Creepers

47

"Wife?" Cora whispered in shock..

Balenger looked at Tod in the surveillance room. "What I told you was the truth-I'm not a cop." He hesitated. "But I used to be."

Tod shook his head in disgust. "And that stuff about Iraq and the hood over your head and the guy with the sword?"

"Was true. I was a detective on Asbury Park's police force. My wife and I live… lived here. She works… worked… I have trouble with tenses when I think about her. Two years ago, she disappeared."

They listened so intently that, despite the rain, the bedroom seemed quiet.

"She was blond. Thin. Like Amanda. Thirty-three. But she looked younger, in her twenties. Like Amanda." Balenger stared down at his clenched hands. "When Mack pulled the vault door open and I saw Amanda in there, God help me, at first I thought she was Diane. I thought I'd finally found her, that a miracle had happened and my wife was still alive."

Balenger's chest ached as he stared at Amanda, who reminded him so much of his wife. "Diane worked for a real estate developer here in town. The same developer who'll be tearing down this hotel in two weeks. She often went to New York City to negotiate with the Carlisle trust for the land the Paragon sits on. The trust kept refusing. It's a damned cruel joke that the trust eventually had to surrender the land for taxes. But two years ago, it still had control. And on Diane's last trip to Manhattan, she vanished."

Balenger drew a pained breath. "A lot of people disappear in New York. I used to go there on weekends and unofficially help the missing persons bureau. Leg work. Shoe leather. Finally the case got so cold, I was the only person doing anything. I kept asking for more time off work to look for Diane, until my boss suggested it would be better if I resigned and took all the time I wanted. I ran out of money. Then an ex-Ranger buddy told me about the quick cash to be earned in Iraq guarding convoys, provided I didn't mind dodging booby traps and snipers. Hell, at that point, I didn't much care if I lived or died. What I did care about was the twenty thousand dollars I'd earn for one month's work, so I could get back to trying to find out what happened to my wife."

Balenger forced himself to continue. "After a year, I didn't have much hope she was still alive. But I needed to keep trying. It gives you an idea how desperate I was that I went to Iraq again. Diane had gotten me back on my feet after the first time. Damned Gulf War syndrome. She never tired of nursing me. It was her idea that I use my military experience and apply for a job with the Asbury Park police. Nothing demanding. A way to feel useful. Fucking Iraq. I told you how the second time turned out. But with the cash I got, I made myself keep searching. I followed every lead, every sex criminal who might have come in contact with her, every mugger who was known to work in the areas where she went. Double- and triple-checked. In the end, all I had was the feeling I'd had from the start but couldn't prove, that Diane's disappearance had something to do with the negotiations for the hotel. No, not the negotiations exactly. Something to do with the hotel itself. I asked permission to go inside, but the trust refused. Safety reasons. I did my best to break in, but the Paragon's a damned fortress."

Balenger's voice tightened. "Three months ago, I read a newspaper article about urban explorers, how their expeditions are like special-ops missions and how some of them have a genius for infiltrating buildings that are supposedly impregnable. I checked urban-explorer websites and approached a group, but I made the mistake of telling the first group why I needed their help getting in. They treated me like I was an undercover agent wearing a wire. With the next group, I tried to convince them to take me into the hotel because it was a fascinating old building. But they didn't trust an outsider any more than the first group did. Plus, there were plenty of old buildings they already had plans to explore. So I used the professor's website next and arranged to meet him. This time, I tried the greed motive. I showed him copies of old newspaper articles from when Danata was killed-rumors about gold coins the gangster supposedly hoarded in a secret vault. Bob was polite. He said he'd look into it. I figured he was brushing me off. But it turned out he'd just been fired, and a week later, he phoned and said he'd help me on one condition."

"That you'd get some of the coins for him," Vinnie said.

"Yes. He admired you and Cora and Rick so much, he was certain you wouldn't agree to take the coins. He was afraid about his health and how he'd pay for his heart treatments. He was angry about losing his professorship. You can't imagine how angry. So the deal was, you'd unknowingly help me search the hotel for some clue about what happened to Diane. Then I'd come back the next night and get the coins for the professor. Of course, once I knew how to get in, I also planned to do a lot more searching."

"I know Ronnie kept at least one other woman here," Amanda said.

"What makes you sure?"

"In the dark, in the vault, the first time he locked me in, I touched something on the floor. About a half-inch long and wide. One end was smooth, the other jagged. I didn't want to admit to myself what it was. A broken fingernail."

Rain lashed the building.

Amanda pulled the Windbreaker around her. "You need to understand what it was like. We had candlelight dinners Ronnie made me watch him prepare. Elaborate gourmet menus. The best wine. CDs of Bach or Handel or Brahms playing in the background." Amanda grimaced. "We spent hours reading in the library. Often, he read to me out loud. Philosophy. History. Literary novels. He's especially fond of Proust. In Search of Lost Time. Lost time." Her voice wavered. "He made me discuss what we read. I think that's one of the reasons he kidnapped me-because I worked in a bookstore. We watched movies. Always art movies. Most were foreign, with subtitles. Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Renoir's The Rules of the Game. All about the past. He never let me watch regular television. He never let me have any idea of what was going on in the world or how long I'd been here. With the shutters closed, I didn't have any sense of whether it was day or night. There weren't any clocks. I couldn't tell hours from days. I had no way of calculating weeks. I couldn't depend on my body rhythms to give me a sense of time. For some meals, Ronnie made me eat when I wasn't the least bit hungry. For other meals, he made me wait till I was starving. In the vault, I couldn't tell if I was dozing for a few minutes or sleeping for hours."

"He must have slept, also," Cora said. "How did he stop you from getting away from him?"

"Except for the first time, when I woke in that damned bed, the only place he ever let me sleep was the vault. When I was with him, he never turned his back on me. He kept a metal belt locked to my waist. The belt had a box on it, like the ones by the trapdoors. He said, if I tried to escape, he could blow me in half, even if I was a mile away. He said the charge was shaped to blow inward so that even if he was in the room with me, he wouldn't be injured."

"Where's the belt?" Balenger asked.

Amanda made a futile gesture. "I don't know."

"We've got to find it." His nerves on fire, Balenger pulled out bureau drawers, searching them. He heard Cora going through the closet. Vinnie looked under the bed.

"Nothing," Cora said. "I'll check the medical room."

"And I'll take the exercise room," Balenger said. "Vinnie, you take the-"

"Wait a minute." Vinnie stared upward. He grabbed a post on the bed and used it for support while he stepped up onto the ornate bedspread. He stretched and peered over the canopy's top. "There it is. Got it."

Amanda looked sick when he stepped down with a metal belt that had a box attached to it.

Balenger tugged at the lid, but it wouldn't come off. "Sealed. I can't disarm the…"

"I see him," Tod said.

"What?" Balenger whirled toward the surveillance room.

"The son of a bitch is waving at me on one of the screens."