She nods. It’s possible, but not probable. Stockton knows as well as she does that when foul play is involved in a missing persons case, every hour that passes decreases the odds that the victim will be found alive.
“I think we may be looking at an online predator,” she muses. “One who could have posed as a woman on a dating site and lured these guys into a trap.”
“Or it could have been an actual woman.”
She shrugs. Again—possible, but not probable.
“Or,” Stockton goes on, “it might have nothing to do with Internet dating sites. Maybe they’re connected by occupation. Construction, architecture, design, engineering . . . these guys travel in the same professional circles.”
“That’s true.”
“Maybe they met someone at a conference or something like that . . .”
“Maybe. We need to check into that,” Sully murmurs, still musing about the online connection and the fact that the first two victims’ profiles have been deleted.
Her gut is telling her they’re going to discover that Carlos Diaz also has—rather, had—an InTune profile . . . and a hot date the night he disappeared.
The door buzzes just as Gaby finishes brushing her damp hair in front of the mirror in a bathroom still steamy from her second shower of the day. Last time, she hadn’t done a great job shaving her legs or under her arms—maybe as added insurance that she wouldn’t allow Ryan to get too close for comfort tonight, or because she already knew it wouldn’t be an intimate evening. She can’t remember, now, what she was thinking this morning. Already the memory has faded—along with Ryan himself—into a pre-Ben past she’d just as soon forget.
Technically, of course, it’s all post-Ben. But she’s chosen to consider this—today, tonight—the beginning of a new chapter in their relationship. The only way for her to go forward with him is to close the door on everything that came before.
Still wrapped in a towel, she hurries over to press the intercom button. “Ben?”
“Yeah.”
“Um—come on up.” She releases the electronic lock to let him past the building’s vestibule.
Wow. He didn’t waste any time getting here after their text exchange. She’d assumed they wouldn’t connect until later, but as he put it, Why wait?
They didn’t even bother to make plans. He just said he’d come over and they could take it from there.
He must have jumped right into a cab, she thinks, as she quickly yanks open a couple of drawers and grabs a T-shirt and pair of shorts. She can always change later, but for now, being fully clothed is definitely a good idea.
A good idea later, too, she reminds herself, with one last glance in the full-length mirror before she hears a familiar staccato knock on the door.
Bump bah-dah bump-bump . . .
An incomplete knock that begs an answering bump-bump.
He’s always knocked that way whenever he took her out on a date or, later, when he arrived home at the apartments they shared. Almost always, anyway.
Throughout the happy years they were together, she’d offer a resounding bump-bump from the inside before opening the door.
Then, for a long time after they lost Josh, he knocked in the regular way—or not at all, slipping into the apartment late at night with his key and stealing past her if she was pretending to be asleep on the couch, or climbing silently into bed beside her.
After they started therapy, he made a couple of attempts at the old jaunty knock.
Bump bah-dah bump-bump . . .
She didn’t have the heart to thump her usual reply; barely managed to open the door to him at all.
Now, though, she does her best to swap the grim memory for a happier one.
Bump-bump, she taps on the door before opening it to see Ben standing there, grinning, with a big bouquet wrapped in a paper cone and cellophane.
“Hi,” he says, grinning.
“Hi.” She can’t keep from grinning back, just as broadly.
For a long moment they just stand there like two happy fools—which is, she realizes, probably exactly what they are. Fools.
Only fools rush in . . .
“Is that for me?” she finally asks, indicating the bouquet.
“No,” he says, deadpan, and her smile fades.
“Sorry, I . . .”
He laughs and thrusts the bouquet into her hands. “Of course it’s for you! Who else would it be for?”
She laughs, too, a little uneasily, not wanting to think about possible answers to that particular question, even if it’s meant to be moot.
“I was planning to bring sunflowers,” Ben tells her, and she feels better instantly. Sunflowers are her favorite.
He remembered.
“But,” he continues, “the Korean market on my corner didn’t have any, so I figured it would be better to get what they had than to get sidetracked hunting for them. At least they’re the right color. And they smell nice, too. And I know roses don’t bother your allergies the way some flowers do.”
“They’re beautiful. Thank you,” she tells him, smiling as she inhales the heady fragrance of a dozen yellow roses.
Sitting across from two NYPD detectives, toying with the half-full plastic water bottle she was drinking when they showed up, Ivy feels as though she’s in a scene from one of those crime dramas she loves to watch on television. She wonders, as she nervously waits for them to start asking her questions, whether they have guns, and whether they’ve ever had to use them. She considers asking but thinks better of it. According to the TV shows—which are very realistic—the cops are the ones who are supposed to be asking questions here.
The oversized man—Detective Barnes—is by far the more physically intimidating of the two. Yet somehow it’s the woman, Detective Leary, an elfin redhead, who seems to have the more commanding presence. She wastes no time getting down to business, quickly but thoroughly going over basic details about Carlos’s position at the company and Ivy’s professional relationship to him.
