Down the Darkest Street (21 page)

The news would almost certainly filter back to the FBI that someone was asking questions. He hadn’t even bothered to call Kathy. He was running on instinct. He knew he had to talk to Arlene.

The strip mall was long and narrow—anchored by a main thruway with satellite stores spreading out toward the east and west. For every active storefront, there was an empty, abandoned one. These kinds of buildings—hodge-podge collections of small businesses set up on the cheap—were commonplace in the suburban outskirts of Miami; even the layout seemed like it was pulled from a template some architect had saved. You could find them off every major intersection for miles.

The smell of fresh Cuban coffee and pastries distracted Pete as he walked past the Futuro Supermarket. He turned a corner and almost missed her.

Emily was walking away from her car, her purse slung over her shoulder and a concerned, pensive look on her face. She hadn’t seen Pete yet, but he had nowhere else to go. A moment later she noticed him. She hesitated for a second before starting to walk over. Pete stayed where he was.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hello.”

“Did you just get out of your car?”

“Yeah,” Pete said, confused by the question. “I’m heading to the Laundromat.”

Emily didn’t answer. She was looking at Pete with a distant, glazed stare. She seemed nervous, almost scared, Pete thought. He waited a beat before talking again.

“How are you?”

“I’m, well, I’m fine,” she said. “I heard about the house…I’m not sure what to say. Are you OK? What happened?”

“I’m OK,” Pete said. He’d rehearsed this moment in his mind dozens of times, and each time he had at least one, maybe two, catchy retorts he could sling back at her. He was coming up blank now.

A few seconds passed. Emily looked toward her car, then back at Pete. She couldn’t look him in the eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said. “About all this. I was confused. I needed some space.”

“You didn’t seem confused,” Pete said, his tone flat.

“I guess I deserve that,” she said.

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m home,” she said, not elaborating. But Pete knew what it meant. “I’m going to work on my marriage. I need you to accept that. There’s another person involved in this, and I can’t…complicate anything anymore.”

“Huh, all right,” he said. He looked away from her and coughed into his hand. “Look, I have to go. I guess I’ll talk to you later.”

Pete watched Emily head down the strip mall’s main walkway. She seemed upset. Pete felt bad for taking some pleasure in that. He didn’t realize he was following her until his feet started moving.

Pete tried to keep his distance. The mall was mostly empty, which made it hard to go unnoticed. He felt angry. Angry at himself for not laying into her enough, and angry at her for letting their exchange end when it did.

She was close to the back of the mall. As Pete started to wonder if she was leaving the mall entirely, she cut into a small shop. He picked up the pace and darted by the storefront. A Realtor’s office. So much for wanting to fix her marriage, Pete thought. Or were they looking for a new place together? The office wasn’t in their neighborhood. It was at least forty minutes north, and it didn’t strike Pete as the kind of place that merited the detour. Had she made a point to go outside her neighborhood because she didn’t want people—or Rick—to know she was looking? He kept walking. The Realtor’s office had a giant glass window in the waiting area, making it easy for those sitting around to people-watch. He wasn’t sure if Emily had seen him, so he had little time to stare. She was chatting with a man around their age—nondescript and boring.

He turned around, intent on going back to his initial plan: visiting Arlene Henriquez’s workplace.

“Are you following me?”

Her voice didn’t surprise him. It was almost as if he’d wanted to get caught.

“I was, but then I decided I had nothing else to say,” Pete said, turning around to face Emily. She’d come outside when she saw him, he realized. The man Emily had been speaking to was now watching them through the office window, probably wondering why his pitch had been interrupted.

She hesitated, not expecting such an honest response. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were you following me, Pete?” Emily said.

“Why are you even here, Emily? Visiting a Realtor?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Emily said. “First of all, it’s none of your business—but that’s obvious. I was in the area and swung by because this Realtor’s been calling nonstop about some kind of deal he wants me—us—to check out.” She let out a long sigh. “Look, I don’t want to get into this here.”

“Get into you and Rick looking to buy some real estate?” Pete said. “Rick, the guy who cheated on you? The guy you left?”

She shrugged. “What do you want from me, Peter?”

“I miss you,” he said.

Her features softened for a second and she looked away, down the direction they’d come from, toward the parking lot.

“Don’t do this to me,” she said. “Please. I’ve made my decision.”

“You’ve said that before,” he said, and the desperation in his voice shamed him. “And you came back.”

She turned to face him, her eyes red. “Did you ever consider Rick in all this?” she said. “You knew I was married. You knew I was vulnerable. Yet you let it happen. You knew I wasn’t myself, yet you let things develop. You pursued me.”

“That’s not true.”

“I know you’ll rationalize this to no end when you walk off,” Emily said, her voice rising. “Because that’s how you can live with yourself, and all the stupid shit you do. We’re not friends. We stopped being friends when we started having sex. You let me move in. You wanted this to happen. And when it finally did you started to act like you were having reservations. You’re not an adult. You’re not a good person. Fuck you, Pete. Fuck you for messing with my emotions and acting like I’m some kind of monster. You’re the monster.”

She didn’t wait for a response as she turned and walked to her car, giving up on the real estate visit. The sound of her flats hitting the dirty concrete matched the painful pounding in Pete’s head.

Miami Purity was a tiny, nondescript, and unremarkable Laundromat tucked away on the north end of the small strip mall. Pete pushed open the door and walked into the empty shop, his senses overloaded by the flowery scent of cheap detergent, the whirring sounds of the washers and dryers, and the television perched above the washing machines playing a
Diff’rent Strokes
rerun. There was no one behind the counter. Pete walked up and looked toward the back of the space, seeing and hearing nothing back there. The door chime cut through the other noise. Pete turned around.

