Strong 03 - Twice (40 page)

“I talked to him right after he learned about Annabelle Hodge,” interjected Piselli. “He wanted me to cooperate with Rawls, the head of MCU. Make sure he got anything he needed from our files. But I didn’t ask him where he was going and he didn’t say.”

“We know he spoke to his wife briefly that evening late, after midnight. She called from Houston,” Piselli said.

“Did you talk to Donofrio?” asked Jeffrey.

“We can’t find him.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lydia, taking a sip from her beer.

“Rawls headed back there and spent some more time with him, but he basically just went over and over the same stuff he’d told Ford. Rawls had nothing to hold him on, so they had to let him go. He never made it home after he left the precinct.”

“You think he fled?” asked Jeffrey.

“With no money, no change of clothes, no call to his mother? No,” said Piselli with a shake of his head.

“Do you have the videotape of their conversation?” asked Lydia.

Piselli pulled a videotape from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. “I didn’t know if it would help you, but I thought I’d bring you a copy.

“They talked about Annabelle Hodge, mostly,” he said, and then ran down the general content of the conversation. “How much she hated Julian Ross and a bunch of other crap about how she was a voodoo priestess or some shit.”

Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look.

“You think she’s the shooter? That she took the twins?”

“She’s suspect number one as far as the Missing Children’s Unit is concerned.”

“Have you been up to Haunted?” asked Lydia.

“We been up there, looking for Ford and Geneva Stout, a.k.a. Annabelle Hodge. No sign of either of them. But we got a warrant and with the help of the locals up there, we took the Hodge residence apart. They’re still watching the place.”

“What did you find?”

“We found a knife that was consistent with the injuries incurred by Richard Stratton. But it had been thoroughly cleaned, no prints, no blood evidence.”

“You talked to Maura Hodge?” asked Jeffrey.

Malone and Piselli shook their heads.

“Can’t find her, either?”

“She’s gone, too,” said Malone.

“The Missing Children’s Unit is working around the clock. Julian Ross’s attorneys are riding them like you wouldn’t believe. Those kids are worth millions.”

“No leads?”

“Nothing, and I mean
nothing
. They’re taking tips from a hotline. They’ve been canvassing the neighborhood and Haunted, too. The lawyers posted a reward, we’ve got sketches of Annabelle and Maura Hodge all over the television, newspapers, the streets. Rawls won’t admit it, but he’s feeling desperate. You can see it in him.”

Lydia felt a flutter of panic and a little guilt. She’d been so overwhelmed with the events of her own life that she hadn’t even thought about the kids since she’d left Eleanor’s apartment that night. Lydia thought of their sweet faces, remembering shaking each of their little hands that day at the hotel. She felt a little ache in her chest, wondering what had happened to Lola and Nathaniel, their father and grandmother dead, their mother locked away.

“It’s cold and getting colder. The case is at a dead end. Two bodies, two missing children, one missing detective, the only survivor whose whereabouts we know of,” said Piselli, showing the palms of his hands, “in the nuthouse. Crazy, talking about ‘destroyers’ and monsters eating her young.”

“Eating her young …” said Lydia. “She’s been saying that from the beginning.”

“She has, hasn’t she?” said Jeffrey.

“A cop disappears like that,” said Malone, apparently not listening to the conversation but thinking about Ford, “people figure he turns up somewhere having parked with a bottle and his service revolver. You know what I mean?”

There was a look of worry and sadness on his face; the job hadn’t yet taught him how to hide his emotions better, hadn’t desensitized him to the ugliness of a cop’s life. Lydia found herself hoping that maybe he’d get out before it did. There was something refreshing about a young man whose feelings you could read on his face. Even
Jeffrey had learned a game face; Lydia couldn’t always tell what he was feeling by looking into his eyes.

They were all quiet for a minute. “We been to Ford’s place in Brooklyn,” said Piselli. “Rose came back; she’s worried sick, of course.”

“Though maybe if she was so worried she wouldn’t have left in the first place,” said Malone with a disapproving snort.

“Not your business,” said Piselli, giving him a look.

“You said he talked to Rose the night he disappeared. What was that conversation about?” she asked.

