by Lisa Unger
“So I suppose there’s no chance we’re going to take his advice and walk away,” said Jeffrey.
“Over my dead body.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Oh, come on. You, too? I didn’t think you scared so easy,” she said with a teasing smile, trying to lighten the mood.
“I didn’t use to,” he said, reaching for her hand. “But I’ve got … I think we’ve got more to live for now, don’t we? I don’t want to sound like a pussy, but I’ve never been happier than I have in the last year with you. I don’t want to lose that. Do you?”
She didn’t say anything, his words echoing her own recent thoughts about what she was and wasn’t willing to put on the line anymore.
“I wouldn’t risk our lives, either. Not anymore. I think Detective Ignacio is overestimating Nathan Quinn.”
“Lydia, two people connected with this case are dead already.”
“And what about Tatiana?”
“She might be dead, too. You said so yourself.”
“But what if she isn’t and we are the only two people who have a chance of finding and helping her?”
“It’s Detective Ignacio’s job to find Tatiana.”
“But he won’t find her because he’s too afraid to follow the path that might lead to her,” she said, an old feeling of desperation creeping up on her. The image of a frightened girl huddling in a phone booth somewhere, thin and cold, hair soaked with rain, played in Lydia’s head. She’d been too late for Shawna, but something told her that Tatiana was still within her reach.
The restaurant was getting more crowded, the sound of laughter and conversation starting to fill the room. She looked around at the people gathering for happy hour, smartly dressed, ordering chic cocktails. She envied them, suddenly, lives that seemed so normal, so safe to her. Her life hadn’t been normal since she was fifteen years old. Since then, it had been populated with monsters. You bring it on yourself. You invite them in, she chastised herself.
“All right, let’s think about this for a minute,” said Jeffrey. “Is this still about finding Tatiana for you? Or is it about Nathan Quinn now? Is he the villain of the year? The next bad guy on your list?”
“Maybe both.”
He exhaled sharply. “I don’t have to remind you that we have no proof that he’s done anything wrong.”
“I’m not often wrong about things like this, Jeffrey.”
It was true. In all the years he’d known her, she’d almost never had an instinct that failed them. This time, he had an instinct, too: to get himself and Lydia as far away from this case as possible. The detective’s warning resonated with Jeffrey. In his years as an FBI agent, he had come to realize that there are men in the world who have all the control. Control over governments, over most of the world’s money and resources, over the media. He had felt their influence as an FBI agent, much in the way Detective Ignacio was feeling it—investigations manipulated, evidence and witnesses disappearing. It was just something that he had come to accept—that behind the events of the world were puppet masters like Nathan Quinn. And if you got caught up in their game, chose to play on the wrong team, you got crushed like meat in a grinder.
He flagged down the perky blond waitress who’d been hovering and ordered two martinis for them.
“A couple of years after the Jed McIntyre case, when Jacob Hanley and I were partners, we ran into something like this,” he said suddenly, as if he had been holding it back.
“You never told me about it.”
“You were still just a kid, then. And I haven’t thought about it in awhile.”
“What happened?”
“There was a girl found dead in Tompkins Square Park. That was back in the mid-eighties, when the East Village was in real bad shape and Tompkins Square was a place strictly for junkies and homeless people. She was the daughter of a very wealthy executive at Chase Manhattan Bank. She was a junior at Chapin … a gorgeous, brilliant debutante, real New York society. Anyway, a homeless man found her. She’d been raped and strangled to death.”
“I vaguely remember that, now that you mention it.”
“We were brought in on the case because this girl was the fifth to have gone missing in the past year who fit a particular profile: all society girls from various prep schools around the city … all pretty, busty, long dark hair. Anyway, long story short, all the evidence came back to this kid. He was a member of a hugely powerful political family, had just graduated from Yale, was about to head to Columbia Law. To look at him, he was every parent’s wet dream. But I swear to God, I saw a demon in this kid’s eyes. So we went after him.
