Fixed in Fear (11 page)

It was a few minutes past seven o'clock when Mort saw Lydia walking down the pier toward his houseboat. He'd called her after dropping Larry back at his university office. Mort had asked if his friend wanted to grab a burger down at the Crystal, but he knew Larry would want to spend the evening reading the letters he'd discovered in the dead man's study. And he'd want to do it alone. Mort understood. If he had found a pile of writings from Edie, he'd lock the world away until he'd memorized every line. Mort wasn't ready for a quiet evening. So he called Lydia to see if she'd be willing to drive up after work. He needed to clear the air with her.

“Are you alone?” Lydia asked as she reached his boat. She wore jeans and a soft sweater, the color of which reminded Mort of mint ice cream. Even though she was dressed casually, Lydia had a way of carrying herself that would have made her modest ensemble worthy of Seattle's snootiest white tablecloth restaurant. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a soft knot at the nape of her neck, but the gentle breeze drifting over the lake teased wisps around her face. Lydia's blue eyes scanned the entirety of the houseboat. A person who didn't know her would assume she was simply admiring the quaint nautical cottage, but Mort knew she was assessing the situation, preparing herself for any contingency. Lydia Corriger was never at ease. Mort knew her history and understood why. But that didn't make him stop feeling a hopeless sense of sympathy for the woman.

“Just me.” He waved her aboard and back to the rear deck where he was sitting. “I've got a bottle of merlot open if you're interested.”

Lydia stood motionless at the stern of the houseboat, watching Lake Union's early evening activity. “Where's Aggie? Out for a paddle?”

Mort liked that she remembered his neighbor. They'd met a few times. Agatha Skurnik had the discernment that came with eight decades of intelligent living. She'd told Mort, upon first meeting Lydia, that she liked her.

She also warned him to be careful, commenting on the low pulsing note only the most astute could detect in Lydia's calm demeanor. “That girl's scared, Mort,” he recalled her saying. “And scared people can be dangerous.”

“No.” Mort handed Lydia a glass of wine. “Aggie's down in Portland for a few days. Learning how to paddleboard.”

Lydia's smile was generous. “On the Columbia? She could have taken lessons here, I'm sure. Why would she choose one of the windiest rivers in the world?”

Mort shrugged. “What can I say? The woman lives for challenge.”

Lydia clinked her glass against Mort's bottle of Guinness. “Here's to challenges, then. May Aggie find them for years to come.”

“And may we have fewer of them,” Mort said before taking a sip.

They sat in flanking deck chairs. Mort knew she'd wait for him to speak first. Lydia wasn't one for small talk. She'd want to know the reason for his invitation before she spoke.

“Like I said on the phone yesterday, I'm proud of you.” Mort didn't explain further. She'd not admit to any involvement with Eddie Dirkin's capture. “And also like I said, I'm worried about you.”

“I can take care of myself, Mort.” Lydia's eyes were fixed on a pair of ducks paddling past.

“I hope you can, Liddy. But if an addict visits a crack house often enough, well…let's just say it's easier to avoid the pipe if he steers clear of those types of situations.”

“Or if
she
steers clear? You're comparing me to a crack addict now?” She tracked the ducks as they swam to the right. “I'm okay, Mort.”

“You're a strong woman. No doubt about that in my mind at all. But sometimes we can think we're a little too strong. Maybe get to thinking we can handle certain situations, but the next thing we know we're getting run over by them.”

“If this is what you want to talk about, maybe it's best I leave.” Her voice was steady. She meant what she said. But it was also warm. Like someone who hoped he'd drop the topic because she really wanted to stay.

“How's life for you down in Olympia?” Mort hoped she'd relax if he changed subjects. “Business good?”

She smiled. “Too good, I think. I thought it would take me longer to rebuild my practice. But I'm to the point where I'm only taking cases that really interest me. My patients are working hard. I like that.”

“Yeah, well, they've got a damned good psychologist. I hope they know that.”

Lydia turned toward him, a curious look in her eyes. “And just how would you know what kind of psychologist I am? I'd know if you had my office bugged.”

