Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “She can’t hear us, Detective,” she said nastily.

  “But I can. So how about you keep your voice down?”

  It wasn’t uncommon for a crime scene to be a place where people laughed and made jokes, disrespecting the victim with nasty remarks. It was the general understanding that this was how cops coped with the horror of it all. But Grady didn’t like it, especially in a nice girl’s apartment. It was one thing in the Bronx, where a bunch of perps had shot one another up. But a girl like Camilla, living alone in the city, working, like any of his sisters. She deserved more respect. He’d make sure she got it.

  “I can’t think,” he said to Jez.

  “Let’s go out in the hall for a second.”

  He followed her out and she leaned against the gray wall. She fished a pack of Chiclets out of her purse, shook some into his hand, and popped a few in her mouth. She used to smoke a bit, not all the time. Just when she was really stressed. Now she chewed gum.

  “She was kind of our only lead,” said Jez after a minute of chewing.

  “There’s still Charlie Shane.”

  “Shane, who is missing, whose apartment yielded nothing.”

  Grady leaned against the wall, so they were shoulder to shoulder. Well—shoulder to arm; he was a full head taller than his partner. He wondered if he should acknowledge that she had been right, that because they did what he’d suggested, they were screwed. He just couldn’t. It lodged in his throat.

  “Okay, so according to Book,” he said instead. “He came here looking for Isabel to convince her to turn herself in. He found her here with the body. She told him that Marcus Raine had killed Camilla, that she’d just seen him.”

  “How’d Book get in?”

  “He said the street door was ajar. He walked right in, came up the stairs.”

  Jez took a few thoughtful chews, pulled a pen from her pocket and started that tapping thing she did. “But Book didn’t pass Raine on the way out,” she said, tap, tap, tapping the pen on her thigh. “And the only other exits—on the roof and in the back—are fire doors that would have set off alarms.”

  Grady started picking at the scab on his knuckles. It wasn’t quite ready to be removed, stung a bit; a little drop of blood sprang from the wound. “So he heard Book on the stairs and hid until he’d passed.”

  “Or Raine was never here.” Jez hadn’t looked at him, but she fished a small packet of tissues from her other pocket and held it out to him.

  He took one and dabbed gingerly at his hand. The pattern of blood on the tissue brought to his mind blooming poppies in driven snow. “I don’t see Isabel Raine as a killer.”

  Jez lifted and dropped her shoulders quickly, started tapping again. “Anyone can become a killer if the motivations are there.”

  Grady knew her theory on this, but he disagreed. He thought it required a special kind of ego-sickness to take a life, a core belief that your needs, your survival took precedence over all others. Unless it was a question of self-defense or to protect another, he believed you had to be at least a borderline sociopath to kill another person. Even if someone is overcome with rage, it takes amazing arrogance to kill. He didn’t see that in Isabel. He saw arrogance, but not that particular brand.

  “Camilla Novak was the last link to the original crime,” Jez said. “Without her we don’t have any live leads. Only the cold-case file. Someone knew that.”

  “There might be something in her apartment,” said Grady. “We don’t know.”

  “We won’t find anything there,” she said quickly. He knew she was thinking of the Raines’ apartment and the office where every scrap of important paper and data had been removed. “If there was anything, one of the Raines took it.”

  “One of the Raines? You really think she could be a part of this.”

  Jez snapped the gum in her mouth, looked up and down the hallway. “Where would Marcus Raine hide? If he heard Book coming?”

  Grady glanced around. A typical downtown building with old tile floors and high ceilings, gray walls, hard stone stairs. “He could have gone up a flight,” he said. “Come back down when Book entered the apartment.”

  Jez tilted her head to the side, walked over to the banister and gazed up the stairwell. She gave a reluctant nod.

  “After Book came inside, Isabel Raine left,” Grady said, “claiming she’d find her husband and make things right for her sister’s family.”

  “And he just let her go?”

