Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) (10 page)

Kurt put his hand on my upper arm protectively. “Description?” he asked.

“Oh, she didn’t have one,” Gabriel answered. “She said that it was a telephone call. A very strange call. She wondered how they got her number.”

“Did they say why they were looking for the woman?” I asked.

“She said they told her they had been separated from their friend, and wanted to know if she had seen her. My assistant told them she could announce the woman’s name over the loudspeakers—how do you say it?”

“Page her,” I supplied.

“Yes, page her. She said the man said no thank you, and hung up.”

“That’s not much,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but it is all that she knew,” Gabriel replied.

Who? Who would ask about someone like me? Jiménez was my chief suspect, but there were those men asking the skycap about Elena in St. Marcos.

“Katie, I think we should get moving,” Kurt said.

Dazed, I checked my iPhone. It was 3:30. Crap
.
We needed to move fast.

The picture of Nick in the mangled plane flashed in my mind again.

Really fast.

The most likely stop in the terminal for Nick and the other three travelers was for food, so we headed there first. I felt like a neon sign on the Vegas strip as we made our way to the cafeteria, the private terminal’s only dining establishment.

Patrons queued for food before a glass case of cold food and drinks. I peeked in. I hadn’t eaten anything since five a.m., but the arroz con leche looked a little sketchy and I realized I was not hungry. There were fried fish and chicken with rice and peas, and baskets of coconut biscuits, or coconetes, according to a tiny hand-lettered sign. It was a lot like the fare from the catering trucks I’d always called roach coaches.

Kurt and I had decided that I would do the talking, since a six-foot-two-inch gruff-voiced American man might be intimidating. We surveyed the cafeteria. Three employees in pressed khaki shorts and navy shirts worked behind the counter and another bussed the red Formica tables just beyond it. Others bumped in and out of swinging doors with trays of food and plates. In my limited Spanish, I questioned every employee in the snack bar in turn. “Did you see a very sexy young woman and her mother two days ago? Maybe two men with them?”

One after another, they answered me in the same nervous way: No. No. No. No.

And then a yes.

Or a sí, rather.

A man, of course; a very young man who had cleared the table next to where our foursome lunched. He said he saw them, and what’s more, he claimed he heard their conversation. He made no apology for eavesdropping.

“Una sexy mamí, sí,” he explained.

Yes, I know.

My years of soaking up the Spanish around me in Texas (and learning as little of it as I could in Spanish class) were coming back to me, and I realized I could understand most of what he was saying. His account was startling. According to him, the two women and the younger man got up from the table first. They thanked the older man and bid him adios.

“And then they walked out of the restaurant?” In my rush, I had switched to English, so Kurt translated.

Out of the airport, it turned out. And the older man stayed behind, drinking café. Saying nothing.

So which one was Nick? The old one or the young one? I pulled up a picture of my husband on my iPhone and showed it to the young man. I had taken it on Monday at Ike’s Bay, less than a week ago, a crying baby in a carrier on his front and a screaming young boy in a pack on his back.

“Sí, drinking café,” he said, and pointed at one of the tables in the dining area.

The older one.

A bird chirped. I looked from the snack bar into the main room of the terminal. A bright yellow sugarbird was circling the beams of the ceiling, searching for a way out. As I watched, it ducked lower, tilted its wing and body, and darted into the sunshine. Lucky bird.

“Drinking coffee. Anything else?” Kurt asked.

“He had a bag. From there.” The young man pointed at the gift shop across the terminal. “He look in his bag and drink coffee. He use his phone.”

Was this good news? Nick had stayed behind. Elena and her entourage had left. Elena had told the Petro-Mex security guard she was in Mexico when he spoke to her last night, but Nick had not gone with her. At least not from the cafeteria. Maybe not at all?

I had believed in Nick all along. But certainty would be very nice. I wanted to know—and have everyone else know—that my husband did not traipse across the Caribbean and Mexico after a femme fatale that every man remembered with a gleam in his eye and a grin on his face.

Kurt’s taut voice broke into my reverie. “Katie, if he didn’t go with them to Mexico, or wherever they went, that raises the chances that he didn’t make it to wherever he intended to go.”

This broke through to me. He was right.

“However, all we know for sure at this point is that he didn’t leave the cafeteria with them,” he continued.

“They left the terminal,” I pointed out.

