Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

I remember being stunned but nodding vigorously, tearing as he put the ring on my finger and came to kneel beside me and take me into his arms. People around us looked on; one woman, another American—I could tell by her Tommy Hilfiger sweater and khaki pants, but mainly by her sneakers—clapped her hands and released a happy little cry.

  What had I expected to feel in that moment? I didn’t know. You see it from the outside, stylized and engineered to sell in films and commercials. You hear the stories your sisters and girlfriends tell. But you only know how it’s meant to feel. It’s one of those moments in your life, in your relationship—the markers, the milestones, the important snapshots. But I could only experience the moment as I experience everything, observing, narrating. How Marcus was as close to emotional as I’d ever seen him. How the men at the bar turned to look at us, one of them sneering. How the lights were too dim for me to really see the ring. How a truck passed by and caused the bottles on the shelves behind the bar to rattle slightly. And I observed myself: happy, surprised, and, dare I admit it, a little relieved that my life wouldn’t pass without this moment. From the outside, I supposed it looked very romantic. But that’s where romance dwells, isn’t it, in the observation? Inner life is far too complicated; one doesn’t feel romance. You feel love, and even that isn’t one note resounding above all others; it’s one element in the symphony of your emotions.

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” my sister said. “You barely know him.”

  Marcus and I had announced our engagement over dinner at my sister’s, and Linda and Erik had made all the appropriate noises; embraces were exchanged, there was the excited chatter about plans and when and where. But later in my sister’s bedroom while Marcus, Erik, and the kids tried out a new computer game Marcus was testing, Linda and I had the real conversation. I knew it was coming, of course, I’d seen her shoulders tense, noticed the brittle quality to her smile, the worried eyes.

  “When it’s right, you know,” I said with a shrug. “Right?”

  That’s when she started to cry, just tear a little, really. But still, it was enough to cause disappointment, and not a little anxiety, to wash over me.

  “I thought you liked him,” I said, sinking onto the bed beside her.

  “Izzy” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, then lowering them to mine. She took my hand. “He’s just so … cold. There’s something unavailable about him, something distant.”

  I shook my head. “You just need to get to know him better,” I told her. “That’s all. It’s a cultural difference.” But there was a hard knot in my middle.

  She nodded and tried to smile. “Just take your time with the wedding. You get to know him a little bit more before you dive in.”

  I felt a lash of anger then. “You know what I think, Linda?”

  “Don’t,” she said, lifting her hand.

  “I think you don’t really want me to be happy in a relationship.”

  “Stop it, Isabel.”

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. I didn’t want everyone else to hear. “I think you’re happier when I’m unhappy. That you’re more comfortable when I’m alone so that you can be the one with everything—the great career, the perfect family.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she spat, “and you know it. You know I’m right. That’s why you’re so angry. Christ, Isabel, he’s just like our father.”

  If I didn’t love my sister so much, I would have slapped her. Instead, I got up and walked out of the room.

  “Izzy” she called after me. I heard apology in her voice but I didn’t care. I told Marcus I wasn’t feeling well and we left soon thereafter.

  I didn’t talk to my sister for almost two weeks—which felt more like two years. Eventually, she called to borrow a pair of shoes and things went back to normal—no apologies, no discussion, no resolution, just water under the bridge. Marcus and I were married six months later in a small church up in Riverdale near my mother and stepfather’s home. An intimate gathering of my family and friends followed. Marcus didn’t have anyone to invite. At the time, it didn’t really seem strange or sad. I don’t recall thinking about it. We were happy; that was the only important thing.

  5

  Detective Grady Crowe stepped out onto Seventh Avenue, leaving St. Vincent’s Hospital. He pulled his leather coat together and brought the zipper up beneath his chin, took the black knit cap from his pocket and slid it over his close-cropped hair.

  It was rush hour. The streets were packed even downtown with people hustling back and forth, huddled against the frigid air. It was a Village crowd, hipper, more casual than what he’d see if he’d found himself in Midtown at this hour. Messenger bags slung across chests instead of briefcases gripped in tight fists, leather instead of cashmere, denim instead of gabardine.

