Strong 03 - Twice (39 page)

“Hold your fire,” McIntyre said. “I’m hit. I give up.”

Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a skeptical look.

“Throw down the gun, McIntyre,” said Jeffrey. “Then we’ll talk.”

“I can’t move,” he said, his voice rasping and just a little too pathetic.

Rain had reached the top level and was approaching the prostrate form they could now see above them, as they, too, drew closer.

“Be careful, Rain,” said Jeffrey.

His words were drowned out by the firing of the Smith and Wesson. Lydia and Jeffrey watched, helpless, as Rain staggered back toward the railing before falling over the side and landing with a sickening thud on the next level.

“Oh, God,” Lydia screamed, feeling a wash of helplessness as Jeffrey opened fire on Jed McIntyre. The darkness came alive with the explosion of gunshots and Lydia wished she could cover her ears as she raced up the ladder and across the landing to Rain, Jeffrey right behind her. In the flashes of light that came each time Jeffrey fired, she could see Rain’s milky, desperate eyes, McIntyre running on the landing above them, Jeffrey’s gaze intent on his target, and finally, McIntyre’s body jerk hard as it absorbed one of Jeffrey’s bullets. Then there was silence and darkness again.

They could hear as he gasped above them. It was a sound they
both recognized, something known as the death rattle, the sound of breath passing through mucus in the moments before death. They heard the gun drop from his hand as it clattered down, hitting metal and then landing in the dirt below them.

Lydia climbed up the final ladder, shaking off Jeffrey’s grasp on her arm. She wanted to see him die. She wanted to see life pass from his body.

He stood still, leaning against the railing, his hand at the wound on his chest, his mouth agape, his eyes shocked. He looked ghostly and weak, and as she approached he turned his eyes on her. They were cold and soulless, revealing nothing even in the final moments of his life. She searched her heart for compassion for this twisted man; she searched herself for one human emotion. And the only one she could come up with was stone-cold hatred. There was no forgiveness in her heart for Jed McIntyre, there was nothing inside her that was right or good or evolved in this moment. In this moment, she was everything he had made her. No better than him.

He seemed to teeter against the railing and she thought he might fall, but she didn’t reach out to grab him. She just watched as his life seemed to drain from the wound in his chest, the ground around him slick with his blood. He whispered something then, a wet sound. And she leaned in to hear him. When she did, he grabbed her wrist, held it hard. She struggled to pull it back, but he wouldn’t let go of her. Panic welled within her as a wide smile bloomed on his face and a wicked look glittered in his eyes. She braced herself against his pull, but her feet couldn’t find purchase on the bloody metal beneath her feet and they slipped as he pulled her closer, whispering something to her that she couldn’t hear.

She felt hypnotized, pulled in by his powerful gaze. He drew her closer and she fought the irrational fear that he could take her into hell with him just by holding her eyes as he died. They were locked like that for she didn’t know how long.

Then Jeffrey’s arm snaked around her from behind, pulling at
her waist. She saw the Glock come around and Jeffrey emptied it into Jed McIntyre. The hand that had grabbed her wrist flew open and the force of the blast pushed him over the railing. They watched as he sailed down ten stories and landed in a heap on the ground below, his arms and legs spread apart as if he were trying to make an angel in the snow.

“
R
ebecca Helms had a great deal of love in her life, it’s clear to see,” said the young preacher at the graveside. “She’ll be deeply, grievously missed by friends and colleagues, and most especially by her younger brother Peter, by her mother and father, Ruth and Gregory. In that love, part of her will live on.”

The preacher was thin and pale, with light blond hair and blue eyes that glowed with his faith. His strident voice carried through the cold and over the heads of the mourners gathered to say good-bye to a woman whose life was over far too soon. Jed McIntyre’s last casualty, the last person destroyed by a man who had been destroyed long ago. Lydia leaned into Jeffrey, hanging back behind the crowd of Rebecca’s close family and intimate friends. One hand rested on the back of Dax’s wheelchair, where he’d be until his Achilles’ tendons healed. He looked up at her with grim green eyes, his face solemn and drawn from sadness and physical pain. He had a bit of a stunned look to him. She moved her hand to his shoulder and he patted it.

