Smoke (15 page)

“You’ve been turning them over to Detective Stenopolis?”

“Yes, at first. But, like I said, nothing really came of it. They got a couple of calls on the Crime Stoppers Hotline, too. As far as I know, those turned out to be dead ends, as well. And, you know, once they got those banking records indicating that Lily had cleaned out her accounts, there was a definite falling off of urgency. I was just considering looking into hiring a private investigator when you called.”

He stood and motioned for Lydia and Jeffrey to follow. He took them into a home office, which might have been neat and organized at one point but was now cluttered with piles of postcards and flyers. A long folding table had been placed along the far wall, opposite a large oak desk that had the look of an antique. Several chairs, which looked as if they’d been taken from a dining room set, sat empty facing the phones. Two large boxes filled with files sat under the phone. There was a big blow-up of Lily’s face on a poster on the wall. Lydia could imagine the place bustling with urgency, volunteers working hard, family and friends still hopeful, phones ringing, excitement rising following a tip and then dropping lower with each disappointment. The silence in the room was the sound of despair.

“Lily Central,” he said solemnly. “For all the good it did.”

“It’s not over yet, Mr. Samuels,” said Lydia, putting a hand on his arm.

“No,” he said.
It might never be over
. That was what he was thinking but didn’t say. She could see it on his face.

“Did anybody you didn’t recognize come to Mickey’s funeral?” Jeffrey asked.

Samuels let out a little laugh.

“The queen of England could have showed up at Mickey’s funeral and I wouldn’t have noticed. It was a very bad day and to be honest I hardly remember it. I think, in fact, I tapped into Rebecca’s tranquilizers. I just didn’t see how else you were supposed to get through something like that. We were zombies, I’m sure. Not very present for Lily. Not as present as we clearly should have been.”

Samuels’ words echoed Jasmine’s words. Not
present
enough, not there for her. Lydia wondered if anybody
had
been present for Lily. How vulnerable she must have been, grief-stricken and alone. Any predator could have smelled the sadness on her, used it to lure her into danger. The copy from the New Day website came back to her.
Perhaps you’ve suffered a tragedy, a terrible loss, and you find you just can’t move on
.

“I’d like to contribute to your investigation,” said Samuels, taking a checkbook from the drawer in his desk and sinking into the leather chair behind it.

“That’s not necessary,” said Lydia, holding up a hand. “Lily’s a friend. We want to do this for her.”

Money didn’t motivate Lydia. She was drawn into investigations by something other than financial gain. She’d only had one case where there was an actual client involved and the truth of it was that she didn’t like answering to people. These days, she had the luxury of answering only to herself and her instincts. The other cases they took at the firm she’d helped to build allowed Lydia the freedom and the resources to follow her gut, her buzz, with little concern about cost.

“Thank you,” he said with that same unreadable expression she’d seen in the living room. “And I know Monica will thank you, too, when she can.”

They talked some about the lead Detective Stenopolis had discovered
during his interview at the bank. Samuels didn’t recognize the vehicle description but seemed heartened by the news.

“I don’t understand why he didn’t call to let me know this,” said Samuels. “He’s been pretty good about keeping me in the loop.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to get your hopes up. There may not be anything to it,” said Lydia with a shrug.

“It’s our impression that he has pressure from above to move on,” said Jeffrey. “From a police perspective, it looks a lot like Lily just took off. They’re not going to devote resources to her disappearance much longer. He might be embarrassed. Not looking forward to giving you that news.”

Samuels nodded his understanding and looked at him eagerly. “Are you going to follow up on those hits?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Jeffrey. “We already have someone on it.”

I
wish there was something more I could do,” said Samuels as he helped Jeffrey load the boxes into the Kompressor. In the gray light of the outdoors, he looked older, more tired than he had inside. Lydia saw lines on his face she hadn’t noticed in the house. She saw dark circles, two days of pale stubble on a strong jaw.

