Trace

12

Lucy doesn't sleep in the third-floor master suite anymore but locks herself into a much smaller bedroom downstairs. She tells herself she has sound investigative reasons for not sleeping in that bed, the one Henri was attacked in, that huge bed with the hand-painted headboard in the center of a palatial suite that overlooks the water. Evidence, she thinks. No matter how fastidious she and Rudy are, it is always possible that evidence was missed.

Rudy has driven off in her Modena to gas it up, or at least this was his excuse when he plucked the keys off the kitchen counter. He has another agenda, Lucy suspects. He is cruising. He wants to see who follows him, assuming anybody does, and probably nobody in his right mind would follow someone as big and strong as Rudy, but the beast who drew the eye, two eyes now, is out there. He is watching. He watches the house. He might not realize Henri is gone, so he continues to watch the house and the Ferraris. He might be watching the house right now.

Lucy walks across tawny carpet, past the bed. It is still unmade, the soft, expensive covers pulled over the foot of the mattress and spilled onto the floor in a silk waterfall. Pillows are shoved to one side, exactly where they were when Lucy ran up the flights of stone steps and found Henri unconscious on the bed. At first Lucy thought she was dead. Then she didn't know what to think. She still doesn't know what to think. But at the time she was frightened enough to call 911, and what a mess that has caused. They had to deal with the local police, and the last thing Lucy ever wants is the police involved in her secret lives and activities, many of them illegal means to just ends, and of course, Rudy is still furious.

He accuses Lucv of panicking, and she did. She should never have called 911, and he's right. They could have handled the situation themselves and should have. Henri isn't Suzy-Q citizen, Rudy said. Henri is one of their agents. It didn't matter if she was out cold and naked. She was breathing, wasn't she? Her pulse and blood pressure weren't dangerously fast or low, were they? She wasn't bleeding, was she? Just a little bit of a bloody nose, right? It wasn't until Lucy flew Henri on a private jet to Aspen that Benton offered an explanation that unfortunately makes sense. Henri was attacked and may have been unconscious briefly, but after that she was faking.

"No way," Lucy argued with Benton when he told her that. "She was completely unresponsive."

"She's an actor," he said.

"Not anymore."

"Come on, Lucy. She was a professional actor half her life before she decided to change careers. Maybe becoming a cop was simply another acting role for her. It may be that she can't do anything but act."

"But why would she do something like that? I kept touching her, talking to her, trying to make her wake up, why would she do it? Why?"

"Shame and rage, who knows why, exactly?" he said. "She may not remember what happened, may have repressed it, but she has feelings about it. Maybe she was ashamed because she didn't protect herself. Maybe she wants to punish you."

"Punish me for what? I didn't do anything. What? She's practically been murdered and it occurs to her, oh, I'll punish Lucy while I'm at it?"

"You'd be surprised what people do."

"No way," Lucy told Benton, and the more adamant she was, the more he probably knew he was right.

She walks across the bedroom to a wall of eight windows that are so high it isn't necessary to cover the top half of them with shades. The shades are drawn over the lower half of the windows, and she presses a button on the wall and the shades electronically retract with n soft whir. She stares out at the sunny day, scanning her property to see if anything is different. She and Rudy were in Miami until very early this morning. She hasn't been back to her home in three days, and the beast had plenty of time to wander and spy. He came back looking for Henri. He walked right across the patio to the back door and taped his drawing on it to remind Henri, to taunt her, and no one called the police. People are vile in this neighborhood, Lucy thinks. They don't care if you're beaten to death or burglarized as long as you don't do anything that might make life unpleasant for the rest of them.

She gazes at the lighthouse on the other side of the inlet and wonders whether she should dare go next door. The woman who lives next door never leaves her house. Lucy doesn't know her name, only that she is nosy and takes photographs through the glass whenever the yard man trims the hedges or cuts the grass in back by the pool. Lucy supposes the neighbor wants proof should Lucy allow anything done to the yard that might alter the nosy neighbor's view or somehow cause her emotional distress. Of course, had Lucy been allowed to top off her three-foot walls with another two feet of wrought iron, the beast might not have had such an easy time getting onto her patio and into her house and up to the bedroom where Henri was sick with the flu. But the nosy neighbor fought the variance and won, and Henri was almost murdered, and now Lucy finds a drawing of an eye that is like the eye scratched on the hood of her car.

