Got the Look Page 4

  “The other night,” she said, “when I was at your house before the cocktail party. I want you to know that I meant what I told you before I left. I have no interest in seeing anyone else.”

  “You mean besides your husband?”

  “I don’t have what you’d call a happy marriage. I never have. Ernesto has done this to me for years. Cheating, I mean.”

  “Really? How long have you been doing it to him?”

  Her eyes were like lasers, and they were aimed straight at Jack. “I’m not like that. This whole thing is new to me. It started and ended with you.”

  “I see. One dumb lawyer evens the score for Ernesto’s string of bimbos—is that it?”

  “Stop it,” she said, her voice breaking. “This wasn’t about getting even. Our marriage was over before he left on his business trip.”

  “It sure didn’t look that way at the cocktail party.”

  “Ernesto Salazar doesn’t easily let go of the things he wants.”

  “You’re not a thing.”

  “You’re not Ernesto.”

  “Did you tell him you wanted a divorce?”

  “I did, a few months ago. He asked me—no, he warned me to think long and hard before I take that step. It was like a threat. Scared me enough to drop it for a while. Then I met you, and I realized that I had to get out.”

  “So it’s my fault, is that it?”

  “No. You were anything but to blame. You were…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just forget it.”

  “No, tell me, please. I’d really like to know exactly what the hell I was.”

  She looked away, then back. “You were the first man I’ve made love to in almost two years.”

  It wasn’t the answer he’d expected. “So, you and Ernesto…”

  “I told you: The marriage was over long before I met you.”

  Jack certainly knew what a failing marriage could do to one’s sex life, no matter how great the glory days had been. But two years was a long time, especially for two people who were still living together in the same house. “Mia, you really don’t have to explain.”

  “I feel like I owe you this much.”

  “Trust me, it’s not going to make things any different between us. You lied to me in the worst way. End of story.”

  “I don’t blame you if you hate me. But it killed me that I wasn’t—that I couldn’t be—honest with you. It still tears me up. I want to tell you the way it really is.”

  “I don’t need to hear it now.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  Of course he didn’t. He wanted to hear it, absorb it, analyze it, the way any good lawyer would. Then he wanted to play it over and over again in his mind until his head exploded and his heart resembled a pincushion, like any other wounded lover. But his Y chromosome was slapping him upside the head, pointing out rather convincingly that any self-respecting man would deny her the privilege of easing her conscience with a lame psychoanalytical excuse that would undoubtedly sound like television talk show drivel.

  “I’m sorry. I have work to do. Good-bye, Mia.” He ducked into his office before she could say another word. He was alone in the vestibule, lights off, leaning against the inside of the smoked-glass door, hoping that she wouldn’t knock, hoping that she would. Should he have let her keep talking? Could she possibly have had a good reason for lying, something that made perfect sense and that would restore the broken trust?

  Or is she just jerking my chain all over again?

  An uneasy silence seemed to lurk outside the office door. Finally, he heard footfalls on the sidewalk. Two tentative steps—stop. Two more steps—stop. A click of her heel followed, then another and another, until their entire relationship faded into nothing.

  Mia was gone.

  5

  FBI Special Agent Andie Henning watched through the calm eyes of a trained professional as the assistant medical examiner dissected Ashley Thornton’s right lung.

  Torrents of icy air gushed from the air-conditioning vents in the ceiling, making the autopsy room so cold that Andie almost had to remind herself that she was still in Florida. It felt more like winter in her native Seattle, where her remarkable performance in an undercover assignment caught the eye of the FBI Critical Incident Response Group. With a degree in psychology, she was quickly singled out as crisis-negotiator material. Seattle had no openings for field negotiators, so after intense training with the Crisis Negotiation Unit at the academy, she transferred to Miami, a city with enough real-life hostage-barricade incidents to keep a negotiator’s skills sharp for life. Miami held the added attraction of being two thousand miles away from her ex-fiancé. But that was another story.

  Bright lights glistened off the white sterile walls and buff tile floors. The unclothed, grayish purple cadavar lay faceup on the stainless steel table in the center of the room. Two deep incisions ran laterally from shoulder to shoulder, across the breasts at a downward angle meeting at the sternum. A long, deeper cut ran from the breastbone to the groin, forming the stem in the coroner’s classic Y incision. The liver, spleen, kidneys, and intestines were laid out neatly beside a slab of ribs on the large dissection table. The cadaver was literally a shell of a human being, strangely reminiscent of the hollowed-out half of a watermelon on a table of hors d’oeuvres.

  Andie smeared another dab of Vicks VapoRub beneath her nostrils to cut the odor. A trip to the medical examiner’s office wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence for an FBI agent. The vast majority of homicides were strictly state and local matters. Kidnapping, however, was a federal offense, and unfortunately Andie’s increasing specialization in negotiation had earned her more trips to the medical examiner’s office than desired.

  “Very interesting,” said Dr. Feinstein.

  The doctor was still examining the right lung, working at a small and brightly lit dissection table on the other side of the cadaver. His powers of concentration were such that his bushy gray eyebrows had pinched together and formed one continuous caterpillar that stretched across his brow. He laid his scalpel aside and snapped a digital photograph, which gave Andie a moment of uneasiness. Not that it was the examiner’s fault, but it seemed that humiliation of the victim continued even in death.

