Forsaken by James David Jordan Page B

placed the gloves on the table in front of Simon.
    Simon picked them up and looked at them for a moment. Then he slid them on.
    Elise, her eyes red and swollen, walked from the couch around the table toward the suite’s kitchen. Harrison followed her. Before he turned the corner, he said, “Just one more thing.”
    Simon looked up. “What?”
    “I’m going to need you to check your e-mails as soon as possible.”
    “Why?”
    “The note. It says they will e-mail you. That’s how we’ll learn what they want.”
    “I can check the e-mails,” Elise said. “I’ll get my laptop from my room.” She headed for the door and looked relieved to be escaping. Harrison went into the kitchen.
    I don’t know why, because I hardly knew him, but I stopped next to Simon and put my hand on hisshoulder. He winced. Then he tilted his head and looked into my eyes. “Thank you,” he said. I wanted to cry.
    He put his hand on mine. I knew he wanted to touch Kacey, not me, but I was there and she was not, and at that moment the touch of a stranger must have been better than no touch at all. I let him hold my hand—and I did cry. But I cried as quietly as I could, because it was his moment to hurt, not mine. Eventually he nodded, and I understood it was time for me to leave.
    As I walked toward the kitchen, wiping my eyes with my fingers, I heard him open one of the bags. I looked over my shoulder. He’d removed Kacey’s finger from the plastic bag. It had been cut cleanly, just above the second knuckle. The skin was already darkening. He turned it over and over, studying it from every angle. He nudged it into his palm and touched it lightly, then stroked it with his fingertips, as if it were still attached to her hand and she were sitting right beside him.
    I felt guilty for watching, and I started to turn away. Before I did, Simon lifted Kacey’s finger and pressed it to his cheek. He held it there for a long time. Then he began to sob.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN
     
    BY 10 P.M. ELISE had been sitting on the couch for a couple of hours and had barely taken her eyes off the laptop resting on the coffee table in front of her. Simon had been in the bedroom alone since he returned the evidence to Harrison. I sat in an upholstered wing chair, flipping through the pages of one of the hotel’s promotional magazines about Chicago. The room smelled like burnt coffee. I wanted a drink of something far stronger.
    At the desk in the corner, Harrison hunched over a report that had been delivered to him a few minutes earlier. From time to time he scratched something onto the paper with the hotel’s ballpoint desk pen.
    Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Elise lean forward and peer at the computer screen. “This may be it!”
    Harrison and I hurried over to the couch. Simon rounded the corner from the bedroom. In three long strides he was at the coffee table. Elise stood and moved out of his way. He leaned over the laptop, clicked open the message, and scanned the screen. After a moment he shook his head and toggled the message to the beginning. He read it again, then sat on the couch.
    “What is it?” Harrison said. “Is she all right?”
    “They have a demand. If I meet it, they say they’ll let Kacey go.”
    Harrison walked around the coffee table and squinted at the laptop. “What do they want?”
    Simon rubbed his hand over the bald crown of his head. “They want me to make a statement on international television this Saturday at the Celebration of Hope in Dallas.”
    “What statement?” Harrison said.
    Simon leaned back on the couch. “They want me to deny that Jesus is the Son of God.”

     
    FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER READING the e-mail, Simon paced near the windows of the suite. “If I don’t say what they want me to say, they will kill Kacey. If we try to find her and rescue her, they’ll kill her.” He stopped, and the muscles in his neck strained until theypractically throbbed above the neck band of his T-shirt. “What she