“Nobody at the yacht club. The boat was docked at a marina in town, and I’ve asked the Newport police to go down there and see if any of the staff remember seeing a pair of large identical twins there the past few days. They’ll get back to me.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. I’d like to know what you hear.”

“I’ll call you when I know something.” Young hung up.

The others straggled into the study from dinner, Lance first.

“That was Young,” Stone said. “He talked to one of the twins; they’re aboard a yacht off Martha’s Vineyard. He’s asked the Newport police for help in placing them in the town over the past four days, and he’ll get back to us when he hears something.”

Dino played bartender for after-dinner drinks.

Stone didn’t know whether to hope his two young cousins were involved in all this, but he wanted something to happen.

49

HOLLY FOUGHT TO stay awake. She had a plan now, and she had to have her wits about her when the guy came back to feed and empty her. She tried remembering things; that kind of mental activity might keep her awake. She tried remembering the names of everybody in her high school graduation class. There were only sixty of them at the small military high school in Germany, when Ham was still in the army.

She went through the girls first; they were the most difficult. The boys’ names came quicker, starting with Burt Bonner, the athlete on whom she had bestowed her virtue when she was eighteen—bestowed it on him a number of times, in fact. She tried remembering the details of each bestowal; that kept her awake.

Then she heard, or rather felt, the footsteps on the stairs. The house must be fairly rickety, she thought, if she could feel footsteps. He went through his routine, but when he ripped off the tape over her mouth, she was ready for him.

“I have over a million dollars in an offshore bank account,” she said quickly.

He crammed the chocolate bar into her mouth anyway.

Holly spat it out. “It’s yours. I can wire-transfer it to any bank account in the world in seconds. You can open an account offshore on the Internet. It’s a million two hundred thousand dollars. You can go anywhere in the world on that. This is untraceable money. An offshore bank will give you a credit card that draws on your balance; you can use it anywhere in the world.”

He poured water into her mouth, crammed the candy bar in again, and retaped. Then he went back downstairs.

Did the guy live downstairs and she couldn’t hear him because of the plugs in her ears? Or did he live somewhere else and just visit her here?