Strong 03 - Twice (8 page)

“You can’t help me,” she said softly, her voice thick and slow. “No one can.”

“Is she heavily medicated?” asked Lydia, looking at the doctor.

“Oh, yes,” answered the doctor. “She was hysterical, a danger to herself.”

“We
can
help you, Julian,” said Lydia softly, leaning in slightly. “If you can tell us what you remember.”

The doctor sighed, agitated suddenly behind Lydia. “I don’t think you’re going to have much luck, Ms. Strong. She’s not going to be able to remember anything at this point.”

Jeffrey held up his hand. “Just give her a minute.”

Julian held Lydia’s eyes. “My children,” she said, her tone not quite a question, more a musing.

“They’re fine,” answered Lydia. “They’re with your mother.”

Julian gave a little laugh and rolled her eyes dramatically. “Oh, well then … they’ll be fine,” she said, her voice suddenly tight with sarcasm and anger. “Look how well I turned out.”

She scribbled something in the air with an invisible pen and looked at Lydia with a wink, as if she thought Lydia were in on some private joke. “My mother, the queen. The queen of the damned. Evil bitch.”

“She’s ranting,” said the doctor.

“I can see that,” said Lydia, turning to look at her with annoyance.

“Why are you so angry at your mother?” asked Lydia. Julian didn’t answer. She just kept writing in the air furiously.

The room was so silent, Lydia could hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights above their heads and Julian’s quick and shallow breathing. A moth fluttered above them, knocking itself into the light with a succession of soft taps.

“Julian, do you know where you are?”

“Do you know where
you
are?” Julian answered with a childish giggle. “Does anyone?”

“Some of us have a pretty good idea,” Lydia answered gently.

“I’m hiding,” she said with a vigorous nod, as if this answered everyone’s questions.

“Who are you hiding from?” asked Lydia.

Julian slid down on the bed suddenly, as if invisible strings that
had been holding her upright had snapped. She curled up into a ball facing Lydia, holding herself tight. She was so thin that Lydia could see her shoulder bones poking through her pale skin.

“From my other half,” she said, closing her eyes. Lydia thought of the painting again, the man’s face divided into two parts, the two women.

“What do you mean, Julian?”

But Julian turned her back on them. She lay facing the wall, her breathing becoming slow and heavy. Lydia asked her question again but got no response.

“I’m going to have to cut you off, Ms. Strong,” said the doctor. “You can see how exhausted she’s become. You can try again in a couple of days.”

Lydia looked reluctantly at the small form of Julian Ross. From behind she looked like a child. She got up to leave, pushing the chair back to the place where she’d found it. She’d seen something dancing in Julian’s eyes, something reachable. Lydia thought if she could only come up with the right trigger, she could rescue Julian from her own mind. The three of them walked toward the door.

“Lydia?” said Julian, without turning around.

“Yes, Julian.”

“He’s come for me, again. No one can stop him now.”

Lydia stood staring at Julian, remembering again the canvas, that monster’s face. As the doctor put her hand on Lydia’s arm and led her from the room, she felt a chill move down her spine. She felt an odd connection to the artist. Maybe it was because Lydia felt hunted, too.

F
rom above his copy of the
New York Times
, he saw them leave the Payne Whitney Clinic on West Sixty-eighth Street. He could smell the honey-roasted cashews from the vending cart on the corner and it made his stomach rumble. Lydia hadn’t eaten yet and neither had he.

She was radiant today, truly glorious, and it filled his heart with love just to be near her. There was something so flushed and creamy about her skin. He would do anything to reach out and touch it. But she was surrounded, always. If it wasn’t Jeffrey Mark, it was that other monkey, the burly Australian. Just the thought of him made his blood pressure rise, caused a tightness in his throat. He wouldn’t forget the way he had been treated by Dax Chicago.

Jed McIntyre wiped the newsprint from his fingers onto the long black wool coat he’d picked up for ten dollars at a thrift store in the East Village and adjusted the plaid golfer’s cap.

