It was a bright, clear day as Ford McKirdy pulled his Taurus up the sidewalk in front of the Sunnyvale Retirement Home on Broadway in the Bronx. It was a sad-looking place, as were all nursing homes, no matter how hard they tried. Really, there was no escaping the fact that even the best of them were the antechamber to death. As he pushed open the white double doors and was assaulted by the odors of decay and disinfectant, he tried not to imagine himself in a place like this, nothing but a nuisance to his children, awake all day with his regrets, waiting to die.
Geneva Stout didn’t exist. Well, she had existed, until two years ago when she’d died alone at the age of eighty-eight in a nursing home in Riverdale, leaving no children, no relatives at all. There was no one registered at NYU under that name. So the nanny, whatever her real name was, had disappeared.
But he had to wonder how the nanny had managed to usurp Geneva’s identity, and his wondering had led him to the place where the old women had died, looking for answers.
Nurse Jeremiah was about as pleasant and easy on the eyes as an old bulldog. With a pronounced underbite, and a head of gray hair that was clearly store-bought, her tremendous girth commanded about two-thirds of the counter behind which she sat. She turned an evil eye on Ford as soon as he’d put foot on the linoleum floor, her scowl seeming to deepen the closer he came.
“Good morning,” he said with his most winning smile.
“If you say so,” she answered, staring at him as if trying to figure out his game.
He took out his gold detective’s shield and placed it on the counter in front of her, expecting her attitude to improve.
“I’m Detective Halford McKirdy from the New York City Police Department,” he said.
She glanced at him, then down at his shield with cool distaste.
“That supposed to scare me?” she asked.
“Uh, no.”
“What do you want, Officer?”
“Look, what’s your problem? You get bonus pay for attitude?”
“I don’t get bonus pay for nothin’. I see you walking in here and I know you’re going to make my morning difficult. I can just see it in that cocky walk of yours.”
Ford looked into her middle-aged face and saw that beneath the crust was a marshmallow center. There was a glitter to her brown eyes and just the slightest upturning of the corners of her thin pink lips. In the lines on her face, he saw a woman who had changed diapers, read stories, gone to graduations. He saw a woman who, in spite of her size, still got out on the dance floor at weddings, whose generous arms were a safe place for the people who loved her. He smiled and leaned in to her a little.
“Come on,” he said. “Give me a break?”
She gave a little laugh, knowing somehow that he’d seen through her. “All right,” she sighed. “What is it?”
“Does the name Geneva Stout mean anything to you?”
She looked past him as if running the name through her mental database.
“I do remember Geneva,” she said finally. “A sweet, sweet old woman. She liked to play Scrabble. Never gave anyone a moment’s trouble. She was all alone, I remember. No one to visit.” She followed her sentence with a quick little cluck of her tongue, a noise that communicated sympathy and a little sadness. “What about her?”
“It’s not her so much as who was working here when Geneva died that interests me.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “This place has a revolving door. It’s gritty work, sad work. Reminds people of what the end could bring.”
“She’s a young woman, maybe in her late teens, early twenties when she was here. Exotic-looking, long dark curly hair. Pretty, petite. On the short side, maybe five-two, five-three.”
She shrugged. “Like I said, a lot of people have been through here.”
“What about employment records?”
The woman heaved a sigh. “See, now, there you go.”
“What?”
“I knew you were gonna make me get up from this seat,” she said, but she gave him a smile and hefted herself from the desk.
“Follow me,” she said, buzzing him through a door to her left.
She asked another woman to watch the front for her and led Ford down a hallway, and through a door marked RECORDS.
“What’s your name?” he asked her as they walked into the room.
“Katherine Jeremiah, my friends call me Cat. You can call me Nurse Jeremiah,” she said with a teasing smile.
When she flipped on the light switch, he expected to see rows of file cabinets; instead, he stood in a room filled with computers. The room was ice-cold and somewhere a vent rattled.
“Most everything is on computers these days. It took years to convert all our records. But we’re mostly caught up. The older files got moved into the basement. And these machines hold all employee and patient files since, I think, 1980 or something.”
Ford just nodded and smiled politely as if he cared. She pulled up a chair in front of one of the computers and began to type.
“Let’s see, if she was that young, then she probably wasn’t a nurse and definitely not a doctor,” she muttered, thinking aloud. “I’m going to search for all females between the age of seventeen and twenty-five working here from 1998 to 2001, and that should cover it.”
She typed a few things on the keyboard and then sat back. “Should take just a minute.”
“You have photographs on there?” asked Ford after they’d waited for a minute.
“There should be a photograph for everyone who worked here.”
She swiveled around in the chair and gave him a blatant once-over. “Wife left you?” she said out of nowhere.
“What?” Ford felt like she’d punched him in the gut.
“I’m just wondering because I see you’re wearing a ring. But no wife would let her husband go out of the house looking all messy like you slept in your clothes. You have a five o’clock shadow and it isn’t even noon.”
“It’s none of your business, Nurse Jeremiah,” he said with a frown.
She shrugged and gave him a knowing smile.
“Get her back,” she said, turning back to the computer. “All women who leave are hoping you’ll beg them to come back.”
“Thanks for the unsolicited advice,” he said, a little angry, a little embarrassed, and a little bit wondering if she was right.
A soft bing from the computer announced that twenty-five matches had been found to the criterion she had entered. She motioned Ford over and he came to stand behind her as she scrolled through each of the entries, each record complete with driver’s license photograph. She flipped slowly through and each face was unfamiliar to him, all of them young, most of them pretty, none of them the woman he was looking for.
He was starting to think he’d hit a dead end when she came to one of the last records. Her hair was much shorter, her face rounder. The picture didn’t at all capture her fiery beauty, but there was the woman he knew as Geneva Stout.
“That’s her,” he said, moving in closer.
“I remember that one,” said the nurse with a snort. “She walked around here like she owned the place. Lazy as the day is long. Then one day she didn’t show up for her shift. Never came back again.”
“Right after Geneva died?”
She thought about it a minute. “I guess that’s right.”
Ford leaned in to the record to read her name. “Oh, Lord,” he said with a shake of his head. “I should have known.”
“That sure is an odd name for a town,” Nurse Jeremiah said, reading the young woman’s address. “Haunted? I’ve never heard of such a place.”
“Unfortunately,” said Ford, “I have.”
In his hand Jeffrey held a sterling Tiffany baby rattle. He turned it and marveled at how small it looked in his hand. It made just the lightest tinkling as he played with it, watched it catch the light sneaking in through the slats of the drawn blinds. He’d bought the rattle for Lydia after he learned that she was pregnant and had been waiting for the right time to give it to her. That time wasn’t going to come for a while.
Jeffrey hadn’t really begun to conceive of the baby as a real person; he hadn’t thought of whether it would be a girl or a boy, what he would look like, if she would have Lydia’s eyes, her stubborn streak, his pragmatism. Jeffrey had only really thought of the baby as a happy concept rather than as a flesh-and-blood part of himself. But the loss was a crush on his heart. He didn’t see it as a death, necessarily… maybe if Lydia had been further along, it would have felt more like that. But it was the death of a hope, a dream he’d had for their immediate future.
It wasn’t to be for them, right now. He could accept that. All that mattered to him at the moment was that Lydia was all right. When he’d seen her fall on the street, he felt like the world was coming to end. It had seemed like miles between them as he ran to reach her, though it was only a few feet. And when he’d seen her face, pale and wan, her eyes half open, he’d felt fear on a level he didn’t even know existed. Now she rested in their bed, her breathing heavy with painkillers and exhaustion.
Lydia had experienced an ectopic pregnancy, where the fetus had settled in her fallopian tube rather than in her uterus, causing a rupture that led to Lydia’s collapse on the sidewalk outside Midtown North. He was more than a little thankful that the miscarriage was a result of circumstances beyond their control, rather than it being the result of the trauma she’d sustained the night before. He wasn’t sure if he’d have been able to forgive himself for that. He was glad he didn’t have to face anger and guilt, as well as grief.
These were the thoughts in his mind as he sat in the chair by the window of their bedroom and watched Lydia sleep. She looked small and fragile wrapped in their down comforter. But physically, she would be all right. With a laparoscopy, the doctor had managed to repair the ruptured tube. The rest of it would just take time.
It was amazing how the world can come grinding to a sudden halt. Everything that seemed so important three days ago couldn’t mean less to him. When life is reduced to the survival of someone you love, everything else reveals itself as trivial. He hadn’t even called in to the office since he called to tell them what had happened.
He replaced the rattle into its black velvet bag and stood to put it back in the drawer on the top of the dresser.
“Are you okay?” she asked groggily.
“Yeah,” he said, closing the drawer and coming to sit beside her. He put a hand on her head and she looked up at him. “How are you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, for what must have been the hundredth time.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. It just wasn’t meant to be right now. We have plenty of time,” he answered, kissing her head. She nodded and then seemed to drift off again.
He stood and walked from the room, pulled the door closed behind him, and walked down the stairs. Before he reached the bottom level, the phone started ringing and he raced for it so that it wouldn’t disturb Lydia.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Craig. How’s Lydia?”
“On the mend,” answered Jeff. “What’s up?”
“I hate to bother you, man. But there’s something you need to know.” Craig’s voice sounded strange to Jeff and it immediately made him alert, brought him back a little to life outside their loss.
“What’s going on?”
“Rebecca’s missing, Jeff.”
“Missing?”
“Yeah,” he said. He paused then as though he weren’t sure how to go on. Finally, he blurted it out like what he had to say was burning his tongue. “Jed McIntyre’s got her.”
The words had the effect of a baseball bat to the stomach. “What?” was all Jeffrey could manage.
Craig started rambling out the details. He was talking fast.
“The day after I told you she called in sick? She didn’t show up, and this time she didn’t call. I left a message for her to make sure she was okay, but she never called back. Then the next morning her mother called, very worried, told me she normally speaks to Rebecca every day but hadn’t been able to reach her at home. Christian headed over to Rebecca’s place, convinced the doorman to let him into her apartment. From the mail the doorman had and the messages on her machine, it looked like she hadn’t been there since Wednesday morning before work. Her coffee cup was still in the sink. We tried her cell phone, friends whose numbers we found in her home address book. Finally at the end of the day we filed a missing person’s report.”
“Why am I just finding out about this now?” said Jeff. His anger and fear were like a balled fist ready to fly.
“We didn’t want to bother you,” Craig said lamely. “I mean, we didn’t know about Jed McIntyre until about an hour ago when we checked the surveillance tape from the lobby.”
“It’s been three days. Nobody thought to look at it sooner?”
“I guess we all just thought she’d show up. We never imagined…”
“What? What didn’t you imagine?” he asked.
“That she’d been taken from the office.”
He wouldn’t have imagined it, either. They all thought of those offices as ultra-secure. Rebecca must have felt the same way. Jeffrey remembered now how both he and Lydia had felt that someone had been rifling though their offices. Now he knew why. He didn’t even have time to think about what Jed might have learned about them, what kind of access he gained to their cell numbers, their security codes.
“How’d he get in?”
“He killed one of the Speedy Messenger guys, took his gear. Used the speed dial on his cell phone and called in a late route to the dispatcher. Christ,” Craig said, his voice catching. “She was basically just sitting here waiting for him.”
More silence.
“From what we saw on the camera as they left, she looked pretty out of it. He was holding her by the arm. We didn’t know who it was at first. He was wearing a wig. Then he looked up to the camera and smiled.”
“Oh, God,” he said quietly. He said a silent prayer for Rebecca; one he was coldly sure would go unanswered. “Did you call the FBI?”
“They’re here already.”
“Okay… I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said, looking up to the bedroom door. As sick as it was, part of him was glad to have something to think about other than his and Lydia’s sadness. Of all the emotions, it was the hardest to deal with because there was an essential powerless to it, a lack of energy. It entered your system like a barbituate, slowing you down, making you weak, forcing you to feel its effects. Fear and anger were like speed, forcing you into action, pumping adrenaline through your veins. No reflection, just movement.
“Also,” Craig said, “Ford McKirdy called a couple times today, said it’s very important that he talk to you. And Eleanor Ross has called about a thousand times, she’s threatening to fire you if she doesn’t get a call back today.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll deal with it when I get there.” He hung up the phone and released a sigh.
“Jesus,” came Lydia’s voice from the top of the stairs. She held the cordless extension in her hand. “You’re outta commission for a few days and the whole world falls apart.”
He recognized the tightness that her voice took on when she was trying not to sound afraid. She looked pale and weak, and seemed too wobbly to be standing at the top of the stairs.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said, sternly. “Get back into bed.”
“But Rebecca”
“You’re no good to Rebecca or anyone else all hopped up on painkillers.”
She headed tentatively down the stairs, her abdomen still painful from the laser surgery. She wore a pair of purple silk pajama bottoms and a gray oversized NYU sweatshirt, her black hair pulled back into a ponytail at the base of her neck. She walked over to the couch and sat down there as if the effort had drained her.
“I know,” she admitted. She closed her eyes and seemed to squeeze back tears. “But Rebecca. Oh, God.”
She tried to push away the visions of Jed McIntyre’s victims and pray instead that somehow Rebecca would manage to escape that fate. But she lacked the energy to control her thoughts, even to pray. Holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder, Jeffrey grabbed a chenille blanket off the couch and covered her with it.
“You need to get over here,” Jeffrey said into the phone, presumably speaking to Dax. Without another word, he hung up.
“Naturally, you can’t leave me here without my babysitter,” she said. But she didn’t have it in her to put up any kind of real protest. She was more just complaining out of habit.
“Please, Lydia,” said Jeffrey with a sigh. “Spare me a little worry for the afternoon, will you? Just stay here with Dax. And when you’re feeling stronger, we’ll talk about getting back to work. In the meantime, I’ll deal with the Ross case.”
“I feel like I’ve been in bed for a month.”
“You’ll be on your feet again soon.”
She nodded and looked away, out the window into the flat gray afternoon sky. He followed her eyes and saw tiny flurries of snow out the window. In the loft across the way, he saw a towering Christmas tree, lights glowing green, red, blue, tinsel glittering on the branches. He looked back at Lydia.
“You have to deal with this okay? Don’t just bulldoze over it.”
She nodded again and he saw the sadness in her eyes, how they were rimmed with dark smudges. He sat beside her and took her into his arms.
As if, she thought, resting her head on his shoulder, I had any choice but to deal with this. Even when her mind got up to its old tricks of pushing things she didn’t want to deal with so far inside that she could almost forget them, the pain of her body was a harsh and constant reminder. She felt hollow and empty, as if something she didn’t even know she wanted had been wrested from her. For all the ambivalence she’d felt about her pregnancy, she grieved the loss. She was trying hard not to feel like it was a punishment, a message from the universe that she wasn’t worthy of motherhood. But the shadow of that belief hovered in her consciousness.
And the fatigue-physical, emotional, spiritual-was so powerful that it pushed everything else out… Julian Ross, Rebecca, even Jed McIntyre. If he were to come for her now, he wouldn’t get much of a fight. She held on to Jeffrey, felt the strength of his body and his spirit, and it gave her comfort. She released him and lay back.
“I’m okay,” she said, wiping the tears that had sprung to her eyes. “I’m going to be fine.”
“I have no doubt,” he said with a smile.
“It’s Rebecca we should be worrying about now.”
The buzzer for the door rang. “Was he waiting downstairs?” said Lydia with a roll of her eyes.
“Who is it?” said Jeff into the intercom.
“Land shark,” said Dax.
“Very funny,” said Jeffrey, pressing the buzzer.
