Smoke (28 page)

Their search of The New Day buildings had yielded nothing immediate. But they’d spent the last couple of hours interviewing each of the few members they’d found on the premises. But talking to one of them was like talking to a radio. Their programming was
not
interactive. Finally, in frustration, Matt had called in for a van and told the members that they were going to the Fiftieth Precinct for further interviews. No one objected.

“I’m not taking them into custody,” said Matt calmly. “I’m taking them in for questioning. There’s a big difference.”

At this point, Templar threw up his hands and walked toward his Jag.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Detective,” he said over his shoulder. “And you’ll be seeing me again in a few hours with a court order to release these innocent people.”

“Okay,” said Mount with a friendly wave. “See you then.”

Jesamyn had this low-level anxiety over the way Mount was antagonizing Templar. It was her opinion that when it came to snakes like Templar, it was always better to stay out of striking distance. Matt was poking him with a short stick.

She watched as the six members of The New Day filed into the van with a weird calm. Not one of them ever asked what was happening to
them or where they were going. The sight of them made Jesamyn shudder; their vacancy and docility unsettled her.

A
t the unfamiliar Fiftieth Precinct, Jesamyn found some terrible coffee in the break room and then asked around for a computer. She wound up being escorted to the desk of one of the homicide detectives who would not be in for another few hours. Someone who knew him well, a young black detective in his twenties with broad shoulders and a shy smile, logged her onto the machine using Detective Winslow’s password. As he did this, she stared at a picture sitting on the desk. It was one of those Sears family portraits featuring a big grizzly of a man Jesamyn assumed was Detective Charles Winslow, his petite and lovely red-headed wife and teenage twin daughters. The girls wore coordinating floral dresses, their hair swept up in matching French twists. Mrs. Detective wore a plain cream silk blouse open at the neck to reveal a strand of pearls. They all smiled brightly. They looked so normal to Jesamyn, so solid. She found herself envying them, wishing she and Dylan could have given normal and solid to Benjamin.

Oh, snap out of it, she was thinking to herself as she thanked the detective. Cute. Too young. She turned her attention to the computer and found the FBI’s Missing Persons website. She didn’t have any real names, so she’d have to sift through pictures and hope for a stroke of luck until Matt was able to get some real names to go on. If he was able to.

She scrolled through picture after picture of missing young men and women, sipping on the bitter, tepid coffee. A young Korean girl who’d left a Halloween party on her Pennsylvania college campus and was never seen again, a young man who’d gone to Argentina as an exchange student who was last seen walking the streets of Bariloche in Rio Negro, a young woman last seen jogging in her parents’ Texas subdivision at 11:30 in the morning while home on Christmas vacation. The list went on, tiny thumbnail pictures of smiling faces that she clicked on to learn the details of each disappearance.

Jesamyn was getting that sick, hollow feeling she got when she searched this database. Where were these people, so many of them children and teenagers, so many of them young women? She thought
of what would happen to her world if she went to pick up Benji one day and he wasn’t there, the teacher saying, “Oh, his dad/uncle/cousin, picked him up.” Or if she let him go to the store for her the way he always begged her to, and he never came home. She’d created a thousand scenarios like this, lived them a million times in her heart. She imagined seeing his face on a computer screen like this. Her throat was dry just at the thought of it. It was this job that made her overprotective of her son. Because she knew the worst could happen, saw it every day, no matter what the statistics said.

She was in the middle of her nightmare fantasy when she saw a face she recognized and her heart leapt … a girl with long dark hair, a round sweet face, and deep set eyes. She’d told them her name was Carla; she was twenty pounds thinner now, at least, her hair shaved tight to her head. But it was the eyes that gave her away, mournful, thickly lashed. Jessica Rawlins of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, had been missing since January of that year. She’d told them that her “New Day dawned on January 30th” when they asked her date of birth. According to the FBI, she’d been born on May 10th, 1982. She’d left her college campus one evening, no one knew why. Friends said she’d been depressed since the death of her father not quite a year earlier, that she’d been drinking too much. But no one feared her to be suicidal; she never talked about walking away from her life. When she didn’t return to her dorm that January night, her roommate called the police. There was a $75,000 reward for information leading to her return home. Jesamyn felt happy for a second; today was going to be a good day for Jessica Rawlin’s family. A very good day.

