A King's ransom

64

Around nine I dropped Jenna off and went home to get ready for my trip. Alex and I had a noon flight that would get us into Bogota in plenty of time before our third Sunday-morning ascent of Monserrate. I hadn’t looked forward to any of the radio contacts with the kidnappers, but this one had me especially apprehensive.

I packed my bag in ten minutes, then sifted through the mail to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important. Next I scrolled through a flood of e-mail messages between Mom and a network of family friends that stretched across the country. The e-mail that caught my eye, however, wasn’t one of hers. It was from someone who used an eight-digit number as a screen name, which gave me pause. The last time I’d opened an e-mail like this one, it had turned out to be from Jaime Ochoa.

I clicked the mouse, and the message popped onto the screen.

“I know where Matthew Rey is,” it read.

I stared at the words. It was the same e-mail message that Jaime had sent to me at my office right after the kidnapping. This time he’d added a teaser. “Come see me, and I will show you.”

I printed the message and checked the time of delivery: 5:12 P.M. Just a couple of hours after the court hearing. My gut wrenched, wishing only that it had come two hours before it. I’d been so afraid to subpoena Jaime as a witness for the hearing that I’d decided to play the bluff. I’d been certain he would have come down with a convenient case of amnesia or, worse, told the judge that I’d shoved his hand into the disposal not in self-defense but simply to coerce a false confession. Things had gone badly between us at yesterday’s encounter, but perhaps things had just gotten out of hand. Perhaps I’d misread him.

Perhaps he was “A Friend.”

I got up quickly and grabbed the keys to my Jeep. I had to pay Jaime one last visit.

It took me twenty minutes to get to Jaime’s house, including a quick stop at my mother’s house on the way. I parked in the driveway but didn’t get out of my Jeep immediately.

The house was completely dark on the outside, no porch light or landscape lighting. Inside, a light from the kitchen appeared to be the only one burning. From a streetlamp at the corner, eerie shadows of power poles and phone lines stretched across the lawn and front porch.

I stepped down and stopped. I had reservations, of course. Driving up, I’d considered everything from the possibility of a cruel joke to a setup. I half expected Jaime and a half dozen of his friends to jump out from the bushes and beat my brains out with baseball bats. Perhaps I was being a little reckless. But the thing I feared more than anything was how the kidnappers might react on Sunday morning upon hearing that the ransom was being cut in half. If anyone could head off that crisis, I figured it was Jaime. I had to put my fears aside and take his offer at face value.

That didn’t mean I was an idiot. The stop at my mother’s house had been to pick up my father’s Smith amp; Wesson.

I walked slowly across the front lawn in the darkness. With each step, the coarse St. Augustine crabgrass crunched beneath my feet. A car passed at the intersection a half block away, howling-drunk teenagers hanging out the open windows as they ran the stop sign. The noise faded as quickly as it had come, leaving me in what seemed to be an even darker and lonelier silence. At the paved walk I turned and started toward the front door, my shadow from the streetlight reaching far ahead of me. My heels clicked, and then the soles scratched like sandpaper as I climbed the final cement steps. I raised my hand to knock, then stopped. The house seemed too quiet.

I shook it off and knocked three times.

I waited and listened. No lights switched on, I heard no footsteps inside. I knocked again, slightly harder. Again there was no response. Jaime’s car was in the driveway, but it was possible that a friend had taken him out for the night. Then I realized why the silence was so troubling.

Not even the dog barked.

The first time I’d visited, Sergeant had practically answered the door herself and nearly eaten me alive on the way out. The second time, she was chained in the yard but barked at my presence. This time, I’d driven up to a perfectly quiet house in a rather noisy Jeep, walked across the lawn, and knocked twice on the front door. It seemed strange that I’d gone unnoticed. Very strange.

I knocked once more, this time with the base of my fist. I pounded hard, and with the third deep thud the door swung open. I stepped back, startled, but no one was there. Evidently it hadn’t been completely closed. The mere force of my knock had pushed it open.

I stepped to the open doorway and said, “Jaime?”

I heard nothing. I glanced again at the car in the driveway, thinking it odd that if someone had taken Jaime out on Friday night that they would have taken his dog with them.

I stuck my head inside the dark foyer, just enough to see inside. “Jaime, it’s-”

I froze in midsentence. From the other end of the hall, at the entrance to the kitchen, Sergeant was staring me in the face, eyes wide open. She wasn’t growling, wasn’t blinking. She wasn’t even breathing. The dog’s body was sprawled across the kitchen floor in a crimson pool of blood.

My instincts told me to run, but I found my feet moving me in the opposite direction, into the house, down the hall, toward the lone light in the kitchen and the grim smell of death. It had been just five hours since Jaime had sent me an e-mail offering to show me where my father had gone. The very sight of his dog lying dead on the floor drew me inside for the answer I feared.

I stopped at the kitchen and gasped.

Jaime was hanging by the neck, twirling slowly round and round at the end of a rope that was fastened to the ceiling fan.

At first I couldn’t move, stunned by the ghastly sight of this strangely elongated body. The toes seemed to reach in futility for the floor. The chin pointed toward the ceiling, yanked upward by a rope so taut that his bulging eyes had nearly popped from the sockets. The whole hideous sight just kept turning with the blades of the paddle fan right before my eyes, as if on display.

Murder was my first thought, but then I remembered how Jaime was so afraid of prison that he would have stabbed me to death to avoid ending up like his brother, abused while incarcerated. He was cowardly enough to kill himself. But why would he have killed his dog, too? Then it hit me. This wasn’t just an escape. This was Jaime’s exit, something he’d wanted me to see. The e-mail had said that he knew where my father was. He’d invited me over to show me.

Death was what he’d shown me. Gruesome deaths-a slit throat, strangulation.

I nearly fell against the doorframe, sickened by the perverse and tortured message that I now knew he was sending me.

They’re going to kill my father, I realized, almost too weak to stand.