Cracked (21 page)

“Well, you’re caught,” he said. “You are hopefully going to spend the rest of your life in jail. What was so important that you had this dickwad” – he gestured back at Dave, who was still sitting cross-legged in the dirt – “pull a gun on us and bring us here?”

“I hired him,” Fred said. “I hired him to follow Ginger. When she started disappearing.”

I looked at Dave. “So you’re some kind of private investigator?”

Dave shrugged. He looked like he was going to say something, but he stopped and gingerly touched his nose.

“Hands on your head,” Darren said, glancing at him only briefly.

“We don’t have much time,” Miller said. “I have to get him back or there will be another manhunt, and I would prefer not to lose my badge. Or go to jail with scum like him,” he added, nodding at Fred.

“You need to get the boys back,” Fred said. He was looking at me, then at Darren. “Please.”

I looked at Fred. He was a ruined man. He did not look like a man who had carried out the murder of his wife and kidnapping of his sons.

“Gladly,” I said. “Where are they?” Darren looked at me. I shrugged. “Benefit of the doubt,” I said.

“Toronto,” he answered quickly. “At least, I think they are.” He leaned against the car, and Miller took a step nearer him. Fred waved his hand as if to say don’t worry. “And so is Jack.”

“Jack?” Darren and I said, at exactly the same moment. In a less disturbing moment, it might have been funny.

Fred nodded, and glanced at Miller. “I need to make this quick, and you need to hear it. I know you hate me. I don’t blame you. I did something horrible to Ginger. But I didn’t kill her.”

I breathed deeply, trying to slow the racing of my heart so that I could hear him above the blood pounding in my ears.

“You know we had a nanny,” Fred was saying. “Jeanette.”

I looked at Dave. “Lola’s sister,” I said. He nodded.

“I was the one who wanted Ginger to get a nanny. She didn’t want to. She didn’t care if the house was chaos or if the boys ran around like savages. She said it made a house a home.” Fred sounded odd, not like himself. Since when did he care about a messy house? But there was a catch in his throat. “I was rich and getting richer, even in this economy. Did Ginger tell you about my business?”

“We don’t care about that,” Darren said. “Just tell us where the boys are.” He nearly yelled the last few words and it seemed to shock all of us.

“Yes. Well I wanted us to have a nanny so Ginger could spend more time on herself. There was no reason she should have to work as hard as she did, running after the boys, you see?”

“Ginger loved running after the boys,” I said. “What did you want her to do, spend more time shopping and getting her nails done?” How did Jack have anything to do with this?

Fred ignored me. “Anyway, I asked around for recommendations and Jeanette came really highly recommended by my lawyer, and she had great references. She was a hit with the boys from the get-go. And with Ginger, too. They were more like friends than anything.” He cleared his throat. “She kind of made herself indispensable around the house. To all of us,” he said. He cleared his throat.

“You had an affair with her,” Darren said. I stopped breathing and looked at Fred. He opened his mouth to say something, then looked down at the ground.

“Ginger had gotten so distant. She was so worried about you, Danny. And she told Jeanette about you. All about you, and Jack. And then when we were, um, alone,” Fred said, face red, “Jeanette would want to know all about you and drugs and Jack and where he lived and money and… I just thought she was fascinated by our… colorful family.”

“Ginger and Jeanette started leaving the boys with Marta and going off, sometimes overnight,” he said. “Ginger started losing weight, and she was distracted all the time. She wasn’t Ginger.”

“Jeanette got her into drugs?” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“You and Jeanette got her into drugs, Danny,” Fred said. “If you weren’t her twin and she hadn’t had this need to feel everything you were feeling, none of this would have happened. None of it.”

Darren walked over to Fred and looked like he was going to hit him. Miller stopped him, said something about it being a bad thing if he brought the prisoner back beaten up.

“The boys,” Darren said. “Hurry up, Fred. I can’t stand to look at you much longer. Even if you didn’t kill Ginger, you’re the one who got her killed.”

“I hired Dave to find out what Ginger and Jeanette were up to,” Fred said. “Turns out they were going to some dive bar and buying drugs and going to the Sunny Jim motel to get high. And who knows what else,” he added.

