"What's the situation in front of the house?" Nikki peered cautiously through the slats of her blinds from the upstairs bedroom window.
"All quiet. Just a few residents, but no vehicles in sight."
Everything had to happen very quickly. Nikki went to her house immediately after Marvin's call and spoke with Nick while driving. He, in turn, had spoken to Ashlyn immediately. It was proven that the man who had told Mike and Nikki his name was Marvin Decker, and he was directly connected to Esther Wallace. It was also indisputable that he had gained the trust of Mike and Nikki by claiming a fictitious identity before the murders and kidnappings and had manipulated them into involving Elizabeth in the investigation. The fact that he had been active on the darknet with illegal activities from Nikki's house still couldn't be proven. Still, the suspicion had been enough to obtain an arrest warrant initially issued for Lennox Wallace. But even the officers, waiting for Marvin to arrive at Nikki's house, only to catch Lennox's twin, could take him to the BPS to establish his identity.
"It's not your fault." Mike sat at the foot of the bed and frowned a little.
"What isn't my fault?" She stepped away from the window again.
"We all would have fallen for it; it's human. I fell for it. Don't blame yourself for it; it was all his fault."
Nikki was about to reflexively claim that she wasn't blaming herself at all, but of course, that would have been a lie, and her husband would have known it.
"It's not so much the disappointment that once again we couldn't find anyone outside the BPD who wanted to be friends with us... with me. The friendship was so perfect that something inside me always thought it couldn't be true anyway. It seemed to me that we weren't good enough for Marvin. The fear that he would soon realize this and turn away from us often offsets the feeling of happiness."
Mike took a deep breath and gritted his teeth. "What is it then that you are thinking about?"
"I think it's the shame of being taken for a ride and not even realizing it. All this time, we were just a damn tool that he used to finally get his hands on his kidnapper from twenty years ago. And that's not all! He didn't even trust me to do it; he just used me to ask Ma for help. He was just doing his job. To keep us functioning as his pawns, he pretended to be a close friend, a confidant. Mike, I had revealed my innermost thoughts to him in the garden many evenings when you were still at work, and I trusted him almost unconditionally. He knows my fears, my dreams, and my vulnerabilities. I feel so stupid and dirty. It's as if I fell for a marriage swindler. How am I supposed to protect other people from criminals and murderers if I fall for them as soon as they say nice things?"
Mike gritted his teeth and took a deep breath. Then he looked at his wife with understanding and warmth in his eyes before replying. "Trust makes us vulnerable, Nikki. Because trust requires us to drop our protective armor. Strictly speaking, trust is one of the worst things that can happen to us. Those who trust run into a burning house without thinking, even though they would be safe outside. Those who trust reveal secrets and desires that could be used against them anytime. They give without taking and forgive things that are actually unforgivable. Honestly, I wouldn't be able to explain to an alien why people indulge in this feeling repeatedly. Complete trust is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. You know the impact is coming, but you still take it to enjoy the exhilaration until then."
Nikki had to smile for the duration of a blink of an eye, even though she didn't really feel like it.
Mike stood up and took his wife in his arms, hugging her tightly without saying another word.
She closed her eyes and enjoyed this moment of security, breathing deeply in Mike's scent.
"Vehicle approaching from the south," it sounded in her in-ear.
Nikki broke away from Mike, who retreated into the hallway without a word and with a quick movement. She answered the colleague, sitting on a park bench opposite her house in civilian clothes and accompanied by a dog, pretending to read a book.
"What kind of car is it?"
"A white Hyundai with Boston license plates."
Nikki's heartbeat quickened. That was definitely Marvin's car. It was quite possible to her that he had also bought this car mainly for his undercover operation.
"Okay, that's him. Let him go into the house normally; we can't risk a shootout on the street. Then secure the escape routes; Mike and I will grab him here."
"Roger that!"
Then, there was radio silence. Nikki crept past Mike into her bathroom and looked out of the window facing the backyard. The RRT officer securing this escape route was in position.
"We'll wait until he's in the kitchen," Nikki whispered to her husband. 'Then he'll be trapped.'
There was the sound of a key being turned in the lock. Mike and Nikki drew their service weapons almost simultaneously, released the safeties, and immediately fell silent.
The door was opened, and footsteps sounded in the hallway.
Nikki waited for Marvin to hang his jacket in the locker audibly, but nothing was heard. Instead, the sound of footsteps continued until Marvin apparently stopped moving. Nikki and Mike looked at each other in wonder. Finally, Nikki indicated to her husband that she had an idea. She put her gun back in its holster and slowly descended the stairs.
