Lydia Strong ran. She ran in spite of the myriad reasons she shouldn’t. She ran hard and fast in December drizzle, her face flushed with cold air and the heat that burned inside her like a furnace. She ran down Lafayette Street past the Gaseteria and the Puck Building, over broken sidewalks, bottles, and litter. Past a dark, dank alley, crowded with bulky shadows and a hundred pink shutters reaching into a sliver of slate gray sky. Into the chintzy chaos of Chinatown, all red and yellow, mobbed with men selling knockoff designer bags, buzzing with windup toys and statues of Buddha, smelling of crispy duck. Past the massive, grand, dirty-white Manhattan court buildings and on to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Lean and strong, with a fullness about her hips and breasts, Lydia was a graceful runner with perfect form, moving seemingly with little effort through the crowded city streets; abs in, shoulders back, heels connecting first with the concrete, her next stride drifting gracefully off her toes. She wove between slower-moving pedestrians on the crowded downtown sidewalks… lawyers, cops, slack-jawed tourists gazing up in awe at the impressive size of the stately court buildings. Her strong angular face and storm-cloud gray eyes were expressionless, if a bit drawn and determined, and offered only the slightest hint of the tension she carried with her this day. It was the tension of always being watched. Hunted, in fact, if she was honest with herself.
She quashed the urge to glance behind her as she crossed the street against the light and began to ascend the mild slope toward the center of the Brooklyn Bridge. She knew he was there. Maybe not right behind her, but nearer than she wanted him. She only hoped that he couldn’t keep up with her.
She increased her effort against the incline and smiled to herself when the concrete gradation gave way to the wooden slats of the bridge. Something about the feeling of wood beneath her feet, the way it gave under her weight, made her feel safer than concrete, reminded her that there was a more innocent New York somewhere in the not too distant past and that part of its essence still existed on the bridge.
It had only been a few weeks since her worst nightmare came true. Since then, she’d struggled to maintain some semblance of normalcy. Not that normal for her was normal for anyone else. As a bestselling true crime writer, once-consultant and now partner in the private investigation firm of the newly minted Mark, Striker and Strong, Lydia got a daily dose of horror that would put most people in a sanitarium. She had devoted her life to understanding the criminal mind, wanting to know what drove a man to rape and kill, what was present or missing within him to make him a monster. In this quest, she had nearly destroyed herself and any chance she would ever have at happiness. She’d been pulled back from the brink before, but now she found herself dangling there again.
Jed McIntyre, the serial killer who murdered her mother, was on the loose after fifteen years behind bars. And he was considerably more insane and newly obsessed with Lydia. It had upped the chaos in her life to a level that she was having a hard time handling. Throw in the fact that she had just realized she was pregnant and that Jeffrey Mark-her longtime friend and mentor, and her live-in lover for over a year-was putting the pressure on her to marry, and some moments she felt like her head was going to explode.
Not that she put her love life in the same category as she put Jed McIntyre. But it was all part of the mounting sense that she had lost control of her once very orderly existence.
She came to a stop in the middle of the bridge under the first gigantic arch and walked over to the railing facing west. She felt the cold on her nose and her cheeks, her heart thumping the rhythm of exertion. The skyscrapers of lower Manhattan reached, gleaming monoliths against a flat slate sky, and the morning rush hour flowed beneath her, a slow, noisy river of tires whispering on wet asphalt, the occasional screeching of a sudden stop or the blast of an angry horn rising from the current.
All the answers were on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the place she always came to when her mind wrestled with a thousand worries and the cacophony in her head made the city noise seem like an orchestra, composed and melodic. She wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with her. Why she wasn’t more euphoric, the way you were supposed to be, about the baby… Jeffrey’s baby… and about the fact that he was gung-ho to get married. Isn’t this what women were supposed to want? But she had never wanted what other people wanted. She had never understood the urgent desire some women feel to procreate. Or the happy blissful glow they displayed when they discovered they were finally pregnant. Don’t you realize, she’d wanted to ask, what an awesome responsibility you have to this new life? That your actions from here on out will affect this child forever?
Lydia wondered how she could bring a child into a world populated by monsters, monsters that she seemed to have an insatiable desire to chase and destroy, one at a time. Or vice versa. She worried that, at the end of the day, she didn’t have enough to offer a baby. It seemed like so many people were concerned about wanting a child, while they never considered what they had to give. She didn’t want to be one of those people. Maybe you should have thought about all this before you went and got yourself knocked up, she chastised.
Jeffrey, on the other hand, seemed to have a Zen-like confidence about the whole thing. “It happened now because it’s time for us,” he had said during one of their midnight conversations after anxiety had disturbed her sleep, and as a consequence his as well. “You’ll surprise yourself. You’re going to be a doting, intelligent, sensitive mother… with your own identity. Trust me.”
Jeffrey was the only person in the world she did truly trust with her life, her future. Lydia had met Jeffrey when she was only fifteen years old and he was a twenty-five-year-old FBI agent investigating her mother’s murder. Over the next fifteen years, they stayed in touch and their connection evolved into friendship. They became colleagues on a number of projects and he became for her a mentor, confidant, and advisor. Somewhere along the line, he became much more. But it was only a little more than a year earlier that they both finally gave in to the feelings that had been boiling beneath the surface of their relationship.
The years before her life with Jeffrey seemed like a landscape of loneliness and isolation that she had crossed. While her career had flourished, her inner life had been a wasteland of fear and pain. She had felt permanently scarred by the loss of her mother, whose body she had discovered one autumn day when she returned home from school. Abandoned long ago by her father, Lydia was raised by her loving but elderly grandparents. In spite of the love and care she got from them, she grew up afraid to really care for them or anyone, afraid to trust because of a crippling fear of loss. After the death of her mother, she had clawed her way back from the abyss of grief and as a young woman she’d decided, albeit on a subconscious level, that she had no intention of ever being thrown back into that slick-walled pit again.
Loving Jeffrey had changed that, had helped her to trust the universe more, to trust herself, had helped her to embrace life instead of wasting it fearing the death of those she loved. Things had been more or less blissful until she invited the monsters back into her life… into their lives. Now Jed McIntyre roamed free. She reached down and felt the Beretta in the pouch she wore at her waist. It gave her some small measure of security.
From the corner of her eye, Lydia spotted a thick figure dressed in black making his way quickly through the smattering of people strolling up the wooden slats of the bridge’s walkway. He was like a drifting mountain and people turned to look at him as he made his way past. Lydia moved quickly behind the stone ballast that stood in the center of the walkway dividing it in two, the bike path on the left and the pedestrian path on the right. She pressed her back against the cold stone and waited, her heart racing.
She knew it would happen just like this. When she was being careless, or worse, reckless, he would come on her in broad daylight in a throng of people. He wouldn’t come in the cover of night, when demons were expected. He would move from the crowd, take her in front of bystanders. No one would make a move to stop him. She could imagine it all as clearly as if it were a memory. When the time came there would be a fight to the death and the odds were even as to who would walk away. She peered around the ballast to see the giant form almost on top of her.
Dax Chicago rounded the corner, breathless and clutching his side.
“Bang, you’re dead,” said Lydia loudly, startling him.
“Jesus Christ, woman. What is wrong with you?” his heavy Australian accent making the words little more than a jumble to her. But she had learned to understand him better after three weeks of seeing him every single bloody day.
“I thought you were in better shape,” she said with a smile.
“I’m trying to help you,” he said, walking a circle, still holding his side.
“You’re a mercenary, Dax. Let’s not glorify your role here.”
“Fuck off,” he said miserably. “It’s fucking cold out here.”
Dax Chicago was six-foot-four of pure muscle and grit. He had the kind of strength that bulldozers envied, and the kind of graceful speed that seemed impossible in a man of his size-in the short haul. Lydia knew that over miles, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with her. She did like to make him earn the money Jeffrey was paying him to be with her when he couldn’t be. A fact she greatly resented. But Jeffrey could not be dissuaded… so Lydia made it as difficult as possible for everyone.
“Pregnant women who are being stalked by serial killers should not be jogging anyway,” he added with a smirk.
She punched him hard on the arm and connected with flesh that felt more like a boulder than a man. She didn’t really mind Dax, and even when she hated him it was the kind of hate reserved for family members, always threatening to bubble over with laughter and lined with affection. She had to admit he was a good man to have on the team. A former Special Forces agent for the British army, his knowledge of weapons, surveillance, and an almost supernatural gift for stealth had definitely been an asset in the past.
The other thing Lydia liked about Dax was that his whole life was cloaked in mystery. He revealed little about his past, how he came to work for the firm, how he came to live in a palatial home in Riverdale complete with a basement that put dungeons to shame. His basement was a maze of rooms-one a weapons armory filled with enough firepower to equip an army; one with a cruel metal table, complete with five-point restraints; yet another adjacent to a second room connected by a two-way mirror. Lydia never tired of probing Dax for details about himself that he refused to disclose. It was as if Dax Chicago sprang fully grown from the earth in a full set of body armor and carrying an AK-47.
“Come on, Lydia. Let’s go,” Dax said, a pleading look in his jade eyes. His pale skin was blotched with angry red patches from cold and exertion. A few brown curls snaked out of the charcoal wool stocking cap he’d pulled down over his ears. He was not bad-looking for a big dumb Aussie.
“Dax, maybe we need to get you a girlfriend,” she said as they reached the bottom of the bridge and headed back into the court district.
He snorted his contempt as Lydia’s cell phone rang. She unzipped the pouch at her waist and removed the tiny silver Nokia that rested against the not so tiny Beretta.
“Hi,” she said, having seen Jeffrey’s number on the caller ID.
“Where are you?”
“At home, on the couch, like a good little prisoner.”
He sighed on the other end of the phone. “Are you with Dax?”
“I can’t seem to shake him.”
“Listen,” he said, “why don’t you two hop in a cab and come to the office? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
They walked across Chambers Street, the sickly sweet smell of honey-roasted nuts from a vending cart carrying on the cold air. An angry cabbie leaned on his horn as a Lincoln Town Car cut him off and sped past them. Sharply dressed yuppies rushed along in a blur of navy and black on their way to important jobs, tasks, meetings, carrying paper cups of Starbucks coffee.
“What’s up?” asked Lydia, hearing the lick of excitement in his voice.
“Did you see the news this morning?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll explain it to you when you get here. Half an hour?”
“About that.”
Dax and Lydia jogged to Sixth Avenue and hopped a cab heading uptown to Mark, Striker and Strong.
Detective Halford McKirdy, Ford to his friends, liked the dark. Darkness formed a cocoon where thoughts could gestate into theories, theories into answers. The light beckoned a man outside himself, encouraged him to be distracted. That’s why he always pulled the shades in his dingy, cluttered office so that only just the hint of sunlight leaked in between the blinds and the sill, between the slats, creating thin ladders of light across the files and photographs on his desk.
This morning there was a strange odor in his office. It could have been the half-empty coffee cup-or half full, as an optimist, which Ford was not, might note-that was perched dangerously on the corner of his desk. It could have been the pastrami sandwich that he knew still lay on the bottom of his wastepaper basket beneath a drift of discarded paper, forms, and message slips. Or the stale cigarettes in the ashtray that he kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his metal and faux-wood desk, so that no one would notice that he was still sneaking the occasional cigarette. Or maybe it was just that the smell of death had followed him from the crime scene he’d left an hour before. Likely, it was some combination of all of those things.
“He has come for me again,” she’d said slowly with a nod, her pink silk pajamas stained with blood, clinging to her, her voice quavering, her eyes staring off into some horror only she could see. The horror right before her eyes seemed to elude her.
“I’ll never escape him now. He’ll eat my young… swallow them whole. And me as well. You can’t stop him. No one can.”
The words she’d spoken to him as the paramedics wheeled her away in restraints were echoing in his head now as Ford flipped through the crime scene photographs. They were up there with the most gruesome he’d seen in his twenty-year career. He sat quietly at his desk. Only the halogen lamp beside him lit his office as he slowly wrote notes in black ink on a yellow legal pad, trying to make sense of what he had seen this morning. This would be the second time he’d investigated the murder of one of Julian Ross’s husbands.
He remembered the first time clearly, just as he remembered all the cases where the answers had never come clear. Something had haunted her that night ten years ago. He could see that behind her eyes, ringed horribly in black by the mascara she had wept from her lashes. But she is not innocent, he remembered thinking. Nor, however, had he sensed in her the capacity for the cold and calculating murder of her husband. He’d had the same conflict about Julian Ross again as he’d arrived at her Park Avenue duplex at five in the morning, called in to investigate the murder of her second husband. It was a good thing she kept her maiden name.
He shifted in his chair, leaning back and rubbing his eyes. He rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, hearing the tension crackling there. He remembered Julian as a tiny woman, really frail-looking, with a fragile beauty that threatened to shatter with the passing years. For some reason he had always remembered her hands and her wrists vividly, so white that he could see the blue of her veins beneath the parchment of her skin. Every time he’d seen one of her paintings over the years, in a magazine or a SoHo gallery, he’d remembered those hands and the questions he still had about her years after she had been acquitted. Something about it had never rested with him. Here he was again. That was his karma; the sleeping dogs never did lie.
Julian Ross, still tiny, still frail-looking, had aged considerably since he’d last seen her, in spite of her wealth and success. To be fair, the fact that she was covered in her husband’s blood and rocking back and forth on her haunches in the corner of her bedroom didn’t do much for her. She had looked at him when he entered, and said, “You again.”
When he’d walked through the front door of the duplex, the energy of rage and terror had raised the hair on his arms. Something wasn’t right, he knew at once. Something wasn’t simple. When he saw the room where the crime was done, all the feelings he’d had that night ten years ago came rushing back to him… the disbelief and the slightest notch of fear in the back of his throat. It was like when he took his wife to Egypt for their honeymoon and they saw the Great Pyramids, those gigantic monuments reaching into the sky so solid, so symmetrical. All he could think was, No human could have done this with the resources available at the time.
Julian Ross’s second husband, Richard Stratton III, the father of her twins Lola and Nathaniel, had been stabbed repeatedly in their bed while she allegedly slept beside him. But stabbed was really too friendly a word for what had been done to Mr. Stratton. He had been disemboweled, nearly decapitated. His face had been bashed beyond recognition. His blood and innards had been spread around the room. There were long trails of blood along the floor and along the walls, as though he’d been dragged about by a poltergeist.
Just like Julian’s first husband, Tad Jenson, his wedding ring and the finger on which he’d worn it had been removed. Neither object was anywhere to be found.
It didn’t seem physically possible that Julian Ross could have done what had been done to her husband. But at the moment, there was no evidence that anyone else had entered the apartment. Julian’s elderly mother, Eleanor; Julian’s six-year-old twins; and their young nanny were sleeping in rooms on the lower level of the duplex. Julian’s claim that she had popped sleeping pills before bed and didn’t wake during the violence wasn’t exactly an airtight alibi.
On the other hand, there was nothing at the scene that could be easily identified as the murder weapon. Then there was the pure physicality of a 100-pound woman beating and bludgeoning to death a 250-pound, six-foot-four male and somehow managing to get his blood all over the walls and even on the twelve-foot-tall ceiling. There was something definitely spooky about it.
“You again,” she’d said when he walked into the room. A smile played upon her lips. Shock or insanity… maybe a little of both.
“What is she still doing in here?” he’d asked the cop who stood at the bedroom door, supposedly guarding the scene until the ME and forensics arrived.
“I’m not leaving my husband,” she said, her voice shrill with the hysteria he knew was going to hit like a tornado in a few minutes. The cop he’d addressed shrugged his helplessness.
“Ms. Ross, let’s get you out of here, okay?” he said, holding out his hand.
“No, I’m not leaving him,” she answered. Her eyes had started to glaze over and he could see that she was trembling. He looked around him at the bloodbath, trying to determine the source of a dripping noise he heard. Blood had soaked through the sheets and was collecting in a pool on the hardwood floor next to Julian. She didn’t seem to notice as it grew and crept toward her.
It was the kind of room showcased in magazines-or anyway it had been before the carnage. The bed was the size of some apartments he’d been in, with its dramatic four posts and plush mattress, at least ten brocade throw pillows. French doors opened onto a balcony revealing a breathtaking view of uptown Manhattan. Pictures of Julian and Richard or the twins, beautifully framed in sterling, wood, or crystal, occupied most of the available nooks and crannies of space on the dresser and night tables. A small alcove of bookshelves reached to the ceiling and a plush maroon chenille chair, matching ottoman, and standing lamp nestled in the space. Embers still glowed in the fireplace, above which was a large canvas that Ford recognized as an early work of Julian’s. An entertainment armoire stood partially open, revealing a large-screen television, DVD player, stereo, and speakers. All of it was marred by blood splatter.
“Sir, the paramedics are here,” said the other uniform on the scene, after jogging up the stairs and stopping at the bedroom door.
“Only one of them in here,” answered Ford. “She needs to be sedated and removed from the room and then no one else will be allowed in here until the crime scene investigators arrive.”
“You think I did this, don’t you?” she asked him in one of her last moments of semi-lucidity.
He looked at her, knowing he should inform her of her right to remain silent.
“I took sleeping pills before I went to bed. I woke up and found him… like…” she said, as a sob took over her body and her voice. “Like this,” she finished in a whisper. He looked over at the body of her husband face down and naked on the bed, one arm draping over the side, knuckles touching the floor. The body looked white and deflated, which Ford guessed made sense, as it seemed to have been drained of most of its blood.
“I wouldn’t say anything at all right now if I were you, Ms. Ross,” he said, trying not to sound as cold as he felt inside.
“Just be grateful you’re not,” she said as he walked from the room, passing by a paramedic who looked younger than seemed possible. Even the cops on the scene looked like babies to him. When did he start to feel so old?
He sighed, remembering, wishing he’d handled her differently, hadn’t let the anger and emotion he’d felt at the scene get the best of him. With Julian totally incoherent now, he couldn’t expect to get anywhere with her for a while. She talked so softly, like a child… seemed so delicate, just like the first time. He remembered how surprised he’d been ten years ago when he’d seen her canvases. Halford McKirdy didn’t know much about art, but he knew rage when he saw it sure enough.
She painted on gigantic canvases in rich, bold lines-heavy on the blacks, reds, and yellows. She painted scenes of rape, murder, and carnage. Some were intricately detailed murals of mass violence, with bleeding, writhing figures in fields of gore and fire. Some were close-up images of mutilated female genitalia, broken flesh and bones, faces contorted in fear or anger or both, women fleeing from some unseen hunter. Other works were just angry slashes of color, amorphous figures in black or gray, lines and shadows. When he first investigated her, she was already a successful artist, a darling of the SoHo gallery scene. Now she was an international sensation and a very wealthy woman. This type of scandal would only make her work worth more, he knew. The world was populated by bloodsuckers that loved the taint of violence as long as it didn’t come too close.
He’d headed down the stairs and toward the sitting room, where he knew Julian’s mother, her children, and the nanny were waiting.
Eleanor Ross was a regal woman in a black silk dressing gown, her silver hair pulled back into a braided bun. She possessed an eerie calm, sitting on a plush red velvet sofa in front of a fire she must just have made. A twin lay on either side of her, each with a head on her thigh, each with blue eyes wide open staring into the flames. She had a hand on each twin’s head.
The nanny, a young girl with skin the color of caramel, weighing in at maybe a hundred pounds on a fat day, sat weeping in a chair close to the fire. It was a mournful and helpless sound, kind of weak. Ford turned to look at her, but her head was buried in her hands, a lush mane of black curls falling almost to her lap. Her shoulders trembled, her feet barely touched the floor.
“We heard nothing and saw nothing, Detective,” Eleanor said before Ford sat down on the ottoman he’d pulled in front of them.
He didn’t look at her as he pulled out his notepad. “Is that so?”
A moment of silence passed between them before Eleanor turned her gaze on him.
“Surely you don’t think my daughter could have done such a thing,” she said imperiously.
“At this point, ma’am, I’m not sure of anything.”
“Don’t just take the easy way out like you did last time. You decided right away it was Julian and never even looked for who really killed her first husband. Whoever killed him got off scot-free,” she said with a disapproving shake of her head.
“You can say that again,” he answered, thinking of the day Julian had been acquitted and the mix of emotions he’d felt. Tonight he felt like Julian had had ten years of freedom she hadn’t deserved and now someone else was dead.
She snorted at him, picking up on his sarcasm. “That jury of teachers and mechanics had better sense than you and the whole police department. They could see. Julian doesn’t have the strength to do such a thing. She doesn’t have the nerve.”
The way Eleanor said it, it sounded like an insult. He looked at her. There was a coldness in her eyes that was mirrored in the eyes of the twins on her lap. Her mouth was a hard straight line in a landscape of lined and sagging skin. Her stubborn chin was a dare to argue with her, to defy her. It occurred to Ford that this woman did not seem even remotely upset that her son-in-law had been brutally murdered, probably by her daughter just upstairs from where she sat. Seeing the three of them there like that, the knowledge of the scene above their heads, the weird aura of togetherness that seemed to surround them, he felt a cold finger of dread trace his spine.
“I’d like to take your statement now, Ms. Ross.”
“I’ll come to the station around noon with my attorney. Leave me your business card so we know where to find you.”
He gave her a look that he’d hoped would be intimidating but clearly wasn’t. They stared at each other for a moment and he saw that she was not going to budge.
“You’re not a suspect at this time, Ms. Ross.”
“The Ross family does not speak to police officers without the presence of an attorney. Remember that, children.”
“Yes, Grandma,” they each said softly. Ford’s creep-meter went off the charts. Nice family, he thought.
“Have it your way,” he said, pulling a card from his jacket pocket.
“I always do,” she said with a bitchy smile that was more a grimace and a narrowing of her eyes.
He heard raised voices from the second level. Eleanor got up and scooted the children toward a door on the far end of the sitting room. Julian’s thin and piercing voice carried down the stairs, ranting something incoherent that ended in a heartbroken wail.
“I’m taking the children to their rooms.”
Ford nodded as she disappeared, and wondered briefly who would take care of Julian. He wasn’t sure why he cared.
When Ford turned to the nanny, he saw that she’d looked up from her hands at the sound of Julian’s voice, and now sat wide-eyed, peering toward the landing of the second floor as if awaiting the approach of a demon.
“Miss?” he said, walking over to the girl. She looked at him, startled, as if she’d only just realized he was there. “You’re the nanny to Lola and Nathaniel.”
“That’s right,” she said. Her voice was oddly level for someone whose eyes looked so wide with fright, someone who’d been weeping moments before.
“Your name?”
“Geneva Stout.”
Ford scrawled her name in his notes. “Do you have identification?”
“Why? You don’t believe me?”
He looked up from his notepad and saw a flash of what might have been anger, might have been fear. “It’s routine, Ms. Stout. That’s all.” He made his voice calming.
She narrowed her eyes suspiciously and then rose to disappear through the same door where Eleanor had taken the children. If she was a little edgy, Ford was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. One of her bosses had just been brutally murdered, the other was ranting like a madwoman, and now she was left with the Wicked Queen as her sole employer. Who wouldn’t be out of sorts? Julian’s wails continued to waft down the stairs, raising the fine hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. Talk about overkill.
Geneva returned and handed him a New York State driver’s license and a New York University student ID. He wrote down the numbers and handed the hard plastic cards back to her.
“Any other addresses?” he asked her. He’d noticed that she listed the Rosses’ address on each piece of identification.
“No,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “I’m a live-in nanny. I take care of Lola and Nathaniel full-time.”
“When do you go to class?”
“I manage,” she said, averting her eyes. “Part-time.”
“Family?”
She looked at him blankly like she wasn’t sure what he was asking. A little too blankly.
“Do you have any family? Where do they live?” he said slowly, looking at her full on now.
“Nope,” she said, again with that quick, certain shake of her head. “I don’t have any family.”
He was going to ask her to clarify her circumstances, but another cry rang through the apartment and Geneva closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with her fingers.
“What are they going to do to her?” she said, her voice tight with anguish.
It seemed like a strange question. Of all the possible things someone would be wondering about at a moment like this, she wanted to know what would happen to Julian.
He sat down on another ottoman that was near her chair and pulled himself next to her.
“Are you very close to the family?” he asked gently. She looked at him like he was some kind of an idiot.
“Well, yeah. I live with them. Take care of their kids. What do you think?”
Then her tough-chick mask split and she started to sob again. “I-can’t-believe this,” she said, barely able to get the words out. He put a hand on her knee and felt her body shaking.
“Okay, Ms. Stout. Take a moment. You can come tomorrow with Ms. Ross and give your statement to me when you’re calmer.”
“My-statement?” she said, looking at him in horror. “I didn’t see anything or hear anything until Julian started to scream. My bedroom is at the other end of that long hallway.” Her words came out between the sharp drawing and releasing of her breath and she pointed unsteadily toward the door she’d gone through earlier.
“Okay,” he said, writing down what she’d said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Unless you want to talk sooner. Call me anytime.” He handed her his card and she grasped it in her hand, gave a small nod. Here she looked at him with those wide dark eyes and he had found himself wondering what it was he saw churning in their depths.
Then he’d heard movement on the stairs. He and Geneva watched as the paramedics brought Julian down restrained on a stretcher. She had stopped screaming and had started to sob her husband’s name in a desperate, keening tone. When she saw Ford at the bottom of the stairs, she looked at him with a pleading in her eyes and said, “He’s come for me again. I’ll never escape him now. He’ll eat my young… swallow them whole. And me as well. You can’t stop him. No one can.”
The temperature in the offices of Mark, Striker and Strong seemed to drop ten degrees when Eleanor Ross pushed through the glass doors. Even from a distance, she had the stern demeanor of a warden and about as much charm. Her long, black cashmere coat was buttoned to the neck and its hem skirted the floor. Dark red lipstick made her face appear paler than a live woman should want. In her proud chin and unsmiling mouth, she carried with her the air of authority that money afforded and the attitude that any deviation from her wishes would result in a beheading.
She was familiar to Jeffrey Mark and he watched her with interest through the glass wall of his office, through which he could see out but those in the waiting area could not see in. It took a few seconds to place her. He had just figured it out when the intercom buzzer on his phone sounded.
“Jeff, there’s an Eleanor Ross here to see Lydia,” announced Rebecca, the firm’s receptionist, who was also a student at John Jay College studying for her master’s in forensic science. “I told her Lydia was out and she asked to see you.”
“Give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”
He had just turned off the television in his office after watching the footage of Julian Ross being rolled out of her Park Avenue building in a stretcher. He remembered her well from ten years ago, and he was not surprised to learn that she was under suspicion again. The only surprise was that it had taken so long. He spun around in his black leather desk chair and looked out over the city, trying to stitch together the fragments of his memory.
The murder of Tad Jenson, Julian’s first husband, was never solved. Even after Julian Ross had been taken into custody and arraigned, Jeff’s good friend Ford McKirdy, the Ninth Precinct homicide detective working the case, couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t that Ford was crusading for her innocence as much as he’d just had a sense that there was more to it, that there was someone else involved. Ford’s superiors considered the case closed. So Ford had contacted Jeffrey and asked for his help, unofficially… not as an investigator but as a friend.
The night her first husband was murdered, Julian claimed that she had been painting in her studio at the far end of the loft, with the door closed and the music blaring. She claimed that she had come out of her studio around six o’clock to see what her husband wanted for dinner and found him brutally murdered. She dropped to her knees beside him in shock and picked up the knife that lay next to him. When the police broke down the door, responding to an anonymous 911 call, that was how they found her.
Ford had arrested Julian Ross because she had been found holding the murder weapon, covered in her husband’s blood, and there appeared to have been no one else at the scene. Only her prints were found on the weapon. The building doorman claimed that no one but Julian and Tad had entered the apartment that night. But something about it had never rested easily with Ford. He was convinced that there was another piece to the puzzle. So, even as Julian went to trial, he and Ford had tried to track down another suspect on Ford’s own time. For a number of reasons, Jeffrey and Ford both agreed that Julian at least had not worked alone. Turned out they were the same reasons that gave the jury enough reasonable doubt to acquit her.
A twenty-three-year-old heroin addict, Jetty Murphy, who had been shifting through the building garbage four floors down from Tad and Julian’s apartment, said he heard three voices, two male and one female. At one point, he heard an inhuman roar come from the window and a woman’s desperate scream. Then, minutes later, as he cowered behind the Dumpster, a giant figure with long hair looking like “some kind of homeless dude on steroids, man, like a real giant but super fast like Speed Racer,” burst from the building’s back door. Jetty claimed to have followed the figure to Prince Street, where the man just disappeared.
There were several long brown and gray hairs found at the scene. But they were never able to match those hairs to anyone Julian knew… friends, associates, neighbors. There were places in the gore where it appeared that someone had wiped something away, possibly foot- or handprints, and the cloth used to do so was never found.
Most compelling of all was Julian’s physical size. It seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that such a small woman would be capable of overpowering a man who outweighed her by a hundred pounds and was nearly a foot taller. Yet the beautiful NoHo loft had been nearly destroyed in the mortal struggle that ended in Julian, allegedly, overpowering Tad and stabbing him to death with a serrated kitchen knife. From the newscast he’d just heard, it sounded like Richard Stratton had met with a similar end, nearly decapitated, parted from his insides.
There had been enough evidence to suggest that someone else had been present; but not enough to figure out who it was or how he got in and out of the apartment that night.
Ford was a good man, with the instincts and tenacity of a bloodhound. He’d been given his nickname, short for Halford, by the other guys at the Ninth Precinct because he was solid and reliable, made of steel, and never said die. Jeff knew that over the years he’d never stopped asking questions about the Julian Ross case. It always came up on the rare occasions they managed to get together for a drink at McSorley’s on Fifth Street. The same place they used to get together nights and talk about the case when it was on, it seemed like the right place to have a beer and talk about old times.
“Remember the Tad Jenson case?” Ford would say with a shake of his head, filling the lull that followed after they’d talked about the job or his kids for a bit.
It was too romantic to say that the case haunted Ford, that it was the one that he never got over. But it was something Jeff knew Ford’s mind turned back to often enough that it niggled at him on those nights after he’d happen to read about Julian Ross in the paper or see her interviewed on television.
Jeffrey swiveled back around in his chair, picked up the phone, and left a message on Ford McKirdy’s voice mail. He called Lydia, then rose to usher Eleanor Ross into his office.
“Do you know why I’m here, Mr. Mark?” asked Eleanor as soon as Jeffrey had closed the door and she had seated herself in one of the two leather Eames chairs that sat across from his desk. Her voice was thin and shaky, with the rasp of a smoker. But he noted that she moved with the grace and strength of a dancer.
“I just turned off the news. I am sorry for your loss,” he said, leaning back on the edge of his desk in front of her, keeping his voice neutral but courteous, compassionate. “How can I help you?”
“I want you to find out who murdered my son-in-law,” she said, turning a cool stare on him.
He turned away from her and felt her eyes on his back as he walked around his desk and sat in his chair. He could smell just the lightest scent of her perfume. It was airy and floral and reminded him of a scent that Lydia wore.
“Which one?” he asked, placing the tips of his fingers together and finally returning her gaze. He had sensed that she was a woman accustomed to giving orders and he wanted it straight at the outset that he was a man not accustomed to obeying them.
She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be assessing him, taking in the details of his face, his clothes, like a boxer sizing up an opponent.
“Ten years ago, the police failed to do their job,” she said slowly, her voice flat. “I want to see that the same thing doesn’t happen again here.”
“Have you considered the possibility that it was the jury that didn’t do their job, Ms. Ross?”
Eleanor Ross’s face lost some of its hardness, seemed to crumble a bit as if she might cry. But Jeffrey had a hard time imagining that kind of emotion from the woman, would have been less surprised if tears fell from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty.
“I know how it looks, Jeff. Can I call you that?” she said, her voice suddenly becoming softer as she leaned toward him in her chair. When he nodded, she continued.
“But I know my daughter and I know that she is not capable of this. If you’re familiar with the case of Tad’s murder, you know there was sufficient evidence to suggest there was someone else at the apartment that night.”
“Do you have any idea who that person might be?”
He thought he saw a flicker there; something that passed in front of her ice blue eyes but was gone as quickly as it came. “No,” she said, raising a hand to her throat. “I can’t begin to imagine.”
“But you believe that the person responsible for Tad Jenson’s death is the same person responsible for Richard Stratton’s?”
“I don’t know what to think,” she said, looking away from him. “I just know that it wasn’t Julian.”
It was in these moments when Jeffrey most needed Lydia. Jeffrey was a facts man. He lived for the empirical, the provable, the trail of evidence that led to an undeniable truth. Lydia believed that the truth sometimes left only a scent on the wind. She got a sense of people, their hidden selves, their secret motives, sometimes in just a few moments. Her instincts were usually dead on. He called it “the buzz.” The tingling of the senses she got when something was not as it seemed, when something was off or needed investigating. Looking at Eleanor, he saw a woman in distress, needing help for her daughter. He wondered, though, what Lydia would see.
He knew Eleanor couldn’t be aware of his involvement in the case ten years ago. No one knew about that except Ford. It seemed like a strange coincidence that she would wind up in his office. He didn’t like coincidences.
“Who’s working the case?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
She pulled a card from the pocket of her coat that she’d unbuttoned but not removed.
“Detective Halford McKirdy. Do you know him?”
“Yes, I do. He’s a good detective, Ms. Ross. You might be wasting your money.”
“Don’t you think I know how it works?” She shifted forward on the chair, her eyes widening in desperation. “The police will go for the easiest suspect. Right now, that’s Julian. I’m her mother, and even I know she looks as guilty as sin. But there’s someone else out there, Jeff, someone who murdered Tad and now Richard. He’ll go free again.”
She pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed her eyes, even though Jeffrey had not actually seen any tears. He could see that she had been a beautiful woman once. Even now, with her silver hair, fair skin, and searing blue eyes, she was remarkable. Her face was a map of fine lines, but they communicated depth and character to Jeffrey rather than old age, beauty faded.
As Eleanor made a show of wiping her eyes, Jeffrey looked up and saw Lydia walk through the glass doors of the office, feeling the familiar lift in his heart that he did every time he saw her. She was shadowed by Dax, and looked tiny next to his large frame. He could see the flush of her skin, her black hair pulled back into a tight, high ponytail. He watched her stop at the reception desk and then stride toward his office, all attitude, dressed head to toe in black except for her white Nike running shoes and socks.
Lydia entered Jeff’s office without knocking, bringing with her the scent of cold air outside. Eleanor startled a bit and looked up from her tissue. Then she rose, extending her hand.
“I’m an admirer of your work, Ms. Strong,” she said. “That’s why I’ve come here.”
“I’m a great fan of your daughter’s. I was sorry to hear of the tragedy that your family suffered today,” answered Lydia, taking Eleanor’s hand in both of hers. Jeffrey wondered at how she had gathered so much information in the half hour since he’d spoken to her, as he watched Lydia focus all the energy of her attention on Eleanor. He’d watched people shrink under that gaze, as if sensing that she could see all the facets of themselves they strove to hide.
Eleanor only nodded at the compliment and sat down again, lowering her eyes. Lydia sat in the chair beside her, leaned back, and crossed her legs. Jeffrey could see the flash in Lydia’s eyes as she sized up the woman next to her before Eleanor raised her eyes again.
“How can we help you, Ms. Ross?” asked Lydia.
“Ms. Ross would like us to find out who killed her son-in-law,” said Jeffrey.
“Which one?” asked Lydia, and Jeffrey suppressed a smile. “I mean, the case ten years ago was never solved, was it?”
“No. That is why I am here today,” answered Eleanor, barely concealing her annoyance at having to repeat herself. “I don’t want the same thing to happen this time.”
Jeffrey noticed that she’d dropped the frightened, desperate-mother persona she had employed in her conversation with him and that her imperiousness had returned.
“Where’s your daughter now?” asked Lydia.
“She’s at the Payne Whitney Clinic, where she’s being treated for a psychotic break she suffered this morning. Quite a natural response to the trauma she’s suffered, I’m told. Especially for someone so emotionally… fragile.”
“Shouldn’t she have gone to Bellevue?” asked Jeffrey, knowing that the Midtown hospital was the standard place to bring what the police referred to as EDPs, emotionally disturbed persons.
“Our lawyer was able to see that she was taken to the hospital with which her psychiatrist is affiliated.”
“Is that to say that she’s had mental health issues in the past?” asked Lydia.
“Julian has suffered severe bouts of depression in her life. But since the birth of the twins, she’s been quite stable. Now… this. Well…” Her voice trailed off and she didn’t finish the thought.
“Can we talk to her?”
“She’s not lucid.”
“Still…”
“I’ll arrange it, if you think it will help.”
Lydia looked closely at Eleanor, wondering how she could be so cool and unemotional in light of the events of the day. Eleanor had appeared to be wiping her eyes when Lydia entered, but Lydia didn’t sense any genuine sadness from the woman. She seemed more like a CEO at an emergency board meeting than a mother whose daughter’s life was unraveling. Some people hid a tumult of emotions beneath a serene façade. But Lydia had the sense that Eleanor’s chill went straight to the bone.
Eleanor looked at her watch suddenly and rose.
“I have to collect my lawyer and see Detective McKirdy to give my statement,” she said, turning to Jeffrey. “I’m sure you’ll recap our conversation for Ms. Strong and contact me to let me know if you’ll accept this case. You realize, of course, that money is not an issue.”
“We’ll contact you by the end of the day today,” answered Jeffrey.
Lydia stood and shook Eleanor’s hand again, saying nothing. The older woman’s hand was as cold and hard as a corpse. She turned toward the door with a sweep of her coat.
Jeffrey escorted Eleanor to the elevators and Lydia watched as they exchanged a few more words while they waited in the lobby. She could hear the cadence of Jeffrey’s deep voice even though she couldn’t understand his words. The elevator doors slid open and Jeffrey held them as Eleanor stepped on. Lydia always admired the way Jeffrey treated people, with a kind of courteous distance. He wasn’t cold, but he wasn’t falsely intimate. There was a quality about his manner and his voice that communicated authority. There was something about the gaze of his hazel eyes faceted with gold and green that could be in turn withering or understanding, loving or just plain dangerous.
When Eleanor disappeared behind the stainless steel, Jeffrey turned to face Lydia, raising his eyebrows and giving her a small smile. She knew he couldn’t see her, but that he was aware of her watching, observing them. The thought made her smile.
In the cab on the way up, Lydia had checked the news headlines on her cellular phone. Remembering Jeffrey mentioning the Julian Ross case of ten years ago to her more than once, she had deduced immediately what was up. Though she certainly hadn’t expected Eleanor Ross would be sitting in his office when she arrived.
She hadn’t been blowing smoke up Eleanor’s ass, not that she was above it. She truly had been a fan of Julian Ross’s work for quite some time. It was grim and violent, alive with a raw passion that moved Lydia. She’d thought more than once of buying an original piece but could never quite bring herself to part with the small fortune it would cost. Besides, there was enough violence and passion to be found on the landscape of her own inner life to keep her occupied.
