Stay With Me (24 page)

“Where is my daughter?” Brenna barely got the words out, winded as she was from running and panic. The phone had been pinged to a clearing in the woods behind the White Plains reservoir, and so she’d had to park her car at the bottom of a hill and run to it, following the smell of smoke, the cluster of emergency vehicles, the black cloud that still hovered in the dull white winter sky.

She said it to the group of uniformed cops who stood in front of the crime scene tape, apart from the firefighters and EMS guarding the smoldering black heap that was still recognizable as Sophia Castillo’s 1996 Lexus ES300. They looked at each other, but none answered.

She zeroed in on one of them—a muscular bald guy she’d met briefly at a sleazy Mount Temple nightclub called Heavenly Pleasures on September 12, 2004, when she’d been investigating the disappearance of a stripper who called herself Clarity. He’d been working security at the time and dressed to fit his job and the surroundings, his thinning hair gelled and sculpted, sunglasses at night, a glossy black goatee that matched the shiny shirt, but she didn’t flash back to it. She couldn’t get lost in a memory when the present felt like this. The air smelled of burning rubber and gasoline and smoke. Like the end of the world.

Her gaze went to the crime scene techs milling around the car wreckage in fireproof white suits, two of them prying open the trunk with a crowbar, her heart pounding.
Please, please, please . . . No, not Maya. Not Maya in the car . . .

She made herself look away, into the eyes of the ex-security guard. “Where is she, Daryl?” she said.

“Do I know you?”

“My daughter is a thirteen-year-old girl—five-foot-eight-and-a-half-inches. She was with the woman who was driving this car.”

“We haven’t seen anyone, ma’am.”

“What was found in the car?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to step back, please.”

Brenna took a breath, tried to keep her voice in check, but still it came out tight, manic. “I’m a private investigator, Daryl,” she said. “I bought you a twenty-dollar pack of Corps Diplomatique cigarettes and a thirty-seven-dollar glass of wine on September 12, 2004. I sat at the bar of the crappy strip club where you worked, listening to you complain about your cheating girlfriend Rolanda for half an hour, while you gave me absolutely no worthwhile information about Clarity and tried to get me into the back room, which you referred to as the VIP lounge.” Her voice broke. She blinked away tears.

Daryl stared at her, his face coloring. The cop next to him raised his eyebrows at him. “She knows you, all right.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m looking for my daughter, Daryl.
It’s the least you can do
.”

He exhaled. “Okay,” he said. “Firefighters managed to put out the blaze pretty quickly. Backseat of the car, we recovered some articles of clothing and what looked like a laptop case. No sign of the driver or any passengers. They’re still working on the trunk.”

She nodded slowly.

“That’s all I got.”

“Thank you.”

He stared straight ahead, his face still red. She moved away, focused on the crime scene techs, working on the trunk. She thought she could make out the charred remains of the honor roll sticker, still clinging to the bumper.

Brenna’s cell phone vibrated. She glanced at the screen, saw her mother’s number, hit decline. When the call went to voice mail, she texted Jim, Faith, and Nick:

Here. No sign of anyone. Just the car.

The phone vibrated again: Her mother, again. Brenna turned off the phone, moved around the periphery to a cluster of trees to the left of the wreckage and got a clear view. She saw Sykes on the passenger side of the car, talking to another uniformed officer, scribbling on his notepad as more techs photographed the car. She waved to him, tried to meet his gaze, but he wouldn’t look at her. Maybe it was on purpose.

Her phone vibrated SOS. She flipped it open. A text from Morasco:

OK. On my way to Tarry Ridge; getting q’ed by IA for the rest of the day.

Internal Affairs. Could they waste any more time with him?

Another text came in, from Trent:

Important info re: Sophia Castillo.

Call when U can.

She started to call him, but then she heard a creaking noise, someone shouting, “Got it,” and she saw the trunk sprung open, a cloud of black dust rising out of it, hanging in the air. She held her breath.

The techs stepped back, covering their faces. “Okay, okay,” one was saying.

