by Lisa Unger
“They won’t let me have any paper or paints,” Julian said as the door closed behind Lydia. “I’m losing my mind in this place.”
She laughed a little then at what she’d said. But then her face was a mask of sadness. “Are you going to help me? Or are you one of them?”
“One of who?”
“You know,” said Julian with a sly smile and eyes that tried to bore into Lydia.
“I really don’t know, Julian. But tell me and I’ll try to help you.”
Lydia seated herself in a chair by the wall, telling herself that a passive body posture would put Julian at ease. But really, she was just exhausted. Before she sat, she gave Julian an up and down, figured she had about thirty pounds on Julian and could definitely ward off an attack if it came to that. She felt comforted by that thought until it occurred to her that Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton probably would have thought the same thing.
She felt like she had used up every ounce of energy she had just by walking from the car to Julian’s room. She wondered briefly if she should have listened to Jeffrey after all. She found herself wondering that a lot.
Julian was watching her carefully. “The destroyers, the takers, the damned,” she whispered. “You’re not one of them. I can tell.”
Lydia’s mind was racing with a thousand questions, but Julian was skittish and jumpy; Lydia knew she had to be careful with words, careful not to frighten or upset Julian any more than she was or she ran the risk of losing her altogether. Julian finally released the chair and came around to sit in it, facing Lydia. She balanced on the edge, bouncing her knees up and down so quickly that she seemed to be trembling.
“The destroyers …” Lydia said, her tone leading.
“You know them?”
“Who doesn’t?” she said, thinking of the forces that threatened to rip her own life apart at the seams.
Julian nodded solemnly. “All my life, they’ve been in the shadows, waiting to snatch away my soul, my life … everything. For a time, I thought I had eluded them. I should have known.”
She thought about Julian’s canvases, the small figures always in peril from the larger, dark, amorphous forms. She thought of the violence that Julian Ross had grown famous for painting. She wondered again whether Julian’s demons were real or imagined.
“Why do they want to hurt you, Julian?”
“That’s just it, you see. I have no idea,” she said with a helpless shrug. Big tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks; she made no sound, no move to wipe the moisture from her face. If she was an actress, she had real talent. Lydia felt a twinge of pity in her heart.
A sharp knock at the door startled them both. “Five minutes, Ms. Strong,” said the guard from outside.
“You called me here, Julian. You said you wanted to talk.”
Julian looked at Lydia closely, her eyes narrowing. Lydia observed her face, sought traces of Eleanor’s cold and deceptive aura in the woman’s daughter and saw none of it. The two woman sat looking at each other in silence, precious seconds passing. But Lydia didn’t speak, sensing that Julian would only talk when she was ready.
“I am complicit in my own fate and in the fate of those I have loved. I see that now,” she said finally, speaking slowly, seeming more lucid for a moment. “We all are, you know. Other people, other forces may direct the orchestra, but each of us has the choice to pick up the violin and play or not. I have played along all my life. Out of fear, out of need to please, out of something—who knows really why? Somehow you feel if you don’t play the music that’s written for you, then you’re guilty of the chaos that ensues. None of the other players know how to proceed. It’s so frightening for everyone.”
Lydia had no idea what she was trying to say, but again she let silence do the coaxing.
“Especially when the queen doesn’t get her way,” she continued.
“The queen?” Lydia asked, but remembered that that’s how she referred to her mother during their last visit.
“The Queen of the Damned,” she said, with all the cool seriousness of a college professor.
“What happens when the queen doesn’t get her way?” Lydia asked, even though it was pretty clear that Julian Ross was quite insane.
Julian smiled, a disturbing twisted grin. “Then off with your head,” she said with a hard laugh. “Of course.”
Julian’s answer sent a chill through Lydia, as the images from the Richard Stratton crime scene came to her head.
“So Eleanor, your mother. She’s one of the destroyers.”
“I’d say so,” Julian said indignantly.
“And your brother, James? What about him?”
