Heart of the Night (5 page)

“Do I dare use the phone? What if the kidnappers try to call and get a busy signal?”

“They'll call again.”

“Should I be ready with a suggestion for an exchange place?”

“They'll have their own place in mind.”

“What if it's somewhere secluded?”

“It probably will be.”

“They'll be able to take the money and run. They won't care about Megan.”

“But you'll insist on seeing Meg first. You'll tell them that they can choose the place, but that the deal is the money for your wife, there and then.”

“How can I demand that, when they're holding all the cards? How can I demand
anything?
”

“You can demand it, and you will,” Savannah insisted, “because they're not holding all the cards. You're the one with the money. Don't forget, it's the money they want, not your wife. A little show of strength is in order, Will. If not for yourself, for Megan.”

For a minute, Will didn't answer. When he did, he was looking puzzled. “Where do you get yours, Savannah?”

“My what?”

“Strength. How do you manage to stay so cool and rational?”

Savannah didn't answer, but gave him a wry look. A minute later, she nodded toward the door and said, “Go on home. I'll see you there in a little while.”

A few minutes later, sitting behind her desk with the telephone receiver honking out a busy signal against her shoulder, Savannah thought about strength. Where did she get it? She wasn't sure. Strength was just something that came with her role, something that came with involving herself with details to avoid the overview.

Her strength was often a front. She could play the game with the best of them, acting cool and rational when inside she was shaking like a leaf. It has been that way from the very start of her tenure at the AG's office. She had had to prove her worth, first, in a traditionally male world, and second, in a world of political favors. She had done it. She was a respected member of the team. She still needed to uphold that image of cool competence.

Perhaps that was why she understood why William Vandermeer did not want people to know he was hurting for money. He was trying to uphold an image, too. If she criticized him, she had to criticize herself.

Pressing the button on the phone, she dialed Susan's number, but it was still busy. She would keep trying. Sending Susan to sit with William was a good idea. Susan needed something to do and someone to think about besides herself. She wasn't a weakling, yet she allowed herself to act like one. Her low self-image needed correcting.

Everyone had a right to moments of weakness. Susan took too many, Savannah too few. There were times when Savannah wanted to relax, to lean on someone, perhaps cry on his shoulder. To some extent, though, she'd backed herself into a corner. She had come to expect competence from herself. Before she could ease up enough to relax, lean on someone, or cry on his shoulder, she had to find a man who could match her strength.

There was no one like that around the office. Nor had she found anyone like that among the men she had dated in the past few years. She was beginning to wonder if one existed.

Women got more picky with age. She had heard it said, seen it written, knew it to be true. At eighteen, she had been far more open to different men and relationships than she was at thirty-going-on-thirty-one. Of course, at eighteen she had been far less sophisticated than she was now. If she had married then, she would probably have divorced soon after. Instead she had been smart and spared herself some pain.

Unfortunately, there was pain in looking toward the future and seeing endlessly long, lonely nights. Perhaps she'd outsmarted herself.

C
HAPTER
3

When Savannah arrived at the Vandermeers shortly after two o'clock, she found Will sitting at the large captain's table in the kitchen, looking lost. Sam Craig and Hank Shanski were in the library, efficiently going about their work. They had already put a tap on the phone, but there had been no call, no contact at all from the kidnappers.

After taking one look at Will, who was staring blindly at the ransom note, Savannah went to the cabinet in search of coffee. There were three bags of beans. The mill was on the counter by the coffee maker. She made a pot of strong coffee and then sat down next to Will.

“Have you called the insurance company?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “They're sending someone over.”

“How long will it take them to get you the money?”

He shot her a worried look. “They have to make sure this is a bona fide kidnapping. They said not to touch anything. Their man wants to do his own investigation before any cleanup is done.”

“He may be satisfied with talking to Sammy and Hank. They're pretty thorough.”

She was quiet for a minute. The coffee maker chugged and gurgled, reassuringly mundane.

Will glanced toward the hallway that led back to the rest of the house. “Have you taken a look in there?”

“Not yet. I don't want to risk contaminating anything.” She reached into her briefcase and took out a legal pad. “There are other things you and I can cover in the meantime.”

“If you're going to ask me who might have done this, don't,” Will advised, sounding every bit as frustrated as he looked. “I've been sitting here, wondering where Megan is, wondering how she is, wondering who could have taken her. Since eight-thirty this morning I've wondered, and I've come up with nothing.”

Savannah shared his anguish. Once again she wanted to beg him to bring in the FBI, but she knew what his answer would be.

“Can you think of anyone who had a grudge against you or your family, or even Megan?”

He shook his head.

“Anyone at the plant?” The Vandermeer money was in textiles. Though Will hid the extent of the damage, most people knew that the Vandermeer mills had seen better days. In the past five years, workers had been laid off and two of the five plants had been closed. “Maybe there was a manager who felt he should have been transferred rather than fired. Maybe there was a rabble-rouser who was fired to make room for a transfer.”

Will denied both theories. “Whoever did this wanted money.” He jerked a hand toward the note. “It's spelled out right there.”

Savannah read the note again. It certainly demanded money. But the wording was odd.
Kick in a cool three million.
Someone had spent extra effort cutting out more letters than was necessary. A simple
Pay three million
would have sufficed.
Kick in a cool three million.
She wrote the words, then studied them. The phrase bothered her.

“Mmm. The three million is pretty clear. Still, someone out for revenge could get it this way. The money would be a bonus.” A different thought occurred to her. “It'd be particularly gratifying if the person knew about your present cash flow problems. How many people do?”

