House of Secrets - v4

by Richard Hawke

  “What.”

  The red digits on her bedside clock showed 3:52. Otherwise, blackness draped the room.

  “Detective Lamb? It’s Sergeant Friedlander. I’m sorry to wake you.”

  Megan croaked, “Who says you woke me?”

  “I… It’s four o’clock. I just assumed.”

  “What is it, Sergeant?”

  “I knew you’d want to know. We’ve got a positive on the vehicle you’re looking for.”

  Megan was in a sitting position before she knew it. She pulled the phone onto her lap. “The van?”

  “White step van. The one used in the Foster abduction.”

  “Hold on.” Leaning sideways, she turned on the bedside lamp. She tugged open the bedside drawer and pulled out a pen and paper. She thumbed the detonator on the pen. “Okay. What do you have?”

  “It’s in a parking garage,” Friedlander said.

  “Address?” She scribbled down the address the sergeant gave her. She underlined it violently. “Shit. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I just got off the phone with the attendant. The van’s up on the roof. The attendant was moving it out from under one of those bunk-bed slots to get to the car on top and he saw something in the back of the van.”

  He paused. Megan stared up toward a corner of her ceiling. “Are you going to tell me what he saw, Sergeant?”

  “It’s a body. Female. The throat’s been slashed.”

  “Shit. Is it the girl?”

  “There’s no ID yet. It’s all still sketchy. The call just came in.”

  “No one’s on the scene?”

  “Just the attendant. A unit’s on the way.”

  “So am I.”

  Megan disconnected the call with her finger. The phone remained on her lap. Her eyes traveled again to her ceiling. The image coming to her mind was all too keen and all too unwelcome. A solitary figure, as white as a snowflake, rising up through a pitch-black sky. Megan was sick to death of ascending angels. Truly sick of them.

  She lifted her finger and began poking out a number. With each digit she pressed she felt like she was setting off little bombs.

  A pair of early morning jetliners were crossing overhead, reflecting the softly bruised sky so completely as to be nearly indistinguishable from it. Detective Megan Lamb stood at the barrier wall of the rooftop lot, watching the planes and also the windows of the buildings along the New Jersey side of the Hudson igniting with golden light.

  She felt like a dope.

  The APB from the day before had alerted law enforcement officers in all five boroughs, as well as the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, to keep their eyes peeled for the nondescript unmarked white van used in the abduction of Senator Andrew Foster’s daughter. Of course, Megan would have been a real dope if she hadn’t put out the call immediately. This wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was that while she had envisioned the van streaking away from the city as fast as it could, she had failed to consider that Michelle Foster’s kidnapper would have driven all of four and a half blocks from the spot where he snatched the little girl and tucked the van into a parking garage. Since yesterday afternoon, the van had been sitting right here on the roof of the garage.

  Megan turned her back on the sky and looked over at the van. A person stumbling onto the scene might have thought that a commercial was being shot, or a movie. Two pairs of strong spotlights had been set up, bathing the vehicle in an unreal semblance of noonday brilliance. The morning was light enough now that the illumination was no longer necessary for the technicians to do their work, but nobody had bothered yet to flip the switches.

  The van was being thoroughly dusted and fluoroscoped; if so much as a common housefly had landed anywhere on its surface — exterior or interior — its teensy footprints would be noted. Those were Megan’s orders.

  The coroner and the photographer had already finished their preliminary work with the body. The blood-soaked mover’s quilts in which it had been wrapped were secured and on their way to the lab. The van’s tires were being scraped for traces of any materials that might suggest where the vehicle’s recent travels had been. In general terms, Megan already knew the story the tires would tell. She had almost told the technicians not to bother. Ninth Avenue and Thirty-second, where the van had been rented. Traces of the West Side Highway. Hudson Street. Perry Street. Possibly — probably — some greased grime from the asphalt of the parking garage. Not a terrifically illuminating story.

  The small body remained on a gurney, tucked away in the parking spot previously occupied by the van. It remained covered with a gray blanket. Two men emerged from the stairwell. One was in a suit. The other — the older of the two — wore an open-collared shirt, dark slacks, and a navy blue sports coat. FBI.

  “Polly wolly doodle all the day,” Megan muttered to herself, and she crossed the roof and met the two in front of the van. The older agent spoke first. Megan knew that he would.

  “Do we need those lamps?”

  “We did,” Megan replied. “We were here before the crack of dawn.”

  “I would have liked to have been here before the crack of dawn.” The senior agent’s irritation was on full display.

  “We were a little busy,” Megan said evenly. “You can probably imagine.”

  The agent’s name was Taylor. He didn’t reply immediately. He decided he had made his point. His partner, Brian Armstrong, was practicing his smart-ass smug face. Already, Megan didn’t care for him.

  “You might attract a traffic copter with those lights,” Taylor said. Megan shrugged. Who cared about a silly traffic copter? Taylor indicated the van. “So, it was here all along?”

  “Appears so. He drove it over here right after he grabbed the girl. It was clocked in here at three twenty-seven. Quick and easy off the street.”

  “Sweet,” Taylor said, though there was nothing dulcet about the way he said it.

