A Father's Desperate Rescue
Patrick Chan wasn’t a limo driver by trade—he was an engineering student at the University of Hong Kong, working on his master’s degree. The young man held down two jobs—teaching assistant at the university and driving the Rolls—to put himself through school and help out at home.
Dirk had done something similar, working three jobs to make ends meet—including movie stuntman—to support Bree and himself before he got his big break in the movies. He’d never been afraid of hard work. Neither had Bree. But Dirk had been too proud to ask her to marry him until he’d snagged his first starring role. Until he could support her in the style she deserved. Until his success meant Bree didn’t have to work at the menial jobs she’d taken in order to stay at his side through thick and thin as he chased his dream of movie stardom...and long before that.
Pain stabbed through him as it always did at the thought of Bree. He could never forget that, because God was punishing him for something that had happened aeons ago. Bree had died. And their daughters had nearly died, too. Only a miracle wrought by the doctors and nurses in the Cedars Sinai NICU had kept their premature twins alive.
Dirk’s phone sounded the tune he reserved for his closest friends, and when he swiped a finger over the touchpad and saw who the call was from, he smiled and answered. “To what do I owe the honor of this call, Your Majesty?”
The voice of Queen Juliana of Zakhar sounded in his ear, prefaced by a very unqueenly snort. “Cut that out,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m still Juliana to you?”
“Ahhh, but what would your husband, the king, say to that?” he teased gently.
They bantered back and forth for a couple of minutes, then Juliana said, “I hear there’s a typhoon expected to hit Hong Kong this evening, and I remembered you mentioned you were filming there. Are you and the girls in a safe place? And Vanessa and Hannah, too, of course,” she added, referring to the women who had habitually accompanied Dirk on location ever since the twins were born.
“Hannah couldn’t make the trip, after all,” he explained now. “She fell down the stairs and broke her leg three days before we were supposed to leave for Hong Kong.”
“Oh, no!” Dirk knew Juliana’s concern was genuine. Hannah had been his housekeeper for years, and Juliana had met her every time she’d visited the DeWinters during their years-long friendship in Hollywood. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Yeah. She’s recuperating in a nursing home. But Linden and Laurel ask about her several times a day. And we call her every night.” Hannah, a longtime widow with no children of her own, had taken on the role of surrogate grandmother for the twins in addition to her housekeeping duties, something for which Dirk was supremely grateful. His daughters adored Hannah—whom they called Nana—and she adored them.
“Email me the address and phone number of the nursing home, please,” Juliana asked. “I’ll send her flowers and a get-well card.”
“Will do. And don’t worry about us, Juliana. We’ll be fine. Thanks for calling, though.”
“Kiss your daughters for me.” That was something Juliana said every time they talked, another thing that was genuinely meant—Juliana had her own child now, but was the twins’ godmother and loved them deeply. This time, however, she hesitated, then added in a voice tinged with pain, “I adore the pictures of them you’ve sent me, but every day they look more and more like Bree.”
At first Dirk’s throat closed with emotion at the reminder of his wife, who’d been Juliana’s best friend before she died, but eventually he managed, “Yeah, they do.”
Dirk disconnected just as Patrick pulled in at the hotel entrance. He drove past the fountain that had already been turned off, and would have dropped Dirk at the front door, but Dirk refused. “Just find a place to park,” he told his driver. “Call your parents, but I know what they’ll say. Then we’ll go up together.”
It only took a minute for Patrick to receive his parents’ blessing to shelter at the Peninsula Hotel. More than a blessing, actually, Dirk thought with an inward smile as he heard Patrick’s side of the phone conversation. More like a parental command. But he didn’t say anything. He admired the old-fashioned deference the younger generation showed the older in Hong Kong. Once upon a time that had been common in the United States, too, but not anymore.
The two men crossed the lobby, heading for the elevators, and Dirk was distracted for a moment by the Peninsula Hotel’s typhoon preparations. The beautiful arched picture windows had already been boarded up, and sandbags were being stacked along one wall, merely as a precaution. The hotel wasn’t that far from Victoria Harbour, and a strong typhoon-induced surge could bring the ocean to the hotel’s front door.
