Smoke (33 page)

Lydia shook her head. There was something about that detail she didn’t like. Something about it seemed wrong. Thinking about his wife, she wondered what it would be like to know your husband had killed himself in your missing daughter’s bedroom.

“You sure it was him?” asked Lydia.

“Who else would it be?”

“You’ve never seen Tim Samuels before. How do you know it was him?”

He took his eyes off the road and gave her a look.

“What am I … an amateur? I checked. There were some pictures on the shelf in Lily’s room. Him teaching her how to ride a bike, him at her graduation. It was him. Trust me.”

They were all quiet for a second, as if out of respect. Each of them was thinking about Tim Samuels and his final moments.

“So what kind of deal would involve him killing himself?” asked Lydia.

“A really shitty one,” said Dax.

“I mean, how could he be sure the other party was living up to his side of the bargain?” said Lydia.

“And if you were going to kill yourself, why would you bother to make a deal at all, in the same way that you wouldn’t bother to lock the door,” said Jeffrey.

“Unless the deal was his life for Lily’s,” suggested Lydia. “He could die knowing that she’d be safe.”

“But he couldn’t know that,” said Jeffrey. “He would only have the word of a psychopath, assuming that he made the deal with Rhames.”

Lydia sighed. “Maybe it was literally the last thing he could do. All of his other resources had been exhausted. Nothing else he could do would save her. He told us Rhames wanted him to surrender. Isn’t suicide the ultimate surrender?”

Dax laughed without mirth. “No,” he said gravely. “Suicide is the
ultimate fuck-you. It’s the ultimate act of control, of total selfishness. It tells everyone that
you
make the decisions about your life, no one else.” He said it with conviction, as if he’d given it a lot of thought. A
lot
of thought. He went on, “You’re a soldier and you get captured by the enemy? If you
surrender
, you’ve failed. If you kill yourself, you’ve robbed them of their control over you.”

“What are you saying then?”

“I’m saying what if Tim Samuels
broke
the deal he made with Rhames or whoever? What if his suicide wasn’t the deal at all but his way of taking back control of his life, even if only to end it.”

It made a sick kind of sense to Lydia. She rubbed the fatigue from her eyes.

“So if he broke the deal with Rhames, then what happens to Lily?” she asked.

Dax stared at the road, his jaw tense. He didn’t answer. Jeffrey caught her eyes in the rearview mirror and she turned to look at him. He reached for her shoulder.

A heavy rain started then and Lydia settled into her seat. They still had ten hours of driving ahead of them before they got to Florida, her least favorite place in the world. Or one of them anyway.

Twenty

T
he bodies of Rosario Mendez and her unborn son were spotted floating in the East River by a tour helicopter pilot. The Coast Guard and NYPD responded immediately and within an hour had retrieved the bodies from the frigid gray waters. It was grim work, unclear whether Rosario had given birth to her son prior to her death, or whether the gases of her decomposing body had expelled the fetus. The umbilical cord was intact.

The wind seemed to have a personal problem with Jesamyn as she stood beside Evelyn on the pier near the medical examiner’s van. With the sun low in the sky and a damp rain to make things worse, the cold pulled at the bottom of her coat, snuck in through her cuffs, under her collar. She wrapped her arms around herself and watched as the Coast Guard officers lifted the bodies with as much care as the rocking waves would allow. Jesamyn turned away, walked back toward the FDR, and watched as the cars raced past. Some guy from the ME’s office she’d never met before leaned against the back of the van smoking a cigarette like he was waiting for a bus. She nodded at him.

On the way down, she’d found herself hoping that it wasn’t Rosario Mendez that they’d found. But then she thought, if it’s not her … then who. Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing to hope for in this line of work. She watched Evelyn, who kept her eyes on the boat, trying to see the face of the corpse no doubt. She looked strained and exhausted; she paced the end of the pier with her hands in the pockets of her thick parka. Evelyn’s partner, Wong, was on medical leave after knee surgery. And with Mount in trouble, they were assigned to each other.

“Can you keep your mind on the job?” asked Kepler when she’d returned to the station.

She nodded, not really sure if she could. But she didn’t have the luxury of flaking; she had Benjamin. As much as she’d like to run off on a crusade to prove Mount’s innocence, she needed to do her job and do it well for her son. Luckily, she had a repentant ex-husband with a lot of time on his hands.

“Good. Because there’s nothing you can do for him right now,” said Kepler, sitting down at his desk. He actually sounded human. She found herself examining him as he sifted through papers on his desk.

“You know he didn’t do this, right?”

He looked up at her and gave her a quick shrug. “That’s not for me to decide. Innocent until proven guilty, as far as I’m concerned,” he said with no feeling at all.

“Right,” she said.

He looked at her, seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then the moment passed. Finally, he said, “Wong’s out on leave. Work with Rosa until things are … resolved.”

He didn’t look up at her again, started scribbling something on the page in front of him. She wondered, not for the first time, what made this guy tick. He obviously didn’t give a shit about the job or the people who worked with him. Why be a cop if you just didn’t care at all? Nobody was in it for the money. She nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her, and left his office. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang about a floater in the East River.

Jesamyn and Evelyn watched as the boat approached the pier, engines sputtering, smoke filling the air with the aroma of gasoline. One of the guys on board threw a line which Evelyn caught and tied off on a cleat. She jumped on board as another guy tied off the stern line. Jesamyn stayed on the dock and watched as Evelyn uncovered the body and stood staring for a second. She laid the sheet back down after a second, looked at Jesamyn, and nodded. She felt a dryness in her throat.

Jesamyn climbed on board and stood beside Evelyn, who lifted the sheet again. The wind whipped around them. Rosario’s face was bloated and green, badly decomposed but not unrecognizable from the photos Jesamyn had seen. There was a tiny lump beside her on the gurney
where they’d laid her, which Jesamyn was careful to keep covered. That was something she didn’t want to see.

She lifted a hand to her nose against the wet, heavy stench that came off of the body. Something had been at her, probably more than one thing. Jesamyn pulled back the sheet farther. She wanted to see what Rosario had been wearing. A long gray knit cotton dress, like a nightgown. Not something you’d wear to the club. Something you’d wear if you were pregnant and tired and home for the evening.

“The guy that pulled her out says it looks like there was a blunt-force trauma to the back of her head. But it’s hard to tell at this point,” said Rosa.

“She didn’t get dressed to go to the clubs,” said Jesamyn.

“What?” asked Evelyn.

“Baby Boy said that Alonzo was hounding her that night to go out. When Baby Boy came home, he said that what she’d been wearing when he left was folded on the bed. That he figured she’d gotten dressed and gone out to avoid a fight.”

Evelyn nodded. “But she didn’t get dressed.”

“It doesn’t appear so,” said Jesamyn lowering the sheet. Evelyn was quiet a moment, looked at the gray sky turning black over Jesamyn’s head.

“So what are you thinking?” she asked. Her voice was smoky and deep, her eyes heavy and thoughtful.

“I’m not sure,” Jesamyn said. The medical examiner came up behind her quickly and startled her.

“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound sorry at all as he nudged her out of the way. She stepped aside and let him start taking pictures. As she stepped off the boat onto the dock, she saw an unmarked Caprice pull up, and two guys she recognized from Midtown North homicide stepped out. She couldn’t remember their names, but she remembered Mount saying he didn’t like the tall one with the bad skin and the strawberry blond hair. She hadn’t heard anything too bad about his Latino partner, other than that he was a bit of a dog.

“Hey, Breslow,” said the redhead as they approached. “I heard you got a floater.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking at him. She tried to remember his name but it wouldn’t come to her.

He looked at her a second. “I heard some fucked-up shit about your partner today,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. There was a kind of malicious glee there that made her want to slap his pale white face.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said, squaring off her shoulders at him.

“I don’t,” he said, raising his palms and giving her a condescending smile. “Seriously, though. What’s the deal?”

Her cell phone sounded then and she’d never been so happy to hear its annoying little ring.

