Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  He nodded. “In a sense, I suppose that’s what she was. My father was a surveillance photographer. Some of those older pictures you saw of Smiley, they were mostly taken by my father.”

  I waited for him to go on. I watched the trees race past us in a blur of green and black. He was driving fast.

  “Most of their activities were classified. But I was able to find out through an old friend of my father’s that they gathered data on Smiley for over seven years.”

  “Why? For whom?”

  “It had come to the attention of the CIA that Max Smiley had some questionable relationships overseas and they were interested in knowing more about his activities. Interpol agreed to watch him when he was in Europe and Africa. My parents were two of the agents assigned to the task.”

  He released a long breath here. I kept my eyes on his profile, watching him as I’d felt him watching me for signs that he might be telling the truth. But what did I know about honesty? I probably wouldn’t have recognized it if it kicked me in the teeth.

  “There aren’t many pictures of my mother, you know. I have one from when she was a girl. But mostly she avoided the camera. She couldn’t afford to have her image floating around—it was so important for her to be invisible in her work. But she was stunning—jet-black hair and eyes so dark they were almost purple. Her skin was this nearly translucent white. She used to keep her hair back and wear these thick dark glasses, because when she didn’t, everyone stared at her. My father used to call her the Showstopper. When she walked into a room, everyone turned to look at her, men and women.”

  I could see some of this beauty in him. It resided in the gray of his eyes, in the fullness of his lips, in the strength of his jaw, in the blue-black shine to his hair. But there was something to him that kept him from being easy on the eyes, something about his aura maybe, that made me want to turn away.

  “She went alone to Paris. My paternal grandmother was ill—near death. My father stayed behind to care for her.

  “There should have been no risk to her. The maître d’ was a supposed Interpol ally and had arranged for a microphone to be placed at the table where Smiley would be dining. Nobody knows how she was discovered. She wasn’t a careless person; she was highly trained. Nobody knows how she wound up dying such a horrible death, her body discarded in the alley behind a grand hotel. She suffered, died slowly. We know that much. The maître d’ was killed as well. Interpol suspected that he had betrayed her and then was killed for what he knew.”

  I let a moment pass in respect for his mother, for how she died and how much it must have pained him to discuss it. Then: “How do you know Max killed her?”

  I saw his grip tighten on the wheel. A small muscle started working in his jaw. “Because beating women to death with his bare hands was Max Smiley’s signature. That’s what he did to get his rocks off, or haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  His tone was so sharp and the words so harsh that I physically shifted away from him in my seat.

  “Wake up, Ridley. Wake the fuck up. Your father, your beloved Max, hated women. He murdered them. Prostitutes, call girls, escorts, women he picked up in bars. Discarded them in hotel rooms and alleyways, in Dumpsters, in abandoned cars. In addition to Project Rescue and his involvement with the lowest scum on the planet there’s a swath of brutally murdered women in his path. Women who he murdered with his own bare hands.”

  He pulled the car over so suddenly that I was jerked about unpleasantly, nearly knocking my head against the side window; my seat belt locked. He turned to me. His face had gone pale with anger. A blue vein throbbed in his temple.

  “He liked to feel their bones collapse beneath his fists,” he said, lifting and clenching his own hand. “He liked to hear them scream and then whimper and sob as he choked and beat the life out of them.”

  He was yelling now and I found myself covering my face and leaning against the cool glass until he went silent. I listened to him breathing hard, listened to the cars race by us, their wheels whispering on wet concrete, felt the Peugeot shake with the speed of their passing. When I lowered my hands, I could see that his eyes were wet and rimmed red. There was a grim intensity to the way he was watching me. I could already see regret in the line of his mouth. I stared back at him, mesmerized by what I saw. His was the face of the ugly truth; I recognized it in every pore. That’s what had kept me turning away from him. I realized that I’d never seen it before, the face of someone who had no secrets to hide, no more lies to tell. I hated him for it.

