by Lisa Unger
“A vacation?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Let me guess.”
“I hear Miami is beautiful this time of year.”
chapter three
Because the world generally yielded to his whims, it was rare that he lost his temper. But when he did, there were casualties. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes, trying to quell the rising anger. He looked up at the sweating man in faded, ill-fitting jeans and distressed-leather jacket who stood across from him.
“I just don’t understand how this can be possible,” he said quietly, but with a benevolent smile on his handsome face, as if he was trying to understand.
“I’m telling you, sir. There’s no trace of her,” the man responded, backing away a step, edging toward the door. He seemed to sense his client’s growing agitation and to understand how dangerous that was, though there were no outward indications of trouble.
“It is a myth that people just disappear, Mr. Parker.”
“People disappear every day.”
“It’s not so,” he responded, rising and walking around his large desk. “People are made to disappear. Or families lack the resources or the inclination to find the missing. But that is not the case here. Is it, Mr. Parker?”
“No, sir,” the private detective answered, feeling dwarfed by the other man’s sheer size. His hands looked like bear claws, large, menacing, effortlessly deadly.
“So, then, what is it, Mr. Parker? May I call you Steve? What is it, then, Steve? When a girl of Tatiana’s considerable beauty—I mean truly stunning, remarkable beauty—walks the street, people notice. It is hard for me to understand how you, with your considerable investigative skills, could not have found one of those people.”
“Sir, my associates and I have scoured Miami. Ridden the same Greyhound bus she supposedly took to New York. I have spent days in Port Authority talking to Greyhound employees, the homeless, and commuters. No one has ever seen her or heard of the bus driver who supposedly spotted her. I have been to places in that city that you don’t even want to know exist. And no one, not one person, showed even a glimmer of recognition. Tatiana is gone, Mr. Quinn. You are only going to find her when she wants to be found. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” Nathan Quinn repeated tonelessly. He turned his back on Stephen Parker and returned to the high-backed leather chair behind his large desk. He picked up a picture of Tatiana that he kept on his desk in a Waterford crystal frame. The sight of her face filled him with rage. If the lush office with its redwood desk, leather chairs, plush sofas, and recessed lighting hadn’t been so dimly lighted, Stephen Parker might not have mistaken the look on Nathan Quinn’s face for profound grief.
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry.”
The door behind Parker opened and two men, even larger than Nathan Quinn, men who apparently had some steroids with their orange juice in the morning, entered quietly and closed the door behind them. Both of them were bald and wore black suits and collarless white shirts. They stood on either side of the door like a set of threatening bookends. Parker wondered how they had been summoned, then realized with dismay that he had checked his weapon in the secured atrium through which he had had to pass to enter Quinn’s office. Fuck, he thought.
“Would you like a drink, Steve?”
“Um, no thanks, Mr. Quinn. I should be going. I just want you to know that I’m not going to charge you for my work. I didn’t help you. So, if you’ll just cover my expenses, we’ll call it even.”
Parker tried to quell the rising tide of panic he felt inside. After all, there was no reason to fear Nathan Quinn—he was just a man looking for his daughter. Parker had done his best but hadn’t been able to help him. It wasn’t as though Quinn was some thug, some mobster who was going to do him in just because he’d stumbled on some delicate information. Nathan Quinn was a respected businessman. He told himself all of these things, but it didn’t stop his heart from beating like timpani or alleviate the dryness in his mouth. Logic told him one thing, but his instincts were saying quite another.
“No, Steve,” he said quietly. “That wouldn’t be right. I’m sure you did everything you could. If you stop and see my secretary at the office tomorrow, she’ll have a check for you in the amount we initially discussed. Minus the bonus, of course, which I promised only if she was returned to me safe and sound.”
“Of course,” Parker said with alacrity. He felt a wash of relief that Nathan Quinn had acknowledged that there would be a tomorrow after all. But he wasn’t going to feel 100 percent better until the meeting was over and he was still in one piece. “As for the other information that surfaced during my investigation,” Parker added, just to be sure they understood each other, “well, that will be our little secret.”
