Smoke (16 page)

“How can you be sure?”

“That girl is twenty pounds thinner at least than Lily was in the bank on the 22nd. And no one with hair like Lily’s would ever shave it down to the skull. Lily’s a pretty girl. Pretty girls don’t make themselves ugly on purpose.”

“What if someone else made her ugly?”

“Kidnapped her, starved her, and shaved her head?”

The phrase was meant, he thought, to sound unlikely. But it hit him hard. Mount turned to look at her, feeling his stomach hollow out. He could tell by the look on her face that she had freaked herself out, too.

“Shit,” she said.

“What are you two doing?” Kepler. “I know for a fact that you have at least three more people on your reinterview list.”

“We’re on our way out right now,” said Jesamyn, turning to look at Kepler and blocking the screen from his view. Matt didn’t turn from the screen while Jesamyn gave Kepler a rundown of the reinterviews they had conducted the day before. Matt very quickly forwarded the email to Lydia Strong; she had left a business card in the jewel case of the CD she’d given him yesterday with her email address.

“Forwarded from the five-oh,” he wrote in the dialog box. “Click this link for the story attached to this photo.” He inserted a link he’d found to an article in the
Journal-News
.

“If this is our girl,” he wrote, “she really needs you. I don’t know what else I can do for her.”

Or what else can be done for her, he thought. Since the girl in this photo was supposedly shot three times in the back just moments after the picture was taken.

“I’m coming back in five minutes. Don’t let me find you here,” Kepler was saying to Jesamyn as Matt pressed
SEND
. He deleted the file
from his sent-mail box and hoped it wouldn’t come down to having to worry about what the IT guys could take off the server. He stood quickly then to his full height and was happy to see Kepler take a step back. He took some satisfaction in knowing that Captain Kepler could be a piece of gum beneath his shoe if Matt were that kind of guy.

L
ydia pushed the glass doors open, and Jeffrey carried the box in. The offices of Mark, Striker and Strong had the quiet hum of a busy space with good acoustics. The sound of it, the muffled voices, the muted ringing of the phone, still gave Jeffrey pleasure. It amazed him how it had grown since he started the agency in his one-bedroom apartment in the East Village. He and the firm’s two original partners, Jacob Hanley and Christian Striker, had started their private investigation firm nearly eight years ago, now. All former FBI men, they had become tired for their own reasons of the politics of the Bureau, sick of the paranoia about the public perception of the organization, and they’d decided they’d be more effective investigators on their own.

They’d started out with small cases—insurance fraud, husbands checking up on wives, some employee screening. Then, through their connections, they’d started working with the FBI and NYPD on cold cases, or cases where the police felt their hands were tied … in those cases, the firm’s involvement was strictly confidential.

It was Lydia and Jeffrey’s first official case together, the infamous Cheerleader Murders, which put Mark, Hanley and Striker on their way to real success. He’d run into a dead end in his investigation into the disappearance of five cheerleaders at a suburban high school. He’d come to a place where all the evidence led into a black hole. He knew he needed a fresh perspective. Desperate, he called the most intuitive person he knew, a young writer named Lydia Strong. Her observations broke the case, and the publicity surrounding the book she later wrote brought them recognition they might never have had. The phone started ringing and never stopped.

The Cheerleader Murders was their first
official
case together. Before that, he’d consulted on her work as a writer for the
Washington Post
and then as a true crime writer. And it had been her observations, when
she was just fifteen years old and he was a young FBI agent, that led him to find her mother’s killer. He’d kept in touch with Lydia’s grandparents after he solved Marion Strong’s murder and captured her killer, partly because Lydia’s sadness had touched him. And mostly because he felt some kind of connection to her, though she was just a young girl then.

When she came to Washington, D.C., where he was still with the FBI, to do her undergraduate work at Georgetown, he’d become her friend, then her mentor. Around the same time he quit the Bureau, she quit the
Post
to write her first true crime novel.
With a Vengeance
was the story of the serial killer who murdered her mother. With that project, they became colleagues. Somewhere along the line, he’d wanted more. But it was a difficult road to that place; not until just a few years ago had they surrendered to their feelings for each other.

