by Lisa Unger
“That’s not exactly true. Because we have an eyewitness who places Lily at this church just days before she was reported missing.”
“An old man in a nursing home with poor eyesight and documented dementia.” Matt glanced at the cellular phone sitting on the desk where Templar had been sitting. The boy had been busy.
“We have a photograph of Lily running from a van bearing the emblem of The New Day on Halloween night.”
Jude Templar blinked at that but said nothing.
“We have reports of a black SUV waiting for Lily as she withdrew all of her money from Chase Manhattan bank and we’ve linked its license plate to the owner. I think it will only be a matter of time before we can connect her to The New Day.”
Another reptilian blink from the lawyer.
“I’m also aware of the allegations leveled against Rhames and The New Day since its inception in 1977.”
“Allegations which were never substantiated,” Templar said, looking at his cuticles.
“I want Lily Samuels and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get her back,” Matt said, leaning into Templar, putting his face so close to the lawyer that he could smell his cologne. He felt Jesamyn’s hand on his arm.
“Mount-” she started, looking uneasily at Templar and then back at him, but he lifted a hand.
“Be careful, Detective,” said Templar. “Be very careful.”
Templar reached for the phone he’d left on the desk, never taking his eyes off Matt. “I’ll wait outside until you’re done with your pointless, fruitless search. But our conversation is officially over. And, if you don’t stay away from me, so is your pathetic career.”
Matt pointed to the ceiling. “The roof,” he said. “Right the fuck off.”
Templar turned his back and left.
“Take it easy, Mount,” whispered Jez. “You coming unglued or what?”
He looked at her and she had genuine worry in her eyes.
“She was here,” he said to her. “I can feel it. She’s still alive.”
Jesamyn stared at him, opened her mouth like she was going to say something and then clamped it shut. They stared at each other for a second.
“If she was here, if she’s still alive, we’ll find her,” she said, her voice soothing and sure.
“How?” he yelled, causing Jesamyn to jump a little in surprise. “There’s nothing here. We’re too late.”
He looked at her a second, felt briefly bad for yelling at her, and then turned his back and walked away toward the breezeway. After a second, he heard her running after him.
“Maybe not,” she said. “You have to talk to some of these people.”
“Why,” he said, turning. “You got something?”
“I don’t know. They seem normal enough at first. But the longer you talk to them, the weirder they get. Mount, there’s something wrong with these people. Something really wrong with them.”
Usually when people woke up in a room with Dax, there was some kind of a powerful reaction. But Charley opened his eyes, registered Dax’s presence, and was as placid as a lamb. He sat up on the cot they’d placed him on, taking the ice pack off his face, and asked politely for some water. Dax complied.
“How are you feeling, Charley?” Dax asked when he returned with a frosty bottle of water. He removed the lid and handed it to Charley.
“Not very well,” he answered. He drank gingerly, as if the action pained him. “My head hurts.”
Charley looked like a raccoon. His eyes were so purple and swollen that Dax was surprised he could even open his lids. The ridge on his nose told Dax that Charley’s nose was broken and that he’d never be quite as pretty again.
“So let’s have a little chat,” said Dax, straddling a chair he’d placed beside the cot. Charley slid back on the cot, rested his back against the bare white wall and pulled his legs into a half-lotus position, as if nothing could please him more than having a little chat. He gave Dax a peaceful half-smile.
“Let’s start with the fact that your name’s not Charley,” said Dax, softly. “It’s James. James Rainer.”
Charley blinked slowly. “You’re mistaken,” he said. “My name is Charley.”
“Your name is James Rainer, known as Jamie to your friends. You’re twenty-two years old and were reported missing by your parents eight months ago. You were last seen leaving a party at the Tribeca loft belonging to your girlfriend. You were angry, upset, drunk.”
Two more long, slow blinks. He said calmly, “You’re mistaken.”
“Okay,” said Dax. “You tell me then, friend. Where were you born?”
He shook his head quickly and answered without hesitation.
“My New Day dawned on April 3rd of this year. I am reborn as the Universe intended me, free of attachments and addictions.”
Dax looked at him. Charley was calm, certain of his statement, his half-smile unwavering. He looked at Dax with clear blue eyes beneath the purple shiners. His skin had a milky quality to it and it was pulled taut over a jutting collarbone, shoulder knobs that pressed through the cotton on his tunic, pronounced cheekbones. His hands looked skeletal.
“And before that?”
“There is nothing before that.” He lifted a bony hand and ran it through his silky blonde hair; it fell like sand through his fingers. Dax saw Charley’s eyes shift down and to the right, as they tend to when a person is trying to remember something or to make sense of a confusing situation. There was something delicate, effeminate about him.
Dax smiled kindly, slid his chair in a little closer.
“Your girlfriend, Amanda Knight, told police that on the night you disappeared you admitted to her that you were gay. That the relationship you’d been carrying on with her was more of a sham for your parents than anything. And though you cared for her as a friend, you didn’t love her in the way she loved you.
