Into the Dark (19 page)

“Fill in the blanks,” she whispered. Diandra threw on her coat, grabbed her bag, and
headed out into the brisk Christmasy morning, preparing for her role.

Chapter
15

T
he Tarry
Ridge station was as empty as you’d expect a suburban police station to be on
a
Sunday morning—just Sally the desk sergeant and a skeleton crew of uniforms.
Nick Morasco was glad of it. Cliché as it sounded, he needed to be alone with
his thoughts.

“Catching up on things?” Sally asked him when he
walked in. She was riveted to her computer screen—online Scrabble, it looked
like. The question was more a clearing of the throat than anything else, and
so
Morasco cleared his throat right back at her.

“Yep.”

He headed for his desk, passing a couple of new
uniforms, who stood up a little straighter when they saw him. The Neff case had
given Nick a type of luster that he still wasn’t comfortable with. Throughout
his career, he’d been told time and time again he didn’t look like a cop—that
he’d fit in much better in a room full of philosophy professors, which he never
knew whether to take as a compliment. (He was guessing no.) But still, he was
used to it. He wore his dad’s old tweed coats out of sentimentality and laziness
and went too long between shaves and haircuts, and for that, he got mocked
sometimes. He didn’t care. The eye rolls he could handle, as opposed to salutes.
And these two new uniforms had just, if he wasn’t mistaken, saluted him.

“Hello, Detective,” said the taller one—a chubby,
carrot-haired kid with pinkish skin and beads of sweat on his forehead and upper
lip. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“No thanks.”

“Let me know if you change your mind, sir.”

Morasco sighed
. Sir.
Yeah, he definitely preferred the eye rolls.

He booted up his computer
.
Take care of the easy stuff first
. He went onto the national law
enforcement database to see if there was a CCH for Robin “RJ” Tannenbaum. A CCH,
or Computerized Criminal History, was really just a fancy name for a rap sheet,
and he could have made Carrot-Top’s day by asking him to look this one up. But
Nick was selfish with the chores today. The thing was, he liked to be useful
while forestalling the inevitable. Plus, he felt like helping Brenna for a
change. Personally doing something to help her—rather than keeping things from
her.

The Tannenbaum info came up quickly, with just one
arrest. Three years ago. Breaking and entering. Dismissed. At the time of his
arrest, RJ had been forty-two—arrested over something you’d ground a
sixteen-year-old for. Not a robbery, but a B&E. He was caught in the master
bedroom. Just standing there. Alone.
A prank
.
A dare
. Morasco sighed, thinking about poor, withered
Hildy Tannenbaum, how she’d blamed the break-in on peer pressure.

Were all mothers of grown losers completely
deluded?

He wondered how much money Hildy had wired Robin
over the years, which made him think of his own mother, continually making up
excuses for his older brother, who was never where he should be. Couldn’t even
be bothered to visit Dad when he was dying in the hospital, and yes that was
twenty years ago, but Nick hadn’t forgiven him. There wasn’t a statute of
limitations on being that much of an asshole.

How much had Mom invested in Seth, financially and
emotionally, to get nothing in return?

When it came to people like that, Nick was with
Pokrovsky. He didn’t care how many dead bodies the guy had stuffed in his window
seat, he’d love to stick his older brother in a steel cage for one hour with
Yuri Pokrovsky in his prime—maybe throw in old RJ for good measure. Morasco had
a feeling that everyone in that cage would get exactly what he deserved.

He e-mailed the California officers who had filed
the CCH, asked them if they could send him back a copy of the whole report,
along with any other information they might have on the break-in. Then he sat
back in his chair, thinking of ungrateful children. And then, just children.

If he had lived, Morasco’s son, Matthew, would be
close to thirteen years old right now—the same age as Maya, edging toward the
verge of adulthood. He tried not to wonder what Matthew would be like as a child
or as a teen, or what his own life would be like with his boy a part of it. But
if he had known those things . . . If he could feel what it was like
to be a parent to someone old enough to screw things up, then he might be able
to understand his mother or, for that matter, Hildy Tannenbaum. Far as Nick
could tell, Pokrovsky was childless, too.