“They might have come back,” he said.

“That’s not what I heard,” I said.

“You’re hearing what you want to hear, then,” Kurt said, without any change in the tone of his voice.

My frustration overcame my good judgment. “What are you saying, Kurt? That you think Nick ran off with this woman to Mexico?”

“Not that I think so, but that it’s possible until we rule it out.”

I hadn’t expected this answer. I didn’t like this answer. “You think it’s possible Nick left me?”

“A house full of babies is a lot of responsibility,” he said in a voice that sounded like he had a lot more to say.

“The babies or me?”

“Well, he ran off to surf a lot, and . . .”

“And?” I said, daring him to finish his thought.

There’s a saying that discretion is the better part of valor. Kurt abandoned discretion and braved my wrath.

“And he really wanted you to lose the baby weight,” he said.

He turned back to the worker and asked whether he had ever seen the women and their companion again.

My mouth dropped. Red filled my vision. Nick had talked to his dad about me being fat? And his dad thought it was possible that he had left me? I worked my jaw, trying to get it to help me form words, words like
asshole
and
Who do you think you are, Mr. Perfect?

Meanwhile, the busboy shook his head back and forth.

“Did you see where the older man went when he finished his coffee, and whether he was with anyone or alone?” Kurt asked.

Again, the young man shook his head.

Kurt looked over at me and took stock of my expression. “Pull it together, Katie. Let’s see if Gabriel has found out anything more.”

“Pull it together?” I hissed. “After I find out you and Nick sit around talking about his terrible life and my giant fat ass?”

“That is not what I said. Let’s go,” he said.

I bit down so hard I wondered which would break first, my jaw or my teeth. A quick iPhone check showed me it was now 4:30 p.m. Only three hours until nightfall. I did need to pull it together. We did need to get moving. We needed to alert the FAA of the new developments. We had to get someone out there searching in the right place for Nick. Or at least around the Dominican Republic, whether that was the right place or not. I didn’t have the luxury of a temper tantrum. I filed my anger at Nick and Kurt away for later.

But I took one last shot. “It may not be what you talked about, but it’s sure what you meant a minute ago. Message received loud and clear, Kurt.”

He didn’t answer.

I overcompensated with effusive thanks to the young busboy and we started back to Gabriel’s office with a wall of emotion between us. Halfway there we saw Gabriel’s back as he entered his office, and without a word passing between us, we broke into a run. I skidded to a stop at the door in my sandals.

Gabriel sat at his desk with papers in his hand. At our abrupt entrance, he looked up, his eyes round and eyebrows in high arcs.

“Well?” I asked, out of breath.

“Nothing,” Gabriel said. “I found out nothing.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find anyone that knew where your husband intended to go when he left here.”

I said, “We were told that the three people he came here with left in a taxi. That means, possibly, he flew out alone. And that would mean, again, possibly, he was flying back to St. Marcos.”

Gabriel nodded. “If you say so. I only know that he left here at 12:52.”

“Did anyone
say
whether he was alone when he left?” I demanded. I didn’t like hearing my voice this shrill, but I also didn’t like how thin Gabriel’s questioning sounded, and I was raw from my interchange with Kurt. What had happened to all the questions I’d suggested he ask? Did the man not understand that yes-no questions yielded next to nothing? That you had to start there, but circle around and approach the issue from every angle?

He looked back down at his desk and his shoulders hunched up. “No one said,” he responded.

Kurt shot me a look that said, “Enough.”

“All right. We’ve made some progress in the last hour, even if we still have a ways to go,” Kurt said. “Thank you, Gabriel.”

“One other thing,” Gabriel said, addressing Kurt instead of me now. “I checked our Dominican systems for a record of a plane crash since Mr. Kovacs left Punta Cana. There is none. And I have my assistant calling the other airports in the DR looking for your plane by its tail numbers, in case he put down somewhere in our country.”

“Excellent idea. Much appreciated,” Kurt said, even more gracious than before. Making up for his shrewish, fat daughter-in-law.

I tried to follow his lead and aimed for firm rather than strident. Sometimes my temperament got in the way of my common sense.
He’s helping us, and he doesn’t have to, Katie. Don’t run him off.
I needed to accept Gabriel’s generosity rather than resent his inexperience, but I was just fuming. At everyone. Nick. His dad. This courtly nincompoop who hadn’t accomplished anything yet except to confirm that Nick’s plane had taken off and landed. I couldn’t believe that only a little while ago I’d been thinking how much I liked him. I didn’t like him. I wanted to bop him on the head.

