The Abduction

32

The Florida campaign schedule had Allison set to leave Washington at noon, with a symbolic first stop in St. Petersburg that was calculated to impress Florida’s huge block of senior citizens. She’d visited St. Pete only once before, years ago on vacation. A shriveled ninety-two-year-old man with a metal detector had helped her look for an earring she’d lost on the famous white sandy beach. In a matter of minutes, eight of his retired friends had joined the hunt, combing the beach like minesweepers, three of them veterans of the First World War. “Land of the newly wed and nearly dead,” she’d heard a young honeymooner at the bar call it. That wasn’t exactly true, but it seemed so.

Before heading to the airport, Allison decided to go into her office for an hour of secluded thought. Whenever she really wanted to get away from the world’s distractions, she did her best thinking in the tiny loft between the sixth and fifth floors of the Justice Building.
The loft was sparsely furnished with a recliner chair, a small bureau and mirror, a window air conditioner, and a daybed that allowed the attorney general to sleep over in times of crisis. It was accessible from a hidden staircase just off a small sitting room in the attorney general’s office suite. It was also near a private elevator that ran all the way to the basement. President Kennedy had made use of the elevator when his brother Robert was attorney general. He and Marilyn Monroe could steal away to the attorney general’s loft, entering through the basement without being noticed.
Allison thought with bitter irony that in this very room the happily married president had romped naked with the world’s most famous sex symbol. Americans could apparently overlook that in a man, but a trumped-up adultery scandal had been enough to send Allison into a political death spiral.
She started in her chair, emerging from her thoughts. All this cogitation on adultery had her thinking of Mitch O’Brien and the scarlet letter photograph, and it suddenly occurred to her that she’d heard nothing more about either of them from Harley Abrams. She assumed he was still in Nashville, so she picked up the phone and dialed his mobile number.
“Harley, it’s me. A loose end just jumped out at me. Any progress on finding Mitch O’Brien, my ex-fiancé?”
Harley was just getting into his car, parked outside the Nashville field office. “Nothing concrete. In fact, it’s just getting stranger. He appears to have left Miami, but wherever he went, he’s leaving no trails. There’s been no activity on his credit cards or cellular phone for over two weeks.”
“I want to get to the bottom of this. If there’s any kind of connection between the adultery accusations and Kristen’s kidnapping, he’s our best lead. And I still think he might be able to tell us something about Emily’s abduction.”
Harley sighed—it was almost a groan. “Allison, I can understand your hoping for a connection between Kristen and Emily. But after last night’s conversation with Tanya Howe, I truly believe that our best theory is that someone kidnapped Kristen to help Lincoln Howe get elected. And if that’s the case, it doesn’t seem likely that there’s any connection at all to what happened to you eight years ago. That may be hard for you to accept, but you can’t let wishful thinking steer you off course.”
“I’m not sailing off course. I’m just fishing with a bigger net. We can’t write off Mitch as a possible suspect just because Lincoln Howe turns out to be a racist who doesn’t love his granddaughter. We have no physical evidence whatsoever to incriminate Lincoln Howe or his supporters. All we have is motive. And you want to talk motive, then I say you have to look at Mitch O’Brien. For all we know, Mitch has been on a mission to destroy me ever since I broke off our engagement eight years ago. He took it very hard when I broke off the engagement, and he was frankly a little paranoid when I started dating Peter. He was the guy who kept me talking on the phone while someone was sneaking into my house to steal Emily. Coincidence? Maybe. But isn’t it also possible that he was intentionally distracting me? You yourself said that Emily’s taking was unusual—that whoever did it didn’t just want a baby. They wanted to hurt me.”
“And eight years later he’s still mad as hell?” His question was laden with doubt.
“Yes. I saw him, I know he’s still mad. He was sweet the first time, when he had a drink at the hotel. But when he showed up at that gala in Washington he was downright scary. Maybe he put a bug in the Republicans’ ear, implying that something sordid had happened between us that night in Miami, implying that I’d been unfaithful to Peter just to get back at me. When the fallout from the adultery controversy didn’t completely knock me out of the race, maybe he got desperate and hired somebody to abduct Howe’s granddaughter. Mitch was a criminal defense lawyer back in Chicago. He met some pretty unsavory characters.”
Harley started his car and turned on the heat. “It’s plausible, I guess. But why would a guy hire somebody to take your baby, virtually disappear from your life, then reappear eight years later only to destroy you all over again?”
“It could have been smoldering inside him all along. Only when he saw me on television every day running for president did it trigger something inside him. Like that guy who killed John Lennon. What’s his name?”
