The Darkness Gathers (27 page)

chapter twenty-six

T
he coffeepot gurgled and filled the kitchen with the warm, comforting aroma of brewing Hawaiian Kona as Lydia sat flipping through the pages of the
New York Times
. The morning light outside was bright and cold, the sky ice blue, the windows frosted and foggy. Jeffrey came down the stairs, dressed in gray chinos, black lug-sole oxfords, and a black ribbed sweater.

“You look good, baby,” she said as he leaned in to kiss her. He smelled lightly of cologne and shaving cream. He nodded, preoccupied, and walked over to the coffeepot and poured them each a cup.

“Are you going to get us ready while I go talk to Jacob?”

“Sure. Jeffrey, why didn’t you tell me what was going on with the two of you?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sitting down with a sigh. “It was like I couldn’t get my head around it. He’s been my friend for so long, I haven’t been able to confront the person that he is because I keep remembering the person he was when we were young. But, first the books, and now remembering the whole George Hewlett thing … I don’t feel like I can trust him anymore. Maybe I’m wrong, overreacting because we’ve had some tough days. I don’t want to imagine that he was up to things behind my back. We had Christmas dinner with his family,” he said, his eyebrows knitting into a frown.

“Follow your instincts, Jeffrey. If you feel that something’s not right, it probably isn’t.”

She reached out for his hand.

“I’m sure it’s nothing. He just hates
me
. Your wanting to bring me in as a partner probably just freaked him out. Which, by the way, is totally unnecessary.”

“I just want you to be a part of the firm.”

“I am a part of it.”

“I mean legally. I want you to reap some of the benefits that you sow there.”

“I already do, through your happiness and success.”

“I just don’t want things to be ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ I want things to be ‘ours.’ Isn’t that what you want?”

She cocked her head and looked at him. He stared at his coffee cup, seeming suddenly a little sad and younger than his forty-one years. She
had
hurt him that night in Miami.

“This life is ours, Jeffrey. There’s nothing that we don’t share,” she said.

“I know that. I know,” he said, standing up. He hadn’t meant to start this, especially when he was minutes from walking out the door. She was beautiful in the morning light, wearing a simple white nightshirt, made gorgeous by the way it exposed her skin, revealed the outline of her body. She looked at him so earnestly, with a trace of worry in her eyes. She stood up and walked around the table, then wrapped her arms around his waist and placed her head on his chest. He held her tightly, placing his lips on her head. He wanted to say, I couldn’t live a day without you. You are everything to me. I spent so long watching you run from me, waiting for you to come back. Now that you are with me, I couldn’t bear to lose you again. But something kept him from saying it. As close as they were, he still felt the need to tread carefully on this subject with her. Talking about forever seemed to make her afraid. And he never wanted her to feel afraid. The night that he had been shot, just over two years ago now, they had stood on a precipice in their relationship. There had been a bond between them since the night they met, the night her mother was murdered. In the early years of their relationship, he had been a grown man and she just a young girl. He kept in touch with her after her mother’s death through her grandparents, making a point to see them when he visited the New York area. When she moved to Washington, D.C., to attend Georgetown University, her grandfather asked Jeffrey to keep an eye on her, which he gladly did. Every Thursday, they would have dinner or go to the movies. He came to regard her as a young friend, though, even then, there was something beneath the surface—a kind of love, a desire to protect and shelter her.

Then one night, just before she graduated from college, she seemed to have transformed from a girl to a woman overnight. He realized that he was in love with her. But still he kept his distance, never wanting to violate the trust she had in him. He knew that she felt safe with him, and he never wanted that to change.

She began her career as a journalist with the
Washington Post;
they began working together on some cases, informally at first and then formally with the Cheerleader Murder case. When she struck out on her own to write
With a Vengeance
, the book about Jed McIntyre and the women he murdered, including her mother, Jeffrey worked with her on pulling together all the details of the case. She started traveling for other stories, and he, fed up with the Bureau, moved to New York to start his own firm. She eventually bought an apartment there to be close to him and to her grandparents. Sometimes they saw each other every day, sometimes not for weeks at a time. Until the night he was shot. She had told him much later that this was the night she was forced to confront the feelings she had been holding inside for about as long as he had. But still it was about a year later, in New Mexico, when they had both finally given in to each other.

