Got the Look Read online

  Got the Look

  Jack Swyteck [5]

  Grippando, James

  HarperCollins (2005)

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  Tags: Jack Swyteck

  Jack Swyteckttt

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  From bestselling author James Grippando comes the newest Jack Swyteck thriller, in a series that critics have called "riveting," "a winner," and "lapel grabbing." In "Got the Look," Swyteck is up against a killer who's so fiendishly clever and diabolical that even Jack may have at last met his match.

  FBI agent Andie Henning is tracking a ruthless kidnapper plaguing south Florida, one who's out to prove that all human life can be valued in dollars and cents. But at every turn, he has slipped through her net. This time he's taken the wife of one of the state's richest horse breeders and is asking a ransom of $1 million. The stakes go up when Andie finds the woman -- dead.

  Enter Jack Swyteck. He has a new girlfriend, Mia, and life is good -- until she goes missing. Then Jack gets a one-two punch: he discovers that his lover is married, and her rich husband receives a ransom demand that pegs Mia as the kidnapper's latest victim. Worst of all, her husband knows all about the affair with Jack, and he decides to pay the kidnapper exactly what his cheating wife is worth: nothing. Feeling deceived, Jack at first resists getting involved. But as secrets unfold about Mia's strange marriage and mysterious past, Jack is in for a twisty ride that may bring him face-to-face with a madman.

  Got the Look

  James Grippando

  For Tiffany.

  And then there were five.

  Contents

  O NE

  The sun never shines beneath the Devil’s Ear.

  T WO

  Yale Law School. Four years of defending Florida’s death-row inmates…

  T HREE

  Jack was lighting candles. Four on the coffee table, six…

  F OUR

  Very nice to meet you, Mr. Swyteck. Yes, indeed. And…

  F IVE

  FBI Special Agent Andie Henning watched through the calm eyes…

  S IX

  With all the personal distractions, Jack was glad to be…

  S EVEN

  It’s a total chick magnet,” said Theo.

  E IGHT

  Jack didn’t call the police. He didn’t have to.

  N INE

  Andie Henning and a tech agent planned to spend the…

  T EN

  Theo scratched his head, pondering his friend’s question. “Got it!”…

  E LEVEN

  The sweep of Jack’s house turned up no new bugs.

  T WELVE

  Jack left Perricone’s and had clear sailing till the traffic…

  T HIRTEEN

  Jack didn’t leave the Breakers right away. He walked through…

  F OURTEEN

  The e-mail hit on Monday at 8 a.m., sooner than he’d…

  F IFTEEN

  Once the tallest building south of the Washington Monument, the…

  S IXTEEN

  The copy center remained a secured crime scene the entire…

  S EVENTEEN

  Jack didn’t touch his midafternoon lunch. Theo ate it for…

  E IGHTEEN

  The meeting of the multijurisdictional task force was held in…

  N INETEEN

  Ernesto Salazar walked straight down the middle of the gray…

  T WENTY

  Mia Salazar feels no pain.

  T WENTY-ONE

  The telephone rang just as Jack was falling asleep. He…

  T WENTY-TWO

  At 2:10 a.m., Andie Henning was riding in the back of…

  T WENTY-THREE

  Across the street from the target residence, Andie Henning drew…

  T WENTY-FOUR

  Jack was one of the first people in Miami to…

  T WENTY-FIVE

  Andie heard gunshots on the other side of the door…

  T WENTY-SIX

  It was still early when Jack left Miami, but with…

  T WENTY-SEVEN

  He was naked, except for the white bath towel wrapped…

  T WENTY-EIGHT

  Nothing quite lit up the little orange lights on a…

  T WENTY-NINE

  What a house, Jack thought as he drove up to…

  T HIRTY

  Jack’s drive back to Miami was even more disorienting than…

  T HIRTY-ONE

  The FBI field office was right off I-95, a plain…

  T HIRTY-TWO

  Around four thirty, Andie had to cut Jack’s prep session…

  T HIRTY-THREE

  Cassandra went to bed at 12:30 a.m., but she didn’t sleep…

  T HIRTY-FOUR

  At 8 a.m. Andie did one final review of the draft…

  T HIRTY-FIVE

  After an early calender call for an upcoming trial, Jack…

  T HIRTY-SIX

  His name was Gerard Montalvo,” said Cassie. “They called him…

  T HIRTY-SEVEN

  Her days were beginning to bleed together.

