by Lisa Unger
She looked up at Dylan, who nodded.
“I asked my ex-husband to come up here and watch Clifford Stern, see where he went, see who visited him.”
“And you saw the van?” asked Bloom, turning to Dylan who stood behind him. Dylan nodded, told him how he’d seen it pull up and sit.
“But no one got out. No one went into the Stern residence.”
“No,” said Dylan, shaking his head and folding his arms across his chest. “I waited a few hours, there was no activity from the van. I went to get Jez-Detective Breslow, to show her the van, and while we were here deciding what to do, we saw three flashes in the window, heard the sound of gunfire. We called 911.”
Bloom had his head cocked to Dylan, but his eyes were on the wall beside him, as if the scene were playing out for him there. “Then you took off?” asked Bloom with a frown that was somewhere between surprise and suspicion. “Why didn’t you investigate?”
Dylan and Jez were silent, exchanged a look. “We weren’t sure how it would look,” Jez said finally. “I thought, if they could frame Mount the way they did, why not me?” She paused and looked down at the table. “I have a son.”
Bloom looked at her carefully, with a slight narrowing of the eyes.
“But the van’s gone now,” he said after a minute of considering their story. They both nodded. “Seems like you could have called and told me what you were up to, Breslow.”
“I told you about The New Day when you questioned me. You didn’t seem to be taking me seriously.”
He shrugged. “I was taking you seriously. But some crazy-sounding story about a cult framing your partner and actually seeing the van in front of the residence of the only eyewitness to his crime is a different matter. Don’t you agree?”
She nodded, feeling like she’d let Matt down in a major way.
“Did you get the plate?” Bloom asked Dylan.
Dylan removed a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to the Detective. Jesamyn looked at him. She’d asked him the same question right before the gunfire and he hadn’t had a chance to answer.
“Did you run it?”
Dylan nodded. “The van is registered to The New Day. There are two outstanding parking tickets, one on the Upper West Side, and one in Riverdale.”
Jesamyn started at the harsh ripping sound of a body bag being zipped. She felt despair at the sound of it. “Two.38 slugs to the head,” said Bloom as the ME rolled the corpse out.
Jesamyn nodded. She knew Mount had a Smith & Wesson five-shot at home. His off-duty revolver, smaller and lighter than the Glock he carried on the job. From the look on Bloom’s face, he knew it too.
“You said two shots?” asked Dylan. “You find a third slug?”
Bloom shook his head. “Not yet. We’re not finished with the scene.”
“We heard three shots,” said Jesamyn.
Bloom shrugged. “If it’s here, we’ll find it.”
Jesamyn held Bloom’s eyes. She knew what he was thinking; she was thinking the same thing. If they’d come in here after the shots were fired, what would they have found? She pushed the thought away; there was no point in worrying about that now. But if she had to make the decision again, she’d do the same. Ben came first. He always came first. She fought the urge to put her head in her hands.
Since the slashing of his Achilles tendons, Dax Chicago had had a lot of time to think about the things he’d done. He’d managed to push so many days and moments from his memory that there were big black spaces in the narrative of his life. He liked it that way. Some things he wasn’t supposed to remember, other things he just didn’t want to remember. The little game Lydia played, trying to tease him into telling her things he couldn’t tell. She thought he was keeping things from her. And in some cases, that was true. There were things he couldn’t tell her or anyone. But there were plenty more he’d succeeded in forgetting altogether. Most people didn’t understand how that was possible. But then most people hadn’t been the places he’d been.
Since the accident, memories had returned unbidden. It was the inactivity, the insomnia, the time that was filled only with the pain of his slowly healing legs that allowed his deeds to come marching back. Now people, too, it seemed. People like Grimm. He’d never thought they would see each other again, and that had been fine by him.
