The Black Widow (18 page)

Everything. You lose everything.

She lives paycheck to paycheck. Her credit cards are maxed out and she’s already a month behind on her mortgage. The bank will take her co-op apartment and she’ll have nowhere else to go. Her parents are dead, and her younger brother is perpetually unemployed and currently crashing on someone’s couch out in Jersey. Seth can’t stay on her couch, because he’s sensitive to cat dander and fur. He actually had the nerve to tell her that she should get rid of Garfield and Snoopy so he could move in with her for a while.

“Get rid of them? They’re . . .”

“They’re not family,” her brother said flatly. “I am.”

But they were family. And when she tried to explain that, he told her she was going to become a crazy, lonely old cat lady someday.

“Ms. Sacks?” Detective Leary prompts.

“Yes?”

“The e-mail . . . ?”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I have no idea who might have written it,” Ivy says, rolling the empty plastic bottle back and forth, back and forth, between her sweaty, shaky palms.

With Señor Don Gato occasionally getting underfoot, Alex prowls like a caged wildcat from living room to kitchen and back again, phone in hand.

Every time she completes another round trip, she checks her latest InTune account.

Every time she looks, there’s still no response from Ben.

It’s been hours now since she first stumbled across his profile and realized she’d discovered someone who not only possesses the necessary genetic traits, but who shares the same awful sorrow that’s eaten away at her soul like a battery acid drip.

Like her, Ben is desperate to hold his child in his arms again.

No, he didn’t write that in his profile.

He didn’t have to. She understands him. Just as he understands her—or at least, he will, when they meet.

In all these years she’s been trying to reclaim her lost son, she never once considered that she might actually be able to have the whole package again. Not just a child, but a husband. A family.

Ben would complete the image depicted in all the crayon drawings on the fridge: smiling stick figure mother and father, flanking smaller stick figure boy and girl children. They were standing in front of a square house with a pointed roof and two chimneys and distinctive red oval windows on either side of the door. The house was surrounded by trees: puffs of scribbled green above parallel vertical brown lines. Lots and lots of trees . . .

Because it’s in the woods.

It’s the perfect place for a dream house,
mi amor.
Peace and quiet . . . no one to disturb us for days, weeks on end . . .

He was right. It was perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Those stick figure children didn’t bounce from one foster home to another, always hoping the next would be populated by a family that would want them to stay forever. The older she grew, the less likely it became that she’d find parents and siblings to call her own. She would have to create a family as an adult. She would have to be the mommy, not the little girl.

Her dream came true—for a while. They had everything, and it would eventually include a house that looked almost exactly like the one in the pictures, in a wooded area far upstate. He’d modified the design many times, adding details, removing details that she didn’t want, like the front porch.

“Why not? I love porches.”

“I hate them.” She shook her head, thinking of the gingerbread foster house of her youth and of his mother’s house down the street. Sometimes, in her mind’s eye, the two were interchangeable.

He erased the porch from his sketches. He wanted her to be happy.

At last the dream house was built. They didn’t live there full-time, but they went as often as they could. Carmen was the daddy, and she was the mommy, and Dante was the little boy, and . . .

And then I had none of it. Not the daddy or the little boy or the house or . . .

But today, in a flash, she saw that she could have everything again.

After finding Ben, she went back into her own account settings and changed her profile from her latest pseudonym to her real name. That’s how certain she was that she was about to make a lasting connection.

She then carefully crafted a private message to Ben. After hitting Send, she sat back and waited for him to respond.

And waited.

And waited.

“Where is he?” Alex asks Gato, who slinks off into the shadows in response, as if he doesn’t want to be held accountable for Ben’s actions—or inaction.

She’d been expecting him to get back to her immediately, perhaps even to text or call. She’d provided her number. Surely he’d recognize their innate connection. He’d probably want to see her right away—tonight, he’d say, if possible.

And of course she’d agree to meet him, even though it’s not the right time of the month.

What they have is real. With Ben, there will be no duplicity; no need for the basement dungeon that’s been scrubbed clean of blood and already awaits its next occupant.

But the phone has remained silent in her clenched hand, and each time she checks her account in-box, there’s no new activity.

She went to the basement and worked out vigorously on her weight machines, building strength, building muscle. Then she tried to rest, thinking it would be a good idea to get some sleep, in case they got together tonight. But now, when she crawls into bed, her body refuses to relax and her thoughts keep going round and round and round . . .