"Marv, is that you?" Her call sounded almost loving. 'Please don't be alarmed, I've come home early!'
She walked down the stairs with sure steps, heading quickly for the kitchen. Just before she would have reached Marvin, she said, 'Did you --' She broke off her sentence.
She had reached the kitchen, but what she saw now left her speechless. She looked her counterpart in the eye with helplessness, but just as she was about to ask something, the rumble of Mike, who rushed down the stairs, followed by his resounding call: "BPD! Hands up and on your knees!"
xxx
"It's okay, Mike. It's okay!" Nikki gestured with a reassuring hand movement so that he could think of his service weapon before she looked sternly at the young man standing before her with shaky knees. "Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my house?"
The teenage boy, no older than nineteen, stared at Mike with wide, pale eyes, threw up his hands, and immediately sank to his knees. "Please don't shoot, Lennox sent me! He gave me the key and his car."
Nikki took a deep breath, rolled her eyes, and announced, "We have the wrong guy; abort the operation. I repeat, abort the operation." Then she turned to the teenager. "All right, tell me: what's happening here, and who are you?"
She held out her hand to the boy, who took it after a moment's hesitation. While she helped the stranger off the floor, Mike put his gun back in its holster and folded his arms across his chest, looking stern.
"My name's Luca Wolfe, and I work in the studios on weekends. I sell drinks and popcorn there. Lennox is one of our presenters, so we know each other. He sometimes comes by during show breaks, and then we chat a little. He gave me fifty dollars to come here."
Nikki began to understand. After she had told Marvin that morning that she was close on his heels, he had initially disabled his cell phone. But then he had apparently wanted to find out if he had been found out. He had allowed Nikki to set a trap for him with his call to test this. After that, he just had to send an unsuspecting student, who had a similar hair color, height, and build, as bait to find out if she had caught on to him.
Okay, this is all going really well. But there is still time!
"Where is Lennox now?" Nikki looked at the student sternly but without hostility.
"Well, he gave me his car just before I left work at the studios. Maybe he's still there. You're Detective O'Laighin?"
"Yes, I am. Did he say anything about me when he sent you here?"
The teenager nodded uneasily. "He said I should call him when I got to your apartment. And that I should give you the cell phone if I ran into you."
Nikki weighed the situation briefly. "All right, as you probably gathered, this is a police operation. You'll call him and tell him I'm not at home. And that you haven't noticed anything special here. Then you'll ask him where he is. So you can return his car."
The student's gaze changed as if he had confessed to Nikki that he had just smashed a vase from her grandmother's inheritance with a football. "Unfortunately, I can't do that..." His voice became hoarse and cracked, and his gaze shifted in shame.
Mike now spoke up, asking in a brusque voice, "Why not? If you don't want to tell the truth to your buddies here, then you're going down for accessory after the fact!"
The teenager looked as if he wanted to cry; the situation seemed to overwhelm him completely. With a shaky hand, he slowly reached into his pocket without jerking, and a smartphone was clearly visible. Under the watchful eyes of Nikki and Mike, he pulled it out and held it out to the two detectives while he said almost imploringly, "It's not possible because he told me to make the call before I went into the house. He heard everything."
Nikki looked at Mike, whose expression needed no interpretation. She took a deep breath, gathered herself, and took the cell phone from the teenager. "All right, now with open cards. What do you want to tell me, Marvin? Or Lennox, I don't know."
Only heavy breathing could be heard on the other end of the line for a second. Then came the voice that Nikki had always thought of as kind. "My name is Carl, but I'm sure you've figured that out by now. Anyway, you're apparently beginning to understand all of this. The big picture, the game of cause and effect. I'm the effect. But as you've probably realized by now, this is about the cause. I have the seven boys, and I have your brother Benjamin. Now that you know who I am, I have lost my cover. And that means that, unfortunately, I am now short of time!"
Nikki closed her eyes and bowed her head. 'So, what do you want?'
"I'm going to pull a lever. After that, the boys have a maximum of two hours to live before they die miserably. I'm going all in now, all or nothing! In two hours, your ingenious mother must have found out who kidnapped me and Dennis twenty years ago and murdered our wonderful parents. You can have me; I don't intend to escape. From now on, it's only about the eight guys. Solve this mystery now, after twenty years, within two hours – or let eight innocent people die!"
xxx
"What do we do now?" Mike looked at his wife with a worried expression.
