“Once this is over, how about we go somewhere warm?”
Ben smiled at the idea. “Where’re you thinking?’”
“Maybe Florida. Or the Caribbean?”
“You miss island living?”
“On days like today…” Andy’s voice faded. The mindless chatter was meant to keep their minds off of what they were about to do.
They were sitting in the driveway as the engine of the beat-up sedan warmed up. Jim and Charlie emerged from the house. They would follow Ben to Green Haven in a second vehicle.
***
Sean’s jaw dropped. “
Please
tell me you’re joking!”
As if his body was no longer his to control, Luke’s weight shifted back and forth from one foot to the other. Standing just a few feet from the window on the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building only further toyed with his equilibrium. “Sean, I wish I were, but it all just hit me…just last night,” he lied. It had been five days. “I’m positive that she drugged me. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. You saw me that morning. You saw how messed up I was. Have you ever seen me that bad before?”
Sean raised a skeptical eyebrow but admitted that Luke had a point. “Maybe. But right now I need to know more about this girl. Who was she?”
Regaining his balance, Luke looked squarely out the window and shook his head slowly. “I don’t remember much about her. All I know is that she was blond and wearing a black dress and her name was something like Kathy or Kaitlin or something that began with a K.”
“Or a C?” Sean added with exasperation.
“Maybe…she didn’t exactly spell her name for me, you know.”
“Great.”
In a sudden motion, Sean pushed his chair away from his desk and shot to his feet. “Let’s go,” he ordered and was out the door before Luke could turn away from the window.
In the elevator, they descended more than sixty flights before getting off at the fifteenth floor. Sean advanced toward a specific office as a bewildered Luke followed. Without bothering to knock, Sean barged into the office and turned on the light, nearly scaring Danny to death. “Good you’re here.”
“Uh, yeah…yeah,” Danny replied.
With Luke standing beside him, Sean placed one hand on Danny’s chair and leaned in toward the computer screen. “Danny, I want you to look up the ID records of every Helen that went to
Papillon
on August…” He looked up at Luke.
“Fourth. August fourth,” Luke supplied humbly.
Danny blinked as the instructions sank in. “Uh, okay.” A few minutes and many keystrokes later, he brought up a list of seventeen names before pushing his chair out of the way so that Sean could get a closer look.
“Good thing it was a Wednesday. Otherwise the list would be longer,” Sean said with a smirk.
“Heh, yeah,” Luke echoed in an effort to sound agreeable. “The Helens hate hanging around the Dregs almost as much as we do, huh?”
Sean didn’t reply. His eyes rapidly scanned over the list of names. All, except two, he recognized. “You know who these two are?” he said to Luke as he pointed to the third name from the bottom and then the very last name. “Isabel Torres and Katrina Wilson?”
When Danny heard the two names, his heart beat faster. Inching farther away from the screen, he pretended to be looking at some papers.
“Katrina…that’s the one, the blond,” said Luke. “But I never met her before that night.”
Sean turned to Danny and unleashed more orders. “I want to know how many times these two names have been scanned going into
Papillon
in the past three months. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” Danny mumbled as he rolled his chair back to his keyboard and typed away until he found the results. “Uh, looks like they were both only there that one night.”
Sean frowned as he stared at the screen, thinking. “Tell me when these two names were registered.”
“Okay.” Danny performed a few quick commands and silently thanked God that he had entered separate dates for all the names that Ben had requested. “Okay, Isabel was registered on May thirteenth and Katrina on June first.”
Sean looked away from the screen and turned to the window, briefly noting how unspectacular the view was on this floor. A minute later, he had a plan. “Follow me,” he barked at Luke without another word to Danny.
Once the two had left his office, Danny got up to switch off the light. “You’re welcome, asshole.” For a long while afterward, he stared out his window and wondered what Sean knew and whether or not he should do anything about it.
***
“God, I miss my truck.” Ben was staring at the fuel gauge. They were still eighty miles from the prison, and though they had filled the tank and threw a couple of full jerry cans in the trunk, he was still uneasy.
“We’ll be fine,” Andy reassured him, reading his mind.
“Yeah…”
“Hey, relax.” She gave him a lighthearted shove and a smirk to go with it. Except for the faintest of smiles, he barely reacted.
“I’ll relax tomorrow. I’d open a hundred bottles of champagne if we had any.”
“Well, I’m sure between the two of us, we can find something to celebrate with.”
This time, a genuine laugh escaped Ben’s mouth, and he took his eyes off the road to give Andy a proper smile. “Oh, really? And what exactly did you have in mind, aside from champagne?”
She looked down at her hands, hands that were now warm, and averted a coy smile from his view. “Maybe dance.”
“Dance?”
“Yeah, why not? People dance when they’re happy, don’t they?”
After a semi-shrug, he replied, “Yeah, sure.”
“So we’ll dance. You and me. But I get to pick the song.”
Ben looked hard at Andy. “That’s all? Just one song?”
She returned her gaze to her hands. She studied the crescents of her fingernails. “Well, one song to start with. Then…”
Gripping tightly on the steering wheel, Ben’s hands began to sweat. He looked over at Andy. “It’s a deal. Just wear that dress.”
She looked up. “What, the one I wore to
Papillon
?”
“Yeah. You looked…you look good in that.”
“I think I have it somewhere.” She smiled.
***
Back on the eighty-first floor, Sean rattled off orders to Luke.