  He’d always liked the lower part of Manhattan best. He considered it more the real New York than Midtown, but less the real city than, say, Brooklyn. Shop windows glittered with Christmas decoration, horns sang in the bumper-to-bumper river of traffic on the avenue. In the air he could smell the wood of someone’s fireplace burning. He always liked that smell, especially in the city. It made the streets seem less hard, less impersonal when you could imagine someone cozy at the hearth, maybe drinking a cup of tea.

  He weaved his way across Twelfth Street through the stopped traffic toward the waiting unmarked Caprice. Exhaust billowed from behind, glowing red in the parking lights. His partner sat talking on her cell phone, her Bluetooth actually—a little device clipped to her ear which also had a microphone. From a distance, it made her look like nothing so much as a schizophrenic having a passionate conversation with herself. He’d told her this. She’d called him a Luddite. He kept meaning to look it up.

  Inside the car, the heat was kicking. His partner, Jez, kept it at nearly eighty degrees in the winter. She was small, couldn’t stand the cold. He didn’t complain. He’d been raised to give women what they wanted. You can fight, his father told him. You can bitch. If you’re a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul? Just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars. The old man was right about that. And with three sisters, Grady had occasion to learn early. But it was his wife who drove the lesson home—then drove off in his new Acura. Turns out lip service isn’t enough; you have to live the surrender.

  “So … what happened?”

  Crowe pulled out into traffic, cutting off a cabdriver who leaned on his horn.

  “Crowe?”

  “You talking to me? I thought you were still on your communicator. You know—beam me up, Scotty” He tried to add some electronic sounds to the joke but it came off lame. Jez gave him a smile, anyway. She was cool like that.

  “Very funny. Yeah, I’m talking to you. What’d you get?”

  In the movies, female cops were always hot. But on the real job, to Grady’s eyes, they were generally pretty butch—dirty mouths, pumped biceps, chopped hair. Jesamyn Breslow was the exception, though he wouldn’t say she was hot exactly. She was cute. Definitely on the femme side comparatively speaking. But in spite of that button nose and blond bob, she was tough in a very real way, minus the self-conscious bravado of most cops, male or female. She knew kung fu. Really.

  He relayed the story the victim had told him about her husband not coming home, about the phone call, and the people posing as FBI agents. It gelled with what they’d found, the vests discarded at the scene with the white letters stenciled on. It was a rush job. Someone who hadn’t already been distraught and overwhelmed might have noticed right away that the letters were sloppy, unprofessional.

  “She thinks she’d be able to identify some of the people if she saw them again, but beyond that she doesn’t know anything about what happened, or why,” he said, reaching for the coffee in the cup holder. It was as bitter and stone cold as his ex-wife. He drank it, anyway.

  “You sure? You know you’re a sucker for a pretty face.” They’d seen her picture on Marcus Raine’s desk. Jez had recognized he
r, was actually carrying a paperback of one of her novels in her bag. Isabel Connelly, her maiden name, on the jacket. Not Isabel Raine, her legal, married name.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “She was a mess.”

  Isabel Raine looked like a doll someone had dropped by the side of the road—bashed up, broken, and abandoned. He’d had the urge to dust her off, tuck her into a little bed somewhere.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “She gave us permission to look around her apartment. Said she’d call the doorman to let us in.”

  “No lawyer?”

  “Not yet. She’s focused on finding her husband. She thinks that’s the major problem, that he’s missing and something’s happened to him.”

  “Maybe she really doesn’t know anything.”

  He gave her a quick glance, raised his eyebrows at her. “I’ve still got my wits about me. Not all your partners fall in love with the victim and go off the deep end.” He was referring to Mateo Stenopolis, her partner when she was with Missing Persons. Stenopolis had fallen in love with a missing girl and pretty much laid waste to his life and his career trying to find her—nearly getting himself and Breslow killed in the process.

