Strong 03 - Twice (3 page)

The other thing Lydia liked about Dax was that his whole life was cloaked in mystery. He revealed little about his past, how he came to work for the firm, how he came to live in a palatial home in Riverdale complete with a basement that put dungeons to shame. His basement was a maze of rooms—one a weapons armory filled with enough firepower to equip an army; one with a cruel metal table, complete with five-point restraints; yet another adjacent to a second room connected by a two-way mirror. Lydia never tired of probing Dax for details about himself that he refused to disclose. It was as if Dax Chicago sprang fully grown from the earth in a full set of body armor and carrying an AK-47.

“Come on, Lydia. Let’s go,” Dax said, a pleading look in his jade eyes. His pale skin was blotched with angry red patches from cold and exertion. A few brown curls snaked out of the charcoal wool stocking cap he’d pulled down over his ears. He was not bad-looking for a big dumb Aussie.

“Dax, maybe we need to get you a girlfriend,” she said as they reached the bottom of the bridge and headed back into the court district.

He snorted his contempt as Lydia’s cell phone rang. She unzipped the pouch at her waist and removed the tiny silver Nokia that rested against the not so tiny Beretta.

“Hi,” she said, having seen Jeffrey’s number on the caller ID.

“Where are you?”

“At home, on the couch, like a good little prisoner.”

He sighed on the other end of the phone. “Are you with Dax?”

“I can’t seem to shake him.”

“Listen,” he said, “why don’t you two hop in a cab and come to the office? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

They walked across Chambers Street, the sickly sweet smell of honey-roasted nuts from a vending cart carrying on the cold air. An angry cabbie leaned on his horn as a Lincoln Town Car cut him off and sped past them. Sharply dressed yuppies rushed along in a blur of navy and black on their way to important jobs, tasks, meetings, carrying paper cups of Starbucks coffee.

“What’s up?” asked Lydia, hearing the lick of excitement in his voice.

“Did you see the news this morning?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll explain it to you when you get here. Half an hour?”

“About that.”

Dax and Lydia jogged to Sixth Avenue and hopped a cab heading uptown to Mark, Striker and Strong.

D
etective Halford McKirdy, Ford to his friends, liked the dark. Darkness formed a cocoon where thoughts could gestate into theories, theories into answers. The light beckoned a man outside himself, encouraged him to be distracted. That’s why he always pulled the shades in his dingy, cluttered office so that only just the hint of sunlight leaked in between the blinds and the sill, between the slats, creating thin ladders of light across the files and photographs on his desk.

This morning there was a strange odor in his office. It could have been the half-empty coffee cup—or half full, as an optimist, which Ford was not, might note—that was perched dangerously on the corner of his desk. It could have been the pastrami sandwich that he knew still lay on the bottom of his wastepaper basket beneath a drift of discarded paper, forms, and message slips. Or the stale cigarettes in the ashtray that he kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his metal and faux-wood desk, so that no one would notice that he was still sneaking the occasional cigarette. Or maybe it was just that the smell of death had followed him from the crime scene he’d left an hour before. Likely, it was some combination of all of those things.

“He has come for me again,” she’d said slowly with a nod, her pink silk pajamas stained with blood, clinging to her, her voice quavering, her eyes staring off into some horror only she could see. The horror right before her eyes seemed to elude her.

“I’ll never escape him now. He’ll eat my young … swallow them whole. And me as well. You can’t stop him. No one can.”

The words she’d spoken to him as the paramedics wheeled her away in restraints were echoing in his head now as Ford flipped through the crime scene photographs. They were up there with the most gruesome he’d seen in his twenty-year career. He sat quietly at his desk. Only the halogen lamp beside him lit his office as he slowly wrote notes in black ink on a yellow legal pad, trying to make sense of what he had seen this morning. This would be the second time he’d investigated the murder of one of Julian Ross’s husbands.