“I want you to send five…no, ten…of your best guys up to Green Haven. I want them to ask the guards stationed there if they’ve seen anything unusual since early August. And I mean
anything
. Even if it’s some cow that got tipped over on a field a mile away, I want to know about it. Then have two of them come back and report what they find by…” Sean looked at his watch. “Seven o’clock. Got it?”
“Got it,” Luke said confidently before heading toward the door.
“And, Luke,” Sean called out, stopping him. “Don’t think I won’t forget that you’re the reason we’re in this mess right now.”
Like a scolded child, Luke swallowed hard. He merely nodded and silently left the room.
“Idiot,” Sean muttered as the door closed. He picked up the phone that sat on his desk and dialed a number. “Yeah, it’s me…I want all video from the night of the fourth of August sent to my apartment within the hour.” Without waiting for acknowledgement from the other end, he hung up and left his office.
Fifteen minutes later, he was back at his apartment after walking alone, something he normally wouldn’t do in broad daylight, but it gave him a chance to think without his bodyguards hovering around him. He locked his front door and went directly to his den. In the corner behind a desk stood an antique armoire with a safe inside. He opened the doors of the armoire and hastily spun off the combination. The safe clicked open, and he grabbed a large stack of stuffed folders from inside and placed them on his desk.
There was a file for every Director and nearly every Helen and Fixer: school files, medical records, juvenile detention records, and even notes from old therapy sessions with over-priced psychiatrists. Most of the files were kept in a standard filing cabinet on the other side of the desk, but Sean stored the most important ones inside the safe.
Organized alphabetically by last name, Luke’s file was on top, labeled “Luke Andrews” on the protruding tab. The contents of his file were underwhelming: a poor math student but decent in history and writing, several disciplinary infractions from grade school teachers but nothing out of the ordinary, and a mild case of childhood asthma that apparently had vanished over the years. The rest of the details were mundane. Handsome, popular, but nonetheless impressionable. Rich parents and an older sister who died with them. Large house in Westchester. The typical profile of an upper-class, white male survivor.
Sean sorted through several others, including Lily’s with scribbled notes dictated by her shrink detailing her history of sexual abuse by her stepfather, and Chad’s folder with graphic crime scene photos of his mother’s murder. Thousands of hours and miles travelled had been spent gathering the total sum of these files.
At the bottom of the pile and out of alphabetical order was Ben Kelly’s file. It was empty except for one small piece of paper. Sean had personally found it on the floor of the guidance counselor’s office at Ben’s elementary school in Virginia. The rest of the file was gone, as was his cousin’s, but Sean guessed that the single paper had accidentally been dropped when he and Jim attempted to erase all evidence of their past after fleeing New York the year before. Though cunning of Ben to destroy his files, it was bad luck for him that such a critical piece of information was left behind.
Sean held the paper up to the light and studied the ten individual fingerprints taken when Ben was ten-years old, as indicated by the date stamped on the top corner. The private Catholic school he and Jim had attended recorded students’ fingerprints in the event that a student was kidnapped or went missing. It was ironic that something once meant to protect Ben might now help to catch him ten years later.
There was a heavy knock at the front door. “You’re late,” Sean barked at the kid delivering a single envelope and slammed the door shut before the boy could squeak out an apology. He marched directly to his living room and turned on his large flat screen television. He removed the first of three disks from the envelope and inserted it into the DVD player beneath the screen.
Every single night at
Papillon
was captured on camera, though only rarely did Sean have time to watch any of the recordings. Still, he ordered the recordings to continue. Following more than half an hour of both real-time and scanned footage from six different cameras positioned throughout the club, he found what he was looking for.
The camera angle was not optimal, but it was still clear enough to see what went on. Looking at the blond, it was easy to understand how Luke had fallen prey. She was wearing an enticing black dress that left just a little to the imagination and high heels that showcased her slender yet muscular legs. Her wavy hair extended to the middle of her back, and every minute or so it would glide back and forth over her shoulders as she moved.
Where had she concealed the gun Luke spoke of? Likely inside her thigh
, he thought.
Sean watched and re-watched the film several times. He had never seen the girl before. He would have remembered. There was something different about her, and although he couldn’t hear a word that either she or Luke said, he could just barely identify the subtleties of the act she had put on for Luke: a slightly forced smile here, a tentative caress there. But would he have noticed had he not been looking for some clue, or if it had been him instead of Luke?
Probably not
, he admitted to himself.
Sean watched the video nine or ten times. The girl never looked directly at the camera, since there was no way that she would know where it was hidden. Still, her face was clearly visible from several angles. He paused the video on the clearest shot and leaned in closer to the screen. His cold, blue eyes soaked in the image, memorizing every pixel. “Pretty little thing, aren’t you?” he said aloud.
***
By the time they reached Stormville, the small town that surrounded the prison, it was pouring rain.
“Man, this sucks,” said Ben as he increased the speed of the windshield wipers.
“Just think of it as a strategic advantage. The guards will be cold, wet, and tired. They’ll be slow to react,” Andy offered, trying to sound positive.
“So will Jim and I. You and Charlie will be nice and warm inside the cars.”
“Not the entire time.”
“Oh, sorry…for like, five minutes you’ll be outside.” Though he was teasing her, there was an edge to his voice.
A few miles from the prison, he steered the car into a vacant gas station and waited. A half-minute later, Jim and Charlie pulled up beside them in the other vehicle. Charlie rolled down the passenger’s window.
“Smashing weather.”