Here She Lies (21 page)

“It appears to be identity theft,” he said, “and yesterday she was picked up on a felony warrant she claims is false. In New York City. Bail bond, yes. Yes. I don’t know yet. It’s under review.”

Claims
was false? His choice of words shook me, but I kept quiet.

Lazare hung up the phone and opened one of his desk drawers, saying, “It’s all set. They’re sending us one of their computer fraud specialists this afternoon.

I mean it when I tell you they’re very serious about this kind of crime these days.” He withdrew a sheet of paper from the drawer and set it on his desk: APPLICA-TION AND AFFIDAVIT FOR SEARCH & SEIZURE WARRANT.

As we spoke, he filled it out.

“That’s what the book says.” Bobby nodded. “That it took a while, but they’re finally starting to put some manpower behind dealing with it.”

“Have to,” Lazare said. “It’s running rampant.”
Rampant?
Well, it was almost a relief to hear that the criminal malignancy that was threatening to ruin my life was common, not rare, meaning that identity theft was already a contagion run amok (something I had unfortunately never paid much attention to). Was it possible that I had been chosen arbitrarily, that
my
thief could be any one of
many
invisible thieves stalking cyberspace? But then I thought of the earrings. I thought of Julie, felt her in my soul, and couldn’t speak.

“They say you can only do so much to protect yourself,” Detective Lazare said. “One thing that might make you feel better, Annie, is that once ID theft’s been confirmed by law enforcement, the victim is pretty much off the hook for the damages when it comes to credit cards.”

“Except,” Bobby added, “according to the book, it supposedly takes years to clear your name. And a huge percentage of identity thieves are never caught.” When I had the chance I was going to rip up that book; I didn’t think I could handle knowing much more about my personal demolition. Whoever said ignorance was bliss was right and I wanted mine back!

“So,” I said, “jumping to the conclusion that my sister’s behind this is kind of rash, then?” My voice sounded feebler than I’d meant it to and my words seemed to float away, untethered to reality.

I saw the pause in Detective Lazare’s expression and felt it in Bobby in his chair beside me: amazement that I wouldn’t accept what seemed evident to them.

“Sweetie,” Bobby said, “Julie’s got all the computer skills to do this, and she gave you those earrings as a gift,
lying
about them, and she’s got so much money.” I wished he wouldn’t talk about Julie’s money, as if we could safely assume that any woman with all that wealth had to be some kind of criminal (even though it
was
strange how all this was falling into place and she
did
seem to live very, very well). “It really does make sense that it was her—and that she’s taken Lexy away because she wants her, too.”

“Hold it, now,” Detective Lazare said. “That is a big assumption. You left your daughter in Julie’s care and she left a note saying she’d be back by noon, and it’s only”—he flipped his wrist to consult his watch—

“eleven fifteen.”

But logic couldn’t penetrate the evocation of my most devastating fear: that Lexy was
gone
.

“We need to find her.”
It burst out of me with so much volume that the other people in the room seemed to temporarily freeze—and then the shuffle of office noise began again.

“Okay, Annie.” Lazare kept his tone smooth, to calm me, but I wasn’t calmed. He steepled his fingers and I noticed that his squarish nails had been jaggedly clipped. “Julie’s note said noon—I say we wait. If she’s not back by then—”

“Wait?”
How could we just wait?

“And they’re not really assumptions,” Bobby said.

“Detective, you yourself called the FBI. Obviously you think something’s wrong.”

“Identity theft is one thing,” Lazare said. “The FBI fraud specialist will be here soon and we’ll start looking into that. Child abduction is a whole other ball game.”

“Detective”—Bobby leaned forward—“Julie tried to get me to go to bed with her. She bought diamonds and charged them to a credit card in Annie’s name, a card we didn’t even know about. Something
she
did landed
Annie
in jail. She practically destroyed our marriage—and now she’s off somewhere with our daughter.”

“Let’s try to calm down a minute—”

“No,”
Bobby said. “We don’t care if she’s at the grocery store. We want to find them,
now.
” Bobby’s anger was satisfying, even comforting. His persistence had transformed into a kind of emotional passion he rarely indulged in.
I
was usually the reactive one. My mind seemed to unclench; and then I thought of something.