  T HIRTY-EIGHT

  Jack was driving from the LeJeune Diner to his office…

  T HIRTY-NINE

  Andie and her forensic specialist showed up at Jack’s house…

  F ORTY

  That night, Jack and Theo paid a visit to Miami’s…

  F ORTY-ONE

  The FBI issued a BOLO for Gerard Montalvo at 8 a.m.…

  F ORTY-TWO

  The videotaped broadcast of Gerard Montalvo’s preliminary hearing arrived in…

  F ORTY-THREE

  The one-eyed monster was staring at her again.

  F ORTY-FOUR

  Even at three o’clock in the afternoon, it seemed only…

  F ORTY-FIVE

  Jack caught up with Mia’s old lawyer in the library…

  F ORTY-SIX

  After dinner, Jack said good-bye to Cassandra and followed Talbridge…

  F ORTY-SEVEN

  Jack flew back to Miami early the next morning, and…

  F ORTY-EIGHT

  Jack got out of the car, and Theo followed him…

  F ORTY-NINE

  Jack downloaded the video attachment to the e-mail and took…

  F IFTY

  Andie ate lunch at her desk. Stacked beside her cup…

  F IFTY-ONE

  Around one o’clock Jack arrived at a dusty construction site,…

  F IFTY-TWO

  Mia was tending to her wound. She first applied pressure…

  F IFTY-THREE

  After her conversation with Mia’s sister, Andie took a short…

  F IFTY-FOUR

  The engine growled as Theo found fifth gear. Jack was…

  F IFTY-FIVE

  Jack watched from the rubbernecker’s side of yellow police tape…

  F IFTY-SIX

  The money hit on Saturday morning, right on schedule. Theo’s…

  F IFTY-SEVEN

  Andie Henning was in a holding pattern. The medical examiner’s…

  F IFTY-EIGHT

  Mia woke from a deep sleep, deeper than any before…

  F IFTY-NINE

  Jack had been to quieter places, but they were usually…

  S IXTY

  At 2:45 a.m. Jack was deep into the forest, following the…

  S IXTY-ONE

  The divers were lying low, but they were itching to…

  S IXTY-TWO

  A fine mist began to fall. It gathered on the…

  S IXTY-THREE

  Agent Crenshaw slipped into the black water without a splash,…

  S IXTY-FOUR

  At a depth of fifty feet in chilly water, Agent…

  S IXTY-FIVE

  The footpath proved to be the long r oute, taking Jack…

  S IXTY-SIX

  He ditched his first pair of spent air tanks about…

  S IXTY-SEVEN

  The limestone chimney carried him straight up, and he broke…

  S IXTY-EIGHT

  Low-hanging branches slashed at her face in the darkness. Mia…

  S IXTY-NINE

  For the third time, Agent Henning tried to ring Jack…

  S EVENTY

  Jack cranked the throttle and pulled a sharp U-turn. The…

  S EVENTY-ONE

  Jack took a hard turn to starboard and gunned his…

  S EVENTY-TWO

  Together, Jack and Mia watched the moon set from the…

  S EVENTY-THREE

  Andie treated her team leaders to an early breakfast at…

  S EVENTY-FOUR

  Jack, Mia, and Theo were back in Miami by noontime…

  S EVENTY-FIVE

  Mia Salazar was weighing on Andie’s mind. She didn’t like…

  S EVENTY-SIX

  Jack watched the FBI’s press conference on television from a…

  EPILOGUE

  Three weeks passed, and Jack heard nothing from Mia. He…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOKS BY JAMES ROLLINS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  1

  The sun never shines beneath the Devil’s Ear.