Finally, frustrated, seething, she gets up again to pace the quiet house as the sun sinks lower in the western sky beyond the windows, casting increasingly long shadows on the hardwoods and the Oriental carpet on the living room floor.

It’s looking rather threadbare, Alex notices. It was worn even when it graced her mother-in-law’s house down the street. But Carmen insisted on moving it here after the old woman died.

“I love it. It reminds me of my mother.”

It reminded Alex of his mother, too.

That’s why she hated it, and hated the house. Carmen actually suggested that they move in there after his mother died, saying it had more space and more charm. Alex wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted him to sell it, but he couldn’t let it go and so it sat empty.

She paces back to the kitchen.

Again she checks her phone to see if Ben has sent a message.

No.

Her jaw tightens.

Back to the living room, and Carmen’s baby picture.

Remembering the final confrontation with her mother-in-law, she feels her blood beginning to boil as if it happened just yesterday.

She checks her phone.

No message.

A tension headache plays at her temples. She tucks her phone into her pocket for a moment and stands still, squeezing her eyes shut and pressing her fingertips into the throbbing hollows alongside her brows.

If only she could rest. If only she could crawl into bed and forget . . .

When she first met Carmen’s mother, she mistakenly believed she’d found someone who would love and nurture her, the way her own mother should have.

Alex never knew anything at all about her biological parents, who had abandoned her as an infant. According to the foster agency’s records, she’d been found in a church, wrapped in a pink blanket with a note pinned to it. She still has the blanket and the note.

Every time she allows herself to look at the yellowed paper, the handwritten two-line message chills her to the bone.

It did, however, contain the one thing her parents—most likely, her mother—had given her: a first name. But not a last. The sympathetic but unimaginative hospital nurses provided her with that: Jones.

She was placed in foster care. You’d think she’d have stood a good chance of being adopted somewhere along the way—a healthy white baby. A few times, she came close, but something always went wrong. The older she got, the more that saddened her, and angered her, too.

“You poor little thing,” her mother-in-law said the first time Alex met her and told her life story. The woman wrapped her arms around her just like a real mom would have, right there in the middle of a busy Manhattan restaurant, and Alex felt as though she’d come home at last.

But as time went on, it turned out she was wrong about her mother-in-law. The woman was just like all the others: the foster parents who would take her in for a little while, then harden their hearts against her; the foster siblings who would befriend her at first, only to turn their backs on her, calling her crazy.

Carmen thought she was just imagining that his mother, too, had become the enemy.

“She loves you!” he’d claim, and point out some sickening sweet thing the woman had said to her in his presence.

He refused to believe that his mother was only nice to Alex when he was around, dropping the act whenever he wasn’t. She didn’t even tell him the whole, horrible truth: that his mother was trying to take Alex’s rightful place with both Carmen and Dante—a fact that didn’t become apparent even to Alex right away.

Once she figured it out, it all made sense in a sick, twisted way: the fact that her relationship with her mother-in-law was fine until she got pregnant the first time. The fact that her mother-in-law started coming around more and more often after Dante was born, even when Carmen was traveling.

Especially
when Carmen was traveling. Then, the woman would visit at all hours of the day and night, even wanting to sleep over.

“I feel like she’s spying on me,” she complained to Carmen, who assured her that it, too, was her imagination.

Those words made her heart sink. She’d heard them so often in her childhood.

This wasn’t her imagination. It was really happening. And Carmen didn’t believe her.

Alex’s gaze falls on the framed baby picture of Carmen on the end table, presented to her at the hospital after Dante’s birth.

“El niño mira justo como mi Carmen,”
her mother-in-law had crooned over the baby.

She’d also said—in Spanish, knowing Alex couldn’t understand, “You’re a real Daddy’s boy, aren’t you, sweetie pie?” and, “Like father, like son.”

Carmen had to translate for her. He did so wearing an uncomfortable expression.

“Carmen’s not a Daddy’s boy, though,” Alex couldn’t help telling her mother-in-law, resting a hand—still bruised from the IV needles—on her husband’s arm. “He’s a
mamalón
,” she added darkly.

That she—who spoke very little Spanish and didn’t care to learn—had opted to use their own disparaging term for Mama’s boy, didn’t go over well with her husband or his mother.

Oh, how she came to loathe that woman. If she and Carmen hadn’t moved to Cherry Street, everything would have been okay.

Seething, she turns away from the framed photo to pace back to the kitchen.

“You go ahead. Go up to bed. I’ll take the baby.” She can hear her mother-in-law’s accented English, can still see her smug face on that last night, above Dante’s fuzzy little head as the woman took him and cradled him to her own breast.