Fifteen

T
im Samuels looked as if he had aged ten years since the last time they saw him. Their visit this time was a surprise; though it was well past noon he clearly hadn’t showered or combed his hair. It was apparently a look he’d been cultivating for days by the smell of him. His face was a mask of stubble and deep lines. He wasn’t happy to see them. No one was ever happy to see them the second time.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” he said when he came to the door.

“Can we talk, Mr. Samuels?” asked Lydia.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “That depends.”

“On?”

“On what you have to say,” he said nastily.

Gone was the hospitable, helpful, and concerned father. Tim Samuels looked like a man on the edge, someone who’d abandoned the petty civilities that help people to get along with others. He had an aura of unstable belligerence. This was Lydia’s cue to step back and let Jeffrey do the talking. She didn’t deal well with unpleasant people; they tended to make her behave unpleasantly, which never helped matters.

“Mr. Samuels,” said Jeffrey quietly. “We know you visited The New Day building sometime in the past week. We need to ask you about that visit because when last we spoke you told us that you’d never heard of that organization.”

He stared at them blankly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Are you sure, Mr. Samuels? Because so far we haven’t gone to the police with this information. But we will.”

“You can go to the police with whatever you want. I’ve never heard
of The New Day,” he said, and slammed the door so hard, the small glass panes along the top rattled.

“There’s a videotape, Mr. Samuels,” Jeffrey said loudly to the door. “It shows you entering a building in Riverdale owned and occupied by New Day members.”

This was a lie but it seemed to have the desired effect. Samuels opened the door a crack.

“Do yourselves a favor and get out of here right now,” he whispered desperately. “Don’t make me talk to you about this. I guarantee you’ll both be sorry.”

“We’re already in pretty deep,” said Jeffrey. “We broke into the building last night, created some chaos, rescued one of their members. If these people have Lily, Mr. Samuels, she’s in big, big trouble. Please. Talk to us.”

Samuels closed his eyes and when he opened them again, two tears trailed down his face.

“Oh, God,” he said. “What have I done?”

B
efore paying Tim Samuels another visit, Lydia and Jeffrey had returned James to his parents. Lydia had called the number on the website and asked to speak to Mr. Rainer.

“Mr. Rainer,” she said when he came on the line. “My name is Lydia Strong. Do you know who I am?”

“Uh, yes,” he said. “I do. You’re the true crime writer.” She heard the mingling of hope and dread in his German-accented English. It was a tone she recognized in the families of victims. They knew her involvement would generate publicity that might well bring justice or answers. But they also knew that tentatively healing wounds would be reopened, that reignited hopes might be shattered once again.

“I want you to know that in the commission of an investigation we’ve found your son, James Rainer.”

She heard him make a sharp inhale and a long slow exhale. “Please,” he said. “This is not a joke?”

She heard a woman’s voice in the background.

“No,” she said quickly. “We have reason to believe that your son
joined an organization called The New Day to help himself with some of his problems.”

“The New Day,” Mr. Rainer repeated as if in a daze. The woman’s voice in the background grew louder, more urgent.

“We infiltrated this group in the search for another missing person, a young woman. We encountered your son and removed him against his will from the premises.”

“Against his will?”

“Yes, Mr. Rainer.”

It took a while to make him understand what had happened to his son and that the road home was going to be more difficult than just arranging a place to meet. She tried to explain that he called himself Charley now and that he might not acknowledge them until he’d gotten some help, to undo the things that had been done to him at The New Day. But she wasn’t quite sure he understood her. He just seemed dazed and a little confused as he shared the news with his wife, who started to weep.

“I’ve arranged to have him accepted to a psychiatric facility in New York City,” she said when Mr. Rainer returned to the phone. “It’s the best possible place for him right now.”