“How much do you know about his personal life?”
Under the scrutiny of the woman’s neon eyes, Ivy does her best not to shift her own gaze—or her weight on the chair—as she replies, “Not very much.”
Met with silence and a slight nod urging her to elaborate, she clears her throat and goes on, “I know that he’s divorced, and that he lives in Howard Beach. That’s about it.”
“Was he seeing anyone?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did he use online dating Web sites?”
The uncapped water bottle slips from Ivy’s grasp, spilling on the parquet floor at her feet and splashing Snoopy, who protests with a loud meow.
“Sorry about that,” she says—mostly to the cat—and jumps up to grab paper towels.
“No problem, take your time,” Detective Leary tells her, pen still poised on her notepad, as is Detective Barnes’s.
Ivy hopes they can’t see her hands shaking as she bends over and sops up the puddle. She tosses the wet paper towels into the garbage but thinks better of throwing away the empty bottle. She needs something to do with her hands so the shaking won’t be so obvious.
Back in her chair, she clutches the bottle as Detective Leary repeats the question about whether Carlos used online dating Web sites.
“I really wouldn’t know about that.”
“Okay.”
Something about the way the woman says the word makes Ivy suspect she doesn’t believe the answer. Or maybe it’s pure paranoia.
But the detectives can’t possibly be aware of her snooping around in Carlos’s private files . . . can they?
Of course not. It’s not as if they’ve had her under surveillance. They didn’t even realize anything was amiss until a few hours ago; had presumably never even heard of her until she reported Carlos missing.
Detective Barnes asks, “Can you access your office e-mail from here?” and the bottle in Ivy’s hands nearly goes flying again.
“Yes, I can
.”
“Okay if we take a look at the e-mails Mr. Diaz sent to you?”
“No problem.” Clearing her throat, she leads them over to her open laptop on the counter and clicks on her in-box, glad the password is stored so she won’t have to type it in front of them.
Not that they’d be able to find anything incriminating even if they were to memorize the password to sneak access to her account again later . . .
Still, she feels vulnerable as she scrolls through her electronic files to the folder containing Carlos’s initials, hoping they won’t notice that she’s saved all the e-mails she’s ever received from him. Or, if they do notice, they may just assume she saves all the e-mails she’s ever received from any employee, which is far from the truth.
“This is the e-mail he sent about his parents’ accident,” she tells them, opening the one that bears the subject line: Terrible News.
Silently, they read it.
Ivy—I just found out my parents were in a terrible car accident in Costa Rica. My father was killed and my mother is badly injured. I’m catching the first flight out and I won’t be at work this week.
The message bears the signature line that contains just his name and the addendum: sent from my iPhone.
“That’s all he sent?” Detective Leary asks.
“The first time.”
“There’s more?”
“Not much more. I wrote him back—you know, just making sure he was okay and asking about the funeral arrangements for his father. I wanted to send flowers—from all of us at the office,” she adds hastily.
“Did Carlos reply?”
“Not until a few days later.”
Leary rapid-fires the inevitable question: “Got that one?”
She nods, pulling it up and allowing them to read what Carlos wrote about the funeral being on hold with his mother still in intensive care. Pinned to the bottom of his note is the electronic trail that includes her response to his first e-mail. Not all of it is visible on the screen—it was rather long, she realizes in dismay—and they ask her to scroll down so they can read the entire thing.
She holds her breath as they stare in silence at the screen. Barnes makes notes of the dates and times on the messages.
“Okay. Then what?” Leary again, briskly.
Ivy blinks. “Excuse me?”
“What happened after he sent this?”
“I asked him if there was anything I could do, and he wrote back, ‘No, but thanks.’ That was the last I heard.”
Naturally, they want to look at that e-mail, too. Then they ask her to forward the files to an address within their department. She does, reluctantly, and is relieved when they turn their attention away from the computer at last.
“What made you decide to contact us today?” Leary asks.
Ivy hesitates. “I was worried when I didn’t hear back from Carlos—after all, it’s been two weeks—and I wanted to track him down at his parents’ house. You know, to make sure he’s okay and see when he expects to be back. Not that I’m callous—I mean, I thought he was going through a traumatic time with his family, but . . .”
“But you have a business to run,” Detective Barnes supplies.
“Exactly.”
“So you tried to track him down . . .”
“I called the emergency numbers in his human resources file.” She doesn’t specify how she got her hands on those numbers. “I wound up speaking to his ex-wife, and that’s when I found out that what he’d told me—what someone had told me—in that e-mail wasn’t true.”
“You don’t think he wrote it, then?” Leary asks sharply.
“I don’t know. If he did write it, it was a lie. And if he didn’t . . .”
“Who do you think did?”
Ivy hesitates.
Should she tell them?
No.
Not yet, anyway.
She’ll only get herself into trouble. If she loses this job, she loses . . .
Everything. You lose everything.