“But every time we got close, something happened. One judge took four hours to issue us a search warrant for his parents’ Upper West Side penthouse. When we got there, the whole family and their very powerful attorney were waiting for us. Someone had tipped them off. We found a pair of girl’s panties in his gym locker at the New York Health and Racket Club. But they were lost somehow after we had taken them into evidence. The media started hammering us, writing articles about how we were harassing an innocent boy, trying to pin something on him, when the girls’ bodies hadn’t even been found, except that one. This was before DNA evidence was as widely used as it is now—it was still like science fiction back then.
“Next thing we know, NYPD had arrested the homeless man who found the girl in Tompkins Square Park. The FBI got kicked off the investigation altogether. The police all of a sudden found the bodies in an abandoned building in Alphabet City. And the case was closed.”
“But you didn’t think the homeless guy was responsible.”
“He definitely wasn’t the guy. First of all, he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic … so far gone that he was totally delusional, barely operating in reality. Which satisfied the public perception that he was the type of person who would have committed this kind of crime, but, in actuality, his mental state eliminated him as a possibility. He just didn’t have the mental organization to pull off an abduction, a rape, and a murder and then hide the bodies. Plus, why would he have reported the last girl he found in the park? He certainly didn’t have opportunity or proximity to these girls. It was ludicrous really. But the media was on board with it. Certainly this crazy homeless man was a better villain than a bright young law student with a brilliant future,” Jeffrey said, disgust and anger filtering into his words.
“So what did you do?”
“Jacob and I protested to our supervisor. We were told in no uncertain terms to stand down. They didn’t give us any explanation; they didn’t even really try to convince us that we were wrong. They just issued the order to walk away, go back to D.C. for our next assignment, and that was what we were expected to do. There was just this sense that it was bigger than we were, a sort of implied threat that if we made waves, we could kiss our careers good-bye.”
“And you let it go?”
“Not exactly. I called this woman I knew who worked at the New York Times, Sarah Winter. She was young and ambitious, looking to make a name for herself. I figured an exposé like this would appeal to her. I met her for a drink at Telephone Bar on Second Avenue and I told her the story.”
He paused as the waitress delivered their drinks and thanked her. Jeffrey raised his glass to Lydia, who lifted hers in response. “Where was Jake in all of this?” she asked.
“He was ready to walk away. After the meeting with our supervisor, this real old-school bastard named Leon McCord, who later died of colon cancer, Jacob was really nervous. So I didn’t tell him about the reporter. I just went on my own.”
“You’re killing me here. What happened?”
Lydia felt another, milder wave of nausea. She suppressed it but pushed her drink away.
“The next day, it just all resolved itself so neatly, it was surreal. The homeless man—his name was George … George Hewlett—managed somehow to hang himself in his cell. And, get this, there were layoffs at the Times. Guess who was one of the unlu
cky reporters to find herself out of job?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No … and that was it. There was no battle left to fight. I mean, it was perfect. If George or Sarah had been murdered, say, or even if Sarah alone had been fired, or if George’s case had made it to trial … well, it would have been like a John Grisham novel—lone FBI agent bucking the secret establishment, exposing an evil conspiracy. But, instead, it just disappeared.”
“Whatever happened to Sarah?”
“I don’t know. I never knew her personally. I called over to the Times, and someone told me that there had been layoffs and that her job had been eliminated. I tried to find her phone number but was never able to locate her. I’ve never seen her byline anywhere.”
“So what’s your point?”
“Just that there are people behind the scenes who call the shots, you know. They can make inconvenient scenarios—and people—disappear.”
“You’re afraid that we’re becoming one of those inconveniences.”
“I’d say it’s a fair bet. Who knows what Stephen Parker stumbled upon—he’s dead. Or what Valentina knew—she’s dead. Or what Manny was close to finding—someone warned him off. Usually when these things start happening, it indicates that someone is invested in having secrets kept. If we keep nosing around …”
“They might be finding pieces of us in alligators all over Florida?”
