“Reach for the sky! ”
A kid’s voice trying to sound older. Jan turned and looked down on the Brice boy, the spitting image of the father. He was holding his right hand like it was a gun and grinning.
“I got that from Woody, in
Toy Story
.”
He laughed and ran off. She shook her head. His big sister was abducted, and he’s playing cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers or whatever his game was. The kid didn’t have a clue.
Jan
ate the protein bar
in four quick bites while watching the small TV on the counter; a reporter standing on the front lawn was saying, “Ransom. John Brice is soon to be a very wealthy man …”
Old news. Jan exited the kitchen, but she could still hear the reporter on the kitchen TV or on the TV in the next room or on other unseen TVs in rooms she passed, as if someone were deathly afraid of missing breaking news: “His company, BriceWare-dot-com, is going public next week, which is expected to make John Brice worth well over—”
Jan entered the study.
“
A billion dollars?
”
Special Agent Eugene Devereaux, the agent in charge, was interviewing the victim’s father. The father nodded blankly. Sitting slumped on the couch, he looked as if he would fall over from exhaustion if not for Agents Floyd and Randall sitting on either side of him like book ends. His curly black hair was a mess, his khakis and blue denim shirt were wrinkled and dirty, the knot of his yellow Mickey Mouse tie was pulled halfway down, and his face was drooped like a balloon after most of the air had leaked out. He appeared even thinner than the last time she had seen him. But what struck her was the incredible sadness in his eyes, brown eyes visible over black glasses sitting low on his nose, the eyes of a man suddenly lost and adrift in a harsh world. His slender fingers were kneading the tie like a rosary.
“She gave this tie to me,” he said to no one in particular.
A telephone attached to Bureau hardware sat on the coffee table in front of the father. An agent wearing headphones was testing the equipment that would record, trap, and trace the ransom call. If the call came. If the motive was money.
“A billion dollars,” Agent Devereaux repeated.
The father looked up at Devereaux and said in a barely audible voice: “He can have it all if he’ll let Gracie go.”
Agent Devereaux dropped his eyes and gave a sideways glance at the other agents. “Mr. Brice, is there any reason someone would want to hurt your family?”
Almost a whisper: “No.”
“Have any threats been made against you?”
“No.”
“Did you fire any employees recently?”
“No.”
“Do you suspect anyone?”
“No.”
“Did you notice any strangers in the neighborhood?”
“No. Those gates are supposed to keep bad people out.”
Agent Devereaux studied the father for a moment, obviously concluding that he was neither the abductor nor a source of information. Devereaux then turned to her.
“Yes, Agent Jorgenson?”
“Sir, I’m completing the detailed description of the victim’s clothing. The mother said Mr. Brice might have the information I need.”
Agent Devereaux nodded. “Proceed.”
This was Jan Jorgenson’s first child abduction. Engaged to the Bureau for eleven months now, she had always assumed that one day she would marry and have children; but now, seeing the father’s pain at the loss of his child, a pain that a billion dollars could not console, she wasn’t so sure. Her question now seemed an awful burden.
“Mr. Brice …”
John stared at the female FBI agent and tried to understand her words. His brain felt fragmented. He couldn’t process what he thought he had heard her say. Why was she asking about Gracie’s—
“Underwear?”
John turned to the other FBI agents, the ones setting up the recording equipment for when the kidnapper called and demanded ransom—a million, five million, ten million—he didn’t freaking care how much. He would pay it and Gracie would come home.
That’s the deal!
His eyes darted from agent to agent to agent. They were staring down at their equipment.
“But you said … I thought … I thought it was about money.”
Until that very moment, it had never occurred to John R. Brice that his money might not be the motive for his daughter’s abduction. He suddenly felt sick. A searing heat spread over his face. He thought he might faint. His upper body fell forward until his hands caught his head. He pulled his glasses off his face; the world around him was a blur, but the image inside his head was 20/20 sharp:
Gracie … and a man … and …
“Oh, God.”
He started crying. He couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t even try. He gave up the fight.
The doorbell rang again just as Elizabeth entered the study. Five grim-faced FBI agents simultaneously looked at her then quickly averted their eyes. Her husband was sitting between two agents on the sofa. His face was in his hands; he was crying inconsolably. Her body clenched with her greatest fear.
“Is it Grace?” she asked.
The lead FBI agent shook his head. Fear released its grip on Elizabeth’s body. She breathed out a “Thank God.” She then turned to her husband. “John, what’s wrong?”
His sobbing did not abate. Elizabeth went to him and stood over his pitiful figure, debating whether to console him or to slap him senseless for allowing her daughter to be abducted. The agents sitting on the sofa relocated across the room. Over her husband’s slumped head, she asked Agent Devereaux, “What happened?”
Agent Devereaux sighed. “We had to ask, Mrs. Brice. We need a complete description of Gracie’s clothing, including her …”
“Underwear.”
Agent Devereaux nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
Elizabeth’s mind was so chaotic with wild thoughts that she had forgotten she had sent the female FBI agent to John with that question. She put her left hand on her husband’s shoulder.
“John,” she said softly. He looked up at her with red eyes and tears rolling down his face and snot running out of his nose and a trembling chin. He wiped the snot on his shirtsleeve. Her little boy.
John Brice had married her when she needed a husband. And he had been a good husband: he had never embarrassed her in public or crossed her in private; he had always sent flowers to her office on her birthday and their anniversary, not that she had any inclination for romance; and he was a loving father to both children and a genius at math, the perfect skill in a wired world. John R. Brice was a gentle brilliant boy … and utterly useless in a fight. He had nothing but a Ph.D. to fall back on in times like this, no reserve of intestinal fortitude to draw upon when you had to be hard and mean and ruthless; he was not like her—she could easily stick a gun to the abductor’s head and blow his fucking brains out if necessary to save Grace. John Brice was not hard or mean or ruthless. He was just a thirty-seven-year-old little boy, looking up at her like he had just been beaten up by the neighborhood bully and needed mommy to hug him and make it all better. Instead, she slapped him across the face.
