Chapter Eleven
Peter and Ruthie were tickling each other all the way back from the golf course to their hotel in Maui, more than ready to make love yet again once they hit their room. But first, they had to get some supper and she needed to freshen up.
Sliding the key card for their room and opening the door, Ruthie gently pried off her husband (who had a hard time letting her go) and immediately headed for the bathroom. What she saw next caused her not to gasp or scream, but merely to moan in a very low pitch.
Sensing instinctively that something was wrong, Peter knocked on the door which Ruthie had locked. It took about ten seconds before his wife opened it, for she had slid to the floor and had to sit back up, reaching behind her to unlatch the lock. It was still dark, but the fan was running.
Peter turned on the light. Ruthie had moved to one side of the bathroom. Still sitting down, she motioned to the mirror about the marble sink. On it, there was a message written with a color that he recognized as Ruthie's lip gloss. It said:
YOU CAN'T RUN, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE. WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM WILL HAPPEN TO YOU. GO HOME, NOW.
"Don't touch anything," said Peter. "Don't shower. Don't freshen up. Don't even brush your teeth. Don't even remove the snot from the corners of your eyes. There's something I have to check."
Immediately, Peter ran out of the bathroom and started looking around. The room was in perfect shape. The balcony door had not been forced open, the bed sheets were freshly changed, the carpet vacuumed. The luggage had not been forced into, nor had the Gideon Bible been swiped from the bed stand. Peter turned on the TV, and logged into his and his wife's room account. No one had made any orders for any movies, erotic or otherwise, while they were out.
Peter called the front desk. Knowing that the hotel kept records of when card keys were swiped, he asked when the room had last been entered into. It was exactly two minutes after he and Ruthie had left – and the cleaning had been done by specially trained officers from the 5-0, who were also sweeping the room for bugs and anything else that someone untoward could use to harm Peter and Ruthie. Before he asked, the front desk clerk assured him the door lock system was impossible to hack into, period. They were controlled by a central computer at the regional office for the hotel chain in Honolulu, and it was impossible to break into because it was protected by a series of firewalls.
Peter hung up the phone. How on earth did someone break in?
"Peter," said Ruthie, stepping out of the bathroom, "look at this."
Peter walked back to the bathroom. He saw his wife pointing up to the ceiling. The fan cover was slightly out of flush, and a bolt had been removed. That bolt, along with the nut which held the bolt from inside the ceiling, was on the floor about a foot away from the left side of the scrawled message. He then checked the "hers" drawer under the sink. The only thing that was missing was the bottle of lip gloss, which Peter had gotten for her before the honeymoon and which cost over $20 because of the unusual color.
"So that's it," said Ruthie. "That's how all those poor couples have gotten attacked. They used the ductwork!"
"I think someone would've noticed someone else crawling through that," said Peter. "Anyone having sex would hear that over their beds."
"They're pretty well insulated, to carry the steam out," said Ruthie.
"But how would they know what rooms those couples are staying in?"
"Simple phone call, saying there's urgent message for a relative, and a return number. They call back, get a reply saying they're the third cousin of the twice removed cousin of whomever, congratulations, and oh, by the way, can we wire you a honeymoon bouquet to your suite? They give out the room number, bang."
"This is Hawaii, Ruthie," said Peter. "The roaming charges must be enormous if the return number is on the mainland."
"I don't think the motive is money, Peter. I think it's about my side of the family." She chose her words carefully as Peter was now, technically, a member of the Camdens too.
"What about Shelby and Rod?" asked Peter. "I don't think anyone could break into the military hotel without ID."
"Which is why they were mugged in front of it," replied Ruthie. "I know it's crazy, and it's going to drive Lucy and Roxanne crazy, but we've got to call them right away. Now we know this guy's after us, whoever he is, and we're going to have to be careful."
"Don't you think it'd be just better to cancel the rest of our trip, go back to the mainland, and use the money we get back to find a place where we can really hide?"
