Paul Blaisdell ascended the steps leading to the squad room with a face that looked like an avenging angel. Annie was firmly in tow, her hand tightly clenched in his. Reaching the front desk, he raised shaggy eyebrows at Broderick. "Any news yet?" He raised a trembling hand to his face and rubbed his upper lip in nervous agitation.
The desk sergeant shook his head grimly. "Nothing solid, Captain. I'm sorry."
Blaisdell gathered Annie in his arms as she uttered a low moan and clutched at him. "Now, Babe, come on, come on, here." He patted her back almost absently. "Peter needs us to be strong for him. We can't fall apart now."
Annie sniffled and wiped at her eyes as best she could reach under her large sunglasses. "We? You mean me, don't you, Paul?"
Paul took a shaky breath. "No, I mean me, too, Annie. I couldn't be more scared if it was Carolyn or Kelly out there. I was always afraid that something like this would happen to you or the girls; sometimes I still am."
He searched the room in front of him for the familiar dark-haired athletic figure, but failed to spot his foster son. He and Annie wrapped their arms around one another as they stepped forward, heading for Captain Simms's office.
The squad room was a beehive of activity, every phone on every desk in the ear of the officer residing there. Jody and Skalany waved distractedly at the Blaisdells, continuing their phone conversations and taking feverish notes before hanging up and dialing again.
Strenlich emerged from the captain's office, eyes lighting up in relief upon seeing the older couple. "Paul, Annie. God, I'm glad you're here."
Paul's face paled, and Annie's grip on his arm tightened reflexively. "You've got a break in the case?"
Frank shook his head mournfully. "Nothing that will hold together yet." His face reddened in frustrated anger. "That pig-headed foster son of yours!"
Paul smiled thinly. "What's he gone and done now?"
"We know that one of the kidnappers is an ex-cop named Sara Rezac. She used to work here and had the hots for Peter," Frank explained. "The 'ransom' she's demanding for Kacie is a one-night stand with Peter. He's going to do it, and won't let us wire him or provide backup."
"Just when is all this supposed to happen?" Paul demanded, as Annie pressed herself more closely to his side.
"None of us know any details, Paul," Strenlich answered glumly. "During our last contact with the perps, we found a message had been mailed to Peter. He wouldn't let any of us see it, and destroyed it before we could get our hands on it. After we lost contact with Sara, Peter wouldn't say more than two words to any of us. He wouldn't tell us anything about the arrangements."
"What kind of contact are you talking about?" Annie's face was white, and her voice tight and strained.
Kermit walked slowly and stiffly from his office, breaking into the conversation. "Computer video conference." Lines of fatigue creased the corners of his eyes and his forehead, and his face was covered with a heavy growth of stubble. Loosening the already skewed tie around his throat, he stretched cramped neck muscles. "We got to be 'entertained' by the repeated brutalization of your daughter-in-law."
Annie gasped, "Oh, my God, Peter must have gone out of his mind watching that happen!"
"Homicidal." Kermit's response was short and flat.
"What do you think he's going to do?" Paul asked quietly, while thinking to himself, {I know what I would do to anyone who laid a hand on Annie.}
Kermit inhaled deeply and blew the air back out noisily. "Do? I think he's going to prostitute himself and hope a crank addict gives him his wife back. When he finally realizes that's not going to happen, he'll try to force the information out of her." He paused and dropped his head, finishing tiredly, "By then, he'll figure it's too late for Kacie and he'll kill Sara, out of hand."
"No!" Annie denied hotly. "Peter could never kill somebody in cold blood. He's not like that!"
Kermit and Paul exchanged a long look, and Paul clenched his jaw as Kermit shook his head fatalistically. "You haven't seen him these past two days, Annie. It was like watching a total eclipse of the sun: it slowly gets darker and darker, colder and colder, until at last the sky is black and the sun disappears. You wouldn't know him now; no one could get through to him, not even his father."
"Where is Peter?" Annie demanded. "I want to see my son; I want to talk to him."
Strenlich's already red face flushed even more angrily. "He snuck out of here a few hours ago. We thought he might do that, so we attached a tracking device to his car." The chief pounded a fist on a nearby desk, causing everything loose on the top to bounce into the air. "Surveillance found the bug hooked onto a garbage truck half an hour ago."
Paul's jaw dropped open in disbelief. "Surely your captain… "
Simms opened her door and walked out slowly, a stunned expression on her face. "His ex-captain."
"What do you mean?" Paul asked tensely. "Where is Peter? What…?"
"I just hung up from talking to him." Simms strode over to Peter's desk, opening the top left-hand drawer as she spoke. "Well, they're here, just like he said." She pulled out Peter's Beretta and badge, laying them on top of the desk blotter. Pursing her lips tightly, she next removed a single sheet of paper that contained a brief printed paragraph and an easily recognizable back-slanted scrawl. "Damn it, Caine!" she snapped in exasperation, slapping the paper in her hand against her thigh in agitation. Before anyone could ask, she reported, "He told me he was quitting the force because he didn't want anything he did tonight to reflect badly on the department."
Paul scrubbed a hand across his face. "Where the hell is Caine while all this is happening?"
"I am here."
The group jumped as one and did a collective double take at the nearly cadaverous features before them. Caine's eyes were dark with a nameless emotion, and his normally erect posture had been replaced with a defeated stoop. He shrugged a despondent shoulder. "I did not know where else to go. My son…" His voice broke, and he swallowed once before going on unsteadily, "My son has closed his mind and heart to me. I do not know where he is, only that he has abandoned all hope." He lifted a grief-stricken visage to face them all. "I have been seeking help from my friends in Chinatown, and even from those who do not call me friend. I cannot find anything; I cannot sense anything. Never…have I felt so powerless. What good are my skills if I cannot help the ones I love the most? What good am I?"