  “No,” she said with a laugh. “You’re no romantic, Crowe.”

  “Just ask my ex-wife.”

  He listened as Breslow called her mother, told her she’d be late picking up her son, Benjamin. He found himself thinking that it was the one small mercy in his failed marriage—no kids. He saw how Breslow struggled with her on-again, off-again husband and the child they shared. You’re bound forever by that life you created. As it was, there was nothing to bind him to his ex, nothing at all. They split what little money there was and that was that. He’d wanted kids, a lot of them. But she hadn’t—maybe one, eventually. She was concerned about her career, didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom like her mother, not on a cop’s salary. His mom had raised four on far less than he made, had never even had a job. She’d gone straight from her parents’ home to her husband’s. Bringing this up didn’t make things better.

  “Those were different times, Grady” she’d countered. “Besides, you think your mother’s happy? I’ve never heard your parents exchange one kind word—hell, I’ve never even seen them kiss each other.”

  She was always talking about “happy” like it was a lottery she was waiting to win. As far as Grady was concerned, happiness was just where you decided to lay your eyes. You see three people dead in a downtown office, their faces contorted in such a way that you understand they died in agony, you feel bad. You go home and find the woman you love and your kids waiting for you, you feel happy. That simple.

  “Obsessing about your ex again?” asked his partner, examining her cuticles.

  “How could you tell?”

  “You make this kind of tiny chewing motion with your jaw, like you’re biting on your tongue a little. You do that whenever you’re working some kind of problem in your head.”

  “You don’t know everything,” he said.

  “No. I don’t. But a year sitting here and I’m getting to know you. My advice: If you can’t let it go, get help. It’s turning you into a sour pain in the ass. You talk about it constantly and you think about it more. Move on, Crowe.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Phil.” He knew she was right. He was a dog with a bone; he just couldn’t stop worrying it, looking for that last bit of marrow.

  Apparently satisfied that she’d made her point, she went back to business. “I put the information we had on Marcus Raine—date of birth, Social Security number—into NCIC and Vi-CAP. I’m waiting to see what comes back.”

  “The wife seems convinced that he’s a victim in this. She’s seriously rattled by that phone call, thinks it was him screaming.”

  “What do we believe?” she asked, really just thinking aloud.

  “Could go either way. We need to dig deeper.”

  THEY PULLED UP to Isabel Raine’s building and parked in the half-circle drive. The doorman was expecting them, gave them a key and told them to take the elevator to the ninth floor. Crowe was a little surprised by the lack of questions, but the doorman was as stoic and grim-faced as a gargoyle, his silver hair slicked back so perfectly it looked shellacked. He apparently had his orders from Isabel Raine and wasn’t interested in anything further. Crowe could see he was an old-school New York City doorman, served the tenants of the building, kept his mouth shut except for niceties, and collected his big Christmas tips.

  “When was the last time you saw Marcus Raine?” Crowe asked him, after writing down his name, telephone number, and address. Charlie Shane lived up in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, almost the Bronx.

  “Yesterday morning, just after nine,” Shane answered immediately. “He was heading off to work, I assumed. His departure was only notable because it was later than usual. Generally, he’s gone by seven. Mrs. Raine works from home and comes and goes during the day unpredictably.” Something about the way he leaned on that last word told Grady that, in Shane’s world, unpredictability was not a good thing.

  Crowe was about to ask about Shane’s schedule but the doorman anticipated the question. “I work Monday through Saturday, from six A.M. to six P.M., sometimes later. I’ve worked in this building for twenty-five years.”

  Grady looked at his watch. “Working late tonight?” he asked. It was going on seven o’clock.

  “The night-shift doorman, Timothy Teaford, hasn’t arrived,” said Shane. “I can’t leave until he does.”

  “He call?”

  “No.”

  “Unusual behavior?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Can I get the name and address of this guy?”

