Smoke

Seventeen

When Internal Affairs came to his doorstep, Matt Stenopolis was still in his boxers, eating a glazed chocolate donut and drinking a cup of coffee. He heard the Caprice pull into the driveway and pulled himself away from the Pokémon cartoon he was watching. He drew back the curtains and stood at the picture window, watching as two men, one paunchy and balding, one young with a bodybuilder’s physique, both of them wearing bad suits and cheap ties and matching wool coats, emerged from the car. There was an aura of cheesy self-importance about them and he recognized them immediately as IAD.

He didn’t bother to put on pants before he answered the door.

“Gentlemen,” said Matt through the screen door. The cold air of the morning was biting, made more brutal by the sharp wind that blew. He noticed the dead trees and the empty street, the streetlamp that still hadn’t dimmed for the day.

“Detective Stenopolis,” said the older man. He had thick lines and soft purple bags under his eyes, his moustache needed a trim, the wool coat he wore over his suit needed a good lint brush. But there was something steely about him, something really tough. A lead toe under a worn old boot.

“What can I do for you this morning?” Matt had an idea that this was about Jorge Alonzo, the Latin King he’d been rough with when he’d disrespected Jesamyn. Those punks all had lawyers; they were always screaming police brutality. Murderers, drug dealers, rapists every last one of them, but God forbid their civil rights were violated.

“Can we come in?”

Matt hesitated. IAD officers were like vampires: once you invited them in, they were hard to get rid of. He noticed then that they’d left the engine running and the backseat of the car stood open. White clouds of exhaust plumed around the vehicle in the frigid air.

“I was just being polite, Detective,” said the older officer when Matt didn’t answer right away. “Don’t make this worse than it’s going to be. Okay, buddy?”

That’s when he felt his stomach clench. He saw his mother and father come out of their house next door, their coats on over their pajamas. They shuffled over the icy sidewalk, his father holding on tightly to his mother so that she wouldn’t slip. The echo of a door shutting in the morning air told him that his brother had been called and was on his way up the street. He wanted to yell at them, tell them to go back into the house, but he didn’t.

“Mateo,” his mother called, looking at him worriedly. “What’s wrong?”

Her short red hair hadn’t been brushed and it stuck up amusingly in several places; his father’s glasses fogged in the cold.

“Nothing, Ma,” he said, holding the screen door open for the officers. He was starting to feel a flutter in his belly, a tingling in his hands.

“Ma’am, sir, I’m going to have to ask you to stand back,” said the younger officer as he walked over to Matt’s parents.

In the distance, he heard sirens sound and as they drew closer and closer Matt realized that they were for him.

“Look,” he said to the older officer. “What’s going on here?”

“Mateo Stenopolis,” he said, removing two pairs of cuffs from his pockets. They were linked together because Matt was too big to have his arms cuffed behind him with just one set. They’d done it before they arrived. If he had known they were going to take him out in cuffs without letting him get dressed, he would have taken the time to do so before allowing them into his home.

“You’re not going to let me put on my clothes?” said Matt, turning his back and putting his hands behind his back like he’d asked a thousand perps to do a thousand times.

“You are under arrest for the rape and murder of Katrina Silvana Aliti. You have the right to remain silent…”

But Matt didn’t hear anything else as two squad cars pulled up, sirens screaming. His mother was crying, emitting a kind of low, despairing moan, standing between his father and brother, who looked on in shock.

“Don’t worry, bro. We’re going to call a lawyer and meet you down there,” his brother said calmly. “Don’t worry, Mateo.”

But it sounded like he was talking behind a piece of thick glass. All Matt could think, as they let him put on his sneakers that lay by the door and led him down the icy path to the waiting squad car, was that he’d never known her last name before this morning. He’d never asked Katrina her last name.

Jesamyn was in a kind of haze as she dropped Benjamin off at school, still tired from the all-nighter they’d pulled the day before yesterday. She kissed him on the forehead.

“See ya,” he said, sliding from the car.

“See ya, little man. I love you.” But he was already gone. She watched as he ran toward the wide double doors without a second glance back at her. She didn’t have time to feel wistful about it as her cell phone started singing. She saw Dylan’s number on the ID. She sighed and considered not answering. But they’d both made a promise to each other long ago to always take each other’s calls out of respect for their mutual love for Benjamin. No matter what passed between them they were each a parent to the same child; that meant something.

“What do you want?” she answered.

“Yeah, look, I know you don’t want to talk to me right now. But I’m down here at 1 Police Plaza, answering more questions about my shooting. There’s something you need to know.”

“Spare me the drama and spit it out.” She was so sick of him, she could barely stand the sound of his voice.

“They just brought Mount in.”

“What? You’ve gotta be kidding me.” She immediately remembered the incident with Jorge Alonzo. That little shit, she thought.

“In cuffs, still in his boxers.”

“What?” she said again. That didn’t sound right.

“They arrested him. Word is, Jez, they took him in for murdering a prostitute.”

She sighed with relief. “Man, you will sink to any level to get an emotional response out of me. You’re not just selfish; you’re sick.”

She took the phone away from her ear and was about to end the call, but she heard him raise his voice. She put the phone back to her ear.

“Listen to me, Jez,” he was saying. “Please. This is not a joke. I am absolutely serious.”

She felt her heart start to race. “Oh my God,” she said.

Two days ago, the night of the raid on The New Day, once they’d identified Carla as Jessica Rawlins, it hadn’t taken long for them to contact her parents in Tennessee. It gave them a reason to put a warrant out for the arrest of Trevor Rhames and to send squad cars to Jude Templar’s home and office. They could question him now on the whereabouts of his client and charge him with aiding and abetting if he didn’t cooperate. But Templar was gone. Not to be found at his office, his home, or at the city courthouses, and by late that night, he still hadn’t turned up. Other than finding Jessica Rawlins, very little came from the search of The New Day. They were no closer to finding Lily, and Trevor Rhames and anything that might have incriminated him in Lily’s disappearance were gone from the premises before they arrived. And none of the people they interviewed, including Jessica Rawlins, had anything bad to say about The New Day; they all claimed never to have seen Lily. It was a big goose egg. They had nothing. And Kepler was angrier than Jesamyn had ever seen him. Matt left after Kepler ripped him a new one and for the first time since she’d known him, he didn’t go into the precinct on their day off the next day. She hadn’t seen or talked to her partner in almost forty-eight hours.

“Jesamyn, are you listening to me?” asked Dylan, still on the other line.

“What?”

“I said, what do you know about this?”

“Know about it? I don’t know anything about it. It’s complete bullshit. Matt Stenopolis is the most upright guy I have ever known. Honest, reliable, mature,” she said, turning the knife a little and hoping he was picking up on it.

“But he’s got a temper,” said Dylan.

She paused a second.

“Yeah, he’s got a temper but only when people act like assholes. Anyway, what are you saying? You think he did this?”

He didn’t say anything but she could hear him breathing on the line. Then, “Jez, I hear they have pictures of him entering and leaving her apartment. Fingerprint evidence at the scene, blood in his car. I mean, they’re not going to bring a cop in like that, humiliate him in front of his family, unless they’re real sure they’re dealing with someone capable of what they say he did to that pro.”

“What do you mean?”

“That girl was beaten to death. Someone beat her to death with his fists. Someone big.”

She squeezed her eyes shut tight and when she opened them, her vision had a white ring around it “You know him, Dylan. I know him. It’s not possible. It’s just not.”

He sighed. “I hope you’re right.”

“I’m coming down there,” she said. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

“They’re not going to let you see him,” he was saying as she ended the call. She started the engine of the Explorer and pulled out of the school drive.

A ghost of a thought was starting to form in her mind. She tried to push it down, but it wouldn’t go.

Eighteen

It was a rage killing. A rage killing that was followed by deep remorse. They knew that by the way Katrina Silvana Aliti had been beaten with big heavy fists, beaten until she died. She was a tiny woman, not five-three, not even a hundred and ten pounds. She never had a chance against a man that size, was likely unconscious after the first blow to her head.

When she was dead, the killer must have come back to himself. Realized fully what he had done. Then he covered her face and body with the pink flowered sheet from her bed. The man that the killer found her with had run, not even bothering to retrieve his clothes. He had wrapped himself in a blanket he found on the couch and fled. His dick was still hard and would stay that way for hours, since he’d taken a double hit of Viagra in anticipation of his evening with Katrina.

The big man had allowed the john to leave, barely even registering his presence. From the street outside where he called the police from a pay phone, the john said he heard the giant wailing like an injured moose. He hid himself in a doorway as the man ran from the building, climbed into an SUV, and sped off.

“I’ve never seen anyone that tall outside a basketball court,” he told the police when they arrived. “He came through that door like it was made out of cardboard. She called him ‘Mateo.’ ”

The surveillance camera from the livery cab company outside captured Detective Mateo Stenopolis arriving at Katrina’s apartment around midnight and leaving less than a half an hour later.

“He doesn’t look upset,” said Jesamyn after watching the tape for the fifth time. “He’s not upset. He’s not running.”

“That’s because he’s a stone-cold killer, Detective Breslow.”

“Bullshit. I don’t care what kind of evidence you have. You’ll never convince me of that.”

“We have an eyewitness account, a videotape, blood evidence in his vehicle.”

“What about his DNA at the scene? If he beat her to death, his DNA should be all over her body. His knuckles should be broken and bloodied. Or bruised.”

“Evidence suggests that he wore gloves.”

“Hair, then. Fibers.”

“It’ll take weeks for that to come back.”

The interrogation room was too cold. She found herself wondering if they knew that she hated the cold, that it made her feel vulnerable somehow and small, that it opened a strange place of sadness within her that she couldn’t explain. She folded her arms across her chest, tucked her hands under her arms.

“Just two days ago, we had a civilian complaint from a Jorge Alonzo. Alonzo claims that Stenopolis menaced and brutalized him, damaged his property.”

Jesamyn looked at the old cop, pushed a disdainful breath out of her mouth. “Give me a break.”

“Is it true?”

She remembered how mad Mount had gotten, how she’d turned her back so she wouldn’t see him put his hands on the guy.

“The kid was a punk, he had an attitude, he made some shitty comment about me and Detective Stenopolis raised his voice.”

Detective Ray Bloom looked at her with wise, moist eyes. She could see that he’d been handsome about a hundred years ago. She could see that he was smart and kind and a good cop. But she hated him anyway.

“He didn’t put his hands on Alonzo?”

“No,” she said. The lie stuck in her throat and she reached for the coffee they’d placed in front of her. It was bitter and cold.

“He didn’t put his hands on Alonzo,” repeated Detective Bloom. He knew she was lying, that it pained her, and he wanted to force her to say it again.

But Jesamyn didn’t say anything, just turned her eyes on Bloom.

“I heard you didn’t even let him put on his clothes,” she said quietly. “How do you people live with yourselves?”

His partner pushed himself away from the wall behind her where he’d been standing for a while and moved into her field of vision. He was a big guy, with a bodybuilder’s physique. Square jaw in square head on square shoulders, very little neck, heavy brow. He didn’t look very smart. Did he think he was intimidating her? Even the biggest of them fell and cried like little girls with a solid kick to the kneecap; hit hard and directly in just the right place it shattered like a china saucer beneath the wheels of a car.

“Let’s try to stay focused, Detective Breslow,” said Bloom. “Did you know he was seeing a prostitute?”

“No,” she said. “If it’s true, I didn’t know that. You still haven’t convinced me it’s true.”

“I don’t have to convince you of anything, Detective,” he said quietly.

She nodded. She’d been in with them for nearly two hours and she was getting tired. Dylan had been right. When she showed up at 1 PP, they wouldn’t let her see Matt. He was being processed and it would be twelve hours at least before she could even talk to him. She’d spent a few minutes with Mount’s family, his mother, father, and younger brother Theo. His mom had been crying and started again when Jesamyn approached them.

She’d embraced each of them and told them that it was all going to be fine, though she wasn’t sure of that at all. It was just a misunderstanding. A mistake, she assured them. Theo looked the least freaked out of the three of them, so she took him aside.

“What you need to do,” she told him, “is get in touch with Mateo’s PBA rep. Call the desk sergeant at the Ninth Precinct, he’ll know who it is and how to get in touch. They’ll know what to do and they’ll help you find a lawyer.”

He put a hand on her arm. “Just tell me the truth. It’s bad, isn’t it?”

She hesitated a second. Then, “Yes, Theo. It’s very bad. Get him a very good lawyer. The best you can afford.”

Theo nodded, looking stunned. She could relate. She felt pretty stunned herself. That’s when Detective Bloom approached her.

“You saved me a trip, Detective,” he’d said, coming up behind her. “I have some questions about your partner.”

They’d led her to an interrogation room, showed her the videotape. Once. Twice. Three times. As often as she asked them to rewind it and play it again.

“If he was seeing her regularly, that video could have been taken anytime,” she said suddenly.

“It’s date stamped.”

“That can be tampered with.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that this is all a little too easy. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t understand what that means,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “We have a lot of good evidence against your partner, if that’s what you mean by ‘too easy.’ What are you suggesting?”

She sighed. “We were threatened,” she said. “The night before last we infiltrated this church group called The New Day. And their lawyer threatened Detective Stenopolis.”

He frowned and his bushy eyebrows came together, looked like a long furry caterpillar on his head.

“So you’re suggesting that this church is setting up your partner,” said Bloom carefully, as a wide smile spread across his partner’s face. She didn’t say anything.

“How about this instead?” said Bloom, leaning into her. “Your partner became obsessed with the Lily Samuels case, started to develop inappropriate feelings for the missing girl. He ran into one dead end after another, enough so that your CO insisted that you both start working on another case. Your partner continued to follow up leads on his own time, looking for a girl who maybe didn’t want to be found, eventually relying on the statement of an unreliable witness to obtain a search warrant in the middle of the night. When that turned into a huge clusterfuck that did nothing to further your case, he was angry and frustrated. Witnesses at the scene said that Matt lost his temper with an attorney, started making threats. Is that true, Detective?”

Again, she just stayed quiet and held his eyes.

“Maybe finding the prostitute whom he fantasized was his girlfriend with another man was just the last straw. He lost it.”

She shook her head slowly, held herself tighter. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,” she said.

“Really,” said Bloom, tapping his pen twice, quickly, on the table. “Have you ever known Detective Stenopolis to be involved in a healthy relationship with a woman?”

She hesitated, then shook her head.

“While he doesn’t live in the same house with his parents, doesn’t he live just one door down and doesn’t his mother continue to cook and clean for him as if he were still a child?”

She didn’t answer because it didn’t matter. Bloom already knew the answer.

“Didn’t Detective Stenopolis lose his temper with Jorge Alonzo when he made a sexual comment toward you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it was sexual exactly-”

“How would you characterize it then?”

She found herself stammering. “I-I-” she said stupidly.

Bloom glanced down at his notes and read. “ ‘Your shit is tight, girl.’ That comment doesn’t have a sexual connotation to you?”

Jesamyn shrugged and shook her head slowly. They were making him sound like some sexually frustrated psychopath, and pretty convincingly at that. If she didn’t know Mount, really know him, they might be able to convince her. And that scared her. She was scared for the man who was her partner and her friend. She looked at the video on the screen in front of her, frozen as Matt climbed calmly into his Dodge.

“Didn’t your eyewitness say that he raced from the building?”

Bloom looked at her. She nodded toward the screen and his eyes followed.

“He’s not racing,” she said. “He’s calm. That’s a discrepancy between the witness statement and the videotape. We’re talking about a life here, not just a career. You owe it to him and to yourself as a cop to check out that discrepancy. And to check out what I’m telling you about The New Day.” She leaned across the table and forced him to hold her eyes. “Because as sure as I’m sitting here, I will tell you that Mateo Stenopolis is no killer. The fact that he hasn’t had a girlfriend in a while and that his mom still does his laundry doesn’t prove a thing.”

Bloom held her eyes for a second longer, then rose from his chair. He was a rumpled, tired-looking little man with messy gray hair and a funny moustache. His suit needed a trip to the dry cleaners. He wore a simple gold band on his left hand. He wasn’t very tall, maybe five-six. He had a modest potbelly that strained the bottom button on his white oxford. But she was afraid of him, afraid of what he could do to Mount.

“Please, Detective Bloom,” she said. “Just take a look at The New Day.”

But he just gathered up his file and walked from the room.

“Don’t go anywhere, Detective,” said Bloom’s partner. “We have a little more talking to do.” They closed the door behind them.

A second later the door opened slowly and Dylan poked his head in.

“You okay?” he asked.

She simultaneously was happy to see him and wanted to put her fist through his teeth. She shrugged, looked away from him. She didn’t trust her voice at the moment. He entered the room and closed the door behind him, straddled the chair Bloom had just left. He held a gray fleece pullover in his hand, which he slid across the table to her. She took it gratefully and pulled it on. He always knew her so well; it was part of the reason he was able to manipulate her so easily.

“So, what’s the deal?” he asked.

“They’re trying to make him sound like some sexual freak.”

“Is that the surveillance tape?” he asked, nodding toward the video monitor.

She nodded, reached over, and rewound it to where Mount exited the vehicle. She fast-forwarded it and they watched as a small, balding man with an earring came rushing out the front door wrapped in a blanket, looking stricken. He ran to a nearby pay phone. A few fast-forwarded seconds later, Mount walked calmly from the building and climbed into his car.

“He’s calm. He doesn’t have a drop of blood on him. He’s not wearing gloves,” she said, looking at Dylan.

He nodded. “But look how he has the jacket zipped all the way up to his neck. On the way in it wasn’t even closed, you could see his shirt. The gloves could be in his pocket.”

She turned her eyes to his. “Whose side are you on?”

“Yours, Jez. I just think it’s better if you have an open mind.”

“What? Like be open to the possibility that my partner is a psycho who could beat a woman to death with his own fists and then walk out of her place like nothing happened?”

He shrugged. Looked at the wall above her.

“Come on,” she said with disdain. “Open your mind. Forget your history with him for one second and think about it.”

He let out a long, slow sigh. “There is one thing weird about this tape.”

“What?”

“If the guy came out just a minute or so after Stenopolis entered and called the cops, why did it take them twenty minutes to get there? I mean he had time to finish the job, wash his face, zip up his coat, and walk calmly to the car. They get a call that a woman is being beaten to death and it takes them that long? I doubt it. Someone will have to check the 911 tapes to get the timing.”

She nodded. “That’s true,” she said, feeling a rush of excitement. She watched her ex-husband for a second and wondered if she could trust him with her thoughts. He stared back at her, like they were in some kind of standoff.

“What?” he said finally, showing her his palms.

“Dylan, I think Mount is being set up.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Come on. Seriously, Jez?”

She told him about The New Day and the threats Templar had made. She told him about Jessica Rawlins. He didn’t say anything for a second after she was finished talking.

“Just tell me you think it’s possible,” she said. He held her eyes for a second and then looked away.

“I guess it’s possible,” he said grudgingly. “Unlikely, Jez. But possible.”

She sat back, relieved. That was all she needed: independent confirmation that her thoughts weren’t totally insane.

Nineteen

Lydia sat, fidgety and anxious, in the passenger seat of the Rover. They should have flown. But between Jeff’s ever increasing phobia of flying and Dax’s need to travel with a small armory, Lydia was outvoted. If they took turns and didn’t stop except for gas and snacks, they could make it in seventeen hours. A big waste of time they didn’t have. The sky was dusty pink and gray with the setting sun and a light rain fell. Lydia watched as the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler approached in the oncoming lane and then whipped past them in a wet, noisy blur. She shuddered at its speed and size, imagining vividly that it jackknifed and the Rover went crashing into its body, squealing tires, then metal on metal, killing all three of them instantly.

“Whatever the deal was,” said Dax, “seems to me like Tim Samuels got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

Lydia shook her head. “I didn’t figure him for a suicide. He seemed too narcissistic.”

In her experience people like Tim Samuels thought too much of themselves to ever put an end to their own lives. It didn’t rest well with her that she was so wrong about him.

“Is it possible someone else shot him in the head?” asked Jeffrey from behind her, reading her mind.

Dax shook his head. “No one left or entered his place while we were there. And you say no one left or entered while you and Jeff watched. Unless someone came and went and we missed it, which I doubt, there was no one else there to do the job.”

“Or unless there was someone in the house already,” suggested Lydia.

“We saw the flash in the upstairs window and were in the house in less than five minutes. If there had been someone else in the house, we’d have seen him leave.”

“They could have come from the water,” suggested Lydia, thinking of the beach behind the house.

“We’d have heard the boat or seen the lights. Besides, the water was really rough. Too rough for a small craft.”

“How did you get into the house?” asked Jeffrey.

“Through the front door. We were going to break it down but it wasn’t locked.”

“That seems weird. Who leaves their door unlocked?”

“Lots of people,” said Dax. “Look, if you’re planning on offing yourself why would you bother locking the door? What exactly at that point would you worry about protecting?”

“It’s a habit,” said Jeffrey. “You do it without thinking.”

“They live out in the middle of nowhere,” suggested Lydia. “Maybe it was his habit not to lock the door.”