  “What was he going to do? Physically restrain her?”

  “It wouldn’t have been a bad idea. She’d look less guilty if she stuck around. Did she take anything with her?”

  “Erik Book says no.” Grady was skeptical. He felt that Book was holding back, wanting to protect his sister-in-law—or maybe his own interests. At the moment, people who looked like victims yesterday weren’t looking as innocent today.

  “But where’s Novak’s purse? Coat’s on the couch, like she was getting ready to leave,” Jez asked.

  Grady shook his head slowly. “No purse, no cell phone, no keys, no wallet in the residence.”

  “Someone took her bag.”

  “Seems so,” he said. “Did you see the stamp on her hand?”

  “She’s a hot, single woman living in New York City. Of course she has a club stamp on her hand.”

  “Yeah, but the club’s in Queens.”

  Jez wrinkled her nose. “Queens? That’s weird. No self-respecting Manhattanite goes to Queens to party.”

  More laughter wafted out the apartment door, and Grady felt a fresh wave of annoyance and frustration. He tried to tamp it down, didn’t want to lose his temper. He was already getting a reputation.

  “I really don’t like that woman,” Grady said.

  “You don’t like anyone,” Jez replied with a patient smile.

  “I like you.”

  “I guess that makes me one of the lucky few who meets with your approval. Do you ever think you might be a little too judgmental?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “My point exactly. You’re supposed to have an investigative mind, not a mind like a steel trap.”

  “More insults from my partner.”

  She pulled a face of mock sympathy. “Think of it as tough love.”

  He gave a little chuckle, thought about making a comment about his ex, but Jez’s earlier admonitions still rang in his head.

  “Women don’t usually cut each other’s throats,” he said after a beat. “That’s an intimate act. And one that takes tremendous strength. You need to immobilize the person with one arm, draw the knife across her throat with the other.” He mimed the action.

  “Or it’s an act of trust,” Jez said. She leaned in quickly, close to him, brought the tip of her index finger to his throat and drew it quickly across. She moved back to the wall. “You wouldn’t let a stranger near enough to cut your throat, unless you were overpowered. Camilla Novak let her killer in, let him get very close to her.”

  He remembered something Isabel Raine had told him at the hospital. “Isabel Raine said that her husband had had an affair. She said it was a couple of years ago, that she never knew with whom.”

  “Maybe it was Camilla Novak.”

  “Which gives both husband and wife possible motive here.”

  “And provides another connection to the missing Marcus Raine.”

  “So, what now? Our best leads missing and dead.”

  “We need to find out where all that money went. We follow it. It’s easy enough for people to disappear, but money always leaves a trail.”

  “Already on it,” Jez said. “Warrant issued, records subpoenaed. We should have everything first thing tomorrow.”

  “And what about cell phone records, for both of them?”

  Jez rolled her eyes at him. “What am I, a rookie? And by the way, you could do some of this stuff every once in while, instead of walking around looking tortured and complaining that you can’t think, trying to feel the scene.” She waggled he
r fingers at him. “You’re like a character cop, an idea of yourself.”

  “Any more insults for me today? Let’s just get them all out of the way now.”

  “Not insults, Crowe. Just observations. Don’t be so sensitive.” She gave him a sly smile, knew that she was getting to him and enjoying the hell out of it. “I’m just trying to get you to keep your feet on the ground.”

  “You don’t give me a chance,” he said, sounding a little peevish even to his own ears. “You’re all over this stuff. Anyway, you’re better at getting things like that done. People listen to you.”

  “Hmm,” she said, moving back toward the apartment.

  “Let’s get a photo of Marcus Raine the second and make a visit to Red Gravity, see if anyone there recognizes him.”

  “If it survived the dot bomb. A lot of those little tech companies didn’t make it.”

  “Worth a shot.”

  “Another thing that’ll have to wait till morning.”

