Tourist Trapped (9 page)

Cooper also leaned in. “Could you tell if the conversation was casual or serious?”

“They looked like they were planning something.”

When the bartender wandered over, he scowled at the young man and reprimanded him in Spanish, kicking him out of the bar.

“Señora, lo siento. Mi amigo, Luis, is confused. This man didn’t come here. It was another fellow.” He grabbed her hand and held it with a firm grasp. “Trust me, your friend wasn’t here and asking more questions could be muy peligroso para tu.” He released her hand and ran his finger across his neck.

TWELVE

Friday December 11, Evening

Amanda and Chad
sat in a corner on the catamaran’s deck. Around them a party erupted as the boat headed into the setting sun. Passengers boogied to Katy Perry and staff members dashed about, clasping squeeze bottles of rum punch, offering everyone a mouthful. Not an environment in which Amanda normally fretted about somebody slashing her throat.

Good old Cooper thumbed through his notes from the day. Why didn’t he chew her out for dragging his ass to Mexico, for risking his safety? He had a family back home who needed him—a responsibility that required an intact neck.

“Maybe it’s time you return to the States. Let’s call Jaz tonight and ask her to make the arrangements,” she said.

“And leave you alone in Cancun? With bartenders warning you that asking questions can be detrimental to your health? I’m not going anywhere, Boss.”

The boat pitched with the waves, heaving up and crashing down. A spray of water settled on Cooper’s notes. “Nice thinking, Chad,” he said. “Pull out paper when sitting three feet over the ocean.” He wiped off the page and stashed his notepad.

She couldn’t shake the bartender’s warning. “If you get hurt, I’d never forgive myself—and your family would have my head.”

“You can protest until the sun goes down, but I’m not leaving—and I highly doubt my wife and kids are stewing with worry over my trip to Mexico, so let’s leave them out of the equation for now and look at what we know.”

“Which isn’t much.”

“Trent and Rebecca came to Cancun on a last-minute trip, but they haven’t vacationed together much. Your sister did the tourist circuit and her husband ditched her every minute he could and focused his efforts on scheming about some deal on the side. Then they both disappeared.”

“And, when we ask about it, we’re warned we could get hurt,” Amanda said. “Who could be involved? Do you think he fell in with a drug cartel?”

“Unfortunately, I think it’s possible. Trent and Rebecca didn’t accidentally fall off the end of the earth. Somebody pushed them.”

* * *

Amanda slumped in
a plastic chair on her balcony, swirling the beer in a condensation-covered Dos Equis bottle. Exhausted from the day, she couldn’t move if she tried. She had fielded a call from Matt and told him about the trip to Isla Mujeres—except for the parts about Cooper, searching for Rebecca and Trent, and the bartender’s threat. A rather short conversation.

Although the interior design tormented Amanda, she welcomed the safety of the resort. She closed her eyes and listened to the surf.

Someone knocked on the door.
Maybe if I’m quiet, they’ll go away.

“Amanda, it’s Chad. I want to show you something.”

She schlepped across the cool marble floor, through the sitting area and past the king-sized bed to let him in.

“They double booked.” He shook a handful of papers at her.

“I don’t understand.”

“Come here.” He spread the documents across the granite-topped room divider. “When we didn’t see any confirmations for Sunday trips and we had so many places to cover, we focused on the sites captured in the camera pictures first, right?”

“And?”

“I compiled a timeline based on the receipts—you know, stepped through each day.”

“And?”

“It doesn’t work. There are too many places—look, they have a souvenir picture from Garrafón. The park is on Isla Mujeres. The catamaran doesn’t take guests there; how would Rebecca and Trent have spent time at Garrafón along with everything else? And why didn’t we see pictures of the park on the camera—and, there are purchased pictures of both of them, not just Rebecca.”

“Which would imply that a dutiful Trent accompanied his wife…could they have gone another day?”

“Maybe, but there aren’t any receipts on some of these places. And if they arrived on Thursday, when did they have time to fit all of this stuff in? Look at what else I found.” Cooper handed her a crinkled receipt. A confirmation for a zip-line excursion on Sunday. “I went back through the Adams’ room to see if we missed anything, and I came across this, crumpled up beneath a chair.”