Jeffrey shivered beside her and Lydia couldn’t tell if it was the chill or the pall that had settled over all of them. She tightened the arm she held around his waist and pressed down the feeling of helplessness, the useless parade of “if only’s” and “why her’s” that marched around in her conscience. Did she hold herself responsible? No. Jed McIntyre and no one else was responsible for the murder of Rebecca Helms and the others. But did she feel as though she had
inadvertently written a part for Rebecca in the twisted, morose symphony of her life? Absolutely. She’d have to live with it, that and so many things.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

No real sense of relief had come since the death of Jed McIntyre. It didn’t feel as though a burden had been released. The world didn’t seem like a better, safer place, and the loss of her mother was no less with her. None of the things that she imagined would happen if the world were suddenly free of her bogeyman had happened. Maybe it was too soon. Or maybe, as was her fear, the damage had already been done. That she wouldn’t heal the way Dax would heal, or Rain would heal. Maybe she was so altered by the events of her life, so damaged, that part of her was as dead as Rebecca or Marion, buried and gone for good. She was trying not to believe that, but a funeral was a difficult place to cultivate a positive attitude.

Lydia watched as Rebecca’s mother and father approached the graveside, each with a white rose in hand. They were quiet, brave. Lydia knew they were enduring the most awful possible moment, the last second of physical connection to their daughter. She knew that when the roses dropped from their fingers and landed on the casket, it was the last time anything they touched would have contact with anything she touched. That each of them was screaming, raging inside with grief and fury, pain that would cause them to wish for death more than once over the next months, maybe years. But they were stoic. Lydia wanted to scream for them. Maybe
they
were the last victims of Jed McIntyre.

The crowd began to thin, as people stopped at the graveside and then moved along to waiting cars and limos. The day was cruelly clear and bright, a light blue sky with a round white winter sun. Better to rain. God didn’t seem so oblivious then to the pain of His children.

The three of them came to stop at the edge of Rebecca’s grave and they looked down onto her gleaming silver casket littered with
the roses dropped by the people who loved her. Jeffrey dropped the three white orchids he had been holding for them. And Lydia said quietly, “I’m sorry, Rebecca.”

After all, what else was left to say?

A
t the Rover, Jeffrey and Lydia helped Dax into the backseat and he bore the assistance like a rectal exam, uncomfortable and humiliated. Jeffrey put the wheelchair in the back of the car and Lydia reached to help him settle and strap in.

“I’m not a child,” said Dax, grabbing the seat belt from Lydia’s hand. He didn’t look at her and his face was flushed with embarrassment.

“Well, then stop acting like one, you big baby.”

She patted him on the head and he glared at her, but there was no heat in it. He was just tired and crabby and hurting. She understood and he knew she did. She was about to open the front passenger door for herself when she was aware of someone standing behind her. She turned to see Detectives Malone and Piselli.

“Ms. Strong,” said Malone. “We need to talk.”

“What’s up, guys?” she asked, Jeffrey walking up beside her.

The two of them looked uncomfortable, worried. They exchanged a glance and then Piselli spoke up.

“When’s the last time you heard from Detective McKirdy?”

The events of the last few days came rushing back in a wave as Lydia tried to remember the last time she’d talked to Ford.

S
lowly they’d filed into the underground chamber, Rain’s legions. Quietly, shuffling and unspeaking, they’d carried Rain and Jed McIntyre up the long metal staircase and eventually out of the tunnels, Lydia and Jeffrey following in a kind of haze. The surreal quality of the whole ordeal made it easy for Lydia to pretend she was participating in an incredibly vivid lucid dream. When they emerged into the city night, the cold air snapped her back a bit and the events that
had just transpired began to sink in. At the corner of Prince Street and Lafayette, they were greeted by the stone-faced Special Agent Goban and the rest of the FBI team, as well as some NYPD uniforms.

Dax had been taken from the tunnels hours earlier, Lydia later learned, and was rushed to the hospital. Before the emergency surgery to repair his injured legs, he managed to explain to one of the hospital staff that they needed to contact the FBI and tell them where Lydia and Jeffrey were. The man, whom Dax couldn’t name and probably wouldn’t recognize, had done that, hence the greeting committee.