“They weren’t up to anything else,” Dave said. He was still sitting cross-legged on the ground, but he’d removed his hands from on top of his head. He looked as comfortable as a person could be under the circumstances. “At least, Ginger wasn’t.”

We all looked at him.

“As far as I could tell, Jeanette was taking over Ginger’s life. The weaker Ginger got, the stronger Jeanette got.”

“Like a vampire,” Darren said.

Dave nodded. “Kind of, yes. She made sure the boys loved her. She seduced Fred. And then, of course, she went for the money.”

Money. Of course. It’s always about money. Sometimes I wish we could burn it all and run the world on the barter system. But we’d still have the haves and have-nots, I suppose. Still have women bartering their bodies for whatever they needed.

“How?” I croaked.

“Blackmail,” Fred answered simply. “Turns out she had filmed our, uh, time together.”

Darren spit on the ground. Fred ignored him.

“And when I wanted to end it, and tried to fire her, she demanded money. A lot of it.”

“A million,” Dave said.

The rage started in my brain like buzzing bees.

“And did you pay her?” I didn’t recognize my own voice.

Fred nodded. “Yes,” he said. A million dollars. I shook my head.

“But it didn’t stop,” Darren said.

“She still wouldn’t leave. She still had the tapes of us together. And I couldn’t tell Ginger. I just couldn’t. I hired him,” he nodded at Dave. “And I just waited. I couldn’t stand the stress, and what having Jeanette in our house was doing to Ginger. I was going to tell her,” he said. “I was. But then… she just didn’t come home one night.”

I didn’t want to think about that. I would think about that later. I would smoke crack and think about that later. My heart felt sore. It actually felt broken, like a sharp cracked rib in the middle of my chest.

“So what does this all have to do with the boys being in Toronto?”

Fred nodded at Dave, who said, “Can I stand up now?” He was looking at Darren. “I’m unarmed and outnumbered. All I was supposed to do was get you here.” Darren and I looked at each other, and I shrugged. Darren nodded at Dave, who climbed to his feet slowly. Not a bad idea, faced with the guns Miller and Darren had. “Jeanette boarded an Air Canada flight from LAX the same day she took the boys. I don’t know what she told them to get them to cooperate, but I do know that they got on that plane. Before the Amber Alert had gone out,” he added. He looked at me. “And Jack MacRae is in Toronto right now, staying at the Four Seasons.”

“Oh,” I said. Jack in Toronto. I wondered how long he’d been there, but wouldn’t ask.

Dave nodded at Fred. “According to my client, Jeanette asked a lot about Jack. There are several possible scenarios we’re looking at. She knows Mr. MacRae has significant capital, so she could be using the boys as some kind of leverage to get money from him. Fred tells me that he told Jeanette a lot about Jack.”

I couldn’t look at Fred. I imagined him engaging in pillow talk with a woman who wasn’t my sister, talking to her about my husband. I clenched my fists, took a deep breath. I could hear Ginger telling me to breathe. So I did.

“There is another possibility, of course,” Dave was saying. He kicked at the ground, and for a second he looked like the slacker I’d met at Lucky’s. “Jack could be involved in this. You left him, and he took it badly? And he’s got mental health issues?”

“You are joking.” I turned and looked at Fred. “You really think Jack would hurt those boys? In a million years? No matter what, Fred, no matter how far off the reservation he might have gotten, he loves those boys as much as any of us do.”

“Danny,” Fred said, almost gently, “people change.”

“Fred would like us to go to Toronto, Danny,” Dave said. I looked at him. “Jack will at least see you, and if he doesn’t know anything about the boys or Jeanette, it wouldn’t hurt to put him in the picture.”

“I know Jeanette will get to him,” Fred said. “She was… very curious about him.”

I looked at Darren, who nodded at me.

“I’ll go,” I said.

I looked at Miller, who had been unusually quiet during this. He called me over with his eyes, and I went. Darren was standing six feet from Fred now, talking quietly, and I knew he didn’t trust himself to get any closer to him.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Miller was asking me. His eyes were soft. “If this Jeanette is there and she did kill Ginger – and I’m starting to think she might have at least had something to do with it – then you’re walking into a lion’s den.” I could tell he wanted to touch me, but this still could not be a worse time for a gesture of affection.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “If he’s right,” I said, nodding in Fred’s direction, unable to even say his name, “then I’ve got to go up there and get the boys. When they’re safe, I’ll deal with Jeanette.”

