Strong 03 - Twice (11 page)

“You all right?” asked Jeffrey, entering the bathroom, kneeling beside her, and placing a hand on her head.

“I’m okay,” she answered, trying to smile at him. She looked into his eyes and saw how happy he was, and it made her happier, too.

She pulled herself together and got up from the marble floor, leaned against the sink and inspected her face closely in the mirror. He stood behind her and smiled at her reflection. He was dressed already, wearing a royal blue Ralph Lauren oxford and charcoal pants, a black Italian leather belt with brushed chrome accents and matching buckled boots.

He put some of her Sebastian gel in his hair behind her as she brushed her teeth and pulled a comb through her jet-black hair.

“Come have a cup of coffee with me before I go?” he said, hugging her from behind.

“Sure,” she said, and trundled downstairs behind him still in
her purple silk pajamas. She had a few hours before she had to meet Eleanor Ross at the office, so she planned to do a little exploring on the Internet, see what she could find about Julian Ross and her past. Dax was sitting on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table watching
The Today Show
as they came down the stairs.

“When did you get here?” asked Jeff.

“A couple of minutes ago,” he said, not looking up from the screen. “I made some coffee.”

“He has a key?” asked Lydia.

“I thought it was a good idea,” answered Jeff with a shrug.

“God, why doesn’t he just move in here and start paying rent?”

“Katie Couric is really
hot
, you know. She’s got this whole sexy girl-next-door thing going on,” said Dax.

“So where did you go yesterday, Dax?” asked Lydia, grabbing two coffee mugs from the cabinet. They’d just left the gallery and were walking toward the Yum Yum Diner when Dax’s cell phone rang. He had about a thirty-second conversation, which seemed to mainly consist of grunts. Then he had hung up quickly and said, “I gotta go. I’ll see you in the morning.” He had walked away without another word, disappearing around the corner.

“None of your bloody business,” he said gruffly. “Christ, you’re
nosy
.”

“All of a sudden you get this call and then you just disappear like James Bond on a mission.”

“I have other clients, you know,” he said, standing up and walking over to them, pouring himself some more coffee and then handing the pot to Lydia. “You are
not
the center of my universe,” he continued, patting Lydia on the cheek. “A concept that I know is difficult for you.”

“Oh, come on, Dax,” she pleaded, “give it up. You’re too
mysterious
. I can’t stand it.” Her curiosity about him, his life, and his past was like an itch that she couldn’t scratch. She placed the cups on the counter, poured some coffee in each, and put the pot back in the
machine. She was about to press Dax further when she was struck by yet another powerful wave of nausea. She turned and ran to the downstairs bathroom, slamming the door behind her. When she was gone, Dax turned to Jeff and said quietly, “I got a lead on him.”

Jeff raised his eyebrows. They’d agreed that if they got a handle on Jed McIntyre, they’d take care of it themselves, without the FBI … and without Lydia.

“Is it reliable?”

Dax shrugged. “I think so. We’ll need to check it out. Sooner rather than later.”

“Lydia has a meeting at the office in a couple of hours with Eleanor Ross. Let’s talk then.”

Dax nodded as Lydia waddled back into the room, holding her stomach, looking gray and sweaty. She threw herself on the couch with a groan. “This kid is kicking my ass already.”

“You know,” said Dax, sitting beside her and dropping his arm around her, “you don’t have that healthy
glow
so many pregnant women seem to have.” He gave her an affectionate squeeze.

“Oh, fuck off, Dax.”

L
ydia’s office, which had been more or less transplanted from the home she’d sold last year in Santa Fe, took up the greatest square footage on the first floor of their apartment. The south wall faced Great Jones Street and was comprised largely of four ten-foot windows. The east wall was floor-to-ceiling bookcases, containing the intellectual clutter of most of the books she had read and all she had written in her career. Across from her desk sat a large sienna leather couch and matching chair, between them a mahogany wood table, which had once been the door of an eighteenth-century Spanish castle.