Lydia and Jeffrey were ahead of him on the path. She was just within his reach. He wanted to grab her shoulders and spin her around, force her to look into his eyes. Her new knowledge of his past-or what she thought was her new knowledge-didn’t change their friendship. Jeffrey, Dax knew, was comfortable with the gray choices. He knew better than most that the just thing wasn’t always the legal thing. He knew that some people had to die so that other people could live. And Jeff, like Dax, was willing to be the person who made choices like that. But Lydia had never shared those feelings… even when her own life was at stake.
“In our line of work, there’s just a thin line that separates us from the monsters we chase. Once it has been crossed, you’re Ahab, you’ve caught the disease, whether you know it or not,” she’d said to him once. He’d never forgotten those words; they resonated with him. Maybe she was right. Maybe he had the disease and he just didn’t realize it. Maybe she thought she saw it in him now and would never be able to see him any other way. The thought pained him. Jeff and Lydia were the only true friends he’d ever known.
He reached for her but before his hand touched her shoulder, the ground fell out from beneath his feet and he was falling, falling into black. He heard Lydia screaming Jeffrey’s name and then there was nothing.
Twenty-Five
Jesamyn stood on Mount’s porch, ringing the bell and freezing her ass off. She knew it was pointless and stupid. He wasn’t going to be there. But part of her was just hoping that he’d come to the door in his sweatpants, groggy from sleep.
“What are you talking about?” he’d say, giving her that look he gave when he thought she was acting crazy. “Arrested? On the run accused of murdering one, possibly two people? That’s nuts.”
But he didn’t come and eventually she took the keys from her purse after a few more rings and let herself in. They’d exchanged keys a long time ago. It was in case something ever happened to either one of them and, for whatever reason, one of them needed entry into the other’s residence. She promised that if he was ever hurt or killed on the job, she’d go and take his porn videos and throw them out so his mother wouldn’t find them. Other than that they hadn’t really thought it through. It had just seemed like a good idea. She was glad for it now.
She was immediately assailed by the smell of garlic and oil as she stepped inside. The heat was blasting and she was grateful for the warmth. She closed the door behind her and stood in the living room, listened to the silence of an empty old house. She wasn’t sure why she’d come here, what she was looking for exactly. She guessed she’d know it when she saw it. She felt tired suddenly, the last few days catching up with her in a big way. She sat on his couch, threw her bag down beside her, put her feet on his coffee table and tried to think like Mateo Stenopolis.
He was a person that she knew. She knew her son Ben. She knew her mother. And she knew her partner. She had loved Dylan deeply once and maybe still did but she’d never really known him, at least not in the way she imagined she did. He kept secrets, told lies, wouldn’t share big parts of himself. You can’t know a person like that; you can love him, fill in the blanks with all your own dreams and desires. But, of course, he’ll disappoint you again and again, until you wake up and realize you can’t build a life with someone who won’t give himself up to it. You can’t live a life built on the romantic imagining of a person.
Mount never held anything back; he wasn’t even capable of it. He was hopelessly open and honest, couldn’t lie or be fake if he wanted to. That’s why he didn’t get along well with people; that’s why he was always vulnerable to getting hurt. She let the fatigue take her, let a few tears drain from her eyes
and spill down her face.
“Mount,” she said. “Where did you go?”
She heard it before she saw it; it was a slight creaking of the wood on the porch where she’d been standing just a minute earlier. Then a large shadow drifted past the glass. She was grateful that he hadn’t turned on the lights and then wondered if she’d locked the door behind her. She slid from her place on the couch, crouched behind the big overstuffed arm and took the Glock from the holster at her waist as the knob started to turn.
Lydia.”
The voice came from deep inside a long, dark tunnel; it was sweetly familiar and edged with worry.
“Lydia, come on.”
She felt warm hands on her shoulders, a soft palm on her face. She woke then with a start, taking in a ragged, gasping breath. Her eyes were open but it was still pitch black; she kept still, unsure of where she was or how she had gotten there. Her mind raced, struggling to make sense of what was happening. She thought of the hotel room they’d been in, the walk along the dark drive.
