Here She Lies (24 page)

so that people like me, lovers of
stuff
, could browse and dial or point and click from a consumer menu that had been designed just for us. According to the book, the government wasn’t exactly on top of it, evidence of which I had now experienced more personally than I could ever have imagined.

The microwave buzzed and its light turned off.

Bobby opened it and, using oven mitts, removed a no-longer-frozen pizza.

“It isn’t much,” he said, “but we’ll split it three ways.”

“Not for me, thanks,” Lazare said. “Remember that wife I told you about?”

“Of course,” I said. “Good night.” I kissed his cheek and he pulled back, startled.

“Good night.” He folded the e-mail into his pocket and quietly left.

Bobby and I split the pizza onto plates and poured ourselves glasses of wine. We ate across from each other at the kitchen table, listening as the whir of Lazare’s car engine melted into the deep silence.

“So,” I said, “I guess that’s why we never saw those other bills.”

“Must be.”

“I’m having trouble believing this.
Julie?
” He put down his wineglass and reached across the table to touch my arm. I reciprocated with my palm over the back of his hand. I felt so
stupid
. I had followed Julie right into the trap: leaving Bobby, running to her for shelter and support, trading clothes like we were little girls and, worst of all, agreeing to wean Lexy. I had just begun to recognize Julie’s envy, but not the
strength
of it. How could I, when all our lives we’d been better-than-best friends? How could I have foreseen that she would plan all this, set the stage, make me her puppet? There I was—
here I am
—

jerking and dancing on an invisible web she wove just for me.
Cobs
and
dumps
and
drops
and
algos
. Okay, she’d proven she was smarter than me, but that was no big surprise. I was the one who was supposed to have
emotional intelligence
and now she had taken that away from me, too. She had siphoned off my identity so slowly and cannily I hadn’t noticed. And she had my baby.
My baby.
Julie had taken my
soul
.

The phone rang just before seven the next morning.

The caller ID read “GBPD”—Great Barrington Police Department.

“Yes?” I answered, hoping for the best and fearing the worst.
We found your daughter. She’s here and
she’s well
; or …

“Detective Gabe Lazare asks that you turn on your TV,” a woman’s voice said.

Bobby and I had slept chastely beside each other and now I woke him. We rushed downstairs to the living room and turned on the TV that hung over Julie’s living room fireplace. The local news station held their camera steady on a microphone-festooned podium on the police station’s front lawn. Tying the belt of my robe, I realized my hands were shaking.

Bobby sat down on the couch and I joined him. I forced myself to breathe deeply, and again. Finally Detective Lazare arrived in the screen’s limited perspec-tive, walking through shadows thrown by overhead branches that obscured the golden morning sun. He settled himself behind the podium and cleared his throat. The dark swaths beneath his eyes told me he hadn’t slept and I noticed that his badge, which he usually didn’t wear, was positioned front and center on his lapel.

“As you know,” he began, “a week and a half ago Zara Moklas was murdered on Division Street in Great Barrington. Now, for those of you from out of town, that’s a quiet country road, a residential area. Her body was found in front of a house from which a baby was abducted yesterday.”

“Baby Lexy?” a pretty television reporter asked.

“Yes.”

“Any news on the baby, Detective?” asked a walnut-faced reporter holding a small pad and a pen.

“Nothing substantial, but we’re following every lead, so to the folks out there watching: Please keep on calling.”

I let out an involuntary moan and Bobby wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. On the screen, a reporter in a plaid shirt raised his hand. Detective Lazare nodded at him and a slim audio recorder was lifted between them.

“Detective, do you think Zara Moklas’s killer abducted the baby? Do you think the killer was after the baby in the first place? The press has already reported that Zara looked a lot like the owner of the house—”

“Hold it, now. Let’s not jump the gun,” Lazare said.

“I’m only stating facts. The house is a common denominator in both cases and so we’re looking at that.

Period. Let’s not jump to conclusions.” But the more Lazare denied that one overshadowed the other, the more the shadows overlapped. You could practically see the excitement in the reporters’ eyes, in the tension and silence as they took their notes.