“Don’t you remember seeing an alarm system in that house?” asked Jeffrey. “If I recall it was pretty high end. Not the kind of thing you would invest in if you were going to leave your doors unlocked.” He always got very worked up about people who were careless about their personal security. Maybe it was their work, or the fact that they’d had to be so vigilant about their own personal security for so long.

“Maybe he was expecting someone,” she said.

No one said anything for a minute, each lost in their thoughts about Tim Samuels.

“He was smart,” said Dax finally. “He put the gun to his temple and fired. Most people think they should put it in their mouth. But you can really fuck yourself up like that. Make yourself a total vegetable. His face was okay, good enough for an open casket, but he was seriously dead.”

“Where was he?” Lydia asked.

“It looked like a girl’s bedroom. Must have been Lily’s childhood room, lots of dolls and gymnastics trophies, pretty pale pink carpet and window seat looking out over the ocean.”

Dax told Lydia and Jeffrey how he’d found Samuels slumped in the bed. The gun had fallen to the floor. It seemed that he’d positioned himself so that the blood and brain matter would splatter on a blank wall beside the bed. But maybe that hadn’t been his intent. Maybe he’d just wanted to be in Lily’s room when he ended his life, not caring what kind of damage his exit would do to it.

Lydia shook her head. There was something about that detail she didn’t like. Something about it seemed wrong. Thinking about his wife, she wondered what it would be like to know your husband had killed himself in your missing daughter’s bedroom.

“You sure it was him?” asked Lydia.

“Who else would it be?”

“You’ve never seen Tim Samuels before. How do you know it was him?”

He took his eyes off the road and gave her a look.

“What am I… an amateur? I checked. There were some pictures on the shelf in Lily’s room. Him teaching her how to ride a bike, him at her graduation. It was him. Trust me.”

They were all quiet for a second, as if out of respect. Each of them was thinking about Tim Samuels and his final moments.

“So what kind of deal would involve him killing himself?” asked Lydia.

“A really shitty one,” said Dax.

“I mean, how could he be sure the other party was living up to his side of the bargain?” said Lydia.

“And if you were going to kill yourself, why would you bother to make a deal at all, in the same way that you wouldn’t bother to lock the door,” said Jeffrey.

“Unless the deal was his life for Lily’s,” suggested Lydia. “He could die knowing that she’d be safe.”

“But he couldn’t know that,” said Jeffrey. “He would only have the word of a psychopath, assuming that he made the deal with Rhames.”

Lydia sighed. “Maybe it was literally the last thing he could do. All of his other resources had been exhausted. Nothing else he could do would save her. He told us Rhames wanted him to surrender. Isn’t suicide the ultimate surrender?”

Dax laughed without mirth. “No,” he said gravely. “Suicide is the ultimate fuck-you. It’s the ultimate act of control, of total selfishness. It tells everyone that you make the decisions about your life, no one else.” He said it with conviction, as if he’d given it a lot of thought. A lot of thought. He went on, “You’re a soldier and you get captured by the enemy? If you surrender, you’ve failed. If you kill yourself, you’ve robbed them of their control over you.”

“What are you saying then?”

“I’m saying what if Tim Samuels broke the deal he made with Rhames or whoever? What if his suicide wasn’t the deal at all but his way of taking back control of his life, even if only to end it.”

It made a sick kind of sense to Lydia. She rubbed the fatigue from her eyes.

“So if he broke the deal with Rhames, then what happens to Lily?” she asked.

Dax stared at the road, his jaw tense. He didn’t answer. Jeffrey caught her eyes in the rearview mirror and she turned to look at him. He reached for her shoulder.

A heavy rain started then and Lydia settled into her seat. They still had ten hours of driving ahead of them before they got to Florida, her least favorite place in the world. Or one of them anyway.

Twenty

The bodies of Rosario Mendez and her unborn son were spotted floating in the East River by a tour helicopter pilot. The Coast Guard and NYPD responded immediately and within an hour had retrieved the bodies from the frigid gray waters. It was grim work, unclear whether Rosario had given birth to her son prior to her death, or whether the gases of her decomposing body had expelled the fetus. The umbilical cord was intact.

The wind seemed to have a personal problem with Jesamyn as she stood beside Evelyn on the pier near the medical examiner’s van. With the sun low in the sky and a damp rain to make things worse, the cold pulled at the bottom of her coat, snuck in through her cuffs, under her collar. She wrapped her arms around herself and watched as the Coast Guard officers lifted the bodies with as much care as the rocking waves would allow. Jesamyn turned away, walked back toward the FDR, and watched as the cars raced past. Some guy from the ME’s office she’d never met before leaned against the back of the van smoking a cigarette like he was waiting for a bus. She nodded at him.

On the way down, she’d found herself hoping that it wasn’t Rosario Mendez that they’d found. But then she thought, if it’s not her… then who. Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing to hope for in this line of work. She watched Evelyn, who kept her eyes on the boat, trying to see the face of the corpse no doubt. She looked strained and exhausted; she paced the end of the pier with her hands in the pockets of her thick parka. Evelyn’s partner, Wong, was on medical leave after knee surgery. And with Mount in trouble, they were assigned to each other.

“Can you keep your mind on the job?” asked Kepler when she’d returned to the station.

She nodded, not really sure if she could. But she didn’t have the luxury of flaking; she had Benjamin. As much as she’d like to run off on a crusade to prove Mount’s innocence, she needed to do her job and do it well for her son. Luckily, she had a repentant ex-husband with a lot of time on his hands.

“Good. Because there’s nothing you can do for him right now,” said Kepler, sitting down at his desk. He actually sounded human. She found herself examining him as he sifted through papers on his desk.

“You know he didn’t do this, right?”

He looked up at her and gave her a quick shrug. “That’s not for me to decide. Innocent until proven guilty, as far as I’m concerned,” he said with no feeling at all.

“Right,” she said.

He looked at her, seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then the moment passed. Finally, he said, “Wong’s out on leave. Work with Rosa until things are… resolved.”

He didn’t look up at her again, started scribbling something on the page in front of him. She wondered, not for the first time, what made this guy tick. He obviously didn’t give a shit about the job or the people who worked with him. Why be a cop if you just didn’t care at all? Nobody was in it for the money. She nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her, and left his office. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang about a floater in the East River.

Jesamyn and Evelyn watched as the boat approached the pier, engines sputtering, smoke filling the air with the aroma of gasoline. One of the guys on board threw a line which Evelyn caught and tied off on a cleat. She jumped on board as another guy tied off the stern line. Jesamyn stayed on the dock and watched as Evelyn uncovered the body and stood staring for a second. She laid the sheet back down after a second, looked at Jesamyn, and nodded. She felt a dryness in her throat.

Jesamyn climbed on board and stood beside Evelyn, who lifted the sheet again. The wind whipped around them. Rosario’s face was bloated and green, badly decomposed but not unrecognizable from the photos Jesamyn had seen. There was a tiny lump beside her on the gurney where they’d laid her, which Jesamyn was careful to keep covered. That was something she didn’t want to see.

She lifted a hand to her nose against the wet, heavy stench that came off of the body. Something had been at her, probably more than one thing. Jesamyn pulled back the sheet farther. She wanted to see what Rosario had been wearing. A long gray knit cotton dress, like a nightgown. Not something you’d wear to the club. Something you’d wear if you were pregnant and tired and home for the evening.

“The guy that pulled her out says it looks like there was a blunt-force trauma to the back of her head. But it’s hard to tell at this point,” said Rosa.

“She didn’t get dressed to go to the clubs,” said Jesamyn.

“What?” asked Evelyn.

“Baby Boy said that Alonzo was hounding her that night to go out. When Baby Boy came home, he said that what she’d been wearing when he left was folded on the bed. That he figured she’d gotten dressed and gone out to avoid a fight.”

Evelyn nodded. “But she didn’t get dressed.”

“It doesn’t appear so,” said Jesamyn lowering the sheet. Evelyn was quiet a moment, looked at the gray sky turning black over Jesamyn’s head.

“So what are you thinking?” she asked. Her voice was smoky and deep, her eyes heavy and thoughtful.

“I’m not sure,” Jesamyn said. The medical examiner came up behind her quickly and startled her.

“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound sorry at all as he nudged her out of the way. She stepped aside and let him start taking pictures. As she stepped off the boat onto the dock, she saw an unmarked Caprice pull up, and two guys she recognized from Midtown North homicide stepped out. She couldn’t remember their names, but she remembered Mount saying he didn’t like the tall one with the bad skin and the strawberry blond hair. She hadn’t heard anything too bad about his Latino partner, other than that he was a bit of a dog.

“Hey, Breslow,” said the redhead as they approached. “I heard you got a floater.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking at him. She tried to remember his name but it wouldn’t come to her.

He looked at her a second. “I heard some fucked-up shit about your partner today,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. There was a kind of malicious glee there that made her want to slap his pale white face.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said, squaring off her shoulders at him.

“I don’t,” he said, raising his palms and giving her a condescending smile. “Seriously, though. What’s the deal?”

Her cell phone sounded then and she’d never been so happy to hear its annoying little ring.

“You can talk to Evelyn over there. She’s the principal on the Mendez case,” she said, giving him a look and answering the phone.

“Breslow.”

“You’re my one phone call,” said Mount.

“Jesus,” she said, feeling her heart skip she was so happy to hear his voice. She walked away so that the others wouldn’t hear her conversation.

“Get me the fuck out of here, Jez.”

She sighed, looked at the cold gray waters of the East River. Two seagulls fought in the air over something one of them was holding in his mouth. They were screaming bloody murder.

“How would you like me to do that?” she said quietly. “You’re envisioning a jailbreak maybe?”

She heard him breathing on the other end. “Tell me you know I didn’t do this.” He sounded tired, afraid.

“I know, Matt,” she said without hesitation. “I know you couldn’t do it.”

“They’re doing this… The New Day.” She believed that, too. But something about the way he said it made him seem so desperate, a little unstable. She knew no one would believe him, unless they could prove it somehow.

She didn’t say anything.

“You need to figure it out, Jesamyn,” he said when she didn’t answer. “How they got that videotape, planted the evidence in my car, how they got that witness to tell the story he told.”

“What about the fingerprints? How did they get your fingerprints in there?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “My fingerprints would have been in there already.”

She sighed. “Oh, Matt. Christ.”

“I was there that night, the night she was killed. They must have been waiting for me to come and go.”

She exhaled through pursed lips in a soft whistle. That was very bad news. Yeah, Officer, I was there that night with the prostitute but she was fine when I left her. I swear.

“I-cared about her. She was a good person,” he said, his voice catching. “She didn’t deserve this.”

“Okay,” she said, pushing any uncertainty from her voice. “We’re going to figure out how they’re doing this to you. We’re going to prove that you’re being set up.”

“Start with that witness.”

“We’re already on it.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Dylan’s got some time on his hands.”

“Dylan.” There was no love lost between the two men. “Why would he want to help me?”

“I think he wants to help me.”

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Just do me a favor. Watch your back, Jesamyn. If they can get to me, they can get to you.”

Her mind immediately went to Benjamin and she felt a pulse of fear. He started to say something else, but there was a heavy click on the line and an electronic voice told them that their time was up. The line went dead in her hand. The wind was whipping around her, pulling at her coat and flipping her blonde hair around.

She turned to see the two homicide detectives and Evelyn huddled around the covered bodies of Rosario Mendez and her child, whose life probably ended before it began at the bottom of the East River. She found herself thinking about Baby Boy Mendez and how he’d wavered between the past and present tense when referring to his sister. She thought about something Mount had said about Rosario practically being Baby Boy’s mother. About how his mother hadn’t cared enough about him to give him a proper name. Then she thought about Mount, accused of murdering a woman, beating her to death with his fists… a prostitute he might have loved or thought he loved. It was up to Jesamyn to prove he didn’t kill her. And suddenly, it all just felt like too much. She walked toward the road, turning away from anyone who might see that tears she couldn’t stop had welled in her eyes, threatened to spill down her face.

Twenty-One

Florida didn’t seem like a real place with its pink birds and orange groves, mobile homes and hurricanes, the endless Jimmy Buffet soundtrack that played from the speakers of every restaurant and beachside souvenir shop. It seemed like someone’s idea of a place. And not a very good idea at that. Furthermore, it was uncomfortable to wear black in Florida. And why would anyone want to go somewhere where it was difficult to wear black?

“And don’t even get me started on Disney,” Lydia said, peeling off her leather jacket and looking at the paper white skin on her arms.

Jeff and Dax both rolled their eyes. They’d heard the Florida rant before. They both knew after a couple of days down here, she’d shed all her clothes and turn into a total beach babe. You had to force her to put a tee-shirt on over her sunburn like a kid.

“If you ask me, this place is black at its core,” she went on, not noticing as Jeffrey and Dax exchanged a look in the rearview mirror. “Anything this shiny and pretty and plastic has to have a rotten center. Pure evil.”

In front of them, the gleaming white Gulf beach and the crystalline blue water beyond looked like an oasis between the heat waves that rose off the black concrete of the road. Of course, their last visit to Florida had been pretty frightening.

“You know, when we travel, we tend to see only the very worst a place has to offer… men with guns, back alleys,” said Jeffrey. “Maybe you should give it a chance.”

An ice cream truck jingled around the roundabout they were waiting to enter.

“They should outlaw those things,” said Lydia.

“They should,” said Dax. “That stupid goddamn music makes me want to pull out my rocket launcher.”

“Man, this is a tough crowd,” said Jeff. “You can’t take New York anywhere. I kind of like it here. It’s peaceful.”

They pulled past a strip of outdoor bars and restaurants, tacky souvenir shops and real estate offices. To the right, white-capped water lapped lazily against a sugar-white beach. A median lined with tall, full palm trees that looked like giant pineapples divided the north- and south-heading lanes of the road. They stopped at a crosswalk and let a dumpy tourist family wearing tacky beach cover-ups and painful-looking sunburns cross in front of them. Dax ogled two bikini-clad rollerbladers with matching heads of bottle-blonde hair, huge fake tits, and impossibly slim bodies.

“Maybe it’s not so bad down here after all, eh?” he observed absently.

They passed a row of gleaming high-rise hotels and crested a causeway that looked out over a marina lined with hundreds of boats in a canal that led to the Gulf. High cumulous clouds towered full and dramatic in a cerulean sky. Lydia rolled down the window to breathe in the salt and they all felt the swath of hot, humid air as it saturated the cool interior of the car.

The causeway ended in a lush explosion of green. The temperature dropped as they passed beneath a glade of trees that seemed to shelter the island in a dark canopy. From the road, they could no longer see the ocean because of the high walls that edged the magnificent homes lining the beaches. A thick cover of palms, oleander, and hibiscus bushes, fanning birds-of-paradise, and loblolly pine allowed only glimpses of tile roofs.

“I think this is it. Up here on the right,” said Dax, scrolling down on his portable global positioning device.

They slowed as they passed a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates, the metal twisted and shaped to resemble thorned branches. Lydia saw the New Day logo on an unmarked plaque above an intercom speaker box. She felt the familiar buzz, an agitation to get behind those gates made her fidget in her seat. When she thought of Lily now, all she could see was that image, those sharp shoulder blades, the shaved head.

“Maybe we should call the police,” said Lydia.

“Tell them what?” asked Jeffrey.

“That we think a missing girl is locked inside those gates,” she said.

“And what do you think they’ll do? Take a report and investigate, announcing to Trevor Rhames and company that we’re here in Florida.”

“And who knows?” added Dax. “They’re as powerful in this town as the FBI seems to think, who’s to say the chief of police is not a New Day devotee.”

“Jeez, it was just a thought. Take it easy.”

“We’ll wait till dark,” said Jeffrey, his eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel. “Then we’ll try to find our way in.”

“Since that’s been working so well for us,” she said, looking at him.

She heard Dax in the back tapping on the keys of his BlackBerry.

“What are you doing?” she asked, turning to watch as he typed furiously with his thumbs.

He looked up at her. “None of your beeswax,” he said, sticking the device in his pocket. Lydia had a wave of technology lust and felt jealous.

“I need one of those,” she said sullenly as she turned to watch the property pass. She could see the cupola on the roof peeking out through the trees and her thoughts turned, for some reason, to Shawna Fox, a girl she’d been far too late to help. She remembered the green eyes that stared out at her from a photograph handed to her by Shawna’s desperate, sad boyfriend, Greg.

Lydia was a different person then, as sad and desperate as Greg, haunted by an unresolved grief for her mother that had become so much a part of her she barely even realized it. Old photos of people who were gone had angered Lydia then. They were cold, eerie reminders of how easily life was lost, of how vividly alive people remained in the memories of those who loved them, and how grief was the slick-walled, bottomless abyss between those places.

Her experiences since that time had taught her something about the nature of love and what it meant to lose it. She’d come to understand that though we may lose the people we love, the gift of their love remains. In the throes of grief, that was little comfort. But in time, that knowledge could bring a kind of peace, a tentative healing. She thought then of her father, whom she’d lost before she ever knew him, who she now realized had been trying to reach out to her for most of her life. She thought of the woman, the stranger, who might be her sister. She felt a wash of anxiety mingling with a strange feeling of hope. Shawna. Tatiana. Lily. The lost, grief-mangled girl Lydia herself had been once.

“Shit,” she said aloud.

Jeffrey put a hand on her knee. “We’ll find her,” he said. “I promise.”

She put her hand over his, looked at the wedding band on her finger, and nodded.

“We need to go inland,” said Dax.

“Why?” asked Lydia, watching the house disappear from her view in the mirror.

“That compound you mentioned… organic produce or something, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I found a listing for a New Day Farms.”

She turned in the passenger seat to look at him; he turned his GPS out to her and showed her a little map on its screen.

“That must be the place Rusty Klautz claimed they were stockpiling weapons.”

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” said Jeffrey. “The waterfront property in an affluent area and a farm out in the-middle-of-nowhere Florida.”

Dax nodded. “It’s a good setup for trafficking.”

“Trafficking what?” asked Lydia.

Dax shrugged. “Pretty much anything,” he said. “Guns, drugs.”

“Diamonds,” said Jeffrey.

Dylan Breslow wouldn’t walk a block to piss on Matt Stenopolis if he was on fire. The guy was an asshole, and if it weren’t for old Mount, Dylan strongly suspected that he and Jesamyn would still be together. Maybe not. But it certainly hadn’t helped their situation when Matt had stumbled upon Dylan making out with a female rookie from the Fifth Precinct at a bar on the Lower East Side. In fact, that was the incident that had led to Jesamyn asking Dylan to leave their home. Not that things had been great prior to that incident.

“I’ve dealt with the pain and humiliation your infidelity has caused me in our relationship. But I can’t handle being humiliated in front of my co-workers,” she told him. “You’ve just walked over the line. Don’t even try to come back.”

She’d meant it. He hadn’t believed her at first but it wasn’t even a month before he was served divorce papers. She had him served on the job during roll call, trying to get even with him, he figured, for hurting and humiliating her the way he had. He didn’t blame her, really. He knew every shitty thing that had passed between them had been his fault; he even knew he didn’t deserve her. But he loved her, loved her like a freight train through his heart. He just couldn’t be faithful to her. He didn’t have enough perspective on himself to understand why.

“Why am I trying to help this guy?” he asked himself aloud as he pulled the unmarked Caprice in front of the Brooklyn row house that belonged to Clifford Stern, the eyewitness who claimed to have seen Matt leave the scene of Katrina Aliti’s murder. The day was bright and cold. An old lady in a black wool coat and a kerchief on her hair made her way slowly up the street with a walker and an air of determination. A young mother in tight jeans and a short, puffy white coat pushed a stroller, had a little rhythm to her step from whatever she was listening to on her headphones. In the schoolyard across the street, children about Ben’s age played, bundled in thick parkas and little wool hats… jump rope, swing sets, jungle gyms. He smiled, thinking that no matter how the world changed, the schoolyard seemed always to maintain a comforting sameness. No video games, no Internet, just the simple physical games he had played when he was a kid. That’s what kids needed, to run around, burn off some of that energy. They didn’t need to be sitting in front of a screen somewhere, stimulating their developing brains with the worst possible garbage, growing physically inactive. It was a recipe for bad physical and mental health. He noticed teachers standing like sentries, arms crossed, eyes alert, by every possible exit or entrance from the yard, four in total. Someone had to keep the world and all its many terrible changes outside the perimeter of the last safe place.

He peeled back the tab on his coffee from the deli up the street and settled in. A door slammed somewhere close by and he started, spilling a little hot coffee on his jeans.

“Nice,” he said, reaching for a napkin from the glove box. He dabbed the hot liquid and swore at the stain it left on his thigh. Since the shooting, he’d been really edgy. He dreamed about Jerome “Busta” White, the boy he’d killed. He’d wake up sweating, and more frightening, he’d had a couple of intense flashbacks during his waking hours. The shrink they made him see told him it was normal and that it would pass. And it did seem to be better, a little better every day. But he knew for a fact that he’d never forget that kid’s eyes. How they were liquid and full of life and in a moment they’d turned cold and still as glass.

