Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Cam looks at her husband, thinking he’s being sarcastic, then sees that he’s gazing down at their baby girl with affection.

  “I think I’ll wait and call Lucinda in the morning,” she decides, yawning deeply. “She’s probably sleeping at this hour anyway.”

  She finishes nursing and carries her drowsy, sated baby down the hall to her room.

  After settling Grace in for the night, she sees that the light is still on beneath Tess’s door.

  She knocks. “Tess? It’s Mom. I’m home. Can I come in?”

  There’s a sound from the other side of the door—not a yes, not a no, maybe not even an actual word.

  Opening the door, she sees her daughter sitting on her bed, still fully clothed, her face tear-stained.

  “Tess! What’s wrong?”

  “We broke up.”

  “Oh, sweetie…” Cam goes to her, puts her arms around her.

  “I don’t know what happened. I thought he loved me.”

  “I know.”

  “It hurts so bad.”

  “I know.” Cam strokes her daughter’s thick brown hair, grown out for her boyfriend’s sake.

  Cam knows better than anyone that in the grand scheme of things, a breakup isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a fifteen-year-old girl.

  But for Tess, right here, right now, tonight, it’s the end of the world. And all Cam can do is hold her tight.

  “Are you ready?” Detective Reingold asks Lucinda as they step out of the squad car in front of the brick apartment building where Jaime Dobiak died.

  Lucinda looks up at it, remembering what she saw—what she heard—when they were here earlier.

  The eerie laughter was unsettling enough then, at dusk.

  Now it’s the middle of the night, with mist rolling in off the lake several blocks away, and the streets are shiny from a cold rain that fell earlier.

  Like London in some movie about Jack the Ripper, Lucinda finds herself thinking uneasily.

  A uniformed officer still guards the building’s entrance. Across the street, a small crowd of curious bystanders has gathered along with reporters, a camera crew, and several news vans.

  Flashbulbs flash as Lucinda, Randy, and the detective walk from the car to the steps of the building.

  “Detective, who are they?” a female reporter calls.

  “Wouldn’t she love to know,” Randy mutters under his breath to Lucinda, flashing her a grin.

  Glad no one seems to have recognized her huddled in a scarf and coat, she can just imagine how the press would react if they knew that the Soothsayer Superhero—the Sexy part definitely being negligible in this getup—is here to try to pick up the killer’s trail.

  It was, surprisingly, Frank Santiago’s suggestion that she visit the crime scene. Reingold agreed only after thoroughly checking out her credentials with Philadelphia and Long Beach Township.

  Before heading over here, he waited while Lucinda and Randy checked in for the night at a nearby hotel. They had no luggage; the desk clerk raised her eyebrow when they asked for two rooms.

  Clearly, she’d thought they were stealing away for a late night tryst.

  It isn’t appropriate, in the midst of all this, for Lucinda to devote even a moment’s wistful thought to Randy and what might have been. She’s only human, though, and her emotions are raw. She couldn’t help but wonder, fleetingly, what it would be like if the clerk were right.

  Then, of course, grim reality came crashing back in, and they were off to the murder scene.

  “I’ll need you to stay out here while I take her up,” Reingold tells Randy. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Randy touches Lucinda’s arm. “You good to go on your own?”

  She nods.

  “Okay. I’ll wait right here for you.”

  Reingold holds the door open, and Lucinda steps inside. Several closed doors line the first floor vestibule.

  She heads for the vintage staircase and begins climbing, the wooden treads creaking loudly.

  “Lucinda?” Reingold asks, behind her.

  Halfway up, she pauses and turns to look down at him. “Yes?”

  “I didn’t tell you Dobiak’s apartment was on an upper floor, did I?”

  “No.”

  He nods. “Just checking.”

  There are two flights, but she stops after the first, looking down the second floor hall at more closed doors.

  There’s no mistaking which apartment is Jaime Dobiak’s: a strip of yellow crime scene tape straddles a door halfway down the hall.

  Reingold removes it, and they cross the threshold.

  Lucinda hears a burst of static in her head—like a radio not tuned into a clear frequency. Startled, she goes still, listening for something more.

  “What’s going on?” Reingold asks after a minute.

  She shakes her head. “I’m not sure. I heard…something.”

  “What was it?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s gone.”

  She looks around the room. Mismatched furniture, framed posters on the walls, a smell of stale cigarette smoke mingling with the telltale scent of bleach.

  “Can I touch her things?” she asks Reingold.

  “Go ahead. But wear these.” He passes her a pair of rubber gloves. “They’ve already taken pictures and dusted for prints, but just in case…”

  She nods and pulls on the gloves, then looks around, settling on a black wool coat tossed over the back of a chair. She picks it up.

  It smells of perfume and cigarette smoke.

  Reingold stands by in silence as she hugs the coat against her and closes her eyes.

  “He came in through the door,” she says quietly after a minute. “He had her key.”

  “How did he get it?”

  Lucinda shrugs. “It wasn’t hard. He was waiting for her when she came home from work.”

  She walks through a doorway, into the bedroom.