  I reached into the back of the car and grabbed my bag, flung the door open, got out, and started walking. The cold air, the now-driving rain, felt wonderful. I heard his door slam and the sound of his feet on the concrete.

  “Ridley,” he called after me. “Ridley, please.”

  There was so much sorrow in his voice that I almost stopped but kept going instead. I thought I could hitch a ride, go to the police and get myself arrested or deported or murdered or whatever. It didn’t matter.

  When I felt his hand on my arm, I spun around and started pummeling him pathetically with my fists. I was so weak, so messed up, that instead of warding me off, he just pulled me into him, effectively pinning me against him. Eventually I stopped struggling. His body was shaking slightly, from cold or emotion, I didn’t know. I could hear the beating of his heart fast and strong in his chest. I let myself sob, standing there on the highway in the pouring rain.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said into my ear. “I’m so sorry. You were right. I am an asshole. You didn’t deserve that.” He tightened his arms around me and I wrapped mine around his waist. “You didn’t deserve any of this.”

  I looked up at him and saw all the pain in the world in the gray of his eyes.

  “Neither did you,” I said. There was a flash of something on his face. I think it was gratitude. And then his mouth was on mine. In his hunger and his passion, I tasted his honesty. I opened myself to it and took it all in—this man, his truth, and his kiss. In that moment, I knew one thing for sure. That Dylan Grace had been right all along. He was the only friend I had.

  I FOUND THAT I had about two thousand pounds sterling in my bag, close to four thousand dollars. How it got there, I had no idea. We parked the Peugot in a public lot and then checked into a rundown hotel near Charing Cross Road. The room was ugly but clean and comfortable enough, and Dylan insisted we chill there for a while, wait for the sun to go down. He washed and rebandaged my wound with great tenderness. I let him, though I could have done it myself. Since our kiss on the road, there’d been a charged silence between us. We spoke to each other politely or not at all.

  I was eager to get to an Internet café but saw the wisdom in waiting for dark. Plus, I was feeling worse and weaker by the minute. I lay down on the queen-size bed, which smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Dylan took the chair beside me and turned on the “telly.” After an hour of watching the news, we still hadn’t seen anything about ourselves. A check of the morning papers in the lobby on the way in showed that we hadn’t made the print media, either.

  “It’s weird,” said Dylan, looking at me from the chair. “I’d have thought our pictures would be all over the place after a mess like that.”

  “Maybe they want to keep it quiet.”

  “No way. Two cops and a nurse dead? Whoever I killed lying on the hospital room floor? You missing? No way to keep that quiet. They should be using every resource at their disposal to find us.”

  “But they did keep it quiet. Obviously.”

  He had his head in his hand and rubbed his temples.

  “You can lie down if you want,” I said. I thought he must be tired, every muscle in his body aching from driving and sitting up all night.

  He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

  I nodded. He rose from his chair and lay down beside me. The bed squealed beneath his weight. I moved into him and let him fold his arms around me. I heard him release a long, slow breath, felt the muscles in his chest and shoulders r
elax. I just wanted to feel safe for a minute. And I did. I drifted off like that. When I woke again, the sky outside our window was darkening.

  He was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and even. My head was on his shoulder and he had one arm curled around me, one flung over his head. I flashed on how his face had looked in the car when he talked about Max, about the things he’d said. How the pain of it had brought tears to his eyes. I hated what he had told me. I felt as if the knowledge was a cancer growing inside me, something black and deadly that would eventually take over and shut all my systems down. I would die from it; I was sure of that.

  I remembered Max’s parade of call girls, women I had always naively thought were his girlfriends. A man like that, so damaged inside, my mother had said once of him, can’t really love. At least he was smart enough to know it. Did she know how much worse it really was? She couldn’t have. She couldn’t.