He’d never given a whole lot of thought to the concept of soul. But Dylan saw something leave that kid. How could it be that life just vanished that way? It was hard to understand in theory; it was harder to witness. They’d all wind up that way, abandoned by life. Him, Jesamyn, Ben, too, someday. The thought filled him with dread. He tried to push the dark thoughts away. They made him question everything about himself, everything about the way he’d lived his life so far. He got the terrible sense that everything he thought was cool and important was shit. That the things he thought were irrelevant, the things he had abused and taken for granted, were the only things that mattered. He’d been on the road for forty years, walking in the wrong direction, taking all the wrong turns. It made him feel sick inside. Worse, Jerome knew it, too. In those last seconds, he saw it. But it was too late for Jerome.

He closed his eyes a second and rested his head back against the seat. When he opened his eyes, he saw Clifford Stern come around the corner of Sixty-Sixth Street and walk up Fourteenth Avenue. He was a small, weaselly-looking man, with a shiny balding head and small, darting eyes. He walked quickly, looking around him nervously, then jogged up the stairs that led to his front door. Dylan noticed that he didn’t turn his back completely to the street as he unlocked the door, but stood awkwardly sideways so that he could see behind him.

Jesamyn was right; there was something weird about all of this. He knew Stenopolis had a temper. He’d been on the receiving end of it. But having a temper and being the kind of soulless killer you had to be to beat a woman to death with your fists were not the same thing. He decided he’d give Clifford Stern a few minutes to relax; he seemed jumpy and afraid. Let him think he was home and safe for a few minutes. Then Dylan would have a few words with him, find out how well his story held up outside the safe environment of a police station.

This was not the best choice of activities for someone already being investigated by IAD for a shooting. But what could he do? The woman he loved, who currently hated his guts, needed him. He’d be crazy to pass up the opportunity to help her.

He dialed Jesamyn but got her voicemail and hung up. He thought about dialing Elena but thought better of it. After Jesamyn had wigged out that night, he’d broken it off with Elena, which pained him because of her outrageous ass, perfect tits, and silky blonde hair down to her waist. But she wasn’t Jesamyn. He wanted to try to be faithful to Jez, even if there was no relationship at the moment. Maybe because he’d screwed up so many times, he’d have to be faithful to her before she took him back. That was his strategy anyway. He’d tell her about it after he helped her and she was feeling grateful. He knew he could make her listen. He could always make her listen; it was just getting her to believe that would be a challenge.

He turned the rearview mirror so that he could makes faces at himself for a second… sexy face, tough face, innocent face… and instead saw something behind him that caught his attention. He lowered himself in his seat and looked out the sideview mirror as a white van cruised slowly up Fourteenth Avenue. He slunk down farther and closed his eyes to slits, feigning sleep, as the van passed by his parked car. The windows were darkly tinted, too dark to see the driver. This was illegal in New York City now, but older-model cars that were already tinted before the law was passed couldn’t be ticketed. The van was well kept but definitely an earlier-model vehicle.

As the van passed by him slowly, he saw the New Day logo on its side.

“Huh,” he said to himself. “How about that?”

Part of him had figured Jez was just being paranoid. She did have paranoid tendencies, especially where Ben was concerned. But there it was. The van made a U-turn and drove past Stern’s house, pulled into a parking space, and came to a stop. Maybe Dylan was catching Jez’s paranoia but he felt the hairs rise on his arms. There was something menacing about that van. He slunk down a little farther and waited.

You shouldn’t have done this,” said Matt.

“My son is going to rot in prison? No,” his mother said with an emphatic shake of her head. “No.”

“Where’d you get the money?” he asked from the backseat of their 1990 Dodge Minivan.

“Don’t worry about it,” his father said sternly.

“Dad.”

“They’ll get it back,” said Theo, putting a hand on his arm, which Matt promptly shook off and gave him a black look. How could he let them do this?

“After the trial,” Theo said, like he needed to explain the law to Matt. Matt turned away from his brother’s face; it was so earnest and young that he couldn’t bear to see it. He would have rather stayed in jail than have his family risk their future to make the $500,000 bond. Even the ten percent they needed… where had they gotten that kind of money?

“They’d have killed you in there, bro,” Theo whispered. “You’re a cop.”

Matt didn’t look back at him or answer. He just stared at the river, at the other cars on the highway. The world seemed so changed. Grayer, colder. He envied the girl he saw singing along with whatever was playing on the radio of her sky blue convertible bug. He envied the kid talking into the wireless cell-phone headset, smiling. Their lives were blissfully intact. Maybe not perfect, but not shattered. They probably didn’t even know how lucky they were.

“Your lawyer says that there are a lot of holes in their theory. He says he bets the charges will be dropped before this goes to trial.” His brother was nervous, worried, filling silence.

“The truth will set you free, Mateo,” said his father, raising a finger in the air. “The system works. They won’t send an innocent man to jail.”

He looked at the back of his father’s balding head, his tearing eyes in the rearview mirror. Matt found himself, as always, simultaneously bolstered and enervated by the old man’s optimism. Matt wanted to believe his father was right, but in his heart feared that his father was just hopelessly naïve about the way the world could grind you up if you got yourself caught in the wrong groove. Theo was more like their father, always facing the hard times with an outstretched chin, believing that the light was on their side. Matt was more like his mother. In the courtroom and in the sideview mirror now, he could see that her face was a mask of fear and sadness. In her brow resided the knowledge that something black had come for her son and it would likely as not succeed in taking him from her. She rested the side of her head in her palm, as if she didn’t have the strength to sit upright.

“A prostitute,” she said softly and then jumped as if she hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“That’s not all she was, Ma,” Matt said softly.

She released a noise that effectively communicated her disdain. He closed his eyes. His father turned on the radio, some oldies station where Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas.” They rode home in silence.

He was glad for the solitude when everyone stopped hovering and falling over themselves to feed him and comfort him, offering words of solace and encouragement. His aunts and uncles, a couple of his cousins had been waiting at his place when he returned, obviously cooking all day as a way to comfort themselves. The Greeks believed that there was no bad thing that could not be made bearable with enough food. He loved them all for what they were trying to do, but he’d never been so glad for the quiet of his own home. His mother urged him to come back and sleep in his old room, which they kept like a shrine to him and Theo. But he had refused. She’d looked at him with the hurt and angry expression that she’d had all day and eventually stopped insisting.

He lay on his bed in the dark and breathed in the heavy scent of oil and garlic that still hung in the air; in fact, he was comforted by it for a time. A heaviness, a terrible inertia had come over him. He should be out there, trying to find out who killed Katrina, trying to prove his innocence, trying to find Lily Samuels, but he felt like his legs were filled with sand, like there was lead in his belly. He knew fatigue on a level that he’d never experienced. Maybe it was all the baklava, but more likely it was the fact that no matter how he looked at it now, his life was over, or so changed as to be unrecognizable. They had taken his gun and shield; his career was over. Even if the charges were dropped or if he was acquitted, he’d never be a cop again. The thought of it was almost too much. He felt a heavy despair settle into his chest and his shoulders.

He was about to call Jesamyn and tell her he was out on bail when the phone rang.

“Hello?” he answered, rubbing his eyes and sitting up on the bed.

“You sound tired, Detective Stenopolis.” It was a sweet female voice, young and mellifluous. “I’m not surprised with all that you’ve been through.”

“Who’s this?” he said.

He heard the sound of a car alarm somewhere off in the distance outside his window and realized he was also hearing it on the phone. He walked to the window and on the street across from his house, he saw a young woman dressed in blue jeans and a short leather jacket, holding a cell phone to her ear. She smiled at him and his heart thumped.

“Lily?”

She laughed and gave him a little wave. As he turned and bounded down the stairs with the cordless still in his hand, he heard the line go dead. He threw open the door and ran out onto his front stoop, wearing only a pair of navy blue sweatpants. The street was empty but he jogged down the steps and onto his drive, the frigid concrete burning his feet with its terrible cold.

“Lily!” he called hugging himself and running up the street. “Lily!” But she was gone. He turned the corner and saw no one. There was no way she could have disappeared so fast on foot. He walked a little farther up the block, then turned around. The excitement he’d felt turned to fear and embarrassment. Some neighbors had gathered at their windows and were looking at him with worried faces.

“Did anybody see her? Did anybody see a woman standing here?” he yelled, looking from window to window.

But no one answered him; they moved back from the windows and soon it was only him on the cold street, half naked. Theo was coming up the block hurriedly, carrying a coat for his brother.

“What’s going on, man? Who was it? Who did you see?”

“Did you see her?” he asked urgently as he accepted the coat and wrapped it around his big shoulders.

“No, I didn’t see anyone,” said Theo, looking at him strangely. “I just heard you yelling. Shit, man. The whole neighborhood heard you yelling.”

The younger, smaller man put his arm around his big brother and pushed him back toward the house. Theo glanced back over his shoulder and looked around him, glaring, as if daring anyone to still be staring at his brother.

Matt saw his parents coming out their door and suddenly realized how crazy he looked. He pulled the coat tighter and moved faster toward his house.

“Who did you see?” Theo asked again.

“Lily Samuels,” he whispered. “I saw her.”

Matt looked at his brother’s face and saw something there that frightened him. Pity.

Twenty-Two

Your boy’s in trouble,” said Dax.

Lydia was lying on one of the queen beds in the hotel room they’d taken to wait for nightfall. The place was a dump. Lydia had scanned the faux wood nightstands with their worn surfaces and nicked edges, initials carved on their sides, water-stained ceiling, and gritty stained bedspreads the most hideous shade of mauve. Then she closed her eyes. Outside, through glass doors that led to a small porch, the Gulf waters lapped the shore and the salt air almost covered the smell, some combination of cigarettes, stale booze, and puke. Jeffrey tapped away on his laptop on the rickety table by the window.

“What?” said Lydia, not opening her eyes. Dax turned up the volume on the set.

“Detective Mateo Stenopolis was released on bail today. Charged with the beating death of prostitute Katrina Aliti, Stenopolis left the courthouse after his family posted bond. The lawyers for the prosecution were outraged by the decision.”

Lydia sat up quickly, shimmied to the end of the bed. The newscast continued.

“Obviously, special consideration was given to this man because he was a cop,” a polished-looking young woman in a gray suit with dark hair pulled back severely from her face complained into the camera. “Anyone else charged with a crime of this viciousness would be held without bail until trial.

“The prosecution claims,” the newscaster went on, “that they have overwhelming physical evidence as well as eyewitness testimony against Stenopolis and that their case against him is nothing less than airtight.”

“No way,” said Lydia. “Absolutely no way.”

Dax turned down the volume on the set.

Jeff had come to sit beside her on the bed. “I was wondering why we hadn’t heard from him after that message you left,” he said.

“I thought he was just pissed at us because of The New Day break-in. Maybe trying to distance himself,” said Lydia, standing up and walking over toward the glass doors.

They were all quiet for a second. “There’s no way he is capable of something like that,” Lydia said finally with an emphatic shake of her head.

“So what are you thinking?”

“He said that lawyer for The New Day threatened him,” she said.

“So you think that he was set up for this?” asked Jeffrey. He sounded skeptical.

She looked at him. “It’s easier to believe that than it is to believe he killed someone with his fists. He’s a good man, a good cop. Do you know what kind of sociopath you have to be to do something like that? You have to be in a narcissistic rage, utterly without empathy.”

“Lots of seemingly normal men are walking around with a terrible misogyny in their hearts, secretly believing themselves to be superior to women, hating them for the power of their sexuality,” said Dax. He leaned back in the chair that groaned beneath his weight and gave her a smile, proud of himself.

Lydia looked at him; he had a point. He was a complete clod most of the time but every once in a while he came out with something pretty insightful. It always amazed her.

“Trust me, it’s not as secret as they think,” she said. “Any intelligent woman can spot a misogynist a mile away. It’s in the way he looks at you, the tone in his voice. I got the sense of Stenopolis as very respectful, even when he was gruff.”

Dax lifted his shoulders. “But you don’t know.”

“Overwhelming physical evidence and eyewitness testimony,” said Jeffrey, repeating what they’d just heard on the screen.

“Can we find out what that means exactly?” asked Lydia.

“I’ll call Striker and see what information he can gather,” he said, reaching for the cell phone by the bed.

Lydia fished her own phone out of her bag and scrolled through the call log until she found Matt’s cell phone number. His voicemail picked up before the first ring completed; he had his phone off. She hung up without leaving a message. She wasn’t sure what to say. Chances are he wasn’t thinking about Lily Samuels at the moment. She thought about Matt Stenopolis, how he’d looked on the street that day when she suggested he might think about a move to the private sector. Like he couldn’t imagine himself as anything but a cop. She felt a strong twist of empathy and concern for him, even as she wondered if he was capable of murder-or if The New Day was doing this to get him off of Lily’s trail.

She walked over to Jeffrey’s laptop while he talked to Striker on the phone. She saw the satellite image of the New Day Farms that Craig had been able to obtain for them.

Lydia always called Craig “The Brain” behind his back. He stood a full head taller than Jeffrey but looked as thin as one of Jeffrey’s thighs. Clad forever in hugely baggy jeans, a white tee-shirt under a flannel shirt, and a pair of Doc Martens, his pockets were always full of electronic devices… cell phone, pager, Palm Pilot, all manner of thin black beeping, ringing toys. A pair of round wire spectacles, nearly hidden by a shock of bleached blond hair, framed his blue-green eyes. Craig called himself a cybernavigator, though his title at Jeffrey’s firm was Information Specialist. More or less plugged into the Internet twenty-four-seven, more or less legally, Craig could gather almost any piece of information needed at any time of the day or night.

The image just looked like a bunch of trees seen from above to Lydia but Jeffrey had been on the phone with Craig for nearly an hour talking about various elements of the image, Dax looking over his shoulder, chiming in. It annoyed her that they all seemed to be seeing something there that evaded her, like one of those stupid computergenerated images that revealed itself only after you stared at it for an hour. She opened another window and looked at the survey of the property. It showed three structures built on the fifteen-acre property. She looked back at the satellite image. Dax and Jeff claimed to be able to see at least six structures. She couldn’t even see one through all the tree cover.

“Look for the unnatural lines,” said Jeff, coming up beside her. “Nature doesn’t like straight lines.”

“Oh, there,” she said after a moment, touching a finger to the screen where a hard edge showed through the tree cover. He nodded.

An anxiousness washed over her. As she traced the line of the building, the LCD screen turned black beneath the pressure of her finger.

“She’s in there,” she said. It was part declaration, part question. But something inside her told her they were close to Lily.

“If she is, we’re going to bring her home.”

She looked up at him. He had this way of sounding so confident she couldn’t think of doubting him.

Jeff’s phone rang then. He answered and sat on the bed. Lydia turned back to the screen. Another window revealed blueprints of one of the buildings at the New Day Farms. As far as Lydia was concerned, she might as well have been looking at hieroglyphics. Anything like that… maps, blueprints, forms… just shut her down mentally.

“Notice anything weird about this building?” whispered Dax who’d come to stand beside her.

She shook her head.

“No windows,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing good.”

“Interesting,” said Jeffrey, dropping the phone into the pocket of his shirt.

“What?”

“That was Chiam Bechim, the jeweler I saw. Someone tried to move some of those stolen stones. Apparently whoever was behind it paid the team in gems. Someone got anxious for his money and tried to sell a couple of small canary diamonds. Bechim’s people were notified.”

“Who are ‘Bechim’s people’?” asked Lydia.

Jeffrey looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “He didn’t say.”

“Okay,” she said with a frown. “So who was it?”

“A guy named Manny Underwood. Started out in corrections. Lost his job and did some hard time for dealing drugs to inmates.”

Dax winced. “Corrections officers don’t usually do well in prison.”

Jeff nodded. “He lived through it because he made some powerful friends inside. Later on, these same people gave him work in ‘personal security.’ Apparently, Manny’s a big guy, total roid case. Good bodyguard material. Anyway, after he was released he went to work for a company called Body Armor. Ring a bell?”

“Body Armor,” Lydia repeated, the name sounding familiar to her.

“Owned until about a year and a half ago by Tim Samuels.”

Lydia let the information sink in. “Huh,” she said, not having anything more intelligent to offer at the moment. The loose connections between people and events were not coalescing for her. Tim Samuels to Michele LeForge to The New Day, The New Day to Mickey, Mickey to Lily, Tim Samuels’ former employee to a jewel robbery to a pink stone found in an abandoned building that LaForge once declared as her residence. It was a chain of evidence linked only to itself, circular and useless.

“Do we know who bought his company?” asked Dax.

“We don’t know. But I’m starting to have my suspicions.”

“The New Day,” said Dax.

“I’d put money on it. That’s probably how Samuels got tangled up with them in the first place. Maybe he didn’t even know it.”

“What would The New Day want with a personal security firm?” said Lydia.

Jeffrey shrugged. “Maybe they needed some trained muscle.”

They were all quiet as they considered the reasons why a ‘church’ would need trained muscle. She thought of the men who’d chased her from the premises. She thought of Lily in restraints. She thought of the jewel heist and Detective Stenopolis accused of a terrible crime she was sure he couldn’t have committed. Who are these people? she thought.

“Well, maybe Underwood has some answers,” suggested Dax.

“Doesn’t sound like he knows much of anything. At least nothing Bechim was willing to share.”

“We can talk to him when we get back to New York. Tomorrow. With Lily,” said Lydia. She was shooting for optimism but it sounded more like desperation even to her own ears.

“When are we going to leave?” asked Lydia. She’d managed her anxiety into a low-level buzz but the volume was coming up again.

“I just want to do a little more research on that building,” said Dax, moving over to the computer.

There was an aggressive knock on the door to their room. All of them froze for a second, then Lydia moved to the wall beside the door. She felt her heart start to stutter and looked at the bag across the room that contained her gun.

“Room service,” a gruff muffled voice said through the thin wood. Jeffrey and Dax exchanged a look.

“Ever see a dump like this offer room service?” whispered Dax.

“Especially when we didn’t call for anything,” said Jeff, kneeling behind the bed and taking his gun from his waist. Dax was about to follow suit, when the door busted in and three unpleasant-looking men in suits entered, guns drawn.

“Guns on the bed, please. Hands where we can see them,” said a balding man with ice blue eyes and a small but powerful-looking physique. He sounded tired, bored, like he’d said the words so many times that his jaw ached from it.

Jeff and Dax put their guns on the bed and their hands on their heads. Lydia felt the tension drain from her shoulders and her adrenaline stop pumping. Federal Agents; better than The New Day freaks.

“Ms. Strong, can you please stand over by your associates?”

Lydia complied and the man replaced his sidearm in its holster and withdrew identification from the lapel pocket of his jacket.

“I’m Special Agent John Grimm with the FBI and you are in my space.” He glanced behind him. “Stand down, boys.” The two younger agents, both thin and fresh faced with good haircuts, replaced their weapons.

“You can take your hands off your heads,” said Grimm, moving toward the bed. Jeffrey and Dax got to their feet. Grimm leaned down and picked up the Desert Eagle.

“Jesus. That’s nice. I’ve never seen one of those. Going moose hunting?”

Dax looked very stiff, his face drained of color. Grimm laid the gun back on the bed.

“I know who you are, Ms. Strong. And you, Mr. Mark, I believe we met when you were still with the Bureau. But I’m not sure I’ve been introduced to your colleague here.”

“Ignatius Bond,” said Dax, extending a hand.

Grimm looked at Dax and nodded. Dax withdrew his hand with a smile that was really more like a grimace. There was an energy between the two men that Lydia wasn’t sure she understood.

“So what brings you all to Florida?” said Grimm, walking over to the laptop and touching the mouse pad.

“We’re vacationing,” said Lydia.

Grimm turned the laptop around so that they could see the satellite photo of the New Day Farms.

“I don’t know what you’re planning here, my friends. But let’s sit down and have a little talk about what you think you know about The New Day.”

Twenty-Three

Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”

Baby Boy Mendez kept asking the same two questions as they drove him from the Alphabet City apartment he’d shared with his sister to the morgue at Belleview Hospital. It was like he’d been caught in some kind of hysterical loop since they showed up at his apartment and gave him the news. He’d been eating a Whopper and watching Sponge-Bob SquarePants on Nickelodeon when they’d entered the apartment, told him the body of a woman and her child had been found in the East River.

“We’ll need you to identify her, Baby Boy,” Evelyn told him quietly. “We’ll confirm her identity with dental records but that’ll take time. It’s going to be hard but you need to come and see if the woman we found is your sister.”

He’d looked at them, eyes moving back and forth between the two women as if he was looking for an expression that would tell him it was a joke or a mistake. Then he ran from them. They waited patiently as they listened to him throw up in the bathroom.

“What if you’re wrong?” Evelyn whispered to Jesamyn.

She put her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels, considering the question. Then, “He still needs to identify her.”

“He could do it from a photograph or on a video monitor.”

Jesamyn shook her head. She wanted Baby Boy Mendez to see his sister’s body and the body of his nephew. She wanted him to see what she suspected he had done to them. If she was wrong, well, she was unnecessarily traumatizing an innocent family member. And that would suck for him and for her; she’d feel very badly about it. She just didn’t think she was wrong.

Evelyn looked doubtful. She didn’t see it in Mendez. But Jesamyn saw a kind of childish rage, a jealousy over the baby who would soon be the focus of his sister’s life, leaving Baby Boy without a mother, in his mind anyway. The child who no one ever cared about enough to even name would be losing the only mother he’d ever known. He probably hadn’t meant to kill her. Or maybe he had. It didn’t much matter in the scheme of things.