  FBI Special Agent Andie Henning must have heard that warning a dozen times on her way to Ginnie Springs, Florida. The Devil’s Ear was one of the more spectacular openings to the watery underworld of the north Florida aquifer, a dark and dangerous limestone labyrinth of interconnecting caves and caverns that discharged 7.7 billion gallons of crystal clear drinking water every day.

  “How much farther?” Andie shouted over the roar of the single outboard engine. The boat was at full throttle, throwing a V-shaped wake against the inky black riverbanks. The Santa Fe was a relatively shallow river, better suited to canoes and kayaks than to large motorboats. Only an experienced driver could head downstream at this speed, especially in the dead of night. Somewhere in the darkness were egrets and alligators, but at midnight the forest slept. The tall cypress trees were mere silhouettes, their moss-clad limbs barely visible against the starlit sky. A thin blanket of fog stretched across the river, waist deep to those onboard. The speedboat cut through it like a laser on cotton candy. Andie zipped up her FBI jacket, staving off the wind chill.

  “About two more minutes,” shouted the boat driver.

  Andie checked her watch. She hoped they had two minutes.

  The kidnapper’s late-night call had confirmed the family’s payment of a ransom, contrary to FBI advice. One million dollars in cash seemed like a lot of money to the average person, but it was hardly a hit to Drew Thornton, one of Ocala’s richest horse breeders. The clipped phone message advised that Mrs. Thornton could be found beneath the Devil’s Ear. It took only a minute to decipher what that meant. The sheriff ’s office deployed emergency/rescue divers immediately. Andie and two agents from the Jacksonville field office went with them. They were part of the FBI team assigned to the Thornton case, and Andie was the only negotiator staying on-site in Ocala throughout the three-week ordeal.

  The engine went quiet, the anchor dropped overboard, and the boat came to a stop. Immediately, the team moved into position.

  “Bottoms up!” shouted the rescue team leader.

  Three scuba divers splashed into the river. With the flip of a switch, handheld dive lights turned the black water into a clear, glistening pool. The driver of the boat was Sheriff Buddy McClean, a bulky man in his fifties. He and a deputy remained onboard with Andie and the two FBI tech agents. The deputy controlled the lifeline, a long synthetic rope that tethered each diver to the boat. It was their road map back from the cave network. One of the techies helped feed a transmission wire as the divers descended with an underwater video camera. The other agent fiddled with the monitor, trying to bring up an image.

  Hundreds of air bubbles boiled to the surface. The lights grew dim beneath the boat, and suddenly the river returned to black. It was as if someone had pulled the geologic plug, but the monitor screen glowing brightly in the darkness told a different story.

  “There it is,” said Sheriff McClean. “Devil’s Ear.”

  Andie checked the monitor. The lights and underwater camera allowed her to see exactly what the divers saw. The team was inside the cavern, somewhere below the riverbed. Andie asked, “How well do your divers know these caves, Sheriff?”

  “All too well,” said McClean. “Since I first swam here as a teenager, there’s been over three hundred scuba divers gone down in Florida’s caves and never come up. Devil’s Ear has claimed its fair share of unwilling souls. Pulled two out myself in my younger days.”

  “What’s the chances Mrs. Thornton’s actually alive?” asked the deputy.

  Andie didn’t answer right away. “We’ve had cases where kidnap victims were buried alive and came out okay.”

  “Yeah, but underwater?”

  “Can’t say that I’ve heard of it,” she said. “But there’s a first time for everything.”

  There was silence onboard, as if they all feared that this was more likely to be the recovery of a body than the rescue of a victim. But that didn’t mean they’d given up hope.

  What if she is alive? thought Andie. Did that poor woman have any idea where she was? Somewhere beneath this black riverbed, beneath God only knew how many feet of sand and solid limestone, lay a living, breathing wife and mother. Perhaps she was trapped in some pressurized tank or capsule, a dark and silent cocoon, enough air for an hour or two. Or worse, maybe her kidnapper had turned her loose down there with nothing but a mask, tank, and regulator. Either way, she’d be in total darkness, unable to find—no, feel—her way out of this aquatic honeycomb. Perhaps she could hear or possibly even feel the strong currents rushing past her, cool springwater flowing as fast as a hundred cubic feet per second. She might decide to go with the flow, or try to fight it, no way of knowing which way was up. Jagged rocks could cut like knives. A sudden change in ceiling height could damage her breathing equipment or knock her unconscious. But not even in her most harrowing moment of panic could she even begin to imagine that some of these cave systems stretched as long as seventeen miles, that she could be carried hundreds or thousands of feet below the surface, that the average liter of drinking water drawn from Florida’s aquifer percolated and circulated around and around for twenty years before reaching the surface.