“Are you okay? Lydia, say something.” Jeffrey. She could feel him and hear him, she could smell his cologne but she couldn’t see him at all. It was that dark where they were.
“I-” she began. “What happened?”
“Can you move? Are you hurt?”
She lay flat on her back on a cool, gritty surface. For a second, she didn’t even want to try to move her limbs or lift her pounding head from the ground. She was afraid; she felt like someone had put her in a giant cocktail shaker and shaken mercilessly. What if she tried to move and she couldn’t?
“I don’t know,” she said, lying still. “Are you okay? I can’t see you.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “We fell. I don’t know where we are now.”
She tentatively moved her feet, then bent her legs. Same with her arms. Then she pushed herself up. There was a general feeling of physical trauma but nothing sharply or frighteningly painful anywhere as she came to a sitting position.
“Nothing broken?” he asked, putting his hands on her shoulders, her arms, then her legs, as if checking her for fractures he might be able to feel with his hands.
“No.” She put her hands on his face, still unable to see him in the darkness. “You’re fine?” she asked him again. “You’re sure.”
She felt him nod, then he took her into his arms. “A few bumps and bruises but okay for the fall we took.”
“Where’s Dax?” she said into his shoulder.
“I don’t know,” he said, moving away from her and then pulling her to her feet.
“You said we fell? Fell where?”
“We were walking and then we fell into some kind of a hole. Now we’re here.”
“At the bottom of the hole?”
“I don’t think so. Our guns and our cell phones are gone.” He took her hand and placed it on cold, smooth concrete; she felt the rough ridges and valleys of brick and mortar. “These are man-made walls. There’s no light coming from up above.”
“Is there a door?” she asked.
“Here,” he said, pulling her over. She felt cool metal. Her hand drifted down to a locked knob. She yanked on it hard but it acted like a big, locked metal door. She let go of a sigh.
“So we fell down a hole. Someone then came, took our cell phones and guns, moved us from the hole and now we’re trapped,” she said.
“I’d say that’s a fair guess.”
She let herself slide down the door and come to a crouch near the floor. “How did we get here?” she asked. “Again?”
She was thinking of Jed McIntyre’s lair beneath the city streets of New York, about the tunnels where he chased her and then she chased him.
Jeffrey sat beside her. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Really? When? While I was lying here unconscious?”
“I’ve been sitting here beside you in the dark for a while. As long as you were still breathing, I figured I’d wait for you to come around.”
She didn’t say anything, knowing he’d go on.
“I think we’ve made some serious errors in judgment.”
Given their current situation, she couldn’t really argue with him. He slid down beside her and she leaned against him. Just his nearness quelled the low-grade panic she felt at being trapped, her fear for where Dax might be. She rested her head on his shoulder.
“We’ve been following Lily’s steps, assuming that she was following Mickey,” he said.
“Right. An assumption that Grimm more or less confirmed.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure we can trust Grimm. He just wanted someone in here to find those weapons and give him a reason to come in guns blazing. Maybe he talked to Lily, maybe he didn’t. Anyway, stay with me.”
“Sorry.”
“We assumed that Mickey, prone to depression anyway, was an easy target for the people looking to put a hurting on Tim Samuels.”
“Right.”
“But what if Mickey didn’t get sucked in? What if he walked in?”
She thought about it a second. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to help his stepfather?”
“But they didn’t get along. Why would he go out of his way to help him?”
“It doesn’t matter whether you get along or not-family is family. He loved Lily. He loved his mother. That was reason enough to help his stepfather.”
“Okay,” said Lydia. “But because he was prone to depression, they got to him?”
“Tim Samuels had a strong enough sense of self to break away from The New Day when he realized they were rotten.”
“But maybe Mickey didn’t?”
“Right,” said Jeffrey.
“But wouldn’t Tim Samuels have told us that? There was no way Mickey could know about his issues with The New Day unless Tim told him.”