He looked at the clock. Noon already. He slid open
his desk drawer, took out the letter. He’d read it many times since it arrived
here at the station two days ago. Yet still, he felt compelled to read it again,
as if maybe the typewritten words had rearranged themselves in his absence to
mean something different.

Dear Det.
Morasco:

I phoned you a month ago
with no response. Perhaps you didn’t get the message. At any rate, I am
dictating this letter to my niece, who has been instructed not to tell
anyone. I’m dying. That isn’t the secret here. It is, however, my reason for
wanting to get in touch with you, urgently. It is my reason for needing to
relay to you this piece of information which I’ve kept secret for many
years. It concerns Brenna Spector. I am aware, through the news, that you
are friends. You can tell her, or not tell her. Use your judgment. I do,
however, want to give you the option.

I must tell you in
person. I don’t want this information to get into any other hands but
yours . . .

Morasco skimmed to the bottom of the letter—to the
shaky signature.

Detective Grady
Carlson.

Morasco knew the name. He’d heard Brenna say it,
repeatedly. In 1981, Grady Carlson had been with the Pelham Bay Precinct, the
head investigator in Clea’s disappearance. He’d come up with nothing. He’d been
rude to Brenna, to her mother.
Grady Carlson was the most
unhelpful cop I’ve ever met in my life
, Brenna had told Nick.
And no offense, Nick, present company excluded and all, but
for me, that is really saying something.

“Are you sure I can’t help you with anything,
Detective?” Carrot-Top asked, looming over him like an unpleasant thought.

Morasco exhaled. He wasn’t being fair. “Actually,
you can,” he said. In his coat pocket, he was still carrying the picture of
Robin Tannenbaum that Brenna had given him. He plucked it out, handed it to the
kid, along with the address of the gas station in White Plains where he’d filled
up on October 9. “This guy was last seen at this gas station in early October.
Can you call the White Plains station, e-mail them the photo, find out if anyone
has seen him?”

Carrot-Top looked as though he’d just won the
lottery. “Of course!” He practically shouted it.

“Thanks . . . what’s your name?”

“Danny Cavanaugh.”

Morasco looked at him. “You related to Wayne
Cavanaugh—detective from Mount Temple?”

He grinned. “That’s my grandpa,” he said. He looked
about three years old.

“Small world, Westchester County.”

“Yeah. I’ll get right on this, then.”

Morasco nodded. “Thanks, Officer
. . .”

“Danny.” He cleared his throat. “Dan.”

“Oh, and also, he may have a beard now. And he’s
got a very expensive camera. The kind a professional moviemaker would have.”

“Got it!” Dan leaped over to his desk to make the
calls. Literally leaped. That enthusiasm, Morasco thought. That feeling that
the
world was yours for the taking if you just worked hard enough—why was that a
feeling only young cops had?

The thing was, this work beat you down quickly.
That was a cliché, too, Nick supposed. But clichés are clichés because they’re
widely known truths, which, again, is another cliché.

You go into police work thinking you can save
lives, and more often than not, you come out of it like Grady Carlson, dictating
letters from some hospital room, trying to make up for all the damage you’ve
done. Maybe it wasn’t just police work that beat the enthusiasm out of you.
Maybe it was life.

Just yesterday, Brenna had said,
If I can find Lula Belle, I might be able to find my
family
. The hope in her voice was so contagious that, for a moment,
Nick had forgotten about the phone call, the letter . . . Was that
hope keeping Brenna going, or was it holding her back even more than her memory?
And either way, why did it have to be Nick’s job to crush it?

You should know that Brenna
and her sister are both pathological
, Evelyn Spector had told him,
once she was full of wine and Brenna out of earshot.
Those
girls have a gift for destruction that runs through their veins. Brenna will
destroy you if you give her a chance. It’s not her fault. It is
genetic.

Not true, Evelyn
, Nick
had thought, even then—just a few hours after he’d gotten that first phone
message from Grady Carlson.
It’s you and the world that
want to destroy your daughter
.
Not the other way
around
.

