22. Heath #2
It took three of them. Two officers and one paramedic, and one of the officers got an arm around my throat, and they dragged me backward off him across my own gravel with my heels plowing furrows in it while I fought them the entire way.
My side had opened up and I was bleeding through my shirt and down my pants and into my shoes and I did not feel one second of it.
“Sir. SIR.” The paramedic was in my face, shouting. “You’re bleeding out on my shoes. Sit down or I’ll put you down.”
I sat down.
I sat down on my own front steps in the freezing dark with my hands shaking and a man moaning on the flagstones eight feet away and my wife somewhere in the night, and the paramedic cut my shirt off me and started working, and nobody charged me with anything, then or ever.
I’ve thought about that too. In Newport, that’s what money is.
It’s not the house. It’s the fact that a man can beat a handcuffed prisoner on his own driveway in front of four police officers and no one ever writes it down.
Police officers tried to ask me questions. I answered in fragments, my mind focused on only one thing: finding Del.
They stitched up the gash in my side in the back of an ambulance while I watched crime scene techs move through my home.
The cut wasn’t deep enough to kill me, but it had bled a lot.
There was blood all over the foyer, all over the living room, all over me.
Most of it was mine. Some of it was the intruder’s.
I hoped it hurt him worse than it hurt me.
They had one of them. The lookout, the one I had put down with my grandmother’s lamp, was conscious now and cuffed in the back of a police car.
The one I had been strangling had gone out through the kitchen while I was on the stairs.
And the third one, the one I had never seen at all, the one who had been standing over my sleeping wife while I congratulated myself on my footwork, was gone with her.
Three. There had been three, and I had counted two.
“Mr. Fairchild.” A detective approached me, notebook in hand. “I need to ask you some more questions.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“I understand you’re upset. But the more information we have, the better our chances of finding your wife.”
I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe. He was right. Getting angry wasn’t going to help Del. I needed to be smart. Strategic.
“What do you want to know?”
“You mentioned hearing one of the intruders talk. Can you remember exactly what?”
“One of them said a woman hired them. Blonde, rich, crazy eyes. That’s all I got before I heard my wife scream.”
The detective nodded, making notes. “Any idea who this woman might be?”
Kendall. The name burned in my throat, but I held it back. I had no proof. Not yet.
“I might have some ideas,” I said. “But I need to talk to the man you have in custody first.”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”
“Detective.” I met his eyes, letting him see the full weight of my desperation.
“That man knows where my wife is. My pregnant wife. The mother of my unborn child. I’ll do whatever it takes to find her, and I have more resources at my disposal than you can possibly imagine.
You can either work with me, or you can try to stop me and watch me tear this whole system apart looking for her. ”
The detective studied me for a long moment. Then he sighed.
“Five minutes. And I’m staying in the room.”
***
The interrogation room at the Newport police station was small and bare, just a table and two chairs and a one-way mirror.
The captured intruder sat on one side. His face was a ruin and I had made it, and he flinched when I walked in, and I was not sorry.
I sat across from him, my hands flat on the table, my eyes never leaving his.
“Who hired you?” I asked.
He said nothing.
“I’m going to ask you one more time.” I leaned forward, keeping my voice calm. “Who paid you to break into my home and take my wife?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The cameras at the gate were disabled. Someone turned them off remotely. Someone with the access codes.” I watched his face, looking for any flicker of reaction. “That means someone on the inside. Someone who knew the security system. Someone who’s been to my home before.”
Still nothing.
I saw the first crack in his composure. A tightening around his eyes, a slight hitch in his breathing.
“But if you cooperate,” I said, “if you tell me who hired you and where they took my wife, I can make some calls. I can talk to the DA. I can make sure you get the best possible deal.”
“And if I don’t cooperate?”
“Then I’ll use every dollar I have to make sure you spend the rest of your miserable life in the worst prison in this country. And trust me, I have a lot of dollars.”
He stared at me. I stared back.
“The woman who hired us,” he finally said. “I never met her in person. Everything went through a third party. But I saw a picture once. Blonde hair, expensive clothes. Looked like the kind of woman who’s never had to work for anything in her life.”
“Name.”
“The third party called her Kendall. That’s all I know. No surname.”
The name hit me in the chest, knocking the breath from my lungs. I had known, of course. From the moment I heard blonde and rich and crazy eyes, I had known. But hearing it confirmed was another matter entirely.
Kendall. Kendall Saladino. The woman who had pretended to be a guest in my home. The woman who had tried to destroy my marriage with lies and manipulation. The woman who had been so obsessed with having me that she had finally resorted to this.
She had taken my wife. She had put my pregnant wife in danger.
I was going to destroy her.
“Where?” I asked, my voice coming out scraped thin. “Where did they take her?”
“I don’t know. I swear I don’t know. The other guy was supposed to handle that part. I was just the lookout.”
“Think harder.”
“I’m telling you the truth. I was the lookout. I stood in a hallway for four minutes and I never went upstairs and I’ve never in my life been told where anybody was going, because that’s the entire point of hiring me.” He spat blood onto the table. “You want the address? Ask her.”
Ask her.
I stood up so fast the chair went over behind me.
The detective followed me out into the corridor, already talking, already saying the word procedure, and I turned around and put my phone in his hand.
“Trace it,” I said.
“Mr. Fairchild...”
“She’s spent twenty years wanting me to call her.
” My voice did not sound like anything. “She’s spent twenty years waiting for exactly one phone call, and I’ve never once made it, and tonight I’m going to make it.
She’ll pick up. Do you understand me? She’ll pick up on the first ring, because she’s been rehearsing it since she was fourteen years old. ”
The detective looked at the phone. Then at me. Then he was moving, shouting for a technician, and somebody was raising the question of a warrant and somebody else was saying exigent circumstances and nobody was saying no.
They set it up in eleven minutes. A gray room with a speaker on the table and a man in headphones with a laptop and a map, and the detective, Mercer, across from me with his hand raised, and my own phone lying there with Kendall’s name on the screen.
“Keep her talking,” Mercer said. “Four minutes if you can. Don’t threaten her. Don’t tell her we’re here. Give her what she wants.”
“What does she want?”
Mercer looked at me almost kindly.
“You,” he said. “Go on.”
I pressed the green circle. Somewhere on the other side of this, in a room I could not see, on a number she had kept in a phone for twenty years waiting for exactly this, it began to ring.
Once. And I understood, in the half-second before it connected, that I would say anything she wanted.
That there was no version of me left that would not.
That she had finally, after twenty years, found the one thing that would make me pick up a phone and beg.