Chapter Four: The Kidnapping
Baz froze, suddenly more awake.
Rei was missing?
"Okay..."
Baz hit speakerphone, letting Jasper talk while he scrolled through Twitter for some kind of news article on the subject.
"What did you do last night?" Jasper repeated, his pitch rising. "Give me your play-by-play."
"I got on the elevator, ran into a friend of Rei's that wasn't twice my age and who I haven't robbed. We talked. She offered to show me around. We killed some time in the library..."
Jasper groaned. He'd seen enough evidence of that.
Baz continued, "she had to make a speech and went to check her makeup or something. I waltzed right into the master bedroom, grabbed the box. I had to hide in the closet while Rei had an argument with her brother. They left. I snuck up to the roof and peaced out."
End of story, except that it wasn't. Rei Collingwood Missing was indeed a headline. Baz clicked.
"You just found the box?" Jasper asked.
"It was sitting on her nightstand."
Baz skimmed the article. Jasper had a good reason for asking.
While it's too early for police to confirm, there is strong suspicion of foul play and kidnapping in Collingwood's disappearance. The bedroom of her penthouse suite in Fairlane Place's Hillside complex was ransacked during a fundraiser hosted in the residence last night.
"Baz," Jasper pressed.
"Have I ever ransacked a place?" Baz protested, "it wasn't me. Rei was in there after I grabbed it. I think she would've noticed if I tossed all her shit around."
The line was silent for a moment. Jasper couldn't deny that Baz always did a clean job. Half the time, once he found his way in, usually an open second-level window, all he had to do was punch in the security code Jasper provided and it was a free-for-all. No one ever hid their prized Roman papyrus scrolls. They kept them in plain sight to get dinner guests talking. Only once did Baz accidentally crack a mirror in a jewelry box while he shimmed the lock to get to a brooch.
"You didn't touch anything?" Jasper asked.
"It was a party. Of course I touched things, but so did a hundred other people there." Baz forced himself out of bed, teeth gritting at the uncooperative muscles protesting.
"Did you leave anything behind?"
"I kicked my shoes off the roof, if someone manages to somehow connect that to the party," Baz said.
"You can't be serious."
"I rappeled down the damn building. Was I supposed to do that in black tie dress?"
It had been an easy choice to make at the time. He was never going to wear a tuxedo again if he could help it and leaving behind those specks of evidence never seemed consequential. No one at that party knew who he was, not even Gwen. They may have been able to give a description of him, but where would they start looking?
Would there even be an investigation for a box? It wasn't old enough to be a relic of historical relevance. Knock-offs were available in the Japanese market, in gift shops even.
A kidnapping, though... A kidnapping of a daughter from a prominent family would definitely be investigated. It wasn't a good night to get sloppy.
"This one's on you," Jasper said.
"Excuse me?" Baz said.
"If the police find traces of you there, who do you think will be their prime suspect? If you don't find her first, they'll find you."
Baz was not awake enough to comprehend.
"I'm not a private investigator. I'm pretty much the opposite, actually," Baz protested, but it was too weak to be persuasive. Jasper was right. It would be easy to lump any evidence of him together into the leads on Rei's disappearance. Her family would put the pressure on. The cops could easily jump to conclusions.
"Do you have a better solution?" Jasper asked.
"No," Baz said. Finding Rei Collingwood sounded like an impossible task, but Baz was supposedly a master of impossible tasks. He could find his way through this one. He could ensure it wouldn't be his neck on the chopping block. It would not be Baz enduring hours of low-key police brutality while they asked him over and over again a question he wouldn't be able to answer: where is she?
Easy solution. Learn the answer before anyone asked him in particular.
"Fix this," Jasper said. He hung up. That was the end of that.
#
Every once in a while, Baz regretted not having a car. It was one of those days. Each push of the pedals came hard and painful. On the plus side, it at least got his body working again, a little looser than he'd woke up.
He hopped off in front of a gym in a neighborhood Baz liked to describe as 'up and coming' instead of... any of the other words people used to describe it. Baz's sliver of Temperance was more renovated industrial property than shiny custom mansions and he liked it that way.
Baz punched the door code to get in, but even he wasn't intense enough to consider getting a workout.
"Baz! The hell you do, man?" Barely a step in the door and Diego Vega was already pulling him into a back-slapping half-hug that tried to knock him over and succeeded in knocking the wind out of him.
Diego's physique was advertisement enough for the gym he worked at. He was bigger than Baz in all ways immediately obvious, but not necessarily stronger than him. Diego was tall, broad, and muscular. Both his hair and beard stayed neatly trimmed and well-kept.
"Take it easy on me. My bruises have bruises," Baz gave Diego a miserable look. Most of the damage was out in the open. Not all of the evidence of the party could be washed away. A lot of it mottled ugly colors under his skin.
Diego's face twisted. He would indeed take pity.
"Fix me, D."
Baz wasn't above begging, but it didn't come to that. Over the years, Baz pointed many people in Diego's direction, mostly people who preferred parkour gyms to get training in. For the most part, Baz did too, but there was no one better at fixing him when he broke himself.
"Quit falling apart," Diego said, but led the way to his therapy office. Baz took his place on top of the massage table. The routine was a mostly wordless one. They didn't need to talk about what Diego had in mind.