Morasco glanced at the clock on his computer again,
then called Roosevelt Hospital, asked for Grady Carlson’s room. “He’s moving
out
to hospice later today,” the nurse said. “But if you get here within the hour,
you can visit with him.” Morasco grabbed his coat and headed out the door,
uncertainty tugging at him. He needed to know what Carlson’s secret was—that
was
a given. But maybe he wouldn’t tell Brenna about it. No one was forcing him to
tell.

“I
ncense, Trent? Really?” Brenna had just been let into Trent’s
apartment after a five-minute delay at his front door. At the time she thought
maybe she’d interrupted a nap. But looking around the place—so much neater than
it had been during her last visit on April 24, and with the lights dimmed and
a
half-empty glass of wine on the kitchen counter next to Trent’s boob-shaped
coffee cup, not to mention the telltale stick of jasmine incense burning at the
center of the stove—she was sure it was a lot more than a nap she interrupted.
“I thought I told you to get some rest.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Trent
stared at the floor. “I lit that incense because it smelled like ass in
here.”

Brenna sighed. She picked up the glass of wine,
examined the rim. “And you were wearing pink lipstick because
. . .”

“I had a visitor, okay? No biggie. Just
. . . just a friend.”

Brenna gave Trent a long look. She took in the
mussed hair, the pink lipstick stains on the bandage on his head and his white
mesh tank top that clashed with the lip-print tattoo on his pec but matched the
stain on the glass, the distracted look in his eye, the smile he kept trying
to
stifle . . . She decided not to mention any of it. “Just take it easy,
okay? Do me that favor?”

He nodded. “So listen, speaking of ass, I’ve had
myself a little Shane Smith film retrospective.”

“Really?”

“They’ve got a whole bunch of his shorts on the Web
site for the School of the Moving Image. I guess he’s won awards at that place,
which proves this new philosophical theory that I’m working on.”

“Which is?”

“Film sucks.”

“Okay . . .”

“Don’t believe me?”

She sighed at him. “I think
Casablanca
was pretty good.
The
Godfather
.
Bad Santa
. . .”

“Those are
movies
. I’m
talking about
film
. Cinema. Whatever. Just check
this out and tell me that it doesn’t get boned by goats on a regular basis.”
Trent grabbed a laptop off of the edge of the counter, opened it up, and hit
play on the film that filled the screen. A title popped up:
Soul Window. A Shane Smith Film.

What followed was a black and white close-up of a
woman’s eye. “Oh,” Brenna said. “As in, ‘The eyes are the window to the
soul’?”

“As in, ‘This chomps butt.’ ”

After around thirty seconds, the eye blinked, and
the film was over. Brenna looked at Trent.

“That won that school’s prize for best short film
of 2006,” he said. “I kid you not.”

The credits rolled down the screen:
Written and Directed by Shane Smith
.

“Written?” Brenna said.

“I know, right?” said Trent. “How about directed?
What’d he do, yell, ‘Blink now, please!’ ”

The Eye: Mallory
Chastain

Lighting Designer: Cameron
Keys

Editor: RJ
Tannenbaum

“So they really were friends,” Brenna said.

“You ask me, RJ made a big step up with the
porn.”

“You find any contact info for Shane?”

He shook his head. “There’s a weirdly large amount
of Shane Smiths in So Cal.”

“No pictures of him accepting his awards?”

“Nope,” he said. “Only thing I could find was a
group shot of his graduating class. It’s pretty blurry, but it isn’t that big
a
group, so I’m working on singling him out, blowing it up, making it clearer.
I
can try some different looks on him, too—thinner, fatter, beard, shaved head
. . .”

“You think you can do all that, just from a group
photo?”

“You should know by now I’m a god,” he said. “I’ll
give him the full Persephone treatment.” His eyes went a little sad at the sound
of the cat’s name. “Plus let’s not forget RJ’s computer in my bedroom. I’ve been
recovering erased search histories, trying to see if he went looking for his
boy.”

“Listen, Trent,” Brenna said. “There’s something I
have to tell you.”

He looked at her. “Is it something bad?” His voice
cracked, and again, Brenna couldn’t help but see him as a six-year-old beauty
pageant contestant. “I feel like you’re going to say something bad.”

Brenna stole a quick glance at the lipstick stain
on the wineglass rim.
Be nice to him, whoever you
are
. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Errol Ludlow is dead.”