“Mark David Chapman.”
“Right, Chapman. He was just a regular guy when Lennon went into relative obscurity. But as soon as his idol starts to make a big comeback, Chapman snaps and shoots him in the back.”
“Chapman had psychological problems that we can’t assume about Mitch. All we know for sure about your ex-fiancé is that he got drunk and cursed you out at a black-tie event.”
“What about the photograph—the scarlet letter message?”
“We don’t know that he sent it.”
“Who else could it be?”
“The lab is analyzing it. Maybe they can tell us. I should be getting a report soon.”
“What are the forensic experts telling you?”
He scoffed with sarcasm. “Unfortunately, I’ve been playing in a golf tournament all week. I haven’t had time to talk to them.”
“Get them on the phone. This is important. I want to talk to them now.”
“Allison—”
“Just get them on the phone. I don’t have time to wait around for a typed and bound report in triplicate.”
“Hold on,” he said with a sigh. Allison drummed her fingers, waiting. After thirty seconds, the line clicked for the conference call.
“Allison Leahy,” said Harley, “I have Dr. Gus Eversol on the line, from our lab at headquarters.”
“Good morning, Doctor.”
“Good morning,” he replied. “Abrams tells me you would like a preliminary report.”
“Yes. A preliminary report. I suppose that’s an appropriate label. Or as my dear old mentor used to say, tell me what the hell you’ve figured out so far.”
Eversol stuttered, then spoke in the stilted voice of a scientist. “I have two preliminary findings at this time. The first shall come as no surprise to you. The active ingredient in the red substance used to create the message on the photograph is octyl methoxycinnamate. It also includes lesser quantities of petrolatum, polybutene, microcrystalline wax, castor oil, lanolin, and propylene carbonate. But, as I say, that comes as no surprise.”
Allison said, “Are you trying to say it’s lipstick, as we suspected all along?”
“Uh, yes. Lipstick.”
“What kind?”
“That’s something I haven’t narrowed down as yet. They’re all very similar, so pinpointing an exact brand is not as easy as you might think. In any event, you may find it more interesting to know that, in addition to the traditional ingredients of lipstick, I have isolated one definite foreign substance.”
“What kind of foreign substance?” asked Harley.
“Human saliva.”
Allison winced with disbelief. “Doctor, are you saying that somebody scrawled that message on the photograph with a tube of used lipstick?”
“Precisely,” he replied.
The line went silent. Finally Allison spoke. “Can you tell anything as yet about the person who may have used this particular lipstick?”
“Not really. In an hour or so I should have a blood type, and I should know whether the person is a secretor or a nonsecretor. The genetic testing will take a little longer, but I will positively determine the sex. In the meantime, if you wanted to play the odds, I suppose you might go ahead and assume it’s a woman.”
Allison said, “I’d like to identify her, if possible. Do you have enough saliva to do DNA testing?”
“Certainly. Just bring me a sample to compare it with. Blood, hair. Whatever you can get from your suspect.”
“That’s very helpful,” said Allison. “Thank you, Doctor. We’ll be in touch. Harley, stay on the line.” She waited for Eversol’s line to click, then continued. “Harley, do you have any female suspects?”
“Not really.”
“What about that woman who was shot in her apartment in Philadelphia?”
“Yeah, Diane Combs, but that’s a long shot. My original theory was that the stolen Camaro with the Tennessee tags found outside her apartment had been used to transport Kristen, but we scoured the entire vehicle and didn’t find a single hair or fiber from Kristen. Whoever stole it doesn’t have a criminal record, either, since none of the fingerprints in the car or in the apartment turned up a match. I guess what I’m saying is that we’re making a double inference here. We’re assuming the photo is connected to the kidnapping, and we’re assuming that Combs was connected to the kidnappers.”
She kneaded her brow, thinking. “What can it hurt? Call the morgue and get a tissue sample.”
“Will do. But I’d still like to broaden the search. Maybe pursue some other suspects simultaneously.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have any other female suspects.”
“True. But we could just proceed by process of elimination.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that we assume everything is connected, like you say. Or let’s at least assume that the scarlet letter photo you received last month is connected to Kristen’s abduction. We start by eliminating the women with a direct connection to Emily, to the photo, or to Kristen.”
“Harley, I didn’t send the damn photo to myself.”
“Okay, that eliminates one mother. There’s still another.”
Allison shook her head. “No way Tanya Howe’s dirty. I’d bet my life on that.”
“I agree. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of a grandmother than a mother.”
Allison sank in her chair. “You mean Natalie Howe?”
The line crackled with Harley’s sigh, as if he were thinking very hard before he spoke. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Not in my lifetime,” she scoffed.
“I’m right here in Nashville. Are you saying you don’t want me to check it out?”
She bit her lip, weighing it. “I’m saying you’d better be discreet.”