“Oh, no,” she said with gravity. “Not Jamey. He’s one of the angels.”
“But he tried to kill you, didn’t he? He tried to burn you and your mother alive.”
“No,” she yelled suddenly, scaring the hell out of Lydia. “That was a lie. A fucking lie that they used to put him away, to keep him away from me.”
The person before her had changed. She had transformed from a meek, scared little waif into the very embodiment of rage. She jumped up from her perch and moved toward Lydia, who immediately stood. Julian’s face had gone red, and the muscles in her arms and neck were taut and straining against her skin. A moment earlier she had looked like a strong wind would knock her down. Now she seemed to possess a kind of wiry strength, as though she were made of cord pulled tight, ready to snap. Her eyes were dark and unseeing, as her chest began to heave.
“Take it easy, Julian,” said Lydia, trying to keep her voice calm as she edged toward the door. “I’m on your side.”
But Julian, seeming not to have heard her, kept moving closer. In her face, which she’d pulled into a kind of grimace, Lydia could see the potential for all the things of which she hadn’t believed Julian capable. Rage, violence, murder. Lydia felt the cold finger of fear poke her in the belly as her exhaustion was replaced by a burst of adrenaline.
“Guard!” Lydia called. Then, summoning her most authoritative voice and looking the other woman directly in the eye, “Julian, you need to calm down.”
Julian laughed, and it was a frightening sound. The woman had turned into a ghoul; Lydia half expected to see that she had grown fangs. Lydia felt a surge of panic as she realized that she wasn’t sure she could fend Julian off. She felt a physical weakness that was unfamiliar to her, as if her body were in rebellion after all the abuse it had suffered.
“Guard!” Lydia called again, this time louder.
Julian looked ready to lunge and Lydia flashed on the attack in the basement of the Ross home. She couldn’t believe it. The bruise on her face hadn’t even healed yet and she was going to get her ass kicked again.
The door opened suddenly and the young officer entered. Lydia sighed with relief, as Julian seemed to deflate like a blow-up doll. Julian sagged to the floor and started to cry, to sob like she was filled with all the grief and pain of the world. The guard shot Lydia an accusatory look as he helped Julian to her feet. She looked about as menacing as a piece of string.
“Please help me,” Lydia heard Julian call as she rushed down the hall, eager to get as far away from Julian Ross and her nightmare existence as possible.
chapter twenty-seven
Central Park was a postcard. A light snow fell, glimmering window lights from the buildings surrounding the park glowed against the blue black of the night sky. The air was crisp but not painfully cold against Jeffrey’s skin as he stood, ignored by the throng of police officers and FBI agents swarming the crime scene. He felt helpless, useless, an outsider in the kind of situation where he was accustomed to being in control. But tonight he was a rogue private investigator, someone at least partially responsible for the dead woman lying naked and unprotected from the chill of winter and the eyes of a hundred agents of the law.
Jeffrey considered himself to have a particularly high threshold for stress. But standing behind the crime scene tape that surrounded Rebecca�
��s body as it lay against a giant oak edging the Great Lawn in Central Park, he felt like he was pretty much at the edge of what he could endure. There had been too much loss, too much grief. He felt a kind of hollow space in his stomach, a heaviness in his heart, as though it were filled with stones.
Then there was the simmer of anger in the back of his mind, a nebulous area of negativity where thoughts of violence, revenge, and vigilantism dwelled. He wasn’t proud of these feelings, which had grown stronger since he and Dax had followed Jed McIntyre into the tunnels below the city. He couldn’t deny them, either. Unlike Lydia, in the cosmic scheme of things he didn’t necessarily believe that these feelings were inherently wrong. But he did acknowledge that they felt like a kind of spiritual poison, a psychic hallucinogen that slipped through his veins igniting visions and desires that he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of.
Over his grief ran a current of panic; Jed McIntyre had made an offensive strike. He was no longer on the run from them. He was moving in. And the only comfort Jeffrey had in this moment was that Lydia was safe at home with Dax.
