“Maybe Star is looking for justice for some larger grievance,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Why did Star—why did Gertrude—join a revolutionary group in college to begin with?”
“A lot of young people did back then.”
“Yes, but very few of them took it to the level Gertrude did. Most of them, like my mother and father, disassociated from the organization when it advocated killing people to make a point.”
“What are you saying?”
“My mother told me Gertrude wanted to blow up Columbia’s library. She had believed people had to die in order for Stormdrain to be taken seriously.” Aubrey stopped to catch her breath. “What made Gertrude willing to take lives?”
Smolleck seemed to be considering this.
“Whatever it was,” she said, “I believe that’s the injustice Gertrude has been trying to right since she was a freshman at Barnard.”
“How the hell are we supposed to figure out what an eighteen-year-old was angry about over forty-five years ago?”
“She had a brother,” Aubrey said. “She wore his dog tag. Can you find out what happened to him? Maybe we’ll have something to offer her that she actually cares about.”
Smolleck didn’t look convinced. “It’s worth a try.”
Aubrey looked back at the mustard-colored building. In it were her mother and her nephew. With an unpredictable psychopath and a bomb.
“Try hard, Agent Smolleck,” she said.
CHAPTER 48
Diana heard ringing. A phone? An alarm? She just wanted to sleep. She tried to roll over and hug her pillow, but her hands wouldn’t move. She tugged on them again, but they were stuck behind her back. She kicked her feet, but they didn’t move, either.
Something sharp and acrid crept up her sinuses. Gasoline fumes. She opened her eyes to darkness and felt a paralyzing terror. Where was she?
Her brain cleared abruptly. She remembered stepping into the foyer of the building, something crashing into her legs. The red tricycle. Gertrude was clearly determined to get all the details right in this reenactment of the past.
Then she remembered the sting in her thigh.
She had been drugged.
So where was Gertrude? And where was the smell of gasoline coming from?
She blinked to clear her vision. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she could make out a pale light coming in from behind closed drapes. She was in a small living room, on a sofa, facing an open kitchen.
Gertrude must have given her a shot of Versed, or something similar, then tied her up. How long had she been unconscious? Had Ethan gotten out safely?
Smolleck’s shouting voice came back to her. Wait, Diana. Why had he told her to wait, unless Ethan was still inside?
A wall air conditioner coughed and began to hum.
Diana looked down at her ankles. They were bound with duct tape, and she assumed her wrists were as well. There was nothing covering her mouth, but who was she going to scream for? The FBI already knew she was in here.
Now that her eyes had adjusted, she took a more detailed inventory of the room. She could see ugly rattan furniture and a glass étagère, a light-colored mica coffee table, and another floral-patterned sofa, catty-corner to the one she was on. On the counter between the dining room and kitchen were several piles. A few short pipes with long fuses. Bottles with rags sticking out of them—Molotov cocktails. Rolls of what looked like thick candles, but knowing what she did of Gertrude’s intentions, she assumed they were sticks of dynamite.
Gertrude had created a bomb factory just like the one that had brought down the brownstone on April Fool.
There was no sign of Gertrude, but she might return at any moment. Diana had to get out of here and find Ethan. She looked for something to cut the tape around her wrists and ankles. There were knickknacks on the upper shelves of the étagère, beyond her reach. Maybe there were knives in the kitchen. She struggled to stand up, then hopped around the coffee table until she reached the kitchen counters. She turned around and pulled open a drawer with her bound hands, then checked its contents. A pair of dark sunglasses and a wig of long hair, the same color as Diana’s.
There was a note written on top of the wig in thick black marker:
did you think i’d leave you a knife, pollyanna?
She tried the next drawer. A white blouse and jeans, just like Diana always wore.
The monster had taken her husband, her fiancé, her grandson, and her identity. Well, she wasn’t going to let Gertrude win.
She grasped the knob of one of the upper cabinet doors with her teeth, pulling it open. Drinking glasses glinted in the thin light, but she had no way to reach them. She scoured the kitchen for something long to hold in her mouth to swipe at them, but saw nothing that would work. She didn’t know what Gertrude’s plan was or how much time she had until Gertrude returned.
Her eyes fell upon the Molotov cocktails on the counter. Glass bottles with pieces of rags. Filled with gasoline. If she broke one of them, the gasoline would spread over the floor. Harmless if not ignited.
Was the risk worth it?
She might be able to get herself out of the apartment and building without cutting her bindings, but she’d never be able to rescue Ethan without the use of her hands.
She hopped around to the other side of the counter. Using her forehead, she pushed one of the bottles toward the edge. It toppled off and fell against the terrazzo floor. Without breaking.
Damn. She pushed the next bottle toward the edge. This time, she gave it a hard shove with her head. It hit the floor with a crash. Glass and gasoline burst over the floor. She leaned against the wall and slid down until she was able to reach the broken glass. As her fingers closed over a long, sharp sliver, familiar laughter rang out from the far side of the kitchen. She frantically sawed at the tape on her wrists, feeling the edge of the glass slice into her hand. A searing pain from the gasoline radiated up the nerves in her arm.