Strong 03 - Twice (17 page)

“Fine. What’s happening with you?” Her voice lilted, but the words felt like rocks in her throat.

“Not much,” he lied. “Are you with Ford?”

“Yeah. Are you with Dax?”

“Yeah. Can we meet up with you guys?”

“Sure. We’re heading over to the Ross building. We saw something on a surveillance tape and we’re going to check it out. Meet us in the laundry room.”

“The laundry room?”

She tried a joke, but it came out sounding harsh and angry. “Is there an echo in here?” She never was any good at hiding her emotions.

“You’re pissed,” he said.

“Why would I be?” Her voice sounded crisp and sarcastic even to her own ears, and she saw Ford turn to look at her out of the corner of her eye.

“We have a lot to talk about later.”

She let his words hang in the air, tried to tell from his tone how things had gone.

“Is it settled?” she asked finally. There was a pause during which the specter of hope that had been lurking beneath the negative emotions swirling inside her faded and was lost.

“No. It’s not.”

“I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Lydia—”

But she hung up. She wasn’t really angry at Jeffrey. She wasn’t really angry. She was scared and tired. But anger was always easier to deal with because anger was power. Anger made you do something, made you act. Anger made you strong. Fear made you weak, made you cower, made you a victim. And that was just not acceptable to Lydia. It just wasn’t an option at all.

“Everything all right?” Ford asked as if he were sticking his hand into the lion’s cage at the Bronx Zoo.

She didn’t even know how to answer that question anymore. So she just nodded and looked out the window as they pulled up to the building on Park Avenue.

“
H
ardly anybody ever uses this laundry room, you know,” said the doorman as he took them down in the service elevator. His Yonkers accent was thick and he seemed out of place in the maroon tails with gold piping on the cuffs and collar that were the uniform for the building. It was probably the only suit he owned and even this was
too short in the legs and wrinkled. He was affable and a little on the goofy side and his name was Anthony Donofrio.

“These people got the cash, you know,” he said, quickly rubbing the fingers on his right hand together. He smiled, revealing crooked, yellowing teeth. “Most of them have washers and dryers in their apartments. Some of the old-timers, too cheap to buy their own, still come down here. But mostly the maids and nannies, if they have more than one load to do, they run down here to save time. I got the monitor in the office behind the front desk and I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I seen the actual tenant down there. But I work the night shift, mostly.”

Ford could tell that Anthony was enjoying this a little bit. Ever since those cop shows had started to make it big on prime-time television, people were a lot more cooperative. They felt like they were part of something when the police came to ask questions unless, of course, they had something to hide. Anthony Donofrio impressed Ford as the kind of guy who visited his mother, had a hard time with the ladies, and still hung out with the same guys he went to grade school with. If he had something to hide, maybe it was that he jerked off every night with a copy of
Hustler
. And who didn’t?

“So how did the camera get turned off that night, Anthony?” asked Ford, taking out his notepad.

“I don’t know,” he said with an exaggerated shrug. His eyes were wide and innocent, but Ford saw it. A quick shift of the pupils. “I never noticed it go off. Only when you guys looked at the tape did they find that it had been turned off and back on.”

Ford didn’t say anything for a minute, just looked down at his pad as if deep in thought. He let the silence grow thick and uncomfortable between them.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Anthony said again, this time with a nervous chuckle. Ford cocked his head to one side and gave Anthony a thoughtful frown. Suddenly he sensed Anthony wasn’t enjoying himself as much anymore.

“That’s the only place where the camera could be turned off, from behind
your
desk?”

Again the shift, and an uncomfortable stepping from side to side.

“Uh, yeah, behind the front desk.”

“Did you leave your post at any time? To take a leak or take a smoke—what ever?”

Anthony looked down at his feet and was quiet for a minute.

“Yeah, maybe,” Anthony said. “Yeah.”

“What was it?”

“A leak, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Hey,” he said, moving in close to Ford and giving a quick look around him. “I’m not supposed to take breaks. I could lose my job.”

“Anthony,” said Ford. “You’re not straight with me and your job’s gonna be the least of your worries, man.”

