The Five-Day Nightmare by Frederic Brown

Author:Frederic Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Early settled back comfortably in his chair. “There are three schools of thought on that business of the leak. Any one of them can be right; there’s no real proof one way or another.

“The one I consider least likely is that Sears gave it away himself, somehow. That his house was being watched at the time he got home and found the note, that the kidnaper was in a car nearby and did follow him for a while and, when he saw Sears was deliberately driving so as to shake off a tail, if any, he decided that Sears wasn’t just driving aimlessly or to some innocent destination, but must have made up his mind to contact the police and was making sure first that he wasn’t being followed. Which was, in fact, just what he was doing.”

“Sounds possible to me,” I said.

“Oh, it’s possible, yes. But here’s why I think it’s pretty unlikely, Lloyd. If the kidnaper had decided then and there to kill Dorothy Sears, he’d never have waited two full days to do it. Holding a hostage for ransom involves a certain amount of risk; keeping one alive and drugged involves a certain amount of trouble. If he decided to kill Dorothy Sears the night of the afternoon he kidnaped her, he most certainly wouldn’t have held her alive for almost forty-eight hours, having to use drugs on her at least eight times in that period and feeding her several times. Yes, she’d been fed—the autopsy showed the presence in her stomach of liquid food, bouillon and milk that had been given her probably through a plastic straw while she was in temporary state of semiconsciousness; the last time within eight hours of her death, I’d say that his information that Sears had gone to the police came to him, if it came to him at all, within eight hours of the time he last fed her. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

“Sure,” I said. “But what the hell did you mean by ‘if it came to him at all’; you don’t think he killed her just for the hell of it, do you?”

“I’ll answer that when I give you the third school of thought. Let me finish the first one first. Unless Sears is flatly lying, the kidnaper couldn’t possibly subsequently have learned through anything he said and did that he’d gone to the police the first night. He claims he didn’t confide in a single person, managed to raise as much of the twenty-five grand as he’d raised up to that point without having to tell anybody at all that his wife was kidnaped. I don’t see any reason to doubt him.”

“The second possibility must be the police. I don’t see any other leak except through Sears or the police—using police’ in a broad enough sense to include the F.B.I. men and anyone at the telephone company who’d been briefed in connection with the bit they were going to set up for listening in on Scars’ phone calls the third night.

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