Strong 03 - Twice (31 page)

“Right.”

“Hey, Ford,” she said. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Funny you should ask. I was just about to take another little ride upstate. The address on Annabelle’s employment record was a place you’ve visited recently. The residence of Maura Hodge.”

She remembered then the noises she’d heard upstairs when they’d interviewed Maura, and the feeling she had that there was so much more going on than Maura was willing to reveal.

“Can you meet us at Payne Whitney in an hour? We’ll go up with you.”

“I never mind the company … unofficially, of course. You up to that?”

“Why not?” she said, her tone clipped, daring him to question her.

“Whatever you say, Lydia.”

“That’s an excellent philosophy.”

S
pecial Agent Charles Goban had a long, crooked nose set between small eyes so dark that his iris and pupil appeared to be one. His gray hair was close-cropped and Jeffrey could see his pink, slightly flaky scalp glowing under the overhead lights. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his wrinkled brow. Goban had the wiry build of a featherweight fighter and stood nearly three inches shorter than Jeffrey. Exuding a kind of pent-up nervous energy, he was a cork about to shoot off a champagne bottle. Although there was nothing to celebrate at the moment.

“I’m trying to get my head around why I didn’t hear about this sooner,” Goban said, wiping away the sweat from his forehead and looking at Jeffrey with some combination of suspicion and condescension.

“It was just a rumor,” answered Jeff. “We were following up. We never found him. Or any real evidence that he’d ever been down there.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Lying to the FBI was not high on his list of things to do. He’d done it before and he’d probably do it again. But he avoided it when possible.

On the train on his way to the office, he’d been staring out the window and saw a dark figure disappear into a hole in the tunnel wall. It had reminded him of Rain and that tomorrow was the deadline he and Dax had issued for the whereabouts of Jed McIntyre. But all bets were off now that Rebecca was missing. He was sorry to fuck with the order of things down there, recognizing it as a way for people
who didn’t belong to have a place in the world. But Jed McIntyre had Rebecca and the thought that she could be down there filled him with dread. He could only imagine her terror, and the thought of it caused a sharp pain behind his eyes. She was a good person, kind and hardworking, close to her mother. She didn’t deserve to be drawn into this nightmare, a pawn for Jed McIntyre to cause Jeffrey and Lydia pain. Jeff felt an intense guilt and desperation to find her … alive. But there was also the voice in his head that whispered to him that it was already too late.

When he’d arrived at the office, it was crawling with agents. The space was being treated like a crime scene, with technicians scouring for evidence, photographers snapping shots of their offices. An agent stood behind Craig as Craig showed how their security systems worked. The whole thing made Jeffrey extremely uneasy; he didn’t like other dogs on his turf. But it couldn’t be avoided now and he was going to have to deal with whatever it took to help Rebecca.

Christian Striker looked pale and agitated as he paced the foyer.

“This is so fucked up, man,” he said as Jeffrey approached.

“I know. What are we doing for Rebecca?”

“I’ve got ten of our guys visiting her friends and family, checking surveillance tapes from some of the other buildings on the block to see if we can get a handle on which way they went after they left. There’s not much we can do, honestly. We know he took her, but no one’s had a handle on Jed McIntyre in months. If we couldn’t find him before, how’re we going to find him now? It’s not good. We’re all too close to this, too worried to be thinking clearly and objectively.”

“I think I know where he might have taken her.”

“Christ, where, man?”

“Where’s Goban?”

“He’s in your office.”

So he told the agent about their trip into the tunnel and how it had yielded nothing but a window into a world he never knew existed.
Before he had even finished, Goban was mobilizing a team to head down beneath the streets.

“You’re a fucking cowboy, Mark. You always have been. If you had told us about this sooner, Rebecca Helms wouldn’t be in this situation at all.”

Jeff didn’t reply, just sat staring and wondering if Goban was right.

“What were you going to do when you found him?”

Jeff shrugged.

“Yeah, do me a favor and don’t answer that. Just tell me one thing. Can you find your way around down there? Do you know where you’re going?”

