Strong 03 - Twice (34 page)

“I’ll tell you what I get.”

“I’ll do the same.”

They swapped cell numbers and Rawls stalked off, his face drawn and determined. Ford thought he looked like a man who didn’t accept failure and he hoped that was good news for Lola and Nathaniel.
Poor kids
. He said a silent prayer for them, though he was not a religious man.

“Hey,” Ford said, walking toward Piselli. “Where’s Lydia Strong?”

“She left. She wasn’t looking well. Said she needed to get home.”

They walked off and Ford looked toward the door. “Crap,” he whispered to himself.
Well
, he thought,
she’s a tough girl, with a big gun. She can take care of herself
. Ford turned then to Eleanor Ross, whose corpse he thought seemed only slightly more cold and stiff than she had been in life.

S
he wasn’t being stubborn or reckless or any of the things she knew she’d be accused of once Jeffrey realized she’d left Ford McKirdy and headed home on her own. In fact, it was just the opposite. If she’d stayed at the scene or headed up to Haunted, she’d be hurting herself. She knew that. Her heart and mind had never felt more unwelcome in her body. What she wanted had been overridden unequivocally by pain and fatigue. Dax was wrong and she was stupid to have listened to him; she needed time to recover … mentally,
physically, and emotionally. For once, she was going to do what was best for her, not what was best for her work. It was a lesson she had learned the hard way.

When the homicide guys arrived and then the Missing Children’s Unit showed up, she had felt as helpless, as useless there as she had been. Standing in the foyer looking at Eleanor’s corpse, Lydia had thought of her mother. Marion would have known which saint to pray to, which saint was charged with looking after children. Lydia couldn’t remember, so she just prayed to her mother. Prayed that Lola and Nathaniel were safe. That Nathaniel had his bunny. When her prayer was done, she knew that there was little else she could do in the state she was in, weak and ill, barely able to hold herself tall.

The energy of the loft embraced her as she stepped off the elevator and reset the alarm system.
Home
, she thought. And the thought sent waves of relief through her body. It was nice to be alone, too, without the watchful eyes of Dax or Jeffrey smothering her. She shed her coat and put a kettle on the stove. She could smell the warm scent of lavender mingling with the aroma of the Murphy’s Oil Soap that Zel, their cleaning lady, used to wash the floors. She sat at the kitchen table and looked out at the city. The world was different to her than it had been before the miscarriage. Even the cityscape seemed to have changed.

The skyline had always fascinated her, each light representing a life lived, each window a mystery waiting to be solved. She was forever wondering who was doing what to whom, who within those lighted windows was laughing, crying, making love, mourning, celebrating. It was this curiosity that made her good at her work … actually, it was this curiosity that made her
indivisible
from her work. She had realized, during the days she’d spent in a drug-induced haze, that there was no separation between what she did and who she was. Was this a bad thing? she wondered.

It amazed her that, with all the demons she had battled since the death of her mother, both internal and external, there were still so many left to fight … Jed McIntyre not least among them.

Two days before Jed McIntyre murdered Marion Strong, Lydia saw him in a supermarket parking lot. She was waiting for her mother in the car while Marion ran into the A&P to get a quart of milk. Sitting in her mother’s old Buick, the fifteen-year-old Lydia punched the hard plastic keys on the AM/FM radio, checking each preset station for acceptable listening, when she felt the hairs raise on the back of her neck. She felt heat that started at the base of her skull and moved like fire down her spine. A hollow of fear opened in her belly. She turned around and looked out the rear windshield.

The car’s front windows were open and the already cool fall air seemed to chill. The man stood with his legs a little more than shoulder length apart, one hand in the pocket of his denim jacket and one resting on the sideview mirror of his red and white car, which reminded Lydia of the car in
Starsky and Hutch
. His flaming red hair was curly and disheveled, blowing into his eyes. She remembered that he did not move to keep it off his face. He just stared and rocked lightly back onto his heels and then forward onto the balls of his feet. Seeing him standing beside his car, his gaze locked on her, made her senses tingle. She detected his malice in his unyielding stare, his perversion in the way he began to caress the sideview mirror when their eyes met. She had reached to lock the doors and roll up the windows without taking her eyes off of him.