“You told her, James, in a room full of the friends you shared, that the only way you could become aroused with her was to imagine that she was another man. You were drunk at the time, James, terribly drunk and furious with her, with yourself, with your parents. Friends tried to stop you from leaving, but you fought them off. They never saw you again.”
A slight quiver had started on Charley’s bottom lip.
“Do you remember?”
“You are mistaken.”
Dax waited a second and listened as Charley’s breathing became labored.
“I don’t know how you heard about The New Day,” Dax said, keeping his voice measured and calm. “Maybe the Internet, maybe an ad on the subway. But to someone who was as lost, as headlong into personal crisis as you were, James, it must have seemed like a safe haven. Maybe you went to them. Maybe they came to you.”
Charley didn’t say anything right away. His eyes had taken on a kind of glazed-over look, like he had disappeared into himself.
“I was lost,” he said. “I walked blindly for so long trying to make sense of all my pain. And then The New Day dawned. Everything that came before is darkness, like the time before birth.”
His words had the practiced quality of a mantra. He knew them by rote, like he’d spoken them a thousand times. Dax let a few beats pass before talking again.
“About two weeks after you dropped out of your life, you showed up at the bank and withdrew all your money. Cashed in your CDs and money market accounts, cleared out your savings and checking. You had quite a bit of money for a young guy, between a trust from your wealthy uncle and the money you were raking in as a trader on Wall Street. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars. You took a cashier’s check when they couldn’t give you cash.”
“I have no need for money any longer. It’s a drug, you only want more and more. There’s never enough, there’s nothing you won’t do for it. We’re junkies for the green stuff, all of us.”
Dax took a picture from his pocket and handed it to Charley. It was a picture of Mickey with his girlfriend Mariah.
“Do you know these people?”
“How about this girl?” Dax asked, handing him another photo, this time of Lily Samuels. Another quick shake of his head, a shift of the eyes.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Okay, James. I’m going to give you a little time to think.”
He walked over to the table that sat in the center of the room and took the article he’d printed off the Internet, complete with a picture of James Rainer. He placed it next to Charley on the cot.
“When you’re feeling up to it, why don’t you read this article? I’ll be back in a little while.”
He left the room then and locked the door behind him. He walked into an adjacent room where Lydia and Jeffrey were watching through a two-way mirror. They were in Dax’s dungeon, as Lydia liked to call it, that mysterious maze of rooms in his basement that was an endless source of fascination for Lydia.
Dax saw as he entered the darkened room that Charley sat perfectly still and hadn’t made a move for the article.
“We better take it easy on him,” said Dax. “With that kind of conditioning, he could crack up, get lost forever in there.” He tapped his temple.
“We might need a professional,” said Lydia. It had taken her about a half an hour on the Internet searching stories on missing young men to come up with the website James Rainer’s parents had posted, the articles that had run in the wake of his disappearance, the blogs from friends who recounted the night he’d disappeared, pleas from people who wanted him to know that they loved him and wanted him home no matter what. Jeffrey had recognized the picture from before his eyes had turned purple and swollen.
“Like a cult deprogrammer?” asked Jeffrey.
She nodded. “But first, we need to get in touch with his family.”
“Well,” said Dax, reluctantly. “Once we do that, we’re going to lose him.”
“Dax,” said Lydia, looking at him incredulous. “You’re implying that we keep him here and only let his family know when we’re done with him?”
He shrugged. “He’s been missing for eight months. Another day or two isn’t going to kill them.”
“Jesus, Dax,” said Lydia. “Are you even human?”
Another shrug. “That kid’s the only thing we got out of our botched visit to The New Day.”
“Not quite,” said Jeffrey. He took the blank visitor’s page from his pocket and laid it on the table. Dax and Lydia leaned in.
“Oh, good. So we have this blank piece of paper, too,” said Dax. “Congratulations, Detective, you cracked the case.”
Jeffrey gave him a look and sat down at the round metal table that stood in the corner of the room. He flattened the page out in front of him and turned on the halogen lamp, which shone a bright, direct beam onto the paper.
“You can see the indentation of writing from the page that was above this one on the clipboard. It’s a visitor’s log.”
Dax opened a drawer in the table and took out a pencil. He sat down beside Jeffrey and slid the paper away from him.
“Let me have it,” he said.
“Don’t fuck it up,” said Lydia, leaning over his shoulder.
Slowly, as Dax delicately shaded over the page, a list of names in a long scrawling hand started to appear in relief. Much of it was illegible, the impressions from the handwriting above uneven in the pressure applied. They could make out some common surnames, like Walsh, Smith, Jones.
Lydia looked away in frustration and noticed Charley reaching for the article beside him. She watched as his eyes scanned the page and his hand started to shake. She started to wonder if maybe they shouldn’t have left that for him to read. Maybe it was too much for him, to see it in black and white. She was about to say something when Jeffrey said,
“Whoa, is that who I think it is?” He reached into his coat pocket and took out his glasses.
Lydia looked down at the page and saw what he had seen. Just then, Charley began to cry.