"That's what he wants us to do," said the wife, pointing to the writing on the mirror. "No, it's a trap. We're going back to Oahu, tonight. We'll take the last plane out. It's in the air long enough so we just have enough time to have a glass of genuine Hawaiian pineapple juice, but we need to get back to where it all started. Retrace our steps. See if we – you and I – stumbled over something from the moment we got here. We need to think like this guy would."
"I'll call front desk again. No, wait a minute," said Peter. He took his wife by his hand and into the bedroom. Turning up the radio so no one could hear (it didn't matter, for all the neighboring guests were at a luau at that time), Peter whispered to his wife to go downstairs, use a payphone, and book a couple of seats with the names Michael and Reese San Quentin. Payment would be in cash upon arrival at the airport, he told her to tell the reservation clerk, and no questions should be asked. Ruthie slipped her room key, gently kissed her husband on the lips, gathered her belongings and tiptoed out of the room, taking the maintenance elevator as an extra precaution.
Meanwhile, Peter turned on the TV again. Dialing up the room account, he selected the on screen display for room checkout. He took his luggage and personal effects, placed the other key into the front shirt pocket, and walked out the door, non-chalant, taking the fire escape. The alarm did not go off as it was designed to do, for a signal received at the front desk when he had make his selection set off a silent alarm at the front desk saying something had gone wrong and the guests known as Mr. and Mrs. Alcatraz needed to get out, now.
This was a coded message that only Peter knew about and that Roxie had given the night before. He didn't even tell his wife what was going on. It hurt him that he had to hide something so important from her; but since she was the one that was being targeted and he quickly realized that her life was more precious than his own, especially if there was any chance that their honeymoon might produce a child to carry on the Camden and Petrovsky blood lines.
Both his panic alarm and her call to the airline were all the cops needed. By the time Peter and Ruthie met again in the lobby, the concierge was already there, taking the keys from Peter's pocket and saying the room was complimentary. Moments later, not one but two SWAT armored vehicles pulled up in front of the hotel. Ruthie was rushed into the first truck, Peter into the second, while their luggage was driven by a third police vehicle, unmarked. A specially chartered private jet was waiting to take them back.
Apparently, the police were taking no chances with the couple; for as Ruthie and Peter were about to learn, about noon that day two more couples had been found; one was murdered, the other was badly shot and left for dead but miraculously still alive. The murdered couple was a close friend of Ruthie's, Lynn Hamilton and her boyfriend Tyler, the kid whose mother had a problem with the IRS. They were staying on the island of Molokai. The survivors were Kevin and Ben's sister, Patty Mary Kinkirk and her new husband. The FBI G-woman hesitated.
"Who?" asked Ruthie. "Who is he?'
"You're not going to believe this," said the Fibbie. "It's your uncle, George Grayson."
Ruthie and Peter were so shocked at this one they didn't even bother at first to ask how Patty Mary and George managed to survive the attack. Ruthie and her husband each grabbed a whole pitcher of grapefruit juice and managed to drink them down in one gulp.
"Patty Mary? I thought she swore off the idea of getting married," said Ruthie, still in shock.
"So did I!" said Peter.
"George was on business for the IRS back in Buffalo, handling a tax appeal, when he ran into a clerk who works at the Buffalo office. She's a mutual friend of both Patty Mary, who also works for the IRS, and George's, and she set them up on a blind date. I think she's what, a couple years older than him, but they hit it off. They actually got married a year or so ago, but they've only gotten around to a honeymoon now because they were waiting for her to be transferred to the West Coast, where he works."
"But Patty Mary's my sister-in-law, and George is my uncle," said Ruthie, "so my sister-in-law's now also my aunt, which makes me her niece and her sister-in-law. When they have children ..."
"They're going to be both your cousins and your nieces or nephews ..." added Peter.
"And since George is Dad's and Julie's brother, which makes him what? His own grandfather?" finished Ruthie sarcastically.
"We'll get to that later," said Peter, waving his hand. "What happened to them?"