Jeffrey was looking at a parody of Marion Strong’s crime scene. No doubt that was McIntyre’s agenda. Rebecca’s throat had been cut, her legs bound, her arms bound and nailed above her head to the tree under which she rested. It was the way Marion and his twelve other upstate New York victims had been posed, albeit in their bedrooms, nearly seventeen years ago now. Sitting as yet untouched in Rebecca’s lap was a white number ten envelope. In the glare of the flashbulbs from the crime scene photographers’ cameras, he could see Lydia’s name carefully printed in black. The forensics team would wait until the photographers had finished their work before dissecting the scene, hair by hair, fiber by fiber, print by print. Everyone was waiting to read the contents of that letter. Jeffrey only hoped that Goban wasn’t going to be a prick and shut him out.
Jeffrey remembered the first letter Lydia had received from McIntyre, while he was still incarcerated, just after the release of her first book, With a Vengeance, which detailed McIntyre’s murders and much of his life. Every month after that, he’d sent her a letter. Letters she received but never opened. It had been a recurring topic of argument between Lydia and Jeffrey. He thought that they should be returned; but Lydia insisted that they be kept, locked away in a drawer. She said they were reminders to her that he was locked away forever, that he was just a mentally ill man who could only reach her by the U.S. mail and that she had the choice to read or not read his communications. His letters, she claimed, comforted her that he was mortal, caged away from society, and not a demon that could materialize from her nightmares. Jeffrey had eventually given up on arguing about the letters, came to understand the peace she had derived from them. This letter, however, proved just the opposite. That he was a demon, come to destroy them all.
Poor Rebecca. Her face was pale and calm like the face of an angel, her glassy eyes cast heavenward. He was glad to see that her face hadn’t frozen in the mask of terror and pain that he had seen too often on murder victims. It made him think that she had found a moment of peace before she died. He held on to that hope as he turned away from her.
Jeffrey was about to approach Goban, who he could see pale beneath the spotlights, huddled with the other members of his team, when his cell phone chirped. He saw Dax’s number on the caller ID display.
“What’s up?”
“Hey. I’ve got big news. You have to meet me.”
“Meet you. Where the fuck are you? Where’s Lydia?”
“Jeff, man,” said Dax, his voice excited, his accent thickening, “there’s no time to explain. Just meet me as soon as you can.” He gave Jeffrey his location.
“Dax, just tell me what you’ve got. Where’s Lydia?”
But he was talking to dead air. He felt his stomach churn a bit, his heart getting in on the action, as well. He had a keen sense of danger and every nerve inside his body was tingling. He tried Lydia, first at the apartment, then on her cell. He got voice mail both places.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself. He remembered the pale, exhausted, grief-stricken Lydia he’d left behind. If Dax had taken her from the apartment, there had to have been a good reason.
He hesitated a moment, turning his eyes back to Goban, who was looking in his direction now. He cast another glance at the letter on Rebecca’s lap. If he left the apprehension of Jed McIntyre up to the FBI, played by their rules, there were no guarantees that he would ever be caught. And frankly, that wasn’t exactly the outcome Jeffrey was looking for any longer. He turned from the scene and walked toward the car. The FBI could walk the grid, gather evidence for proper identification and prosecution, do what they had to do to tow the line. In the meantime, he was going to make sure Jed McIntyre never took another life.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, careless, fucking stupid, thought Dax through the cloud of his pain. He should have known when he saw that little dwarf with Danielle that there was something up. But who’d ever felt threatened by a midget, for fuck’s sake?
Only as he’d pulled up to the doorway in the meatpacking district where Danielle had instructed him to meet her did he wonder: Why here? Usually he met her at her corner on Tenth Avenue. But he hadn’t really thought much of it. For all her chronic neediness and her pathetic whining, he trusted her. Not in the way of friendship, exactly, but just that she was predictable. She had needs that their business transactions helped her to fulfill; it was a good arrangement. It was easy money for her. Why would she fuck with that?