  In the file there’d been a list—a kind of time line. I’d quickly passed it over because I didn’t understand it. I realized now with horror what it was. I slipped myself away from Dylan and went over to the pile of our things on the chair. The file was there beneath my bag. I sat cross-legged on the floor and opened it in my lap, flipped through its leaves until I found what I was looking for. It was a time line, apparently compiled by the FBI’s Serial Crimes Division in cooperation with Interpol, of a list of women found murdered, perpetrator unknown, organized by date and geographic location. It started in Michigan in the ghettos surrounding Michigan State, where Max went to college. Four women, streetwalkers, were found over the four-year period Max resided in that area. One: Emily Watson, seventeen, found in an alleyway beneath some bags of trash behind a Chinese restaurant. Two: Paris Cole, twenty-one, found beneath a bridge over the Detroit River. Three: Marcia Twinning, sixteen, found in a drug den in downtown Detroit. Four: Elsie Lowell, twenty-three, found in an empty lot, her body partially burned. The list went on. Women in New York, New Jersey, London, Paris, Cairo, Milan—around the country and around the world—with two things in common: the brutality of a beating death and the fact that Max was in the area around the time of their murders. Young women, lost women, walking the streets, fallen upon by a predator and left like trash. I noticed that the list ended the year Max died.

  I felt my stomach churn, even as my mind clouded with a thousand questions. What did it mean precisely that these deaths corresponded with Max’s passage through the world? Surely you could compile a list like this for almost anyone. People were murdered every day in a thousand different ways all over the globe. And if, in fact, there was any real evidence that he’d murdered these women or that he’d been involved in criminal enterprise with any of the people in the photographs, why wasn’t he ever arrested? Why wasn’t he ever charged? They didn’t seem to have any difficulty finding and following him.

  “You want to talk about some of that?” Dylan asked from the bed, startling me.

  “No,” I said. “I’m tired of talking.” I felt as if we’d been talking for days.

  There was so much I didn’t know and didn’t understand, so many things that didn’t make sense with the information I had. And I always had Jake in the back of my mind. Where was he? What had happened to him? How much of our life together was a lie, a fabrication on his part to be close enough to me to know if Max was still alive? How much of what was in this file did Jake already know? I thought of his own file he’d shown me, the one that had disappeared after the last time we made love. I wished I had paid more attention to what was in there.

  I heard Dylan sit up and crack his back. He issued a low groan and I turned to look at him; he was clearly in pain. Looking at him made me think of Jake again. They were such different men but driven by the same desire to find my father. It was weird, karmic in a way. I knew there was a lesson for me to learn here, but I was miles away from understanding. He rested his gaze on me and I felt an odd wash of attraction and guilt. I looked away.

  “What do you want to do?” he said softly.

  “I need some clothes. I can’t go clubbing like this,” I said, looking down at my pilled blue sweater and ugly, too-tight jeans. I’d unzipped them to spare my injury any additional discomfort, but I couldn’t very well go running around London with my pants open.

  16

  We went to Knightsbridge for some new clothes for me, using the cash I’d discovered in my bag. Dylan trailed around after me, edgy and watchful, while I, in under an hour, got myself a pair of black jeans and a black suede jacket at Lucky (ripped and faded and beat to hell for a ridiculous sum, but oh so fab), a pair of pull-on Doc Martens boots (think skinhead chic), and a ribbed black lightweight sweater with a zip-up neck at Armani. I felt better after shopping, more normal. And more than that I looked cool, which almost made up for being in mortal danger, an international fugitive, and a partial amnesiac.

  You’re thinking it was an unlikely time for me to be shopping, that there were bigger fish to fry. And you’re probably right. But sometimes you have to pull yourself together on the outside to pull yourself together on the inside.

  My hair was growing on me, figuratively speaking, though I wondered if I should change it again. I opted for a ski hat and sunglasses instead. It’s pretty traumatic to cut and dye your hair if you’ve never done anything like that, and I’d had enough trauma to last me a while.

  Besides, since I hadn’t seen myself on television or in the papers, I’d lulled myself into a false sense of security that we wouldn’t be spotted by the police. Of course, I managed not to think about the fact that there were probably more dangerous people looking for me. Who knows, maybe I wanted to get caught. I was feeling pretty low, pretty disconnected from myself. I think numb is a good word for it. I was numb—except for the injury in my side, from which radiated a low-grade pain controlled somewhat with whatever pills Dylan was giving me.