  Unconscious, thought Andie. Alive but unconscious. That was by far the best-case scenario.

  “Where are they now?” asked Andie.

  Sheriff McClean took a closer look at the screen. The divers had long since passed the point where it mattered if it was night or day. “I’d say about two hundred feet into the cave.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “See that rock formation there, just ahead of them?” he said as he pointed to the monitor. “That thing that looks like a big, open whale’s mouth is called the lips restriction. It’s the first real narrowing you reach in the Devil System.”

  “They’re going through that?” asked the tech agent.

  “Sure. Right now they’re in the gallery, which is basically a big passageway that takes you from the entrance to the first breakdown. There’s plenty to explore beyond those lips.”

  “How deep are they?” asked Andie.

  “Maybe fifty feet. Doesn’t get much deeper than that in this part of the system. Which gives me a little hope that, you know…”

  That Mrs. Thornton could be alive. He didn’t have to say it.

  On-screen, the lead diver passed through the lips, like Jonah swallowed by the whale. The videographer followed behind, his camera jerking back and forth as he made his way through the opening. The image steadied as the crew regrouped on the other side of the lips. Here, the camera didn’t have to move up and down from top to bottom. One frame c ould cover the entire cave, sandy floor to limestone ceiling. The divers shifted their adjustable tanks from the usual position on their backs and brought them under their bellies so that the equipment wouldn’t hit the rugged limestone formations overhead.

  Slowly, the camera swept the cave, aided by the powerful dive lights. It reminded Andie of an ancient tomb, a flooded version of the Roman catacombs, though she tried not to dwell on that characterization. Not with a woman’s life hanging in the balance.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  The camera focused on a long, smooth shaft protruding from the wall.

  “Looks like a bone,” said the tech agent.

  “You think it could be—”

  “No way,” said the sheriff. “That’s been there for centuries, probably from a whale or maybe even a mastodon. All kinds of prehistoric relics down there. Used to be more, till all the jackass tourists came along and started hauling stuff away to make paperweights.”

  The camera shifted away and focused on the third diver. All lights were upon him. He was holding a glass vial in his gloved hand. He broke the vial, and a thin blue streak stretched across the screen.

  “That’s a dye,” said the sheriff. “They’re testing the current. It’s not always easy to tell which way the water is circulating down there. Generally it flows up, like a chimney, but a lot depends on the amount of rainfall we’ve had lately, whether there’s been any new cave-ins or sinkholes in the system. I’ve seen ponds drained so quickly that trees get yanked right off the banks, like the baby going out with the bathwater. It’s tricky stuff down there. Even an experienced diver can get disoriented pretty easily.”

  “Are you saying they’re lost?” asked Andie.

  “Not hardly,” said the sheriff. “With all those passageways, they’re just trying to figure out where Mrs. Thornton might end up.”

  “You mean if she’s dead or if she’s alive?”

  “I mean if she’s down there,” he said, making no predictions.

  On-screen, the wisp of blue dye faded away. The lead diver made a gesture, and the team did an about-face.

  “Are they going back?” asked Andie.

  “Yeah, but not exactly the same way they came in. Looks like they’re taking the lips bypass, which also connects to the gallery.”

  The divers followed a narrow corridor to a broader opening. Perhaps an expert could appreciate the different shades of Oligocene limestone, the mosaic of fossilized scallops and sea biscuits against the pale pitted stone, the variety of formations and surface textures that had developed over thirty million to sixty million years. But to Andie, watching a monitor, it was all starting to look the same. No wonder so many divers had taken their last breath while swimming around in circles, some never realizing that safety lay just a few feet around the next turn.