“That reminds me,” Dirk told Patrick as he rang for the elevator, “we’d better find out what we need to do to make the suite’s windows safe from the typhoon, if the hotel staff hasn’t already done so. And we want to make sure we have plenty of food and drinking water in the suite—if we lose electricity, there’s no way I want to hike down all those floors and back up again.”
They rode up in the elevator to the palatial Peninsula Suite on the twenty-sixth floor, with connecting bedrooms for the twins and their nanny. Dirk would have been just as happy in something less grand, but the movie studio was footing the bill for the suite, and he’d never stayed here when Bree had been alive—an important factor in his decision to accept the accommodations. The private gym, cinematic screening room and baby grand piano had also been contributing factors, not to mention the isolation. Before he’d become a father himself, Dirk had wondered why parents couldn’t do a better job keeping their children from causing disturbances. Now he knew how nearly impossible that was, but he still didn’t want to impose his daughters’ totally to-be-expected behavior on the hotel’s other guests if he could help it.
He let himself into the suite and was puzzled at the unusual silence. His daughters might still be napping, although they were usually awake by this time, but Vanessa and the bodyguard—one of three in the entourage that had accompanied Dirk’s family from Hollywood to Hong Kong—were on duty today, and they were missing. Usually, at this time of day Vanessa, the girls and their bodyguard could be found in the living room. The twins were fascinated by the breathtaking sight of Hong Kong Island across the harbor, day or night, and the boats plying the waters, views they could easily see through the floor-to-ceiling windows. And the girls had a habit of standing right up against the windows and smearing whatever they could reach with invariably sticky fingers.
The spacious living room was empty, but one of the chairs from the twins’ miniature tea table, set up in front of the central picture window, had been overturned...and left that way. Then Dirk noticed other things. The diaper bag, which Vanessa usually kept by the front door, stocked and ready to go should she leave the suite with the girls, was missing. But the double stroller was right where Vanessa kept it, and her purse was on the table by the door. She wouldn’t have left the suite without either of those things, Dirk realized in a flash. Vanessa might have been able to carry one toddler in her arms, but not two—not for long. And even if the bodyguard on duty today, Chet Ritter, had carried one of the girls against protocol, no woman ever went anywhere without her purse.
There was a strange odor in the air, too—just the faintest trace of something sickly sweet. Dirk couldn’t put his finger on it, but it tugged at a chord of memory.
Then he heard a sound. An odd, muffled sound, accompanied by sudden thumping, coming from the girls’ bedroom. He strode to the door with Patrick right behind him, and a zing of terror shot through him. Vanessa and Chet lay on their sides on the floor, hands bound behind their backs with duct tape. There was tape around their ankles, too, and across their mouths—the muffled sound was Vanessa trying to call out through the barrier. The thumping was her pounding her bound feet against the carpeted floor, trying to gain attention from the hotel room below.
Linden and Laurel were nowhere in sight.
Chapter 2
“Chet” was the first word out of Vanessa’s mouth when Dirk removed the gag. She coughed and swallowed before adding, “Is he okay? They hit him and knocked him out, then they took the girls.” She gasped, “Mr. DeWinter—”
“When?” Dirk demanded roughly, then said, “Hold still,” placing his hands on her arms just above the duct tape, making sure she didn’t move while Patrick sliced through her bonds with the switchblade knife he’d pulled from his pocket. When Vanessa’s hands were free, Patrick focused on her ankles. Dirk helped her to a sitting position once she was completely freed, then briskly rubbed her wrists to restore circulation while Patrick did the same thing to her ankles.
Then both men turned their attention to Chet. A darkening contusion on his forehead showed how he’d been overpowered before he’d been gagged and bound, but he was conscious now. “What happened?” Dirk asked as he and Patrick freed Chet. “How long ago?”
Vanessa answered his last question first. “About two hours ago, I think. I...I can’t be sure, but I think so. I thought it was room service with lunch when the doorbell rang.”
Dirk frowned. “The front door to the suite?” he asked. “Not the butler’s entrance in the kitchen?”
Vanessa looked startled for a moment, as if she’d just realized something. “Oh, I...I didn’t think of that. But yes, the front door. Chet answered it, and before I knew it one of them had knocked him out and there were two men in the living room. One of them was Chinese—” Dirk started to ask another question, but she answered it before he could get the words out. “I didn’t recognize them. But I’d know them if I saw them again, especially the second man, the one who wasn’t Chinese. The one with a gun.” She shuddered. “His eyes. They were so cold.”