As he hulked through the elevator door, Dax’s head was not visible behind the gigantic bouquet of Stargazer lilies he’d brought for Lydia. The sight of them made her heart sink a little further. He placed the flowers down on the coffee table beside her, leaned in, and gave her a little kiss on the head. He smelled like musky cologne and snow, his cheek pink and cold against her own.
“How’re you doing there, girl?” he asked, his green eyes sincere, concerned. No wisecracks, no insults. It was awful. If Dax felt like he had to be nice to her, things must be worse than she thought.
Rebecca was a strong girl, with big, tight thighs. She may even have had some martial arts training and Jed McIntyre had some bruised ribs and a black eye to show for it. But in the end none of that had done her much good. Even the toughest women had throats with skin as soft and easily torn as silk. That had always been his favorite end for the women in his life. It was so intimate, so final. To feel their mortal struggle against his chest, panic radiating off their skin like a perfume, the pain as they tried to scratch at his arms, the music of the death rattle in their throats. Then the peaceful moments when life left them to sag into his arms. Then silence. Frankly, sex didn’t even compare to the release. Yes, Rebecca was a strong girl. But he was stronger.
Nobody paid attention to the homeless man pushing his shopping cart up Central Park West, making a right at Eighty-sixth Street onto the path that led into park. Most people would rather stick their face in a public toilet than get too close to the man who shuffled, mumbling to himself, his clothes stiff with filth, his nails long and caked with dirt. He’d piled his red hair into a stocking cap and pulled it down over his ears, wore an old pair of sunglasses he’d found in the tunnels. They were missing one plastic arm and hung crooked on his face. He’d found a pair of old scrubs in the Dumpster behind Mount Sinai Hospital and he wore those over thermal underwear and under a bright red bathrobe. Combat boots from the Salvation Army were a lovely finish to the ensemble. In his current capacity, he found it necessary to abandon vanity. It was truly liberating. And where else but New York City did you have to make an utter spectacle of yourself to disappear completely?
The right front wheel of his cart was making an irritating squeal and the temperature had dropped significantly in the last few minutes. His hands were going red in the cold and his load seemed to grow heavier with each passing second.
He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do. He was waiting for inspiration, which he hoped would come soon, sometime after dark and sometime before rush hour when the park would fill with commuters and joggers. Then he’d be forced to wait outside for hours just to get a little privacy. This was another thing about New York: You could never find anyplace to be alone.
He’d developed a special affection for Rebecca over the last few days. She’d brought him closer to Lydia, and more important at this point to Jeffrey Mark, than he’d ever dreamed he would get. Of course, she struggled valiantly to keep the little details of their lives from him. It was the hydrochloric acid that had changed her mind. And then there was no shutting her up. Until he shut her up permanently.
He suspected she had known she was going to die whether she talked or not, even though he’d promised otherwise. He didn’t like to lie, but sometimes it was necessary. He thought she was hoping not to be disfigured, for her family’s sake. He found it so odd that people cared about things like that. But she was pretty in death. Prettier, he thought, than in life.
He looked out over the Great Lawn, the grand Metropolitan Museum of Art white and stately across the park, took in the cold air and the aroma from a nearby hot dog vendor’s cart. He watched as the short Mexican man bundled in a New York Yankees sweatshirt, scarf, and hat against the cold, handed a dog, lathered in mustard and kraut to a young rollerblader. The young man glided off down a slope, eating joyfully as he went.
“The devil is in the details,” Jed said aloud, as he came to a bench, pulled his cart over, and sat heavily. None of the people moving past him on the path, not the businesswoman in her red wool coat and frumpy, well-used Coach briefcase, not the young mother pushing a stroller carting a baby so wrapped up that he resembled a cocktail wiener, not the old man and his little kerchiefed wife in their matching black coats and orthopedic shoes, turned to look at him when he spoke aloud. Persistent ignorance. He laughed out loud and noticed how people quickened their pace.
It’s an acquaintance with the minutiae of a life that makes people truly intimate with each other, he thought. It’s the knowing of preferences, habits, idiosyncrasies, the little quirks of personality that really allow you to get inside someone’s head. When you know what someone loves, what someone fears, what turns someone on, what repulses him, and most important what hurts him, you have the lock, the full nelson. Nobody was going to give that to Jed McIntyre. He couldn’t get close enough to Lydia and Jeffrey to figure it out for himself. So he’d had to hijack it.
Well, okay, maybe he hadn’t exactly gotten into their heads via the information Rebecca had about them and what he could find in their offices. But what he did find was appointment books, cellular phone numbers, things he’d been lacking. The tunnels hadn’t really given him the access for which he’d been hoping. They’d gotten him close, but not close enough. He’d fantasized that he’d find a way into Lydia’s building through one of the mythic speakeasy tunnels he’d heard so much about. But it didn’t work out that way.
So, he’d cased the offices of Mark, Striker and Strong and found easily the flaw in their security. The Speedy Messenger service, the one that came at the end of the day when most people had gone. It was easy enough to derail a few of the messengers… a flat tire here, a busted chain there. And then finally, grabbing the guy from his route, surprising him at the service exit of the CBS building with a pipe to the head. As far as Jed knew, no one ever found the naked body he’d left in the Dumpster. He took the kid’s outfit, his bag, and his cellular phone. Called into the preprogrammed number on the phone to the Speedy dispatcher and told him he’d run into delays but would still make the stops. It was that simple. Rebecca had just been caught off guard.
Now, of course, the real question was how to use what he’d learned to its maximum effect. As darkness closed around him, he waited for inspiration.
“You cheating Aussie bastard,” Lydia complained weakly as Dax destroyed her for the third time at the game of Go. He had a gift for pattern recognition and a strategy that was truly unsurpassed, and at the moment Lydia hated him for it.
“The least you could do is let me win,” she said, feeling better for a few hours of thinking about nothing more serious than little black and white stones on a wooden board. Her nightmares had temporarily been put on hold and she was almost feeling normal again. Whatever that meant.
“Never. I have too much respect for you,” he said. She looked at him for evidence of sarcasm, but his face was serious.
“Oh, please,” she said with a laugh.
“And I’m sure you’d be even a worse winner than you are a loser.”
“You’re probably right about that,” she said, leaning back on the couch. It was good to be with Dax, good to be with someone who didn’t share her loss, whose face wasn’t a mirror of her own sadness. The hurricane of emotions she’d experienced over the last few days had left her drained, too numb to feel anything at the moment. She knew the comfortable numbness wouldn’t last. Grief wasn’t linear, getting progressively better with time. It came in waves, in an ebb and flow. For a moment or a day, you’d feel almost whole, ready to begin the move forward. Then it came again out of nowhere like a tsunami, wiping you out with a crushing force. And then, of course, there was the Jed McIntyre nightmare looming, the innocent Rebecca in his clutches.
“So how long are you going to sit around in your pajamas?” asked Dax, regarding her with an open, honest face.
“Hi, I just had surgery?”
“Laser surgery,” he said, as though it didn’t count.
“Oh, yeah, I’m a real slug for lying around for two days after having a miscarriage,” she said, getting a little pissed at him for being such an insensitive clod.
“Three days. And I think you should throw away those painkillers. Whatever pain you’re in at this point is bearable. Those things will slow your recovery, and they make it easier for you to lie around here wallowing in depression.”
“I’m not wallowing,” she said defensively.
“Not yet,” he said with a shrug, putting the Go pieces into their little wooden bowls.
“Why is everybody always telling me what to do?” she said, realizing that she sounded like a sullen teenager.
“Look. Jeff loves you. He wants to protect you from any pain or danger that might befall you. He’d be happy to keep you in a padded room under twenty-four-hour guard until Jed McIntyre is six feet under. But that’s not you, you know? With everything going on, and now this,” he said, pointing to her belly as if it were the offending party, “I think it would be easy for you to get really depressed. You need to pull yourself together and get back to work. Worry about someone else’s messed-up life for a while.”
She looked at Dax and wondered why she’d never realized he was so smart. Everything he’d said had been dead on and she added a new layer of respect to her concept of him.
“Fuck off, Dax,” she said with a frown and a shrug. He just smiled and got up to put away the game. The phone rang.
“Can you get that?” she called as he disappeared upstairs.
“Get it yourself,” he called back. She laughed and went over to the phone.
“Hello?” she answered.
“Is this Lydia Strong?” came a woman’s voice, sounding edgy and fragile.
“Who’s calling?” asked Lydia, trying to place the familiar voice.
“This is Julian Ross.”
Lydia let a second pass as the information sank in. She could hear the sound of people talking in the background. She heard some laughter and then what sounded like a wail off in the distance.
“What’s happening, Julian?”
“I need to see you. I need to talk.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the Payne Whitney Clinic. Can you come? Can you come right away?” she asked. Her voice was desperate and Lydia could hear she was on the verge of tears.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” she answered without hesitation.
Forty minutes later they were in the Rover. There was something beautiful about a late fall dusk in New York City. The sky had taken on a kind of blue tinge, and Lydia watched as people hustled along the sidewalks, rushing to or from, carrying bags. Christmas was just a few weeks away and the shop windows were dressed to draw in holiday shoppers. She loved the energy this time of year, the excitement of tourists in the city to see the tree and look in the windows of the department stores on Fifth Avenue, the ringing bells of Salvation Army Santas outside Macy’s. It reminded her of when she was a child, how thrilled she’d been when her mother took her into the city for these things, and for the museums and the theater, for the ballet and the Philharmonic. She’d never wanted to live anyplace else and she couldn’t imagine her life without these things. She looked over to Dax, who was staring intently at the road ahead though traffic was thick and they were barely moving.
“It’s an amazing city, isn’t it?” she asked.
“New York City is a whore,” said Dax with disgust. “It looks good enough from a distance, but there’s disease at its core. It makes a lot of promises, but in the end you pay for what it gives you with your soul.”
“That’s nice, Dax,” she said, not knowing quite how to respond to that.
A homeless man drifting up the street beside the Rover made her remember the tunnels that existed beneath the streets, made her think of the hole in the laundry room floor, and in turn of Ford McKirdy. She took her phone out of her purse and dialed his cell phone number.
“McKirdy,” he answered.
“It’s Lydia,” she said.
“Hey, Lydia. How are you? You scared the shit out of me the other day.”
“I’m okay,” she said quickly, not wanting to be reminded that she should really still be in bed. “Listen, Julian Ross gave me a call. I’m on my way to talk to her.”
“Good luck,” he said with a laugh.
“You’ve been to see her?”
“Yeah, she seemed lucid enough at first, but she’s fried,” he answered. “I got nothing from her.”
“What else has been happening? I’m a little behind,” she said. There was a slide show in her mind of the events in the days before she’d collapsed. She saw Maura Hodge smoking her pipe in her Gothic drawing room, the monster attacking Dax in the basement of the Ross house, Dr. Wetterau shining his penlight into her eyes and telling her about James Ross but not the whole story. A thought was starting to take form in her mind, but she couldn’t quite make out the shape.
“I’ve been trying to reach Jeff all day,” said Ford, sounding a little exasperated. “I hated to bother you guys, knowing what you’re going through. But I found something that makes me think you may have been on the right track after all.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
He told her about the nanny and his visit to the Sunnyvale Retirement Home.
“So who was she?”
“The name on her employment record was Annabelle Hodge. She’s from Haunted.”
Lydia heard blood rushing in her ears and her heart did a little flutter. She was transported back to that night over a hundred years ago when Annabelle Taylor watched her five children die before her eyes because of Elizabeth Ross’s cowardly heart. The vision was so vivid she smelled gunpowder.
“Annabelle Hodge. Who is she? Maura’s sister?”
“Her daughter. Must be. She’s only twenty-something. Looks like old Maura got a late start in the baby race.”
Lydia remembered Maura telling her that all her children had been stillborn. More lies.
“I don’t get it. Did Julian know that ‘Geneva’ was Maura Hodge’s daughter? Or did Eleanor?”
“Eleanor says she had no idea. Says that she hasn’t been to Haunted in twenty years, how could she have known? She and Maura weren’t exactly on speaking terms. She didn’t even know Maura had a daughter.”
“Or so she says.”
“Right.”
“Hey, Ford,” she said. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Funny you should ask. I was just about to take another little ride upstate. The address on Annabelle’s employment record was a place you’ve visited recently. The residence of Maura Hodge.”
She remembered then the noises she’d heard upstairs when they’d interviewed Maura, and the feeling she had that there was so much more going on than Maura was willing to reveal.
“Can you meet us at Payne Whitney in an hour? We’ll go up with you.”
“I never mind the company… unofficially, of course. You up to that?”
“Why not?” she said, her tone clipped, daring him to question her.
“Whatever you say, Lydia.”
“That’s an excellent philosophy.”
Special Agent Charles Goban had a long, crooked nose set between small eyes so dark that his iris and pupil appeared to be one. His gray hair was close-cropped and Jeffrey could see his pink, slightly flaky scalp glowing under the overhead lights. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his wrinkled brow. Goban had the wiry build of a featherweight fighter and stood nearly three inches shorter than Jeffrey. Exuding a kind of pent-up nervous energy, he was a cork about to shoot off a champagne bottle. Although there was nothing to celebrate at the moment.
“I’m trying to get my head around why I didn’t hear about this sooner,” Goban said, wiping away the sweat from his forehead and looking at Jeffrey with some combination of suspicion and condescension.
“It was just a rumor,” answered Jeff. “We were following up. We never found him. Or any real evidence that he’d ever been down there.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Lying to the FBI was not high on his list of things to do. He’d done it before and he’d probably do it again. But he avoided it when possible.
On the train on his way to the office, he’d been staring out the window and saw a dark figure disappear into a hole in the tunnel wall. It had reminded him of Rain and that tomorrow was the deadline he and Dax had issued for the whereabouts of Jed McIntyre. But all bets were off now that Rebecca was missing. He was sorry to fuck with the order of things down there, recognizing it as a way for people who didn’t belong to have a place in the world. But Jed McIntyre had Rebecca and the thought that she could be down there filled him with dread. He could only imagine her terror, and the thought of it caused a sharp pain behind his eyes. She was a good person, kind and hardworking, close to her mother. She didn’t deserve to be drawn into this nightmare, a pawn for Jed McIntyre to cause Jeffrey and Lydia pain. Jeff felt an intense guilt and desperation to find her… alive. But there was also the voice in his head that whispered to him that it was already too late.
When he’d arrived at the office, it was crawling with agents. The space was being treated like a crime scene, with technicians scouring for evidence, photographers snapping shots of their offices. An agent stood behind Craig as Craig showed how their security systems worked. The whole thing made Jeffrey extremely uneasy; he didn’t like other dogs on his turf. But it couldn’t be avoided now and he was going to have to deal with whatever it took to help Rebecca.
Christian Striker looked pale and agitated as he paced the foyer.
“This is so fucked up, man,” he said as Jeffrey approached.
“I know. What are we doing for Rebecca?”
“I’ve got ten of our guys visiting her friends and family, checking surveillance tapes from some of the other buildings on the block to see if we can get a handle on which way they went after they left. There’s not much we can do, honestly. We know he took her, but no one’s had a handle on Jed McIntyre in months. If we couldn’t find him before, how’re we going to find him now? It’s not good. We’re all too close to this, too worried to be thinking clearly and objectively.”
“I think I know where he might have taken her.”
“Christ, where, man?”
“Where’s Goban?”
“He’s in your office.”
So he told the agent about their trip into the tunnel and how it had yielded nothing but a window into a world he never knew existed. Before he had even finished, Goban was mobilizing a team to head down beneath the streets.
“You’re a fucking cowboy, Mark. You always have been. If you had told us about this sooner, Rebecca Helms wouldn’t be in this situation at all.”
Jeff didn’t reply, just sat staring and wondering if Goban was right.
“What were you going to do when you found him?”