“She told him she was coming back so that they could talk.”

“He would have been happy about that; the conversation would have made him hopeful,” said Lydia. She remembered her conversation with Ford when they’d driven upstate. He’d seemed very depressed then, unsure about the future and doubting the way he’d lived his life. Those things and the pressures of the job, the lack of an outlet for his emotions and a viable support system … well, it led a lot of cops to the end Malone feared. But not with Rose coming back. Unless that added a whole other set of pressures that he couldn’t handle.

“Ford wouldn’t go out like that,” said Jeffrey, sounding certain. “Especially not with Rose coming back. It doesn’t make sense.”

“So what can we do, guys?” said Lydia.

Now that they were talking about the case again, she was infused with a sense of urgency. It gave her a jolt of energy that she hadn’t felt in a while. Her fear for Ford and the twins and the itch of curiosity awoke a familiar fire within her. She felt a little guilty, but part of her was relieved to have a problem to solve. Her work had always helped her keep her mind off of her life … for better or for worse.

“Nothing,” said Piselli with a shrug and a sideways glance. “We’re just following up with you, Lydia, since you were one of the last people to see him.”

“Nothing?”

“Yeah, since you know,
legally
we got no reason to go back up to Haunted and take another look around,” he said, looking pointedly at Lydia. “The Richard Stratton case takes precedence over Ford, since there’s no evidence of foul play in Ford’s case. MCU is handling the twins and our help is not exactly welcome. We have no chain of evidence that leads us back to Haunted, with Maura and Annabelle Hodge nowhere to be found. We’re stuck.”

“Well,” she said, leaning back and looking at Jeffrey, unable to keep the edge out of her voice. She was hoping that he wasn’t going to try to stop her from getting involved. “We
should
be getting back to work on the Ross case, anyway.”

“Even though our client is dead, we have a responsibility to Julian Ross to follow through,” agreed Jeffrey. “Maybe we can come up with something on Ford while we’re up there.”

Lydia observed the same combination of concern and energy in Jeffrey’s face, in the way he was so quick to agree. Distractions could not be overrated when the options were sitting around grieving and reliving nightmares.

“Of course, you’ll let us know how it goes,” said Piselli with a satisfied nod.

“Naturally,” answered Lydia.

They all looked at one another for a minute, the questions and possibilities turning in front of their eyes.

“Why doesn’t anybody in this country just say what they mean?” said Dax sourly.

B
ack at the apartment, they watched the tape of Ford’s interview with Anthony Donofrio. Jeffrey and Lydia sat next to each other on the couch and Dax had asked to be parked by the window. Lydia had a pad on her lap and a Montblanc pen in her hand. She tapped the pen quickly on the arm of the couch, turning things over in her mind as the tape played.

“So Annabelle—” said Jeffrey when the taped had ended, getting up and flipping off the VCR, “why would she hate Eleanor and Julian so much?”

“Maybe it’s inherited hatred. Passed from mother to daughter, like the curse?” answered Lydia, speculating.

“As far as we know, she was the last person to see Eleanor, the last person to enter that apartment before the twins went missing,” Jeffrey said.

“But why? Why kill Eleanor in cold blood and take the twins? What does she have to gain?”

There was no answer for that question that Lydia could get her brain around. She knew the facts, that Annabelle was the obvious person to be looking at for the murder of Eleanor Ross and the disappearance of the twins. But the motive seemed weak to her: Kill Eleanor because Maura hated her. And even if that were the case, why take the twins?

“So we go back to the basic question: Who has the most to gain now that Richard Stratton and Eleanor Ross are dead and Julian is
locked away?” said Jeffrey, sitting beside Lydia. “I mean, it looked for a while like Eleanor had the most to gain.”

“But now she’s dead.”

“So presumably the Stratton-Ross estate will go to the twins.”

“But they’re only children. So right now probably those lawyers Piselli was talking about would be in charge of their trust.”

“So the lawyers have the most to gain.”

“Assuming that all of this comes down to money.”

“Doesn’t it usually?” said Dax.

Someone had said to Lydia not very long ago that it was not money but the love of money that was the root of all evil. She didn’t want to believe that … there was something so cheap about the concept that the human soul could be corrupted by something so fleeting, so ultimately unsatisfying as monetary wealth.

