No Second Chance
Page 12“Yes, but when—”
Click.
I let my hand drop to my side. Numbness seeped in. I did not fight it. The little girls across the street were quarreling now. I couldn’t hear the specifics, but the wordmy popped up a lot, that simple syllable accentuated and drawn out. An SUV sped around the corner. I watched it as though from above. The brakes shrieked. The driver-side door was open before the car had come to a complete stop.
It was Lenny. He took one look at me and picked up his pace. “Marc?”
“You were right.” I nodded toward the house. Regan was standing by the door now. “They think I’m involved.”
Lenny’s face darkened. His eyes narrowed, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints. In sports, you call it putting on your “game face.” Lenny was becoming Cujo. He stared at Regan as if deciding which limb to chew off. “You talked to them?”
“A little.”
Lenny jerked his gaze toward me. “Didn’t you tell them you wanted counsel?”
“Not at first.”
“Damn it, Marc, I told you—”
“I got a ransom demand.”
That made Lenny pull up. I checked my watch. Paramus was a forty-minute ride. With traffic, it could take as much as an hour. I had time, but not much. I started filling him in. Lenny gave Regan another glare and led me farther away from the house. We stopped at the curb, those familiar cloud-gray stones that lie on property lines like sets of teeth, and then, like two children, we squatted deep and sat on them. Our knees were at our chins. I could see Lenny’s skin between the argyle sock and tapered cuff. Squatting like this was uncomfortable as hell. The sun was in our eyes. We both looked off rather than at each other, again just like in our youths. It made it easier to spill it all out.
Regan stopped. “What?”
“Are you arresting my client?”
“No.”
Lenny pointed toward Regan’s crotch. “Then I’m going to have them bronzed and hanging from my rearview mirror, if you take another step.”
Regan straightened his spine. “We have some questions for your client.”
“Tough. Go abuse the rights of someone with a lesser lawyer.”
Lenny made a dismissive gesture and nodded at me to continue. Regan did not look happy, but he took two steps back. I glanced at my watch again. Only five minutes had passed since the ransom call. I finished up while Lenny kept the laser glare aimed at Regan.
“You want my opinion?” he said.
“Yes.”
Still glaring. “I think you should tell them.”
“You sure?”
“Would you?” I said. “I mean, if it was one of your kids?”
Lenny gave it a few seconds. “I can’t put myself in your place, if that’s what you mean. But yeah, I think I would. I play the odds. The odds are better when you tell the cops. Doesn’t mean it works out every time, but they’re experts at this. We’re not.” Lenny put his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hands—a pose from his youth. “That’s the opinion of Lenny the Friend,” he went on. “Lenny the Friend would encourage you to tell them.”
“And Lenny the Lawyer?” I asked.
“He would be more insistent. He would strongly urge you to come forward.”
“Why?”
“If you go off with two million dollars and it vanishes—even if you get Tara back—their suspicions will be, to put it mildly, aroused.”
“I don’t care about that. I just want Tara back.”
“Understood. Or should I say, Lenny the Friend understands.”
Now it was Lenny’s turn to check his watch. My insides felt hollow, scooped out canoe-style. I could almost hear the tick-tick. It was maddening. I tried again to do the rational thing, to list the pros on the right, the cons on the left, and then add them up. But the tick-tick would not stop.
Lenny had talked about playing the odds. I don’t gamble. I’m not a risk taker. Across the street one of the little girls shouted, “I’m telling!” She stormed down the street. The other girl laughed at her and got back on her bike. I felt my eyes well up. I wished like hell Monica were here. I shouldn’t be making this decision alone. She should be in on this, too.
I looked back at the front door. Regan and Tickner were both outside now. Regan had his arms folded across his chest, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Tickner did not move, his face the same placid pool. Were these men I could trust with my daughter’s life? Would they put Tara first, or as Edgar had suggested, would they follow some unseen agenda?
Someone had murdered my wife. Someone had taken my child. For the past few days, I had asked myself why—why us?—trying again to stay rational and not allowing myself extended forays in the deep end of the pity pool. But no answer came. I could see no motive and maybe that was most frightening of all. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe it was just pure bad luck.
Lenny stared straight ahead and waited. Tick, tick, tick.
“Let’s tell them,” I said.
Their reaction surprised me. They panicked.
Regan and Tickner tried to hide it, of course, but their body language was suddenly all wrong—the flutter in the eyes, the tightness at the corners of their mouths, the unduly modulated, FM-soft-rock timbre in their tones. The time frame was simply too close for them. Tickner quickly dialed up the FBI specialist on kidnapping negotiations to enlist his help. He cupped his hand around the mouthpiece while he spoke into it. Regan got hold of his police colleagues in Paramus.
When Tickner hung up, he said to me, “We’ll get people to cover the mall. Discreetly, of course. We’re going to try to get men in cars near every exit and on Route Seventeen in both directions. We’ll have people inside the mall by all the entrances. But I want you to listen to me closely, Dr. Seidman. Our expert tells us that we should try to stall him. Maybe we can get the kidnapper to postpone—”
“No,” I said.
“They won’t just run away,” Tickner said. “They want the money.”
“My daughter has been with them for almost three weeks,” I said. “I’m not putting this off.”
He nodded, not liking it, trying to keep up with the placid. “Then I want to put a man in the car with you.”