Jeff shrugged.
“Yeah, do me a favor and don’t answer that. Just tell me one thing. Can you find your way around down there? Do you know where you’re going?”
Before he could answer, a young agent walked into the room. With his slick black hair and bright blue eyes, he wore all the idealism and righteousness on his handsome face that Jeff had felt during the first few years on the job. The feeling had faded fast.
“Sir, a body’s been found in Central Park matching the description of Rebecca Helms.”
Dax watched Lydia disappear through the glass doors of the Payne Whitney Clinic and shifted the Rover into park. He sat with the engine idling and the heat blaring, keeping his eyes on the entrance to the hospital. No one would get in or out without his noticing. He knew Jeff was going to kick his ass for encouraging Lydia to be up and about. But aside from being a little sore, and a little broken inside, she was fine. Jeff wanted to treat her like she was made out of glass. That’s why Dax never wanted to fall in love. From what he could see, it clouded your judgment terribly.
He could still see Lydia in the foyer trying to negotiate her way in, though only ten minutes remained for visiting hours. He was not surprised when he saw the guard relent and let her through. He wondered what she’d said to get her way.
When his cell phone sang inside his pocket, he had a feeling he knew who it was. He hadn’t forgotten Rain’s deadline, and he was sure Rain hadn’t forgotten, either. With Rebecca missing now, the stakes were even higher.
“Dax-ie,” said the husky voice on the other line. “How are you, darling?”
Danielle’s voice was slurred and sloppy. There was a desperation to her mock-seductive tone. She was making Dax more and more uncomfortable every time they spoke. He could see that she had entered the downward spiral of booze, drugs, and dangerous sex that would likely end with her dead in an alley somewhere. He didn’t want to feel badly about that when it happened. He needed to find a new street contact, someone not so high-risk, someone with better self-preservation instincts.
“What have you got, Danielle?” he said, trying to keep the disgust out of his voice.
“Can you come get me? I’m cold and hungry and I have some news for you,” she said in a singsong voice that she must have imagined was enticing.
“Give me the news now and I’ll come get you later. A woman is missing and I don’t have time to play games with you.”
There was a pause on the other line. And when Danielle spoke again, her voice had turned sharp and angry.
“Well, fuck you, too, Daxie.” She hung up the phone with a loud slam. Dax just sat there, knowing she would call back in under a minute. She was jonesing and she needed him. The phone chirped and blinked in his hand.
“Let’s try to be civilized, shall we?” he said as he answered.
“Come get me right now or I’m not going to give you Rain’s message,” she said, now pouting and sullen like a child. “I mean it, Dax.”
Again the stab of pity in his heart for her. “Okay, okay. I’ll be there. Where are you?”
She gave him her location and he hung up the line. “Bloody hell,” he said, looking back at the glass doors through which Lydia had disappeared. He dialed Jeff’s number and got voice mail, but didn’t leave a message.
As he put the phone back in his pocket, Ford McKirdy’s Taurus pulled up beside him and Dax rolled down the window. Ford got out of his car and walked over. Fatigue and stress radiated off him like an odor.
“Did you hear?” asked Ford.
“Hear what?”
“We found a body in Central Park that matches the description of Rebecca Helms.”
“Christ,” he said, feeling a wave of anger and sadness.
“I know,” said Ford with a slow shake of his head.
“Listen,” said Dax after a moment. “I have to go. I’ll meet up with you two in Haunted. Ford, just watch out for Lydia. I’ll be right behind you.”
He didn’t like leaving Lydia, especially since Ford had another agenda. But if Danielle had a line on Jed McIntyre, it couldn’t wait. McIntyre had killed Rebecca and was moving closer to Lydia and Jeffrey. Dax could feel it, could smell it like a scent on the wind.
“Where are you going?” called Ford. But the Rover was already pulling down the street.
Julian Ross looked like one of the tortured figures in her paintings. She stood in the corner, huddled there as if protecting herself against some imagined assault. She had a white-knuckled grip on one of the room’s orange plastic chairs, as if she might need to lift it and use it to ward off lions. Some of her color had returned, but her wild eyes spoke of a living nightmare. Her fear and confusion were palpable in the stale air of the room. Her hair looked grayer and she looked thinner than when Lydia had seen her last. So much had happened since then that it seemed like a month, but really it had been less than a week.
“They won’t let me have any paper or paints,” Julian said as the door closed behind Lydia. “I’m losing my mind in this place.”
She laughed a little then at what she’d said. But then her face was a mask of sadness. “Are you going to help me? Or are you one of them?”
“One of who?”
“You know,” said Julian with a sly smile and eyes that tried to bore into Lydia.
“I really don’t know, Julian. But tell me and I’ll try to help you.”
Lydia seated herself in a chair by the wall, telling herself that a passive body posture would put Julian at ease. But really, she was just exhausted. Before she sat, she gave Julian an up and down, figured she had about thirty pounds on Julian and could definitely ward off an attack if it came to that. She felt comforted by that thought until it occurred to her that Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton probably would have thought the same thing.
She felt like she had used up every ounce of energy she had just by walking from the car to Julian’s room. She wondered briefly if she should have listened to Jeffrey after all. She found herself wondering that a lot.
Julian was watching her carefully. “The destroyers, the takers, the damned,” she whispered. “You’re not one of them. I can tell.”
Lydia’s mind was racing with a thousand questions, but Julian was skittish and jumpy; Lydia knew she had to be careful with words, careful not to frighten or upset Julian any more than she was or she ran the risk of losing her altogether. Julian finally released the chair and came around to sit in it, facing Lydia. She balanced on the edge, bouncing her knees up and down so quickly that she seemed to be trembling.
“The destroyers…” Lydia said, her tone leading.
“You know them?”
“Who doesn’t?” she said, thinking of the forces that threatened to rip her own life apart at the seams.
Julian nodded solemnly. “All my life, they’ve been in the shadows, waiting to snatch away my soul, my life… everything. For a time, I thought I had eluded them. I should have known.”
She thought about Julian’s canvases, the small figures always in peril from the larger, dark, amorphous forms. She thought of the violence that Julian Ross had grown famous for painting. She wondered again whether Julian’s demons were real or imagined.
“Why do they want to hurt you, Julian?”
“That’s just it, you see. I have no idea,” she said with a helpless shrug. Big tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks; she made no sound, no move to wipe the moisture from her face. If she was an actress, she had real talent. Lydia felt a twinge of pity in her heart.
A sharp knock at the door startled them both. “Five minutes, Ms. Strong,” said the guard from outside.
“You called me here, Julian. You said you wanted to talk.”
Julian looked at Lydia closely, her eyes narrowing. Lydia observed her face, sought traces of Eleanor’s cold and deceptive aura in the woman’s daughter and saw none of it. The two woman sat looking at each other in silence, precious seconds passing. But Lydia didn’t speak, sensing that Julian would only talk when she was ready.
“I am complicit in my own fate and in the fate of those I have loved. I see that now,” she said finally, speaking slowly, seeming more lucid for a moment. “We all are, you know. Other people, other forces may direct the orchestra, but each of us has the choice to pick up the violin and play or not. I have played along all my life. Out of fear, out of need to please, out of something-who knows really why? Somehow you feel if you don’t play the music that’s written for you, then you’re guilty of the chaos that ensues. None of the other players know how to proceed. It’s so frightening for everyone.”
Lydia had no idea what she was trying to say, but again she let silence do the coaxing.
“Especially when the queen doesn’t get her way,” she continued.
“The queen?” Lydia asked, but remembered that that’s how she referred to her mother during their last visit.
“The Queen of the Damned,” she said, with all the cool seriousness of a college professor.
“What happens when the queen doesn’t get her way?” Lydia asked, even though it was pretty clear that Julian Ross was quite insane.
Julian smiled, a disturbing twisted grin. “Then off with your head,” she said with a hard laugh. “Of course.”
Julian’s answer sent a chill through Lydia, as the images from the Richard Stratton crime scene came to her head.
“So Eleanor, your mother. She’s one of the destroyers.”
“I’d say so,” Julian said indignantly.
“And your brother, James? What about him?”
“Oh, no,” she said with gravity. “Not Jamey. He’s one of the angels.”
“But he tried to kill you, didn’t he? He tried to burn you and your mother alive.”
“No,” she yelled suddenly, scaring the hell out of Lydia. “That was a lie. A fucking lie that they used to put him away, to keep him away from me.”
The person before her had changed. She had transformed from a meek, scared little waif into the very embodiment of rage. She jumped up from her perch and moved toward Lydia, who immediately stood. Julian’s face had gone red, and the muscles in her arms and neck were taut and straining against her skin. A moment earlier she had looked like a strong wind would knock her down. Now she seemed to possess a kind of wiry strength, as though she were made of cord pulled tight, ready to snap. Her eyes were dark and unseeing, as her chest began to heave.
“Take it easy, Julian,” said Lydia, trying to keep her voice calm as she edged toward the door. “I’m on your side.”
But Julian, seeming not to have heard her, kept moving closer. In her face, which she’d pulled into a kind of grimace, Lydia could see the potential for all the things of which she hadn’t believed Julian capable. Rage, violence, murder. Lydia felt the cold finger of fear poke her in the belly as her exhaustion was replaced by a burst of adrenaline.
“Guard!” Lydia called. Then, summoning her most authoritative voice and looking the other woman directly in the eye, “Julian, you need to calm down.”
Julian laughed, and it was a frightening sound. The woman had turned into a ghoul; Lydia half expected to see that she had grown fangs. Lydia felt a surge of panic as she realized that she wasn’t sure she could fend Julian off. She felt a physical weakness that was unfamiliar to her, as if her body were in rebellion after all the abuse it had suffered.
“Guard!” Lydia called again, this time louder.
Julian looked ready to lunge and Lydia flashed on the attack in the basement of the Ross home. She couldn’t believe it. The bruise on her face hadn’t even healed yet and she was going to get her ass kicked again.
The door opened suddenly and the young officer entered. Lydia sighed with relief, as Julian seemed to deflate like a blow-up doll. Julian sagged to the floor and started to cry, to sob like she was filled with all the grief and pain of the world. The guard shot Lydia an accusatory look as he helped Julian to her feet. She looked about as menacing as a piece of string.
“Please help me,” Lydia heard Julian call as she rushed down the hall, eager to get as far away from Julian Ross and her nightmare existence as possible.
Central Park was a postcard. A light snow fell, glimmering window lights from the buildings surrounding the park glowed against the blue black of the night sky. The air was crisp but not painfully cold against Jeffrey’s skin as he stood, ignored by the throng of police officers and FBI agents swarming the crime scene. He felt helpless, useless, an outsider in the kind of situation where he was accustomed to being in control. But tonight he was a rogue private investigator, someone at least partially responsible for the dead woman lying naked and unprotected from the chill of winter and the eyes of a hundred agents of the law.
Jeffrey considered himself to have a particularly high threshold for stress. But standing behind the crime scene tape that surrounded Rebecca’s body as it lay against a giant oak edging the Great Lawn in Central Park, he felt like he was pretty much at the edge of what he could endure. There had been too much loss, too much grief. He felt a kind of hollow space in his stomach, a heaviness in his heart, as though it were filled with stones.
Then there was the simmer of anger in the back of his mind, a nebulous area of negativity where thoughts of violence, revenge, and vigilantism dwelled. He wasn’t proud of these feelings, which had grown stronger since he and Dax had followed Jed McIntyre into the tunnels below the city. He couldn’t deny them, either. Unlike Lydia, in the cosmic scheme of things he didn’t necessarily believe that these feelings were inherently wrong. But he did acknowledge that they felt like a kind of spiritual poison, a psychic hallucinogen that slipped through his veins igniting visions and desires that he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of.
Over his grief ran a current of panic; Jed McIntyre had made an offensive strike. He was no longer on the run from them. He was moving in. And the only comfort Jeffrey had in this moment was that Lydia was safe at home with Dax.
Jeffrey was looking at a parody of Marion Strong’s crime scene. No doubt that was McIntyre’s agenda. Rebecca’s throat had been cut, her legs bound, her arms bound and nailed above her head to the tree under which she rested. It was the way Marion and his twelve other upstate New York victims had been posed, albeit in their bedrooms, nearly seventeen years ago now. Sitting as yet untouched in Rebecca’s lap was a white number ten envelope. In the glare of the flashbulbs from the crime scene photographers’ cameras, he could see Lydia’s name carefully printed in black. The forensics team would wait until the photographers had finished their work before dissecting the scene, hair by hair, fiber by fiber, print by print. Everyone was waiting to read the contents of that letter. Jeffrey only hoped that Goban wasn’t going to be a prick and shut him out.
Jeffrey remembered the first letter Lydia had received from McIntyre, while he was still incarcerated, just after the release of her first book, With a Vengeance, which detailed McIntyre’s murders and much of his life. Every month after that, he’d sent her a letter. Letters she received but never opened. It had been a recurring topic of argument between Lydia and Jeffrey. He thought that they should be returned; but Lydia insisted that they be kept, locked away in a drawer. She said they were reminders to her that he was locked away forever, that he was just a mentally ill man who could only reach her by the U.S. mail and that she had the choice to read or not read his communications. His letters, she claimed, comforted her that he was mortal, caged away from society, and not a demon that could materialize from her nightmares. Jeffrey had eventually given up on arguing about the letters, came to understand the peace she had derived from them. This letter, however, proved just the opposite. That he was a demon, come to destroy them all.
Poor Rebecca. Her face was pale and calm like the face of an angel, her glassy eyes cast heavenward. He was glad to see that her face hadn’t frozen in the mask of terror and pain that he had seen too often on murder victims. It made him think that she had found a moment of peace before she died. He held on to that hope as he turned away from her.
Jeffrey was about to approach Goban, who he could see pale beneath the spotlights, huddled with the other members of his team, when his cell phone chirped. He saw Dax’s number on the caller ID display.
“What’s up?”
“Hey. I’ve got big news. You have to meet me.”
“Meet you. Where the fuck are you? Where’s Lydia?”
“Jeff, man,” said Dax, his voice excited, his accent thickening, “there’s no time to explain. Just meet me as soon as you can.” He gave Jeffrey his location.
“Dax, just tell me what you’ve got. Where’s Lydia?”
But he was talking to dead air. He felt his stomach churn a bit, his heart getting in on the action, as well. He had a keen sense of danger and every nerve inside his body was tingling. He tried Lydia, first at the apartment, then on her cell. He got voice mail both places.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself. He remembered the pale, exhausted, grief-stricken Lydia he’d left behind. If Dax had taken her from the apartment, there had to have been a good reason.
He hesitated a moment, turning his eyes back to Goban, who was looking in his direction now. He cast another glance at the letter on Rebecca’s lap. If he left the apprehension of Jed McIntyre up to the FBI, played by their rules, there were no guarantees that he would ever be caught. And frankly, that wasn’t exactly the outcome Jeffrey was looking for any longer. He turned from the scene and walked toward the car. The FBI could walk the grid, gather evidence for proper identification and prosecution, do what they had to do to tow the line. In the meantime, he was going to make sure Jed McIntyre never took another life.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, careless, fucking stupid, thought Dax through the cloud of his pain. He should have known when he saw that little dwarf with Danielle that there was something up. But who’d ever felt threatened by a midget, for fuck’s sake?
Only as he’d pulled up to the doorway in the meatpacking district where Danielle had instructed him to meet her did he wonder: Why here? Usually he met her at her corner on Tenth Avenue. But he hadn’t really thought much of it. For all her chronic neediness and her pathetic whining, he trusted her. Not in the way of friendship, exactly, but just that she was predictable. She had needs that their business transactions helped her to fulfill; it was a good arrangement. It was easy money for her. Why would she fuck with that?