  “He was waiting here. This is where she died. On the floor. He stabbed her.”

  “Yes.”

  At Reingold’s affirmation, she looks directly at him. “Was she wearing a watch? Engraved on the back with the date she died and the longitude and latitude?”

  “Is that what you’re seeing?”

  “No. It’s what I’m guessing, because that’s how Carla was found. It was a Freestyle watch. The battery had run out, and the hands were stopped.”

  “Same brand. But there was no battery,” Reingold tells her. “Not here, anyway.”

  Closing her eyes, Lucinda sees a gloved hand removing a watch battery with a pair of tweezers.

  “You’re right. It was deliberately stopped.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “At what time?” she asks.

  “About five after seven. Why?”

  “Is that what time she died?”

  “Around then.”

  “Same thing with Carla Barakat.”

  “So you’re sure it’s the same guy.”

  “I’m positive.”

  She looks at the clock radio on the bedside table. Walking over to it, she notices that the volume dial is turned off all the way. She turns it clockwise, and immediately, the room is filled with radio static.

  Frowning, she looks up at Reingold. “This is what I heard. Was the volume on when they first found her?”

  “Not that I know of. I’ll check.”

  Lucinda leans over to look at the dial. The radio is tuned to FM 104.5.

  “What do you think it means?”

  “It could mean nothing at all. She’s got an iPod on the table here, see? And the clock radio has a docking station. I’m guessing she must listen to the iPod, not the radio.”

  “Then why isn’t the iPod plugged into it?”

  Lucinda shrugs. “I think we need to look at this more closely. Check out places that have 104.5 as a longitudinal coordinate.”

  “There have to be hundreds. Thousands. Doesn’t it seem far-fetched that he’d leave us just the lon
gitude without the latitude?”

  “Maybe. But we can’t overlook anything. The radio setting might mean something. We need to check out places that broadcast radio stations on 104.5, too, and look at them as potential locations for his next murder.”

  Lucinda examines the other items on the table: a box of blue tissues and a stack of magazines with subscriber labels attached: Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue. On the bottom of the pile is a trade publication, Journal of Social History, dated Summer 2006. There is no subscription label.

  Puzzled, Lucinda picks it up, thumbs through it. There are articles about AIDS, war, illegitimacy. At a glance, none of it is meaningful.

  “Did Jaime have an interest in social history, do you know?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Lucinda replaces the journal and looks thoughtfully at it.

  “It doesn’t go. I feel like he put it there.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugs.

  “It would really help if you could give me some idea of what he looks like,” Reingold tells her.

  “I’m trying.” She stands in silence for a few minutes. Then she walks over to stand in a spot beside the bed, looking down at the floor where it happened. Sinking to her knees, she presses her palms against the hardwood, now scrubbed free of blood.

  A burst of ugly laughter fills her head.

  “I can’t see him. But I can hear him.”

  “What is he saying?”

  “He’s not saying anything.” She looks up at Reingold in shock and disgust. “He’s laughing. He thinks it’s funny. He’s laughing while he’s killing her.”

  “If you can tell us what he looks like…anything at all…”

  She closes her eyes, and an image comes to her.

  But it isn’t the killer’s face.

  “I see her—Jaime. She…” She takes in the oddly grotesque image, wondering if she possibly has it right. “She’s wearing red lipstick—too much lipstick, it’s everywhere, all over her face, and she didn’t put it on herself.”

  “No,” Reingold says quietly, “she didn’t. And neither did Carla.”

  Lucinda opens her eyes.

  “I didn’t know,” she tells him, her voice taut with emotion. “I didn’t know about the lipstick.”

  “That’s because the lead investigator kept that information classified. It cannot leave this room, Lucinda.”

  “It won’t.”

  “You have to swear to me. You can’t tell anyone. Not even your boyfriend down there.”

  “My…? Oh. He’s not my boyfriend.”

  Reingold shrugs; obviously he couldn’t care less what Randy is to her.

  “Listen,” he says, “I really wish you could get a picture of this guy so we’d know who we’re looking for.”

  “So do I. All I know is that he’s still laughing, wherever he is now. He’s laughing at how he fooled everyone. And he’s going to do it again.”

  “When? Where?”

  She shakes her head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

  PART III

  7:44

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Ms. Sloan, I don’t know how we can ever thank you for what you’ve done.” Desiree Drew clasps Lucinda’s hands in her own.

  “I’m glad I could help.” Lucinda never knows what else to say when victims’ families insist on meeting and thanking her in person.

  You’re welcome feels trite in the light of what it is, exactly, that she’s done: help this devastated single mother locate the decomposing remains of her beloved, promising, twenty-one-year-old son who had his whole life ahead of him.

  Isaiah Drew was located in the morgue last month—shot through the head, stripped of his wallet, and left to die anonymously on a crack-infested street in North Philly.

  His family and friends, Lucinda knows, have come up with every imaginable reason he might have ventured to that neighborhood. They refuse to accept the reality: that he was a closeted junkie in search of a fix.

