The Stranger(93)
Gabrielle: “I didn’t sign up for kidnapping.”
“Will you all just stay calm?” But even the stranger now sounded on edge. “We need to find out what happened to Ingrid.”
Adam winced and said, “I don’t know what happened to Ingrid.”
They all turned toward him.
“You’re a liar,” Merton said.
“You need to listen to—”
Merton cut him off with another kick to the ribs. Adam’s face landed back on the hard concrete. He tried to crawl into a protective ball, tried again to free his hands so that they could cradle his aching head.
“Stop it, Merton!”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Adam managed.
“Right, sure.” It was Merton. Adam tried to tighten up his protective ball in case another kick was coming. “And I suppose you didn’t ask Gabrielle about Chris either, right?”
Chris. He knew the man’s first name.
“Back up,” Chris—the stranger—said. He moved closer to Adam and said, “You started searching for Ingrid and me, right?”
Adam nodded.
“And you found Ingrid first.”
“Just her name.”
“What?”
“I found her name.”
“How?”
“Where’s my wife?”
Chris frowned. “Excuse me?”
“I said—”
“No, I heard you.” He looked back toward Gabrielle. “Why would we know where your wife is?”
“You started this,” Adam said. He struggled up into a sitting position. He knew that he was in deep trouble here, that his life was in danger, but he also knew that these people were amateurs. The stench of their fear was everywhere. The bike chain was loosening. He was starting to work his wrists free. That might help, if he could get Merton and his gun close. “You came at me first.”
“So, what, you wanted revenge? Is that what this is about?”
“No,” Adam said. “But I know what you do now.”
“Oh?”
“You learn something compromising about a person. Then you blackmail them.”
“You’re wrong,” Chris said.
“You blackmailed Suzanne Hope about her faking a pregnancy. When she didn’t pay up, you told her husband, just like you told me.”
“How did you know about Suzanne Hope?”
Merton, who was the most frightened and thus the most dangerous of all of them, shouted, “He’s been spying on all of us!”
“She was friends with my wife,” Adam said.
“Ah, I should have seen that,” Chris said with a nod. “So Suzanne Hope was the one who referred Corinne to the site?”
“Yes.”
“What Suzanne did—what your wife did—it’s a horrible thing, don’t you think? You see, the Internet makes it easy to be deceptive. The Internet makes it easy to be anonymous and to lie and to keep terrible, destructive secrets from your loved ones. We”—he opened his hand, indicated his group—“are just evening the playing field a little bit.”
Adam almost smiled. “Is that what you tell yourself?”
“It’s the truth. Take your wife, for example. The Fake-A-Pregnancy site, like all those sites, promises to be discreet, and she thought because it’s online and makes that silly promise that no one would ever know. But do you really believe anything is truly anonymous? And I’m not talking about some kind of spooky governmental NSA thing. I’m talking about human beings. Do you really think that everything is that automated, that there aren’t employees who can access your credit card information or your browsing history?” He smiled at Adam. “Do you really think anything is truly a secret?”
“Chris? That’s your name, right?”
“Right.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Adam said. “I care about my wife.”
“And I told you the truth about her. I opened your eyes. You should be grateful to me. Instead, you hunted us down. And when you found Ingrid—”
“I told you. I didn’t find her. I searched for you, that’s all.”
“Why? Did you check the link that I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“And then you checked your Visa bill. You knew that what I told you was the truth, right?”
“Right.”
“So—”
“She’s missing.”
“Who?” Chris frowned. “Your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Wait, when you say she’s missing, did you confront her with what I told you?”
Adam said nothing.
“And then, what, she ran off or something?”
“Corinne didn’t just run off.”