She stood awkwardly beside a Dumpster. She was made up for work, this time in a wig of red curls, iridescent purple hot pants, thigh-high black boots, and a leather motorcycle jacket. Some weird kind of necklace glinted in the light from across the street. Her pink T-shirt that read YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH! in red block letters. No shit, thought Dax. Danielle was a one-person Crying Game.
He hadn’t even noticed the midget until he stopped the car. They made quite a pair. Dax had to turn away and suppress a laugh. Danielle, six feet of skanky chic, and then the little guy, who looked like a reject from a Ray Bradbury traveling carnival, barely reaching the seam of her hot pants; the street life encouraged some strange couplings, that was for certain. But this was The Twilight Zone.
He rolled down the window, smelled the snow and the stench of stale blood and raw meat. He was instantly alerted to a problem when Danielle didn’t walk over to the Rover.
“So what’s the fucking emergency, Danielle?” he said, sounding casual as he released the safety on the Desert Eagle wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console.
“This here is Horatio,” she said, motioning stiffly toward her small companion. “Says he’s got word from Rain. But he wouldn’t tell me. He only wants to talk to you.” Her voice sounded different to Dax, thick and strained. He couldn’t see her eyes in the darkness. He noticed then that a wall-mounted bulb above her head had been shattered.
“Well, let’s have it, then, mate,” he said, looking down at the dwarf. “What have you got?”
The dwarf shook his head. He hopped lightly from foot to foot, as if doing a strange ritualistic dance.
“He wants you to get out of the car. He’s afraid of you,” explained Danielle, as if she were Horatio’s translator.
“He’s going to have a lot more to fear if I get out of the car,” he said with a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. Then he gave a little laugh to break the tension that seemed to be building. “Come on, Danielle. The two of you get in and we’ll go to McDonald’s. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“You’ve got to come out here, Dax. Or Horatio’s not going to give you the message.”
“Well, fuck you both, then,” he said, rolling up the window.
“Dax!” Danielle had a chance to yell before the razor wire that had been around her throat was pulled taught by a hand that appeared out of the darkness. She raised her hands to her throat and pulled them back bleeding; a horrible noise escaped from her mouth as blood spilled from the wound, from her lips, and down her shirt. Dax sprang from the car with the Desert Eagle in his hand.
He fired a round into the dark from where the hand had come. Its roar bounced off the buildings surrounding the empty street and he heard the bullet connect with the concrete wall, sparks flying. In the fireworks he saw a dark form.
“Say hello to my little friend,” came a voice from the darkness. As the words floated across the night air to Dax’s ears, the little bastard dwarf slashed at the back of his calves with what must have been a straight razor. Achilles’ tendons sliced, Dax fell straight to the ground, the pain like rockets up the backs of his legs, the gun launching from his hand and landing out of reach.
He looked to Danielle, who had slid down the wall to slump on the ground. Her glassy eyes had rolled back into her head and Dax could see that she had bled out already. On his forearms, he crawled after his gun, craning his neck to look behind him as he went but unable to see the midget now. As his fingers strained for the weapon, a combat boot came to rest on top of it. The midget appeared to his right, his straight razor gleaming like a shooting star, a ghoulish grin on his face. Dax fought for consciousness against the white pain that was nearly paralyzing and the weakness he imagined must be resulting from a loss of blood.
Jed McIntyre stepped out of the darkness.
“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” groaned Dax, rolling over on his back.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Jed as he brought his combat boot down hard onto Dax’s face.
“The destroyers?”
“That’s what she said before she went all Jekyll and Hyde on me.”
Lydia was one with the upholstery of the Taurus, her whole body sinking into its softness, the headrest the only thing actually holding up her head. Fatigue like this was a whole new thing to her.
“Lydia,” said Ford, noting with concern the pallor of her skin, the dark circles under her eyes. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look like shit. Are you up to this?”
“What I’m not up to is lying around thinking about how fucked up my life is right now,” she said, rolling her head over to meet his gaze and placing a hand on her stomach. He gave her a sad smile and a nod.
“I hear you,” he said. “Still, you look like you belong on a gurney.”
An ambulance wailed past them as though to make a point, its red and white lights flashing, siren screaming.
“She said something else, too,” said Lydia, looking after the ambulance, which had stopped because the traffic was slow to give way. The wailing continued, seemed to get louder, and was joined by a cacophony of honking horns.
“What’s that?”
“She calls Eleanor ‘The queen’… ‘the Queen of the Damned.’ ”
“The mother-daughter relationship is very complicated,” said Ford, pulling a bad Austrian accent.
“Eleanor Ross has done a lot of lying since she hired Jeffrey and me,” Lydia continued, as if thinking aloud. “Really… she’s done little else. She never told us about her murder trial or her missing son until confronted.”
“Sins of omission…”
“And, if you think about it, she has a lot to gain. If Julian is declared incompetent, she’s most likely to become Lola and Nathaniel’s guardian.”
“So you think it’s about the kids.”
“They’ll be worth quite a bit. Daddy’s dead; Mommy’s in the nuthouse. If Julian doesn’t recover, the family estate will likely go into trust for them. There will need to be an executor.”
“Grandma.”
Lydia shrugged. It was a theory she was trying on, something she and Jeffrey had begun to discuss during their last visit to Haunted. It didn’t fit quite right, but it was something. She looked at her Movado watch.
“Maybe it’s too late to head to Haunted?”
He shrugged. He was jonesing to head up there, find Annabelle Hodge, get her to answer a few questions. But he supposed it could wait until the morning. He’d be better off heading up there with Piselli or one of the other detectives on his team, rather than cowboy it, with Lydia Strong riding shotgun. If things got out of hand, there’d be hell to pay.
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
“Let’s see if we can’t get an audience with the queen.”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got some questions for the court jester as well.”
Anthony Donofrio didn’t look happy to see Ford as he and Lydia walked through the front door of the Park Avenue apartment building. In fact, he looked downright pale. Apparently his fascination with the specifics of police work had come to an end.
In spite of Ford’s vigorous objections, Eleanor and the twins had been allowed to move back into the duplex the day before yesterday. Money talks, apparently loudly enough that the order had been handed down directly from the chief of police. He had managed to keep sealed the bedroom where Stratton had been killed. Nobody seemed to think it was at all strange that Eleanor would feel comfortable moving the twins back into the apartment where their father had been brutally murdered.
“It’s late, Detective. They’re probably asleep,” explained Anthony when no one answered his call, pulling himself up and squaring off his shoulders as if preparing himself for a fight.
Ford looked at him and noticed a light sheen of perspiration on his upper lip.
“That’s okay, Anthony. I actually have a few questions for you, too,” said Ford. “Did you know Geneva Stout?”
“Um, the name sounds vaguely fa-fa-familiar,” he answered. He’d developed a stutter.
“The nanny for the Stratton-Ross children,” said Ford calmly, looking around the foyer.
“Oh… yeah. I seen her around.”
“You never spoke to her? She’s a pretty girl,” Ford said, turning his eyes on Anthony with a knowing smile. “I would’ve thought a stud like you would be putting the moves on.”
“Uh, n-no. It wasn’t like that.”
“So you never talked to her? Never saw her outside the building?”
“No,” he said with a shrug. The guy was lying, his eyes dancing all over the place, the sudden stutter. Ford decided to let him dangle a little.
“Sure about that, Anthony?”
“I’m sure,” he said, his face coloring now.
“ ’Cause it wouldn’t be a good idea to lie to me.”
“I w-w-wouldn’t,” he said emphatically. “Let me try that buzzer for you again.”
When there was still no answer, Ford and Lydia advanced toward the elevator.
“I can’t let you go up there unannounced,” said Anthony, a lilt of panic making his voice sound like a teenager’s.
“Anthony,” said Ford as they climbed into the elevator. “Whaddaya gonna do? Call the cops?”
The doors closed and Lydia and Ford were alone.
“What the hell was the matter with that guy?” asked Lydia as the elevator climbed slowly toward the top floor.
“I’ve been thinking about how the camera got turned off. The children’s psychologist that I used to interview Lola and Nathaniel said that someone was exerting a lot of power over the kids, someone intimate.”
“Yeah?”
“And that she couldn’t see Nathaniel acting without Lola, or without someone giving orders.”
“Okay…” she said, not quite sure where he was going.
“So, if Lola was down in the basement and Nathaniel was charged with turning off the camera and then turning it back on when she was done, something or someone had to distract Anthony long enough for him to do that. He couldn’t have snuck into the office alone.”
“And, to a loser like Anthony Donofrio, nothing is quite as distracting as a pretty girl?”
“Exactly. And a nanny would certainly exert plenty of power over the children.”
“Interesting,” said Lydia as they stepped off onto the floor. They walked down the hallway and paused at double doors to the duplex. The door stood ajar. Both Ford and Lydia drew their weapons. For once, Lydia was armed. Every other time she’d needed a gun in the last two months, it had been in her bag, in her car, somewhere out of reach. With the threat of Jed McIntyre on the loose, she had grown more cautious.
“Ms. Ross?” called Ford, looking at Lydia’s Glock with disapproval. “Put that thing away, Lydia. You fire a round in this apartment and I’ve got serious trouble. I shouldn’t even allow you to be here.”
“I’m not even with you,” she said. “I came here on my own with a separate agenda.”
“Put it away,” he said again, pushing the door open, moving in front of Lydia. Naturally, Lydia ignored him.
“Ms. Ross,” he called again, this time louder.
They walked into the apartment, which was dark except for the embers of a fire still glowing in the fireplace of the drawing room to the right of the entryway. Lydia waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, keeping close to Ford. They both noticed at the same time that a form sat stiff and motionless in the overstuffed chair near the fire. Lydia felt her heart start to do the rumba and her fingers tingled with adrenaline.
“Ms. Ross?” Ford said again, this time his voice a question. There was no movement, no response from the dark figure. Ford felt along the wall for a light switch and finally found one.
She sat upright and regal, her head tilted slightly back, the expression on her face one of cool disdain, the corners of her mouth turned down. Her long, thin hands gripped the arms of the chair to which she was bound with rope. Tresses of long gray hair cascaded down over her shoulders. She looked beautiful, except for the dark red bullet hole precisely between her blue eyes.
“Shit,” said Lydia, all the answers she’d hoped to get from Eleanor disappearing up the chimney like the thin black smoke from the embers of the fire.
“Oh, God. Oh, Christ. I didn’t know. I s-s-swear to G-G-God,” cried Anthony Donofrio from behind them. He fell to his knees and started to weep.
Ford spun around to see Anthony in a crumpled mess on the floor, blubbering like a little girl. Ford’s stomach fell out. Oh, God, he thought, if Eleanor’s dead… where are the twins?
Lydia and Ford exchanged a glance, both of them of one mind, and together they ran through the living room. Ford pushed through the door and went down the long hallway that led to the children’s bedrooms. The rooms were across the hall from each other, adjoined by a bathroom. Ford handed Lydia a pair of surgical gloves and pulled on a pair himself. They split up. Ford went into Nathaniel’s room, characterized by a SpongeBob SquarePants motif. Lydia took Lola’s room, filled, it seemed, with every Barbie and Barbie accessory ever made. Lydia could hear the sounds of Ford ripping back the covers on the bed, pushing aside the clothes in the closet, as she did the same.
“They’re not here,” said Ford, breathless, walking into Lola’s room. He pulled out a cell phone and called in the Missing Children’ Unit, as well as backup from the homicide department. While he talked, he and Lydia searched the rest of the apartment. The space was filled with the sounds of Lydia and Ford calling for the twins and with Anthony wailing in the foyer the entire time, pausing only to puke his guts up on two separate occasions.
“Where are the kids, Anthony?” asked Ford, remembering the days when no one cared about police brutality.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
It seemed like a mantra he was using to calm himself. He’d said little else since Ford had grilled the truth out of him about the night Stratton was murdered. Apparently, while Richard Stratton was being disemboweled on the fourteenth floor, Anthony was getting the blow job of his life from the nanny formerly known as Geneva Stout. Anthony didn’t know he was being duped, or so he claimed tearfully. He just thought Geneva liked him. He still didn’t know how the camera got turned off, but Ford imagined that little Nathaniel snuck in while the couple were otherwise engaged and did the deed. He’d ask Nathaniel himself. But the twins were gone.
“Did it occur to you after the murder that maybe Geneva Stout had just been trying to distract you?” Ford had asked as he sat across from Anthony at the kitchen table.
Anthony shrugged, his face a mask of misery, his eyes downcast. “Not really,” he said sheepishly.
The guy was just too pathetic, too stupid. It had probably seemed just like the plot of every porn movie Anthony had ever seen. Doorman, just minding his own business, sexy nanny from upstairs comes to visit just dying to suck his dick. Anthony probably thought it happened all the time… to other guys.
“Jesus,” said Ford now, shaking his head.
“Who came into this building tonight, Anthony. You’re the fucking doorman. Who. Did. You. Let. In?”
“No one. I swear to God. No one was here.”
“Oh, someone was here.”
“Christ,” Anthony sighed, lifting his eyes toward heaven. Ford thought he might actually be praying.
“So then, maybe you want me to conclude that you came up here, killed Eleanor Ross, and hid the twins, or handed them off to someone else, or maybe even killed them.”
“Nonononono,” he wailed. “God, no way. No fucking way.”
“Then what kind of conclusion do you want me to draw?”
“I don’t know.” Back to his mantra. Ford sighed.
“Look, you’re gonna ride down to Midtown North with one of the uniforms. We need to talk more and I don’t have time right now.”
“I told you everything I know,” said Anthony, panicked.
“I don’t think so,” answered Ford. After a few hours to himself in an interrogation room, thinking things over, the thoughts and doubts would start turning like debris in the winds of a tornado: How did I get here… how did this happen… that bitch, I should’ve known she was up to something. People get talkative after a few hours in their own head.
“I want a lawyer,” he said suddenly, looking up at Ford and crossing his arms across his chest.
“You’re not under arrest,” said Ford calmly.
“Then I don’t have to go anywhere with you. I know my rights.”
Ford brought his fist down hard on the kitchen table that stood between them. Anthony jumped and looked at him with fear and an uncertain anger in his eyes.
“Do not fuck with me, Anthony,” said Ford, getting right in the kid’s face and lowering his voice to a quiet menace. “You think you know how things go because you watch NYPD Blue? You have impeded the progress of my investigation by not being forthcoming with what you know. Cooperate with me, Anthony, and you could be home by midnight. Otherwise, man, I’ll arrest you right now and you’ll need a fucking lawyer. Do we understand each other?”
Anthony nodded and lowered his head. Ford thought the guy was going to start to bawl right there. “Good,” he answered, clapping Anthony on the shoulder. “Stay here until I send someone to take you to the precinct.”
Ford left him in the kitchen and walked out back toward the living room, where the crime scene technicians were starting to arrive. Detectives Piselli and Malone stood with their arms crossed by the door; they looked lost, like they didn’t know what to do with their hands. He was reminded that they were young, new to the detective squad. Though they’d each been on the job nearly five years, they’d had mostly patrol, some “buy-and-bust.” The crime scene was still new to them in this capacity.
“How’s it going? Holding up the wall like that?” he said.
They looked embarrassed, both pushing themselves forward and glancing at him expectantly, waiting for orders. He shook his head.
“Jesus, start looking around. You know… for clues? Something that might help you figure out what went on here?”
Peter Rawls, the head of the Missing Children’s Unit, had already arrived with his team and they seemed to be setting up shop in the room opposite from where Eleanor was found. He was grim-faced and barking orders. At well over six-foot-four with Popeye arms and a chest like a side of beef, no one argued with him.