  THE INTERNET CAFÉ we found back near the hotel was also a pizza place, so we ordered a pie and found ourselves a quiet booth toward the back. A laptop hummed on each table and the room was filled with the weird blue glow of computer screens. It was pretty quiet, not too many other surfer diners. A young girl with a pile of textbooks and a sad face sat a few tables away from us, sipping from a mug and staring absently into space. A middle-aged man in a beige cardigan and thick glasses moved his mouth as he read something on the screen in front of him. He sat near the door. All the other tables were empty, and for that I was glad.

  “I wonder if this is a good idea,” said Dylan as I started to tap on the keyboard. “They’re likely watching your account. They’ll be able to tell where you accessed your e-mail.”

  “How long would that take them?”

  He shrugged. “Could take a while.”

  “Then we’ll be gone by the time they figure it out.”

  I assumed he was talking about the FBI, but maybe he meant the other people looking for Max, too. He’d said, Max Smiley picked a good time to die. People felt robbed. He hadn’t really expounded on who else might be looking for Max and why. I asked him about it.

  “A man like Max makes enemies,” he said vaguely. “The people he dealt with would look for revenge. You’re his daughter. It wouldn’t take them long to come to the same conclusion that everyone else did, that you’re the way to him.”

  “I get that,” I said, thinking about the men in the Bronx. “But who?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know …. The Albanians, the Russians, the Italians. The families of women he might have murdered. There’s a catalog to choose from.”

  I noticed Dylan kept scanning the room as he spoke, kept peering at the street outside the café window, glancing toward the door. He was edgy.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems strange that there doesn’t appear to be any kind of search for us,” he said, repeating his earlier concern. “It seems like a damn big news story, doesn’t it?”

  He was right, of course. An American woman appears in London, no
record of her travel, a gunshot wound in her side. Someone removes her from police custody at a hospital, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Now she’s missing, a victim or a fugitive, no one’s certain. A rogue FBI agent, broken away from his agency, is also missing, and may be her suspected captor or rescuer or accomplice. Big news story. Irresistible, in fact.

  Outside our window, two uniformed bobbies strolled by, their faces blank and bored. They didn’t exactly seem to be on red alert, but Dylan tensed until they passed.

  “Would you feel better if our faces were all over the place and we couldn’t make a move?” I asked. “If we had no choice but to turn ourselves in?”

  “In a way? Yeah. At least that would seem in line with the circumstances. I just have a weird feeling,” he said, the British accent returning just slightly. It was funny that I knew him well enough now to know that he was stressed.

  I logged into my e-mail account, then slid over to Dylan’s side of the booth and turned the laptop around so that he could see. As I moved in close to him, he dropped an arm around my shoulder and I felt the hard metal of the gun at his waist. I’d forgotten he was carrying a weapon and it reminded me how screwed up everything was. I found myself wondering if he was right, if we should turn ourselves in. Jake’s words at the Cloisters came back to me. I think he was trying to say that maybe we didn’t need to understand the past in order to have a future. We didn’t necessarily need to know where we’d come from in order to move ahead. Was he right?

  I explained to Dylan what Grant had told me about the website with the red screen, how messages could be hidden in pieces of unused data. I described Spam Mimic, how messages that appeared to be spam could also be alerts to log into the website.

  “You think your father was using this to communicate with Max?”

  “It seems like a fair guess,” I said. The thought made my chest constrict with anger, but I couldn’t think about any of that now.

  I scanned through the multiple spam messages on my account. I expected to see something from Ace but there was nothing. If he knew the trouble I was in, he didn’t care. A message from my parents dated three days ago told me that they were in Corsica. They raved about the food. Unbelievable. I suspected that they might be on their way home by now. After sorting through the rest of my mail, I saw a message from Grant. I clicked on it immediately. It read: