Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) (14 page)

Bile rose in my throat and my stomach threatened upheaval.
That bastard.
How brazen was a cop that left a voicemail like that, knowing he would get away with it? He wasn’t going to, not if I could help it, but right now my one and only worry had to be finding Nick. I should be getting help from local law enforcement, and instead, I got this. It sounded an awful lot like a threat against my children, and here I was, stuck in the Dominican Republic.

And Nick. I couldn’t stop to think about Nick, what shape he might be in now, whether he was even alive.

He told you he was all right. You just have to hurry.

Funny, he was communicating more clearly with me now than he had before he disappeared, which would really make me mad if I let myself think about it.

Collin burst in. “Hold the press, team. I’ve got information.”

This got Kurt’s attention.

“Here’s what Tamara and her buddies came up with. You probably already know or you wouldn’t have asked for this information, but rum is a double whammy on a piston-driven engine. The alcohol overheats the cylinders, and the sugar caramelizes on the pistons. The question is how much rum, and how long would the plane fly before the engine shut down, given the varying amounts of rum possible.”

I broke in. “The witness said there were several of the big Cruzan bottles.”

“That’s what Tamara thought. She said if someone knew enough to use the rum, surely they’d know the right amount, which would be about a gallon in each tank, call it four liters per tank.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Our witness said the bottles filled a trash bin. Can you imagine someone standing there, pouring eight liters into the tanks? He must have had a hand trolley or cart of some kind. Not that it matters. Keep going.”

“Yeah, the asshole had some balls. So, assuming he had time to get three or four liters per tank poured in, and assuming Nick set his air speed at a hundred and sixty knots, he could probably make it thirty to thirty-five miles before he lost the engines. Tamara and her buddies expect he’d be at an altitude of 8,500 feet when it happened.”

His words pierced my heart. I knew Nick had to have crashed, I had known it in my core for days, and I knew the current goal was to find his crash site. But hearing this made it real and more painful. My hands started shaking and I clasped them together. So much. So much all at once.

Collin kept going. “So let’s assume a couple of positive things. First, that Nick keeps his ditch kit in the co-pilot seat, like any good pilot would do over water. So he’s going to have an inflatable life raft and a survival kit.”

“Yes, he does,” I said. “He always does. When I fly with him, we put it between my feet. He never flies without it.”

“Excellent. Next, we’re going to assume he coasts to a picture perfect deadstick landing on the water. Here’s another positive: Piper Malibus have retractable landing gear. Nick will have the landing gear up, so when he hits the water, the plane should stay upright. And he’s got a minute, up to three, to ditch. That’s no problem whatsoever for a guy like him. He gets out with his ditch kit, pops the inflatable on the raft, hops in, and paddles away before the plane sinks. I can see it happening. And last but not least in the good news department, the seas were calm at one to three feet forty-eight hours ago.”

This was encouraging. I could see it, too. This is how it would have gone down. Tamara was an expert. And Nick had told me he was fine. But what if he hit his head on the dash when the plane hit the water? It could have knocked him out. Or what if we were wrong and there was no rum in the plane? What if he had a stroke or a heart attack and just crashed the plane? What if the bad guys had planted a bomb, and it went off?

STOP IT.

I had held off an anxiety attack so far. I had to stay positive. Nick was counting on me.

“OK,” I said, and both men looked at me like I had pierced their eardrums. I ratcheted back. “Show me on the map. Where is he?”

Kurt pulled his map around for Collin and me to see and took out his wax pen and a ruler. He positioned the pen on Punta Cana and drew a straight line from there to St. Marcos along the ruler. Then he measured the distance against the scale on the map. He drew an X at the thirty-mile mark. He drew another X at the thirty-five-mile mark. Then he took out his compass, slipped the wax pen into it, and set it to draw a circle around the center point between the two X’s with a ten-mile radius.

“Some people would be more precise, but this is the quick and dirty,” he said. “Let’s say he landed somewhere in here.”

“That’s almost exactly where Tamara said to look,” Collin said. “Which way does the sea move out there?”

Kurt tapped his pen on an area to the east of the center point of his circle. “Primarily westward. Although this passage here—the Mona passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic—is a tough one. Lots of variation in current, lots of sand bars. But it moves mostly to the west.”

We studied the map together.

“How long could he stay afloat, just drifting?” I asked.

“Indefinitely,” Kurt said. “But he only has enough water in the survival kit for a few days. After that, he needs rain.”

I looked out the window. Nothing but blue skies out there.

Kurt saw my glance. “Don’t forget, though, Katie, there are squalls nearly every afternoon. He’s getting some water.”