There was a moment where Nathan Quinn stared blackly at Stephen Parker, but then his grim expression turned into a cordial smile.
“I’d expect nothing less from a professional of your caliber, Mr. Parker,” said Nathan Quinn, grinning complicitly.
The private detective returned the grin, then looked behind him at the men who stood by the door, arms crossed and faces expressionless.
“I should be going,” Parker repeated, the discomfort he had felt not entirely dissipated.
“Yes, of course.” Quinn rose and offered his hand, which Parker took. Quinn’s grip was predictably crushing. When Parker was released, he rushed out the door, slamming it behind him.
Nathan Quinn was silent for a moment, watching the black lacquer doors as if waiting for Parker to return. Then he walked over to the bar and poured himself a glass of gin.
chapter four
Jeffrey was asleep beside Lydia on the flight to Miami, the result of his taking Tylenol PM and two shots of Jack Daniel’s before getting on the plane. Bottled bravery, because Jeffrey was terrified of airplanes. His breathing was heavy, and his head was on her shoulder, one hand palm-up on her thigh. She kissed his forehead, glad he was sleeping instead of fidgeting and nervous, which, in turn, would make her fidgety and nervous. The first-class cabin was dark and nearly empty, except for a few other passengers. A young businessman sat on the aisle across from her, tapping furiously on his laptop. An older Asian woman, wearing a black silk tunic and a remarkable jade fu lion on prayer beads around her neck, had the kind of ageless beauty and silken hair of Asian women that Lydia had always admired. The other passengers were just dark, silent forms around her.
Too edgy to read or sleep, Lydia’s thoughts turned again to Tatiana. A girl possessing such luminous beauty is in for all kinds of trouble in her life, thought Lydia. Average women, plagued with self-doubt about their bodies, battling negative self-images, constantly comparing themselves unfavorably to media images of beauty, would likely look on someone like Tatiana Quinn with a jealousy bordering on hatred, even though she was only fifteen. What they didn’t know, what they could never know, was that physical beauty was no recipe for happiness. A certain kind of man would desire her, but feel inadequate and hate her for it, and perhaps become abusive. Another kind would never approach her at all, assuming that she was too good for him. Women would be falsely nice but secretly hate her. People worship that kind of physical perfection but despise it at the same time, aspire to it endlessly but can’t bear to see it in others, a reminder of their own imperfections.
For some reason, Lydia kept thinking about the Gretchen Corley murder, a high-profile case on which she and Jeffrey had consulted briefly. Her mother, Kristen, had entered Gretchen in beauty pageants from the time she was old enough to walk, just as Kristen, a loser in the Miss America pageant, had been before her.
Lydia’s personal theory about Gretchen Corley had been that her mother had murdered her, though no arrests had ever been made. The case was still unsolved. Lydia believed that Kristen had groomed Gretchen all her short life to be the little coquette that she was, all the while hating her for the youth and beauty that underscored Kristen’s inevitable trek toward old age. And that Kristen had one
day discovered her husband was molesting their daughter.
Instead of feeling a murderous rage toward him and the violation he had committed against their daughter, she must have been jealous toward the little girl, who, even at her young age, was more beautiful than Kristen had ever been. That in her heart, Kristen probably believed that her daughter had stolen her husband. A narcissist would be compelled to eliminate the threat. Lydia wondered if something like that could be at play with Tatiana.
Lydia believed that women like Kristen Corley, who admire their own beauty and believe it is the only valuable thing about them, were generally in for big trouble when they approached middle age, particularly if they were emotionally unstable to begin with. When outer beauty fades, all that remains is the self. Vain, beautiful women often lack self-esteem because they never explore their inner gifts. They only know themselves by the reflection in the mirror. Not that it is really their fault. No one teaches them otherwise. Lydia had always been grateful to her mother for teaching her better.
