Gone Cold (6 page)

I eyed the empty lounge sofa, wondering who was about to sit across from us.

A second, older waitress came by to take our orders.

Ashdown said, “A pint of Smithwick’s.”

I said, “I’ll have an espresso.”

As she walked away, Ashdown asked whether I planned on sleeping tonight.

“Sleep will come when it wants me bad enough,” I told him.

Our drinks arrived before our guest. My impatience began clutching at my throat. My nerves were raw, my skin tingling. I removed my hand from inside my jacket. Took a bite of the biscotti then downed half my espresso.

I set the cup down on its saucer and leaned back in the chair, pinching the bridge of my nose and squeezing my eyes shut because I felt a monstrous headache coming on. When I opened my eyes, I glanced at my watch without noticing the time. I exhaled audibly, lifted my cup of espresso but didn’t take a drink. Instead I tilted my head back and gazed up at the high ceiling.

When I looked down, the thirty- or fortysomething woman from the bar was seated directly opposite me.

She stared at me, though I wasn’t sure whether it was to scrutinize me or to avoid Ashdown’s gaze. The tension between them was immediately obvious—and thick enough to smother someone.

“Hello, Simon,” the woman said in a heavy British accent. She was lanky, wore a bright red dress she couldn’t quite fill out. She may have been pretty, perhaps even beautiful, but it was impossible to tell under the dense layers of paint on her face. Her eyes were brown, possibly black, their color lost in a whirlwind of electric-blue eye shadow and brightly colored mascara.

I glanced at Ashdown.

“Simon,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Zohanna Carlyle.”

As I sat in silence trying to associate this woman with a case, with a cause, with something, anything, the cop added, “She is also the former Mrs. Ashdown.”

I turned to him. “Your
wife
?”

“
Ex
-wife,” the woman said, crossing her long, black-stockinged legs.

“I don’t understand,” I said to Ashdown. “You told me we were meeting a mutual friend.”

Ashdown rocked his head from side to side. “A figure of speech, old boy.”

“But I don’t even know her.…” I started to say.

Then it struck me like a sledgehammer to the chest.

Slowly, I said to the woman, “I take it Carlyle isn’t a return to your maiden name.”

She shook her head.

Impossible,
I thought.
After more than three and a half decades …

“Tuesday?” I said so quietly I wasn’t sure I said it aloud.

She parted her ruby red lips in a smile. “I never much fancied that name.
Tuesday
. An awful day, isn’t it? Stuck there between Monday and Hump Day like the meat in a
bleh
sandwich. Not to mention I was actually born in the wee hours of a Wednesday morning.” She shook her head but never once took her eyes off me. “No, Tuesday’s not for me. Since you and dear old Daddy left us, I’ve always gone by Zoey.”

Chapter 11

TWELVE YEARS AGO

“We went out to the backyard,” Tasha says breathlessly, “to have a kind of picnic. I’d put together ham and cheese sandwiches and made a pitcher of sweet tea. We threw a blanket down on the grass and set it all up then sat down to eat. We’d each taken just a few bites when the telephone rang. I ran inside to get it because I thought it might be Simon. I thought maybe his plane had been delayed or he was landing sooner than expected. I don’t know…”

Sitting on the sofa next to Tasha as she tells Special Agents John Rendell and Candace West what happened this morning, I want to lift my arm and place it around her shoulders, but I don’t have the strength. But no, it’s more than that, I realize. I
don’t
want to hold my wife. I don’t want to hold her because I’m angry. I’m angry at
her
. I don’t want to be, but I can’t help myself. How the hell could she let this happen? How the hell could she allow Hailey to be taken right from under her nose?

“But it wasn’t Simon,” she says, “it was my mother. She was just calling to check in with me, see how Hailey and I were doing. She calls a lot while Simon’s away. While I was on the phone with her I looked out the window. Hailey was fine. She’d finished half her sandwich and she was sipping her sweet tea. The kitchen phone’s a cordless, so I was about to take it outside. But I noticed a little puddle on the floor. Just a splash of Hailey’s orange juice from this morning. I didn’t want to step in it, so I grabbed a paper towel off the rack and wiped it up. Then I threw the paper towel in the garbage under the sink.”

I don’t want to be sitting here. I want to launch myself off this couch and jump into our Ford Explorer and start combing the streets looking for Hailey. But Rendell insists that I can be of the most help by staying here and providing him and West with the information they need to find my daughter.

I lean forward. The more I listen to Tasha tell her story the angrier I get. I don’t
want
to get angrier; I want to sympathize. We need each other right now, more than we have ever needed each other before. I realize that. But part of me wants to—nearly
needs
to—stand up and shout, “What the hell were you
thinking,
leaving Hailey out there all by herself? You’re her
mother,
goddamn you. How could you take your eyes off her even for a second? She’s only
six years old
.”

“When I looked out the window to check on her again, I didn’t see her,” Tasha says through her tears. “But I thought she’d just moved to another part of the yard. Or maybe she was heading inside. I listened for the door. When I didn’t hear anything I looked out the window again. Then I walked outside and looked around the yard. The gate was closed, so I thought maybe she was hiding. On the phone, my mother was telling me some ridiculous story about my father fighting with their neighbors over some landscaping issue. I didn’t want to interrupt her or shout in her ear. So I kept looking. After another minute or so, I finally told my mother to hang on and I started calling out Hailey’s name.”

I know it’s useless to point fingers just now. All that matters is that Hailey is found. But I can’t help but feel as though Tasha’s to blame. She says nothing else in the yard was amiss. That the sandwiches and sweet tea were still on the blanket. She listened and listened and heard nothing but silence. Finally she told her mother she had to go. Didn’t say why, didn’t mention that she couldn’t find Hailey, just said, “Let me call you back, Mom, I’ve got to check on something.”
Why?
I think. Why not say, “I don’t see my daughter.” Maybe then her mother hangs up and dials the police, sends them to our address. Maybe it saves fifteen minutes. Maybe that fifteen minutes is all the time it would have taken to reverse this hell we’re facing right now.

“I ran across the street to the neighbor’s,” she says. “They have a daughter a little older than Hailey, and a puppy Hailey loves to play with, a little basset hound named CJ. I rang their bell. I heard the dog barking, but no one came to the door. I was still holding the phone, so I tried to call nine-one-one, but I was too far from the house for the cordless to work. So I ran back to the house and called.”

Rendell nods his head. “What did you tell the dispatcher?”

“I said, ‘
Someone took my daughter!
’”

“Why?” Rendell cuts in. “Why did you say that? Why did you think that right away?”

I look at my wife and for the first time since I arrived she fumbles for words.

“I don’t … I just
knew
. I mean, she wasn’t in the backyard and the gate was closed. It was
locked
. Even if Hailey left—which she’d never in a million years do—she couldn’t have reached over and locked the gate.”

Rendell makes a face I’ve seen before, a face only cops make when they’re skeptical of something someone is saying. “Couldn’t have?” he says. “Or wouldn’t have?”

Tasha has to think about it. I wait for her to look at me, but she doesn’t. She’s barely looked at me since I arrived home, in fact.

“I don’t know,” she says finally. “I guess she’s tall enough now. But she
knows
better than to leave the yard when I’m not there.”

How often are you not there?
I nearly shout.

“All right,” Rendell says in the voice of an ER doctor about to deliver bad news. “We and the D.C. Police have every available human resource out there looking for your daughter. We’ll watch the phones and hope we receive a call that Hailey’s safe and sound, that she just strolled away and got lost. But it’s been a few hours now since she went missing, so our job, mine and Special Agent West’s, is to operate under the assumption that she’s been taken. If she has, this first twenty-four hours is crucial. So I’m going to ask you a series of questions, some of which may seem completely irrelevant and some of which may make you uncomfortable. But it’s all standard operating procedure, and the more you cooperate, the faster we’re going to find Hailey and bring her home.”

“We understand,” I say.

“Good,” he says, opening a small notebook. “Then let’s start with family and friends who live in the area.”