Today he was an old man reading a paper at a bus stop. Yesterday he had been a homeless woman pushing a cart down her block. Tomorrow … well, who knew? Every day was a creative challenge. The world was looking for him. He was hiding in plain sight. People never really saw what was right in front of them; you could always count on that.

Luckily for him, before Dax Chicago had put a major kink in his plans, he’d stowed the duffel bag given to him by Alexander Harriman, Esq., in a locker in Grand Central Station. The key hung on a chain around his neck. So he was flush. No money worries, though he had lost his vehicle. Anyway, in the city, a car was more a pain in the ass than it was worth.

He watched her, through the round gold rims of his glasses that had no lenses, as she stood on the corner with Jeffrey. He watched the way she draped a hand casually on his arm as she talked. She was animated, leaning into him, her eyes bright. Jeffrey Mark hailed a cab and then opened the door for Lydia. He slid in behind her and then they took off.

Jed stood and watched until the cab was out of sight. The crosstown bus hissed to a stop in front of him and he got on, slid his card through the slot, and took a seat at the back. He saw a white van pull from its spot on the street, though he was sure there hadn’t been a driver in there a minute ago. It headed downtown after the
yellow cab. Those FBI guys were everywhere. Yet they saw nothing. He laughed a little too loudly and the elderly woman sitting next to him glanced at him warily. He gave her a bright smile.

“
I
t just doesn’t work for me,” said Lydia, flipping through the photos Ford had given them. The cabdriver wove between and around cars, racing up the West Side Highway as if the cops were chasing him.

“Can you slow down, please?” Jeffrey said to the bulletproof glass that separated them from the driver. But the driver seemed not to hear … or maybe more likely not to give a shit.

“I admit the logistics are a bit hard to put together,” he said, finally giving up on trying to get through to the maniac cabdriver. “But right now it doesn’t look like there was anyone else there.”

“More evidence is going to turn up,” she said. She had a way of sounding so sure of herself and her intuition that Jeffrey was always inclined to nod in response to what she said, even if he didn’t necessarily agree with her.

“You know, there have been cases where a person is so pumped full of adrenaline that he takes on superhuman strength.”

“Usually brought on by fear,” said Lydia, thinking of the painting again.

“Or narcotics.”

“Ford’s notes say that her blood alcohol level was only slightly elevated and that there were no narcotics present at all.”

“Or rage,” suggested Jeffrey, bracing himself as the cab made a sharp fast exit from the highway at Ninety-sixth Street and headed across town. It was the street that divided the city. Ninety-sixth separated the richest people in Manhattan from the poorest, the safest neighborhoods from the most dangerous. The city was segregated like that all over, but nowhere more starkly than here. If you followed Madison Avenue or Park Avenue from midtown up to the Bronx River Expressway, you saw the city change before your eyes. Luxury high-rises, trendy cafés, exclusive shops morphed into stark
projects and dark doorways, abandoned buildings with boarded-up windows and marred by graffiti, empty lots filled with garbage.

“I guess the most pressing question at this point,” said Jeffrey, “is whether there was another way into the building.”

“There are a
lot
of questions,” said Lydia, feeling the buzz tingling in her fingertips. “Like who does Julian believe has come for her? Is it someone real? Or is she delusional?”

“Well, she’s definitely delusional.”

“Something’s not right,” she said, looking out the window.

“If I had a nickel for every time you’ve said that …”

“You
do
,” she said with a smile.

“True enough.”

Jeffrey and his partners Jacob Hanley and Christian Striker had started their private investigation firm nearly seven years ago, now. All former FBI men, they’d grown tired of the politics of the bureau, tired of the paranoia about public perception of the organization, and they’d decided they’d be more effective investigators on their own.

They’d started out with small cases—insurance fraud, husbands checking up on wives, some employee screening. Then they’d started working with the FBI and NYPD on cold cases, or cases where the police felt their hands were tied … in those cases, the firm’s involvement was strictly confidential. But it was Lydia and Jeffrey’s first case together, the infamous Cheerleader Murders, that put them on the map. Now the firm that started out of Jeffrey’s one-bedroom East Village apartment employed over a hundred people and filled a suite of offices in the West Fifty-seventh Street high-rise. They’d been hugely successful, in large part due to Lydia, her contributions as a consultant, and the publicity that surrounded the books she wrote on some of the cases they’d worked. When Jacob died last year, Jeffrey and Christian Striker had asked Lydia to come on as partner.

