Ordeal by Terror by Lloyd Biggle Jr

Author:Lloyd Biggle Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: terror, suspense, mystery, menace, shock
ISBN: 9781434443304
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Conference Room B was a small room that had half a dozen chairs arranged around a conference table. When Laylor entered it at four o’clock, there were note pads positioned at each chair, and Miss Carlyss had sent down a pitcher of ice water and glasses. Laylor’s investigative assistant, a private detective named Ray Bront, was waiting with the two law students Laylor had hired for the summer. Bront had been living with the missing persons file as long as Laylor had. The students had been introduced to it that morning.

Laylor seated himself in a chair beside Bront, dropped the file onto the table in front of him, and pushed the note pad aside to make room for his own shorthand notebook. Across the table from them, the two students edged forward and waited attentively. Jill Tabold was blond, freckled, very cute, and very, very bright. With her pert ponytail, she looked more like a high school freshman than a college law student. Bruce Kagen was an intense-looking redheaded youngster. He was as bright as Jill, but he appeared to be slower because he liked to collect all of the loose ends into a neat package before committing himself.

There were other law students working for the firm that summer—prim and properly dressed interns who were eagerly prepared to accompany their superiors to court on a moment’s notice. Perhaps these two would have preferred that, but jobs were hard to find, and they needed the money. Because both of them were intelligent, they quickly inferred that little of their on-the-job training would directly concern the practice of law. They also discovered that trainees working for Laylor, Jr., were considered mavericks by the other members of the firm no matter how carefully they dressed, so they emulated their boss’s informality. Jill wore jeans and a summery blouse; Bruce Kagen affected Laylor’s turtleneck sweater.

Laylor greeted them with a smile and a nod and turned to Bront. The private detective dressed according to the job at hand. Today he had been in and out of police and business offices, and he wore a suit. Tomorrow’s assignment might call for eavesdropping in a coal bin, and he would don appropriately begrimed overalls. He was a chameleon who needed a few minutes’ notice and a place to change.

He was as unlike Laylor as a master designer could have made him—beefy looking, with coal black hair and a babyish face. Whereas Laylor looked older than his forty years and never gave it a thought, Bront looked much younger than his and worried about it.

“We all know the background,” Laylor said. “Let’s have some details so we can see whether these latest disappearances have anything in common with the others.”

Bront took out his notebook. “The missing persons have very different backgrounds,” he announced. “Two are college graduates, but one went to the University of Michigan and the other to Darwood College, which is a small school in Illinois. The third, who didn’t go to college, may be the best educated of the three, but he did it on his own.

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