by Lisa Unger
“Just be grateful you’re not,” she said as he walked from the room, passing by a paramedic who looked younger than seemed possible. Even the cops on the scene looked like babies to him. When did he start to feel so old?
He sighed, remembering, wishing he’d handled her differently, hadn’t let the anger and emotion he’d felt at the scene get the best of him. With Julian totally incoherent now, he couldn’t expect to get anywhere with her for a while. She talked so softly, like a child … seemed so delicate, just like the first time. He remembered how surprised he’d been ten years ago when he’d seen her canvases. Halford McKirdy didn’t know much about art, but he knew rage when he saw it sure enough.
She painted on gigantic canvases in rich, bold lines—heavy on the blacks, reds, and yellows. She painted scenes of rape, murder, and carnage. Some were intricately detailed murals of mass violence, with bleeding, writhing figures in fields of gore and fire. Some were close-up images of mutilated female genitalia, broken flesh and bones, faces contorted in fear or anger or both, women fleeing from some unseen hunter. Other works were just angry slashes of color, amorphous figures in black or gray, lines and shadows. When he first investigated her, she was already a successful artist, a darling of the SoHo gallery scene. Now she was an international sensation and a very wealthy woman. This type of scandal would only make her work worth more, he knew. The world was populated by bloodsuckers that loved the taint of violence as long as it didn’t come too close.
He’d headed down the stairs and toward the sitting room, where he knew Julian’s mother, her children, and the nanny were waiting.
Eleanor Ross was a regal woman in a black silk dressing gown, her silver hair pulled back into a braided bun. She possessed an eerie calm, sitting on a plush red velvet sofa in front of a fire she must just have made. A twin lay on either side of her, each with a head on her thigh, each with blue eyes wide open staring into the flames. She had a hand on each twin’s head.
The nanny, a young girl with skin the color of caramel, weighing in at maybe a hundred pounds on a fat day, sat weeping in a chair close to the fire. It was a mournful and helpless sound, kind of weak. Ford turned to look at her, but her head was buried in her hands, a lush mane of black curls falling almost to her lap. Her shoulders trembled, her feet barely touched the floor.
“We heard nothing and saw nothing, Detective,” Eleanor said before Ford sat down on the ottoman he’d pulled in front of them.
He didn’t look at her as he pulled out his notepad. “Is that so?”
A moment of silence passed between them before Eleanor turned her gaze on him.
“Surely you don’t think my daughter could have done such a thing,” she said imperiously.
“At this point, ma’am, I’m not sure of anything.”
“Don’t just take the easy way out like you did last time. You decided right away it was Julian and never even looked for who really killed her first husband. Whoever killed him got off scot-free,” she said with a disapproving shake of her head.
“You can say that again,” he answered, thinking of the day Julian had been acquitted and the mix of emotions he’d felt. Tonight he felt like Julian had had ten years of freedom she hadn’t deserved and now someone else was dead.
She snorted at him, picking up on his sarcasm. “That jury of teachers and mechanics had better sense than you and the whole police department. They could see. Julian doesn’t have the strength to do such a thing. She doesn’t have the nerve.”
The way Eleanor said it, it sounded like an insult. He looked at her. There was a coldness in her eyes that was mirrored in the eyes of the twins on her lap. Her mouth was a hard straight line in a landscape of lined and sagging skin. Her stubborn chin was a dare to argue with her, to defy her. It occurred to Ford that this woman did not seem even remotely upset that her son-in-law had been brutally murdered, probably by her daughter just upstairs from where she sat. Seeing the three of them there like that, the knowledge of the scene above their heads, the weird aura of togetherness that seemed to surround them, he felt a cold finger of dread trace his spine.
“I’d like to take your statement now, Ms. Ross.”
“I’ll come to the station around noon with my attorney. Leave me your business card so we know where to find you.”
He gave her a look that he’d hoped would be intimidating but clearly wasn’t. They stared at each other for a moment and he saw that she was not going to budge.
“You’re not a suspect at this time, Ms. Ross.”
“The Ross family does not speak to police officers without the presence of an attorney. Remember that, children.”
“Yes, Grandma,” they each said softly. Ford’s creep-meter went off the charts. Nice family, he thought.
“Have it your way,” he said, pulling a card from his jacket pocket.
“I always do,” she said with a bitchy smile that was more a grimace and a narrowing of her eyes.
He heard raised voices from the second level. Eleanor got up and scooted the children toward a door on the far end of the sitting room. Julian’s thin and piercing voice carried down the stairs, ranting something incoherent that ended in a heartbroken wail.
“I’m taking the children to their rooms.”
Ford nodded as she disappeared, and wondered briefly who would take care of Julian. He wasn’t sure why he cared.
When Ford turned to the nanny, he saw that she’d looked up from her hands at the sound of Julian’s voice, and now sat wide-eyed, peering toward the landing of the second floor as if awaiting the approach of a demon.
“Miss?” he said, walking over to the girl. She looked at him, startled, as if she’d only just realized he was there. “You’re the nanny to Lola and Nathaniel.”
