A Billionaire's Redemption(26)

She nodded, and followed obediently as he rushed out the front door. He opened her door impatiently, nearly slamming it on her skirt in his haste. The short ride to her house was silent.

He pulled up to the curb out front and she said only, “I hope Melinda’s all right.”

Me, too,” he bit out.

He peeled away from the curb without watching Willa to her front door. It was nine in the morning, after all. The bad guys were only coming after her at night.

Thankfully, Vengeance was a small town and no destination was more than a few minutes away. He pulled up outside the police department and was not surprised to see reporters camped out on the front steps. If he were the new sheriff, his first order of business would be to plug the leak in the Vengeance police force.

Girding himself to face the grilling, he stepped out of his Escalade and was immediately assaulted by a chorus of shouted questions.

He raised his voice to be heard over the cacophony. “I don’t know anything. I have no comment, and I’m sure you already know as much or more than I do.” That brought a few dry chuckles from the press. Yup, definitely an informant in the building.

He elbowed aside a newcomer to the Vengeance coverage who hadn’t learned to stay the hell out of his way yet, and jogged up the steps to city hall and the police department inside.

Officer Radebaugh met him just inside the door. The young cop struck him as clumsy but well-meaning, and not entirely incompetent at his job. Gabe nodded at the officer. “How’s Melinda? How much does the kidnapper want?”

There’s no ransom demand. Would you like to see the video?”

Duh. “Of course.”

We’ve got a video set up in the conference room. An analyst from the FBI is looking at it now.”

Gabe followed the cop down a short hall to a dim room dominated by a long conference table, disordered chairs and an old-fashioned roll-down screen at one end of the room. A laptop projected a currently still image up on the wall. Gabe stopped, shocked.

Melinda sat in a wooden chair, her short blond hair disheveled, her arms restrained behind her back in some unseen manner. Although her ankles weren’t visible, her posture indicated that they were tied to the chair, as well. The collar of her blouse was torn, and she looked haggard. A lurid bruise lit up her left eye. She looked like she hadn’t bathed or slept in days.

Radebaugh spoke from behind Gabe. “This is Professor Grayson’s husband.”

An attractive brunette woman looked up briefly from her contemplation of the still image, then went right back to her study. “I’m Agent Delaney. Play the video from the beginning, Green,” the woman ordered absently.

Deputy Green made a face at the woman’s back as he hit a button on the laptop sitting in front of him on the table.

Gabe watched the video of Melinda intently. Her voice was as assertive as ever as she said, or maybe read, “My name is Melinda Grayson. I am alive and being held against my will. I am unharmed as of now, and as long as the police call off their search for me, I will remain that way. Further instructions will be forthcoming that, if followed to the letter, will ultimately result in my release.”

The video stopped.

That’s it?” Gabe exclaimed.

Yup,” Radebaugh answered.

The FBI analyst turned abruptly. “Would you say the syntax of that speech was similar to your wife’s typical patterns of sentence construction and inflection?”

Gabe blinked, startled at the question. “Are you asking if that sounded like Melinda?”

Yes,” Agent Delaney replied impatiently.

He considered it briefly. “That sounded exactly like Melinda. If someone told her to say that she was unharmed and instructions would follow, that would be pretty much exactly how she would say it.”

The analyst tapped a front tooth with a long, manicured fingernail. “Then why the explicit statement that she is being held against her will? It’s a strange assertion to add into this sort of communication. Of course she’s being held against her will. We can see that she’s tied to a chair.” Delaney frowned and then added, “Dr. Grayson strikes me as an extremely intelligent person who takes pride in her intellect.”

You would be correct,” Gabe replied drily.

Then it would not be her style to make such a blatantly obvious observation?” the analyst asked tersely.

She’s generally scornful of people who state the obvious,” Gabe answered, frowning. Now that the agent mentioned it, that had been a weird thing for Melinda to say.

Watch it again, Mr. Grayson. Does anything else stand out to you?”

He would have corrected Agent Delaney’s mistake about his name, but the tape started to play again. He perched on the edge of the conference table to watch it more closely.

Again, please,” he murmured.

After about three more times through it, the analyst asked, “Anything?”

Well,” he answered slowly, “it seems a little strange how forceful she sounds. Don’t get me wrong. She’s nothing if not an assertive woman. But I would have expected her to sound a little more...cowed...by the experience of being kidnapped and held against her will. She’s not accustomed to much of anything happening against her will.”

Of course, maybe he’d been spending too much time around sweet, gentle Willa Merris. By comparison, Melinda was about as soft and feminine as a Mack Truck. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, though, he felt bad about it. He shouldn’t compare the two women. They were as different as night and day. And he owed Melinda a certain loyalty. They’d been married once, after all.

He added, “Maybe Melinda is playing some sort of head game with her captors. It would be her style to manipulate them as much as possible. Could she be signaling us as to what she’s doing?”

Lord knew Melinda had played plenty of head games with him during their short marriage. When he’d finally gotten wise and started calling her out on it, she’d poo-pooed his anger, saying it was part of her job as a sociologist to experiment on the people around her. They’d had quite a fight over it, as he recalled, with him insisting he didn’t want to be her lab rat, and her railing that he was being oversensitive and childish.

Most of their fights had come down to that. He’d never been enough man for her, not smart enough, not mature enough, not intellectual enough to satisfy her. He’d spent their entire marriage feeling wholly inadequate, and scrambling to play catch up with the meteoric rise of her career.

Even now, when he was a billionaire for crying out loud, Melinda accused him of being a slave to the almighty dollar and of not having achieved anything of real importance. Not like her—author of multiple books, famous lecturer, professor, intellectual and sought-after commentator.

Agent Delaney tilted her head thoughtfully. “Does she have enough psychological training to attempt to manipulate her captor or captors?”

Gabe snorted. “The woman’s brilliant. And her favorite hobby is messing with people.”

It’s an interesting theory, Mr. Grayson.”

Gabe pointedly ignored Deputy Green’s smirk as the FBI agent called him by the wrong name again.

The woman distracted Gabe by asking, “You used the plural, captors, when referring to whoever kidnapped your wife. Why is that?”

I just assumed...” he trailed off. “You’d have to know Melinda to understand. She’s a formidable woman. The idea of a single person overwhelming her and kidnapping her just doesn’t seem plausible. It would have to be several people.”

She’s a fighter?” Delaney asked.

That’s one way to describe her,” Gabe replied. “Combative. Aggressive. Self-confident to a fault. She wouldn’t go down without a fight.”

And yet,” the analyst commented speculatively, “not a thing was out of place in her home. Not a chair overturned, not a pencil on the floor. Nothing whatsoever to indicate that there was any kind of struggle.”

Gabe nodded. “I know. That part baffles me, too. It makes no sense at all that someone just walked in, knocked her out and was able to drag her out of her home without leaving a single sign behind.”

Can you think of anyone she might have left home with willingly? Perhaps not realizing she was being kidnapped?” the agent pressed.

I’ve been over this and over this with the police,” Gabe answered on a sigh. “I can’t think of anyone. But then, I don’t know any of her students or colleagues. I’m fairly out of touch with her life these days.”

And why’s that?”

Deputy Green snorted behind Gabe. Jackass. “Because we’ve been divorced for nearly ten years.”

Agent Delaney, to her credit, looked chagrined. “My mistake. You seemed so invested in her safety when you came in here....” The woman turned back to the screen without finishing the observation. Uncomfortable silence filled the room.

Deputy Green commented snidely, “Guess we know who wore the pants in that relationship.”