“I’m trying not to trample on your scene McKirdy,” he said with an apologetic nod. “But we got kids missing. Time is short.”
Ford looked around him. It was pandemonium; even a first-year public defender would have a field day with evidence gathered in this circus.
“We’ll work together. Find those babies, get the shooter.” Ford’s voice sounded sure even though he wasn’t. Rawls nodded.
Ford briefed Rawls quickly on the family history and the homicide case he was working. Rawls listened with his eyes down and his arms crossed, nodding as Ford ticked off the facts as they stood so far.
“What a mess,” Rawls said when Ford was done. Ford just nodded. It was a mess, all right.
“I need some time with that doorman when you’re done with him,” said Rawls.
“I am done for now. Take all the time you want with him and then have him sent to my precinct with a uniform. I’m going to take another go at him in less comfortable accommodations.”
“I’ll tell you what I get.”
“I’ll do the same.”
They swapped cell numbers and Rawls stalked off, his face drawn and determined. Ford thought he looked like a man who didn’t accept failure and he hoped that was good news for Lola and Nathaniel. Poor kids. He said a silent prayer for them, though he was not a religious man.
“Hey,” Ford said, walking toward Piselli. “Where’s Lydia Strong?”
“She left. She wasn’t looking well. Said she needed to get home.”
They walked off and Ford looked toward the door. “Crap,” he whispered to himself. Well, he thought, she’s a tough girl, with a big gun. She can take care of herself. Ford turned then to Eleanor Ross, whose corpse he thought seemed only slightly more cold and stiff than she had been in life.
She wasn’t being stubborn or reckless or any of the things she knew she’d be accused of once Jeffrey realized she’d left Ford McKirdy and headed home on her own. In fact, it was just the opposite. If she’d stayed at the scene or headed up to Haunted, she’d be hurting herself. She knew that. Her heart and mind had never felt more unwelcome in her body. What she wanted had been overridden unequivocally by pain and fatigue. Dax was wrong and she was stupid to have listened to him; she needed time to recover… mentally, physically, and emotionally. For once, she was going to do what was best for her, not what was best for her work. It was a lesson she had learned the hard way.
When the homicide guys arrived and then the Missing Children’s Unit showed up, she had felt as helpless, as useless there as she had been. Standing in the foyer looking at Eleanor’s corpse, Lydia had thought of her mother. Marion would have known which saint to pray to, which saint was charged with looking after children. Lydia couldn’t remember, so she just prayed to her mother. Prayed that Lola and Nathaniel were safe. That Nathaniel had his bunny. When her prayer was done, she knew that there was little else she could do in the state she was in, weak and ill, barely able to hold herself tall.
The energy of the loft embraced her as she stepped off the elevator and reset the alarm system. Home, she thought. And the thought sent waves of relief through her body. It was nice to be alone, too, without the watchful eyes of Dax or Jeffrey smothering her. She shed her coat and put a kettle on the stove. She could smell the warm scent of lavender mingling with the aroma of the Murphy’s Oil Soap that Zel, their cleaning lady, used to wash the floors. She sat at the kitchen table and looked out at the city. The world was different to her than it had been before the miscarriage. Even the cityscape seemed to have changed.
The skyline had always fascinated her, each light representing a life lived, each window a mystery waiting to be solved. She was forever wondering who was doing what to whom, who within those lighted windows was laughing, crying, making love, mourning, celebrating. It was this curiosity that made her good at her work… actually, it was this curiosity that made her indivisible from her work. She had realized, during the days she’d spent in a drug-induced haze, that there was no separation between what she did and who she was. Was this a bad thing? she wondered.
It amazed her that, with all the demons she had battled since the death of her mother, both internal and external, there were still so many left to fight… Jed McIntyre not least among them.
Two days before Jed McIntyre murdered Marion Strong, Lydia saw him in a supermarket parking lot. She was waiting for her mother in the car while Marion ran into the A &P to get a quart of milk. Sitting in her mother’s old Buick, the fifteen-year-old Lydia punched the hard plastic keys on the AM/FM radio, checking each preset station for acceptable listening, when she felt the hairs raise on the back of her neck. She felt heat that started at the base of her skull and moved like fire down her spine. A hollow of fear opened in her belly. She turned around and looked out the rear windshield.
The car’s front windows were open and the already cool fall air seemed to chill. The man stood with his legs a little more than shoulder length apart, one hand in the pocket of his denim jacket and one resting on the sideview mirror of his red and white car, which reminded Lydia of the car in Starsky and Hutch. His flaming red hair was curly and disheveled, blowing into his eyes. She remembered that he did not move to keep it off his face. He just stared and rocked lightly back onto his heels and then forward onto the balls of his feet. Seeing him standing beside his car, his gaze locked on her, made her senses tingle. She detected his malice in his unyielding stare, his perversion in the way he began to caress the sideview mirror when their eyes met. She had reached to lock the doors and roll up the windows without taking her eyes off of him.
When her mother returned to the car, Lydia pointed out the man to her and he just stood there smiling. Marion tried to tell her it was nothing. But Lydia could see her mother was afraid in the hurried way she threw the milk into the backseat and got into the car, the way she fumbled to put the key in the ignition. They drove off and the man pulled out after them. But when Marion made a quick turn, he did not pursue them. They laughed; the threat, real or imagined, was gone. But Lydia would look back at that moment as the point at which she could have saved her mother’s life. She had written down the license plate number with blue eyeliner on the back of a note a friend had passed to her in class. That information had led to the apprehension of Jed McIntyre, serial murderer of thirteen single mothers in the Nyack, New York, area. But only after he had killed Marion Strong, leaving her where Lydia would find her beaten and violated as she returned home from school.
She knew now, of course, that even if they had reported the parking lot incident to the police, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. But when she got that feeling, the feeling she and Jeffrey had come to know as “the buzz,” she had never been able to walk away from it again. Wondering always who else would die if she did.
She had walked away from the missing twins, from Eleanor and Julian Ross tonight, not because this curiosity, the need to hunt the demons and save their victims, had died. It was not that she didn’t care about the children, Julian’s plight, or Eleanor’s murder. She did very much; this drive was alive and well within her. It was just that the loss of her baby, the risk to her own life, and the damage done to her body had made clear things that had always been nebulous. She had realized for the first time how much her own life was worth, how much she cherished her time with Jeffrey, and how much, even though she hadn’t realized it, she had wanted to be a mother. She rested her head on her arm and let a tear fall, as a hot wave of sadness swept over her.
There was a kind of peace to her grief, though. There was an irony to the situation that was not lost on her. Only the loss of her pregnancy could have made her see what it took to be a mother. And how she never could have taken care of her child when she wasn’t even willing to take care of herself. Something in the fact that she had learned this lesson comforted her, made her believe that there would be another chance to do it right. She was reminded of the airplane safety rule stating that should the oxygen masks drop you should put on your own mask before putting it on your child. Something that seems so selfish, so backward, may be the ultimate selfless act. You can’t help anyone until you’ve helped yourself.
The kettle on the stainless steel stovetop whistled and Lydia got up to make herself a cup of raspberry tea. She took the cup and placed it on the coffee table, pulled off her boots and lay on the couch. She pulled the chenille blanket over herself and sank into the plush furniture. She thought to turn on the television and watch the news, but she decided no. She thought briefly that she should check her messages. But she didn’t do that, either. She never even had a chance to sip her tea because sleep came for her hard and fast and there was no resisting.
Sitting alone there, Anthony had indeed, as Ford suspected, whipped himself into a frenzy of worry, deciding confession and contrition were his only options. By the time Ford arrived, Anthony was barely holding it in. When Ford walked into the room, it reeked of fear and body odor. Ford hadn’t even taken his seat before Anthony started talking.
“She hated Julian Ross. And Eleanor, too. I mean hated their guts,” said Anthony, wiping perspiration from his brow. He looked pale in the harsh fluorescents, with black smudges of fatigue and worry under his eyes. Anthony was a reasonably big guy with broad shoulders and thick arms, but behind the long table he looked deflated.
“Who did?”
“Geneva… or whatever her name was.”
“Annabelle.”
“Yeah.”
“So you talked about Julian,” said Ford, leaning his elbows on the table and folding his hands.
“And Eleanor. Yeah, we talked sometimes.”
“So the whole dick-sucking incident wasn’t your first encounter, is what you’re telling me. Because before, you made it sound like-”
Anthony held up a hand and gave a nod. “We talked a couple of times. Nothing serious, you know. Not like we were dating or anything. I took her for coffee around the corner. But that’s it. I swear.”
“When did you talk?”
“She’d come down at night, after the kids were in bed. Sometimes she’d bring a couple of beers. She was lonely. I thought she was lonely,” he said. His mouth had turned down at the corners and he shook his head a little bit. Anthony had been used and it was just starting to dawn on him. Ford felt for the guy, he really did.
“So what did you talk about?”
“About Julian and Eleanor Ross, mostly. She did most of the talking. I listened,” he said, looking down at the table. “I guess, looking back, it always seemed like I could have been there, or not.”
“So what kind of things did she say?”
“A lot of it didn’t make sense. She would start off talking about what a bitch Ms. Ross was, how badly she treated her, Geneva-Annabelle, I mean. Then she would start on how Julian didn’t deserve the life she had, her husband, the twins, all their money. But then she’d say things like, ‘One day soon, that’s all going to change.’ When I asked her what she meant, she’d say that the past was bound to catch up with Julian and Eleanor Ross.”
“You didn’t think that was an odd thing to say?”
“I guess, to be honest, I wasn’t really thinking too much about what she was saying,” he said, looking at Ford sheepishly. “She was, you know, really hot. I was mostly just thinking about what it would be like to fuck her.”
Ford nodded, not surprised.
“Did it sound like a threat to you? Like she was planning to hurt Julian Ross?”
“No… it sounded more like a prediction.”
Ford cocked his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. “A prediction.”
“Yeah, like she knew something bad was going to happen; not like she was threatening to make her pay for something. There’s a difference, don’t you think?”
Ford shrugged. “Did she ever talk about her home, her family? Did she ever mention Haunted?”
“She said she was part Haitian. Seemed pretty proud of it. She said, and I remember thinking this was weird, that she had the blood of a voodoo priestess in her veins. I was, like, You’re not going to put a curse on me, are you? She didn’t seem to think that was very funny.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Not if you’re good.’ But she didn’t laugh or anything. She was a little freaky, I guess.”
“I guess.”
Back to the voodoo curses, thought Ford. Lydia Strong might not have been as far off base as he’d thought. He looked at Anthony, who instead of seeming less agitated after spilling his guts seemed to be getting more uncomfortable. He shifted up in his chair, rolled his neck and shoulders, releasing audible pops.
“What else, Anthony?”
He shrugged, looked around the room. He nodded to himself finally, as if coming to a decision after an internal conference.
“Tonight. She was there again tonight.”
Ford shook his head in disbelief. “And you’re just getting to this now?”
“I didn’t know…” he said, his voice trailing off miserably.
“What did she want?”
“She didn’t come to see me.”
“Who’d she come to see?” asked Ford, feeling like he was going to have to wrestle every last bit of information from this kid.
“Eleanor Ross.”
“And coincidentally, now Eleanor Ross is dead. And the twins missing.”
Anthony nodded.
“What time did she come?”
“Around nine-thirty. Just after I came on duty.”
“So you called up to Eleanor and told her Geneva was here.”
“She said Eleanor was expecting her. That she was holding a paycheck for Geneva, and that she still had a key.”
“So you didn’t call up?”
Anthony hesitated a moment and then shook his head.
“And what time did she leave?”
“I never saw her leave. I thought she was still up there, maybe playing with the twins.”
Ford turned it over in his mind. The basement entrance had been sealed and was no longer a way in or out. The back door, he knew, was attached to a fire alarm.
“Let me just ask you, Anthony,” said Ford, reaching. “Did the fire alarm go off tonight for any reason?”
“Yeah, that thing is always acting up,” he said with a laugh and a shake of his head like they were talking about a mischievous child. Then it dawned on him. “Oh… yeah.”
“What time was that?”
“I guess about an hour before you arrived.”
“Anything else, Anthony? And I mean anything.”
Anthony shook his head slowly, his eyes telling Ford that he was searching the limited database of his brain. “Nope,” he said finally. “Can I go now?”
“Did you tell any of this to Peter Rawls when he talked to you?”
Anthony shook his head. Ford glared at him and Anthony seemed to shrink into himself.
“With missing kids, every hour, shit, every minute counts. You may just cost those kids their lives. I hope you can live with that, Anthony.”
Anthony started to blubber again. Ford was old school. He really hated it when men cried. He turned his back on the man and walked out the door.
“But-” Anthony was protesting as Ford closed the door behind him. He turned the camera and audio recorder off from the switch that looked like a thermostat outside the door.
Returning to his office, he called Peter Rawls and told him about Annabelle Hodge. Rawls sounded excited by the news of a suspect and he hung up the phone quickly. Then Ford called Piselli and told him to make sure that Rawls got anything from their files on Annabelle that he needed. He thought about the kids for a minute, remembering how they’d clasped hands during the interview with Irma Fox. And it made him think of his Katie and Jimmy. He thought about little Nicky Warren watching his mother shoot his father. He felt a rush of anger at the way kids get crushed when adults fail to protect them.
He leaned back in his chair, absently tapping an impatient staccato on the desk, trying to strategize his next move. His fingers touched manila.
Sitting on his desk was nothing short of a miracle. DNA evidence analysis takes weeks, sometimes months, especially in New York. Now, with all the cold cases being reopened, death row appeals, you’re lucky to get your results at all. But Ford had a few friends, and the Ross case was a high priority. Still, he was surprised to see an envelope from the lab on his desk. In spite of the lecture he’d delivered to Lydia Strong, he had sent her Milky Way wrapper, with the hairs from the Tad Jenson murder scene, up to the lab.
“Well, goddamn,” he said softly, scanning the report. “It’s a match.”
He’d sat there at his desk, working out what this might mean. It didn’t mean James Ross was still alive, necessarily. They didn’t have a DNA sample on him to compare to the hair and the wrapper. Legally, it only meant that someone at the scene of the Tad Jenson murder had also been in the basement of the Ross house in Haunted. Ford picked up the phone on his desk. When he didn’t get Jeff, he left a message.
“Jeff, it’s Ford. Listen, Lydia was right. That DNA evidence from the Milky Way bar links whoever attacked her in the Ross home with someone present at the Jenson scene. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m heading up to Haunted. This can’t wait till tomorrow, especially with the twins missing. I’ll keep you posted.”
The ringing of her cell phone woke her finally. She glanced at the clock and saw that it was after two. It took her a few seconds to orient herself… home alone, Jeffrey not back, phone ringing… where’s the phone? She found it in her jacket and saw on the caller ID that it was Jeffrey.
“Where are you?” she answered.
“Hello, Lydia.”
She let silence be her answer as dread swelled within her. His voice had a nasal quality, a kind of raspy edge to it that she recognized even though she’d heard him speak only a few times. The room seemed to spin around her.
“You don’t have to answer. I know you know who this is, old friend.”
She didn’t say anything because she couldn’t. Fear had lodged itself in her throat like a chicken bone.
“It’s been too long. We must get together, Lydia. It’ll be a party. Your beloved Jeffrey and your friend and guardian Dax have already joined me. It wouldn’t be the same without you. But, darling, it’s a private party. Do not contact your friend Ford or Agent Goban. Come alone, come as you are, and come quickly.”
“You don’t have them,” she managed, clinging to denial. This wasn’t happening. It was too much like a nightmare. “I don’t believe you.”
Her mind raced. Wasn’t this phone tapped? And then she remembered that no, only the land line was trapped. The cell transmissions weren’t always monitored.