“Any new suspects, Detective?” Pen poised to write.

“Have you lost hope of finding Thomas Soiffer?”

“We have
not
lost hope of finding Mr. Soiffer,” Lazare answered. “We’re as interested as ever in speaking with him right now.” Soiffer’s face filled the screen, taking me by surprise. It was the same mug shot I’d first seen last week. “As I’ve said before, Mr.

Soiffer was known to be in the area shortly before Ms.

Zoklas was killed. In light of this new development, we’re hoping he might be able to provide us with some information that could help us in our search for Lexy Goodman.”

A different television reporter, another woman, stepped forward. “Are you saying, Detective, that you want to question Mr. Soiffer specifically in connection with the abduction of the baby?”

“That’s what we’re hoping.”

“Does that mean he’s now also considered a suspect in the baby’s abduction?”

A thin smile stretched across Lazare’s face, the kind of blank-slate response that was no more promising than discouraging. “I’m saying he’s a person of interest.”

Person of interest.
The media knew as well as I did what that overworked phrase meant: suspect without enough evidence for an arrest.

“One more question, Detective.” Plaid shirt, recorder raised. “The owner of the house, Julie Milliken, is known to have an identical twin sister who is the mother of the missing baby. Is it possible that Mr.

Soi—that
someone
who killed Zara, if they were after the baby—thought they were killing the sister? To get the baby? And why would they be after
this
baby, Detective? What is the significance of her abduction?”

“No use guessing, is there? We want to find Mr.

Thomas Soiffer and ask him a few questions. That’s it for today. Thanks for coming out, folks. We’re hoping the media attention will help us find the baby. Thank you.” Lazare waved and thin-smiled as he turned his back on the reporters and walked away. Calmly. The way that man could hold himself together was disorienting.

Bobby picked up the remote and clicked off the TV.

“What was that all about? Why didn’t he at least warn us?”

“Last night he seemed convinced
Julie
had her,” I said. “What changed? Does he really think that man has our Lexy?”

The phone rang again and this time it was Detective Lazare himself. Bobby answered the living room extension and I went to the kitchen phone so I could join the conversation.

“If Julie thinks we’re after Thomas Soiffer for Lexy’s abduction,” Lazare was already saying when I picked up, “it just might make her feel safer and it might bring her out of the woodwork. She might increase her movements, which would increase our chances of finding her—and your daughter.”

“Okay,” Bobby said. “I can see it.”

“So you
do
think Lexy’s with Julie?” I said, jumping in.

“I suspect so,” Lazare answered. “I’m using the media to set a trap. When we don’t find someone right away, we try to jolt them out of their hiding place. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you my plan, but you have to understand that time is not on our side.”

I couldn’t argue with him; he was trying to find my baby. But a media blitz terrified me because of how it might shock Julie, and it seemed to me that Lexy’s safety depended on Julie’s equilibrium. What also frightened me was his comment about time, because if you really thought about the nature of time—how there was too much of it when it didn’t matter and not enough when you needed it—you’d realize how per-ilous it could be, at life’s worst possible moments, to wait even a minute too long.

By early afternoon, Detective Lazare appeared at the house to hand-deliver two important pieces of news. He came through the kitchen door and sat us down at the table so we could hear him out.

“We found Soiffer’s van,” he said, pacing, “behind an abandoned barn in New Hampshire. Now listen closely to this next part. A preliminary inspection found nothing of Lexy in that van.
Nothing.
” Bobby and I glanced at each other. Something more was coming.

“The van had a lot of blood in the back part. It’s already been typed, and the type does not match your daughter’s. It
does
match Zara’s, so that’s where we’re going with this. Unfortunately DNA analysis can take a couple of weeks, and we won’t know for sure until then, but we seem to be heading in some direction now.”

“Where’s Soiffer?” Bobby asked.

“Good question.” Lazare stopped at the far end of Julie’s kitchen counter and appeared to contemplate her squat black espresso machine, but I knew his mind was deep in the morning’s developments and the satis-faction that his plan, on some level, was working.