“Deal with?” he said.

“Give her a stern talking-to.” Miller nodded. No point in putting him in a position where he had any moral qualms about letting me go into what could, by my own hand, turn into a war zone.

“Keep in very close touch,” he said. He tried to smile. “I’ll worry.”

I nodded. “I’m still not sure how much of this is true,” I said. “This isn’t the Fred I know. He’s changed.”

Miller shrugged. “I didn’t know him before, of course, but it seems like this Jeanette character has a pretty bad influence on people.” He looked at Fred and Darren talking, and lowered his gun. With one hand he fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and managed to light it. “Lindquist is going to trial. If I get found out for this little expedition, I could lose my job.”

“So why did you?”

He inhaled deeply and grinned at me. “I want to get the girl in the end,” he said. “Seems worth the risk. Besides, it’s not like Lindquist will tell anyone. He’s the one who wanted to come here.”

I smiled, or something like it. Too many conflicting emotions. Right now, I just wanted the boys back, and safe. And now Jack was in the mix. And this was complicated.

But then again, I seemed to run towards complications.

I patted his arm and turned to Dave, who was watching us closely. “So you’re coming with me?” I said.

“No,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

“You can trust him, Danny,” Fred said to me. Darren came over and ruffled my hair. I felt so tired suddenly. I felt like I could lie down and sleep for a year. “Really.”

“High praise coming from you,” I said. “You fucking prick,” I said. “You goddamn cheating, lying, fucking prick.” But I was weary, and so were my words. And if Dave worked for Fred, at least he was trying to get the boys back, which made him an ally in that, at least.

I looked at the men around me. Darren, Fred, Miller and Dave. Of all of them, Dave was the one whose well-being I cared the least about. A perfect companion, then, for the task ahead.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go find the boys.”

We drove in the two cars to a private airfield in the desert. I rode with Dave and Darren, while Miller escorted his prisoner.

In our car, at least, we were silent. I closed my eyes, found myself breathing deeply and holding it, then exhaling slowly. It might have looked like a relaxation exercise, but I was pretending I was inhaling crack. If you hold your breath for a really long time and then exhale very slowly from deep in your lungs, you get a teeny, tiny rush. For now, I would take it.

Dave said that Fred had a private plane on stand-by. A rental, he said. Fred didn’t own it.

“Pfft. I thought you said he was rich,” I said. “Where’s the Gulfstream?” Dave laughed.

We all got out of the cars. My skin felt burnt and raw and dry, a nice match for my insides.

“Time for you to go,” Fred said. Back to Toronto. Back home to my apartment, and Gene, if he was there. And D-Man.

And maybe Jack. And please God, Matthew and Luke.

And Jeanette. I was going to put a stop to this. To her.

I stood still for a minute, letting myself bake. I felt like this dry sun could erase me, shrivel me up and take away my rage. For a few moments I welcomed it. I felt nothing, and it was like a blessing.

Darren and Dave seemed to have come to a sort of truce. Darren pulled a bag out of the Fiat’s backseat, with the few bits of clothes and toiletries I had picked up in Palm Springs. Darren was civil enough to Dave, considering an hour ago Dave had a gun pressing into the back of his neck.

“Take care of everything here,” I said, hugging my little brother. He held onto me tightly.

“It should be me,” he said into my hair. “I should be going.”

I shook my head. “Don’t be stupid. I’m the one Jeanette was impersonating. Jack is my husband. It has to be me, Darren. Jeanette called my apartment for a reason. To let me know the game is on back there. Whatever her plan is, it’s got to do with me somehow.”

Darren nodded.

“And it’s you Jeanette seems to want to play with,” Fred said. “Maybe because of Jack. If he’s her next target, you’re the one standing in her way. Like Ginger was,” he said. He looked down and wiped one hand over his face, a weary gesture. Whatever happened to him now, he would never fully recover from this.

And he needed to use me as bait to get the boys back.

I nodded. I understood. In his shoes, I don’t know that I would have done any differently.

“But promise me one thing,” I said. “Somebody has to trust me with a gun up there.”

Dave looked at Miller. “We’ll talk about that on the plane,” he said.