Anthony let out a long slow exhale and shook his head. “Every so often,” he said, with his eyes down, “I’d, you know, step outside for a smoke.”

“So the equipment was left unattended a number of times throughout the night. Someone could have walked in, turned it off, and turned it back on while you were outside?”

“I guess. Yeah, its possible.”

Ford gave a hard look at Anthony. Maybe he had more to hide than that
Hustler
after all. “What else, Anthony? If there’s something you’re holding back, now’s the time to let it out.”

“No, that’s it. I swear,” he said, casting an earnest look at Ford.

Ford nodded but gave Anthony eyes that said he wasn’t a hundred percent convinced that they were finished talking.

“Listen,” Anthony said, lowering his voice. “I really need this job.”

“You probably should have thought about that before, huh, Anthony?”

•  •  •

T
he laundry room looked like every other laundry room Ford had ever seen—fluorescent lights, cinderblock walls painted a light gray, Formica floors. The scent of detergent and that unmistakable smell that comes from dryer vents was heavy in the air. Only one dryer rumbled and through the glass Ford could see rose-colored sheets and blue and white towels tumbling. A bulletin board held building announcements, a page printed from a computer printer offering babysitting services and some inspection documents. The room looked clean, innocuous. That would change. He looked at his watch; forensics should be joining them any moment.

“Nobody touch anything,” he reminded Lydia and the other detectives.

“It’s a laundry room, Ford. This place will be covered with prints. You gonna have everyone authorized to use this room fingerprinted so that we can compare?” asked Piselli.

“Hey, you volunteering to head that up?” said Ford with a scowl. Piselli rolled his eyes.

“Fucking rookies been on the job less than five years and they think they know everything. It’s not out of the question. Not easy, but not out of the question.”

Lydia looked around the room. It felt like a dead end; there was nothing to see but washers and dryers, bland walls, white floors.

“How often is this room cleaned?” she asked.

“Maintenance comes in here once a week to dust and mop the floors,” Anthony answered, pleased to be helpful.

“Have they been here since Richard Stratton was murdered?”

“No, they come on Fridays—day after tomorrow.”

Lydia walked along the edge of the dryers, tracing the path that the person caught in the video camera must have taken. She walked to the end of the row where there was a small space between the last dryer and the wall. Here she dropped to the floor and peered under the dryer.

Ford walked over to her. “What do you see?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, standing up and wiping the dust from her nose. “We need to move the dryer.” Piselli and Malone removed surgical gloves from their pockets and easily slid the dryer forward. The four of them crowded in to peer behind the dryer.

“Well, will you look at that,” said Malone.

“What’s going on?” asked Jeff as he and Dax walked into the room.

“Christ, you two smell like a couple of sewer rats,” said Ford when they got closer.

“It’s a trapdoor,” said Lydia, not looking up at Dax and Jeff. She was too fascinated by their find. And besides, she hated both of them at the moment.

“Yeah. But leading where?” asked Piselli as if he didn’t really want to know.

It was a wooden door with a wrought-iron ring for a handle. It appeared to have been nailed and painted shut at some point, the Formica laid over it. But the flooring had been cut away, the nails had been pried out, and the paint chipped through around the edges. Ford moved in and lifted the lid. A ladder led down into a pitch-black hole. A foul dank odor of mold and rot wafted from the darkness. It was a smell that Dax and Jeff recognized all too well.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” said Dax in a bad impression of Al Pacino. Nobody laughed.

I
t’s the dark spaces, the secret passageways, the hidden doorways that the demons use to enter your life and rip it to pieces. It’s where the light doesn’t shine that they dwell and breed like bacteria in a warm, moist wound. The hole in the floor they’d discovered opened a similar blackness within Lydia. Someone had crept through this trapdoor in the floor to visit death on Richard Stratton and horror onto Julian Ross. Julian’s bogeyman, her worst nightmare, was alive and well and moving with stealth beneath the city streets. So was Lydia’s. She was more kindred to Julian than she had imagined and wondered how far she was from sharing Julian’s fate.

