Strong 03 - Twice (35 page)

Anthony started to blubber again. Ford was old school. He really
hated it when men cried. He turned his back on the man and walked out the door.

“But—” Anthony was protesting as Ford closed the door behind him. He turned the camera and audio recorder off from the switch that looked like a thermostat outside the door.

Returning to his office, he called Peter Rawls and told him about Annabelle Hodge. Rawls sounded excited by the news of a suspect and he hung up the phone quickly. Then Ford called Piselli and told him to make sure that Rawls got anything from their files on Annabelle that he needed. He thought about the kids for a minute, remembering how they’d clasped hands during the interview with Irma Fox. And it made him think of his Katie and Jimmy. He thought about little Nicky Warren watching his mother shoot his father. He felt a rush of anger at the way kids get crushed when adults fail to protect them.

He leaned back in his chair, absently tapping an impatient staccato on the desk, trying to strategize his next move. His fingers touched manila.

Sitting on his desk was nothing short of a miracle. DNA evidence analysis takes weeks, sometimes months, especially in New York. Now, with all the cold cases being reopened, death row appeals, you’re lucky to get your results at all. But Ford had a few friends, and the Ross case was a high priority. Still, he was surprised to see an envelope from the lab on his desk. In spite of the lecture he’d delivered to Lydia Strong, he
had
sent her Milky Way wrapper, with the hairs from the Tad Jenson murder scene, up to the lab.

“Well, goddamn,” he said softly, scanning the report. “It’s a match.”

He’d sat there at his desk, working out what this might mean. It didn’t mean James Ross was still alive, necessarily. They didn’t have a DNA sample on him to compare to the hair and the wrapper. Legally, it only meant that someone at the scene of the Tad Jenson
murder had also been in the basement of the Ross house in Haunted. Ford picked up the phone on his desk. When he didn’t get Jeff, he left a message.

“Jeff, it’s Ford. Listen, Lydia was right. That DNA evidence from the Milky Way bar links whoever attacked her in the Ross home with someone present at the Jenson scene. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m heading up to Haunted. This can’t wait till tomorrow, especially with the twins missing. I’ll keep you posted.”

T
he ringing of her cell phone woke her finally. She glanced at the clock and saw that it was after two. It took her a few seconds to orient herself … home alone, Jeffrey not back, phone ringing … where’s the phone? She found it in her jacket and saw on the caller ID that it was Jeffrey.

“Where are you?” she answered.

“Hello, Lydia.”

She let silence be her answer as dread swelled within her. His voice had a nasal quality, a kind of raspy edge to it that she recognized even though she’d heard him speak only a few times. The room seemed to spin around her.

“You don’t have to answer. I know you know who this is, old friend.”

She didn’t say anything because she couldn’t. Fear had lodged itself in her throat like a chicken bone.

“It’s been too long. We
must
get together, Lydia. It’ll be a party. Your beloved Jeffrey and your friend and guardian Dax have already joined me. It wouldn’t be the same without you. But, darling, it’s a private party. Do not contact your friend Ford or Agent Goban. Come alone, come as you are, and come quickly.”

“You don’t have them,” she managed, clinging to denial. This wasn’t happening. It was too much like a nightmare. “I don’t believe you.”

Her mind raced. Wasn’t this phone tapped? And then she remembered
that no, only the land line was trapped. The cell transmissions weren’t always monitored.

“We’ve been through so much together. Do you think I’d lie to you?”

When she said nothing, his voice changed from mocking, crooning, to razor-sharp.

“Think about it. Do you really think you’d be alone right now if I didn’t? For such well-armed, well-trained men, it was really ridiculously easy.”

“Where are you?” she said, suppressing a wave of nausea.

He told her where he wanted her to meet him.

“Remember, Lydia: One phone call from you to anyone and the party is over. Do you understand me?”

“I do.”

The line went dead. Lydia waited, blood rushing in her ears, throat dry as sand, heart thumping. She waited to wake up in her bed, Jeffrey breathing beside her. When she didn’t, she ran upstairs to their bedroom. She pulled off her shirt and pulled on a black ribbed Calvin Klein sweater of Jeffrey’s. She traded the yoga pants she was wearing for comfort, since her abdomen was still swollen from surgery, for a pair of Levi’s. She unlocked the safe in the floor and removed a Smith and Wesson .38 Special and a shoulder holster.