“She’s driving my rental car and it has a GPS system.”

“Well, good,” Lazare said. “That gives us something concrete. They provide those systems so they can keep track of their property—sometimes customers dump the cars. They’ll have a tracking system. An individual unit doesn’t even have to be turned on to be traceable.

What agency did you use?”

I told him and he leaned abruptly toward his computer. He was a fast typist and in a minute he was dial-ing his desk phone. He recited his credentials and stated his case, then was put on hold. “They’re checking me out, which is smart of them.” Finally they came back on the line and his face lit up.

“You’re sure?” He listened some more. “All right.

Thank you.” He hung up and said, “The GPS system shows them at the house.”

I stood up and pulled my purse strap over my shoulder. If Lexy was back, I could have her in my arms in ten minutes’ time and the worst of this would be over.

Bobby also stood. Lazare folded his search warrant application and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, then he scooped up the earrings, slipped them back into the little envelope and handed it to me. I put it into my change purse as we all hurried out of the station.

“I’ll meet you at the house,” Lazare said. “I’m stopping at the courthouse to drop off this warrant applica-tion.” He used his key chain remote to unlock his car and in the lot behind the station a silver sedan beeped and its rear lights blinked.

We had parked Julie’s Audi out front. It had already stopped raining and then, as we reached the car, the clouds dissipated and sun poured lavishly onto the road.

Bobby drove and I sat beside him, watching the bright greens and pinks and yellows and reds and oranges of springtime stream past, hoping with all my heart and soul that I would find Lexy back at the house. My feelings about Julie were too inchoate to classify, but I supposed I hoped to find her, too. Was it possible she had an explanation for all this?
Could
it be possible she was not the one wreaking havoc in my life?

We were halfway there when my cell phone rang in my purse. I fished it out, hoping it would be Julie, ag-gravated that it would probably be Clark Hazmat again.

“It’s Liz,” I told Bobby when I saw her law firm’s name on the caller ID.

“Hey, honey,” Liz said. “How are you hanging in there?”

“Not so great.” I told her about the appraisal. She listened quietly before plunging in to her reason for calling.

“Better hold on to your hat,” she said, “because it gets worse.”

“Tell me.”

“The embezzlement charge?”

“
Fake
embezzlement charge.”

“Yes, that’s the one.” I almost laughed, then I almost cried, and then she told me, “Almost twenty-five grand, in two parts, siphoned out of two different bank accounts belonging to your Kentucky prison.”
My
prison! “What do you mean, ‘siphoned’?”

“Transferred into accounts owned by you,” she said.

“You mean
not
owned by me, Liz—”

“Yes, Annie, I do mean that. But I have to convey what I’ve been told.”

I was stunned. Speechless.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Liz said. “I’m about to call this organization affiliated with the FBI called IC3—the Internet Crime Complaint Center—

and start by lodging a formal complaint on your behalf. That’s step one. Step two is contacting the Cyber Division of the FBI and requesting hands-on help with this
now
.”

“The local detective here just did that.”

“Great. I’ll call anyway; it never hurts to reinforce a call for help. Where are you now?”

“On our way to Julie’s house. The GPS system in the car she’s driving thinks she’s home.”

“Good luck, Annie. Let me know what happens.

And don’t worry. I’ll keep in touch, too.” My blue rental car was nowhere in sight when we pulled up in front of Julie’s house. Mica’s truck was gone, so we parked in the driveway and were standing on the lawn when Detective Lazare arrived. A heavy humidity hung in the air and for the first time this spring I felt claustrophobic inside my clothes. I had on the same outfit I’d worn to Manhattan two nights ago, jeans and a tight-fitting top that revealed my milky cleavage in a way that no longer felt daring, just sad. It was the outfit I’d changed into after my prison stay (the beige suit now hung in my father’s city closet—I would never wear
that
bad-memory rag again). I was aware of a film of sweat clinging to every inch of my skin as the three of us—Detective Lazare, Bobby and I—searched the grounds of Julie’s house, front and back, for the car.