I raised my voice—a lot. I smacked the side of my hand in the other palm to emphasize each point. “Here it is, guys. Nick’s been missing for two days. We’ve gone to our local police. They were less than no help. We called the FAA, who called the Coast Guard. But they couldn’t do jack either, because we had no idea where Nick had gone. But he came here and he left here. And I know—I
know
—that if he could have contacted us, he would have. That means there’s a very high probability that his plane went down somewhere. We need people searching for him. Now.”

Gabriel was stiff. “There is no reason to shout, Mrs. Kovacs.”

“There is a reason to shout! My husband is missing!”

 
“I don’t agree with your tone, but I agree with your point. Gabriel, can we contact the FAA together now?” Kurt said.

Gabriel flipped a vintage Rolodex with cards gone yellow with age. I closed my eyes. Here, with the soft Caribbean air on my flushed skin, without the white noise of air conditioners, I could imagine Gabriel under a bamboo ceiling fan dialing a clunky black rotary phone. My pulse quickened. I opened my eyes to see him pressing the buttons on his cell phone.

Someone must have answered on the other end, because Gabriel explained who he was and passed the phone to Kurt, saying, “You’re on.”

Kurt told our story. It sounded improbable and so full of holes you could, well, fly a plane through it, but Kurt stressed the reasons we believed Nick had gone down between the Dominican Republic and St. Marcos, and soft-pedaled the Mexico angle and the world of other possibilities. He listened for a minute, said thank you, and exchanged contact information with someone. The call was far too brief for my liking.

“What did they say?” I asked after he hung up.

“They knew who we were from my earlier call. They agreed to search between here and St. Marcos,” he said. “He—Burt Taylor was his name—said they would coordinate it with the Coast Guard tonight, but that nothing can be done until daylight tomorrow.”

Twelve more hours. At least twelve more hours. A long, long time. It was a big ocean out there. The FAA and Coast Guard had the resources we did not; we had no choice but to wait for their help with the search. But there was much we could do in the meantime. That I could do.

Hold on, Nick.

Hold on.

By the time we’d finished with Gabriel and the FAA, the day shift at the airport had ended. Kurt had called ahead to Victor for our ride. We walked out with dusk falling around us. Sweat rolled down my inner thighs under my knee-length orange skirt that was uncomfortably snug in the waist. More sweat clung to the hair at the base of my neck. I had melted like a crayon, like the mango tango from Taylor’s giant Crayola box. My anger had melted, too, and was being replaced by a deep sadness.

Victor pulled his white 1999 Oldsmobile Cutlass to the curb. He kept it in immaculate condition, especially considering the battle islanders fight with rust and sand. He jumped out to open the door. Kurt must have paid him well.

“Buenas noches, señor y señora.”

Kurt and I mumbled buenas noches back to him, and Kurt lowered himself into the front seat while I settled into the back. We hadn’t said a word to each other since we left Gabriel’s office. Victor talked to Kurt quickly and I gave up trying to understand after only a few seconds. Kurt engaged in an animated conversation with Victor, whose hands spent more time in the air than on the steering wheel.

I let my head drop back against the tan ribbed upholstery and tried not to think of all the unwashed heads that had done so before mine. Oil. Dandruff. Dead skin. Lice. Bed bugs. I was so tired I didn’t even flinch.

But my head jerked up when I heard Kurt say Nick’s name. Victor slowly repeated it twice.

“Kurt, what’s up? What are you guys saying about Nick?” I asked.

“Victor met Elena and her party,” he replied.

“What?” I leaned forward across the front seat between them.

“Yes, hold on, though. We’re not done talking. Let me find out everything he knows.”

We pulled up at the passenger drop-off at the Puntacana Resort. Victor put the car in park and kept his mouth running.

I was hanging on every word now, although I didn’t understand half of it. I bit a fingernail. How fitting that I would lose my husband and find myself looking for him in a strange land in which I, too, was lost. A flash of something burst inside me. Anger.

If Nick had just told me where he was going, what he was up to—

But I shut it down; now was not the time to indulge my emotions. I had already lost control once today. Victor knew something, and I wanted to know it, too.