“I’m going a little crazy with my own uselessness. Mickey’s gone. I don’t know how to help Lily, or her mother. You spend your whole life thinking you have some control and then in a matter of weeks …” He let the sentence trail.

“Just know that we are going to do everything in our power to bring Lily home to you,” said Lydia. “And if you think of anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it is, anything strange, anything off, anything that made you wonder even for a moment, please call me.”

He looked down at the gravel on the drive. “Do you think she’s alive?”

It was a hard question to ask, she knew. It was harder to answer. His whole body seemed to brace for the response. Part of her wanted to reassure him, give him some hope. But she couldn’t do that, it wasn’t right.

“I don’t know,” she said putting a hand on her arm. “But have faith, Mr. Samuels. We do.”

• • •

T
hey watched him in the rearview mirror as they pulled up the drive. He followed them with his eyes and then turned his back, walked with slouching shoulders, hands in his pockets, back into the house. Lydia would have paid money to see his face when he thought no one was looking.

“He held something back from us,” said Jeffrey when the house was out of sight.

Lydia nodded. “Definitely.”

“What’s your sense of him?”

She thought about it a second. “It’s hard to say. I didn’t get a good read on him.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “That’s never a good sign.”

“I know,” she said. Usually a person’s essence was clear to Lydia within seconds of the first greeting. People emitted an energy that either meshed or clashed, that attracted or repelled. They’d both learned over the years that Lydia’s impressions, more often than not, would be proved correct over time. In the few instances when she’d had trouble getting a read on someone, they’d later discovered that the person in question was deeply veiled, guarded, or hiding vital parts of himself.

“I just didn’t buy that Lily and Mickey could be so close and she not know that he’d been on and off anti-depressants all his life,” she said.

“Why would Samuels lie about that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “But it kind of makes Lily sound like she didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. And it makes her certainty that he didn’t kill himself seem based on ignorance of key facts.”

He nodded his agreement.

“You know how he seemed to me?” said Jeff. “He seemed
insincere
. That little breakdown he had?”

“No tears,” she said. “I noticed that, too.”

They pulled onto the Long Island Expressway and Lydia was glad to see that traffic into the city was lighter than it had been on the way out. But still they came to a stop as the traffic thickened. The sky
outside was hopeful, with patches of blue straining through the gray cloud cover.

“I got a call yesterday,” she said, looking out the window at the trees and the sea of cars.

“From who?” he answered, glancing at her.

“A law firm on Fifty-Seventh Street, representing my father’s estate,” she said. “They say they have a box for me. Things he left me supposedly. They want me to pick it up.”

He was quiet a second, then put a hand on the back of her neck. “How do you feel about that?”

She looked into his face. Warm hazel eyes in a landscape of strong, defined features. Strong cheekbones and full, wide lips, clean-shaven jaw. There was a vein on his temple that appeared when he was angry, a muscle that worked in his jaw when he was worried or thinking hard. She knew every line and feature of his face and just the sight of it could give her comfort.

“I don’t know. I think I hate it a little. I mean, what could he possibly have wanted me to have? It seems kind of cowardly to try to make a connection
after
he died.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m curious enough to go get the goddamn box.”

He smiled at her and it ignited her smile. “Of course you are,” he said, squeezing her shoulder.

“You know what’s weird? I just have this sense that I should feel more than I do about his passing. I mean, when Samuels was talking about Mickey, I could imagine that kid, sitting there in a dark car with a bottle of Jack in one hand and a gun in the other. I could feel despair so total that the barrel of a gun looked better than the future. I
felt
for him,
felt
the terrible sadness of it. But I don’t have any of that compassion or empathy for Arthur Tavernier. When I think of my father, I just feel empty.”

Jeffrey was quiet for a second, considering her words. She had always loved about him that he was a careful listener, always present for what she was saying, not just waiting to say what he wanted to say.