She lives paycheck to paycheck. Her credit cards are maxed out and she’s already a month behind on her mortgage. The bank will take her co-op apartment and she’ll have nowhere else to go. Her parents are dead, and her younger brother is perpetually unemployed and currently crashing on someone’s couch out in Jersey. Seth can’t stay on her couch, because he’s sensitive to cat dander and fur. He actually had the nerve to tell her that she should get rid of Garfield and Snoopy so he could move in with her for a while.
“Get rid of them? They’re . . .”
“They’re not family,” her brother said flatly. “I am.”
But they were family. And when she tried to explain that, he told her she was going to become a crazy, lonely old cat lady someday.
“Ms. Sacks?” Detective Leary prompts.
“Yes?”
“The e-mail . . . ?”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I have no idea who might have written it,” Ivy says, rolling the empty plastic bottle back and forth, back and forth, between her sweaty, shaky palms.
With Señor Don Gato occasionally getting underfoot, Alex prowls like a caged wildcat from living room to kitchen and back again, phone in hand.
Every time she completes another round trip, she checks her latest InTune account.
Every time she looks, there’s still no response from Ben.
It’s been hours now since she first stumbled across his profile and realized she’d discovered someone who not only possesses the necessary genetic traits, but who shares the same awful sorrow that’s eaten away at her soul like a battery acid drip.
Like her, Ben is desperate to hold his child in his arms again.
No, he didn’t write that in his profile.
He didn’t have to. She understands him. Just as he understands her—or at least, he will, when they meet.
In all these years she’s been trying to reclaim her lost son, she never once considered that she might actually be able to have the whole package again. Not just a child, but a husband. A family.
Ben would complete the image depicted in all the crayon drawings on the fridge: smiling stick figure mother and father, flanking smaller stick figure boy and girl children. They were standing in front of a square house with a pointed roof and two chimneys and distinctive red oval windows on either side of the door. The house was surrounded by trees: puffs of scribbled green above parallel vertical brown lines. Lots and lots of trees . . .
Because it’s in the woods.
It’s the perfect place for a dream house, mi amor. Peace and quiet . . . no one to disturb us for days, weeks on end . . .
He was right. It was perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect.
Those stick figure children didn’t bounce from one foster home to another, always hoping the next would be populated by a family that would want them to stay forever. The older she grew, the less likely it became that she’d find parents and siblings to call her own. She would have to create a family as an adult. She would have to be the mommy, not the little girl.
Her dream came true—for a while. They had everything, and it would eventually include a house that looked almost exactly like the one in the pictures, in a wooded area far upstate. He’d modified the design many times, adding details, removing details that she didn’t want, like the front porch.
“Why not? I love porches.”
“I hate them.” She shook her head, thinking of the gingerbread foster house of her youth and of his mother’s house down the street. Sometimes, in her mind’s eye, the two were interchangeable.
He erased the porch from his sketches. He wanted her to be happy.
At last the dream house was built. They didn’t live there full-time, but they went as often as they could. Carmen was the daddy, and she was the mommy, and Dante was the little boy, and . . .
And then I had none of it. Not the daddy or the little boy or the house or . . .
But today, in a flash, she saw that she could have everything again.
After finding Ben, she went back into her own account settings and changed her profile from her latest pseudonym to her real name. That’s how certain she was that she was about to make a lasting connection.
She then carefully crafted a private message to Ben. After hitting Send, she sat back and waited for him to respond.
And waited.
And waited.
“Where is he?” Alex asks Gato, who slinks off into the shadows in response, as if he doesn’t want to be held accountable for Ben’s actions—or inaction.
She’d been expecting him to get back to her immediately, perhaps even to text or call. She’d provided her number. Surely he’d recognize their innate connection. He’d probably want to see her right away—tonight, he’d say, if possible.
And of course she’d agree to meet him, even though it’s not the right time of the month.
What they have is real. With Ben, there will be no duplicity; no need for the basement dungeon that’s been scrubbed clean of blood and already awaits its next occupant.
But the phone has remained silent in her clenched hand, and each time she checks her account in-box, there’s no new activity.
She went to the basement and worked out vigorously on her weight machines, building strength, building muscle. Then she tried to rest, thinking it would be a good idea to get some sleep, in case they got together tonight. But now, when she crawls into bed, her body refuses to relax and her thoughts keep going round and round and round . . .
Finally, frustrated, seething, she gets up again to pace the quiet house as the sun sinks lower in the western sky beyond the windows, casting increasingly long shadows on the hardwoods and the Oriental carpet on the living room floor.
It’s looking rather threadbare, Alex notices. It was worn even when it graced her mother-in-law’s house down the street. But Carmen insisted on moving it here after the old woman died.
“I love it. It reminds me of my mother.”
It reminded Alex of his mother, too.
That’s why she hated it, and hated the house. Carmen actually suggested that they move in there after his mother died, saying it had more space and more charm. Alex wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted him to sell it, but he couldn’t let it go and so it sat empty.
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