“Did Carla…Did she wear red lipstick?”
He shakes his head.
“Never?”
“No. Never.”
“You’re that sure?”
“Positive. It was a thing with Carla. Makeup. My mother-in-law worked at one of those department store cosmetics counters.”
Ssssssssstore cossssssssssmeticssss countersssssssssssss…
Is he slurring?
“Zelda figured out Carla’s best colors,” he forges on, “and she always wore pink lipstick. Always. Pink. And blue eyeshadow. I hate it. Blue eyeshadow. Looks cheap. But you know what? She wears it anyway. She says it goes with her eyes. Said,” he amends, remembering.
Blue eyes.
They both had blue eyes, he and Carla.
Back when he still thought they had a chance in hell of making it together, he had imagined the blue-eyed children they would have. Basic genetics. Blue eyes plus blue eyes equals blue eyes.
“What do you think it means?”
He looks at Lucinda. She’s not talking about all those little squares—what the heck do you call those little squares?—in biology class.
Lucinda has brown eyes.
Big brown eyes.
One pair of big brown eyes plus one pair of blue eyes—his—equals…
What does it equal?
Blue?
Brown?
He should have paid more attention.
No. He shouldn’t be paying attention at all, not to her eyes, not to his feelings for her. Not tonight.
“Randy?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay? Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Then…what do you think it means?” she asks again.
What does he think it means?
What does he think what means?
He leans his head back against the couch cushion, attempting to backtrack along the conversational path, but his thoughts are hopelessly entangled.
Damned bourbon.
“The red lipstick,” she reminds him. “It was on my mirror, too. And—I swear, Randy, when Neal mentioned that today when we were in the meeting, Van Aken and Lambert exchanged a look, as if…I swear it meant something to them. Does it to you?”
Does it to you….
Does it to you….
Red lipstick. She’s talking about red lipstick.
“Hell, no.”
She looks at him for a minute. “Are you okay?”
“I’m…drunk,” he says helplessly.
She nods. “I’m going to call Neal.”
“Okay.” He closes his eyes, just to rest them for a minute.
Beneath an overcast, moonless sky, he walks through the cold along Rush Street toward West Division, past restaurants and bars crowded with patrons even on a weeknight, most of them young, some spilling out onto the sidewalks to smoke.
He buys himself a beer in one of the bars—not because he wants to, but because he has to. He buys a pack of cigarettes. Same reasoning.
He drinks the beer with his back to the bar, and then he goes outside and he smokes a few cigarettes and he tries not to shiver in the bitter cold.
He’d rather not linger too long inside, where the bartenders and wait staff, at least, are sober. Watchful.
He watches the carefree patrons, many of them inebriated, not even shivering as they smoke and laugh and talk in the frigid Chicago night.
They don’t see him.
No one gives him a second glance.
Not the guys, who are focused on the girls.
And not the girls, who are focused on the guys their own age, unaware of the predator in their midst.
Lucinda stands over Randy, wondering what to do.
She shook him a few times, but there’s no waking him. His head is thrown back, mouth open, chest rising and falling in slow, rhythmic breathing.
He needs sleep.
So does she.
Neal reminded her of that just now, before they hung up.
“Get some rest,” he said, after they’d discussed the latest development. “We’ll go over everything tomorrow.”
“You get home safely.” She was worried about him, still on the road from the shore to Philadelphia.
It’s slow going, he told her. Accidents everywhere.
“I’m glad you stayed there, Cin.”
So is she.
Especially now that Randy’s asleep and she doesn’t have to worry about…
Well, anything.
Her throat aches with the effort of forcing sound; another sip of bourbon soothes it a little, but she pours the rest into the sink. She needs sleep. Now.
She goes back into the bedroom and takes the quilt—embroidered with nautical flags, of course—off the rumpled bed. Back in the living room, she covers Randy with it, gently tucking the edges around his shoulders and legs.
He doesn’t stir.
She props a life preserver-embellished throw pillow beneath his head. He’s still sound asleep, but at least he looks more comfortable.
Encouraged, she kneels and takes off his boots.
Okay, better yet. But that’s as far as it goes.
He’ll be fine.
She stands and watches him sleep for a moment, remembering that she did this once before. Years ago.
She watched him sleeping on the final night they were together and shouldn’t have been, the night when she came to the realization that she had to end it. She extracted herself from his naked embrace, got out of bed, and snuck away, but only after giving him a long, last look, memorizing everything about him. She knew they would see each other again, that they would go on working together for as long as they had to, but was certain she would never again experience the intimacy of watching him sleep.
She was wrong.
But never in a million years could she have imagined the incredible series of events that had led them from that moment to this.
Shaking her head, she goes into the bedroom and slips between sheets that smell of Randy, resting her head on a pillow that smells of Randy.
She leaves the light on.