After a while: “Maybe the box will help you get in touch with that.
Maybe you’ll find the place where your father should be is not as empty as you think.”

She let go of a little laugh. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Let’s stop and get it on the way to the office?”

She nodded and gave him a smile, took his hand and held it for a while as they crawled back toward the city.

I
t’s hard to say what happened, Detective Stenopolis,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Witnesses say a van approached the parade from a side street. A young woman ran into the crowd, wearing only a tee-shirt and underpants. Two men gave chase. When shots were fired, the crowd panicked and dispersed. Witnesses say that the men then lifted her body and carried it back to the van and reversed back down the street it had arrived from.”

Mount liked the sound of her voice; it was smoky, sexy. It belonged to a Detective Margie Swann from the Fiftieth Precinct in Riverdale.

“Did you get a description of the girl?”

“Thin, nearly emaciated. Short cropped black hair, like a buzz cut. That’s about it. I’m emailing you a jpeg right now. Are you at your computer?”

“I am,” he said, clicking on the
SEND/RECEIVE
button. “Nothing yet.”

“This photograph was just given to us this morning, Detective. It’s very fuzzy, hard to see anything, but we’ve sent it on to State to see what their techs can do for it.”

“You’d think a lot of people would have had cameras and video equipment that night since it was Halloween.”

“You’d think. But I guess people were too busy running away to be taking pictures. People freak these days when there’s a public disturbance, run for the hills.”

“No area businesses with outside surveillance cams?”

“None. It’s kind of a small main street area with lots of mom-and-pop type businesses still. Locals try to keep it that way. It’s pretty low tech around here.”

He pressed
SEND/RECEIVE
again and nothing popped up.

“Still nothing?” she asked.

“No. Sometimes things are a little slow around here.”

“Here, too,” she said with a smile in her voice.

“My partner said that there was no blood found at the scene?”

“That’s right. There was a squad car there right after the shooting. But they didn’t see anything. It might mean that she was shot in the back with small caliber bullets or from a far enough distance that there were no exit wounds to bleed out. Or it might mean that there were blanks in the gun and it was some kind of prank. I don’t know. It was Halloween after all. It could be someone’s idea of a joke.”

“A joke?” he said with a laugh. “I don’t get it.”

“There are lots of things I don’t get, Detective. I’m sure you feel the same way.”

He sighed into the phone as his answer. “Can we stay in touch?” he asked. “Let me know if you get any more images?”

“Yeah, definitely. And if you identify her as your missing girl, please let me know right away. Maybe we can help each other.”

“It’s a deal.”

He hung up and waited a few more seconds, then checked for the email again. This time a little bell sounded and a message from Margie Swann appeared in his inbox. He clicked on the attachment and waited while the image filled his screen. It was very blurry, as if the shutter speed had been set too slow. Colorful costumes, streetlights, bizarre masks pulled like taffy, colors ran into one another. In the center, he could see the back of a painfully thin girl, running away from a white van. One leg stuck out of the door, a black pant leg ending in a black boot, obviously connected to someone who was about to give chase. The woman’s face was turned just slightly so that he caught the edge of her profile. Her head was shaved. There was no way to tell if it was Lily or not. Lily had long, dark curly hair. In the photographs he had of her, she was busty, very lush looking. Not heavy but certainly not emaciated the way the girl in the photograph was. If it was Lily, something had caused her appearance to alter dramatically. There was a frightening chaos to the photo, the masked faces adding a surreal quality to the image.

“What’s that?” asked Jesamyn, arriving at her desk.

“It’s an image from the Fiftieth Precinct in Riverdale. That shooting you called about.”

“Man, you are
fast
,” she said.

He tried not to notice the happy glow that seemed to be coming off of her. He knew that in a matter of days, that glow would turn to a pall. That was the way it was with her and Dylan. Euphoria to misery and back again. She came behind him, rested her weight on the back of his chair, and looked over his shoulder.

“It’s not her,” she said.