"Gunshot wound," said the fed. "He snuck into the room, via the ductwork, and was lying in wait inside the closet. He shot them while they were having sex, aiming for both their heads. Except they decided to switch positions at that moment, and he got them both in their thighs. They'll be okay, but they're in shock more than anything. Good thing they called the cops when they did, because they were both losing a lot of blood."
"Did you get fingerprints?" asked Ruthie.
"Place is clean. He was using racing gloves," replied the cop. "But we have the bullets. Preliminary forensics show they come from a gun barrel with five turns, instead of the usual six. We called ATF and they're running a check on all the registered owners of those guns, see if any have been reported lost or stolen recently. That's a start. It's the first real break we've had in this case, in fact."
Peter and Ruthie sank in their seats. They both had the feeling someone was looking out for them, but they couldn't figure out why they had escaped being attacked, and how long it was going to be before they were really targeted.
Five thousand miles away, at their new home in Chicago, Simon Camden and Deena Stewart had just put their daughter, three year old Annie Janice, to bed. Simon was working for the Chicago Film Office, while Deena had gotten a job as a photographer for the mid-west region of a newspaper chain. After having finally settled down, Simon and his wife decided the time was right to have another baby. That morning, Deena had learned she was pregnant again. She and her husband were so ecstatic that they decided to make love that night just for the sake of making love.
They went through the usual motions. As Simon brought her to climax, his eyes closed as he was grunting, Deena opened her eyes and started screaming, "Oh my God – oh, my God!"
"I'm not there yet, sweetheart," said Simon, gently grabbing her hips. Then, a second later, "Now I am."
"No, honey," said Deena, rolling to her side and pushing her husband off of her, "not that." She laid herself back down and paused for a moment, while she gently moaned and her body shook. Then she sat up, her bosom facing Simon.
"It just occurred to me. It's all those couples in Hawaii you've been telling me about, and about Ruthie and Peter. They've got it all wrong. It's not about your family, it's about Peter. I think I know who's doing it, and why."
Peter and Ruthie were tickling each other all the way back from the golf course to their hotel in Maui, more than ready to make love yet again once they hit their room. But first, they had to get some supper and she needed to freshen up.
Sliding the key card for their room and opening the door, Ruthie gently pried off her husband (who had a hard time letting her go) and immediately headed for the bathroom. What she saw next caused her not to gasp or scream, but merely to moan in a very low pitch.
Sensing instinctively that something was wrong, Peter knocked on the door which Ruthie had locked. It took about ten seconds before his wife opened it, for she had slid to the floor and had to sit back up, reaching behind her to unlatch the lock. It was still dark, but the fan was running.
Peter turned on the light. Ruthie had moved to one side of the bathroom. Still sitting down, she motioned to the mirror about the marble sink. On it, there was a message written with a color that he recognized as Ruthie's lip gloss. It said:
YOU CAN'T RUN, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE. WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM WILL HAPPEN TO YOU. GO HOME, NOW.
"Don't touch anything," said Peter. "Don't shower. Don't freshen up. Don't even brush your teeth. Don't even remove the snot from the corners of your eyes. There's something I have to check."
Immediately, Peter ran out of the bathroom and started looking around. The room was in perfect shape. The balcony door had not been forced open, the bed sheets were freshly changed, the carpet vacuumed. The luggage had not been forced into, nor had the Gideon Bible been swiped from the bed stand. Peter turned on the TV, and logged into his and his wife's room account. No one had made any orders for any movies, erotic or otherwise, while they were out.
Peter called the front desk. Knowing that the hotel kept records of when card keys were swiped, he asked when the room had last been entered into. It was exactly two minutes after he and Ruthie had left – and the cleaning had been done by specially trained officers from the 5-0, who were also sweeping the room for bugs and anything else that someone untoward could use to harm Peter and Ruthie. Before he asked, the front desk clerk assured him the door lock system was impossible to hack into, period. They were controlled by a central computer at the regional office for the hotel chain in Honolulu, and it was impossible to break into because it was protected by a series of firewalls.
