by Lisa Unger
“Who are ‘Bechim’s people’?” asked Lydia.
Jeffrey looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “He didn’t say.”
“Okay,” she said with a frown. “So who was it?”
“A guy named Manny Underwood. Started out in corrections. Lost his job and did some hard time for dealing drugs to inmates.”
Dax winced. “Corrections officers don’t usually do well in prison.”
Jeff nodded. “He lived through it because he made some powerful friends inside. Later on, these same people gave him work in ‘personal security.’ Apparently, Manny’s a big guy, total roid case. Good bodyguard material. Anyway, after he was released he went to work for a company called Body Armor. Ring a bell?”
“Body Armor,” Lydia repeated, the name sounding familiar to her.
“Owned until about a year and a half ago by Tim Samuels.”
Lydia let the information sink in. “Huh,” she said, not having anything more intelligent to offer at the moment. The loose connections between people and events were not coalescing for her. Tim Samuels to Michele LeForge to The New Day, The New Day to Mickey, Mickey to Lily, Tim Samuels’ former employee to a jewel robbery to a pink stone found in an abandoned building that LaForge once declared as her residence. It was a chain of evidence linked only to itself, circular and useless.
“Do we know who bought his company?” asked Dax.
“We don’t know. But I’m starting to have my suspicions.”
“The New Day,” said Dax.
“I’d put money on it. That’s probably how Samuels got tangled up with them in the first place. Maybe he didn’t even know it.”
“What would The New Day want with a personal security firm?” said Lydia.
Jeffrey shrugged. “Maybe they needed some trained muscle.”
They were all quiet as they considered the reasons why a ‘church’ would need trained muscle. She thought of the men who’d chased her from the premises. She thought of Lily in restraints. She thought of the jewel heist and Detective Stenopolis accused of a terrible crime she was sure he couldn’t have committed. Who are these people? she thought.
“Well, maybe Underwood has some answers,” suggested Dax.
“Doesn’t sound like he knows much of anything. At least nothing Bechim was willing to share.”
“We can talk to him when we get back to New York. Tomorrow. With Lily,” said Lydia. She was shooting for optimism but it sounded more like desperation even to her own ears.
“When are we going to leave?” asked Lydia. She’d managed her anxiety into a low-level buzz but the volume was coming up again.
“I just want to do a little more research on that building,” said Dax, moving over to the computer.
There was an aggressive knock on the door to their room. All of them froze for a second, then Lydia moved to the wall beside the door. She felt her heart start to stutter and looked at the bag across the room that contained her gun.
“Room service,” a gruff muffled voice said through the thin wood. Jeffrey and Dax exchanged a look.
“Ever see a dump like this offer room service?” whispered Dax.
“Especially when we didn’t call for anything,” said Jeff, kneeling behind the bed and taking his gun from his waist. Dax was about to follow suit, when the door busted in and three unpleasant-looking men in suits entered, guns drawn.
“Guns on the bed, please. Hands where we can see them,” said a balding man with ice blue eyes and a small but powerful-looking physique. He sounded tired, bored, like he’d said the words so many times that his jaw ached from it.
Jeff and Dax put their guns on the bed and their hands on their heads. Lydia felt the tension drain from her shoulders and her adrenaline stop pumping. Federal Agents; better than The New Day freaks.
“Ms. Strong, can you please stand over by your associates?”
Lydia complied and the man replaced his sidearm in its holster and withdrew identification from the lapel pocket of his jacket.
“I’m Special Agent John Grimm with the FBI and you are in my space.” He glanced behind him. “Stand down, boys.” The two younger agents, both thin and fresh faced with good haircuts, replaced their weapons.
“You can take your hands off your heads,” said Grimm, moving toward the bed. Jeffrey and Dax got to their feet. Grimm leaned down and picked up the Desert Eagle.
“Jesus. That’s nice. I’ve never seen one of those. Going moose hunting?”
Dax looked very stiff, his face drained of color. Grimm laid the gun back on the bed.