Excellent. A lead on where they disappeared. “Normally they’d need to take the slip with them to get on the shuttle.”

“I think somebody planted it. Look.” He showed her photos of the room. “This is one of the pictures I took on the first day and this is what I took tonight.” The ball of paper sat beneath the chair in the second photo, but not the first.

“Housekeeping probably stirred it up from somewhere.”

“I don’t think so. I have a feeling somebody is trying to keep us off the trail—between the bartender’s warning and the questionable pile of trips and trinkets in Rebecca and Trent’s room, I don’t think this is a simple situation of a lost couple.”

Darth Vader started sucking air. Dad probably wanted an update. What would she tell him—something other than the bartender’s warning of slit throats and Cooper’s discovery of planted information. Yep, she’d have to come up with something else. She answered her phone.

“Mandy, they’ve been kidnapped! Trent and Rebecca are being held for ransom—it’s due on Thursday, we don’t even have a week to get the money together—and I still don’t have my passport.” Miriam howled in the background.

“Ransom? Shit, can this get any worse?” She flipped on the speakerphone and grabbed a tablet off the bureau. “Okay, Dad, we’re ready. What does the message say?”

“Let me put you on speakerphone so Miriam can hear.” The woman’s sobs spilled into the hotel room.

“Here goes. We have Trent and Rebecca Adams. They are safe.” She’d never heard her father’s voice quiver. “To get them back you need to pay one million American dollars by eight o’clock Thursday night. Leave a suitcase with the money, in non-sequential bills no larger than hundreds, in a locker at the downtown bus station and put the key in the envelope taped beneath the last bench in the station. If you do not follow these instructions, your daughter and her husband will die. If you involve the authorities, Trent and Rebecca Adams will die.”

Kidnapped. Not out of gas in the jungle, not adrift on the ocean. The queasiness from the Buho’s encounter morphed into full-blown nausea. “How did they reach you?” Amanda said.

“They left a phone message.”

“Dad, we can’t go it alone. We need to notify Officer Rodriguez about the call, and maybe the FBI.”

“No! They said we shouldn’t contact them,” Miriam sobbed. “They’ll kill my baby.”

Cooper leaned into the phone. “Miriam, I’m with Amanda on this one. If they’ve abducted Rebecca and Trent, we’re going to need help.”

“Listen here, Chad,” her father said. “Rebecca’s our daughter and we’ll decide who should be notified of her disappearance.”

“Not to be disrespectful sir, but, since Amanda and I are the ones on the ground in Cancun searching for her, I would think Amanda should have some input into decisions.”

“Dad, email me a copy of the ransom message. We’ll need to read it carefully. And we have to contact the police.”

Cooper scribbled something on his notepad and handed it to Amanda.
Are you telling them about Isla Mujeres?

She shook her head no. That would finish them off.

“We’ll cash in some of our savings, or take out a loan against the business,” Miriam said. “We can pull the money together.”

“You work on the financials and we’ll keep searching for them down here,” Amanda said.

“Mandy, have you figured out where they went on Sunday?”

“We have a possible lead, nothing concrete yet Dad, but I think we’re close enough that we’ll find them in the next couple of days.”

A little lie couldn’t hurt.

* * *

“She’s stopped working
the case, Mr. Harding,” Jonathan said, over the phone. “Ms. Sloane’s too busy with her sister’s disappearance to spend time on anything else.”

“You’re certain?” Gordon said, sprawled out on his king-sized bed, leaning against a pile of silk-covered goose down pillows.

“Yes. Not a word about it tonight—and she has been notified of the ransom. We’ve upped the ante to ensure she remains preoccupied with her missing family.”

“And the man?”

“Mr. Cooper is a bit of a problem. He’s a little…too focused on the kidnapping, digging up more than he should.”

“Like?”

“He’s figured out that some of the documentation was manufactured, but he doesn’t know who’s involved.”

“Keep it that way.”

“Will do. Um, sir…we had a bit of a problem today. A bartender on Isla Mujeres.”

“Handle it.”

“Standard procedure?”

“Whatever works. I trust your judgment.”

“Choosing Cancun was an excellent spot for an abduction. If I may ask, sir, why did you select it?”