  Megan shook her head. “He boned us.” The word earned a spark of life from the younger agent. Megan wanted it clear between her and the federal agents that she wasn’t a whiner or an excuse maker. She also wanted the word us in there. Share the love, share the blame.

  She went on, “Of course we all thought he would get the hell out of Dodge. Ninety percent of the time that’s what they do. They scram. We know that. It doesn’t mean he’s smarter than us. He had the luxury of planning. We had to leap.”

  We, we, us, we. That should do it.

  Taylor appeared willing to concede the point. “Do you want to show us the vic?”

  The three moved over to the gurney. Brian Armstrong glanced overhead at the empty parking rack above them, and Megan explained to the agents the parking choreography.

  “Guy came in from the clubs around three. His car was up there, so they had to move the van to get it. That’s when they found her.” She added, “Good thing they moved things around. We might not have caught this for days.”

  Taylor frowned. “We need to keep thinking in terms of hours on this, Detective.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  He indicated the gurney. “Let’s see it.”

  As Megan reached for the blanket, the spotlights over by the van clicked off. The effect was something like the opposite of a camera’s flash, everything plunging into a thick darkness for the several seconds it took until the eyes adjusted. Megan took hold of the blanket and pulled it down past the victim’s neck. The neck was where the damage had been done. A deep black slice. There were also several small cuts around the eyes.

  Taylor asked, “Any prints anywhere?”

  “There’s a pair of eyeglasses. It’s too early to tell for certain. But there looks to be a pretty sizable thumbprint on one of the lenses.”

  “A thumb would be nice.”

  Megan looked down at the stilled face. “They’re pretty strange-looking glasses. I mean, style-wise. Nothing you’d catch me wearing.”

  Armstrong spoke up for the first time. His
smile revealed baby-sized teeth.

  “Wouldn’t be caught dead, huh?”

  The siege outside Andy and Christine’s apartment building had thickened overnight. The police had been forced to bring in metal barrier gates in order to keep the sidewalk in front of the building clear. Anyone entering or exiting the building was ripe for interviewing by the scrum of media that swarmed the block. Across the street, onlookers gathered on the sidewalk, numbers of them pointing up toward the top floor of the building. Some of the gawkers looked authentically forlorn, though the vast majority of the faces were lit with the adrenaline of anticipation. The mood was faintly festive; something was happening.

  Andy stood in his kitchen watching the small television on the counter as the orange-haired woman from 3E pretended that she and the Fosters were fast friends. Nothing could have been further from the truth. To Andy, the woman was a certified harridan: She had petitioned the building to have Doc banned from the elevators simply because she didn’t like the way the dog had looked at her once. Andy sipped his coffee and listened as the woman spun a compelling fiction to the reporter about her devotion to Michelle Foster and some of the “lovely times” the two had allegedly spent together going up and down the elevator.

  Andy poured himself a second cup of coffee and went in search of Christine. He found her in Michelle’s bedroom, at the window. Her cheek was pressed against the glass.

  “Hey, sweetie.”

  Christine turned from the window.

  “We can’t stay, Andy. I’ll kill you. You’ll kill me.” She indicated the window. “I won’t be able to kill them, which is what I want to do the most. Either way, we can’t stay. At least I can’t. I don’t know about you.”

  The mad dash to the waiting limo felt like a trip through one of Alice’s less savory wonderlands. The klieg lights. The towering satellite poles. The buzz of gnashing voices, like a white noise of grasshoppers.

  “Any word on Michelle…?”

  “Senator, do you think that Michelle…?”

  “Have Michelle’s kidnappers…?”

  A Secret Service man had materialized in the lobby, a silent broad-chested specimen direct from central casting. He shadowed the Fosters as they made their way to the waiting limo. Christine caught a glimpse of his weapon as his suit jacket flapped open.

  She and Andy settled into the plush leather seat. Cameras and faces descended on the car’s blackened windows. From the front seat, a second Secret Service agent was twisting around to face them. He drew Andy’s attention to a black phone mounted just above the armrest on Andy’s side, where a small red light was blinking.

  “The president would like a word with you, sir.”

  The car pulled away from the curb — slowly, so as not to crush anybody. Andy seemed momentarily stunned. He had not made a move for the phone.

  “Better get that,” Christine said sourly. “Maybe he wants to invite us down for dinner.”

  Christine could not abide the thought of reclaiming her childhood bedroom. Instead she and Andy settled into Peter’s old room. All traces of her brother were long gone. Christine draped a light sweater over her shoulders and stepped to the window, which looked out on the tennis court and the small gazebo just beyond it. She did so less to take in the view than to make it clear to Andy that she was not in the mood to talk. She watched absently as a sparrow flitted from perch to perch, too agitated — it seemed — to settle on one spot for more than a second. A second bird darted in from around the corner of the house and took up pursuit of the sparrow. For a brief instant the pair tangled and plummeted partway to the ground together, then they separated again and zoomed out of sight.