Eleanor Ross made quite an impression herself. Lydia could tell that she was a formidable woman, strong and domineering, intelligent, and not to be fucked with. But she could also see Eleanor was hiding something, something that frightened her very much. Lydia could sense that by the way the older woman’s hands were ice-cold and shook almost imperceptibly, by the way she shifted her eyes quickly between Lydia and Jeffrey, by the way she slipped behind a queenly façade when Lydia mentioned the first murder case. The buzz was so loud it sounded like blood rushing in her ears.
Jeffrey returned to the office and shut the door behind him. He wore a thin black Armani sweater with three bold horizontal gray stripes across his broad chest, over charcoal wool flat front pants. A pair of black leather boots was the perfect finish. His sandy brown hair was cut short with a stylish bit of length on top. He was the only straight man she knew who loved designer clothes and good hair as much as she did.
“What did you think of her?” he asked, knowing by the look on her face that she’d already formed an opinion.
“Freaky,” she said with a smile. Lydia stood and Jeffrey pulled her in to him. She took in the scent of his cologne, feeling his warm hard body against hers and the stubble on his chin against the soft smooth skin of her face. She wrapped her arms around his waist.
“How’s everybody?” he asked, pulling back from her and patting her still-flat belly. Then, not waiting for her to answer, “I really don’t think it’s a good idea to be running, do you?”
She bristled a bit, never liking much the suggestion that he knew better than she what should and should not be done.
“Maybe not, but it’s not even a month yet,” she said with a shrug, moving away from him and heading toward the couch.
He smiled and said nothing, knowing by now the futility of trying to tell Lydia what to do. He pulled a bottle of water from a small refrigerator under the bar on the far wall of his office and tossed it to her. She pulled it from the air and they sat on the cream chenille sofa arranged to look out onto his spectacular view of downtown Manhattan. She put her feet up on the glass top of the chrome-and-bleached-wood coffee table and hugged a rust-colored pillow to her chest as he filled her in on the rest of the conversation with Eleanor and some of the more relevant details of the earlier case.
“What about those hairs? Any chance they’re still floating around somewhere? DNA technology has come a long way.”
He shrugged. “Anything’s possible. I left a message for Ford McKirdy.”
“So what do you think?”
He drew in a deep breath and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’d like another crack at this,” he said thoughtfully. “There are too many unanswered questions. I know Ford feels the same way. At least, if we get involved, we know we can count on his cooperation.”
“You really think there was someone else there that night… you know, back then?”
“I really do. I’m not saying she was entirely innocent. But there was definitely someone else there. There’s more to what happened than we were ever able to piece together. I just have a strange feeling that what happened last night will shed some light on the past.”
He got up and walked across the elaborately patterned Oriental rug to the window.
“Just one thing, Lyd. Don’t get pissed.” His voice was tentative as he watched her from across the room.
“What?” she said, looking up at him with a frown.
“I only want your brain involved in this. You leave the legwork to the other people on the team.”
She nodded, since they’d already agreed that she’d do nothing to put herself in danger while she was pregnant and until they had captured Jed McIntyre. But the resentment she felt was already a stone in her heart. It pulled down the corners of her mouth and creased her brow. He walked back over and sat down beside her, putting his arm around her shoulder.
“I know this is hard for you. But it’s not forever.”
“Is there any word?” she answered, not wanting to look at him, not wanting to reveal how constantly she wondered where Jed McIntyre was.
“There’s no sign of him. The FBI has people watching us, watching your grandparents on Kauai. There’s an alert at airports and at bus and train stations. If he makes any kind of a major move, chances are we’ll know about it. He’s going to have to take a risk sometime.”
She nodded, knowing he was right. But the waiting was like a physical pain, invading her sleep, keeping her from peace and comfort. The sense of something dark and angry at her heels was always with her.
“How are your grandparents doing?” he said, trying to lighten the subject that was casting a pall over their days.
“Great,” she said with a forced smile. “They love it there. They’re looking forward to seeing us.”
They had sent Lydia’s grandparents on a “vacation” indefinitely to Hawaii after their brush with Jed McIntyre early last month. There they would stay under FBI surveillance until Jed McIntyre was behind bars again. Or until he was dead.
“Did you tell them?” he asked, and she knew he was talking about her pregnancy.
“No, I’ll tell them when we go to visit in February,” she said, leaning into him. She looked into his eyes and smiled, running her fingers though his thick hair. “It’s too soon. And I want them to hear it from both of us… together.”
She got up and walked toward the window, looking out onto the cityscape, leaning her head against the cool glass. After a tense minute, she gave a little laugh.
“What?”
“I was just thinking, at any given moment I could be watched by the FBI, Jed McIntyre, and Dax Chicago… all at once.”
“I resent being lumped in with that crew, I’ll tell you that,” said Dax, appearing at the door on cue like a bulky apparition. He walked into the office and stood next to Jeff.
“Not very good company, is it?” said Jeff, patting Dax on the back.
The buzzer on the intercom sounded.
“Jeff, there’s a Detective McKirdy on the phone for you,” Rebecca’s voice announced over the speaker.
“I got it,” Jeff said as he moved toward his desk and picked up the line.
“Hey, Ford. Rough night?” he said into the phone. He laughed lightly after a pause and said, “Well, you’ll never guess who just stopped by my office.”
Lydia looked at Dax and said, “Let the games begin.”
The woman was afraid, small, cowering in the shadows. Lydia could practically see her chest heaving, could almost hear her ragged breathing. The woman, her skin gray, her face bleeding from a gash under her eye, clung to the tatters of her clothes as she tried to look around a concrete wall, tried to see without being seen. But she couldn’t quite commit herself to the action, as though she’d really rather not know what was on the other side of the cinderblocks. Maybe it was just as well, because on the other side of the canvas world was carnage. The sky was painted a churning of red and black, the streets were washed in blood. Bodies writhed in pain, disemboweled, decapitated, clawing at the earth. Some figures were engaged in violent sexual contact, others in the throes of death and murder… and it was hard to tell the difference. The detail was intricate, a screaming mouth, a bleeding eye, a man inserting a blade between a woman’s legs, a woman ripping the heart from her own chest. Reigning over it all, two towering black wraiths, the shadows of their ghoulish fingers leaking in the black clouds in the sky, the blood on the earth. The canvas was gigantic, nearly seven feet tall and ten feet long. Julian Ross called it a self-portrait.
Something about Julian Ross’s artwork had always resonated with Lydia. Standing now in front of the giant canvas in the white SoHo gallery space, the sounds of light traffic carrying in through the open door, the sunlight washing through floor-to-ceiling windows onto the bleached wood floors, Lydia was moved again by what she saw. What hung before her was the work of a victim, someone haunted, someone hunted. Whether she was chased by demons inside her mind or by demons that lived and breathed in the real world, Julian Ross was on the run. Lydia could relate.
“That’s bloody awful,” said Lydia’s shadow.
“It’s art,” said Lydia briskly, annoyed with him for always being right behind her, invading her space and her thoughts. Dax was so close she could smell the peppermint on his breath.
He snorted. “Art… as if any hack who puts a brush to canvas is an artist. That’s rubbish.”
She ignored him, hoping he would go away and let her think. After a moment he walked a loop around the gallery and found a place standing outside the door, legs apart, arms folded. My bodyguard, Lydia thought, wanting to scream and throw things at him like a toddler having a tantrum.
“Why did you want to come here?” asked Jeffrey. She’d persuaded him to come with her to the gallery that displayed Julian Ross’s most recent work on their way to meet Ford McKirdy at a diner on West Fourth Street.
“I just wanted to get a sense of what she’d been painting recently. This one,” she said, pointing to the tag beside the giant canvas, “was finished about two months ago.”
“It’s intense,” he said, regarding the painting before him. “Not the work of a stable person, if you ask me.”
Lydia nodded. “But not necessarily the work of a murderer, either.” She pointed toward the cowering figure behind the cinderblock wall. “Julian Ross sees herself as a victim.”
“Maybe so, but her husband is the one spread all over the bedroom walls.”
Lydia nodded again, not quite sure how to respond to a statement like that.
“Can I help you?” asked a smooth male voice from behind them.
They turned to see a suave, tall, dark-skinned Latino with a slick of black hair that flowed to his shoulders. His lips were a warm, full pink and his liquid brown eyes spoke to Lydia of salsa dances under a full moon, scandalous assignations, and sangria. He wore a pair of black linen pants that draped elegantly from his thin hips and a white silk shirt unbuttoned to reveal a hairless chest. He extended a manicured hand to Lydia. “I am Orlando DiMarco and this is my gallery,” he said, looking straight into her eyes.
Lydia smiled and shook his hand but didn’t offer her name. He released her hand a moment later than was appropriate and glided past her. He removed the information tag from the wall beside the painting and replaced it with one that read SOLD.
“Unfortunately, this piece was sold this morning.”
“Bad news travels fast,” said Jeffrey.
Orlando gave Jeffrey a cool smile. “But there are many more interesting pieces in the back I can show you, if you like.”
He was handsome and sexual in a very effeminate way, not as though he were gay but in the way of European men. As if he were more in touch with his emotions and less afraid to show them than an American man. She could sense that he was highly temperamental. It was something in the shape of his eyes, the warmth of his hand, and the sway of his hips that communicated to Lydia that he would be an earth-shattering lover.
“Are they recent?” Lydia asked.
“Yes, of course. One of them she turned in just a few days ago. Of course, it may be her last for a while. So, it’s particularly valuable,” he said matter-of-factly. “Follow me.”
She turned around to tell Dax they were going in the back, but he was already right behind her.
The room behind the gallery space was bigger than Lydia had expected. There were hundreds of shrouded canvases leaning against the walls like ghosts. The lighting was dim and the air cooler than it had been in front, she imagined to preserve the artwork. A light and not unpleasant scent of paint and linseed oil permeated the room. In the back she saw a large black lacquer desk with a computer, a credit card machine, and stacks of files. She also noticed a framed picture, a close-up of Julian Ross smiling radiantly, her cheeks flushed from the sun, a wisp of dark hair blown in front of her eye. She looked happy, in love. Lydia glanced over at Orlando DiMarco as he climbed up on a chair to remove a shroud from the largest canvas in the room, and wondered.
“You carry Julian Ross’s work exclusively?” she asked, as he struggled with the far corner of the sheet. Jeffrey moved in to help him, but Orlando waved him away.
“Well, mostly,” he said. “Though recently I have started to feature other artists. There has always been enough demand for Julian’s work, but she hasn’t been as prolific in recent years.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“She was happy,” he said almost sadly, and the shroud dropped to the floor.
A monster stared out at them, trapped in Julian Ross’s canvas. It was a face divided in half. On the right, the canvas was dominated by the features of a handsome young man, his mouth drawn into a twisted sneer. He had a shock of blue-black hair and one clear green eye, in which there was the reflection of a beautiful woman. The figure posed in the reflection of his eye, naked, her arms bent lifting her hair off her neck, her breasts pushed forward. On the left, it was the same face but age had warped the features, the hair had grown long and gray, twisted into shabby dreads, his teeth brown and sharp. His mouth was drawn into the same sneer, but a trickle of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth. In his eye, the reflection of the same woman, mutilated, her body opened and innards escaping, hung from the black branches of a great oak tree. The detail of the face and the images dancing in his eyes was exquisite, every line, every shadow, every muscle defined by the deft hand of a gifted, accomplished artist. It was remarkable.
All four of them stood there looking.
“What did she say about it?” Lydia asked finally.
“Nothing. She had it sent by messenger. I called her and she never returned my call,” he said, and sounded bitter.
“Who is it?”
“Look closely.”
She examined the detailed facial features of the man and at the woman reflected in the green pools of his eyes.
“It’s her,” said Lydia. “It’s Julian Ross.”
“The woman?” asked Jeffrey, looking more closely at the reflection in the monster’s eyes.
“Both,” answered Lydia. She walked over to the desk and picked up the picture she had seen there. Orlando looked uncomfortable but didn’t protest. She held the picture up for Jeffrey and the features were undeniably similar to the man in the painting.
“What did she call it?”
“He Has Come for Me,” he said, shaking his head. “I think it’s her most disturbing work. Though I can’t say why. There’s just something so fearful about it.”
“How well do you know her?” Lydia asked.
Orlando reached out and took the photo gently from Lydia’s hand. “Who are you?” he asked, suspicion creeping into his voice. “You’re not here to buy art.”
“No,” said Jeffrey, holding out his private investigator’s identification. “Eleanor Ross has asked us to find out what happened to Julian’s husband. I’m Jeffrey Mark and this is Lydia Strong. This is our associate Dax Chicago.”
Orlando nodded, as if he weren’t surprised. Most people would have been at least annoyed, but he looked suddenly tired. Lydia saw him retreat into himself. He got that glazed-over look that people get when their thoughts have turned inward. He walked back over to his desk, placed the frame back in its place, and sat in the chair behind his desk.
“We have worked together for over twenty years. We were… we are friends,” he said, still looking at the photograph, and Lydia saw so much more than feelings of friendship there in his face.
“So you knew her when her first husband was murdered,” said Lydia.
He nodded. “She was acquitted,” he said, a little defensively. “She’s innocent… of that and of this. I’m sure of it.”
“How can you be so certain?”
He sat forward and looked directly at Lydia. She walked closer to him, while Dax and Jeffrey hung back a bit. Lydia sat down across from Orlando, returned his gaze. He sounded positive, as though there were not a doubt in his mind. But Lydia had to wonder, wouldn’t even the most loyal friend have his suspicions after the second murder?
“Because I know her,” he said, sitting back.
“So then, any thoughts on who would be motivated to murder Julian Ross’s husbands?” she asked, keeping her voice light and even. Here she saw his eyes shift, as if he were remembering something. Whatever it was, he didn’t share it.
“Someone who was stalking her, someone who wanted to hurt her, an enemy?” Lydia pressed. “Was there anyone she feared?”
Orlando shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, his voice harder, more certain than his eyes.
Lydia nodded now, thoughtful. She was reaching, probing, looking for something that might give her a map of Julian’s life, something that might lead her eventually to find out how it had fallen so horribly apart.
“You said she was happy. She was happy with her husband?” said Lydia. “She loved him?”
He shrugged. Again the shade of something across his face.
“Yes, she loved him. He gave her the thing she wanted most in life, her children,” he said quietly. “Lola and Nathaniel-she loved them more than her art. She would never do anything that would take her away from them.”
It was an interesting answer. Interesting because of what he didn’t say. She had expected to hear how wonderful Richard and Julian were together, that she loved him more than life, that she could never hurt him. But he didn’t say any of those things.
“Was there trouble in her marriage? Were they having problems?”
He raised his hands and stood. His face had flushed and now there was anger in his eyes. “That’s enough. What you are looking for here, you will not find. She’s innocent. This I know for a fact.”
“You could only know that for certain if you know who killed Richard Stratton.”
Orlando looked stricken for just a second. But then he just shook his head and grew quiet.
“I don’t need to know that. I know Julian.”
Lydia looked back at the monstrous face on Julian’s canvas.
“But her art is so violent. Is it possible that there’s a side of her you never saw?”
He followed her eyes to the canvas and didn’t answer for a second. “I suppose,” he said, looking from the canvas to the photo in his hand. “There’s a side to all of us that no one ever sees.”
The basketball courts on West Fourth Street were packed as usual with mostly young black guys and a couple of white guys either playing hard or hanging on the fence watching. Most of the players had their shirts off and were sweating like it was July even though the air was cool going on cold. The bouncing ball and the short shrieks of rubber soles on the asphalt echoed off the concrete buildings and an occasional cheer rose up like a wave over the traffic of Sixth Avenue. Jeffrey watched a young man fall hard on the concrete with a groan trying to block another player’s shot and then bounce right up like he was made out of rubber. He was back on his feet and running across the court.
“I remember what it was like to be young and in shape like that,” said Jeffrey.
“You’re not ready for life support yet, Grandpa,” said Lydia, patting his hard, flat abs.
“I’m just saying… you don’t get up from a fall like that and run a mile after forty, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said with a smile. She liked to rub in their ten-year age difference whenever possible. He gave her a look.
Dax had left them suddenly after he received a mysterious call on his cell, so Lydia and Jeffrey proceeded to their meeting with Ford McKirdy alone. They entered the Yum Yum Diner on the corner and found a table toward the back of the converted trailer that stood next to a playground under the shade of trees. They slid into the same side of a red leather booth and Lydia started to flip through the mini-jukebox at the end of the table. The smell of coffee, grease, and cigarettes had worked its way into the walls and the leather seats. Lydia was suddenly ravenous, lost interest in the jukebox, and eyed the pie case, where cakes and pastries rotated enticingly on plastic shelves. The Yum Yum Diner was the kind of place that was just as packed at three A.M. when people were heading home from the clubs as it was on a weekday at lunchtime.
Jeffrey waved to Ford as he watched his old friend make his way through the crowd that was forming for lunch. Jeffrey stood up to shake Ford’s hand.
“It’s been too long, man,” Jeffrey said. “How’re you doing?”
“You look good, Jeff. You, too, Lydia. How are you?” said Ford, taking Lydia’s hand.
He sat down across from them, and placed on the table a manila envelope he had carried in his left hand. Ford McKirdy looked soft and pasty to Lydia. She knew him to be a little over fifty and he looked every second of it. The late nights, high stress level, and bad diet of a cop’s life were taking their toll. He had a light sheen of perspiration on his forehead and she noticed that his belly grazed the edge of the table as he slid with effort into the booth.
“How was your meeting with Eleanor Ross?” asked Lydia.
“Chilly,” said Ford, wiping his brow with a napkin. “That woman is a real piece of work. She was supposed to come with the nanny. But she claimed not to have anyone else to leave the children with; I’ll have to catch up with Geneva Stout later.”
“She give you anything?” asked Jeff.
“Claims she didn’t see or hear anything until Julian started screaming.”
“What did she tell you about their marriage?” asked Lydia.
“Said they were happy. She’d been with them three weeks and said they didn’t have so much as a tiff that she saw.”
“Where’s she visiting from?”
“She lives in Boca now part of the year, part of the year here with her daughter. Said she would have been with them through the holidays and then back down to the condo after the New Year.”
“So what was it like? The scene, I mean,” asked Jeffrey.
“You know, you asked me the same question ten years ago. My answer is the same. It was a fucking mess. Not the same struggle as last time, but Richard Stratton was taken to pieces, just the same as Tad Jenson. I brought you copies of the crime scene photos and my preliminary findings and notes,” he said, sliding the envelope over to them. “You guys are taking the case, right?”
“I haven’t called Eleanor Ross yet, but I think so. I want another shot at this and I know you do, too.”
“You’re damn right.”
“You think there was someone else there this time?”
“I don’t know… doesn’t look like it. On the other hand, it doesn’t look like she could have done it alone. There was blood on the ceiling… a twelve-foot ceiling, for Christ’s sake. The doorman said no one came or left from the front door. But we got no murder weapon. From the preliminary findings of the ME, he said it was a serrated knife, just like the last time. One other thing… don’t tell anyone about this. We’re keeping it from the press. Richard Stratton’s ring finger, and his wedding ring with it, are missing. Unless she swallowed the knife, the ring, and the finger or hid them very, very well, someone else took them from the scene. When I got to her, she was in no condition for a lucid action like hiding evidence.”
“Or so she’d have you believe,” said Jeffrey.
Ford shrugged, gave a quick nod. “Yeah. Tell you what. She’s faking it? Then she’s one hell of an actress.”
“Tad was missing his ring and ring finger, too,” Jeffrey explained to Lydia.
“Nice,” said Lydia with a shake of her head.
Lydia turned it over in her mind, what a thing like that might mean. Was it a symbol? Was she freeing herself from the bonds of marriage? Or was someone else freeing her from it?
“You said she wasn’t lucid when you found her?” asked Lydia.
“She was losing it. She wouldn’t leave the room where her husband had been killed. When the paramedics took her away, she was ranting. She said, among other things, ‘He’s come for me.’ ”
Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look.
“What?”
“We just came from her gallery. A couple of days ago she turned in a painting to Orlando DiMarco, her rep there. She’d titled it He Has Come for Me.”
Lydia described the painting to Ford. He took notes as she spoke, she could see him taking the information in, plugging it into the equation that was growing in his mind.
“I’ll head over there and check it out,” said Ford. “I remember Orlando DiMarco from the investigation ten years ago. He was a big cokehead then. Rumor was that they were lovers, on-again off-again… nothing serious. But I was never able to place him at the scene. Anyway I had him pegged for a lover… not a murderer. Bet he wouldn’t want to mess up all those pretty clothes.”
“It looked to me like there were some hurt feelings there. I would have put money on him being in love with her,” said Lydia.
He nodded and looked at her without seeing her. It was a look she recognized from Jeffrey and even herself. He was moving pieces of information around in his head trying to see what fit where.
“So, what’s the game plan, kids?” he said after a moment in thought and coming back to the present. “I think I’ll pay a visit to Mr. DiMarco. Take a look at that painting.”
“I think we’ll pay Julian Ross a visit,” answered Lydia.
“Good luck. She’s gone, baby, gone. You’re going to need a decoder ring to get anywhere with that one right now.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Lydia said as the waitress approached. She looked ridiculous and unhappy in a pink-and-white-checked uniform with matching cap, someone’s idea of what a fifties diner waitress would wear. Her name tag read BUFFY. She was clearly over fifty years old, and her enormous breasts hung down to the top of her apron. Buffy looked at her customers beneath layers of blue eye makeup and mascara.
“What can I getcha?” she said.
“I’ll have a bacon double cheeseburger with fries and a large chocolate milkshake,” said Ford as the waitress scribbled in her pad.
Lydia looked at him with worry, hoping that he wasn’t going to have a heart attack right there at the table.
“I’ll have the same,” she said.
Urine, Lysol, and misery were the odors that assailed Lydia and Jeffrey as a strapping orderly buzzed them through a heavy metal door. They stepped into a gray, dimly lit hallway with speckled Formica floors, brightly clean and polished, with a flat wooden railing running the length of each of the walls. Lydia could hear the sounds of someone sobbing and someone laughing.
“Is this your first visit to a psychiatric facility?” asked Dr. Linda Barnes, a bright, pretty young woman whose deep, sultry voice seemed incongruous to her petite frame. Lydia and Jeffrey had met the doctor down on the street in front of the clinic. It was clear from her clipped attitude that the doctor was not pleased with the visit Eleanor Ross had insisted upon. She had the drawn look of someone acting against her better judgment, offered nothing but a quick polite greeting and then an escort up to Julian Ross. She walked quickly and quietly, her rubber-soled shoes not making a sound on the floor. Lydia and Jeffrey had to pick up their pace to keep up with her.
“No,” answered Lydia, “We’ve both seen our share of places like this.”
“I ask because the first time can be pretty rough on the uninitiated,” she said.
“We are fairly well acquainted with insanity,” said Jeffrey.
The doctor shot him a look. “We prefer ‘mental illness’ in my profession.”
“Call it what you will, Doctor,” said Jeffrey.
A large man with a larger brow and a badly shaved head shuffled past them. His lids were purple and heavy, his eyes stared off into the distance intently as he clenched and unclenched his fists. He muttered something unintelligible as he moved past.
“Normally, we wouldn’t allow Ms. Ross any visitors at all,” she said. “It is not advisable to her recovery at this point. But since there are special circumstances and her mother insists, I’ll allow it. But I am going to ask you to keep this visit as brief as possible.”
“I understand,” said Lydia. “How is she?”
“She’s had a psychotic break. It’s a state that occurs, usually, when the mind has sustained a shock that it is not equipped to handle. Julian has more or less shut down. She is incoherent… sometimes ranting, sometimes nearly catatonic. This is more than likely a temporary condition… but I couldn’t hazard a guess as to how long it will last.”
“Could she be faking it?” asked Jeffrey.
“If she is, she’s a very convincing actress,” said Dr. Barnes. “Generally, Mr. Mark, people don’t try to fake their way into a place like this.”
“It’s better than prison.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” answered Lydia.
An elderly woman in a pink smock holding on to a walker with one hand pounded on a door at the end of the hall. “Let me in!” she yelled, frantically looking around her with eyes wild and red-rimmed at her invisible pursuers. “Let me in!” An attendant in green scrubs ran over to her and gently ushered her down the hall, whispering to her. A crowd of patients, all wearing the same pink smocks, crowded around a window where a nurse was handing out tiny paper cups filled with pills.
Looking around her, Lydia felt some combination of pity and dread. She couldn’t imagine a more grim place in which to find yourself. She felt the fear and suffering radiating off the walls and wondered what it would be like to wake up and go to sleep in this place haunted by the delusions of your own mind, searching for the road back to sanity.
“How long have you been Julian’s doctor?” asked Lydia.
“I’ve seen Julian on and off for about the last eight years,” she said. “Until about a year ago.”
“What happened then?”
“She came to her appointment and told me she would no longer be continuing our sessions.”
“Did she say why?”
“She said something very odd. That she’d realized that ninety percent of her problems were due to the fact that she hadn’t been true to herself. That she’d decided to surrender.”
“Surrender?”
“That was the word she used. She wouldn’t expound. Just thanked me, wrote me a check, and left. I didn’t see her again until she was admitted here.”
Lydia turned the connotations of the word over in her mind. Surrender… to give up, to admit defeat. What within herself had she been fighting?
“Her mother told us that she’s suffered with depression. Any indication that there might be something more seriously wrong with her? Did she ever discuss with you the murder of her first husband?”
This time Dr. Barnes didn’t bother to hide her annoyance.
“Naturally,” she said officiously, “I am not at liberty to discuss my patient’s condition or the things we discussed with you. But if you’re asking me if I had any indication that she might be a threat to herself or to others, the answer is no.”
“Did she mention to you at any time that she was afraid of someone, that she had any enemies who might wish to harm her or her family?”
The doctor didn’t answer Lydia. She pulled her mouth into a tight grimace as if she were physically trying to prevent words from flying out.
Lydia stopped walking and the doctor turned to face her. “Look, Doctor. I’m not trying to infringe upon your professional ethics. But a man is dead and your patient is the prime suspect-the only suspect. We’re trying to help her. Maybe you can do the same.”
“I can’t help you. And the only way I can help Julian is by treating her illness and protecting her patient-doctor privilege.”
Case closed. Dr. Barnes was a tough nut and Lydia could see that they’d gotten as far with her as they would today.
After a number of twists and turns down long gray hallways, they reached another metal door and were buzzed through into yet another hallway that had six closed doors on each side and ended in a large, barred window. Sunlight streamed in through the grating and a uniformed police officer sat in a green metal chair reading a copy of the New York Post outside the last door.
“This is the wing for patients who are not stable enough to mix with the others. Ms. Ross is being kept here for obvious reasons,” said Dr. Barnes.
The cop at the door checked his list for Lydia and Jeffrey’s names and found them. He stood up and stepped aside as the three of them entered Julian Ross’s room.
Julian Ross was a ghost of the woman Lydia had seen in the photograph back at the gallery. She sat on the small twin bed in the corner of the room, leaning against the wall, hugging her knees to her chest. She was pale, her eyes glassy and wet. All the light had drained from her. Lydia imagined that she could be picked up and tossed to the floor like a rag doll.
Lydia tried to reconcile the frail woman before them with the gruesome images in the crime scene photographs Ford had given them. She tried to imagine Julian’s tiny, delicate hands wielding a serrated knife and committing the carnage that had been wrought in her Park Avenue duplex. It didn’t work for her. Physically it didn’t seem possible. But more than that, Lydia just couldn’t envision it, though she couldn’t say why. Lydia pulled up a metal chair beside Julian’s bed and tried to look into her eyes. But they were like the eyes of a cat, flat and without depth. It was as if her soul, the essence of who she was, had floated away, leaving only a breathing human shell.
Lydia was not uncomfortable with mentally ill people. She’d interviewed more than one in the past. In fact, she was more comfortable with them than she was with most “sane” people. There was often a logic to their thoughts that made a kind of sense if you listened carefully. There was no artifice to their personalities, nothing put on. It was crazy but it was real.
“Julian,” said the doctor as if she were talking to a child. “This is Lydia Strong and Jeffrey Mark. They are here to see you at your mother’s request.”
There was no sign that she had heard.
“Julian,” said Lydia, “we want to help you.”
She turned bright green eyes on Lydia. Lydia felt a little jolt of shock inside as she saw clearly the eyes from the portrait in Orlando DiMarco’s gallery. She wondered if, as in the painting, there was another side to the wispy woman before her, another side that only Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton had seen. Someone that she had hidden from others and maybe even from herself. In the hard fluorescent light of the room, Lydia could see that Julian’s pupils were dilated. Her long dark hair was highlighted with strands of red and was pulled back into a loose ponytail. Several strands had escaped and hung listlessly around her frail shoulders and in front of her eyes.
“You can’t help me,” she said softly, her voice thick and slow. “No one can.”
“Is she heavily medicated?” asked Lydia, looking at the doctor.
“Oh, yes,” answered the doctor. “She was hysterical, a danger to herself.”
“We can help you, Julian,” said Lydia softly, leaning in slightly. “If you can tell us what you remember.”
The doctor sighed, agitated suddenly behind Lydia. “I don’t think you’re going to have much luck, Ms. Strong. She’s not going to be able to remember anything at this point.”
Jeffrey held up his hand. “Just give her a minute.”
Julian held Lydia’s eyes. “My children,” she said, her tone not quite a question, more a musing.
“They’re fine,” answered Lydia. “They’re with your mother.”
Julian gave a little laugh and rolled her eyes dramatically. “Oh, well then… they’ll be fine,” she said, her voice suddenly tight with sarcasm and anger. “Look how well I turned out.”
She scribbled something in the air with an invisible pen and looked at Lydia with a wink, as if she thought Lydia were in on some private joke. “My mother, the queen. The queen of the damned. Evil bitch.”
“She’s ranting,” said the doctor.
“I can see that,” said Lydia, turning to look at her with annoyance.
“Why are you so angry at your mother?” asked Lydia. Julian didn’t answer. She just kept writing in the air furiously.
The room was so silent, Lydia could hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights above their heads and Julian’s quick and shallow breathing. A moth fluttered above them, knocking itself into the light with a succession of soft taps.
“Julian, do you know where you are?”
“Do you know where you are?” Julian answered with a childish giggle. “Does anyone?”
“Some of us have a pretty good idea,” Lydia answered gently.
“I’m hiding,” she said with a vigorous nod, as if this answered everyone’s questions.
“Who are you hiding from?” asked Lydia.
Julian slid down on the bed suddenly, as if invisible strings that had been holding her upright had snapped. She curled up into a ball facing Lydia, holding herself tight. She was so thin that Lydia could see her shoulder bones poking through her pale skin.
“From my other half,” she said, closing her eyes. Lydia thought of the painting again, the man’s face divided into two parts, the two women.
“What do you mean, Julian?”
But Julian turned her back on them. She lay facing the wall, her breathing becoming slow and heavy. Lydia asked her question again but got no response.
“I’m going to have to cut you off, Ms. Strong,” said the doctor. “You can see how exhausted she’s become. You can try again in a couple of days.”
Lydia looked reluctantly at the small form of Julian Ross. From behind she looked like a child. She got up to leave, pushing the chair back to the place where she’d found it. She’d seen something dancing in Julian’s eyes, something reachable. Lydia thought if she could only come up with the right trigger, she could rescue Julian from her own mind. The three of them walked toward the door.
“Lydia?” said Julian, without turning around.
“Yes, Julian.”
“He’s come for me, again. No one can stop him now.”
Lydia stood staring at Julian, remembering again the canvas, that monster’s face. As the doctor put her hand on Lydia’s arm and led her from the room, she felt a chill move down her spine. She felt an odd connection to the artist. Maybe it was because Lydia felt hunted, too.
From above his copy of the New York Times, he saw them leave the Payne Whitney Clinic on West Sixty-eighth Street. He could smell the honey-roasted cashews from the vending cart on the corner and it made his stomach rumble. Lydia hadn’t eaten yet and neither had he.
She was radiant today, truly glorious, and it filled his heart with love just to be near her. There was something so flushed and creamy about her skin. He would do anything to reach out and touch it. But she was surrounded, always. If it wasn’t Jeffrey Mark, it was that other monkey, the burly Australian. Just the thought of him made his blood pressure rise, caused a tightness in his throat. He wouldn’t forget the way he had been treated by Dax Chicago.
Jed McIntyre wiped the newsprint from his fingers onto the long black wool coat he’d picked up for ten dollars at a thrift store in the East Village and adjusted the plaid golfer’s cap.
Today he was an old man reading a paper at a bus stop. Yesterday he had been a homeless woman pushing a cart down her block. Tomorrow… well, who knew? Every day was a creative challenge. The world was looking for him. He was hiding in plain sight. People never really saw what was right in front of them; you could always count on that.
Luckily for him, before Dax Chicago had put a major kink in his plans, he’d stowed the duffel bag given to him by Alexander Harriman, Esq., in a locker in Grand Central Station. The key hung on a chain around his neck. So he was flush. No money worries, though he had lost his vehicle. Anyway, in the city, a car was more a pain in the ass than it was worth.
He watched her, through the round gold rims of his glasses that had no lenses, as she stood on the corner with Jeffrey. He watched the way she draped a hand casually on his arm as she talked. She was animated, leaning into him, her eyes bright. Jeffrey Mark hailed a cab and then opened the door for Lydia. He slid in behind her and then they took off.
Jed stood and watched until the cab was out of sight. The crosstown bus hissed to a stop in front of him and he got on, slid his card through the slot, and took a seat at the back. He saw a white van pull from its spot on the street, though he was sure there hadn’t been a driver in there a minute ago. It headed downtown after the yellow cab. Those FBI guys were everywhere. Yet they saw nothing. He laughed a little too loudly and the elderly woman sitting next to him glanced at him warily. He gave her a bright smile.
“It just doesn’t work for me,” said Lydia, flipping through the photos Ford had given them. The cabdriver wove between and around cars, racing up the West Side Highway as if the cops were chasing him.
“Can you slow down, please?” Jeffrey said to the bulletproof glass that separated them from the driver. But the driver seemed not to hear… or maybe more likely not to give a shit.
“I admit the logistics are a bit hard to put together,” he said, finally giving up on trying to get through to the maniac cabdriver. “But right now it doesn’t look like there was anyone else there.”
“More evidence is going to turn up,” she said. She had a way of sounding so sure of herself and her intuition that Jeffrey was always inclined to nod in response to what she said, even if he didn’t necessarily agree with her.
“You know, there have been cases where a person is so pumped full of adrenaline that he takes on superhuman strength.”
“Usually brought on by fear,” said Lydia, thinking of the painting again.
“Or narcotics.”
“Ford’s notes say that her blood alcohol level was only slightly elevated and that there were no narcotics present at all.”
“Or rage,” suggested Jeffrey, bracing himself as the cab made a sharp fast exit from the highway at Ninety-sixth Street and headed across town. It was the street that divided the city. Ninety-sixth separated the richest people in Manhattan from the poorest, the safest neighborhoods from the most dangerous. The city was segregated like that all over, but nowhere more starkly than here. If you followed Madison Avenue or Park Avenue from midtown up to the Bronx River Expressway, you saw the city change before your eyes. Luxury high-rises, trendy cafés, exclusive shops morphed into stark projects and dark doorways, abandoned buildings with boarded-up windows and marred by graffiti, empty lots filled with garbage.
“I guess the most pressing question at this point,” said Jeffrey, “is whether there was another way into the building.”
“There are a lot of questions,” said Lydia, feeling the buzz tingling in her fingertips. “Like who does Julian believe has come for her? Is it someone real? Or is she delusional?”
“Well, she’s definitely delusional.”
“Something’s not right,” she said, looking out the window.
“If I had a nickel for every time you’ve said that…”
“You do,” she said with a smile.
“True enough.”
Jeffrey and his partners Jacob Hanley and Christian Striker had started their private investigation firm nearly seven years ago, now. All former FBI men, they’d grown tired of the politics of the bureau, tired of the paranoia about public perception of the organization, and they’d decided they’d be more effective investigators on their own.
They’d started out with small cases-insurance fraud, husbands checking up on wives, some employee screening. Then they’d started working with the FBI and NYPD on cold cases, or cases where the police felt their hands were tied… in those cases, the firm’s involvement was strictly confidential. But it was Lydia and Jeffrey’s first case together, the infamous Cheerleader Murders, that put them on the map. Now the firm that started out of Jeffrey’s one-bedroom East Village apartment employed over a hundred people and filled a suite of offices in the West Fifty-seventh Street high-rise. They’d been hugely successful, in large part due to Lydia, her contributions as a consultant, and the publicity that surrounded the books she wrote on some of the cases they’d worked. When Jacob died last year, Jeffrey and Christian Striker had asked Lydia to come on as partner.
“True enough,” he repeated, taking her hand.
The cab came to a halt in front of an attractive brownstone off of Central Park West. Jeffrey paid the cabdriver through the small flip tray in the glass and tipped, even though the guy had practically killed them all. But they had made good time, and he couldn’t complain about that. He did make a mental note of his name and ID number-Abdul Abdullah, number 689GHT2-for what purpose he didn’t know. The driver never acknowledged them at all except to take the money.
Lydia slid out of the cab behind Jeffrey and looked at the door to the ob/gyn office with trepidation.
“Maybe that test was wrong,” she said, hesitating at the sidewalk.
“Maybe,” answered Jeffrey, reaching out his hand. “That’s why we’re here.”
But he hoped that it wasn’t wrong. He wanted this and he knew in his heart that she did, too. She was just afraid. But he was sure that everything was just as it should be and that they were going to be fine… all three of them.
The past was immortal. Maybe it slept, but it never died. It had been creeping up upon them all this time. Without sound and without odor, like the most skilled predator, it had stalked them and suddenly it was upon them. In her two-bedroom suite at the Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue, Eleanor Ross poured hot water from a hand-painted porcelain pot into a matching teacup. The scent of oolong tea rose potent and savory as she put the lid in place with a delicate clink, and replaced the pot on the tray. She sat on the plush sofa and drummed her long fingernails on the dark oak surface of the coffee table.
She regarded her hands for a moment with their long manicured fingers, their loose white skin and veins like ropes beneath the nearly translucent surface. They were the hands of an old woman. She brought a hand to her hair and touched the rough, brittle strands that were pulled back tightly into a bun. The hair of an old woman. It was funny how the external changed so dramatically but the internal remained much the same. Her perceptions, her concept of herself had not changed all that much since she was a young mother. Even though the shell of her was virtually unrecognizable. She’d been beautiful once, so beautiful. Tall and voluptuous, with long, thick red hair, almond-shaped eyes that blazed green, perfect breasts, magnificent white unblemished skin. But that was all in the past now… the only part of the past that was dead and gone. Beauty had faded, but the horror lived and breathed.
