Smoke (24 page)

“In this New Day,” Rhames went on, “you work for the betterment of yourself and for the world around you, not for the profit of some corporate giant. You spend your free time getting to know God by getting to know yourself, cleansing yourself of the poisons you’ve been fed since before you were old enough to even know what was happening to you. Imagine a life free from addiction, anxiety, depression, bad relationships, dead-end jobs, and financial worry.

“Imagine,” he said, a wide smile splitting his face. “Imagine a New Day.”

As Rhames continued his spiel, Lydia waited for him to turn his
back for a second, then slipped from the darkened room into the hallway. She stood there for a moment, looked around her as if lost and trying to orient herself. She looked for cameras, waited for some tunic-clad hippie to arrive and escort her from the building. But if there were cameras in the long hallway, she couldn’t see them. And when no one came, she made her way deeper into the building, toward the kitchen. Dax had managed to obtain an old building layout from his contact, so she had an idea which way to go, though she’d never really been good with maps.

Doors were closed; lights were dim. There was a palpable hush. The building had an air of desertion to it, like a school empty for the summer, its hallways echoing with the memory of footfalls and voices. Lydia walked quickly, trying to keep her boot heels from clicking on the tile floors.

When she came to the place she thought the door should be, she realized that she must have turned right where she should have turned left. She doubled back, feeling a little stupid, butterflies in her stomach. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy to move around a building that had such tight security. It
would
have been more logical for Jeffrey to come in with the meeting group, she knew that. But she’d had a strong desire to see Trevor Rhames, to understand more about The New Day. Now she wondered, as she usually wound up doing at some point, if she should have listened to Jeffrey. Maybe they knew who she was, were watching her, giving her just enough rope to hang herself. Then again, maybe she was just being paranoid. Maybe the cameras Dax had mentioned didn’t come on until the building locked down.

At the end of a long hallway, she came to an institutional-sized kitchen. She pushed through one of the doors marked
NEW DAY STAFF ONLY
. In the dark, she felt her way through a maze of large ovens and grills, metal sinks and cabinets, shelves of canned goods. It was a kitchen that served a lot of people, maybe hundreds. For some reason the place gave her the chills.

At the back of kitchen, she found the door and took a deep breath before opening it, bracing herself for an alarm if Dax’s intel was wrong and preparing herself for a sprint. But the door pushed open quietly and standing there was her favorite sight. Jeffrey. He stepped inside and
took a roll of electrical tape from his pocket and taped the latch of the door down so that it appeared closed but remained unlocked. When the place shut down, they’d still have a way out, unless the system read that a door wasn’t closed properly. She let the door shut behind him.

“I told you it would be all right,” she said.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Anyway, what are we looking for in here?”

“Lily Samuels for one. Or any evidence that she might have been here,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know exactly. I guess we’ll know it when we see it.”

H
ello?” The voice was groggy, as if its owner had been sleeping. Matt looked at the clock. It was just after ten … not that late.

“I’m looking for Randall Holmes.”

There was a pause on the line, a drawing in of breath, a rustling of sheets.

“Who’s calling?” It was hard to tell if he was talking to a man or a woman, the voice was hoarse, sounded old.

“This is Detective Stenopolis from the NYPD. Mr. Holmes made a call to a tip line. I’m following up, sir. Sorry for the late hour.”

The voice heaved a sigh. “Son, that was two weeks ago.”

“You’re Randall Holmes?”

“Well, who the hell else would I be? You called me.”

Matt smiled. “You’re right, sir. I’m sorry.”

The man grunted on the other end of the line.

“You told the tip line operator that you saw Lily Samuels in church. Is that right, sir?”

“No, that’s not what I said,” he said. “That place is no church, I’ll tell you that. Bunch of Moonies, if you ask me.”

“Which place?”