  “What do you see?” asked Andie.

  The doctor took a step back and almost smiled. Andie felt a digression coming on.

  “The first thing you have to understand,” said Feinstein, “is that drowning cannot be proven by autopsy. It is a diagnosis of exclusion, based on the circumstances of death.”

  “Ashley Thornton’s case presents some rather grim circumstances.”

  “Yes, it does. But a dead body underwater does not always mean a drowning. I’ve seen victims strangled and then thrown into swimming pools. I’ve seen victims hit over the head with a hammer and then tossed into the lake.”

  “Are you suggesting that’s what happened here?”

  “Quite to the contrary. Yes, she has some scrapes, and a simple fracture where her tibia locked up with that steel grate inside the cave. The aquifer is moving water, so you can’t expect to recover a body in perfect condition. The significant point is that I see no signs of life-threatening trauma.”

  “So, in your process of diagnosis by exclusion, what does that tell you, Doctor?”

  “Not as much as this,” he said, returning to the dissection tray. He grabbed a penlight and motioned Andie toward him. The focused beam of light was shining through the dissected wall of the right lung.

  “Do you see that?” asked Feinstein.

  “Looks like dirt.”

  “Sand. In a drowning case, that, my friend, is about as close to a home run as you can get.”

  “She has sand in her lungs?” asked Andie.

  “Yes. Now, that’s a critically important fact if you think about what happens when you drown. Your normal reaction when the head goes underwater is to hold your breath. Eventually, you can’t do it any longer, and your body is forced to
gasp for air. That presents a major problem if you can’t reach the surface.”

  “Or if you’re trapped inside an underwater cave.”

  “Exactly. So the victim starts gulping water into the mouth and throat, literally inhaling water into the lungs. This, of course, sends the victim into an even more frenzied panic, and the struggle becomes more desperate. If she doesn’t break the surface, her lungs continue to fill, and she struggles and gasps in a vicious cycle that can last several minutes, until breathing stops.”

  “And the victim takes in sand with the water?”

  “Not always. Sand can end up in the mouth and throat when the current pushes a lifeless body along the bottom. But here the body was essentially fastened to this steel grate, and sand ended up not only in the mouth and throat, but also in the lungs. And think about where this victim was struggling.”

  “In an underwater cave.”

  “A cave with a sand bottom. Drowning is a slow, agonizing death. The final minutes of life are sheer terror and panic. This woman was trapped in a cave with a low ceiling. The more she flailed around in the dark, trying to find air, the more sand she kicked up. Within the tight confines of this cave, the sand had nowhere to go except into her lungs.”

  Andie glanced at the dissected lung and said, “So, you’re confident that this is a case of death by drowning?”

  “As confident as I can be.”

  Andie thought for a moment, saying nothing.

  Dr. Feinstein said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” said Andie. “It must be the odor that just got to me.”

  What she wanted to say was that she was embarrassed for a moment, put off by the way her own job almost forced her to stand beside a corpse and feel nothing but clever about slapping on a label like “death by drowning.” It was never that impersonal for her.

  “I guess what you’re saying, Doctor, is that some sick bastard brought Ashley Thornton down into this cave, tied her to a steel bar, and then swam away and left her in the dark with no air tank. He left her there alive.”

  He glanced at Ashley’s face. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Thanks, Doctor,” she said, the words “slow, agonizing death” continuing to resonate in her mind as she left the autopsy room.

  6

  With all the personal distractions, Jack was glad to be in trial. A lawyer in trial was like a woman in labor. People generally didn’t expect you to drop everything and run to the phone in the middle of it all.

  Hello, this is God speaking. Is Mr. Swyteck available?

  Sorry, sir, he’s in trial.

  Oh, don’t bother him then. Just this little matter of his mortality we need to address. Ask him to call Me when he’s finished, please.

  People often said that William Bailey had more money than God. Apparently he had a greater sense of urgency as well. Jack was outside the courtroom, sipping water from the drinking fountain, when one of Bailey’s personal assistants tracked him down.

  “Mr. Swyteck, Mr. Bailey must speak with you immediately.”

  Jack straightened up and wiped a drop of water from his chin. His secretary had undoubtedly given Bailey the standard “He’s in trial” response by telephone, and one of Bailey’s fetch boys was promptly dispatched to the courthouse on a mission.

  “Tell Mr. Bailey that I’m in trial, and that I’m working over the lunch hour.”

  “My apologies, sir. But Mr. Bailey told me not to take no for an answer. He and Mr. Salazar are expecting you. It has to do with Mrs. Salazar.”

  Mrs. Salazar. Strangely enough, somewhere in the cavernous hallways of the old courthouse, Jack could have sworn that a fat lady was singing. “All right,” Jack said with resignation. “As long as I’m back by one p.m.”

  Alive.