Collin spoke. “Look here, guys. I know the water is moving to the west, but look at these islands. One of them is pretty big and it’s close to our projected splash zone. What do you know about Mona and Monito?”

Mona Lisa
, I thought
.

Now why had those words come into my head? Mona Lisa? I had never heard of those islands.

Kurt said, “I dunno. Guess we could get online and find out.” He started typing his keys.

Thoughts ricocheted around my head.
Rubber raft. Tackle box with a picture of Mona Lisa. My Wild Irish Kate.

What was I supposed to be seeing?

The opening beats of “Eye of the Tiger” thumped in my head in time to my heartbeat, and I knew.

Holy shit
.

Nick had been telling me this all along. He had tried to tell me, and I didn’t get it, but now it was clear, so clear that it was undeniable. But how could I explain it to Kurt and Collin—this insanity, these dreams, these messages from Nick to me?

“I’m not crazy,” I blurted out.

So they both looked at me like I was.

I babbled incoherently about the dreams,
Mona Lisa
, the raft,
Wild Irish Kate
, about how Nick had told me he was fine, not to give up, but to hurry because he was counting on me to come for him—me and only me—and not to rely on anyone else. When I was finished, my eyes dropped from theirs and I sat without breathing.

Please believe me.

Silence.

Then Kurt spoke in his matter-of-fact way, as if I had presented them with a spreadsheet of scientific formulas leading us to this conclusion, instead of the nonsense I had just spewed. “Can we get to Mona from here?”

He and Collin trained their eyes on the map.

“It looks like it’s about halfway,” Collin said. “We can’t get there from here tonight by boat. We’d have to leave in daylight. So, I guess the question is how do we get there the fastest: boat, plane, or some combination?”

I huffed a breath out. I swallowed. They didn’t think I was crazy.

Kurt said, “It has to be faster from here.” He pointed to Rincón, the westernmost town in Puerto Rico closest to Mona. “If we could be here, on a boat at daybreak, we’d have a following sea. I’d guess it’d be a four-hour trip out there with a good boat and decent weather, maybe less.”

I sat down at my laptop and pulled up Expedia and typed in a travel search. “We can’t fly to Rincón, but we could fly from Punta Cana to Mayagüez at eight tonight, and from there it’s probably a thirty-minute taxi ride over to Rincón.”

We all looked at the clock: 5:30 p.m. Very doable.

“We need to call the FAA and the Coast Guard. I can do that,” Kurt said.

“I can get on the phone with Julie and see if she can help with a hotel and boat charter,” I said.

“I’ll book the tickets,” Collin said.

“All I have left to do is click to purchase,” I said.

“Cool. Then I’ll paint my toenails. Can I borrow some nail polish?” Collin replied.

I rolled my eyes at him.

Collin mock-sighed. “OK, I’ll call Tamara instead and run our conclusions by her for a final logic check. I’m going to fill her in about the Chihuahuas, too.”

When we were all done, we would still have an hour to pack and grab food at the airport before hopping on the plane.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

We scattered to our tasks. I tried Julie and got voicemail, so I texted her: “Julie, we can’t reach you on the phone. We need help. Skype?”
Come on.
She answered immediately.
Yes.

“Skype open. Ready.”

I connected. “No time for details, Julie, but we’ve made progress and need your help. Drop-everything kind of help.”

“Ruth is here with the kids. I can do whatever you need.” I heard something in her voice. Maybe my excitement was infectious? No. My stomach knotted. No time for more trouble. I pushed on.

“We need a charter boat for tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn in Rincón, Puerto Rico, to take us out to Mona Island. And a hotel in Rincón.”

“Hotel in Rincón, boat from Rincón to Mona, earliest possible departure.”

“Yes.”

“I’m on it.”

A thought, a crazy thought, came to my mind. “Julie, wait.” I scrolled through the contacts in my phone. Found him. “Humor me. Call this number first and see if this guy is available to be in Rincón for a charter.” I read off the digits. “Don’t waste a lot of time, just one phone call, leave a voicemail, but then go straight to searching for another. But if he’s available under the same time frame, I want him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bill.” The captain of the
Wild Irish Kate
. “He’s a childhood surfer friend of Nick’s. He captains a boat out of San Juan named the
Wild Irish Kate
for a rich American who likes to play in the Caribbean. Nick chartered him once a few years ago.”

“Got it. And I think I remember him. Let me know what’s going on when you can.”

“I will, I promise.”

Julie took a deep breath. “I don’t want to worry you, Katie, but there is one thing that happened this afternoon that you need to know.”

My tummy seized up. I’d been right. Trouble. “Tell me.”

