Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game by Sidney Sheldon, Tilly Bagshawe
Authors: Sidney Sheldon, Tilly Bagshawe
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bitch!”
Pulling back his arm, he punched her in the face so hard she blacked out.
Time passed.
She was in a room with no windows. A low-wattage lightbulb burned constantly. Days and nights became one. At first, the pain in her face where the corpse had punched her was unbearable. But gradually it began to subside.
There was a bed in one corner, an old-fashioned porcelain chamber pot and a battered cardboard box containing a few desultory books and toys. The walls were bare, the floor smooth, green linoleum. It felt more like an office than a room in a house. The toys and books were all designed for much younger children.
My kidnappers don’t know much about kids.
Fear gave way to boredom. There was nothing to do, nothing to break the monotony of the endless, lonely hours. At regular intervals, a masked man would enter, empty and replace the chamber pot and bring Lexi some food. Her captors never spoke to her, or answered when she spoke to them, but occasionally she heard their dim, muffled voices through the walls.
There were three of them. A leader with a deep voice and a strange, foreign accent, and two others—the corpse and a third man who wore a variety of animal masks, sometimes a pig, sometimes a dog or a snake. It was the third man, animal man, who really frightened her.
He was standing over her bed. He had the pig mask on.
“Make a sound and I’ll kill you.”
No you won’t. If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now. You need me alive.
Lexi opened her mouth to scream but it was too late. A huge, hot hand clamped over her mouth. He was on the bed, pushing her down. The weight of him squeezed the breath from her body. One hand still covered her mouth, but Lexi could feel the other clawing beneath her nightgown. NO! A sharp pain between her legs brought tears to her eyes. She tried to move, to struggle, but it was hopeless. She was pinned like a leaf beneath a boulder.
He made strange noises. Deep, guttural groans Lexi had never heard before. The hair on her scalp began to rise with terror. Then suddenly the weight lifted.
Voices.
“What are you doing in there, man?”
It was the leader.
“She ain’t due another meal for three hours.”
Lexi couldn’t see the pig’s face, but she could tell he was afraid.
He hissed at her. “One word and I will slit your throat. Understand?”
She nodded.
Agent Andrew Edwards looked at the stack of black-and-white photographs on the table in front of him. It was as thick as a phone book.
“Is this all of them?”
“Yes, sir. That’s every warehouse, hangar and industrial facility within a fifteen-mile radius of where the car was dumped.”
It was eleven days, four hours and sixteen minutes since Peter Templeton had reported his daughter missing. Agent Edwards had played the tape of Peter’s desperate 911 call so many times he could recite it by heart. Nine times out of ten with these child disappearances, the parents ended up being involved. What could you say? It was a sick world. But in this case, Agent Edwards believed the father. Not only did Peter Templeton’s distress seem genuine, but the ransom note left under the child’s pillow bore all the hallmarks of an organized criminal operation: no fingerprints, typed on the most common Lexmark printer paper, succinct, untraceable.
The Blackwell family had two weeks to transfer $10 million to a numbered account in the Caymans. If they involved the police at any point, the girl would be killed immediately.
Agent Edwards was a Scot by birth but a New Yorker by temperament. He had pale skin, watery amber eyes and hair that couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to be blond or red. He loved the Yankees, hated the street gangs and drug dealers that plagued the city and described his yearly vacation to the Jersey Shore as “traveling.”
He sighed heavily.
“There must be three hundred facilities here.”
“Four hundred twenty.”
“Got any good news for me,
Pulling back his arm, he punched her in the face so hard she blacked out.
Time passed.
She was in a room with no windows. A low-wattage lightbulb burned constantly. Days and nights became one. At first, the pain in her face where the corpse had punched her was unbearable. But gradually it began to subside.
There was a bed in one corner, an old-fashioned porcelain chamber pot and a battered cardboard box containing a few desultory books and toys. The walls were bare, the floor smooth, green linoleum. It felt more like an office than a room in a house. The toys and books were all designed for much younger children.
My kidnappers don’t know much about kids.
Fear gave way to boredom. There was nothing to do, nothing to break the monotony of the endless, lonely hours. At regular intervals, a masked man would enter, empty and replace the chamber pot and bring Lexi some food. Her captors never spoke to her, or answered when she spoke to them, but occasionally she heard their dim, muffled voices through the walls.
There were three of them. A leader with a deep voice and a strange, foreign accent, and two others—the corpse and a third man who wore a variety of animal masks, sometimes a pig, sometimes a dog or a snake. It was the third man, animal man, who really frightened her.
He was standing over her bed. He had the pig mask on.
“Make a sound and I’ll kill you.”
No you won’t. If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now. You need me alive.
Lexi opened her mouth to scream but it was too late. A huge, hot hand clamped over her mouth. He was on the bed, pushing her down. The weight of him squeezed the breath from her body. One hand still covered her mouth, but Lexi could feel the other clawing beneath her nightgown. NO! A sharp pain between her legs brought tears to her eyes. She tried to move, to struggle, but it was hopeless. She was pinned like a leaf beneath a boulder.
He made strange noises. Deep, guttural groans Lexi had never heard before. The hair on her scalp began to rise with terror. Then suddenly the weight lifted.
Voices.
“What are you doing in there, man?”
It was the leader.
“She ain’t due another meal for three hours.”
Lexi couldn’t see the pig’s face, but she could tell he was afraid.
He hissed at her. “One word and I will slit your throat. Understand?”
She nodded.
Agent Andrew Edwards looked at the stack of black-and-white photographs on the table in front of him. It was as thick as a phone book.
“Is this all of them?”
“Yes, sir. That’s every warehouse, hangar and industrial facility within a fifteen-mile radius of where the car was dumped.”
It was eleven days, four hours and sixteen minutes since Peter Templeton had reported his daughter missing. Agent Edwards had played the tape of Peter’s desperate 911 call so many times he could recite it by heart. Nine times out of ten with these child disappearances, the parents ended up being involved. What could you say? It was a sick world. But in this case, Agent Edwards believed the father. Not only did Peter Templeton’s distress seem genuine, but the ransom note left under the child’s pillow bore all the hallmarks of an organized criminal operation: no fingerprints, typed on the most common Lexmark printer paper, succinct, untraceable.
The Blackwell family had two weeks to transfer $10 million to a numbered account in the Caymans. If they involved the police at any point, the girl would be killed immediately.
Agent Edwards was a Scot by birth but a New Yorker by temperament. He had pale skin, watery amber eyes and hair that couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to be blond or red. He loved the Yankees, hated the street gangs and drug dealers that plagued the city and described his yearly vacation to the Jersey Shore as “traveling.”
He sighed heavily.
“There must be three hundred facilities here.”
“Four hundred twenty.”
“Got any good news for me,
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