“We’ve heard from Jason Soiffer, Thomas’s son, to broker the safe emergence of his father.” It was incredible news. As Lazare spoke, it became apparent that negotiations had been going on for hours.

“Son’s a straight shooter,” he continued. “No record, avoided his father’s criminal path completely.

Jason Soiffer is a plumber, union guy, hard worker, salt of the earth. He is adamant that his father has nothing to do with Lexy’s abduction.
Adamant.
I sat back and let him talk and he told me all about his father’s problems. Said the identity theft took Tom by surprise about a year ago, and by the time he discovered it, he was on a mudslide, hitting bottom. Said his father was doing his best to keep out of trouble and rebuild his life on parole. He’d been out of jail almost two years and was doing well. Even the ex-girlfriend he’d assaulted was talking to him again—not the brightest move on her part, but the point is, the guy was hanging in there.

He went to his local police about the identity theft, but they did nothing for him.” Lazare paused at that and shook his head. “Local police departments only started getting trained on ID theft recently, ours among them, so I believe these people that they didn’t get the help they needed. No one knew
how
to help. So Tom hired a private investigator, who found Julie for him, and then he lost it. He started stalking her. Jason said he’d known about it since late winter and tried to convince his dad to try the police again, but Tom refused. He was convinced the police wouldn’t work too hard to help an ex-con. He felt he had to deal with it himself.

Big mistake. With all the new attention, and now with the van being found, Tom figured he couldn’t hide anymore. Jason says he can’t explain the bloody van, but he believes that his father knows nothing about Lexy’s abduction and that he did not kill Zara Moklas—but he was there, and he saw it.”

“He saw it?” I leaned across the table and reached for Bobby’s hand. “What did he see?”

“We don’t know yet.” Lazare pulled out a kitchen chair and joined us, finally coming to rest. “He’ll come forward if we get him immunity. I said I could look into some kind of limited immunity, pending the results on that blood, if he agreed to be photographed with me. I want Julie to see that we’ve got him. Jason said his dad wouldn’t like the publicity, but he’d see what he could do. We’re waiting to hear.”

“So it’s working,” Bobby said. “Just like you hoped.”

One side of Lazare’s mouth crooked up. “Looks like it, so far. I’m calling another news conference for eight o’clock tonight in the hope I can get him out of hiding that fast.”

The eight p.m. news conference—this one held outside Julie’s house—came and went with nothing but a tepid update on the case in which Detective Lazare basically stated that nothing had changed. The reporters seemed only mildly disappointed; apparently Lazare had succeeded in making Lexy’s disappearance a top story of the day and any exposure of the players was grist for the hungry media content mill. That was a bonus for us, because now the whole country cared and was watching for Lexy. At the end of the news conference, as planned, Bobby and I joined Lazare in the glare of lights so we could beg and cry in public. We did. I hated for Julie to see us this way, since I suspected she would feed off our weakness, but Lazare promised that it was part of his plan. When Soiffer eventually emerged, so would we, again, relieved and hopeful that this person of interest could offer information that would lead us to our daughter. And then, if Lazare had his way, in the relative safety of misdirec-tion, Julie would shed a layer of caution. Or would she? The Julie I knew had never been careless and the Julie I
didn’t
know was turning out to be exceedingly calculating.

At two o’clock in the morning Thomas Soiffer arrived at the Great Barrington Police Department in a sea of artificial lights. It was a carefully brokered moment; there was no talk, just the image of Soiffer being escorted into the station between his son and Detective Lazare. Half an hour later, senseless with exhaustion, Bobby and I faced a splinter group of reporters who had traveled back to Julie’s house.

“I’m so grateful.” I wept on camera, Bobby pressed to my side. “Now they have Thomas Soiffer in custody.

If this man knows who killed Zara Moklas, then maybe he can also help us find our baby.”

And so the night passed, hour after hour, while Detective Lazare kept Thomas Soiffer to himself in ominous silence at the police station. The reporters and TV