The Printed Page

Little Molly Messenger is kidnapped on a sunny June morning. Three days later she’s returned, apparently unharmed. Molly’s mother, Chris, is so grateful to have her daughter back that she’s willing to overlook the odd circumstances.

A few days later, the brakes go out on Chris’s car.

An accident? Maybe. Except that it turns out that Chris, the IT manager at a large Chicago bank, may have misappropriated three million dollars. Not convinced that his daughter is safe, Molly’s father hires PI Georgia Davis to follow the money and investigate Chris’s death.

Panic has a way of defining an individual. It scrapes the soul bare, strips away pretense, reveals the core of the human spirit. It’s hard to dissemble when fear crawls up your throat, your heart stampedes like a herd of wild animals, and your skin burns with the prickly-heat of terror. For the six people thrown together in a Loop office building on a hot June day, the moments they shared would reveal parts of themselves they had not known existed.

It was early afternoon in Chicago, the kind of day that made people want to ditch the chill of air conditioning and head to Wrigley Field. The first man who stepped into the elevator at the sixty-fifth floor might have been doing just that. He was a florid- faced, doughy man with gray at his temples. His jacket was hitched over his shoulder, and his shirt gapped between buttons, calling attention to his belly. He moved to the left side of the car and kept his gaze on the floor, as if by doing so, he—and his early departure—might escape notice.

The elevator descended to the sixty-second floor, where two women who didn’t know each other got on. One was slender and small, with mousey brown hair pulled back at her neck. She wore a heavy sweater over a flowered dress. She went to the back of the car and leaned against the metal railing, trying to look inconspicuous. The other woman, in a gray pinstriped pants suit over a sleeveless black tank, wore her hair in a chin-length bob. She positioned herself on the right side of the car and kept her eyes on the car’s indicator panel. The faint aroma of coconut shampoo surrounded her.

On fifty-seven a young man got on. Wearing shorts and a ratty t-shirt, he clutched a large manila envelope in one hand and a bicycle helmet in the other. The envelope bore the logo of a prominent Chicago messenger service. He kept shifting his feet, and his mud-caked sneakers left tiny pellets of dirt on the tiled floor.

Three floors below a middle-aged man in khaki chinos entered. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and he wore his hair in a sparse comb over. Another man entered the car on the fifty-first floor. Dressed in a suit, tie, and crisp white shirt, he wore wrap-around Oakley sunglasses. He kept one hand in his pocket, but through the shades despite the shades, appraised everyone in the elevator.

As the elevator descended past the fiftieth floor, it gathered speed. It was one of three express cars from the upper floors; the next stop was the lobby. Both women stared at the overhead panel lights. The messenger squeezed his eyes shut. Comb-over Man hugged the back wall. Florid-face shot the man with the Oakleys a sidelong glance, but whether from envy or trepidation, it was hard to tell.

No one expected the elevator to lurch to a sudden stop.
~ Chapter One, pages 7-8, Doubleback by Libby Fischer Hellmann ~