In the car, she could still smell his vomit and the acrid odor of fear, sweat.

“Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”

She’d be doubting herself if he was wailing, accusing Jorge Alonzo of his sister’s murder. But he wasn’t doing any of those things. He was pale, the features on his face slack, his eyes shifting back and forth almost imperceptibly. To Jesamyn all of these things said guilt and fear, not grief, not terror over the fate of a loved one, not hope that the police were mistaken in their tentative identification of the body.

“That’s why we need you to make the positive ID, Baby Boy,” said Evelyn. “We could be wrong.”

Evelyn threw her a look and Jesamyn folded her arms. No one would ever ask a family member to ID a body as badly decomposed as Rosario Mendez’s and Jesamyn could see that Evelyn was sick over it. They could wind up getting sued, especially since this was technically no longer their case. It was a homicide case now.

“She never changed to go out to the clubs that night,” Jesamyn had said to Evelyn on the dock. “She stayed home.”

“Which contradicts what Baby Boy told us,” said Evelyn, watching the Medical Examiner’s van pull away.

“He pointedly told us that she had changed. That he saw what she’d been wearing when he left folded on her bed.”

Evelyn nodded.

“When Mount and I talked to him, he wavered back and forth between referring to her in the past and present tense,” Jesamyn went on when the other woman didn’t say anything.

“He did that with us, too. Wong thought it meant something.”

“I don’t think Alonzo cared enough about Rosario and their baby to bother killing them. I mean, what’s his motive? What does he have to gain?”

“He claimed the baby wasn’t his,” said Evelyn.

“So?” she said with a shrug. “That’s not a motive. She never asked him for anything, not even money, according to her friends.”

“So what are you suggesting?” Evelyn had asked, putting her hands in her pocket and shrugging against the cold.

“Let’s bring the brother in for the ID.”

Baby Boy started to sniffle as the three of them walked up the cold gray hallway. Until then, there had only been the sound of her and Evelyn’s heels, the squeaking of Baby Boy’s sneakers on the linoleum floors. The smell of death and chemicals was already strong and the morgue was still a few doors down. The fluorescent lights above buzzed.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, coming to a stop. Jesamyn took a hard look at him. There was only fear there in his liquid brown eyes. He’d wrapped his arms around himself, was shifting from foot to foot.

“There’s no other way,” said Jesamyn. “I’m sorry.”

“One of her friends, maybe,” he suggested. “One of them could do it.”

Jesamyn shook her head. “You’re her next of kin, Baby Boy. It’s your job to do this for her. You’re all she has, now. The only one. She took care of you all your life; now you have to do this for her.” It was a bull’s-eye; she saw it as his face fell to pieces. His liquid brown eyes ran over and the tears started to fall. He doubled over, gripping his stomach as if he were in terrible pain.

“Oh, God,” he wailed. “I’m so sorry. Rosie, I’m so sorry. Oh, God. I miss her so much.” He dropped to his knees and Jesamyn was beside him.

“You were so jealous of that baby, weren’t you?” she whispered, putting her arm around him. He wailed harder. “You were so angry with her for betraying you, loving someone else as much as she loved you. More. He wasn’t even born yet and she already loved him more, didn’t she?”

He pushed Jesamyn away and leaned against the wall. “Get away from me,” he shrieked.

“There’s nothing like the love between a mother and her son,” said Jesamyn, standing, her voice low and sure now. “It can’t even compare to the love between a sister and her brother; it’s not the same.”

He released the most heartbreaking cry. “He was all she ever talked about,” he screamed. “The baby, the baby, her baby boy. I just wanted her to shut the fuck up about him. I was her baby boy. That’s my name.”

Jesamyn felt a stab of pity for him. Pity and disgust.

“She was in labor, wasn’t she, when you came home?” asked Evelyn, as if the thought had just occurred to her. “She needed you to take her to the hospital.”

Jesamyn shot her a look, afraid the shaking judgment in Evelyn’s voice would shut him down. Baby Boy was sobbing now, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on his haunches.

“She was in labor and you killed her,” said Evelyn with a shake of her head. “How did you do it?”

He stopped crying then. He wiped his eyes and his nose with the sleeve of his Rangers jersey. He issued a couple of shuddering breaths. Jesamyn was sure he had realized that he was on the brink of confessing, that he’d come back to himself.

“I hit her in the back of the head with a bat,” he said, quietly. “She never even saw it coming. She never knew.”

Evelyn let go of a sigh and bowed her head. Baby Boy’s face went blank then and he glanced up at the ceiling for a second.

When he looked down, he said quietly, “I want my lawyer.”

The homicide guys tried to take the collar but Evelyn fought them for it. It was her case from the beginning and she wanted the arrest. She wasn’t going to let someone stroll in during the last round and take the credit for all her weeks of late nights and dead ends. It didn’t give Jesamyn any satisfaction to put the cuffs on Baby Boy and bring him in with Evelyn. Jorge Alonzo she would have liked to see in a cage. But Mendez was this damaged kid, acting out of his own abused spirit. He’d live with the hell of what he had done every day for the rest of his life.

Jesamyn left the precinct a few hours later after helping Evelyn get started with the paperwork, then leaving her to finish it up. It was Evelyn’s collar, after all. She’d get the glory, which Jesamyn didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t have to do all the typing and waiting around that followed an arrest. Stepping onto the concrete, she saw Dylan across the street on the swing set in the park beside the lot. She crossed the street and laced her fingers through the chain-link fence.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” he said, coming around the fence. “I have something to show you. You need to come with me.”

“What do you need to show me?” she asked, suspicious. She wondered if he was just dangling a line to get her to spend some time alone with him.

“I’ll tell you on the way,” he said, moving toward his GTO. She could see the fin and the white stripe that ran from the hood to the trunk just a few cars down. She didn’t follow him right away.

“Where are we going?” she asked again, but the wind took her words away. He didn’t appear to hear her question.

He turned around and extended a hand. “Come on. What are you waiting for?”

Though her feet felt like they were made out of lead all of a sudden, though something inside her resisted, she followed him. She always followed him.

The moon shone through his window and bathed his legs in its milky light. He was watching for her, the phone in his hand. He could hear the laugh track from whatever his brother was watching on the television downstairs; his family didn’t want to leave him alone now. All he wanted was to be alone and wait for Lily in peace. If it was Lily he had seen at all. If there had been anyone there on the street outside his house. He wondered absently if he was losing his mind. He didn’t think so; he still felt like himself, if a little numb, a little emptied out.

He’d tried to call Jesamyn but she hadn’t picked up the phone and he hadn’t left a message. He’d checked his messages and found three from Lydia Strong. The last one had been left just a few hours earlier.

“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “We’re in Florida. We’re going to find Lily and-” The cell phone connection had cut out before she’d finished her message. He wondered if she knew that he’d been accused of murder and arrested. He thought about calling her back but he didn’t know what to say. The phone had sat limp in his hand for the better part of an hour while he scrolled through all his options, rejected each, and eventually wound up doing nothing except sitting by the window, waiting.

“What are you doing, bro?” asked Theo, who had appeared in the doorway. He looked worried. No, that wasn’t right. He looked scared.

“Just sitting here.”

Theo nodded in the solemn way he had. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

“I will,” said Matt.

Theo nodded again and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and pulled his shoulders up, took a deep breath. “It’s going to be okay, you know?”

“I know.”

Matt was older and bigger than Theo, but Theo had always been the one to take care of him. When Matt was taunted at school for his height and awkwardness, it was Theo who always took up the fight. When Matt was tortured by his shyness around girls, it was Theo who advised him. Matt felt guilty that Theo had to sit on his couch while his wife was home alone.

“Go home, man,” said Matt. “You don’t need to be here. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

“I don’t want you to be alone, Mateo,” his brother said sadly. He’d been a sensitive, compassionate kid who’d grown into a kind and caring adult. Matt was proud of Theo.

“I’m okay. Really. I’m just going to go to bed. Before? I was probably just dreaming. The stress of everything, maybe just got to me for a minute. But it’s fine, you know. I’m fine.”

He tried to make himself look normal by sitting up straight and smiling. But from the look on Theo’s face he suspected that it wasn’t successful. Theo walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder, bent down and kissed him on the head.

“Just call me if you see anything else, you know, before you go running out into the street like that?”

“I promise,” said Matt, inwardly breathing a sigh of relief.

Theo gave him a quick pat on the back and moved backward toward the door.

“You sure-?” he started to say, but Matt lifted a hand to stop him.

“I’m sure, Theo. Thanks.”

When he heard the door close downstairs, he stood and quickly got dressed, pulling on a pair of jeans, a gray wool sweater and a pair of Timberlands. He took his wallet from the dresser and from a lock box in the back of his closet he removed his off-duty revolver, a five-shot Smith & Wesson. He moved quickly to his office and took out a file that contained all his banking records, his life insurance policy, of which his parents were the beneficiaries, and all of his investments. There was another file that contained his will. They were papers most cops had in order, someplace easy to find. He left them all on the kitchen table. There was enough, he thought, to cover his bond if he didn’t make it back. He pulled on his leather jacket and walked out the back door of his house. He told himself not to look back and he didn’t.

Too many bodies and a struggling old window air-conditioning unit made the hotel room too warm. Lydia shed the tailored black gabardine jacket she’d been wearing and laid it on the bed beside her. She pulled her hair back into a twist at the base of her neck as Special Agent John Grimm spoke. She liked him. He was sarcastic and tough, but not disrespectful of why they’d come to Florida.

“We first heard about Trevor Rhames in 1994,” said Grimm, crossing his legs and tapping a finger on the tabletop. His eyes were on the satellite image of the New Day compound. “He was arrested in the former Yugoslavia for selling arms to the Bosnians after the UN had imposed the embargo that pretty much left them at the mercy of the Serbian nationalists.”

“There are plenty of people who think the UN never should have imposed that embargo,” said Dax, a little defensively, thought Lydia. John Grimm gave him a long, hard look.

“Anyway,” said Grimm, looking away from him and turning his eyes to Jeffrey. “He was found to be working with a company called Kintex.”

“The arms company owned by the Bulgarian government,” said Jeffrey with a frown. “How did he wind up working with them?”

“It’s a bit of a mystery,” said Grimm. “Rhames, as you probably know, is an American. You might not know that he was a decorated Marine, honorably discharged from service after touring in Rwanda, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia. For a couple of years, he kept a very low profile, worked in security systems in the private sector with the training he’d received in the Marines. He dropped off the radar for a while, then he turned up overseas in Bulgaria.

“Bulgaria has been notorious for decades as an anything-goes arms bazaar, selling things like assault rifles, mortars, antitank mines, ammunition, all kinds of explosives to anyone who has the money to buy, no matter what their agenda,” said Grimm. “They’ve supplied-utterly without code or conscience-arms in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Libya, regions riven with conflict, rebel governments guilty of the most heinous civil-rights violations.

“The government keeps trying to get it under control because they want very badly to become part of NATO and the European Union,” he continued. “But the arms business is so entrenched in that culture that it’s almost impossible to be rid of it without bankrupting the economy. Then of course there’s all the corruption.”

“Okay,” said Lydia, thinking this was the first she’d heard of Bulgaria’s weapons activities. “So he wound up there doing what?”

“We’re not sure exactly. But he was apprehended during an Interpol sting where Kintex was selling guns to the Bosnians in direct violation of the UN embargo. He was extradited to the United States. He was charged and indicted for illegal weapons sales and did two years in a military prison.”

“That’s all you get for something like that?” asked Lydia. “Two years?”

Grimm leaned back and crossed his arms. “His spotless military record and lack of criminal history helped. And he made a deal. He gave up some of the security codes he’d established for Kintex, some names and some upcoming deals, which allowed Interpol to intercept some illegal shipments. Anyway, after he was released he disappeared completely for a few years. Then he turned up working for a company called Sandline, a Privatized Military Company incorporated in the Bahamas but with bases of operation all over world.”

“What’s a Privatized Military Company?” said Lydia with a frown. “Like mercenaries?”

“In a sense,” said Grimm. “More like companies that facilitate arms deals, consult with ‘legitimate’ or democratically elected governments being threatened by rebel factions, provide trained soldiers for ‘conflict resolution,’ usually elite former military men from around the world.”

“For a price,” said Lydia.

“For a huge price,” said Grimm with a nod.

Her eyes fell on Dax, who was examining with great fascination the floor between his feet. He raised his eyes to her, saw her looking at him, and quickly looked away. Lydia held back a smile.

“They work best for small conflicts,” said Jeffrey. “Where only a couple of thousand men are needed for a job. But if they operate without conscience or in violation of UN accords, then they can have a destabilizing effect. You know, like arming rebels against a democratically elected government. But at their best, PMCs are effective for hostage negotiations or rescue operations, disaster cleanup, monitoring elections, sort of small, dirty jobs.”

Lydia nodded absently, the wheels already turning as she tried to connect this new information to what they already had.

“How do you go from being a mercenary to being a preacher?” Lydia asked.

“It’s a good question. He joined The New Day in 1998 after injuries he sustained on an op for Sandline. He almost died from multiple gunshot wounds and broken bones. He took some bullets and got blasted out a third-floor window in Kosovo. There was no reason for him to survive but he did. And apparently, during a grueling convalescence at a rehab center in Florida, he found religion.”

“Or it found him,” said Jeffrey.

Grimm nodded. “He was ripe for recruitment. Injured, likely depressed, no family or personal connections. Rhames was orphaned at the age of ten when his parents died in a house fire that he escaped; he went to live on a working farm belonging to his uncle and aunt.

“By all accounts, he was happy enough there. With a genius-level IQ, he did well in school, but was a bit of a loner. Unfortunately, a year after Rhames arrived, his aunt and uncle died in a house fire that the boy escaped.”

Jeffrey and Lydia exchanged a look. They knew too well the childhood signs of psychosis. Arson was a big one.

“Suspicious? Yes,” said Grimm, reading their faces. “But there was never any evidence that Rhames had started those fires. He had no other history of violent or aberrant behavior. He was sent to a state-run orphanage, the money and the land left to him by his parents and his uncle kept in a trust for him until he turned eighteen and was emancipated from the system. It was a fair amount of money for a young man, enough to go to college and start a life. But he chose to join the Marines.

“He excelled in the Corps. I mean, he was the best of the best. He became a part of an elite unit that doesn’t officially have a name. And his activities, until his honorable discharge in 1981, are classified. There aren’t many people who know what he did during that time.”

“Okay, so he went into the Marines, was discharged in 1981. He was off the radar for a while, you have no idea what he was doing until he showed up selling arms in 1994. He was arrested and went to prison for two years. After which point he went to work for Sandline. He was injured and almost killed but somehow recovered and wound up running The New Day?” asked Jeffrey.

Grimm shook his head. “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘runs’ it exactly,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s a big multinational organization, with tentacles reaching into a number of different business arenas, real estate, the entertainment industry, banking. Rhames isn’t a businessman. He’s a tactician, a security specialist, a soldier. We don’t know enough about his military career but we do know that he’s trained in what the military refers to as ‘psych ops,’ the ability to manipulate and control an enemy through brainwashing and mind games. What he does for the organization is unclear.”

“So who shot him in Kosovo?” asked Jeffrey.

“Who shot him, how he survived and got back to Florida are all unknowns. The unofficial word was that Sandline wanted to be rid of Rhames,” said Grimm. “He was unpredictable and becoming a liability; they doubted his loyalty. A couple of security breaches led the higherups to suspect someone was selling codes and information. But he knew too much to just serve him his walking papers.”

“So they arranged for his termination, but he survived?” asked Jeff.

Grimm nodded.

“Why haven’t they come after him again?” asked Lydia.

“Who says they haven’t? They just haven’t succeeded in getting to him. In fact, you three got closer to him than anyone ever has. As you know, his security is very tight.”

It was clear now why Rhames had spent so much money on his security system.

“I just walked in through the front door,” said Lydia.

“What did you see in there?” asked Grimm.

“A guy with a lot of personal power giving desperate people some hope, some spaced-out looking people in tunics, and a couple of big bald guys in leather.”

“On security monitors I saw people in five-point restraints, on feeding tubes, wide awake,” said Jeffrey.

Grimm didn’t seem surprised. “We’ve been on you since that night.”

“Why?” asked Jeffrey. “What do you want from us?”

“I’m glad you asked,” said Grimm.

I was sitting out here, waiting to go in when the van pulled up. Look. It’s still there.”

They’d parked the GTO on Fourteenth Avenue and walked up Sixty-Sixth Street, stopping at the corner across from Clifford Stern’s residence. Jesamyn looked at her watch.

“How long ago?” she asked.

Dylan shrugged. “Like five or six hours.”

“Just sitting there all this time. Why?”

“Maybe they’re trying to make sure he stays put. At first, I thought maybe they were going to head in there… kill him, take him, whatever. But then I thought, why? If what you say is true and The New Day is trying to frame Stenopolis, they need his testimony.”

“Right.”

“I waited here for hours and then I came to find you.”

“Why didn’t you just call me?”

He looked down at his feet. “I tried; you didn’t answer,” he said. “And I was afraid you wouldn’t come if I just left a message for you to meet me here.”

She looked at him, then back at the van. “You didn’t go across the street to see what was going on in there?”

He shook his head, turned his eyes on her. “I didn’t want to give myself up, in case they were looking to make some kind of a move.”

“And you didn’t see anyone exit the van?” Another shake of the head. She didn’t see anyone in the driver’s seat.

“You should have kept trying to call me and stayed with the van. Who knows what happened here in the hour or so you were gone?”

He didn’t say anything, just pulled his sheepish face. He’d used this as an excuse to spend time with her. He brought her here not to help Mount but to hold her in his thrall, create a drama they could share. If he’d called, she would have come but she would have had her own car, could have come and gone as she pleased without him. He was such a child.

“So what are we doing here?” she said. “I mean what are we going to accomplish here?”

“Let’s call it in, let’s call the van into 911. Suspicious vehicle.”

“What does that do?”

“It ties The New Day to Clifford Stern, gives some plausibility to the story you told Detective Bloom.”

She held his eyes for a second. It wasn’t a bad idea. It was effective and by the book. Or they could call Bloom directly; they weren’t breaking any laws by being there. They were both off duty, just passing through the neighborhood that just happened to be where Clifford Stern, the man who’d implicated her friend and partner, was probably watching television like he hadn’t just ruined somebody’s life.

“Why didn’t you do that before?”

He showed her his palms.

“Did you run the plate?”

He opened his mouth to answer when two flashes of light lit up Stern’s bay window. Two sharp pops followed; then another blue flash. Another pop.

“Oh, shit,” said Dylan, grabbing her arm hard and pulling her back from the corner. The sound of gunfire, even muffled, was unmistakable to both of them.

“Oh, my God,” said Jesamyn, reaching for the Glock at her waist as she instinctively dropped to a crouch. But no one exited the front door of the row house; there was no movement from the van. The street remained quiet, no one popping their heads out windows, no new lights coming on.

“Call 911,” said Dylan.

She hesitated, wanting to go up there herself. He put a hand on her arm.

“If you don’t, and someone just killed Clifford Stern, you’re the first person on the scene. Do you realize what that looks like?” he said, reaching into the pocket of her coat for her phone.

She looked at him. He was right. It would look like she shot him. She had no business being there, no legitimate reason for being in the vicinity. Something in her went stone cold.

“That’s crazy,” she said uncertainly. “My gun hasn’t been fired. Ballistics test would prove I hadn’t shot him.”

He looked at her like she’d lost her mind. There was something she hadn’t seen very often in his eyes. Fear. “Aren’t you the one insisting that The New Day framed Stenopolis, that somehow they managed to plant blood and fingerprint evidence to implicate him?” he whispered fiercely. “Protect yourself, Jesamyn. Protect both of us. For Ben.”

The sound of their son’s name caused a tide of panic to rise within her. She grabbed the cell phone from him and put it back in her pocket.

“I can’t use that. Are you nuts?” she said and moved away from him quickly toward the pay phone on the corner. She pulled on her gloves and dialed 911, made the report, keeping the receiver away from her mouth and ear. These days they could get prints and DNA off of anything. Chances were if there were no other witnesses, they’d be looking for the person who made the 911 call. Inwardly she cursed herself as they climbed into the GTO. Every instinct had told her not to come here with him. They pulled down Fourteenth Avenue as three police cars raced past them, sirens crying, lights spinning.

“What if someone saw us?” she asked him.

“No one saw us. Besides, even if they did, there’s no way for them to identify us. I mean it’s not like we’re wearing name tags.”

He was trying to be funny. But there was nothing funny about this. He pulled the car over in front of an espresso shop; she could smell the aroma of coffee and the sweet smell of pastry from inside the car. He leaned over her and turned on his police scanner; the chatter, sizzle of static, and beeping filled the car.

“Let’s get a coffee and listen to the scanner. See what happened in there.”

She nodded and he left the car. She listened to the crackle and hiss of his police scanner, the voices fuzzy and distant like they were coming from the moon. A robbery, two units responding. A suspicious man standing on the corner, one car on the way. She listened. A Medical Examiners van and CSI team summoned to 1604 Fourteenth Avenue.