Mort was certain she would. Her sense of self-preservation was the legacy of a childhood spent with her very survival depending upon her ability to predict what the adults around her were liable to do. One slip—and from the files he'd read about her time in the foster system he knew there'd been many—could lead to rapes or beatings. The younger Lydia hadn't been able to assure her safety. The adult Lydia employed every resource available to ensure she was never again the victim.

“I see how you care for your patients. How you care about them. I see how you are with me.” He took another pull from his Guinness. “I'm not always the cool, calm, and collected man about town you see before you.” Her smile was coming more easily. He liked that. “You've been there for me, Liddy. I've not forgotten.”

Her silence reminded him how uncomfortable she was with praise.
Poor Liddy,
he thought.
Hungry to know you belong and are welcome, yet so unfamiliar with genuine affection you're awkward and unnerved by the simplest compliment.
He decided to shift topics again.

“I wonder if you're working too hard. You getting out much? How's that relationship going? I don't typically endorse great women dating anyone who's ever been near a police academy, but as far as cops go, you couldn't do better than Detective Paul Bauer.”

“Edie seemed to do all right with you.”

A gentle soothing came over him at the mention of Edie's name. He took that as a good sign. The days the thought of her caused nothing but white-hot crushing pain were gone. Even the sad times were getting shorter and farther apart. Now the memories of his late wife usually brought him peace. He knew better than to hope the constant missing of the woman who'd been his truest companion for over thirty years would ever disappear. He'd settled into acceptance, and that seemed to be enough.

“Yeah, well, if she did it was none of my doing. But don't change the subject. It's not good to stay in that fortress you've built for yourself. Gorgeous as it is, a bunker's still a bunker.”

He knew she was considering his words. Mort watched the light shift on the water and gave her the time she needed.

“I enjoy Paul,” she said finally. “You're right. He's a great guy. Great cop, too. One of the really
good
good guys. So you and I both know there can be nothing more between the two of us than a casual hookup now and again.”

“Don't limit yourself, Liddy. You've changed.”

“How often do you tell yourself that, Mort?” Her whisper had an edge. “Is it some kind of mantra you feel the need to repeat several times a day? Maybe to justify your decision to let me go? Or maybe you think if you tell me that enough, it will somehow magically be true?”

“Easy, Liddy. There's no threat here.”

She inhaled long and slow, held her breath for a few heartbeats, then blew it out softly. “Think about what you and Edie had. That great marriage. You and Edie together. Ready to take on whatever the world wanted to pitch at you, knowing there'd be no surprises. Just pure love and openness. You know I can't offer that. I can't burden Paul or any man with the truth about who I am. What I've done.” She surprised him by chuckling. “And if I did, can you imagine the eggs he'd be walking on for the rest of his life? Can you think of any man wanting to tell me my cosmetics were taking up too much bathroom space or maybe I put too much salt in the spaghetti, knowing I've got more than thirty notches on my holster?”

“It's a lonely life you're building.”

She nodded. “But it's mine. And it's safe.”

He reached over and patted her hand twice, knowing it was about all the human touch she could handle. It had taken him two years to earn even that small intimacy.

“Thanks for coming up,” he told her. “And make sure you give Bauer my regards next time you have one of those hookups you mentioned.”

“I will. Now talk to me about a topic other than me. There's something more you want to tell me.” Lydia took a sip of wine, still looking straight ahead at the loveliness of Lake Union after dusk.

Mort heaved a weary sigh. “It's been a long, quirky day. Marked with little elements of pure hell.” He brought her up to date on Carlton Smydon's murder case. He shared his concern that he's frequently stepping on Rita Willers's toes. “I don't mean to offend the chief. It just seems to be something I do naturally around that woman.” He told her about Bilbo Runyan, the sixty-year-old man hopelessly lost in the toked-up world of his youth. “And I got to meet the great Abraham Smydon. I'll never see his commercials in the same light again.” Mort finished by telling Lydia about Larry's discovery of Helen's letters and his wish that he could hear Edie's voice, even if it was only speaking to him from a handwritten page. Through twenty minutes of Mort's recollection of his day, Lydia listened. She nodded and smiled when it was appropriate. But she asked no questions and interjected no comments. She waited a full minute after he finished before speaking.

