A Billionaire's Redemption - By Cindy Dees Page 0,52
right.”
“Me, too,” he bit out.
He peeled away from the curb without watching Willa to her front door. It was nine in the morning, after all. The bad guys were only coming after her at night.
Thankfully, Vengeance was a small town and no destination was more than a few minutes away. He pulled up outside the police department and was not surprised to see reporters camped out on the front steps. If he were the new sheriff, his first order of business would be to plug the leak in the Vengeance police force.
Girding himself to face the grilling, he stepped out of his Escalade and was immediately assaulted by a chorus of shouted questions.
He raised his voice to be heard over the cacophony. “I don’t know anything. I have no comment, and I’m sure you already know as much or more than I do.” That brought a few dry chuckles from the press. Yup, definitely an informant in the building.
He elbowed aside a newcomer to the Vengeance coverage who hadn’t learned to stay the hell out of his way yet, and jogged up the steps to city hall and the police department inside.
Officer Radebaugh met him just inside the door. The young cop struck him as clumsy but well-meaning, and not entirely incompetent at his job. Gabe nodded at the officer. “How’s Melinda? How much does the kidnapper want?”
“There’s no ransom demand. Would you like to see the video?”
Duh. “Of course.”
“We’ve got a video set up in the conference room. An analyst from the FBI is looking at it now.”
Gabe followed the cop down a short hall to a dim room dominated by a long conference table, disordered chairs and an old-fashioned roll-down screen at one end of the room. A laptop projected a currently still image up on the wall. Gabe stopped, shocked.
Melinda sat in a wooden chair, her short blond hair disheveled, her arms restrained behind her back in some unseen manner. Although her ankles weren’t visible, her posture indicated that they were tied to the chair, as well. The collar of her blouse was torn, and she looked haggard. A lurid bruise lit up her left eye. She looked like she hadn’t bathed or slept in days.
Radebaugh spoke from behind Gabe. “This is Professor Grayson’s husband.”
An attractive brunette woman looked up briefly from her contemplation of the still image, then went right back to her study. “I’m Agent Delaney. Play the video from the beginning, Green,” the woman ordered absently.
Deputy Green made a face at the woman’s back as he hit a button on the laptop sitting in front of him on the table.
Gabe watched the video of Melinda intently. Her voice was as assertive as ever as she said, or maybe read, “My name is Melinda Grayson. I am alive and being held against my will. I am unharmed as of now, and as long as the police call off their search for me, I will remain that way. Further instructions will be forthcoming that, if followed to the letter, will ultimately result in my release.”
The video stopped.
“That’s it?” Gabe exclaimed.
“Yup,” Radebaugh answered.
The FBI analyst turned abruptly. “Would you say the syntax of that speech was similar to your wife’s typical patterns of sentence construction and inflection?”
Gabe blinked, startled at the question. “Are you asking if that sounded like Melinda?”
“Yes,” Agent Delaney replied impatiently.
He considered it briefly. “That sounded exactly like Melinda. If someone told her to say that she was unharmed and instructions would follow, that would be pretty much exactly how she would say it.”
The analyst tapped a front tooth with a long, manicured fingernail. “Then why the explicit statement that she is being held against her will? It’s a strange assertion to add into this sort of communication. Of course she’s being held against her will. We can see that she’s tied to a chair.” Delaney frowned and then added, “Dr. Grayson strikes me as an extremely intelligent person who takes pride in her intellect.”
“You would be correct,” Gabe replied drily.
“Then it would not be her style to make such a blatantly obvious observation?” the analyst asked tersely.
“She’s generally scornful of people who state the obvious,” Gabe answered, frowning. Now that the agent mentioned it, that had been a weird thing for Melinda to say.
“Watch it again, Mr. Grayson. Does anything else stand out to you?”
He would have corrected Agent Delaney’s mistake about his name, but the tape started to play again. He perched on the edge of the conference table to watch it