He heard the man breathing heavily on the other line. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

Matt put his head into his hand. After going through Lily’s file and finding nothing, he’d started sifting through some copies of the tip line transcripts he’d brought home with him. About halfway through the stack, he’d come across Randall Holmes, who’d claimed that he’d
seen Lily at church. The notation from whoever took the call was that Holmes was “unstable, ranting.” A note indicated that Jesamyn had made a follow-up call the next day and came to the same conclusion, that the guy was nuts. But now, knowing about The New Day, this call about a church from a man who lived in Riverdale held more potential. At least that’s what Matt had hoped.

“Sir, I’m a Missing Persons detective with the NYPD. I’m one of the good guys. I promise.”

The old man snorted. “I’ve heard that one before.”

Matt sighed, feeling disappointment and frustration squeeze at the back of his neck, tense the muscles on his shoulders. Another dead end.

“Okay, Mr. Holmes, thanks for your time,” he said, getting ready to hang up and go to sleep.

“Anyway, you’re too late,” he whispered.

“Too late for what?”

“Too late to help that girl.”

Matt felt his stomach do a little flip. “What do you mean?”

“I
mean
I watch them go in. Some of them come out. Some of them don’t. I sit on the porch after most of the others have gone to sleep. I like to go outside still, like to breathe the clean air. The rest of the people in this place are already dead, they’re just waiting to stop breathing. Not me. I want to suck every last breath of air out of this world.”

“Where are you, sir?”

There was a pause. “At the home here, the Sunnyvale Home for the Elderly. Boy, you don’t know much of anything, do you?”

He was calling from almost directly across the street from The New Day.

“No, sir, not really. Maybe you could help me out.”

“I sit in the dark corner of the porch so I can see without being seen, you know. It’s always so much better not to be seen.”

“I agree,” said Matt solemnly. “What can you see from your porch?”

“I can see the brown building with the stained glass window. They try to make it look like a church. But there’s no God in there. I know that for a fact.”

“You said you watch people go in?”

“Some nights they gather outside, groups of people. They look
nervous and hungry like they’re waiting for a meal or a handout. A thin girl with bony shoulders and no tits opens the door for them after a while. They go inside; a few usually come out in the first half hour or so. Some come out a couple hours later. Others don’t come out at all.”

“You saw Lily Samuels there one night?”

“The girl on the news. I saw her. I told the nurse. She said it was dark and my eyes aren’t what they used to be. So I called the number they gave on the television. I have a phone in my room, my son makes sure I have a good television and my own phone number here.”

“He must be a very good son,” said Matt.

He made some kind of grunting noise that might have been assent or disdain. Hard to tell.

“So you saw her standing and waiting with the others?”

“That’s right. She looked lost,” he said. “Very sad. Sadder than the others, somehow.”

“Did you see her come out?”

“No. She didn’t come out that night.”

“That night? You saw her come out another night?”

The old man laughed. “No, son, haven’t you been listening? What I’m trying to tell you is that if they don’t come out the same night they go in, they don’t come out at all.”

W
hat are you doing over here, miss?”

“I’m sorry,” said Lydia with an embarrassed smile. “I got a little lost on my way from the bathroom.”

The woman looked at her stonily. She had hard, angular features and creamy white skin. “You’ll have to return to the meeting now.”

“I was just heading back.”

The blonde woman who’d led the group gathered outside into the meeting walked her back to the auditorium. Lydia slipped back into the dark and noticed that the crowd had thinned considerably. Trevor Rhames was booming now, his voice resonating; he was pacing wildly; something about society trapping people in a prison of self-hatred and materialism. But she wasn’t listening anymore. She was looking for a way out. She scanned the room for other doors and saw one down by
the stage. But heavy and metal, with a glowing red exit sign over it, it looked like an exterior door. Shit, she thought. It was always a bad idea to split up. Always.

They’d decided that to save time, Jeffrey would take the corridor to the adjacent building to see what was over there and she’d look for an administrative office with computers or files, maybe even a list of members. He jogged off down the hallway and disappeared while she watched. As soon as she turned the corner, the bony woman had been there, looking at her with hard, suspicious eyes.

