Sliver of Truth (15 page)

It was the same red screen I’d been staring at on and off at my own computer. The same website. Except now there was a small window open in the upper right-hand corner of the page, some kind of streaming video of a busy street corner bustling with chic pedestrians. I leaned in closer. It only took the flow of traffic for me to identify the city—the fat black taxis, the towering red buses. It was London. The low brown buildings, boutique shop windows, and street cafés made me think it was Soho, possibly Covent Garden.

I watched. It was night, the street lit by orange lamplight. People were dressed warmly, walking quickly. If the webcast was live, it would be after midnight. The people looked young, were mostly in groups it seemed, maybe heading home from the pubs, from late-night drinks after the theater. I moved my face close to the screen, looking for I don’t know what. I half-expected to see the shadowy form I had seen in the photographs that had started all of this. But there was nothing to see, just groups of jovial people, hurrying from one place to another in the cold evening.

After a while, I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes, which had started to sting and tear.

“What am I seeing here?” I asked myself aloud. “Why would Jake have this on his computer?

A soft sound from the loft space was my only answer. That’s when it occurred to me that the door downstairs had been unlocked. In all the time I’d been coming here, that door had been unlocked only once. I felt my throat go dry as I got up slowly and walked toward the doorway that separated the loft and the office. I noticed that the high narrow window, the only window in the place, was open. The night had turned windy and the breeze blowing through the window rustled the white covers over Jake’s sculptures. It took only a second for me to identify with relief that this was the sound I’d heard. In the movement of the air the covered forms looked like a population of restless spirits, rooted to the ground but dreaming of flight.

I scanned the room and my eyes fell on something else: a large black kidney-shaped stain on the floor near the standing artist’s lamps that Jake turned on when he was working. Beside the stain was the hammer he used to bend and shape the metal. I walked slowly toward it, wary of the rustling shapes behind me, my right ear (my stress alarm) buzzing loudly. I reached up the thin metal rod that held the light, felt for a switch and found one. Though the ceiling lights hadn’t come on, this one did. The glaring white from the bulb made me blink. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust.

When they did, I could see that the stain wasn’t black, of course, but deep red. Blood. Too much of it to be healthy for anyone. I stepped back. The room tilted unpleasantly.

There was thunder then, a distant and insistent pounding. I thought it might be coming from my own head, but eventually I recognized it for what it was: the sound of footfalls on the stairs. I was in a kind of shock, lost in a place of fearful imagining of the scene that might have left that stain on the floor, wondering whose blood it was, praying that it wasn’t Jake’s. I turned to see a man charging up the stairs, gun drawn. Every instinct told me to run, but there was only one way out of the loft.

And then I heard my name: “Ridley?” It was a voice I recognized.

When he stepped into the light, his face looked softer and kinder than I had known it; not arrogant, not full of some secret knowledge. Agent Dylan Grace.

“Ridley,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay?” His eyes moved to the bloodstain on the floor. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“What’s happening? Why are you here?” he asked. I wanted to break away from the intensity of his gaze. I started to struggle against the grip he had on my shoulders, but he held me fast, forced me to hold his eyes.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Esme Gray is dead. Witnesses place Jake Jacobsen at the scene around the time of death. Where is he?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. There’s blood on the floor.”

I felt as if I was breathing through a straw. Esme was dead. There was a horrible amount of blood. Where was Jake? White spots bloomed before my eyes, a sickening fireworks display. I don’t remember much that happened for a while after that.

I have to admit, I am prone to blacking out under extreme circumstances. It’s something I have recently learned about myself. If you’ve been with me since the beginning, you might remember this about me. It’s not a fainting or swooning. It’s more like a short circuit. Too much awful imput, too many terrified and confused thoughts, and
poof!
—lights out. But it’s
not
fainting. So stop thinking that.

My head was still reeling when I was aware of things again. I found myself slumped in the chair by Jake’s desk. Agent Grace produced a bottle of water; he cracked the lid and handed it to me. He looked sad, had dark circles under his eyes.

