by Lisa Unger
They walked up a short, narrow flight of concrete steps to a faded red metal door that was ajar. In fact, it looked as though it had been pried open with a crowbar more than once in the past. It was scratched and dented, but the lock looked new. Since it was the only door in sight, Jeffrey considered it a good bet that Sasa had entered there. But still, there was something about the whole scenario that had him tense and watching their backs. The Ryder truck was nowhere to be seen, and Jeffrey wondered whether it had been following them after all.
“This is a little too easy,” whispered Lydia, echoing his feelings.
He nodded but pushed the door open slowly. It led to a long, dark staircase. They exchanged a look, Jeffrey shrugged, and they began to climb, guns drawn. They kept their backs partially to the wall, Lydia keeping one eye behind them, and crept along the side of the stairs, hoping to minimize creaking. They both heard the muffled voice of an angry man above them behind a closed door. The closer they got, the less light carried from the open door beneath them. It was almost pitch-black by the time they reached the top.
“She leaves for Albania tomorrow,” the voice said behind the closed door. It was the voice they’d heard on the DVD—no doubt about it, given the way Lydia’s stomach hollowed out at the sound of it. “We need to be in Vlorë by tomorrow and ready to roll. There’s no time to waste. Once he finds out what we’ve done, there won’t be a place in the world we can run to. But by Monday, American Equities and American Beauty won’t even exist anymore.… We won’t exist. And Nathan Quinn will be left holding his dick.”
There was a pause and then the man said, “Okay,” exhaling heavily. They heard him hang up the phone, and then silence again. Jeffrey flicked the safety off his Glock, preparing for Sasa to burst through the door. Lydia and Jeffrey looked at each other, barely able to make out each other’s faces in the dark. But they heard him walk off over hardwood floors and a door slam, then quiet. They waited a minute before moving in slowly.
Lydia suppressed a groan as she recognized the room from the DVD they had watched. It was a huge loft space with high opaque windows, dirty wood floors, and gray walls. Supporting columns stood like soldiers in the dim light. She noticed the bed, which had been stripped of its red satin sheets and pillows, sat atop a number of overlapping tarps, in front of a white screen. She didn’t want to walk over to inspect the area, but she did anyway. Everything smelled of bleach, as though it had been scoured. She wondered how much death and horror this room had seen, trying not to hear the screams echoing off the walls, worming their way into the floorboards, living in the stale air.
Before she knew what was happening, Jeffrey grabbed her from behind and pulled her over in back of the screen behind the bed. In a few seconds, she heard footsteps; a door opened and closed. She often wondered how Jeffrey always heard things a few seconds before she did. She figured it was because she was always inside her own head, making connections, feeling energies. He was always paying attention to the physical, the external, watching the road signs. They stood still, occupying one space as he stood behind her, pressed against the wall, holding her around the waist. Their breathing was shallow as someone paced back and forth. She hated not being able to see. But the door slammed again. They heard a lock turn, footfalls down the stairs, and they stood still for a few seconds in the silence. Then they heard the Boxster’s engine rev to life downstairs.
Lydia slowly peered around the screen and saw that the room was empty.
“I know where we are. I know what this is,” she whispered.
He nodded, “This is the room from the video.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “The Miami offices of American Equities.”
chapter twenty-two
The different elements of their investigation seemed strange and disjointed; each facet made the picture less clear, the light more diffuse. Each lead seemed, in fact, to take them away from Tatiana. But after her conversation with Craig, a form began to appear through the fog for Lydia. Jeffrey raised his eyebrows at what she said and seemed to process the possibilities, still staying quiet because he wasn’t sure where they were or if they were alone. He walked over to the other door, which led, it turned out, to an office.
The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Furnished with a metal and faux-wood desk and accompanying swivel chair, a three-drawer filing cabinet, and a green plastic chair that reminded Lydia of high school cafeterias, it was the most generic of offices. Sitting on the desk were a blank blotter, a pen cup holding several orange Bic pens, a digital clock, and a halogen lamp beside a decorative box of tissues. It struck Lydia as odd that men who raped and murdered young women might find need for something as clean and innocent as a Kleenex.
Lydia sat down at the desk while Jeffrey stood at the door, leaving it open a crack, peering out into the other room. Since there was no door other than the one through which they’d entered, if someone came up the staircase, they were going to have to talk or shoot their way out.
“What makes you say it’s the Equities office?” asked Jeffrey, still keeping his voice low.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, running her fingers under the surface of the desk, looking for bugs. She didn’t have much hope that a snuff-film production company would keep good records, but she started rifling through drawers. “There’s no computer and no telephone,” commented Lydia.
“And no camera equipment out in the other room.”
The desk drawers were empty, so Lydia moved over to the filing cabinet. Oddly, the drawers were all opened slightly and filled with files.
