Smoke (30 page)

Eventually Dax showed up in the Rover to relieve them. He pulled up behind them and didn’t exit the vehicle. He had a friend with him,
a guy Lydia and Jeffrey knew only as Claude. He was mute; he looked like Frankenstein’s monster with a square jaw, bad hair, and assorted scars on his face and hands. Dax couldn’t work alone yet, since he still couldn’t run properly. He was slow and stiff, as they’d seen earlier at The New Day. And anything that didn’t involve him pulling out his big gun and firing from a sitting position was going to be difficult for him. He’d brought Claude along for anything that required speed and finesse. Which was kind of like using a sledgehammer to etch glass.

“Maybe we should have asked one of the trainees at the firm to work with him,” said Jeffrey, gazing at Dax and Claude in the rearview mirror. They looked like a pair of escapees from an asylum, brooding, drinking Mountain Dew from giant plastic cups.

Lydia gave him a look. “Dax doesn’t play well with others. Anyway, it’ll be dark soon. There are no other houses for a mile or so, so hopefully the villagers won’t see them and come after them with torches.”

Lydia’s cell phone rang and she looked in the rearview mirror as she answered.

“Hey,” she said.

“What are we looking for?” asked Dax.

“Anyone who comes in, follow when they leave. If he leaves, trail him.”

“How long do you want us to stay?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, call us later.”

She saw him nod in the rearview. She and Jeffrey took off and headed back to the city.

M
onica Samuels moved like she was made out of glass, as though the slightest misstep or sudden noise would cause her to shatter into a thousand pieces.

“I didn’t have anyplace else to go,” she told Lydia, placing a cup of tea on the table before her. “I couldn’t stand the thought of a hotel. So impersonal. I feel disconnected enough as it is.”

A call to Jasmine had revealed that Monica Samuels had moved into her daughter’s apartment. Now, Lydia and Monica sat at the small
round table in Lily’s tiny kitchen. Monica had asked Lydia if she wanted tea and Lydia had declined. But Monica didn’t seem to hear, boiled some water and made her a cup anyway. The bitter smell of some herbal concoction drifted unpleasantly into Lydia’s nostrils.

“I’ll stay just until she comes home,” she said with a sad, hopeful smile. “A young woman doesn’t need her mother hanging around.”

Monica Samuels wasn’t a beautiful woman, not in the classic sense. Her nose was too long, her mouth too thin. Her long dark hair was streaked with wiry grays and badly in need of a shaping. But there was a fire to her, something wild that lived in the deep brown of her eyes. She was dulled by grief and drugs but there was an unmistakable radiance to her, a captivating mix of sexuality and vulnerability. She wore an oversized blue cardigan, which she wrapped protectively around herself.

“Timothy told me you were looking for Lily,” she said softly, giving Lydia a look she couldn’t quite read. “The police have given up. You can tell just by their tone, at first. Then they stop returning your calls.”

She seemed to drift off then, her eyes focusing on a point somewhere above and behind Lydia. Her hand rested wearily on the cup of tea she hadn’t touched.

“I feel close to Lily here,” said Monica. “Can’t you feel her? Feel her energy?”

Lydia nodded carefully. She waited a beat before saying, “I need to ask you about The New Day, Mrs. Samuels.”

She drew in a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “They’re like a pestilence Tim let into our lives. They’re eating us alive.” She shook her head then, looked regretful. “But that’s not entirely fair. I’ve made mistakes, too. Awful ones.”

“What kind of mistakes?”

“The kind of mistakes that keep you hostage in your efforts to conceal them, to keep them buried in the past. The kind that make you prey to people like Trevor Rhames.”

Lydia waited but Monica didn’t go on. That frustration she’d felt with Tim Samuels rose up in her chest again. What was it with these people and their secrets?

“I can’t help you and I can’t help Lily,” said Lydia more harshly
than she’d intended, “if you and your husband continue to be secretive and dishonest. What does Rhames have on you? What could be so bad that you will sacrifice both of your children to hide it?”

Monica smiled patiently at Lydia and leaned into her.