Jeffrey had lived with the ache for Lydia for so long, tortured when she was close, and tortured when she was away. The loneliness of those years, in spite of a good number of flings and one-night stands, was difficult to look back on. To have a life with her finally was everything he had imagined it would be. He knew she felt the same way; they were kindred spirits, bound together by love, respect, trust, passion, and something more. Something that had existed when he first looked into her eyes fifteen years ago. Was it ridiculous and old-fashioned for him to want to marry her? “Marriage promises something that can’t be promised. People change and life is cruel.” He’d heard her say that so many times before they moved in together. She hadn’t said it since, but was that the way she truly felt? That what held them together might someday fade and legal agreements would just make it more difficult to part? Is that why he
wanted
to make it legal? Then there was the matter of starting a family. Did she even want that? And how could they even consider it doing the kind of work that they did, risking their lives with regularity? If they had a child, they certainly wouldn’t be getting on a plane to Albania that night. Was that a good or a bad thing? These were things they’d never touched, like the good china in a cabinet, too delicate for every day, saved for an occasion that never comes.

“We’ll talk later, okay?” he said into her silky hair, drawing in the scent of lavender.

She walked him to the elevator as he pulled on his leather coat.

“Don’t open the door for any Eastern European guys with guns,” he said with a smile as the doors closed. She felt vaguely sad, as if she should call him back, hold him, and apologize—for what, she wasn’t sure.

She walked back to the kitchen, poured herself another cup of coffee, and headed toward the stairs, but before she got there, she was assailed by another bout of nausea so powerful that she dropped the cup to the floor and barely made it to the downstairs toilet. She threw up coffee, the only thing in her stomach, and then dry-heaved for the next five minutes. Then she sat on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, feeling weak and dizzy, resting her head against the bathtub, the nausea subsiding as quickly as it had come.

This is the second time you’ve hurled in forty-eight hours, bitched her crabby inner voice. What is going on with you? She had an idea that she hardly dared to face.

T
hey were a cozy couple; even he had to admit that. Though what someone of Lydia Strong’s intelligence could find to engage her in the muscle-bound, pretty-boy, ex-G-man was beyond him. Maybe she was entertained by his very large gun. It was a little disappointing, actually. He’d expected her to be more cerebral, preferably celibate, maybe on a subconscious level saving herself for him. She kept all his letters; he knew that much. She thought of him at least once a month. The thought made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Well, there’d be time to talk about all of that. When they were alone.

It was cold on his roof perch, even in the heavy parka, black wool hat, and leather gloves. But it was worth it for the view into their apartment. He would have thought they’d be more privacy-conscious. The upstairs had shades, but the downstairs was wide open. Peering through his high-powered binoculars, a thoughtful gift from his benefactor, he watched them walk to the elevator, saw him disappear as Lydia waved. Did she look a little sad?

He hurried from his spot, keeping low beneath the wall, then raced down the fire stairs that opened onto Lafayette, just in time to see Jeffrey Mark heading toward the subway station. The wind burned the skin on his face, but he felt alive for the first time in years.

M
aybe it was because he had an awareness that he and Lydia were in danger, or maybe it was just that he’d spent so many years of tailing other people, but Jeffrey sensed he was being followed. He wondered briefly if he was being paranoid, but stopping suddenly at a newsstand to pick up a copy of the
Post
, he saw a tall dark figure in a thick parka and black hat move away from the crush of commuters heading down into the Astor Place subway stop, then slip into a doorway behind him.