“Dispatch, we got a DB, multiple gunshot wounds,” said a deep male voice. “A witness describes the suspect as a Caucasian male, more than six feet tall, big build, over two hundred and fifty pounds, wearing a dark jacket, possibly leather, and blue jeans. He exited the back of the home and scaled the fence to the street. Witnesses say he headed east on foot.”

“Units responding,” said the dispatcher.

“Oh my God,” said Jesamyn.

Dylan slid back into the car, handed her a coffee and a white bag that was already greasing through on the bottom with whatever pastry was inside.

“They’ve got a dead body at the scene. The suspect matches Mount’s description,” she said to him with a smile. “But Mount’s in lockup. Maybe whoever killed Stern, killed Katrina Aliti. They said he was heading east on foot; let’s go.”

Dylan looked down at her with a frown. “Jesamyn, you didn’t hear?”

“What?”

“Mount’s out,” he said. “He was released on bail earlier this afternoon.”

She looked at him and thought she might throw up.

“No,” she said, searching his face for dishonesty or uncertainty. “He would have called.”

Dylan shook his head slowly. “His family posted bond. He went home this afternoon. Suspended without pay pending the outcome of the trial.”

She kept staring at him, the full implication of his words sinking in. Dylan looked away uncomfortably after a moment, sipped on his coffee. Taking the phone from her pocket, she scrolled through the call log. A couple hours earlier there was a call from Matt’s home phone but no message. She quickly dialed the number and waited as the phone just rang and rang. She tried his cell, but the voicemail picked up immediately, indicating to her that he had it off. Her throat felt tight; her hands cold.

“Listen,” Dylan said gently. “Nobody who was guilty of Aliti’s murder would kill the witness implicating someone else. If The New Day is trying to frame Mount, they’re not going to kill their eyewitness. The only person who would want the witness dead is the person being implicated.”

“Unless they just want Matt to look guilty for this, too.”

Dylan sighed and rolled his eyes. “Come on Jez. Let’s get real, here.”

“You saw the van,” she almost shouted. “What were they doing there? What’s The New Day’s connection to Clifford Stern?”

“Maybe it was a coincidence,” he said with a shrug.

She looked at him, incredulous. “A coincidence?”

“Yeah,” he said weakly. “It’s not out of the realm of possibility, is it? That the van was parked there for some other reason not relating to Clifford Stern?”

She shook her head. “Just drive East on Sixty-Sixth Street.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

He put the car into gear and made a left on Sixty-Sixth Street.

“He could be anywhere by now. It’s not like we’re going to find him strolling up the street, taking in some air.”

Jesamyn knew he was right but it made her feel better to be doing something. She scanned the few figures on the street, walking quickly, huddled against the cold. Matt or someone who looked like him would be easy to spot. Speaking of coincidences, she couldn’t help but wonder how they wound up here for this. She thought about how they just happened to get there, minutes before the shooting, just in time to call 911. She looked at Dylan, who had his eyes on the road.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“What? I told you. So you could see the van.” He glanced at her quickly, then put his eyes back on the road.

“How did you know it would still be here?”

“I didn’t.”

She didn’t say anything, just scanned the streets, peering between buildings, glancing up on the el platform. Maybe she was getting paranoid. After all, what was she thinking? She’d asked him to help her and that’s what he was doing, in his own self-serving way. Her head felt foggy; she was overtired, overwhelmed, and confused. She rested her head against the cool window, never taking her eyes off the street. Was it possible that Mount had killed Clifford Stern? She tried it on, toyed with accepting the idea. That he was terrified or had lost his mind, had shot the man out of some kind of desperation or temporary insanity. She shook her head. It just didn’t fit; there was no way. But he might as well have shot Stern; a man matching Mount’s description was seen leaving the scene after shots were fired. There weren’t that many people who looked like Mount and he was already accused of another murder in which Stern was the witness. His fate was more or less sealed, wasn’t it? Except that she had seen The New Day van parked outside the apartment.

“Go back,” she said.

“Where?

“To Stern’s street,” she said. “I want to make sure that van doesn’t go anywhere.”

He nodded and made a U-turn, headed back toward Fourteenth Avenue.

There was a sea of police vehicles in front of the Stern residence. They arrived as the Medical Examiners van and the CSI team were approaching the row house. She saw Ray Bloom through the bay window over the porch as they parked the car and approached the corner where they’d heard the gunfire. She turned to see the van. But, of course, it was gone. A beat-up red Saturn had already taken its place.

“Shit,” she said. “Shit.” She put her head in her hands. She almost cried right there on the street.

Dylan put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go talk to Bloom,” he said softly. “Let’s tell him what we saw. He’s a smart guy; he’ll know we’re telling the truth.”

She nodded. They had no choice. If they didn’t, Mount didn’t have a chance.

Matt sat against the concrete wall in the alley, barely noticing the stench of urine and garbage. His heart had just slowed to a normal rhythm but his lungs still ached from the exertion of effort and terror. He’d run nearly ten blocks through back alleys. His hands and thighs were still shaking. He put his head down in his hands and felt the warm, viscous liquid against his forehead.

“Oh, Christ,” he said, surprised at the shaking fear he heard in his own voice. He drew his hands back and they were dark with blood. He thought of the backdoor handle where he’d exited the house, the fence that he’d grabbed and pulled himself over. He stood and stripped off his leather jacket, then the sweater he wore beneath it. If the police caught up with him, he didn’t want to be wearing clothes soaked with Clifford Stern’s blood. He threw the sweater in the Dumpster beside him. He inspected the leather jacket for blood in the dim glow of the streetlight and saw that it was clean; he put it back on and zipped it up to his throat. He leaned over and vomited, his whole body wracked with it.

A squad car raced past the alleyway, lights flashing but siren off. He jumped and crouched behind the Dumpster, hitting his head on its metal side. He was shivering now from fear and from the cold and from pain. He could barely believe that his life had come to this, that he was squatting in an alley hiding from the police. He tried to think of the moment, the pivot on which his life had turned. He could pinpoint it exactly: when he’d threatened Trevor Rhames and The New Day. But no. Maybe it was earlier than that. Maybe it was the day he fell in love with Lily Samuels, a girl he’d never seen in the flesh until tonight. If the girl he’d seen had been her at all. If he’d even seen a girl. He couldn’t be sure now; the memory of her felt foggy and indistinct.

He tried to think about his options but the pain in his head was so bad he thought he might be having a stroke. He wished he were having a stroke, that he would drop dead right there-then at least he wouldn’t have to deal with the disaster his life had become. What was he supposed to do now?

He’d just wanted to talk to Clifford Stern, wanted to understand why this stranger had implicated him in a crime he didn’t commit. He’d believed he could convince the guy to go to the police with the truth: that The New Day had paid him or threatened him to be an eyewitness. There was no other explanation. But he should have known not to go there, should have known that they’d be waiting. Now the abyss he’d fallen into was deeper and darker than it had been hours earlier, and it had been pretty fucking deep and dark.

He had five hundred dollars in cash in his pocket and a five-shot Smith & Wesson. He was a fugitive, wanted now for two murders. Within hours, his face was going to be all over the television, in post offices, airports, bus and train stations. He looked at the cell phone in his pocket. Who could he call? Theo? Jesamyn? Lydia Strong? No. The first thing Bloom would do was subpoena his cell phone records; anyone he called could be accused of aiding and abetting. It struck him strangely, hard to the gut, that he was alone now. He’d been lonely before, maybe for most of his life; he was used to that. But he’d never been alone like this, never felt like every connection he had to his life had snapped and he was lofting away into the sky. He could feel himself getting farther and farther away from Earth.

He took a deep shuddering breath, stood. He figured there was only one thing left to do.

Twenty-Four

Basically, Grimm wanted to use them. Lydia had pretty much figured this the moment he pulled up a chair. Otherwise, rather than sitting and having a friendly little chat about Trevor Rhames and The New Day, he probably would have arrested them. He could easily do that and hold them for as long as he wanted under the Patriot Act.

“We can’t go in there,” Grimm told them. “They’ve got lawyers and political connections up the yin-yang. We’ve been in there before and found nothing.”

“After Rusty Klautz escaped,” said Lydia.

“That’s right.”

“So what makes you think there’s anything there now?” asked Jeffrey.

“These satellite photos,” he said, pointing to Jeffrey’s laptop screen, “which I’m not even going to ask how you got your hands on, reveal buildings that don’t exist on the property survey.”

“They weren’t there when you went in the first time?”

“No,” said Grimm with a shake of his head. “We also have new information. Are any of you familiar with the topography of Florida?”

Jeffrey nodded. “It’s karstic, meaning that it’s basically a porous limestone bedrock over a high water table.”

“Right. And beneath Florida is a system of caves formed by water running through the pores of that limestone, many of which are submerged. Cave-diving and spelunking heaven.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Lydia, not sure she liked where this was going.

“According to our source, they’re using some of the dry caves to hide weapons. Not just guns.”

“Who’s your source?” asked Lydia.

“Well, that’s the other thing,” said Grimm, shifting in his seat and putting his eyes on Lydia. “We’ve lost contact. We lost contact weeks ago.”

“You sent someone to infiltrate,” said Jeffrey, with a frown. “Because the kid we pulled out of there? He was fried, totally divorced from reality and from his personality.”

Grimm nodded. “In most cases, we train our people to resist those techniques.”

“In most cases?” asked Lydia.

“In this case, there was no time. It was a matter of opportunity.”

“So there’s an agent in the compound somewhere? Doesn’t that give you cause to go in?” asked Lydia.

“It’s more complicated than that. Let’s just say-” He paused as if searching for the right words. “Rules have been broken. It comes from on high that it’s hands off The New Day. But some of us didn’t think that was such a good idea.”

“So now you’ve lost someone that you can’t get out without admitting that you’ve been investigating a group that was supposed to be immune to investigation,” said Jeffrey.

Grimm didn’t answer, just glanced back at the computer screen. Lydia watched Jeffrey; there was a muscle working in the side of his jaw and he had leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs. He had turned a hard look on Grimm. He didn’t believe what Grimm was telling them, or not all of it. Lydia felt the same edge of uncertainty. An uneasiness had burrowed its way into her gut. They both knew that with the new anti-terrorism laws the FBI didn’t really need cause to raid the New Day Farms. There was some other reason they didn’t want to go in there.

“You want us to find your agent and bring him out,” said Dax.

“Since you’re in the neighborhood and were planning a visit anyway.” There was a blankness to Grimm’s face and his voice, a strange nebulousness to his whole being, as if you might forget what he looked like shortly after you’d left him. Suddenly Lydia didn’t like him or what he was asking them to do. It seemed off, crooked even for the FBI. “And in return, we won’t arrest you for any of the variety of things we could arrest you for right now.” He smiled. It wasn’t pretty.

“So who’s your man?” asked Jeffrey.

“Our man is a woman,” said Grimm, looking down at his shoes. “I believe you all know her. Her name is Lily Samuels.”

Lydia drew in a sharp breath of surprise. “Oh my God,” she said, standing up with the shock of it; both Dax and Jeffrey turned their eyes to her. A thousand things that hadn’t made sense suddenly did. “You used her,” said Lydia. Her voice was quiet but her tone was white hot with anger. “She came to you for help, trying to understand what happened to her brother and you used her.”

She thought of the message Lily had left her. “I really need your help. I am out of my league. Big-time. I-I just really need to talk to you,” she’d said. Man, she wasn’t kidding.

“It wasn’t like that, Ms. Strong,” said Grimm, holding up a hand. “Not at all. Lily Samuels came to us with a proposition. We took her up on it. Otherwise, she would have gone in on her own. We thought we could offer her some protection while pursuing our own agenda. We were wrong.”

“What was her proposition?” asked Jeffrey.

“She was convinced that The New Day had something to gain through Mickey’s death. She wanted to know what that was. In return for our support, she would provide evidence against The New Day and write an exposé that would tear the lid off the organization and send its political supporters scattering like roaches.”

“Allowing you to go in and get Trevor Rhames,” said Dax.

“And expose The New Day for what we believe them to be,” said Grimm. “A criminal organization that robs people of their lives and their money. One that uses that money and the money earned through a variety of illegal activities to fund terrorist groups and supply weapons and men to rebel factions, destabilizing political situations around the world to create chaos.”

“So your feeling is that The New Day is a Privatized Military Company masquerading as a religion,” said Jeffrey. Lydia looked at him and could tell that the same things were flashing through his mind: the house on the water, the compound in the middle of nowhere, the pink diamond, the jewel heist, Tim Samuels’ security company. All the pieces fell together, but something still didn’t feel right.

“At least partially-the part that Trevor Rhames runs,” said Grimm vaguely.

They were all quiet for a second. The sun had dropped below the horizon outside and the sky was deep blue-black with streaks of orange like the belly of a tiger. Outside two pelicans dive-bombed into the dark, gold-tinged water, taking advantage of the last bit of light to fish by.

“What are the security specs?” asked Jeffrey.

So that’s what you do? You work for one of these Privatized Military Companies?”

Jeffrey had the wheel and Lydia sat beside him, turned to look at Dax who sat in the backseat, his legs up, his back against the door.

“I’ve done a lot of things.”

Something in his face changed when he said it, as if the memory of some of those things pained him. He looked away from her, his eyes taking on that veiled look they got when she asked too many questions. He was shutting her out.

“You’re a mercenary,” she said. She’d leveled this accusation against him before but never with any seriousness. He turned his eyes on her then, seemed about to say something but didn’t. Jeffrey hadn’t said anything, she noticed. She settled into her seat and watched Dax out of her sideview mirror. She thought he looked a little sad.

“What difference does it make who else he works for or what he does?” Jeffrey said after a few minutes of riding in an uncomfortable silence. “You’ve saved our asses and sacrificed enough for us, Dax, that we could never doubt your loyalty or your friendship.”

Dax nodded and Lydia didn’t say anything. It was true, of course. But something in her still felt bruised. She folded her arms across her chest, rested her head against the back of her seat and closed her eyes for a minute. When she opened them, she saw Dax watching her in the mirror. She held his eyes for a second and looked away from him.

“Do you think Grimm can be trusted?” Jeffrey asked Dax.

“As much as anyone,” he said with a shrug.

“Do you know him?” Lydia asked, suddenly turning around. “There was something between the two of you in that room.”

Dax was silent, turned to look out the window. Lydia blew out a sharp breath, turned back around.

“The question is,” said Jeffrey, looking at the headlights in his rearview mirror, “are we doing the right thing in helping them?”

“I don’t see where we have a choice,” said Dax. “We were going to go in anyway. Now we have better security specs. It doesn’t matter whether Lily Samuels was working with them or not. We still need to bring her home. They’re not going in after her. What do we have to lose?”

The question made Lydia flinch. It was like tempting the Universe; there was plenty to lose-Lily, for one. She didn’t say anything.

The drive to the New Day Farms was long and mostly silent; nearly an hour and a half toward the center of the state. They took a small state highway that passed quickly through the pretty seaside town, then past a fairly large metropolis with tall gleaming buildings in its downtown center, creating a small but attractive skyline. The city was edged with million-dollar bayfront homes, all hosting boats bigger than some houses Lydia had seen. The scenery quickly turned to the projects and dilapidated houses of a depressed outer urban area. About an hour outside the city the dark, empty roadside was dotted by rundown houses and shacks. Shells of old cars lay in front yards like sleeping dogs, wash hung on lines, people gathered on porches, monster trucks rumbled in short gravel driveways. They passed a couple of seedy-looking bars, some barbeque joints, a Waffle House. Near the middle of the state everything turned green-black and they saw nothing for miles but lush, thick vegetation in the glow of the headlights.

Buried in the middle of nowhere, the New Day Farms kept only a high chain-link fence at the end of the drive that connected to the road. Lydia and Jeffrey scaled it easily; Dax took it a little harder and the landing looked like it caused him some pain. But all in all, he seemed to be getting back to form, still stiff but much stronger and more agile.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some foreign specimen under a microscope.”

“I just don’t understand-” she started but Jeffrey held up a hand and looked at them both sternly.

“This is not the time.”

“I’m the same person,” he whispered to her as they walked along the edge of the drive. She nodded, looked into his eyes. “Nothing has changed,” he said when she didn’t answer him.

The air was so thick with humidity that Lydia felt like she was breathing gauze. Even in short sleeves, she was sweating as they made their way quietly but quickly in a light jog up the drive. The heavy foliage around them was so green it was black in the dark; it had a pulse, it moved. She felt like they were walking beside a living thing. She heard the flapping of giant wings in the leaves above them, something scurrying near their feet. There was a threatening aura to the exotic ferns, twisting vine-covered trucks, fanning palm leaves, so much they couldn’t see. She kept close to Jeff and away from Dax.

“There won’t be any security to speak of until you get to the end of the drive. Then it’s going to get complicated,” Grimm had told them.

But Lydia felt watched. She felt like the wall of living green to her right had eyes, that they were expected and someone was having a good laugh about it.

“I don’t like a single thing about this,” said Lydia to Jeffrey.

“Me neither,” said Jeffrey. “Just stay close and be careful.”

So what you’re telling me is that you just happened to be in the neighborhood at the time of the shooting and spotted The New Day van on the side of the street.”

Jesamyn shrugged, wondering if he’d let it fly. But he turned a hard look on her.

“Detective, if we’re straight with each other things might go easier for everyone, including your partner.”

She sighed and sat down at Clifford Stern’s dining-room table, old, full of nicks and hairline scratches. It wobbled when she put her elbow on it. Bloom sat beside her. She looked at him and wondered: Was he a good cop just looking for the truth? Or was he an asshole who thought he already had it sewn up and any new evidence or information that proved otherwise would be an assault to his ego?

She looked up at Dylan, who nodded.

“I asked my ex-husband to come up here and watch Clifford Stern, see where he went, see who visited him.”

“And you saw the van?” asked Bloom, turning to Dylan who stood behind him. Dylan nodded, told him how he’d seen it pull up and sit.

“But no one got out. No one went into the Stern residence.”

“No,” said Dylan, shaking his head and folding his arms across his chest. “I waited a few hours, there was no activity from the van. I went to get Jez-Detective Breslow, to show her the van, and while we were here deciding what to do, we saw three flashes in the window, heard the sound of gunfire. We called 911.”

Bloom had his head cocked to Dylan, but his eyes were on the wall beside him, as if the scene were playing out for him there. “Then you took off?” asked Bloom with a frown that was somewhere between surprise and suspicion. “Why didn’t you investigate?”

Dylan and Jez were silent, exchanged a look. “We weren’t sure how it would look,” Jez said finally. “I thought, if they could frame Mount the way they did, why not me?” She paused and looked down at the table. “I have a son.”

Bloom looked at her carefully, with a slight narrowing of the eyes.

“But the van’s gone now,” he said after a minute of considering their story. They both nodded. “Seems like you could have called and told me what you were up to, Breslow.”

“I told you about The New Day when you questioned me. You didn’t seem to be taking me seriously.”

He shrugged. “I was taking you seriously. But some crazy-sounding story about a cult framing your partner and actually seeing the van in front of the residence of the only eyewitness to his crime is a different matter. Don’t you agree?”

She nodded, feeling like she’d let Matt down in a major way.

“Did you get the plate?” Bloom asked Dylan.

Dylan removed a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to the Detective. Jesamyn looked at him. She’d asked him the same question right before the gunfire and he hadn’t had a chance to answer.

“Did you run it?”

Dylan nodded. “The van is registered to The New Day. There are two outstanding parking tickets, one on the Upper West Side, and one in Riverdale.”

Jesamyn started at the harsh ripping sound of a body bag being zipped. She felt despair at the sound of it. “Two.38 slugs to the head,” said Bloom as the ME rolled the corpse out.

Jesamyn nodded. She knew Mount had a Smith & Wesson five-shot at home. His off-duty revolver, smaller and lighter than the Glock he carried on the job. From the look on Bloom’s face, he knew it too.

“You said two shots?” asked Dylan. “You find a third slug?”

Bloom shook his head. “Not yet. We’re not finished with the scene.”

“We heard three shots,” said Jesamyn.

Bloom shrugged. “If it’s here, we’ll find it.”

Jesamyn held Bloom’s eyes. She knew what he was thinking; she was thinking the same thing. If they’d come in here after the shots were fired, what would they have found? She pushed the thought away; there was no point in worrying about that now. But if she had to make the decision again, she’d do the same. Ben came first. He always came first. She fought the urge to put her head in her hands.

Since the slashing of his Achilles tendons, Dax Chicago had had a lot of time to think about the things he’d done. He’d managed to push so many days and moments from his memory that there were big black spaces in the narrative of his life. He liked it that way. Some things he wasn’t supposed to remember, other things he just didn’t want to remember. The little game Lydia played, trying to tease him into telling her things he couldn’t tell. She thought he was keeping things from her. And in some cases, that was true. There were things he couldn’t tell her or anyone. But there were plenty more he’d succeeded in forgetting altogether. Most people didn’t understand how that was possible. But then most people hadn’t been the places he’d been.