“I know who you are, Ms. Strong. And you, Mr. Mark, I believe we met when you were still with the Bureau. But I’m not sure I’ve been introduced to your colleague here.”
“Ignatius Bond,” said Dax, extending a hand.
Grimm looked at Dax and nodded. Dax withdrew his hand with a smile that was really more like a grimace. There was an energy between the two men that Lydia wasn’t sure she understood.
“So what brings you all to Florida?” said Grimm, walking over to the laptop and touching the mouse pad.
“We’re vacationing,” said Lydia.
Grimm turned the laptop around so that they could see the satellite photo of the New Day Farms.
“I don’t know what you’re planning here, my friends. But let’s sit down and have a little talk about what you think you know about The New Day.”
Twenty-Three
Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”
Baby Boy Mendez kept asking the same two questions as they drove him from the Alphabet City apartment he’d shared with his sister to the morgue at Belleview Hospital. It was like he’d been caught in some kind of hysterical loop since they showed up at his apartment and gave him the news. He’d been eating a Whopper and watching Sponge-Bob SquarePants on Nickelodeon when they’d entered the apartment, told him the body of a woman and her child had been found in the East River.
“We’ll need you to identify her, Baby Boy,” Evelyn told him quietly. “We’ll confirm her identity with dental records but that’ll take time. It’s going to be hard but you need to come and see if the woman we found is your sister.”
He’d looked at them, eyes moving back and forth between the two women as if he was looking for an expression that would tell him it was a joke or a mistake. Then he ran from them. They waited patiently as they listened to him throw up in the bathroom.
“What if you’re wrong?” Evelyn whispered to Jesamyn.
She put her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels, considering the question. Then, “He still needs to identify her.”
“He could do it from a photograph or on a video monitor.”
Jesamyn shook her head. She wanted Baby Boy Mendez to see his sister’s body and the body of his nephew. She wanted him to see what she suspected he had done to them. If she was wrong, well, she was unnecessarily traumatizing an innocent family member. And that would suck for him and for her; she’d feel very badly about it. She just didn’t think she was wrong.
Evelyn looked doubtful. She didn’t see it in Mendez. But Jesamyn saw a kind of childish rage, a jealousy over the baby who would soon be the focus of his sister’s life, leaving Baby Boy without a mother, in his mind anyway. The child who no one ever cared about enough to even name would be losing the only mother he’d ever known. He probably hadn’t meant to kill her. Or maybe he had. It didn’t much matter in the scheme of things.
In the car, she could still smell his vomit and the acrid odor of fear, sweat.
“Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”
She’d be doubting herself if he was wailing, accusing Jorge Alonzo of his sister’s murder. But he wasn’t doing any of those things. He was pale, the features on his face slack, his eyes shifting back and forth almost imperceptibly. To Jesamyn all of these things said guilt and fear, not grief, not terror over the fate of a loved one, not hope that the police were mistaken in their tentative identification of the body.
“Th
at’s why we need you to make the positive ID, Baby Boy,” said Evelyn. “We could be wrong.”
Evelyn threw her a look and Jesamyn folded her arms. No one would ever ask a family member to ID a body as badly decomposed as Rosario Mendez’s and Jesamyn could see that Evelyn was sick over it. They could wind up getting sued, especially since this was technically no longer their case. It was a homicide case now.
“She never changed to go out to the clubs that night,” Jesamyn had said to Evelyn on the dock. “She stayed home.”
“Which contradicts what Baby Boy told us,” said Evelyn, watching the Medical Examiner’s van pull away.
“He pointedly told us that she had changed. That he saw what she’d been wearing when he left folded on her bed.”
Evelyn nodded.
“When Mount and I talked to him, he wavered back and forth between referring to her in the past and present tense,” Jesamyn went on when the other woman didn’t say anything.
“He did that with us, too. Wong thought it meant something.”
“I don’t think Alonzo cared enough about Rosario and their baby to bother killing them. I mean, what’s his motive? What does he have to gain?”