  At ten minutes past noon Jack was fifty-one stories above downtown Miami, though he hardly noticed the amazing view of cruise ships and the Port of Miami from the corner office of BB&L’s managing partner. William Bailey was standing behind his desk, his arm resting atop a globe so old that Prussia was still a country. His most important client was seated at the far end of the leather couch, opposite Jack, who was in the winged armchair. Ernesto Salazar was a distinguished Latino with jet-black hair (dyed, of course) and the dark, piercing eyes of a shrewd negotiator. He was wearing an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, a Rolex wristwatch, and a deep scowl that Jack assumed was intended exclusively for him.

  “My wife’s gone missing,” said Salazar in a somber voice.

  Jack looked at Bailey, then back at Salazar. Nearly ten days had passed since Jack had met Mia’s husband, and it was not yet clear that they knew about him and Mia. Before the conversation inevitably moved in that direction, however, Jack wanted some details. “How do you mean, missing?”

  Bailey said, “She’s been kidnapped.”

  The word hit him with surprising impact. Under Cupid’s Rules of Love and War (Idiot’s Edition), he technically shouldn’t have given a damn. But he did. “Kidnapped? By whom?”

  “We have no idea,” said Bailey.

  “Have you called the police?”

  “No,” said Salazar. “Like many wealthy South American families, the Salazars are no strangers to the threat of kidnappers. Rarely does it make sense to turn to the police in these situations.”

  “I can understand your view. But often there are good reasons to call the police.”

  “That’s one of the reasons we called you,” said Salazar. “Your advice.”

  “I’ll help in any way I can.” Jack paused to measure his words, as this seemed like the appropriate time to clear the air on his unwitting adultery. “Mr. Salazar, there’s something I should probably—”

  “Hold that thought,” said Bailey. “I know you have to be back in trial by one o’clock, so please just let Mr. Salazar lay out the pertinent facts. We need your criminal-law expertise on one very specific point. Is that all right with you?”

  “Sure,” said Jack.

  “Thank you,” said Salazar. “Basically, I don’t have a lot of information at this point. My wife went out last night with one of her girlfriends. I was dead tired. At around ten thirty, I went to sleep. When I woke up this morning, she’d already gone out for her run.”

  “What time was that?” asked Jack.

  “About seven.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing, just then. But three hours later, she still wasn’t home. I dialed her cell phone—she always carries it with her when she runs—and got no answer. Then I called her friend Emilia, but she didn’t know anything. That’s when I started to get worried.”

  Jack couldn’t help noting the absence of any emotion in Salazar’s voice. Some people reacted that way to a crisis, but Jack wasn’t sure about Salazar. “Then what did you do?”

  “I searched the house, the yard, the garage. Didn’t see anything. That’s when I decided to check my computer.”

  “Your computer?”

  “Yes. My e-mail. I had a bad feeling about this. I had a sense that someone might have a note for me.”

  “You mean a ransom note?”

  “Of course. Like I said, my family has been touched by kidnapping before. My uncle, when he was on business in Brazil, to be precise.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Jack. “Did you find anything on the computer?”

  “This,” said Bailey as he stepped forward and handed Jack a printed e-mail. “We already checked out the source. It was a text message sent with a stolen wireless service. No way to trace it back to any specific person.”

  Jack would have expected no less. He read to himself, quickly but carefully. The message was short and to the point:

  PAY ME WHAT SHE’S WORTH.

  Further instructions to follow.

  “That’s it?” said Jack.

  “That’s the entire message,” said Salazar. “Ever seen anything like it?”

  Jack laid the paper flat on the coffee table in front of him. He read it again and said, “
Can’t say that I have. Then again, I prosecuted only two ransom cases at the U.S. attorney’s office, and the kidnappers I defended on death row were never after money.”

  “Ever heard of anything like it?”

  “No. Often it takes kidnappers time to formulate a demand, particularly if they’re politically motivated. But when the objective is purely monetary, the number is usually pretty specific. Sometimes unrealistic, but specific.”

  “Sounds like a hoax to me,” said Bailey.

  “Could be,” said Jack. “But until you can find out one way or the other, you need to make some threshold decisions. Number one, are you going to call the police?”

  “No police.”

  “Then you’ll have to decide who your point person will be. The note says that instructions will follow. Presumably someone will have to communicate with the kidnapper on your behalf.”

  “I think William should do that,” said Salazar.

  “Your lawyer is a good choice, if he’s willing.”

  “I chose him as a friend, not as a lawyer,” said Salazar, his tone taking on something of an edge.

  “Even better,” said Jack. “The other thing to consider is the ransom. The demand is open-ended, so you should start thinking about how much you’re willing to pay.”

  “That’s easy,” said Salazar. “It says pay what she’s worth. I pay nothing.”

  “I think what you’re trying to say is that you’ve made a decision not to pay a ransom. Families do that. But just to be clear, that doesn’t mean your wife is worth nothing. It means that—”

  “No, I said precisely what I meant.”

  Jack did a double take. “You’re saying that your wife is worth nothing?”

  “Is there something wrong with your hearing, Mr. Swyteck?”

  “No.”

  “Then why is this so hard for you to grasp? I pay what she’s worth.” Salazar moved to the edge of the couch, leaning toward Jack as he spoke in a coarse voice that was just above a whisper. “Mia was cheating on me. She’s worth nothing.”