Peter hung up the phone. How on earth did someone break in?
"Peter," said Ruthie, stepping out of the bathroom, "look at this."
Peter walked back to the bathroom. He saw his wife pointing up to the ceiling. The fan cover was slightly out of flush, and a bolt had been removed. That bolt, along with the nut which held the bolt from inside the ceiling, was on the floor about a foot away from the left side of the scrawled message. He then checked the "hers" drawer under the sink. The only thing that was missing was the bottle of lip gloss, which Peter had gotten for her before the honeymoon and which cost over $20 because of the unusual color.
"So that's it," said Ruthie. "That's how all those poor couples have gotten attacked. They used the ductwork!"
"I think someone would've noticed someone else crawling through that," said Peter. "Anyone having sex would hear that over their beds."
"They're pretty well insulated, to carry the steam out," said Ruthie.
"But how would they know what rooms those couples are staying in?"
"Simple phone call, saying there's urgent message for a relative, and a return number. They call back, get a reply saying they're the third cousin of the twice removed cousin of whomever, congratulations, and oh, by the way, can we wire you a honeymoon bouquet to your suite? They give out the room number, bang."
"This is Hawaii, Ruthie," said Peter. "The roaming charges must be enormous if the return number is on the mainland."
"I don't think the motive is money, Peter. I think it's about my side of the family." She chose her words carefully as Peter was now, technically, a member of the Camdens too.
"What about Shelby and Rod?" asked Peter. "I don't think anyone could break into the military hotel without ID."
"Which is why they were mugged in front of it," replied Ruthie. "I know it's crazy, and it's going to drive Lucy and Roxanne crazy, but we've got to call them right away. Now we know this guy's after us, whoever he is, and we're going to have to be careful."
"Don't you think it'd be just better to cancel the rest of our trip, go back to the mainland, and use the money we get back to find a place where we can really hide?"
"That's what he wants us to do," said the wife, pointing to the writing on the mirror. "No, it's a trap. We're going back to Oahu, tonight. We'll take the last plane out. It's in the air long enough so we just have enough time to have a glass of genuine Hawaiian pineapple juice, but we need to get back to where it all started. Retrace our steps. See if we – you and I – stumbled over something from the moment we got here. We need to think like this guy would."
"I'll call front desk again. No, wait a minute," said Peter. He took his wife by his hand and into the bedroom. Turning up the radio so no one could hear (it didn't matter, for all the neighboring guests were at a luau at that time), Peter whispered to his wife to go downstairs, use a payphone, and book a couple of seats with the names Michael and Reese San Quentin. Payment would be in cash upon arrival at the airport, he told her to tell the reservation clerk, and no questions should be asked. Ruthie slipped her room key, gently kissed her husband on the lips, gathered her belongings and tiptoed out of the room, taking the maintenance elevator as an extra precaution.
Meanwhile, Peter turned on the TV again. Dialing up the room account, he selected the on screen display for room checkout. He took his luggage and personal effects, placed the other key into the front shirt pocket, and walked out the door, non-chalant, taking the fire escape. The alarm did not go off as it was designed to do, for a signal received at the front desk when he had make his selection set off a silent alarm at the front desk saying something had gone wrong and the guests known as Mr. and Mrs. Alcatraz needed to get out, now.
This was a coded message that only Peter knew about and that Roxie had given the night before. He didn't even tell his wife what was going on. It hurt him that he had to hide something so important from her; but since she was the one that was being targeted and he quickly realized that her life was more precious than his own, especially if there was any chance that their honeymoon might produce a child to carry on the Camden and Petrovsky blood lines.
Both his panic alarm and her call to the airline were all the cops needed. By the time Peter and Ruthie met again in the lobby, the concierge was already there, taking the keys from Peter's pocket and saying the room was complimentary. Moments later, not one but two SWAT armored vehicles pulled up in front of the hotel. Ruthie was rushed into the first truck, Peter into the second, while their luggage was driven by a third police vehicle, unmarked. A specially chartered private jet was waiting to take them back.
