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22
Kennedy Center, Concert Hall
Rehearsals
FRIDAY MORNING
Officer First Class Joy Trader walked through the rear door into the second tier of the concert hall on her rounds. These were the most distant seats from the stage in the concert hall—the cheapest seats—though no one would think them inferior in this amazing facility. The view looking down at the whole concert hall was amazing. When her lieutenant had assigned her to assist Special Agent Sherlock to help bodyguard Emma Hunt, Joy had nearly bounded up from her seat and fist-pumped she was so excited. Imagine working with Agent Sherlock herself and helping protect a twelve-year-old prodigy at Kennedy Center. She was pleased Lieutenant Raven recognized she was thorough, usually never missed a thing, and she was fast to respond and calm in a crisis. Even though no one believed the man who’d shot Agent Sherlock in the neck with a dart would be hiding between the seats up here, Agent Sherlock had told her to look everywhere and so Joy checked out every shadowed corner, looked behind every seat in this vast hall. She was wearing her newest dark blue uniform with her badge and MPD insignia, her Glock 19 clipped to her waist. She’d wanted to look sharp, and she did.
She’d already briefly met Emma and her parents, Molly and Ramsey Hunt, when they’d arrived at the Kennedy Center. Emma was not only very pretty, she was shyly charming. Joy couldn’t wait to hear her play. Her parents had offered tickets to Joy’s whole family to hear Emma play, along with another young prodigy, an Italian boy from Milan. She thought for a second it might inspire her own boys to want to play, and then she wondered if they’d even want to come. If it wasn’t football, they mostly played video games. At least while she worked today, she was getting to listen to this amazing girl play Chopin.
Last night, Joy’s husband, David, had teased her when she’d pulled out her laptop to read about the Hunts after they’d finished the dishes, dragged the boys to bed, and cleaned up the preteen debris. He shook his head at her and laughed, kissed her. “When you figure it all out, Joy, you let me know,” he said. Well, of course she’d read about them. She was curious about a lot of things, like what the Russians were saying about the latest cyberattacks on US electric companies, and learning about the Hunts was no different. Joy wondered how much more Lieutenant Raven knew about the Hunts than he’d told her, wondered what Sherlock and her husband, Special Agent Dillon Savich, knew.
There was no shortage of photos and stories about Emma Hunt’s kidnapping when she was a six-year-old, and about her kidnapper who’d later died. There was mention of Emma’s grandfather, Mason Lord, and how ironic was that? Even she’d heard of Mason Lord of Chicago. Federal Judge Ramsey Hunt was a powerful criminal’s son-in-law, and wasn’t that something? Joy studied an older photo of Mason Lord. He looked like an aristocrat in the photos, with his blade of a nose, dark arched brows, cold blue eyes, and pewter hair, perfectly presented, attending a charity ball with his then young wife, Eve. There were photos of his huge compound in a ritzy Chicago suburb, with high walls and beautiful gardens, even guards patrolling. She saw a recent photo of him taken by a paparazzo, looked like London. He didn’t look much older, still striking, still imposing.
Joy had also read Emma Hunt had inherited her amazing talent from her father, metal rock star and guitarist Louey Santera, who’d died in a car explosion six years ago. His genius music genes had taken a different direction in his daughter. No riffing on an electric guitar for Emma; she was a pure classical pianist. There were more links to Louey Santera than Joy could possibly read and scores of photos and clips of him performing, women screaming, trying to climb up onto the stage. He was amazing in his way, like Emma.
She studied photos of Mason Lord’s very young ex-wife, Eve, taken after her husband was shot and nearly died. She looked heartbroken and heroic, but very soon after that, she’d left him. Why would a young wife be hovering over her wounded husband one day and gone the next back to her father, Rule Shaker? All Joy could find out about Shaker was he owned and operated several casinos in Las Vegas. In a picture with his daughter, he wore a bespoke suit, but oddly, he came across looking like a stereotypical Hollywood gangster.
There were more recent photos of Eve standing between her father and her groom, taken the previous year at her second wedding to a Rich Doulos. Doulos was in his midthirties, fit and looked suave enough, she supposed. He was from South Florida, his family rich and well connected, but he wasn’t in the family business; no, among other things, he owned a private gambling club. In another photo, he was wearing a tux, standing beside his wife, Eve, who looked drop-dead gorgeous. He still looked suave, but there was a slight sneer marring his mouth. And what was that about?
Joy sat back and wondered what hadn’t happened to this young girl and her family? When her husband came in the kitchen and asked her what was so fascinating, Joy gave him a rundown of the players. She yawned, closed down her laptop, tapped her fingers on the cover. “It amazes me that Federal Judge Ramsey Hunt, and yes, he’s still known as Judge Dredd, is a powerful criminal’s son-in-law. And now Mason Lord’s granddaughter is in danger. Talk about a mystery.”
Her sweet husband had kissed her, told her she’d help figure it out. And he believed it. She’d fallen asleep wondering how much more Lieutenant Raven knew about Emma Hunt’s situation but hadn’t told her.
As Joy now finished walking through the second tier, she looked down at her Apple Watch, a Christmas present from her mother-in-law. It was time to head back downstairs and make her backstage circuit, look through all the rooms and closets and wherever else someone could be hiding.
Three minutes later she stood stage left and realized she had exactly five minutes before her iWatch binged an alarm and she’d check in with Sherlock, who had told her she’d be seated in the back of the orchestra section near the doors, with a full view of the stage and the entrances to the concert hall orchestra seats, exactly where she’d been yesterday when Dart Gun got her. Sherlock was a stickler about checking in at a precise time, so Joy was certain never to be even a second late.
At that moment, she heard Emma Hunt play a dramatic glissando, the violins coming in counterpoint, the sound incredible. She was twelve years old. It was mind-boggling. Come on, Joy, get with it. She took a quick look at the orchestra seats on the right side, close to the stage, where Judge Ramsey Hunt and his wife, Molly Hunt, were sitting. She thought Judge Hunt fit his billing as a federal judge and Judge Dredd, tall, dark, his expression stern, a man you’d be a fool to mess with. She’d read Emma’s mother, Molly Hunt, was a photographer with a growing reputation. Joy loved her red curly hair, like Sherlock’s, but a very different shade. She imagined how insanely proud the Hunts had to be of their daughter, and how scared they were for her.
She didn’t know the name of the Chopin piece Emma Hunt was playing, but it was fast and furious, her eyes on her flying fingers, the passionate music pouring out of her. Joy wondered how she could stay so focused, knowing danger was so close. She’d read somewhere musicians got lost in their music, and maybe it was so.
Joy checked through each of the dressing rooms, spoke briefly with two technicians and a stagehand to be sure they hadn’t seen anyone they didn’t know, and paused to check a pantry filled with stage equipment. She knocked on the door of the backstage men’s room and looked through it, checked each of the stalls. She looked through the women’s room in the same order. When she opened the door of the final stall, she saw a figure crouching on the toilet seat, heard a light footstep, felt something sharp bite her neck. She pulled out a dart and was reaching for her Glock when something very hard struck her on the side of her head, and she collapsed without a sound against the stall door and slid to the floor.