“Did they leave a ransom note?” Dirk’s brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, but icy fear trickled down his spine at the thought of his daughters—Bree’s daughters—in the hands of kidnappers. Your fault. His conscience was quick to judge. You failed to keep your daughters safe. Just as you failed to save Bree.
Vanessa shook her head. “They didn’t leave a ransom note with me. Did you find one in the other room?”
“No.” Dirk jumped to his feet, tuning Vanessa’s voice out as he pulled his smartphone from his pocket. He scrolled quickly, then selected the number for the US Consulate for Hong Kong and Macau, thanking his lucky stars he’d been advised to store the number in his contacts for the duration of his stay here.
“Mr. DeWinter!” Chet was trying to get his attention, but Dirk impatiently waved him to silence.
The phone rang and rang. Dirk started to heave a sigh of relief when the phone was finally answered, but the relief soon turned to despair when a recorded voice came on the line. “Due to the impending typhoon, the US Consulate for Hong Kong and Macau is closed until further notice. We expect to resume normal business operations as soon as the typhoon passes, but please call ahead before coming to the consulate. If this is an emergency, please contact the Hong Kong Police Force or the Public Security Police Force of Macau—” Dirk disconnected before the message ended, then caught Patrick’s eye.
“The US consulate is closed because of the typhoon,” he said roughly. “The message says to call the Hong Kong police in an emergency. You don’t happen to have their number, do you? Otherwise I—”
“Not the police!” Vanessa shrilled. “The kidnappers said if you call the police they’ll know, and they’ll kill the girls and dump their bodies in the harbor.”
Patrick reluctantly concurred. “She could be right, Mr. DeWinter. You don’t know anything about these kidnappers—they might have paid off someone on the police force to notify them if you call in the cops. And do you really want to take that chance?” He bit his lip. “Paying ransom in Hong Kong is a tricky business. It used to be illegal, in fact. But nowadays it’s usually handled by ransom negotiators and almost always done before the police are notified.”
Vanessa struggled to her feet, then put a hand on Dirk’s arm. “The kidnappers said the only way you’ll ever see the girls alive again is to wait for them to contact you and do exactly what they say.”
“They know I’d pay—” Dirk’s voice broke, and he had to stop a moment. “I’d pay anything to get my daughters back. But I can’t just do noth—”
“My cousin is a private investigator,” Patrick said suddenly, interrupting him. “And a ransom negotiator.” He pulled out his own smartphone, his finger hovering over the keypad. “Should I...”
“I don’t think—” Vanessa began before Dirk cut her off.
“Call,” he ordered Patrick after only a moment’s hesitation. No way was he going to go against the kidnappers’ orders and contact the Hong Kong police...not yet. But he was also smart enough to know that paying the ransom demanded, no matter how much, wasn’t a guarantee he’d ever see his daughters again—alive or dead. He had to do something. His life would be over if anything happened to Linden and Laurel.
Dirk gave a hand to help Chet to his feet, then led his daughters’ nanny and bodyguard into the living room while Patrick called his cousin. “What else can you remember about the kidnappers?” he asked Vanessa as he seated her on the sofa. He grabbed a notepad and pen from where they sat beside the phone and handed them to her. “Jot down every detail you can think of while it’s fresh in your mind.”
He turned to Chet, who was hovering beside the sofa, and brusquely indicated he should sit, too. “I know you were unconscious, but do you remember anything before they hit you?”
Chet shook his head as he sat. “I don’t even remember answering the door,” he admitted. “Vanessa says I did, so I must have, but...” He touched the swelling on his forehead, feeling it gingerly. “I just remember coming to on the floor in the girls’ bedroom, bound and gagged beside Vanessa. The twins were already gone.”
Patrick entered the living room saying, “My cousin will take a cab and be here in less than fifteen minutes—assuming they’re still running with the typhoon about to hit soon.”