It wasn’t there.

“What now?” Bobby asked Lazare.

Lazare looked around, thinking. Then he faced me and said, “I have a hunch about something.” He walked toward the house and we followed. At the kitchen door he stopped. “If I go in there before the search warrant’s issued, and we find she’s removed the GPS unit, and if this turns into something, we won’t be able to use it.” I understood him perfectly: he meant
in court
. It would be disqualified as
evidence
. Hearing it put that way sounded unreal. I just couldn’t believe it would go that far.

“It’s possible that, with Annie’s permission, I could legitimately poke around inside the house,” Detective Lazare said. “Possible, but not certain. Why take chances?”

“So you want me to do it,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Can Bobby come with me?”

“He’s your husband. There’s nothing unusual about him going into the house.” Meaning
yes
.

So I unlocked the kitchen door and Bobby followed me in. Dust sparkled in a block of sunlight that fell from the window. The teal enamel wall clock read 11:45 and I
knew
, in the perfect quiet, that they weren’t here and hadn’t been here for a while and probably weren’t coming.

We began in the kitchen, opening cupboards and cabinets. In the dining room and living room we checked in and under and on top of furniture. I took a flashlight from the downstairs coat closet and shone it into the two oversized ceramic urns Julie had picked up at a local antique shop, finding cobwebs and a mouse skeleton but no abandoned electronic devices.

Upstairs, Bobby looked through the loft and the unused guest room, while I looked through the Yellow Room and the Pinecone Room. We opened every drawer, looked into the corners and high shelves of every closet, checked under every bed. The longer we looked and found nothing, the more my rebellious hopes began to return. Noon arrived and I found my-self pausing to listen each time a car drove past the house.

“I’m finding
nothing
,” I called to Bobby. “How about you?”

“Nada,” he said, joining me in the second-floor hall.

He opened the door that led up to Julie’s third-floor suite. “Shall we?”

“Wait,” I said. Across from the Pinecone Room was another closet. When I opened the door, an automatic ceiling light showed a neat color code of linens: sheets below, towels above. On the floor were two stacked laundry baskets and an empty humidifier. I bent down to pull forward the baskets—and there it was, lying on the floor. The GPS unit from my rental car. The satellite-signal receiving device looked like nothing but a small hunk of black plastic surrounding a sleeping grayish screen. A single suction-cup leg extended from its back. It was a relatively inexpensive model, probably bought by the rental car agency in bulk and considered expendable.

“Here it is,” I whispered.

Bobby joined me and looked at the unit, such an innocuous little thing. After a moment he took it from my hands and we walked down the stairs and out of the house. A band of sweat had formed down the back of his shirt and as soon as I noticed it I realized that my own forehead was damp, my temples dripping, my heart filled with cold fright.

The only reason someone would remove a global positioning system from a car was so they couldn’t be easily found.

Detective Lazare was sitting on a shallow stone fence twenty feet from the kitchen door. A neon-winged dragonfly had balanced on his bent knee and he appeared to be watching it. When he saw us, and stood, the dragonfly fluttered away.

Bobby showed him the GPS.

“You’re sure that’s the one that was in your car, Annie?” Lazare asked.

“Positive,” I said.

Lazare flipped open his cell phone and calmly told us, “I’m requesting an Amber Alert. Is Lexy her given name?”

“Alexis,” Bobby answered.

“What color are her eyes?”

“Brown.”

“Any birthmarks?”

Bobby looked at me; he didn’t know.

“Behind her left knee,” I said. “It’s maroon, small, like a lopsided triangle.”

“The car,” Lazare said. “It’s sky blue, right? Toyota?

Four-door?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Interior?”

“Pale blue.”

Lazare scrolled down his cell phone’s stored-numbers list and dialed. He announced himself officially, without any of his usual chitchat. “I need an Amber Alert
stat
for a baby girl. Alexis Goodman, goes by Lexy.

Almost six months old, short reddish peach-fuzz hair, brown eyes, maroon birthmark in the shape of an uneven triangle behind her left knee. Presumably in the care of her maternal aunt, Julie Milliken. I’ll e-mail a photo in the next few minutes.”