He remembered the first time clearly, just as he remembered all the cases where the answers had never come clear. Something had haunted her that night ten years ago. He could see that behind her eyes, ringed horribly in black by the mascara she had wept from her lashes.
But she is not innocent
, he remembered thinking. Nor, however, had he sensed in her the capacity for the cold and calculating murder of her husband. He’d had the same conflict about Julian Ross again as he’d arrived at her Park Avenue duplex at five in the morning, called in to investigate the murder of her second husband. It was a good thing she kept her maiden name.

He shifted in his chair, leaning back and rubbing his eyes. He rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, hearing the tension crackling there. He remembered Julian as a tiny woman, really frail-looking, with a fragile beauty that threatened to shatter with the passing years. For some reason he had always remembered her hands and her wrists vividly, so white that he could see the blue of her veins beneath the parchment of her skin. Every time he’d seen one of her paintings over the years, in a magazine or a SoHo gallery, he’d remembered those hands and the questions he still had about her years after she had been acquitted. Something about it had never rested with him. Here he was again. That was his karma; the sleeping dogs never did lie.

Julian Ross, still tiny, still frail-looking, had aged considerably
since he’d last seen her, in spite of her wealth and success. To be fair, the fact that she was covered in her husband’s blood and rocking back and forth on her haunches in the corner of her bedroom didn’t do much for her. She had looked at him when he entered, and said, “You again.”

When he’d walked through the front door of the duplex, the energy of rage and terror had raised the hair on his arms. Something wasn’t right, he knew at once. Something wasn’t simple. When he saw the room where the crime was done, all the feelings he’d had that night ten years ago came rushing back to him … the disbelief and the slightest notch of fear in the back of his throat. It was like when he took his wife to Egypt for their honeymoon and they saw the Great Pyramids, those gigantic monuments reaching into the sky so solid, so symmetrical. All he could think was,
No human could have done this with the resources available at the time
.

Julian Ross’s second husband, Richard Stratton III, the father of her twins Lola and Nathaniel, had been stabbed repeatedly in their bed while she allegedly slept beside him. But
stabbed
was really too friendly a word for what had been done to Mr. Stratton. He had been disemboweled, nearly decapitated. His face had been bashed beyond recognition. His blood and innards had been spread around the room. There were long trails of blood along the floor and along the walls, as though he’d been dragged about by a poltergeist.

Just like Julian’s first husband, Tad Jenson, his wedding ring and the finger on which he’d worn it had been removed. Neither object was anywhere to be found.

It didn’t seem physically possible that Julian Ross could have done what had been done to her husband. But at the moment, there was no evidence that anyone else had entered the apartment. Julian’s elderly mother, Eleanor; Julian’s six-year-old twins; and their young nanny were sleeping in rooms on the lower level of the duplex. Julian’s claim that she had popped sleeping pills before bed and didn’t wake during the violence wasn’t exactly an airtight alibi.

On the other hand, there was nothing at the scene that could be easily identified as the murder weapon. Then there was the pure physicality of a 100-pound woman beating and bludgeoning to death a 250-pound, six-foot-four male and somehow managing to get his blood all over the walls and even on the twelve-foot-tall ceiling. There was something definitely spooky about it.

“You again,” she’d said when he walked into the room. A smile played upon her lips. Shock or insanity … maybe a little of both.

“What is she still doing in here?” he’d asked the cop who stood at the bedroom door, supposedly guarding the scene until the ME and forensics arrived.

“I’m not leaving my husband,” she said, her voice shrill with the hysteria he knew was going to hit like a tornado in a few minutes. The cop he’d addressed shrugged his helplessness.

“Ms. Ross, let’s get you out of here, okay?” he said, holding out his hand.

“No, I’m not leaving him,” she answered. Her eyes had started to glaze over and he could see that she was trembling. He looked around him at the bloodbath, trying to determine the source of a dripping noise he heard. Blood had soaked through the sheets and was collecting in a pool on the hardwood floor next to Julian. She didn’t seem to notice as it grew and crept toward her.