“He claimed the baby wasn’t his,” said Evelyn.
“So?” she said with a shrug. “That’s not a motive. She never asked him for anything, not even money, according to her friends.”
“So what are you suggesting?” Evelyn had asked, putting her hands in her pocket and shrugging against the cold.
“Let’s bring the brother in for the ID.”
Baby Boy started to sniffle as the three of them walked up the cold gray hallway. Until then, there had only been the sound of her and Evelyn’s heels, the squeaking of Baby Boy’s sneakers on the linoleum floors. The smell of death and chemicals was already strong and the morgue was still a few doors down. The fluorescent lights above buzzed.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, coming to a stop. Jesamyn took a hard look at him. There was only fear there in his liquid brown eyes. He’d wrapped his arms around himself, was shifting from foot to foot.
“There’s no other way,” said Jesamyn. “I’m sorry.”
“One of her friends, maybe,” he suggested. “One of them could do it.”
Jesamyn shook her head. “You’re her next of kin, Baby Boy. It’s your job to do this for her. You’re all she has, now. The only one. She took care of you all your life; now you have to do this for her.” It was a bull’s-eye; she saw it as his face fell to pieces. His liquid brown eyes ran over and the tears started to fall. He doubled over, gripping his stomach as if he were in terrible pain.
“Oh, God,” he wailed. “I’m so sorry. Rosie, I’m so sorry. Oh, God. I miss her so much.” He dropped to his knees and Jesamyn was beside him.
“You were so jealous of that baby, weren’t you?” she whispered, putting her arm around him. He wailed harder. “You were so angry with her for betraying you, loving someone else as much as she loved you. More. He wasn’t even born yet and she already loved him more, didn’t she?”
He pushed Jesamyn away and leaned against the wall. “Get away from me,” he shrieked.
“There’s nothing like the love between a mother and her son,” said Jesamyn, standing, her voice low and sure now. “It can’t even compare to the love between a sister and her brother; it’s not the same.”
He released the most heartbreaking cry. “He was all she ever talked about,” he screamed. “The baby, the baby, her baby boy. I just wanted her to shut the fuck up about him. I was her baby boy. That’s my name.”
Jesamyn felt a stab of pity for him. Pity and disgust.
“She was in labor, wasn’t she, when you came home?” asked Evelyn, as if the thought had just occurred to her. “She needed you to take her to the hospital.”
Jesamyn shot her a look, afraid the shaking judgment in Evelyn’s voice would shut him down. Baby Boy was sobbing now, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on his haunches.
“She was in labor and you killed her,” said Evelyn with a shake of her head. “How did you do it?”
He stopped crying then. He wiped his eyes and his nose with the sleeve of his Rangers jersey. He issued a couple of shuddering breaths. Jesamyn was sure he had realized that he was on the brink of confessing, that he’d come back to himself.
“I hit her in the back of the head with a bat,” he said, quietly. “She never even saw it coming. She never knew.”
Evelyn let go of a sigh and bowed her head. Baby Boy’s face went blank then and he glanced up at the ceiling for a second.
When he looked down, he said quietly, “I want my lawyer.”
The homicide guys tried to take the collar but Evelyn fought them for it. It was her case from the beginning and she wanted the arrest. She wasn’t going to let someone stroll in during the last round and take the credit for all her weeks of late nights and dead ends. It didn’t give Jesamyn any satisfaction to put the cuffs on Baby Boy and bring him in with Evelyn. Jorge Alonzo she would have liked to see in a cage. But Mendez was this damaged kid, acting out of his own abused spirit. He’d live with the hell of what he had done every day for the rest of his life.
***
Jesamyn left the precinct a few hours later after helping Evelyn get started with the paperwork, then leaving her to finish it up. It was Evelyn’s collar, after all. She’d get the glory, which Jesamyn didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t have to do all the typing and waiting around that followed an arrest. Stepping onto the concrete, she saw Dylan across the street on the swing set in the park beside the lot. She crossed the street and laced her fingers through the chain-link fence.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’ve been trying to call you,” he said, coming around the fence. “I have something to show you. You need to come with me.”