“I know you’re just trying to help, Ms. Strong,” she said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “But what you don’t understand is that you are just making things worse. I think it would be best if you just leave now.”

Lydia looked at Monica Samuels and saw a surprising mettle. Lydia shook her head.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I know you don’t,” said Monica, suddenly looking tired. She got up and took the blue ceramic teacup she’d placed before Lydia and walked it over to the sink. Lydia had never touched it. “Believe me; it’s better that way.”

Lydia stood up from her place at the table. She could see that their conversation was over.

“Your husband thinks he’s made some kind of deal with Rhames,” she said to Monica’s back. “Do you know what it is?”

Monica let go of a mirthless laugh. “That’s Timothy for you. Always thinking he can make things right with the last-ditch heroic effort, never realizing that if he behaved properly in the first place there’d be nothing to
save
.”

O
ut on the street, Lydia breathed in the cold air. Monica Samuels had asked her to leave and although she was no closer to Lily than she had been when she arrived, she respected the older woman’s wishes and left her to her grief. She leaned against the brick wall beside the entrance to Lily’s building and wished she had a cigarette, took a deep breath instead.

The avenue was packed with rush-hour traffic and busy New Yorkers raced by talking on cell phones or staring at the ground beneath their feet. A bicycle messenger barely avoided a nasty collision with a taxicab and the driver rolled down the window to shout something in Spanish. She felt Lily slipping away and she quashed the tide of
anxiety that rose at the thought of it. She started walking, bag clutched tight to her side, heels connecting purposefully with the concrete. She became part of the wave of pedestrians on the city sidewalk, lost in her own head, trying to find a way to believe that she hadn’t come to an absolute dead end.

Sixteen

S
omehow the box she’d left in Jeffrey’s office had made it into their living room and it stood there taunting her for her cowardice as she stepped off the elevator into her apartment. The pile of letters sat on top and snickered their agreement. She stared at it a second and then made her way through the room, up the stairs of their duplex and into the bedroom. It was empty. She dropped her bag and stripped off her coat, throwing both on the bed. She marched back down the stairs, through the living room to the other end of the foyer and down the few small steps into her office where Jeffrey sat at the computer. Hiding, from the look of him.

“Jeffrey,” she said.

He swiveled in the chair to look at her. “Don’t be mad,” he said with a grimace. He held up his arms as if to ward off blows. She sighed and threw herself on the couch. He came and sat across from her.

“I just thought you’d be more comfortable opening it here,” he said quietly. “If you decide that’s what you want to do.”

She nodded. He was right as usual and she wouldn’t bother arguing. Anyway she wasn’t really thinking about the box. She was thinking about Lily.

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” she said.

“About the box.”

“No, about Tim Samuels.”

“Did you talk to Dax?” Jeffrey asked, sitting up.

“I just called and there was no answer. I left a message,” she said.

“Okay,” said Jeffrey, ever mellow. “He’ll call.”

“I just feel like we screwed everything up,” she said, looking at him. “I feel like when we went to The New Day we lost every chance we had at finding Lily. I feel like she’s gone, Jeffrey.”

She had pain in her neck and shoulder and she lifted a hand to rub the muscle there. Jeffrey came and stood beside her. She lifted her feet, he sat, and she dropped her legs on top of his.

“No,” he said. “We did our best, what we thought was right. We’ll find her.”

He sounded so certain, she could almost believe he wasn’t just saying it to make her feel better.

“I don’t think Detective Stenopolis feels the same way.”

She pulled her tiny phone from the pocket of her jeans and called in for the message she’d saved. She handed it to Jeffrey so he could listen.

He’d left her a scathing message about how The New Day had cleared out of the building, wiped their computers, and lawyered up by the time he’d arrived. He didn’t say it outright but his tone implied that he blamed them. Which she thought was a little unfair considering that without them, he’d never have even known about The New Day in the first place. It wasn’t like his brilliant detective work had led him there and they’d screwed it up for him.

“She was here, Lydia,” the detective said in his message, sounding angry and desperate. “I can feel her. But she’s gone now. I think gone for good.”