“Maybe it’s not about money. Maybe it’s about revenge,” said Lydia.

“The curse, you mean?” said Jeffrey.

“Yeah.” The quest for justice, no matter how twisted, was something that Lydia could understand better.

“So who’s invested in the fulfillment of the curse?” asked Jeffrey.

“Maura and Annabelle Hodge. The daughters of the daughters of Annabelle Taylor. Cops found that knife at the scene.”

Jeffrey shrugged. “Without prints or blood evidence. I mean, you could probably find a knife in our kitchen that was consistent with the knife that killed Richard Stratton.”

Lydia nodded. “But still, it’s something.”

They were quiet for a minute.

“If you ask me—” said Dax sullenly, “and you didn’t—whether it’s about the money or it’s about the curse, whether it’s Annabelle or Maura Hodge, or the goddamn ghost of whoever, there’s only one person left to get any answers from.”

They both looked at him.

“Julian Ross.”

•  •  •

S
itting on an orange plastic chair in the Payne Whitney waiting room, Lydia, in spite of everything, felt a strange lightness, like the relief that comes after the blinding pain of a migraine subsides.

She had come to Payne Whitney unaccompanied. And though it was a grim errand, the fact that she had traveled here not stalked by Jed McIntyre, not watched by the FBI, and not guarded by Dax and Jeffrey gave her a sense of freedom she didn’t remember feeling for years.

As she’d stepped off the train, moved through the platform, and jogged up the concrete steps to the street, she had the sudden thought:
Jed McIntyre is dead
. And something inside her shifted. She had the powerful sense that a higher justice had been served. The grief and numbness she’d been feeling wasn’t gone exactly, but she could see thin fingers of light splitting the gray she’d been dwelling beneath. Then she wondered, was it the satisfaction of a vengeance that made her feel this good—vengeance for her mother, for herself, for all his victims living and dead—or was it just relief? She looked into her own heart and didn’t find the answer. But she did realize that, for her, revenge had been a powerful motivator—love, even greater. And, sitting in the sterile clinic waiting room, that thought led her to draw the conclusion that love, revenge, and money were probably the most powerful drives she could think of, outside of survival. It applied to everyone she could think of, including Jed McIntyre. She wondered which of those things were at play in the Ross case; she was starting to suspect all three.

Every time Lydia had come to see Julian Ross, she seemed smaller and grayer. Her lips were cracked and her eyes were dull, side effects, Lydia imagined, of her medications. The woman who had turned into a demon before her eyes just days earlier seemed incapable of even sitting up straight. Still, a burly orderly stayed in the room during their interview this time.

“What do you want?” asked Julian, looking at her with darting, paranoid eyes.

Lydia sat down so that they were eye-level. She held eye contact and made sure her voice was clear and strong. “Listen, Julian. This is your last chance to play straight with me.”

Julian narrowed her eyes. “They sent you, didn’t they?”

“No, Julian, they didn’t. Listen to me,” she said, using the voice she would use to speak to a child. “The destroyers have your children. You need to tell me how to help them. Right now, before it’s too late.”

Dax was right. Julian was their only hope for answers, their only hope for a direction that might lead to Ford and the twins. Maybe, by speaking Julian’s language, she might get something that they could use.

But Julian stared blankly at Lydia, blinked her eyelids heavily, slowly, as though they were filled with sand. A long minute passed and Lydia wondered if she’d made a mistake. She looked into Julian’s eyes, searching for something there that she might appeal to, but they were flat and glassy.

“Your mother is dead and the twins are gone,” she said finally. “If you don’t help me, I can’t help find your children.”

She didn’t seem moved by the information, but something flickered on Julian’s face and then she rose and walked over to her bed, casting a glance at the guard by the door. She reached beneath her mattress and withdrew a large sketchpad. Some black ink pens clattered to the floor.

“She’s not allowed to have that,” said the orderly quickly, moving toward Julian.

“It’s okay,” said Lydia, reaching her hands out to Julian. “I’ll take it. Please.”

Julian handed it to her. “Now get out,” she whispered venomously. “I have nothing left to say.”