Three stories down, the pool disappears over its edge, and beyond is the deep blue water of the Intracoastal Waterway, then a spit of beach and the dark blue-green ruffled water of the ocean. Maybe he came by boat, she thinks. He could tie up at her seawall and climb up the ladder and there he would be, right on her patio. Somehow she doesn't think he arrived by boat or even has a boat. She doesn't know why she thinks that. Lucy turns around and walks closer to the bed. To the left of it in the top drawer of a table is Henri's Colt.357 Magnum revolver, a lovely stainless steel gun that Lucy bought for her because it is a piece of art with the sweetest action on earth. Henri knows how to use a gun, and she isn't a coward. Lucy believes without a doubt that had Henri heard the beast inside the house, flu or not, she would have shot him dead.

She pushes the button on the wall and closes the shades. She turns off the lights and walks out of the bedroom. Just off it is a small gym, then two master closets and a huge bathroom with a Jacuzzi built into agate the color of tiger eye. There has been no reason at all to suspect that Henri's attacker entered the gym, closets, or bathroom, and each time Lucy has walked into them, she stands still to see what she feels. Each time, she feels nothing inside the gym and closets, but she feels something inside the bathroom. She looks at the tub and the windows behind it that!

open onto the water and the Florida sky, and she sees through his eyes. She doesn't know why, but when she looks at that huge, deep tub built into agate, she feels that he looked at it, too.

Then something occurs to her and she backs up to the archway that leads into the bathroom. Maybe when he came up the stone steps to the master floor, he turned left instead of right and ended up in the bathroom instead of the bedroom. That morning it was sunny, and light would have filled the windows. He could see. He might have hesitated and looked at the tub before turning around and heading silently into the bedroom, where Henri was clammy and miserable with a high fever, the blinds down and the room dark so she could sleep.

So you came into my bathroom, Lucy says to the beast. You stood right here on the marble floor and looked at my tub. Maybe you never saw a tub like that. Maybe you wanted to imagine a woman naked in it, relaxing, minding her own business before you murdered her. If that's your fantasy, she says to him, then you're not very original. She walks out of the bathroom and back down the steps to the second floor, where she sleeps and has her office.

Past the cozy movie theater is a large 'guest bedroom that she has converted into a library with built-in bookcases, the windows covered by black-out shades. Even on the sunniest day, this room is dark enough to devlon film. She turns on a li^hr, and hundreds of reference books and loose-leaf binders and a long table bearing laboratory equipment materialize. Against one wall is a desk that is centered by a Krimesite Imager that looks like a stubby telescope mounted on a tripod stand. Next to it is a sealed plastic evidence bag, and inside is the drawing of the eye.

Lucy plucks examination gloves out of a box on the table. Her best hope for fingerprints is the Scotch tape, but she'll save that for testing later because it involves chemicals that will alter the paper and the tape. After brushing Magnadust over her entire back door and the windows nearest it, she lifted not a single print with ridge detail, not one, just smudges. Had she found a print, chances are it would be the yard man's, Rudy's, hers, or that of whoever washed the glass last, so there isn't much point in feeling discouraged. Prints outside a house don't mean much, anyway. What matters is what she finds on the drawing. Gloves on, Lucy unsnaps the clasps of a hard black briefcase lined with foam rubber and gently lifts out the SKSUV30 Puissant Lamp. She carries it to the desk and plugs it into a surge protector power strip. Pressing the rocker switch, she turns on the high-intensity short-wave ultraviolet light, and then turns on the Krimesite Imager.