“What do you need to show me?” she asked, suspicious. She wondered if he was just dangling a line to get her to spend some time alone with him.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” he said, moving toward his GTO. She could see the fin and the white stripe that ran from the hood to the trunk just a few cars down. She didn’t follow him right away.
“Where are we going?” she asked again, but the wind took her words away. He didn’t appear to hear her question.
He turned around and extended a hand. “Come on. What are you waiting for?”
Though her feet felt like they were made out of lead all of a sudden, though something inside her resisted, she followed him. She always followed him.
The moon shone through his window and bathed his legs in its milky light. He was watching for her, the phone in his hand. He could hear the laugh track from whatever his brother was watching on the television downstairs; his family didn’t want to leave him alone now. All he wanted was to be alone and wait for Lily in peace. If it was Lily he had seen at all. If there had been anyone there on the street outside his house. He wondered absently if he was losing his mind. He didn’t think so; he still felt like himself, if a little numb, a little emptied out.
He’d tried to call Jesamyn but she hadn’t picked up the phone and he hadn’t left a message. He’d checked his messages and found three from Lydia Strong. The last one had been left just a few hours earlier.
“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “We’re in Florida. We’re going to find Lily and-” The cell phone connection had cut out before she’d finished her message. He wondered if she knew that he’d been accused of murder and arrested. He thought about calling her back but he didn’t know what to say. The phone had sat limp in his hand for the better part of an hour while he scrolled through all his options, rejected each, and eventually wound up doing nothing except sitting by the window, waiting.
“What are you doing, bro?” asked Theo, who had appeared in the doorway. He looked worried. No, that wasn’t right. He looked scared.
“Just sitting here.”
Theo nodded in the solemn way he had. “Why don’t
you try to get some sleep?”
“I will,” said Matt.
Theo nodded again and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and pulled his shoulders up, took a deep breath. “It’s going to be okay, you know?”
“I know.”
Matt was older and bigger than Theo, but Theo had always been the one to take care of him. When Matt was taunted at school for his height and awkwardness, it was Theo who always took up the fight. When Matt was tortured by his shyness around girls, it was Theo who advised him. Matt felt guilty that Theo had to sit on his couch while his wife was home alone.
“Go home, man,” said Matt. “You don’t need to be here. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”
“I don’t want you to be alone, Mateo,” his brother said sadly. He’d been a sensitive, compassionate kid who’d grown into a kind and caring adult. Matt was proud of Theo.
“I’m okay. Really. I’m just going to go to bed. Before? I was probably just dreaming. The stress of everything, maybe just got to me for a minute. But it’s fine, you know. I’m fine.”
He tried to make himself look normal by sitting up straight and smiling. But from the look on Theo’s face he suspected that it wasn’t successful. Theo walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder, bent down and kissed him on the head.
“Just call me if you see anything else, you know, before you go running out into the street like that?”
“I promise,” said Matt, inwardly breathing a sigh of relief.
Theo gave him a quick pat on the back and moved backward toward the door.
“You sure-?” he started to say, but Matt lifted a hand to stop him.
“I’m sure, Theo. Thanks.”
When he heard the door close downstairs, he stood and quickly got dressed, pulling on a pair of jeans, a gray wool sweater and a pair of Timberlands. He took his wallet from the dresser and from a lock box in the back of his closet he removed his off-duty revolver, a five-shot Smith & Wesson. He moved quickly to his office and took out a file that contained all his banking records, his life insurance policy, of which his parents were the beneficiaries, and all of his investments. There was another file that contained his will. They were papers most cops had in order, someplace easy to find. He left them all on the kitchen table. There was enough, he thought, to cover his bond if he didn’t make it back. He pulled on his leather jacket and walked out the back door of his house. He told himself not to look back and he didn’t.