The connection was cut. I was hanging up the extension when there was a crash in the hallway. Mrs. Dunning was kneeling on the herringbone floor, sobbing inconsolably.
“It’s Jacob,” she moaned. “That bastard has my Jacob.”
The butler arrived a step before me and helped her into a chair.
I speed-dialed the chief. Unbelievable. This really was a kidnapping. We had no time to waste to get set up. We needed to hustle if we were going to have all our teams in place in three hours. It was going to be close.
I frowned out the window. Down across Central Park West, a tour bus was disembarking, people checking their cameras as they crowded toward the Strawberry Fields John Lennon memorial. My boss’s phone rang with a painful slowness as Mrs. Dunning’s cries carried through the high-ceilinged rooms.
“C’mon,” I said in frustration. “Pick up.”
A BUSINESS JET inbound for Teterboro Airport made FBI special agent Emily Parker duck her copper-colored head as she hurried across the Enterprise parking lot on Route 46 in New Jersey. She stopped for a moment and watched it streak down the runway toward the sleek Gulf-stream G300 that had just dropped her off.
She checked her watch after she turned over the engine of her rented Buick LeSabre. It was not yet three. Her boss had called her at twelve-thirty at her home outside Manassas, Virginia. She’d traveled two hundred fifty miles in under two hours.
Now, that’s what I call a rush job, she thought. Granted, she was used to the pace, having been in charge of the FBI’s northeast regional CARD, or Child Abduction Rapid Deployment, team for two years.
“The ADIC asked me to put my biggest badass on this one, Emily,” John Murphy, the special agent in charge of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, had said to her. “Guess what. You’re it.”