It was the kind of room showcased in magazines—or anyway it had been before the carnage. The bed was the size of some apartments he’d been in, with its dramatic four posts and plush mattress, at least ten brocade throw pillows. French doors opened onto a balcony revealing a breathtaking view of uptown Manhattan. Pictures of Julian and Richard or the twins, beautifully framed in sterling, wood, or crystal, occupied most of the available nooks and crannies of space on the dresser and night tables. A small alcove of bookshelves reached to the ceiling and a plush maroon chenille chair, matching ottoman, and standing lamp nestled in the space. Embers still glowed in the fireplace, above which was a large canvas that
Ford recognized as an early work of Julian’s. An entertainment armoire stood partially open, revealing a large-screen television, DVD player, stereo, and speakers. All of it was marred by blood splatter.

“Sir, the paramedics are here,” said the other uniform on the scene, after jogging up the stairs and stopping at the bedroom door.

“Only one of them in here,” answered Ford. “She needs to be sedated and removed from the room and then no one else will be allowed in here until the crime scene investigators arrive.”

“You think I did this, don’t you?” she asked him in one of her last moments of semi-lucidity.

He looked at her, knowing he should inform her of her right to remain silent.

“I took sleeping pills before I went to bed. I woke up and found him … like …” she said, as a sob took over her body and her voice. “Like this,” she finished in a whisper. He looked over at the body of her husband face down and naked on the bed, one arm draping over the side, knuckles touching the floor. The body looked white and deflated, which Ford guessed made sense, as it seemed to have been drained of most of its blood.

“I wouldn’t say anything at all right now if I were you, Ms. Ross,” he said, trying not to sound as cold as he felt inside.

“Just be grateful you’re not,” she said as he walked from the room, passing by a paramedic who looked younger than seemed possible. Even the cops on the scene looked like babies to him. When did he start to feel so old?

He sighed, remembering, wishing he’d handled her differently, hadn’t let the anger and emotion he’d felt at the scene get the best of him. With Julian totally incoherent now, he couldn’t expect to get anywhere with her for a while. She talked so softly, like a child … seemed so delicate, just like the first time. He remembered how surprised he’d been ten years ago when he’d seen her canvases. Halford McKirdy didn’t know much about art, but he knew rage when he saw it sure enough.

She painted on gigantic canvases in rich, bold lines—heavy on the blacks, reds, and yellows. She painted scenes of rape, murder, and carnage. Some were intricately detailed murals of mass violence, with bleeding, writhing figures in fields of gore and fire. Some were close-up images of mutilated female genitalia, broken flesh and bones, faces contorted in fear or anger or both, women fleeing from some unseen hunter. Other works were just angry slashes of color, amorphous figures in black or gray, lines and shadows. When he first investigated her, she was already a successful artist, a darling of the SoHo gallery scene. Now she was an international sensation and a very wealthy woman. This type of scandal would only make her work worth more, he knew. The world was populated by bloodsuckers that loved the taint of violence as long as it didn’t come too close.

He’d headed down the stairs and toward the sitting room, where he knew Julian’s mother, her children, and the nanny were waiting.

Eleanor Ross was a regal woman in a black silk dressing gown, her silver hair pulled back into a braided bun. She possessed an eerie calm, sitting on a plush red velvet sofa in front of a fire she must just have made. A twin lay on either side of her, each with a head on her thigh, each with blue eyes wide open staring into the flames. She had a hand on each twin’s head.

The nanny, a young girl with skin the color of caramel, weighing in at maybe a hundred pounds on a fat day, sat weeping in a chair close to the fire. It was a mournful and helpless sound, kind of weak. Ford turned to look at her, but her head was buried in her hands, a lush mane of black curls falling almost to her lap. Her shoulders trembled, her feet barely touched the floor.

“We heard nothing and saw nothing, Detective,” Eleanor said before Ford sat down on the ottoman he’d pulled in front of them.

He didn’t look at her as he pulled out his notepad. “Is that so?”

A moment of silence passed between them before Eleanor turned her gaze on him.

“Surely you don’t think my daughter could have done such a thing,” she said imperiously.

“At this point, ma’am, I’m not sure of anything.”

“Don’t just take the easy way out like you did last time. You decided right away it was Julian and never even looked for who really killed her first husband. Whoever killed him got off scot-free,” she said with a disapproving shake of her head.