Gone (Michael Bennett)

heavy tool with an ax on one side and a sledgehammer on the other, known as a splitting maul.
    The young woman hefted it neatly.
    “No!” Lillian screamed as the young woman brought the sledgehammer side of the maul back and up and then down with authority onto Lillian’s left elbow, pulverizing it into splinters.
    Vida turned up the music as Lillian shook and screamed and howled in pain. When the white noise of Lillian’s excruciation notched slightly back, Haydn was still playing merrily.
    Vida lifted the sledge again.
    “We’re going to try this one more time. With the ax part this time. Where is Bennett?” she said.
    “In Northern California … near Susanville,” Lillian found herself saying between the sobs and the throbbing, center-of-the-sun agony that had become her left elbow. “I’m not … sure exactly where … I’d tell you his address if I could … but they wouldn’t tell me … in a million years.”
    “How do you know this?” Vida said.
    “An agent from the LA office,” Lillian continued in her pain-induced, haiku-like rhythm, “was sent up there … to pick his brain … about capturing Perrine … I do the books for the office … I saw the destination on the manifest.”
    “An agent from the task force?”
    “Yes.”
    “What was the agent’s name?”
    “Parker. Emily Parker,” Lillian said without hesitation. She hated herself. She knew she was putting others in jeopardy. But she was in so much pain. And afraid. God, was she afraid.
    Vida dropped the splitting maul and consulted a binder in the corner of the room. She flipped a page, then flipped it back. Then she lifted a phone.
    “Bring the van around,” she said into it.
    Vida stepped back around to the rear of the office chair and pulled the gun from the waistband of her yoga pants.
    “Just one more thing, Agent, and we’ll get you right out of here,” Vida said, raising the suppressed black-steel Smith & Wesson .22.

CHAPTER 67
     
    A WAGON TRAIN OF FIRE trucks, ambulances, and cop cars was on the scene when we got to Venice.
    There were beach cops everywhere, on four-wheelers and in 4x4s and pickups. Most of them were sporting M-16s. Crime-scene tape fluttered as aviation whipped past low overhead in a buzz of bright, shaking light.
    There were dozens upon dozens of citizens pressed up against the crime tape. Most were shirtless. One interested observer seemed to be clad in nothing save a hotel towel. Coming out of the Vic, I looked over my shoulder as I heard a suspicious click-clack. But it was just some bushy-haired thirty-year-old skateboarder attracted to the bright, shiny flashing lights.
    Getting out of the G-car, Emily and I stepped around someone’s little dog, hitched to a public water fountain, and went under the crime-scene tape. Behind us, a squad-car siren was going off and going off and going off like a broken alarm clock.
    There was reason to be alarmed, all right. We’d been scouring the city all day, chasing leads to try to find the fifteen-year-veteran agent who’d been snatched in broad daylight. Her husband, who was FaceTiming with her at the moment of abduction, had called it in from Brazil, of all places, where he was on a business trip. I didn’t envy the man.
    Especially now that we’d finally found his wife.
    The crooked smile of a quarter moon shining above black water was the first thing to greet us as we walked down to the sand. There was the soft, distant boom-and-shush of waves crashing, the sound of the palm fronds rasping in the wind. We stepped under a second strip of crime tape and across a deserted bike path.
    Beside the path, just in the sand and facing the water, Agent Mara sat in a wheelchair with two bullet holes in her head. A dirty blanket covered her loosely. There was blood on the right corner of her mouth. In her lap was a plain brown bag that, we had already heard from the first responders, contained her cut-out tongue.
    She’d been strapped to a wheelchair with tie wraps, obviously killed somewhere else. This was just a dump site. Her left elbow had been demolished, I noticed in the glare of the five-hundred-watt halogen work light the crime-scene people had set up. It looked like it had almost been severed with some blunt-force trauma. She’d been tortured, no doubt.
    We turned as Detective Bassman stepped out of the shadows, straight up to us.
    “Hey,” he said. “We looked for video in the stores along Ocean Front Walk, but it’s not looking good.