“We’ve been through so much together. Do you think I’d lie to you?”
When she said nothing, his voice changed from mocking, crooning, to razor-sharp.
“Think about it. Do you really think you’d be alone right now if I didn’t? For such well-armed, well-trained men, it was really ridiculously easy.”
“Where are you?” she said, suppressing a wave of nausea.
He told her where he wanted her to meet him.
“Remember, Lydia: One phone call from you to anyone and the party is over. Do you understand me?”
“I do.”
The line went dead. Lydia waited, blood rushing in her ears, throat dry as sand, heart thumping. She waited to wake up in her bed, Jeffrey breathing beside her. When she didn’t, she ran upstairs to their bedroom. She pulled off her shirt and pulled on a black ribbed Calvin Klein sweater of Jeffrey’s. She traded the yoga pants she was wearing for comfort, since her abdomen was still swollen from surgery, for a pair of Levi’s. She unlocked the safe in the floor and removed a Smith and Wesson.38 Special and a shoulder holster.
Downstairs, she took the Glock from her bag and stuffed it in the back of her jeans, donned her leather jacket and a pair of soft black leather motorcycle boots at the door, and she was gone. Adrenaline had taken care of her pain and fatigue, for the time being at least.
He recognized the smell, but he just couldn’t see through the blackness that surrounded him; it was a copious dark in which not even a pinprick of light had survived. He could feel the space, cold and concrete, damp. As he fought to hold on to consciousness, his head nothing but a house of pain, he knew something was not as it should be. He just couldn’t remember what. There was an odd tightness in his limbs. He was having difficulty breathing and he felt as if the room were spinning… or maybe his head was spinning. He tried to piece together the last events of his memory, but they eluded him, like the fading images of a dream.
There was a low groan to the left of him. And in hearing it, memory came rushing back like a kick in the teeth.
He’d taken the call from Dax and rushed to meet him, uneasiness buzzing in his subconscious. Something about Dax’s voice, something about the way he’d said Jeff’s name. Normally, his accent seemed to drag the word out, imbuing it with a rising and falling of tone, like Jay-eh-f. There was usually something pleasant about his tone, even when it was gruff, something musical and comforting about that Aussie accent. But that night, he’d seemed terse, his accent strained. If it hadn’t been for the caller ID announcing his number, Jeffrey might not have recognized Dax’s voice at all. But he’d ignored the alarm bells ringing, told himself that Dax was just excited and in a rush.
There are a few significant ways in which life is not like movies. Here, bound in the darkness, scared and disoriented, Jeffrey thought of one of those ways. In the real world, sometimes people disappear and no one who loves them ever knows what happened to them. Like the West Village couple who were expecting friends for dinner one fall evening a couple of years back. When their friends arrived and rang the buzzer, no answer. After waiting around for an hour or so, they figured that there had been a misunderstanding about date and time and left. But three days later, the superintendent lets NYPD into that apartment, after numerous calls from family and friends, and the table is set for entertaining, food is on the stove and in the oven; their shoes are by the door. It was as if something had sucked them from their life still in their stocking feet.
There was a dispute between the couple-middle-aged, childless, working good jobs, the woman in publishing, the man a public school teacher-and their landlord. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment that, if they vacated, could be rented for four times what they were paying for it, having lived there since the late seventies. For weeks there were news stories, posters all over the city. Then nothing; they faded from the city’s memory. Jeffrey remembered the maddening feeling that they wouldn’t ever be found, that no one would ever be certain if they were alive or dead, or what they might have endured in their last few hours on this planet. A life interrupted, no reason why.
Their disappearances coincided within a few weeks of police finding dismembered limbs on the Jersey side of the Henry Hudson. A couple of legs, some arms, a hand. Thought to be the work of the Russian mob, and in conjunction with allegations that the landlord had connections with the same organization, police thought initially that the mystery had been solved, as least as far as their end was concerned. Turns out the limbs belonged to someone else. Never identified. Another unsolved mystery… another miserable end.
He thought about Lydia now, feeling his heart begin pounding in his chest with fear for her, fear for himself. Where was she? Where was Jed McIntyre? Was this his plan, to keep Dax and Jeff locked up until he’d finished with her? He struggled against his bindings, which felt as if they must be duct tape. Panic was a swelling tide within him and he tried to keep it from choking him. He’d failed her so many times in the last few months, failed to protect her, failed to protect their child. He could barely stand the thoughts that were racing through his mind. Again the groan, bringing him back to himself.
“Dax?”
“Why the fuck did you come, man? That was the worst Australian accent I’d ever heard,” said the darkness. “Christ, you’re stupid.”
“I saw your number on the caller ID,” he said lamely, hating himself for ignoring his instincts. Fucked by technology.
“He took my phone,” said Dax miserably, somewhere down and to the left.
The other way in which life differed significantly from the movies was that much of it is a series of stupid mistakes, unplotted, unplanned, reactionary.
When he’d pulled up to the warehouse in the meatpacking district, he first saw the Rover, parked, headlights on, driver’s door standing open. Next, he’d seen Dax lying face down in a pool of blood. Forgetting every moment of training he’d ever had, not even thinking for a second who could be lurking in the darkness, he’d jumped from the Kompressor and run to help his friend. He saw too late that Dax’s mouth was gagged, his eyes open and wild with warning. Out of the corner of his vision, he saw a small form emerge from the darkness. In a surreal moment, a midget raised a blackjack and nailed him in the temple.
“Was there a midget?” Jeffrey asked Dax.
“Fucking midget,” answered Dax. “I’m going to kill that little turd.”
“What’s your situation right now?”
“I’m in trouble, man,” he said, his voice thick and slow, as if he were just barely holding on to consciousness. “That little dwarf sliced the back of my calves. I think I’m missing some teeth. I taste blood. I’m bound, can’t move.”
“Shit,” said Jeff, his stomach hollowing out. “Hang in there, buddy. It’s going to be okay.” Panic was replaced by a lethargy, a feeling of desperate hopelessness.
That was the other way in which life was so different from fiction. Not everyone always gets out alive.
Lydia felt an odd calm as she walked down the cold empty street, a light snowfall crunching beneath her feet. The lamps created circles of light in a dark winter sky and the snowflakes that fell there glittered like stardust. On one level, she was scared-terrified, of course. That part of herself seemed to exist beneath a surface of soundproof glass, banging, screaming, but unheard. Mostly, she was numb. She had the sense that every moment of her life since the death of her mother had led her to this moment. She thought of what Julian Ross had said about the music written for her, the notes one chose to play or not. But Lydia wasn’t quite as passive as that. She had written this symphony for all of them and she recognized it now. Hadn’t she in a way forced the hand of fate? If she hadn’t lived the life she had, chasing monsters, pulling back the curtain on evil, would she be here now? Would Dax and Jeffrey be in danger… or worse? She knew as a fact that they would all be somewhere else this moment. She couldn’t say if it would be a better situation or a worse one, though it was a safe bet it couldn’t be much worse. But they wouldn’t be here.
If she hadn’t written With a Vengeance, the book about Jed McIntyre and his crimes, he may never even have thought of her again while he rotted away in the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane. If she and Jeffrey hadn’t gotten into that mess in Miami, Jed McIntyre would still be locked away. She took a sharply cold breath of air into her lungs and stopped herself. This was a mental spiral that could only lead to a loss of focus. And she needed to be focused right now. She could self-flagellate later, when they were all safe.
She didn’t have far to go. Just to the abandoned subway station at Prince and Lafayette. She was to walk down the stairs and wait at the gate. She thought of the network of tunnels Dax and Jeffrey had described to her. She was about to see them for herself. She paused at the top of the stairs and wondered, not for the first time, if she should call Ford or Agent Goban. Somehow she didn’t quite believe that McIntyre had the ability to know what she was doing, that he was watching her, or had some way to listen to her phone; but she was reluctant to take the chance. As if in answer to her musings, the phone in her pocket rang. She retrieved it and put it to her ear.
“Well,” said Jed McIntyre. “What are we waiting for?”
Jeffrey was sitting on some kind of rickety wooden chair, each ankle bound to a chair leg, each wrist bound to its arms. Dax was gnawing at the binding on Jeffrey’s ankle like a rat. Since Dax was tied and on his belly, that was the only binding he could reach. Occasionally he would stop and spit, make a noise of distaste. Jeffrey slowly moved his foot and ankle forward, trying to put stress on the tape. They didn’t seem to be making much progress, until suddenly Jeffrey had more freedom of movement. The hope gave him strength and after a few minutes, he snapped the ankle free.
“Now what?” said Dax. “What are we going to do with this free ankle? Kick our way out?”
He had a point.
“Knock yourself over,” suggested Dax. “And I’ll try to get the bindings on your hands.”
Jeffrey began to rock himself and eventually toppled to the side, landing hard on cold concrete.
“Does this type of thing really happen?” he asked.
“I heard that some people are actually hiring companies to kidnap them. I mean, like, attack them on the street, take them away in a van, and tie them up like this. They predetermine the number of days they’ll be held, what kinds of things they want to happen to them. They try to get away. For fun. Can you imagine? There are too many idiots with money in this city.”
“No shit.”
Awkwardly, they snaked their bodies closer to each other, and after a few minutes of adjustment, Dax went to work on one of Jeffrey’s wrists.
“You know,” said Jeffrey, “in some cultures we’d have to get married now.”
Dax spit. “Bloody homo.”
Standing behind the gate was a homely midget. He was filthy, with a big face and a striped stocking cap; in his hand he held a key, which he passed through the gate to her. Lydia suppressed the urge to run screaming. When she leaned in to him, she saw that his beard was full of crumbs and that he gave off a strange odor, some combination of body odor, foot rot, and baked goods. He smiled a dirty smile at her, his teeth brown and filmy, as she swung open the gate. He took the key back from her and locked it behind them, then he jumped down on the tracks. She followed quickly, landing awkwardly and almost dropping to her knees. She’d never thought to carry a flashlight. The dwarf seemed comfortable with the darkness, so she kept her eyes on him and stayed close to the wall as the relative light from the abandoned station behind them faded, becoming smaller until it disappeared altogether.
The dwarf jumped though a hole in the concrete, and, pausing to look through, all Lydia could see was black. The darkness seemed alive with ugly possibilities and she was aware that her heart was pounding in her chest, every nerve ending in her body pulsing with fear and the desire to flee. She could hear the skittering of rats, but she couldn’t see them. The sound of their tiny, clawed paws seemed to come from above and below her, all around. She steeled herself and followed the midget through the hole like Alice in some sick urban Underland.
They were making progress until Dax passed out. His head just kind of got heavier against Jeffrey’s arm, and Jeffrey felt a wave of fear.
“Dax? Dax?” he said uselessly, his voice bouncing off the concrete that surrounded them. He forced his own breathing to quiet, and was relieved to hear Dax’s. He couldn’t begin to imagine how much blood Dax had lost.
For a second he almost believed that this was a nightmare, not real. He didn’t want to believe they were going to die down here; thinking thoughts like that was suicide. But things were looking grim. He continued to turn his wrist, working it in circles and trying to stretch the tape and put stress on the tear Dax had made. He thought of Lydia, imagining that this piece of tape was the only thing that kept him from seeing her again, that kept him from holding her safe and warm in their apartment. He imagined that it was the only thing that kept them from putting an end to Jed McIntyre. Finally, he pulled his hand free. He had a moment of elation and relief. He reached out his hand to touch Dax’s neck, feeling for a pulse. It was weak; but he was alive.
He went to work on the other hand, the left half of his body free now. He imagined that getting this hand loose was the only thing that was going to save Dax. And it wasn’t far from the truth. Dax groaned next to him.
“Hang in there, Dax. Hold on.”
It was then that he heard someone approaching in the darkness. Jeffrey held his breath, every nerve in his body on edge. There was silence again and he started pulling desperately on the other bindings. The sound of chains and a padlock coming undone made him freeze. He came as close to praying as he ever had. A door swung open and a large form stood in the doorway. It was lighter outside than it was in the room where they were being held, but he still couldn’t see the face of the person standing before them.
“You boys are in a lot of trouble… again,” said a voice Jeffrey recognized.
She didn’t know how long they had been walking and the darkness was disorienting. She felt closed in and was having difficulty breathing in the dankness. Though she was trying to remember where they had turned by running her hands along the wall, feeling for abnormalities that she would remember if feeling her way out, it seemed fairly hopeless. She had no idea where she was, and if she turned and tried to leave, she might be wandering the tunnels forever.
She followed her guide more just by hearing him than actually seeing him. He shuffled his feet loudly, maybe on purpose so she could hear him. Or maybe that was just the way he walked… quickly, rushing, shuffling his little feet. He hadn’t said a word and she wondered if he was mute. She started talking, mainly just to make herself feel better.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked him. “What’s he giving you?”
He didn’t answer her, just gave a little snort that was maybe meant to express disdain.
“Because he’s using you, you know. When you’ve fulfilled your purpose he’ll kill you and never think twice about it. So anything he’s promised you is a lie.”
“Shut up,” came a small, whiny voice from in front of her.
Bull’s-eye, she thought with an inner smile.
“It’s true. He doesn’t care about you. He’s not your friend.”
She had given it a little thought while feeling her way through the darkness. What would motivate someone to do the bidding of Jed McIntyre? The life of a homeless dwarf couldn’t be an easy one. He was probably scared a lot of the time, lonely, a misfit even in a land of misfits. Money doesn’t buy loyalty for very long, generally. But fear can, gratitude, maybe for a time. Maybe Jed was offering him protection.
“You think he’s looking out for you. But as soon as he has what he wants, he won’t need you anymore, Shorty.”
“Don’t call me that,” he said, his voice defensive and angry.
She grinned at her victory. Even in moments of mortal danger and terrible fear, Lydia really had a knack for fucking with people’s heads.
“Just tell me what he promised you. Is he protecting you? He’s going to leave you here when he goes, trust me. He’s not taking you with him. Besides, I’m going to kill him. Then you’ll have to answer to me.”
The midget laughed and it sounded at once childlike and sinister.
“Yeah, right. You’re going to kill him.”
“Watch me. Then we’ll see who’s laughing.”
His giggling stopped abruptly. “When he’s done with you, you’re not even going to want to live.”
The words sent an army of chills from her neck into her fingertips. She wanted to pull out her gun and make the dwarf wet his pants and weep for mercy. But if she killed him, she’d never find Jeffrey. If she never found Jeffrey, then the little bastard would be right after all.
“When this is over, I’m going to have mercy on you, Shorty.”
“Isn’t that generous?” came another voice out of the darkness. “You’re a better person than I am, Lydia Strong.”
Suddenly there was light and the darkness seemed to skitter away in the beam of the powerful flashlight. In the momentary blindness that followed, she heard Jed McIntyre laugh.
She struggled against arms that wrapped around her from behind, arms as cold and strong as lengths of chain. One impossibly powerful arm held her immobile across the chest and another wrapped tightly around her throat. She tried to twist away from him, feeling weak against his superior weight and the intensity of his grip on her. When she stomped down hard down on his foot, his grip loosened for just a moment and she managed to free an arm. Her hand flew to the shoulder holster but stopped dead when she felt the steel of a blade against her neck. It was so sharp that just the lightest touch nicked her skin and she felt a warm vein of blood trickle down her neck. Her breathing came harsh and ragged.
“This would be a good time to hand over your weapons, Lydia,” Jed McIntyre said reasonably. “I can feel one here at your back.”
Releasing her arms but keeping the knife pressed to her throat, he pulled the Glock from her waistband and handed it to the dwarf. “I dislike guns,” he said. “They’re so sloppy.”
