Dominion

by Greg F. Gifune

  “OK, again, let’s deal with what we know.” Bryce put his drink aside and wandered away from the bar. “Who were the last people to see her?”

  “Brad Shaffer and the clients they were meeting with, a couple out-of-towners from some big corporation on the west coast. They had a meeting at the Park Plaza Hotel that went from about five-thirty until around seven-thirty. The police told me they’d all agreed it broke up around that time, give or take a few minutes one way or the other.”

  “Was Lindsay supposed to head straight home from there?”

  “Brad said he drove her back to the office to get her car first.”

  “OK,” Bryce said, “but instead of going home from there, she stops at the mall. You can get from Quincy to that mall in ten minutes even with fairly heavy traffic, so even if we take into consideration the drive from the Park Plaza, being wildly generous, that puts her there around eight o’clock.”

  “Right.”

  “My point being, it’s probable she could’ve gotten to the mall before it closed.”

  “There were no bags in her car, and no purchases showed up on her credit or debit cards, so even if she did go shopping for a while—which I don’t think she’d do at that hour—she didn’t buy anything.”

  “OK, but either way, why did she cross that highway? And why cross it on foot? I’ve been to that strip mall across the street plenty of times. I know everything in it was closed by then. They’re all businesses that close well ahead of the mall. There’s a dry cleaner there I used to use and they were always open the latest, but only until around six. So she wasn’t going there.”

  “Then why cross the street at all? What the hell was she doing?”

  “What did that detective say about it, anything?”

  “He didn’t really seem to have a theory as to what she was doing there,” Daniel said. “When I asked him he thought maybe she’d thought one of the stores might’ve been open, he seemed as confused as I was about that particular point.”

  “Confused or evasive?”

  Daniel thought that an odd question. “Why would he be evasive?”

  “You know how cops are sometimes. They keep a lot of shit to themselves.”

  “I’m her husband, for Christ’s sake, why would he keep anything from me?”

  “Maybe he didn’t, I was just throwing it out there. Thing is, you can see whether everything in that strip mall is open or closed from where her car was parked. You’ve been there, think about it. And besides, why the hell would she walk?”

  Daniel shrugged.

  “Let’s try to think logically here for a minute. What else is in the area?”

  “There’s a car dealership diagonally behind the strip mall.”

  “Yeah,” Bryce said, nervously clearing his throat, “and beyond that there’s a motel.”

  SIX

  The last time Daniel and Lindsay had made love was two days before her death. Unlike the majority of his memories of her, this one was neither shrouded in shadow and partially obscured by darkness, nor overblown to the point of caricature. In fact, he remembered it, and her, with startling clarity. It had burned into his psyche like a brand.

  When he closed his eyes and allowed himself to remember, he could see the two of them laying in bed just moments afterward, an unusual, eerie and constant summer wind blowing about just beyond the window screens. During a brutal heat wave like they’d experienced that week, even the wind being hot seemed reasonable, and though it only made things worse, there was something oddly beautiful about it. The sound those winds made that night, not quite a howl but more a soft whine mixed with a whisper or an unusually long exhale of breath, sounded nearly human.

  Side by side and breathless, they lay there quietly, bodies glistening with perspiration, a love premeditated, understood and realized passing between them, unspoken.

  Spent, Daniel watched the blades of the ceiling fan above them spin, noticing how with the moonlight bleeding through the windows, it created something of a strobe effect, the shadows of the blades playing along the walls and ceiling like ghosts.

  Nearby, Lindsay lay on her back (the only indication that she was still awake, as she always slept on her stomach), one arm draped over his chest and the other across her forehead. The single sheet was a crumpled and tangled mess at the foot of the bed, and though it was very late, neither she nor Daniel seemed in a hurry to sleep.

  “Listen to that wind,” she said some time later. “Have you ever heard wind like that?”

  “No,” he answered, voice hoarse. “It’s kind of spooky.”

  “It just started a few minutes ago. Can you feel it? It’s so hot, like its passing through fire before it gets to us.”

  He leaned his head toward the window without lifting it from the pillow. “The moon’s low tonight too, I can see it from here. Odd, since it’s so bright.”

  Lindsay rolled over then sprung from bed. Naked, her white buttocks gently bounced amidst shadow, paler even than the rest of her naturally light flesh. She leaned forward against the sill and looked out at the night, the city, the wind, the heat. A small droplet of sweat that began between her shoulder blades trickled along her spine to the crack of her ass, continuing to the delicate muscles along the backs of her thighs and calves, taut from years of going to the gym and swimming laps at the pool there. Finally, as the drop rolled toward her heel and vanished from Daniel’s line of sight, he drew a breath and let it out as a moan of peace and contentment.

  “Strange night,” she said. “Wind isn’t supposed to feel like that, it’s not supposed to sound like that.”

  He wondered now if that unnatural wind had been a harbinger of catastrophe—a courier delivering warnings of what lie ahead for them in the coming hours—but that night nothing nearly so sinister seemed possible. He watched her there, standing beyond his reach, unaware that soon she would reside in that space forever. “I just wish it wasn’t so damn hot.”

  “The city’s asleep,” she whispered, as if it might hear.