It was a peaceful place, a cocoon, and as she settled into the black leather chair at her desk and booted her laptop, she listened to the hushed street noise that only just barely made it through the
thick glass of the windows. A scented candle beside her gave off a hint of jasmine, though it wasn’t lit. On the wall behind her hung a clutter of awards, her Pulitzer chief among them. Several black-and-white photographs accented empty wall space: an adobe church against a darkening sky threaded with lightning, a photograph of her taken by Herb Ritts during a shoot for a
Vanity Fair
feature in which she looked a pleasing combination of haunted and mysterious, mischievous and wise. It had surprised her then that she looked so utterly together, when she was really just lost inside. She had been relieved that it didn’t show.

Here, in her office, she was free. She didn’t have to think about Jed McIntyre, or about her pregnancy. She only had to focus on the case at hand, give in to the buzz, and search for the pieces of the puzzle. It was like a drug she used to escape her reality, even as she was chasing someone else’s.

When her computer was up and running, her fingers danced across the keyboard as she logged in to her powerful search engine. She entered Julian Ross’s name and came up with over a thousand entries. Lydia wasn’t necessarily interested in the accounts of Julian’s first husband’s murder. She had more details from Ford McKirdy’s old files and Jeff’s memory than she would find online. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for exactly. She was just looking. She would know she’d found it … when she felt the familiar jolt of electricity course through her veins.

She scrolled down through the gallery reviews, the publicity pieces, the gossip columns, the wedding announcement. Lydia marveled at the photographs … the radiant, photogenic woman captured laughing, dancing, or serious, with searing, intelligent eyes, giving interviews, walking in Washington Square Park with a child on each hand, her husband close behind.

There were several images of Julian with Richard Stratton. He looked more like her father than her husband, an elegant man with graying temples, high forehead, and a cool, distant gaze. There was
a photo of them in tennis whites on the lawn of a sprawling Hudson estate, one of them in formal wear arriving at a Guggenheim event, and a candid shot captured as the family shopped on Fifth Avenue. Three different moments in time, but their body language in each was similar. Richard with a possessive arm around her shoulders, hand on her arm, or holding one of her hands in both of his. Julian leaning away or looking away. In the candid, she seemed to shrink from him and he had a wistful look on his face as though even when they were close, she eluded him.

Still, the Julian Ross Lydia saw cataloged before her in snapshots, moments, some posed, some honest, seemed content if not exactly happy, in command of her life, a mother, a wife, an artist. But she was a specter, in no way resembling the shattered, wretched woman Lydia had met at the Payne Whitney Clinic.

“What happened to you?” she wondered out loud, her voice just a whisper.

She clicked on a
New York Times
piece,
AT HOME WITH JULIAN ROSS
. Here a color picture of Julian showed her delicate beauty lit in natural sunlight that gleamed in from a tall window in her Park Avenue duplex, as she reclined on a red velvet sofa. Her small twins, tiny reflections of each other, sat on either side of her. They were her image, delicate features, green eyes, wise and deep. There was nothing of Richard Stratton apparent in their faces. They stared at the camera as if hypnotized by it. The little girl, Lola, sucked her thumb. Lydia felt a little twist of something in her stomach as she looked at the photograph. There was something so ephemeral, something otherworldly about the twins. They were almost … spooky.

She read through the article, which was a valentine about Julian Ross, how wonderful, how talented, how resilient to bounce back from personal tragedy. It contained no questions about who might have murdered Tad if she did not. Just a story about her struggles with an uptight art professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, her studies in Paris, in Florence, an art teacher who recognized
her talent in grade school in the small upstate New York town where she was a child. A town called, of all things, Haunted.

Nice place to raise a family
, she thought, images of dead trees and dilapidated cemeteries playing in her mind.

She looked at the clock on the lower right-hand side of her screen and realized she had lost track of time, scrolling through the numerous articles. She’d have to jet if she was going to make her appointment with Eleanor Ross. There was just one more thing she wanted to check. She entered “Haunted, New York” into the search engine. There weren’t that many entries, so it didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. She sat back when she saw it and inhaled sharply with a shake of her head, the buzz electric inside her.

“
D
id you know that back in 1965 when Julian was five years old, her father, Jack Proctor, was murdered? And that Eleanor was accused, tried, and acquitted for the crime?” said Lydia to her cell phone in a cab headed uptown. Jeff and Ford McKirdy were conferenced in on the line.