It seemed so silly now that she had imagined they could all escape their legacy. She thought of her daughter in that awful place, the twins sleeping in the bedroom across the suite. They were still innocent, but she saw it in them, too. In their too-old eyes, in the way they looked at each other, in the way they communicated without speech. She had tried to ignore it, but she had seen it too many times. Eleanor still missed her own brother, in spite of everything. In spite of the fact that he’d been dead now nearly twenty years. There was a connection there that no one and nothing could sunder. Not even time. Not even murder.
She looked into the facets of the magnificent emerald in its antique platinum setting on her left hand. Her engagement ring, given to her by the only man she had ever loved enough to marry. Gone now, too. Before she could stop it a tear traveled down her cheek and she quickly wiped it away. She got up and walked to the window, looked down to the street, where people hustled about their ordinary lives. Steam billowed from a manhole cover, its plumes rising into the air and dissipating in the cold before they reached the sky. The day was gray and felt like snow. The people, coming home from work, or running to do some shopping for Christmas, or meeting friends for dinner, filled Eleanor with envy. What must it be like not to live under the shadow her family lived under? But then she imagined, maybe just to make herself feel better, that they were all haunted by something, weren’t they? There was something that they didn’t want to be. They didn’t want to repeat the cycle of their family legacy, become an alcoholic, an abusive parent, the victim of a congenital disease, an old woman living alone with no one to look in on her. Everyone lived under the shadow of some fear or dysfunction, didn’t they?
The phone was ringing softly on the end table beside the couch, maybe twice, maybe three times before she noticed it. She moved over to it quickly and picked it up.
“Hello?” she said warily, anxious that it might be more bad news. The phone was cold and heavy in her hand.
“Ms. Ross. It’s Lydia Strong. We wanted to let you know that we’re going to be taking on your case.”
“I’m so glad,” she said, and she was. Relief washed over her like a wave.
“There’s paperwork you’ll need to fill out. Would you like us to messenger it to you, or would you prefer to come by?”
“You saw my daughter today,” she said, not answering the question. “Do you think she’s guilty?”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone before the girl answered. “No. I don’t.”
Eleanor was glad to hear it, though she wasn’t sure she believed Lydia Strong. “I’ll come by the office tomorrow around noon, if that’s all right.”
“That’s fine. We can talk some more then. I have some more questions for you.”
“Very well,” answered Eleanor. “Good-bye.” She hung up the phone and sighed. They could ask all the questions they wanted. But there were only so many answers she could give.
Lydia folded Jeffrey’s cell phone and handed it back to him. He took it from her and held her hand in the warm pink waiting room. Everything was pink and roses, smelling of potpourri. Even the bulbs behind the sconce lighting were pink, the reception desk a rose-colored Corian. A very pregnant woman sat across from Lydia reading a copy of Parenting magazine. She looked so young and serene, her cheeks glowing with health and color. She had her arm looped with the arm of a young man, who was reading a copy of Money. She stared at them in wonder. Aren’t they terrified? She was ready to get up and run screaming from the doctor’s office, and these two just radiated peace and joy. The young woman looked up at her, must have felt Lydia’s eyes on her. She gave Lydia a happy, shy smile, and patted her belly. “I’m huge, aren’t I?” she said, her blue eyes shining, “Just a couple more weeks.”
Lydia smiled back at her. “You’re beautiful,” she said, and meant it. The man smiled at them and returned to his magazine. After a few more moments, a nurse came out and escorted the young couple in to see the doctor. Lydia noticed a soapstone sculpture that sat beneath a lamp on the end table next to the couch where the woman had been sitting. It was the impression of a woman, her head a stone atop her belly, which was a circular nest with another tiny stone nestled in the curve. Motherhood.
“Oh, God,” said Lydia, squeezing Jeffrey’s hand.
“I’m right here,” he said with an indulgent smile.
“You damn well better be,” she said. “You’re stuck now… shotgun wedding and all.”
He laughed and released her hand, put his arm around her and pulled her close. “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried,” he whispered in her ear.
Ford McKirdy pulled his green Taurus into the narrow driveway beneath his Bay Ridge row house. He didn’t bother pulling the car into the garage, but he attached the Club to his steering wheel, took the bag of Chinese takeout from the passenger seat, and locked the doors. Nobody wanted his piece-of-shit car, anyway, which was part of the reason why he drove it.
He felt heavy and tired as he pulled himself up the red brick steps to his front door. His neighbors in most of the other houses had hung their Christmas lights and decorations, making the block a tacky visual cacophony of multicolored bulbs, plastic Santas, reindeer, snowmen, and nativity scenes. Ford’s house looked grim and neglected by comparison. He held the screen door open with his back, looping the bag around his wrist as he fit the key into the knob. The air was cold outside, a biting winter chill moving in for the first time in a season that had been unusually mild. The house was dark inside, empty.
A lifetime ago, his children, Katie and Jim-or James, as he liked to be called now-and their golden retriever, Max, would have raced each other to the door in a messy, happy tumble to greet him. He could hear the echo of Max’s deep barking, the kids’ yelling. His wife would be standing in the archway between the living room and the dining room, the look on her face telling him if he was in trouble or not for however he’d fucked up that day. The smell of whatever she was cooking reaching him as he embraced her. But tonight the house was quiet. Max was long gone, put down nearly five years ago now. Katie, a kindergarten teacher, lived with her husband and two kids in Houston. Jimmy was a Wall Street broker living in Battery Park City “working like a slave and partying like it’s 1999,” as he liked to say; Ford saw even less of him than he did Katie, though he was only a few subway stops away.
His wife, Rose, hard to believe she was gone more than a year now. All the difficult times they’d faced together, all the hell he’d put her through, all the fights and late nights she spent worrying about him, all the canceled dates and missed anniversaries because he’d “made a big collar.” After thirty years together, she’d finally had enough.
“I have good years left, Ford,” she told him one night, when he’d come home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, her coat on and an overnight bag by her feet. “I don’t want to live them like this. Our children are grown and happy. I did my job, taking care of my family.”
She’d put some money away, wanted to travel.
Turns out no one ever told him that all the things that make you a great cop make you a shitty father and husband. He missed her every night when he came home to the quiet, cold Brooklyn house where he’d lived for twenty-five years, twenty-four of them with her. But when he thought of her, he realized he didn’t know certain things about her that a man should know about his wife, like her favorite color, the perfume she wore, what made her laugh. He’d paid attention to every detail of every case he’d ever investigated, had a catalog of professional memories, remembered things about cases twenty years ago like it was yesterday. But when it came to Rose, he was ashamed to admit, he didn’t even know her dress size.
Ford flipped on the light in the hallway and hung his coat in the closet. He looked at himself in the mirror that hung behind the door, the mirror where Rose had always combed her curly black hair and applied lipstick to her full, soft mouth before leaving the house. He looked old, with blue smudges of fatigue under his eyes, a five o’clock shadow on his jaw. His salt-and-pepper hair was in serious need of a trim. He was fat and pale. Shit, he didn’t even get on the scale anymore. He didn’t want to know.
He turned out the light and walked over the red shag carpet of the living room and onto the speckled Formica of the dining room and into the kitchen.
When Rose left, he realized he didn’t know how to run the dishwasher. That he couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed a stitch of clothing or been inside a grocery store. He was virtually helpless. Thank god for Chinese takeout and Laundromats. If it weren’t for the Asians, he’d be dirty and hungry all the time.
The aroma of sesame chicken wafted from the bag as he dropped it on the counter by the sink. He washed his hands and pulled a plate from the cupboard. It was funny, not in a ha-ha way but in a pathetic and miserable way, that he’d spent his whole life trying to be different from his father and his life was turning out just exactly the same way-alone, a heart attack looming in the not-too-distant future. He turned on the television that sat on the stand by the table to the eleven o’clock news, brought the bag and the plate over to the table, and sat down.
Ford’s father, a first-generation Irish American, had been a mean bastard of a drunk who’d never held down a job for more than a month. Living off welfare and the meager salary Ford’s mother earned as a clerk at Macy’s, his father had systematically terrorized and tried to ruin the lives of his wife and each of his children. He’d beaten Ford and his older brother Tommy, nearly killed his mother before she got the strength to leave him and move them all away. His father died alone in a room at the YMCA, a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, with no one to mourn him.
In his life, Ford had worked to be exactly the opposite of the man his father was. He’d learned the value of discipline and hard work from his mother and promised himself that no children of his would want for things the way he and his brother had. He’d worked long hours of overtime to make sure his family had everything they needed and more. He’d never had more than a beer or two in a sitting. Even with all of that effort, always sure he was doing the right thing just because it was the opposite of the way his father had done it, now he was alone.
Ford had never touched his children in anger; in that way at least he had not lived his father’s legacy. Nonetheless, Katie and James were distant, polite strangers who made the obligatory calls on Sunday night and visited every few months. He couldn’t blame them… he hadn’t been the best father. He hadn’t really been a father at all. But they were good kids because of Rose.
He reached over to turn up the volume on the set when he saw himself on the screen. He looked even worse than he thought. He stood beneath the maroon awning of the Park Avenue building where Richard Stratton had been killed, with the reporter he’d agreed to answer some questions for when he’d been ready to make his statement to the press.
“At this time,” he was saying to the pretty blond reporter, “no charges have been brought against Julian Ross.”
He cringed to hear himself talk. Just a month ago, his partner Frank Benvenuto would have talked to the press. A good-looking guy, charismatic, funny, Frank had always handled the press with ease, knew how to use his relationships with reporters to the department’s advantage. But Ford had no such expertise. Now, with Frank retired and no new partner assigned to him, Ford had to deal with the vultures himself. He tried not to think about the fact that his chief had hinted at a reluctance to assign Ford a new partner, the assumption being that Ford, too, must be considering retirement.
“Does this murder make you doubt the jury’s decision to acquit Julian Ross ten years ago?” the television reporter asked, her smile and perky voice seeming inappropriate to him.
“There’s nothing at this time to connect the two events,” he said, curt and non-committal. Why did I keep running my fingers through my hair like that, Ford thought, hating the way his voice sounded.
But Ford wasn’t thinking about retirement. He had no idea what he would even do with himself. It was fine for Frankie, now sailing around the Caribbean in a fifty-foot sloop with his wife, Helen… his dream for as long as Ford had known him. Ford kept getting postcards from exotic locales: “The emerald water is calling you, my friend! Come meet us in St. Bart!” Yeah, right. And do what? Sit on my ass and sip cocktails?
“Where is Julian Ross now?” asked the reporter.
“She’s under psychiatric care at an undisclosed location,” he answered.
“Are there any other suspects?” the reporter pressed.
“There are no suspects at this time,” he said, moving away from the reporter and toward the unmarked Caprice that he drove while he was on duty. “That’s it. I have no further comments right now.”
As he watched himself get into his car, the camera still following him, Ford noticed that he had a huge bald spot on the back of his head. He sighed and served himself some of the sesame chicken, started eating with a plastic fork. The fact of it was that, without a partner, he’d been lucky to catch this case at all. If he hadn’t worked the first Julian Ross case, he’d be doing peripheral work for people like Piselli and Malone, a couple of junior guys assigned to work the case with him.
“As you can see,” the reporter concluded, “the police have no leads in the murder of Richard Stratton, husband of world-renowned artist Julian Ross. But inside sources say that the arrest of Ross is imminent. We’ll keep you apprised of all breaking news on the case. This is Betsy Storm, ABC News.”
The newscast was enough to switch his focus from the misery of his life back to the Julian Ross case. His visit to Orlando DiMarco had led him nowhere. The guy wasn’t about to admit that he and Julian were lovers. But Ford did get a good look at the painting Lydia Strong had described. It reminded him of the description Jetty Murphy had given him ten years ago, the mysterious man who’d left through the basement back door and disappeared into the night. He could track Jetty down easily enough, but getting him to remember might not be so simple. After Jetty raped and murdered an elderly woman in Tompkins Square Park a few years ago, he’d been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and sent to the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane. It was an awful place… made Payne Whitney look like Club Med. People who went there didn’t usually get better. So he didn’t expect Jetty’s mental health to have improved much. But it might be worth a trip up there with Lydia and Jeff, to see if there was anything they’d missed the first time.
He looked down at his plate and was surprised to see that he’d polished off all of the sesame chicken and the white rice that had come with it. He’d barely even tasted it. He pulled himself up from the table, threw the containers in the garbage, rinsed the plate off, and placed it in the dishwasher next to the plate from last night. He walked over to the refrigerator and popped a Michelob Light and headed down the stairs to his basement office. He walked past the groaning old furnace and through the laundry room.
His office was a converted walk-in pantry; it was in this small space where he had pored over the Julian Ross case, among others, over the years. It was this small space that he had chosen over the love and company of his wife and children. It was here where he had spent every ounce of his energy and his free time going over the cold cases where the answers had eluded him. It was here that he had given everything of himself over the course of his career. So it was fitting, he supposed as he reached up to pull the string and turn on the light, that it was all he should have left.
The bent old man carrying a Balducci’s bag, wearing a long black woolen coat and a plaid golfer’s hat, shuffled off the bus at Astor Place. He moved slowly with his head down, moving against the crowds of people still pulsing along the streets though it was nearly midnight.
He made his way down the stairs to the subway and walked to the end of the nearly deserted platform. He could hear the street noise from the grating above his head. When the downtown 4/5 arrived, a screeching, hissing metal bullet, the few passengers waiting on the platform got on. But the old man waited, seated on the wooden bench against the tiled wall. “Stand clear of the closing doors,” the conductor yelled, and in a rumble and flash the train was gone.
The old man walked to the edge of the platform, looked once over his shoulder, and then jumped with the strength and grace of a younger man onto the tracks, careful to avoid the third rail. He made his way along the edge, watching for the circle of light that would warn him of an oncoming train. In the darkness, small forms skittered, their tiny razor-sharp nails scratching against the concrete. They didn’t bother him anymore, the rats. They didn’t bother him at all.
He felt more than heard the roar of the approaching train before it turned the bend and he saw the glow of the light looming ahead of him. He picked up his pace to a jog, moving faster as the light approached him. The sound was louder now as the train grew close and he broke into a run. His heart rate quickened and his breath came harder in the dank and soot of the tunnel. As the train bore down on him, a frenzy of light and sound and metal, Jed McIntyre ducked into a doorway and the train went rushing past in a blaze. He leaned against the concrete for a moment to catch his breath, and then pushed through the entrance and made his way down the corridor. Water dripped from the ceiling, dropping rhythmically to the ground, collected in shallow puddles. Ahead of him, he could see the blaze of a fire and hear the echo of voices.
Beneath the streets of New York City there was an entirely other world. He’d heard of it when he’d been locked up. A paranoid schizophrenic had told him about the tunnels. But he’d never actually believed it… after all, the other people at the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane were insane. But his unfortunate circumstances had compelled him to investigate the matter for himself.
The homeless were the invisible population of New York City. They staggered through the streets, ranting, reeking, begging for change, and yet they were barely acknowledged by even the most compassionate New Yorkers sharing the sidewalks. People didn’t want to acknowledge their existence, as if to do so were to admit that they themselves were only about a paycheck away from the same fate. The homeless were filthy and crazy, to be ignored and avoided at all costs, just like the city rats. Worse… because rats could be poisoned. He had always felt that way himself until by his circumstances he became one of them… well, in that he had no place to go.
In a small park on Rivington Street he’d met a man called Charlie, an aging Vietnam vet with a bad case of halitosis and a mean heroin addiction. Charlie approached Jed at a moment when Jed was feeling quite lost. The city was crawling with cops and Feds with his picture on their dashboards and he’d been moving in the darkness, through alleys, dressed as a homeless man for two days and nights, sleeping in subway stations. Truth was he had enough cash to stay at the Waldorf or to go anywhere in the world, but he didn’t dare go near a hotel, an airport, or a train station. Jed had been slumped on a park bench, pretending to sleep, when he heard the clattering of a shopping cart pushed over concrete and detected a dreadful odor… some combination of urine and foot rot. He looked up to see the watery brown eyes and dirty face of his savior.
“New at this, huh?” Charlie had said, sitting beside him, pulling his cart possessively to his side.
Jed had just nodded, eyeing him suspiciously. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had spoken to him of his own accord. He wondered briefly if Charlie was an undercover cop. But decided he was just too disgusting; he smelled of years of being on the street, irregular bathing. No cop was that good.
“I’m Charlie,” he said, offering a moldy hand, his long fingernails caked with dirt. Jed didn’t offer his in return. Charlie withdrew his without emotion.
“Well, it’s gonna start to rain soon,” he said with an air of authority. “Soon it’s gonna get real cold. You got a plan?”
Jed shook his head.
“I know a place where you could go and be safe… well, safer than the shelters anyway. You could find a little place to call your own, you know? Got any money?”
“A little,” said Jed, curious.
“Can you help an old man out?” asked Charlie, looking like he was jonesing a bit, his foot tapping, his mouth moving as though he were chewing an invisible piece of gum.
So they made a deal… though it didn’t quite turn out for Charlie as he had expected. After Charlie told Jed about the tunnels, how to get in, who to see when he got there, Jed pretended to reach into the pocket of his coat for money and instead took a blade and plunged it deep into the old man’s throat. Charlie never made a sound and Jed thought the old man had looked at him with relief, as if he’d been done a favor. Jed sat beside him until the life drained from him and his eyes stared off into the world beyond. You could never trust a junkie.
So Jed had finally found a home, a place where he could be safe in the mad world that loomed above him. Catacombs, webs of tunnels that stretched for miles, wound down into the earth some said ten, some said twenty levels deep. There were nooks, rooms, bridges, ledges, catwalks, a million places where you could make yourself a nest, free from the hassles of the city above. He’d been a little afraid at first, a little uneasy. But then the dark and the silence had seduced him… and really, of whom exactly should Jed McIntyre be afraid? Who was sicker, more evil and twisted, more homicidal than himself?
He turned off into another tunnel before he reached the group of bottom-feeders that were gathered around the fire under a vent that led to the street. There was a community under here that Jed did not wish to be a part of. He only participated enough to be connected to the information web when he wanted, directions, secrets of the tombs. He had a few things they did not. Money, for one; intelligence, for another. Then there was the fact that people knew somehow to be afraid of him. Those who lived down here hadn’t survived without a certain kind of animal instinct. They smelled his evil like an odor. All these things had served so far to get him what he needed. That was how he had figured out a very important thing about the tunnels.
He would rest awhile in the little space he’d created for himself and then he’d continue his exploration of the catacombs, as he liked to call them. It reminded him of Paris and the networks of tunnels lined with bones beneath Denfert-Rochereau in Montparnasse. Comte d’Artois, later Charles X, threw wild parties in the catacombs just before the revolution. He, like Jed, must have been very comfortable with the idea of death-other people’s deaths, of course.
It was totally silent by the time he’d reached home. He climbed the metal stairs with a light jog, removed a key from his pocket, and unlocked the padlock he’d bought at the Big K up top. The door creaked loudly as it opened, and the echo sounded in the tunnels like a human scream.
Inside, he lit one of his battery-powered lanterns, placed the padlock on the interior latch, and left the key in place, in case he needed to get out in a hurry. It was the only door in or out of his cozy little space, so he felt relatively safe. But one could never be too careful.
He’d also purchased an AeroBed from the same Big K where he’d picked up the padlock and lanterns, along with some lovely sheets, blankets, and pillows from the Martha Stewart Collection. The floor along the wall was lined with books, Lydia’s books, books about the history of New York City and its subway system, computer manuals so that he could keep up with his trade. He kind of liked his little nest.
He sat on the floor and removed his foie gras and Carr’s Water Crackers from the Balducci’s bag. He had other little treats in there, too, but he’d save them for later. He spread the foie gras on a cracker with a plastic knife and savored the spicy, meaty taste on his tongue while he gazed up at the wall. Taped up on the wall were long sheets of brown paper towels that he had drawn upon in charcoal pencil. It was here that he was making maps of his wanderings in the catacombs, charting how the tunnels and levels connected to each other, and what corresponded on the streets above. By his calculations, his little nest was almost directly below Lydia and Jeffrey’s Great Jones Street loft.
The rumor of the tunnels was that some of them led to concealed entrances to buildings, passageways created during the Prohibition Era so that bootleggers could move their product to the city’s speakeasies beneath the sight of the law. He’d yet to find any of these entrances, and he wasn’t a hundred percent convinced that they even existed. But he liked the romance of the idea, the idea of a dark netherworld connected by secret portals to the world above, small unguarded spaces where demons could move from hell into the light and back again, carrying their prey on their backs. He fairly shivered with the thrill of it.
Dax Chicago loved Lydia Strong. Not in any kind of romantic or sexual way. She’d drive him absolutely insane. But in the way of friendship, which for Dax was the most powerful love of all. He loved Jeffrey Mark in the same way, with a fierce loyalty and deep affection. Because they were threatened, because their lives and their happiness were in danger, he felt threatened and very much as though he’d let them down that night in Riverdale when Jed McIntyre had gotten away.
Jeffrey had been right when he’d warned Dax. “Don’t underestimate him,” he’d said. “He’s not as stupid as he looks.” Dax hadn’t listened. Of course, Jed McIntyre had some help that night. But still, if Dax had been a little more cautious, Lydia and Jeffrey wouldn’t be in this mess. Dax considered it his personal responsibility to fix it up right. And fast.
He drove his Range Rover slowly down Tenth Avenue. The night was turning frigid and the cold had crawled in beneath his sleeves and down his collar and he felt it in his bones, in spite of the fact that heat was blasting from the Rover’s vents. He felt badly for the prostitutes and she-males who strutted their stuff in fishnets and miniskirts. He’d always had a soft place inside himself for the strays of the world, the broken, the damaged. Some people, he knew, just never had a chance.
He watched as they gyrated and preened underneath the orange glow of the streetlights. Their sparkling and brightly colored clothes were a garish contrast to the dark, gray buildings and empty doorways. Some of them looked okay from a distance, but they were skanks, every last one of them, dirty, looking ten years older than they actually were, covered in track marks, wreaking of sex. But there was no one who knew the streets like these people, knew what was going down when and on whom.
He fiddled with the heat, adjusted the vents, though he knew it couldn’t blow any harder; he couldn’t stand the bloody cold. His thick, strong hands gripped the wheel as he scanned the women and wanna-be women, looking for one in particular. They catcalled him as he drove by, walked slowly toward his vehicle. A tiny woman with orange hair and red leather pants gave him the finger when he didn’t stop for her. He couldn’t tell how old she was and he tried not to think about the fact that she looked like an adolescent. He’d been moving slowly enough and she’d come close enough for him to see her eyes. There was the deadness there of someone lost, someone who’d already been marked for a tragic end.
He saw her, finally, huddled by a Dumpster with a long bleached blond wig hanging to her thin waist, long, shapely legs in red tights and black patent leather platform shoes and matching hot pants, a big pink faux fur cropped jacket unzipped to reveal a leather bustier. He pulled the car over to the sidewalk and rolled down the widow. She sauntered over and leaned her arms on the door in typical ho fashion.
“Dax. I missed you,” she said, her voice deep and husky.
“You got a little bit of a five o’clock shadow going there, Danielle,” said Dax, with a smile, unlocking the door.
“It’s been a long shift,” the transvestite complained, sliding her six-foot frame into the Rover with the grace of a duchess. Dax handed her a hundred-dollar bill, which she immediately stuffed into the little pink clutch she was carrying.
“Oh, honey,” Danielle said. “You shouldn’t have.”
“It’s the least I could do,” answered Dax, not quite making eye contact with her. Danielle made Dax uncomfortable; she was a black hole of need and misery and Dax knew there was only so much he could do for her. He needed to keep his distance.
“You got that right, cowboy,” she said, her voice growing hard. She sensed his unease and it insulted her. “What I have is going to cost you more than that.”
“Tell me what you’ve got first and I’ll decide how much it’s worth.”
She laughed a deep, hearty laugh… a man’s laugh. Then she moved to get out of the vehicle.
“Okay, okay. How much?” he said.
“Five hundred,” she answered.
He took the money from the breast pocket of his leather jacket and handed it to her, watched as it disappeared into her bag. He could feel hard calluses on her hands as she grabbed the bills from him. It was what he had expected to pay her anyway. She settled into the passenger seat and got comfortable, held her hands up to the heat coming from the vents and rubbed them together for a minute.
“All right, Danielle, enough fucking around,” he said, losing patience. “Tell me what you know.”
“Um-hum, I just love that accent. It’s so sexy. Take me to McDonald’s, Daxie, and get me a Big Mac and fries, huh? I’m starving. I’ll tell you everything over a hot meal.”
Her face was a mess. Her nose had been broken and never healed right, leaving a large bump on the bridge. Her violet contact lenses looked ghoulish in combination with her dark, scarred skin. Dax noticed that her lip quivered and her hands shook slightly. As he looked at her, his impatience gave way to pity. He started the Rover and moved away from the sidewalk. It was going to be a long night.
Lydia had never been so acquainted with her toilet bowl as she had become over the last few days of morning sickness. She felt like her insides were being ripped open by some alien creature trying to get out. She was weak and tired, sleep having eluded her the last few nights. She’d dreamed of Julian Ross and the painting they’d seen, but she couldn’t remember the content, just that she’d awakened sweating and with a feeling of restless unease. She rested her head on the rim, bracing herself for another round, but was grateful when the nausea seemed to be subsiding.
“You all right?” asked Jeffrey, entering the bathroom, kneeling beside her, and placing a hand on her head.
“I’m okay,” she answered, trying to smile at him. She looked into his eyes and saw how happy he was, and it made her happier, too.
She pulled herself together and got up from the marble floor, leaned against the sink and inspected her face closely in the mirror. He stood behind her and smiled at her reflection. He was dressed already, wearing a royal blue Ralph Lauren oxford and charcoal pants, a black Italian leather belt with brushed chrome accents and matching buckled boots.
He put some of her Sebastian gel in his hair behind her as she brushed her teeth and pulled a comb through her jet-black hair.
“Come have a cup of coffee with me before I go?” he said, hugging her from behind.
“Sure,” she said, and trundled downstairs behind him still in her purple silk pajamas. She had a few hours before she had to meet Eleanor Ross at the office, so she planned to do a little exploring on the Internet, see what she could find about Julian Ross and her past. Dax was sitting on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table watching The Today Show as they came down the stairs.
“When did you get here?” asked Jeff.
“A couple of minutes ago,” he said, not looking up from the screen. “I made some coffee.”
“He has a key?” asked Lydia.
“I thought it was a good idea,” answered Jeff with a shrug.
“God, why doesn’t he just move in here and start paying rent?”
“Katie Couric is really hot, you know. She’s got this whole sexy girl-next-door thing going on,” said Dax.
“So where did you go yesterday, Dax?” asked Lydia, grabbing two coffee mugs from the cabinet. They’d just left the gallery and were walking toward the Yum Yum Diner when Dax’s cell phone rang. He had about a thirty-second conversation, which seemed to mainly consist of grunts. Then he had hung up quickly and said, “I gotta go. I’ll see you in the morning.” He had walked away without another word, disappearing around the corner.
“None of your bloody business,” he said gruffly. “Christ, you’re nosy.”
“All of a sudden you get this call and then you just disappear like James Bond on a mission.”
“I have other clients, you know,” he said, standing up and walking over to them, pouring himself some more coffee and then handing the pot to Lydia. “You are not the center of my universe,” he continued, patting Lydia on the cheek. “A concept that I know is difficult for you.”
“Oh, come on, Dax,” she pleaded, “give it up. You’re too mysterious. I can’t stand it.” Her curiosity about him, his life, and his past was like an itch that she couldn’t scratch. She placed the cups on the counter, poured some coffee in each, and put the pot back in the machine. She was about to press Dax further when she was struck by yet another powerful wave of nausea. She turned and ran to the downstairs bathroom, slamming the door behind her. When she was gone, Dax turned to Jeff and said quietly, “I got a lead on him.”
Jeff raised his eyebrows. They’d agreed that if they got a handle on Jed McIntyre, they’d take care of it themselves, without the FBI… and without Lydia.
“Is it reliable?”
Dax shrugged. “I think so. We’ll need to check it out. Sooner rather than later.”
“Lydia has a meeting at the office in a couple of hours with Eleanor Ross. Let’s talk then.”
Dax nodded as Lydia waddled back into the room, holding her stomach, looking gray and sweaty. She threw herself on the couch with a groan. “This kid is kicking my ass already.”
“You know,” said Dax, sitting beside her and dropping his arm around her, “you don’t have that healthy glow so many pregnant women seem to have.” He gave her an affectionate squeeze.
“Oh, fuck off, Dax.”
Lydia’s office, which had been more or less transplanted from the home she’d sold last year in Santa Fe, took up the greatest square footage on the first floor of their apartment. The south wall faced Great Jones Street and was comprised largely of four ten-foot windows. The east wall was floor-to-ceiling bookcases, containing the intellectual clutter of most of the books she had read and all she had written in her career. Across from her desk sat a large sienna leather couch and matching chair, between them a mahogany wood table, which had once been the door of an eighteenth-century Spanish castle.
It was a peaceful place, a cocoon, and as she settled into the black leather chair at her desk and booted her laptop, she listened to the hushed street noise that only just barely made it through the thick glass of the windows. A scented candle beside her gave off a hint of jasmine, though it wasn’t lit. On the wall behind her hung a clutter of awards, her Pulitzer chief among them. Several black-and-white photographs accented empty wall space: an adobe church against a darkening sky threaded with lightning, a photograph of her taken by Herb Ritts during a shoot for a Vanity Fair feature in which she looked a pleasing combination of haunted and mysterious, mischievous and wise. It had surprised her then that she looked so utterly together, when she was really just lost inside. She had been relieved that it didn’t show.
Here, in her office, she was free. She didn’t have to think about Jed McIntyre, or about her pregnancy. She only had to focus on the case at hand, give in to the buzz, and search for the pieces of the puzzle. It was like a drug she used to escape her reality, even as she was chasing someone else’s.
When her computer was up and running, her fingers danced across the keyboard as she logged in to her powerful search engine. She entered Julian Ross’s name and came up with over a thousand entries. Lydia wasn’t necessarily interested in the accounts of Julian’s first husband’s murder. She had more details from Ford McKirdy’s old files and Jeff’s memory than she would find online. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for exactly. She was just looking. She would know she’d found it… when she felt the familiar jolt of electricity course through her veins.
She scrolled down through the gallery reviews, the publicity pieces, the gossip columns, the wedding announcement. Lydia marveled at the photographs… the radiant, photogenic woman captured laughing, dancing, or serious, with searing, intelligent eyes, giving interviews, walking in Washington Square Park with a child on each hand, her husband close behind.
There were several images of Julian with Richard Stratton. He looked more like her father than her husband, an elegant man with graying temples, high forehead, and a cool, distant gaze. There was a photo of them in tennis whites on the lawn of a sprawling Hudson estate, one of them in formal wear arriving at a Guggenheim event, and a candid shot captured as the family shopped on Fifth Avenue. Three different moments in time, but their body language in each was similar. Richard with a possessive arm around her shoulders, hand on her arm, or holding one of her hands in both of his. Julian leaning away or looking away. In the candid, she seemed to shrink from him and he had a wistful look on his face as though even when they were close, she eluded him.
Still, the Julian Ross Lydia saw cataloged before her in snapshots, moments, some posed, some honest, seemed content if not exactly happy, in command of her life, a mother, a wife, an artist. But she was a specter, in no way resembling the shattered, wretched woman Lydia had met at the Payne Whitney Clinic.
“What happened to you?” she wondered out loud, her voice just a whisper.
She clicked on a New York Times piece, AT HOME WITH JULIAN ROSS. Here a color picture of Julian showed her delicate beauty lit in natural sunlight that gleamed in from a tall window in her Park Avenue duplex, as she reclined on a red velvet sofa. Her small twins, tiny reflections of each other, sat on either side of her. They were her image, delicate features, green eyes, wise and deep. There was nothing of Richard Stratton apparent in their faces. They stared at the camera as if hypnotized by it. The little girl, Lola, sucked her thumb. Lydia felt a little twist of something in her stomach as she looked at the photograph. There was something so ephemeral, something otherworldly about the twins. They were almost… spooky.
She read through the article, which was a valentine about Julian Ross, how wonderful, how talented, how resilient to bounce back from personal tragedy. It contained no questions about who might have murdered Tad if she did not. Just a story about her struggles with an uptight art professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, her studies in Paris, in Florence, an art teacher who recognized her talent in grade school in the small upstate New York town where she was a child. A town called, of all things, Haunted.
Nice place to raise a family, she thought, images of dead trees and dilapidated cemeteries playing in her mind.
She looked at the clock on the lower right-hand side of her screen and realized she had lost track of time, scrolling through the numerous articles. She’d have to jet if she was going to make her appointment with Eleanor Ross. There was just one more thing she wanted to check. She entered “Haunted, New York” into the search engine. There weren’t that many entries, so it didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. She sat back when she saw it and inhaled sharply with a shake of her head, the buzz electric inside her.
“Did you know that back in 1965 when Julian was five years old, her father, Jack Proctor, was murdered? And that Eleanor was accused, tried, and acquitted for the crime?” said Lydia to her cell phone in a cab headed uptown. Jeff and Ford McKirdy were conferenced in on the line.
There was silence on the other end of the phone before Ford said, “Uh no. Is that true? Where did you hear that?”
“I found it online, a periodical archive search engine I subscribe to. I printed up copies so that you could see for yourself. Did anybody look into Julian Ross’s childhood during the last murder investigation? Or did you focus primarily on the physical evidence and witness testimonies?”
“Yeah, I have to admit,” said Jeff. “We focused pretty much on the present tense.”
“How was he killed?” asked Ford.
“In much the same way that Tad and Richard were killed. Taken apart at the seams. Eleanor was acquitted for many of the same reasons Julian’s jury found her innocent. No one could believe that a woman, especially a woman of that size, was physically capable of it.”
The cabdriver leaned on his horn pointlessly as they crawled through midtown crosstown traffic. Other cars jammed on the street followed suit.
She heard Ford let out a loud sigh. “God… how could we have missed that?”
“So what are you suggesting?” said Jeffrey. “That nearly thirty-five years later the mysterious killer strikes again?”
“I’m suggesting that it bears looking into. The murder took place in a town called Haunted, New York.”
“Haunted?” both men asked simultaneously.
“Yes.”
“Actually, Lydia,” said Ford, “I think I know where that is. It’s north, near the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane…”
Lydia’s stomach lurched at the mention of the place that had housed Jed McIntyre for so long and had failed to keep him where he belonged.
“I was planning on heading up there this afternoon,” Ford continued. “Feel like taking a ride?”
“Why do you need to go up there?”
“To talk to Jetty Murphy. You remember him, Jeff. The witness who saw the man leaving the apartment building.”
“He was a junkie, Ford.”
“Yeah, and he’s a murderer and a rapist. But he’s got eyes. Won’t hurt to interview him again. You never know.”
“I’ll go with you, Ford,” said Lydia. “If we can stop in Haunted, too.”
“Lydia,” said Jeffrey, “are you sure that’s a good idea?” She could hear enough concern in his voice to visualize him frowning and tapping his pen on his desk.
“Jed McIntyre isn’t there anymore, Jeff. Anyway, that’s probably the one place in the world he won’t follow me.”
“Oh, shit, Lydia. I’m sorry,” said Ford, embarrassed at his carelessness.
“It’s fine,” she said, annoyed at being handled like a porcelain doll. “Pick me up at the firm at one.”
“See you then. Don’t worry, Jeff. I’ll keep her safe.” She heard him click off.
“Are you sure you’re all right with this?” asked Jeff.
“I promised you I won’t put myself in any danger and I meant it. So trust me to take care of myself, okay?” she said briskly.
“I do. You know that,” he said. But she didn’t believe him. She knew he thought her reckless and stubborn. And maybe, sometimes, she was both of those things.
“I’ll see you in a minute.”
She hung up the phone feeling restless, caged. She didn’t like the limitations being imposed on her… don’t go here because of Jed McIntyre, don’t do this because you’re pregnant. Beneath the claustrophobic sense of being shackled and helpless was a tiny flame of rebellion. She was starting to feel a headache creeping up on her.
“Don’t worry, Lydia,” said Dax beside her. He was so quiet sometimes that she forgot he was right next to her. She looked at him and he had earnest eyes on her. “It’ll be over soon. I have a feeling.”
She knew he was talking about Jed McIntyre. He had a way of knowing what she was thinking that revealed about him a surprising amount of intuition. She looked at him and gave him a sad smile.
“You’re right,” she lied. “I feel it, too.”
When Lydia and Dax arrived at the office of Mark, Striker and Strong, Eleanor Ross was already seated at Lydia’s desk, filling out the firm’s paperwork… payment contract, liability disclaimers, etc. It occurred to Lydia that this was the first case she’d had that actually involved a paying client. Usually she was drawn into cases by something else… a hunch or a feeling. Something would pique her interest and she’d wind up tripping into a whole big mess and bringing Jeffrey along with her.
She pushed her way through the glass doors, wearing a long black cashmere coat, black stretch jeans, and a red Calvin Klein ribbed wool sweater with a cowl neck. A big leather bag over her shoulder contained her “life”-everything from her Palm Pilot to her Beretta to her hairbrush.
As Lydia was about to enter her office, she turned to Dax and said, “What are you going to do with yourself for the next hour or so?”
She was not-so-subtly suggesting that he entertain himself elsewhere while she conducted her interview with Eleanor Ross. She didn’t need him skulking in the corner of her office like a gargoyle while she tried to extract more information from the old woman.
“I dunno,” he said innocently, looking behind him at Jeffrey’s office door. “I’ll go talk to Jeff.”
“Fine,” she said, shutting the door behind her.
Eleanor looked up from her documents.
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long,” said Lydia. She approached Eleanor and waited for her to relinquish the spot she’d chosen at Lydia’s desk and move over to the chairs clearly designated for visitors. The fact that Eleanor had chosen to seat herself behind Lydia’s desk in the first place was extremely annoying, a clear violation of Lydia’s personal space. She certainly wasn’t going to sit on the couch or in one of the chairs opposite her desk, allowing Eleanor the power position. After a long moment, the woman got up, looking at her watch.
“For all the money you charge, I’d imagine you’d be on time,” she said, moving past Lydia.
Lydia smiled politely, reminded of the reason she hated being on somebody’s payroll. She seated herself at her desk and took a cursory glance to see that nothing had been disturbed.
“I’ll just take a moment to establish a few ground rules, Ms. Ross,” she said sweetly. “First of all, you pay this firm for the service of finding the answers to your questions. Those answers may not always be the answers you wanted. Second, I am not your employee. This firm may choose to walk away from your case at any time, should we feel that your demands exceed our resources or that you have been dishonest with us in a way that hinders our ability to meet your goals. Is that understood?”
The woman began to bluster. “I don’t appreciate-”
“Do you understand my terms, Ms. Ross? If there’s a problem, we can terminate this agreement before you’ve inconvenienced yourself further with the paperwork.”