Downstairs, she took the Glock from her bag and stuffed it in the back of her jeans, donned her leather jacket and a pair of soft black leather motorcycle boots at the door, and she was gone. Adrenaline had taken care of her pain and fatigue, for the time being at least.

H
e recognized the smell, but he just couldn’t see through the blackness that surrounded him; it was a copious dark in which not even a pinprick of light had survived. He could feel the space, cold and concrete, damp. As he fought to hold on to consciousness, his head nothing but a house of pain, he knew something was not as it should be. He just couldn’t remember what. There was an odd tightness in his limbs. He was having difficulty breathing and he felt as if the room were spinning … or maybe his head was spinning. He tried to piece together the last events of his memory, but they eluded him, like the fading images of a dream.

There was a low groan to the left of him. And in hearing it, memory came rushing back like a kick in the teeth.

He’d taken the call from Dax and rushed to meet him, uneasiness buzzing in his subconscious. Something about Dax’s voice, something about the way he’d said Jeff’s name. Normally, his accent seemed to drag the word out, imbuing it with a rising and falling of tone, like
Jay-eh-f
. There was usually something pleasant about his tone, even when it was gruff, something musical and comforting about that Aussie accent. But that night, he’d seemed terse, his accent strained. If it hadn’t been for the caller ID announcing his number, Jeffrey might not have recognized Dax’s voice at all. But he’d ignored the alarm bells ringing, told himself that Dax was just excited and in a rush.

There are a few significant ways in which life is not like movies.
Here, bound in the darkness, scared and disoriented, Jeffrey thought of one of those ways. In the real world, sometimes people disappear and no one who loves them ever knows what happened to them. Like the West Village couple who were expecting friends for dinner one fall evening a couple of years back. When their friends arrived and rang the buzzer, no answer. After waiting around for an hour or so, they figured that there had been a misunderstanding about date and time and left. But three days later, the superintendent lets NYPD into that apartment, after numerous calls from family and friends, and the table is set for entertaining, food is on the stove and in the oven; their shoes are by the door. It was as if something had sucked them from their life still in their stocking feet.

There was a dispute between the couple—middle-aged, childless, working good jobs, the woman in publishing, the man a public school teacher—and their landlord. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment that, if they vacated, could be rented for four times what they were paying for it, having lived there since the late seventies. For weeks there were news stories, posters all over the city. Then nothing; they faded from the city’s memory. Jeffrey remembered the maddening feeling that they wouldn’t ever be found, that no one would ever be certain if they were alive or dead, or what they might have endured in their last few hours on this planet. A life interrupted, no reason why.

Their disappearances coincided within a few weeks of police finding dismembered limbs on the Jersey side of the Henry Hudson. A couple of legs, some arms, a hand. Thought to be the work of the Russian mob, and in conjunction with allegations that the landlord had connections with the same organization, police thought initially that the mystery had been solved, as least as far as their end was concerned. Turns out the limbs belonged to someone else. Never identified. Another unsolved mystery … another miserable end.

He thought about Lydia now, feeling his heart begin pounding in his chest with fear for her, fear for himself. Where was she? Where
was Jed McIntyre? Was this his plan, to keep Dax and Jeff locked up until he’d finished with her? He struggled against his bindings, which felt as if they must be duct tape. Panic was a swelling tide within him and he tried to keep it from choking him. He’d failed her so many times in the last few months, failed to protect her, failed to protect their child. He could barely stand the thoughts that were racing through his mind. Again the groan, bringing him back to himself.

“Dax?”

“Why the fuck did you come, man? That was the worst Australian accent I’d ever heard,” said the darkness. “Christ, you’re stupid.”

“I saw your number on the caller ID,” he said lamely, hating himself for ignoring his instincts. Fucked by technology.

“He took my phone,” said Dax miserably, somewhere down and to the left.