  “There are two other part-time doormen who take the evening shifts and rotate the Sunday shifts. But naturally, they don’t have the same relationship with the tenants and the building that I do.”

  “Of course not,” Crowe said gravely. “I’ll still need their names and contact information.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Crowe saw Breslow looking around at the lobby that opened into a courtyard with a tall stone fountain turned off for the winter. She had the class not to gawk or comment, but he could tell she was impressed. He’d seen plenty of lobbies like this one—the high ceilings, the marble floors, the large pieces of art, the plush furniture. He was Bay Ridge born and raised, working class to the bone, but had attended Regis High School in Manhattan. Regis had competitive admissions, tuition free to those who got in, so the socioeconomic structure was more diverse than at other area prep schools. But plenty of his friends and classmates were the children of the very wealthy, were now the very wealthy themselves—doctors, lawyers, writers, newscasters. He could be living like they were. But Grady had always wanted to be a cop like his father.

  After Regis, he attended New York University, though he’d been accepted at Princeton, Georgetown, and Cornell. He just didn’t understand spending all that money. Even with the partial scholarships he’d been offered at those schools, the tuition seemed staggering. His parents would have helped, but it would have left nothing for his sisters. NYU gave him a free ride. He joined the NYPD as soon as he graduated.

  He had the sense that his family was disappointed. They’d expected something more. His father was the least pleased of all. “All that hard work you put in,” he lamented. “You could have gone to public, skipped college altogether, if all you wanted out of your life was to chase skells.” Like most blue-collar guys, his father had a strict and simple formula for determining success: income minus effort. Police work was hard and dangerous and you’d never get rich as an honest cop. It was bad math. You ended up giving more than you got. But the Jesuits didn’t measure success that way; neither did Grady.

  Because of his education, because of a year doing the most dangerous work on a South Bronx buy-and-bust detail, and because of one flashy arrest, he got his gold shield fast. Five years on the job and he was a homicide de
tective. Too fast for some of the guys with more years on. Because of this, Grady wasn’t as popular as his old man had been. “Fuck them,” his dad advised. “They’re crabs in a barrel, people like that.”

  After Shane gave them the names and contact information of the other doormen, Grady and Breslow took the elevator up to the ninth floor and walked down the long hallway over plush carpet.

  “I think we’re in the wrong line of work,” Jez said, running a finger along the wall.

  “No doubt about it,” Grady answered, just to be sociable. He appreciated nice things—good clothes, upscale restaurants—but he was unimpressed by opulence. He knocked heavily on the door, modulated his voice to be deeper than it normally was.

  “NYPD. Open up, please.” He knocked again hard for emphasis.

  They waited a full thirty seconds, knocked one more time, then Grady unlocked the door and pushed it open. He could see from where they stood that a vase lay shattered in the entrance hallway.

  They moved to either side of the door, drew their weapons, and stepped carefully inside. They went through the apartment, room by room, checking closets, making sure the place was empty. When they were sure it was, they holstered their weapons. Jesamyn called for uniforms and a crime-scene team.

  The stunning duplex with its hardwood floors and high ceilings, gleaming gourmet kitchen, second-floor master bedroom suite, had been trashed. Furniture was slashed, drapes shredded, shelves dumped, pictures shattered. Grady could see that two computer CPUs—one in the upstairs office off the bedroom and the other at a desk in the kitchen downstairs—were gone, monitors left with cords cut, just like at Razor Tech. A file cabinet hidden inside a closet stood completely empty, drawers gaping like mouths. In the master bathroom, someone had dumped a bottle of red nail polish over a framed black-and-white photo of Isabel Raine walking on the beach with a big dog and two kids. The polish was not quite dry.

  Back downstairs, Grady surveyed the living room. Somehow the damage inflicted seemed angry, frenetic. A row of family photos had been swept from a shelf and stomped upon, cushions had been slashed, bleeding white stuffing. A chinz couch had been scribbled on with indelible marker. It seemed a lot more personal than the damage done in the office space.