“He’s my baby. I’ll take care of him.”

“No, you should get some rest . . .”

Massaging her forehead, she remembers how she’d crawled into bed and tried to sleep. She couldn’t.

How well she recalls the satisfaction that came later, though. After the sun went down and her mother-in-law had gone back home to sleep.

At the mere memory, the vise of pain seems to loosen its grip on her skull.

Only slightly, though. Just enough to remind her that relief is an eventual possibility.

If only she could sleep now.

If only she had something in her medicine cabinet that would knock her out and allow her to escape for a little while.

If she had it, she would take it. It’s not as if she’s pregnant. It’s not as if she can even try to get pregnant just yet. Her fertile time is over a week away. By the time she’s ready to conceive, any medication she takes tonight will be out of her system, right?

What if it’s not, though? She would never put anything toxic into her body that might harm the baby. That’s how this all began, years ago . . .

But she doesn’t want to think about that right now.

If only she could unleash all this pent-up frustration and fury on someone who deserves it, like her mother-in-law did. If only . . .

Her eyes snap open.

No. That’s a bad idea.

Now isn’t the time to take risks. Not when she’s so close to reclaiming what should have been hers all along. A family, a
real
family . . .

Contemplating the possibilities, Alex reaches for her phone again. If Ben responded to her message, then she can forget all about this crazy spark of an idea.

But he hasn’t.

She can see Don Gato’s glowing, disapproving green gaze watching her from the shadows in the corner.

“Don’t worry,” she tells the cat. “I’ve got this.”

Again, she paces.

But the idea continues to take shape in her head, and like the tension headache, it seems to grow more persistent with every step as the dusky shadows grow longer on the floor and Carmen’s own words beat an endless refrain . . .

Some things just don’t feel right until the sun goes down
.

Chapter 8

Just a few decades ago, freight trains were still running along this elevated stretch on Manhattan’s west side. Back then the busy neighborhoods below—Chelsea and the Meatpacking District—were far more seedy than trendy. Now those streets are lined with chic restaurants and boutiques, and the train tracks above have been transformed into the Highline, a garden promenade with breathtaking views of the Hudson River to the west and the skyline to the north, east, and south.

At dusk, strolling hand in hand with Ben, Gaby gazes at the pink-and-orange-streaked sky above a river dotted with white sailboats. The fat setting sun casts a silvery glow over the water and the towering skyline to the east, glinting on sleek glass and steel facades yet to be artificially illuminated at this hour from within.

“Isn’t it amazing how when you’re up here, you can almost forget where you are?”

Ben nods. “That’s what I love about the Highline. The city seems a million miles away right now.”

So does the past, Gaby thinks, and their problems.

If only they could stay up here forever. The walkway is lined with tall grasses that sway in the breeze off the water, and vibrant blooms that attract fluttering butterflies and fat bumblebees. Yes, the lush landscape tickles Gaby’s nose and makes her sneeze from time to time, but she doesn’t care. Not today.

The mad urban cacophony seems to have fallen away; traffic below seems oddly muted, along with the voices of other pedestrians and even their own footsteps along the path.

It reminds Gaby of the beach where they met years ago: another enchanted sanctuary in the midst of a vast, scarred city teeming with humanity and peril. Some might argue that Orchard Beach—the Bronx Riviera, Jaz always called it, with a roll of her dark eyes—is no paradise. But when the city is all you’ve ever known, and you’re young, and in love . . .

As that first summer drew to a close, Gaby accepted that her feelings for Ben were more than platonic. Their first date lasted until well past dawn. She remembers how they snuck back down to the beach—“their beach”—after breakfast at the diner, where he teased her about her appetite. They sat on the sand, legs outstretched, her back against his chest and his arms wrapped around her, and listened to the water lapping at the shore as the first pink light of a new day began to glow in the September night sky.

Today it’s the last light.

But summer has just begun.

“Look.” Ben points to another couple vacating a pair of wide wooden chairs that are pushed right next to each other. “Want to sit and watch the sun rise?”

“You mean set.”

“
Set
and watch the sun rise?”

She laughs. “No!
Sit
and watch the sun
set
. It’s not rising.”

“Oh—right. Sorry.” He smiles and squeezes her hand.

Clearly, his thoughts meandered along the same path hers have taken to the past.

Does he, too, remember the promise of that first sunrise they watched together? Does he remember how they kissed for hours? Just kissed, and talked, and kissed some more, because they had all the time in the world . . .

Or so they thought.