You have no right to take these people into custody,” said Jude Templar on the walkway. He’d jumped out of his Jag when he saw the van approaching and the members of The New Day began filing out of the building. He approached the van’s back door as Matt and a couple of the uniformed officers led The New Day members out into the cold. Everyone was getting tired, the sun starting to make its debut over the horizon. Even Templar was starting to look a little wiped out, a little frayed.
Their search of The New Day buildings had yielded nothing immediate. But they’d spent the last couple of hours interviewing each of the few members they’d found on the premises. But talking to one of them was like talking to a radio. Their programming was not interactive. Finally, in frustration, Matt had called in for a van and told the members that they were going to the Fiftieth Precinct for further interviews. No one objected.
“I’m not taking them into custody,” said Matt calmly. “I’m taking them in for questioning. There’s a big difference.”
At this point, Templar threw up his hands and walked toward his Jag.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Detective,” he said over his shoulder. “And you’ll be seeing me again in a few hours with a court order to release these innocent people.”
“Okay,” said Mount with a friendly wave. “See you then.”
Jesamyn had this low-level anxiety over the way Mount was antagonizing Templar. It was her opinion that when it came to snakes like Templar, it was always better to stay out of striking distance. Matt was poking him with a short stick.
She watched as the six members of The New Day filed into the van with a weird calm. Not one of them ever asked what was happening to them or where they were going. The sight of them made Jesamyn shudder; their vacancy and docility unsettled her.
At the unfamiliar Fiftieth Precinct, Jesamyn found some terrible coffee in the break room and then asked around for a computer. She wound up being escorted to the desk of one of the homicide detectives who would not be in for another few hours. Someone who knew him well, a young black detective in his twenties with broad shoulders and a shy smile, logged her onto the machine using Detective Winslow’s password. As he did this, she stared at a picture sitting on the desk. It was one of those Sears family portraits featuring a big grizzly of a man Jesamyn assumed was Detective Charles Winslow, his petite and lovely red-headed wife and teenage twin daughters. The girls wore coordinating floral dresses, their hair swept up in matching French twists. Mrs. Detective wore a plain cream silk blouse open at the neck to reveal a strand of pearls. They all smiled brightly. They looked so normal to Jesamyn, so solid. She found herself envying them, wishing she and Dylan could have given normal and solid to Benjamin.
Oh, snap out of it, she was thinking to herself as she thanked the detective. Cute. Too young. She turned her attention to the computer and found the FBI’s Missing Persons website. She didn’t have any real names, so she’d have to sift through pictures and hope for a stroke of luck until Matt was able to get some real names to go on. If he was able to.
She scrolled through picture after picture of missing young men and women, sipping on the bitter, tepid coffee. A young Korean girl who’d left a Halloween party on her Pennsylvania college campus and was never seen again, a young man who’d gone to Argentina as an exchange student who was last seen walking the streets of Bariloche in Rio Negro, a young woman last seen jogging in her parents’ Texas subdivision at 11:30 in the morning while home on Christmas vacation. The list went on, tiny thumbnail pictures of smiling faces that she clicked on to learn the details of each disappearance.
Jesamyn was getting that sick, hollow feeling she got when she
searched this database. Where were these people, so many of them children and teenagers, so many of them young women? She thought of what would happen to her world if she went to pick up Benji one day and he wasn’t there, the teacher saying, “Oh, his dad/uncle/cousin, picked him up.” Or if she let him go to the store for her the way he always begged her to, and he never came home. She’d created a thousand scenarios like this, lived them a million times in her heart. She imagined seeing his face on a computer screen like this. Her throat was dry just at the thought of it. It was this job that made her overprotective of her son. Because she knew the worst could happen, saw it every day, no matter what the statistics said.
She was in the middle of her nightmare fantasy when she saw a face she recognized and her heart leapt… a girl with long dark hair, a round sweet face, and deep set eyes. She’d told them her name was Carla; she was twenty pounds thinner now, at least, her hair shaved tight to her head. But it was the eyes that gave her away, mournful, thickly lashed. Jessica Rawlins of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, had been missing since January of that year. She’d told them that her “New Day dawned on January 30th” when they asked her date of birth. According to the FBI, she’d been born on May 10th, 1982. She’d left her college campus one evening, no one knew why. Friends said she’d been depressed since the death of her father not quite a year earlier, that she’d been drinking too much. But no one feared her to be suicidal; she never talked about walking away from her life. When she didn’t return to her dorm that January night, her roommate called the police. There was a $75,000 reward for information leading to her return home. Jesamyn felt happy for a second; today was going to be a good day for Jessica Rawlin’s family. A very good day.
Fifteen
Tim Samuels looked as if he had aged ten years since the last time they saw him. Their visit this time was a surprise; though it was well past noon he clearly hadn’t showered or combed his hair. It was apparently a look he’d been cultivating for days by the smell of him. His face was a mask of stubble and deep lines. He wasn’t happy to see them. No one was ever happy to see them the second time.