They had sent the teenager to the BPD with officers so the young man could make his statement at the station. For Nikki and Mike, on the other hand, it was now a matter of quickly finding answers to crucial questions.
"Mom's not answering her cell or her landline. She's not answering her email or WhatsApp either. And frankly, I don't think she'll get back to us." Nikki was still frantically typing on her smartphone.
"How could you keep it to yourself that your brother was kidnapped?" Mike had rarely sounded so stern.
Nikki made a movement that seemed both dismissive and helpless. "I know it myself; that was against every rule. But Marvin, or whatever this guy's name is, doesn't play by the rules either. And as Esther Wallace's adopted son, he knows enough about our work that we can only catch him if we act as he expects. He assumed that Ben's abduction would force Ma into the ring. And that's exactly what he didn't get!"
"Dude, that's totally insane!" Mike looked disgusted. Liz is letting her own son down for tactical reasons? What the hell is wrong with her?"
"I'm sure she's planning something. I'm just a little afraid of what it is. Mom seriously thinks that I can solve this case on my own, but how am I supposed to do it in two hours?" She broke off her sentence, and there was only tense silence in the room.
"If Marvin is so sure that you can solve the old case in two hours, then maybe he assumes that you know something that you just haven't appropriately evaluated yet," Mike started again.
Nikki held her hand to her husband to ward off further words. Her thoughts had begun to flow, and she had no interest in being interrupted in her realization by external influences. Finally, she began to speak, even though it undoubtedly sounded to Mike as if she were talking to herself.
"The question we must answer within two hours is not who kidnapped Carl and Dennis. We haven't heard of it for twenty years and have no new information on the subject. Marvin – that is, Carl – knows that he's been caught and is putting massive pressure on us again because he's blindly hoping that Ma can conjure up the solution out of thin air if only her son is threatened. We must not invest a minute of our time in this whole complex! So now we have to define what our real question is."
"And I suppose you already have an answer to that?" Mike spoke softly, almost as if afraid of interrupting his wife's train of thought.
"The only question we need to answer is: Where did he hide the boys?"
Mike shrugged. "But we've been searching for them with a large force for weeks. Why should we be able to do it so quickly suddenly?"
Nikki grinned from ear to ear. "Because Marvin just gave me some valuable information about it. Probably just out of carelessness, it was a hard day for him after all." She stood up and began pacing back and forth in her living room. Her gaze was unfocused, and her paths were directionless. It was as if she wanted everything in and around her in a continuous flow that she hoped would ultimately wash the gold from the bottom of the lake to the shore. "He handed over his car to that teenager at the studios. The site is industrial, and you can only get away without a car using a shuttle bus. But I can't imagine that he will use it. Now, at the climax of his insane plan, he's not going to get on the damn bus and chug through Boston. No, he wants to stay close to the boys. After all, he doesn't actually want to kill them, so he has to be able to stop the countdown at any time. I'm sure he's still at Unirealm Entertainment Studios! The huge, winding area offers hundreds of opportunities to hide. Especially for him, he has been there for years. He can easily hide on the premises for two hours without us finding him. But now comes the most important information he has given me."
Nikki looked at Mike and noticed that he was looking at her intently. She had led the investigation with great passion and dedication from day one, but what was going on in her mind now felt to Nikki as if her brain was a slot machine that had hit the jackpot and was constantly throwing out coins.
"Come on, what did he tell you?" Mike was visibly getting restless.
"He said, 'I'm going to pull a lever now. After that, the boys have a maximum of two hours to live before they die miserably. I don't think it was intentional for him to give me that detail. He was totally nervous, ready to do anything, ready to kill innocents. I think he's desperate and didn't weigh his words carefully."
Mike looked up at the ceiling, his way of focusing. "If he has the guys at Unirealm Entertainment Studios, then there must be a place where they can't be heard for two weeks or found by the cleaning crew or anyone else. He has to be able to rely on that completely; he couldn't risk anything. And it has to be a hiding place that can be turned into a deathtrap by simply flipping a switch, but that doesn't kill for another two hours."
"You said it!" Nikki jumped up and gave her husband a big hug. "Carl knows every rock on this property and is well-liked at Unirealm Entertainment Studios. They feed him information and let him into restricted areas. And above all, he is friends with the head of the stunt team! We need to get in touch with Paul Moore immediately and get into Unirealm Entertainment Studios!" She patted Mike's chest as if he were a racehorse and needed motivation to get going.
"So where is he hiding the guys?" Mike looked at Nikki questioningly.
"Sokolov said: If you want something to go unnoticed, you should do it publicly. Carl seems to agree!"