Starr back when she was first getting up to speed at CitiSpace. It was one of her first jobs. At that time Kristen had just signed a two‑year contract with E! and she wanted to renovate her co‑op in Chelsea. But then just as the job was completed, she sold the place and moved to a brownstone in the West Village, or so she'd said. Ally didn't know why she had done it or where precisely she had moved to, but she got the impression some very rich new sugar daddy was setting her up and he wanted the privacy of a town house.
Could it be that Kristen was the mysterious missing patient Stone was trying to locate and interview? Ally hadn't seen her on TV for a while, so maybe she had moved on to other things.
"I really don't know where she is now," Van de Vliet said. "She became emotionally unstable in the middle of her treatment. It's a rarity but it has happened. She checked out. After that, I don't—"
"That's a damned lie," the woman declared. "I know it now. That's what your receptionists have been telling everybody. It sounded a little like her at first, but now I realize it's preposterous. She didn't just up and run off. You're keeping her somewhere. Where is she? Where's my only child?"
"Wherever she is, I can assure you she's most assuredly not here," Van de Vliet intoned smoothly, even as his eyes struggled to stay calm. "Would that she were. She wanted... a procedure done and I think we were having some success. But then she became traumatized for some reason best known to her and insisted on leaving. No one is forced to complete the regimen here against their will. As best I recall, someone said she went to a spa in New Mexico."
"I know that's what your flunkies have been telling me over the phone. That she went to New Mexico to hide out. But now I know everybody lied to me. For the last three years she's been sleeping with that bastard Winston Bartlett, but now his office won't even return my phone calls. You all think you're so smart, but I could smuggle a gun past your guards. In my bra!" Her eyes had acquired a further kind of wildness now as she awkwardly began opening her purse, hanging from a shoulder strap, with her left hand while still holding the pistol in her right. "And I got a letter from her just this morning. The postmark is New York City. So—"
"What—" Van de Vliet's eyes began to blink rapidly.
"She's not in New Mexico now. If she ever was." The woman waved a small tan envelope at him. There was large, loopy writing on the outside.
"Could . . . could I see that?" He started to reach for it, but she waved the black Beretta at him and shoved the letter back into her purse.
"No you can't. What you can do is tell me where the hell you're keeping her. Now."