There was a moment when Lydia expected Eleanor to get up and walk out. She had drawn herself up and sat rigid and tall, her eyes blazing indignation and anger. But the moment passed and Eleanor’s attitude softened. “I understand,” she said finally, though the words seemed to choke her.
“Good. Now, with that said, I’d like to know why you didn’t consider it relevant that you were tried in 1965 in Haunted, New York, for the murder of your husband, Jack Proctor. Particularly when the manner of death was so eerily similar to the murder of both of your late sons-in-law.”
Eleanor Ross went quite pale. She seemed to swoon a bit, but Lydia didn’t rush over to her to see if she was all right. Eleanor Ross was a strong woman and Lydia knew it.
“Can I have some water?” the old woman said quietly. Lydia rose to walk across her office, passing the large windows that offered an expansive view of uptown Manhattan and to a small refrigerator that sat behind a large black leather sofa. Her office was almost as large as Jeffrey’s and decorated in the same warm colors-cream, rust, browns, and greens. She took a small bottle of Evian and handed it to Eleanor, who cracked the top and took a delicate sip. Lydia walked back over to her high-varnished mahogany desk and waited.
“I didn’t kill my husband, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Eleanor said without looking at Lydia.
“Who did?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, and the grief that shadowed her features and darkened her eyes suggested she might be telling the truth. But Lydia wasn’t quite convinced.
“But you believe that the three murders are connected.”
“Doesn’t it seem likely?” asked Eleanor, turning her gaze to Lydia.
“So why didn’t you say anything about it?”
“It’s a chapter of my life, as I’m sure you understand, that I was not eager to reopen.”
“It seems as though it has been reopened for you. I guess the question is, Eleanor, by whom?”
They sat in silence for a second, with Eleanor looking down at her hands and Lydia watching her intently, looking for some sign of the inner workings of her mind. Eleanor’s arms were folded across her body and she hugged herself tightly. She’s protecting herself, thought Lydia. Lydia knew that it was often the furtive gesture, the nervous tick, the tapping foot that communicated the most about a person. Words were chosen, but the body never lied.
“You never remarried,” said Lydia, breaking the silence.
“No…” said Eleanor.
“Why not?”
Eleanor stood up and walked over toward the windows. “I loved enough for one lifetime. My husband… no one could have compared to him. It was a rare love; we were lovers, friends, and partners in this life. It’s a hard thing to replace. I never tried.”
Her words struck a chord inside Lydia. It reminded her of Jeffrey and how she loved him. Reminded her of her old fears of losing him to death, how she knew that if he was gone all the light would drain from her life. She shuddered inside, pressed the feelings down.
“Who do you think killed him, Eleanor?” said Lydia, her voice softer now.
“I don’t know,” she said again, her voice catching and dropping to a whisper. Her eyes seemed to look into her past, flip through a catalog of bad memories. There were things there she didn’t want to look at again and things she didn’t want to share.
“You suspected no one, Eleanor?” Lydia pressed. “You were in the house when it happened, weren’t you? Just like Julian.”
“I was in the garden, tending to my roses. I was far from the house out by a gazebo near a lake on our property,” she said, defensive now, raising her voice. “I saw nothing and heard nothing.”
The woman was shaking and Lydia backed off for a second. She took a breath and let Eleanor move back to the couch and sit for a minute, sipping her water and sifting through the past. People clung to denial like a shield in a hail of arrows. Convincing them to put it down and face the truth was like convincing someone to commit suicide.
“I’m not sure why you’ve hired us. You believe that the murders of Julian’s husbands are connected to the murder of your own, but you failed to reveal that to us. Did you hire us because you want answers? Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t really seem like you do.”
“I hired you because I want the killing to stop,” she said with a sudden ferocity. There was real emotion on her face now, her careful façade slipping to reveal the true woman. “Because I want someone in this family to grow up without tragedy.”
She looked up at the ceiling and clenched her fists. “I begged her not to marry again,” she hissed.
Eleanor sat on the couch and put her head in her hands, anger and frustration coming off her in waves. Lydia sat forward on her chair, confused and intrigued.
“Why, Eleanor?” she asked, shaking her head. “Why shouldn’t Julian have married again?”
“Because for generations,” Eleanor said, looking up from her hands, tears falling now unattractively down her face in black rivulets, her mouth quivering, “someone has been killing our husbands.”
Her words hung in the silence and Lydia looked at Eleanor Ross, wondering if there was a history of mental illness in the family.
“My husband, my father, my grandfather before him. Probably further back. Every generation, every woman thinks that she will be the one to escape it. Every time, she’s wrong. I need you to find out what’s happening to our family… and stop it. Enough is enough.”
The sky had turned from bright blue to gunmetal gray and the air smelled like snow as Lydia and Ford McKirdy sped up I-95 toward the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane.
“She didn’t have any idea who might be behind these multigenerational murders?” asked Ford, not bothering to keep the disbelief out of his voice.
“She claimed not to have the faintest idea,” said Lydia, looking out the window at the gray trees, some brightly colored leaves still clinging to their branches. The road and the foliage had taken on a kind of silver tinge in the sunlight pushing through the thick cloud cover. The world was cast in the eerie light that portends a storm.
“So what is it? Some kind of Black Widow curse?”
Lydia shrugged. “I don’t know.” Her mood had turned foul since her interview with Eleanor Ross, not that it had been so great leading up to that.
“What’s the matter with you anyway? You’re all punky.”
“Where are Dax and Jeff?” she asked, not answering his question.
“I don’t know,” he answered, eyes intent on the road ahead. “They were gone when I got there.”
“Yeah, right,” said Lydia.
Ford pretended not to notice her sarcasm.
Her interview with Eleanor had ended abruptly. The woman had just stood up and left. As she was clearly at the end of her rope, Lydia just let her go. They’d talk more later, she was sure of that. Eleanor had more to tell. The past was insidious that way; you could only press the horrors down for so long. Once the lid on the box in your heart had been opened a crack, the demons rushed forth. You could never close that lid again.
She had walked across the hall to tell Jeff what she had discovered and he was gone. So was Dax. Ford McKirdy sat in the waiting area reading a copy of National Geographic.
“Jeff and Dax had to run out,” said Rebecca, her Brooklyn accent thick, drifting out over cotton candy pink lips. She had a round pretty face and a sophisticated layered blond bob. Her face was dominated by bright, deep brown eyes.
“Jeff said he’ll call and to stay with Ford McKirdy until he does.”
“Was that an order?” Lydia asked, directing her annoyance at Rebecca, who really didn’t deserve it. She noticed how Ford kept his nose in the magazine during this encounter, not even looking over at them.
Rebecca lifted up her hands, cool and unflappable as she always was. “Don’t shoot the messenger. They were out of here like their pants were on fire.”
“Where did they go?”
“I swear, Lydia, I have no idea.”
Lydia had the distinct impression that she had been “handed off” to Ford, and the thought filled her with resentment and a fierce need to bust away from all of them. But what bothered her most of all was wondering where Dax and Jeffrey had gone and why they hadn’t told her where they were going. It was totally out of character and she felt a swell of anxiety that she couldn’t quash. A hard twinge in her lower right abdomen caused her to inhale sharply.
“You okay?” asked Ford, glancing over at her. But the pain passed as quickly as it had come.
“I think so,” Lydia said, though in her heart a tiny seed of dread was blooming.
Dax and Jeff walked down the stairway that led to the long-closed Lafayette Street station. As they rounded the bend past the staircase, they faced a locked metal gate. A bright hard shaft of light shone in from the street above them, but on the other side of the gate a tunnel led into such blackness that it looked as though a curtain had been drawn. The walls around them were covered with the work of graffiti artists, and the single bulb that lit the tunnel buzzed and dimmed, threatening to go dark. Jeff watched as Dax removed a key from his pocket and fit it into the lock on the gate.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Jeff, pointing toward the key.
“Apparently, when the city retires subway stations, they put these special locks on the gates. They make about four hundred keys for transit workers. But my contact told me about a hardware store in Brooklyn that actually sells copies of the key, if you can imagine. I thought she was full of shit, but here you go.” He removed the padlock, unraveling the chain and opening the door.
“Leave it open in case we need to get out of here in a hurry,” said Jeff. Dax nodded as he wrapped the chain back through the metal bars and hung the padlock from the last link.
Dax jumped down on the tracks and Jeffrey followed. They made their way through the dank and dirty tunnel, the rumbling of trains audible in the distance, the stench of urine and mold heavy in the air. Beneath the streets of New York City was a labyrinthine network of subway and train tunnels, gas and water mains, sewer lines and cables. There were layers of lines for phone, cable, and electric, street and traffic lights, then gas mains on top of water mains. There were over a hundred miles of steam mains, below which lay the sewer lines and tunnels. The organization of this vast network was pure chaos. No cohesive map of the underground network existed. Over the years so many different companies had been responsible for the installation of lines and networks that even the workers responsible for upkeep and repairs now never knew what they would find when they entered the tunnels. Jeffrey had read that a merchant sailing vessel from the eighteenth century was found under Front Street, part of the landfill when Manhattan’s lower tip was being extended. Wall Street was named for a three-hundred-year-old wall that still stood beneath the street, presumably designed to keep out intruders, probably Indians.
Below all of that were miles of abandoned subway tunnels and stations. Here thousands of homeless people were rumored to live, creating communities and social networks beneath the streets. Most people considered the idea of people living under the streets to be an urban legend, too fantastical to be true. But working with the NYPD for so long on so many different cases, Jeffrey had learned that this was a sad and certain fact. One that the police tried to keep as quiet as possible. The burgeoning homeless population was one of the department’s greatest challenges and the fact that thousands of displaced people now lived beneath the city didn’t make the situation any better.
“Why does your contact think he’s down there and how did she know to tell you?” Jeffrey had asked Dax back at the office. Dax had looked reluctant to reveal how he got his information.
“I put the word out there with some of the people I know on the street and this is what came back,” he said with a shrug. “It’s going to cost you, too. I had to pay five hundred dollars for it. Plus another seven at McDonald’s.”
“Just put it on your expense report,” said Jeff absently. “What do you mean, you ‘put the word out there’?”
“You know, there’s this network aboveground and belowground. Information is passed from one person to the next.”
“So it’s about as reliable as a game of ‘Telephone.’ ”
“It’s all we have, mate. Let’s check it out,” Dax said sensibly. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”
Maybe you have nothing to lose, thought Jeff.
So they’d waited for Ford to arrive, filled him in on their plans, and asked him to stay with Lydia until they got back. Then they slipped out before her meeting with Eleanor was over. He knew she wasn’t going to be happy. But there was no way he was going to allow her to tag along on this errand and there would have been no way to stop her if she knew where they were going. So he’d take his beating later.
“According to Danielle, the entrance should be coming up here on the right,” Dax said, his voice low. A moment later they came upon an opening in the concrete wall. They could hear voices in the distance. Dax and Jeff exchanged a look. “After you,” said Jeff with a smile, and Dax disappeared into the hole. Jeffrey followed him into the darkness.
The New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane rose like a beige monument to misery against the horizon. Lydia and Ford had driven for miles through heavy trees without passing another car or seeing another building, and a light snow had started to fall. Whether it was the stark lines of the structure, or the bars on the windows, or just the knowledge of the hell within its walls, Lydia went cold inside as they grew closer. The place had always existed in her imagination as a house of horrors… where patients suffering from disease of the mind, and maybe the soul, wandered about trying to sort out reality from delusion. She imagined flickering lights, wet gray hallways, somewhere the sound of someone scraping, someone moaning. A place where the cures-shock therapy, lobotomy-were more horrifying than the disease. She wondered if the walls of the structure soaked up the nightmare visions of its residents, she wondered if their fantasies lived somehow in the concrete and gates-if that’s why the sight of it filled her with dread.
She was glad there was still a half an hour of distance to cover; she was almost sorry she had come at all. What good did it do for her to come to this place, former home of Jed McIntyre? It was like she was always trying to prove something… how brave, how strong, how able she was to handle any situation.
“So how’s Rose?” asked Lydia, trying to make idle conversation. Billy Joel sang “The Piano Man” on the easy listening station and his tune crackled and sounded tinny on the cheap car speakers. The moment of silence that followed her question told Lydia that she’d said the wrong thing.
“Better than ever, if you ask her,” he said with a small laugh. “She left me about a year ago.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at him. He tapped his finger on the steering wheel and she watched his jaw work. Instead of letting it drop, she asked, “What happened?”
She’d only met Rose a couple of times, once at a Christmas party the firm threw and once when the four of them had dinner one night at Burrito Loco on West Fourth Street more than two years ago. She wouldn’t have said that Ford and Rose looked overly happy together, but they had seemed like a set of people, like bookends, one less of itself without the other.
“What happened? I don’t know… what happens to people? I was an asshole and she put up with it for thirty years. Then she stopped wanting to put up with it. Said if she couldn’t be the center of my attention, then at least she could be the center of her own.”
They were both quiet for a second. Lydia thought he would go silent, but he went on as though he were glad for the release.
“She said when the kids were home it wasn’t so bad. She felt needed, loved. She was busy. But when they went away to live their lives, she realized that we didn’t have a life together. She saw the rest of her life stretching out ahead of her and she wasn’t sure she wanted to live it with me. Not the way I am, a workaholic, always putting the job first. I can’t really even blame her.”
“So she packed and left?”
“Pretty much,” he said with a shrug, remembering her there, waiting with her suitcase and her coat on.
“Did you try to stop her?”
“She didn’t want to be stopped.”
“Maybe she wanted you to go with her?”
He was silent, like it was a possibility he hadn’t considered.
“Well, its too late now,” he said finally.
“It’s never too late, Ford. Not after so many years. Not if you still love her. You should retire and go after her.”
“Yeah, right. What am I if I’m not a cop?”
“Maybe it’s time to find out.”
More silence as the hospital grew closer and loomed before them. Ford glanced over at her. She wondered if she’d stepped over a line with him. But she’d never been very good at staying inside the lines or keeping her opinions to herself.
“Sometimes, you know,” he said, “you’re so busy being yourself, so selfish, that you forget about the people who depend on you, who love you. You just walk through your life creating damage. By the time you notice, you feel too old, too tired to undo the mess you’ve made and there’s no turning back anyway.”
Lydia looked at the road ahead thinking what a sad way to have to look back at your life. She wondered if he was right.
“But you can always move forward,” she said. Ford shrugged and gave a polite nod as if he weren’t convinced but wanted the conversation to end. The conversation withered between them, leaving them both feeling a little worse than they’d felt before it started.
Ford took a right onto an access road. The snow was falling more heavily now, lightly blanketing the trees that surrounded them as far as she could see. They were in the middle of nowhere, which Lydia guessed was a good location for a place that housed dangerously insane criminals. She looked out the passenger window into woods and saw a high metal fence topped with razor wire running along the side of the road, almost invisible through the trees.
Of course, the reality of the hospital was nowhere near her twisted imagining of it. Originally built in the late 1800s, the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane sat on nearly three hundred acres of heavily wooded land. The first mental hospital in New York and one of the first in the country, NYSFCI was remarkable for its history and its architecture. The main building, closed but still standing on the grounds, was designed by Captain William Clarke. The 550-foot-long edifice with its immense Doric columns was still imposing and grand, meant to exude an aura of authority and stability. And the rest of the buildings were a hodgepodge of different architectural styles, all unified by their gated windows and aura of pain.
Over the years the hospital endured a number of different incarnations. Initially it housed only civil commitments, people who were mentally ill but not necessarily dangerous. When violent and escape-prone convicts began to arrive from local prisons there in the 1950s, the institution became overburdened and a new building was erected on the same grounds for insane convicts. But even with the additions, the hospital became dangerously overcrowded.
It was closed briefly in the 1970s due to budget cuts and allegations of patient abuse and administrative corruption. But the prison systems became so overwhelmed with mentally ill prisoners that the hospital opened again in 1985. Just in time to provide a bed for Jed McIntyre. This was not a place people went to get well. It was a place intended to warehouse and manage people too ill for prison or society, though, of course, no one would ever officially admit that.
Two armed and uniformed guards manned the booth beside the mammoth metal gates that separated the hospital from the rest of the world. Lydia could see another in a tower high above them, the silhouette of a rifle visible from the ground. The younger of the two guards approached the car and Ford handed over his ID and shield. The man returned to the guardhouse and could be seen picking up a phone and briefly speaking into the receiver.
“Proceed to the visitors’ entrance,” the guard said when he returned to the car, handing back Ford’s identification.
The giant gate slid open and Ford drove forward, pausing before a second gate. The first gate closed with a heavy clang and Lydia looked behind her. She took a deep breath as the second gate opened and they drove up the road.
The odor in the tunnels was hard to describe except that it smelled so strongly of human rot and dank earth that it made Jeffrey’s eyes water. The two men forged their way through the darkness, behind the beam of Dax’s Maglite. Jeffrey held one hand over his mouth and nose against the odor and kept his other on the wall to his right. A strange crunching suddenly beneath their feet prompted Dax to shine the flashlight beam to the floor. Cockroaches the size of hamsters formed a writhing, skittering carpet on the ground.
“Holy Christ. I fucking hate bugs,” said Dax. “Ah, God. I wish I’d just left the light off.” They picked up their pace a bit and Jeff fought the urge to scratch every inch of his body.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” asked Jeffrey, glancing behind him at the fading shaft of light that marked their entrance. He tried not to think about the fact that if anything happened to them down here, they might never be found.
“There should be a stairway coming up,” said Dax. “Someone is supposed to meet us.”
“Another one of your mysterious contacts?”
“Something like that.”
“And what does this person know?”
“Well, we won’t find that out until we talk to her, will we?” said Dax.
In the distance, the acoustics of the tunnels making it impossible to tell if noise came from above or below, from in front or behind, they could hear the sound of voices. Briefly, Jeffrey swore he heard the sound of someone playing a flute. The tune was mournful and slow, melodic. Some diffused light made its way down from the gratings above them, enough so they could make out doorways, shapes in the darkness but not enough to really see. The wall was cool and wet beneath Jeffrey’s hand. A dripping could be heard from somewhere and twice something had brushed past his shoe. The Glock at his waist gave him no sense of security at all. They were underneath the world and reality felt suspended. Bullets couldn’t stop shadows.
“This is worse than I imagined it would be,” said Dax.
“No shit,” said Jeff.
“Figures an animal like Jed McIntyre would make a lair in a place like this,” said Dax. “I couldn’t think of a better place for him.”
“I can,” said Jeff.
Dax turned around to look at Jeffrey but saw only a shadow behind him. “Here we go,” he said after a moment, shining his light into an opening in the wall that led to pitch-nothingness. “Just where she said it would be.”
A flight of metal stairs took them into a new layer of darkness where whatever brightness had carried in from the streets above was extinguished by a damp and utter black. The silence was so total that Jeffrey could hear his breath and Dax’s, too. The stairs had led them to a narrow walkway, and at the end in the beam of Dax’s flashlight they could see a metal door with no handle. Jeffrey felt like they were in a tomb. They approached the entrance and stood for a moment.
“What do we do?” said Jeffrey.
“We knock,” said Dax, raising a big fist to the metal and banging hard.
Jetty Murphy reminded Lydia of nothing so much as Golem, the creature from The Hobbit that dwelled in darkness guarding his precious ring. Bent over and twisted like an old branch, he was so thin that his elbows looked like knobs and his collarbone stretched against his skin. His overlarge head seemed to bob on the end of his neck as if he didn’t possess enough strength to support it. Black oily curls hung past his shoulders. He cupped his hands together over his mouth and his fingers were long and ghoulish, with nails bitten to the quick, his eyes black saucers set in gaunt features. He rocked on his haunches in the chair across from Ford. An armed guard stood by the door and Lydia stood beside him.
“Do you remember me, Jetty?” asked Ford. He’d seated himself across from Jetty and sat relaxed, leaning back in the chair. Lydia noticed how he’d molded the expression on his face to a look of benevolence, of understanding.
“Of course I remember you. I’m crazy, not stupid,” Jetty said bitterly. He dropped his feet to the floor and pulled himself upright so that he was sitting with a straight back. He raised his chin in a gesture that seemed to mock dignity.
“It was a long time ago,” said Ford gently, running his fingers along the edge of the table. “Even I have a hard time remembering that far back. How long ago was it now?”
“Ten years or so,” Jetty answered with a shrug. “What do you want?”
“Something’s come up, Jetty. I think you can help me.”
“Help you?” he said, laughing a little, as if such a thing were beyond imagining. But Lydia saw a brightening in his expression, like he had something someone wanted and it was a new feeling for him.
“I want you to remember that night for me again. Tell me again what you saw.”
“What’s in it for me?” he said, looking over at Lydia quickly and then back at Ford. “Can you make me a deal?”
He leaned forward quickly on the table and Lydia felt the guard twitch at her side.
“Sit back, Murphy,” he barked at Jetty. His voice boomed off the cold walls and filled the room. Murphy jumped back as if he’d been shocked.
“It’s okay,” said Ford, looking at the guard. “Me and Jetty go way back. Right, Jetty?”
“That’s right. Way back,” said Jetty, relaxing and casting a smug smile at the guard.
“I can’t make you a deal, Jetty. I won’t lie to you. But I might be able to get you a few privileges, put in a good word at your next review. I’ll tell you straight that you don’t have to help me. But I’d really be grateful if you did.”
Something about the way Ford had softened his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, the way he leaned in slightly toward Jetty, seemed to have an impact. Jetty looked less hopeless, a little less edgy. Lydia had to remind herself that she was looking at a rapist and a murderer, but it was hard not to have compassion for someone who just seemed so weak, so desperate. Ford lifted a bag that had been sitting by his feet filled with candy bars and a carton of cigarettes.
“I remembered that you used to have a sweet tooth, Jetty.”
“We’re not allowed to have that stuff here,” he said, casting a sidelong glance at the guard and a longing look at the bag.
“I’m sure I could get them to bend a few rules if you help me today, Jetty. What do you say?”
Jetty shrugged, trying and failing to look nonchalant. “What do you want to know?”
Ford took a Baby Ruth from the bag and slid it over to Jetty, who grabbed it up, ripped the wrapper off, and shoved it in his mouth in one movement. He pressed the bar into his mouth, chewing at it frantically, smearing chocolate on his face, as if he were afraid if he didn’t eat it fast someone would snatch it from him. Lydia looked away. It was pathetic. She wondered what had to happen to a person in his life that he wound up here, like this.
Ford took a photograph from his pocket and slid it over to Jetty, waiting patiently for him to finish eating. When he was done, Jetty wiped his hands on his jumper, leaving long streaks of chocolate up his leg. He reached for the photograph and stared at it.
“It’s a painting. But does this face look familiar to you?” asked Ford.
“Yeah… yeah. It’s the man I saw that night. The one I told you about.”
“Tell me again what you saw that night.”
“I was behind this building looking through the garbage. I was a junkie then and I was always looking for something to sell, you know. I heard voices up above me… loud, scared. It sounded like two men and one woman.” He was talking fast, the sugar making him hyper.
“Try to remember now, Jetty, did you hear anything that you could understand? Did you hear what they were saying?”
Jetty closed his eyes as if trying to transport himself back to that night.
“I heard the woman. I heard something she said.”
Ford looked surprised. “You did? You didn’t mention that ten years ago.”
“Didn’t I?” Jetty shrugged. Then, “You don’t believe me?”
“Sure I do. What did she say?”
“She said, ‘I don’t love you. Not like that. I never did.’ She screamed it. I mean, she was screaming her lungs out. And then another voice, said, ‘You’re lying. It’s time to surrender.’ He was yelling, too. That was all I could understand.”
Lydia caught the word and remembered what Julian had said to Dr. Barnes, that she’d chosen to surrender.
Ford looked at Jetty and couldn’t decide whether the guy was full of shit or not. Jetty had given a statement and testified in court ten years ago and had never mentioned those words before. But why would he be lying now?
“Then there was a, like… I don’t know how to say other than it was like a roar. It was scary, man. I almost bolted, but there was a lot of good garbage. Then I didn’t hear anything for a while except a sound that could have been the woman crying, like a low wailing. And then, when I thought it was over and started looking in the trash again, the back door of the building came slamming open and a giant man with long gray dreads, just like this,” he said, lifting the picture, “came out. He turned, but I was behind the Dumpster, he didn’t see me. It was dark, but I saw part of his face. Then he ran. I don’t know why, but I followed him. But he just disappeared… he rounded the corner of Prince and Lafayette and he was gone. That’s it. That’s what I saw.”
Ford was impressed that this man who was so fried from drugs and medication remembered anything at all. Except for the conversation he claimed to have overheard, the details of the story hadn’t changed much in ten years, though Ford didn’t remember Jetty telling him that he’d seen the man’s face. He would have remembered that; they would have had a sketch done or something. As far as he knew, the man in the painting was a figment of Julian Ross’s twisted imagination and Jetty was just embellishing his story to make himself feel important.
“And you’re sure that this person in the photograph is the person you saw?” asked Ford.
“You wouldn’t forget that face if you saw it,” said Jetty, and Ford could see Jetty believed it to be the truth.
“You sure you didn’t see anything else when you rounded the corner? Think back. A cab speeding off, a door closing… any hint of where he could have gone.”
“There was a subway station.”
“When we went down into that subway station, there was a metal gate. It was locked up. He couldn’t have gone any farther.”
“Well, that’s not true. I know things now about those entrances that I didn’t know then,” said Jetty with a sly smile, tapping his foot rapidly on the floor. Lydia could see that some of his teeth were brown and jagged, some of them missing entirely.
“What’s that?” asked Ford.
“People live down there, man. In the tunnels. The mole people.”
“Give me a break, Jetty.”
“No, for real. There’s, like, a whole society under there… mainly psychos and junkies, but they’re under there. They make whole, like, towns… with mayors and ‘runners,’ people who go topside for stuff. I’m not making this up. You can check it out for yourself.”
“I’ll do that,” said Ford. He wasn’t about to engage in an argument with a prisoner in a mental institution. It was a story he had heard before but never quite believed. The thought of people lurking beneath the ground, living their lives out there, was just too weird to be true. A lot of cops he knew believed it, but he’d never seen any evidence of it. Anyway, anybody who was willing to go down there to investigate the possibility had a screw loose, as far as he was concerned-Jeff and Dax included.
Jetty seemed to have fixated on Lydia after he finished talking. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her and Ford couldn’t blame him. It must have been a long time since he’d seen a woman like Lydia.
“I know you,” he said suddenly, pointing a bony finger at her, his mouth widening into a jagged grin.
“I don’t think so,” said Lydia with a polite smile.
“Yeah, I do,” he said, nodding vigorously. “You’re Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.”
The sound of Dax knocking on the metal door reverberated on the concrete around them and sounded like thunder. Silence was the answer and the two of them stood holding their breaths, waiting. Jeff was half hoping that no one would respond to the knocking so that they could get the hell out of there.
After a moment, they heard a shuffling inside and then a thin tentative voice whispered, “Who?”
“Danielle sent us. She said you could help us find someone,” Dax answered, sounding as casual as if they were selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door.
The door opened slowly and Dax and Jeff entered a small, tidy, warm space that was lit with hurricane lamps. The ceiling must have been sixteen feet high and the floor was actually carpeted. Large cushions and beanbag chairs were scattered about the floor, and a wooden table leaned against the far wall covered with a black crocheted tablecloth and topped with silk flowers in a blue and white vase, a chair on either side. A futon mattress was covered with sheets and quilts and plenty of pillows. A small refrigerator hummed in the corner and a kettle sat on top of a hot plate.
“There’s electricity here?” said Dax, incredulous, looking around him.
“Of course, young man. Just because we’re houseless doesn’t mean we’re uncivilized,” said the woman who let them in.
“Of course,” said Dax, throwing Jeff a look.
“My name’s Violet,” she said. Her voice sounded like coins dropped on tin, her white hair stuck out like wires. Her eyes, sunken and misshapen, were an unnerving shade of violet, hence her name, Jeff imagined. And it only took a second to realize that her fixed stare meant she was blind. Short and round, with hunched shoulders and a shuffling gate, she took Jeff’s hand as he and Dax introduced themselves with a strong confident grip. She wore a gray bathrobe over a pilled, stained green sweater and navy blue sweatpants. Her feet had been shoved into too-small black Chinese slippers. Using a cane to move across the room, she seated herself stiffly on a pile of cushions.
“Have a seat and tell me, what can I do for you boys?” Violet asked affably.
Jeff and Dax seated themselves across from the old woman and told her who they were looking for. Jeff wondered if it was impolite to point out at this time that he was unsure how a blind woman could help them to find Jed McIntyre.
“Just like topside, there is good and evil under here,” the old woman said as she stared off at nothing. “The balance is the same, just some people up there hide themselves better. Down here, all pretenses have been dropped. The one you are looking for is down here. He’s a different kind of bad.”
“I don’t want to be rude,” said Dax, “but you’re blind. How could you know that?”
“If anything, I’m at an advantage,” she said. “You two stumbled through the tunnels, not used to the dark. I heard you coming ten minutes before you arrived. Darkness is my natural habitat. I’ve only got these lights on for visitors. Besides, I’ve been down here longer than most. People come to me for advice, with gossip. I know everything that goes on.”
Jeff and Dax exchanged a look. Jeff’s disbelief was palpable, but Dax shrugged. Jeff stared at the woman, who he thought looked a little bit like Yoda without the ears. He didn’t question her sanity; he could tell by the way she spoke that she was as sound as either of them, educated, intelligent.
“Well, then… where is he?”
“I’ll have to take you there myself. If you don’t mind following behind an old blind woman,” she said with a raspy noise that was somewhere between a cough and a giggle.
“And what do you want for your help?” asked Dax. In his experience, people like this never did anything for nothing. It was the way of the streets.
She cocked her head a bit. “Young man, I just want him out of the tunnels. People are afraid of him. They call him The Virus because that one’s no good for anyone. No one’s safe with him down here. People start coming after him, and we’re all gonna be in trouble. It starts with you two, next thing you know it will be the police, the FBI. This hole,” she said, waving her cane, “is the only place I have in the world. I lose this and I have nothing.”
Dax nodded. “Well, let’s go, then.”
The three of them exited her nest and continued down the tunnel that had led them to her home. Violet led the way and Dax trailed behind them. The going was slow and the darkness and stench became less and less tolerable the deeper they got. The flashlight Dax carried created a narrow beam of light, but there were so many edges and corners it didn’t illuminate that it didn’t make the blackness any less menacing. After a while, Jeff lost track of the turns and stairways they had taken and said a silent prayer that this woman could be trusted enough to lead them back.
Though she walked with a limp and a cane, Violet didn’t stumble and grope in the darkness as Dax and Jeff did, didn’t seem startled by the sounds of rats or voices in the distance. She was home and they were not; she could see and they were blind.
“How did you wind up down here, Violet?” asked Jeff, after they’d been walking awhile. She’d pushed off the offer of his arm and lumbered up ahead of him. She sighed lightly as if she’d been expecting the question but was reluctant to answer it.
“How did you not wind up down here, Jeffrey?” she asked in return. “There’s no easy answer to that question, is there? How many decisions little and big did you make every day of your life, how many factors known and unknown to you, within and out of your control, led to your life being what it is today?”
“I never thought of it that way,” he answered, chastened.
“Why would you? You don’t seem like the kind of person who has a whole lot of reason to question your decisions… and maybe not a whole lot of time, even if you had reason. Me, I find that I have plenty of both. Reasons and time, that is,” she said without bitterness, her voice little more than a whisper.
“So what did you come up with?” Jeff could sense Dax moving in closer to hear the answer.
“Short version: I was born blind, like I told you, in the late thirties. Part of a large Irish family living in a railroad flat in the East Village. I grew up, got married, was a teacher at the Helen Keller School for the Blind. My husband, Patrick, worked in the Bowery sweatshops making men’s shirts. He handled all our finances and I trusted him to do it, even though he was a drunk and a gambler. I thought that all our lives we were putting money away for our old age. I had a pension, insurance. But when he died about ten years ago, I learned that he had drunk and gambled away every penny, even going so far as to take a loan against my pension. It was only a matter of months after his funeral that I was on the street.”
“No family?” asked Dax.
“None I could turn to,” she said quietly.
“But there have to be programs set up to help “Jeff began.
Violet held up a crooked hand. “I won’t live in a shelter or a hospital where they treat me like an invalid. I need my own space. This is not so bad… for a blind person. At least it’s quiet. I got people who bring me everything I need, a comfortable place to sleep. I’m safer down here than I would be up there.”
“I could help you, Violet,” said Jeff. He thought of his own mother, who’d died five years back from pancreatic cancer surrounded by loved ones. If she had to die, he was happy she’d died like that, knowing that she was loved, that her life had meant something. He would rather have died himself than imagine her like Violet, living in a coffin.
“You’re a nice boy,” she said, not turning around to face him. “But I’m like one of those recidivists. You know, those guys in jail who bitch and moan about how bad they want out of prison. But then they get out and they don’t even know what to do with themselves. They go right back. I don’t think I could live another life.”
“Well, you get in touch with me through Dax and Danielle if you change your mind. You help me get Jed McIntyre and I’ll owe you my life,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
She shrugged him off. “I don’t like to be touched,” she said sternly.
“Sorry,” answered Jeff, turning around to look at Dax, who lifted his hands with a grin. He pointed a finger to his temple and made a circle in the air mouthing, Crazy. Jeff shook his head.
“We’re coming into Rain’s territory now,” she said. “Stay close to me and keep your mouths shut.”
“Who’s Rain?” asked Dax.
“Someone down here that you don’t want to fuck with.”
Dax gave a smug little laugh and Jeff checked the Glock at his waist.
“What did you say?” asked Lydia as the ground and the room around her seemed to disappear. She looked at the wretched man before her and he looked back with a lascivious leer. She wanted to leap across the room and strangle him, but she kept her place by the guard. The room suddenly felt hot and small and she wanted nothing more than to leave except to know why this little psycho thought she was Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.
“What are you talking about, Jetty?” asked Ford, the sweet lulling tone he’d been using to coax information out of Jetty gone, cast off like a bad disguise. His voice was a fist poised to take care of Jetty’s few remaining teeth.
Jetty turned to look at him in surprise, the smile he wore flickering into a worried frown. He looked sadly at the bag of candy and cigarettes that Ford still had under his hand.
“J-J-J-Jed,” he stammered, “had pictures of her. He talked about her all the time. Said she was waiting for him to get out.”
“When did you have the opportunity to talk to him?” asked Lydia, who had always imagined Jed like Hannibal Lecter, bound, isolated, with a mask over his face. At least that’s how she liked to think of him.
“During art therapy,” said Jetty quietly. “He only drew pictures of you.”
Lydia had to suppress a laugh, even though there was nothing funny about any of it. The ridiculousness of allowing Jed to have art therapy where he fed his obsession by drawing pictures of her was a testament to the idiocy of the psychiatric profession in general and this hospital in particular. No wonder he’d been allowed to get away. “You bastards,” said Lydia under her breath.
“You said a bad word,” admonished Jetty. Lydia shot him a look and he cringed as if he thought she’d strike him. She felt bad for a second. Then the feeling passed as another thought occurred to her.
“Jetty,” she asked, moving toward him and sitting in the free chair beside Ford, “did you tell Jed McIntyre about the tunnels beneath the street?”
Jetty nodded. “He didn’t believe me.”
Ford looked at Lydia guiltily with a shake of his head.
“What?” she said, a frown creasing her forehead and dread burrowing what seemed to be a permanent home in her belly.
As they approached a ragtag group of men sitting around a lopsided card table playing poker by candlelight, Jeff decided that they had entered the twilight zone. They appeared to be playing for bottles and cans, using caps and metal tabs for chips. A few sacks filled with cans and bottles lay scattered on the floor around the table. Engaged in a loud, slurred argument over who had won the last hand, the card players did not acknowledge Violet, Dax, and Jeff as they passed until Dax accidentally shone the flashlight beam on their table.
“Hey, brother,” barked a beefy guy with a red baseball cap. “Mind your own business.”
Jeffrey braced himself for Dax to flip out but he just raised a hand in apology. “Sorry, mate.”
They passed a row of tents that seemed to lean against one another and go on forever. They were lit from inside, and Jeff and Dax could see shadows moving within, heard the occasional voice. Jeff thought he caught the scent of meat cooking.
“Track rabbits,” said Violet.
“Track rabbits?” said Dax with a grimace. “Dare I ask?”
“People down here are hungry. And the rats get pretty big,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not half bad. The concept is harder to swallow than the meat.”
“That is fucking disgusting,” said Dax.
“Spoken like someone who’s never gone hungry,” said Violet indignantly.
“Whatever,” he said, not liking the old lady’s attitude. Jeff rolled his eyes; Dax didn’t even know how offensive he could be sometimes. But his honesty, even when it was inappropriate, was one of the things Jeff liked most about him. There was no artifice to Dax. He didn’t give a shit what anyone thought, and that made him one of the most trustworthy people Jeff knew. Dax was just like Lydia in that way, which was probably why the two were always butting heads.
Jeff felt Dax’s hand on his arm just before he noticed a tall form appear before them on the track, taking up the height and width of the tunnel. Violet seemed to hesitate for a second as though she had sensed something, but then she kept walking.
“There’s someone ahead of us,” whispered Jeff.
“I know.”
Jeff heard Dax click the safety off his gun. As they drew closer, Jeff could see that there was a light source behind the form, creating a shadow that was much bigger than the man who waited in their path.
“You brought cops down here, Violet?” asked the shade, his voice deep and resonant. He stood about six feet tall and seemed to be draped in robes, but the light was dim and Jeff couldn’t make out his clothes or his face. He just looked like a wraith, a dark shadow in a land of shadows.
Violet had instructed Dax to turn his flashlight off a while back and it didn’t seem like a good idea to turn it back on, though Dax was itching to do so. But he had his hands full with his Magnum Desert Eagle, a nasty Israeli gun that had more stopping power than a freight train.
“They’re not cops, Rain. They’re friends of Danielle’s.”
There was a pause and then a deep, cruel laugh. “That crack ho doesn’t have any friends.”
“Yes, she does,” said Dax, offended. He didn’t like it when people insulted his friends, even if what they said was true.
They stood silent for a moment and Rain was so still that he looked as though he could fade into the black and be as gone as if he’d never been there at all.
“What do they want?” he asked finally.
“They’re here for The Virus.”
As they talked, Violet continued to move forward slowly toward Rain and she was dwarfed by his height and size. Jeff and Dax hung back, waiting to see how the standoff would go.
“We’re the cure,” said Dax, his voice quiet but resonating against the concrete.
Rain nodded but kept his ground. “And then what?”
“And then we leave and never come back,” said Jeffrey.
“And you never tell anyone that you came here.”
“Sounds like a deal.”
“Leave the body. We’ll take care of it. No one will ever find it.”