  Grady looked at his watch; it was close to ten P.M. The morning seemed a long way off. He didn’t think they could wait around on banking and cell phone records, offices that might or might not still exist.

  “What till then?” he asked.

  She turned back to him. “We go door-to-door and let everyone tell us they didn’t see or hear anything. Then I say we take Erik Book in and talk to him a little more. I don’t think he’s telling us everything.”

  “And when he lawyers up—if he hasn’t already—how ’bout we do a little clubbing?”

  “You read my mind.”

  *

  I WAS FEARLESS once. I remember this. I remember being so sure of myself, of my opinions, passions, and goals. I remember raging and debating in my classes at NYU—politics, literature, history. Everything seemed clear. Everyone with a different opinion was simply wrong. There wasn’t one event that changed this, not that I remember.

  But as I grew older, that passionate certainty faded. I became more reserved, more reticent. My righteousness was less assured. I avoided the kind of heated political debates that I once enjoyed. Existential, religious, moral arguments made me uncomfortable. There were so many opinions, so many convinced of their own righteousness. A slow dawning that the world was impossibly complicated, that differences were too often irreconcilable, made me less inclined to do battle.

  I saw this mellowing in Linda, too. After our father’s suicide, she was so angry. And she stayed angry—angry at him, at our mother, at Fred, at anyone who crossed her or disrespected her. She was always embroiled in some argument with this one or that, fought with clerks in various shops, waitresses, massage therapists, over any little issue. Once I had to drag her, screaming over her shoulder, from a gay sing-along bar in the Village after she fought with a drag queen over I can’t even remember what. I was pretty sure it was about to come to blows.

  But when Erik came into her life, something in her shifted and settled. “He removed the thorn from her paw,” Fred said in his usual quiet way. Emily’s arrival calmed her still more. By the time Trevor came on the scene, she seemed as serene as a monk. I’d arrive at the loft and find the place in chaos—dishes in the sink, the floor a gauntlet of baby gyms, cloth blocks, and teddy bears—and Linda peacefully lying on the living room carpet, holding up a set of keys in the light for Trevor, or reading to Emily from a towering stack of books.

  “I just don’t have the energy, Isabel,” I remember her telling me one afternoon. I was at the loft, and she mentioned a bad review she’d received. The reviewer had called her work “common” and “maudlin.” No one likes a bad review. But Linda could be expected to go off the deep end, sulking for days, making complaining phone calls to editors, writing nasty “reviews” of her reviews and sending them to the critic. But that afternoon, she just seemed to shrug it off.

  “I can’t afford my own temper tantrums anymore. You owe them something, you know. These kids, you bring them into the world. They didn’t ask for it; you did it for all your own reasons, good or bad. The least you can do is not be a bitch all the time, someone who’s always in a rage, or complaining, or depressive.”

  I saw the simple wisdom in this.

  “I mean, look at them,” she said, pointing to Trevor, who toddled about in his diaper, putting random large, colorful objects in his mouth. “We were all that. Every rude jackass on the street or maniac killer or corrupt politician was walking around in someone’s living room with a wet diaper, chewing on rubber keys or something. When you understand that, it’s so much easier to be forgiving than it is to be angry all the time.”

  I wondered but didn’t say, When you lose that youthful assurance, that arrogance, what else goes with it? Your passion, your drive, that hunger to create? When motherhood seemed to demand so much time, energy, love—when an uninterrupted night’s sleep was something to celebrate—wouldn’t the artist be sacrificed?

  But no. It was harder for her to work, certainly. I watched her struggle for time, for the mental space she needed to see. There was so much conflict in the artist mother; Linda was eloquent in her angst.

  “I never knew that loving them, being a mother would occupy such a huge space in my heart. That there wouldn’t be much room for anything else.” But ultimately her work had more depth, more beauty than anything she’d ever done before Trevor and Emily.