When Jacob Hanley died, Jeffrey and Christian Striker asked Lydia to come on as a partner. Now, they were partners in every sense of the word; it was a thought that gave Jeffrey tremendous satisfaction.

Jeffrey carried the box into her office and put it on the floor. She stood in the doorway, keeping her eyes on the box, looking at it as if she didn’t want to enter while it was in her office.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Can we put it in
your
office until I decide? I don’t want to look at it right now.”

“Sure,” he said, picking it up. She moved out of his way and he carried the box back toward his office. She followed. It was musty and it smelled of mold, and he sneezed loudly as he set it down by the door. He, for one, was dying to know what was inside, but he wouldn’t push her, knowing if he did, she’d just dig her heels in and maybe
never
open it … just to be stubborn.

“What are you, her beast of burden?” said Dax from a reclining position on the couch.

“Comfortable, Dax?” said Jeffrey, sliding the box into the corner over by the windows facing downtown Manhattan.

“Very. What is this—chenille?”

“It
is
chenille,” said Lydia, stripping off her black cashmere coat and throwing it over one of the leather chairs facing Jeffrey’s desk. “Very impressive knowledge of textiles.”

“So what happened?” she said, sitting across from him in one of the matching gold chenille chairs opposite the brushed chrome and frosted glass coffee table.

Jeffrey came and sat on the arm of her chair. He caught sight of their reflection in the glass wall that separated his office from the reception area. For a second, he watched them, these three clad mostly in black. A beautiful woman with blue-black hair and fair skin … the expensive drape of her designer clothes, the easy way she crossed her legs, communicating wealth and confidence. A man, older than she but fit and equally well dressed, hovering protectively. Another man, the approximate size of a refrigerator, leaning into them, forearms on his thighs, fingers laced. There was an aura of intensity to the group and, yes, excitement. Jeffrey knew it felt good to all of them to be back in the chase. The quiet of the last year had been a necessary time of healing. Jed McIntyre had taken something from all of them, and left part of himself behind in each of them. They’d needed time to process the events that had changed and scarred them. He felt vaguely guilty that it took someone else’s tragedy to move them toward the next stages of their recovery, but that, it seemed, was the way their lives were constructed, for better or worse.

“What happened?” repeated Dax. “I went to The New Day and told them I needed to be saved.”

Lydia looked at him. “You did?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They said it was too late for me.”

“Seriously, Dax. What happened?”

He stood up and stripped off his three-quarter-length leather jacket, exposing his muscular shoulders and huge biceps straining against a black tee-shirt.

“You might think about laying off the weight training,” said Lydia. “Pretty soon, you’re not going to be able to put your arms down at your sides anymore.”

He ignored her and reached into his lapel pocket and withdrew some brochures, handed them to Lydia, and sat back down.

She read the titles off of each of them. “Grief Counseling, Addiction Recovery, Moving on From a Painful Childhood, Ending an Abusive Relationship, Stop the Cycle of Child Abuse, The Legacy of Sexual Abuse, The Weight of Your Pain.” They were all simple tri-fold
pamphlets, with the same images of culturally diverse faces that they’d seen on the Internet.

“Sounds like The New Day has it covered in the self-improvement department,” said Jeffrey.

“I went there this morning and walked in through the front door,” Dax said, leaning back on the couch. “I didn’t see anyone at first but there was like this kiosk beside a reception desk that held all these pamphlets.”

D
ax was taking some, shoving them in his pocket when a woman appeared at the door. She wore a white tunic and faded blue jeans over a slender body; her short blonde hair was slicked back from her face. A slight smile turned up the corners of her mouth. She had a kind of peaceful, ageless face … like she could have been thirty or fifty and would have been beautiful either way.

“Can I help you?” she said, leaning against the doorway.

“I found your church on the Internet,” said Dax. “I thought I’d see what you had to offer.”

There was something catlike about her, aloof and knowing. She nodded.