When Lydia had faced Jed McIntyre in the flesh, she felt sure that she would burst into flames. He had always been a ghost in her life, shadowing any peaceful moments, growing large in times of pain and sadness, and, in many ways, the reason behind most of her drive. If he hadn’t murdered her mother, she wasn’t sure she’d even be the person she was today. Certainly the pain that had always impelled her to understand the minds of madmen—her hopeless and relentless effort to pick up the pieces they left behind them, sort them, name them, make them understandable—had been visited upon her by Jed McIntyre. But actually, he had become almost theoretical. He was the face of fear, of pain, evil, grief. He was every murderer, every sin. And in being all these things he had become over the years a concept rather than a man. To see him real and alive—breathing, flesh and blood—had felt to Lydia like the animation
of her darkest, most secret inner fears. To imagine him lurking, shadowing the edges of her life like a wraith, was too much for her mind to absorb. A sad numbness had wrapped itself around her. And every day he was at large, it pulled itself tighter and she was starting to suffocate, finding it hard to draw a breath.

The hole yawned beneath her and everyone around her had disappeared. She felt like she was standing at the gates of hell, about to be pulled from the solid earth into a place of misery. And its pull was almost magnetic.

“Lydia.” She heard Jeffrey’s voice as if through glass. She felt his hand on her shoulder and she spun around to face him.

“Easy, tiger,” he said with a smile, and the world came rushing back. “Are you okay?”

“Why is everybody always asking me that?” she snapped, walking away past them and out of the room into the cool gray basement hallway. She leaned against the wall and rested her head against the stone wall. The pain throbbed again in her side. Slight but definitely not a good thing. She put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again, Jeffrey was standing before her.

If Jed McIntyre was the embodiment of all things ugly, wrong, and bad in the universe, then Jeffrey was all things good. Since the night they met, he had always been to her something just shy of a superhero. When he’d nearly been killed after taking a bullet in pursuit of a child killer on a Bronx rooftop, she realized he was just a man. But instead of that making him seem less to her, it had made him more precious. It had also allowed her childhood feeling of hero-worship for him to mature into love. Part of her still believed that he was faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Part of her would always believe that.

“We’re going home,” he said.

“What? No. I want to see where the doorway leads.”

“Dax will stay. He’ll call with any developments.”

“But—” she protested. It sounded weak even to her own ears.

She let him put his arm around her shoulder and lead her toward the elevator. She leaned into him, accepting the warmth and comfort that washed over her. She
was
going to kick his ass, for acting like a vigilante, for scaring the life out of her, for just being a cowboy. But that could wait a little while.

H
er head was twisted unnaturally to the right, her eyes were wide, and her mouth had frozen in a circle of surprise and fear. Her arms were flailed out to her sides and her legs were bent as though she were jumping for joy. Her eyes seemed to glow even in the darkness. Lying there on the cold dirty ground, she looked as though life had just left her, discarded her as if she’d never been worthy of drawing breath.

Rain stood over Violet’s body and was sorry. Sorry that she’d led such a hard life and sorry that it had ended in such an ugly way. Some people had heard him scream in anger when he found her body lying broken and bleeding not far from where The Virus lived or had lived. He could hear them now, shuffling up behind him, gasping as they saw Violet on the ground. Someone started to cry, but mostly they were silent. Tragedy struck here almost every day; people didn’t live long lives in the tunnels. No one was surprised to stumble upon a dead body.

They came to call him Rain because of a line that De Niro said in
Taxi Driver
. “Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalks.” He’d done that in a small way down here, he knew that. People depended on him because they needed order. Even in this place, people wanted to feel safe.

He felt them crowding in behind him and knew they were waiting for him to say something, to make it okay somehow. But he was momentarily at a loss for words. He’d depended on Violet as much as anyone else down here had, for motherly advice, encouragement, or just a sounding board. And now that she was gone, he felt true grief. More grief, in fact, than when his own mother, a junkie and
a whore, had died what seemed like a lifetime ago. He fought tears, kept his back turned to those that had gathered around him and Violet.