Chapter 12

I woke on the sofa in the sitting room of an elegant suite on the top floor of the Radisson. Daylight was squeezing through the razor-thin opening where the curtains were supposed to meet. I glanced at my watch and sighed. It was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. I was disappointed with myself, but not the least bit surprised. After viewing the surveillance footage from the Stalemate, Zoey and I had stayed up most of the night, attempting in our own strange way to catch up on the past thirty-six years of our lives.

When I sat up on the couch, I noticed that Ashdown had retrieved my Swiss Army suitcase from his vehicle. I decided to shower and dress before knocking on the bedroom door and waking them.

I walked into the bathroom. Shed the clothes I’d been wearing since I spoke to Kati back in the States nearly thirty-six hours ago and stepped into the shower. As the scalding water beat down on my chest, I thought about last night.

Over the past couple of years I’d often daydreamed about what it would be like to meet my sister, Tuesday. (I still hadn’t fully adjusted to the name change and seriously doubted that I ever would.) In any event, my sister was nothing like the woman I’d fantasized meeting. I’d expected a demure woman, refined in the ways in which most Americans imagine the British to be. But this woman was crass, even crude at times. She wasn’t the modest, soft-spoken little girl I’d lost thirty-six years ago. She was blustery and garish; she drank like a sorority girl and cursed like a stockbroker witnessing a career-ending crash on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

At one point during the conversation here in the suite, I’d asked her how she met Ashdown. She raised her lip in a snarl as her ex-husband looked on. “Damon was working at the Met at the time. I’d been a dancer. After work, me and some of the girls would hit the car park for a bit of dogging and a wee taste of Charlie.…”

Ashdown casually averted his eyes.

“The car park was in a secluded spot,” she continued, “and no one round there raised much of a fuss, so it was rare for the filth to make an appearance. But one night, he and his partner roll up like bloody Starsky and Hutch, and this one taps on our window and flashes his badge and tells us, ‘Out of the car.’ My girlfriends think we’re right fucked because of the drugs, but from the way this one was looking at me, I could tell straightaway he was as randy as a schoolboy, and that if I gave him half the chance he’d bend me over the hood for a quickie. So, I ask him, ‘Fancy a shag?’ and he turns all red in the cheeks and says as coolly as he can under the circumstances, ‘How about a date to start?’ So, I say, ‘Sure, whatever floats yours, ya know, long as you let us go,’ and the next night he picks me up from my flat and takes me to this club, only he doesn’t dance, so instead we grab a few bevvys and get pissed and end up snogging like a pair of teenagers right there in the middle of the lounge. This goes on for over an hour before he finally realizes,
What the fuck?
and takes me back to his place to have it off straight through the morning.” She shot Ashdown a look. “Now, of course, he regrets the whole bloody episode.”

Ashdown turned to her. “I don’t regret a single minute of that night, love. It’s my cock-up the next morning I’ll never live down, isn’t it?”

She looked at me and smirked. “The wanker falls for me straightaway, asks me to move in with him after breakfast. A bit dodgy, wouldn’t you say, little brother?”

Little brother.
Simply hearing those words returned me to the London of my childhood, where Tuesday and I alternately laughed and fought with each other, she a fan of flicking my large five-year-old ears, me a master at pulling her longish brown hair. Both of us lousy little tattletales to boot.

When I stepped out of the shower I found Ashdown standing on the balcony, smoking a cigarette, gazing out over the lush grounds.

“Didn’t take you for a smoker,” I said, stepping outside to join him.

“I’m not. The trollop just draws it out of me.” He quickly looked over, said, “Sorry, mate. I didn’t mean to…”

I shrugged it off and moved back inside. It wasn’t me to whom he owed the apology.

Ashdown flicked his butt over the railing and followed me in. “What’s the first order of business this morning?”

“A double shot of espresso,” I said.

“And then?”

I stared at myself in the mirror, took in my own hooded gaze. Truth was, I didn’t know what came next. The crime scene hadn’t spoken to me; the dead man’s hotel room had said even less. I told myself it didn’t matter. It felt vital for me to remember that I was looking for Hailey, not Eli Welker’s killer. As far as I was concerned, this wasn’t an investigation; it was a search.

I started to respond to Ashdown’s question but was saved by the bell on my BlackBerry. I hurried over to the desk and picked it up.