Kerrick Read online

Kerrick wondered at what the kid could have seen, but, when Brandon started to talk, Kerrick quickly pulled out his phone and hit Record because it seemed Brandon had an incredible sense of recall. Whether it was his imagination or not was too early to tell, but he gave everything about the two guards, from the color of each guy’s hair to the type of shoes each wore. Kerrick and Griffin exchanged hard glances as they listened to Brandon. When he finally ran down, Kerrick said, “Well, that’s an awful lot of detail. I hadn’t expected that much.”

  “Photographic memory,” Brandon said quietly. “Most people laugh at me for it.”

  “We’re not laughing,” Griffin said. “We’re ecstatic. Because you’ve given us lots of information, and hopefully we can use that information to help solve this.”

  Kerrick heard Amanda asking Brandon, “Do you have any memories of when you were locked up? Who came to see you? Who brought you food? What was in your room? Maybe it was different than what I went through.”

  Brandon shrugged and said, “It was four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. All appeared to be concrete.”

  And then he went into the same detail that he had spoken of before, describing the type of rotten food—which he refused to eat for the most part suspecting drugs but was smart enough to mash up and add to his chamber pot—who had brought in the food, how they were dressed, whether they had keys, and what kind of weapons they had.

  Kerrick was stunned. “Is there any reason to suspect that your photographic memory is something that they know about?”

  “I don’t know how they would,” he said.

  “Does your father brag about it?” Amanda asked.

  “My father thinks I’m a freak,” Brandon said, his voice calm, like he was used to saying that a lot.

  “You were smart enough to know Morse code and to use it, so I highly doubt that,” Amanda rushed to reassure him.

  But Kerrick had seen a lot of fathers who were assholes, so he wasn’t so sure.

  Brandon immediately said, “I don’t mind. My father’s kind of weird too.”

  “In what way?”

  “He sells body parts,” he said.

  “As in organ-donor body parts?” Amanda asked.

  There was silence first, and then Brandon, his voice very small, said, “Something like that.”

  Kerrick’s heart hardened. If Brandon’s father dealt in the black market for body parts, that put these kidnappers into a whole different level of criminal activity here. “Do you think that’s why you were kidnapped?”

  “Part of it, I’m sure,” he said. “But it could be any number of things.”

  “Well, I’m interested in hearing your theories,” Kerrick said, struggling to believe he was talking to a ten-year-old.

  “Well, there’s my dad’s business,” he said. “Plus, I’m one of those students who everybody loves to hate.”

  “With a memory like that, I’m sure you get straight As all the time, don’t you?” Griffin asked, looking at Brandon in the rearview mirror but smiling at him in a friendly and best-buddy way.

  Brandon nodded. “Yes. I get very little wrong. And that makes everybody upset, including the teachers.”

  “They should be happy you’re a star pupil.”

  He just shrugged and stared out the window. “Still makes me a freak. In the world, nobody likes freaks.”

  Amanda gripped his fingers and said, “I understand. But it gets better as you get older. I know. So, freak or not, I like you anyway.”

  Brandon chuckled at that. He turned to look at her and said, “Not many women know Morse code.”

  He was blissfully unaware of how sexist his comment came across. Whether it was his own upbringing or his limited experience, Amanda didn’t know, but he’d completely slapped Amanda into a category of potentially being a dumb blonde. She just laughed, her voice soft and mellow as it floated through the vehicle, showing no signs of the strain of the last couple days. Low, melodic, and almost mesmerizing.

  Kerrick struggled to keep all the details of her separated in his mind as the information flowed through the car. He was grateful he had his phone on Record because so much was discussed right now. It was hard for him to keep track of it all.

  “I’m not a dumb blonde,” she said gaily. “I’m not quite in the genius category as you are, Brandon, but …”

  “Amanda?” Brandon said, his voice raising, as if something suddenly clicked into place. “Amanda Berg?”

