A Dark Love (4 page)

But it was no use. He’d been spotted.

“You see, John, I told you we’re not crazy for taking our power walk tonight. Porter’s out, and he’s a doctor.”

John.
Recognition flashed, and Porter lifted his head, sensing opportunity. He arranged his features to hide the irritation he felt for Lindsay Crowley and her endless chatter. “Hi, Lindsay, John.”

They stopped in front of him, John Crowley standing quietly while Lindsay bobbed up and down, to and fro on the balls of her feet, like a jogger waiting for a traffic light to turn green. Annoying.

“Where’s Caroline? Don’t tell me you left her home cleaning the dishes all by her lonesome?”

Porter knew they were taking it all in, from his dress shirt and slacks despite the suffocating heat to the misery that showed on his face. Reaching a quick decision, he didn’t try to hide his emotion. “No,” he replied. “Caroline’s not there.”

Lindsay stopped bobbing and raised both eyebrows. “Where’d she go?”

Satisfied that Lindsay was already on the right track, Porter drew in a deep breath, letting it out slowly before he made a reply. “God only knows.” Slowly, he slid his hands into his pockets and looked down at the sidewalk. “After last time…” He shook his head.

“Is she all right?” Lindsay’s accent, combined with the emphasis she placed on the second syllable, caused the words to come out sounding like
all raaht
.

Which clearly indicated that Lindsay had already made up her mind that things were not all right, a fact Porter intended to use to his full advantage. “Not really. She stopped taking her medication. She’s done it before.” Porter allowed his sorrow to show in his eyes. “People think because I’m a psychoanalyst, that I can control things, but there’s only so much I can do.”

Lindsay Crowley’s eyes grew round, questioning. She settled on the simplest one. Saving the biggest ones for later, Porter thought. “So, she just up and left?”

Porter nodded. “She could be anywhere.” He pulled his hands from his pocket and spread them in front, palms out, in slow motion. “Her passport’s gone.”

There was silence as they all considered this fact.

Porter waited a beat before seizing the moment. “Now we just have to wait and hope.” He snuck a glance at John Crowley, who was frowning at a point in the darkness.

Crowley cleared his throat, which Porter took to be an encouraging sign. He waited, hardly daring to breathe, keeping his eyes on Crowley’s face in a silent plea.

But it was Lindsay who spoke next. “When did she go?”

Lindsay was digging for information, not yet ready to assist him. Porter evaluated her question before settling on the truth. If Crowley did take the bait, he’d need to know which flights to scan. “This morning, around nine.”

He watched Crowley, silently urging him to speak. Like all of Porter’s patients, John Crowley had risen to
the top of his field. Not without doing favors when it suited him, Porter reflected.

Crowley perked up at this bit of information, turning his gaze on Porter. Interested now. “You mean, she left at nine o’clock today?”

Porter nodded as Crowley threw his wife a questioning glance.

At which point Lindsay Crowley resumed bobbing up and down on the balls of her feet. But not before raising one laced cross-trainer and dragging it down the back of her husband’s heel.

Crowley did a quick about-face. “That’s a shame.”

Porter’s single ray of hope sputtered and died. Caroline could be on a flight to Heathrow at this very moment, or Charles de Gaulle or fucking Beijing for that matter. And his neighbor, who headed up a special post-9/11 agency to oversee airline security, and his busybody wife were not going to lift a collective finger to help.

Porter watched Crowley work to maintain his footing, shifting his stance so the toes of his brand-new cross-trainers were now pointing squarely across the street at his own front door, signaling this get-together had come to an end.

Lindsay murmured something about keeping Porter and Caroline in her prayers. She did not ask if there was anything she could do to help.

“What was that about? You nearly took my ankle off.” John Crowley basked in the air-conditioning as he locked their townhouse door behind them and kicked off his costly new exercise shoes.

“That man,” Lindsay muttered, bending down to
untie her laces before removing her exercise shoes one at a time.

“He’s worried about his wife, who seems to have taken off,” he pointed out. He had met Caroline just once and she had seemed shy and ill at ease. The memory tugged at him. He made a mental note to call their daughter at college in Austin tonight before he went to bed.

John Crowley had a well-earned reputation for being tough in business, but fatherhood had mellowed him. “Sounds like she’s in trouble.” The truth was, Moross seemed in need of help.

“No.” Lindsay’s tone was sharp. She pulled off her socks and straightened up, wriggling her toes against the cool floor. “She’s not in trouble. She just got herself out of trouble.”

John pulled his socks off and followed suit. It felt good.

“I thought you said you saw her this morning at CVS drug store, and something seemed wrong. If it was nine o’clock that would be just about the time she walked away. The guy seems upset.”

Lindsay jutted her chin into the air and blew a breath out through her upturned nose, a move John had come to know over the years. It showed his wife cared little for the facts surrounding a situation because her mind was made up.