  Neal, seated behind his desk, clears his throat. “Ms. Drew, Lucinda would like to give you something.”

  She’s already reaching into her purse for the envelope. “This is a contribution for the scholarship fund you’ve set up in Isaiah’s name.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lucinda expects the woman to put the envelope away and is dismayed when she tears it open, then gasps at the sizable amount written on the check.

  “Oh, my goodness…This is…I don’t know what to say.” She looks up, tears shining in her brown eyes. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  This time, Lucinda’s equally heartfelt “You’re welcome,” is more than appropriate.

  A few minutes later, Neal returns to his office after escorting Isaiah’s mother out.

  “You did well, Cin.” He knows she always dreads meeting the families after all is said and done.

  She shakes her head. “I wonder if it might have been better if she hadn’t known what happened to him.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Maybe I’m starting to. Maybe it’s better to hold onto hope for as long as you can.”

  Neal sits down and looks closely at her from across the desk “Are you okay?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s up?”

  She shrugs. “For the past day or two, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that something bad is going to happen.”

  “To you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. To someone. Somewhere.”

  She tells him how she’s been haunted by bursts of fiendish laughter. By blood, and flashes of a shadowy figure, but never his face.

  “You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t shaken up after what’s gone on.”

  What’s gone on, she now knows, is that strands of hair with DNA matching her own were found in Carla Barakat’s cold hands.

  She was horrified when she met with Neal and Dan Lambert and learned the news. “Someone had been in and out of my apartment,” she told them. “He must have taken my hair from—I don’t know, the bathroom, or a brush, and planted it—”

  “We know,” Lambert said. “Don’t worry. You’re not a suspect.”

  Not anymore, was what he didn’t say.

  Not with a second murder halfway across the country.

  The Chicago police called in the FBI almost immediately. Notwithstanding an age-old rivalry between the two law enforcement agencies, they’re now working together and in conjunction with the Long Beach Township police, having determined that Jaime Dobiak and Carla Barakat were killed by the same person.

  Lucinda has been half-hoping—or maybe half-expecting—that an arrest would be made once the FBI got involved.

  But the weeks have unfolded without any news on that front.

  Detective Reingold, with whom Lucinda has directly kept in touch, doesn’t seem to think anything is imminent—though, as he cautioned her, he’s not at liberty to give her the details.

  “We’re working on a theory,” was all he told her. He promised to pass along the possible Ava Neary/Sandra Wubner connection to the FBI, but again, warned that he couldn’t share the follow up.

  He did say—because it directly involved her—that his technicians had traced the e-mail Lucinda received to a stolen laptop. The owner was a college student who said it had gone missing from a Starbucks not far from his Loyola campus. Nobody there recalled seeing anything, and the laptop has yet to resurface.

  Another dead end.

  “I should go,” she tells Neal, picking up her khaki raincoat from the adjacent chair.

  “Let me take you to lunch. We’ll go get a salad, now that you’ve decided you like your veggies after all.” He grins.

  “You know, I never should have told you that you were right—or that I actually like something that’s really good for me.”

  “And deny me the chance to say I told you so?”

  She rolls her eyes. “On that note…”

  “I was serious about lunch.”


  “No, thanks. You’re busy, and…I’ve got to get going.”

  “What are you doing today?”

  “Let’s see…. Sitting at home, reading magazines, eating stale marshmallow Peeps, and waiting for something terrible to happen,” she admits with a shrug. “That’s pretty much it.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “I like them stale. I leave the packages open on purpose. They get this crunchy crust of sugar that I really—”

  “I’m not talking about the Peeps. I’m talking about the waiting for something terrible to happen.”

  “Oh—I’m just kidding, about that, Neal.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “You’re right. I’m not.” She sighs.

  “Hey, listen—if you weren’t kidding about reading magazines…” Neal opens a drawer and hands her something.

  She looks at it. “Meanderings.”

  “Garland’s got another story out. He gets paid in copies. He gave me five of them, Cin. What am I going to do with them? Take it. Toss it into the garbage, leave it on the subway, whatever.”

  “Maybe I’ll read it,” she tucks it under her arm, “while I’m waiting for the something terrible.”

  “You know, I moved here last year because it was supposed to be a great place to meet guys,” Danielle Hendry tells her friend Alicia as they walk out of their office building onto California Street, heading toward the light rail station at 16th Street.

  “You’ve done nothing but meet guys since I’ve known you.”

  “Maybe, but every single one of them has had even more baggage than the losers I left behind in L.A. Including my ex-husbands.”

  They stop at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to turn. It’s rush hour, and the streets of Denver are teeming with office workers—on foot, in cars, on public transportation, on bicycles, roller blades, and even skateboards.

  At this time of year, it could be snowing, and Danielle has heard that it often is. But this particular April late afternoon is balmy, thanks to warm air blowing up from the Gulf Stream. The sky is overcast with the threat of the season’s first spring thunderstorm.

  Danielle turns to watch a strapping businessman walk by, noting that he’s probably in his first year out of college, maybe second. A good generation younger than her, maybe just a few years older than her son.