“That’s right,” she said. Her voice was oddly level for someone whose eyes looked so wide with fright, someone who’d been weeping moments before.
“Your name?”
“Geneva Stout.”
Ford scrawled her name in his notes. “Do you have identification?”
“Why? You don’t believe me?”
He looked up from his notepad and saw a flash of what might have been anger, might have been fear. “It’s routine, Ms. Stout. That’s all.” He made his voice calming.
She narrowed her eyes suspiciously and then rose to disappear through the same door where Eleanor had taken the children. If she was a little edgy, Ford was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. One of her bosses had just been brutally murdered, the other was ranting like a madwoman, and now she was left with the Wicked Queen as her sole employer. Who wouldn’t be out of sorts? Julian’s wails continued to waft down the stairs, raising the fine hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. Talk about overkill.
Geneva returned and handed him a New York State driver’s license and a New York University student ID. He wrote down the numbers and handed the hard plastic cards back to her.
“Any other addresses?” he asked her. He’d noticed that she listed the Rosses’ address on each piece of identification.
“No,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “I’m a live-in nanny. I take care of Lola and Nathaniel full-time.”
“When do you go to class?”
“I manage,” she said, averting her eyes. “Part-time.”
“Family?”
She looked at him blankly like she wasn’t sure what he was asking. A little too blankly.
“Do you have any family? Where do they live?” he said slowly, looking at her full on now.
“Nope,” she said, again with that quick, certain shake of her head. “I don’t have any family.”
He was going to ask her to clarify her circumstances, but another cry rang through the apartment and Geneva closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with her fingers.
“What are they going to do to her?” she said, her voice tight with anguish.
It seemed like a strange question. Of all the possible things someone would be wondering about at a mom
ent like this, she wanted to know what would happen to Julian.
He sat down on another ottoman that was near her chair and pulled himself next to her.
“Are you very close to the family?” he asked gently. She looked at him like he was some kind of an idiot.
“Well, yeah. I live with them. Take care of their kids. What do you think?”
Then her tough-chick mask split and she started to sob again. “I—can’t—believe this,” she said, barely able to get the words out. He put a hand on her knee and felt her body shaking.
“Okay, Ms. Stout. Take a moment. You can come tomorrow with Ms. Ross and give your statement to me when you’re calmer.”
“My—statement?” she said, looking at him in horror. “I didn’t see anything or hear anything until Julian started to scream. My bedroom is at the other end of that long hallway.” Her words came out between the sharp drawing and releasing of her breath and she pointed unsteadily toward the door she’d gone through earlier.
“Okay,” he said, writing down what she’d said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Unless you want to talk sooner. Call me anytime.” He handed her his card and she grasped it in her hand, gave a small nod. Here she looked at him with those wide dark eyes and he had found himself wondering what it was he saw churning in their depths.
Then he’d heard movement on the stairs. He and Geneva watched as the paramedics brought Julian down restrained on a stretcher. She had stopped screaming and had started to sob her husband’s name in a desperate, keening tone. When she saw Ford at the bottom of the stairs, she looked at him with a pleading in her eyes and said, “He’s come for me again. I’ll never escape him now. He’ll eat my young … swallow them whole. And me as well. You can’t stop him. No one can.”
chapter three
The temperature in the offices of Mark, Striker and Strong seemed to drop ten degrees when Eleanor Ross pushed through the glass doors. Even from a distance, she had the stern demeanor of a warden and about as much charm. Her long, black cashmere coat was buttoned to the neck and its hem skirted the floor. Dark red lipstick made her face appear paler than a live woman should want. In her proud chin and unsmiling mouth, she carried with her the air of authority that money afforded and the attitude that any deviation from her wishes would result in a beheading.
She was familiar to Jeffrey Mark and he watched her with interest through the glass wall of his office, through which he could see out but those in the waiting area could not see in. It took a few seconds to place her. He had just figured it out when the intercom buzzer on his phone sounded.
“Jeff, there’s an Eleanor Ross here to see Lydia,” announced Rebecca, the firm’s receptionist, who was also a student at John Jay College studying for her master’s in forensic science. “I told her Lydia was out and she asked to see you.”
“Give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”
He had just turned off the television in his office after watching the footage of Julian Ross being rolled out of her Park Avenue building in a stretcher. He remembered her well from ten years ago, and he was not surprised to learn that she was under suspicion again. The only surprise was that it had taken so long. He spun around in his black leather desk chair and looked out over the city, trying to stitch together the fragments of his memory.
The murder of Tad Jenson, Julian’s first husband, was never solved. Even after Julian Ross had been taken into custody and arraigned, Jeff’s good friend Ford McKirdy, the Ninth Precinct homicide detective working the case, couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t that Ford was crusading for her innocence as much as he’d just had a sense that there was more to it, that there was someone else involved. Ford’s superiors considered the case closed. So Ford had contacted Jeffrey and asked for his help, unofficially … not as an investigator but as a friend.
The night her first husband was murdered, Julian claimed that she had been painting in her studio at the far end of the loft, with the door closed and the music blaring. She claimed that she had come out of her studio around six o’clock to see what her husband wanted for dinner and found him brutally murdered. She dropped to her knees beside him in shock and picked up the knife that lay next to him. When the police broke down the door, responding to an anonymous 911 call, that was how they found her.