Before he could answer, a young agent walked into the room. With his slick black hair and bright blue eyes, he wore all the idealism and righteousness on his handsome face that Jeff had felt during the first few years on the job. The feeling had faded fast.

“Sir, a body’s been found in Central Park matching the description of Rebecca Helms.”

D
ax watched Lydia disappear through the glass doors of the Payne Whitney Clinic and shifted the Rover into park. He sat with the engine idling and the heat blaring, keeping his eyes on the entrance to the hospital. No one would get in or out without his noticing. He knew Jeff was going to kick his ass for encouraging Lydia to be up and about. But aside from being a little sore, and a little broken inside, she was fine. Jeff wanted to treat her like she was made out of glass. That’s why Dax never wanted to fall in love. From what he could see, it clouded your judgment terribly.

He could still see Lydia in the foyer trying to negotiate her way in, though only ten minutes remained for visiting hours. He was not surprised when he saw the guard relent and let her through. He wondered what she’d said to get her way.

When his cell phone sang inside his pocket, he had a feeling he
knew who it was. He hadn’t forgotten Rain’s deadline, and he was sure Rain hadn’t forgotten, either. With Rebecca missing now, the stakes were even higher.

“
Dax
-ie,” said the husky voice on the other line. “How are you,
darling
?”

Danielle’s voice was slurred and sloppy. There was a desperation to her mock-seductive tone. She was making Dax more and more uncomfortable every time they spoke. He could see that she had entered the downward spiral of booze, drugs, and dangerous sex that would likely end with her dead in an alley somewhere. He didn’t want to feel badly about that when it happened. He needed to find a new street contact, someone not so high-risk, someone with better self-preservation instincts.

“What have you got, Danielle?” he said, trying to keep the disgust out of his voice.

“Can you come get me? I’m cold and hungry and I have some news for you,” she said in a singsong voice that she must have imagined was enticing.

“Give me the news now and I’ll come get you later. A woman is missing and I don’t have time to play games with you.”

There was a pause on the other line. And when Danielle spoke again, her voice had turned sharp and angry.

“Well, fuck you, too,
Daxie
.” She hung up the phone with a loud slam. Dax just sat there, knowing she would call back in under a minute. She was jonesing and she needed him. The phone chirped and blinked in his hand.

“Let’s try to be civilized, shall we?” he said as he answered.

“Come get me right now or I’m not going to give you Rain’s message,” she said, now pouting and sullen like a child. “I mean it, Dax.”

Again the stab of pity in his heart for her. “Okay, okay. I’ll be there. Where are you?”

She gave him her location and he hung up the line. “Bloody
hell,” he said, looking back at the glass doors through which Lydia had disappeared. He dialed Jeff’s number and got voice mail, but didn’t leave a message.

As he put the phone back in his pocket, Ford McKirdy’s Taurus pulled up beside him and Dax rolled down the window. Ford got out of his car and walked over. Fatigue and stress radiated off him like an odor.

“Did you hear?” asked Ford.

“Hear what?”

“We found a body in Central Park that matches the description of Rebecca Helms.”

“Christ,” he said, feeling a wave of anger and sadness.

“I know,” said Ford with a slow shake of his head.

“Listen,” said Dax after a moment. “I have to go. I’ll meet up with you two in Haunted. Ford, just watch out for Lydia. I’ll be right behind you.”

He didn’t like leaving Lydia, especially since Ford had another agenda. But if Danielle had a line on Jed McIntyre, it couldn’t wait. McIntyre had killed Rebecca and was moving closer to Lydia and Jeffrey. Dax could feel it, could smell it like a scent on the wind.

“Where are you going?” called Ford. But the Rover was already pulling down the street.

J
ulian Ross looked like one of the tortured figures in her paintings. She stood in the corner, huddled there as if protecting herself against some imagined assault. She had a white-knuckled grip on one of the room’s orange plastic chairs, as if she might need to lift it and use it to ward off lions. Some of her color had returned, but her wild eyes spoke of a living nightmare. Her fear and confusion were palpable in the stale air of the room. Her hair looked grayer and she looked thinner than when Lydia had seen her last. So much had happened since then that it seemed like a month, but really it had been less than a week.