He immediately got to work on a roll of elastic tape, peeling strips of it off for use. .
"Looks like you fell off a building," Diego said, "hope nobody saw."
They had that in common, but Baz wasn't worried about witnesses for the reason Diego thought. Falling off buildings was not necessarily unusual for Baz. He just shrugged and pulled his shirt over his head.
Diego shot him impressive side-eye. "You get that hickey from falling off a building, too?"
"I got to make out with Gwen Ferrero. Maybe it was worth it," Baz said.
For a beefy-fingered guy, Diego was surprisingly precise while applying the tape strips to Baz's shoulder over a nasty purple bruise he probably got on his final ungraceful drop to the ground. It looked especially grotesque under his scar.
Diego laughed. "Right. Was she wearing that diamond bra from the ad?"
"She was not. And she said no one would believe me," Baz said. Worth a shot, anyway. Diego never believed him and that was part of the game. How much reality could slip into conversation, masked as screwing around? Almost all of it. Baz didn't need Diego to buy all his crazy stories. It was a lot like hiding in plain sight and a lot less like keeping secrets.
"If you were gonna meet Gwen Ferrero, how would you do it?" Diego asked, tape tugging at Baz's skin as he worked. Baz inhaled sharply, toying with the ring at his neck.
"My escort gig."
"I chose the wrong career."
It was definitely Baz that picked unwisely. There were a million things he could've been and somehow he ended up a likely future suspect for a high-profile kidnapping. That wouldn't have happened if he became a librarian or a gymnastics coach like he thought he'd be when he was a little kid, drawing crayon pictures of his future self.
Olympian, champion, medaled world-record holder. Those were the things a kid dreamed about. Baz could just imagine what his Kindergarten teacher would've said if he colored himself, all in black, stealing diamonds and rubies.
"Did you hear Rei Collingwood was kidnapped?" Baz asked, wincing a little as Diego prodded at his shoulders.
"Jeez, man. So tense."
Baz gritted his teeth as Diego increased the pressure. It was good pain, though. The pain would get him back in working order.
"I heard. The news is on all the damn time here," Diego answered the question, "rich girl scandals."
"She just... she's like a black belt. How the hell do you manage to kidnap a Taekwondo black belt in the middle of a party?"
The more he thought about it, the weirder it was. Just the burglary was a bizarre situation. Now it was a mystery. Who would even consider kidnapping Rei Collingwood? Who could actually pull it off? If Jasper thought the box was valuable enough to steal, were there others who thought the same?
"Chloroform?" Diego suggested.
That was an option. A party was the perfect venue for covert drugging.
"Her room was torn apart, though. That doesn't exactly scream subtle."
Unless they were looking for the box. They obviously couldn't find it while Baz had it in his drawstring bag, halfway down the building.
"Somebody probably wants ransom." Diego may not have been very concerned, but he was right. There was the ransom aspect, but of all the rich daughters of the world, why Rei? There were plenty of wealthy families in the world who had young children who didn't eat rattlesnakes or know Taekwondo. Wouldn't those kids make better targets?
Unless, of course, the kidnappers didn't plan on demanding money in exchange for Rei's safe return...
So, what was in the box? Who was capable of kidnapping the modern Indiana Jones? Who else was at the party?
"For real, what did you do?" Diego asked. Digging his thumb into tender tissue was an easy way to get Baz's attention. "I told you specifically not to mess up this shoulder again."
"Building:1, Baz: 0."
"More like Building: 50, Baz: 0. Whatcha climb? The Compass?" Diego asked, "lie down."
Someone had rappeled down The Compass, but it wasn't Baz. Someone in a proper safety harness and a suitable length of rope descended the tallest building in Temperance's skyline for a promotion for some sportswear company last week. Baz wished he'd had done that instead.
He shifted, lying face down on the table. Immediately, Diego's thumb pressed into his back, the pain forming white spots in Baz's vision. Diego held it a long, drawn-out moment before releasing.
"Close. Hillside by Fairlane Place."
Diego pressed into another trigger point and Baz wanted nothing more than to have something to hang onto until the pain subsided.
"Builders always come up with the most boring-ass names."
The last thing Diego did was tape Baz's knees and one ankle. It wasn't sprained, but the elastic tape was a good reminder to not go doing anything stupid. No hyperextension. No repetitive movements. No needlessly jumping off of stuff.
"They'll probably find the guy or guys quick," Diego said. Baz looked up from flexing his ankle back and forth. Pink tape snaked around his foot and up to his joint.
"Hmmm?"
"Whoever took your girl," Diego said, "whoever did it had to be on the guest list for the party, right?"
"Right." Baz nodded.
How did he get a look at that guest list?
Diego slapped him across his good shoulder. "You sure you don't want anything? No Aspirin or nothing? Ibuprofen?"
"Nope," Baz said, too quickly, "I don't need any of that. I've got you."
Diego didn't look so sure of that. The tape wouldn't stop the tenderness. It just helped Baz heal and reminded him not to go too crazy.
"I owe you one," Baz said, pulling his shirt back on.
"If I ever need an escort, I'll call that favor in."
A little less worse for wear, Baz left the building, hopping on his bike to pedal on to his first lead.