And with that he seemed to meld into the darkness and was gone. Jeff was left with a chill down his spine and a feeling of dread in his heart. They’d be murderers when this deed was done and he wasn’t sure that rested well with him, no matter the reason. It was justice, of that he had no doubt. It was whether they had the right to dispense it that worried him. He knew how Lydia felt about it; they tried to take care of it her way… the “right” way. They’d failed, and now Jed McIntyre was free, uncontained. And that was unacceptable to him.
The three of them started walking again in silence. He didn’t want to talk anymore, to just pretend the bizarre unreality of this made it all a bad dream. If he hadn’t been one hundred percent certain that he had no choice, they wouldn’t be here at all. As it was, he’d willingly trade his soul for the woman he loved and the child she carried inside her.
“What are they thinking?” said Lydia at the wheel of Ford’s Taurus, speeding back to New York City. Ford had let her have the keys because he knew her head was going to explode if she didn’t have something to do on the way back to town. Now he regretted it as she pushed the old car beyond its limits, driving it as if it were her small tight Mercedes. Which it definitely was not. Ford heard an unfamiliar noise from the engine.
“Look… there’s no point in overreacting and there’s no point to racing back there,” said Ford. “We should just proceed to Haunted as planned. They’ll call when they’re done.”
“Done with what?” she asked. “Even if Jed McIntyre is lurking in the subway tunnels, what exactly do they plan to do?”
“That’s not information I need to have. And you should just let it go, too. They’re big boys, they can take care of themselves and anyone who tries to fuck with them. What are you going to do when we get there? Race into the tunnels and try to find them? Sit at your apartment, wringing your hands?”
Lydia pulled the car over to the side of the road and put her head on the wheel. He had a point. But her whole body was electrified with the need to get back to New York. What if something happened to them down there? The thought of Jeffrey crawling beneath the streets looking for Jed McIntyre made her sick with anxiety. How could he do this? Without telling her? When she knew he was okay, she was going to kill him.
Ford put a warm, callused hand on the back of her neck and she sat up, taking a deep breath. He had a kind, fatherly face, even if it was a little hard around the edges. She’d seen it change from warm to cold in under a second. Brown eyes communicated a depth and a sensitivity that Lydia found rarely in career cops, told her that he still had a humanity and compassion that were often casualties of the job. A thin smile disappeared into deep creases around the corners. A seemingly permanent five o’clock shadow made him look a little tough, a little unkempt. He smelled of Old Spice and sesame chicken.
“Pull it together, girl,” he said. “Let’s go to Haunted.”
She was about to agree with him when his cell phone rang. He removed it from the inside pocket of his lined beige raincoat.
“McKirdy,” he answered. “Oh, yeah?” he said after a second, his eyebrows raising in interest. Another pause, then, “What do you mean, ‘unusual’? He tapped an impatient finger against the dash. “Well, I’m more than an hour away.”
He looked at his watch and then at the sun hanging low and white in the sky, the sky growing dim as night began to fall. “Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“What’s up?” she asked as he put the phone back into his pocket.
“Turns out there’s a surveillance tape from the Ross building.”
“Really? What’s on it?”
“They can’t tell. One of the junior detectives I got working with me says they can’t make sense of what they’re seeing. The camera was in the basement of the building, in the laundry room. They see something strange around two-thirty in the morning and then it goes black.”
“Huh,” said Lydia. “So… what?”
“So looks like it’s back to NYC after all. Haunted will have to wait until tomorrow.”
She pulled out onto the road and headed back toward the city. Relief and anxiety fought it out in Lydia’s stomach. Part of her wanted to head toward Haunted and away from everything that was happening in her life, as if to lay distance between her and the possible outcomes of Dax and Jeffrey’s mission were to make it less real. And the other part of her wanted desperately to be there, to be present, as if just being in the city would prevent the worst from happening. It was the helplessness that she couldn’t handle, that tied her up inside, that caused a dull ache in her head. She gripped the wheel and forced her foot down on the gas. The car struggled in response, but she kept pushing as if going faster would speed up time.
“This is as far as I go,” said Violet. “I’ll wait here to take you back.”
They stood at a point where two tunnels met. About a hundred yards away they could see in the beam of Dax’s flashlight a metal staircase leading to a landing and a narrow catwalk that led to a door.
“Is he in there?” asked Dax.
“I know he lives just past this divide,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s in there or not.”
“Let’s wait a bit,” said Jeff to Dax. “Turn out the light and let’s just see if there’s any activity.”
“Come on, man. Let’s take this fucker. We’ve waited long enough. I’m getting fucking claustrophobic down here,” said Dax, cracking the tension out of his neck.
“There’s no point in just busting in there if he’s out and about. We’ll just give ourselves away and lose our chance. Patience.”
Dax turned out the light and Jeffrey motioned for him to follow as he made his way toward the staircase. Beneath the metal landing there was a narrow break in the wall that looked like it had once held an emergency phone. There was enough room for both of them to stand side by side. There they could see anyone coming from either direction and were just below the doorway.
Dax sighed and crouched down on the ground. He pulled the Magnum Desert Eagle from the holster at his shoulder and examined it, clicking off the safety. Jeffrey removed his new Glock from his waist. He’d never recovered the gun he’d lost in Albania a few months ago, and this one had never been fired off the range. He liked the semiautomatic and generally carried one, but it always seemed like a wild card compared to the revolver. Revolvers were workhorses, they never jammed; semiautomatics were less reliable but had more rounds.
He tried to get a feel for their situation, but it was as if being in the tunnels had dulled his senses. He had always believed as a young FBI agent that you knew when you were walking into a mess, when the house that was supposed to be deserted, wasn’t; when a bust was going to go wrong; when a negotiation was about to fail. But he’d learned over the years that there was no way to tell how bad things were going to get, even if you had the instinct that things weren’t going to go your way.
He leaned against the wall and ran his free hand through his hair, which was damp with sweat and the moisture in the dank air. He regretted walking out on Lydia without saying good-bye. He felt it now in the form of an ache in his solar plexus; it had been arrogant to assume he’d be back before she knew he was gone. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, or how long it would be before he saw her again. He would have strangled her if she’d tried to pull something like this over on him. The only comfort he had was in knowing she probably would have done the same thing.
“I heard something,” said Dax.
“From where?” asked Jeff.
“From inside the door.”
Jeff listened carefully in the darkness and then he, too, heard a shuffling from above them. “Let’s move,” he said quietly.
The metal staircase was surprisingly strong and didn’t creak under their weight even slightly. They climbed carefully and then edged their way along the catwalk, backs flat against the wall. At the landing, Dax stood on the far side of the door examining the hinges. He was glad to see that the door opened in; it made for a much easier and more surprising entry. The heavy gray metal door had a latch for a padlock but was unlocked from the outside anyway. Dax touched it with his finger and it moved just slightly. It was open.
Jeff held up one hand and counted to three on his fingers, and before he’d reached go, Dax had pushed open the door with one hand and was moving in with his gun aimed in the other.
“Get down on the fucking floor,” yelled Dax at no one, as Jeff followed him in, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other. His booming voice echoed against the walls.
The room was empty except for a large rat rustling through a Balducci’s bag. The rodent looked up resentfully at the intrusion. Beside the bag lay a copy of Lydia’s first book and a piece of notebook paper on the floor.
“Motherfuck,” said Dax, feeling his face flush. He picked up the piece of paper and held it up for Jeff. It read, “You didn’t really expect it to be that easy, did you?” Then he crumpled it in his fist and threw it against the wall. The rat moved past them slowly, unafraid.
“Looks like that game of ‘Telephone’ goes both ways,” said Jeff, staying in the doorjamb in case someone was looking to surprise them from behind.
“He’s slippery. I’ll give him that,” said Dax, trying to keep his voice light but unable to control the tight line of his mouth. Jeff saw the anger in his eyes, how it turned his normally affable face cold and hard.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Jeff, the walls suddenly closing in on him. He took a last glance at the room, shining the light onto the walls and up onto the ceiling. There was no other exit from the room. Jed was gone before they had arrived. Just as Jeff was about to turn around and leave, he caught sight of something on the wall… pieces of masking tape with shreds of paper stuck beneath. It looked as if something had been affixed there and then ripped from the wall in a hurry.
“What’s that?” asked Dax.
“I don’t know,” Jeff answered, moving in to examine the pieces. He could see the edges of some type of drawing, but couldn’t begin to make out what it might have been.
“Shit,” he said, the frustration of Jed McIntyre slipping through their fingers raising his blood pressure.
As Dax and Jeff moved down the stairs, Jeff shone the flashlight over to where Violet had been standing, but he didn’t see her there. He wanted to call out her name but thought better of it, not sure who was skulking in the darkness. He suppressed a feeling of panic when they rounded the corner and Violet was nowhere to be seen. They stopped and looked at each other.
“Oh, bloody hell,” said Dax quietly, grabbing the flashlight from Jeff and shining it down into the tunnel they had come from. The light seemed like the tiniest thread in a field of black.
“Violet!” Dax yelled, his voice bouncing all over the tunnels. They were answered by a low laugh that seemed to come from everywhere. Then a giant form melted out of the tunnel walls and into the beam of their flashlight. It moved slowly toward them, seeming to glide rather than walk. Jeff and Dax held their ground with guns drawn.
“Freeze or I’ll blow your fucking head off,” yelled Jeff, in his best stop-’em-in-their-tracks voice, leveling the Glock against his target, though his heart was racing in his chest.
“This is no time for bravery, boys,” came a voice behind them suddenly. “Run. Follow me.”
The Midtown North Precinct was a circus of activity, phones ringing, perps yelling, civilians waiting to file police reports, as Lydia and Ford entered through the tall wooden front doors. The desk sergeant with a unibrow and a permanent scowl buzzed them through the gate. Both Lydia and Ford checked their weapons with the rookie who sat guarding the lockers. It was over warm in the precinct to combat the dropping temperature outside and a large, sloppily decorated Christmas tree wilted in the corner of the room. They were buzzed through another door and they began the climb up the stairs to the third floor to homicide.
The homicide office was dark and quiet in comparison to the cacophony that followed them up the stairs. Computer screens glowed green in the dim light and somewhere a phone was ringing. Lydia glanced at the window and noticed that the last moment of light had passed from the sky and it was officially dark, officially night, with no word from Jeffrey. She checked her cell phone again to see if she’d maybe missed a call. She fought a feeling of dismay that lingered, waiting to push its way through as soon as she let it. Walking toward the back of the offices behind Ford, she focused on the task at hand, knowing anything else was pointless.
Two men sat in the audiovisual room, which was really just an interrogation room where they kept a television, VCR, and tape cassette player on a metal cart that could be rolled out if the room was required for its original purpose.
“What have we got, guys?” said Ford, entering the room and shedding his raincoat. Lydia kept her cashmere coat on, wanting its warmth around her in the chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. She sat at the table after being introduced to Detective Joe Piselli, a short, dark-haired man with girlishly long eyelashes, a bright smile, and a strong handshake, and Detective Al Malone, an awkward man with bad acne scarring and stooped shoulders. Neither of them looked older than twenty-five, and if they’d seen any kind of action at all, Lydia would have been surprised. They still had that bright and eager look in their eyes, the shine of idealism about the job they were doing.
“We’ve watched it over and over and we can’t figure out what we’re seeing,” said Piselli as he walked over to the television. He pressed play, then fast-forward, and Ford took a seat beside Lydia.
The tape showed a row of ten washing machines that faced a row of dryers. The camera, which must have been mounted over the door, captured most of the large laundry room. The room was washed in a harsh fluorescent light and as the time-elapsed play progressed, a short, plump woman in a maid’s uniform skittered in, threw in a load of wash, and left in under a second, her fast-forward movements making her look like a windup doll. She returned and changed the wash to the dryer a few minutes later.
“Can we speed this up?” said Ford impatiently. “It’s a laundry room. If all you have is a bunch of people doing laundry-”
“Just a second-” said Malone. “There.” He reached over and put the machine back to play. Lydia leaned in closer and saw the ghost of a movement, the edge of something that was just out of reach of the camera’s lens. Then the screen went black.
“Is there another entrance to that room?” asked Lydia.
“Not that we saw,” answered Piselli. “It’s just that one door. And the super says there’s no other way in.”
“How much of the room can you see on the tape?” asked Ford.
“I’d say about seventy-five percent. You can’t see under the camera and the far back of the room. And apparently there’s an area to the right of the camera that’s out of range.”
“So someone familiar with that could have come in the door and stayed to the right, out of range of the camera?” asked Lydia.
Piselli gave a nod and a shrug.
They rewound the tape and Lydia watched it again, leaning in close to the screen. The fluid nature of the movement and the faint pattern Lydia saw on second look made her think it was fabric.
“It’s a hem,” she said, putting her finger on the screen. Piselli rewound the tape again and they all leaned in. “It’s the hem of a dress. See… it’s a dark color with tiny hearts.”
“So why would someone be skulking around the laundry room at two-thirty in the morning? And why would they be purposely staying out of range of the camera?” asked Ford, thinking aloud.
“It would have to be someone pretty small to be able to stay out of sight,” said Malone.
“And how did the camera get turned off without our seeing who did it?” asked Piselli.
“So maybe it’s down here where we’ll find our missing murder weapon and Stratton’s ring… not to mention his finger,” said Ford.
“Well, we’ll find something down there,” said Lydia, getting up and moving toward the door. “Let’s go.”
“With a cure like you guys, who needs disease?” said Rain with a short disdainful laugh. “I thought you boys had an edge, were going to take care of the problem. Instead I have to save your sorry asses.”
“What was that back there?”
He didn’t answer, just kept moving on ahead of them. Rain was an older man with smooth chocolate skin and a full white beard. His liquid eyes were clear and sober, but his face was etched with the lines of struggle and pain. Without the robes, he was just a stooped old man who walked with a limp. Most people didn’t live to be his age in a place like this, and Jeffrey wondered what his story was but declined to ask. Ahead of them, he could see some kind of light; it looked like the glow from a street lamp shining through a grating. They couldn’t get there fast enough as far as he was concerned.
“Now he’s on the move and it will take time for us to locate him again,” Rain went on. “You boys have made a mess down here.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” said Dax testily. He’d just about had his fill of street people and their tirades.
“And I’m not going to,” answered Rain, stopping and turning to Dax with a frown and a pointing finger.
“How did he know we were after him?” Jeff cut in.
“Someone tipped him off. I can’t be sure who. But I’ll find out and I’ll deal with it, believe me.”
“What are you, like the Mayor of the Tunnels or something?” asked Dax with a smirk.
“Something like that. I don’t like your attitude, boy,” said Rain. If Bill Cosby were dirty, very crabby, and lived below the streets of New York City, he’d look like Rain.
“What happened to Violet?” asked Jeff, moving between Dax and Rain.
“I don’t know,” he answered, looking away from Dax, concern darkening his features. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his pants and looked Jeff in the eye.
Then he turned, casting a warning glance in Dax’s direction, and started walking again. Soon they stood at the opening in the wall that would lead them out the way they had come in, and Jeff had never been so happy to see a subway track in his life.
“Remember your promise,” said Rain to Jeff, moving away from them.
“Wait a second. We didn’t get what we came for.”
“That’s not my problem,” he threw behind him as he continued on his way with a thug’s saunter.
“I think it is,” called Jeff. “All we have to do is tell the FBI that we know he’s down here somewhere and they’ll tear this place apart.”
Rain stopped in his tracks and Dax smiled. “Won’t be much of a mayor without your city, will you?” he said.
“What do you want from me?” he said, turning around. “Goddammit, I knew that one was going to be trouble the minute I heard about him.”
“Then why didn’t you take care of it yourself?” asked Jeff.
“Because that’s the code down here, man. Everybody gets a chance to be a part of this community. Up there, they’re losers-drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, nuts. They got nothing and no one to give them respect. Down here, there’s a place for everyone, as long as you obey the rules, don’t hurt nobody, and don’t ever talk to the police or anyone topside about what goes on down here.”
“This man is a murderer, Rain,” said Jeff. “He’s going to hurt more people. All we want is a line on him and we’ll take care of the rest. When you know where he is, let us know. That’s all we ask.”
“And you’re gonna take care of it? Like you did today?”
“You have a week,” said Dax. “If we don’t hear from you, we come down here with the Feds and you can kiss your little kingdom good-bye. You’ll be in a shelter or a nuthouse or wherever it is that you belong.”
Jeff shot Dax a look that was lost on him in the darkness and probably would have been anyway. They had different ways of dealing with people. Jeff believed that all people, regardless of their circumstances, deserved to be treated with respect until they proved themselves unworthy. Dax felt exactly the opposite. Dax was fiercely loyal to a few people and everyone else could just go to hell as far as he was concerned.
“Look,” said Jeff, hoping to soften the blow of Dax’s words-but Rain was walking away. “Rain, let’s talk about this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Dax, moving through the opening and stepping onto the comparatively bright track on the other side. “He’ll get in touch with us.”
“Fuck,” said Jeff, watching the only lead he had on Jed McIntyre disappear into the darkness of the tunnels.
“Trust me, mate,” said Dax with the winning smile that always made Jeff forget what an asshole and a wild card he could be. “I know these people. If he’d promised to get in touch with us, then I’d be worried. Let’s get topside so we can call Lydia. She’s going to kick your ass back fifty feet underground. And I want to be there to see it.”
There were few things Lydia hated more than arguing in front of other people. She hated the feel of eyes on her at the best of times but least of all when she was angry and vulnerable. People were judgmental and she didn’t want the baggage of someone else’s energy in her personal life. It was for this reason and this reason alone that she kept her voice light and measured as she spoke to Jeffrey on her cell phone. Her whole body had felt electrified with relief when she’d seen his number on her caller ID. When the relief drained her, anger and dread filled her back up.
“Hi,” she’d answered. She was conscious of Ford sitting next to her and Detectives Piselli and Malone riding in the backseat. In the dark silence of the car all ears were on her.
“Hey, how’s it going?” he said, voice tentative, guilty. The line crackled and he sounded like he was on the moon. And he might as well be, for as close as she felt to him right now.
“Fine. What’s happening with you?” Her voice lilted, but the words felt like rocks in her throat.
“Not much,” he lied. “Are you with Ford?”
“Yeah. Are you with Dax?”
“Yeah. Can we meet up with you guys?”
“Sure. We’re heading over to the Ross building. We saw something on a surveillance tape and we’re going to check it out. Meet us in the laundry room.”
“The laundry room?”
She tried a joke, but it came out sounding harsh and angry. “Is there an echo in here?” She never was any good at hiding her emotions.
“You’re pissed,” he said.
“Why would I be?” Her voice sounded crisp and sarcastic even to her own ears, and she saw Ford turn to look at her out of the corner of her eye.
“We have a lot to talk about later.”
She let his words hang in the air, tried to tell from his tone how things had gone.
“Is it settled?” she asked finally. There was a pause during which the specter of hope that had been lurking beneath the negative emotions swirling inside her faded and was lost.
“No. It’s not.”
“I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Lydia-”
But she hung up. She wasn’t really angry at Jeffrey. She wasn’t really angry. She was scared and tired. But anger was always easier to deal with because anger was power. Anger made you do something, made you act. Anger made you strong. Fear made you weak, made you cower, made you a victim. And that was just not acceptable to Lydia. It just wasn’t an option at all.
“Everything all right?” Ford asked as if he were sticking his hand into the lion’s cage at the Bronx Zoo.
She didn’t even know how to answer that question anymore. So she just nodded and looked out the window as they pulled up to the building on Park Avenue.
“Hardly anybody ever uses this laundry room, you know,” said the doorman as he took them down in the service elevator. His Yonkers accent was thick and he seemed out of place in the maroon tails with gold piping on the cuffs and collar that were the uniform for the building. It was probably the only suit he owned and even this was too short in the legs and wrinkled. He was affable and a little on the goofy side and his name was Anthony Donofrio.
“These people got the cash, you know,” he said, quickly rubbing the fingers on his right hand together. He smiled, revealing crooked, yellowing teeth. “Most of them have washers and dryers in their apartments. Some of the old-timers, too cheap to buy their own, still come down here. But mostly the maids and nannies, if they have more than one load to do, they run down here to save time. I got the monitor in the office behind the front desk and I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I seen the actual tenant down there. But I work the night shift, mostly.”
Ford could tell that Anthony was enjoying this a little bit. Ever since those cop shows had started to make it big on prime-time television, people were a lot more cooperative. They felt like they were part of something when the police came to ask questions unless, of course, they had something to hide. Anthony Donofrio impressed Ford as the kind of guy who visited his mother, had a hard time with the ladies, and still hung out with the same guys he went to grade school with. If he had something to hide, maybe it was that he jerked off every night with a copy of Hustler. And who didn’t?
“So how did the camera get turned off that night, Anthony?” asked Ford, taking out his notepad.
“I don’t know,” he said with an exaggerated shrug. His eyes were wide and innocent, but Ford saw it. A quick shift of the pupils. “I never noticed it go off. Only when you guys looked at the tape did they find that it had been turned off and back on.”
Ford didn’t say anything for a minute, just looked down at his pad as if deep in thought. He let the silence grow thick and uncomfortable between them.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Anthony said again, this time with a nervous chuckle. Ford cocked his head to one side and gave Anthony a thoughtful frown. Suddenly he sensed Anthony wasn’t enjoying himself as much anymore.
“That’s the only place where the camera could be turned off, from behind your desk?”
Again the shift, and an uncomfortable stepping from side to side.
“Uh, yeah, behind the front desk.”
“Did you leave your post at any time? To take a leak or take a smoke-what ever?”
Anthony looked down at his feet and was quiet for a minute.
“Yeah, maybe,” Anthony said. “Yeah.”
“What was it?”
“A leak, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Hey,” he said, moving in close to Ford and giving a quick look around him. “I’m not supposed to take breaks. I could lose my job.”
“Anthony,” said Ford. “You’re not straight with me and your job’s gonna be the least of your worries, man.”
Anthony let out a long slow exhale and shook his head. “Every so often,” he said, with his eyes down, “I’d, you know, step outside for a smoke.”
“So the equipment was left unattended a number of times throughout the night. Someone could have walked in, turned it off, and turned it back on while you were outside?”
“I guess. Yeah, its possible.”
Ford gave a hard look at Anthony. Maybe he had more to hide than that Hustler after all. “What else, Anthony? If there’s something you’re holding back, now’s the time to let it out.”
“No, that’s it. I swear,” he said, casting an earnest look at Ford.
Ford nodded but gave Anthony eyes that said he wasn’t a hundred percent convinced that they were finished talking.
“Listen,” Anthony said, lowering his voice. “I really need this job.”
“You probably should have thought about that before, huh, Anthony?”
The laundry room looked like every other laundry room Ford had ever seen-fluorescent lights, cinderblock walls painted a light gray, Formica floors. The scent of detergent and that unmistakable smell that comes from dryer vents was heavy in the air. Only one dryer rumbled and through the glass Ford could see rose-colored sheets and blue and white towels tumbling. A bulletin board held building announcements, a page printed from a computer printer offering babysitting services and some inspection documents. The room looked clean, innocuous. That would change. He looked at his watch; forensics should be joining them any moment.
“Nobody touch anything,” he reminded Lydia and the other detectives.
“It’s a laundry room, Ford. This place will be covered with prints. You gonna have everyone authorized to use this room fingerprinted so that we can compare?” asked Piselli.
“Hey, you volunteering to head that up?” said Ford with a scowl. Piselli rolled his eyes.
“Fucking rookies been on the job less than five years and they think they know everything. It’s not out of the question. Not easy, but not out of the question.”
Lydia looked around the room. It felt like a dead end; there was nothing to see but washers and dryers, bland walls, white floors.
“How often is this room cleaned?” she asked.
“Maintenance comes in here once a week to dust and mop the floors,” Anthony answered, pleased to be helpful.
“Have they been here since Richard Stratton was murdered?”
“No, they come on Fridays-day after tomorrow.”
Lydia walked along the edge of the dryers, tracing the path that the person caught in the video camera must have taken. She walked to the end of the row where there was a small space between the last dryer and the wall. Here she dropped to the floor and peered under the dryer.
Ford walked over to her. “What do you see?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, standing up and wiping the dust from her nose. “We need to move the dryer.” Piselli and Malone removed surgical gloves from their pockets and easily slid the dryer forward. The four of them crowded in to peer behind the dryer.
“Well, will you look at that,” said Malone.
“What’s going on?” asked Jeff as he and Dax walked into the room.
“Christ, you two smell like a couple of sewer rats,” said Ford when they got closer.
“It’s a trapdoor,” said Lydia, not looking up at Dax and Jeff. She was too fascinated by their find. And besides, she hated both of them at the moment.
“Yeah. But leading where?” asked Piselli as if he didn’t really want to know.
It was a wooden door with a wrought-iron ring for a handle. It appeared to have been nailed and painted shut at some point, the Formica laid over it. But the flooring had been cut away, the nails had been pried out, and the paint chipped through around the edges. Ford moved in and lifted the lid. A ladder led down into a pitch-black hole. A foul dank odor of mold and rot wafted from the darkness. It was a smell that Dax and Jeff recognized all too well.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” said Dax in a bad impression of Al Pacino. Nobody laughed.
It’s the dark spaces, the secret passageways, the hidden doorways that the demons use to enter your life and rip it to pieces. It’s where the light doesn’t shine that they dwell and breed like bacteria in a warm, moist wound. The hole in the floor they’d discovered opened a similar blackness within Lydia. Someone had crept through this trapdoor in the floor to visit death on Richard Stratton and horror onto Julian Ross. Julian’s bogeyman, her worst nightmare, was alive and well and moving with stealth beneath the city streets. So was Lydia’s. She was more kindred to Julian than she had imagined and wondered how far she was from sharing Julian’s fate.
When Lydia had faced Jed McIntyre in the flesh, she felt sure that she would burst into flames. He had always been a ghost in her life, shadowing any peaceful moments, growing large in times of pain and sadness, and, in many ways, the reason behind most of her drive. If he hadn’t murdered her mother, she wasn’t sure she’d even be the person she was today. Certainly the pain that had always impelled her to understand the minds of madmen-her hopeless and relentless effort to pick up the pieces they left behind them, sort them, name them, make them understandable-had been visited upon her by Jed McIntyre. But actually, he had become almost theoretical. He was the face of fear, of pain, evil, grief. He was every murderer, every sin. And in being all these things he had become over the years a concept rather than a man. To see him real and alive-breathing, flesh and blood-had felt to Lydia like the animation of her darkest, most secret inner fears. To imagine him lurking, shadowing the edges of her life like a wraith, was too much for her mind to absorb. A sad numbness had wrapped itself around her. And every day he was at large, it pulled itself tighter and she was starting to suffocate, finding it hard to draw a breath.
The hole yawned beneath her and everyone around her had disappeared. She felt like she was standing at the gates of hell, about to be pulled from the solid earth into a place of misery. And its pull was almost magnetic.
“Lydia.” She heard Jeffrey’s voice as if through glass. She felt his hand on her shoulder and she spun around to face him.
“Easy, tiger,” he said with a smile, and the world came rushing back. “Are you okay?”
“Why is everybody always asking me that?” she snapped, walking away past them and out of the room into the cool gray basement hallway. She leaned against the wall and rested her head against the stone wall. The pain throbbed again in her side. Slight but definitely not a good thing. She put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again, Jeffrey was standing before her.
If Jed McIntyre was the embodiment of all things ugly, wrong, and bad in the universe, then Jeffrey was all things good. Since the night they met, he had always been to her something just shy of a superhero. When he’d nearly been killed after taking a bullet in pursuit of a child killer on a Bronx rooftop, she realized he was just a man. But instead of that making him seem less to her, it had made him more precious. It had also allowed her childhood feeling of hero-worship for him to mature into love. Part of her still believed that he was faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Part of her would always believe that.
“We’re going home,” he said.
“What? No. I want to see where the doorway leads.”
“Dax will stay. He’ll call with any developments.”
“But-” she protested. It sounded weak even to her own ears.
She let him put his arm around her shoulder and lead her toward the elevator. She leaned into him, accepting the warmth and comfort that washed over her. She was going to kick his ass, for acting like a vigilante, for scaring the life out of her, for just being a cowboy. But that could wait a little while.
Her head was twisted unnaturally to the right, her eyes were wide, and her mouth had frozen in a circle of surprise and fear. Her arms were flailed out to her sides and her legs were bent as though she were jumping for joy. Her eyes seemed to glow even in the darkness. Lying there on the cold dirty ground, she looked as though life had just left her, discarded her as if she’d never been worthy of drawing breath.
Rain stood over Violet’s body and was sorry. Sorry that she’d led such a hard life and sorry that it had ended in such an ugly way. Some people had heard him scream in anger when he found her body lying broken and bleeding not far from where The Virus lived or had lived. He could hear them now, shuffling up behind him, gasping as they saw Violet on the ground. Someone started to cry, but mostly they were silent. Tragedy struck here almost every day; people didn’t live long lives in the tunnels. No one was surprised to stumble upon a dead body.
They came to call him Rain because of a line that De Niro said in Taxi Driver. “Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalks.” He’d done that in a small way down here, he knew that. People depended on him because they needed order. Even in this place, people wanted to feel safe.
He felt them crowding in behind him and knew they were waiting for him to say something, to make it okay somehow. But he was momentarily at a loss for words. He’d depended on Violet as much as anyone else down here had, for motherly advice, encouragement, or just a sounding board. And now that she was gone, he felt true grief. More grief, in fact, than when his own mother, a junkie and a whore, had died what seemed like a lifetime ago. He fought tears, kept his back turned to those that had gathered around him and Violet.
He blamed himself for this. He should have taken care of the problem right away. Now they were all in trouble. Whether it was The Virus or the cure, they were in danger of having the world they created exposed and shattered. To hell with the “rules.” Who were they kidding anyway? There were no rules down here. It was as lawless a place as existed on earth.
He turned to the people who gathered behind him and felt their eyes on him.
“We’ll find who did this,” he said, his voice deep and resonating with conviction. There was a murmured noise of agreement. Rain thought of Dax Chicago and Jeffrey Mark and the threat they made. He shrugged inside. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
The silence between them was heavy as Lydia lay on the couch staring up at the ceiling and Jeff made a salad in the kitchen while they waited for their pizza to arrive. From where he stood at the counter, he could see into the sunken living room and he watched Lydia idly twirling a strand of blue-black hair, looking up at the tiny halogen track lights that ran the length of their Great Jones Street loft. He wondered, as he tossed tomatoes, avocado, onions, and cilantro over baby greens, what was going on in that head of hers. They’d hopped a cab home and had been skirting the events of the day, agreeing on dinner and saying little else.
Lit by the orange glow of three pendant lamps hanging over the black granite island, the terra-cotta tile floor, the wood cabinets with their stainless steel fixtures, the kitchen was a warm and cozy room. Like everything in the apartment they had designed it together, paying attention to every detail of the home they would share. When they bought the duplex last year, they got rid of most of their old furniture and belongings, keeping only what meant most to them.
“New beginnings demand new objects,” Lydia had declared. And Jeffrey had agreed. He’d never developed attachments to things anyway. He’d never had much of a home life, so he’d never spent much time on the East Village apartment he’d owned since he left the FBI. He’d started his private investigation firm from there, sleeping on a pullout couch in the back bedroom. In all the years he’d lived there, his apartment had remained almost empty of furniture. He found the only possessions that meant anything to him were his mother’s engagement ring, his father’s old service revolver, and a closetful of designer clothes.
Lydia’s apartment on Central Park West had looked like it belonged on the cover of House Beautiful. Sleek, modern, impeccably decorated, but, Jeffrey thought, totally cold and impersonal. “You live in someone’s idea of the most gorgeous New York apartment,” he’d commented once. She’d sold it as is, furniture and all, to some software designer, just months before the dotcom bomb. Jeffrey sold his apartment, too, throwing in the pullout couch and rickety kitchen table and chairs. They both made a killing and then bought the three-bedroom duplex.
A metal door with three locks opened from Great Jones Street into a plain white elevator bank. A real Old New York industrial elevator with heavy metal doors and hinged grating lifted directly into the two-thousand-square-foot space. By New York standards it was palatial. The cost was exorbitant, of course, as it was New York City ultra-chic, shabby-cool. But Lydia had declared it home the minute they stepped off the elevator onto the bleached wood floors. The private roof garden, which was at least a story higher than most of the other downtown buildings, sealed the deal. From the garden, they could see the whole city. At night it was laid out around them like a blanket of stars, which was a good thing, since you can’t see many actual stars in New York City. Now it was home, the place in the world they shared.
“So,” he said, putting the salad on the table and walking over to her. “How did you figure out where we were? Ford told you?”
“Not exactly,” she said, looking at him. He lifted her feet and sat on the end of the couch, placing them on his lap. She told him about their interview with Jetty, what he’d told her.
“Ford just looked so white, so guilty when Jetty mentioned the tunnels, that it just clicked for me that’s where you were. I can’t believe you guys took off on me like that. How could you, Jeffrey?”
He shrugged and looked over at her. “I didn’t see another way. Would you have been okay with it? With us going down there?”
“Hell, no. You were insane to do that. What if something happened to you down there? I should have been with you.”
“Exactly my point,” he said, his blood pressure rising at her stubbornness. “You’re pregnant. Will you get that through your thick head?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said, pulling her feet from his lap and sitting up. “I’m not made of glass.” They regarded each other for a moment and then she said, “Fine. You shouldn’t have gone down there, either. You should have let Dax go. Or called the FBI. But you shouldn’t have gone off like that, not even telling me anything. It’s not fair.”
He nodded. She was right and he was sorry he’d frightened her. But he couldn’t say he wouldn’t have done it the same way again. So he said nothing at all, just looked down at the floor.
“I mean, what were you going to do when you found him? Bring him in?”
Again, there was nothing he could say. They both knew he and Dax had had no intention of cuffing Jed McIntyre and putting him back into custody. It was as if, because he’d managed to escape once, Jeff would never be able to sleep again until Jed McIntyre was dead. As long as he lived, Lydia would be in danger. And Jeffrey just couldn’t live with that.
“No matter how you look at it, Jeff, it’s murder. Are you a murderer?”
The word sounded as harsh and as ugly as it was and something inside him lurched. He looked at her face and she was pale and drawn. Her eyes shone with a wetness that licked at her lower lashes. That word on her lips felt like an indictment and he felt a sick shame inside.
“Not yet,” he answered, not meaning it to sound as glib as it did.
She looked at him with an expression that was somewhere between worry and disappointment. The buzzer rang and Jeff got up to answer it. “Who is it?” he called, depressing the talk button.
“It’s me,” came Dax’s unmistakable voice. “And I’ve got a pizza here. Though I don’t know what you two are gonna eat.”
“The tunnel went down about twelve feet, then out another two hundred, and then split into three separate passages. It’s going to take a couple of men and a lot of man-hours to follow each of them and see where they lead. Not a fun job, as you well know,” said Dax between gigantic bites of pizza. Lydia counted, and it took him a total of four mouthfuls to finish one slice. Jeff had called to order another after Dax polished off three pieces in under ten minutes. “And there was no bloody way I was going down there again. Not after our little adventure today.”
“So why don’t you tell me about this little adventure?” said Lydia, looking at Jeff. “I never did get to hear all the details.”
“It was bloody awful,” said Dax. He ran down the highlights as Lydia watched him, eyes wide. She managed to nibble at her salad a little as he talked, but she’d lost her appetite. She’d been ravenous just minutes before Dax arrived.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you two were full of shit,” said Lydia, when he’d finished. “Did this Rain ever tell you who you saw down there?”
“No,” said Jeff, remembering the specter that had seemed to melt from the tunnel walls.
“I can’t believe people live like that,” said Dax, as though he resided in a clapboard house with a white picket fence, two kids, and a dog.
“It seems like there’s more than one gator in the sewers,” said Jeffrey, thinking about how strange it was that the tunnels beneath New York City held Jed McIntyre and possibly some of the answers to the Ross case, as well.
“So now we know how someone else could have gotten into the building the night Richard Stratton was murdered,” said Lydia, shifting the pieces around in her head.
“Yes and no,” said Dax.
“Right,” answered Jeff, knowing where he was going. “Someone from the inside had to move the dryer, otherwise whoever wanted in couldn’t open the trapdoor.”
“So it had to have been either Julian or Eleanor on the tape,” said Dax.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Lydia as though she’d already given it some thought. “The person who snuck in there had to be really small to avoid the camera. And someone else had to turn it off from behind the desk upstairs. If the camera was still on, it would have captured the dryer being slid forward.”
“So two people, then?”
“Definitely two people.”
“Eleanor and Julian in on it?” said Dax.
“Or maybe-” said Jeff, looking at Lydia.
She finished his sentence. “The twins.”
Sometimes in love, arguments are better dropped. No resolution is in the offing and to continue belaboring the point inevitably causes more damage than understanding. Lydia and Jeffrey had allowed their disagreement to come to bed with them, and though Jeffrey slept soundly, Lydia lay awake staring at a small water stain that had just made its debut in the ceiling above them.
After Dax left, they’d tried to continue the discussion they’d been having before he arrived. But there was no understanding to be reached. Jeffrey apologized for frightening her, but that’s as far as he went, leaving Lydia with the uneasy feeling that if the opportunity presented itself, he’d do it again. She looked over at his sleeping form and felt an odd distance from him. She felt angry at him, and helpless. She quashed the urge to nudge him awake and fight with him until she felt better.
She was conscious of the street noise from Lafayette below them, cars speeding, the general hum that was a million conversations, electricity through wires, trains rushing through tunnels, whatever combination of myriad sounds. She’d never imagined the parallel universe that existed beneath them. Naturally, she’d heard the stories somewhere in the periphery of her consciousness. But it had never seemed real to her. Now she had to contend with the idea of a netherworld just a few feet beneath her, like the first layer of hell where her nightmare and Julian Ross’s as well stalked. The thought made her shiver.
The hem she’d seen in the video, a dark color patterned with little white hearts, had impressed her as something a child would wear. That was how it came to her mind that possibly the twins had let someone into the building. It seemed a little far-fetched, after she’d thought about it, but not out of the question. The how and why would take some figuring out. She’d see Eleanor and the twins tomorrow. Ford had said he’d work on a warrant to search the children’s rooms and find the nightgown. He couldn’t remember what the little girl had been wearing the night their father was killed. He’d promised to think about it and swing by in the morning to take Lydia up to Haunted.
She thought about getting up and searching the Internet for more information on Haunted. But she felt sleep tugging at the back of her eyes and the thought of putting her bare feet on the cold wood floor beneath her was enough to deter her. She shifted to her side and moved in closer to Jeffrey, his body heat a magnet she couldn’t resist. She closed her eyes and curled up tighter beneath the covers. She hadn’t felt the pain in her side again since earlier in the evening and she’d done a good job convincing herself it was gas or something. She closed her eyes and sleep came for her.