A waiting ambulance rushed Rain to Bellevue, where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest. And Lydia had the grim satisfaction of watching the coroner’s office team zip Jed McIntyre into a body bag. He lay white, his eyes staring, a thin line of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. She watched as he was swallowed by black plastic and loaded into the back of the van, the doors slamming hard and final behind him.

“Where will you bury him?” she asked one of the men. “No one will claim him.”

He shrugged, not looking at her. “Depends.”

“How do I find out?” Something in her voice must have caught his attention because he turned his eyes on her. He was an older Hispanic man, with deep lines etched around his eyes and a receding hairline. In his face she saw the reflection of a thousand ugly, anonymous deaths.

“Call the office tomorrow,” he said, with something like sympathy in his voice. “Ask for Hector, that’s me. I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” she said, offering her hand. But he didn’t see it and walked off.

“Time to let go,” said Jeffrey from behind her. “You don’t need to know where the body goes.”

She nodded but knew she would call to find out anyway. Why? She didn’t really understand, herself.

The next two days, they’d barely talked, left the house only to go to the hospital to be with Dax. They walked around each other in a kind of daze of pain and loss, touching more than speaking. That had always been the way with them in times of trouble; they communicated better with their bodies than with words. Everything that had happened before the tunnels had become a distant memory. Everything, of course, except the loss of the pregnancy. Lydia carried that with her like an arm in a cast. The physical pain was subsiding; she imagined the emotional pain would fade eventually, as well.

Julian and Eleanor Ross, the missing twins, their drama, all seemed to exist on a distant planet in another galaxy. Their client was dead. The questions were still out there, floating in the outer edges of Lydia’s consciousness, her curiosity, but she didn’t have the energy to acknowledge them again yet. She hadn’t even thought about Ford.

This morning Dax had insisted on coming to Rebecca’s funeral. He didn’t have insurance, so the hospital was looking to unload him anyway. Lydia believed that he needed to stay another few days, just to assure he’d stay off his injured legs. Against their better judgment, they wheeled him out and here they were.

“I haven’t seen Ford since we discovered Eleanor Ross’s body at the duplex,” she answered finally.

“That’s the thing,” said Piselli, lighting a cigarette. “Neither have we.”

“
I
t’s not like him. He’s not going to just take off,” said Piselli, sitting in the pub where they’d decided to meet at on Astoria Boulevard in Queens. It was a dump of a place called Cranky’s. Every inch of the wall had a beer-bottle cap nailed to it like some alcoholic mosaic. The jukebox played “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. A couple of old men hunched in the corner, nursing pints and arguing about Giuliani. The typical bar aroma of booze and cigarettes was accented by a subtle but definite hint of vomit.

Piselli and Malone sat across from Lydia and Jeffrey in a red vinyl booth; they’d parked Dax’s wheelchair at the end of the table.

Lydia really looked at them for the first time. They were both pretty good-looking guys, Piselli with slicked black hair and dark eyes that observed sharply and missed nothing. He had a fashionable bit of stubble on his square jaw and a slight hook in his nose didn’t detract from his face but made it almost aquiline, at once sexy and regal. They were both young, but Malone had more of a boyish look to him, a soft innocence around the corners of his eyes. The acne scarring she’d noticed when she’d met him the first time didn’t seem as angry or red as it had. His skin was unlined, shaven, and clean. He smelled of Ivory soap.

Lydia and Jeffrey ordered Amstels from the bartender; Malone ordered a Coke. And Piselli drank coffee from a white ceramic mug that read
ONE DAY AT A TIME
. Dax sulked.

“This is what we know,” said Piselli, lighting the fourth cigarette he’d smoked since approaching them at the Rover. Lydia fantasized about asking for one but didn’t.

“He had a uniform take Anthony Donofrio down to the station while he hung around the scene for a while with us. He poked around the apartment, then headed down after them. We know that he spent about forty-five minutes with Donofrio; he taped the conversation. During this conversation he learned that Annabelle Hodge had entered the building just hours before you and Ford found Eleanor Ross dead.”