Riptide (3 page)

Her in-laws had stood guard over that trust fund like the Marines posted at Fort Knox.

And now it belonged to her.

This fact danced along Christina’s nerve endings, already stretched taut like tuning wire. The result was a sensation that tingled its way out to the surface, releasing energy in the form of a sound that was halfway between strangulation and a giggle.

The vibration made it difficult to focus on the words that were flowing, warm and smooth like hot coffee, from Peter’s mouth.

“It’s okay.” Peter reached for both Christina’s hands, working them over inside his with his thumbs. “Whatever you’re feeling now is okay. Just feel the feelings and move through them.”

But the look in his eyes was not as open and supportive as it had been just a few minutes ago. Christina frowned, struggling mightily to wrap her mind around the fact that she had just became a widow, albeit one of respectable wealth.

Another sound zoomed up, unbidden like the first, through her mouth.

Both men looked away, grabbing at the same time for the last remaining Dixie cup. They fumbled and nearly spilled its contents.

This struck Christina as funny, and she tried to hold back a giggle but could not.

The Rehab King frowned.

“It’s okay, Christina.” Peter pressed the Dixie cup into her hands. “Everybody grieves in their own way.”

T
he Terminal 3 arrivals hall at JFK International Airport thrummed at full capacity. Crowds of people, most with cell phones glued to their ears, gave status reports on their single, common goal: collecting their luggage and getting the hell out of there.

You could tell the natives from the tourists. The New Yorkers wore black despite the fact that the temperature outside hovered a few degrees above blazing. They were the ones jockeying for position at the bottom of the luggage chute, waiting to pounce. To hell with the uniformed staff checking bar codes at the door. Which left the straightaway sections of the luggage carousel wide open for the out-of-towners, who stood a polite distance apart.

This particular crowd of tourists appeared even more polite than usual.

Delta’s nonstop had just touched down from the Midwest.

A scuffle broke out among the New Yorkers. Two women and a man were having a tug-of-war over a suitcase, the man on one side and the women on the other. He was pulling hard, but the women were giving him a run for his money.

Voices were raised, and more than a few people in the crowd lowered their cell phones long enough to glare at Suffolk County Homicide Detective Frank McManus.

McManus shot a look across the terminal at his partner, Detective Ben Jackson. Both were dressed in plain clothes, Jackson holding up a sign like a chauffeur. Doing his best to look nonchalant, which was easy since nonchalance was Jackson’s MO, he caught the look in Frank’s eye and grinned.

Even minus the uniform, people always pegged them for cops. Detectives wore shoes of their own choosing, but the county-mandated suit or sport coat and tie was a giveaway. Nobody wore suits at work these days, except homicide detectives and the President of the United States.

Frank McManus gave a quick lift of his eyebrows to say,
Yeah, they know who we are.
No words required. He turned his attention back to the crowd in black, where the dustup was ending. Some genius had thought to check the luggage tags.

McManus continued scanning the down escalators, spilling over with new arrivals who looked like they all shopped from the same Lands End catalog.

With one exception. A woman stepped aboard up top. Thirtysomething, with an expensive-looking face, which was to say a perfect nose and those big Aunt-Jemima-looking lips rich chicks all seemed to have now. That was as much as McManus could make out, what with the pink velour hoodie pulled down low and a giant pair of dark sunglasses.

Like Paris Hilton trying to duck out on a bad day.

Christina Cardiff would be deep into a bad day of her
own, based on what Frank McManus knew. And there was still a lot of day to come.

McManus shot another glance at his partner.

Ben Jackson gave a quick nod to indicate he’d spotted her, too. He stayed put, holding up the sign that spelled out CARDIFF in block letters, just in case she declined Frank’s offer and went off in search of her own car service.

In which case, she’d have a bit of a wait. Detectives McManus and Jackson had taken the liberty of dismissing Mrs. Cardiff’s driver, who took one look at the badge and headed back to the limo lot.

All that remained was for Christina Cardiff to accept their offer of a free ride out to Hauppauge, a landlocked town in central Suffolk that was famous not for any sandy white coastline but for an unpronounceable name thanks to the Wyandanch tribe of Indians, who were long gone. What Hauppauge had going for it, however, was the fact that it served as home base for much of the Suffolk County government apparatus and the tax revenues and jobs to go along with it. The acres of office buildings that lined Veterans Memorial Highway included the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s office, where at this very moment the remains of Christina Cardiff’s late and not so very great husband were chilling.