It took her off into a warm blackness. She dreamed that she was on a tiny wooden rowboat with only one oar. In a narrow stone tunnel, the current of a bloodred river swept the boat along and she had to hold the sides to steady herself. All around her she could hear screams, but she saw nothing except the walls of the tunnel and the river beneath her. She placed a finger in the water and pulled it back to find her hand dripping with blood. And at the sight of it, she was torn with the ache of a loss so profound that she felt she might die from it. She didn’t know what was gone, only that it had been so precious and she so unworthy. And then there was the mocking laughter of madmen, echoing against the walls. It surrounded her and she couldn’t be sure whether she was moving toward its source or away.
Haunted, New York was every bit as bleak and even uglier than Lydia had imagined it would be. The gray sky seemed committed to gloom and the trees here had already shed their leaves. Winter branches reached gnarled and high and the ground looked as cold and dead as a grave. Even the weathered and beaten old sign that read WELCOME TO HAUNTED looked as though the sun had never shone on it. Someone had spray-painted RUN WHILE YOU CAN across the top. Lydia wondered if anyone would bother to repaint or replace it.
Lydia sat in the front seat beside Ford, with Jeff in the back of the old Taurus.
“Ford, why don’t you get a new car? This is a piece of shit,” said Lydia when he had picked them up on Great Jones Street a few hours earlier. In spite of a restless sleep, she was feeling stronger than she had last night. The daylight made the events of yesterday seem surreal and far away. And she left them there, temporarily putting Jed McIntyre out of her mind.
“I take offense at that. Just because something looks like shit doesn’t mean it is shit,” he replied, looking in the rearview mirror and tamping down an errant hair as they climbed into the car. “Meanwhile, I’m lucky it’s running at all the way you drove it yesterday. I’m surprised the engine didn’t fall out.”
“You let her drive?” asked Jeff. “You shouldn’t let her drive when she’s angry.”
“I’m a very good driver,” said Lydia indignantly.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what the monster truckers think, too.”
She gave him a look to let him know he was still on her shit list and would be there until further notice.
“So, what happened last night?” she said, turning to Ford.
“Not much after you left. Forensics showed up, did their thing… obviously, there were a lot of different prints, fibers, hairs down there. No way to know if any of it will mean anything. However, no prints on the ladder rungs or on the door handle. Wiped clean. We got men down in the tunnels seeing where they lead. At least we know now that someone could have gotten into the building without anyone seeing. That’s good news for Julian Ross. Of course, it raises a lot more questions for us.”
“What about blood evidence?”
“Nothing visible. We’re going to do some Luminol later tonight. So we’ll see. Meanwhile, Eleanor Ross is expecting us at four, says we can speak to the twins then… with her lawyer present, of course.”
“Of course,” said Lydia and Jeffrey in unison, exchanging a look in the sideview mirror.
“I didn’t tell her about the warrants I’d be bringing to search their belongings at the apartment and at the hotel. I gotta admit, though, Lydia, it seems a little crazy to think those kids had anything to do with it.”
“Stranger things have happened. People use kids as pawns in all kinds of games. Some sicker than others.”
She could think of a number of cases she’d come across where children had committed or been used in the commission of heinous crimes. Roger Jeffers, a middle-aged New Orleans tax attorney, used his ten-year-old son to lure other young boys out of community pools and parks, then made him watch while he sodomized and then murdered them. Even the Cheerleader Murders case, the first that Jeffrey and Lydia worked together, had involved a teenage girl. Fifteen-year-old Wanda Jane Felix, who’d been tormented and humiliated by the victims, helped her mother to abduct and mutilate the girls in retaliation… though Mrs. Felix had done the actual murders. Then there was twelve-year-old Randy Crabtree, who sold raffle tickets door-to-door to raise funds for his school soccer team. When one eleven-year-old boy who was home alone claimed not to have a dollar to buy a ticket, Randy forced his way into the house and beat the child to death with a coaxial cable. Kids, they were growing up so fast these days under the careful tutelage of sick adults. True, the twins were young. But they were old enough to follow orders. Children made loyal and diligent little soldiers, eager to please, their only knowledge of right from wrong hand-fed to them. Okay to murder, bad to tell anyone about it.
They pulled off the smaller highway that they’d been on since they’d exited the Interstate and followed the signs to Main Street. Unlike some upstate New York towns that prided themselves on their quaint, gentrified downtown areas lined with pretty, well-kept buildings, sweet cafés, and trendy boutiques, Haunted looked as though someone had dumped it on the side of the road in the seventies and forgot to come back and pick it up. It wasn’t dilapidated as much as it appeared to be the victim of determined and persistent apathy.
The Taurus cruised up a street riven with potholes. An old woman hobbled along the sidewalk and took a turn into a bakery that didn’t have a name-bearing sign. The word BAKERY was painted in a fading baby blue on the storefront window. There was a hardware store and a barbershop, complete with the requisite red, white, and blue pole beside the door. The Rusty Penny was a diner that from the street looked utterly empty except for a bored-looking waitress reading a paperback at the counter. All the buildings were painted the same slate gray and seemed to blend into the sky around them. Some hardened and brown snow edged the sidewalk, though most of yesterday’s snowfall seemed to have melted away. They stopped at a light, though there was no other traffic except a decrepit red Chevy pickup behind them. It felt like they waited an inordinately long amount of time before the light changed again.
“Cheerful little burg,” said Ford. “Where should we start?”
“Let’s find the library,” said Lydia. “Drop me off there, then you and Jeff can go off and talk to the local police. See if anyone from 1965 is still around and willing to talk.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The librarian at the Haunted Public Library was as leathery and dusty as an old unabridged dictionary. Directed there by a gas station attendant who looked like he was high on something, they’d found it about ten minutes north of Main Street. As luck would have it, the local police station was just a quarter of a mile down the same road, visible from the parking lot of the converted old Protestant church-cum-library. Lydia would have expected to be treated with distrust and suspicion in a small backward town like Haunted; anyway that’s what she’d always heard about small towns. But the few residents they’d encountered-the kid at the gas station, the waitress at the Rusty Penny where they’d stopped to pick up some truly vile coffee-had seemed to barely register their existence. In fact, they seemed to barely register their own existences. The librarian was another story.
Lydia had been inside a few small town libraries. She’d expected a few shelves of bestsellers, some back issues of Reader’s Digest, and the archives of the local paper. She’d expected a gray institutional place with faux-wood shelving and bad carpet, fluorescent lights and the sour smell of apple juice spilled during a particularly riotous story hour. What she found was a musty old place, dimly lit. A heavy oak information desk with a gold-plated sign reading WELCOME TO HAUNTED PUBLIC LIBRARY, MARILYN E. WOODS, HEAD LIBRARIAN seemed to act as a sentry against entering. Two banker’s lamps with rich green glass shades sat atop the desk, casting a warm yellow light. Behind the desk, Lydia could see row after row of richly varnished oak shelving, stacked high with what looked like leather-bound volumes with gilt-edged pages. A staircase led to a gated loft, where more volumes could be seen behind glass. Off to the right was a cozy sitting area, where red brocade overstuffed chairs stood imperiously beside a long table the same varnished oak as the shelves. It was the kind of library Lydia would have expected to see at an Ivy League university or in some Gothic mansion.
“Can I help you?”
Marilyn E. Woods looked as though she had been born to be a librarian. She was a tiny woman, frail about the shoulders but with a long, graceful neck. Her graying hair flowed in thick curls down her back, a few strands pulled back from her face with a barrette. Her skin was as pale as moonlight. Wire-rimmed spectacles sat atop a beakish nose; the eyes beneath were dark and searing, wrinkled at the corners but glittering with intelligence and curiosity. She wore a simple black long-sleeved empire waist dress, and a jade amulet hung from prayer beads around her neck. She had an aura of belonging where she was, as if she were as much a fixture of the library as the oak shelves.
“This is a public library?” Lydia asked stupidly, the sign right in front of her.
“That’s what the sign says,” the woman said with a courteous smile and interested eyes.
“It’s just that Haunted doesn’t seem like an especially wealthy town. And this is a beautiful library.”
“It’s a public library funded by a private trust, actually,” said Marilyn, her smile widening as though Lydia had just said she was beautiful. The smile took about ten years off her face.
“Mind if I take a look around?”
“Not at all,” she said, hitting a button under the desk. A soft buzzer sounded and a low gate to the side of the desk opened. “Is there something I can help you find? I’ll warn you, most of the books you’ll find are reference materials that don’t leave the library. Some first editions of local New York writers, historical texts, old maps, genealogies of some of our more prominent families. I do have some shelves toward the back with some ‘popular’ titles.” The word popular seemed to stick on her tongue and then get spit out as if it tasted bitter. “And I can order most anything you need from one of the larger libraries if you have a library card. But I don’t think you do, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
The whole place smelled like wood and leather and Lydia walked up and down the shelves looking at the beautiful volumes there. She traced a finger along the bindings and thought she caught the slightest scent of lemon, as if the books had been dusted with Pledge.
She came to a narrow staircase that crept along the wall, the mahogany banister polished until it gleamed in the light. A small plaque at the bottom of the stairs announced that Haunted historical texts and genealogies were kept above and were for reference only, not to leave the library. Lydia looked around, expecting the librarian to leap out from the shelves and forbid her to go any farther. But she didn’t and Lydia jogged lightly up to the next landing. It was hard to believe that a town so small and innocuous could have so many volumes dedicated to its town history and the people who lived there, but there were at least ten floor-to-ceiling shelves lined across the room and stuffed with leather-bound volumes. Lydia looked around for a light switch but didn’t find one. She made do with the low light that traveled up from the floor below and scanned the shelves. She went to the shelf marked Q-T to see what might exist on the Ross family and walked along that row, squinting her eyes and leaning in close so that she could read the bindings. Toward the end of the shelf, she found a book entitled Hiram Ross: Son of the Founding Fathers. She pulled it from its place and moved over to a table close to the landing where the light was a bit better.
She sat and opened the book. The book was in pristine condition and the now-familiar scent of lemons seemed to waft from its pages. She perused the table of contents and found a chapter entitled “Descendants,” then flipped to that page. What she found was a careful chart, dating back to Hiram’s great-grandparents, continuing through his marriage to a woman named Elizabeth Rye in 1856, who died early, before her twenty-second birthday, just a few years later in 1859. Less than a year later, Hiram remarried to a woman named Eleanor Hawthorne, who bore him a son and a set of fraternal twins, one boy, one girl. The chart covered several pages, reaching all the way to three generations later, to Eleanor and Paul Ross, twin daughter and son of Hiram’s great-great-grandson. The chart ended at Eleanor’s marriage to Jack Proctor, with no mention of Julian’s birth or Jack’s death. Lydia scanned back through the marriages and saw that Eleanor had been telling the truth, that the husbands of the Ross women seemed to die all within a few years of the birth of their children.
“What are you looking for exactly?” said the librarian, poking her head up from the stairs and flipping on a light from someplace Lydia couldn’t see. Lydia’s heart leapt, but she managed not to show it.
“How long have you worked here?” asked Lydia, not looking at her.
“Just over thirty years,” she said.
“Did you grow up here?”
Marilyn seemed taken aback by the personal nature of her questions. She hesitated, then answered.
“Why yes.”
“Does the name Ross mean anything to you?”
Marilyn laughed a quick, uncertain laugh and seemed to back away a few steps. “The name Ross means something to everyone in this town. Something different to everyone.” Lydia turned her eyes from the book. Marilyn looked as if she might turn and scurry away, but she didn’t.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Marilyn asked finally.
“I’m looking for information on Eleanor Ross and her murder trial back in 1965. And anything else you can tell me about the Ross family.”
A strange expression crossed the woman’s face, some combination of conspiratorial pleasure and fear, the desire to talk and the knowledge that she shouldn’t.
“I know the librarian can be the hub of almost any small town,” Lydia flattered, remembering how well Marilyn had responded to the compliments to her library. “And I can see I wasn’t wrong in coming here before going anyplace else.”
“Who are you?” asked Marilyn again, moving in closer to her.
“I’m Lydia Strong. I’m a writer interested in the case.”
“Oh, of course,” the librarian said, covering her mouth and the smile that bloomed there. “I should have recognized you. I’ve read every one of your books.”
Lydia smiled. The librarian had climbed the rest of the steps and now stood beside her, glancing at the book open in front of her on the table. Lydia held out her hand, which Marilyn grabbed and shook enthusiastically.
“Will you help me, Marilyn?”
The woman could barely conceal her excitement, but she recovered well and took on her previous air of authority. “Well, it depends on what you’d like to know. I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot you won’t find in these books.”
Lydia followed Marilyn back to her office behind the information desk and sat in a plush sofa. Marilyn offered tea, and when Lydia accepted, she walked from the office and was gone for a time. Lydia looked around the small space, made smaller by the heavy wood paneling and large oak desk lit by the same style banker’s lamp that had sat on the desk out front. Marilyn’s degrees hung behind her desk: there was a bachelor’s in English literature, a master’s in library science, as well as a second master’s in American history, all from Syracuse University. Lydia stood up to inspect them more closely.
Marilyn’s desk was predictably spotless and impeccably organized. A small pile of manila folders was stacked flush against the far corner of the desk, ten identical Uni-Ball black ink pens stood in a leather cup: A cup of tea, still steaming, sat on a coaster. A small, sectioned tray contained rubber bands and paper clips. An unfinished game of computer solitaire when Lydia accidentally touched the mouse. She must be bored to tears, thought Lydia as the librarian returned with a cup of dark oolong tea with cream and sugar.
“You said this library was funded by a private trust?” asked Lydia, sitting back down on the sofa and placing the tea on the end table. Marilyn jumped up to place a coaster beneath the cup and then sat back down.
“Yes, from the estate of one of the original settlers of this town, a man named Thomas Hodge. He is the ancestor of a woman who still lives in Haunted, a woman named Maura Hodge.”
She paused a second and then took a sip of her tea.
“Does your visit have something to do with the recent murder of Richard Stratton?” Marilyn asked.
“It does,” Lydia answered simply, not offering any additional information.
Marilyn nodded and a look of uncertainty crossed her features, as if she were unsure now that she wanted to offer Lydia what she knew. But after a moment, she began to speak. “The Rosses’ ancestors, originally from Holland, settled Haunted back in the 1700s. The land, obviously, was virtually wrested from the Seneca Indians, who are just one of the tribes that existed in this region before colonization. Mainly trappers and farmers, the settlers flourished here in the ‘New Netherlands.’ ”
Lydia smiled politely, not exactly interested in a history lesson. The woman must have read it on her face. “I know it seems like I’m starting a long way back, but I think it’s relevant to what you want to know,” she said.
“Please, go on,” said Lydia. “It’s fascinating.”
“By the beginning of the early 1800s the Rosses were by far the wealthiest farming family in the North. They also owned the largest number of slaves. In fact, before slavery was abolished in 1865, New York had the largest number of slaves of any northern state.”
She paused here and took another sip of her tea, looking at Lydia over the rim of the mug, gauging her reaction.
“The Rosses were notoriously brutal to their slave workers. In particular, Hiram Ross, Eleanor Ross’s great-great-great-grandfather, was rumored to have beaten and even murdered his slaves. Beatings, of course, were not unusual. But actual murder was rarer than you might think because slaves were extremely valuable. A strong young male could be worth as much as twenty-five hundred dollars, which in that day was an extremely large sum of money, as odious as it is to talk about human life in such a way.”
Lydia nodded her agreement and understanding. She felt cold suddenly and had the sense that the history lesson was about to get ugly.
“Anyway, Hiram Ross was hated and feared by just about everyone who knew him… his slaves, his fellow farmers, even his family. He was a thief, a liar, and, if rumor was to be believed, a rapist and murderer. He was believed to have fathered a great many children by his female slave workers; children who grew up to be his slaves, as well.”
Marilyn was by this time leaning forward on her chair toward Lydia, her face animated by the story she was telling. Lydia’s interest was piqued, as well.
“Now, Elizabeth Ross, Hiram’s wife, was not exactly a saint herself. In fact, she herself was carrying on an affair with one of the slave workers, a man named Austin Steward. They were both young, no older than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and they were supposedly truly in love. Hiram was no fool and he learned soon enough about the affair. The story goes that one night, while he was supposed to be away selling the season’s crops, he came home early to find the two in the throes of passion on the parlor floor.”
Lydia could imagine the two lovers entwined on the floor of a grand parlor, the light from a full moon bathing their naked bodies. She could see a man enter and stand at the doorjamb, watching, his face contorted in anger, rage flowing through his veins.
“Hiram was obviously enraged,” Marilyn went on. “And Elizabeth, whether out of terror or cowardice or both, claimed that Austin Steward had raped her.”
Lydia could see the young woman, moving away from her lover, maybe gathering her clothes around her, hiding her naked body from the gaze of the two men… her lover and her husband, the circumstances having made them both hostile strangers to her.
“Austin was also married, to a young Haitian slave named Annabelle Taylor. Of course, that was her slave name. There are no records of her true Haitian name that I’ve been able to find. Hiram took Austin and Elizabeth out to the shack where Austin and Annabelle lived with their five children. He pulled those children out of their beds and asked Elizabeth again if she was having a willing affair with Austin or whether he had raped her. He promised to kill a child each time she lied. She lied five times. And Hiram killed all five children with a shot to the head while Annabelle and Austin looked on, restrained by Hiram’s slave drivers. Naturally, Austin was arrested and hanged. And Elizabeth, it’s said, went quite insane. She died of the flu the next winter.”
Marilyn had told the tale as though it were a ghost story, something that was heinous and terrifying but not real. And she spoke with a kind of alacrity that Lydia found a tad inappropriate. Lore was like that; the years drained the horror from it, leaving just an echo over time. But in Marilyn’s telling, Lydia had been transported and was left with a cavity of sadness in her chest at the cruelty and harshness of the story. She could imagine vividly the scene that night, see the bloated full moon, hear Annabelle screaming for the lives of her children, hear Elizabeth lying again and again as the children were slain, see their small bodies fall lifeless to the ground, smell the gunpowder in the air as the shots rang out. It was one of the worst stories she’d ever heard. And she’d heard some bad ones.
“That’s an interesting piece of folklore, Marilyn. But I’m not sure what it has to do with-”
“There’s more. Annabelle lived to be a very old woman. It’s said that the only thing that kept her alive was her hatred for the Ross family. Some people believed that in Haiti Annabelle had been a voodoo priestess. And on the night her children died, she created a curse against the Ross bloodline. A curse that could only be kept alive by herself and her daughters, and her daughters’ daughters-a kind of legacy of hatred.”
“And what was the curse?” asked Lydia.
“That none of the women descended from Hiram would know a natural love. That if they fell in love and married, a horrible fate would befall their husbands.”
“What about the children? Hiram killed her children. Wouldn’t she want revenge for that?”
“No, supposedly she would not wish harm to children, no matter what the crimes of their ancestors.”
“So I take it Annabelle’s bloodline is still alive and well.”
“And residing in Haunted. Annabelle remarried and had more children some years after the tragedy. She was just nineteen when her children by Austin were murdered.”
“Really,” said Lydia, less a question than an exclamation. “And how did you come by all of this information?”
“In addition to being the librarian, I’m also the town historian,” she said with pride. “And Annabelle’s descendant is the woman I mentioned whose trust funds this library. It’s Maura Hodge. A descendant of Thomas Hodge, Benjamin Hodge, married a descendant of Annabelle Taylor, Marjorie Meyers… a very controversial marriage in its day, since Marjorie had Haitian blood in her veins. Maura was their only child. Her ancestors settled and worked as slaves on this soil. She knows everything there is to know about the history of this town, the Ross family, and especially the curse.”
“So when Eleanor’s husband, Jack Proctor, was murdered, people believed that it had to do with the curse?”
Marilyn lowered her eyes for a second, then raised them to meet Lydia’s gaze.
“I suppose it seems silly to someone who’s… not from here.”
“No one other than Eleanor was ever suspected? No rumors?”
Marilyn looked thoughtful, but shook her head. “In a place like this where so little goes on and so little ever changes, the past just seems closer. Superstitions, ghost stories, they seem more real, I guess. When Eleanor was acquitted and no one else was ever charged, it almost seemed like proof that the curse was alive and well.”
Lydia looked at Marilyn and she seemed suddenly strange and innocent. Haunted was only a couple of hours from New York City, but it might as well have been on the moon, it was so removed.
“Anyway, like I said,” Marilyn went on, “Maura knows a lot more about the curse and the Ross family than I do. But I’ll warn you that she’s not overly friendly. And she’s suspicious of outsiders. Since her ancestors settled this town, she kind of thinks of it as hers. There’s not much left to it, but she’ll protect it with her life.”
Lydia thought of the roads riven with potholes and the crumbling neglected Main Street. She thought of a land wrested from the Native Americans and tilled by slaves who worked and bled and died on it. She thought of Annabelle Taylor and the souls of her dead children. She thought maybe there was never a more fitting name for a town.
“There’s a lot of blood in the ground,” said Lydia, half thinking aloud.
“Indeed there is.”
“Frankly, Detective, I don’t see what my mess, from nearly forty years ago, has to do with your present situation.” Police Chief Henry Clay was a fat, sour man with a big belly and a face that was as wrinkled and dirty as an old potato. He was bald except for a few determined silver strands that were currently being blown every which way by the heat coming from the vent above his head. His hands were thick and pink, reminding Jeffrey of nothing so much as wads of Silly Putty.
“Well, sir,” said Ford, trying his level best to use honey instead of vinegar, “it might have nothing to do with it; it might have everything to do with it. But we would sure be interested in your thoughts on the ’65 case.”
The old man made a noise that was somewhere between a grunt and a belch as he pushed himself up from the chair behind his desk. He walked past them and opened the wood and opaque glass door that bore his name and said to his secretary, who was seated outside his office, “Can you go down to the archives, Miss Jean, and see if you can’t find the Ross file?”
There was a moment of silence, and the woman, who was at least as old as the police chief, sounded incredulous as she repeated, “The Ross file, Henry? Eleanor Ross?”
“Well, goddammit, woman, you heard me,” he answered, and closed the door.
“The case was never solved, is that right, Chief Clay?” asked Jeff.
“That’s right,” he said with a sigh as he sat back in his chair, which groaned in protest of his tremendous girth.
“Who were the other suspects?” asked Ford.
“Well, there were no other suspects, officially. No one we could ever charge.”
“But you had someone in mind,” led Ford.
“There had always been bad blood between Eleanor Ross and another longtime resident, a crazy old woman named Maura Hodge. It was something ancestral, some kind of family feud that went way back to when their people settled this town. But that was just a lot of gossip. Maura’s always been an angry woman, very bitter. And she had a well-known hatred for Eleanor. Jealousy, I always thought. You know how women are.”
Jeff said a silent thank-you that Lydia was not with them. She really had a distaste for misogyny and could not be counted on to hold her temper when faced with men like Henry Clay.
“Oh, yeah.” Ford laughed in a complicit man-to-man kind of way.
“She’s still alive?” asked Jeff.
“Yeah, that old bitch is too mean to ever die,” he said with a laugh that ended in a rasping cough. “She lives just up the road a piece in a big old house. Gorgeous old mansion from her husband’s estate. Heard it’s gone to disrepair over the years, though. She doesn’t keep it up the way she used to. Doesn’t let anyone on her property to help her. Like the Ross estate. Now, there’s a piece of property that’s gone to shit.”
“The house where Eleanor’s husband was murdered?”
“The same. The Rosses still own it, but it’s sat empty some fifteen years. They still pay taxes on it, though, so it stands as they left it. Furnished and everything. We have lots of trouble with kids up there, breaking in. They claim it’s haunted, course.”
The chief was loose and talking now, so Ford kept pumping. “Anyone else you thought at the time might be a suspect?”
The old man leaned back even farther in his chair and lifted his arms, folding his hands behind his head. He looked above them with his small blue eyes and squinted as if he were looking off into the past.
“Well, Eleanor’s brother was always trouble when they were growing up. Something wrong with him… you know, in the head. He was never right. There were always rumors about him and Eleanor. That their relationship was…” He stopped before finishing his thought and looked at them. He seemed angry suddenly, as if they had tricked him into talking about things he hadn’t wanted to discuss. “But that’s all ancient history.”
“Where’s Eleanor’s brother now?
“Paul? He disappeared more than thirty years ago. Most people think he’s dead,” he said, looking at his watch. Just then there was a knock at the door and Miss Jean pushed in before waiting for an answer.
“Sir, I just can’t find those files for the life of me,” she said, looking at them apologetically. Ford didn’t believe her for a second. “I’ll keep looking, though, and let you know if they turn up.”
“All right, then, Miss Jean,” the chief said with a nod. “Well, gentlemen, if you leave your card, I’ll give you a call if those files turn up.”
Ford handed him a card and the chief regarded it suspiciously before stuffing it in his breast pocket and standing. “If there’s nothing else…”
“Actually, Chief Clay, I’m just curious,” said Ford, leaning in and lowering his voice to a low, just-between-us-cops tone. “Do you think that Eleanor Ross killed her husband? Did she get away with murder?”
He looked at Ford and an ugly smile split his face. “Tell you what. You were thinking of marrying one of those Ross women? I’d tell you to think again.”
Word was that he wasn’t welcome in the tunnels any longer. But that was just too damn bad. Word was that Rain, the omniscient, omnipresent Rain whom the bottom-feeders had deified into their lord and savior, was angry over Violet’s murder and was planning to make him pay. Jed couldn’t give a shit less. He didn’t fear the wrath of Rain the way Horatio the Dwarf seemed to when he’d found Jed and delivered the news.
“You better leave, and leave soon,” he’d said, shifting nervously from foot to foot and wringing his hands. Jed handed him a black-and-white cookie for his warning. Horatio was funny that way. He didn’t care about money or drugs; he didn’t even drink. But he had a sweet tooth and kept Jed in the loop for fresh cookies and pastries from some of the fine food purveyors in the city. Horatio didn’t like packaged foods; only freshly baked would do.
“I’m not going anywhere, Horatio,” he’d said, patting the little man on the head.
“That’s what you said before. Where would you be now if you hadn’t listened?” he asked, his mouth full of cookie.
It was true. When Horatio had pounded on his door yesterday to warn Jed about the approach of intruders, he’d had only twenty minutes to pack his belongings and disappear deeper into the tunnels. He’d loaded Horatio up like a pack mule and sent him off while he waited in the darkness. When Jeffrey Mark and Dax Chicago burst into his hovel, he quickly and easily killed their guide, so they would have no choice but to turn around and go back. He’d thought about going after them, too, when they were trapped with no exit in his space. But Dax Chicago stood at the door, never turning his back. And he had the biggest handgun Jed had ever seen. That one couldn’t be trusted to go down easily; he was crazy. Not to mention incredibly strong. So Jed slung Violet’s body over his shoulder-she was surprisingly heavy for such a short woman-and disappeared. He dumped her where she would be found. He wanted the twisted corpse to be a warning to those who might think about trying to lead anyone to him again.
Now Horatio was the only one who was aware of his new location. The sudden move had been inconvenient at the time, but in the end he found himself a much better spot, closer to an exit. Closer to Lydia. The map he’d begun was lost, but he’d committed it to memory, had started to draw it in a notebook that he carried with him.
Horatio, who was not very bright and resembled nothing so much as a shabbily dressed, down-on-his-luck Umpa Lumpa, was the closest thing Jed had had to a friend since he was in grade school. With scraggly long black hair, a long, wide face covered with patches of hair that should have been a beard but didn’t really seem to grow in right, and bright blue eyes, he seemed more like a creature from Grimm’s than he did a man. He wasn’t much, but he’d proven useful and loyal.
“You’re the only one who knows where I am, right?” said Jed, turning his gaze from his notebook to Horatio, who seemed to jump a bit.
“Of course,” he said eagerly.
“Then we don’t have anything to worry about. Do we?”
“Rain knows these tunnels better than anyone. If he wants to find you, he will,” Horatio said, his brows knit, the rest of the cookie forgotten in his hand.
“You’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“How?”
“I have every confidence that you’ll find a way to lead them away from me.”
“I don’t know”
“Find a way, Horatio. You wouldn’t want Rain to know that you’ve betrayed him. Then it will be back up topside for you, doing little dances on the subway to make money.”
Horatio had made the mistake of telling Jed how frightened he was of the streets, how much abuse he’d taken as a homeless dwarf, how he’d almost been killed more than once. Rain had given him a home and community where he felt safe. Now Jed used the information to control him. The dwarf looked sadly at his cookie as if it were the reason for the predicament he found himself in and nodded.
“Good,” said Jed. “I have to keep a low profile for a few days. I’m going to need some help with a few things.”
The food was worse than the coffee at the Rusty Penny, where Ford, Lydia, and Jeffrey sat at a booth toward the back. New Yorkers never realized how spoiled they were when it came to eating out until they left the city. Even the worst greasy spoon in Manhattan usually had something to offer, a personality, a history, something. But the Rusty Penny was like a boil on the buttocks of Haunted, nothing you’d want to look at too closely and certainly producing nothing you’d put in your mouth.
Lydia picked at the sesame bun on her chewy and grizzled hamburger. Ford, however, hadn’t seemed to notice and was eating as if he hadn’t had a meal in a week. Jeffrey had pushed away his turkey club and ate potato chips from a small bag.
“I think it’s better if we’re not there when Ford interviews the twins,” said Jeffrey, taking a swig from a bottle of mineral water. “After all, we’re supposed to be on Eleanor’s team. It wouldn’t look good to show up with the cops, especially given her opinion of them.”
“Not that you should be showing up with me anyway. As far as I’m concerned, you guys don’t even exist,” said Ford, looking at his watch.
Lydia nodded. She had been curious to hear the interview, but she was more interested in meeting Maura Hodge.
“How are you guys going to get back?” asked Ford.
“Dax is on his way,” said Jeffrey. “He’s meeting us with the Range Rover.” Dax had been tied up that morning with one of his other “clients.”
“What does that guy do exactly?” asked Ford. Then he held up a hand. “You know what? Don’t tell me.”
They were quiet for a second. Lydia couldn’t stop thinking about what Marilyn Wood had told her.
“What do you think about the librarian’s story?” she asked Ford.
“What,” said Ford, with a laugh. “You mean the curse.”
“You think it’s funny?” asked Lydia, leaning in to him.
“I wouldn’t say funny, exactly,” answered Ford with a smile, his amused skepticism wrinkling his eyes and turning up the corners of his mouth.
“It’s possible, isn’t it, that this Maura Hodge is making sure her ancestor’s curse is fulfilled… one way or another?”
“What do you mean… like she’s killing the husbands?”
“Or paying someone to do it. Or she has some kind of accomplice.”
Ford shrugged, looked up, and seemed to be considering the possibilities. “Seems a little far-fetched,” he said finally.
“What’s so far-fetched about it?”
“How old is this woman?”
“In her sixties, according to the librarian.”
“So that would make her in her late twenties around the time of Eleanor’s husband’s murder.”
“About that. What’s your point?”
“Nothing. Just that all these murders have been overkill. You know, rage killings. A killer for hire isn’t going to rip someone to pieces. And as for Maura Hodge, how much anger could she muster up for someone else’s two-hundred-year-old gripe?”
“Gripe? A woman watched her five children murdered before her eyes and then her husband was hanged. All because Elizabeth Ross didn’t have the courage to tell the truth. I’d say that’s a little more than a gripe.”
“Whatever you call it, it’s Annabelle’s gripe. Not Maura Hodge’s gripe. See what I’m saying? Whoever killed those men was filled with rage right now,” he said, tapping his finger hard on the table in time with his last two syllables. “Not a hundred and fifty-some years ago.”
She was there again on that night, inside Annabelle’s skin. She could feel the rage, the pain, the immense sadness that must have threatened to burst out of her chest, turn her mind toward insanity. She could imagine her powerless fury, hear her screams that must have sounded like an animal’s howl in the night, carrying all the panic and terror into the air. What if rage like that, pain like that, left an imprint on your DNA? What if over generations it became like a congenital disease that was passed down from one soul to the next? And what if, over time, that rage grew stronger instead of weaker? But these were things she wouldn’t say aloud to people like Ford McKirdy. He was so grounded, so flat to the earth; he would think she was insane. She couldn’t tell him that the buzz was louder than it had ever been. That she sensed an evil in this broken-down town and she couldn’t be sure whether it lived and breathed or whether it was just a part of the ground on which the town sat, that it had sunk into the water and poisoned the whole damned place.
She moved her hand to her belly. It was an unconscious gesture, but when she’d done it, felt the denim beneath her hand, she acknowledged a feeling that had been growing, fluttering in the periphery of her consciousness since she’d discovered she was pregnant. It was the sense that she was no longer alone in her skin. That everything she felt and thought, everything she ate, even the air that she breathed was being shared by another being. All of this, of course, she knew intellectually. Sitting there in the Rusty Penny, she experienced a palpable moment when the information reached her heart. And in that moment, she just felt so real.
She wasn’t sure why this feeling had come to her now. Maybe it was thinking of what people passed on to their children. How the baggage people carried was unloaded onto the most innocent among them; how the generations of two families since that awful night long ago might have been impacted by hatred and revenge, one way or another. And maybe it made her think of her own baggage and how she was going to try like hell not to pass it along to their child. She looked up then and saw both Ford and Jeff looking at her.
“What?” she said. “I wasn’t listening.”
“What’s going on in there?” said Jeff, looking at her with a little worry and putting a hand on the back of her head.
“Nothing,” she said. She looked into his eyes and smiled.
“Well, curse or no curse, I gotta head back to the city,” Ford said, wiping the grease from his mouth. He threw ten dollars on the table. “No offense, Lydia. I can’t handle this hocus-pocus bullshit. I have to deal with the facts, find out who crawled up through that hole, if anyone, who let him in, which of them killed Richard Stratton. We’re not going to figure that out digging into some town legend.”
“And what about Eleanor’s mysterious missing brother? And the town recluse, Maura Hodge? What if the answer to your question is right here in Haunted?”
“Call me on my cell. But watch out for the Headless Horseman, will ya?”
“Very funny.”
“Seriously, keep me posted. I’ll call you when I’ve finished with Eleanor and the twins.”
“Ford, what about the autopsy results? When do those come back?” asked Jeff.
“Should be today; they’ve been a little backed up. Busy homicide month. But they pushed mine up because it’s high-profile. There’s a meeting in the morning-ME, crime scene technicians, junior detectives, ten A.M. Midtown North. You guys can drop by afterward if you keep a low profile. I’ll fill you in.”
“We’ll be there,” said Jeff as Ford slid out of the booth. He stopped a second before walking out the door. He regarded them with a frown and pointed a paternal finger at them.
“You two be careful,” he said, thoughtful, as if his mind were already on something else. “Call me if you run into anything tangible.”
Lydia watched him as he muddled out the door. With his worn old beige raincoat and bad navy blue suit, he looked like a sad cliché of himself. Run-down middle-aged cop, nothing in his life but the job. Anything tangible… she thought. As far as she was concerned, the information the librarian gave her was the most tangible thing they had.
“I say,” said Dax with a wicked smile from the backseat, “we go in, guns blazing. Ask questions later.”
The three of them sat in the Range Rover in front of a giant elaborate wrought-iron fence, its bars formed to look like a network of vines and thorns. A sign was posted to the right of the gate explaining that the owner was legally entitled to shoot anyone who set foot on her property. It also warned that trained Dobermans roamed the property and that the owner was not responsible for the actions of said animals in the event someone decided to trespass. However, the gate was ajar. It felt oddly to Lydia like a dare.
“As much as I appreciate your input, Dax,” said Lydia flatly, “I think we’ll try a more civilized approach.”
She pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her black leather blazer.
“I’ve seen Chiclets bigger than that thing,” Dax said, pointing to her tiny cell phone. “I’d have to have a six-pack of them. I’d crush one a day at least.”
Lydia smiled in spite of herself. She was trying to treat both of them with a disdainful distance for their actions of yesterday. But they were hard to stay angry with, especially since she knew they were motivated only by concern for her.
“There,” said Dax, catching her smile in the rearview mirror and issuing a triumphant laugh. “I knew you wouldn’t be a bitch all day.”
“Just keep talking. You’d be surprised how long I can hold a grudge,” she answered, turning away so he wouldn’t see her smile widen.
“I wouldn’t,” said Jeff, with his best henpecked sigh. Lydia smacked him on the arm with her free hand.
A small Post-it that she’d tacked to the back of her phone had scrawled on it Maura Hodge’s number. Lydia dialed and waited while it rang three times before a machine picked up. “Leave a message,” said an angry voice. “Though there’s no guarantee I’ll get back to you.”
“Ms. Hodge, my name is Lydia Strong. Marilyn at the library said you might be willing to speak with me. I’m in Haunted, at the bottom of your driveway, to be exact, and I’d like to take a little bit of your time. Please call me when you get this message. And by the way, the gate is ajar. Thought you might like to know.” She left the number and hung up.
“Now what?” said Dax.
“We wait a few minutes.”
“What makes you think she’ll call back?” asked Jeff, skeptical.
“Because she’s lonely. Lonely people always like to talk. Especially when they think they have a cause.”
“Maybe we’ll get points for not busting in even though the gate was open.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
They waited a few minutes in silence before the phone rang and Lydia picked up.
“Hello?”
“What do you want?” came the same voice from the machine in even less pleasant tones. She knew she’d have exactly one chance to enter the property with Maura Hodge’s permission. Otherwise it was going to be B &E, with the possibility of either getting shot or mauled by Dobermans.
“I’m writing an exposé on the Ross family. Marilyn told me that you know a lot about their history. I was hoping you would share the truth about them with me, Ms. Hodge.”
There was a moment of silence during which Lydia held her breath. Then, “Come up and make sure the gate is closed behind you.”
“Okay,” Lydia said, and hung up the phone. She looked at Jeff. “Let’s go up.”
Dax jumped out to open the gate, waited until the Rover was through, then closed it behind them. Closed it mostly, anyway. There was no way he was going to lock the only exit he knew of from the property. When he was back in the car, they headed up the narrow drive, shaded by a canopy of trees so thick that after a few feet it seemed like all the light had faded from the sky. Jeff turned on his headlights, wondering why they always seemed to be headed into the dark unknown.
Maura Hodge was a goddess with a sawed-off shotgun. She stood on her porch waiting, the gun cradled in her arms like an infant. Her hair was as black and wild as a storm cloud, reaching out every which way and down her back nearly to her waist. In a diaphanous patchwork skirt and long black wool tunic, she was a large woman, with big soft breasts and wide shoulders, legs like tree trunks, arms like hams. She looked at them as they approached, with a withering stare that probably turned most people right around. Luckily, they weren’t most people. Though Lydia was starting to wish they were.
“Those your bodyguards?” asked Maura, nodding toward Jeff and Dax as Lydia exited the vehicle.
“They’re my associates,” said Lydia vaguely, but looking Maura straight in the eye. You couldn’t give an inch to a woman like Maura Hodge, otherwise she’d bulldoze right over you. Anyone could see that. Lydia could also see that she was mostly bark. Though she couldn’t speak for the Dobermans lying on the porch behind Maura, their black and rust coats gleaming in the rays of sun that sliced through the tree cover like fingers reaching down from heaven. They looked a little lazy, though. They hadn’t even raised a head at her arrival.