The other shouted, “We have something!” and Sykes moved around to the back of the car. He backed away, shaking his head . . .

No . . .

“Ma’am!” someone said, because she was running to the wrecked car, legs pumping, breath cutting through her lungs.

“Please step back!” someone said, as she reached the car. She got a glimpse of it—fists clenched, knees bent . . .

She screamed, and lost her footing and felt arms around her, holding her back. “
Nooo . . .”

The officer pulled her away. She heard, “Looks to be a female . . .”

She heard, “Need some identification . . .”

Brenna couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. She heard Faith in her head.
She’s happy now
.
That could mean so many things. So many terrible, unthinkable things . . .

Her knees gave out and she felt arms around her. She saw Sykes talking to one of the techs, his face a deep red. She focused on his fists, Sykes’s meaty fists clenched like the ones in the trunk. And then blackness crowded her eyes and her head swam and for a second, she heard only the sound of her beating heart.

Trent sent the text, waited. No response from Brenna. He stared at the article on his screen—a short one, in the
Deseret News
, May 2, 1970, about a car crash that killed a young family of three—the Liptaks. The daughter, age four, was named Sophia Belyn.

Another instant message came in from Camille:
Did you read?

Yep.

Weird, right?

I don’t get it. Sophia Liptak died like forty years ago?

Camille typed:
All I can tell you is it was a lot easier to get a new identity in the eighties.

Trent typed:
Right
. He wanted to come up with more words, but he couldn’t. It was hard, on this little sleep and this much stress, to put his thoughts together. Man, he needed another energy drink.

One thing he did know though: There was no use looking for another Sophia Belyn Liptak. This one, the forty-years-dead one. This was his girl.

Document-wise, Sophia Belyn Liptak Castillo had come alive at the age of seventeen, when she took and passed the GED. After that, Trent had been able to trace her graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder, then from nursing school back in Albany. She’d married Christopher Castillo in a small ceremony at the age of twenty-five, and had Robert a few months later. She’d lived in Katonah and worked as an ER nurse at St. Vincent’s, right up until seven years ago, when Christopher had dumped her, taking Robert back to his native El Salvador. (Dude was clearly not into the whole visitation thing.)

She’d gone a little cray-cray after the divorce, what with the DUI, the break-in at Brenna’s mother’s house. She’d lost her job at St. Vincent’s and worked at two different clinics in Mount Temple before getting laid off two years ago and filing for unemployment. All those ups and downs of Sophia’s life were documented, just as they were with everybody.

What was missing, though, was the prequel. Trent had found no high school records for Sophia Belyn Liptak—no local news articles or sports awards or medical records or stints in juvy. Nothing about her at all before the age of seventeen, her childhood one giant missing puzzle piece.

Trent had no idea what this girl’s real name was or what awful turn of events had fueled the need to steal a dead baby’s identity and start over. He wished he knew. He wished someone could tell him what sick things Sophia Belyn Liptak Castillo had witnessed—or done—when she was a kid, when she was Maya’s age. What was she capable of doing to a girl like Maya now?

Camille typed:
You okay?

“Nope,” Trent whispered to the screen. He typed:
Yep. Just confused.

I’ll see if I can find anything else on her,
she typed.
But it may take a while.

“I don’t have a while,” said Trent, who had looked for enough missing people Sophia’s age to know that the while it would take would be a very long one.

In the sixties, seventies, eighties, most kids didn’t even get social security numbers until they were in their late teens. So in other words, Sophia Liptak’s social could have been this chick’s first and only, and where did that leave him? In the dark.

He typed,
Thanks, CC. Gotta go.

You can change your identity, you can change your looks but you can’t change who you really are
. That was one of the first things Brenna had taught him when he started working for her, and it was true. No matter how hard you try to act like someone else, you’re still going to be drawn to that one thing you need—whether it’s golf or guns or knitting or kinky sex. You’ll buy a gun, you’ll join a country club, you’ll frequent bars and groups and private chats where that need can be satisfied.