She didn’t have to go with them, of course. She had not been named a Person of Interest. Not yet, anyway. Nobody had. There was not one bit of evidence at the scene to suggest that Jason Cardiff’s death had been anything more than a tragic accident. But when a guy with that kind of money drowns in his own swimming pool, at the height of tourist season in the Hamptons,
it’s bad for business. Which meant you could bet your E-ZPass the Suffolk County DA was going to keep an eye on it. And when the drowned guy turns out to be a Cardiff (as in
The
Cardiffs of Southampton) the DA was going to be on it like white on rice.

Enter Detectives McManus and Jackson.

Old man Cardiff played golf at Good Ground with the former governor of New York State. McManus had seen Cardiff around plenty, had even been on the receiving end of a free round at the bar when he was assigned to work crowd control at the ’95 US Open. Nice enough guy.

The fact that his son Jason was probably the biggest prick on all of Long Island only served to make Frank McManus’s job more interesting.

McManus strode quickly to the base of the down escalator, people scattering in front of him like the parting of the Red Sea.

Definitely the suit jacket and tie, he decided. People just seemed to know.

Christina Cardiff did.

She had singled McManus out by the time she was halfway down. She fixed those bug-eyed shades on him long enough to take it all in, right down to the heavy black shoes, all the while maintaining a tight grip on the rail with one hand.

Which was good, McManus thought, because Mrs. Christina Cardiff did not appear to be in shape to handle any sort of road trip.

She held a cell phone in her free hand, about to make a call. At the sight of McManus, she changed her mind and flipped it shut, dropping it into a shoulder bag the size of Delaware.

It would be nice to know whom she had been about to call.

She stepped off the escalator, one pointy mule at a time, and stood.

Waiting.

She knew, all right.

“Mrs. Christina Cardiff?” McManus extended his right hand, flashing his on-the-job smile. Courtesy first.

After the merest hesitation, she placed one hand inside his.

It was cold like ice and had about as much life to it.

She allowed herself to be led a short distance away, out of the stream of humanity that continued to pour off the escalators around them.

“How’re you doing, ma’am?”

Her only reply was to tip her head down so the long blond bangs fell forward, shielding the small bit of face that was visible, what with the sunglasses and the hoodie. She dug around some more inside that giant bag.

A crowd of gawkers was already forming.

McManus glared, which was enough to get the Lands End set moving. The New Yorkers didn’t budge. They sniffed a story, and they were right. Everything about Christina Cardiff screamed big money and quite possibly fame, from the interlocking gold letters on the sides of her sunglasses, to the dark blue jeans that hung too perfectly to be Levi’s, to the teetering pointy-heeled mules pieced together from something that should have been slithering across a desert floor.

The tremors in her shoulders didn’t look too good.

Neither did the odor coming off her. Frank McManus
knew the smell, adrenaline mixed with BO. Raw nerves from someone who had fallen out of the habit of regular bathing. Both were hallmarks of a junkie, or else someone likely to be involved in the commission of a crime. Very often, these individuals were one and the same. And if said individuals were having a bad run of luck, their paths would cross with that of Detective Frank McManus.

He breathed in and picked up the overlay of perfume, something heavy like figs, that probably cost a ton.

It was not working for her.

McManus’s nose twitched.

Head bent, she continued rifling through her bag.

“I’m Frank McManus,” he said in a low voice. “I’m here with my partner, Ben Jackson, from Suffolk County PD.” He did not add the word “Homicide.” “We are both sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

She found what she was looking for at last and raised her head. “Oh. Thank you.”

She had a voice like honey that oozed out from those oversized lips, coating the air between them so it felt soft and sticky and sweet. Sexy, if you wanted to know the truth.

Those designer sunglasses were opaque, even at close range.

Aiming them up into his face, she pressed something into his palm and for that brief moment, while their skin came into contact, McManus felt his breath catch in his throat.

He could only make out the barest outline of her eyes behind the shades.

“Are we parked near the terminal?”

Without waiting for an answer, she clattered past
him in her little shoes, and Frank got the impression she lived in a world where men could always be counted on to bring the car around.

“My partner’s near the door. He’s holding up a sign with your name on it,” he began.