Opening the plastic bag, she grips the sheet of white paper by a corner and pulls it out. She turns it over, and the eye drawn in pencil stares at her as she holds it up to the overhead light. The white paper lights up and there is no watermark, just millions of cheap paper pulp fibers. The pencil-drawn eye dims as she lowers it, placing the sheet of paper in the center of the desk. When the beast taped the drawing to her door, he attached the tape to the back of it so the eye would be staring through the glass, into her house. She puts on a pair of orange-tinted protective goggles and centers the drawing under the Imager's military-grade ocular lens, and peers into the eyepiece, opening the UV aperture all the way while slowly rotating the focus barrel and focus ring until the honeycomb viewing screen is visible. With her left hand, she directs the UV light at her target, adjusting it to just the right angle, and begins moving the sheet or paper, scanning ror prints, hoping the scope will pick them up so she doesn't have to resort to destructive chemicals such as ninhydrin or cyano acrylate. In the UV light, the paper is a ghostly greenish-white beneath the lens.

With her fingertip, she moves the paper until the piece of Scotch tape is in the field of view. Nothing, she thinks. Not even a smudge. She could try rosaniline chloride or crystal violet, but now is not the time for that. Maybe later. Sitting down at the desk, she stares at the drawing of the eye. That's all it is, just an eye, the pencil outline of an eye, iris and pupil, fringed in long lashes. A woman's eye, she thinks, drawn with what looks like a number-two pencil. Mounting a digital camera to a coupler, she takes photographs of magnified areas of the drawing, then makes photocopies.

She hears the garage door go up and turns off the UV lamp and the scope and places the drawing back inside the plastic bag. A video screen on the desk shows Rudy backing the Ferrari into the garage. Lucy tries to decide what to do about him as she shuts the library door and quickly skips down the stone steps. She imagines him walking out the door and never coming back and has no idea what would become of her and the secret empire she has created. First there would be the blow, then numbness, then pain, and then she would get over it. This is what she tells herself when she opens the door off the kitchen and he is there, holding up her car keys as if he is holding up a dead mouse by the tail.

"I guess we should go ahead and call die police," she says, taking the keys from him. "Since technically this is an emergency."

"I guess you didn't find prints or anything else important," Rudy says.

"Not with the scope. I'll do the chemicals if the police don't take the drawing. I'd rather they didn't take it. Actually, we won't let them take it. But we should call. See anybody while you were out?" She walks across the kitchen and picks up the phone. "Anybody besides all the women who ran off the road when they saw you coming?" She looks at the key pad and enters 9-1-1.

"No prints so far, Rudy says. "Well, it ain't over til it's over. What about indented writing?"

She shakes her head and says, "I want to report a prowler."

"Is the person on the property now, ma'am?" the operator asks in her calm, capable voice.

"Doesn't appear to be," Lucy said. "But I think this might be related to a B-and-E your department already knows about."

The operator verifies the address and asks the complainant's name because the name of the resident showing up on her video screen is whatever limited liability corporate name Lucy happened to have selected for this particular property. She can't remember what it is. She owns a number of properties and all of them are in different LLC names.

"My name's Tina Franks." Lucy uses the same alias she used last time she called the police, the morning Henri was attacked and Lucy panicked and made the mistake of dialing 911. She tells the operator her address, or more specifically, Tina Franks's address.

"Ma'am, I'm dispatching a unit to your home right now," the operator says.

Good. You happen to know if CSI John Dalessio is on duty?" Lucy talks to the operator easily and with no fear. "He might want to know about this. He responded to my house the other time, so he's familiar." She picks out two apples from a bowl of fruit in the kitchen's center island.

Rudy rolls his eyes and indicates that he can get hold of CSI Dalessio a lot more quickly than the 911 operator can. Lucy smiles at the joke and shines an apple on her jeans and tosses it to him. She buffs the other apple and bites into it as if she's on the phone with a take-out restaurant or the dry cleaner or Home Depot and not the Broward County Sheriff's Department.

"Do you know which detective worked your breaking and entering, originally?" the 911 operator asks. "Normally, we don't contact the crime scene investigator, just the detective."

"All I know is I dealt with CSI Dalessio," Lucy replies. "The don't think a detective ever came to the house, just to the hospital, I guess. When my house guest went to the hospital."