“They won’t let me have any paper or paints,” Julian said as the door closed behind Lydia. “I’m losing my mind in this place.”

She laughed a little then at what she’d said. But then her face was a mask of sadness. “Are you going to help me? Or are you one of them?”

“One of who?”

“You know,” said Julian with a sly smile and eyes that tried to bore into Lydia.

“I really
don’t
know, Julian. But tell me and I’ll try to help you.”

Lydia seated herself in a chair by the wall, telling herself that a passive body posture would put Julian at ease. But really, she was just exhausted. Before she sat, she gave Julian an up and down, figured she had about thirty pounds on Julian and could definitely ward off an attack if it came to that. She felt comforted by that thought until it occurred to her that Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton probably would have thought the same thing.

She felt like she had used up every ounce of energy she had just by walking from the car to Julian’s room. She wondered briefly if she should have listened to Jeffrey after all. She found herself wondering that a lot.

Julian was watching her carefully. “The destroyers, the takers, the damned,” she whispered. “You’re not one of them. I can tell.”

Lydia’s mind was racing with a thousand questions, but Julian was skittish and jumpy; Lydia knew she had to be careful with words, careful not to frighten or upset Julian any more than she was or she ran the risk of losing her altogether. Julian finally released the chair and came around to sit in it, facing Lydia. She balanced on the edge, bouncing her knees up and down so quickly that she seemed to be trembling.

“The destroyers …” Lydia said, her tone leading.

“You know them?”

“Who doesn’t?” she said, thinking of the forces that threatened to rip her own life apart at the seams.

Julian nodded solemnly. “All my life, they’ve been in the shadows, waiting to snatch away my soul, my life … everything. For a time, I thought I had eluded them. I should have known.”

She thought about Julian’s canvases, the small figures always in peril from the larger, dark, amorphous forms. She thought of the violence that Julian Ross had grown famous for painting. She wondered again whether Julian’s demons were real or imagined.

“Why do they want to hurt you, Julian?”

“That’s just it, you see. I have no idea,” she said with a helpless shrug. Big tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks; she made no sound, no move to wipe the moisture from her face. If she was an actress, she had real talent. Lydia felt a twinge of pity in her heart.

A sharp knock at the door startled them both. “Five minutes, Ms. Strong,” said the guard from outside.

“You called me here, Julian. You said you wanted to talk.”

Julian looked at Lydia closely, her eyes narrowing. Lydia observed her face, sought traces of Eleanor’s cold and deceptive aura in the woman’s daughter and saw none of it. The two woman sat looking at each other in silence, precious seconds passing. But Lydia didn’t speak, sensing that Julian would only talk when she was ready.

“I am complicit in my own fate and in the fate of those I have loved. I see that now,” she said finally, speaking slowly, seeming more lucid for a moment. “We all are, you know. Other people, other forces may direct the orchestra, but each of us has the choice to pick up the violin and play or not. I have played along all my life. Out of fear, out of need to please, out of something—who knows really why? Somehow you feel if you don’t play the music that’s written for you, then you’re guilty of the chaos that ensues. None of the other players know how to proceed. It’s so
frightening
for everyone.”

Lydia had no idea what she was trying to say, but again she let silence do the coaxing.

“Especially when the queen doesn’t get her way,” she continued.

“The queen?” Lydia asked, but remembered that that’s how she referred to her mother during their last visit.

“The Queen of the Damned,” she said, with all the cool seriousness of a college professor.

“What happens when the queen doesn’t get her way?” Lydia asked, even though it was pretty clear that Julian Ross was quite insane.

Julian smiled, a disturbing twisted grin. “Then
off
with your head,” she said with a hard laugh. “Of course.”

Julian’s answer sent a chill through Lydia, as the images from the Richard Stratton crime scene came to her head.

“So Eleanor, your mother. She’s one of the destroyers.”

“I’d say so,” Julian said indignantly.

“And your brother, James? What about him?”

“Oh, no,” she said with gravity. “Not Jamey. He’s one of the angels.”