The thought both excited and terrified him. Would she be able to stop him?
Had he finally met his match?
God, she looked like her sister. Except she was missing that fearful expression he’d liked so well in Kimberly. Jasmine wasn’t scared of anyone. She was shrewd, determined, strong.
Turning up the volume, Gruber listened once again as she described the personality characteristics of a recent sex offender who’d been victimizing little boys.
Fucking pervert. What kind of man wanted to have sex with a boy?
He pressed the volume button on the remote. This was the part where Jasmine talked about her sister, and he didn’t want to miss it. He didn’t have to worry about the neighbors. No one was going to hear anything in the cement bunker he’d built.
That was the beauty of it. He could do anything down here.
“I was twelve years old when my sister went missing. A bearded stranger came to the door and asked for my father.”
Gruber smiled. He no longer wore a beard. According to his sister, who constantly pointed out his every flaw, he had a weak chin and needed the facial hair to camouflage the defect. But he knew it was important to periodically change his appearance. Maybe Jasmine was smart, but he was smarter. Even vanity couldn’t get in the way of survival.
“After he left, I realized my sister was gone, too,” she was saying.
He remembered that day as if it was yesterday. Peccavi had sent him to Cleveland to pick up another kid Jack had scouted the previous week, and he’d bumped into Peter Stratford in line at a fast-food joint. They’d struck up a conversation, and Peter had offered him a temporary job.
Gruber still wasn’t sure why he’d ever gone to the address Peter had given him. Except that he’d been bored and looking for something to interest him. Then there she was. So easy. A gift. He’d promised her an ice cream cone for showing him such a nice cartwheel, told her they’d bring one for her sister, too, and she’d climbed right into his truck.
The phone rang. With a curse, he stopped the program and returned it to the beginning, planning to watch it all over again as soon as he was off the phone. He enjoyed studying Jasmine, enjoyed fantasizing about finally meeting her, looking into her eyes and telling her he was the one she’d been searching for these past sixteen years.
“Hello?”
It was Roger, or someone he called Roger. Gruber had no idea what his real name was. He only knew that he wasn’t as good a scout as Jack had been.
“What is it?”
“I have one for you.”
“Where?” he asked.
“Right here in the city.”
“Are you crazy? That’s too close.”
“This is a contract baby.”
Meaning Roger had found a prostitute or some other woman desperate enough to give up her baby for money or drugs. They acquired the children who went through their little company in a variety of ways. Buying them from crack addicts and prostitutes was the least dangerous—at least for him as the pickup man—because they paid for what they took.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gruber insisted. Because of a close call years ago, and because they based their entire enterprise out of New Orleans, they didn’t usually take children, via any method, from their home area. Peccavi constantly stressed how important it was to keep all illegal activity as far away from the transfer house as possible.
“Peccavi’s making an exception,” Roger said. “He’s not happy with the money we’ve got coming in right now.”
And because babies were hard to come by and always sold for a premium, Peccavi occasionally relented on this rule. “Then why can’t you pick it up?”
“I’m in Detroit, looking for something a little more specific.”
Gruber frowned and rubbed his bare chin as he stared at the frozen picture of John Walsh on his TV screen. “She’s giving it up on Christmas?” he said.
Apparently she was even more hard-hearted than his bitch of a mother had been.
“She wants to be able to buy herself a few things. Do you mind?”
“Some kids don’t have a chance,” he grumbled.
“That’s our business, isn’t it? Giving them a chance.”
Gruber had to laugh. Roger’s self-delusions sometimes boggled his mind.
“You really believe that shit? That we’re angels in disguise?”
Defensiveness infiltrated Roger’s response. Obviously, he didn’t want to face reality today. “I believe that Peccavi’s got his hands full right now, and he wants you to take care of this. Do you need him to call you?”
Gruber almost said yes. Without some intervention, some distraction, he feared Peccavi would kill Jasmine before Gruber had the chance to confront her. But if Peccavi could stop Jasmine that easily, she wasn’t a worthy adversary. And Gruber couldn’t threaten his own livelihood—possibly his life—by doing anything to make Peccavi suspicious. Like her sister before her, Jasmine was an indulgence, a risk. He had to play it smart or the man he worked for would turn on him the way he’d turned on Jack….
“You gonna answer me? You there?” Roger asked.
“I’m here. Go ahead and give me the details.”
Roger spouted off a set of directions, which Gruber copied on the back cover of Sports Illustrated, a magazine he sometimes read to make himself feel like an everyday guy. He bought SI or even Playboy occasionally, although he knew it wouldn’t really work. He wanted to be an everyday guy. But he’d never been like other men. “Got it,” he said when he was finished.
“At least you don’t have to travel for this one, eh?” Roger said.
Gruber tossed the pen aside. “I guess.” The mother was home from the hospital and staying in a motel room courtesy of Peccavi. All he had to do was pick up the baby and take it to Beverly Moreau at the bungalow that served as their transfer house.
But leaving his bunker took him away from the pleasure of watching Kimberly’s sister talk about him on national television, and he hated Peccavi and Roger for that.
Chapter 11
Returning to her hotel for a meal and a shower sounded better in theory than it actually turned out to be. By the time Jasmine reached Maison du Soleil, it was nearly six o’clock and dark. The businesses along St. Philip Street—and everywhere else—were already closed for Christmas Eve.
Jasmine pulled to the curb and stared up at the building. With its festive lights glowing eerily through the fog, she felt as if she’d entered a Christmas ghost town.