“I’ve never had any interest in vacationing in Mexico. If I wanted to spend time with a bunch of spics, I’d hang around the illegals at one of my meat packing factories. If we end up with bodies, it’ll be tough to trace them back to me.”

* * *

“Thanks, Art. Let
me know what you uncover.” Chad finished the call and traipsed along the beach, letting the moonlit waves wash over his bare feet. How did they get from a drug deal to a kidnapping? Did Trent screw up and now they’re holding the couple for the drug payment? Or had it been a gambling debt that the idiot didn’t honor? The abductors were professionals—even creating fake pictures and receipts. At least they made contact, so hopefully nobody had died.

He turned up the beach and flopped onto a lounge chair by the pool, dialing Vince.

“Any news?”

“Hey Chad. My buddy dug up a big goose egg on cell calls and credit cards. No leads there, and Danielle and the kids are still off the map. They’re getting better at hidin’—but don’t worry, it’s impossible to stay underground too long when you’ve got teenagers.”

“Day at a time, right?”

“Right. How goes it in Cancun?”

“A bartender told us to stop asking questions ‘or else,’ somebody planted docs to keep us running in circles, and Amanda’s parents received a ransom message. Other than that, just your typical day in paradise.”

“Holy crap. Any idea what went down?”

“No clue. All we’ve deduced is that Trent Adams is a womanizing jerk and most likely a moron who involved himself with some dangerous dudes.”

“Have you cracked their email?”

“No and I wasn’t planning to.”

“You want to find them, right? Don’t you need to know who they’ve communicated with?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Let us know if we can help.”

“As a matter-of-fact, can Fozzy pull cell phone records for Trent Adams? I’ll send the address and phone number.”

“Sure…but let me understand this. You’re asking Fozzy to break the law, and yet you’re squeamish about hacking an email account or two now that you’re a lawyer? ‘Fraid to get those manicured nails dirty?”

* * *

The jungle noises
rose when darkness fell. Rebecca huddled in the corner of the stuffy, narrow hut, between tall cinderblock walls and beneath a high tin roof. Bugs shared occupancy, wandering in through the wire mesh ventilation at the top of the walls. Unfortunately, it was too high for her to reach and push out.

Rebecca and her mother once rented an old two-bedroom flat with a crumbling brick fireplace. One October, an animal sneaked into the chimney and her mom contacted a service to get rid of it. The guy had told them he fished out a squirrel. Existing in the squalid nine-square-foot space, she knew what the critter had experienced.

The birds quieted with dusk, but the bugs and frogs took up the song, their sounds bursting forth from the untamed world around her. The occasional frantic screech of prey resonated through the trees as another creature trapped it within the hunter’s iron jaws.

Alone in the hut, the hours crept by, leaving Rebecca what felt like a lifetime to ponder her and Trent’s fate. At first, the fear of rape terrified her, but they had left her untouched. She focused her worries on her husband. Bruised and battered, he looked terrible. Most days their captors threw him in with her for a couple of hours, and each time the number and size of his bruises and cuts grew. In between visits they beat him, trying to force a ransom contact out of him.

Why no Trent today?
One sound had stood out, a vehicle’s engine, possibly a jeep. It started up and drove off midday. Had they taken Trent somewhere? Each minute crawled by, like the worm inching its way up one of the hard, unforgiving walls. The insect barely moved, as if content to share the space with another being. Could they have broken Trent? Did he tell them how to reach her parents? She prayed for his safety.

Who held them and when would they free them? Had her mother alerted the authorities? By now her parents must be searching all of Cancun.

The door creaked and the young girl slipped in again, leaving a plate with tortillas, beans and fruit. She replaced the slop pail with an empty one and left a couple of bottles of water. The man with the rifle and a bandanna covering his face could be heard outside the door. He always accompanied her.

The adolescent’s big, brown, sad eyes belonged on a face much older. The ragged, dirty shirt and shorts she wore engulfed her, meant for a well-fed child. And yet, the girl always offered a weak smile before leaving.

Rebecca hadn’t found her appetite since the abduction, but she forced down the food to keep up her stamina. If the chance to escape made itself known, she would need to be in the best shape possible.

Another animal squealed in fear before succumbing to its slayer.