Dirk glanced at Vanessa. “What have you got for a description so far?” Before she could answer, he turned his attention back to Patrick. “Linden and Laurel don’t like strangers. They’d probably have been crying at the very least, maybe even screaming, so how could the kidnappers get away without anyone noticing and calling the police?”
Patrick shook his head. “I’ll bet anything your daughters weren’t conscious when they were taken out of here. The kidnappers wouldn’t want to take a chance someone would notice them.”
“Chloroform,” Dirk said, a chill of recognition washing through him. “That’s what that smell was when I first walked in.” His anger went from white-hot to ice-cold. “Those sons of bitches chloroformed my little girls for money.”
His iPhone rang suddenly, and he answered immediately, even though the caller’s ID was blocked. “Yes?”
“Mr. DeWinter?” The voice was as American as his own, silky smooth, with menacing overtones.
“Yes?”
“We have your daughters.”
Dirk drew a deep breath, tamping down his sudden, overwhelming rage. “Whatever the price is, I’ll pay it.”
The voice on the other end of the line laughed softly. “Of course you will, Mr. DeWinter. Of course you will.”
“How much?” he demanded. He put a tight clamp on his emotions, trying to force himself to focus, as if this was happening to someone else. His brain was already operating at warp speed when he said, “But you have to give me time. Everything’s closed here—banks, everything—because of the typhoon. I can have the money wired from the States tomorrow, but—”
The cold voice cut him off. “You’ll be contacted with the details—how much, when and where. But don’t worry, you’ll have all the time you need. The only thing you need to know right now is, if you call the police, your daughters are dead.”
“I haven’t called them.” He thanked God that Vanessa and Patrick had stopped him.
Then everything else was driven from Dirk’s mind when the other man said, “Very good, Mr. DeWinter. Or should I say...Mr. Summers?”
All the strength went out of Dirk’s legs, and he sank into the nearest armchair. “What do you mean?” he whispered.
“Terrell Blackwood sends his regards.” Then the phone went dead.
Dirk’s eyes squeezed shut. “They’re dead,” he said under his breath, trying to take in the reality. “Oh, God, they’re dead.”
A long-ago memory surfaced, Terrell Blackwood screaming at him across the courtroom, “You’ll pay for this, Summers! You’ll pay in blood!”
He’d already paid, every day of his life. The scar on his body was nothing compared to the scar on his soul. He’d carried the knowledge of what he’d done with him, weighing on his conscience, making him the man he was. Until Bree had died, he’d managed to suppress his guilt, though, had managed to convince himself his motive had been pure.
But God had seen into his heart and had known the truth—and made him pay. He was still paying. That punishment he could bear. What he couldn’t bear was knowing Bree had also paid when she was totally innocent. Just like his daughters—totally innocent. A memory flashed into his mind, him wild with grief, telling Juliana the day before Bree’s funeral, This is my punishment. God is punishing me, but she paid the price.
And if anything happened to Linden and Laurel because of him...he wouldn’t be able to bear it.
Vanessa, Chet and Patrick all stared at Dirk strangely, but Vanessa spoke first. “What do you mean...they’re dead?” she asked in a halting, choked voice. “They can’t be dead. That’s—” She broke off suddenly.
Dirk’s brows drew together in a question, but the sound of the suite’s doorbell distracted him. Patrick turned to answer the door, but Dirk was faster. He yanked the door open, then stared in incomprehension at the beautiful, dark-haired Eurasian woman standing there. The woman in the red dress from two weeks before. The woman who’d haunted his dreams. Mei-li Moore.
“Yes?” He had no idea why she was there, but he strove for patience. “Can I help you, Miss Moore?”
“I think it’s the other way around, Mr. DeWinter,” she replied with a smile intended to put him at his ease. “My cousin said you need my assistance.”
Patrick was right beside Dirk, and now he said, “Mei-li! Thanks for coming so quickly.” He reached around Dirk and tugged her inside, then closed the door.
Dirk hadn’t been expecting Patrick’s cousin to be a woman. That’s all he could think of to account for his sudden inability to process what he was seeing and hearing. That, and his emotional turmoil over the kidnapping and the mention of Terrell Blackwood’s name. He wasn’t sexist. He really wasn’t. But when Patrick had said his cousin was a private investigator and a ransom negotiator, he’d immediately envisioned a man. Especially here in Hong Kong, where even now women were struggling for equality in many professions. It wasn’t as bad in Hong Kong as it was on the Chinese mainland, but women here still had a long way to go to achieve even what the women in the United States had.