“Did you say Esme Gray is dead?” I asked, wondering if maybe I’d dreamed it.

He nodded. “She’s dead. Someone beat her to death with his fists.”

I thought about this; it brought to mind the horrors Nick Smiley had revealed, as well as my last encounter with Esme, her image of me with a sledgehammer, swinging at everyone’s life. That she was dead and that she had died so horribly were abstract concepts to me. It didn’t seem real and I felt nothing but a kind of light nausea.

“Not Jake,” I said.

He shrugged. “Jacobsen was last seen on her porch, pounding to be let in. About an hour later he was seen running from her residence.”

“When?”

“Earlier today.”

“Who called the police?”

“Anonymous caller.”

“But you have a positive ID?”

“Esme’s next-door neighbor recognized him from a prior visit. Apparently Esme had told her who he was, asked her to call the police if she ever saw him around when she wasn’t home.”

I shook my head. “If he was going to kill her, he’d have been more careful.”

“Unless it wasn’t premeditated.”

I shook my head again. I knew the heart of exactly one person in the world. Yes, I knew the sadness and the rage that dwelled there, but I also knew the sheer goodness of him. I
knew
Jake. No way.

It still hadn’t sunk in that Esme was dead. Later I would grieve her and everything she was to me once. Now all I could think about was Jake.

“Trust me,” I said. “I know this man. There’s no way he would ever kill Esme, especially not like that.”

He seemed to consider saying something, then changed his mind. I could almost guess what he was thinking: that I’d been wrong about people before, that maybe I wasn’t the best judge of character. He might have wanted to say that at one point nearly everyone I knew turned out to be someone different than I’d thought.

I stood and pointed toward the loft. “What about the bloodstain on the floor? Something’s happened here. Maybe the person who killed Esme hurt Jake, too.”

I thought about the red computer screen (hidden for the moment behind the screen saver), the street scene in London, the matchbook with its odd symbol and note still in my pocket. It was all on the tip of my tongue. But I remembered the text message:
Trust no one.
It seemed like good advice. I kept my mouth shut.

“What?” asked Agent Grace. His eyes were trained on my face as though he could read my thoughts there. “What are you thinking right now?”

I could almost believe that I might trust him, turn all of this stuff over to him to investigate or to dismiss. It is so easy to turn over power, to shift off responsibility and walk away. Maybe if Jake wasn’t missing (not that he was
missing
exactly, but we weren’t sure where he was at the moment), a bloodstain marring his floor, I might have been more willing to enlist Agent Grace’s help. Something deep told me to heed the advice of the text message, that Jake might be the one to pay if I didn’t.

“I’m
thinking,
” I said, sounding slightly hysterical to my own ears, “that something has happened to Jake. And I’m wondering what you’re going to do about it.”

He didn’t say anything, just kept those gray eyes on me.

“If someone killed Esme and there’s blood on the floor here”—I was yelling now—“doesn’t that seem like a connection to you?”

“I’m
looking
at the connection, Ridley.”

Now it was my turn to go silent.

“My missing couple, Myra and Allen Lyall. A dead woman, Esme Gray. A large bloodstain on the floor of Jacobsen’s apartment, Jacobsen nowhere to be found, last seen leaving the scene of a homicide. What do these people have in common? What links all of them?”

You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out where he was going.

“I’m not the only thing that links them,” I said defensively.

“No,” he said slowly. “There’s Project Rescue. But you’re intimately linked to that as well.”

I sat back down in the chair. Agent Grace pulled the other chair close to me and tilted it back against the wall, balancing on its two rear legs. I wished he would fall backward, hit his head and look like an idiot.

“When’s the last time you saw your boyfriend?” He leaned on the word
boyfriend
with some kind of sarcasm or even hostility, maybe both. I thought about telling him that Jake wasn’t technically my boyfriend any longer, but I didn’t want to be disloyal to Jake. Or answer the questions that would follow about the current nature of our relationship.

“The night before last.”

“And the last time you heard from him?”

“He left a message earlier today. Asked me to meet him here for dinner around eight.”

“What time did he leave the message?”

“I don’t know. Around three or four, I guess.”

“How did he sound?”

“Fine.” The truth was I couldn’t quite remember what he had sounded like.

“Did he call you from the landline here,” he said, nodding toward the phone on Jake’s desk, “or from his cellular phone?”

“I don’t know. I think from this phone. I can’t remember.” He’d called me from his cell; I could tell by the background noise. At least I thought so; I would check my caller ID when I got home. In any case, I didn’t want Agent Grace to know that he’d been on his cell; it seemed incriminating somehow. I was dying to call Jake now but didn’t know if it was wise to do this in front of Agent Grace.

He continued with the questions, writing my answers in a little black notebook he’d extracted from his pocket. “Where were you today that you weren’t available to take his call around that time?”

I hesitated, thought about lying, decided against it. “I went to Max’s apartment.”

He looked up at me. “Why?”

I explained to him the reasons I sometimes visited that place. I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t understand, thought my behavior was suspicious. Which, of course, it was.

“Can anyone confirm that you were there?”

“The doorman, Dutch.” I watched him write. “Is that the time around when she died?” I asked, deducing as much from his questions. “This afternoon around three or four?”

He didn’t say anything, just kept scribbling in his pad. I felt a tide of panic swell for Jake, a desperate worry aching in my chest.

“I have to be honest with you, Ridley,” said Agent Grace after a moment. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything you should be. I’m having a hard time trusting you right now.”

I tried for indignation but it didn’t take. I shrugged instead. “I really don’t give a shit what you think of me, Agent Grace,” I said, keeping my voice mild. It was true; I couldn’t care less. This was new for me; I used to be worried about what people thought, eager to please and play by the rules. But that was before. Before I knew I was Max’s daughter. “I don’t trust you, either.”

I wondered how long it would be before he started sifting through Jake’s office, before he looked at the computer and discovered the strange website. I wondered if he’d make the connection between the streaming video in London and the overseas call that had come into my apartment. Of course he would. He was all about making connections. I wondered how much he knew already. Probably a lot more than I did.

“I’m going to have someone take you home, and I want you to stay there, Ridley.”

“I want to stay here in case Jake comes back,” I said.

“If he comes back here, I guarantee he won’t be available for dinner,” he said coolly. “Give me your cell phone.”

“What? Why?”

“I want to call Jacobsen from your phone. We’ve been trying to reach him but he hasn’t answered. I’m wondering if he’ll answer a call from you.”

I didn’t know what my rights were here. I felt another wash of panic, folded my arms across my chest, and looked down at the floor. He held his hand out.

“Seriously?” he said. “Don’t make me wrestle it from you or take you into custody and confiscate your belongings, search your apartment. I might have to do that eventually, but it doesn’t have to be right now.”

It seemed like he was always issuing threats of this kind. I looked at his face and saw that he meant it. After another second’s hesitation, I handed my phone to him, watched him scroll through my address book and hit send. He put the phone on speaker and we both listened to it ring. I closed my eyes, praying silently for Jake to answer, until the voice mail picked up. My heart dipped into my stomach as Agent Grace ended the call. I held my breath, wondering if he was going to scroll through my call log, check my messages. But he didn’t do that; he simply handed the phone back to me. I was surprised; it seemed like a logical thing for him to do, to check my incoming and outgoing communications. We locked eyes and I considered giving everything up to him. Later I would look back on this as the last moment I could have asked for help out of the hole I was climbing into . . . a moment I let pass.

A stone-faced young man with a blond crew cut and a scar from his neck to his ear drove me home in a white Crown Victoria. I recognized him as Agent Grace’s partner. I didn’t remember his name. In the passing streetlights, his head looked like a wire brush. I stared out the window and cried quietly, hoping he couldn’t tell, until he handed me a tissue without a word. I was afraid for Jake, afraid for myself, unsure of what to do next.