“Taylor was outside playing right after we talked to you earlier. Ruth and I were watching him, and he was in the driveway. And then he was gone, in the blink of an eye. The only reason we knew to look so fast was that Annalise set off every alarm in the house. I swear, she about pierced our eardrums.”

“Is Taylor all right?” There was panic in my voice.

“He’s fine. But what happened is strange and scary. The crazy old guy that told you there were skeletons under Annalise had picked him up and was walking down the driveway with him. We saw and ran after him. He was very calm and friendly when he saw us. He handed Taylor back to me, and he said, ‘Sure easy to lose a boy.’ And he just walked off. When we got back to the house, we saw that all of the dogs were asleep. I think they’d been drugged, Katie. So everything is OK now, but we don’t know what to make of it.”

Tutein. That asshole Tutein.

“I think I do. Tutein left me a voicemail telling me what beautiful children I have, and he said I still have a chance to make all the problems with Annalise go away before the court makes its ruling on the injunction. I think he’s sending us a message.”

“I don’t like this message.”

“Me either. Please, ask Rashidi to stay with you guys from now on. Don’t let anyone go off alone.” The seizing in my stomach had turned to roiling nausea. “Oh, Julie, I’m so sorry.”

My children. My husband. How could I protect everyone at once? I didn’t want to tell the guys, but I knew I had to.

We hung up. I turned to the men. All of us had completed our tasks.

“I need to go first,” I said. I updated them quickly and the mood sobered. We moved on to Collin, who said Tamara thought our Mona scenario made sense.

Kurt reported on the FAA and Coast Guard. “I called our contact numbers and gave them our new information. The FAA said they will also call the Coast Guard and ask them to direct some of their search capabilities tomorrow between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The Coast Guard person gave me the same line they did last time, so I called my friend Ralph and asked for help. He’s going to rattle sabers and call me back.”

On cue, Kurt’s phone rang. “Yup. Uh-huh. Yeah, OK. Thanks.” He hung up and nodded. Quintessential Kurt.

Collin lost patience first. “Well?”

“My friend got through. They’ll start flyovers in the Mona Passage tomorrow. It’s too late today, not enough light. But he also said that tomorrow is day four and the resources will change for a recovery operation rather than a rescue.”

“Recovery?” I asked.

“Body recovery,” Collin said, putting his hand on my forearm. “But don’t worry, Katie. They’re just reading from a script. He’s out there. We’ll find him.”

The adrenaline in my body dilated my pupils. I concentrated on expanding and filling my lungs, then emptying them, five times. It helped. Enough to keep me upright, at least.

Kurt and I threw our bags together and we reconvened in the sitting area five minutes later.

I asked, “Time to go?”

“Ready,” he said.

“Just one more thing,” Collin said. “I made out a black guy watching us at the airport, and by the time we’d gotten to the hotel, he’d picked us up and was on our tail. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure at the time, but I am now. When I went out to talk to Tamara, I saw him and another black guy casing our room. Hadn’t had a chance to tell you yet, but now’s the time.”

“Oh my God!” I said, too loudly.

Kurt said, “If they’re out there, why don’t they just try to kill us like they did that boy today?”

Nice thought, Kurt.

“I don’t think they would want to attract attention by killing us unless they have to,” Collin said. “I’ll bet they just want to follow us in case we know something, especially about Nick or his passengers, who they seem to very much want dead.”

“Shit! What are we going to do?” I asked.

Collin said, “We need to scatter like a covey of quail.”

“Like that means something to me. Tell me in a way I can understand, big brother.”

“There are two of them and three of us. We need to leave one at a time, scatter in three directions—Katie go left, Kurt go right, and I’ll go forward—move fast, take confusing routes, walk past Victor’s car, find a new taxi. We’ll meet there. If that doesn’t work, we can visit a Plan B in the taxi.”

Kurt did his usual—he nodded. I gulped, then parroted him.

My phone flashed. No time to check messages.

Collin said, “Katie, you go first. Then Kurt. I’ll bring up the rear and carry all three bags. Ready, guys?”

Kurt and I answered yes, him with more steam than me.

“Go, Katie,” Collin ordered.

With my heart thundering, I handed him my bag and lunged out the door, then righted myself.
Don’t look at them.
I didn’t turn around, but I saw a black-skinned figure start to move in my side vision.
Shit shit shit.
I checked my watch. I needed to kill five minutes and make it good.

I made a sharp left toward the lobby. When I got there, I turned down a long hall of rooms. My purse slipped off my shoulder and bounced against my legs with each step. I forced my eyes to remain forward, no matter how badly I wanted to glance over my shoulder. I went up a flight of stairs.

