After the Golden Age

“Celia?” It was Mark on the phone again. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah. Hey, I’m glad you called. We should have dinner or something soon. To make up for last night.”

“I could sure use a hello like the good-bye I got from you.”

Oh yeah. Definitely a keeper.

When she finally hung up, the phone flashed a message waiting light at her. It was Analise, practically screaming: “What happened last night? Don’t try to tell me you weren’t there because I know you were. And you didn’t call me? Why didn’t I hear about this? My supreme deductive reasoning powers tell me that this Mark Paulson guy is the cop who took you home after the last time. Am I right? There’s a picture of you making eyes at him on page three of the Eye. Girl, you guys look hot. You have to—” The message timed out there.

* * *

Monday morning, she was back in the office researching the Leyden Industrial Park, the next strand in the web that was Sito’s life.

The current phone book and city title records had no listings for a Leyden Industrial Park, which meant the name had changed sometime during the last fifty years, or the place didn’t exist anymore. An address would have helped, but the censored Greenbriar file hadn’t been that generous. She’d have to head to City Hall or the library and hope they had historical street plans or title information going back that far.

She also made time for a little independent research, looking into valuations of Stradivarius instruments. It wasn’t exactly a straightforward endeavor. The average thief would never be able to unload one on the black market. Most of the instruments were well known within the communities that would pay the most for them. Their histories, characteristics, ownership, were all recorded in detail. They even had nicknames. It would be like trying to sell someone’s child. Someone’s famous child. Not that criminals hadn’t tried that, too.

If the thieves had a private buyer lined up, one who didn’t care about the niceties of law, no one would ever see those instruments again.

So why had they taken a hostage if they were just going to let him go? Once they were out of the building, they didn’t need the human shield anymore—they could have released him immediately. Except they hadn’t originally taken any hostage, they’d wanted her. Which meant they’d wanted to get at the Olympiad. If they’d kept her as a hostage, her parents might not have listened when the cops asked them to stay out of it. Maybe that was why they’d let Mark go. He was the wrong bait.

The hubris, putting herself at the middle of this.

She had dinner with Mark Saturday night. Just dinner. She was becoming so conservative. Really, though, she had enjoyed the chance to talk to him when they weren’t in a courtroom or a kidnapping scene.

Appleton had grilled him about the Stradivarius Brothers, as the press had named the gang, most of Friday night and into Saturday. He’d given descriptions of his captors to the sketch artist and profiling software; the department was still trying to find matches with the mug shots on file. He’d spent the entire time in their car, which never went more than a mile from the symphony hall and the police station, and points in between. The Stradivarius instruments had been in a different car. Not much to go on, as far as tracking the instruments was concerned. He hadn’t gotten a look at the plates of either car.

He had heard part of a phone conversation. The driver of the car called someone to ask what to do, since the plan had gone awry.

“The guy he was talking to was yelling so loud I could hear him. He said, ‘You were supposed to get the girl.’ Then the driver said, ‘The mayor’s son ought to be just as good.’ But the answer was no. Then they dropped me off. I thought you’d want to know.”

They’d been after her, and she wasn’t willing to call two kidnapping attempts in as many weeks a coincidence.

* * *

Mark came over to her place Monday evening with carry-out Chinese. She dumped lo mein onto plates and poured hot-and-sour soup into bowls while he leaned on the doorway to the kitchen, watching.

“I asked around about who talked to the Olympiad Friday night. All anyone knows is the order came from upstairs, from higher up than Appleton. Probably the Commissioner. Nobody was too upset about it; you know we’ve never really gotten along with those guys.”

Because the Olympiad kept making them look bad.… “But there was an order. I wish your dad wouldn’t go around saying it was their fault they weren’t there.”

“It would have been like them to just show up. Why didn’t they?”

Because they hadn’t known there was a kidnapping involved and there were lives at stake. She didn’t want to argue with him. “Who knows? I can’t explain them.”

“Can’t you?”

“You may have noticed, I’ve spent the whole of my adult life putting distance between them and me.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”