Since the accident, memories had returned unbidden. It was the inactivity, the insomnia, the time that was filled only with the pain of his slowly healing legs that allowed his deeds to come marching back. Now people, too, it seemed. People like Grimm. He’d never thought they would see each other again, and that had been fine by him.

Lydia and Jeffrey were ahead of him on the path. She was just within his reach. He wanted to grab her shoulders and spin her around, force her to look into his eyes. Her new knowledge of his past-or what she thought was her new knowledge-didn’t change their friendship. Jeffrey, Dax knew, was comfortable with the gray choices. He knew better than most that the just thing wasn’t always the legal thing. He knew that some people had to die so that other people could live. And Jeff, like Dax, was willing to be the person who made choices like that. But Lydia had never shared those feelings… even when her own life was at stake.

“In our line of work, there’s just a thin line that separates us from the monsters we chase. Once it has been crossed, you’re Ahab, you’ve caught the disease, whether you know it or not,” she’d said to him once. He’d never forgotten those words; they resonated with him. Maybe she was right. Maybe he had the disease and he just didn’t realize it. Maybe she thought she saw it in him now and would never be able to see him any other way. The thought pained him. Jeff and Lydia were the only true friends he’d ever known.

He reached for her but before his hand touched her shoulder, the ground fell out from beneath his feet and he was falling, falling into black. He heard Lydia screaming Jeffrey’s name and then there was nothing.

Twenty-Five

Jesamyn stood on Mount’s porch, ringing the bell and freezing her ass off. She knew it was pointless and stupid. He wasn’t going to be there. But part of her was just hoping that he’d come to the door in his sweatpants, groggy from sleep.

“What are you talking about?” he’d say, giving her that look he gave when he thought she was acting crazy. “Arrested? On the run accused of murdering one, possibly two people? That’s nuts.”

But he didn’t come and eventually she took the keys from her purse after a few more rings and let herself in. They’d exchanged keys a long time ago. It was in case something ever happened to either one of them and, for whatever reason, one of them needed entry into the other’s residence. She promised that if he was ever hurt or killed on the job, she’d go and take his porn videos and throw them out so his mother wouldn’t find them. Other than that they hadn’t really thought it through. It had just seemed like a good idea. She was glad for it now.

She was immediately assailed by the smell of garlic and oil as she stepped inside. The heat was blasting and she was grateful for the warmth. She closed the door behind her and stood in the living room, listened to the silence of an empty old house. She wasn’t sure why she’d come here, what she was looking for exactly. She guessed she’d know it when she saw it. She felt tired suddenly, the last few days catching up with her in a big way. She sat on his couch, threw her bag down beside her, put her feet on his coffee table and tried to think like Mateo Stenopolis.

He was a person that she knew. She knew her son Ben. She knew her mother. And she knew her partner. She had loved Dylan deeply once and maybe still did but she’d never really known him, at least not in the way she imagined she did. He kept secrets, told lies, wouldn’t share big parts of himself. You can’t know a person like that; you can love him, fill in the blanks with all your own dreams and desires. But, of course, he’ll disappoint you again and again, until you wake up and realize you can’t build a life with someone who won’t give himself up to it. You can’t live a life built on the romantic imagining of a person.

Mount never held anything back; he wasn’t even capable of it. He was hopelessly open and honest, couldn’t lie or be fake if he wanted to. That’s why he didn’t get along well with people; that’s why he was always vulnerable to getting hurt. She let the fatigue take her, let a few tears drain from her eyes and spill down her face.

“Mount,” she said. “Where did you go?”

She heard it before she saw it; it was a slight creaking of the wood on the porch where she’d been standing just a minute earlier. Then a large shadow drifted past the glass. She was grateful that he hadn’t turned on the lights and then wondered if she’d locked the door behind her. She slid from her place on the couch, crouched behind the big overstuffed arm and took the Glock from the holster at her waist as the knob started to turn.

Lydia.”

The voice came from deep inside a long, dark tunnel; it was sweetly familiar and edged with worry.

“Lydia, come on.”

She felt warm hands on her shoulders, a soft palm on her face. She woke then with a start, taking in a ragged, gasping breath. Her eyes were open but it was still pitch black; she kept still, unsure of where she was or how she had gotten there. Her mind raced, struggling to make sense of what was happening. She thought of the hotel room they’d been in, the walk along the dark drive.

“Are you okay? Lydia, say something.” Jeffrey. She could feel him and hear him, she could smell his cologne but she couldn’t see him at all. It was that dark where they were.

“I-” she began. “What happened?”

“Can you move? Are you hurt?”

She lay flat on her back on a cool, gritty surface. For a second, she didn’t even want to try to move her limbs or lift her pounding head from the ground. She was afraid; she felt like someone had put her in a giant cocktail shaker and shaken mercilessly. What if she tried to move and she couldn’t?

“I don’t know,” she said, lying still. “Are you okay? I can’t see you.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “We fell. I don’t know where we are now.”

She tentatively moved her feet, then bent her legs. Same with her arms. Then she pushed herself up. There was a general feeling of physical trauma but nothing sharply or frighteningly painful anywhere as she came to a sitting position.

“Nothing broken?” he asked, putting his hands on her shoulders, her arms, then her legs, as if checking her for fractures he might be able to feel with his hands.

“No.” She put her hands on his face, still unable to see him in the darkness. “You’re fine?” she asked him again. “You’re sure.”

She felt him nod, then he took her into his arms. “A few bumps and bruises but okay for the fall we took.”

“Where’s Dax?” she said into his shoulder.

“I don’t know,” he said, moving away from her and then pulling her to her feet.

“You said we fell? Fell where?”

“We were walking and then we fell into some kind of a hole. Now we’re here.”

“At the bottom of the hole?”

“I don’t think so. Our guns and our cell phones are gone.” He took her hand and placed it on cold, smooth concrete; she felt the rough ridges and valleys of brick and mortar. “These are man-made walls. There’s no light coming from up above.”

“Is there a door?” she asked.

“Here,” he said, pulling her over. She felt cool metal. Her hand drifted down to a locked knob. She yanked on it hard but it acted like a big, locked metal door. She let go of a sigh.

“So we fell down a hole. Someone then came, took our cell phones and guns, moved us from the hole and now we’re trapped,” she said.

“I’d say that’s a fair guess.”

She let herself slide down the door and come to a crouch near the floor. “How did we get here?” she asked. “Again?”

She was thinking of Jed McIntyre’s lair beneath the city streets of New York, about the tunnels where he chased her and then she chased him.

Jeffrey sat beside her. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Really? When? While I was lying here unconscious?”

“I’ve been sitting here beside you in the dark for a while. As long as you were still breathing, I figured I’d wait for you to come around.”

She didn’t say anything, knowing he’d go on.

“I think we’ve made some serious errors in judgment.”

Given their current situation, she couldn’t really argue with him. He slid down beside her and she leaned against him. Just his nearness quelled the low-grade panic she felt at being trapped, her fear for where Dax might be. She rested her head on his shoulder.

“We’ve been following Lily’s steps, assuming that she was following Mickey,” he said.

“Right. An assumption that Grimm more or less confirmed.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure we can trust Grimm. He just wanted someone in here to find those weapons and give him a reason to come in guns blazing. Maybe he talked to Lily, maybe he didn’t. Anyway, stay with me.”

“Sorry.”

“We assumed that Mickey, prone to depression anyway, was an easy target for the people looking to put a hurting on Tim Samuels.”

“Right.”

“But what if Mickey didn’t get sucked in? What if he walked in?”

She thought about it a second. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to help his stepfather?”

“But they didn’t get along. Why would he go out of his way to help him?”

“It doesn’t matter whether you get along or not-family is family. He loved Lily. He loved his mother. That was reason enough to help his stepfather.”

“Okay,” said Lydia. “But because he was prone to depression, they got to him?”

“Tim Samuels had a strong enough sense of self to break away from The New Day when he realized they were rotten.”

“But maybe Mickey didn’t?”

“Right,” said Jeffrey.

“But wouldn’t Tim Samuels have told us that? There was no way Mickey could know about his issues with The New Day unless Tim told him.”

She felt him shift in the darkness. “He’d probably feel pretty guilty about it. Maybe he didn’t want us to see him as responsible for Mickey’s death.”

Lydia was quiet for a second, turning the scenario around in her mind. “Okay. What if that’s the case? Mickey left his job on Wall Street and moved up there, hooked up with his dad’s ex-girlfriend and tried to infiltrate. He couldn’t take the mind-control techniques of The New Day; they caused him to snap and he killed himself. What difference does it make? He’s still dead and Lily was still trying to find out what happened to him when she disappeared.”

“Right, but the whole basic assumption shifts,” said Jeff.

“Huh? I’m not following.”

“Well, Samuels made it sound like The New Day was systematically stalking his children in order to force him to surrender, tugging at the strings of his life to see which one he couldn’t bear to lose.”

“Which one would cause him to say ‘Uncle.’ ”

“But what if, actually, it was Mickey and then Lily stalking The New Day?”

“Not doing such a great job of it, but giving it the old college try.”

“But if they were chasing The New Day and not the other way around…”

“Then The New Day wasn’t targeting Tim Samuels?” she said. “But what about the IRS and the murdered lawyer?”

“I don’t know,” said Jeffrey.

“He lost his children, his wife left him, and he had a meeting looming with the IRS, which could result in his losing everything and possibly doing time. Somebody was messing with his life.”

“Yeah,” said Jeffrey. “Just maybe not The New Day.”

“But what about the ‘deal’ with Rhames? What about his name in the guest book?”

“I was thinking about that. Did he ever say the deal was with Rhames, exactly?”

“Yes,” said Lydia emphatically. “I think so. I’m not sure.”

“We made a lot of assumptions,” said Jeffrey.

Lydia was silent as she tried to recast her thinking, see it in this new way. She had trouble getting her head around it. She’d cast Trevor Rhames and The New Day as the monsters and everyone else as their victims. It was hard to imagine another scenario.

“Remember what Dax said about suicide being the ultimate fuck-you?” said Jeffrey after a moment.

“Yeah. I’m not so sure about that,” she answered.

“Me neither. But in this case, Samuels implied that all his assets were in jeopardy because of the IRS investigation. He stood to lose everything. But say he had a big life insurance policy and on his death, a settlement would be paid to whomever the beneficiaries were. He was still worth something.”

Lydia thought about it. She saw where he was going suddenly. “Unless he killed himself.”

“Most policies have a suicide clause,” said Jeffrey.

“If he killed himself, no life insurance. If the IRS took everything else, he’d be leaving nothing behind for anyone.”

“That is the ultimate.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“So whoever is the beneficiary of that policy gets the big middle finger.”

They were quiet again and the darkness seemed to swell around them. The buzz was deafening and Lydia’s agitation at being trapped was starting to feel like something living in her chest. Her hands were tingling to get on a keyboard or a telephone pad to start finding answers to all her new questions.

“We’re not in much of a position to figure out who that beneficiary might be,” she said.

“No,” said Jeffrey, squeezing her shoulder. “We’re not.”

She took a deep breath and leaned her head against the cold concrete wall.

“So, as long as we’re questioning our assumptions,” she said after a minute, “what about Mickey?”

Jeffrey exhaled sharply and shifted back farther toward the wall, straightened out his legs.

“I guess I’ve been operating under the belief that he killed himself, maybe due to the maneuverings of The New Day in addition to the fact that he was depressed, feeling bad about the breakup and the failed business. Lily was grief-stricken, trying to hold onto her brother by proving that he didn’t end his own life. Maybe in tangling with The New Day, making serious accusations, threatening an exposé of the organization, she got in over her head. If she was good at what she did, she probably found out everything that Detective Stenopolis told you about Rusty Klautz and the others. She was a threat to The New Day, at least an inconvenience. She thought she was protecting herself by involving the FBI, not realizing that they were just using her and wouldn’t be any help in a jam.”

“How does that all change if Mickey didn’t kill himself, if Lily was right and he was actually murdered?”

She could hear him breathing. “I’m not sure,” he said finally.

“What if she found proof that Mickey didn’t commit suicide?” She heard Lily’s voice again. “I’m out of my league. Big-time.”

“Then it would mean that whoever was threatened by that proof is a likely suspect in her disappearance.”

“Right, so it would mean that there was another motivator in getting rid of Lily, not just another blow to Samuels.”

They both knew there was a big piece missing, a hole that ran through their investigation which had been there all along. They had just been too blinded by their assumptions to realize it.

“You know what else is bothering me?” said Lydia.

“What’s that?”

“Michele LaForge.”

“How she seduced both father and son?”

“That was okay when we were assuming that The New Day was trying to take Tim Samuels’ life apart. She seduced Tim as Marilyn and Mickey as Mariah, a siren luring them onto the rocks of The New Day.”

“Very poetic.”

“Thank you. But if we’re thinking that Mickey and Lily were going after The New Day and not the other way around, where does Michele LaForge come into all of this?”

Jeffrey was quiet. She felt rather than saw him lift his head and sniff the air.

“What?” she said.

“Do you smell something?” he asked, standing up and pulling her to her feet.

She took some air in through her nose. She did smell something. Smoke.

She put her hand against the metal door and drew it back quickly. It was burning hot. She backed away from the door, wrapping her arms around herself.

“Jeffrey.” Her throat suddenly went dry. Her heart started to pump in her chest. They were trapped and there was a fire raging outside the door.

“Come here,” he said, pulling at her arm, dragging her to the far corner of the room and pulling her to the floor. She lay down on her stomach in the corner and Jeffrey lay in front of her, protecting her body with his, so that she was between him and the wall.

“It’s okay. This room is made out of concrete and the door is metal. The heat will rise. We’ll be okay.”

It seemed wildly optimistic but she chose to be comforted by the sound of his voice and the feel of his body beside her, his arms around her. The smell of smoke was getting stronger and the temperature seemed to have risen twenty degrees.

“We’re going to cook in here,” she said, her voice tight with fear.

There was a pounding on the door then, and the muffled sound of a shouting voice.

“What was that?” asked Lydia.

More pounding and then the voice came again louder. Lydia couldn’t understand what he was saying but she recognized the cadence of the voice. It was Dax.

“What the hell is he saying?” she yelled at Jeffrey.

“I think he said to stay away from the-” Jeffrey started. “Shit. Cover your head.”

The explosion was so loud that Lydia wouldn’t hear right for hours. The metal door that had seemed immovable crumpled like paper and they were blasted with a wave of heat and concussion that Lydia was sure was going to kill them both. The silence that followed felt like a vacuum to Lydia. Then there was a high-pitched ringing in her ears as her body wracked with coughing from the concrete dust. She could see Jeffrey coughing too, but she couldn’t hear him. A bulky form emerged from the cloud. Dax. He was yelling something at them, then leaning in and dragging her to her feet, pulling on her arm. Jeffrey got up and stood behind her. She looked at Dax’s face; he was scared, angry, something, still yelling. She tried to read his lips.

“It’s on fire. We have to go,” he was saying.

“What do you mean it’s on fire?” she yelled. “What’s on fire?”

“Everything. It’s burning.”

He pushed Lydia and Jeffrey in front of him and they all started to run down a long hallway, toward cool air they felt flowing from somewhere, the heat of flames at their backs.

For a second Jesamyn almost lowered her guard as the knob started to turn and then stopped; whoever stood outside started jiggling the knob lightly. She had locked the door behind her like a good New Yorker. She thought, what if it’s Theo or Matt’s dad. But then the dark form moved in closer to the door and blocked all the light coming in from the nine glass panes. He was huge; she felt her heart drop into her stomach. Tired apparently of messing around with locked knobs, the form put a gloved hand through one of the panes of glass as if it were made out of cellophane, reached in and unlocked the dead bolt and turned the simple lock on the knob itself. Then, as if thinking now he should be quiet, he opened the door slowly and stepped inside. He had to bend his head to avoid hitting it on the frame.

From her place behind the couch, she had a good look at him as he entered the foyer. Giant, with a buzz cut so close to the scalp that his hair looked like a five o’clock shadow. His face was grim and blank of expression, deep lines carved between protruding bones, a long hook of a nose. She checked his body for the bulge of a gun and saw something inside his jacket that could very well have been a big revolver or a semiautomatic. He stood and lifted his nose to the air for a second and turned his head toward the living room, moved toward her slowly. She felt the reverberations of his footfalls in the floor beneath her own feet. She crouched lower. She’d need the element of surprise to have the advantage over his size. She’d need him to come very close to her before she revealed herself. The blood was rushing in her ears as he approached the couch. When he was not a foot away from her, she moved from her spot and held the gun in front of her, aimed directly at his center mass.

“Freeze,” she yelled, deepening her voice. “Get on the ground and put your hands behind your head.”

She hated the way her heart was pounding, the way her chest was heaving with her fearful breathing. He smiled at her like she was a pretty child putting on a show and that made her angry as well as afraid. He put his hands up and mock shivered, started backing away from her.

“Oooh,” he said.

“Get on the ground,” she yelled, making her voice as loud and deep as possible. She didn’t want to kill this guy; he might know something that could help Mount. But she would kill him if it came to that. He moved backward and she followed, her finger on the trigger of her gun. She could already hear the deafening boom it would release when she fired. He had his back against the wall now, knocking down a portrait of the Stenopolis family. She jumped when it crashed to the ground and shattered. In that instant she saw him glance down at the bulge in his jacket, saw his right hand twitch.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said, reaching behind for her cuffs. “How many times do I have to tell you? Get down on the fucking ground. Right. Now.”

He started to bend toward the ground, but telegraphed the lunge that followed by bringing his right knee up quickly. All her fear subsided now that the fight had begun. All her training from the academy and from the kung fu temple kicked in. She was pure action, no thought at all.

She sidestepped him easily and he crashed into the low coffee table, headfirst. She let a round go and felt the concussion in her chest, was temporarily deafened by the roar of the Glock, felt the sting of powder in her nose. She’d missed him, the bullet creating a valley in the end table and exploding the lamp on top of it. A piece of glass or something ricocheted and hit Jesamyn below her left eye. But she barely felt it, seeing that the giant had managed to draw his weapon, a huge revolver that looked like a Ruger with a big long barrel.

She dropped as he got to his feet, put her hands on the ground with the gun still in her grip and swept him hard, using her foot as a hook. Her ankle connected hard with his thick leather boots and it hurt like hell, but he fell right on his back, feet flipping up from beneath him like he was wearing roller skates. She heard his head connect with the floor and it sounded like a bowling ball dropping on a lane. The Ruger came loose from his hand and landed harmlessly on the velour couch. She was on him then, her knee in his solar plexus as the porch outside exploded with light and sound. He reached to pull her off him and she used her elbow to strike him hard on the side of his face. Once, he was still smiling. Twice, the smile faded and he started to get a dazy look in his eyes.

The front door slammed open and the room was full of voices and heavy footfalls. She knew the sound of her colleagues: radio static, booming voices, holsters unsnapping. She felt hands on her then and she got to her feet, still pointing her gun at the man dressed in leather. He looked stunned; two blows to the head and a knee to the solar plexus could do that to a guy, no matter how big he was. Still, it took two guys to flip him and two sets of cuffs linked together to bind his hands.

“We had to link the cuffs together for your partner like that,” said Bloom, coming up behind her.

She turned to look at him. The adrenaline was draining, leaving her shaking in its wake, the wound on her face starting to throb. “You followed me?”

She wouldn’t admit to it, but under the circumstances she was grateful. She’d been able to bring the guy down but she wasn’t sure she would have been able to cuff him. She might have wound up cuffing one wrist to the couch leg and calling for backup.

He nodded, watching as two uniformed officers pulled the intruder to his feet. He was a little unsteady, dazed, and he hadn’t said a word. One of the uniformed officers starting reading him his rights.

“I figured you’d lead us straight to Stenopolis.”

“But instead I led you to this guy. He matches Mount’s description. Don’t you think?” she said, nodding toward the leather-clad freak.

“We’ll see,” he said, noncommittal. “Anyway, I’d go so far as to say things are looking a little better for Stenopolis, except that he’s a fugitive on the run considered armed and dangerous.” He sighed. “It’s always a bad idea to run.”

She shook her head at him. He’d made all his assumptions already; he’d have to wrestle his ego a little before he came to terms with the fact that she’d been right all along. But she could tell he was the kind of man who’d put the truth first and she respected him for it.

Dylan came through the door then, looking afraid and a little angry. He walked over to her, eyes scanning the room, then resting on the big man in cuffs. She’d split off from Dylan after he brought her back to the precinct to get her car, saying she wanted to get home and rest. Really, she hadn’t wanted to drag Dylan into the gray area of entering Matt’s house and looking for clues as to where he might have gone. It could be bad for his career, considering he was already on temporary suspension. And, maybe most of all, she’d just wanted some distance from him.

“I thought you were going home,” he said to her.

“I thought you were going home,” she said, looking at him. She fought the urge to wrap her arms around him until she could stop shaking.

“I was. I heard the call on my scanner and turned around.”

He put a hand to her face and she winced at the pain. “You’re gonna need stitches on that,” he said as the two uniforms moved past them with the prisoner.

“Not before I talk to that guy.”

“I’ll be talking to him, Detective,” said Bloom. “I don’t need to remind you that this is not your case.”

