The Black Widow (16 page)

“I’m already in my late thirties.”

“So? Your mother had you when she was in her thirties.”

“But she couldn’t have any more kids after me, so . . .”

“Didn’t,
” her father said. “Not
couldn’t
.”

That gave her pause. She’d always assumed her parents subscribed to the Catholic Church’s Natural Family Planning teachings, as her many—
many
—aunts and uncles did, which had resulted in dozens of cousins. If her parents hadn’t had five or six or more kids, Sully figured, it was probably because they couldn’t. And perhaps, hereditarily, why she herself had so much trouble conceiving.

She was wrong. Her father told her that she was always meant to be an only child. He also confessed that he’d been hoping for a son, because he wanted someone to follow in his law enforcement tradition.

“This was before all that women’s lib stuff happened,” he reminded her. “But your mom—she was always ahead of the times. She said you could be whatever you wanted to be.”

“Or whatever
you
wanted me to be,” Sully said with a grin, remembering all those childhood nights spent up past her bedtime, curled up on his lap watching
Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, Adam-12 . . .

She never wanted to be anything but a cop. She got her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from John Jay, enrolled in the police academy, and worked her way from rookie patrol cop to detective with the Missing Persons Squad in Manhattan.

Now, she’s exactly where she always wanted—and planned—to be.

Generally speaking, that is.

In this moment—on her way to inform the mother of a teenage runaway that her daughter’s body was just pulled from litter-strewn swampland in Staten Island—she wouldn’t mind being someplace else.

“On a tropical beach with a frozen piña colada,” she tells her partner, Stockton Barnes. “How about you?”

“Where would I be if I could be someplace else right this second?” He glances over his shoulder to check for traffic as they merge onto the northbound FDR, heading toward Harlem, where the runaway’s family lives.

“You can be anyplace at all,” Sully tells him. “Anyplace in the world.”

“I’d best be on that beach with you, Gingersnap, holding up an umbrella and coating you in sunscreen,” he says with a grin. “ ’Cause with that lily white skin o’ yours, you gonna fry up crisper and redder than bacon.”

“Again with the jokes about my pasty complexion?” She rolls her eyes. “You know, I could have a great tan if I ever had a day off.”

“Yeah, and I could turn white as a sheet if I ever ran into a ghost. But none of those things is gonna happen, so . . .”

“So it is what it is.”

“It is what it is.”

That’s their mantra. They say it to each other a lot.

Some days are harder than others. This is one of them.

Though the vast majority of missing persons cases involve juveniles, nearly all are solved sooner or later, and very few end with homicide.

Sully sighs, gazing out the window at the sun-splashed buildings that line the East River, thinking about the mother of the dead girl. What is she doing right now? Is she sipping her coffee and wondering whether today might be the day her daughter comes home to her? Or did she lose hope long ago? Did she wake up wondering whether this will be the day two detectives come to the door with the worst news a parent can hear . . .

“I just hope she’s not alone when we get there,” Stockton says, and she knows that his thoughts have taken the same path. That happens a lot.

“She’s a single mother with three younger kids. It’s better if she
is
alone,” Sully points out, wanting to spare the dead girl’s siblings the ordeal of witnessing a tragic moment that will leave an indelible mark.

You think about that a lot, when you’ve done this job long enough. You prepare yourself for the role you’re required to play in what will undoubtedly become the worst memory in someone’s life. Sometimes it’s a stranger who answers the door to the bearers of bad news. That’s hard enough. But when it’s someone you’ve gotten to know over the past few months, as is the case with this particular mother . . .

That’s brutal. As a cop, you learn to compartmentalize, but you can never fully disconnect yourself from the emotions that go with the territory.

Stockton has fallen silent again, but Sully knows he’s still thinking about the mother and the task at hand.

Detectives are naturally intuitive; reading your partner’s mind is another thing you learn after enough time on the job. So is finishing each other’s sentences—not that Stockton appreciates it when she does that.

Physically, the two of them are polar opposites. He’s tall, beefy, and black; she’s a slightly built redhead who is, as Stockton likes to say, “whiter than white.” But they have far more in common with each other than either ever did with their ex-spouses.

A fellow detective back at the precinct had asked her—when she and Stockton were simultaneously going through their divorces—if they were romantically involved.

Sully found that laughable. So did Stockton, when she told him, though he feigned disappointment.

“What, you’re not into me?”

“Are you kidding? I made the mistake of marrying a fellow cop. You think I’m going to date one now?”

“Ditto, Gingersnap,” he said, and they slapped palms in agreement.

Stockton is her partner, best friend, big brother, super hero . . . but not her love interest.

Who the hell has time for a love interest with this crazy job?

As if to punctuate the thought, her cell phone rings.

She takes it out, sees that it’s the precinct, and answers it the way she always does—precinct or not: “Yeah. Leary.”

The voice on the other end—Hakim Aziza, a fellow Missing Persons detective—wastes no time on preamble. “You know the Fuentes and Delgado case?”

“Do I
know
it?”

She’s only spent the last few months trying to figure out whether the disappearances of two local businessmen were random coincidence, or whether they met with foul play—never an easy determination when you have no body and no evidence pointing in that direction.

Most adults who vanish do so deliberately—though the loved ones they leave behind will often insist they’d never voluntarily walk away from their lives. Sully has discovered plenty of grown men and women alive and well, often having run off with another woman or man. And while you’d rather close a case with a live body than a dead one, it’s never a pleasure to tell someone their spouse abandoned them by choice. Nor is it easy to stick with protocol and refuse to disclose the person’s whereabouts. All you can say is that they’ve been found alive, and leave the loved ones to draw their own conclusions.