The other way in which life differed significantly from the movies was that much of it is a series of stupid mistakes, unplotted, unplanned, reactionary.

When he’d pulled up to the warehouse in the meatpacking district, he first saw the Rover, parked, headlights on, driver’s door standing open. Next, he’d seen Dax lying face down in a pool of blood. Forgetting every moment of training he’d ever had, not even thinking for a second who could be lurking in the darkness, he’d jumped from the Kompressor and run to help his friend. He saw too late that Dax’s mouth was gagged, his eyes open and wild with warning. Out of the corner of his vision, he saw a small form emerge from the darkness. In a surreal moment, a midget raised a blackjack and nailed him in the temple.

“Was there a midget?” Jeffrey asked Dax.

“Fucking midget,” answered Dax. “I’m going to kill that little turd.”

“What’s your situation right now?”

“I’m in trouble, man,” he said, his voice thick and slow, as if
he were just barely holding on to consciousness. “That little dwarf sliced the back of my calves. I think I’m missing some teeth. I taste blood. I’m bound, can’t move.”

“Shit,” said Jeff, his stomach hollowing out. “Hang in there, buddy. It’s going to be okay.” Panic was replaced by a lethargy, a feeling of desperate hopelessness.

That was the other way in which life was so different from fiction. Not everyone always gets out alive.

L
ydia felt an odd calm as she walked down the cold empty street, a light snowfall crunching beneath her feet. The lamps created circles of light in a dark winter sky and the snowflakes that fell there glittered like stardust. On one level, she was scared—terrified, of course. That part of herself seemed to exist beneath a surface of soundproof glass, banging, screaming, but unheard. Mostly, she was numb. She had the sense that every moment of her life since the death of her mother had led her to this moment. She thought of what Julian Ross had said about the music written for her, the notes one chose to play or not. But Lydia wasn’t quite as passive as that. She had written this symphony for all of them and she recognized it now. Hadn’t she in a way forced the hand of fate? If she hadn’t lived the life she had, chasing monsters, pulling back the curtain on evil, would she be here now? Would Dax and Jeffrey be in danger … or worse? She knew as a fact that they would all be somewhere else this moment. She couldn’t say if it would be a better situation or a worse one, though it was a safe bet it couldn’t be much worse. But they wouldn’t be here.

If she hadn’t written
With a Vengeance
, the book about Jed McIntyre and his crimes, he may never even have thought of her again while he rotted away in the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane. If she and Jeffrey hadn’t gotten into that mess in Miami, Jed McIntyre would still be locked away. She took a sharply cold breath of air into her lungs and stopped herself. This was a mental spiral that could only lead to a loss of focus. And she needed to
be focused right now. She could self-flagellate later, when they were all safe.

She didn’t have far to go. Just to the abandoned subway station at Prince and Lafayette. She was to walk down the stairs and wait at the gate. She thought of the network of tunnels Dax and Jeffrey had described to her. She was about to see them for herself. She paused at the top of the stairs and wondered, not for the first time, if she should call Ford or Agent Goban. Somehow she didn’t quite believe that McIntyre had the ability to know what she was doing, that he was watching her, or had some way to listen to her phone; but she was reluctant to take the chance. As if in answer to her musings, the phone in her pocket rang. She retrieved it and put it to her ear.

“Well,” said Jed McIntyre. “What are we waiting for?”

J
effrey was sitting on some kind of rickety wooden chair, each ankle bound to a chair leg, each wrist bound to its arms. Dax was gnawing at the binding on Jeffrey’s ankle like a rat. Since Dax was tied and on his belly, that was the only binding he could reach. Occasionally he would stop and spit, make a noise of distaste. Jeffrey slowly moved his foot and ankle forward, trying to put stress on the tape. They didn’t seem to be making much progress, until suddenly Jeffrey had more freedom of movement. The hope gave him strength and after a few minutes, he snapped the ankle free.

“Now what?” said Dax. “What are we going to do with this free ankle? Kick our way out?”

He had a point.

“Knock yourself over,” suggested Dax. “And I’ll try to get the bindings on your hands.”

Jeffrey began to rock himself and eventually toppled to the side, landing hard on cold concrete.