“The hell it isn’t,” she said, pushing past Bloom. “I would have been the one to put the cuffs on him if your boys hadn’t come in. I would have had him for breaking and entering, assaulting an officer.” He put a gentle but firm hand on her arm.

“I don’t want to have to arrest you for obstructing an investigation,” he said quietly. “Which I could do, considering we both know why you came here.”

She looked him up and down. He was half the size of her most recent assailant, but there was something tougher about him.

“If you’d listened to me in the first place, we wouldn’t even be here. It never would have gone this far,” she said, looking down at his arm and then turning her eyes on him.

He gave her a black look and she let out a sigh, looked at the ground.

“Let me come with you, at least,” she said when he didn’t answer her.

He nodded grudgingly and released her arm. “Paramedics are outside. Let them patch you up first. Meet me at HQ.”

What is happening?” yelled Lydia.

“They moved in. They’re taking the compound.”

Dax’s sentence was punctuated by the sharp report of semiautomatic gunfire. In the distance she heard voices but they sounded faint and far away, yelling, as they stepped from the building they’d been in into the humid night. There was another sound, too, also faint and far away to Lydia’s damaged ears: the crackle of flames. The thick, hazy air seemed to hold an orange glow and smelled strongly of burning wood. She felt like she was breathing in the color gray. She held a hand over her mouth.

“Who’s moving in? The Feds? I thought they couldn’t come in here,” she said as they followed Dax at a run into the cover of a glade of trees.

She was feeling disoriented and her heart was still chugging. But something was bugging her, nudging at her consciousness. She could see the look on Jeffrey’s face, too. Blank but eyes slightly narrowed, trained on Dax.

How did Dax know where they were? Was it her imagination or did he seem to know where they were going?

“About a half an acre west of here, there’s a wall that we can get over and get out of here,” said Dax.

“No,” she said. “We’re not leaving without Lily.”

He looked at her. “Do you understand what’s happening here?” he asked her. There was something cold in his tone she’d never heard before. She didn’t like it.

“No, I don’t, Dax. Why don’t you tell me?” she said, turning to him, moving in closer.

She felt Jeffrey’s hand on her arm. “We should do this later,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

“We have to find Lily,” said Lydia.

“Look at the reality here,” said Dax. “The place is burning. Every building in this compound is on fire. FBI and ATF are all over the place.”

The sky exploded with light and the chopping blades of a helicopter. Lydia felt her hair whip around her, and she covered her eyes, squinting against the brightness of the spotlight that shone through the trees directly on them.

“Drop your weapons and get down on the ground.” It sounded like the voice of God coming down from the sky. But it was really just someone in full body armor with the big letters ATF printed on his chest. Still, Lydia figured it behooved them to listen. He had a gun trained on them-a very big scary-looking gun much like the one Dax was carrying. A moment later, four other men in body armor emerged from the trees around them, their faces obscured behind the Plexiglas masks of their helmets.

Jeffrey and Lydia exchanged looks and did what they were told.

What? I can’t hear you?” Lydia yelled. She wasn’t trying to be obnoxious; she really couldn’t hear very well. Maybe she was trying to be a little obnoxious, but given what the FBI was trying to pull she figured they deserved it.

The young agent who was questioning her looked annoyed. They sat together in the back of a van that was mercifully air-conditioned, just the two of them, on two metal chairs he had provided. She didn’t know where Dax and Jeff were; she imagined they were in two other vans somewhere close by. The agent had given her an ice pack when she’d complained of a pain in her ribs and then he’d started questioning her. She wasn’t worried until he started acting like he didn’t know Agent Grimm.

“Did he show you any identification?” the kid yelled at her. He was a kid, maybe not even twenty-five. He had the fleshy, earnest face of the very young and wore the look that milk-fed people have before they’ve experienced the rest of the world, before they’ve realized that 95 percent of people are living in poverty and chaos, that hatred reigns and justice is in short supply. But maybe Lydia was just feeling bitter.

“Yes,” she said more quietly. “He showed us his shield and identification.” He’d flashed it, actually. She hadn’t inspected it closely, mainly because they had guns that she recognized as Glocks, pretty standard law-enforcement equipment.

“You got a close look at it?”

She shrugged. “Close enough.”

“Close enough?”

“Close enough to be convinced. He was out of shape and wore a bad suit. He had a crappy attitude and a kind of annoying self-righteousness to him that just screamed FBI.”

Agent Gary Hunt ignored her comment, to his credit, and scribbled something in a black notebook.

The doors to the van were closed but through the rear windows she could see that the fire at the New Day Farms still raged; she could smell burning wood and hear the hiss of the chemical spray firefighters were using to quell the blaze. They were a safe distance from the scene now, but the occasional shout and bursts of gunfire carried through the air. The New Day compound was a war zone, another Waco in progress, and they were a part of that. Maybe the biggest part, since the Feds were using them as their reason for invading the compound. And for all Lydia knew, Lily Samuels was somewhere inside. Failure sat in her stomach like a piece of lead. Lydia still felt herself start to shiver slightly from a cold that seemed to come from deep inside her center and spread out through her veins to the rest of her body.

The kid ran a hand through a thick, silky shock of jet-black hair.

“Okay,” he said. “You, Mr. Mark, and Mr. Bond are private investigators. You were following leads on the disappearance of a girl.” He stopped and checked his notes. “Lily Samuels. You were planning on gaining entry to the New Day Farms to search for her when someone claiming to be an FBI agent named Grimm approached you and your associates. He told you that Lily Samuels was working for him when they lost contact with her. He wanted you to go in and try to retrieve Lily Samuels and provide proof that The New Day was stockpiling weapons so that the resultant publicity would make it possible for them to take down an illegal organization that was being protected by highranking members of the government.”

“She could still be in there,” said Lydia. “There could be an innocent girl in there.”

Her desperation was making her loud but Agent Hunt didn’t say anything; he just looked at her like he was trying to figure out what her angle might be.

“A lot of the people in there could be innocent. Brainwashed, trapped. Do you understand?” she said when he remained silent.

He shook his head, wrote something in his little notebook. She took a deep breath, tried to chill out a little, trying to quell the combination of anger and anxiety doing battle in her chest.

“Okay,” she said, trying to sound calmer. “If he wasn’t a federal agent the way you seem to be implying, then how did you know we were in there? Why did you come in after us?”

“We’ve had the compound under surveillance for about six months, gathering evidence in preparation for a raid scheduled next month,” he said. “We heard gunfire and explosions, then a fire broke out. We had to move in tonight or never.”

“How convenient. So you’re claiming that the gunfire, explosions, and fire all started before you ever stepped foot onto the farm.”

“You’re saying different?” he asked, and something in his voice sounded cold as steel to her. He suddenly didn’t seem so young.

She paused, looked at the ceiling above her.

“I fell down a hole, lost consciousness, and woke up in a concrete cell,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes. “I don’t know what happened.”

“So you say,” he said, returning her gaze.

Uh-oh, Lydia thought. Time to shut up.

“Lawyer,” she said quietly. The kid gave her a look.

“Give me a break,” he said, like she was asking him to fetch her a cup of coffee.

She pressed her mouth into a thin, tight line and crossed her arms in front of her chest, causing herself a surprisingly sharp pain in her ribs. She shook her head to indicate that she wouldn’t be saying another word.

He held her eyes for a moment and was too young to hide his exasperation. He got up suddenly and marched away from her, exited the rear of the van and locked the doors behind him.

She leaned back in her chair and suddenly wished she had a better knowledge of the Patriot Act. How long could they hold them without evidence and without charge? She started to wonder if maybe “stubborn smart-ass” wasn’t the best tack to take. She wondered what Dax and Jeffrey had said and how much trouble they were all in. What she needed to do, she figured, was to call Striker and have him send down one of the firm’s lawyers. Or maybe more than one. Three lawyers. They were going to need three.

These were the things on her mind when the chrome handles on the rear door of the van started to turn and one of them opened, letting in a swath of humid air. Lydia sat up in her seat and was about to start getting loud about wanting to call her lawyer, when she saw a face she didn’t expect step into view. All the words she had been planning to say deserted her, died between her throat and her mouth.

“Hi,” said a painfully thin young girl with her hair shorn close to her head.

Something came alive in Lydia, something that was hope and elation, anger and confusion in one ugly tumble.

“Lily,” she breathed. Her lost girl found.

Twenty-Six

Jesamyn climbed into the cold interior of her Ford Explorer, gunned the engine, and blasted the heat. She had three stitches on the side of her face, right beneath her eye. She turned down the rearview mirror so that she could take a look at them; she kind of liked them. Like the bruises she often got in kung fu, big purple and brown flowers of blood beneath her skin, she saw this as a badge of honor, the mark of a battle fought and survived. She was glad Dylan had agreed to leave and go to her mom’s to help her get Ben ready for school in a few hours. Her mother hated Dylan with the passion only a mother can muster for the person who hurt her child. But she was able to stay civil for Benjamin’s sake.

She felt fatigue tugging at the lids on her eyes as she backed the Explorer out of Matt’s driveway. Matt’s parents and Theo had come out in the commotion and she had had to tell them that Matt was on the run. Detective Bloom had found the files Matt had left on the kitchen table, and Matt’s mother had wept inconsolably. Now she saw the living-room light glowing in the row house next to Mount’s. She wanted more than anything to bring him back to that place, safe and sound, proven innocent.

She hoped Bloom wasn’t just paying her lip service about talking to the suspect. But she suspected he was just trying to get her to shut up. She was going there anyway; she’d make a huge scene if she had to. She was about to merge onto the highway when she saw the darkness in the backseat shift. Her heart thumped as she pulled onto the shoulder suddenly with a screeching of her tires, ripped her gun from its holster and thrust it behind her, slamming the vehicle into park with her free hand.

“Hands where I can see them,” she yelled, motivated by her own fear rather than a desire to intimidate.

“Take it easy,” said the darkness. “I’m sorry. I fell asleep or I would have said something before you started driving.”

Her fear drained away and she sank back into her seat, the adrenaline rush leaving her shaking at her core. “Jesus Christ,” she sighed, leaning her head back against the upholstery. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“I’m sorry,” said Mount.

“You are a major, major fuck-up, you know that?” she said, turning to look at him. “What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking, I guess. I was acting. I saw her. I saw Lily.”

“What? Where?” she said. He looked exhausted, pale with blue canyons of fatigue under his eyes, dark stubble on his jaw. There was something in his eyes that didn’t thrill her. For a second she wondered, has he lost it?

“On my street, in front of my house. I went out after her but she was gone.”

“Were you dreaming?”

“No. I saw a woman. I’m sure of that. I’m not sure it was Lily. But I was certain of one thing when I saw her: that someone was fucking with me and if I didn’t do something about it, I was going to spend the rest of my life in jail.”

“So you went to see Clifford Stern?” she said, guessing, because that’s what she would have done.

“I didn’t know where else to go. They cleared out the church in the Bronx. Jude Templar was gone. I knew Stern was lying. There was no other reason for him to lie or to be a part of that set-up unless he had a connection to The New Day. I figured I could scare him into telling me the truth.”

He leaned back in the seat, put his feet up, and rested his head against the glass.

“They knew,” he said. “That’s the scariest thing. They knew enough about me to know that I’d show up there, trying to get the guy to come clean. They sent that girl, whoever she was, to make that call, and knew it would cause me to act. Don’t you think that’s frightening?”

Jesamyn watched her friend and partner. He met her eyes for a second and then closed them, fell silent. She was about to say something when he went on.

“They were waiting there for me. I came in through the back. The door was unlocked, that should have been my first clue. Stern was in a La-Z-Boy, half asleep in front of the game.

“I walked right through his dining room and stood twenty feet away from him before he turned to look at me. He smiled. ‘Man, you are predictable,’ he said. But he looked stoned, I mean high as a kite. It was more like he was talking to someone he thought was a figment of his imagination than me, standing by his recliner with a gun in my hand. But there was something crazy in his eyes; I think now it was a warning. I moved in close to him until I was standing right over him. He smiled again.

“There was this deafening sound and his chest kind of exploded and splattered all over me. He died immediately with that crazy, stoned expression still on his face. He never even knew what hit him. There were two shots and they came from behind me, so I spun around and found a man as big as I am, a little taller even, slightly wider. He held a thirty-eight identical to my own in a gloved hand. I drew on him when I heard something behind me. I turned and there was another one.”

“Another what?”

“Another guy all in leather, bald, big. Like it was a uniform, some kind of look they were cultivating.

“He fired on me and I ran. I knew what they were trying to do. They wanted it to look like I broke into his house and that Stern and I shot each other. Case closed. They’re rid of me and they don’t have to worry about Stern either. Nice and neat.”

“We arrested one of them,” she said. “One of those men you saw.”

“Just now?”

“Yeah, I came to your place to get your porn,” she said with a smile. “And he came in after me.”

“You took him to the mat?”

“You bet your ass.”

“You’re a tough bitch, Detective Breslow.”

She smiled. “If I’d known he was such a bad shot, I wouldn’t have been so scared.”

“Bad shot?”

“Yeah, he fired at you and missed. You’re like the proverbial side of the barn.”

He coughed a little. “Who said he missed?”

“Oh, shit,” she said, leaning over the seat. “You’re shot?”

He nodded. “I was coming home to die like a wounded old grizzly,” he said with a smile. “But it was too crowded at my place. I thought I’d do it in the back of your car.”

“How bad is it?” she said, unzipping his jacket and seeing that the tee-shirt beneath was red with his blood.

“Not that bad, I don’t think. I think it went straight through.”

She looked at him more closely; he was fading, his lids lowering over eyes that seemed to be having trouble focusing. There was so much blood, she couldn’t see where the wound was. She saw that the waistband of his jeans was black with his blood. She quashed the rise of panic down hard. No time for that.

“Mateo Stenopolis,” she said loudly, pulling on his legs to get him to slide all the way down. She didn’t want him falling over during the mad dash she was about to make for the nearest hospital. “You stay with me.”

He looked at her and nodded weakly.

“Don’t make me pull out the kung fu,” she said when he said nothing. He raised his hands in a gesture of mock surrender, then winced at the movement.

“Jez,” he said, as she turned and threw the car into drive, roared onto the highway. “Just be careful.”

“Careful of what?” she said, pushing her foot heavily on the gas. “You worried about my driving?”

“The other one. You only got one of those guys. I think they travel in pairs.”

She thought of her vacant-eyed leather-clad assailant and wasn’t thrilled that he had a partner. Then she saw a pair of headlights behind her, square and bearing down quickly.

“Mount,” she said.

He didn’t answer and she looked up in her rearview mirror, saw only darkness in the backseat and the hot, high beams of the white van on her tail.

Lily felt like she could crumble to dust in Lydia’s arms, she was so fragile. She clung to Lydia like she was a buoy in the violent water of Lily’s life.

“Lily, my God,” she said. Agent Hunt stood behind them.

“This is the girl you were looking for?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. He nodded his acknowledgment and may have even smiled a little.

“She came wandering out of the New Day Farms about an hour before you. She’s been talking about an Agent Grimm, too. For someone who doesn’t exist, he sure does get around.”

Lily was shivering in her arms and Lydia held onto her tight as the girl began to sob.

“Please,” she said, appealing to the youthful humanity she saw in him. “Let me take her back to our hotel. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just let me get her comfortable and safe.”

An hour later, Lydia, Jeffrey, and Lily were back in the hotel room with an escort waiting outside their door and Agent Hunt sitting at the table. Dax had not been released and no one would discuss his situation with either of them; Lydia was concerned… for a lot of reasons. She wasn’t sure how he had found them and led them out, or what would happen to him now. But she knew he could take care of himself; she’d worry about him after they’d talked to Lily, made sure she was safe from The New Day and returned her to her mother where she belonged.

“I did what you taught me to do. Only it worked a little too well,” she said with a slight laugh. She sat across from Agent Hunt, accepting a bottle of water from the minibar but nothing more.

Everything about her was changed. Where she’d been bright and exuberant, she was quiet and careful. Lily had always been the kind of girl who got excited by things, spoke quickly, moved her hands wildly, laughed easily. This girl was pale and thin as a slip of paper, speaking through lips that were cracked with dehydration, eyes that were dull and filled with grief. Her cloud of silky black curls that had always bounced around her face was gone; only the slightest stubble of her hair remained. She kept bringing a shaking hand up to it, feeling its texture. Lydia wanted to take her home so that she could be tucked in to bed and fed soup until she was feeling better. It was painful to watch her.

“So after your brother’s funeral you went up to Riverdale,” Lydia said. “To try to get into his head.”

She nodded. Swallowing the water seemed to cause her pain and Lydia remembered what Jeffrey had told her about the tubes he’d seen in the throats of New Day guests.

“I had the keys to his apartment. It didn’t take me long to figure out what he had been trying to do.”

“Did you know about the problems your stepfather was having with The New Day?” asked Jeffrey. Lydia glanced at him, realizing that Lily probably didn’t know Tim Samuels was dead. She figured that this wasn’t the right time and they weren’t the right people to tell her.

She shook her head. “No. I knew he and my mother were having problems. I suspected an affair, some asinine midlife crisis. But I didn’t know anything about The New Day.”

“Until?”

“Until after my brother’s alleged suicide.”

Lydia noticed Lily’s use of the word alleged, as if she still didn’t believe her brother had killed himself.

“So Mickey went there to try to help your stepfather?”

She shook her head slowly, like she still couldn’t believe it. “That’s the way it looked to me; like he’d gone up there for the express purpose of infiltrating The New Day, maybe hoping to expose them or find evidence that could get them to release their grip on Tim.”

“What did you find in your brother’s apartment that made you think that?” asked Jeffrey. His tone was kind and warm, but there was a slight wrinkle in his brow that Lydia recognized as the expression of his natural skepticism. She was with him; something felt off.

“When we were kids, Mickey lived in his imagination, you know? He had a rough time of it after our father’s death. I was too young, really, to feel the impact the way he did. It altered him.” She paused, and turned the bottle of water on the table, inspected it with intensity, as if the movie of her childhood were playing out on the sweating plastic. “It was like he was always looking for something to fill the empty space our father left.”

The words hit Lydia hard, reminded her of her own childhood after her mother died. Her lonely hours filled with books and the stories she wrote. Even before her mother died her mind had worked that way; but afterward she practically disappeared into the mysteries she was forever trying to solve.

“He was different from other kids. He wore this loneliness, this sadness like a cape that somehow set him apart from everyone else, made him seem freakish and strange. So he was a target for bullies, he was awkward and never seemed to fit in anywhere. So he wrote. Notebook after notebook. Journals, poetry, short stories. He exorcised all his demons there. He cut the fabric on the bottom of his box spring and slipped them up inside there.”

“That’s where you found his journals in Riverdale?”

She nodded. “It was his current obsession, The New Day. But it was always something. He was always pouring himself heart and soul into something, trying to lose himself, trying to find himself. I’m not sure which.”

“And you always followed,” said Lydia, remembering the conversation when she’d told her as much.

“All my life I felt like I was chasing him up this path, and he was always just about to turn that one corner after which I’d never be able to find him again.”

Rivers of tears fell from both her eyes and met at her chin, dripped onto the ATF sweatshirt Agent Hunt had given her. Lydia wanted to comfort her but wasn’t sure how; she kept her distance.

“Your brother and your stepdad didn’t always get along. Did it seem weird to you that Mickey would shift off his life to help him?” said Jeffrey.

“They didn’t always get along, that’s true. But Tim raised us both, you know. They had a relationship, even if it wasn’t always an easy one.” She sighed and rolled her head from side to side as if to release tension residing there. “But you’re right. I don’t really know why he did it. My suspicion is that he just thought he was helping Tim. That there was something about the message of The New Day that resonated with him and he was just using Tim’s problems as an excuse.”

She put an elbow on the table and leaned her head on her hand. Lydia noticed how frail and small her arms looked.

“So much made sense to me after I found his journals. He’d been so strange since the move, so distant, so wrapped up in Mariah. I just thought he was getting himself into another obsessive relationship that was going to end in disaster. Reading his journals I could see clearly how he lost his perspective, his advantage. He went in thinking he had the upper hand and they went to work on him.”

“Maybe The New Day knew who he was all along,” said Lydia.

“It’s possible, I guess. They knew everything about my stepfather.”

“How did your brother get involved with Mariah?”

“He met her at one of The New Day meetings. It was right at the point where his journal entries started to shift. He started out with nothing but disdain for them and slowly began to express a kind of grudging admiration.”

“He didn’t connect that Mariah was Marilyn.”

She shook her head. “No. He never made that connection that I know of. We’d never met her while my father was dating her. So he would have had no way of knowing what she looked like. Maybe Tim never even told him about her. I only learned that they were the same person after Mickey died. When I found the journals, I confronted Tim. He admitted to me that he’d confided in Mickey but claimed he had no idea what Mickey was planning.”

“At that point, Lily, why didn’t you take what you knew to the police?” asked Jeffrey.

She looked at him. “My stepfather. He has made some terrible mistakes that he thought were dead and buried. Trevor Rhames knew those secrets, threatened to expose him.”

Lydia shook her head. “What could be so bad that he would sacrifice his children to escape it?” It was the second time she’d asked that question in forty-eight hours.