“I know he’s upset,” Lindsay said, meeting her husband’s gaze. “But there’s something about that man I just don’t trust.”

“Yeah,” John said, reaching down to tuck a piece of Lindsay’s hair behind her ear. It was something he did out of habit as he reflected what he had learned during a career spent negotiating deals with Wall Street invest
ment bankers, union lawyers, and even the president of the United States.

“But if that girl walked out, it’s not because she’s crazy. It’s because she needed to get away from that man.”

That man. Lindsay had made up her mind, no two ways about it.

“It would be good to stay in touch with that girl,” Lindsay said thoughtfully. “But that man is someone I would not trust even one little bit.”

John Crowley generally made up his mind after careful consideration of the evidence and all the facts, while his wife went with her gut in an instant. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred they reached the same conclusion. His wife had the sharp instincts of a jackal, a trait that had served team Crowley well over the years. “You know,” Crowley said now, “I don’t trust him, either.”

C
aroline must have dozed sometime during the night. She had wanted to stay awake, so as to savor every minute of her life here in the eighth row from the front of the Greyhound bus, where it didn’t matter that she had no identity, no home, no family, no friends. Just her and Pippin, safe inside their cocoon.

As the morning wore on, the bus slowed, weaving its way through traffic. By eleven A.M. Chicago’s famous skyline came into view.

The first leg of Caroline’s journey was coming to an end.

The bus rumbled through downtown to the terminal. She followed the crowd inside, her eyes aching with lack of sleep, jumpy with nerves. She expected someone to grab her at any moment and force her to go back home. She waited in line at Amtrak and purchased a one-way ticket to Denver on the California Zephyr, departing that afternoon. She stowed the ticket carefully inside her tote before heading out into the searing midday sun. She had three hours to kill.

A stiff breeze blew off Lake Michigan, whipping bits of trash around in tiny eddies. She released Pippin and
the little dog stood, unsteady after so many hours in the tote. He shook himself top to bottom, panting heavily.

“C’mon, fella.” Caroline gave the leash a gentle tug and was relieved to see him prance along beside her, his usual self, none the worse for wear. She made her way quickly along the unfamiliar streets, checking signs to get her bearings. She had charted it out beforehand on MapQuest.

Within a short while, she reached her destination. A pawnshop. She was becoming schooled in the business of hocking jewelry, trading it for the cash she had smuggled out in her Keds. Just yesterday morning. It already seemed eons ago. She was already growing wise in the ways of her new life. Pawnshops, she now knew, were conveniently located near bus stations and train depots.

She got buzzed in and deposited her wedding and engagement rings on a worn velvet mat of midnight blue. She waited while the man behind the counter studied them with the aid of a jeweler’s loupe.

He named a price.

Giving a quick shake of her head, Caroline named a price that was nearly double and waited, unsmiling. She had already learned the first rule of survival on the streets. Smiling was a sign of weakness.

A short time later, she was six hundred dollars richer. She dined on a park bench overlooking Lake Michigan before heading back to Union Station to board the westbound Amtrak express.

She collapsed against the upholstered seat, reciting a silent prayer as the train pulled out, carrying her from the Midwest and into her new life.

Porter awoke to the persistent buzzing of the doorbell. It was not yet seven o’clock in the morning. He closed his eyes again, indignant, deciding to ignore it. And then realization hit him like a tidal wave. The bed next to him was empty. Caroline was not where she belonged. She was gone.

Someone pressed the downstairs buzzer again in four long, persistent, evenly spaced bursts.

Porter flew out of bed. He decided against his robe, pulling on his clothes from yesterday instead. Whoever was now rapping firmly on the brass knocker, Porter preferred to face in wrinkled clothes rather than wrapped in the fuzzy vulnerability of pajamas.

He stopped long enough to grab his eyeglasses and run a hand through his hair. Hopefully it was the PI from Beltway Security Investigations with news of Caroline, news that could not be delivered by phone. An image came to mind of his wife far from home, badly injured or worse. The thought moved through Porter like a jolt of electricity, setting his nerves on end, as he undid the locks.

And so his heart, already primed for bad news, was hammering uncontrollably when he yanked open the door to find two uniformed police officers on his front stoop.

They watched unblinking while Porter stared, struggling to grasp the implications of their presence on his property at this unlikely hour of the morning.

A radio squawked.

Porter jumped, aware that this made him appear jittery.

“Porter Moross?”

He nodded, tried to swallow past the lump in his throat and failed, which made him queasy. He told
himself they couldn’t hear the thumping of his heart inside his chest no matter how loud it sounded in his ears.

The man doing the talking was shorter than his partner but no less broad across the shoulders. Together they took up every square inch of space on the tiny brick stoop and, it seemed to Porter, every last molecule of oxygen in the hot, humid air.