A hotel doorman leaned down to Victor’s open window. The best I could tell, he asked Victor to drop us off and move along. Victor waved him away with the back of his hand. “Sí, pronto”—yes, soon—and rolled up his window.

The conversation resumed for another few minutes, and then the car grew quiet. Kurt nodded as he squeezed his lips with his thumb and forefinger.

He turned to face me. “OK, Elena and her mama and the younger guy rode with Victor. He’s sure of it. The time of day fits, he picked them up at the right terminal, and they match the description.”

“That’s great!” I said.

“Victor said they were worried about someone following them, and they kept saying maybe the mafioso was on to them. He took them to catch a bus to Santo Domingo. They didn’t say anything about Nick or where they were going, but they did say that everyone would think they went back to Mexico.”

All those words—ten minutes of talking—and Kurt could sum it up in so few. We had confirmation that Nick had not rejoined Elena’s group. No one had gone to Mexico. The universe of possible locations to search for Nick shrank by a fraction. Had he pointed his plane back towards home, to St. Marcos, to me?

“Did he get the name of the man? Can he describe him?” I asked. I heard my voice crack. I licked my lips and swallowed.

Kurt and Victor talked briefly. Kurt said, “No name. But Victor said he looked Mexican, too, but tall, sort of tall, with a mustache and a big gold medallion around his neck.” Victor said something else to Kurt. “Correction: He said he looked Mexican or Dominican or Puerto Rican; in other words, he looked Latino.”

The doorman reappeared and politely rapped his knuckles on Victor’s window. Victor held up one finger and nodded without making eye contact with him.

“You mentioned the mafioso. What mafioso?” I asked.

“He didn’t know.”

“I would guess Mexican cartel heavies,” I said, thinking back on my conversation with Nick about the Chihuahua cartel and the whispers about terrorists and mafia in our Petro-Mex meeting. I shared it with Kurt now, and then asked, “Could Monroe’s death have something to do with one of the cartels?”

“Monroe wasn’t Mexican, was he?”

“No, he was American, and plain vanilla Caucasian. Petro-Mex gave us his file, and I want to say he was from some little town in Louisiana. In his picture, his hair was strawberry blond.”

“I asked him if they talked about St. Marcos or a dead man. He said they didn’t,” Kurt said.

Victor cut in. “Perdóname, señor, pero yo recuerdo algo.” I could figure out that one: Pardon me, sir, but I remember something. He continued, and Kurt’s eyebrows rose into peaks.

Kurt translated. “This is interesting. Victor said Elena and the man were lovers. Kissing, stroking.” Victor said something else, and Kurt continued, “Calling each other by lovers’ names. The mother was not very involved in the conversation. She sat in the front with Victor.”

I felt my jaw drop. “You’re kidding me! Mrs. Monroe was sucking face with some mystery guy, and running off to the DR with him one week after Mr. Monroe died? And Nick was their pilot? My Nick, who was supposed to be investigating Monroe’s death?” My Nick, who was
not
sucking face with Mrs. Monroe, no matter what his father thought?

“What in the world is going on?” I yelled.

Kurt and Victor shrank back.

I took a breath.
Down, girl
.

Kurt asked me, “How long ago did the Monroes marry?”

“Only six months ago.” I bumped my palm against my forehead. “Oh man, I completely forgot to tell you something. When I was in Tutein’s office, he said that Petro-Mex gave Elena to Monroe as a retention bonus. He called her the ‘mail-order mamí.’”

Kurt didn’t blink at this information. “So, no love match?”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

My excitement tapered off quickly. Nick had still lied to me about something, more than one something, and hadn’t told me where he was going. I couldn’t exactly anoint him a saint.

The harried doorman leaned over the hood of the Cutlass and smacked it sharply with his palm, once, then twice. Victor shouted what sounded like Dominican curse words back at him.

Kurt continued. “Does the guy sound familiar to you, Katie?”

I squinted my mind’s eye back and it pulled up an image of the man who had pulled Nick aside at the Ag Fair. “Yes. Yes, he does. When we met with Elena, she took Nick’s card, which identified him as a pilot, not just an investigator. She remarked specifically on that. Three hours later at the Ag Fair, a guy who could match the description Victor gave you pulled Nick aside and talked to him for about ten minutes. Young, Latino, and on the tall side. Mustache. Top button undone like ‘I’m too sexy for my shirt.’ I remember a flash of gold on his chest, too. I asked Nick about him later and he lied.”