As I reached the top of the staircase I tried to adjust my purse—and ended up dropping it. It tumbled out of my hands and everything in it spilled down the top three steps. My heart hammered in my chest and I kept my eyes on the tile floor as I crouched down and started shoveling things into my bag. Top step. Lipstick. Sunglasses. Passport. Second step. Keys. Checkbook. Pens. Third from the top. A pair of earrings. A roll of mints. I put my wallet in last and stood up, then saw my blue spiral notebook halfway down the hall. It must have  bounced out of my purse earlier. I looked up and straight into the eyes of a black man walking down the long hallway toward me—and my notebook.

Shit.

Everything we’d learned so far was in that notebook. I couldn’t just leave it—it was a map directly to my husband. I sprinted down the steps and back through the hall on a collision course with the man. We reached the notebook at the same time and as he bent over to retrieve it, I grabbed a pen out of my purse, ready to gouge his eyes out. He stood up.

“You dropped this, ma’am,” he said in a voice that gave away his origins: Midwest, U.S.A. A tourist.

My fingers released the pen.

“Th-th-thank you, very much.”

I took it from him as another black man bolted around the corner behind him. I didn’t stick around to meet him. With my hand in my purse gripping my notebook, I wheeled and sprinted back up the stairs and into the short hallway at the top of them, where I ran head-on into one of the exact two people I did not want to meet. My breath was literally knocked out against his chest. His black eyes gleamed with recognition and triumph, and he grabbed me by my upper arm as I tried to spin back in the direction I’d come. His grip was strong. He wasn’t overly tall, maybe five foot ten, but he was lean and muscular.

He spoke, and it was an island lilt. “Good afternoon, miss. Would you come with me, please?” His mock courtesy and tight smile over gleaming teeth were sinister.

Sylis? Or his buddy? Who knew, who cared. My fear slipped away and years of compulsory practice in the dojo took over. He was bigger, he was stronger, but I was smarter and felt sure he underestimated me. I pretended to trip and shot my free arm into a hammer punch to his groin, then followed his sagging body with a side kick under his chin. My teacher had always praised my side kicks as my most effective move. His head snapped back—I heard his teeth meet with a loud clack—and he fell backwards to the floor.

I didn’t stick around to see if I’d knocked him out, but I was hoping for the best as I sprinted around a corner to the right, found another set of stairs, and headed down. I walked out onto the pool deck, trying not to look like I was heaving for breath. I circled the pool and entered the lobby from another angle, browsing the boutique windows as my breath slowed down, but not my pulse. I exited the far side of the lobby and walked around to the front of the hotel, where I saw Victor’s car.

I chanced another glance around. There were men everywhere. Black men, Latino men, men that could be from St. Marcos, men that could be from Mexico or not. Men that could be interested in me or care less. I walked past Victor’s Cutlass and down to the end of the row of cars for hire. I searched for a sign of Kurt or Collin. Nothing.

“Taxi?” I asked, leaning down to speak to a driver through the open window of his large van. I panted.

“Sí,” he said.

I hopped onto the first bench in the back. His radio was playing Kat DeLuna’s obnoxious “Whine Up.” U.S. pop music, Dominican-style. And I was trapped in his car with it, having a mini-panic attack. Not ideal. My blood pressure started rising.

“Where to, miss?” he asked. “Miss” sounded like “mees” in his accent.

“Wait. Two more men coming.”

“I charge you for wait,” he said. He sounded happy about it.

“Yes, charge me, that’s fine.” As long as he kept the taxi in park until Kurt and Collin came; that’s all I cared about.

Footsteps. I willed my eyes to stay on the floorboard. The door opened and Kurt dropped onto the seat beside me.

“One of the guys went after you. Did you see him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw him all right.”

“We go now?” the driver asked.

“No, wait. One more man,” I replied.

“I still charge you,” he said.

“Yes, that is fine.” This time he had definitely sounded happy. “Did anyone follow you?”

“I think so, or at least one guy did. I didn’t see him when I reached the cars, though.”

“That’s good.”

“Yup.”

Suddenly the car door on the other side of me opened. There had been no footsteps. Collin settled himself in, tossing our three bags across our laps. I should have packed lighter.

“I go now?” the driver asked.

“Yes, the airport, please,” I said.

“Cape Air,” Collin said.

Collin didn’t say a word to us. His eyes roamed the people and cars around us but his head never moved. Kurt and I stayed silent. The driver pulled his taxi van away from the curb and eased around the other parked cars. Collin’s eyes hardened and I followed his gaze. One Afro-Caribe man stood at the entrance to the lobby, craning his neck and searching all the cars.