Jeffrey shrugged. “Something spooked Detective Ignacio. He doesn’t seem like the skittish type. It would have to be something or someone pretty powerful to call that dog off.”
Lydia nodded. “He did seem afraid, like he thought he had to make a choice between his family and going after Nathan Quinn … and possibly Tatiana’s safe return.”
Jeffrey couldn’t blame him. There was nothing more important to him than Lydia. He would choose her life over his own or anyone else’s, if it came to that.
“Can you walk away from this? When a girl’s life hangs in the balance and two people are already dead?”
“If I thought staying our course meant risking our lives, then yes. What about you, Lydia? Can you walk away?”
Lydia folded her arms and leaned over the table a bit. She searched his face and saw tiny lines she hadn’t noticed before around his hazel eyes, realized he hadn’t shaved that morning. She slipped her foot from her shoe, slid it under the table, and traced his calf with the tip of her toe. Her nausea had subsided, replaced with the familiar feeling of electricity in her blood. The thought of powerful forces conspiring to keep secrets was irresistible to her.
“Just twenty-four more hours.”
“For what?”
“To dig around a bit and see what we find. If nothing pops by this time tomorrow night, then we are fated to go home to our new, happy, quiet life. And I’ll seriously consider a career as a novelist,” she said, smiling. When the buzz was at its hottest, she felt like she was ten feet tall and bulletproof.
“And if something ‘pops’? What then?” he asked, meeting her storm-cloud eyes and reaching for her fingers with one hand, rubbing her small forearm with the other.
But they weren’t invincible. The boundary of their skin was weak, their beating hearts delicate and fallible. And she could feel that they stood at the bottom of a dark mountain.
His hands were hot on her, pulling her into the safety and comfort of his aura. But she could not shake the images in her mind: the girl in the phone booth, Shawna Fox’s green eyes, Jed McIntyre in the parking lot, rocking back and forth as if the chaos of his thoughts kept him in constant motion.
She searched for a witty one-liner to make him laugh, to pull him into her buzz. But she couldn’t think of anything. So she just hung her head a bit and looked down at his hand on her arm, touched his strong fingers.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I just don’t know.”
chapter sixteen
Lydia Strong had written in her book With a Vengeance that Jed McIntyre had been trying to create a “brethren of misery” when he murdered thirteen single working mothers in upstate New York. Jed McIntyre had been impressed that someone finally understood him so well. He hadn’t really even known it at the time, but he eventually acknowledged that he had wanted other people to suffer the way he had suffered when his father murdered his mother, slit her throat with a dull cleaver in her own kitchen. He wanted someone else in the world to understand his loneliness, grief, and isolation. But of course it ran so much deeper—or, rather, so much higher—than that. It’s not as though one makes a conscious decision to become a serial murderer. It’s more like you feel so bad, so ugly, so broken inside all day, doing the things that other people do. Then somehow, maybe accidentally, or maybe because you read something or see something on the television, you discover something that makes you feel less bad all the time. For some people, it’s drugs and alcohol; for some people, it’s food; and for him, it was murder. But still he was touched, really moved that Lydia had taken the time to get to know him. It made him want to be a better man for her. But of course that wasn’t possible.
He had known already, from the first moment he saw her, that Lydia was special. Her delicate, ephemeral beauty, her intelligent gray eyes, these would have changed the game for him had he been allowed to continue playing. He remembered how their eyes had met in the parking lot of the A&P that twilight more than sixteen years ago. She had felt him, felt his intentions, seen into his dark, twisted soul; he had watched the knowledge drain the color from her face, watched her small hand dart out to lock the car doors, then roll up the windows. But then she turned to look at him with some combination of curiosity, defiance, and fear. He’d had to smile; she melted something within him. He should have known she’d be the one to lead to his arrest. He’d been so careless that night, he almost deserved to get caught. She’d distracted him and made him forget himself.