“True enough,” he repeated, taking her hand.

The cab came to a halt in front of an attractive brownstone off
of Central Park West. Jeffrey paid the cabdriver through the small flip tray in the glass and tipped, even though the guy had practically killed them all. But they had made good time, and he couldn’t complain about that. He did make a mental note of his name and ID number—Abdul Abdullah, number 689GHT2—for what purpose he didn’t know. The driver never acknowledged them at all except to take the money.

Lydia slid out of the cab behind Jeffrey and looked at the door to the ob/gyn office with trepidation.

“Maybe that test was wrong,” she said, hesitating at the sidewalk.

“Maybe,” answered Jeffrey, reaching out his hand. “That’s why we’re here.”

But he hoped that it wasn’t wrong. He wanted this and he knew in his heart that she did, too. She was just afraid. But he was sure that everything was just as it should be and that they were going to be fine … all three of them.

T
he past was immortal. Maybe it slept, but it never died. It had been creeping up upon them all this time. Without sound and without odor, like the most skilled predator, it had stalked them and suddenly it was upon them. In her two-bedroom suite at the Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue, Eleanor Ross poured hot water from a hand-painted porcelain pot into a matching teacup. The scent of oolong tea rose potent and savory as she put the lid in place with a delicate clink, and replaced the pot on the tray. She sat on the plush sofa and drummed her long fingernails on the dark oak surface of the coffee table.

She regarded her hands for a moment with their long manicured fingers, their loose white skin and veins like ropes beneath the nearly translucent surface. They were the hands of an old woman. She brought a hand to her hair and touched the rough, brittle strands that were pulled back tightly into a bun. The hair of an old woman. It was funny how the external changed so dramatically but the internal remained much the same. Her perceptions, her concept of herself had not changed all that much since she was a young mother. Even though the shell of her was virtually unrecognizable. She’d been beautiful once, so beautiful. Tall and voluptuous, with long, thick red hair, almond-shaped eyes that blazed green, perfect breasts, magnificent white unblemished skin. But that was all in the past now … the only part of the past that was dead and gone. Beauty had faded, but the horror lived and breathed.

It seemed so silly now that she had imagined they could all escape their legacy. She thought of her daughter in that awful place, the twins sleeping in the bedroom across the suite. They were still innocent, but she saw it in them, too. In their too-old eyes, in the way they looked at each other, in the way they communicated without speech. She had tried to ignore it, but she had seen it too many times. Eleanor still missed her own brother, in spite of everything. In spite of the fact that he’d been dead now nearly twenty years. There was a connection there that no one and nothing could sunder. Not even time. Not even murder.

She looked into the facets of the magnificent emerald in its antique platinum setting on her left hand. Her engagement ring, given to her by the only man she had ever loved enough to marry. Gone now, too. Before she could stop it a tear traveled down her cheek and she quickly wiped it away. She got up and walked to the window, looked down to the street, where people hustled about their ordinary lives. Steam billowed from a manhole cover, its plumes rising into the air and dissipating in the cold before they reached the sky. The day was gray and felt like snow. The people, coming home from work, or running to do some shopping for Christmas, or meeting friends for dinner, filled Eleanor with envy. What must it be like not to live under the shadow her family lived under? But then she imagined, maybe just to make herself feel better, that they were all haunted by something, weren’t they? There was
something
that they didn’t want to be. They didn’t want to repeat the cycle of their family legacy, become an alcoholic, an abusive parent, the victim of a congenital disease, an old woman living alone with no one to look in on her. Everyone lived under the shadow of some fear or dysfunction, didn’t they?

The phone was ringing softly on the end table beside the couch, maybe twice, maybe three times before she noticed it. She moved over to it quickly and picked it up.

“Hello?” she said warily, anxious that it might be more bad news. The phone was cold and heavy in her hand.

“Ms. Ross. It’s Lydia Strong. We wanted to let you know that we’re going to be taking on your case.”