With no space between the chairs, they have to walk around to opposite sides in order to sit. He gives her hand a final squeeze before letting go.

“This was a good idea,” she tells him as she settles into her seat, facing the water.

“Sitting down after all that walking?”

“That, too. But I meant coming up here in the first place.”

“Not much of a date so far.”

“So this is a date, then?” she asks.

“Did you not think it was?”

“No. I thought it was. I hoped so, anyway.”

He smiles. “Good. I was thinking of a movie, or a museum—but the weather is perfect and I know you can never allow yourself to be inside on days like this.”

“No, I can’t, thanks to Abuela.” She pauses. “You know all my little quirks, don’t you?”

“You know all of mine, too.”

“Pretty much. Unless you’ve developed some new ones since . . .” She leaves the sentence unfinished. It’s much more pleasant, when dating one’s ex-husband, not to mention the divorce.

Dating one’s ex-husband . . .

What am I doing?
she wonders, not for the first time since she canceled her plans with Ryan and Ben showed up on her doorstep with roses.

To his credit, he didn’t ask what her original plans had been, or why she was suddenly free. No, he just seemed happy to be with her, no questions asked.

As she put the yellow roses into a vase, he suggested that they go for a walk.

A
long
walk. They covered a good fifty blocks along Manhattan’s west side before even reaching the Highline. Short uptown-downtown blocks, but still quite a distance.

She barely noticed, though. As they walked, they talked, poking in and out of a few stores along the way and stopping to buy
palatas
from a bodega: chocolate with banana for him; guava for her.

“The usual,” Ben said with a laugh. “I guess some things never change, do they?”

Some things don’t.

As for the rest . . .

So far they’ve managed not to talk about any of it.

Now, though, watching the sun sink lower in the summer sky, she has to bite her tongue to keep from asking what his life has been like without her. Not in terms of his professional and recreational and social life—they’ve covered all that. Well, everything except the dating.

But she finds herself wanting to know how he’s been feeling, what he’s been thinking, whether he’s had regrets.

“Look at that cloud,” he says. “See it?”

She nods. “Looks like it might rain later.”

“Gaby!”

“What?”

“You’re not looking at it the right way. It doesn’t look like rain; it looks like a cowboy hat with feet, and the feet are wearing boots with spurs, see?”

She tilts her head. “I do see.”

“Really?”

“Not really.”

“Keep trying. Remember, if you really want to see something . . .”

“I remember. Just keep looking, and it’ll be there.”

“Exactly.” Ben reaches over again and finds her hand. His grasp is warm and strong and familiar.

“I shouldn’t have let go,” he says simply.

She looks at him, and realizes he’s not just talking about holding her hand.

“I pretty much forced you to, Ben.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was just going through the motions of working on our marriage. If I couldn’t be a mother, I didn’t want to be a wife. It’s ugly and selfish and horrible, but it’s true.”

“I know that. And I have to be honest—it hurt. It just about killed me.”

“I’m so sorry.” She pushes the words past a lump in her throat. “It’s too late for apologies, and I know it doesn’t help, but I am. I was so cruel to you, and you were hurting, too. No one should have to live like that. I don’t blame you for leaving.”

“That’s not why I left.”

“Then why?”

“Because I loved you. Not because I’d stopped. It was a last resort. I thought it would jar you into realizing you loved me and needed me and didn’t want to live without me. I was so sure you’d come after me after a few days alone, a few weeks, maybe a month. But . . . you never did.”

“Thank you for telling me that. I never realized. I just thought you—” She swallows hard and shakes her head, barely able to speak.

“No. I just didn’t know what else I could do to get through to you. I kept thinking there had to be something I was missing, but . . .”

There was,
she thinks miserably.
I blamed you for Josh’s death
.

She opens her mouth to tell him, but can’t seem to find the right words.

“What?” Ben asks. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

He squeezes her hand and they fall silent, watching the sky darken as day becomes night.

“Okay, first we should consider the good news,” Sully tells Stockton, as they sit gazing at the chart they’ve compiled on the white board that covers one of the four windowless walls in this room at the precinct.

There are three columns, each topped by a name.

Jake Fuentes.

Tomas Delgado.

Carlos Diaz.

Listed beneath each name is the date on which the man disappeared, his last known whereabouts, and other basic details, with lines criss-crossing the columns wherever similarities can be found.

There are so many criss-crosses that it looks, as Stockton said, like a damned tic-tac-toe grid where everybody wins—and loses.

