She settled in her chair again and stared at him. “You know what? I think that’s probably my problem too.”
“In what way?”
“My last relationship kind of sucked,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad, but it just wasn’t good enough to maintain. We didn’t want to be alone, so we kept it going, trying to give life to something that was dead and gone.”
“I’ve had that happen a time or two myself,” he muttered. “It’s not how I want to have a relationship.”
“Nope,” she muttered, “not at all.”
Ice walked in just then, with her son, Hunter. Di looked up at the baby and held out her arms. Hunter, who had never even seen her before, immediately held out his arms.
Ice laughed. “Well, that was easy,” she said. She handed off the toddler into the arms of her friend, and Hunter immediately reached out and grabbed hold of Di’s hair with both fists.
Dianne let him tug and play, kissing his soft forehead. “He’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Well, I’m biased,” Ice said, pouring herself a coffee and sitting down at the table. “But you’re right, he is.” She chuckled and said, “And, while you’re holding him, he’ll make life a little easier for you, while you tell me what happened.”
Dianne wrinkled up her nose at her friend. “Right to business, huh?”
“Yep, sure am,” she said, “and the longer you evade it, the more details we’ll miss out on.”
Looking at Ice in surprise, Di nodded slowly. “I wasn’t thinking of it from that perspective.”
“Nope. Now stop stalling and start talking.”
Di gave the little bit of details that she had, and, as she watched, Ice recorded it. “Why tape it?”
“So we have details to refer back to,” she said. “We tend to miss out on things, or something comes up later that didn’t seem relevant early on. I just do it as a matter of course now.”
“Makes sense.” Di turned to Noah. “Maybe he has something to add.”
“Nope,” he said, “I don’t. When I got there, you were in the back of your vehicle.”
“Any chance I crawled in there myself?” she asked.
He looked at her in surprise and then said, “I don’t know.”
“I—” She started to speak, then frowned and sighed. “You know? I just don’t know. I don’t know why I would have, except that I was terrified, and, sitting there in the front seat, I felt like I was more vulnerable and open, than if I was hidden in the back.”
“And that would make perfect sense if you had,” he said, “and it would alleviate the thought that somebody was hanging around, watching for you.”
“But why wouldn’t I have just laid down in the front seat?”
“Because you had a gearshift between the two bucket seats,” he suggested.
She looked at him and frowned. “Right, I did. I usually rent vehicles without them, but this was the only one they had. I didn’t even realize why because rentals don’t often have standards anymore.”
“Not many people know how to drive them either,” he murmured.
She nodded. “But I learned to drive in the outback of Australia, and we could drive anything there. It’s a skill I’ve never really lost.”
“That’s good,” Noah said. “It’s not a skill that everybody has, so it’s rare to find a rental with a manual transmission these days. Is there any reason to suspect that vehicle was a part of it?”
Everybody at the table shook their head.
But Ice made a note. “I’ll call them and see. It will be one more thing to check off the list.” She picked up the phone, while they were all sitting there and talking. By the time she got off, she shook her head and said, “It’s the only one they had, and it’s usually a staff vehicle. But, they had some accidents and mechanical problems and came up short on vehicles, so this one was pulled into use.”
“And because I could drive a standard, I was given this one. Okay, so mark that off the list, as you said,” Di murmured.
“Why were you staying at that hotel?” Noah asked her suddenly.
She shrugged and said, “The conference is being held there, so I thought it would be more convenient,” she said.
“I guess,” he murmured. “I just wondered if that had anything to do with it. You’re attending this conference?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Hosted by the health food industry,” she said, “so I was there for my work.”
“Anybody else know about it?”
“Everybody back at the company I work for,” she said. “Anybody who was at the conference or organizing the conference would have known about it. It was well publicized.”
Noah looked at Ice and Levi. “What does this Maxwell guy do?”
“He was in construction,” Levi said. “That’s one of the reasons his son was taken. Somebody was trying to apply pressure to have Maxwell do a job without all the safety protocols required, and he wouldn’t do it.”
“So they grabbed his son?” Noah asked, incredulous.
Ice nodded. “It was a multimillion-dollar job they needed done, and everybody had refused. So they were desperate and decided to get ugly in their tactics. Unfortunately everything went wrong, and his son was killed in the process.”
“Were you involved in that?” Noah asked Levi.
He shook his head. “No, I wasn’t. Not at all.”
“So why target you then?”
“Because he asked me for help.”
There was silence at the table.
“Ouch,” Noah said. “And you couldn’t help, why?”
“Well, for one thing, I wasn’t in Australia,” he said. “Two, my teams were spread very thin. And, three, the papers said various local authorities were already on it, and Maxwell didn’t give me much time, which happens with kidnappings, especially of children,” he said heavily. “Ice and I discussed this at the time,” he said, looking over at Ice, who nodded, “before I told Maxwell. He needed immediate help in Australia, and the local police already had a team in place.” He sighed. “But then everything went wrong, and so—” He left the words hanging. “He probably blames me.”
“Okay, I get that, but why attack me though?” Dianne murmured.
“Somehow he knew about the personal connection between you and me—plus, no offense here, but you would be easier to get to than one of my men—and, because of that personal link, it was just all about maximum pain.”
“I’ve heard that phrase related to serial killers a couple times,” Di said, “about them wanting to get maximum pleasure out of other people’s pain.”
“Yes,” Levi said, “that’s generally how they get their kicks. What makes their life happy and worth living is to see other people suffer. Usually these guys have messed-up histories, where they’ve suffered terribly, so their only way of regaining power in their life is to make others suffer, claiming joy in proving they aren’t suffering anymore.”
“That’s kind of twisted, isn’t it?”