He barely dared to think of her, except for once a month, when he wrote her a letter. When he thought of her, not even the medication could quell the desires that rose in him. Not that the pills really worked anyway; they really only dulled the twisting, aching, burning inside him. It was like he existed behind an opaque Plexiglas screen, barely recognizable, his voice unintelligible, even to himself. But it was good to have the meds as long as he was in this place; otherwise, he’d surely go insane.
He caught sight of himself in the two-way mirror. His Day-Glo orange jumper was most unflattering, a terrible color for a fair-skinned redhead, making him look even paler and more washed-out than he normally did. And it certainly did nothing to show off the body he’d been so carefully cultivating over his years here. It took discipline, real mental discipline, to work out when you were so heavily medicated. But it was a kind of release. He took great satisfaction in his hard, lean, muscular body, with cuts that would make Arnold blush like a little girl. If he’d been soft and paunchy when they’d brought him in here, he was a machine now. He looked down at his sinewy wrists and at the cuffs there, which matched the shackles on his ankles. He hated them; they made him look so common, like a thug or a gangster. But he had a feeling he wouldn’t be wearing them for long.
He looked across the long Formica table at the man who sat as far away from him as possible. He reminded Jed of one of those dream-team lawyers, the self-righteous swagger, the intimidating frown of disdain. He knew enough about the trappings of wealth to identify the gentleman’s three-thousand-dollar suit, his weekend-in-the-Caribbean tan, his manicured fingernails, his thick, glittering Tag Heuer watch. His silver-white hair seemed to glow against his tanned face; his blue eyes glittered like gems, bright and hard and cold. R. Alexander Harriman, Esq., used the kind of state-appointed attorneys who had represented Jed at his previous release review hearings to clean out his colon.
After his last hearing, two years ago, Jed had resigned himself to a lifetime behind bars. As he walked into the review, he had been sure that he had sufficiently duped the shrinks into believing that he had found Jesus and that his
“mental illness” was under control with medication. He was sure that he would be sent to some halfway house, where escape would be possible. But when he’d walked in the door to appear before the committee, he’d seen former Special Agent Jeffrey Mark sitting at the table, in front of him the stack of letters Jed had monthly sent to Lydia Strong. He couldn’t believe that thirteen years later, Agent Mark still had a hard-on for him. But then as Jeffrey Mark spoke passionately to the board against Jed’s release, Jed realized that Agent Mark had a hard-on for Lydia Strong. Well, well, even the good guys were not above lusting after fifteen-year-old girls. When the parole board denied him, Jeffrey Mark had smiled. Mark, that smug, self-righteous bastard, leaned forward in his chair and said, before he could be stopped, “I’ll be here every single time you come up for review, you sick fuck.”
But that was before R. Alexander Harriman, Esq., had appeared in the visitors’ room like an avenging angel—well, really more like Satan in some clever guise, bargaining for Jed’s soul. Little did R. Alexander Harriman, Esq., and his mysterious client realize that they were getting the short end of that stick.
They’d been sitting in the cold, harshly lighted room for nearly an hour, and Harriman hadn’t said one word to him, but Jed occasionally caught him sneaking a glance, a look of disgust and apprehension on his face. They both startled when the door opened quickly and the guard entered.
“The Review Board is assembled, Mr. Harriman, and will see you and your client now,” said a bulky, fuzzy-headed young Samoan man, leaning down to unshackle Jed’s chains from the table. Another guard stood at the door.
The attorney leaned toward Jed and said in a fierce whisper, “There will be no fucking with me or my client, Mr. McIntyre. I want you to understand that. You will be back in here so fast, it will make your teeth rattle. And there will be no second chances. You’ll rot in here until you die, and then you’ll rot in hell. Are we clear?” His words were like hammers and about as hard to swallow, but Jed held his tongue and turned on as much obsequious charm as he could muster without gagging. Frankly, he’d suck the old man’s dick if it would get him out of the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane.