Shadowkiller (21 page)

Anyway, anyone who'd known her then—including Mack himself—would scarcely recognize her. She's older, yes, but more importantly, she's deliberately plainer, grayer, heavier. Even when she looks at her own reflection—something she so rarely bothered to do when she was living on Saint Antony—she's caught off guard by the frumpy stranger in the mirror.

Now, searching for evidence of the woman she once was, she imagines that she might find her if she could take a chisel and chip away at the fleshy, weathered face staring back at her. Only in her blue eyes can she clearly spot her old self—but she avoids looking into them, because whenever she does, she sees her father as well as herself.

Today her eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, to mask herself not from fellow passengers who might recognize her, but from those who might glance in her direction now and be able to identify her later.

That was the main reason she waited until Saturday to take the train. Relying not just on her research, but on her memory, she knows that for commuters, the weekdays are all about routine. Even those who ride the crowded PATH or subway lines follow certain patterns, and often see the same faces every day, but there are countless new ones, making it easy for Carrie to lose herself in the crowd.

Metro-North railroad to the wealthy northern suburbs is far more intimate, though. The same commuters ride the same trains every day, often in the same cars, the same seats, even—with the same people.

On a weekday, a fellow passenger glancing up from her newspaper or opening his eyes from a nap might idly take notice of a newcomer carrying anything more than a briefcase. On weekends, these trains are not only far less crowded, but chances are higher that riders are largely strangers to one another and the conductors, far less in tune with patterns and aberrations.

Carrie's meticulous planning paid off, as always. She boarded early and got a double seat all to herself, pleased when no one filled the three-seater opposite her or even the row behind. The sun has yet to set, and even the suburbanites who spent the day in the city seem to have chosen to linger there. The car, just half full when they left Grand Central, has systematically emptied, discharging a passenger or two at each northbound stop until only a handful are now left.

There's a mechanical ding as the train pulls into the station, and a robotic voice announces, “Glenhaven Park.”

Carrie is the only one to disembark here.

This is it
, she thinks as the doors close.
I made it.

The train rattles off to the north, leaving her alone on the platform. Giddy with anticipation, she carries her bags to the stairs that lead to the overpass that crosses the tracks. It, too, is empty, as is the stairwell that takes her back down the other side to Glenhaven Avenue, the main thoroughfare in this bucolic bedroom community Mack and Allison now call home.

Having studied the town's layout on Google Earth, Carrie memorized not just the names of streets, but the way they're laid out. Here in the business district, she knows, they run perpendicular to each other. Always one to appreciate an orderly grid system, she knows that turning left on Glenhaven Avenue will take her to Church Street, where she'll turn right, walk a few more blocks, and go left on Elm, right on Abernathy. In about twenty minutes, she'll find herself on Orchard Terrace, where the MacKennas now live. If she walks slowly, it should be suitably dark by the time she gets there.

But she finds herself instinctively picking up her pace just minutes into her trip. Lined with charming nineteenth-century storefronts that house boutiques and upscale restaurants, Glenhaven Avenue is surprisingly busy as dusk slowly falls on this, the longest Saturday of the year.

Nearly every one of the diagonal parking spots is occupied—most, it seems, by Mercedes and Lexus SUVs. Clean-cut teenagers in two-hundred-dollar sneakers loiter in the old-fashioned gazebo just beyond the train station. A sidewalk café is crowded with patrons, and more waiting for tables on benches near the door. Families congregate with ice cream cones on the steps and low wall beside a shop called the Sweet Tooth, exchanging greetings with one another and with passersby.

This is a small town, yes, but far more transient than the Midwestern ones she once knew. Here, newcomers are greeted with indifference at best. For all these people know, Carrie just moved with her family into one of the gabled houses on the residential streets branching out from the train station.

Still, there are far too many people out and about for comfort. Carrie's heart beats quickly as she makes her way past them, doing her best to appear as though she's on a leisurely stroll back from the train, having walked this route many times in the past.

At last, she rounds the corner onto Orchard, a quiet, leafy block lined with two- and three-story homes. The MacKennas' center hall Colonial, white with dark green shutters, lies about halfway down. Carrie recognizes it instantly, thanks to the real estate listing she'd found still available online though it's been six or seven years since Mack and Allison moved in.

The ad included exterior shots of the house, with its tall shrub border and mature trees whose trunks are entwined with English ivy that also covers the trellis arching over the brick front walk and the black wrought-iron lamppost.

As an added bonus, there were interior shots as well, depicting formal living and dining rooms, a glass sunroom, half bath, large expanded kitchen, and an entrance hall with a stairway leading up to the second floor, where there are three bedrooms, a small study, another bath, and a master suite.

Only the floor plan was missing, but it was fairly easy to figure out using the photographs.

As much as she longs to stop and stare, Carrie forces herself to keep walking past the house. With its large homes set well apart from each other and back from the street, screened by lush shrubs and old trees, the neighborhood feels deserted—but she reminds herself that it most definitely is not.

People are most definitely lurking nearby. Mingling with the chatter of crickets and the whisper of lawn sprinklers, she can hear a basketball thumping on a driveway and children splashing in a pool in a nearby yard. The air is thick with barbecue smoke—the unmistakable aroma of grilling steaks makes her mouth water—and lights shine brightly, indoor and out, at every house, including the MacKennas'.

Wait—not
every
house.

As the large brick Colonial next door to the MacKennas' comes into view beyond the dense border of shrubbery, Carrie sees that it's completely dark.

This, she knows, is the house where a woman named Phyllis Lewis was murdered on Halloween night by a serial killer known as the Nightwatcher. It was the widespread media attention to that case—and Mack and Allison's connection to it—that placed them squarely on Carrie's radar again last fall.

The Lewis house isn't just dark, she realizes now, seeing the red and black “For Rent” sign posted near the door.

It's vacant.

Well, what do you know.

Carrie can't help but smile again. Yes, things are falling into place very nicely indeed.

Chapter Eleven

Miami, Florida

A
fter fifteen years with the Miami-Dade Police Department's Domestic Crimes Bureau and five more on her own as a private investigator, LaJuanda Estrada has been working with the families of missing persons long enough to anticipate the likely reaction to certain stages in the investigation.

That's why she made sure there was a box of tissues on her desk before she started playing the surveillance tape footage for Nancy Temple, whose daughter Molly went missing after getting off a cruise ship here in Miami last month.

The woman had found her way to this rented office on West Flagler Street the same way many people do; she'd gotten fed up with the way the police detectives were handling her case.

“I feel like they're not trying hard enough to find Molly,” she told LaJuanda earlier this week, when they first met.

It wasn't for LaJuanda to decide whether that was the case. Her job was to find out what had happened to Molly Temple, a Cleveland accountant who'd vanished back in May.

That was when LaJuanda had first heard about her, as the media was actively publicizing her disappearance. She'd even seen footage of a tearful Nancy at a press conference, pleading for her daughter's safe return.

Same old sad story, LaJuanda thought when she saw it, and wondered how long it would be before a body turned up somewhere, fitting the missing woman's description. But she didn't give the case more than a passing thought until it landed in her lap.

“I called you because your ad said that you leave no stone unturned,” Molly's mother told her. “Promise me you'll do everything you can to find her.”

LaJuanda promised, and true to her word, she's left no stone unturned.

She knew the MDPD detectives would have examined the surveillance video showing Molly's movements in the week before she disappeared. She also knew that they were perpetually overburdened and only human; in other words, they might have missed something.

It wasn't easy for her to get her hands on the tapes, but when you're acquainted with the right people and you know your way around the city—and the system—you can make things happen.

It had taken a couple of days, but this morning, she was finally able to download the video into her laptop.

Now, moments after it begins playing, Nancy Temple gasps. But instead of bursting into tears at the sight of her lost daughter, she covers her mouth with her hands and gapes at the screen.

Caught off guard, LaJuanda sees that her gray eyes behind her wire-rimmed bifocals are not—as anticipated—flooded with tears. They're wide with shock.

“What is it, Nancy? What's wrong?”

“That isn't Molly!”

“What?”

“That woman—it's not her!”

“As I said, this is the tape from the Marriott where—”

“I know what you said, but it's not her.” She shakes her gray head rapidly. “I know my own daughter. That isn't her.”

Folding her arms across her ample bosom, LaJuanda shifts her gaze from Nancy Temple back to the computer screen, where a female figure is making its way through the crowded lobby of the Marriott.

She herself has watched this footage from the hotel security cameras countless times in the last twenty-four hours, searching for signs of impending foul play as Molly Temple arrived at the hotel shortly before her disappearance. Now—unlike her police counterparts—she's asked Molly's mother to take a look, just in case something jumps out at her.

Something has.

But Nancy Temple—whose husband died of a heart attack on Easter Sunday, just over a month before their firstborn fell off the face of the earth—is obviously still reeling from the double blow. How can she possibly be thinking clearly?

LaJuanda herself is happily married with two teenagers. She can't imagine that she'd be in her right mind if anything ever happened to her own loved ones.

Not only that, but children—even adult children—are often different people when they escape their parents' watchful gazes. Particularly daughters of mothers who are as primly conservative as Nancy has proven to be.

So, while she won't come right out and dismiss Nancy's bizarre claim, LaJuanda is inclined to tread carefully around it.

“What makes you say it's not Molly, Mrs. Temple?”

“What makes me say that? It isn't her! That's what makes me say it!”

The retort is so out of character for the Ohio librarian, who has been reserved and unfailingly polite from the moment they met, that LaJuanda raises a dark eyebrow.

“I understand that, Mrs. Temple, but what is it about her? Because to me, that looks like Molly. But I've never met her in person. I don't know her the way you do. Tell me what you're seeing.”

“It's . . . it's the way she's walking. That's not Molly's walk.” Her voice quavers. “She doesn't move that fast.”

She might if she were on her way to a secret rendezvous
.

Aloud, LaJuanda says only, “I'll back this up so that you can take another look.”

“I don't need another look. I'm positive. That's not Molly; it's someone who's wearing her clothes and pretending to be her.”

LaJuanda allows those powerful words to sink in for a moment, her thoughts spinning off in an ominous new direction.

Keeping her tone and expression carefully neutral, she says, “Okay, let's go back a bit for a minute. Those are Molly's clothes?”

“Yes. Oh my God . . .”

“You're sure of it?”

“Positive!” The word is a wail.

LaJuanda's gold bracelets jangle as she reaches out to lay her tanned, manicured hand over Nancy's frail, trembling white one.

The contact seems to steady her, and she takes a deep breath before she goes on talking. “I was with Molly when she bought that top at Sears right before the cruise. She didn't want to get it, but I talked her into it. I told her the bright color was perfect for the tropics. I was the one who talked her into going on the cruise, too.”

“She didn't want to go?” LaJuanda has heard this story before, but in light of what Nancy just said about the woman on tape being an impostor, every detail has taken on possible new meaning.

“She never wants to go anywhere. She doesn't even have a social life. Part of the problem is that she works so hard—her company has been downsizing, and she's been picking up the slack. I told her she was going to burn out if she didn't take a break. But she still wasn't crazy about leaving. She's such a good girl—out of my three children, Molly is the one who stays close to home and keeps an eye on me and Ed. I mean, she
kept
an eye on me and Ed,” she amends, and her eyes are filled with a fresh flood of tears.

“Yet she decided to go on a cruise by herself, and she bought the ticket with money you gave her for Christmas,” LaJuanda reminds her, to keep her on track.

“Yes, because she finally realized she needed a break from her job, and that she'd better start living her life, instead of waiting around to find a husband to do things with. I kept reminding her what a good time she was going to have, and how proud I was of her, going off on such an adventurous vacation all alone.” The woman's voice breaks. “Why would someone else be wearing her clothes? Where is she?”

Nancy has repeatedly asked that last question of LaJuanda since their first telephone conversation.

It had taken her a few days, she said then, for her to realize that her daughter was missing.

Back at home in Ohio, Molly rents an apartment just a few blocks from her mother and they speak every day, but . . .

“I was trying to give her some space,” she told LaJuanda. “We lost my husband a few months ago, and she'd already bought her cruise ticket. She'd been through so much—she was the one who found Ed lying on the floor—and I wanted her to get away and put it behind her. She was worried about leaving me, and I told her I'd be fine while she was gone. I didn't want to bother her with phone calls.”

Molly, she said, had been planning to spend the weekend sightseeing in Miami before flying home to Ohio. Nancy was worried when her daughter didn't call on Friday to let her know she was off the ship, and even more worried when she didn't answer the messages her mother left on her cell phone over the weekend. But her worry became full-blown panic when Molly failed to confirm the plan for Nancy to pick her up at the airport in Cleveland.

“And when she didn't get off that plane,” she said, “I knew something awful had happened to her.”

The officers who were handling the missing persons report weren't so sure—and neither was LaJuanda when she first took the case.