And since Hong Kong had a stringent restriction on firearms possession—the three bodyguards he’d brought with him from the States had been forced to leave their weapons behind—many private investigators didn’t even carry guns, the great equalizer between men and women.
All those thoughts flashed through Dirk’s brain in less than a minute. And at the same time he realized this could actually work to his advantage. If the kidnappers were watching him—as the threats voiced to Vanessa indicated—they might not suspect Mei-li was a private investigator working the kidnapping case.
Assuming his daughters weren’t already dead.
That brought him back around to his immediate reaction to hearing Terrell Blackwood’s name. And it didn’t take him any time at all to realize that if Blackwood was involved, ransom probably wasn’t the sole motive for the kidnapping. Far from it.
“Mr. DeWinter?”
The strong, cultured voice belonged to Sir Joshua Moore’s daughter. “I need to find out everything you know as quickly as possible,” Mei-li continued. “Patrick couldn’t tell me much over the phone, just that the kidnappers warned you not to call the police, and you haven’t done so. Is that still the case?”
“Yes.”
“I think that’s wise at this stage.” She pulled a pen and notebook out of the capacious handbag slung over one shoulder, then indicated the sofa and chairs in the living room. “Can we sit down? I’d like to hear everything that happened from the beginning.”
It didn’t take long for Chet to disclaim any knowledge of the kidnapping since he’d been unconscious, and for Vanessa to reveal what little she knew. While she was telling her story, Dirk tried to marshal his own thoughts into some kind of order. He needed to tell Mei-li about the phone call from one of the kidnappers. About Terrell Blackwood. And why Blackwood had reason to want revenge.
* * *
Mei-li listened carefully to what Vanessa said—and what she didn’t—following her usual routine. She had questions, a whole slew of them, but sometimes you got the most answers just letting people talk. Especially when there was nothing but silence, and the person telling the story felt he or she desperately needed to fill that silence...with something. Sometimes the most amazing revelations were blurted out, and Mei-li never broke the flow.
But eventually Vanessa’s story petered out. Mei-li waited patiently until Vanessa said, “That’s it. That’s everything I remember.”
Mei-li knew the odds were against Vanessa’s statement. Witnesses—even cooperative witnesses, as Vanessa seemed to be—rarely told everything they remembered. They tried their best to recount what they thought were the important things, not realizing sometimes it was the little details that broke a case. Then again, sometimes witnesses remembered something important long after the fact. Especially if they weren’t required to repeat their story countless times, so that the story as they told it became their memory of the event.
Mei-li took copious notes in her own cryptic shorthand and asked a few questions when she needed clarification. She jotted Vanessa’s answers down as well, then said, “Would you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Would you close your eyes? Sometimes events can be clearer in our minds if we close our eyes and think about them.”
A nearly imperceptible hesitation was followed by, “Okay.”
Mei-li noted the hesitation but didn’t comment on it, just filed it away for the future. “Thank you.” She waited until the other woman’s eyes were closed, then asked, “Where were the girls when Chet answered the door?”
“In the bedroom. They were...they were taking their afternoon nap.”
Mei-li’s sharp eyes glanced around the room, and she wrote a couple of things in her notebook. “So walk me through everything that happened the minute the door was opened.”
“I couldn’t really see the front door from where I was standing. One of the men must have struck Chet in the head, because I heard him cry out and saw him fall right at the base of the sculpture in the foyer. Before I could react both men were in the living room. One of them had a gun. He put it to my head and demanded to know where the girls were. He told me he’d kill me if I didn’t cooperate—and I believed him.”
Mei-li made another cryptic notation, but said in a matter-of-fact tone, “So you saw their faces?”
“No, oh, no,” Vanessa replied after a second. “Only their eyes. They both wore black ski masks.”
“But you could tell one of them was Chinese and one wasn’t,” Mei-li prompted.
“Right. Their eyes. You know, the shape. I could just tell.” Vanessa cleared her throat. “Well, one was Asian. I assumed he was Chinese, but...anyway, Asian.”