  “Yes,” she said. In the review mirror, Kerrick could see her staring at Brandon in surprise. “What did you remember about me?”

  “You’re a Mensa, aren’t you?”

  She studied him carefully. And then she nodded, a grin spreading across her face. “I am, and so are you, Brandon Coleman. Aren’t you?”

  He gave her a big flash and a white smile. “Absolutely.” He reached out of hand and said, “Pleased to meet you. You’re more my kind than I thought.”

  While the two in the back seat carried on a quite animated conversation, Kerrick brought up a completely new point. He glanced over at Griffin and muttered, “What’s another reason why the kidnappers would be collecting brains?”

  “None I want to think about,” Griffin said. “Particularly after somebody who provides body parts seems to be involved in this.”

  An edginess shifted down Kerrick’s spine as he contemplated Griffin’s answer. This was ugly. But it could get a whole lot uglier yet.

  Kerrick directed Griffin to drive toward Kerrick’s motel but had him bypass it and went on to another one he had seen not too far away, set off in the back corner of its property. It was little more than a dive, but it was a motel and had a second floor with direct outdoor access.

  When he pulled their vehicle in front of the motel office, Griffin hopped out, leaving the car running, and headed inside. He came back less than two minutes later with keys, chuckling as he sat in the car again. “I didn’t think the clerk would take my cash at first. Seems my burglar outfit scared him.” Chuckling still, Griffin turned to face the two in the back seat. “Don’t you like my pleasant and honest smiling face?”

  Amanda groaned. “I’m sure you’d scare children and most adults with all those black marks on your face. But the clerk won’t tell anyone that we’re here, right?”

  Griffin shook his head. “I made sure of that. He’ll keep our secret to his grave.”

  Amanda’s eyebrows rose as she looked at Brandon. “Good thing he’s on our side, right?”

  Now Brandon giggled too.

  Griffin drove them around back, parking their vehicle between two huge SUVs, basically hiding it in plain sight. The two men quickly escorted their guests up to the second floor and into the double rooms that shared an interconnecting door. Griffin locked one front door, crossed over to the other room to the join the rest of them, and said, “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  “Don’t you want to take the paint off your face first?” Brandon asked.

  Griffin gave him a white-toothed smile and said, “Nope, not for this job.” And he disappeared into the darkness of the early morning hours.

  Kerrick motioned at the double beds in this room and said, “If you guys need to sleep …”

  “We need to eat, to drink, and I need a shower,” Amanda announced.

  Kerrick smiled and said, “Your bathroom’s right there. Food’s coming.”

  When Amanda took off for the bathroom, he pulled out his laptop and sat down.

  Immediately Brandon hopped up at the kitchenette table across from him and said, “I really need to use your laptop.”

  “Why is that?” Kerrick asked, still struggling with the wise man inside the boy’s body.

  “To tell my dad that I’m safe.”

  Kerrick was busy on the chat page, letting his cyberteam know their latest location and that they had rescued Amanda and a kid but also warning his contact person that a lot more people were potentially being held in the same building. “Let me have my people do that, so nobody can t
race our call. Is that okay with you?”

  Brandon nodded.

  “But I need to give them a quick update first, okay?”

  Brandon nodded his head again, patiently waiting on Kerrick.

  Kerrick wrote a short rundown and then uploaded the video and the audio tape that he had taken on his phone, mostly the ton of details that Brandon had handed over. It would be great is Kerrick’s people could pull that together and maybe dredge up some matches to Brandon’s descriptions via facial recognition software.

  “You’ll get to speak to your dad directly after we catch some of these bad guys, okay?” He nodded at Brandon, who seemed to understand, and asked, “Do you remember any names?”

  Brandon blinked and, almost like a film reel rolling, started spouting names.

  “I meant names from being kidnapped.”

  Brandon just gave him a droll look before spouting those in a fast string.