“There’s good news?” he asks now, tilting his chair back and lacing his fingers at the nape of his beefy neck. “Because the way I see it, these three guys aren’t coming back alive. You’re talkin’ seven months since the first one disappeared, going on four months for the second, over two weeks for the third. You know the statistics.”

“I do know the statistics. I’m not talking about good news for those three.” Leary waves a hand at the white board. “But they disappeared exactly three months apart, right?”

“Twelve weeks apart,” Stockton amends. “Not the same thing.”

He’s right.

Fuentes vanished on Friday, December 13. Three months later would have been March 13, but Delgado went missing on March 7, a Friday. Exactly twelve weeks after that, on Friday, May 30, Diaz fell off the face of the earth.

“Okay, so if you look at the pattern, there shouldn’t be another disappearance until . . .” She starts to reach for her phone, with its electronic calendar.

“August twenty-second,” Stockton supplies without missing a beat.

“What are you, some kind of . . .”

“Idiot savant?”

“I was going to say mathematician,” she says with a shrug, “but if the shoe fits . . .”

“So you’re saying the good news is that the Hispanic single men of the city are safe for another ten weeks.”

“Nine weeks, six days. Now who’s the idiot savant?”

“Well played, Leary. Well played. Now tell me why whoever’s abducting these guys—if they are being abducted—is on the twelve-week plan, and we’re on our way to solving the case.”

“We may have missed something earlier, too. There could have been others who fit the victim profile. Now that we’ve nailed the pattern, we need to go back twelve weeks from the first disappearance and see if anything fits.”

“That would be Friday, September twentieth.”

“Show off.”

“And twelve weeks before that would be—”

“Yeah, I get it. Your brain is a freaking calculator.”

“Credit where credit is due.”

Rolling her eyes, she goes on, “We also still need to figure out whether Diaz had an InTune account.”

“Right. Too bad it’ll take forever to jump through enough hoops to get our hands on those records.”

They’ve already filed the necessary paperwork. Unfortunately, given the fact that with no solid evidence of foul play, and that most adults who disappear
want
to disappear, this isn’t necessarily a high-profile, high-priority case. It’s not likely that they’ll be granted access to Diaz’s financial records, much less his Internet files, anytime in the immediate future.

If only there were a way around the red tape . . .

If only Ivy Sacks had been more forthcoming . . .

If only she—or someone else—had reported him missing before a full two weeks had passed . . .

Stockton leans forward, resting the front legs of his chair on the floor again and his elbows on the table, fists beneath his chin. “So what do you think she was hiding?”

Sully doesn’t have to ask who he’s talking about.

Ivy Sacks. His thoughts, as usual, have taken the same path as her own.

“I don’t know,” she tells him, “but it was definitely something.”

They discussed this earlier—several times, in fact, beginning in the car after leaving Ivy Sacks’s apartment. They’d agreed that the woman was exceedingly nervous.

Witnesses—even the innocent ones—often are. But her body language indicated that she was keeping something from them.

After leaving her apartment, they’d looked into her past, trying to uncover a link between her and the other two victims. They’d found nothing.

Nor did they uncover a profile for her on any of the popular dating Web sites, including InTune. She did have a Facebook page—but of course, none of the three missing men showed up on her friends list.

They could have been there at one time, but none of the missing men have active Facebook profiles. Fuentes and Delgado both had accounts that were abruptly deactivated, according to their families. Diaz doesn’t show up in the search engine. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there at one time.

They need a search warrant for his computer files—but again, that takes time. Meanwhile, all they can do is try to interview everyone who knew him well and saw him regularly.

There aren’t many—if any—available candidates. Like many single people in this overpopulated city, Carlos Diaz seems to have led a relatively lonely life.

“Maybe he really did just walk away,” Stockton muses, rubbing his double chins.

Leary shakes her head, unable to avoid looking at all the lines criss-crossing the columns on the wall. “Maybe,” she says, “but I doubt it. I think he crossed paths with the wrong person on May thirtieth. Let’s just hope whoever it is doesn’t pounce again until August twenty-second. That should give us enough time to figure out who he is.”

“Or who
she
is.”

“If it’s a woman, then what’s her motive?”

“Good old-fashioned perv?” Stockton asks, and then, seeing her expression, “No?”

“Maybe, but I’m thinking it might be a hell of a lot more complicated than that.”

“Like . . . ?”

“Damned if I know.” Leary shakes her head. “I think I’m too exhausted right now to think clearly.”

“You need to get some rest.”

“I need to get some good strong tea. Rest can wait until we figure this out.”