  “It’s the middle of the night, we should be too.”

  “Who can sleep in this heat?”

  “I’m guessing people with air-conditioners,” he said through a wiseass smile, opening one eye to check her reaction. Because of her allergies, they’d never been able to have an air-conditioner in the house.

  Lindsay looked back at him, her hair falling across the top of her shoulder. With a playful smirk, she stuck her tongue out and responded with a loud and lengthy raspberry.

  “Do not point that thing at me unless you intend to use it, madam.”

  Even in the near-dark, her deep brown eyes sparkled. Smirk still in place, she pushed away from the window and sauntered back toward the bed. A gold crucifix on a delicate chain she wore around her neck caught the moonlight a moment, but she didn’t seem to notice. “You’ve had all the tongue you’re gonna get tonight, Bunky.”

  The memory of their laughter that night, so free and comfortable and true amidst the sighs of an otherworldly wind, would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Now, five months later, he heard Bryce’s voice telling him things he’d tried frantically to discount, to not know, dragging him back to a time and place where that peculiar hot wind had been replaced by one cold, unforgiving and more familiar, and where there was no longer any such thing as Lindsay.

  “She wouldn’t have been at the motel,” Daniel said.

  “Danny, there’s nothing else there.”

  “She would not have been at the motel.”

  “Then why did she park her car and walk across four lanes of highway she could’ve just as easily driven across? And even if she had decided to walk for some unknown reason, why would she walk to the strip mall or the car dealership when both were closed? The only thing open at that hour, on that side of the road, was the motel. Where the hell else could she have been going?”

  Daniel stood frozen a moment, hopeful the feeling rising from his gut—one of terror mixed with agonizin
g sadness—wasn’t as evident in his expression as he feared. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure the cops checked that angle out.”

  “The detective told me he questioned the desk clerk there and even showed him a photograph of Lindsay,” Daniel admitted. He’d never told anyone that before, and he somehow felt disloyal doing it now. “The guy had never seen her.”

  “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t there. If she was meeting someone, he could’ve checked in first, called her on her cell and let her know what room he was in. She parks at the mall, so that if even on the off-chance someone she knows sees her car at the motel she won’t have to explain it. Then she crosses the street to the motel and goes directly to the room. The desk clerk would’ve never seen her or even known she was there. Matter of fact, nobody would’ve.”

  “How do you come up with this shit?”

  “Like just about everybody else at one point or another, I’ve done some sneaking around in my life before. Not saying I’m proud of it, but I’ve done it.”

  Daniel pushed a new plethora of hideous pictures from his mind. “It all seems so…”

  “Devious?”

  He nodded, stared down into his drink. “Yeah.”

  “Maybe she never actually went through with it,” Bryce said. “Maybe she changed her mind and turned around, walked back across the highway, and that’s when she got hit.”

  Daniel offered no response, just continued staring into his drink as if for answers.

  “They did an autopsy, Danny. The cops can tell you if Lindsay had sex that night.”

  “The detective did tell me.” Again, a pang of guilt shook him. “She hadn’t had sex.”

  “OK, I—I didn’t think she would’ve, but what else was she doing there? There are only so many reasons you’d meet someone at a motel at that hour of the night, and none of them are exactly encouraging.”

  “I didn’t have any indication that anything like that might be going on,” he said, moving back to the window, the falling snow. “And I mean none, Bryce.”

  “I know. I always envied you guys. You were the happiest couple I’ve ever known.”

  “Then why would Lindsay have been cheating on me?” In a nearly desperate attempt to focus on something beautiful, Daniel kept his eyes trained on the snowflakes beyond the window, but he could hear Bryce shuffling around uncomfortably behind him. “It doesn’t make any sense. We were in love.”

  “Things don’t always make sense. And people in love cheat on each other every day. Sometimes shit just happens. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  The snowflakes blurred, blended with the night. Daniel fought to control himself, to prevent the tears filling his eyes from spilling out. He felt so goddamn weak, so horribly raw and vulnerable. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

  “Have you ever talked to Audrey about it?” he asked, referring to Lindsay’s closest friend.

  “Not in any depth, no.”

  “Maybe you should. If she’d confided in somebody it probably would’ve been her.”

  “Yeah, makes sense.”

  “Look, I’m not saying that’s definitely what she was doing.” Bryce dropped down onto the couch and kicked off his sneakers. “Hell, if they’ve already shown she hadn’t had sex that night then we know for sure that’s not what she was up to, at least not at that particular moment anyway. Maybe she was ending something. Maybe not—I don’t know—I’m just saying it’s something you have to think about, to consider if you really want to get to the bottom of what she was doing there that night.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I do want to know.”

  “That’s something only you can answer.”

  “At the end of the day, is it really going to make any difference?” Daniel asked. “Lindsay’s gone. Nothing can ever bring her back.”

  “It’s not really about Lindsay anymore. It’s about you and what you need.”

  “And now there’s this phone call,” Daniel said, as if he hadn’t heard Bryce’s last comment. “What the hell is that all about?”

