He was clutching the phone so fiercely that his hand ached. He was not able to relax his grip.
“I’ve had a lot of experience working through surrogates, Mitch. You’re an instrument to me, a valuable tool, a sensitive machine.”
“Machine.”
“Hang with me a minute, okay? It makes no sense to abuse a valuable and sensitive machine. I wouldn’t buy a Ferrari and then never change the oil, never lubricate it.”
“At least I’m a Ferrari.”
“When I’m your handler, Mitch, you won’t be pressed beyond your limits. I would expect very high performance from a Ferrari, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to drive it through a brick wall.”
“I feel like I’ve already been through a brick wall.”
“You’re tougher than you think. But in the interest of getting the best performance out of you, I want you to know we’ll treat Holly with respect. If you do everything we want, then she’ll come back to you alive… and untouched.”
Holly was not weak. She would not easily be mentally broken by physical abuse. But rape was more than a violation of the body. Rape rended the mind, the heart, the spirit.
Her captor might have raised the issue with the sincere intent of putting some of Mitch’s fears to rest. But the sonofabitch had also raised it as a warning.
Mitch said, “I still don’t think you’ve answered the question. Why should I believe you?”
“Because you have to.”
That was an inescapable truth.
“You have to, Mitch. Otherwise, you might as well consider her dead right now.”
The kidnapper terminated the call.
For a while, Mitch’s sense of powerlessness kept him on his knees.
Eventually a recording, a woman with the vaguely patronizing tone of a nursery-school teacher not fully comfortable with children, requested that he hang up the phone. He put the handset on the floor instead, and a continuous beeping urged him to comply with the operator’s suggestion.
Remaining on his knees, he rested his forehead against the oven door once more, and closed his eyes.
His mind was in tumult. Images of Holly, tornadoes of memories, tormented him, fragmented and spinning, good memories, sweet, but they tormented because they might be all that he would ever have of her. Fear and anger. Regret and sorrow. He had never known loss. His life had not prepared him for loss.
He strove to clear his mind because he sensed that there was something he could do for Holly right here, now, if only he could quiet his fear and be calm, and think. He didn’t have to wait for orders from her kidnappers. He could do something important for her now. He could take action on her behalf. He could do something for Holly.
Humbled against the hard terra-cotta tiles, his knees began to ache. This physical discomfort gradually cleared his mind. Thoughts no longer blew through him like shatters of debris, but drifted as fallen leaves drift on a placid river.
He could do something meaningful for Holly, and the awareness of the thing that he could do was right below the surface, floating just beneath his questing reflection. The hard floor was unforgiving, and he began to feel as if he were kneeling on broken glass. He could do something for Holly. The answer eluded him. Something. His knees ached. He tried to ignore the pain, but then he got to his feet. The pending insight receded. He returned the telephone handset to its cradle. He would have to wait for the next call. He had never before felt so useless.
Although still hours away, the approaching night pulled every shadow toward the east, away from the westbound sun. Queen-palm shadows yearned across the deep yard.
To Mitch, standing on the back porch, this place, which had previously been an island of peace, now seemed as fraught with tension as the webwork of cables supporting a suspension bridge.
At the end of the yard, beyond a board fence, lay an alleyway. On the farther side of the alley were other yards and other houses. Perhaps a sentinel at one of those second-floor windows observed him now with high-powered binoculars.
On the phone, he had told Holly that he was in the kitchen, and she had said I know. She could have known only because her captors had known.
The black Cadillac SUV had not proved to be in any dark power’s employ, imbued with menace only by his imagination. No other vehicle had followed him.
They had expected him to go home, so instead of tailing him, they had staked out his house. They were watching now.
One of the houses on the farther side of the alley might offer a good vantage point if the observer was equipped with high-tech optical gear that provided an intimate view from a distance.
His suspicion settled instead on the detached garage at the rear of this property. That structure could be accessed either from the alley or from the front street via the driveway that ran alongside the house.
The garage, which provided parking for Mitch’s truck and Holly’s Honda, featured windows on the ground floor and in the storage loft. Some were dark, and some were gilded with reflected sunlight.
No window revealed a ghostly face or a telltale movement. If someone was watching from the garage, he would not be careless. He would be glimpsed only if he wished to be seen for the purpose of intimidation.
From the roses, from the ranunculus, from the corabells, from the impatiens, slanting sunlight struck luminous color like flaring shards in stained-glass windows.
The butcher knife, wrapped in bloody clothes, had probably been buried in a flower bed.
By finding that bundle, retrieving it, and cleaning up the blood in the kitchen, he would regain some control. He’d be able to react with greater flexibility to whatever challenges were thrust upon him in the hours ahead.
If he was being watched, however, the kidnappers would not view his actions with equanimity. They had staged his wife’s murder to box him in, and they wouldn’t want the box to be deconstructed.
To punish him, they would hurt Holly.
The man on the phone had promised that she would not be touched, meaning raped. But he had no compunctions about hitting her.
Given reason, he would hit her again. Punch her. Torture her. Regarding those issues, he had made no promises.
To dress the set of the staged homicide, they had drawn her blood painlessly, with a hypodermic syringe. They had not, however, sworn to spare her forever from a knife.
As instruction in the reality of his helplessness, they might cut her. Any laceration she endured would sever the very tendons of his will to resist.
They dared not kill her. To continue controlling Mitch, they had to let him speak to her from time to time.
But they could cut to disfigure, then instruct her to describe the disfigurement to him on the phone.
Mitch was surprised by his ability to anticipate such hideous developments. Until a few hours ago, he’d had no personal experience of unalloyed evil.
The vividness of his imagination in this area suggested that on a subconscious level, or on a level deeper than the subconscious, he had known that real evil walked the world, abominations that could not be faded to gray by psychological or social analysis. Holly’s abduction had raised this willfully repressed awareness out of a hallowed darkness, into view.
The shadows of the queen palms, stretched toward the backyard fence, seemed taut to the snapping point, and the sun-brightened flowers looked as brittle as glass. Yet the tension in the scene increased.
Neither