“I’m just going to pretend you’re picking up your dry cleaning for work tomorrow,” Harras said. His eyes had a “gotcha” look—like a cat realizing it’d just cornered an injured mouse.

“That works,” Pete said, trying to remain calm. “Except the dress code at the Book Bin is pretty lax.”

Harras walked up to Pete and looked around the Laundromat.

“What the hell are you doing here, Fernandez?”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Help me?” Harras said. “You have a weird way of helping. Do you usually do exactly the opposite of what people ask you to do?”

“Nina Henriquez is alive,” Pete said.

“How the fuck would you know that?”

“The killer made that pretty clear,” Pete said, his mind flashing back to that night, surrounded by fire and smoke.

“You are a real trip, you know that?” Harras said. “How many times did I or someone on my team ask you about what happened that night? Never once did you share that little nugget. Now you’re cornered and you suddenly have a lead?”

Before Pete could respond, a low, confused voice cut through their conversation. “Can I help you?”

Pete and Harras both turned to find an older woman standing behind the counter, her eyebrows raised, waiting for a response.

Before Harras could speak, Pete interjected, “Arlene Henriquez?”

She nodded, her eyes on Pete.

“We’re with the FBI, ma’am.” Pete felt Harras’s stare burning into the back of his head. “We want to talk to you about Nina.”

Her expression changed from detached confusion to sad relief. She placed her palms on the counter, as if to balance herself. “Oh, OK,” she said. “Yes, yes. How can I help you?”

Harras stepped forward, shooting daggers at Pete before clearing his throat. “I’m Agent Harras, Mrs. Henriquez,” he said. “This is Pete Fernandez. He’s an associate of mine. We’re sorry to interrupt your day, but we wanted to ask you a few more questions about Nina’s disappearance. Can we sit somewhere and talk?”

“Yes, of course,” she said and motioned for them to come around the counter and toward an office in the back. Harras shot Pete a look that promised intense physical harm to him in the not-so-distant future. Pete shrugged in response. He’d deal with Harras when the time came. For now, they were talking to Arlene Henriquez.

The back office was tiny and offered little wiggle room. Arlene went in first and left the door open. Light from a medium-sized window lit the room. She sat behind a tiny desk with no computer and let Pete and Harras fight over the remaining chair. Pete motioned for Harras to take it.

“Now, Mrs. Henriquez,” Harras began.

“Please, call me Arlene,” she said.

“All right, Arlene,” Harras continued. “I want to talk to you about your daughter. You reported her missing a few days ago. I know someone from Miami PD came by and got a report, but I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything you may have forgotten that could be of use to us.”

Mrs. Henriquez nodded. Pete could tell English wasn’t her first language. She was trying to keep up with Harras without letting on how difficult it was.

“
Hablas español?
” Pete asked.

Her eyes lit up. She nodded at Pete. Harras frowned.

“I don’t
habla español
, Pete,” Harras said, mis-conjugating the verb for emphasis. “So let me handle this, OK?”

Pete looked at Henriquez.

“
Quiere hablarte en inglés
,” Pete said. She responded with a gracious smile, thanking Pete for trying.

Harras cleared his throat and continued. He’d pulled out a tiny notepad and began taking notes.

“Mrs. Henriquez, when was the last time you saw your daughter?”

“Not for a long time,” Mrs. Henriquez said, her voice low, almost ashamed.

Pete fought the urge to blurt out a question. Harras responded quickly and with more precision. “Your daughter,” he said. “Nina. She’s missing. When was the last time you saw her?”

“Saw her?” Henriquez said. She paused and looked toward the ceiling, as if to focus her thoughts. “I no see her for a long time. Six month. Year.”

Harras let out a deep breath and rubbed his temples. “Mrs. Henriquez, did Nina live with you?”

“No, Nina live with her father and brother,” Mrs. Henriquez said.

“But you reported her missing, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Her father tell me she was missing, so I call the police.”

“Have the police talked to her father?” Pete asked her, ignoring Harras’s glare.

Mrs. Henriquez looked at Pete, then back at Harras, smiling, her nerves showing through. Her body was saying what she couldn’t:
How would I know?

Harras stood up and walked out of the office. Pete was left alone with Henriquez, who looked more confused than when they started. Pete nodded politely and followed Harras, catching up with him outside the Laundromat. Harras turned around, his face red from anger. He took a step closer to Pete.

“Why are you wasting my time?” Harras said, his teeth gritted.

Pete took a step back. “How would I know she didn’t live with her mother?”

“You’re not supposed to ‘know’ anything,” Harras said, using air quotes in a way Pete would have found obnoxious under normal circumstances. “This is not your case. This is not your job. This is not your life. I followed you because I knew you were going to do something stupid; I didn’t expect you’d go into this with no idea.”

Pete didn’t respond.

“You’re the worst kind of know-it-all, you know that?” Harras said. “You think this lady wants to relive the fact that her daughter is missing and we have zero leads? You probably didn’t even think about that. You self-involved prick.”

Henriquez’s scream cut through the empty strip mall before Pete could respond.

***

Harras stepped into the Laundromat first, gun drawn. He didn’t protest when Pete followed, his own weapon out, awkwardly held in comparison with the more polished Harras. The place seemed quiet, especially compared to a few moments ago, when all Pete could hear was Harras berating him. As they tiptoed toward the tiny room in the back of the Miami Purity Laundromat, he prayed it would be that simple.

They reached the office and each took a stance on one side of the door, which was now closed. No sound was coming from inside and nothing had been heard since the scream a few moments earlier. Harras reached for the handle and gave it a quick turn. It was unlocked. The door swung in with a slight, whining creak. Pete swallowed and closed his eyes for a second.