  “Let’s think about who it could’ve been first.” Bryce crossed his left ankle over his right knee and began kneading the bottom of his foot. “It seems to me there are only so many possibilities on that count. We were wondering before if maybe it could’ve been somebody related to the guy that hit her, some friend or family member or someone just calling to fuck with you. The whole Ohio thing doesn’t add up with that though.”

  “Yeah, he was from Southie,” Daniel said in agreement. “Hardly had any family and his only friends were other junkies. The guy was pretty much a loner according to the cops.”

  “All right, I mentioned this before, but could it have been someone she knew through work? Do you know if Lindsay dealt with anyone from Ohio, a client maybe? Even somebody a long time ago—I mean, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone she dealt with through work was a nut or didn’t like her, had an axe to grind or something and figured he’d get back at her by making a call like this.”

  “I don’t know of any clients from Ohio,” Daniel answered, “but that certainly doesn’t mean there weren’t any. I didn’t know of or hear about every single client she ever had. I’m sure I could find out though. If I asked her boss—or even Brad Shaffer—I don’t see why they wouldn’t tell me. Seems like a long-shot though.”

  “I know, seems unlikely, but we’ve got two things to think about here. We’ve got the person she was meeting at the motel and whoever made this phone call.”

  “You’re saying you think they’re the same person?”

  Bryce switched feet and began rubbing the other. “I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

  His emotions more controlled now, Daniel turned back to his friend. “Why call here, though? Why say those things to me unless you’re looking to fuck with my head?”

  “Yeah, true.” Bryce dropped his foot to the floor and lay back against the cushions on the couch. “Shit, I don’t know, man.”

  “The more I replay it in my mind, and the more I hear that guy’s voice, the more I think he wasn’t just out to hassle me. It was like he was challenging me somehow, like he had some problem with me personally.”

  “And you got all that from his tone of voice, or what?”

  “Partially, but I guess it was a gut feeling kind of thing too.”

  “Like maybe it was more about you than Lindsay?”

  “Maybe, I—I can’t be sure.”

  Bryce changed his position on the couch, wiggling around like he couldn’t quite find a comfortable spot. “You didn’t tell me that before. That could be pretty significant.”

  “I’m not positive, it’s just a feeling, a sense I’m getting. I could be wrong.” Daniel strode to the bar and put his now empty glass down. “You still think I should tell the police about it?”

  “Maybe you ought to just wait and see if he calls again.”

  He’d told Bryce about Lindsay’s final words in a previous conversation, and though he’d dismissed it as probably nothing more than incoherent ramblings the same as Yolanda Vasquez and the police had, he brought it up again regardless.

  “Do you think she could’ve been talking about this guy right before she died?” Daniel asked. “It’s not me. Tell him it’s not me. Could she have meant him? Could she have been trying to tell me about him maybe?”

  “I think that’s a reach, to be honest. From what that EMT chick told you I’m pretty sure Lindsay didn’t have clue-one as to what she was saying.”

  “But if she did know, if she was trying to tell me something, what could she have meant?” Prior to this he’d been inclined to agree with the others, but now he found himself thinking it through and trying to see if it fit any number of other scenarios. “By him, did she mean me?”

  Bryce waited a while before offering his take. “Maybe she meant it wasn’t her fault, what had happened, like it wasn’t her doing or something.”

&nbs
p; “Could be,” he said. “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “That’s assuming she knew what she was saying, of course, which is one big honking assumption. The long and short of it is that we’ll never truly know. I wish we could, but we can’t. We can work possibilities all night, and we’ll never know for sure.”

  They were quiet for a long while, and other sounds moved to the forefront: a ticking clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the city both near and far, the faint wail of a siren.

  Daniel motioned to the closest bottle of vodka. “You want another drink?”

  “Nah, I better get going. Work tomorrow.”

  “You want me to call you a cab?”

  Bryce pushed his feet back into his sneakers then stood up with a muffled grunt. “It’s cool, I’ll walk it.”

  “I don’t think you want to walk that far in this,” Daniel said. Under normal circumstances a walk to Bryce’s apartment—only about twelve blocks away—wasn’t a big deal, but with the snow and these temperatures coupled with the amount he’d had to drink, it hardly seemed a good idea.

  “Fresh air should do me good, sober my ass up.”

  As Bryce grabbed his coat and pulled it on, Daniel said, “Listen, I know this has been—”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it, all right? I’ve got your back no matter what.” He leaned in and gave Daniel a quick hug. “I’m here if you need me.”

  For the first time in what seemed an eternity, Daniel felt a genuine smile cross his face, albeit it a short-lived one. “Thanks, Bryce.”

  “Let me know if you get another call.”

  Daniel nodded.

  Moments later, in the silence and loneliness of his home, Daniel’s mind continued to race. But one brief phrase he could not shake repeated again and again until it had moved to the forefront and dominated all else.

  She’s alive.

  “No she’s not,” he finally replied in a voice as hollow and lifeless as the room in which he stood. “And neither am I.”

  SEVEN

  For some reason, all the furniture was draped with sheets, and from the dust and the musty smell, it was clear everything had been shut down, covered and sealed off in the brownstone for quite some time. It was as if no one had lived within these walls in years. But how could that be?