When her mother returned to the car, Lydia pointed out the man to her and he just stood there smiling. Marion tried to tell her it was nothing. But Lydia could see her mother was afraid in the hurried way she threw the milk into the backseat and got into the car, the way she fumbled to put the key in the ignition. They drove off and the man pulled out after them. But when Marion made a quick turn, he did not pursue them. They laughed; the threat, real or imagined, was gone. But Lydia would look back at that moment
as the point at which she could have saved her mother’s life. She had written down the license plate number with blue eyeliner on the back of a note a friend had passed to her in class. That information had led to the apprehension of Jed McIntyre, serial murderer of thirteen single mothers in the Nyack, New York, area. But only after he had killed Marion Strong, leaving her where Lydia would find her beaten and violated as she returned home from school.

She knew now, of course, that even if they had reported the parking lot incident to the police, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. But when she got that feeling, the feeling she and Jeffrey had come to know as “the buzz,” she had never been able to walk away from it again. Wondering always who else would die if she did.

She had walked away from the missing twins, from Eleanor and Julian Ross tonight, not because this curiosity, the need to hunt the demons and save their victims, had died. It was not that she didn’t care about the children, Julian’s plight, or Eleanor’s murder. She did very much; this drive was alive and well within her. It was just that the loss of her baby, the risk to her own life, and the damage done to her body had made clear things that had always been nebulous. She had realized for the first time how much her
own
life was worth, how much she cherished her time with Jeffrey, and how much, even though she hadn’t realized it, she had wanted to be a mother. She rested her head on her arm and let a tear fall, as a hot wave of sadness swept over her.

There was a kind of peace to her grief, though. There was an irony to the situation that was not lost on her. Only the loss of her pregnancy could have made her see what it took to be a mother. And how she never could have taken care of her child when she wasn’t even willing to take care of herself. Something in the fact that she had learned this lesson comforted her, made her believe that there would be another chance to do it right. She was reminded of the airplane safety rule stating that should the oxygen masks drop you should put on your own mask before putting it on your child. Something
that seems so selfish, so backward, may be the ultimate selfless act. You can’t help anyone until you’ve helped yourself.

The kettle on the stainless steel stovetop whistled and Lydia got up to make herself a cup of raspberry tea. She took the cup and placed it on the coffee table, pulled off her boots and lay on the couch. She pulled the chenille blanket over herself and sank into the plush furniture. She thought to turn on the television and watch the news, but she decided no. She thought briefly that she should check her messages. But she didn’t do that, either. She never even had a chance to sip her tea because sleep came for her hard and fast and there was no resisting.

S
itting alone there, Anthony had indeed, as Ford suspected, whipped himself into a frenzy of worry, deciding confession and contrition were his only options. By the time Ford arrived, Anthony was barely holding it in. When Ford walked into the room, it reeked of fear and body odor. Ford hadn’t even taken his seat before Anthony started talking.

“She hated Julian Ross. And Eleanor, too. I mean hated their guts,” said Anthony, wiping perspiration from his brow. He looked pale in the harsh fluorescents, with black smudges of fatigue and worry under his eyes. Anthony was a reasonably big guy with broad shoulders and thick arms, but behind the long table he looked deflated.

“Who did?”

“Geneva … or whatever her name was.”

“Annabelle.”

“Yeah.”

“So you talked about Julian,” said Ford, leaning his elbows on the table and folding his hands.

“And Eleanor. Yeah, we talked sometimes.”

“So the whole dick-sucking incident wasn’t your first encounter, is what you’re telling me. Because before, you made it sound like—”

Anthony held up a hand and gave a nod. “We talked a couple of times. Nothing serious, you know. Not like we were
dating
or
anything. I took her for coffee around the corner. But that’s it. I swear.”

“When did you talk?”