The hoodie bobbed once, and the back of her hand came up, signaling she got it. She made pretty good time in those heels.

McManus looked down. In his hand were the claim tickets for her bags.

The medical examiner had told her Jason’s body was in good shape, like someone who had stayed too long in the tub.

About a hundred years too long.

Good shape, my ass, Christina thought. The ME must be so used to looking at dead people, he no longer realized how bad they looked. “Oh, my God, he looks like shit,” she burst out, squeezing her eyes shut. She regretted it almost as soon as the words left her mouth. Any kind of emotional outburst, she knew, would brand her as unbalanced.

Like someone who had been sprung too soon from a nuthouse.

Nobody said anything. Not the ME, who appeared slightly wounded by her assessment, and not Detectives McManus and Jackson, who stood behind her and a respectful distance away.

Blocking the exit, but near enough to catch her if she fainted.

Christina Cardiff was not the fainting type.

God, I hate this. She hated everything about it.

Mundo Bizarro.

She closed her eyes in an attempt to block out the entire shitty scene, hoping maybe she’d wake up from the nightmare and find herself in the sunny guest room of the house on Jonah’s Path, with the surf pounding at the southern edge of their property line, or maybe on the foldout couch in the den of their Olympic Tower condo that overlooked St. Patrick’s Cathedral. That condo, smack in the center of the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan, had never felt as much like home to Christina, who was a country girl at heart, but she loved the power and privilege of living at one of the most exclusive addresses in the world. Step outside and Rockefeller Center was right there, with Saks Fifth Avenue just a few steps away. Tyler loved those windows at Christmastime, and, oh, Jesus Christ…

This was no nightmare.

Reality was a million times worse than any coke hangover she’d ever had.

There was only one way out of this, and that was through it. Christina allowed her eyes to flutter open. “That’s him,” she said to the medical examiner, who sat facing the monitor in the seat next to hers. “That’s Jason Cardiff. My husband.”

The ME gave a quick nod.

“That’s it? That’s what you need for an official identification?” She turned around to check with Frank McManus. Of the two, she had developed some small rapport during the ride out here, based on nothing more than the fact that his partner did the driving, which left McManus to make small talk. And thank God he had not done much of that.

McManus and his partner were here purely as a matter of protocol, he had explained.

He nodded now.

“Okay, then,” Christina said. She had been relieved to learn the identification process would take place via closed-circuit video monitor rather than actually having to stand in the same room as Jason’s body like on the TV show
Law & Order.
As if watching a video of her dead husband would make everything so much easier instead of having to ID him in person.

As if.

The reality of it, the fact that Jason was dead, slammed into her with the force of a hurricane that threatened to suck her brains out, blowing away her soul right along with it.

Christina tried to look away but couldn’t resist one last glimpse of the grainy image of Jason on the screen, his skin waxy white and his lips a grotesque purplish stain. Frozen in place. Not moving.

The screen went black, and the image disappeared, ghostlike, into the ether.

Through the cinder-block wall, she heard measured movements that were, she somehow knew, the sound of hydraulics equipment.

Because heavy equipment was now required to move what was left of her husband from one place to another.

She pictured him hale, healthy, and suntanned, all six feet of him, laughing at a joke she’d made. Not Jason the husband who had grown tired of living with her, but Jason the boyfriend from so long ago who had brought her to parties to show her off to his friends from college and then slow-danced with her, whispering in her ear that he wanted to live with her.

Jason’s metamorphosis, from living, breathing, up
right person to the hideous horizontal thing she’d just seen on the monitor, was proof that the world had gone mad. Life was no longer safe. Jason was being stowed at this very moment in a refrigerated compartment so his body would not rot before they finished with it. This idea tumbled like a dry weed on the wind that was blowing through the hollow place that remained of her insides. Bile pulsed up high into her throat, and Christina swallowed hard, forcing it down. She winced with effort.

She did not want be sick in front of these men.

“Thank you, Mrs. Cardiff.”

The ME pushed his chair back, signaling this was over.

That was a relief.

“Do you need anything before you go?”

The list of things she needed was so long that, in the end, she could not settle on any kind of reply.

Christina stood.

The ME followed suit.

“I’ll let you know once I figure out where to…” She couldn’t bear to finish the sentence.

The ME was probably used to it, because he raised a hand to spare her the effort. “Fine. Let us know. Should be ready by day’s end tomorrow.”