“Now, I’ve had two calls. One from Marilyn telling me you are a writer interested in the Ross case. And one from Henry Clay telling me that your ‘associates’ here are investigators. Which is it?”
“A little of both,” said Lydia.
If Lydia had to imagine what the descendant of an angry voodoo priestess might look like, Maura came pretty close. Generations of mixed races had lightened her skin to a coffee-and-cream color, but her eyes were as black as rage itself and they fairly glowed with intensity. The burden of a lifetime of bitterness seemed to have bent her back into a permanent slump. Her mouth was a hard cold line that looked as though it might never have smiled or spoken words of love.
Lydia approached the woman and reached out her hand. In a heartbeat, the dogs were on their feet, teeth bared, emitting low growls of warning.
“Easy, boys,” said Maura lightly, and the three resumed their reclined positions, reluctantly. Lydia began to breathe again. “Now call your dog off,” said Maura. Lydia turned to see that Dax had managed to draw his gun. How he’d done it so quickly, she couldn’t imagine. Jeff hadn’t even managed to get out of the car yet. Jeff and Dax looked more scared than she was.
“Easy, tiger,” said Lydia to Dax.
“I hate fucking dogs,” said Dax, lowering his weapon, staring at the beasts with suspicion.
“I’m sure they feel the same way about you,” said Maura. She turned and walked into the old house, her dogs at her heels. The three visitors stood for a second. Jeffrey looked to Lydia and she shrugged. The air was growing colder and Lydia could feel her cheeks and the tip of her nose going pink from the chill.
“I’ll stay with the car,” said Dax, getting into the driver’s seat and starting the engine as though he thought they might need to make a quick getaway. Lydia thought he was just afraid of the dogs.
“He just doesn’t like things he can’t intimidate,” Lydia whispered to Jeff.
“Who does?” answered Jeff with a shrug.
There was something rotten about the inside of Maura Hodge’s home. There was an air of neglect, visible in the dingy walls and dusty surfaces. Bits of grit crackled beneath Lydia’s feet as they stepped onto the creaking floorboards of the foyer. A chandelier looked a bit less stable than it should. The gilt frame on a mirror across the entranceway was chipped, the glass foggy. And there was an odor. Or maybe a mingling of odors… mold, dirt, moisture trapped in wood. Lydia couldn’t place the smell exactly, but her sinuses began to swell and a headache debuted behind her eyes. By the time they’d followed Maura in through the front door, she was nowhere in sight. They followed the sounds of the dogs’ collars and their nails scratching on the floor through a dim hallway. Lydia looked around for a light switch but saw that the fixtures were bare of bulbs. Above their heads they briefly heard what could have been footsteps, but the sound was gone as quickly as it came. Lydia wasn’t positive it wasn’t just the house settling.
“Does someone else live here with you, Ms. Hodge?” asked Lydia as they entered a large sitting room where a fire burned in the hearth and Maura sat on a high-backed dark wood chair, her gun across her lap.
“I thought you wanted to talk about the Rosses,” she said, looking at Lydia with a kind of sneer that may have been her natural expression.
Lydia sat on the couch across from the woman, though she hadn’t been invited to, and Jeffrey stood beside her. “Police Chief Clay claims that there’s bad blood between you and Eleanor Ross. Is that right, Ms. Hodge?”
The woman laughed a little. It was kind of a verbalization of her permanent sneer, accompanied by a shake of her head. “I sincerely hope you have not come here to talk about that stupid curse,” she said.
“In fact-”
“Because I’ll tell you right now that it’s pure bullshit.”
Lydia felt like they were sitting in Dracula’s parlor, as Gothic manor was the general decorating theme of the room. A dark red wall-to-wall carpet was badly in need of a vacuuming and steam clean. The gigantic fireplace was topped by an elaborately carved maple mantel where a wrought-iron candelabra sat, its many white candles nothing but melted wax that had been allowed to drip carelessly on the wood and on the hearth below like stalactites. The feet on the overstuffed red and gold brocade sofa and chairs, antiques that Lydia couldn’t name, were lions’ paws. A beautiful rolltop desk made of a highly varnished wood nestled in a dark corner and was covered in ledger books, letters, all manner of papers. Lydia’s fingers practically itched to rifle through the piles of documents.
“Marilyn didn’t seem to think so,” said Lydia.
“It’s a ghost story, Ms. Strong. An urban-or maybe in this case a small town-legend.”
“Most legends have some element of truth to them,” said Jeffrey.
“I’m not saying the history is false,” said Maura, reaching to a standing ashtray to her right and retrieving a pipe that rested there. She tapped out some stale tobacco from the bowl. “I’m saying that the matter of the curse is merely town gossip.”
She removed a velvet pouch from the pocket of her skirt and pinched out some tobacco. She put the pipe to her lips and lit it with a small gold lighter. Lydia could see that her fingers were yellowed and the nails short and cracked.
“And yet the men that marry the Ross women do seem to fall on some bad luck, don’t they?” said Lydia flatly.
For the first time, Maura Hodge smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t explain that.”
“But it amuses you?”
“They reap what they sow,” she said, leaning back in her chair. Lydia could see that Maura Hodge was not a kind woman, that the heavy burden of hatred she carried had made her cold. The tobacco was a pungent cherrywood and the smell was making Lydia nauseous. Or maybe it was the company.
“So there’s no curse. But you do hate the Ross family? Why?”
Again there was a noise from upstairs. She saw Jeffrey look up at the ceiling from the corner of her eye. Even one of the Dobermans, who had settled themselves at Maura’s feet, pricked up his ears and then emitted a small whine.
“It might be hard for someone like you to understand,” Maura said to Lydia in a mildly condescending tone, smoke filling the air around her, dancing like thin ghosts in the light shining from a lamp beside her. “But when you come from a family of slaves, generally you don’t find yourself overly fond of people who descend from a family of slave owners.”
“But, according to Marilyn, you descend from both.”
A look of annoyance flashed across Maura’s face, as if she resented someone trying to talk her out of her hatred. “My father and mother loved each other, Ms. Strong. But any white blood in my mother’s veins got there through rape, slave owners raping their female slaves. That kind of crime, that kind of injustice… let’s say you don’t just forget it.”
“So that’s why you disliked Eleanor Ross?”
“That and the fact that she’s a bitch and a liar and a damn jezebel,” she said, but without the heat of anger. There was no passion in her voice, just an old hatred, long hardened. Lydia thought of what Ford had said about the overkill, about how the murder was a rage killing. Maura Hodge was a big, strong woman, but there was a lethargy to her, like she might be as hard to move as a piece of the heavy old oak furniture. Time to see what her temper looked like.
“You grew up together in this town,” said Lydia, more a statement than a question. Jeffrey heard a little flame of mischief light up in her voice.
“That’s right.”
“So what was it then, really? She stole your date to the prom? She took your clothes while you were skinny-dipping in the creek with your boyfriend? She wrote your telephone number on a bathroom wall? Or is it just that she was beautiful and rich and you were not-just jealousy, plain and simple? Why do you hate Eleanor Ross?”
There was a flash in the woman’s eyes, her jaw tightened. But Lydia didn’t get the reaction she was hoping for.
“It’s an inherited hatred,” Maura said easily, taking a long puff on her pipe. “Woven and handed down by Annabelle Taylor.”
“Is it a powerful enough hatred that it would drive you to murder?” Obviously, she wasn’t expecting a confession, just a reaction she could read, something to move the investigation forward.
Maura Hodge chuckled and the chuckle evolved into a full belly laugh. “You think I’m murdering the husbands of the Ross women?” she said when she’d finished.
Lydia said nothing, just sat with her eyes on Maura, waiting. It took a little more than laughter to rattle Lydia’s cage.
“Look,” Maura said, turning a hard gaze on Lydia, “the Ross family doesn’t even need a curse. They are so fucked up in so many ways that they curse themselves.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Karma, Ms. Strong. Bad karma.”
“But how are they fucked up?” pressed Lydia.
“That’s a question best answered by Eleanor. Only she really knows the answer. The rest of us can only imagine what went on in that house after Eleanor’s husband was killed. Most of us weren’t old enough to remember Eleanor’s father’s murder. But when Jack was killed, in the same house, no less-you can imagine the frenzy, the scandal in this town. For most people, it was as if the Headless Horseman himself had ridden into Haunted. Of course, people never looked at me the same after that, either. As I am the daughter of the daughters of Annabelle Taylor, naturally they believed that I had something to do with it-mystically or otherwise. As if I were sitting in my living room casting spells.”
“And did you have something to do with it?”
“Please,” she said, shifting her girth in the seat and rolling her eyes.
“Do you have daughters, Ms. Hodge?”
“Stillborn,” said Hodge brusquely. “I’ve never been able to carry a child to term.”
Here Lydia saw the anger she’d been looking for-anger and sadness laced with a mammoth disappointment. Always a volatile mix.
“I’m sorry,” Lydia said.
“Maybe it’s for the best. Then this business of the curse will die with me.”
“What do you know about Eleanor’s brother?”
“Most people think he’s dead,” she said, her tone indicating that there was more to come. Maura was silent for a minute, chewing on the end of her pipe. Lydia could see she had something more she wanted to say and was debating whether to continue. The keen desire to gossip was clear in her black eyes.
“Some people say he loved her,” she said finally, her voice lowering a bit. “Not in the way a brother loves a sister. They say it tortured him, drove him mad.”
“What happened to him?”
“I was told his family sent him away. Some people believed he joined the army, but the popular rumor always was that he was sent to an asylum, where he killed himself. And others…” she said, pausing dramatically, “others believe he escaped-either the army or the asylum, depending on who’s telling the story-came back, and killed Eleanor’s husband because he couldn’t stand another man touching her. They say he ran off, leaving her to take the rap to punish her for not loving him.”
She shook her head. “But I never believed that. Paul was a quiet boy, gentle, maybe even a bit on the slow side. He didn’t have it in him. Just more stories for the bored little minds in this town.”
Lydia was quiet.
“He was the only one of them who wasn’t rotten at the core,” Maura said, looking off over Lydia’s head. She opened her mouth again, then clamped it shut as though to keep trapped whatever was about to escape. Her face grew harder and she looked at Lydia. Lydia could sense that they’d outworn their dubious welcome, but she pressed on.
“So who do you think is killing the husbands of the Ross women?”
A smile at once mocking and victorious spread across her face. “Well, it’s always been my hope that it is Annabelle Taylor herself, come back from the grave to do the job.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in curses,” said Lydia, fighting a chill that had raised goose bumps on her arms.
“I don’t,” she said, expressing streams of smoke from her nostrils like a dragon. “But I never said I didn’t believe in ghosts.”
Sitting quietly on the couch, sunlight streaming in from the large window overlooking Fifth Avenue, Lola and Nathaniel Stratton-Ross looked less like children than they did tiny adults. But they were children and interviewing them was a delicate matter. It had occurred to Ford on the way back from Haunted that maybe he didn’t have the finesse, the delicacy it might require. He didn’t want to fuck it up, so he put in a call to a woman he knew, a child psychologist by the name of Irma Fox.
He and Irma had worked together a couple of times in the past five years. Most recently when his only witness to a double homicide was the six-year-old son of one of the victims. He remembered Nicholas Warren as he’d found him that night, in his Toy Story pajamas, holding tight to a wilted stuffed dog, freckled with blood splatter.
They’d found him crouched in the bedroom closet, where he’d clearly had a front-row seat as his father and his new stepmother were shot to death while they slept in their bed. He told Ford that night that he’d come to his father’s room to wake him after a bad dream but hid in the closet when he heard something on the stairs. He’d not closed the door, he said, but he’d covered his eyes, so he hadn’t seen anything. Ford knew that Nicholas had seen it all and believed he could identify the killer. But he wanted the information without traumatizing the kid further.
It took Irma to bring Nicholas to a place where he was able to reveal the truth about that night. After two hours behind closed doors with Irma, Nicholas revealed that he’d let his mother into the house that night, as he’d promised her he would. And that she’d killed his father and his father’s new wife. “So that I could live with just Mommy again.” Nicholas’s mom was doing two consecutive life sentences and Nicholas was living with his aunt and uncle in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse. Ford hoped the kid was getting some good therapy and didn’t wind up on the FBI’s most wanted list sometime in the future.
Irma had a way about her and everyone responded to it, not just children. She was a careful person, careful with her words, her tones. She had a way of focusing all her attention on you when you talked, a way of turning her warm green eyes on you with such understanding, compassion, respect, that you just couldn’t help but pour out your soul into her hands. Ford knew this truth about her well, having confessed more to her over the years than he had to his own wife.
She was pretty, not beautiful, with a kind face, her skin smooth and pink like a peach. She was small but not what he’d call thin, with a motherly fullness about her breasts and hips. She was always well dressed but was not exactly what he’d call stylish. It was as if she’d been carefully constructed to be pleasing without being threatening. As if she wanted people never to notice her so much that they forgot about themselves.
He called her from the car and by the time he pulled up in front of her Central Park West office, she’d cleared her afternoon for him. She owed him a favor big time. He’d managed to get her eighteen-year-old off the hook on a DUI that was going to cost him his license and possibly some jail time, and into a special AA program instead. Shrinks’ kids were always the most fucked up, he’d noticed.
There were some small fireworks upon their arrival at the Waldorf suite when Irma insisted that she speak to the children alone, without Eleanor and without the attorney present. She did agree to a video camera, so that they could all watch on a closed-circuit monitor from another room. It took a while before a uniform showed up with the equipment.
As the interview began, Piselli searched the children’s room in the suite, while Detective Malone was back at the crime scene, working their bedrooms. Ford felt confident that something was going to turn up, one way or another. Either that or he was going to lose his job. Eleanor Ross was pissed and she wasn’t going to be quiet about it. He could feel her eyes boring into his temple as Irma introduced herself to Lola and Nathaniel, as they watched on the small black-and-white monitor.
The twins had different energies. While Lola’s face was cool and expressionless, Nathaniel’s was open and guileless. Lola sat upright, legs crossed like a little lady, leaning elegantly on the armrest. Nathaniel slumped, pumping his legs back and forth, fidgeting in his suit.
“Do you know why we’re all here today?” Irma asked the children, her voice light but firm.
There was silence for a moment during which Nathaniel looked at Lola. Irma waited, not pushing them along.
“Someone killed our daddy,” said Lola softly. Nathaniel nodded.
“I’m sorry, Lola,” Irma said, and Ford could hear the sympathetic half smile on her face, though she was mostly off camera, just a triangle of her shoulder visible on the screen. “Yes, that’s right. You’re both very brave to talk to me today even though you’re feeling sad. Is that how you’re feeling?”
“Our daddy’s with the angels,” said Nathaniel with a vigorous nod. Again silence, and Ford could imagine Irma nodding, a look of quiet understanding on her face.
Then, “Do you remember the night your father died?”
Nathaniel seemed about to say something when Lola spoke up, casting a look at her brother. “We were sleeping,” she said with finality.
“Okay,” said Irma. “Tell me what you remember about that night before you went to sleep.”
Again Nathaniel looked to Lola. “We went to a restaurant with Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma,” said Lola.
“That sounds nice. Where did you go?”
“Twenty-one. I had a hamburger and a Pepsi.”
“And Nathaniel, what about you? What did you have?”
Ford rolled his eyes and tried not to be impatient. He didn’t want a rundown of every item on the menu at 21. He reminded himself that his impatience was precisely why he’d called in Irma to handle this interview. He tried not to sigh as Irma and the children talked more about the dinner, about the story Grandma read to them before bed, and other inane details that were intended to relax the children, get them remembering and talking. Ford started to tune out, listening to the rhythm of Irma’s soft voice, the lighter, higher pitches of the children’s voices responding.
“Let’s try a little game,” said Irma, her voice bright. “Let’s see how many little things you can remember about that night.”
“Like what?” said Lola suspiciously. Something about her, the way she talked, even her facial expressions, made her seem so much older than her twin. She had a gleam of intelligence and a composure that Nathaniel lacked but made up for in a kind of lovable sweetness.
“I don’t know…” said Irma, her voice coaxing. “Just anything that comes to mind. Like, what stuffed animals did you sleep with that night?”
Nathaniel’s face lit up. “I had Pat the Bunny,” he said with a smile, then looked around as if to see if he could find it for Irma.
“I don’t sleep with stuffed animals,” said Lola imperiously, casting a disapproving look at her brother. Nathaniel looked at her with a sad shyness that made Ford’s heart twinge a little. They were silent for a moment, looking at each other, Lola frowning, Nathaniel with a little worried wrinkle in his brow. There was a dynamic at play between the two of them, something unspoken, a meta-communication. Ford noticed that Irma remained quiet, waiting to see what would develop. Even on the monitor, Ford could see Nathaniel’s eyes start to glisten.
“I want my bunny,” he said suddenly, his little face threatening to crumble into tears.
“You’re such a baby,” said Lola, disgusted.
“It’s okay, Nathaniel. We’ll get your bunny for you,” said Irma, turning and looking into the camera lens.
“It’s not here,” snapped Lola. “It’s in his room at home and we can’t go there.”
“That’s okay, Nathaniel,” said Irma again, her voice light and happy. Nathaniel looked at her and smiled at whatever he saw in her expression. He sniffled a little, but the threat of a tantrum seemed to pass. “We’re still playing the game,” Irma reminded him, “and you’re doing so well. What else can you remember?”
Lola was sulking now. He’d seen the look before-a frightened and sad child who used anger as a shield. Ford was reminded that, in spite of her composure, she was just a little girl who’d endured a shattering trauma.
“Ummm…” said Nathaniel, an exaggerated look of concentration on his face.
“I know,” said Irma enthusiastically, as if the thought had just occurred, “what were you wearing?”
“Oh! I was wearing my SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas,” Nathaniel said happily. “I wear those every night. Want to see?”
“That’s wonderful! I can’t wait to see them as soon as we’ve finished talking,” said Irma. “What about you, Lola?”
“I don’t remember,” she answered sullenly.
Nathaniel looked over at his sister and seemed to be affected by her mood. He reached out a hand to touch her leg and she took it in hers. Ford saw the closeness there that he’d seen the first night. Nathaniel slid in closer to Lola.
“I remember,” Nathaniel said. “You wore your red nightgown with the hearts. Remember?”
Bingo, thought Ford. Neither child seemed to feel that they had anything to hide about their attire. He’d half worried that Lola was smart enough to understand why they wanted that information. Ford cast a glance at Eleanor. But if she was having a reaction to what Nathaniel had revealed, she hid it well. She stood with her arms folded, her eyes fixed on the monitor. Her lawyer sat on the sofa watching, as well, and taking notes.
“So let’s go back to that night. Close your eyes and think hard for me, okay, guys? Your grandmother read The Night Before Christmas. Then your mommy put you each to bed. What’s the next thing you remember?”
At this, Nathaniel’s eyes widened. Lola looked over at him with a severe glance as he started to sniffle.
“What, Nathaniel? What is it?” asked Irma, her voice coaxing.
“Nathaniel” Lola said, her tone a warning. He looked over at her and his little mouth curled, his eyes filled with big tears.
“The bogeyman,” said Nathaniel. “The bogeyman came.” And he released a wail that raised goose bumps on Ford’s arm, that was at once heartbreaking and frightening.
“Roaches, tunnels, curses, dogs-now ghosts. Give me good old hand-to-hand combat any day compared to this shit,” said Dax from the back of the Rover. The sky had turned to blue velvet outside and stars began to glitter in the night. They had the heat on full blast and Lydia still didn’t seem to be able to warm up after their visit with Maura Hodge.
“What’s the matter, Dax? Chicken?” she said.
“Not bloody likely,” he said, snorting his contempt. “But that woman and her beasts gave me the shivers. Who else was in the house?”
Lydia looked over at Dax. “She said no one. But I heard some movement upstairs, or thought I did.”
“Well, I saw someone in the window upstairs. There was definitely someone up there.”
“Man, woman? What?”
“What do I have, a fucking bionic eye? It’s dark; I couldn’t tell.” Then, “Where are we going now?”
“Haunted house,” said Jeff, looking in the rearview mirror. “No pun intended.”
“Naturally.”
They’d left the Hodge residence with the uneasy feeling that Maura was either crazy or deceitful or both. Lydia was unsatisfied with the interview; it felt like a tease and that they had left with more questions than answers. Lydia had the distinct impression that Maura had talked to them only because she knew they weren’t going to take no for an answer. And that she’d carefully evaded giving any actual information about anything. Or maybe she really didn’t know anything. Maybe she was just an old woman, alone with her bitter and crazy thoughts, and that was all she had to share.
Once they were back in the SUV, Jeff had a brief conversation with Ford in which they’d exchanged information about their respective interviews.
“So you got ghosts and I got the bogeyman,” Ford had said with a laugh.
“That’s about the size of it. Now what?”
“I’m going to head back over to the laundry room and watch the forensics team. If someone did that crime and then left through the laundry room, there has to be blood evidence. Even if it was wiped clean, the Luminol has a chemiluminescent compound that reacts to the iron in the hemoglobin and glows under a blue light. If nothing else it could prove someone else was at the scene that night.
“The other thing I wanted to tell you was that we have about twenty guys down in those tunnels trying to find a trail to follow… the Luminol might help with that, too. I learned, however, from this New York City architectural historian that I located at Columbia University that tunnels like this are not at all unusual in older buildings. They were blasted out during Prohibition, made quick getaways for speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers. Interesting, huh? I never knew that before.”
“Me neither.”
“Anyway, they’re all over the place, especially in the East Village. Most of them have been sealed up, though.”
Jeff was silent a minute, thinking of the whole network of passages beneath the street connecting to buildings. It added another dimension in his mind to the city he thought he knew. With Jed McIntyre crawling around down there, it made him more than a little uneasy.
“Jeff?” said Ford.
“Sorry. We’re going to head over to the Ross estate,” he said, snapping back to the conversation. “Apparently it has sat empty and untouched for years. Lydia thinks we’ll find some answers there.”
“Good luck. See you in the morning.”
Breaking and entering just didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. Lydia remembered a time when it seemed very exciting in its grayness, in the way it walked the line between right and wrong. But tonight it took Jeff about fifteen seconds to pick the lock and they were into the Ross home as easily and with as much a sense of entitlement as if they’d had a key.
“That lock is new,” commented Jeff as the door swung open, creaking on its hinges. They’d bickered briefly in the car about Lydia waiting outside in the event that floorboards and such in the house were unstable. She, naturally, wouldn’t hear of it. So Jeffrey guessed that their agreement about her not involving herself in the more dangerous aspects of the investigation was little more than a sham. It was his turn to be angry now. Angry that she was so stubborn; angry that his concerns for her safety-completely natural concerns, given the circumstances-were ignored. She made him feel like a Neanderthal for wanting to protect her and their child-and he was starting to resent the hell out of it. He wondered when she was going to start acting as if she cared about her own safety… and if she was going to start acting and feeling like a mother at some point.
The three of them stood in the grand foyer and looked about them at the havoc time and neglect had wrought. Their Maglite beams cut through the darkness like tiny kliegs, circles of light falling on graffiti across the walls, beer bottles on the floor. Spider webs glittered and swayed from the chandelier above their heads. In a drawing room off to the right of the foyer, the stuffing had been ripped from an antique sofa and chairs, a fireplace was filled with trash. The wind was picking up outside and it blew through the house with a moan.
“What are we looking for?” asked Dax.
“I’ll know it when I find it,” answered Lydia as she walked down a hallway that led deeper into the house. Dax headed off to the right toward the staircase. After a second, they could hear the steps creaking dangerously beneath his weight. Lydia half braced herself, waiting for him to come crashing through the wood until she heard him reach the landing above.
At the end of the hallway, she and Jeffrey reached a set of double doors that led to a library, where every inch of wall space was covered with books on rich oak shelves. With high ceilings, an elaborate Oriental rug over dark wood flooring, a cavernous fireplace across from a leather sofa and matching wingback chairs, a low, wide cocktail table, the room was elegant in a masculine way. Everything was covered by a thick layer of dust, had the aura of decay and abandonment.
Lydia walked over to the books and observed leather-bound volumes of all the classics-full collections of Tolstoy, Dickens, Milton, Lawrence, Hawthorne, Shakespeare-pretty much every major author Lydia could imagine. She also noticed medical and law texts, volumes on botany, biology, psychology. She reached up and extracted one of the books, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and opened it to realize by the stiffness of the binding and the pristine condition of the pages that the book had never been read. But written on one of the endpapers was a note:
To Eleanor
We will never be apart.
Paul
It made her think back to what Maura Hodge had said about Eleanor and her brother. There was something so final in his assertion, almost as though it were more of a threat than a declaration of brotherly love. Really, there was nothing brotherly about it, and looking at it written on the page in the faltering hand of a younger person, dark wonderings about the Ross family started to dance in Lydia’s mind like haunting specters.
Glittering particles hung in the beam of Jeffrey’s flashlight like stardust as he shone it toward Lydia. She turned to smile at him and showed him the inscription.
“Weird.” He nodded, taking the information in and wondering what it meant to the investigation at hand.
She placed the book on the shelf and walked behind a gigantic desk that stood before a bay window. The leather chair creaked beneath her weight as she seated herself and started opening drawers by their gilt handles. She looked like Alice in Wonderland, sitting in furniture that had clearly been made for someone much larger than herself. Jeff was just about to sit on the sofa across from her when he noticed a used condom there. He decided to stand.
“Let’s think for a second,” he said, walking behind her and glancing out the window behind him into blackness.
“Okay,” said Lydia. “What do we know for a fact?”
This was their ritual. To line up the facts like cans on a wall, then shoot at them one by one with logic, intuition, evidence, or just plain guesswork. The last can standing was the winner, or the loser, depending on how you looked at it.
“That both of Julian’s husbands, as well as Eleanor’s husband, were brutally murdered in very similar ways. And that all three of those crimes are as yet unsolved.”
“We know that Eleanor Ross has a twin brother who may or may not be dead,” said Lydia. “And we know that she never revealed this fact to us. She also never revealed that her husband was murdered, until I cornered her with it. So what does that tell us about Eleanor?”
“That she’s hiding things.”
“So why did she hire us, then?”
“Because she doesn’t know who’s killing these men, either?”
“Or because she’s afraid?”
Jeffrey shrugged, the question hanging in the air while Lydia rifled through what looked like old letters. He walked over and sat on the windowsill behind her, glancing over her shoulder.
“Afraid of what?” he asked.
“Or afraid of who?” She put the letters back into the drawer, apparently not finding anything that interested her. Then she opened another that was filled with old photographs jumbled together in a pile so large that she had to struggle to pull the drawer out all the way.
“The question is… and it nearly always boils down to this… who had the most to gain from Richard Stratton’s death?”
“Julian Ross,” answered Lydia simply. Ford had done a pretty thorough job looking into Richard Stratton’s business dealings and personal life. There was no one else who had as much to gain from his death as his wife.
“What about Eleanor Ross?”
“What about her?”
“Well, Julian is in a mental institution right now. If she’s at some point judged incompetent… Eleanor will likely become her executor. She’ll have access to all that money and the children, as well.”
Lydia nodded thoughtfully. “Which takes us back to why she’d hire us in the first place. But let’s stick to what we know for a minute. We know that there was another way into the building,” she said. “So at least there’s the possibility that someone else was there that night.”
“And we know that someone from the inside had to let him in. And that it looks like it might have been the twins.”
“Why ‘him’?”
“It seems logical. After all, we’re saying that Julian didn’t have the strength to kill her husband. Wouldn’t that hold true for another woman, as well?”
“Maura Hodge is a fairly big woman. Strong, too.”
Lydia spoke without looking up, sifting through images. A young and gorgeous Eleanor with flame red hair in her rose garden; Julian as a toddler on Christmas morning peering into a gigantic dollhouse; Eleanor again in an embrace with a man Lydia assumed to be her husband. Beautiful people, all the images representing an idyllic life of affluence, their happy smiles never hinting at the tragedies in their past, nor foreshadowing the future. The Ross family lineage was rotten at the core and you’d never know it to look at them. Beauty was so often a trick of nature, a careful camouflage.
“Are you saying you consider her a suspect?”
Lydia held a photograph in her hand, looking at it closely beneath her flashlight’s beam. “Not necessarily. What about this mysterious brother of Eleanor’s? Is it possible that he’s been lurking around all these years waiting for the chance to kill again?”
“Living in the tunnels below New York City, hiding in the woods of Haunted? Possible. Not likely.”
“How about living in the basement of this house?” said Dax, appearing suddenly in the doorway.
They both looked up at him.
“Follow me,” he said.
The door down to the basement might have easily escaped notice, if Dax hadn’t lost his footing, tripping over a spot where moisture had caused the wood floorboards to rot, one piece bending and curling up. He’d felt the wall give a bit beneath his weight when he used it to catch himself and thought it odd for an old house to have such shoddy construction. At closer glance, he discovered that there was a door fit to look like part of the oak paneling on the wall. A lock was hidden beneath a flap that had been cleverly camouflaged to look like a knot in the wood.
Now Lydia and Jeffrey followed him down as he shone the way with his light, his gun drawn. They were all quiet. The stench of mold and wet earth rose up to greet them and something about the smell made Lydia think of fresh graves. The dark space seemed to stretch on into infinity, the beam of their lights not revealing the far wall once they’d reached the bottom. All that darkness and something electric in the air made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
“Look at this,” Dax said, leading them beneath the stairs.
Someone had made a little nest within a large blue nylon tent. Jeffrey got down on his hands and knees and Lydia followed. Together they poked their heads in through the tent flap. The smell was the first thing to hit her… the foul stench of body odor and semen, strong and ripe. It seemed to linger in the fabric of the tent and in the pilled brown blanket that lay atop an air mattress. Candy wrappers, empty potato chip bags, and a half-eaten can of kidney beans with a plastic spoon still in it were scattered about the space. Mingled with the other aromas, Lydia could vaguely smell salt and vinegar.
“Holy shit,” said Jeff. Lydia wasn’t sure whether he was reacting to the smell or to the fact that every inch of the walls and ceiling of the tent was covered with pictures of Julian Ross-photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles.
It was moments like this when she was glad she thought ahead, which didn’t happen often. From the pocket of her coat she removed two plastic bags, surgical gloves, and a pair of tweezers.
“Nice,” said Jeffrey with a smile.
In a rare moment of foresight, she’d taken them from her bag before they got out of the car. She slipped one of the gloves on, picked up a Milky Way wrapper with the tweezers, and put it in a baggie. Then she ran her finger across the blanket, shining the flashlight beam and looking closely at the surface. She found what she was looking for, strands of hair. Long and gray. She lifted them with the tweezers and put them in the second baggie, then stuffed them both into her pocket. She looked at Jeff, remembering what he’d said about the hairs they’d found at the scene of Tad’s murder.
“Guys,” said Dax. Lydia paused at the sound of his voice. Dax was constantly fucking around, cracking jokes; his voice was almost always edged with the promise of laughter. Except when he was worried. Then he was dead serious. And Dax didn’t worry often.
“This space heater, right here?”
“Yeah?” they answered in unison, turning to look at him.
“It’s off. But it’s still warm.”
They didn’t have time to contemplate what that might mean because out of the darkness like a freight train came a blur of gray and red accompanied by an inhuman roar. The monster, because that’s what it looked like to Lydia, knocked Dax to the floor before any of them knew what hit him. Lydia and Jeff scrambled to their feet, Jeff reaching for his gun, Lydia remembering that she hadn’t taken hers from her bag-as usual. She raised the Maglite over her head to strike the creature and get him off Dax, who she couldn’t even see beneath the gigantic mass of whatever it was that was on top of him. But she never made contact because the monster turned, as if by instinct, and swung out with an arm as heavy as a two-by-four. In the seconds before she took a blow to the head that put the lights out, she saw a flash of green eyes, a bared mouth of yellow, jagged teeth, a mask of pure rage and malice. It was a face she recognized.
The offices of Mark, Striker and Strong were dark and quiet. Everyone had gone home except for Rebecca, who was packing her bag and closing down the computer system from the main unit at the reception desk. Security was very tight at the firm and that included their intranet. Craig, their self-proclaimed cybernavigator, had built a firewall that was more secure, he claimed, than that of the FBI. And he should know, having been the most wanted hacker in the world until he was finally arrested just after his eighteenth birthday, for precisely that… breaking into the FBI databases and fucking around. Now, as he liked to say, he used his powers “for good and not for evil.” Lucky for him, Jacob Hanley, his uncle and one of the firm’s original partners, along with Jeff and Christian Striker, all former FBI agents, managed to get the kid a deal. Now he was plugged into the Internet more or less day and night, more or less legally working for the firm. Lydia called him The Brain behind his back and joked that one day they were going to look into his windowless office and find that he’d been sucked into his computers like a character in a William Gibson novel.
There was a whole elaborate shutdown process that was linked to the office security system. Rebecca was just about to initiate the final sequence that would give her precisely fifteen minutes to exit the front door when she heard the elevator. She looked at her watch-8:15. Rodney, the second messenger of the day, hadn’t arrived at his usual time. Rebecca had been trained to watch out for little things like this. So she called the service and the dispatcher said, “It’s been a crazy day. Two of my guys got into accidents today. He or someone else will get there tonight, I promise.”
Christian Striker was waiting for photos back from the lab they used down in SoHo and she knew it was important he have them for tomorrow even though he was already gone. So she fixed her makeup, peering at her flawless pink skin in the Clinique compact mirror and waited, watching the elevator climb by the tiny numbers alternately lighting green as it climbed to their floor. She quickly pulled a brush through her silky blond hair and applied a berry shade of Princess Marcella Borghese lipstick to her full lips.
The stainless steel doors opened and a wiry bike messenger with long curly dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail, dirty, tattered bicycle shorts, and a tight white T-shirt with just do it emblazoned in orange across his chest walked into the elevator lobby and headed toward the door. A large messenger bag was slung across his shoulder and she noticed he was wearing soccer cleats when he pushed through the glass doors.
“Speedy Messenger?” she asked.
“You got it. Sorry for the delay,” he said, removing a bundle of packages from his pouch.
“Last stop of the night, I hope,” she said, looking down on her desk for a pen to sign his clipboard.
“Not quite,” he said. There was something in his voice that made her look. She looked into ice blue eyes and caught sight of a few wisps of red hair peaking out from beneath the black. She realized too late that she was looking at Jed McIntyre.
Before Jeffrey could react to Lydia flying back and hitting the ground hard, he saw a bright white flash and heard the unmistakable sound of the Desert Eagle firing off rounds. The basement exploded with the sound, as loud as a bomb, followed by a sharp report. The smell of gunpowder filled Jeffrey’s nose as the assailant roared in pain or terror or maybe both. Jeffrey dove for Lydia as the monster got up and ran for the stairs, moving impossibly fast. Dax, a large cut bleeding on the side of his face, got up in a heartbeat and gave chase.
“I missed! I can’t fucking believe it. He was right on top of me,” he yelled as he disappeared into the darkness. Jeffrey heard the sound of the gun again as he pulled Lydia into his arms. His heart lurched with relief when she moaned. A line of blood trailed from her nose, and the light shadow of a bruise that he could see would flower into a deep purple and cover most of the right side of her face was already making its debut.
“Jesus,” he said, filled with anger, fear, and a painful love for her. He wanted to lock her in a padded room for the rest of her life. He hated himself a little for it… and hated her for not allowing him to do it. He had known it would come to this if they weren’t careful. And they hadn’t been.
“Dax,” she said, opening her eyes when more shots rang out upstairs. “I’m fine. Go. He needs help.”
She sat up and gave a smile to show she was all right. Her head throbbed and the room seemed to lurch and blur.
“Don’t move,” he said, kissing her on the top of the head. Then he raced after Dax, taking the stairs two at a time, the Glock in his hand. When he was out of sight, Lydia leaned over and threw up the coffee and bad food she’d eaten at the Rusty Penny. It tasted even worse the second time around.
When she was reasonably sure that the room had stopped spinning, she reached for the flashlight that had rolled away from her and turned off. She pressed the black rubber button beneath her thumb and the beam sliced into the darkness. She could hear Dax shouting in the distance outside and she tried to struggle to her feet, but the floor wouldn’t stay solid and she figured she’d be more a liability than a help to them in her present condition. It was probably the first smart decision she’d made all day. Another shot rang out, and she made herself believe that as long as she could hear them, they were okay.
Her mind was doing cartwheels, her heart racing, and her hands were still shaking from the adrenaline coursing through her veins like an Indy 500 race car. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out the photograph she’d been looking at upstairs. What she had seen in that photograph right before Dax entered the room was a young boy and girl standing side by side under a glade of trees. They were so alike, their features narrow and refined, the same bright green eyes, the same slight smile. The boy was much taller, much wider through the shoulders than the girl. He draped a protective arm across her shoulder and glanced at her, a mischievous glint to his expression. The girl was Julian Ross, the boy, Lydia deduced, her brother, possibly her twin. Why she hadn’t thought of it before, she wasn’t sure. If Eleanor was a twin, and Julian’s children were also twins, it was very possible that Julian could be a twin herself. Lydia would put money on the fact that they’d just met Julian’s other half… in the man who’d attacked them tonight.
She tried again to stand and the room did a little dance, a weird up-and-down, side-to-side kind of action, and Lydia braced herself for another bout of nausea.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the baby, without thinking, patting her stomach and grabbing one of the steps to try to haul herself to her feet. It didn’t quite work and she sort of hung there halfway between standing and falling. She tried not to think about the damage she might have done to herself; she just willed herself to be strong and solid, to walk it off. And as soon as she could stand, she was going to do that.
Thunderous footsteps broke the silence as Jeff and Dax ran down the stairs like a herd of buffalo. Lydia felt the sound on every nerve ending in her rattled brain.
“What happened?” she asked as Jeffrey helped steady her.
“Gone. Into the woods. I think I hit him, though,” said Dax.
“You can’t shoot a fleeing suspect, for Christ’s sake,” said Jeffrey, his face red from exertion and his brow knitted with concern for Lydia and anger at Dax.
“I didn’t shoot him for Christ’s sake,” Dax shouted. “I shot him for my sake. He scared the shit out of me. He practically killed me. He hit Lydia. I’m not the fucking cops. I play by my rules.” The adrenaline was clearly making him more aggressive and less reasonable than usual.
Jeffrey shook his head and rubbed his eyes.
“Let’s put our philosophical differences aside, shall we, and get the fuck out of here before Julian’s evil twin comes back?” said Lydia.
“Julian’s twin?”
She handed the photograph to Jeffrey. “More information not provided by our client,” he said, handing the photograph back to her.
“Sounds like it’s time to fire the old hag,” said Dax.
“I want to make one more stop before we do,” said Lydia.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Jeff, taking her arm. “The emergency room.”