“Don’t try to skate by on your looks, Lydia. They don’t last. Use your brain.” This was one of Marion’s most annoying admonishments. When Lydia asked Marion, “Do you think I’m beautiful?” her mother answered, “You are beautiful … inside and out. But inside is what counts; outside is just icing.” So, though Lydia considered herself a little vain, loving beautiful clothes and expensive cosmetics and maybe checking her reflection a little more often than Marion would have thought necessary, she knew the pursuit of perfection was a losing battle, one that could claim heavy casualties. Even your very sanity.
Tatiana was beautiful in a dangerous way. Lydia could see that from her pictures. It didn’t necessarily mean anything in reference to her disappearance. What was her relationship to her mother, to her stepfather? Had her beauty caused her mother to be jealous, her stepfather to be overly solicitous? Had she been afraid in her home, thinking the streets were safer? Or had her beauty attracted someone who had seduced or abducted her, making it look as though she had run away?
So far, the Miami police had been unresponsive. She’d left two messages for the detective working the case, whose name she’d found in the articles on the Internet, a Detective Manuel Ignacio. The papers had called him “the Saint of Lost Children,” a twenty-five-year veteran with an uncanny track record for finding missing kids in the first forty-eight hours. Those were the critical hours. Statistics showed that if a missing child was not found in that time frame, the chances of ever finding her alive decreased exponentially for every hour that passed.
Lydia had left a message, saying that she had a potential lead in the case but not mentioning specifically the tape cassette and note that she carried in her bag. But she imagined that with a million-dollar reward in the mix, Detective Ignacio spent a lot of time sifting through messages, most of which were probably false leads, costing countless lost man-hours. She’d left her cellular phone number, hoping he’d get back to her before she and Jeffrey showed up at the police station.
Jeffrey shifted next to her, trying to get comfortable in his sleep. She knew he would wake up with a sore neck and in a hazy bad mood.
“It would be nice if you could bring a case into this firm that actually made us some money,” he’d complained as they were packing to go on their “vacation.” Though she knew he didn’t really care. The firm of Mark, Hanley and Striker took on enough high-paying cases—insurance fraud, rich husbands checking up on cheating wives, some government work, which Lydia wasn’t 100 percent clear on and knew she wasn’t supposed to be—that the partners could afford to back Lydia’s hunches. Technically, she was employed by the firm as an investigative consultant. They called her in on cases they thought she could help with; she had access to their resources and manpower; the publicity from her books kept business coming into the firm. It was a very beneficial relationship for everyone.
Sometimes she got the feeling that Jacob Hanley resented her a bit, though. He certainly hadn’t been happy about the trip to Miami. In fact, he seemed to go a little pale when they delivered the news. “What do you guys think you are going to find that the Miami police didn’t find?” he’d asked when they’d stopped by the firm on their way out of town.
“I don’t know. We’re just going to check it out. Lydia has the buzz.”
In response to that, Jacob, who had followed them from the lobby into Jeffrey’s office and was slouching in the chair across from Jeffrey’s desk, had practically snorted. “That’s great,” he said sullenly, with a dramatic throwing up of hands. “Do what you want.”
“Don’t worry about it, Hanley. It’s more like a vacation than anything.”
He made that snuffling noise with nose and throat again. “That’s what you said when you went to Santa Fe last year.”
Lydia had felt her temper flare a little bit at that. But she bit her tongue, which was never easy for her. Jeffrey and Hanley had been friends since West Point. So she had never offered her opinion that Hanley had always seemed like deadweight to her and that Jeffrey and Christian Striker had done most of the work in building the firm to what it was.
“And?” Jeffrey said, a little more anger in his eyes and tone than Lydia had expected.
“And you both practically got yourselves killed,” Hanley responded, shifting his manner from that of annoyance to one of concern, a kind of tonal backpedaling. After the awkward pause that passed between them, Jacob raised his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “I’m just saying, don’t get yourselves into any trouble.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Jeffrey said. She could see from her position across the large office, sitting on the plush beige couch with the rust chenille pillows that she had picked out at Crate & Barrel, that Jeffrey was really annoyed. His jaw was clenched and he avoided looking at Hanley. “Anything else?”