She stood awkwardly beside a Dumpster. She was made up for work, this time in a wig of red curls, iridescent purple hot pants, thigh-high black boots, and a leather motorcycle jacket. Some weird kind of necklace glinted in the light from across the street. Her pink T-shirt that read YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH! in red block letters. No shit, thought Dax. Danielle was a one-person Crying Game.
He hadn’t even noticed the midget until he stopped the car. They made quite a pair. Dax had to turn away and suppress a laugh. Danielle, six feet of skanky chic, and then the little guy, who looked like a reject from a Ray Bradbury traveling carnival, barely reaching the seam of her hot pants; the street life encouraged some strange couplings, that was for certain. But this was The Twilight Zone.
He rolled down the window, smelled the snow and the stench of stale blood and raw meat. He was instantly alerted to a problem when Danielle didn’t walk over to the Rover.
“So what’s the fucking emergency, Danielle?” he said, sounding casual as he released the safety on the Desert Eagle wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console.
“This here is Horatio,” she said, motioning stiffly toward her small companion. “Says he’s got word from Rain. But he wouldn’t tell me. He only wants to talk to you.” Her voice sounded different to Dax, thick and strained. He couldn’t see her eyes in the darkness. He noticed then that a wall-mounted bulb above her head had been shattered.
“Well, let’s have it, then, mate,” he said, looking down at the dwarf. “What have you got?”
The dwarf shook his head. He hopped lightly from foot to foot, as if doing a strange ritualistic dance.
“He wants you to get out of the car. He’s afraid of you,” explained Danielle, as if she were Horatio’s translator.
“He’s going to have a lot more to fear if I get out of the car,” he said with a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. Then he gave a little laugh to break the tension that seemed to be building. “Come on, Danielle. The two of you get in and we’ll go to McDonald’s. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“You’ve got to come out here, Dax. Or Horatio’s not going to give you the message.”
“Well, fuck you both, then,” he said, rolling up the window.
“Dax!” Danielle had a chance to yell before the razor wire that had been around her throat was pulled taught by a hand that appeared out of the darkness. She raised her hands to her throat and pulled them back bleeding; a horrible noise escaped from her mout
h as blood spilled from the wound, from her lips, and down her shirt. Dax sprang from the car with the Desert Eagle in his hand.
He fired a round into the dark from where the hand had come. Its roar bounced off the buildings surrounding the empty street and he heard the bullet connect with the concrete wall, sparks flying. In the fireworks he saw a dark form.
“Say hello to my little friend,” came a voice from the darkness. As the words floated across the night air to Dax’s ears, the little bastard dwarf slashed at the back of his calves with what must have been a straight razor. Achilles’ tendons sliced, Dax fell straight to the ground, the pain like rockets up the backs of his legs, the gun launching from his hand and landing out of reach.
He looked to Danielle, who had slid down the wall to slump on the ground. Her glassy eyes had rolled back into her head and Dax could see that she had bled out already. On his forearms, he crawled after his gun, craning his neck to look behind him as he went but unable to see the midget now. As his fingers strained for the weapon, a combat boot came to rest on top of it. The midget appeared to his right, his straight razor gleaming like a shooting star, a ghoulish grin on his face. Dax fought for consciousness against the white pain that was nearly paralyzing and the weakness he imagined must be resulting from a loss of blood.
Jed McIntyre stepped out of the darkness.
“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” groaned Dax, rolling over on his back.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Jed as he brought his combat boot down hard onto Dax’s face.
“The destroyers?”
“That’s what she said before she went all Jekyll and Hyde on me.”
Lydia was one with the upholstery of the Taurus, her whole body sinking into its softness, the headrest the only thing actually holding up her head. Fatigue like this was a whole new thing to her.
“Lydia,” said Ford, noting with concern the pallor of her skin, the dark circles under her eyes. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look like shit. Are you up to this?”