She felt him shift in the darkness. “He’d probably feel pretty guilty about it. Maybe he didn’t want us to see him as responsible for Mickey’s death.”
Lydia was quiet for a second, turning the scenario around in her mind. “Okay. What if that’s the case? Mickey left his job on Wall Street and moved up there, hooked up with his dad’s ex-girlfriend and tried to infiltrate. He couldn’t take the mind-control techniques of The New Day; they caused him to snap and he killed himself. What difference does it make? He’s still dead and Lily was still trying to find out what happened to him when she disappeared.”
“Right, but the whole basic assumption shifts,” said Jeff.
“Huh? I’m not following.”
“Well, Samuels made it sound like The New Day was systematically stalking his children in order to force him to surrender, tugging at the strings of his life to see which one he couldn’t bear to lose.”
“Which one would cause him to say ‘Uncle.’ ”
“But what if, actually, it was Mickey and then Lily stalking The New Day?”
“Not doing such a great job of it, but giving it the old college try.”
“But if they were chasing The New Day and not the other way around…”
“Then The New Day wasn’t targeting Tim Samuels?” she said. “But what about the IRS and the murdered lawyer?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeffrey.
“He lost his children, his wife left him, and he had a meeting looming with the IRS, which could result in his losing everything and possibly doing time. Somebody was messing with his life.”
“Yeah,” said Jeffrey. “Just maybe not The New Day.”
“But what about the ‘deal’ with Rhames? What about his name in the guest book?”
“I was thinking about that. Did he ever say the deal was with Rhames, exactly?”
“Yes,” said Lydia emphatically. “I think so. I’m not sure.”
“We made a lot of assumptions,” said Jeffrey.
Lydia was silent as she tried to recast her thinking, see it in this new way. She had trouble getting her head around it. She’d cast Trevor Rhames and The New Day as the monster
s and everyone else as their victims. It was hard to imagine another scenario.
“Remember what Dax said about suicide being the ultimate fuck-you?” said Jeffrey after a moment.
“Yeah. I’m not so sure about that,” she answered.
“Me neither. But in this case, Samuels implied that all his assets were in jeopardy because of the IRS investigation. He stood to lose everything. But say he had a big life insurance policy and on his death, a settlement would be paid to whomever the beneficiaries were. He was still worth something.”
Lydia thought about it. She saw where he was going suddenly. “Unless he killed himself.”
“Most policies have a suicide clause,” said Jeffrey.
“If he killed himself, no life insurance. If the IRS took everything else, he’d be leaving nothing behind for anyone.”
“That is the ultimate.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“So whoever is the beneficiary of that policy gets the big middle finger.”
They were quiet again and the darkness seemed to swell around them. The buzz was deafening and Lydia’s agitation at being trapped was starting to feel like something living in her chest. Her hands were tingling to get on a keyboard or a telephone pad to start finding answers to all her new questions.
“We’re not in much of a position to figure out who that beneficiary might be,” she said.
“No,” said Jeffrey, squeezing her shoulder. “We’re not.”
She took a deep breath and leaned her head against the cold concrete wall.
“So, as long as we’re questioning our assumptions,” she said after a minute, “what about Mickey?”
Jeffrey exhaled sharply and shifted back farther toward the wall, straightened out his legs.
“I guess I’ve been operating under the belief that he killed himself, maybe due to the maneuverings of The New Day in addition to the fact that he was depressed, feeling bad about the breakup and the failed business. Lily was grief-stricken, trying to hold onto her brother by proving that he didn’t end his own life. Maybe in tangling with The New Day, making serious accusations, threatening an exposé of the organization, she got in over her head. If she was good at what she did, she probably found out everything that Detective Stenopolis told you about Rusty Klautz and the others. She was a threat to The New Day, at least an inconvenience. She thought she was protecting herself by involving the FBI, not realizing that they were just using her and wouldn’t be any help in a jam.”