“You can talk to Evelyn over there. She’s the principal on the Mendez case,” she said, giving him a look and answering the phone.

“Breslow.”

“You’re my one phone call,” said Mount.

“Jesus,” she said, feeling her heart skip she was so happy to hear his voice. She walked away so that the others wouldn’t hear her conversation.

“Get me the fuck out of here, Jez.”

She sighed, looked at the cold gray waters of the East River. Two seagulls fought in the air over something one of them was holding in his mouth. They were screaming bloody murder.

“How would you like me to do that?” she said quietly. “You’re envisioning a jailbreak maybe?”

She heard him breathing on the other end. “Tell me you know I didn’t do this.” He sounded tired, afraid.

“I know, Matt,” she said without hesitation. “I know you couldn’t do it.”

“They’re doing this … The New Day.” She believed that, too. But something about the way he said it made him seem so desperate, a little unstable. She knew no one would believe him, unless they could prove it somehow.

She didn’t say anything.

“You need to figure it out, Jesamyn,” he said when she didn’t answer. “How they got that videotape, planted the evidence in my car, how they got that witness to tell the story he told.”

“What about the fingerprints? How did they get your fingerprints in there?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “My fingerprints would have been in there already.”

She sighed. “Oh, Matt. Christ.”

“I was there that night, the night she was killed. They must have been waiting for me to come and go.”

She exhaled through pursed lips in a soft whistle. That was very bad news.
Yeah, Officer, I was there that night with the prostitute but she was fine when I left her. I swear
.

“I—cared about her. She was a good person,” he said, his voice catching. “She didn’t deserve this.”

“Okay,” she said, pushing any uncertainty from her voice. “We’re going to figure out how they’re doing this to you. We’re going to prove that you’re being set up.”

“Start with that witness.”

“We’re already on it.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Dylan’s got some time on his hands.”

“Dylan.” There was no love lost between the two men. “Why would he want to help me?”

“I think he wants to help
me
.”

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Just do me a favor. Watch your back, Jesamyn. If they can get to me, they can get to you.”

Her mind immediately went to Benjamin and she felt a pulse of fear. He started to say something else, but there was a heavy click on the line and an electronic voice told them that their time was up. The line went dead in her hand. The wind was whipping around her, pulling at her coat and flipping her blonde hair around.

She turned to see the two homicide detectives and Evelyn huddled around the covered bodies of Rosario Mendez and her child, whose life probably ended before it began at the bottom of the East River. She found herself thinking about Baby Boy Mendez and how he’d wavered between the past and present tense when referring to his sister. She thought about something Mount had said about Rosario practically being Baby Boy’s mother. About how his mother hadn’t cared enough
about him to give him a proper name. Then she thought about Mount, accused of murdering a woman, beating her to death with his fists … a prostitute he might have loved or thought he loved. It was up to Jesamyn to prove he didn’t kill her. And suddenly, it all just felt like too much. She walked toward the road, turning away from anyone who might see that tears she couldn’t stop had welled in her eyes, threatened to spill down her face.

Twenty-One

F
lorida didn’t seem like a real place with its pink birds and orange groves, mobile homes and hurricanes, the endless Jimmy Buffet soundtrack that played from the speakers of every restaurant and beachside souvenir shop. It seemed like someone’s idea of a place. And not a very good idea at that. Furthermore, it was uncomfortable to wear black in Florida. And why would anyone want to go somewhere where it was difficult to wear black?

“And don’t even get me started on Disney,” Lydia said, peeling off her leather jacket and looking at the paper white skin on her arms.

Jeff and Dax both rolled their eyes. They’d heard the Florida rant before. They both knew after a couple of days down here, she’d shed all her clothes and turn into a total beach babe. You had to force her to put a tee-shirt on over her sunburn like a kid.

“If you ask me, this place is black at its core,” she went on, not noticing as Jeffrey and Dax exchanged a look in the rearview mirror. “Anything this shiny and pretty and plastic has to have a rotten center. Pure evil.”