The stocky one spoke again. “You have a wife, Caroline Hughes, who resides at this address?”

“Yes.” An icy shudder began at the top of Porter’s head and traveled down his spine with lightning speed. This was bad. He squeezed his eyes shut and groped for the railing with one hand. “Oh, God, no.”

“Take it easy, sir, everything’s okay.”

Porter opened his eyes.

The stocky one frowned. “I take it your wife is not at home with you now?”

The hammering in Porter’s ears turned to thunder. He blinked uncertainly, forcing his mind to grasp what was being said. They had not come with news of his wife.

The stocky one repeated his question, louder now. “Is your wife here with you?”

They were here to seek out news of his wife. “No,” Porter said warily as his mind shifted gears, racing ahead now.

Lindsay Crowley.

Bitch!

He had been wrong to approach the Crowleys last night. He had hoped to prevail upon John Crowley to locate Caroline in the nationwide databank of commercial airline passengers. Porter knew Crowley and
his nosy wife might come up with their own reason for Caroline’s sudden disappearance. He had no control over that.

But Dr. Porter Moross knew the value of a half truth, how it could be used to ease doubts.

So he had crafted a version of the truth, one that would appeal to a man like Crowley with daughters who lived out of state. Namely, that Caroline was not well and needed to be found and brought home. Which was true. But Porter’s gamble hadn’t paid off. Crowley had seemed cautious but willing to help. His meddling wife had not. She didn’t like Porter and never had.

He now realized he had underestimated Lindsay Crowley. She was a loose cannon who had gone to the police with her concerns. She could have said things to arouse their suspicions so they would think him capable of almost anything, Porter realized.

“She’s out of town.” Porter glanced down, licking his lips that had turned dry. He tasted salt. The sweat on his face prickled his skin. He took a swipe at it, willing himself to drop his hands before he scratched at the hives that were bubbling beneath his beard, making him itch.

The cops merely watched him.

The tactic was tried and true, as any mental health professional knew.

And right now it worked like a charm on Porter, a fact he was aware of but had no control over. “She’s visiting her mother.” His mind skipped to his mother-in-law, sallow-skinned and in the end stages of alcoholism, staring out over the muddy waters of the Gulf from her third husband’s condo.

Porter realized his mistake. It would take no more than a phone call to unleash a tirade about the hurt she
suffered as the result of her only daughter’s longtime estrangement.

The police would have something to go on if they caught him in a lie.

“It’s a surprise visit. She might not be there yet,” he added, flailing about for options.

“Guess she didn’t fly.” The tall one spoke for the first time.

How could they know that? Porter’s eyes widened and he took a step back, aware that his unease was showing.

“Sanitation turned these in last night.” The tall one, smiling now, handed Porter two small booklets that were a familiar shade of royal blue.

Relief washed over Porter. “Thanks,” he murmured, accepting the passports with a hand he tried to keep steady. He let out a deep breath and forced a smile.

“Sanitation found them in a trash can on Wisconsin yesterday, just up the block.” The taller one motioned with his chin.

So Lindsay Crowley wasn’t behind this. Porter looked down, turning the passports over in his hand, fingering their compact weight. “Thanks,” he said again.

“No problem,” the tall cop said. “Glad we could help.”

The stocky cop was not smiling. He continued to watch Porter with a gaze that did not waiver. “Any idea how you and your wife’s passports went missing?”

“Yeah.” The flood of adrenaline and its aftermath was too much. Porter dug at his beard, long and hard, giving in to the urge that always plagued him in times of stress. The move bought him a precious few seconds. “Someone broke in a couple days ago. They got some of my wife’s jewelry as well.”

“Did you file any report with the police?” The tall one’s smile faded.

Porter shook his head slowly for effect. “I know I should have, but I feel sorry for the guy. I mean, I know who it is.” He let out a long, deep breath. “Our cleaning woman is in some kind of trouble. Her husband came here on a tourist visa and I know for a fact it expired. I had to let her go. They’re here illegally. I’m sure they’re desperate for money.”

The cops exchanged glances. “You know where this guy lives?”

Porter nodded. “I should probably report him to the INS.” He hated cops.

The shorter one spoke. “Look, Mr. Moross, I think you should come down to the station and file a report.”

“Good idea. I should have done that right away,” Porter replied thoughtfully. “I’ll do it as soon as I grab a shower.”

“That’ll be a help to us,” the shorter cop said, taking out a business card and handing it to Porter. “I’m Officer Mike Hartung.”

Porter took the card, helpful now. “Thank you, Officer Hartung. Will do.”

“We appreciate your time, Mr. Moross.”

“No trouble, no trouble at all,” Porter said. “And, by the way, it’s Dr. Moross.”