  Christine felt her cheeks reddening. For the past eighteen hours or so, the events surrounding Michelle’s abduction had handily shoved Christine’s encounter with the sculptor off to a dormant corner of her brain. But now, images of the heated scene were beginning to make a play for her attention, and Christine was startled anew as she considered just how close she had come to allowing herself to give in to the man’s — and her own body’s — urgings. Had that really been her in that studio? Couldn’t she just blame all this on a Christine doppelganger? There was scant solace in the fact that she had ultimately resisted the sculptor’s advances. The bottom line was that at nearly the precise moment her daughter was being snatched off the street, not ten blocks away, Christine had allowed herself to be led to the brink of adultery by an eager and handsome young stranger. She had almost allowed the door to swing wide open. And it had been astonishingly easy.

  Behind her, the springs squeaked as Andy sat down on the edge of the bed. Christine’s fury spiked. She refused to shoulder all the blame for what was happening. Not for Michelle’s disappearance and not for whatever was transpiring in her own heart. The fault was equally Andy’s. He had failed to make everything right. He had failed to keep his family safe. This was his job, too — his responsibility — and he had failed at it completely. The memory of the sculptor’s strong hands rose back up in her mind, and it took all her will to keep from putting her fist through the glass in front of her.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Christine announced. She yanked the sweater off her shoulders and turned to face her husband. Andy was watching her closely from the bed.

  “Would you like me to go with you?”

  Christine pulled the sweater on over her head, tugging it tightly.

  “That’s the last thing in the world I need.”

  Her father’s personal secretary was coming up the stairs. Paul Jordan and Christine reached the landing simultaneously and paused. Jordan looked earnestly into Christine’s eyes.

  “I want you to know that Hailey and I have you and Michelle in our prayers. And the senator, of course. If there is anything you need from either of us, you’re not to hesitate to ask. Anything. Hailey wanted me to tell you that you’re to feel free to seek her out.”

  Christine mumbled her thanks.

  The secretary went on. “Your father is devastated by what’s happened. But you know how he is; he’s going to show you a brave front. That’s just the governor.”

  “Thank you,” Christine murmured again.

  Christine stayed in place as Jordan continued up the steps. He disappeared around the curved banister. As she listened to the man’s light footsteps receding down the hallway, the thought came to her that everyone else in the world was still going about the regular business of conducting their regular lives. It wasn’t the planet’s nature to screech to a halt every time disaster struck one of its inhabitants. Maybe to the being experiencing the disaster it felt that this was what should happen, but this belief was only the perversity of self-importance. The planet kept spinning; it’s what planets do. And the countless Christines of the world simply had to rig together whatever coping mechanisms they could manage.

  Long after the sound of Paul Jordan’s footfalls had faded, Christine remained where she was standing, suspended in the precise middle of the staircase.

  No up.

  No down.

  It was Jim Fergus who phoned Andy with the news that the van that had been used in Michelle’s abduction had been located at a parking garage right there in the Village. Andy had assigned his aide-de-camp as his point person, providing Fergus’s number to the police rather than his own. Fergus told him that there was no sign of Michelle, then added, “They did find something, Andy. It’s not good.”

  Andy had been in the kitchen speaking with Jenny when the call came in. He told Fergus to hold on and retreated to his and Christine’s bedroom to conduct it in private. He perched on the edge of the bed.

  “Go on.”

  Fergus told him of the body that had been discovered in the back of the van, rolled up in a greasy mover’s blanket. The woman had been identified as Marion Patricia Mann. The ID had come through the rental company on Thirty-second Street where Ms. Mann had picked up the van early Thursday morning.

  “They want to know if that name means anything to you,�
� Fergus said. “The detective would like you to give her a call.”

  Andy tried out the name. “Marion Mann.”

  “She could go by Patricia. Or Pat. I guess even Mary.”

  Andy conducted the roll call. Marion Mann. Patricia Mann. Patty Mann. Mary Mann. Familiar? Not wholly unfamiliar. But they were all fairly normal-sounding names, the sort one hears all the time.

  “It’s not ringing a bell, Jim,” Andy said. Even as he was saying this, however, the name Marion was circling back on him. Andy felt he was hearing the name being said aloud. It was more the attitude of the speaker that was teasing his memory, not so much the name itself.

  Marion… Marion…

  Andy asked, “What are the police saying? There were no signs of Michelle at all?”

  “None. Like I said. At least nothing they shared with me. The lady cop prefers to speak with you directly. I tried to explain that you’ve got a lot going on right now, and you’d prefer I run interference for you. She doesn’t appear to be the type who’s too easy to impress.”

  “I guess in its way that’s refreshing.”

  “I think we need to be realistic about this, Andy. Whoever it was who snatched Michelle most likely murdered this Marion woman. That’s not good.”

  “Certainly not good for her.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying, Jim.”

  Andy caught sight of his drawn face in the mirror above the dresser. Next to zero sleep the night before was showing.

  Where the hell was his daughter?

  “Jesus Christ, Jim. This is fucking madness. What in the world would anyone gain by killing a—”

  The bedroom door had opened. Christine stood in the doorway. She had heard her husband’s truncated question.

  “Hold on,” Andy said into the phone. Christine’s knuckles were white on the doorknob. Andy lowered the phone to his lap. “They found the van, Chrissie. No trace of Michelle yet.”