about you, promise. Please let me go.”

Silence.

“I only came down here to help. I’m not with the police. I’m not even a real social worker, just a student. I wanted to make the people who run this city realize that you’re down here. To make them stop ignoring you.”

Then, a sound. It came in hushed vibrations all around her, making her heart thump wildly. From every corner of the pitch-black chamber she could hear her keepers. Ever so quietly, they were laughing.

* * *

The street where Jack lived was all but deserted when Lindsay reached it, the rows of cheap shops and slum housing standing stiff and battered in the chill morning. A bunch of young men gathered around a junker turned as her Lexus cruised by, their expressions sullen and calculating. All seemed too cold to do more than look.