She smiled at her luck. But then as she started flipping through the file folders, her smile faded. Each folder, marked with a white tab hand-scrawled with a woman’s name, contained a badly shot picture of a naked woman. Attempting to look sexy and seductive, they instead looked cheap and used, afraid. Along with the photos in each file were vital statistics, copies of their passports, all from Albania, and what looked to be a printout from a Web site page. It featured a poor-quality scan of the photo, the vital statistics, likes and dislikes, and the girl’s name, different from the one on the file, changed to names like Candy, Brandy, Brittany. The company name at the top of the Web page read: AMERICAN BEAUTY, below which was a disclaimer about American Beauty being a modeling agency and that there was no implication intended that these girls would perform any service other than modeling. She noticed that some of the files had been reused; one name had been scratched out and written over with another. She had an idea of what had happened to the others before their files had been recycled. Lydia noted that there was no phone number to call and that the Web address was not printed anywhere.
“Jeffrey, you have to see this,” she said. He left the door reluctantly, walked behind her, and looked over her shoulder.
“Grab one of those folders and let’s get out of here,” he said, returning to his post.
“Wait a minute.”
“Hurry up, Lydia. We’ve been here too long already.”
She flipped through the files, looking for a picture of the girl they had watched murdered on the DVD last night, or, worse, for a picture of Tatiana, but she found neither. She took a random folder, laid it on the floor, and opened the next drawer. There she found some stationery with the American Beauty letterhead lying in a box on the bottom. It took a second before she noticed the small print on the bottom that read: “A subsidiary of American Equities.” She grabbed a sheet. “Jackpot,” she said, opening the final drawer. Inside was an At-A-Glance date book. She opened it and flipped through the pages. On the first Saturday of each month, someone had written “Vlorë” and a time, “Italy” and a time, a number ranging from forty to seventy, and a dollar figure. Lydia had no idea what she was looking at, but she knew it was important. She grabbed everything and moved to the door.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, feeling a sharp edge of excitement and a nervous energy that told her it was time to go.
“Do you smell that?” asked
Jeffrey, shoving the file and date book under his shirt and into the waistband of his jeans as they walked toward the door through which they had entered the loft space. Lydia sniffed.
“It smells like …”
“Gasoline.”
A puddle began to spread from the crack under the door and they heard heavy footsteps retreating quickly down the staircase outside. And in the same second that flames licked in from under the door in a hot whisper, Jeffrey pulled them out of the way.
“Shit,” he said as they looked around them for a way out. They ran to the other end of the space, heading toward a large, heavy opaque window that looked as though it hadn’t been opened in a decade. They each took a handle and tried to lift it, but it had been painted shut.
“Stand back,” Jeffrey said as he aimed his gun at the glass. In three shots, it had completely shattered, leaving sharp teeth of glass in the edges and revealing a five-foot drop onto a tin roof beneath. As Jeffrey hopped up on the sill and kicked out the rest of the glass on the bottom of the frame, he caught sight of the rear end of the Boxster, followed by the Ryder truck, both speeding up the street. The flames were spreading across the room in what appeared to be a straight line and were licking at the door to the office where they had just been. Jeffrey reached a hand down to Lydia and helped pull her up on the sill and then hopped down to the tin roof outside.
“Be careful. Don’t cut yourself,” he said just as a stalactite of glass sliced through her shirt and tore a gash in her shoulder. Her adrenaline pumping, she barely felt it, but she saw the blood trail out from under her cuff and run down the back of her white hand. They stuck close to a wall to the right of the window and edged down the slight slope, smoke billowing out the window behind them. In front of her, Jeffrey held out his arm to keep her back. “Let me make sure there’s no one on the street before we jump down.”
“Jump down?”
“Maybe I could just whistle for the Jeep and it’ll come galloping over to the rescue.”
“Just like Knight Rider.”
“Exactly.”
Jeffrey scanned the block. Unless someone was hiding in a doorway or behind a Dumpster, which seemed highly possible, he saw no one. They had no choice but to go for it and hope someone wasn’t waiting for them when they hit the ground. He would kick himself later for walking into such an obvious trap, but right now he just wanted to get them out alive. “I’m going to go down first,” he said. “Watch the street. Make sure no one shoots me in the back while I’m dangling from the gutter.”
“Great,” Lydia replied, sarcasm being her weapon against mortal fear. She drew her gun and gazed uneasily back and forth up the deserted street, looking for moving shadows, remembering that she was a lousy shot. When she heard Jeffrey’s feet hit the ground, she lay down on her belly and peered over the side.
“Just turn around, drop your feet over the side, and lower yourself down, holding on to the gutter. Keep your knees soft when you land,” he said, looking around him.
“Okay, Mr. One Hundred Pull-ups a Day.”
She lowered herself slowly, muscles burning, her arms starting to shake almost immediately. When she felt his fingertips brush her thighs, she tried to lower herself a little farther but lost her strength and fell the rest of the way, tumbling on top of Jeffrey. He bore the impact of her weight with a groan as they hit the ground hard.