“Now what?” he muttered to himself, handing some change to the vendor. He’d take the
Post
to the
Times
Lydia preferred any day. He stood there for a minute, flipping through the tabloid pages, trying to think what to do next, and then decided to head down the stairs to the train with the rest of the crowd. He needed to get to the West Side and had been heading to the N or the R train, but he didn’t want to lead whoever was following him to the office. He folded the paper under his arm and jogged down the stairs, moving against the flow of people coming up. He walked to the end of the crowded platform, as the downtown number 4 train squealed into the station on the other side of the metal partitions. He heard the familiar tones announcing the train was about to depart and then heard the conductor yell angrily over the speaker, “Stand clear of the closing doors.” He leaned over the tracks to look for the lights of the approaching uptown train but saw nothing. People continued to file down the stairs, the platform getting ever more crowded.

As he kept moving back, he saw a figure taller than the rest, wearing a black wool hat, pushing his way through the crowd. Jeffrey felt a surge of adrenaline and was conscious of the cool metal of the gun at his waist. Though shooting on a crowded subway platform was at best ill-advised.

“Come on, come on,” he said under his breath, willing the train to come as the figure moved closer. Jeffrey craned his neck to try to see a face, but he couldn’t make out anything in the crowd. Finally, he heard the squeal of metal on metal and saw the light in the tunnel as the silver train pulled into the station. A flow of people burst through the doors as soon as they opened and the people waiting fanned out around them, preparing to enter. Commuters, normally reasonably mild-mannered and polite people, pushed and shoved, cursed at and elbowed one another with increasing intensity as the tones sounded. Jeffrey kept his eyes on the black hat, biding his time, wondering if the man could see him through the crowd. He pretended to be waiting for the next train, leaning against one of the metal beams that stood like soldiers along the platform. He noticed the man in the parka, whom he could see better now that the crowd had cleared, do the same. Then, just before the doors closed, Jeffrey shoved his way onto the train, eliciting groans from those around him and a low “Motherfucker” from one of the other passengers. He was pressed between the metal door in front and soft flesh covered in winter coats behind. He could see the form still leaning against the beam on the platform, and Jeffrey smiled.

Until the train passed Jed McIntyre on the platform, grinning ghoulishly, lifting a gloved hand to wave at Jeffrey as the train carried him away.

“L
ydia, are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. What do you want?”

“I just wanted to apologize.”

“Don’t apologize to me, Jacob. Apologize to Jeffrey. He’s on his way to the office right now.”

“I wanted you to know that Nathan Quinn identified the body of Tatiana last night in Miami. I guess she ran away after all.”

Lydia gripped the cordless phone and sat down on the plush chenille sofa in the living room. She’d been feeling a bit stronger before the phone rang; the nausea had passed, leaving a shaky fatigue in its wake.

“So that will be the end of this, then. Right, Lydia?”

Maybe Tatiana
was
dead. But no, it didn’t feel right. She just couldn’t accept it as the truth.

“You might be right, Jacob. There’s nothing left to investigate.”

“I’m serious, Lydia. It’s time to call it quits with this. If not for your sake, then for Jeffrey’s. It doesn’t do any of us any good to be on the bad side of the FBI.”

“Don’t you ever get sick of this role? The skulking in the back of limos, darkened hotel rooms, issuing cryptic warnings? Because it’s tired, Jacob.”

She heard him sigh on the other end of the phone. “I should have known better than to try to reason with you. You don’t give a shit about Jeff, do you? All you care about is your ‘buzz.’ And you don’t care who gets hurt in the process of trying to satisfy your curiosity. Even someone you claim to love,” he said.

The accusation stung like a slap in the face.

“You don’t know me, Jacob. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I? I watched you lead that guy on for years, dragging him into all kinds of messes, knowing he was in love with you and using that,” he said with venom.

“Is that what all of this is about? Some cliché about the friend feeling threatened by the girlfriend. Aren’t we all too old for this?”

“If you think you’re going to insinuate yourself into this firm and drag us all into your crazy adventures, you’ve got another thing coming. I won’t allow it.”