“Just stay in touch. Let us know if we can help,” he said, with his verbal tail between his legs.
Jeffrey didn’t respond, and after a moment, Hanley got up and left. Lydia just sat on the couch as Jeffrey shoved files into the drawers and sifted through a stack of pink phone messages. She didn’t say anything because she knew that his annoyance needed a target. And she didn’t want to be it.
“And I will be snagging some beach time while we’re in Miami,” he said. “I don’t want to wind up tailing people, sneaking around alleys, getting into shoot-outs, like we usually do.”
She didn’t argue. “Okay, okay. What’s going on with you two?”
“Nothing. He’s just … Forget it.”
She didn’t press it, knowing he’d tell her his thoughts once he’d sorted them out. But the conversation had had an odd effect on her, too. Sitting next to their suitcases, four hours before the quick flight to Miami, she had wanted to go home. For a second, she wished she’d never opened the brown envelope and had never even had the chance to get the buzz.
The fact was that she didn’t want to be sneaking around alleys and getting into gunfights, either. Two years ago, she wouldn’t have given a little investigational jaunt like this one a second thought. She would have been hoping to crack something big. But these days, she didn’t feel overly inclined to put their lives in danger. Not for the first time since she’d put the serial killer in Santa Fe in a coma that he lay in to this day, she thought, Maybe I’m losing my edge. The things that had always thrilled her, had always driven her were suddenly not as appealing as the thought of being home with Jeffrey by the fire. God, what a girl I am all of a sudden, she had thought, disgusted. Maybe I should take up macramé. Even though she wasn’t even sure what macramé was.
“Why are you frowning?” Jeffrey had asked.
“I’m not.”
“You are. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking, Let’s go. What are you doing?”
“I’m just sending an E-mail to Christian and Craig, asking them to do some checking around here. One of the articles you found mentioned that someone had seen Tatiana on a bus to New York City
.”
“Cool. Are you ready?”
“Yep. What’s your hurry? Flight isn’t for another four hours.”
“I’m just anxious.”
He walked over to her, took her hands, and pulled her up gently from the couch. He kissed her forehead and pulled her into his arms. She breathed deeply, feeling his closeness, smelling the familiar scent of his skin. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find out what happened to her.”
“I know,” she said, feeling a little guilty because she wasn’t sure that was the source of her anxiety. “Let’s get a quick drink first.”
They had stopped at the Irish bar on the corner, where Jeff ordered two shots of whiskey and two Tylenol PM tablets and Lydia had a Ketel One martini. Then they took a cab, where, in the drizzly gray of the Friday-afternoon rush hour, they crawled to JFK in a sea of honking horns and screaming cabdrivers. Jeff was half-asleep as they boarded the plane in the last moments before the door closed, almost exactly twenty-four hours since Lydia had first heard Tatiana’s frightened voice.
The soft ping of the airplane intercom interrupted Lydia’s thoughts. The pilot’s practiced voice sounded muffled to Lydia because her ears always felt blocked when she flew. “We have begun our initial descent into the Miami area. The weather is a perfect seventy-five degrees. We will be pulling into the gate a few minutes earlier than expected this evening. Arrival time will be ten-fifteen P.M. We ask you to remain seated with your seat belts on and your trays in the upright position for the duration of the flight. Attendants, prepare for landing. We hope you enjoy your stay in Miami or wherever your final destination may be.”
chapter five
Everything about this case had been weird. And it looked like it was about to get weirder. Detective Manuel Ignacio scribbled Lydia Strong’s cellular phone number onto his scratch pad and saved her message on his voice mail. A thin ray of hope shone through the fog of six weeks of fatigue. He looked at the scratched face of his leather-band Timex and saw that it was 10:15. He sighed and put his head down in his hands; his wife was going to kill him. He was supposed to have been home by eight o’clock and he hadn’t even called.