"He's marked off, ma'am, but I can get him a message," the 911 operator says, and she sounds a bit uncertain, and she should be uncertain since CSI John Dalessio is someone the operator has never talked to or ever met or heard on the air. In Lucy's world, a CSI is a Cyber Space Investigator who exists only in whatever computer Lucy or those who work for her hacked into, which in this case is the Broward County Sheriff's Department computer.

"I've got his card. I'll call him. Thanks for your help," Lucy says, disconnecting the line.

She and Rudy stand in the kitchen, eating their apples, looking at each other.

"Kind of a funny thing when you think about it," she says, hoping Rudy will start seeing the situation with the local cops as funny. "We call the police as a formality. Or worse, because it entertains us."

He shrugs his muscular shoulders, crunching into the apple and wiping juice off his mouth with the back of a hand. "Always good to include the local cops. In a limited way, of course. You never know when we might need them for something." Now he's turning the local cops into a game, his favorite game. "You asked for Dalessio, so it's on record. Not our fault he's hard to track down. They'll spend the rest of their careers trying to figure out who the hell Dalessio is and did he quit or get fired or what? Did anyone ever meet him? He'll become a legend, give them something to talk about."

"Him and Tina Franks," Lucy says, chewing a piece of apple.

"Fact is," he replies, "you'd have a hell of a lot harder time proving you're Lucy Farinelli than Tina Franks or whoever else you decide to be on any given day. We've got birth certificates and all the other paper shit for our fake IDs. Hell, I can't tell you where my real birth certificate is."

"I'm not sure I know who I am anymore," she says, handing him a paper towel.

"Me, either." He takes another big bite out of the apple.

"I'm not sure I know who you are, now that you mention it. So you'll answer the door when the cop shows up and have him call CSI Dalessio to pick up the drawing."

"That's the plan." Rudy smiles. "Worked like a charm last time."

Lucy and Rudy keep jump-out bags and crime scene kits at strategic locations, such as residences and vehicles, and it is amazing what they manage to get away with by virtue of ankle-high black leather boots, black polo shirts, black cargo pants, dark windbreakers with forensics on the back in bold yellow letters, the usual camera and other basic equipment, and most important of all, body language and attitude. The simple plan is usually the best one, and after Lucy found Henri and panicked and called 911 for an ambulance, she called Rudy. He changed his clothes and simply walked in her front door after the police had been there a few minutes, and he said he was new with the crime scene unit and the officers didn't have to hang around while he processed the house, and that was fine with them, because to hang around with the crime scene technicians amounts to babysitting in the eyes of cops.

Lucy, or Tina Franks, as she identified herself on that terrible day, offered her own lies to the police that morning. Henri, also given a false name, was a guest visiting from out of town, and while Lucy was in the shower, Henri, who was sleeping off a hangover, heard the intruder and fainted, and because she tends to get hysterical and hyperventilate and may very well have been attacked, Lucy called for an ambulance. No, Lucy never saw the intruder. No, nothing was taken as far as Lucy could tell. No, she doesn't think Henri was sexually assaulted but she ought to be checked at the hospital because that's what people do, right? That's what they do on all those cops shows on television, right?

"Wonder how long it will take them to figure out that CSI Dalessio never seems to show up anywhere except your house," Rudy says, amused. "Damn good thing their department's taken over most of Broward. It's as huge as Lexas and they don't know who the hell is corning or going."

Lucy looks at her watch, timing the marked unit that should be headed this way now. "Well, what matters is we included Mr. Dalessio so he doesn't get his feelings hurt."

Rudy laughs, his mood much improved. He can't stay irritable for long when the two of them swing into motion. "Okay. The po-lice will be here any minute. Maybe you should scram. I won't give the uniform guy the drawing. I'll give him Dalessio's number, tell him I'd be more comfortable talking to the CSI since I met him last week when you called about the B-and-E. So he'll get Dalessio's voice mail, and after he leaves, yours truly, the legendary Dalessio, will call him back and tell him I'll take care of things."

"Don't let the cops in my office."

"The door's locked, right?"

"Yes," she says. "If you're worried about your Dalessio cover being blown, call me. I'll come right back and deal with the cops myself."

"Going somewhere?" Rudy asks.

"I think it's time I introduce myself to my neighbor," Lucy says.