Her heart had clenched at his words. Naturally, they hadn’t intended to shoot their way out of there. They’d expected the whole thing to go a little more quietly but it just hadn’t worked out that way.

“I hope you can use some of those resources you were talking about to find out where Rhames might have gone,” he went on angrily. “Because, I’ll tell you what. When my CO finds out how badly this went, I’m going to be doing traffic duty for the rest of my goddamn career.”

“He was just frustrated,” said Jeffrey, ending the call. “We all are.”

“Besides,” he went on when she said nothing. “When you talk to him again you’ll be able to tell him that we have a good idea where to find Rhames.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said, sitting up. “Where’s that?”

He smiled, patted her on the thigh. “Detective Stenopolis told you that The New Day owned a good deal of real estate in Florida, that they’ve been buying up a lot of property in a town by the Gulf.”

“Right.”

“Well, I made some calls.”

A
contact of Jeffrey’s at the Westchester Airport confirmed that a private jet belonging to The New Day had left the airport after midnight en route to Tampa with five passengers on board. But there was no passenger manifest.

“That’s illegal, isn’t it?” asked Jeffrey.

“It is,” confirmed Jack Anderson, one of the Transportation Security Administration security directors of the Westchester Airport. Jeffrey had done a number of favors for him in the past, including running an in-depth background check on his daughter’s fiancé about six months earlier, who it turned out was a pretty stand-up guy.

“But with the private jets, sometimes we seem to have this problem. People make a lot of ‘mistakes’ when money is involved, if you know what I mean.”

“Seems like a pretty big security hole,” said Jeffrey uneasily. He hated airplanes and this was just one more thing he could add to his list of reasons to stay on the ground.

“It is. And it has been. People flying privately are looking for the ultimate in security and secrecy. Passenger manifests are available only to customs and immigration. As long as other security precautions are met, that manifest is very rarely requested. So pilots are often, shall we say, ‘lax’ about obtaining the identities of all the passengers on board, particularly if that pilot works for the owner of the jet and not a charter company or one of those ‘jet share’ companies.”

“Can we talk to that pilot?”

“I’ll get in touch with him, see what I can find out. But he works for The New Day. Those guys are pretty slippery.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I had some questions for one of their pilots a while back and the guy just disappeared. They basically said that he left the organization and we were never able to find him.”

“What kind of questions?”

“The same kind you’re asking.”

Some unformed thoughts were tumbling around in Jeffrey’s head … Tim Samuels’ private security agency, The New Day’s private jet fleet, the dead jeweler and his missing cache of pink diamonds.

“When was this?”

“A couple of weeks ago actually.”

“Did it have something to do with a murdered jewel dealer from South Africa?”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. “I can’t answer that, Jeff. Sorry.”

An answer like that and he didn’t really have to.

“So I guess we’re going to Florida,” said Lydia with a roll of her eyes.

“I guess.”

J
effrey whipped up some egg-white omelets with scallions and smoked salmon while Lydia brooded at the counter with a cup of coffee. She didn’t cook, never had really. But she was a master with the “one-button” machines, as Jeffrey called them. Coffeemaker, mini–food processor, toaster … she could make espresso, chop garlic, and toast up a piece of sourdough bread like nobody’s business.

She sat on one of the stools by the counter and turned her back to the box that sat on the floor between the love seat and the fireplace hearth. As long as she had Lily Samuels to think about, she didn’t have to think about Arthur Tavernier and his legacy or his letters. In fact, it would be selfish to worry about her issues when Lily Samuels could be somewhere fighting for her life.

“We should go tonight,” she said, starting to feel the buzz of anxiety. She stood and turned toward the staircase.

“First we eat, then we rest a bit,” he said sensibly. “Then we’ll go.”

He was always the one that made sure they took care of themselves,
even when there was chaos all around them, even when the buzz could keep her running on empty for days.

“The worst mistakes are made when you’re hungry or when you’re tired,” was his famous philosophy. “When we can, we need to avoid making decisions during those times.”

“I can’t believe we’re going back there,” she said, after a minute.

“Me neither.”

They’d just sat down at the table when the phone rang. Lydia leapt up to grab it.