Touch & Go (Tessa Leoni, #2)(10)

“But he doesn’t park in the garage?”

“Nope, single bay, which gallantly, I suppose, he gave to her. They also have a reserved parking space around back, but the housekeeper uses it. Guess he’s gone so much, he mostly keeps his car in the Denbe parking garage and limo’s it from there. Then, on the few days a week he’s back home, he takes his chances street side, like the rest of us schmucks.” D.D. rolled her eyes.

“And the girl, Ashlyn? Where was she?”

“Parents’ night out. She was staying in.”

Tessa processed this. “So the teenager is already home. Parents return. Enter through the front door… Attacker is already inside. Ambushes Justin and Libby in the foyer.”

“Attacker or attackers?”

“Attackers. One person can’t subdue an entire family with a Taser alone. And Justin worked in the field, yes? Hands-on, my boss said. Big guy, fit.”

“Big guy,” D.D. agreed. “Very fit.”

“So attackers. At least one or two in the entryway. Element of surprise for the parents. Which just leaves the girl.”

“If you were the kidnappers, who would you tend to first? Parents or child?”

“Child,” Tessa said immediately. “Moment you control the child, you control the parents.”

“Yep. Which is where our guys almost made their first mistake. Girl’s room is on the third floor. Come on, follow me.”





Chapter 5


MY FATHER DIED THE SAME WEEKEND as my eleventh birthday. To this day, when I think of him, I taste Duncan Hines yellow cake, topped with sugary buttercream frosting and rainbow sprinkles. I smell the melting wax of my twin number-one birthday candles, shoved side by side into the top of my lopsided round cake. I hear music, “Happy Birthday,” to be exact. A song I’ve never sung to my own family and never will.

Motorcycle accident, it turned out. My father wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Darwinism, my mother would mutter, but her blue eyes were always drawn, her expression deeply saddened. My first experience that you can both hate a man and miss him terribly.

Losing a parent isn’t a great financial proposition. Up until that point, my father’s job as an electrician and my mother’s part-time work at the corner dry cleaners had kept us solidly blue collar. Cute little apartment in a working-class area of Boston. A single used POS car for my mom, the weekend motorcycle for my dad. We bought our clothes from J.C. Penney, or if my mother was feeling frisky, T.J. Maxx. I never worried about food on the table, or the roof over my head. My friends in the neighborhood were also working class, and if I didn’t have much, well, at least I had as much as they did.

Unfortunately, the working-class lifestyle generally leaves households with just enough income to meet monthly obligations, while not quite enough to fund such luxuries as savings accounts or, better yet, life insurance.

After my father died, my mother and I lost seventy percent of our family’s income. Social Security kicked in some survivor’s benefits, but not enough to bridge that gap. My mom went from part-time work to full-time hours. When that wasn’t enough, she started a cleaning service on the side. I’d go with her, two nights a week, plus every weekend, perfecting my own vacuuming, dusting and washing skills as we scoured our way toward one more meal on the table.

Good-bye, cute little apartment. Hello, one-bedroom subsidized living unit in a vast, soulless building where gunfire was a nightly occurrence and the cockroaches outnumbered the human occupants a thousand to one. On Friday nights, my mother would light the gas stove and I’d stand by with the can of Raid. We’d take out two to three dozen roaches at a time, then watch Seinfeld on a tiny black-and-white TV to celebrate.

Good times in the new world order.

I was lucky. My mom fought the good fight. Never gave in to hopelessness, at least not in front of me, though subsidized housing units have thin walls and many nights I woke up to the sound of her sobbing. Grief. Exhaustion. Stress. By rights, she was entitled to all three, and in the morning, I never spoke of it. Just got up, and continued on with the business of surviving.

I discovered art in high school. Had a great teacher, Mrs. Scribner, who wore bright-colored peasant skirts and stacks of silver and gold bracelets, as if a gypsy had gotten lost in inner-city Boston. Students made fun of her. But the second you entered her classroom, you couldn’t help but be transported. She covered the bone-white walls in Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Pollock’s splattered drips and Dali’s melting clocks. Color, flowers, shapes, patterns. The dingy halls and battered lockers and leaking drop ceilings of an underfunded public high school faded away. Her class became our refuge, and guided by her enthusiasm, we tried to find beauty in an existence that for most of us was harsh and, for many of us, tragically short.

When I told my mom I wanted to study art in college, I thought she was going to spit nails. Fine art, what kind of degree was fine art? For the love of God, at least study something practical like accounting, where one day I could get a real job, and earn enough money to get both of us out of this hellhole. Or, if I absolutely had to be creative, what about a marketing degree? But at least study something useful that would one day qualify me for doing more than asking, “Do you want fries with that?”

Mrs. Scribner brought her around. Not by arguing that I had talent worth pursuing, or dreams worth chasing, but by mentioning there were a number of scholarships available for inner-city youths. At that stage of the game, free money was the key to my mother’s heart. So I studied and painted and sculpted, exploring various artistic media, until one day I read about silver-infused clay and realized I could combine sculpting with jewelry design, the best of both worlds. My mother even liked it, because jewelry was tangible, something you could sell, maybe to some of her cleaning clients if it came down to it.