Lydia took a seat near the back and turned to see the woman standing by the door, her arms folded like a sentry. Lydia glanced around her. There had been about thirty people in the room, now there were maybe ten. In the dark, all she could see were the backs of their heads. They seemed to be nodding just slightly, almost in unison.

If she got up to leave, they’d probably escort her out of the building. Jeffrey would be alone, not knowing she was out. Then she remembered the door leading to the kitchen. She could leave the building and then sneak back in that way. She got up and walked toward the door.

“Leaving so soon?” asked the woman.

“Yeah,” said Lydia. “I don’t think this is my cup of tea. No pun intended.”

The woman offered a wan smile. There was something so cold about her, something so stiff.

“We all find our way,” she said.

Lydia wondered briefly if that was true. Did everyone find their way in this world? Didn’t some people get crushed, or left behind? Or was
that
the way they found,
their
way, if not the way they wanted.

Two large men in the New Day uniform of blue jeans and white tunics were waiting outside the door. They wore the same cool, smug expressions. But all of them had those vacant eyes. They and the woman stayed close as she walked to the door. She felt their eyes on the back of her neck and she fought the urge to run or turn and punch one of them in their empty faces to see if they were really flesh-and-blood people. Out in the cold, they stood on the top stair leading to the church.

“Good-night,” Lydia said and walked up the street. The blonde lifted a hand in farewell.

Lydia pulled her coat tight around her and walked quickly north. She passed Dax sitting in the Rover but didn’t look at him. She could still feel their eyes on her. Dax didn’t look at her either; obviously he sensed something was wrong or saw the three standing in the doorway, watching her leave.

J
effrey crossed from the church building through the breezeway with glass walls into the taller condo building. He pushed through a light-colored wooden door and entered an empty foyer where the only sound was the buzzing of fluorescent lights. The floors and walls were crisp white, the high ceilings a robin’s egg blue. The empty reception desk that stood in front of the entrance was a white lacquer semicircle. The space was antiseptic, meant, he thought, to communicate purity, cleanliness. Then he remembered what Matt Stenopolis had told Lydia about the “cleansing” period new members were required to undergo. The place gave him the creeps and an uneasy instinct whispered that they should get out as fast as possible. He paused for a second, glancing around for cameras, but didn’t see any. He walked over to the reception desk, on which sat a multi-line phone, a clipboard, and a cup of pens printed with the New Day logo.

Jeffrey realized when he held the pen in his hand that he’d seen the logo often on items like coffee cups, notepads. It hadn’t really clicked for him when he’d seen the logo on the van. But now he recalled seeing it on advertisements on the subway for things like depression counseling, addiction recovery, breaking the cycle of child abuse. The light blue line drawing of sunbeams reaching through cloud cover on a white background. He thought of the website and the brochures Dax had taken. It was outreach. Like the pedophile who picks the child with the lowest self-esteem, or the rapist who picks the smallest, most defenseless woman, they were trawling for people in the most pain, people who’d give almost anything to feel better.

The list of visitors was blank. But Jeffrey could see that heavy handwriting on the page above had left an impression on the blank sheet that must have been below it. He held it up to the light and tilted it, hoping to make something out. But his eyes were not great to begin with, so he gave up quickly. He took the sheet, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

The sounding of a soft bell startled him. He turned to see an elevator bank to his right. The lighted display above one of the doors indicated that the car was in a downward descent. He looked around for a place to hide.

L
ydia walked nearly two blocks as quickly as she could without looking as if she were afraid or in any kind of a rush. She passed some shops that were closed for the evening, a small café, a copy and mailing center, a pet store. The neighborhood was an awkward mix of businesses, private homes, and condo buildings. Some of the homes were old and regal, adding a quaintness to the area which otherwise would have been like any other modern city block. They stood proudly beside the larger, newer apartment buildings that had cropped up, looking a bit out of place but refusing to give ground.