clear that he would have needed a hospital for his wounds. But no one matching Rodrigo’s injuries had been treated at any Spanish hospital in the days following the kidnapping. The Spanish even checked with the Portuguese, French, and Italians, came up blank.
She’d told them about Rodrigo’s screams and the shot that ended them, too. But the cops never found a corpse matching his description. Of course, Jacques could have weighed the body down and dumped it in the Atlantic for the sharks. The house was barely a two-hour drive from the coast.
So many unknowns.
Rebecca had detected a slight skepticism from some of the detectives who talked to her: Maybe this guy Rodrigo isn’t dead. Maybe the escape didn’t exactly go the way your daughter says. Underneath that, a question: If Jacques was such a pro, could she have gotten away if he didn’t want her to?
Which in turn maybe led to two other questions: Did he let her go? And if he did, why?
Questions that ended with the ultimate taboo thought: Was she working with them all along?
But the Spanish cops were too polite to say any of that out loud, or even hint at it. The Interior Ministry had its two million euros back. The Queen—the old lady who lived across the back alley from Helado—confirmed Kira hadn’t been conscious when she left the bar. And Kira had clearly endured two days of something. Under the circumstances, pushing too hard on Kira made no sense.
The Spanish had been wise not to ask, Rebecca knew. Because on the nine-hour plane ride from Madrid to D.C., Kira had told Becks more about how she’d escaped Rodrigo. Not much but enough. Rebecca had encouraged her to “talk to someone.”
But Kira just shook her head in a way that suggested she didn’t plan to talk to anyone at all, and Rebecca decided not to press.
The NSA’s tricks had failed too. The phones the kidnappers had used were dead. Their metadata chains went nowhere. The ransom recording revealed nothing more on its hundredth play than its first. And Jacques and Lilly had both been smart enough to make sure their voices hadn’t been caught anywhere. They must have known the NSA was even better at matching voices than faces.
Rebecca had even taken advantage of the thin possibility that the case was terror-related to push the CIA and European agencies to look at their raw intel on kidnappings, the semi-legal or illegal stuff the police never heard. But no one came up with anything that looked remotely similar to this case.
So.
Nobody knew nothing. Nobody had answers.
Especially to the question that gnawed the most, the one that wouldn’t go away: Why Kira?
Until they knew whether Jacques had taken Kira at random or targeted her, they couldn’t know if she was safe. If she’d been specifically chosen, then Rebecca had to know why, what message Jacques had meant to send, whether he or his bosses were satisfied with what had happened.
Because money didn’t make sense as a motive. Anyone who had researched Kira would have known she didn’t have enough to matter. Even the two million that Jacques had demanded was far more than the Unsworths could have raised. If the Spanish hadn’t come through they would have had no way to pay.
But other parents could have. Every summer, plenty of American college students whose families had ten or twenty million dollars visited Paris. They would have been no harder to target than Kira. They didn’t have bodyguards. Only billionaires had personal security for their children, certainly on trips somewhere as safe as France.
If Jacques had taken Kira specifically, he’d done so for some other reason. Try as she might, Rebecca couldn’t see what it might be. Nothing in the ransom demand had been political. And Kira insisted Jacques had seemed genuinely surprised to learn of Rebecca’s FBI connection.
What then? If Jacques hadn’t targeted Kira, he’d just happened on her, and—what? Meticulously orchestrated the cross-border kidnapping of an American citizen without knowing if the American’s family had millions of euros to pay him off?
One other possibility lurked.
Rebecca didn’t like to think about it, but it did fit the facts. Even the strangely messy way the kidnappers had handled the ransom demand. Maybe Jacques hadn’t cared about the ransom. He had considered it a diversion. Let the Unsworths bring the money somewhere and the Spanish police watch the pickup site for a day or a week. Meanwhile, he’d go with his original plan: selling Kira. The act