“John,” she said through clenched teeth, the rage making a move to escape the darkness, “it damn well better be ransom. Because if it’s not—”
“Eliza—”
She slapped him again.
“Goddamn you! You let him take her!”
“Mrs. Brice,” Agent Devereaux said, “this won’t help.”
It was helping her. Elizabeth raised her hand again, but a black hand grabbed her wrist. The rage turned on Agent Devereaux.
“Let—me—go.”
The phone rang. Agent Devereaux released her and sat next to John. The agent wearing headphones activated the recorder then nodded at Agent Devereaux. The phone rang again.
“Mr. Brice,” Agent Devereaux said.
John remained in the same position she had left him: his hands still cupping his face to block her blows and crying and saying softly, “I’m sorry.”
The phone rang again.
“Mr. Brice, can you take the call?”
Her husband didn’t move. Elizabeth thought,
Utterly useless in a fight
, then she thrust her hand out to Agent Devereaux.
“Give it to me.”
Agent Devereaux lifted the phone off the receiver and handed it to her. The tape was running. She put the phone to her ear.
“Elizabeth Brice.”
A child’s voice came across. “Can Sam play?”
“
What?
No, Sam can’t play today!”
The agents exhaled and rolled their eyes in unison. Elizabeth handed the phone to Agent Devereaux and sighed; the child’s voice had given her pause. Her anger spent, the rage retreated like a tornado into the dark sky and she now gazed down upon the destruction left behind—her husband still sobbing and his face red and welted—and the slightest twinge of remorse tried to ignite her conscience. But she stomped it out like a discarded cigarette.
It’s his damn fault! He let someone take her!
Her respiration spiked. One last glare at her utterly useless husband, then she marched out of the study and down the gallery and was crossing the foyer when the doorbell rang again. She stopped, yanked the front door open, and stared at the man standing on her porch. Anyone who knew his life would have expected a bigger man, a harder looking man. But there he stood, perhaps an artist who painted the West and dressed the part, wearing rugged Santa Fe-style attire that looked so phony on the models in the Neiman Marcus catalog but seemed born to his lean frame with his chiseled facial features and ruddy skin, the ragged blond hair framing his tanned face and setting off the most brilliant blue eyes imaginable. Remarkably handsome for a sixty-year-old man, he could be a middle-aged movie star. Instead, he was a drunk.
Elizabeth Brice turned and walked away from her father-in-law.
Ben Brice stepped inside his son’s home and into the middle of a busy intersection. He quickly retreated as uniformed police and FBI agents and a maid talking into a portable phone and his grandson in a baseball uniform pursued by a young Hispanic woman— “
Señor
Sam, the oatmeal, it is ready!”—raced past him.
Beneath his feet was a polished hardwood floor; above his head was a lighted dome painted with a mural. A wide gallery extended off the entry into both wings of the residence. A sweeping staircase rose in front of him to a second-floor landing. Beyond the stairs was a living area with a two-story-tall bank of windows looking out onto a brilliant blue pool with a waterfall. Gracie had said her new home had cost $3 million. At the time, he thought she had to be mistaken; but now, looking around, Ben could believe this place cost every bit of $3 million, maybe more. Which was good: his son could afford the ransom.
Ben had not spoken to John in five
years, when he had last come to Dallas for Sam’s birth. He almost didn’t recognize the slight young man who had wandered aimlessly into the foyer and who now found himself caught in the middle of a fast-moving stream of bodies like a bug in a whirlpool; he looked defeated and lost, like the senile World War Two vets at the VA hospital, a blank face in a world no longer recognizable. Ben dropped the duffel bag, stepped over to his son, and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“John.” A stiff shake. “John.”
His son regarded Ben as he would a complete stranger and said, “You think it’s ransom?”
“John, it’s me … Ben.”
John pushed his glasses up and blinked hard. “
Ben?
What are you doing … How did you … Who called you?”
“You should have, son.”
A voice from above: “I did.”
She had left him right after Gracie was born, determined that her only granddaughter would not be raised by a nanny. Ben had figured it was just an excuse, not that he blamed her; if he could have, he would have left himself a long time ago. She had made regular visits back at first, but the time between visits grew longer and longer. Five years ago her visits had stopped altogether, when she had two grandchildren to raise.
Now, seeing her at the top of the stairs, her red hair and fair complexion glowing in the light of the dome—still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen—the love that Ben Brice had tried to drown in whiskey along with the pain returned with such force he thought his knees might buckle; instead, tears came to his eyes— she was still wearing her wedding ring. A devout Irish Catholic, she would never divorce her husband but could no longer live with a drunk; a devout drunk, he would never love another woman but could not live without a drink.
She descended the stairs, and Ben could tell that she had cried through the night. He knew because he had caused this woman to cry through many nights. Not that he had ever touched her in anger. Ben Brice was not a mean drunk. He was a silent one. The more he drank, the deeper inside himself he burrowed, battling the demons within and leaving his wife to cry herself to sleep. His soul was stained with her tears. Five years since he had seen her, touched her, held her, he ached to hold her now; but he stood paralyzed, like a buck private facing a four-star general.
She knew.
She came to him and buried her face in his chest. Ben pulled her tight and breathed in her scent as if for the first time. And for a brief moment, it was thirty-eight years earlier when the world still made sense. She sighed deeply, almost a cry, and he felt her slim body sag slightly.