  I was comforted by this when I realized I was pregnant—something about which I’d been deeply ambivalent. I’d missed my period. The drugstore test confirmed my fears. I spent a full week buffeted by joy and abject terror, angst and excitement before I told Marcus.

  The look on his face when I delivered the news was a low point in our marriage. A cool, half smile. Was I joking? Then, when he realized that I wasn’t, a strange blankness, a total withdrawal from me, from the scene. He crossed his arms across his chest and walked over to the window.

  “It’s not a good idea, Isabel. It’s not…” He let the sentence trail with a bemused shake of his head.

  “It’s not an idea, Marcus. It’s a person.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. More than any other moment, this was the moment that should have sent the alarms jangling. But, of course, I couldn’t have seen anything then through the veil of my anger and disappointment.

  Now, as I sat on a rocking subway car hurtling uptown, I realized he wanted to tell me then. He wanted to confess. That was the pleading I saw on his face when he turned to look at me.

  “Listen …,” he began. I lifted a hand, terrified of the words that were coming.

  “Don’t. Don’t say something you won’t be able to take back.”

  I thought he was going to tell me to end the pregnancy. And I couldn’t have those words written between us, alive and gnawing at our marriage like rats in the attic. You’d try to kill them, but they’d always be up there scampering, scratching, crawling in through any hole they found. But maybe he wasn’t going to say that at all; maybe he was going to tell me everything I was finding out now, the hard way.

  I am a person lulled to calm by moving vehicles. The subway, even with all its filth and myriad threats, is no different. My memories and the present moment mingled in a semi-dream state. I wasn’t sleeping—I was way too wired for that; it was more a kind of restless doze. Though I was aware of the rumble of the train, the stops as they came and went, I was back there in our kitchen. I could smell the marinara that simmered on the stove, hear the music from the stereo in the living room, feel the cold granite of the countertop beneath my hands.

  “Don’t make me hate you,” I said.

  He looked at me quickly, startled as though I’d slapped him. I wanted to. I wanted to pummel him, scream at him. And I might have if I didn’t suspect he’d just stand there, stoic, accepting my blows.

  “What do you think it means to be a parent?” he asked. There was a musing quality to his tone, as if he wasn’t quite looking for an answer. I answered, anyway.

  “I think it means you stop living only for yourself
,” I said. “I think it means you experience a different kind of love.”

  It sounded lame, defensive, even to my own ears. He gave me a long look.

  “But what if it doesn’t mean any of that?” Something in his eyes made me shiver. “What then?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You know as well as I that not everyone loves their children.”

  I felt a wave of nausea, the debut of a tension headache. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  He shook his head, pressed his lips into a tight line. I have such clarity on this moment now, but then I was mystified, despairing. All I could think was, He doesn’t want our child. He doesn’t think he could love a baby.

  I knew he’d be nervous, afraid. I expected him to be as ambivalent as I had been. But in my center I believed that, like me, under the current of all that surface intellectual confusion there would be a deep well of love and desire for a child. His frigid withdrawal, the draining of color from his face, the physical retreat—I see it now as the beginning of an end that was still too far off to perceive.

  “Linda and Erik are happy,” I said.

  “Really. You think so?”

  “You don’t?”

  “Is that what this about? Wanting what your sister has?”

  “No,” I snapped. “Of course not. This conversation is not about what I want or don’t want. It’s about what is. I’m pregnant.”

  “So you wouldn’t have chosen this?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  He gave me a smirk, a quick nod of his head. “That’s what I thought.”

  I felt a rush of guilt, for not wanting this enough, for having it anyway, for now trying to convince Marcus it was a good thing. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I remembered Linda and Erik’s euphoria when they learned she was pregnant. They hadn’t planned Emily—or Trevor, either. But they were truly happy each time. I thought it would happen that way for us.

  The light outside was growing dim and we hadn’t turned on the lights inside yet, so we were sitting in near darkness.

  “Isabel,” he said, coming nearer to me.