  When he ran out of names, Kerrick made him repeat them, while checking his handwritten list and realizing he’d caught all but two of them. He sent that list off to his contact also, surprised to see Amanda joining them so soon. Her hair was dry, so she hadn’t had her shower yet. “And you’re both in the Mensa club, right?” He looked over at Amanda and then back at Brandon. They both nodded. “Is there a special ranking system in the club?”

  “Just our IQ level,” Brandon said. “People like me love to be ranked. But, if you’re not at the top, nobody wants to be ranked.”

  Kerrick chuckled at that. “Well, when you’re the best of the best, nobody wants to know that they’re the worst of the best.”

  Brandon laughed with the lightheartedness that a ten-year-old could.

  Kerrick glanced at Amanda to see a wry look on her face. “Is it rude of me to ask, but is there a major difference between your IQs?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Brandon immediately popped up and said, “I’m 175.”

  She laughed. “Well, his IQ is higher than mine by one point.”

  “Is that enough to make a difference?”

  She shrugged. “Not for me, no.”

  “Not enough, no,” Brandon said.

  “Did any of the people,” Kerrick said, talking slowly, “and think about this now, were any of the people who you saw involved in this kidnapping mess, are their names associated with the Mensa group?”

  Brandon’s eyebrows shot up, and he sat back. “Interesting theory.”

  “But one we need to consider,” Amanda said. “In my case, it was Dr. Hinkleman. In my opinion, he only joined Mensa for the public attention, for more accolades. But he was not actively engaged with the other members as far as I could see.”

  Kerrick turned to look at her in shock. “You know who kidnapped you?”

  “I don’t know the men who took me off the street. I was grabbed by two men, and a hood was thrown over my head. Then I was tossed into the back of a lorry, alone. They remained on the street. The lorry drove off almost faster than my kidnappers could close the rear door. Then I heard the driver and his passenger talking at some point. So I counted four different men involved in my kidnapping.

  “So the driver and a passenger were already inside the lorry. I didn’t recognize their voices. So no idea who those men were either. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in this dark room, like a jail cell, and then yesterday, the day before, whenever”—she waved her hand as if she’d lost track of time—“when the guards came in, Dr. Hinkleman came in too.”

  “Interesting. So Hinkleman had no problem letting you see his face, correct?”

  “He was my boss, supervised my work. My cancer research,” she said slowly. “And when he came back a second time to see me in my cell, he was angry. He said something was wrong with my data.”

  “Was there?” Kerrick asked.

  Brandon snorted. “Only that the others probably couldn’t read it, right?”

  Amanda gave a small shrug. “Potentially, yes.”

  Chapter 8

  Amanda didn’t know how to explain it but tried. “When I do my work, I must always consider theft issues, and people like to question your results and to test you, even when you haven’t had a chance to finish your own experiments. So I’ve gotten into the habit of writing in a short form when doing theorems, doing that right from college. It’s faster for me, and other people can’t read it.”

  “So, when your boss said your data didn’t work, was it because he couldn’t read your shorthand?”

  “It’s possible,” she said slowly. “But he did say that one of my coworkers had been working with my research. And, if it was somebody who I work with closely, they would have known ahead of time about my shorthand.”

  “Meaning, they should have been able to read it.”

  She shrugged and sat down on the third chair at the table. “Potentially. I don’t know how hard it is for others to read. How long until we get food?” she asked, holding out her hand, palm up. She stared at her fingers, a little worried because they shook so bad.

  “It’s coming,” he said, noting her concerned expression and her visibly shaking hand. “You should be eating within twenty minutes.”

  She nodded and said, “That’ll be fine.”

  Brandon quickly reached out, grabbed one of her hands, and held it in his. “Do you have blood sugar problems?”

  “Only when I’ve been starved,” she said, joking.

  “Right. I thought my stomach would eat itself,” he complained. “Don’t they know how much food a ten-year-old needs?”

  “Apparently not,” she said, “or they didn’t care.”