“I’ve been feeling … depressed,” he said.

She looked at him, cocked her head slightly. “I noticed you limping when you came in,” she said, pointing to a surveillance camera in the corner of the room. Dax had noticed it on arriving. He’d also noticed a keypad by the door for what looked like a component in a very expensive, very sophisticated alarm system. There was no brand on the keypad or on any of the exterior windows.

The blonde woman motioned for him to follow her and they moved to a comfortable sitting room, off a much larger room with a stage and rows of chairs that looked more like a movie theater than the chapel he’d expected.

I
told her, you know, that I’d been in a car accident over a year ago. That a friend of mine had died and some of my other friends had also been hurt. My injuries are not healing the way I expected they would
and I can’t work the way I used to, at least not yet. That this period of convalescence has caused me to look at some of the choices I’ve made in my life and I’m not as happy with things as I thought. I’ve been feeling hopeless, depressed. But I don’t know how to change things.”

He was looking at his feet as he spoke, and his voice had gone really soft, almost throaty, and Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look. He put his head in his hands and Lydia saw his big shoulders shake. She felt like someone had punched her in the stomach. She moved quickly over beside him on the couch and put both her arms around him, or tried to.

“Oh, no, Dax,” she said, all her guilt rearing up in her heart. “Do you really feel that way? I’m so sorry.”

He looked up at her with a broad smile. “Pretty convincing, huh?”

“Oh, my God,” she said, punching him as hard as she could in the side. He let out a groan as she connected right below his rib cage. “You asshole.”

She moved back to the chair and glared at him while he laughed. She really hated him in that moment. Then she felt laughter and a smile threaten. She quashed them. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Lydia, I never knew you cared,” he said when he’d stopped laughing. He cracked himself up again.

“I don’t,” she said stonily.

“You’re such a hardass all the time,” he said. “But you just have a big marshmallow center, don’t you?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Can we get on with this?”

Jeffrey could see the flush in her cheeks that told him she was really angry. Only he knew that beneath her stone façade was a cauldron of emotions so strong that she was swept away by them sometimes. And that was the reason for the façade in the first place. He’d heard journalists and reviewers call her cold, unfeeling in her treatment of some of her subject matter. But he knew the truth. He put a hand on her shoulder.

“Okay,” said Dax, wiping his eyes. “So, she was not quite as loving as you, Lydia, but she was very sympathetic.”

T
he room she’d taken him to was gently lit with pink lightbulbs, painted a soothing pale blue. Again he saw cameras, but they were
small, recessed into the wall. He kept his face turned from them as best he could without being conspicuous; he had done this since approaching the building out of habit.

“So many people feel that way,” she said. “More than you’d ever imagine.”

He actually managed to get himself a little teary while talking to the pretty woman, who’d introduced herself as Vivian. And after a few minutes of comforting platitudes, a young man walked in, wearing the same outfit: white tunic and blue jeans. He handed Dax a cup of something hot. It smelled like some kind of herbal tea. Dax took it and thanked the kid, put it on the low coffee table in front of him. Vivian made no explanation for the kid or the tea. She slid a box of tissues across the table toward him. He took one and blew his nose loudly.

“The kid had a really glazed-over look to him. Not like drugged but more—” he said now to Lydia and Jeffrey, and paused as if searching for the right word. “Vacant.”

Lydia thought about what Matt Stenopolis had told her. Thelma Baker had used the words
hollow
and
empty
to describe Lily. Nothing could be further from the girl Lydia knew. Lily was a bright light, a firecracker. Anybody who met her, no matter how casual the encounter, would have seen that about her.

Dax said that Vivian had nodded to the young man and he left quietly.

“My mother always said that everything looks better after a good cup of tea,” said Vivian, leaning into him and smiling.

“My mother always said you’re a worthless piece of meat that will never amount to anything,” Dax had said, leaning away from the cup.

Vivian nodded solemnly. “Sometimes our parents, acting from their own place of pain, don’t realize how powerful their words can be. How we carry them with us for the rest of our lives.”