“Nick lied to you? About what?” Kurt sounded as disconcerted as I’d ever heard him sound.
You and me both, Kurt
.
Do you still want to lecture me about your unhappy son and his fat wife?

“Yes, he lied. He left me with the girls while he took Taylor to the bathroom. When he came back, he told me that he had walked Taylor straight to the potty. But it wasn’t true. I watched him. He took a ten-minute detour out of sight with that guy before he returned and went to the bathroom.”

“That’s odd.” Kurt was staring out the window, his lips tight and brow furrowed.

“Very. I was pretty mad at him about it,” I admitted.
Am. Am pretty mad at him.

Kurt said, “I’m sorry, Katie.”

“Yup,” I said, borrowing a play from his book.

Victor had been watching us like we were tennis players in a lengthy volley. His eyes glowed like Gabriel’s had when he was helping us. We were much more exciting than the average fare, vacationers talking about food, alcohol, golf, sun and sex. Certainly not talking about Elena and Nick. Or had they?

“Kurt, did anyone else ask him about Elena’s group, or about Nick? And can you make sure he knows what Nick looks like?”

Kurt showed Victor the picture of Nick and him with the airplane as he relayed my question. Victor replied in the negative and Kurt stated the obvious. “No one asked about them.”

Horns blared behind us. Victor turned around and shook his open palm at the other drivers. I suspected the doorman had put them up to it.

What else should we ask Victor? My head swam with all the little knowns and unknowns floating through it. I fished for their relevance, but caught nothing.

Kurt tipped Victor an amount equal to a week’s earnings and arranged for him to pick us up the next morning. To the doorman’s relief, Victor finally pulled away.

We entered the hotel through yet another open-air entrance, this one into a vast lobby with massive ferns on each side of a central corridor and tongue-in-groove ceilings that reminded me of Annalise. Kurt stopped in the reception area amid a stream of golfers on their way toward the smoky bar.

My heart rate slowed down. Here, the tourists spoke English. I could read the signs directing us to the restaurants and the pool. Nick was missing, I was in the Dominican Republic, but I felt less foreign. I relaxed a little. And then Kurt said, “Katie, I don’t want to scare you, but I think we need to be very careful.”

OK, maybe not so relaxed anymore.

“What makes you say that?”

“This whole time, I’ve thought Nick had a simple plane wreck or was in a car crash. That he had amnesia or was unconscious. Or at worst, that he ran off somewhere.”

“I—” I started to jump on him about his earlier comments, and then just stopped. I wasn’t going to get into it with Kurt again.

“But now I’m concerned about foul play. And if someone went after Nick and we’re here nosing around asking questions, well, we could end up in the same predicament. Hell, Katie, I’m convinced now that the man who called the airport today was looking for you.”

Had someone killed my husband?

The familiar cadence of American English around me changed from a comforting hum to a distracting arrhythmia. Snatches of conversations assaulted my eardrums. I winced. Were there people here watching Kurt and me?

I let my brain process my thoughts, but it was my heart that spoke.

Nick told you he was all right.

And so he had. In my dreams, he’d told me to search until I found him. That was real enough for me. Maybe someone had hurt him, but I had to believe him, and to keep myself safe so I could find him.

“You’re right,” I said, my voice lower than before. “How about we change our rooms to a suite. And then we can eat and strategize.”

“Yup. I will feel better if I’m there to protect you,” he said.

Protect me? With what? Kurt had only his bare hands. Big hands, strong hands, but that was it. That flare gun he carried yesterday would have eased my terrors right now. Or the machete. But Annalise wasn’t here to toss one into our hands. I didn’t even have the pepper spray I kept in my car back on St. Marcos. The best idea I could come up with was stealing our steak knives at dinner, and if that was all we had, we might as well just carry ballpoint pens. We could use them to stab our attackers’ eyes out. Or write, “Stop, you cad!” on a paper napkin and wave it at them.

“OK. How about I get us a table at one of the restaurants while you work on the rooms?” I asked.

“No, let’s stick together.”

I eyed the growing crowd.

Yes, I liked his idea better.