Lily turned her eyes to Lydia. “I really don’t know. But he said it involved my mother and that she would be hurt by the exposure, as well.”

“You weren’t curious to know what they might be, these secrets?” asked Lydia, knowing the heart of a journalist too well to let that slide.

“I pressed him, believe me. I did some digging on my own. The best I can figure is that it has something to do with Body Armor and possibly his military career before he married my mother.”

She saw Jeff shift in his seat and Agent Hunt scribble in his book. She thought of the Privatized Military Companies Grimm talked about, she thought about the weapons, the pink diamond they’d found. Everything vague, their connections as delicate and translucent as a spider’s silk.

“So you decided to follow Mickey’s plan and get yourself into The New Day?” said Lydia.

Lily looked at her; there was a flash of something in the young woman’s eyes. That fire they both had to know, no matter the cost.

“I wanted to free my stepfather from their grasp. I wanted to prove that they killed my brother. I wanted to expose them. I thought I was stronger than Mickey. That I had a more evolved sense of myself, too much so to fall prey to their brainwashing.”

“But?”

“But their program is amazingly strong,” she said with a long exhale. “I didn’t know how tentative a hold we have on reality, how under the right conditions we lose ourselves and our ideas of right and wrong like a cheap pair of sunglasses. They take you away from everything that defines you, family, friends, your profession, your privacy. And then they create a new world for you. It’s wild. I thought I could resist.”

“And you did,” said Lydia.

She laughed sadly. “Just barely. I took some precautions; I used my connections at the paper to get in touch with the FBI. I called around and got a lot of sidestepping, no one knew anything about The New Day, no one was available to speak to me, until finally Grimm contacted me. You met him?”

Lydia nodded.

“Grimm wanted The New Day but couldn’t pursue them for political reasons… or that’s what he told me. The deal was: I infiltrated, got all the info I needed to do a ripping exposé and gave him the juice he needed to bust them. In exchange, I kept in contact with him and if I didn’t report he was supposed to come in after me.”

“How did you keep in contact?”

“However I could. I wasn’t a prisoner, ostensibly. I could come and go as I pleased. I called a couple times from my own cell phone, from pay phones at coffee shops. Emailed from an Internet café. I just didn’t count on the drugs and then the cleansing.” She gave a visible shudder and then drank from the water bottle. The very act of talking seemed to drain her.

“I went to a Monday night meeting and I stayed. It was only a matter of days before I turned my money over to them. I figured I should go along with it, just to be convincing. Eventually, keeping in touch with Grimm started to seem like a smaller and smaller priority. By the time they started pushing the ‘cleansing’ on me, it seemed like a promotion, some kind of honor.”

She paused here and looked at the floor. Then out the window into the blackness. They all stayed silent, waiting for her to go on.

“It was Halloween night. I was supposed to begin my cleansing the next day. They claim to wash you of all the negative thoughts and energies and messages that you accumulate throughout your life. When you’re done, you’re this new creature filled with light and positive thoughts, free of pain and addictions, able to go on to achieve everything the Universe intended for you. I was so happy, nearly euphoric. I just had the slightest memory, the tiniest nagging thought that maybe this wasn’t the right thing, that it wasn’t why I’d come.

“Then the weirdest thing happened. A car drove past on the road that ran outside my dorm room. The windows were open and the radio blaring. It was a song from the eighties, ‘Shout’ by Tears for Fears. And all of a sudden I was a kid again, walking through the hallways of my high school, the speckled linoleum floors and olive green lockers, the fluorescent lights, the smell from the chemistry lab, and that song playing on a tiny pink Sanyo boom box.”

For a second, she seemed like the Lily Lydia remembered, animated, excited. Some of the color came back to her cheeks and she started to use her hands to express herself.

“And just like that, my life started to leak back, my job, my parents, my apartment. I realized that I was about twelve hours away from losing myself completely, becoming one of the zombies I’d seen hanging out in the common room.”

“So you ran,” said Lydia.

“Yes, I ran. I ran for my life. But they caught me.”

She slumped in her chair.

“They shot me… not with bullets but with those hard rubber pellets riot police use to subdue crowds. It felt like bullets. I thought they’d killed me; I tasted my own blood. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, they had strapped me down, they forced a feeding tube down my throat, played these audio visual messages about shedding the old self, my new day dawning, shifting off the negative messages of a sick society and smothering family. But I don’t remember much of it.” She stopped and smiled here.

“I just kept hearing that song in my head. ‘Shout, shout, let it all out.’ You know it?”

Lydia nodded.

“I don’t know why, but that song saved me. When I heard it in my head I just remembered who I was and where my life was. And I knew that no one could take my power; only I could give it away.”

The tears fell again. She took a tissue from the box and wiped them dry, blew her nose.

“I’m not sure how much time passed but as soon as they removed the tube, I started acting like my New Day had dawned. I just did whatever they wanted, looked vacant and euphoric. But I started pouring out the tea they gave me; I realized whatever is in that just makes you really mellow and susceptible. And all this time I’ve been listening, observing, taking notes.

“I figured Grimm would come for me at some point but then after a couple of weeks I started to get worried. Maybe he couldn’t come in after me; I knew he wasn’t supposed to be dealing with me at all. I started figuring out how I could get away.

“Then there was some emergency in Riverdale. I thought, finally, it was the FBI coming but they moved us down here… just a few of us. They left some people behind; the ones that didn’t have any more money I think, those whose families had cut them off, who couldn’t be extorted.”

“So that’s the agenda?” said Jeffrey. “To draw people with problems into The New Day, take all their money, then extort more funds from the families?”

She nodded. “I mean, you tell Rhames everything. Between the way he is, his personal power and the drugs, he becomes like your confessor, your lover, the only true friend you ever had. You bare your soul and all your pain to him. And he heals you. Or anyway that’s the way it feels in that controlled environment with the drugs and the audio visual messages they play.”

There was something pleading to her tone. She wanted them to understand, and Lydia did.

“But you have to be in pain first, right? In order to be healed by him?”

Lily looked at her with wide, sad eyes. She nodded.

“And that’s what you didn’t count on. That your grief over the loss of your brother fractured you, that you were in terrible pain and seeking revenge. It made you vulnerable.”

“That’s right. And I think I had a sense of it before I went in that night. I’d read Mickey’s journals and contacted the FBI. But I felt so overwhelmed, suddenly, unsure if I was doing the right thing. That’s why I called you.”

“I’m sorry, Lily,” said Lydia, moving to sit beside her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

She held Lily for a minute and then released her.

“No,” Lily said, shaking her head. “You couldn’t have known. Besides, if I hadn’t made that call, I might still be in there. Did it lead the police to you?”

Lydia nodded. “And then we came looking for you.”

Lily smiled a real smile for the first time. “Thank you.”

After a moment, the smile faded and worry clouded her features.

“I need to get in touch with my parents. They need to know I’m okay. And they need to be warned. They’ll come after me. And they’ll do that by trying to get to my parents.”

Lydia looked down and took Lily’s hands. “Your mom is staying at your apartment in New York. We can send someone to look out for her.”

Lily nodded. “They’re having problems again,” she said, as if she suspected it was inevitable. “Where’s my stepdad? At the house?”

“I’m so sorry, Lily,” Lydia said. She hadn’t wanted to tell Lily about Tim Samuels, but she didn’t want to lie either. Lily deserved better than that.

“What?” said Lily, her eyes widening.

“He’s dead,” she said simply. There was no better choice of words.

Lily jerked as if Lydia had slapped her. And Lydia instantly regretted her decision to tell the truth. Lily wasn’t strong enough to handle the news. Lydia reached for the younger woman.

“What?” she breathed into Lydia’s ear. “How?”

Lydia shook her head, searching for what to say. Lily drew away from Lydia and looked her in the face. There was something hard and angry in her expression, a look Lydia had never seen on her. It turned her prettiness to granite. The girl was gone. In her place was a woman made hard by bitter experiences and crippling grief.

“It was suicide.”

“Suicide?” she said, incredulous.

Lydia nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, Lily. Yes.”

All the air seemed to suck out of the room as they waited for her to crumble beneath the weight of this new grief they’d delivered. But she didn’t crumble. Her face went blank and her lids lowered in rage.

“That bastard,” she hissed. “That coward.”

She stood suddenly, then lost her legs and fell into a pile of skin and bones on the filthy carpet. Lydia knelt beside her. Lily put her head in her hands and started to sob, terrible wracking sobs that connected painfully to the grief in Lydia’s own heart. Lydia pushed back tears, rested a hand on Lily’s shoulder. She hadn’t expected anger like that from Lily; it surprised her.

“He did this to us, to all of us,” she managed, between sobs. “And then he just bails? How could he?”

She leaned into Lydia and started to wail. Lydia looked up at Jeffrey who was leaning into them, his hand on Lydia’s shoulder. Agent Hunt stood back from the scene, looking uncomfortable and useless. On Jeffrey’s face she saw concern but she saw something else, too. Suspicion.

The high beams of the van were blinding her in the rearview mirror and the roar of its engine told her that it was souped up. Her Explorer was all bark and no bite, its engine no match for whatever was humming beneath the hood of the white van. The van rammed her hard from behind and she jerked hard from the impact. She’d managed to get her seat belt on before she started driving and she was glad for it when it locked and held her tightly in place, though she felt the sting of the friction burn on the side of her neck. She pressed her foot to the gas and the Explorer and the headlights dropped behind her but kept following fast.

“Matt,” she called. “Matt, please.” But there was no answer from behind her and she felt panic rise up in her throat. Her heart was thumping hard and her arms and hands were tingling with adrenaline. A few cars flew past her on the other end of the highway in the opposite direction. Her Glock lay between her thighs. The van came up fast and rammed her again; this time so hard she involuntarily let go of the wheel for a moment and the car veered toward the shoulder. She caught the wheel and held the vehicle steady. The van was bigger and had a lower center of gravity; the driver was trying to get her to flip. Then when they were stunned or trapped in the vehicle, he’d walk up and kill them both. She could just barely see him in her rearview mirror, a large, dark, hairless form at the wheel. Terrified tears threatened then, but she held them back.

“No way,” she said out loud, gripping the wheel hard. “No fucking way this guy’s going to get us.”

But there was only silence in the back of the Explorer.

“Please, God,” she said, as she saw the van come at her again fast for another try. She sped up and veered into the right-hand lane. The exit she needed was less than a mile away; if she could get to it, she figured he wouldn’t follow her onto the streets. At nearly four A.M., the BQE was practically empty, with just a smattering of cars making their way through the dark morning. She hoped one of them had a cell phone and might call the police to report the van ramming her, two drivers racing out of control. Her own phone was out of reach in her bag on the floor, and she didn’t dare take her eyes off the road.

He rammed her again, this time harder, and she lost control of the Explorer for a second, felt the left side of the car leave the ground. She caught the wheel and righted herself. Something in the engine was straining hard.

“Jez,” said Mount from the back. “Slow down. Let him approach the vehicle and then blow his head off.”

She practically wept with relief to hear his voice. “Slow down? Are you crazy?”

“We can’t outrun him.”

“We can make it to the hospital. Just one more exit. Once we’re on the streets, he’ll pull away. He’s not going to follow us into a populated area where there’ll be good witnesses.”

“Just pull over. He’ll never expect you to do that.”

The van had dropped behind but was picking up speed again for another hit. Harder. It went against all her instincts screaming to drive as hard and as fast as she could. But she knew in her heart that Matt was right. They couldn’t outrun the van. They had a better chance if they stood and fought.

She let the vehicle slow and pulled onto the shoulder as if she was in distress. She reached quickly for her bag and dialed 911.

“This is Detective Jesamyn Breslow with the Ninth Precinct,” she said, watching the white van pull over a hundred yards behind her and sit idle. “Officers in trouble. We need backup on the Eastbound BQE, just before exit 121. Assailant in white van, armed.”

The dispatcher was saying something, but Jesamyn let the phone drop on the seat beside her. She turned around and used the back of her seat as a barricade, holding her gun over its edge. She looked down at Matt, who had his hand on his chest; his paper-white face seemed to float in the darkness.

“As soon as he starts to move on us, unload your weapon into him. Don’t wait for him to fire first. They want us dead.”

The door to the white van opened and a man identical in dress and hairstyle to the guy whose ass she’d kicked early, stepped out onto the road. An eighteen-wheeler whipped past them, horn blaring. Jesamyn felt the Explorer rock in its wake.

When he stepped into view, her heart did a flip from her chest to her stomach. He was taller than the other man, broader through the shoulders. She couldn’t make out his face very well in the dark but she could see clearly that he had some kind of huge gun in his right hand. She couldn’t tell what it was… a shotgun or an assault rifle; something big and nasty.

She breathed hard against the dread that was growing in her.

“Stay calm, make sure he’s in range, and then just let it rip,” Matt said weakly.

In the way far distance she heard the sound of sirens. They were far, maybe five or six minutes away. They won’t get here in time, she thought, as the monster lifted the gun and started moving toward them slowly.

“Stay down,” she yelled to Mount. She opened fire through her rear windshield and the air around them came alive with sound and light and a blizzard of glass.

Twenty-Seven

The Gulf slapped lazily against the white sand and a sliver of moon hung over palm tress that stood perfectly still in the windless night. Lydia lifted the beer to her lips. It wasn’t as cold as it needed to be and there was no lime but it still tasted okay. Jeffrey grimaced as he drank it.

“It’s warm,” he complained.

“It’s something.”

Lily was finally sleeping in one of the queen beds and Lydia and Jeffrey sat outside on the cinderblock patio in white plastic chairs drinking Coronas. Agent Hunt had left to return to the scene, leaving behind two agents to ensure they made good on their promise to stick around. Lily had had a tearful conversation with her mother on the phone and then collapsed into bed after Jeffrey called Striker, asking him to send someone to protect Lily’s mother and to send a lawyer down to Florida. Chances were the ATF would just let them go at a certain point, as long as things went their way. But you never could tell when federal agencies would be looking for a scapegoat; Lydia was glad Jeffrey took the precaution of getting a lawyer.

“What about Dax?” she asked.

“He’ll be fine,” Jeffrey said, turning to look at her.

“How did he know where we were?”

“Lydia,” he said. “Over the years I’ve learned that, with Dax, the fewer questions you ask the better.”

She frowned at him. “What kind of answer is that?”

“He saved our asses, right? He got us out of there. What more do you need to know?”

She looked at him, incredulous. “You’re kidding, right?”

He didn’t say anything, took a drink of his Corona and avoided her eyes.

Then, “It’s none of our business.”

She was quiet for a second. “So that’s what he does? He works for one of those Privatized Military Companies? So was he working for them tonight or was he working with us?”

Dax had never really answered her and now Jeffrey was being equally tight-lipped. She got the idea that he knew more than he was telling her and the thought made her crazy.

“So we’re going to start keeping things from each other now?” she asked.

Jeffrey turned his eyes on her.

“No, Lydia,” he said, softly. He reached for her hand. “I know as much about what he does as you do. But I know Dax. I trust him. I trust his friendship. And I figure if he needs to hold certain things back from us, then maybe it’s for our safety or for his. That’s okay with me.”

Her heart fluttered a little as a dark form emerged beside Jeffrey, stepping around from the side of the building. She stood quickly and then saw that it was Dax as he stepped into the light.

“But it’s not okay with you, is it, Lydia?” he said quietly, holding her eyes.

She sat back down and looked away from him. She was glad to see him, glad they’d let him go, but there was something between them now that prevented her from being entirely comfortable with him in the way she’d always been.

Jeffrey handed Dax a beer. He pulled up one of the plastic chairs and straddled it like he was mounting a horse. He popped the lid with his hand even though it required a bottle opener.

“We got what we came for, right? What are we still doing here?” he said.

“Waiting for you, for one,” said Jeffrey. “And we told the ATF we’d stick around for a while.”

“Fuck the ATF,” said Dax, taking a long swig of his beer and drinking nearly a third of it down. “Let’s get that girl home where she belongs. It’s done, right?”

Lydia looked at him. It was done. They’d come looking for Lily and they’d found her. She told them what had happened to her and now she was safe. The ATF and supposedly the FBI got what they wanted, the scene that allowed them to go into The New Day and the publicity that would follow would take care of the rest of the organization. This cult that had been stealing people’s will and all their money was finished… or at least mortally wounded. But it didn’t feel finished, not to Lydia. There were giant holes, myriad unanswered questions. She could sense them, even if she couldn’t exactly verbalize what was bothering her.

“Dax, how did you find us? How did you get us out of there?”

“Someone wanted us out of the way,” said Jeffrey. “Hence the fall down the hole and waking up in a cell.”

“Same thing happened to me. Only when I woke up, the door was open and I was still armed.”

“So what happened?” said Jeffrey, leaning forward in his chair.

“I left the cell and went looking for the caves Grimm mentioned. I found them, saw the weapons stored there. I mean, we’re talking like an arsenal that would make the U.S. Army proud. Unreal.

“I heard an explosion then, some gunfire. I came to the surface and the Feds were running all over the place, buildings were burning. I figured that there had been some kind of screw-up and I was out of luck. I came to get the two of you.”

Lydia shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. I thought the whole point was that the FBI couldn’t go in after Rhames. That’s why they secretly supported Lily; that’s why they came to see us. Why was the ATF able to go in? Why didn’t Grimm just piggyback on their investigation? According to Hunt, they had the compound under surveillance in preparation for the raid.”

“Maybe Grimm didn’t know. Government agencies are notorious for not communicating with each other,” said Dax, reaching for the last Corona from the six-pack by Jeffrey’s feet.

“Right,” said Jeff slowly. “But it makes more sense if Grimm doesn’t actually work for the FBI, that he works for someone else with their own agenda for getting to Rhames.”

Lydia thought about it for a second, looked at Dax.

“So we got duped?” she said.

“We were going in anyway,” answered Jeffrey.

“What difference does it make?” asked Dax. “We got your girl. We’re all alive and kicking. Let’s go.”

“I still don’t understand how you found us and how you got us out.”

“Not your problem. Just be glad I did.”

Not my problem, thought Lydia. She looked at Dax but his face was blank. She took another sip of her warm beer and wondered if she’d ever know the whole story behind what happened to them tonight-or if she was going to have to add that to the list of unanswered questions in her life. She glanced behind her at the sleeping form on the hotel-room bed. Lily was the whole reason they’d come and she was safe now. It was over.

Twenty-Eight

She fired blind through the blizzard of glass and missed the guy completely. He kept coming. A shot fired from his weapon whipped past her so close and so fast that she thought it drew blood without touching her, blowing a cannon-sized hole in the windshield, then in the seat beside her. She looked down at Matt; he was pale and out cold but she could see his shallow breathing. But her mind was clear; panic had left her. As their assailant ratcheted the gun, bringing more ammunition to the chamber, she scrambled from the car and went around the hood. Inside the vehicle, she knew, she was a sitting duck. From outside, she could protect them both better.

“Put your gun on the ground and your hands in the air,” she yelled ridiculously. “I’m a police officer and the sirens you hear are coming this way.”

He answered her by putting another round into the car. The Explorer jerked with the impact and she held on tight to her Glock. She’d fired four rounds already, which meant she had thirteen left. She lay on the ground and saw his feet beside the Explorer, right beside the back driver’s side where Mount lay wounded and helpless.

Then, “Stand where I can see you and I won’t kill your partner,” he said, his voice calm, hard and rough as the engine of a semi. “I’m standing over him with the barrel of my gun to his head.”

Every nerve ending in her body felt like it had been electrified and all she could hear was the sound of her heart hammering in her ears.

“Okay,” she said, her breathing so labored she was having trouble speaking. She fought to keep the fear out of her voice. “Put your gun on the ground and I’ll move where you can see me.”

“Yeah,” he said with a laugh. “That’s gonna happen.”

She heard him ratchet the gun again as she moved onto her belly and held her Glock in front of her. She heard the sirens growing louder; they were still too far to help her. She was on her own. She fired at his ankles, a nearly impossible shot. But he had a big ankle and she had good aim and the night filled with the sound of him screaming, high pitched and girlish, frantic with agony. She fired again, clipping his other leg for good measure. She heard the gun go off as he fell and then landed on the concrete. She was on her feet before he hit the dirt and then she heard the sirens louder and closer. She felt something like relief pulse through her.

“Mount,” she yelled as she came around behind him, her gun trained in front of her. The guy didn’t look as big or as tough lying on the ground writhing in pain. She held the Glock in his direction as she came around his side and kicked his gun away. It slid across the gravel of the shoulder, out of his reach.

She made a mistake then. She looked away from the road and from the man lying there and into the window where Mount lay very still, too still. She yelled his name again and reached a hand in to feel his pulse.

She never even saw the other van come up from the other direction until shots fractured the night with sound and light. She felt an impossible impact and then a terrible burning in her shoulder, her leg, her arm. She opened fire with her own gun, putting holes in the side of the van. The man on the road reached for his gun and she put a round in his chest. He fell flat and motionless, eyes staring.

Then she was falling. The van was speeding off and the sirens were loud; she could see their red and blue glow. Before the van was out of sight, she saw a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair at the wheel. And beside her was a young man. It was a face she recognized but could not place. Then there was black.