Chapter 8 - THE MAN WHO DROVE THE CAR
Police arrested Anthony before he reached the airport shuttle.
He denied kidnapping anyone. He denied knowing Claire. Then Rachel placed a photograph of the crashed car on the table.
Anthony stopped talking.
His lawyer arrived. Three hours later, Anthony began giving a statement.
Vincent had hired him to follow Isabella and recover the ledger. Anthony and another man stopped Isabella after she left the diner. Claire had followed in her own car when Isabella failed to answer her calls.
“Claire saw us take her,” Anthony said. “She came toward us yelling that she’d called the police.”
“What happened to her?” Rachel asked.
Anthony stared at the table. “The other guy grabbed her. I was putting Isabella in the SUV. I heard Claire fall.”
“Was she alive?”
“When I left, yes.”
“Who put her in Isabella’s car?”
Anthony closed his eyes. “I don’t know. Vincent told me later there’d been an accident.”
Rachel knew he was holding something back. Still, his account gave investigators places to search and people to question.
He also told them Isabella had escaped from a locked house eleven days after the crash. She took Bruno, who had been kept in an outside kennel. Vincent had become furious when the search failed.
“Why didn’t she call her husband?” Rachel asked.
Anthony looked at Lorenzo through the interview-room glass.
“Vincent told her we had somebody watching his house. He said if she contacted him, the housekeeper and her little girl would pay for it.”
Lorenzo’s hands closed into fists.
Rachel stepped out of the room. “Go home.”
“Vincent’s still free.”
“We’re building the case. Don’t give him a reason to disappear before we have everything.”
Lorenzo walked out without answering. On the way to his car, an unknown number called.
He picked up.
For a few seconds, he heard traffic and a dog panting.
Then a woman’s voice said, “Lorenzo?”
His knees nearly gave out.
“Isabella. Where are you?”
May you like
A sharp sound came through the phone. Isabella whispered, “Don’t trust—”
The call ended.