There was silence on the other end of the phone before Ford said, “Uh no. Is that true? Where did you hear that?”

“I found it online, a periodical archive search engine I subscribe to. I printed up copies so that you could see for yourself. Did anybody look into Julian Ross’s childhood during the last murder investigation? Or did you focus primarily on the physical evidence and witness testimonies?”

“Yeah, I have to admit,” said Jeff. “We focused pretty much on the present tense.”

“How was he killed?” asked Ford.

“In much the same way that Tad and Richard were killed. Taken apart at the seams. Eleanor was acquitted for many of the same reasons Julian’s jury found her innocent. No one could believe that a woman, especially a woman of that size, was physically capable of it.”

The cabdriver leaned on his horn pointlessly as they crawled
through midtown crosstown traffic. Other cars jammed on the street followed suit.

She heard Ford let out a loud sigh. “God … how could we have missed that?”

“So what are you suggesting?” said Jeffrey. “That nearly thirty-five years later the mysterious killer strikes again?”

“I’m suggesting that it bears looking into. The murder took place in a town called Haunted, New York.”

“Haunted?” both men asked simultaneously.

“Yes.”

“Actually, Lydia,” said Ford, “I think I know where that is. It’s north, near the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane.…”

Lydia’s stomach lurched at the mention of the place that had housed Jed McIntyre for so long and had failed to keep him where he belonged.

“I was planning on heading up there this afternoon,” Ford continued. “Feel like taking a ride?”

“Why do you need to go up there?”

“To talk to Jetty Murphy. You remember him, Jeff. The witness who saw the man leaving the apartment building.”

“He was a junkie, Ford.”

“Yeah, and he’s a murderer and a rapist. But he’s got eyes. Won’t hurt to interview him again. You never know.”

“I’ll go with you, Ford,” said Lydia. “If we can stop in Haunted, too.”

“Lydia,” said Jeffrey, “are you sure that’s a good idea?” She could hear enough concern in his voice to visualize him frowning and tapping his pen on his desk.

“Jed McIntyre isn’t there anymore, Jeff. Anyway, that’s probably the one place in the world he
won’t
follow me.”

“Oh, shit, Lydia. I’m sorry,” said Ford, embarrassed at his carelessness.

“It’s fine,” she said, annoyed at being handled like a porcelain doll. “Pick me up at the firm at one.”

“See you then. Don’t worry, Jeff. I’ll keep her safe.” She heard him click off.

“Are you sure you’re all right with this?” asked Jeff.

“I promised you I won’t put myself in any danger and I meant it. So trust me to take care of myself, okay?” she said briskly.

“I do. You know that,” he said. But she didn’t believe him. She knew he thought her reckless and stubborn. And maybe, sometimes, she was both of those things.

“I’ll see you in a minute.”

She hung up the phone feeling restless, caged. She didn’t like the limitations being imposed on her … don’t go here because of Jed McIntyre, don’t do this because you’re pregnant. Beneath the claustrophobic sense of being shackled and helpless was a tiny flame of rebellion. She was starting to feel a headache creeping up on her.

“Don’t worry, Lydia,” said Dax beside her. He was so quiet sometimes that she forgot he was right next to her. She looked at him and he had earnest eyes on her. “It’ll be over soon. I have a feeling.”

She knew he was talking about Jed McIntyre. He had a way of knowing what she was thinking that revealed about him a surprising amount of intuition. She looked at him and gave him a sad smile.

“You’re right,” she lied. “I feel it, too.”

W
hen Lydia and Dax arrived at the office of Mark, Striker and Strong, Eleanor Ross was already seated at Lydia’s desk, filling out the firm’s paperwork … payment contract, liability disclaimers, etc. It occurred to Lydia that this was the first case she’d had that actually involved a paying client. Usually she was drawn into cases by something else … a hunch or a feeling. Something would pique her interest and she’d wind up tripping into a whole big mess and bringing Jeffrey along with her.

She pushed her way through the glass doors, wearing a long
black cashmere coat, black stretch jeans, and a red Calvin Klein ribbed wool sweater with a cowl neck. A big leather bag over her shoulder contained her “life”—everything from her Palm Pilot to her Beretta to her hairbrush.