False Witness (5 page)

Clark blistered the phone with more cursing. Empty threats, he knew, but he couldn't control the anger. He wanted to strangle Huang Xu with his bare hands—slowly, painfully. He vowed vengeance, whatever the cost.

“The next day, at precisely seventy-two hours, we start the incisions for her face-lift—a little slash here, another cut there. We think you'll find it quite an improvement.”

Clark pounded his fist on the roof of the Taurus, then shook the pain from his hand and tried to think. The world spun—fury and the lingering effects of the tranquilizer taking their combined toll. Jessica
needed
him calm. He inhaled. He clenched his teeth.

“The next day, at ninety-six hours, we start with the breast reduction—”

“Stop!” Clark shouted. “That's enough. What do you want from me?”

There was another pause, and for a brief moment Clark thought Xu had hung up. “I thought we already covered that,” Xu said. “But I did neglect to mention one other deal breaker. If you contact Dr. Silvoso or go anywhere near him, your wife dies. Just so you know, Silvoso didn't double-cross you voluntarily. We applied the same kind of pressure to him that we're applying to you.”

Clark grunted his assent but made a mental note to circle back and exact his revenge on Silvoso once Jessica was safe.

“Do we have a deal, Mr. Shealy?”

Clark swallowed hard. Hesitated. He pictured Jessica duct-taped hand and foot, surrounded by leering men. They would be dead men soon.
So help me God.

But for now, he needed time. These were events he couldn't control; an unfamiliar sense of helplessness and panic threatened to overwhelm him.

“Yes, we have a deal.”

4

Clark opened the folder he'd found under the car seat and flipped through the information on Professor Kumari, his hands trembling with rage. He couldn't pry his thoughts away from Jessica—what Xu and his cohorts might have already done to her. He thought about ways to trace the phone number he had just dialed but knew it would only lead to a stolen cell phone or one registered in a bogus name.

His mind began to clear. Why did they leave a cell phone instead of just a number to dial? He realized that the phone itself was probably planted with some type of tracking device—an electronic leash of sorts. He thought about tossing it but didn't want to make a move that might result in retaliation against Jessica.

He looked around the parking garage for signs of suspicious activity. Nothing. It was now 1:45 p.m. He set the timer on his wristwatch. Things had suddenly turned frenetic. Time was the enemy. Each second wasted could mean the difference between Jessica's surviving or not. He had less than forty-eight hours.

It took every ounce of will to focus on the documents in front of him. He needed to
do
something. Race down the road, fight the bad guys, crack somebody's head. Anything. The frustrations and tension knotted every muscle. The adrenaline demanded
action
.

Instead, he read. From the plane tickets, debit card receipts, and other data in the file, Clark quickly reconstructed Kumari's most recent activities. The man entered the United States on a research visa exactly twenty-five days earlier. He landed at Newark, spent a day on the East Coast, and then flew to Las Vegas, leaving a trail of debit card receipts in and around Sin City for four days.

He bought twenty-four desktop computers, top-of-the-line models with the fastest processing chips and maxed-out RAM. He bought cables and routers and a burglar alarm system. He bought cell phones and a GPS system with a tracking device. After this flurry of purchasing activity, he closed out the debit card account and went underground—as if he had dropped off the face of the earth. He could be anywhere by now. Clark wondered if the professor was even still alive.

What if he wasn't? What would happen to Jessica?

Clark didn't want to know.

His first call was to a personal friend who owed Clark a few favors. The man promised to use his local connections to check the Vegas hospitals and morgues, though he warned that his hospital sources didn't violate the privacy laws for free. He offered to let Clark use an office computer for Internet access so that Clark could research the typical databases.

Clark drove to his friend's office, his mind racing every second of the way, the dreaded possibilities nearly paralyzing his thought processes. This was too real to be a nightmare. Too concrete. Too devastating.

For an hour and forty-five minutes, Clark sat at his friend's computer and ran into one dead end after another. He could hardly sit still. Every time the computer showed its hourglass wait symbol, it reminded Clark of the fleeting seconds. He had never felt such enormous pressure, as if the walls of the borrowed office had started closing in on him like a car crusher, compacting his body inch by inch.

He was going crazy. But if he knew that, did it mean he was still sane?

At 4:00 p.m., Clark pulled up his Outlook database through the web access feature and generated a list of the twenty best bounty hunters in the L.A. and Vegas areas. He added the names of a few notorious Vegas bondsmen who had a reputation for trouble, then e-mailed pertinent information from Kumari's file, including a scanned-in photograph. Technically, he was asking them to skirt the law. Bounty hunters, or “bail-bond enforcers” as the title read on the cards of his more sophisticated friends, derived their power from a bond agreement. Every felon released on bail signed such an agreement, giving the bail bondsman power to arrest the felon if he or she skipped a court appearance. The bondsman would then assign this power to bounty hunters like Clark, granting them a derivative power to arrest the skip and bring the felon back to face the judge. But licensed bounty hunters had no more authority to make apprehensions of members of the general public than a soccer mom would.

Who gave a rip? These men were bounty hunters, not the type to get hung up on legal technicalities, especially when the Green Lady whispered seductively in their ears. Clark would be coy in his e-mail; his friends could read between the lines.

Every bounty hunter would immediately run a background check on Kumari and realize there were no criminal charges pending and, thus, no bond contract. Still, for the right reward, Clark's friends would produce Kumari and risk a wrongful arrest charge. To do so, each bounty hunter would e-blast his or her own database of shady characters, offering to split the reward with anyone who found Kumari. That layer of greedy individuals could be expected to do the same, until half the pseudo–law enforcement characters on the West Coast would be looking for one man. The trick, of course, would be a bounty large enough to attract their interest.