What was Sophia’s need? Drugs, sure. But what was Trent supposed to do? Post her pic on Craigslist? Start canvassing offices of oxy docs? The drug-dealing community wasn’t exactly known for helping out investigations, and he didn’t have much time . . .

Sophia had other interests. She
had
to. He wished he’d kept her on the phone for longer when she’d called Saturday morning. He wished he’d asked her more about her life, because she’d seemed in the mood to talk, unlike Trent, who could only think about that freakin’ paternity test . . .

He’d even said it, hadn’t he?
Your son was lucky. Not everybody who’s a parent even wants to have kids.

Not a day goes by
, she had said,
when I don’t think about my Robert
.
He’s my everything and he always will be.

Trent’s breath caught. “Wax my ass with a hot glue gun,” he whispered. Maybe he
hadn’t
needed to stay on the phone any longer. Maybe he’d found out everything he needed from her.

Screw drugs. Screw her real name. Screw everything except the one thing in Sophia Liptak Castillo’s life that really mattered.
Robert
.
Her missing child
. Robert was Sophia’s need.

The Families of the Missing rooms used to be a well-kept secret, but for a few weeks this past fall, the Neff case had turned them into a “thing.”

So it stood to reason that someone pissed off enough at Brenna to break into her mother’s house, obsessed enough with her to take her kid . . . that person would know all about the chat room that Brenna had invaded, right? It made sense that someone like Sophia would join that chat room, make friends there, maybe get extra close to a young girl who sounded so much like Brenna’s daughter . . .

Trent found Chrysalis. He looked up the chat rooms. He invented a name for himself: DowntownEnrique. (Sexy, right?) He was about to go into the room, but he remembered the trouble Brenna got into when she tried the same thing. He called up the profile pages, went to “create your profile” and started typing info about DowntownEnrique: twenty-seven, missing a baby sister . . .

Man. They might not have asked for real names, but there were a lot of personal questions on these profiles. Everything from favorite band and celeb crush to “What was the saddest moment of your life?” Maybe it was to weed out the fakes, but filling out this thing could take all day.

Trent scrolled down the list, thinking.
Has everyone in that chat room answered all these questions? Have they answered any of them?

If that was the case, he might not have to fill one out at all.

Trent looked through the existing profiles till he found NYCJulie’s. He opened it up and started reading it, skimming over the favorite band–type questions, going for the gold . . . Missing loved one:
My son. He’s been gone for seven years
. . . Biggest disappointment:
Finding out who my real friends are. Not having anyone on my side
. . . He read on, but when he got to one of the final questions, “Do you ever think you’ll be able to move on without your loved one?” his jaw dropped open.

“Bingo,” he whispered.

NYCJulie had answered:
Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my son. He is my everything and he always will be.

When Brenna’s eyes fluttered open, she was lying in a gurney, a man’s face hovering over hers. “Drink this.” He fell into focus—an EMT worker, round and baby-smooth and with eyes like shiny black buttons. A human teddy bear. He handed her a bottle of water. “You’re probably dehydrated,” the bear said. “Sip it slowly.”

She did, but within seconds, the horror crowded in again, the charred, clenched fists . . . “My daughter,” she said. “In the trunk.”

“There was one body found in the trunk of the car, ma’am.”

“My daughter.”

“No ma’am,” he said. “It’s a middle-aged woman.”

Brenna looked at him. She blinked a few times. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Can I leave now, please?”

“I’d rest a bit more . . .” he said.

But she was already sitting up, and he had no choice but to help her. She slid off the gurney and found her way out of the vehicle and back outside. Emptying the water bottle into her mouth, she headed toward the blackened car, to where Sykes was standing, head bowed. She said his name and he turned. “Ms. Spector.” His mouth was tight, his eyes clouded.

She looked at him. “Detective Sykes . . . the body in the trunk. The EMT told me it was a grown woman.”

“Yes,” he swallowed hard.
That face
.
The shock
. “Some of the clothes are still intact . . .” He didn’t say anything more; he couldn’t. But Brenna knew.