From the start, she had reminded herself—and the worried mother—that unexpected things can happen when a single woman, no matter how respectable, goes on a decadent vacation for the first time in her life. Molly might have met someone and impulsively decided to run away with him—or
her
—and start a new life. LaJuanda has seen it before here in Miami.

Nancy's reaction to that theory was, of course: “Not my daughter. She'd never just take off and let me worry like this.”

That's always the parent's knee-jerk response, whether the missing person in question is a respectable grown woman or a fourteen-year-old runaway suspected of turning tricks on Biscayne Boulevard.

Sadly, though, in Nancy Temple's case, it's probably true. Her daughter wouldn't have just taken off. The more LaJuanda has learned about the missing woman over the past week, the more convinced she's become that Molly fell victim to a predator.

It might have been someone she'd met at sea and agreed to see again in Miami, or—more likely, LaJuanda guessed—someone whose path she'd had the misfortune of randomly crossing after she left the hotel on foot less than an hour after checking in.

If, indeed, she
had
checked in.

Someone
certainly did.

LaJuanda reaches out to click the mouse, freezing the image onscreen. She stares at the woman she's had no reason to believe, until this moment, isn't Molly Temple. She's wearing a hat and sunglasses, but that's not unusual in Florida.

Still . . .

LaJuanda rewinds the footage a bit, then lets it play again, checking out the other people in the lobby. Some have sunglasses pushed up on their heads, or dangling from cords around their necks, but none is wearing them.

Was the sun shining at the hour when Molly Temple walked into the hotel?

LaJuanda makes a mental note to check that out as she watches Molly talk to Pamela, the desk clerk who'd checked her in using her ID and credit card. It's not a good angle; she can't get a good look at Molly's face, but she can see that the interaction appears to be routine.

When LaJuanda interviewed Pamela, she said she hadn't noticed anything amiss. She confessed that she barely remembered Molly, though.

“I check hundreds of people in and out of this hotel every day, you know. A lot of them are coming and going on cruises. I'm sorry . . . like I told the police, I just don't remember much about her.”

Maybe because she didn't want you to
, LaJuanda thinks now, suppressing a shudder. If that's not Molly—what happened to her between the cruise dock and the hotel? Or—was it even sooner?

The surveillance tape is nearing its end. In silence, LaJuanda and Nancy watch Molly emerge from her hotel room shortly after she first entered it, hanging the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob. She's carrying one of the bags she brought into the hotel, and it looks fairly heavy, judging by the way she shifts it from shoulder to shoulder while waiting for the elevator.

There's a cut back to the lobby, where she goes from the elevator to the exit. Through the glass, she's visible having a conversation with one of the doormen before she exits the picture, never to be heard from again.

Yesterday morning, LaJuanda spoke to the doorman, a sharp-eyed grad student in his early twenties.

“You mean that woman the cops were here asking about a few weeks ago?” He looked her up and down, taking in her curve-hugging teal dress, four-inch wedge sandals, and dark hair falling in loose waves down her back. “You're not a cop, are you?”

“I'm a detective.”

“No kidding.”

“I never kid a kid.”

“Ouch.”

“Sorry. I say that all the time to my son. You remind me of him.” She flashed him a smile. “What do you remember about Molly Temple?”

“Just that she didn't need a cab,” he told LaJuanda's cleavage, “and then she walked away, heading south, toward downtown.”

“You have no idea where she was heading?”

“A lot of tourists go that way. There's a lot to do down there. The park, the Convention Center, Bayside Marketplace, Riverwalk . . . She could have gone anywhere.”

Yes—and she must have crossed paths with a predator along the way, LaJuanda thought at the time.

Now, she shifts her thinking: What if the woman who'd left the hotel
was
the predator?

Then she was making her escape, LaJuanda realizes. This changes everything.

The tape over, Nancy Temple turns to her, trembling. “That wasn't Molly. What in the world is going on?”

Good question. Her mind working through various scenarios, LaJuanda clicks the mouse and briskly presses a few keys, pulling up a new file on the computer. “There's footage from the Carousel's security cameras. Can you take a look at that, too?”

Nancy nods mutely, and LaJuanda notes that her eyes are no longer dry. She plucks a tissue from the box and passes it over. Molly's mother takes it with a wan thank-you.

“Hang in there.” LaJuanda pats her hand again.

“Believe me, I'm trying.”

“I know you are, honey.”

“Do you think . . . do you think it's a
good
sign that it's not her?”