Outside, the wind roars, hurtling pellets of ice against the house.
After a few minutes of listening to the storm’s fury, she gets up and digs her iPod out of her coat pocket.
Settling back in bed with the earbuds in her ears, she presses the scroll wheel, hoping to find some soothing music on one of the playlists she uploaded before Curaçao.
Wait a minute….
What’s going on?
Where is all her music?
How can Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 14 be the only song file on the iPod?
She didn’t put it here.
She did, however, load the iPod with hundreds of other songs…all of which are somehow missing.
Did she accidentally erase all the files somehow?
She must have.
But then, how the heck did Sonata 14 end up on here? She’s not big on classical music. It’s not that she doesn’t like it. She just knows absolutely nothing about it.
Could she possibly have picked up someone else’s iPod by mistake?
Must be.
An iPod that belongs to someone whose only song choice is classical piano written over two hundred years ago.
An iPod that’s encased in an identical mint green leather skin.
Okay, that might be the only thing that makes sense, but it’s a reach.
It’s also not the case. Because when she slips the iPod out of the skin to check the back of it, she sees her initials and telephone number etched there.
The engraving was free when she ordered it from the Web site on her last birthday, a gift to herself.
So it’s definitely her iPod.
Without her music.
With unfamiliar music.
Or maybe, she realizes after she presses Play, not so unfamiliar at all.
Lucinda’s heard Sonata 14 before, many times.
Even she, with her limited knowledge of
classical music, knows the famous piece, only not as Sonata 14.
She knows it by its more familiar name: Moonlight Sonata.
It’s freaking freezing out here, and it’s getting late, and as much as he’d hoped to find her on this first night and not waste any time, he finally decides to call it a night.
He stomps out his cigarette on a sidewalk scraped dry and clean of snow, and he starts to walk away.
That is when it happens.
A cigarette butt, still smoldering, lands by his feet.
A butt stained scarlet at the tip.
He looks up, slowly.
And there she is.
A buxom blonde in a red dress, laughing with her friends, oblivious to him as she shakes another menthol out of her pack.
He watches as she purses the cigarette between luscious lips the dense, sugary red of a summer tomato.
As she lights up, he smiles a satisfied smile.
The clock has just started ticking, the countdown begun again.
Lucinda stares at the framed nautical map of Long Beach Island on the wall opposite the bed, wondering how she can possibly still be awake.
It’s not the storm—that’s died down quite a bit in the hour since she climbed into bed.
And it’s not that she’s not tired, because her body aches with fatigue and it’s all she can do to form coherent thoughts.
It’s not that the light is on, because she’s used to that.
It’s the iPod.
Someone tampered with it. Someone was on her computer, accessing her music files. Someone replaced them with a haunting Beethoven sonata that means nothing to her.
Should it?
She can’t seem to shake the nagging feeling that she’s missing something. Maybe not anything to do with the iPod, but some clue that’s right under her nose.
Was it something Cam said when they spoke earlier?
Or Neal?
She’s gone over both conversations repeatedly, coming up with nothing.
Neal was intrigued by the letter Cam had received, particularly because it was written in red lipstick.
“There’s something about the lipstick, Neal,” she told him. “The local cops here aren’t telling us everything.”
“Of course they aren’t. They were humoring us by having us there. Humoring Randy, really.”
“Not really. We’re the ones with the evidence. And they’re going to be working with the police in Philly. You are the police in Philly.”
“But I’m personally involved. No one on the investigation is going to trust me—or you, for that matter—with any information we don’t already have. For all they know, we could be involved.”
By we, he meant she.
“Do you think they’re still suspicious of me, Neal?” she asked worriedly.
“Why would they be? You have an alibi. You were away all weekend. Jimmy was with you, and he can vouch for it. Don’t worry, Cin. They’re not suspicious of you.” There was a click on the line, and he said, “I have to go. That’s Erma calling me. She’s worried sick about me out here on the road.”
“So am I. Please get home safely.”
By then, her voice was a mere whisper. Efforts to clear her throat brought mere squeaks of sound.
Hopefully it’ll be better tomorrow.
It will be if you get some rest.
Lucinda punches the too-flat loose down pillow beneath her head and tries desperately to fall asleep.
Nothing doing.
Cam Hastings was rattled, to say the least, to hear of the possible connection between her sister’s death and Carla Barakat’s.
“It’s too huge a coincidence, don’t you think?” she asked Lucinda. “To think that whoever killed my sister killed Carla.”
“Not if whoever killed your sister read or saw on TV that we were looking for more information about Ava’s death. You and I and Randy were all out there—our names, our faces. We were on national TV, Cam. Do you know how many people we reached?”
“And you think one of them was responsible for Ava’s death.”
“Or knew something about it.”
“What about Carla, though?”
That’s just it.
What about Carla?
What if her killer is still here on the island?