“There's more,” she said. “A bad day would have you sharing a beer with Micki and Jimmy. A rotten day would mean you'd take them out for steak. Instead you called me.”

For a moment Mort wondered if it was Lydia's training and experience as a clinical psychologist that made her so skilled at observing the unspoken. Or perhaps it was the six years she spent as The Fixer. Did she need to attune more to what was below the surface in order to carry off her executions so invisibly? He decided it didn't matter. There'd be no hiding anything from her.

“I saw Allie today.”

Lydia didn't react to the startling news with anything more than a slow nod. She wanted to know the facts. When? Where? She turned toward him in her chair when Mort described seeing his daughter from across a crowded soccer field, one hand on each of his granddaughters' shoulders.

“Did she hurt them?”

Mort shook his head. “I think they were more curious than anything. About her, for sure. And I'm certain the car ride home was filled with questions about why Daddy and Papa ran straight through the second half of the fifth-graders' game to get to them.”

“What does she want?”

Mort tilted the bottle to his lips and thought while he sipped. “She says she's lonely. Says Tokarev's dead. She misses her family. Wants to know her nieces.”

“Is she back in Seattle full-time? Is she free to travel?”

Lydia knew everything. Allie had been the mastermind behind a prostitution ring here in Seattle. Though it was locally run by a scheming thug named Chris Novak, Allie pulled the strings from wherever in the world she and Vadim Tokarev happened to be. That operation had led to a series of snuff films resulting in the deaths of three women, one of them a patient of Lydia's. When Chris Novak was arrested, he laid responsibility for the snuff films on Vadim Tokarev. He swore he had to make the girls available or the Russian would kill him. Novak said the prostitution operation was run by Tokarev's mistress. She was angry, Novak said, when her employees started turning up dead. Warned him to stop the films.

Mort remembered Novak sobbing after his arrest, describing how Tokarev gave him no other option than to provide another girl to the Hollywood asshole producing the snuffs. Novak was a defeated man, broken to the point of madness, as he described the revenge the woman he called
Tokarev's whore
exacted from him. He showed Mort a film she'd made. Mort watched it in horror and saw a giant of a man playing with a young girl in a pool. Novak identified her as his daughter, Maria. Mort watched Maria laugh as the giant romped with her in the pool. He watched her joy turn to terror as the giant man Novak knew as
Staz
held her under the water until she died. Novak said he'd been promised his sons and wife would meet the same fate if he ever crossed her again. Mort had hoped, while watching the innocent young girl pay the ultimate price for her father's betrayal, that his daughter wasn't involved. When Novak told him he'd heard Tokarev refer to his whore as Allichka, Mort learned his daughter was a murderer.

And Lydia was the only other person who knew Allichka was his daughter.

Novak was in jail now, due to be sentenced next month to life without the possibility of parole for his role in the snuff films. Mr. Hollywood, the man starring in the films, was dead. While the world thought he drowned while on the run eluding the warrant for his arrest, Mort feared it was Lydia who had found him. He had nothing but his intuition to base his fears on, and he didn't plan to ever compromise her by asking.

But the nagging pull was still there in his gut.

“There are no outstanding warrants for her arrest,” Mort told Lydia. “So that wouldn't bar her travels. According to Allie, Tokarev's dead. If that's true, he can't stop her.”

Lydia displayed a calm Mort wished he could feel himself. But every time he tried to take a deep breath he saw a split-screen image in his mind. On the left he saw his beloved daughter, so beautiful on a September day, kneeling and embracing Hayden and Hadley. On the right side of the screen he saw Staz, holding young Maria Novak under water, just as Allie had ordered.

“Did she say where she was staying?”

“I told her to stay clear of the family until she was ready to walk away from the life she's living. Told her Robbie and I would stand with her as she faced whatever she needed to in order to atone for what she's done.”