Ford had arrested Julian Ross because she had been found holding the murder weapon, covered in her husband’s blood, and there appeared to have been no one else at the scene. Only her prints were found on the weapon. The building doorman claimed that no one but Julian and Tad had entered the apartment that night. But something about it had never rested easily with Ford. He was convinced that there was another piece to the puzzle. So, even as Julian went to trial, he and Ford had tried to track down another suspect on Ford’s own time. For a number of reasons, Jeffrey and Ford both agreed that Julian at least had not worked alone. Turned out they were the same reasons that gave the jury enough reasonable doubt to acquit her.
A twenty-three-year-old heroin addict, Jetty Murphy, who had been shifting through the building garbage four floors down from Tad and Julian’s apartment, said he heard three voices, two male and one female. At one point, he heard an inhuman roar come from the window and a woman’s desperate scream. Then, minutes later, as he cowered behind the Dumpster, a giant figure with long hair looking like “some kind of homeless dude on steroids, man, like a real giant but super fast like Speed Racer,” burst from the building’s back door. Jetty claimed to have followed the figure to Prince Street, where the man just disappeared.
There were several long brown and gray hairs found at the scene. But they were never able to match those hairs to anyone Julian knew … friends, associates, neighbors. There were places in the gore where it appeared that someone had wiped something away, possibly foot- or handprints, and the cloth used to do so was never found.
Most compelling of all was Julian’s physical size. It seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that such a small woman would be capable of overpowering a man who outweighed her by a hundred pounds and was nearly a foot taller. Yet the beautiful NoHo loft had been nearly destroyed in the mortal struggle that ended in Julian, allegedly, overpowering Tad and stabbing him to death with a serrated kitchen knife. From the newscast he’d just heard, it sounded like Richard Stratton had met with a similar end, nearly decapitated, parted from his insides.
There had been enough evidence to suggest that someone else had been present; but not enough to figure out who it was or how he got in and out of the apartment that night.
Ford was a good man, with the instincts and tenacity of a bloodhound. He’d been given his nickname, short for Halford, by the other guys at the Ninth Precinct because he was solid and reliable, made of steel, and never said die. Jeff knew that over the years he’d never stopped asking questions about the Julian Ross case. It always came up on the rare occasions they managed to get together for a drink at McSorley’s on Fifth Street. The same place they used to get together nights and talk about the case when it was on, it seemed like the right place to have a beer and talk about old times.
“Remember the Tad Jenson case?” Ford would say with a shake of his head, filling the lull that followed after they’d talked about the job or his kids for a bit.
It was too romantic to say that the case haunted Ford, that it was the one that he never got over. But it was something Jeff knew Ford’s mind turned back to often enough that it niggled at him on those nights after he’d happen to read about Julian Ross in the paper or see her interviewed on television.
Jeffrey swiveled back around in his chair, picked up the phone, and left a message on Ford McKirdy’s voice mail. He called Lydia, then rose to usher Eleanor Ross into his office.
“Do you know why I’m here, Mr. Mark?” asked Eleanor as soon as Jeffrey had closed the door and she had seated herself in one of the two leather Eames chairs that sat across from his desk. Her voice was thin and shaky, with the rasp of a smoker. But he noted that she moved with the grace and strength of a dan
cer.
“I just turned off the news. I am sorry for your loss,” he said, leaning back on the edge of his desk in front of her, keeping his voice neutral but courteous, compassionate. “How can I help you?”
“I want you to find out who murdered my son-in-law,” she said, turning a cool stare on him.
He turned away from her and felt her eyes on his back as he walked around his desk and sat in his chair. He could smell just the lightest scent of her perfume. It was airy and floral and reminded him of a scent that Lydia wore.
“Which one?” he asked, placing the tips of his fingers together and finally returning her gaze. He had sensed that she was a woman accustomed to giving orders and he wanted it straight at the outset that he was a man not accustomed to obeying them.
She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be assessing him, taking in the details of his face, his clothes, like a boxer sizing up an opponent.
“Ten years ago, the police failed to do their job,” she said slowly, her voice flat. “I want to see that the same thing doesn’t happen again here.”
“Have you considered the possibility that it was the jury that didn’t do their job, Ms. Ross?”
Eleanor Ross’s face lost some of its hardness, seemed to crumble a bit as if she might cry. But Jeffrey had a hard time imagining that kind of emotion from the woman, would have been less surprised if tears fell from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty.
“I know how it looks, Jeff. Can I call you that?” she said, her voice suddenly becoming softer as she leaned toward him in her chair. When he nodded, she continued.
“But I know my daughter and I know that she is not capable of this. If you’re familiar with the case of Tad’s murder, you know there was sufficient evidence to suggest there was someone else at the apartment that night.”
“Do you have any idea who that person might be?”
He thought he saw a flicker there; something that passed in front of her ice blue eyes but was gone as quickly as it came. “No,” she said, raising a hand to her throat. “I can’t begin to imagine.”