What if he followed Lucinda and Randy over here tonight and is hovering somewhere nearby right now?
She looks at the map on the wall, gauging the distance between this cottage and the Barakats’ house….
Between this cottage and the police station.
Is there a legend? What’s the scale?
As she searches the fringes of the map, something jumps out at her.
Shocked, she sits up in bed, leans closer, gets out, and hurries over to the wall to examine the map.
Can it be?
Lucinda gasps, clapping a hand over her mouth in utter astonishment.
“Oh my God,” she whispers, then tries to scream, “Randy!”
The effort is futile. Her voice is shot.
She hurries to the next room, frantically whispering, “Randy, wake up!”
PART II
7:05
Chapter Eleven
Weeks’ worth of paranoia come rushing back to haunt Jaime Dobiak the moment she walks into her bedroom to see him standing there.
“Hello, Jaime.”
All this time, she’d been feeling as though something wasn’t right. As though someone might have been in her apartment. Things were moved around. Things were missing; her new yellow scarf seemed to have vanished overnight from the bedpost where she was certain she’d left it.
Yet even now, she wants to believe he is whom he’d claimed to be all along—a harmless new neighbor from down the block, whose path has occasionally crossed hers these last few weeks.
“What are you doing h—” She breaks off, seeing the knife.
She tries to run, but he’s got her by the arm, his strong bicep pressed against her face, muffling her cries for help.
At twenty-two years old, Isaiah Drew was on the cusp of becoming the first one in his family to graduate college—Ivy League, no less—when he disappeared off a South Philly street over the weekend.
This isn’t the first time Lucinda’s been called in to investigate a missing student at the University of Pennsylvania.
Typically, someone goes off on a bender or a spontaneous road trip or caves under the rigorous academic pressure and simply checks out for a while. Those cases tend to have happier endings than most.
This one won’t.
“Drugs,” she tells Neal, who’s standing in the doorway as cops and campus security behind him keep curious dorm residents at bay.
Neal shakes his head slightly. “No.”
“I’m not asking you, Neal, I’m telling you. He was involved in drugs.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” Neal responds, “but that would be news to his roommate and his R.A. and his friends. Every person we’ve talked to who knew Isaiah says he was a good kid. Clean.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you’re not sure?”
Lucinda hesitates.
Ordinarily, she wouldn’t. Ordinarily, she’d trust her instincts and tell Neal that yes, she’s sure.
This evening, though, she’s not able to focus one hundred percent of her energy on her work. She feels as though a pall is hanging over her—has felt it all day, even before Neal called to summon her to the campus.
She rests her hand on the pillow where Isaiah reportedly took a nap before heading out onto the street and vanishing.
Nothing comes to her.
It isn’t just this evening; her perceptive abilities simply haven’t been up to par since she received an odd package in the mail the other day.
The package bore a typewritten label and no return address. It had been postmarked in Chicago.
She turned it over to the police without opening it. Inside, she learned, was a yellow silk Hermès sc
arf. That was all.
Lucinda wanted so badly to believe that there was no connection, after all, between the brutal murder of Carla Barakat and the strange communication over the same period of days.
Now, of course, it’s clear that was no coincidence.
She’s known that from the moment she was compelled to look at that nautical chart of Long Beach Island in Randy’s rental house almost a month ago.
74.2
39.6
The precise longitude and latitude of Beach Haven, New Jersey.
The second set of numbers proved to be the longitude and latitude of Chicago.
Are they—and the scarf—meant to indicate that the killer has struck there, as well? Or that he intends to?
Lucinda is taking no chances.
Neal had her laptop examined and found that someone had disabled her spyware and installed a keyboard sniffer: surveillance software that is notoriously difficult to detect unless you’re looking for it—and sometimes, not even then.
She hasn’t let her guard down, not even when she’s alone in her apartment.
Plagued by insomnia, she asked the doctor for a prescription sleeping pill when she was recently there for the flu. She filled the prescription, but hasn’t been able to bring herself to take a pill just yet.
“Why on earth not?” Bradley asked her over the phone the other morning, when she confessed to yet another sleepless night.
“Because I don’t like medication. I’m afraid I won’t be in control if I take it.”
“Lord knows you like to be in control,” he agreed. “You know, you’d sleep a lot better if you’d just turn out the lights like the rest of the world.”
“How do you know that I don’t?”
“Honey, the whole world knows you’re afraid of the dark.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said it in one of those interviews you did on television. Don’t you remember?”
She shrugged. She said a lot of things in those interviews. None of them yielded a solid clue to what happened to Ava Neary.
If the police have re-opened the investigation into her death—as Lucinda had expected them to—they’ve given her no information. For all she knows, they consider it a dead end.
Solve it and you will find me.
It’s such an odd phrase. It’s been nagging at her. So has the scrapbook.
Dead Before Dark Page 17