“Not many,” Will said, then conceded, “I mean, the layoffs and plant closings are common knowledge. It's obvious that I'm tightening my belt, but not many people know why.” He shook his head. “But I don't think it's revenge. I've never been an ogre. I'm just not a good money manager.”

“Okay,” Savannah said. “We'll guess that this was done purely for the money. Just in case, though, why don't you give me the names of your plant managers.”

Will's eyes widened in alarm. “They're all good men!”

“I know,” she soothed, “but I'd like to put them to work for us. They would know, or be able to find out, whether there's been any trouble—”

“They would have reported it to me.”

She tried again. “Maybe trouble is the wrong word. What I'm looking for is different—strange behavior, something out of the ordinary, a change from the norm, like unexplained absences by a regular worker, a sudden grouping of two or three workers who hadn't been friends before, any recent complaints that seemed particularly strong or out of order.”

Will remained skeptical. “I don't think it's anyone from the plant. I told you, aside from the layoffs, my people are treated well. Maybe too well. If I were stingier, I wouldn't be losing money. My workers have a good deal.”

Choosing her words with care, she said, “That may be so in your opinion and mine, but a worker may see things differently.”

“Then he's crazy.”

“Anyone involved in kidnapping usually is.” With that, Savannah could see she'd made her point. “I have to consider every possibility, Will. Look at that note; we won't learn much from it. Sammy and Hank can dust this house from top to bottom, but if the kidnappers wore gloves, we won't get fingerprints. If they were careful about where they stood and moved, we may not learn anything from the lab reports. I may be groping around in the dark, but all I need to do is graze the light switch, and we're on.”

Will looked deflated. “But I wanted this kept quiet.”

“It will be. We'll be totally discreet in our inquiries.”

“You'll be doing the asking?”

“No,” Savannah said, then went on, taking the offensive quickly and confidently, if gently. “Time is of the essence. I can't do the asking myself and still coordinate things, and we need as much information as quickly as possible. Ideally, I'd take a dozen detectives and feather them through the state, but since I didn't think you'd go for that, I've called in two other people. Just two. They're like Sammy and Hank. They work full-time for us. They happen to be wonderful people, a married couple, very effective. No one ever knows they're law enforcement officers.”

Will's frustration overwhelmed him. Slamming a fist on the oak tabletop, he cried, “Damn it, I didn't want this, Savannah! I didn't want the police brought in at all! You
knew
that!”

Savannah refused to be cowed. “We need information, Will. Ginny and Chris will be strictly in the field. They won't come anywhere near the house. They'll be asking questions, that's all.”

“If they're asking questions, they'll be making everyone and his brother suspicious. People will wonder what's going on. Before long, rumors will be flying, and then we'll have no hope of keeping a lid on this thing.” He drove a hand through his hair. “I shouldn't have gone to you people. Someone's going to blow it.”

On the one hand, Savannah understood Will's position. In his social circle, questions sparked gossip, and on the tongues of the idle rich gossip was lethal. Yet she doubted Will's rich friends were going to be at the center of the investigation. They wouldn't need three million dollars. Nor would they risk the electric chair. There were easier ways to commit suicide—most of which the idle rich knew.

“No one is going to blow anything,” she vowed. “As of this minute, there are seven people who know about this case—Paul, Anthony and me, Sam and Hank, Ginny and Chris. We're all professionals. Paul will be in touch with you and me; he'll do what we ask and only what we ask, and he'll keep Anthony at heel. If we get any information, we may hook into the pattern-crime computer program, but we'll be a code word, that's all. Sam and Hank will send their findings to the crime lab—which will know this case only by a number—then they'll sit here by the phones with us. They won't have contact with anyone on the outside, unless we ask them to.”

“But these new people, Ginny and Chris—”

“Are right now cruising around talking with car dealers asking about recent purchases or rentals of vans. What we have to do,” she explained in a soft but urgent voice, “is to think like the kidnappers. We have to psych them out. We have to reconstruct what they've already done and, from there, plot what they're going to do.”

Realizing that she had Will's full attention, she continued. “A crime like kidnapping isn't committed on the spur of the moment. It's carefully planned. The kidnappers have probably been in this area for a while. They knew about you, knew that you had the means to deliver three million dollars. They probably staked the house out for a while before they chose their time of day and entry point.

“Given the distance from this house to the next and to the woods behind you, chances are slim your neighbors would be of help. So we'll focus on the commission of the crime. The kidnappers needed some form of transportation, preferably something without windows. A van would be perfect. They could have stolen one, but that would have been risky. We'll check it out anyway, but at the same time Ginny and Chris will concentrate on finding a dealership in Providence that sold a van within the past few days to anyone at all suspicious. I also have two people in the office making calls—” She held up a hand against the objection Will was about to make. “They don't know what case they're working on, simply that they're supposed to canvas the area beyond Providence about the recent rental or purchase of a van. They're collecting names, that's all, and they're parading as members of the consumer protection division. No one will ever suspect what we want the information for.”

Will was temporarily mollified, if begrudgingly so, but Savannah was satisfied with that.

“When Ginny and Chris feel they've exhausted the dealerships,” she went on, “they'll move on to local motels. The kidnappers have Megan stashed somewhere. If I were a kidnapper, I'd want a place near an airport for a quick getaway.” She paused to look at him beseechfully. “Do you see what we're trying to do?”

Will nodded unhappily. “I just wish there were a safer way of doing it. The note says no police. I don't think I'll be able to live with myself if we find Megan dead.”

“We won't find her dead,” Savannah said with a force that was more personal than professional. Determinedly, she lowered her voice again. “Let's make sure we don't.” She picked up her pen. “I'll need the names of your plant managers.”