At first glance, Dr. Franklin Wetterau had the look of a man who had swabbed a million throats, delivered a thousand babies, and listened to endless lists of symptoms and ailments ranging from the common cold to stomach cancer. He looked as though he’d offered countless words of comfort, advice, and reprimand with the same gentle smile and knowing eyes he now turned on Lydia as she sat bruised and tired on his examining table. Dr. Wetterau was an old-fashioned country doctor, with his small office in the back of his old Victorian home on Maple Street.
The nearest hospital was over thirty miles away, so Dr. Wetterau was apparently the man to call with minor emergencies day or night, or so they were told at the gas station where they stopped for directions, the very same gas station, in fact, where they’d stopped earlier. There was a different slack-jawed attendant now on shift. The young man-Hank, if the embroidered name on his striped uniform shirt was to be believed-gave them the good doctor’s number. Of course, the earlier attendant had also worn a shirt with the name Hank embroidered on it. Were they both named Hank or were they sharing a shirt? Lydia wondered pointlessly, as “Hank” stared into the Rover at her and Dax, whose bruised and bloody condition was definitely notable.
They’d walked a narrow path along the back of the house as per the instructions the doctor gave Jeffrey over the phone and the old man was waiting for them at the door. Lydia saw him look them each up and down, his expression betraying neither shock, wonder, nor judgment, just a mild curiosity. Inside, a woman in a neat red dressing gown, trimmed with white, looking like nothing so much as Mrs. Claus with a wide pink face framed by graying hair in a bun on the crown of her head, sat primly at a small reception desk and took their names and addresses, entering the information into some type of logbook. She offered them water or tea and, when they declined, retired through a door marked private that Lydia assumed led to their home.
Alone with the doctor now, Jeff and Dax sitting out in the waiting room, Dax’s cut newly cleaned and stitched, Jeff she assumed sinking into a foul mood and plotting ways to keep her locked up forever, Lydia sat stiffly as the doctor shone a light into each of her eyes.
“Mrs. Smith,” he said, “what kind of an accident did you say you, your husband, and your, uh, brother were involved in?”
“We didn’t, Doctor,” Lydia answered calmly.
The doctor nodded, reaching into a small refrigerator and offering her a gel icepack wrapped in an Ace bandage pouch. She pressed it to the side of her head, the cold and the pain causing her to feel light-headed again. She lay back, hearing the crinkle of the sanitary paper over the vinyl table. The sound reminded her of childhood visits to the doctor, her mother, and how nice it was to feel cared for when you were sick.
“You do appear to have a mild concussion, Mrs. Smith. Now, I don’t have the proper equipment here to check on the health of your baby. And I’m going to suggest that you get to your OB as soon as possible. But I will tell you that any type of trauma to the mother will put the fetus at risk. So my other suggestion is that you minimize your exposure to situations where you are vulnerable to, uh, accidents.”
She turned to look at him and even though things were a bit on the fuzzy side, his eyes, the clearest blue she’d ever seen, were intelligent and a bit stern. She felt like he knew her, though they were strangers to each other. In him she recognized her own ability to intuit the truth about people, about who they truly were, by noticing small details, the things they said and didn’t say. Everybody has a face they wear, the one they want people to see, to recognize as their true face. And for a few people, you get what you see. But usually there’s something more beneath the surface, something hidden. The furtive gesture, the shifting glance, the tapping foot offered so much, revealed facets of personality that people tried to hide. Lydia had always possessed the ability to see quickly through façades. Tonight she wondered what this doctor saw when he looked at her. Someone careless, someone reckless, someone more concerned with chasing investigations than she was for the life of her child. Someone scared that she was not up to the responsibility about to be bestowed upon her. Someone running from her own problems by burying herself in nightmares that belonged to someone else.
“That’s not always possible in my line of work,” she said, feeling a little defensive.
He placed a hand on her arm. “Then take a vacation,” he said gently.
His hand was big and warm, slightly callused. He looked like someone’s daddy, someone’s grandpa, the man who was always there for his family, the one everybody leaned on. She wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a man like that as your father. Life would be easier, she was sure. Decisions would be a lot less daunting. There would be fewer questions about what was right and wrong when you had someone like Dr. Wetterau to ask. Lydia fought the urge to cry; pregnancy was making her more emotional than she liked.
She managed a nod and sat up slowly. “You might be right,” she admitted.
He kept watching her with those eyes and she started to feel a twinge of discomfort. When she returned his glance, her vision sharper than it had been a moment earlier, she saw he had the eyes of a combat soldier. There was a look a man got on his face when people had died at his hands. It was as if a piece of cosmic truth had been revealed to him that others never even glimpse, and as if that knowledge had come to rest in the color of his eyes. It’s there even when he’s laughing or looking on you with eyes of love. Her grandfather had eyes like that, as if the slightest trigger could start a cavalcade of images too awful to share with anyone who hadn’t been there, who didn’t know. But Lydia thought maybe if she looked deeply enough into the abyss of his pupils, she would see it all there playing like a movie on a screen, as if his eyes had a memory of their own. She saw it in Dr. Wetterau, clear as day.
“Did you know the Ross children?” Shot in the dark.
He rubbed the side of his face thoughtfully and looked at her as if deciding whether it was in either of their best interests to answer her question.
“I did,” he answered, letting the sentence dangle.
“Julian and…,” she said, hoping he’d finish the sentence for her.
“Is that why you and your friends are here? Are you looking for him?”
Lydia didn’t answer, but cast her eyes down as if her clever ruse had been uncovered. “Do you know where he is?” she asked after a moment.
“James? I know where he belongs,” he answered. “But he hasn’t been there for over ten years.”
“Where’s that?”
“On my recommendation, his family committed him to Fishkill Facility, a psychiatric hospital not far from here.”
“What for?”
“He tried to burn down his family home, his mother and sister along with it,” said the doctor with a sad shake of his head. “A very disturbed young man.”
“Did he say why he did it?”
“He claimed that his mother and sister had put a curse on him and that the only way to save himself was to burn them both and the house. The house, he believed, held all their negative energy.”
“He thought they were witches?”
“Sometimes,” said the doctor with a shrug. “There was that, and his bizarre obsession with Julian. He believed that her body housed the spirit of his true love from another life and that her soul could only be free if Julian died. He was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At first he was largely unresponsive to medication. But after many years of treatment, he graduated to a work release program. One night, after his shift at a library was over, he didn’t return to the facility. That was ten years ago.” The memory seemed to sadden the doctor. “He was the first person I thought of when I heard the news about Julian’s husband.”
“Which one?”
“Both. Tad was murdered just months after James disappeared.”
“Did you go to the police?”
He sighed and shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
Another heavy sigh. “The Ross family is like… a virus. If you want to preserve your health, you should just stay away. I learned that lesson a long time ago. I have a feeling you might benefit from learning that lesson as well, before it’s too late.”
“An innocent woman might have gone to jail,” said Lydia.
“Let me tell you something: When it comes to the Rosses, there’s not an innocent among them,” he said, turning a joyless smile on her along with those eyes that had seen too much.
“What do you mean by that, Doctor?”
“Just stay away from them, Mrs. Smith. Take my advice.”
She could tell by the firm line of his mouth and the flatness that had come to his eyes that he had said all he was going to say on the subject of the Ross family.
“You can keep the ice pack,” he said, offering her a hand to help her off the table, which she accepted.
Jeffrey paid the bill in cash and they left the office. On the walkway, Lydia turned around and looked at the doctor, who stood in the doorway. The night had grown bitterly cold and Lydia wrapped her coat tightly around her. A harsh wind had crept up and a few stray snowflakes danced around them. The doctor’s large frame filled the doorway.
“He’s here, you know. In Haunted.”
The doctor didn’t seem surprised. “Some people claim he’s been here all along, living in the woods. He’s mythic in his way. Parents use him to warn their children to stay out of the woods at night.”
“Be good or James Ross will get you?”
“That’s right.”
Back in the relative warmth of the Rover, Lydia told Jeff and Dax what the doctor had shared with her. Even with the heat blasting, the cold felt like a fourth presence in the car. Lydia was shivering, cupping her hands against one of the vents. She was grateful when the air grew warmer as the car heated up.
“Should we call Henry Clay?” she wondered aloud.
“And tell him what? That we broke into the Ross home and saw the bogeyman?” asked Jeff, driving carefully down the dark road, slick with the light snowfall.
“And that he kicked our asses,” added Dax from the backseat.
“James Ross is not the bogeyman. He’s a viable suspect for two murders and he’s wandering around Haunted unchecked. He’s dangerous,” said Lydia.
“Sounds to me like he’s only dangerous to his family.”
“I beg to differ,” said Dax. “I’ve got eight bloody stitches to make my argument.”
“We don’t know that,” said Lydia, responding to Jeff. “He’s got to get picked up at some point for questioning at the very least.”
“But we’re not the people to do it at the moment. And I don’t feel like answering to the police about why we broke into the Ross home.”
“So, what? We just leave him out there?”
“No, we’ll call Ford, tell him what we’ve found. He can arrange something with the Haunted police.”
“What if it’s too late by then?”
“Lydia, the guy has been on the run for ten years and he’s still hanging around his own backyard. My guess is he’s not going to go far. In fact, if he’s mentally disturbed, I bet he even goes directly back to his tent in the basement. We’ll get him. Just not tonight.”
For once, Lydia was too tired to argue. Her head was pounding and fatigue made her limbs feel like they were filled with sand. Besides, Jeffrey’s logic, as usual, was irrefutable.
Lydia had wanted to stop at Maura Hodge’s again before leaving Haunted, but she didn’t even bother to broach the subject as Jeffrey pulled onto the highway going back to New York. The air between Lydia and Jeffrey was charged with a million things each of them wanted to say. But neither had the energy to say any of them. So after Jeff put in a call to Ford, letting him know about James Ross, they rode in silence until Lydia fell into an uneasy sleep, jerking awake every few miles, seeing alternately the face of her attacker and Jed McIntyre raging toward her over and over again.
WCOU Bar on Second Avenue was slow on Monday nights. That, and the fact that the old bartender mixed a dangerous Manhattan and looked as much like a relic as the antique jukebox and the glowing neon art deco clock on the wall, was the reason Ford chose to stop there with Irma. The room was smoky and narrow, dim, with high tables and stools against the walls. It had atmosphere in that kind of nonchalant way that made it real. If the lights came up, you’d see cigarette butts on the floor, nicks in the wall, that the ceiling was mottled with water stains. But in the glow of low-wattage bulbs beneath glass shades, you felt like you were in a black-and-white movie and any second Humphrey Bogart was going to saunter through the door and bum a smoke.
So far, the forensics team had turned up nothing at the laundry room. He and Irma had stopped up after the interview with the twins to check in with the forensics scientist heading up the team. The Luminol had detected no blood traces. Because so many people had access to the laundry room, no one was optimistic that any of the prints, hairs, or fibers collected at the scene would have any relevance to the case. And no one was happy about how much work it was going to take to determine that.
Ford ordered their drinks from the bartender and then carried them back to the table Irma had chosen at the far back corner of the bar. Shedding his coat, he folded his arms and looked at her.
“So what are your thoughts on the twins?”
Irma sighed lightly and took a sip of her Cosmopolitan. “The children are deeply veiled,” she said, keeping her voice low and her face close to Ford’s. “Someone is exerting a lot of power over them. They’re both very intelligent, especially Lola, so they have an instinct that something is wrong. But they feel powerless. And, of course, they are, in the context of their situation.”
“So who’s exerting this power?”
“Someone who frightens them, someone who in Nathaniel’s mind has taken on the proportions of a monster, his bogeyman.”
Irma took another sip of her cocktail, while Ford drank his Perrier with lime. Technically, he was still on duty, so the Manhattan was going to have to wait for another night.
Ford’s mind jumped from Irma’s comments, to the news Jeffrey had just given him about Julian’s twin, to the picture he’d seen in the gallery, and then to the description of the man Jetty Murphy claimed he saw the night Tad was killed. Was James Ross the bogeyman Nathaniel claimed to have seen? Was he also guilty of the murder of Tad Jenson?
The fact that Julian had a twin brother was another crucial piece of information he hadn’t had when investigating Tad’s murder. The thought made him sick with frustration and anger-anger at himself for not digging deep enough. The knowledge threatened a cornerstone in his self-narrative. In his own mind, the excuse he gave himself for being a shitty father and husband was that he was a good cop. Tonight he didn’t even feel like he was that. His mood was low and getting lower.
Efforts to calm Nathaniel Stratton-Ross had failed and Irma convinced Ford that pressing forward to find out why they were in the laundry that night would be pointless at best, traumatic at worst. So the interview with the twins had ended with both of the children in tears, Nathaniel screaming his head off, and Eleanor threatening Ford’s job. Not that he cared much about that at the moment. The conversation he’d had with Lydia in the car kept coming back to him. I don’t even know what I am if I’m not a cop, he’d told her. Maybe you should find out, she’d answered him. He was starting to wonder if she was right.
“Lola is clearly the dominant personality,” Irma went on. “But I sense that she’s just as afraid as Nathaniel is; she’s just better at hiding it under a sullen façade.”
“Do you think it’s possible that they saw who killed their father?”
“I’m inclined to say that no, they didn’t witness the murder. To be honest, there haven’t been that many studies done on children who witness the death of their parents. But to watch their father murdered so brutally and to display no evidence of trauma or distress would be highly unusual.”
“What if they’re repressing the memory,” said Ford.
Irma shook her head. “Repressed memory is far less common than you think. If anything, emotionally charged events are the least forgettable of all memories.”
“But it’s possible.”
She shrugged her assent. “It’s possible. But say they had completely blocked out their memories of the event, there would be other indicators of repressed memory of the trauma. Probably any mention of that night would cause terror and panic. But they remember every detail happily until they went to bed.”
“But Lola was down in that laundry room. We’ve got the videotape. And Piselli found Lola’s nightgown back at the apartment. She didn’t mention that.”
“But that doesn’t mean they’ve repressed the memory. It will take more time to find out what happened at that point. They’ve been instructed not to discuss that with anyone. That much was clear. Lola tried to warn Nathaniel to be quiet. But he couldn’t hold it in. He’s afraid of someone. They both are.”
“What about Nathaniel? If Lola went into the laundry room to move the washing machine…”
“Wait, she’s just a little girl. How is she going to move that machine by herself?”
“It was on casters, very easy to move.”
“Okay.”
“Is Nathaniel smart enough to turn off that camera, wait till his sister and whoever have cleared the laundry room, and then turn the camera on again?”
She thought about it for a second. “It’s hard to see Nathaniel acting like that on his own. He seems very dependent on Lola. He’d probably be able to follow instructions, but I doubt very much if he’d be able to carry out a task like that alone.”
Ford took a sip from his Perrier and wished it were a Manhattan. He turned the pieces around in his mind, circling the edge of his glass with his fingertip, trying to fit everything together, what he knew, what Lydia and Jeffrey had come across.
Things weren’t falling together, even with the possibility of James Ross as a suspect. There were just too many questions: Where had he been all these years? Why would he kill his sister’s husbands when it was her he supposedly hated? And logistically, how would he have gotten from Haunted to New York City and back again? How did he know there was a tunnel leading to the building? How was he communicating with the children? It just seemed too far-fetched. Maybe Lydia and Jeffrey had time to play X-Files, but he needed a chain of hard evidence. He could only hope that, after taking James Ross in for questioning and analyzing the evidence Lydia and Jeffrey had collected, some tangible connection could be made, that answers would start to evolve from the tangled mass of questions in his mind.
He felt Irma’s eyes on him and he looked up from his glass.
“Welcome back,” she said, and gave him a smile that reminded him how pretty she was. There was concern in her eyes, and something more.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Lost in thought.”
She put a warm hand on his arm and he looked down at her slender fingers, her perfectly manicured nails. Her blond hair looked like spun gold and framed her face in a delicate flattering way. He found himself remembering how long it had been since he’d been this close to a woman. It opened the hole in his heart that Rose had occupied, and for a moment he felt like putting his head down on his arm and sobbing. Luckily, his cell phone rang and he was spared the embarrassment.
“McKirdy,” he answered, looking at Irma with apology in his eyes. She withdrew her hand and looked down at her Cosmo.
“Henry Clay here. This better be good.”
Ford had put in a call to the Haunted PD and convinced the desk sergeant to rouse his chief from bed.
“Chief, you have someone residing in your town that I need to bring in for questioning. I’d like to send two of my detectives up to you tomorrow and I am hoping you can put some uniforms on this.”
“Who exactly are we talking about here, Detective?”
“James Ross.”
There was a leaden silence on the other end of the phone.
“Chief?”
“Are you fucking with me, Detective?” asked Clay, and Ford could hear an angry quaver in the man’s voice.
“I don’t have time to fuck around,” said Ford, dropping the polite formality he’d employed up to this point and turning away from Irma. Ford was old school, and old school men don’t swear in front of women, if they can help it.
“James Ross has not lived in this town for more than twenty years.”
“I have good information that he’s residing in his family home.”
Silence again. Ford could hear Clay breathing on the line.
“Where did you get your information?” he asked finally.
“That’s not important.”
“The hell it isn’t. We had reports of a break-in at the old Ross house tonight. Was that your people?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Ford lied.
More silence.
“Look, are you going to help me or not?” said Ford, at the end of his patience. “I’ll send someone up there either way. I was just giving you the respect of a phone call to let you know we’d be entering your jurisdiction to question a suspect in a murder investigation.”
“Well, you won’t get any of my men to go near that house.”
“What are you talking about? Why not?”
“Because it’s… not right, that house. It’s evil.”
Ford shook his head slowly in disbelief. He let out an uncertain laugh.
“Bad things happen to the people who go into that house,” Clay continued, his voice low and serious.
Ford let a second pass before saying, “You’re supposed to stop the bad things from happening, Chief. That’s what cops do.”
“Your men want to go up there, be my guest. But I guarantee you’re not going to be bringing James Ross in for questioning.”
“Why not?” Ford asked.
There was static on the line when Clay spoke, and Ford was sure he hadn’t heard him correctly. “Can you repeat that?”
The man issued a mighty sigh.
“I said, because he’s dead, McKirdy. James Ross is dead.”
“When you love someone, I mean really love someone,” she said, “it hurts so much. Even the pleasure can feel like a blade. It’s all temporary and your heart recognizes that transience because it is temporary. Even the beauty of love is edged with the knowledge that an end will come horribly, sadly, inevitably.”
Marion Strong sat serene and beautiful at the edge of Lydia’s bed. Jeffrey slept soundly beside Lydia, his breathing heavy and even. The angry words they’d spoken before bed still danced in the air.
“You look like an angel,” Lydia told her mother.
“Only because you love me.”
Marion’s black hair streaked with gray flowed down over her shoulders to the small of her back. She wore a crisp white cotton nightgown that Lydia remembered from her childhood. Sitting there, the amber light from the street lamps outside leaking through the blinds, she seemed to glow.
Lydia observed every line on Marion’s face, the way her strong veined hands rested in her lap, the arch of her dark eyebrows, the black of her eyes. She wanted every detail seared into her memory. Because that was all she would have of Marion to share with her own children. It was all she’d had for so long. Sometimes it seemed as if the sadness she felt over the loss of her mother was a well within her that could never be filled.
“I’m pregnant,” Lydia said, feeling an odd longing, a kind of desperation, grow in her heart.
But Marion only smiled sadly and shook her head.
“People die,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard. “But love lives on, we carry it in our blood and our bones. When you lose someone, you’ve only lost the giver, not the gift.”
When Lydia awoke she was already sitting up, her heart rate elevated, her breathing coming sharp and shallow. She reached for Jeffrey and shook him awake. He sat up quickly, startled.
“What’s wrong?”
She didn’t know what to say, so she moved to him, clung to him, feeling the soft skin and hard muscles of his chest against her cheek. He held on to her tightly. She needed to be as close as the boundaries of their bodies would allow so that she could feel his life and the warmth of blood flowing beneath his skin.
“It’s okay. I promise,” he said, not knowing what she was feeling but understanding that she needed him to comfort her. “I swear it’s all okay.”
She looked up at him and in her eyes he saw such a painful combination of fear and love that it awoke a powerful longing within him. He regretted deeply the lecture he’d delivered when they’d returned to the apartment about her carelessness for her health and safety. Even in the darkness of the room, he could see the purple and black of the bruise that dominated the right side of her face.
“I love you so much,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “You were right… about everything.”
He pressed his mouth to hers, wanting to be gentle but overwhelmed by a sudden hunger for her, which he felt returned in her kiss. She knelt before him on the bed now. He touched the slope of her shoulder and the curve of her bare breast. He touched the line of her jaw. She moved in closer, running her hand down his chest, over his tight abs, then stroking him as he grew hard in her hand. Then she leaned in to take him into her mouth. He lay back, her tongue, the wet walls of her mouth sending a shock of pleasure through him.
She slithered up his body and he felt every inch of her slide along every inch of him in a current of taut and silky flesh. Then she straddled him and took him inside of her with a moan. He placed his hands on the fullness of her hips and held her as she rocked, her movements slow, sensual. He felt weak with pleasure, as the rhythm of their bodies became more intense.
She threw her head back slightly as he pulled her closer, took her breast in his mouth and teased her nipple with his tongue. Her breath came in soft low moans. He knew her body so well, he could feel her coming to climax, every nerve ending in his body alive with the heat of wanting her. Then he came deep and hard inside of her.
“Lydia,” he whispered, her name sounding like a prayer as she came for him, pulling him deeper inside of her.
She lay beside him, back to his front, her body curved into his, his arm draped over her. He breathed in the lavender scent of her hair.
“I need you to promise to take better care from now on,” he whispered.
“I promise,” she answered, trying to push away the memory of her dream and be in the present, feeling the warmth of him beside her.
He moved the hair off her face and touched the bruise there, then kissed it lightly.
She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again, his breathing had sunk into the rhythm of sleep. She turned so that she could look at him. She observed every detail of his face, loving the tiny lines around his eyes, the fullness of his mouth, the small star-shaped scar on his right cheekbone. She watched him like this for she didn’t know how long until sleep came for her as well.
To her obvious disappointment, Ford had dropped Irma off at her Central Park West apartment building. He was flattered by Irma’s subtle advances and not a little attracted to her, but he was and maybe always would be in his heart still married to Rose. Still, Irma had awoken a terrible restlessness in him and he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned lazily above him. He thought of Rose, wondering where she was, how he might reach her, what he would say if he had her on the line.
He had the television turned on but the sound muted; it was something he did when he couldn’t sleep, when he was missing his wife. It made him feel less alone. Something on the screen had attracted his attention and he turned his head to see Fran Drescher being interviewed by David Letterman. The Nanny, he remembered, was a show that Rose had liked. The thought brought Geneva Stout to his mind, reminded him that he’d wanted to have another conversation with her. Then it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen Geneva the day they’d interviewed the twins.
He thought back to the night of the murder. After the paramedics had taken Julian Ross from the duplex, Ford had interviewed the live-in au pair. She was young, he remembered, twenty-one or twenty-two, soft-spoken, and very upset by the events of the evening. She’d been pretty in a dark, exotic way, with full lips and almond-shaped eyes. He remembered thinking the name sounded off, bringing to mind a busty Swedish girl with silky blond hair. Geneva clearly didn’t have a Nordic bone in her body, with café au lait skin and a bolt of shiny black curls that spilled across her shoulders and down her back.
She’d been sleeping, she claimed that night, and had seen nothing. Ford had no reason to suspect otherwise, since her room was in the back of the first floor behind the kitchen, far from the entrance and master bedroom in the palatial duplex. He’d given her his card, asked her to call if she thought of anything that might help him, and told her she’d probably be hearing from him.
He leaned over, looked at the clock, hesitated, and then picked up the phone anyway.
“Where’s the nanny, Ms. Ross?” asked Ford into the phone.
“Detective McKirdy, it’s after midnight,” said Eleanor, indignant.
“The nanny, Geneva Stout. She was there the night of the murder. But she wasn’t with you when we interviewed the twins this evening.”
“Well, naturally, she quit, Detective. Wouldn’t you?”
“Where did she go?”
“How should I know? I didn’t hire her. Only Julian would know that… and she doesn’t even know who I am at this point.”
“Do you know how long she worked for the family?”
“I’m not sure. A year, maybe eighteen months… Why is this relevant, Detective?”
“Thank you, Ms. Ross, sorry to disturb you.
“Huh,” he said aloud after hanging up the phone.
Other than the name, nothing else about her had set off any alarms. He’d asked to see ID and she’d provided him with an NYU student ID and a New York State driver’s license, both with the Rosses’ address as her own. He knew he’d written down both her student ID and driver’s license numbers. He’d run them through first thing in the morning. Even though she’d left the Rosses’ employment and Eleanor was right about that, why wouldn’t she? he figured she’d be easy enough to find.
He’d need to check his notes again and then look through the papers at the Stratton-Ross home, see if there was another address for her. It was probably nothing, but now that the twins were part of the equation he had a strange feeling that maybe Geneva Stout, someone who’d been intimate with the children for more than a year, had more to contribute to his investigation than he’d originally thought.
After talking to Eleanor, he lay still for a few more minutes. Then with the remote he switched off the television and closed his eyes, hoping that sleep would come, that he wouldn’t lie awake watching the hours pass, thinking of murder and lost love.
“Nice face,” said Craig from his seat behind the reception desk as Lydia and Jeffrey pushed their way through the glass doors. As tall and thin as a reed, Craig slumped at the desk gripping a tattered copy of Neuromancer. He pushed aside the curly blond hair that fell over his round spectacle lenses and looked at Lydia quizzically.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
“You should see the other guy,” answered Lydia with a half smile she didn’t feel.
“Where’s Rebecca?” asked Jeffrey.
“I’m filling in. She called in sick. Flu,” he said. “She sounded like you look, Lydia.” A boyish smile broke his long, narrow face and saved him from the barb she was about to toss back at him.
“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” she answered as she stepped into her office. At the door, she paused a second. Something felt off. She looked around the room, saw nothing unusual, and decided she was just being paranoid. She shed her coat, though she knew they’d only be there for a short time, draped it over the sofa, and sat at her desk. She pulled a compact from her bag and gazed at herself in the mirror for the hundredth time since she’d gotten out of bed. A face only a prizefighter’s mother could love, she thought. She snapped the compact closed and booted her computer.
“Was someone in my office?” she heard Jeffrey ask Craig over the intercom.
“Not that I know of,” he answered. “Why?”
She got up and walked across the hall to Jeffrey’s office. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. My computer is on, my day planner is open. It’s just not the way I left things,” he said with a frown.
“Maybe Rebecca was looking for something?” she offered, knowing even as she spoke that it wasn’t Rebecca’s style. Everything would have been left exactly as she found it. Rebecca was precise, effective, and compulsively neat. Her appearance was always perfect; her work was always exceptional. In fact, Lydia couldn’t remember a time when Rebecca had called in sick before today.
“Hm,” said Lydia.
“What?”
“Let’s get her on the phone.”
“Why?”
“Because I had a feeling someone was in my office, as well.”
“Something missing?”
“Nope. Just a weird feeling,” she said thoughtfully. She walked back to her office and stood in the doorway. The space was pretty sterile because of Lydia’s compulsive need to carry things with her everywhere she went and because she really considered her office at the loft to be her workspace. Still something seemed different.
“I got the machine. Left a message for her to call,” said Jeffrey, coming up behind her. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Lydia nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” The uneasy feeling in her gut said something else. It was a feeling that stayed with her as they headed out the door, on their way to get some answers from Eleanor Ross.
When Lydia and Jeffrey reached the Waldorf, Eleanor and the twins appeared to be on their way out. Their luggage had been loaded onto a cart and a porter was leaving the room as Lydia and Jeffrey entered.
“Going somewhere, Ms. Ross?” asked Lydia.
“Back to the apartment. The children need to be in their home.”
“But it’s a crime scene,” said Lydia, appalled that she would even consider moving the children back to the place where their father was murdered and wondering how she was even allowed access.
“Money talks,” said Eleanor, drawing back her shoulders and jutting out her chin. “It’s up to me to decide what’s right for the children now, since there’s no one to look after them.”
“But to bring them back to the apartment where their father was-” Lydia stopped abruptly when the children entered the room.
They seemed to move as one, holding hands as they walked into the room. Their matching white blond heads of hair glowed golden in the sun that shone in from the window. Ivory skin and ice blue eyes, they looked as if they were made from light, luminous and ethereal.
“Grandma, Nathaniel can’t find Pat the Bunny,” said Lola, her voice light and musical.
“It’s on the cart headed downstairs, Nathaniel. You’ll have it before we get in the car. I promise.”
Nathaniel nodded, but Lydia could see his anxiety. The kid wanted his bunny. Lydia felt an irrational wash of anger that Eleanor hadn’t kept the bunny off the cart, knowing, as she must, that he would be looking for it.
“Who’s that?” said Lola, eyeing Lydia suspiciously.
“These are friends of mine, children. Their helping us find out who hurt your father.”
Lydia was surprised at the candor of Eleanor’s answer and couldn’t imagine what good could come of them knowing that. But the children didn’t seem upset. Both Lola and Nathaniel turned their eyes on Lydia and Jeffrey with a kind of wonder. Lydia leaned down and offered her hand.
“I’m Lydia,” she said, smiling. Each child shook her hand properly in turn. “And this is my partner, Jeffrey.”
“Is he your boyfriend?” Lola wanted to know.
“He’s my partner,” she said again. It was really a more truthful answer anyway.
“Oh,” said Lola with a little frown, as if sensing the complexity of the answer but too young to really understand.
“What happened to your face?” asked Nathaniel, pointing to her bruise. “It looks bad.”
Lydia smiled at Nathaniel and then looked up at Eleanor. “Can we have a few minutes with you?”
Eleanor nodded and escorted the children from the room.
“Nice to meet you,” Nathaniel tossed over his shoulder with a little smile. He had been taught to be polite and the lesson had stuck.
When Eleanor returned, Lydia didn’t waste any more time.
“Why didn’t you tell us you had a son, Eleanor? A son who’d been committed and escaped from a mental institution; a son who tried to kill you and Julian.”
A stillness came over Eleanor. She moved over to the couch and sat unsteadily.
“My son is dead,” she said quietly.
“No, I don’t think so, Ms. Ross. I have this bruise on my face to prove it. He attacked me in the basement of your house in Haunted.”
Eleanor shook her head firmly. “Whoever did that to you, it wasn’t my son. He was found dead last year in that same house. There’s a death certificate to prove it.”
Lydia was feeling a little unsteady herself suddenly. Her face had flushed with a rush of heat and she moved to the chair beside Eleanor.
“What about your brother, Eleanor? What about Paul? Where is he?”
Eleanor shook her head again, this time slowly. She cast her eyes to the floor. A deep sadness had come over her and for the first time since Lydia had met her, Eleanor seemed human.
“He’s been missing for many years,” she nearly whispered. “I’ve long believed him dead. He was my twin; I’d know if he was still alive.”
“There are rumors, Eleanor. Ugly ones. About you and Paul, about James and Julian.”
Eleanor slammed her hand suddenly down on the coffee table in a hard, flat slap.
“Goddammit!” she yelled. The lid that had opened in Lydia’s office flew wide and all the demons flew out. “Why do you think I took Julian and left that place? Those rumors, the curse-they plagued us. Do you know what it’s like to live beneath the shadows of others’ fear and ignorance, their voyeurism? Everyone always whispering; thinking that they know you, your family. It is a nightmare.”
She stopped and took a shuddering breath. Lydia and Jeffrey were silent, allowing her to collect her thoughts.
“When Jack was murdered, things became unbearable for us in that town. All they had was each other, James and Julian. None of the other children would play with them; at school they were taunted, bullied. James was fighting every week, defending himself and his sister. They became inseparable, united against the rest of the town. But then James started to change. I’d seen it before in Paul. The mental illness, the delusions, the terrible rages. That is the curse of our family, the shadow we live under.”
Lydia imagined James and Julian, their father murdered, their mother accused, the people of the town treating them like pariahs. Adolescence is such a tortured time under the best of circumstances; there was no telling how additional pressures like that could damage a person.
“But there is no incest in our family, if those are the rumors you’ve heard. James and Julian loved each other, needed each other, were closer than other siblings because they were twins. That’s it. Nothing more. The same was true for Paul and me. People in that town are so small and sick, so bored, they’ll do anything, say anything to entertain themselves. God, I hated that place.”
Eleanor was crying now. Silent tears streamed down her face and she looked old, frail, shattered. Her regal posture sagged, as though the truth had deflated her.
“What can you tell me about your relationship with Maura Hodge?”
Lydia saw Eleanor cringe at the sound of her name.
“Maura Hodge.” She said the name as if it were sour on her tongue. “She hates us. Hates our family. Hates me most of all.”
“Why?”
“She’ll tell you it’s because of years of injustice, starting with Hiram Ross. I’m sure you’ve heard about that curse. She’s made sure that that legend never dies with that library of hers. She’s been commissioning writers and historians for decades, making sure the history of Haunted is preserved forever. As if anyone cares but her.”
“She claims not to believe in the curse, either,” said Lydia, remembering what Maura had said about the Ross family cursing themselves.
“Whether she believes or not, she used it to turn the town against us when Jack was killed. A part of me holds her responsible for James losing his mind.”
“How’s that?”
“I just wonder if the people in the town hadn’t been so cruel, hadn’t bought into all the rumors and made James and Julian feel like monsters, maybe James would have recovered. Maybe-” Eleanor stopped herself short. She looked past Lydia, rested her gaze on something far away.
“But Paul and James are dead now,” she said after a moment, with a kind of relief in her voice, as if everything had been settled. “They’re at peace.”
“Great,” said Lydia. “But that doesn’t explain who killed your husband or who killed Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton. That doesn’t help Julian.”
Lydia waited for Eleanor to respond, but she didn’t. The emotion she’d displayed earlier seemed to have drained from her and her former chilly demeanor returned. She wiped her eyes and straightened her back.
“Do you think Maura Hodge could be behind the murders?” asked Lydia, reaching now.
“I suppose it’s possible,” she said without conviction, almost without interest.
“Eleanor, you must have some idea. Some theory.”
“Actually, dear,” she said, “that’s why I hired you.”
The Eleanor who had raged about Haunted and the Eleanor who now sat cold and hard as an ice sculpture were two entirely different women.
“What are you hiding, Eleanor? What don’t you want us to know?” asked Lydia.
“I have nothing else to say. I’ve told you all I can.”
They had been dismissed.
“Dead men don’t eat Milky Way bars,” said Lydia, handing over to Ford the baggies of evidence she’d collected in the Ross basement.
They stood in Ford’s office, which was a little bigger, but not by much, than a broom closet. In the back of the main homicide office, a maze of busy cubicles and ringing phones, it was dank and dusty, but at least there was a door to pull closed. The blinds were pulled down over the only window and the room was lit by a flickering fluorescent overhead and a small desk halogen.
“Well,” he said, handing her a document, “Chief Clay had the hospital records department fax over his death certificate. Whoever it was did that to your face, it wasn’t James Ross.”
“I know what I saw,” Lydia said stubbornly, perusing the paper in her hand.
“You lost consciousness, right? You have a concussion? You can’t be sure of what you saw,” said Ford.
She looked at the document in her hand.
“You’d just seen the photograph of Julian’s twin. It was a moment of intense stress. And it was very dark,” said Jeff pragmatically. “Isn’t it possible that you just imagined his face on whoever it was that attacked us?”
Lydia shook her head. She had been frightened in the moment and injured afterward, but she certainly wasn’t going to let anyone convince her that she couldn’t believe her own eyes.
“According to Chief Clay, his body was found in the Ross home last year by some kids who snuck in there to do some drinking, fool around,” said Ford. “He’d hanged himself from the landing over the foyer.”
“Jesus,” said Jeffrey.
Lydia still hadn’t taken her eyes off the paper Ford had handed her. According to the death certificate, James Ross had been found last April 16, dead over a week, cause of death determined as suicide by asphyxiation. He was positively identified by his dental records. She looked down at the signature. Dr. Franklin Wetterau.
“If James Ross was found dead, then why didn’t Dr. Wetterau tell us that last night?” she said, showing Jeffrey the doctor’s name on the document.
Jeffrey shrugged. “No idea,” he said.
“Maura Hodge never mentioned that Julian even had a twin brother. Henry Clay didn’t say anything about him when the two of you spoke yesterday. Eleanor never even mentioned him until we confronted her, and he’s her son. Doesn’t that seem odd to either one of you?”
“Maybe we just weren’t asking the right questions,” said Jeffrey.
“Anyway, what difference does it make? He’s no good to me dead,” said Ford. “If he’s in the ground over a year, he didn’t kill Richard Stratton.”
“But he could have killed Tad Jenson.”
“I suppose he could have. But that case is cold. I need to solve this one. You guys follow whatever leads you want.”
“Just see if the hairs match the ones from the Jenson case, Ford. See if there’s any DNA on the candy bar wrapper.”
“And what if there is? How does that help this case? Even if the hairs match and the wrapper has the DNA from James Ross’s ghost, what does that tell me about Richard Stratton?”
She looked at him and shook her head slightly, but didn’t bother arguing. He had a case to solve and their investigation was becoming too far-fetched for him, she could see it in his eyes. It was like this when you were a private investigator; cops sometimes cooperated when they thought you might help. And Jeffrey had a lot of contacts, people who owed him favors, people he’d worked with in the past either with the FBI or as a private consultant, who gave them the kind of access of which other PIs could only dream. But when you started to get in the way, you got the official boot. She didn’t blame him, that’s just the way it was.
“Look,” he said, “you guys are all over the board here… curses, ghosts, incest, family feuds. Sometimes, you know, the simplest solution is the right solution. Maybe someone hired a killer to do Richard Stratton. Maybe someone wants you to think James Ross is still alive, stalking his sister and murdering her husbands.”
She nodded. “Maybe you’re right,” she said.
Ford and Jeffrey both looked at her with disbelief as she turned and walked out the door.
Outside the precinct, the air was cool, and that was exactly what she needed. A cold rain had fallen in the early morning, but now the sky was a bright blue with some light wisps of white clouds. The trees in the lot across the street were nearly bare and the wind blew the fallen leaves up to flutter into the sky, some of them sticking to the wet hoods of the crisp blue and white cruisers that lined the block.
Lydia took the cold air into her lungs and tried to breathe against the pain she felt in her abdomen. But instead of subsiding the way it had the last few times, it seemed to grow hot and sharp inside her. She clutched her bag to her side, leaned against the concrete of the precinct building, and tried to keep herself together. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t walked out of the building and away from Jeffrey, but the office had seemed so hot and close. She’d thought if she could just get some air, she would feel all right again. Now she was alone on the street and the pain grew even more intense. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a familiar voice, heard her name. Then there were hands on her. Everything around her pitched horribly, like she was on a boat in a storm. Then the street and the sky and her awareness of these things faded away.