“That went well,” he croaked. They both stood and dusted themselves off, breathing heavily, Lydia coughing from the smoke and the effort. They could see the flames through the window he had shot out above them. And when they heard sirens wailing in the distance, they bolted for the Jeep.
chapter twenty-three
The back of the limousine was cold and the company was even colder. Mr. Harriman was revolted by and a little afraid of Jed, and Jed could sense it. And to be honest, he was a little insulted by the lawyer’s attitude. He had conducted himself with professionalism during their entire encounter. He certainly was smarter than to bite the hand that feeds. Still, when Jed had climbed into the back of the limo and extended his hand to Harriman, the man looked at Jed as if he were offering a pile of excrement.
“Let’s not pretend we’re friends, shall we?” he’d said, glaring over the small gold rims of his spectacles.
They had left a beautiful set of clothes for him at the hospital to change into upon his release. Very nice faded blue jeans from the Gap, a warm navy cotton turtleneck with coordinating plaid flannel shirt, a brand-new pair of Timberland work boots and wool socks, and an oxide gray REI parka with a detachable fleece lining. And there was a large duffel bag of new clothes waiting for him in the limo, as well as a case containing more sophisticated surveillance equipment than he’d ever seen—high-powered binoculars and telescope, night-vision goggles, and some other items, including a large hunting knife. He hadn’t been able to identify everything in the quick glance he’d been offered as Harriman ran down the catalog of items to be left with him.
“My client believes in giving his employees the freedom of their … uh … talents,” said Harriman. “So naturally, we leave you to your own devices. Lining your duffel bag, in addition to the new clothes, you’ll find one hundred thousand dollars in small unmarked bills. When this money is gone, you’re on your own, so I suggest you make it last. Obviously, I have not revealed to you my true name or the name of my client … so don’t come looking for me. I’ll remind you again that if you even think about attempting to find me … well, I’m sure you can imagine the type of power and connections it took to have you released. Do not imagine that those powers cannot be used to your very grave detriment, Mr. McIntyre.”
They had pulled into a parking garage in the city during this conversation and come to rest next to a black Land Rover. “This vehicle,” said Harriman, pointing to the Rover, “belongs to you now, Mr. McIntyre. You’ll find all the necessary paperwork, including a Pennsylvania driver’s license in the glove box. There is also a Social Security card. Both documents are in the name of Martin Monroe. Martin Monroe’s record is clean and his résumé, which is fully verifiable and which closely resembles your own, will allow you to find work at some point in the future. Do you have any questions, Mr. McIntyre?”
Jed was impressed, really impressed. “Why?” he asked, his engineer’s brain really wanting to know. “Why would anybody do this?”
“Let’s just say my client has some macabre whims. And the resources to indulge them.”
chapter twenty-four
The desk clerk at the Delano looked at Lydia and Jeffrey with disdain as the two of them, dirty and trailing about as much dust as Afghan refugees, walked through the elegant lobby. Feeling shaken and angry, she sneered at the concierge, who raised a curious and condescending eyebrow at their disheveled appearance. Waiting for the elevators to arrive, Lydia smoothed out her hair pointlessly in the mirrored doors, then turned to the side to inspect the cut on her arm.
“That’ll leave a nice scar if we don’t get it stitched,” said Jeffrey, leaning in to take a look.
“It’s not that deep,” she said, but it stung when he touched it, and she flinched.
“We’ll stop by the emergency room on the way to the airport.”
“We don’t have time.”
“You’re right,” said Agent Bentley to her reflection as he came up behind them, accompanied by his trusty sidekick, Agent Negron. When the elevator opened, the two FBI agents pushed Lydia and Jeffrey in before them.
“Ms. Strong, Mr. Mark, you have two choices,” said Agent Bentley, apparently having trouble keeping his temper. He was clenching his big white teeth and speaking through them. “Either you will cooperate and accept our escort back to the airport, where you will catch the first flight to New York, or we will arrest you for knowingly interfering with a federal investigation, which has led to the destruction of evidence.”
Lydia looked at him with an expression of mock sheepishness. Jeffrey said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re leaving,” said Lydia. “Just let us get our bags and we’re out of here. Nothing and no one is worth this much hassle. We were trying to help. Maybe we were a little pushy about it. But we’re done here. Someone else can worry about Tatiana Quinn.”
Agent Bentley looked at her with some combination of skepticism and relief. “No fucking around,” he said, half-questioning, half-threatening.
“No fucking around,” she answered. “We’re on a two o’clock flight to New York. You can call the airline and check it out for yourself.”
Bentley reached behind him and the elevator started its assent with a jolt. A voice came crackling loudly over the speaker, “Everyone all right up there?”
“It’s moving now,” said Bentley, sounding carefree as he spoke into the intercom. “You better check it out when it lets us off, though.”
“Will do. Sorry about that, sir.”
“No problem.”
The doors opened on Lydia and Jeffrey’s floor, and the four of them filed out.
“I’m sure you won’t object to our sticking around and making sure you get to the airport safely, what with all the misadventure you two seem to get yourselves involved in,” said Bentley with mock courtesy.
“Suit yourself,” replied Jeffrey as he pushed open the door to their room.