"Is it Mike? Did he get Andrew Tripping?"
"I haven't heard a thing from Mike. I got another glitch."
"Like what?"
"Just you come home."
"You've got to tell me so I know what I'm dealing with here," I said, hoping the concern in my whispered words hadn't been carried to Hoyt by the wind.
"After I left Kevin Bessemer at the hospital, I stopped by to see Tiffany's mother. Thank her for calling in the tip."
"Yeah."
"Remember Tiffany told us she took something from Queenie's apartment, after she got there and found the old girl was dead?"
"A photograph. She took a photograph of Queenie with her son."
"That's who all of us believed was in the picture, when Tiffany said it was a young boy, right? We just assumed it was Fabian because it came out of Queenie's apartment."
"It's not Fabian?"
"Mrs. Gatts had the picture at her place, 'cause she took her daughter's purse home with her the day Tiffany was arrested. It was a ten-year-old boy in the picture, all right, but it wasn't McQueen Ransome's son and it wasn't taken forty years ago."
"What?"
Hoyt had slowed the boat even further, and I continued to fake my lack of concern.
I needed to listen to Mercer and not panic. I needed to let him tell me what he knew.
"The kid in the photograph is Dulles Tripping-it's a Polaroid and he signed his name right on the back, thanking McQueen Ransome for something, maybe something she gave him."
"Um, hmm, I understand," I said, beginning to see the light.
"And it's dated. It was taken on the afternoon Queenie died, just hours before Kevin and Tiffany got there and claim she was already dead."
"I see," I said, still pretending to be talking to Sarah Brenner. "I'll take care of that next week."
"You'll take care of it right now, Alex. Whoever the agency had let Dulles go off with that afternoon, whoever he was allowed to visit with, might be the person who killed McQueen Ransome. Now maybe it's not Graham Hoyt, but until I can get an answer to that from the child welfare agency, I don't want you alone with him for another nanosecond."
"It's okay, Sarah. We're just a couple of minutes away from the yacht. I'm counting on a delicious lunch from Mr. Hoyt's chef." I wanted Mercer to know there was a crew on board the boat with Dulles, so I wouldn't be alone for long.
"Call me when you get there, right?"
Hoyt had picked up the walkie-talkie again and was speaking to someone on the Pirate.
"Would you do me one more favor?" I said to Mercer. I had shifted my body now so that I was holding the phone to my left ear, my back to Hoyt, with the magnificent skyline of Manhattan receding before me.
"Shoot."
"Call Christine Kiernan, will you? She triangulated a phone number for a new case last week. Tell her it's urgent. Ask her to do a trap-and-trace on my line immediately. She's got all the forms and the contacts at TARU. She can do it in minutes. Keep an eye on me till we get back. Track my coordinates, please?"
"Stay on with me, Alex. Just stay on the line."
Hoyt shut off his receiver and hung it in its cradle. He jerked the steering wheel as hard as he could and pushed ahead on the throttle, turning the boat completely around, a full one-eighty, heading back to the mouth of the great river. I fell down against the seat and the small phone flipped out of my hand onto the wet floor, sliding across out of reach to the other side of the tender.
Find me, I prayed silently to Mercer. Find me before I'm sleeping with the fishes.
39
I hugged the leather seat cushion and tried to balance myself against it on my way to grab the cell phone. Hoyt had let go of the wheel for a few seconds. Steadier than I as the boat crossed its own wake, he stepped ahead, leaned over, and picked it up before I could get to it.
"Is there some change in-?" I tried to ask without broadcasting my alarm.
"We're going back to the Chelsea Piers. Just stay where you are. I'm going to bounce us around a bit." He was looking angry now, under way at excessive speed and rolling me across the stern of the sturdy Whaler.
He pressed a button on the phone and held it to his ear with one hand. He must have hit redial. If he heard Mercer's voice and not Sarah's, he'd know I'd been lying.
Mercer probably answered immediately, since we had been disconnected abruptly.
Hoyt turned to me and sneered, throwing the phone into the water and laughing as he spoke into the breeze, "Sorry, wrong number."
There were craft of all shapes and sizes zigzagging across the Hudson on this fall afternoon. I wasn't able to stand up without falling at the speed we were going, no one could hear me over the noise of the various engines if I were to call out for help across the water, and the only option left-waving my arms in the air-would look like a friendly greeting to most boaters out on a sunny afternoon.
"Don't even think about it, Alex. Just sit nice and still."
I was anything but still, tossing around on the seat cushion as Hoyt purposely steered the boat back and forth, almost hot-rodding it on the chop to keep me off-balance.
"Over here," he said, snarling at me. He pointed to a spot directly next to his feet.
I didn't move. Hoyt spun the wheel sharply to the left, hard enough to knock me across the length of the rear seat and send me crashing onto the floor.
"Damn it. I said I want you over here."
I crouched and started moving in his direction, looking everywhere for some kind of tool that I could use to defend myself.
We were below Forty-second Street now-I could track the West Side Highway ramp descending and the roadway curving-but Hoyt gave no sign of slowing down as we came into striking distance of Chelsea Piers.
"We're going to let the boy be for a while, Alex. You and I have things to talk about."
There wasn't going to be time for a long conversation before we passed the southern tip of Manhattan heading into Upper New York Bay and the ocean that stretched out forever beyond the Verrazano Bridge. The Atlantic was a massive graveyard that I didn't want to visit today.
"Your captain will be back-"
"I know, I know. And your buddies will be looking for you all the way from Chelsea to the Dover cliffs. But I just told my crew that the damn engine in this boat is acting up again. And my unreliable steering column-I meant to have it repaired in Nantucket. It would be a terrible thing if I lost control and it crashed up on the rocks," he said, pausing to glance down at me. "With one of us still aboard."
There had to be a knife or bottle opener or sharp-edged object in some compartment or other. Everything seemed to be stowed tightly in place, and I saw nothing loose that I could grasp for protection.
Hoyt went on. "I just told the captain that you insisted on seeing the Statue of Liberty up close. So this excursion will be, after all, your very own idea, Alex. That's the way he'll tell it."
I was sitting in a puddle now, and when Hoyt dipped the boat on its side to throw me off-guard from time to time, I shivered from my thighs to my shoulders as the cold water saturated my clothing.
With one hand, he unlatched a drawer beneath the windshield and reached in, removing a short length of rope and dangling it in front of my face.
Paige Vallis. What had Squeeks told me about her cause of death? She'd been strangled by some kind of ligature. Probably a thin rope.
Hoyt let go of the wheel for a few seconds while he made a sailor's knot, deftly, as if he'd done it hundreds of times before. Maybe even in the laundry room of Vallis's apartment building. Again he let it swing before my eyes.
"What was it that changed your mood, Alex? What did the detective tell you that seemed to frighten you so terribly?"
"Nothing scared me. I-uh, I was just worried about Mike. He was talking to me about Mike Chapman. Nobody's heard from him since he ran off after Andrew Tripping. Mercer's concerned, too."