Apparently, the police were taking no chances with the couple; for as Ruthie and Peter were about to learn, about noon that day two more couples had been found; one was murdered, the other was badly shot and left for dead but miraculously still alive. The murdered couple was a close friend of Ruthie's, Lynn Hamilton and her boyfriend Tyler, the kid whose mother had a problem with the IRS. They were staying on the island of Molokai. The survivors were Kevin and Ben's sister, Patty Mary Kinkirk and her new husband. The FBI G-woman hesitated.
"Who?" asked Ruthie. "Who is he?'
"You're not going to believe this," said the Fibbie. "It's your uncle, George Grayson."
Ruthie and Peter were so shocked at this one they didn't even bother at first to ask how Patty Mary and George managed to survive the attack. Ruthie and her husband each grabbed a whole pitcher of grapefruit juice and managed to drink them down in one gulp.
"Patty Mary? I thought she swore off the idea of getting married," said Ruthie, still in shock.
"So did I!" said Peter.
"George was on business for the IRS back in Buffalo, handling a tax appeal, when he ran into a clerk who works at the Buffalo office. She's a mutual friend of both Patty Mary, who also works for the IRS, and George's, and she set them up on a blind date. I think she's what, a couple years older than him, but they hit it off. They actually got married a year or so ago, but they've only gotten around to a honeymoon now because they were waiting for her to be transferred to the West Coast, where he works."
"But Patty Mary's my sister-in-law, and George is my uncle," said Ruthie, "so my sister-in-law's now also my aunt, which makes me her niece and her sister-in-law. When they have children ..."
"They're going to be both your cousins and your nieces or nephews ..." added Peter.
"And since George is Dad's and Julie's brother, which makes him what? His own grandfather?" finished Ruthie sarcastically.
"We'll get to that later," said Peter, waving his hand. "What happened to them?"
"Gunshot wound," said the fed. "He snuck into the room, via the ductwork, and was lying in wait inside the closet. He shot them while they were having sex, aiming for both their heads. Except they decided to switch positions at that moment, and he got them both in their thighs. They'll be okay, but they're in shock more than anything. Good thing they called the cops when they did, because they were both losing a lot of blood."
"Did you get fingerprints?" asked Ruthie.
"Place is clean. He was using racing gloves," replied the cop. "But we have the bullets. Preliminary forensics show they come from a gun barrel with five turns, instead of the usual six. We called ATF and they're running a check on all the registered owners of those guns, see if any have been reported lost or stolen recently. That's a start. It's the first real break we've had in this case, in fact."
Peter and Ruthie sank in their seats. They both had the feeling someone was looking out for them, but they couldn't figure out why they had escaped being attacked, and how long it was going to be before they were really targeted.
Five thousand miles away, at their new home in Chicago, Simon Camden and Deena Stewart had just put their daughter, three year old Annie Janice, to bed. Simon was working for the Chicago Film Office, while Deena had gotten a job as a photographer for the mid-west region of a newspaper chain. After having finally settled down, Simon and his wife decided the time was right to have another baby. That morning, Deena had learned she was pregnant again. She and her husband were so ecstatic that they decided to make love that night just for the sake of making love.
They went through the usual motions. As Simon brought her to climax, his eyes closed as he was grunting, Deena opened her eyes and started screaming, "Oh my God – oh, my God!"
"I'm not there yet, sweetheart," said Simon, gently grabbing her hips. Then, a second later, "Now I am."
"No, honey," said Deena, rolling to her side and pushing her husband off of her, "not that." She laid herself back down and paused for a moment, while she gently moaned and her body shook. Then she sat up, her bosom facing Simon.
"It just occurred to me. It's all those couples in Hawaii you've been telling me about, and about Ruthie and Peter. They've got it all wrong. It's not about your family, it's about Peter. I think I know who's doing it, and why."