The dwarf pointed it at her, his grin superior and malicious. She wondered if he realized she had the safety on. It was a piece of information she’d hold on to for the time being. Her mind was oddly clear in spite of the horror and unreality of the situation. Things seemed to be happening very slowly.
Jed McIntyre removed the Smith and Wesson from the holster and pushed her away from him; she hit a concrete wall hard. She raised a hand to her neck and felt the wet stickiness of her own blood. It looked black on her fingers.
Jed McIntyre picked up the flashlight that lay on the ground and shone it under his face. He looked ghoulish in the harsh white light, creating black circles under his eyes, his teeth yellow and shining. His red hair was a chaos of wild curls.
“You can’t imagine how long I’ve been waiting for this moment, Lydia. Doesn’t it feel like destiny?”
With that he pointed the revolver at the dwarf, whose malicious smile melted into uncertainty. He let go a little laugh, his eyes darting from Jed to Lydia and back to Jed. “What are you doing?” he asked, voice cracking. “Come on, Jed. It’s not funny.”
“I wouldn’t shoot that in here if I were you,” said Lydia, looking around at the concrete tunnel they were in. At such close range the bullet would pass through the dwarf and ricochet all over the tunnel.
“Sorry, Horatio. It’s been great.”
Horatio swung the gun he had pointed at Lydia toward Jed. It was too big for his hands, but he managed to reach the trigger. But the gun wouldn’t fire. Those pesky safeties.
McIntyre fired the revolver and Lydia dropped to the ground, curled herself in a ball, and covered her head with her arms. The echoing bang must have been heard for miles.
Horatio issued a girlish scream that ended abruptly in a horrible gurgle. She heard him fall to the floor, heard him rasping and convulsing there on the ground for thirty seconds, maybe more. She heard the sharp scream of the bullet as it bounced off the walls, twice, maybe three times before losing momentum, all the while waiting to be struck by it. She leaned against the wall, feeling pity and revulsion, terror and rage come in flashes, competing with one another in intensity. Then there was silence.
“I hope I didn’t act in haste,” said McIntyre, musing.
Horatio’s leg twitched horribly for a few seconds more as blood drained from a throat wound. Lydia felt pity for him as she got to her feet to stand face to face with Jed McIntyre.
“Ford?”
“Rose.”
“How are you?”
“Can’t complain.” His throat felt as dry and his hands as shaky as a boy talking to his crush. An awkward silence fell between them. They were strangers to each other now. Strangers who shared a twenty-five-year past.
“Where are you?” he asked finally.
“With Katie in Houston.”
“How is she?”
“She’s doing well.”
Again silence. He wasn’t sure what she wanted, why she called. Was it guilt?
“I miss you, Ford.”
He closed his eyes against the swell of emotions that rose in his chest. If he released all that he was feeling, he was sure that the wires on the phone would burst into flames. “I miss you, too,” he said in a voice that croaked, one he barely recognized.
“Can we talk?”
“Aren’t we talking?”
“In person.”
“Come home,” he said, and he tried not to sound like he was begging.
“Ford…”
“Just come home, Rose. We’ll talk all you want.”
“Things have to change.”
“Okay whatever you want,” he said, and he meant it.
“No. It has to be what we want, Ford. If we don’t want the same things, then there’s no point in our being together anymore. Do you understand that?”
He paused, listening, really listening to her, maybe for the first time. He did know what she meant and he wondered if maybe it was hopeless after all.
“I can only be what I am, Rose,” he admitted, expecting her to hang up.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Her voice was soft, loving, sounding like she had when they were young.
“We’ll talk, then. Figure it out.”
“Yes. I’ll come home in a few days. Friday.”
“Okay.”
“Ford?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
He cried then; he didn’t care that she heard him sobbing like a baby. “I love you, Rose. So much,” he managed to croak before he hung up the phone.
He played the conversation over in his mind as he drove the Taurus up to Haunted. He’d stopped home before heading upstate, to shower and change, more to keep himself awake than out of concern for hygiene, and had been there to take the call from Rose. Part of him was starting to believe he dreamt it, that she wasn’t really coming back, that he was going to be forced to live out the rest of his life alone with only his unsolved cases to fill the empty hours and years. Like a schoolgirl, he analyzed her words. Was she coming back to stay? If he didn’t say the right things, would she leave again? Friday seemed impossibly far away. He pushed the conversation from his mind. He had to focus now. Two children were missing, two people were dead, three if you counted Tad.
He raced up the road that wound toward the outskirts of the town. Tall trees rose on either side of him and there was only the sliver of a moon in the sky. He should have waited for morning. But with the kids missing now, there wasn’t a second to waste. He was a homicide detective, so finding out who killed Richard Stratton might be the only way he could help Lola and Nathaniel. Maybe he should have brought someone with him. But he needed Malone and Piselli working the crime scene, working with the task force assembled to find the twins. He reached for his cell phone to call Malone, let them know where he was headed. But the thing was dead. Goddamn things always ringing, never charged when you need them.
Anyway, he wasn’t going to go breaking into the Ross house in the middle of the night, he wasn’t going into the Hodge residence looking for Annabelle and Maura. He was just going to look around, absorb the situation, see who was coming and going. Before he made a move, he’d get some help, maybe stop by the precinct and get a hand from old Henry Clay’s boys.
He found the drive leading to the Hodge house, then found a spot and pulled the car over, gave it some thought, and felt a little conspicuous beside the gate. So he drove a few yards farther until he found a place where he could move his vehicle slightly into the trees and out of the path of approaching headlights, giving him a little more cover. Then he cut the engine and settled in. It was going to be a long, cold night. But at least he could think about Rose and hope that this was going to be one of his last nights without her.
How do you have a conversation with your worst nightmare? Lydia wondered. How do you do something as mundane as move your lips to talk when looking into the face that has become in your imaginings the embodiment of evil?
Since the murder of her mother, in Lydia’s nightmares and daydreams Jed McIntyre had become Freddy Krueger and Jason and Charlie Manson in one horrible form. Standing across from him, she looked at his hands and knew that the bones within them bent to grip the knife that killed her mother, that part of him touched her in her last moments. It was almost too much for her mind to get around. She felt a part of herself shutting down, slipping into a kind of shock, a welcome emptiness.
But so close to him, seeing him in flesh and blood, seeing his chest rise and fall with his breath, smelling the stench of his body, in fact, took some of his power away. He was just a man with a beating heart, with skin, muscle, and bone. He was not a demon, a supernatural force the way he’d seemed to her since his mistaken release. He was just a man with an evil heart and a sick mind. Someone who would meet his end like the rest of them. Hopefully sooner.
“Where are they?” she forced the words from her mouth like they were children clinging to her coattails.
“We’ll go to see them. Would you like that?”
She nodded.
“I wish I didn’t see so much hatred in your eyes, Lydia. That’s not what I’d hoped for,” he said, and he really did sound disappointed.
She shook her head, reminded of how insane he was. He moved closer to her and she shrank from him. A look of hurt flashed in his eyes and she almost laughed.
“What did you expect?” she asked, not wanting to feel his name on her tongue, as if to say it would validate him in some way.
“I just thought maybe somewhere inside, you’d come to feel about me the same way I feel about you. That we are one mind, one heart. Sure, we have a complicated past. But can’t we move beyond that?”
She had heard this tone of voice before. It was the tone of the manipulator, the controller, the tone of righteousness implying that all you think and all you feel, the things you believe, are wrong-headed. It was the tone of the angry and abusive man, the one who coaxes at first, then turns to violence when challenged. She’d heard it before, a couple of points lower on the Richter scale. It made him less frightening somehow, reducing him to his twisted psychology. She wondered how delusional he really was, how easily she could fool him. She forced herself to smile, though she wasn’t sure she could make it reach her eyes. Pretending was not one of her strong suits.
“I don’t hate you,” she said softly. “Not at all.”
He was a coil of energy, wound tight and ready to spring. She tried to look into his blue eyes but saw only a flat deadness reflected there. It was as if the thing within us that makes us human hadn’t been granted to Jed McIntyre. Seeing him confirmed her long-held belief that evil was the absence of something, rather than the presence of something. He was a golem, a hideous creature in the tunnels below New York City, hated and reviled, hunted, made wretched and alone by his own terrible self. Even in his grasp, he was less terrifying to her than he had been in her imagination.
“I’m crazy, not stupid,” he said, echoing exactly the words Jetty Murphy had said to Ford McKirdy. Funny how things came in circles.
He grabbed her arm and put the barrel of the gun to her temple. “We’re in the endgame now. Let’s not dawdle.”
They came to a place where a rumble of trains could be heard far in the distance above their heads, a place where pieces of concrete fell fine and glittering like snow. Though Lydia couldn’t imagine what their source could be, thin, very faint shafts of light came through the spaces between metal beams, revealing walls covered with graffiti, an old sagging couch, and other abandoned furniture. A school desk balancing on three legs, a toppled standing ashtray, a card table, its vinyl surface ripped and pouting like a mouth. A filthy pile of school lunch trays and milk cartons lay near the tracks. Unbelievably, a small tree stood in the dirt. It looked as though it had struggled in the dim light, then gave up the fight, its dead branches radiating an aura of abandonment and failure. Lydia tried to imagine the journey of each of these objects, how each of them had wound up in this place. It was something her mind was doing to distract her from the situation she was in; a kind of coping mechanism to keep the brain from being devoured by the chemicals of terror.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Lydia, her flippant tone belying the fear that had burrowed a home in her belly.
“Mi casa, su casa,” said McIntyre with a smile.
She hated him so much she felt like her heart would turn inside out. Death was too good for him, too easy, too quick a way out. She wanted to make him pay, not just for the things he had done, but for the way she had felt over the last sixteen years of her life. She had carried this hatred around with her for so long, it had poisoned nearly every experience she’d had, impacted nearly every decision, it had, in effect, changed the entire vector of her life. She hadn’t realized the intensity of her pain and her anger she had carried on her back all these years until just this moment.
Again, she thought about the curse of Annabelle Taylor. She thought of how hatred and righteous anger had warped generation after generation of two families. And then she thought about her own lost child. She had to wonder if a child could survive in a body so consumed by pain; what child would want to be born to such a woman, whose whole life had been directed by vengeance? She looked at Jed McIntyre and for a second she wondered if she was any better than he. Maybe the only difference between them was that she didn’t kill others to mitigate her own suffering. Maybe that was the only thing that separated them. That we are one heart, one mind. Maybe he was right.
Just let it go, a voice inside her head whispered. Be calm, focus.
“We’re here,” he said as they stopped in front of a metal door locked by chains. “I’m going to let go of your arm right now to unlock this door. Remember, if you try anything, I’ll kill them both and let you live. Remember that-life will be your punishment.”
She nodded and looked expectantly at the metal door, praying that when it swung open she’d see Jeffrey and Dax safe and sound. She closed her eyes, unable to bear the waiting, the awful desperate feeling of hopeful expectancy that bloomed inside her.
But when the beam of the flashlight filled the room, there was only a toppled chair and scattered pieces of duct tape. Inside, she smiled. They got away… but how? she wondered. The door had been locked from the outside.
Jed McIntyre stood staring into the room, his mouth agape. He squeezed his eyes shut once and then opened them again as if willing his vision to obey his expectations.
It took about a half a second for Lydia to realize that she didn’t have a reason to cooperate anymore, and another half a second to decide whether to stay and try to end this twisted match of theirs or run. Then another second to assess her odds, unarmed and physically smaller than her opponent. She ran.
Any athlete will tell you that mental edge is what it takes to win when it comes to physical exertion. You can be the strongest or the fastest or the most talented athlete in any competition, but when focus is replaced by doubt, you might as well go home. The other thing is-and athletes don’t necessarily know this in the same way that, say, antelope do-that fear, the terror of being pursued, is like a shot of nitro in your engine. You’ll never be faster than when you’re running for your life.
Lydia ran into darkness, back the way she came. She ran without seeing into a labyrinth that she didn’t know her way out of. She summoned every ounce of strength left in her battered body, knowing she only had to stay an inch out of the grasp of the man behind her.
It took Jed McIntyre a few seconds to give chase. He chased her with a powerful flashlight in his hand, and its beam cast her shadow long in front of her and lit her way a bit, though the light shifted and pitched as he ran. Shadows and shapes of light and dark danced in front of her and she felt like she was in a house of horrors. She could feel him right behind her, not feet but inches, as her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest and her throat went dry with exertion. Her breathing came ragged now, every intake of air like sandpaper on her lungs.
She took a tight corner quickly and was running into blackness again, back the way they came but in another tunnel. It took him longer to get around the corner, but soon his beam filled the narrow tunnel ahead of her. It was so dark that the light only reached a few feet in front of her; she never knew what lay just ahead of the beam. It could be a wall, it could be a ten-story drop. But she had no choice… in this case, the devil she didn’t know was better than the one at her back. She heard him stumble behind her and it gave her an extra push forward. As the light came up again, she saw what looked to be a hole in the concrete, a makeshift doorway with planks of wood slanted across.
Heading for that doorway, she saw something that glinted on the ground. As she drew closer, she saw it was a wrench. She bent as she ran and picked it up, slowing only a little. She took a chance; turning as she ran, she threw the wrench with a hard flick of her wrist and sent it sailing through the air. He ducked out of its way and it landed harmlessly on the ground behind him. He laughed and then she stumbled, tried to catch herself, but fell fully to the ground hard onto her abdomen. Waves of pain turned the world red and white and threatened to take her consciousness. He slowed and stood over her, breathing heavily. She tried to crawl away from him, but he put his foot hard on her back. More fireworks of pain. He put the flashlight down beside her.
“Silly girl,” he gasped. “I could have shot you in the back anytime I chose. Ask yourself why I didn’t.”
“Fuck off,” she said, her mouth full of dirt.
“Kiss your mother with that mouth?” he said. “Oh, that’s right. I killed her.”
She struggled against his foot and got nowhere; it felt like a lead weight on her back.
“You’re not an easy woman to love, Lydia.”
“I’d have to disagree with that,” said Jeffrey, somewhere in the dark around them.
She felt the barrel of her own Smith and Wesson at her temple. Did you know that you’re forty times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime if you own a gun? her inner voice quipped. Hysteria was setting in.
Jed crouched and stretched out an arm to pick up the flashlight, never moving the gun from her head. He swung the beam around. Lydia could see that they had spilled from the narrow tunnel into an open space where five track lines lay next to each other. Around them and above them were metal stairways, ledges, and catwalks. The beam of his flashlight didn’t reveal where Jeffrey was standing.
“Jeffrey,” she said, her voice sounding desperate and scared even to her own ears.
“Jeeefffreey,” Jed mimicked. “I know you’re not armed, G-man.”
“You also thought I was tied up and locked behind a metal door. It’s time for you to start questioning your assumptions.”
“If you shoot me, I’ll make sure my last action on this earth is to put a bullet in her brain,” he said, but Lydia could hear the nervousness in his voice.
A loud bang sounded from the left, like metal falling on metal. Jed swung his gun and fired. He had four rounds left.
“I’m over here,” said a voice Lydia didn’t recognize from above them and to the right. Jed fired again.
“Just put the gun down, McIntyre,” came Jeffrey’s voice again.
“I can’t even believe you would waste your breath by saying that. It’s such a cliché. Of course I’m not going to put the fucking gun down.”
He spun madly, shining the light above him and all around. A shot rang out of the darkness, but missed its mark, hitting the dirt next to his feet. He let out a scream and moved for cover, dragging Lydia with him by the collar of her jacket. Lydia clawed at his wrist and kicked her legs, resisting him as best she could, but it didn’t seem to be of much use. They were right next to the doorway she had seen before.