“I—I can’t afford that. I’m sorry. We’ll have to help James here at home.”

She’d already anticipated that.

“I’ve taken care of the expense, Mr. Rainer,” said Lydia. “And I just want you to do one thing for me. When he’s well, if we haven’t found Lily Samuels, I’d just like to talk to him again.”

She heard him sigh on the other end. “I can’t,” he said, his voice growing strained with tears, “express my gratitude.”

Lydia had made a late-night call to Irma Fox, a child psychiatrist she had met through Ford McKirdy, a retired homicide detective whom she and Jeff had worked with on the Julian Ross case last year. Irma was unlucky enough to be the only shrink in Lydia’s Palm Pilot and Lydia recalled her having mentioned doing cult deprogramming work with adolescents and young adults in their late teens. On hearing the situation, Irma was very quick to accommodate Lydia, calling back immediately to say that a bed could be arranged for James Rainer that night
at a facility on the Upper West Side. The cost was exorbitant. But Lydia figured it was the least they could do, since Jeffrey had practically killed the kid and Dax had pumped him so full of Xanax to calm him that James was nearly catatonic.

T
im Samuels wasn’t looking much better than James had when they dropped him off, beaten and drugged and about to undergo the worst few weeks of his life.

“This is what they do,” said Samuels in his living room. The beautifully appointed space was a mess. The couch was being used as a bed. Half-empty glasses and cups with congealed liquid, dirty plates crusted with dried food, and empty fast-food containers occupied most available spaces. The shades had been drawn against the view and the room had an unpleasant odor.

“Who?”

“The New Day. They ruin. What they can’t possess, they destroy.”

He put his head in his hands and started to weep. It sounded a little forced and pathetic to Lydia, but then she didn’t have a lot of patience for sobbing men.

“Where’s your wife?” she said. He looked up at her.

“She left.” He sighed and hung his head. “She can’t stand the sight of me.”

Lydia bit back an impolite comment but he must have seen it on her face.

“Yeah, imagine that. Right?” he said.

Lydia raised her eyebrows at him but said nothing.

“Time for you to come clean with us, Mr. Samuels,” said Jeffrey, sitting across from him. “For Lily’s sake. And by the looks of it, for yours too.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, looking up at them with red-rimmed eyes.

Jeffrey showed Samuels his palms. “Make me understand. Make me understand what’s happening here.”

• • •

T
im Samuels was desperately unhappy. So he had an affair with a twenty-two-year-old stripper and bought a Ferrari. When that didn’t work, he went looking for God.

“I just started getting this feeling like everything worth doing was already behind me,” he said quietly. He looked beaten as he sipped from the glass of ice water Lydia had fetched him from the kitchen.

“The kids were grown, living their lives. Much more fulfilling, exciting lives than I ever dreamed of, I might add. Monica and I, we love each other, you know. She’s my best friend. But after twenty-five years, things were not exactly hot … if you know what I mean.”

Lydia hoped he wasn’t going to go into detail and she shifted in her seat on the couch across from him. Jeffrey stood by the hearth, watching Samuels in that way that he had. Listening carefully, critically. Looking for all the cues that Lydia looked for, the shifting eyes, the tapping foot. It was the furtive gesture, the uneasy glance, the unconscious tick that told you the most about a person. Words were chosen. But the body never lied. Tim Samuels gave her the impression of someone who’d been crushed. He slumped in his chair like he didn’t even have the energy to sit upright anymore.

“When I retired a year and a half ago, sold my business, I made a killing. I mean like, more money than I ever dreamed of.”

He let out a little laugh. “It was what I had worked for my entire life … to have enough money so that I didn’t have to work. It took about a year of golfing and drinking, sleeping late, watching soaps, to realize that I didn’t know anything about myself. All my life I had always done what I was told to do, the right thing, work hard, marry well, send your children to college. I was always so busy working, or working on the house, or raising the kids, or taking care of my marriage. I’d never had any time to really think about myself, my life. Do you know how scary that is? To realize that your life is more than half over and that you are a stranger to yourself? It scared the shit out of me.”