"Oh, that is all just so much bullshit!" Annie snapped.
Heads swiveled and stared at her in surprise.
Face flushed and eyes flashing through her sunglasses, Annie was practically snarling. "If I know this precinct, they're tearing the city apart right now to find Kacie. To say nothing of Paul's people…"
"Paul's people?" Simms raised an expressive eyebrow at Kermit.
"You don't want to know." Paul and Kermit spoke in unison, using the same ominous tone of voice, identical grim smiles on their faces.
"Paul's people," Annie repeated firmly and put her hands on her hips, facing the direction she had heard Caine's voice coming from. "I don't want to hear any more garbage coming from you, Kwai Chang Caine, about giving up hope. There are a lot of very determined people looking for our daughter, and I, for one, believe they are going to find her and bring her home to Peter and to us." She snorted. "So help me, if you were within arm's length right now, I would slap you!"
Caine stepped forward and paused before her. "Perhaps that would be a good idea."
Her face and voice softened, and she reached out her arms for him. "I think maybe this would be a better one." In an instant the two worried parents were holding one another tightly.
"Captain!" Broderick called from his post at the front desk. Both Paul and Simms swung their heads in that direction. A woman of average height and build stood at the counter, nervously twisting the strap of her purse between her fingers. The sergeant gestured at the woman. "This lady here says she might have some information."
Simms motioned the woman to join their group, and Skalany and Jody halted their phone work, getting to their feet and following after the informant.
The woman was in her late twenties, with medium-length red hair. There was a newly healed scar over her right eye, that ran from scalp line to brow that she had tried to cover with makeup, and she looked pale and ill.
Simms gave the woman a direct stare. "Who are you, and what information are you talking about?"
The woman introduced herself. "My-my name is Jessica Bellar. I'm-I'm a detective for the 51st precinct across town. I-I've been out on medical leave for the past two months, and just heard about the kidnapping of Detective Caine's wife today."
"Bellar, Bellar," Skalany mused out loud, shaking her head. "I should know that name, but why?"
Jody snapped her fingers. "She was mentioned by some of the cops we interviewed from the 52nd as a friend of Sara's, only we haven't been able to reach her." She shifted her attention to the obviously uncomfortable woman. "Where have you been? Why haven't we been able to contact you?"
Taking a steadying breath, Jessica quavered, "Sara and I, yeah, we worked a few vice cases together when our precincts had us working the same beat. We got acquainted; we'd go out."
"So you're friends with Rezac?"
Jessica's eyes grew hard and bitter. "Were. Two months ago we were working a stakeout on a crank house together. She sent me inside first, and when the lab blew up, I'm the one who ended up in ICU for two weeks. She never even came to see me; never called, nothing. By the time I got out of the hospital, I found out that she'd been booted off the force, and that the house we were staking out belonged to her boyfriend's supplier."
"What's that got to do with my…our… " Paul looked over at Caine, who nodded in agreement. "Our son's missing wife?"
"Sara was always talking about the 101st, and especially Peter Caine. The way he blew her off whenever she'd hit on him really got to her. She was always talking about how she was going to get even with him."
"Would you get to the point already?" Kermit exploded impatiently. "We know that she's after Peter! What can you tell us that will help us find Kacie?"
Jessica flinched at the anger in his voice, but stood her ground. "If-if it turns out that Sara is somehow using me in all this, I want to make it clear that I had nothing directly to do with any of it."
Simms speared the woman with an icy stare. "If you know ANYTHING and you are keeping it from us, I will personally see to it that you are drawn and quartered." Calming down somewhat, the captain went on. "If you are implicated by association only, I'll see to it that you are protected."
Taking another shaky breath, Jessica spoke hesitantly. "The guy she'd been hanging out with and getting her junk from is named Jason Fischer. He's been charged with intent to deliver a couple times down at my precinct, and every time we booked him, he had a different address. I don't know for sure, but chances are that he's involved."
Jessica nodded. "That's the guy. He always gave me the creeps." Kermit ducked into his office, heading for the information his computer could give.
"Why did he give you…the creeps?" Caine entered the conversation for the first time, staring at Jessica intently.
"Because he was always undressing me with his eyes, and finding ways to 'have' to bump into me, even when he was with Sara." She shuddered. "He's one of those sex-on-demand kinda guys, and hinted around that if Sara wasn't there to give him what he wanted, he'd find a way to get it from somebody."
"And he'll be alone with Kacie tonight," Annie breathed. "But she's five months pregnant; she's someone else's wife. Surely he wouldn't…"
"It won't make any difference to him. He'd probably think it was something new and interesting."
Kermit rejoined the group, an excited glow on his face. "We've got a DNA and fingerprint match from the coffee cup we took out of Kacie's car. Fischer is definitely involved in this. Yes-s-s! With this, and Jessican's statement, we've finally got the break that we needed!"
"Why didn't you have a fingerprint match before now?" Paul looked puzzled. "There's been plenty of time for…"
"Computer glitch," Kermit explained, his eyes narrowing dangerously behind the green lenses. "I'm going to have to do something about that when I get a free minute."
"We must hurry." Caine sat up alertly, head cocked to one side, as if listening to a far-off voice. "Both Peter and Kay Cee are in very grave danger, and there is little time."