Clark ran down a mental list of available assets—his business accounts and credit line, his checking and stock accounts, a home-equity loan he could take out, even the twenty thousand or so he had secretly squirreled away for some home improvements Jessica had been hinting about. The total came to nearly three hundred thousand dollars. He would also need to borrow from friends or talk his banker into an unsecured loan. It would take half a million to get the undivided attention of the top bounty hunters. His e-mail offer was simple:
Attached is information about Professor Moses Kumari, a man I have been contracted to bring in. Within thirty-six hours of this e-mail, bring him to me ALIVE or provide information leading to my apprehension of him and earn $500,000 U.S.

By 4:05 p.m. the hunt was on.

In less than thirty minutes, Clark received his first call, an unknown number with a Vegas area code that made his heart jump. It turned out to be Joe Peters, from the repair shop where Clark had left the Cadillac that morning.
Was that just this morning?
It seemed like a different life.

The car was ready, Peters said. With the clock ticking for Jessica, the Cadillac had been the last thing on Clark's mind. But the next step in Clark's investigation required a return trek to L.A., and Peters's garage was only ten minutes out of the way. Clark might need the ready cash the Cadillac could provide. Besides, Clark could make up the ten minutes during the three-and-a-half-hour drive, testing the Cadillac's upper limits. If he averaged ninety, he could do it in three.

His stopwatch showed an elapsed time of two hours and twenty-six minutes. The vise in his stomach tightened.

5

Los Angeles

Clark entered his house by the side door, covering the doorknob with his shirtsleeve so his fingerprints wouldn't smudge those of the last person to touch the door. It felt surreal: his own house a crime scene—one that couldn't even be reported to the cops. He stepped into the mudroom and called out her name.

“Jess?”

His voice echoed in the stillness. He waited, not even breathing, as if the whole thing might be a bad dream after all. Maybe somehow Jessica would come bounding around the corner and wrap her arms tightly around his neck, kissing him eagerly, expectantly, the way she did when he had been gone too long.

But he knew in his heart it wouldn't happen. He walked slowly from room to room, accompanied by the sound of blood rushing through his ears, heartbeat by heartbeat, as the reality of his desperation took root. He didn't even really know what he was looking for. Perhaps he'd see some small hint of where she might be now. Anything out of place.

It all looked depressingly normal. The mail haphazardly spread on the counter as if Jessica had pulled a prized magazine out of the batch and left the bills unopened, hoping they would pay themselves. A blanket wadded up on one end of the couch, the pillow on the other armrest—vestiges of Jessica nestling down for a television show the night before. An exercise ball tucked away in a corner of the room, evidence of his wife's infatuation with flat abs.

He surveyed every piece of furniture, every trinket and paper, and the sandals that had been kicked off next to the back door. The house looked exactly like it did on every other day. And every detail reminded him of Jess.

He slipped into the first-floor office and checked the computer. The last e-mail had been sent at 9:05 that morning. She had not logged off. The computer file on Johnny Chin remained undisturbed, as far as Clark could tell. He checked the front door and the back, confirming that both were locked. Jessica's car was still in the garage. It seemed as if somebody had just transported her away—as if she had vanished without leaving a trace.

He imagined the scene: a UPS truck pulling into the side driveway and the driver knocking on the mudroom door with a package. Jessica, who never met a stranger, greeting him with a smile. “Sign here,” he says, and while she scribbles her flowing signature, he elbows inside and overwhelms her. Not without a fight, of course. His Jess would definitely have put up a fight.

But he couldn't find any evidence of it.

Clark climbed the stairs to the bedroom, struck by the tranquility of the scene there. The setting sun illuminated the room through the window on the west wall, silhouetting particles of airborne dust in their evening minuet. The bed was made, and Jessica's worn teddy bear, the one her mom said had been Jessica's favorite since first grade, rested contentedly against the pillows. As was her habit, Jess had neatly folded her pajamas and placed them next to the bear. Clark picked them up, held them to his face, and breathed in Jessica. Clutching the pajamas with both fists, he promised himself that nothing would happen to her. He wouldn't let it.

I already have.

He rejected the thought and placed the pajamas back on the bed. He wanted to collapse and weep, or maybe go ballistic and punch the wall, but this was no time to get emotional. “I'll get her back,” he said to her teddy, as if the words could make it happen. “She'll be all right.”

He headed out to the fenced-in backyard and nearly came unglued. Here, too, everything was in order, but he had let his emotional guard down a little when he stepped out back. And now, staring at the trampoline, the tears started rolling down his face.

He remembered her the way she might never be again. Confident, effusive, untroubled by the cares of their dysfunctional lives.

Jess, bouncing on the tramp and displaying the form from her competitive diving days, doing full layouts and back twists, her body ramrod straight as she flies through the air. “Come on, you big baby,” she taunts. Clark, his manliness challenged, mounts the trampoline and tries to muster the courage for a single backflip.

“I've got you,” she says. “Trust me.” One strong hand is on his right hamstring; her other hand rests against his lower back. She stands beside him, gently bouncing. “Remember: get good height and then pull your knees up and kick back. I'll throw your legs around if I have to.”

One minute Clark is trembling, bouncing, Jessica urging him higher. The next she's counting: “One . . . two . . . three.” He jumps and pulls his legs in, losing all balance and perspective, while Jessica whips his legs around. Next thing he knows . . . he's landing on the trampoline feetfirst. Off-balance, he falls forward, but Jess grabs his shirt and catches him, laughing. They hug . . . kiss.