“She’d come down at night, after the kids were in bed. Sometimes she’d bring a couple of beers. She was lonely. I thought she was lonely,” he said. His mouth had turned down at the corners and he shook his head a little bit. Anthony had been used and it was just starting to dawn on him. Ford felt for the guy, he really did.

“So what did you talk about?”

“About Julian and Eleanor Ross, mostly. She did most of the talking. I listened,” he said, looking down at the table. “I guess, looking back, it always seemed like I could have been there, or not.”

“So what kind of things did she say?”

“A lot of it didn’t make sense. She would start off talking about what a bitch Ms. Ross was, how badly she treated her, Geneva—Annabelle, I mean. Then she would start on how Julian didn’t deserve the life she had, her husband, the twins, all their money. But then she’d say things like, ‘One day soon, that’s all going to change.’ When I asked her what she meant, she’d say that the past was bound to catch up with Julian and Eleanor Ross.”

“You didn’t think that was an odd thing to say?”

“I guess, to be honest, I wasn’t really thinking too much about what she was saying,” he said, looking at Ford sheepishly. “She was, you know, really hot. I was mostly just thinking about what it would be like to fuck her.”

Ford nodded, not surprised.

“Did it sound like a threat to you? Like she was planning to hurt Julian Ross?”

“No … it sounded more like a prediction.”

Ford cocked his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. “A prediction.”

“Yeah, like she knew something bad was going to happen; not
like she was threatening to make her pay for something. There’s a difference, don’t you think?”

Ford shrugged. “Did she ever talk about her home, her family? Did she ever mention Haunted?”

“She said she was part Haitian. Seemed pretty proud of it. She said, and I remember thinking this was weird, that she had the blood of a voodoo priestess in her veins. I was, like, You’re not going to put a curse on me, are you? She didn’t seem to think that was very funny.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Not if you’re good.’ But she didn’t laugh or anything. She was a little freaky, I guess.”

“I guess.”

Back to the voodoo curses
, thought Ford. Lydia Strong might not have been as far off base as he’d thought. He looked at Anthony, who instead of seeming less agitated after spilling his guts seemed to be getting more uncomfortable. He shifted up in his chair, rolled his neck and shoulders, releasing audible pops.

“What else, Anthony?”

He shrugged, looked around the room. He nodded to himself finally, as if coming to a decision after an internal conference.

“Tonight. She was there again tonight.”

Ford shook his head in disbelief. “And you’re just getting to this now?”

“I didn’t know …” he said, his voice trailing off miserably.

“What did she want?”

“She didn’t come to see me.”

“Who’d she come to see?” asked Ford, feeling like he was going to have to wrestle every last bit of information from this kid.

“Eleanor Ross.”

“And coincidentally, now Eleanor Ross is dead. And the twins missing.”

Anthony nodded.

“What time did she come?”

“Around nine-thirty. Just after I came on duty.”

“So you called up to Eleanor and told her Geneva was here.”

“She said Eleanor was expecting her. That she was holding a paycheck for Geneva, and that she still had a key.”

“So you didn’t call up?”

Anthony hesitated a moment and then shook his head.

“And what time did she leave?”

“I never saw her leave. I thought she was still up there, maybe playing with the twins.”

Ford turned it over in his mind. The basement entrance had been sealed and was no longer a way in or out. The back door, he knew, was attached to a fire alarm.

“Let me just ask you, Anthony,” said Ford, reaching. “Did the fire alarm go off tonight for any reason?”

“Yeah, that thing is always acting up,” he said with a laugh and a shake of his head like they were talking about a mischievous child. Then it dawned on him. “Oh … yeah.”

“What time was that?”

“I guess about an hour before you arrived.”

“Anything else, Anthony? And I mean
anything
.”

Anthony shook his head slowly, his eyes telling Ford that he was searching the limited database of his brain. “Nope,” he said finally. “Can I go now?”

“Did you tell any of this to Peter Rawls when he talked to you?”

Anthony shook his head. Ford glared at him and Anthony seemed to shrink into himself.

“With missing kids, every hour, shit, every minute counts. You may just cost those kids their lives. I hope you can live with that, Anthony.”