  “They didn’t care,” he said. He stared out the window, even though it was completely closed off with the blinds, his face glum. “I think that’s the story of my life.”

  “What? That nobody cares?” Amanda asked.

  “I think my father only kept me around because of what I could do for him.”

  Kerrick leaned forward suddenly. “Maybe you should tell me what you do for him?”

  “Run probabilities, analyze the company data, and figure out where he’ll make more money,” he said. “It’s pretty simple. He doesn’t run a very complicated business, so it’s not like I need a whole lot of financial education for his purposes.”

  Amanda smiled. “But so many people don’t know how much we do understand and how much we don’t, once we’re labeled as a Mensa. It’s expected that we know the velocity for traveling to the moon and what speed we need to lower to and how many feet off the surface.”

  He looked at her in surprise and nodded. “You do understand.”

  “Absolutely,” she said as she leaned forward with a smile at the corner of her lips. “When I first started working at the lab, and they found out that I was a Mensa, people would ask me all kinds of questions, almost all to test my knowledge. But they were stupid questions, like, Do you know how many skin cells are on an armadillo?”

  Brandon snorted at that. “You know what? I can’t imagine the animal would sit still long enough for us to count, but we’d be talking minuscule amounts. Skin cells are sloughed off every twenty-four-hour period, so you’d be forever dealing with the fact that some of the skin cells would be falling off, and some would be ready to peel off. So, are they talking about the skin cells underneath and the skin cells that are in progress of being dumped?”

  She nodded. “Exactly.” She glanced up to see Kerrick frowning at her. She smiled and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  But his gaze darkened, and he shook his head. “It’s amazing for those of us who don’t have your brains to see just how much ability and smarts you guys have.”

  “Which is why I wanted to direct mine into cancer research,” she said. “Particularly breast cancer. But then you already know that.”

  “I do,” Kerrick said, “and I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.”

  She acknowledged his statement with a gentle nod of her head. “It was a very difficult time.
” She glanced over at Brandon suddenly and asked, “Where’s your mother?”

  His shoulders sagged, and he shook his head. Kerrick picked up the conversation. “Do you remember her at all?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Sorry, dude.”

  Brandon just shrugged. Amanda reached over and gripped his fingers. “It’s tough, but it’s something we end up living through.”

  “Exactly.”

  Just then a car door slammed outside.

  She gasped, and her fingers started to shake. Brandon gripped her hand tightly as they stared at each other in fear. Kerrick stood and peered through the blinds. “Dinner’s here. Or whatever you want to call a meal at four in the morning.” He got up, walked through the adjoining room, then stopped, and looked at them. “Do not for any reason open any door, do you hear me?”

  They both nodded. She watched as he disappeared into the adjoining room, leaving the adjoining door slightly ajar, and then opened its outside door. She could hear him conversing with somebody, and she thought it was Griffin. She slowly relaxed. “It’s okay,” she said to Brandon.

  When Kerrick returned with a large bag in each hand, she was surprised to find him alone. “Did you order delivery or something?”

  “Or something,” he said, deliberately not letting her know anything.

  There had been a lot of secrecy between her and him. She really wanted to get some answers, but it was hardly the time or place. And she didn’t know how much was necessary for Brandon to know. That massive brain of his was already churning through the details and trying to figure out this mess. It might be a good thing for him to face this head-on or for him to solve this all by himself even, but, at the same time, she wasn’t sure he needed to know much more about evil human nature at this point.

  Then the smell coming from the bags hit her, and she groaned. “Is that Chinese food?” she asked.

  “We have Chinese food, fried chicken, and burgers,” he said. “I didn’t know what you wanted, so I ordered up a bunch of all of it.”

  Brandon gave a yelp of joy and raced toward the second bag. “Burgers? With fries?”

  “Yes, but if you wanted anything special,” he warned, “you won’t be happy because I ordered straight off the basic menu.”