Balenger listened to the building’s silence. “Amanda!” he shouted.
The echo died. No one answered.
Massaging his forearm, he returned to the corridor and peered up the stairs. Its dark carpet led toward shadows.
“Amanda!”
Still, no answer.
The stairs creaked as Balenger hurried up.
“I’m coming with you,” Cochran said.
“You’d better let me go first.” Ortega caught up to them.
“I know how to do this,” Balenger said. “I used to be a police officer.”
“But are you armed?”
“No.”
“Chief Cochran?”
“I’m out of my jurisdiction. I didn’t bring my gun.”
“Then I’ll go first,” Ortega emphasized. At the top, he checked a murky room, then proceeded along a corridor.
Balenger went into the room. Its carpet had imprints where a bed, a dresser, and a chair once stood. The closet door was open, revealing a couple of hangers on a rod.
The second room contained two empty packing boxes.
On the next floor, all they found were a few more hangers and a strip of bubble wrap.
Ortega opened the final door. “The attic.”
No one moved for a second. Then they braced themselves and went up a narrow stairway, where the creaking was louder than on the main stairs. Balenger followed Ortega, dust irritating his nostrils. He heard Cochran behind him.
Sunlight struggled through a grimy window. The pitched ceiling was so low that Balenger needed to stoop. He studied an uneven pine floor and an exercise mat, torn at one edge. “A long time ago, this was probably the servants’ quarters.”
“Sort of like a cave,” Ortega said. “I bet kids would enjoy playing up here.”
Cochran pointed. “What’s that in the corner?”
“Looks like a couple of CD cases,” Balenger said.
Ortega pulled latex gloves from his suit-coat pocket, leaned into the corner, and picked up the cases. “Not CDs. Video games. I never heard of the first one, but the other is Grand Theft Auto. My kids play it. I told them to stop — a cop’s kids playing games about stealing cars and beating up prostitutes — but I’m sure they keep playing it behind my back.” Ortega opened the cases. “No wonder they got left behind. The discs are missing.”
Balenger’s forearm continued to ache. The small talk hadn’t eased his tension. “We’re not finished searching.”
“I know,” Ortega said. “There’s always the basement.”
12
Descending, Balenger felt his chest cramp so hard that he had trouble breathing. Dankness surrounded him. The basement was a single, long area, poorly lit, with old brick walls and cobwebbed pipes. The concrete floor had cracks. The furnace was covered with grit. Rust lay under the water heater.
“Four million dollars for this place?” Cochran murmured. “It ought to be condemned.”
The attempt at small talk still did nothing to calm Balenger. No matter how thoroughly he looked, there wasn’t any sign of Amanda.
“When was the last time you checked your home?” Ortega asked.
“The chief drove me there first. I picked up a photograph.” Balenger pulled it from a jacket pocket. It came from a shoebox Amanda kept on a closet shelf. It showed her playing with her parents’ Irish setter in their backyard in Connecticut.
Ortega studied it. “How tall is she?”
“Five six. A hundred and twenty pounds.” Balenger’s throat tightened. When he rescued her from the Paragon Hotel, she’d been gaunt. It had taken a lot of encouragement to get her to eat enough to regain a healthy weight.
“Eye color? It’s hard to tell in the photo.”
“Blue. Soft. Kind of translucent,”
“Hair. Would you call it straw-colored?”
Balenger nodded, overwhelmed with emotion. He gazed longingly at the joyous smile in the image. Shoulder-length hair. Lovely chin and elegant cheekbones. He had an anguished memory of a similar conversation with a detective when his wife disappeared.
“I need to tell you something,” Balenger said.
“Oh?”
“This happened to me once before.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My wife disappeared, too.”
The dim lights in the basement didn’t hide Ortega’s surprise.
“She looked like Amanda.” The dankness penetrated Balenger’s core, making him shiver. “Chief Cochran told you about the Paragon Hotel when he phoned you.”
Ortega nodded somberly.
“I found my wife in that hotel. Dead.” Confronting his memories made Balenger’s hands and feet numb. His rapid breathing caused him to feel lightheaded. “I also found Amanda there.”
Ortega’s gaze intensified.
“The physical resemblance isn’t coincidental.” Balenger rushed on, unable to control the speed of his words. “We know who kidnapped my wife. The same man who kidnapped Amanda a year ago. He was fixated on young women with blond hair, blue eyes, and similar features. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he did this. But I saw Amanda beat him to death with a two-by-four. After it broke, she used it as a stake and rammed it into the bastard’s heart. I keep having nightmares about him. But he couldn’t have done this.” Balenger felt desperate as he turned toward Cochran, needing reassurance.
“Right. That’s all he is — something in nightmares,” Cochran said. “I saw the corpse on the beach. I saw it in the morgue. I saw it in the autopsy. Later, I spoke to witnesses who saw it cremated.”
Balenger’s anguished voice reverberated through the cellar. “So what other son of a bitch would want to make this happen a second time?”
LEVEL TWO
“WELCOME TO SCAVENGER”
1
“But before the ceremony occurred, someone stole the capsule from an unattended van,” a voice droned.
Amanda felt as if she floated upward from a deep pool.
“The second most-wanted time capsule is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Amanda drifted to the surface.
“In 1939, MIT engineers sealed various objects in a container and deposited it under a huge cyclotron they were building. The cyclotron was eventually deactivated, but the time capsule was forgotten for more than fifty years.”
Her eyes opened.
“It might as well have stayed forgotten. Short of tearing the building apart, no one knows…”
Amanda discovered that she lay on a bed.
“… how to remove the capsule from under its eighteen-ton shield.”
She felt groggy and nauseous. Her head throbbed. But its rhythm didn’t match the sudden, frantic pounding of her heart.
“The third is the M*A*S*H Capsule.”
Amanda jerked upright. Where’s Frank? she thought. Stifling a moan, she scanned the room. Beamed ceiling, stone fireplace, log walls, wooden floor. Sunlight streamed through a window, hurting her eyes. In the distance, she saw jagged mountains capped with snow. She feared she was going insane.
“In 1983, cast members of the popular television program M*A*S*H put costumes, props, and other items related to the series into a capsule and buried it on the Twentieth Century Fox film-production lot.”
The voice belonged to a man and came from everywhere around her.
“But the studio changed so much in the intervening years that no one can identify the capsule’s location. Possibly it lies under a hotel constructed on property the studio once owned.”
Amanda rolled from the bed. She realized that the voice came from audio speakers hidden in the ceiling and walls.
“The fourth is George Washington’s Cornerstone. In a Masonic ceremony in 1793, George Washington supervised the placement of a time capsule into the cornerstone of the original Capitol Building.”