Lydia craned her head to try to look around her, but she could see nothing in the pitch-black outside the flashlight beam, which was starting to flicker and dim. She felt the barrel of the gun leave her temple and looked up to see Jed moving toward the doorway. He kept the gun pointed at her, and backed away slowly.
“Another day, Lydia,” he said, and disappeared. She heard him clanging down a stairway.
The time was passing slowly and the car was getting cold. Ford could feel the tip of his nose and his toes going numb. The night was silent, the sky riven with stars. Somewhere in the woods around him he could hear the low calling of an owl, slow and mournful. It was giving him the creeps. In all the time he’d been sitting by the side of the road, not one car had passed him. He turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto the street.
The more he thought about it, Maura Hodge’s residence was probably the last place Annabelle would go. Sitting, freezing his ass, he’d recalled the conversation he’d had with Chief Clay, how the old man had told him the cops wouldn’t go near the Ross home, how they thought it was haunted. He thought of the old house, sitting gated and avoided by the police, and wondered if maybe, were he Annabelle Hodge, it might not be a half-bad place to hide temporarily.
Ford had never heard such silence. Maybe if it had been summer there would have been crickets singing or something. But as he pulled the car onto the side of the road across from the gate leading to the Ross estate and killed the engine, the silence was so loud it felt like a presence. He looked longingly at his cell phone. He even had one of those things that you plug into the cigarette lighter to power it. Malone had given him one after the last time his phone had died. But he’d never used it. It sat still in its stiff plastic packaging in his desk. It just seemed so self-important to have a cell phone, to be so concerned about it and who might be calling you or who you should be calling that you’d have a little rig in your car. But it didn’t seem quite as foolish right now.
He got out of the car and shut the door. Even though he’d tried to do it quietly, the click of the door closing and the crunching gravel beneath his feet seemed to echo through the night. He crossed the street and stood before the gate, noting that it was unlocked and, in fact, ajar. He pushed it open and it emitted a long, slow screech.
As he walked up the long narrow drive, the house rose out of the trees. As he grew closer, he saw that it was completely dark, no sign of life or movement. But he drew his gun anyway. Something about it, its black windows and towering copulas, its shutters hanging askew, its sagging eaves, the great dead oak beside it communicated menace to him. The house seemed to be regarding him with disdain, seemed to bear its teeth. Ford felt the thump of adrenaline in his chest, felt it drain the moisture from the back of his throat.
What the hell are you doing, old man? he thought. You shouldn’t be here alone. What are you trying to prove? That you’re a good cop after all? That it will all have been worth it, everything you threw away for the job, if you can just prove to yourself that you were a good cop?
He heard the conversation he had with Lydia play in his head again.
I don’t even know what I am if I’m not a cop.
Maybe it’s time you figure that out.
He stood at the bottom of the stairs leading to the house and the silence around him grew louder. The moonlight dappled the porch, cast the spindly shadow of the dead oak across the shingles.
Inside that door, he might find the answers to the Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton murders. Jenson, one of his cold cases, and Stratton, maybe his last case. The thought of solving them both felt like closure to him. Maybe then he could walk away from the job, from that basement office, and feel like everything he’d forced Jimmy, Katie, and most of all Rose to endure might have some meaning after all. Justice had meaning, didn’t it? It was worth a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice, if it was truly served.
Then he heard a child crying. It was soft and low, just like the owl, but without the peaceful, mournful rhythm. He looked around him and the sound seemed to come from the sky and the trees, not from inside the house. He walked around back, slowly, gun in his hand, staying close to the house. He could see in the moonlight that a path cut into the trees and again heard the sobs of a child. He thought of Nathaniel and how he’d cried that day about the bogeyman. It sounded like him, but Ford couldn’t be sure. With his gun drawn and his heart in his throat, he headed toward the sound.
“Jeffrey,” Lydia yelled, struggling to her feet. “He’s getting away.”
The echo of Jed McIntyre’s footsteps had faded. She ran to the doorway and saw that it led to a stairway into nothingness. She could still just barely hear his footfalls on the metal steps and started to head down after him when Jeffrey emerged from the darkness and came to her side.
“I thought I was never going to see you again,” he said, putting what looked like her Glock in his waistband and taking her into his arms. Relief washed over her, as she let it sink in for a second that they were both safe. But then she pushed herself away from him, as relief was replaced with panic.
“He can’t get away, Jeffrey,” she said, listening to his footfalls fading. “I can’t live like this anymore. Not for one more day.”
“All right,” he said simply. He didn’t offer the usual arguments for why he should go and she should stay, seemed to recognize that they needed to go after him together.
“Where does this staircase come out?” he said.
“How should I know?” she answered. But then she realized he wasn’t talking to her.
Jeffrey motioned with his head behind her and she turned to see what amounted to a small army of men and women. Maybe twenty or thirty people had gathered around them. She remembered what Jetty had called them, the mole people. They were the most beautiful sight Lydia had ever seen. One man stood apart, ahead of them, looking at once regal and strong, in spite of his torn and tattered clothes, the dirt on his face. His gray hair was like a dusting of snow on dark earth and in his eyes Lydia saw wisdom and an inherent goodness.
“This is Rain,” said Jeffrey.
Lydia reached out a hand to Rain, and when he shook it, his hand was callused and rough.
“The staircase leads to other, smaller tunnels, other catwalks beneath the electric wires, there are maybe twenty offshoots from the main stairwell,” said Rain. “But as far as I know, this doorway is the only way back into the main tunnel system. He’s trapped. I’ll take you down. The others will stay here and watch the entrance.”
“All right, let’s go,” said Jeffrey. They stood aside and let Rain pass in front of them.
Ford moved into the trees and the darkness seemed to come alive around him, the shadows and dark spaces in the woods seemed to shift and move, seemed to have life and substance. The ground beneath his feet was soft, covered with dead leaves still wet from the last rain or snow, and it allowed him to move quietly toward the sound. He felt like he’d been walking forever and the sound never seemed to grow louder. Then it ended abruptly. The silence that followed was more frightening than the cries and Ford picked up his pace to a light jog. Up ahead he saw a dancing orange light and smelled the scent of wood burning.
He came to a clearing where he saw several ruined structures, shacks with tin roofs, all but one of which had toppled, grown over with weeds and moss. A wood fence sagged around the area, most of it rotted, eaten by termites. The shacks were arranged in a half circle and in the center was a fire, crackling and smoking. Trees stood all around like an army of dark soldiers. Ford paused, not seeing any movement. He thought of the story Lydia had told him about Annabelle Taylor, about her murdered children, about the curse she’d cast on the Ross family. Standing in the silent, wooded night alone watching the fire burn, looking at the tumbled shacks, he could almost believe it. He was gripping his Smith and Wesson service revolver so hard his hand was starting to hurt.
“Nathaniel!” he yelled suddenly, shattering the silence like a thunderclap. “Lola!”
He felt better, like he’d taken control of the night. Until a dark form appeared in the door of the only shack still standing. He took a step back, unlatching the safety on his gun. The figure stepped into the light.
“Put down the gun, Detective,” she said.
Ford McKirdy sighed, strangely comforted by the sight of the gun in her hand. At least she was human.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “Where are the children?”
“The gun or the children die,” she said, her voice dead and flat. She reached into the darkness and pulled Lola out of the shack by the hair. The little girl shrieked, her face a mask of fear. Nathaniel leapt out after her, clinging to her legs.
“No-no-no-no-no-no,” he cried, his little voice broken by sobs.
She thrust the gun to Lola’s temple. “You think I don’t mean it? You think I give a shit about either one of these brats?”
Lola shrieked again and Ford felt like someone had a hand over his heart and was squeezing without mercy. He inched closer to Annabelle and saw that she was as frightened as the kids; Ford could see it in her shifting eyes, hear it in the quaver of her voice. Lola started a quiet whimper and Nathaniel joined in. He could see tears in Annabelle’s eyes, too. Christ, he thought, they’re all children.
“Annabelle, listen to me,” Ford said, his voice soft and coaxing. “It doesn’t have to be this way.” His voice was steady, but his mind was racing, turning over his options. If he didn’t put the gun down, Lola could be dead. If he put the gun down, they all could be.
“Yes, it does. Don’t you see that? It always had to be this way. Before I was even born she had this whole thing planned. I never even had a choice.
“It’s my destiny,” she went on, practically spitting the word. “You think the Rosses are cursed? They got nothing on me.”
“You have a choice now,” he said rationally. “Let’s all walk away from this together. I can help you, Annabelle. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t mean it.”
He wanted her to see a way out, but he wasn’t sure she could hear it. She was in a black place and he could see something dark in her expression; he was afraid it was a loss of hope. More than menace, more than terror, it was the most dangerous thing you could see in an adversary’s eyes.
“You can’t help me. No one can,” she said. His heart pumped, hearing the echo of Julian Ross’s words. “He’s come for all of us.”
“Who has, Annabelle? Tell me and I can make it all stop.”
The night was filled now with the sound of the children crying. The three of them were before him, lit by the orange glow of the fire, the fear in each of their eyes burning bright and wet. There was a moment when he saw her expression shift, when he thought he’d reached her. It was the last thing he saw before he felt a terrible pressure on the back of his head and a curtain of darkness fell before his eyes.
Jed could hear them coming for him, hear their clumsy steps on the metal stairs he had just descended. So he crouched in the darkness and waited. He’d left his flashlight up above, not that he could use it. His eyes had adjusted to the new level of blackness and he felt comfortable in the cold air. Light did, unbelievably, travel down here and the eye found it after a few moments of adjustment.
He sighed and his voice echoed throughout the cavernous space, a maze of walkways below electric mains and who knew what else. A giant mess of veins hung suspended from the ceiling, stories of ledges and narrow walkways connected by ladders. He had gone as far as he could go before he realized that there was no other exit. Now he hid at the uppermost level of the final chamber connecting to the stairway. There was a ten-story drop below him. He was trapped, but he was in the catbird seat. He’d see them before they saw him and he had three bullets left.
He was disappointed in Lydia Strong. He never imagined her to be such a foul-mouthed bitch. When he’d looked into her eyes he’d seen only hatred and anger, not the connection he’d imagined them to have all these years. His plan had been thwarted, but it might not have worked anyway. He’d wanted her to see him kill her love and her only friend. He’d hoped that in her grief, she’d turn to him. But he had the sense now that she might still have rejected him even if she’d had nothing left. There was that defiance to her. It was not an attractive quality in a woman.
He was uncomfortable and shifted. In doing so, he knocked some unseen piece of debris and it fell loudly, bouncing off metal, clanging, and then hitting the floor. A silence followed and Jed McIntyre held his breath.
The three of them stopped in their tracks on the stairway at the sound. The flashlight Lydia held in her hand flickered dramatically and recovered, though the light was dimmer still. Figures.
Lydia opened her mouth to talk, but Rain put a silencing hand on her shoulder. He motioned for them to follow; they tried to be as quiet as possible moving toward the sound. After a moment, he took the flashlight from Lydia and turned it off, laying it on the stairs beside them. They were plunged into blackness and it took a few minutes for their eyes to adjust.
Following Rain, they turned off the stairwell into a cavernous chamber, a maze of walkways crisscrossing across the height of it, some ten stories tall or more. Lydia’s eyes scanned the catwalks.
“I can hear you breathing,” said Rain suddenly, loudly, and his voice echoed off the concrete. They were answered by silence. Rain moved in close to Jeffrey and whispered, “I’m going to draw his fire. When he shoots, you’ll be able to see where he is.” Jeffrey nodded and Rain moved toward one of the ladders and started to climb. He moved quickly with grace and strength.
“You better stay where you are,” came a voice from high above them. But Rain kept moving; he was already at the third level.
A shot rang out and the blast from the gun revealed Jed’s position, high and in the far corner of the room. He was trapped like a rat, and from the tone in his voice, he was starting to realize it. He was not getting out of this room a free man.
“You’re trapped, McIntyre,” said Lydia. “And you only have two rounds left.”
Lydia surmised that Rain was still out of Jed’s range, but he wouldn’t be for long. Jeffrey and Lydia started up after him. When Rain was on the fourth level, Jeffrey opened fire in the direction from which Jed’s shot had come. He let three rounds go. Judging by the sparks and the sharp sound of the ricochet, it sounded like two of the bullets hit concrete or metal. But the third shot… she couldn’t be sure. The darkness around them seemed to hold its breath, and all three of them crouched low in their positions waiting for return fire. But none came. For a brief second hope bloomed in Lydia’s heart that Jed McIntyre was dead. It was an ugly feeling and she was ashamed of it; but she felt it nonetheless. After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, a low groan came from above them.
“Hold your fire,” McIntyre said. “I’m hit. I give up.”
Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a skeptical look.
“Throw down the gun, McIntyre,” said Jeffrey. “Then we’ll talk.”
“I can’t move,” he said, his voice rasping and just a little too pathetic.
Rain had reached the top level and was approaching the prostrate form they could now see above them, as they, too, drew closer.
“Be careful, Rain,” said Jeffrey.
His words were drowned out by the firing of the Smith and Wesson. Lydia and Jeffrey watched, helpless, as Rain staggered back toward the railing before falling over the side and landing with a sickening thud on the next level.
“Oh, God,” Lydia screamed, feeling a wash of helplessness as Jeffrey opened fire on Jed McIntyre. The darkness came alive with the explosion of gunshots and Lydia wished she could cover her ears as she raced up the ladder and across the landing to Rain, Jeffrey right behind her. In the flashes of light that came each time Jeffrey fired, she could see Rain’s milky, desperate eyes, McIntyre running on the landing above them, Jeffrey’s gaze intent on his target, and finally, McIntyre’s body jerk hard as it absorbed one of Jeffrey’s bullets. Then there was silence and darkness again.
They could hear as he gasped above them. It was a sound they both recognized, something known as the death rattle, the sound of breath passing through mucus in the moments before death. They heard the gun drop from his hand as it clattered down, hitting metal and then landing in the dirt below them.
Lydia climbed up the final ladder, shaking off Jeffrey’s grasp on her arm. She wanted to see him die. She wanted to see life pass from his body.
He stood still, leaning against the railing, his hand at the wound on his chest, his mouth agape, his eyes shocked. He looked ghostly and weak, and as she approached he turned his eyes on her. They were cold and soulless, revealing nothing even in the final moments of his life. She searched her heart for compassion for this twisted man; she searched herself for one human emotion. And the only one she could come up with was stone-cold hatred. There was no forgiveness in her heart for Jed McIntyre, there was nothing inside her that was right or good or evolved in this moment. In this moment, she was everything he had made her. No better than him.
He seemed to teeter against the railing and she thought he might fall, but she didn’t reach out to grab him. She just watched as his life seemed to drain from the wound in his chest, the ground around him slick with his blood. He whispered something then, a wet sound. And she leaned in to hear him. When she did, he grabbed her wrist, held it hard. She struggled to pull it back, but he wouldn’t let go of her. Panic welled within her as a wide smile bloomed on his face and a wicked look glittered in his eyes. She braced herself against his pull, but her feet couldn’t find purchase on the bloody metal beneath her feet and they slipped as he pulled her closer, whispering something to her that she couldn’t hear.
She felt hypnotized, pulled in by his powerful gaze. He drew her closer and she fought the irrational fear that he could take her into hell with him just by holding her eyes as he died. They were locked like that for she didn’t know how long.
Then Jeffrey’s arm snaked around her from behind, pulling at her waist. She saw the Glock come around and Jeffrey emptied it into Jed McIntyre. The hand that had grabbed her wrist flew open and the force of the blast pushed him over the railing. They watched as he sailed down ten stories and landed in a heap on the ground below, his arms and legs spread apart as if he were trying to make an angel in the snow.