Jake Fuentes was single and lived alone. When he was reported missing back in December, his family—like so many others—was convinced something terrible must have happened to him. His mother sobbed that her son would never miss Christmas at home with the family; his sister insisted that he would never disappoint his nieces.

“Jake had promised to take them ice skating at Rockefeller Center so they could see the tree on Saturday,” she said, clutching a soggy Kleenex, “and then he was going to take them shopping at the American Girl Store. He spoiled my girls. He doted on them. He never would have taken off like this.”

Her words rang true, but then . . .

They usually do, when families are talking about the missing person who could never, would never . . .

“I just know something terrible happened to Jake,” his sister said worriedly.

At the time, Sully doubted it.

But a few months later, when Tomas Delgado disappeared, she started to wonder. He, too, was single and lived alone.

The two men had other things in common, too. Both were handsome Hispanic men in their thirties. One was a residential architect, the other a civil engineer. Both disappeared on Friday nights, exactly three months apart. Both had sent e-mails to their bosses claiming they needed time off for family emergencies that later proved to be lies.

Sitting up straighter in her seat, Sully asks Hakim, “What about Delgado and Fuentes? Did one of them turn up?”

“No. But there’s another one.”

“Another one missing?”

“Yeah, and he fits the bill. Works for a construction firm, and his supervisor just called to say he fell off the face of the earth two weeks ago—apparently, on a Friday night, exactly three months after Delgado. His name is Carlos Diaz.”

That Gaby very likely has a date tonight shouldn’t have surprised Ben, much less bothered him.

Or so he’s been reminding himself ever since he reached out to see if they could get together and she responded that she’s busy.

If it weren’t a date, she would have told him about her plans. She’s never been one to skimp on details. Back when they were married, they’d had a couple of minor arguments due to her inability to tell someone she couldn’t do something without offering at least one solid reason why.

“You don’t owe people an explanation,” he would tell her, “because then you’re giving them an opening to talk you into something you’d rather not do.”

Most of the time, “people” referred to Gaby’s cousin Jacinda. Ben always liked her well enough, and they got along for the most part—unless she tried to steal the reins from his wife.

In truth, Gaby was more than capable of keeping Jacinda in her place. She’d been doing it her entire life. For her, Jaz was big sister, best friend, and cousin all rolled into one. But sometimes Jaz’s pushiness wore thin.

Or maybe Ben was slightly jealous of the bond between the two women.

“You just want me all to yourself,” Gaby would say whenever Jaz tried to talk her into changing plans to spend time with her instead of at home with her husband.

“There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re my wife. And if you tell someone you can’t do something, you can’t do it. Just say you’re busy and leave it at that. End of story.”

This morning, when he’d impulsively reached out to see if Gaby wanted to go to the beach and say hello to some of their old lifeguard friends, she told him that she was at brunch with her cousin. But when he asked her to go out tonight instead, she replied only that she was busy.

Not with her cousin. Not with work, or a friend. Just . . .

Busy
.

Yeah—she has a date. And why shouldn’t she?

For that matter, why shouldn’t
he
?

It’s been a few days since he signed into his InTune account. But now he grabs his phone, clicks on the app, and goes to the log-in page. Having saved his user name and password, all he has to do is hit Enter to access his page.

Still—something stops him.

Do you really want to date someone else?

The answer:
No
.

Now that he’s seen Gaby again, he only wants to reclaim what they once had together. Whether that’s even within the realm of possibility is unclear, but he’ll know soon enough.

If it is, he’ll delete this online dating account and focus every bit of energy on starting over with his ex-wife.

If it isn’t . . .

I still don’t want to date anyone else.

But then, he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life alone either.

Okay. If it turns out that Gaby isn’t interested in a future with him, he’ll force himself to keep trying to meet someone who is.

With a satisfied nod, he closes out of InTune and is about to put the phone aside when it vibrates with an incoming text.

Gaby.

It reads simply:
Still free tonight?

It’s been a hell of a day for Sully.

Technically, it began at midnight, when she and Stockton were on a stakeout that lasted into the early morning hours. She then crawled into bed at home just before dawn, only to be awakened by the crash of a cymbal: her upstairs neighbor’s son practicing the drums at eight o’clock.

Shortly afterward came the phone call about the teenage runaway’s remains turning up in Staten Island. Not fun. She and Stockton had to notify the mother that her daughter had been found, comforting the poor woman when she collapsed in grief, and calming her distraught younger children, who were all at home when they showed up.

As always, they assured the family that they would do everything possible to find the person who’d killed their loved one.

After that ordeal came the usual endless paperwork. Finally, back at the station, they were briefed on the latest missing persons case.

Carlos Diaz had last been seen fifteen days ago, on a Friday night, when he left his office after work. His supervisor at the construction firm reported that he’d sent an e-mail later that night saying there had been a death in his family and he would be out for at least a week.

There hadn’t been a death in his family, though. Not recently anyway. His father is long dead and his mother and her boyfriend are alive and well in Central America.

Jake Fuentes and Tomas Delgado had also last been seen on Friday evenings—one in March, the other last December—and had sent similar e-mails. Both were known to use dating Web sites, and Jake had mentioned to a coworker the night he disappeared that he had a date with a new woman he met online.

“It’s not unusual for a single guy in Manhattan to have an online dating profile,” Sully reminds Stockton now, as they drive from the precinct toward the midtown apartment of Ivy Sacks, the woman who reported Carlos Diaz missing.

Sully is behind the wheel this time, while Stockton wolfs down the sandwich he’d bought at a deli right before they got into the car. It’s his second lunch. He’d somehow consumed the first right after they saw the photographs of the corpse in the Staten Island swamp. The man has an iron stomach.

“
I
don’t have an online profile,” he points out, wiping crumbs from his mustache with a paper napkin.

“Maybe you should.”