I also knew-though I did my best to sound calm-that there was a fever of urgency in my eyes, signs of incipient panic in my fidgeting hands. Somewhere, Jamal and his cronies had Serena. Only his feelings for her had kept them from killing her after they'd cut Diggs's throat. Would that be enough to stop them now? And what about the attack they were planning? It was already two in the morning-a minute or so after. It was Friday, the eve of Yom Kippur and Ramadan. This was the day Casey Diggs had predicted they would strike.
You know, you have this idea in your head-I had this idea in my head, anyway-that once you go to the police, the machinery of law enforcement kicks into high gear. I had this idea there would be fast action: terse questions and quick answers followed by even quicker action, phone calls, racing to crime scenes, arrests. In fact, what happened was exactly the opposite. It felt like that, anyway. Once the police arrived, it felt as if everything just stopped. It was a matter of perspective, I guess. With the police on the scene, my frantic efforts to rescue Serena screeched to a halt. The active role in the drama passed over to them. All I could do now was describe the events of the week and then… well, then nothing. There was essentially nothing else for me to do. I sat there with Fitzgerald. We talked sometimes. Sometimes he made a phone call. Sometimes he wandered off and chatted with other detectives. Sometimes he tapped at his computer. And all the while, I just sat there. The clock ticked on the wall.
"Shame about what happened to the guy," he said now.
"To…?"
"Piersall. Patrick Piersall."
"Oh."
"That scene down at City Hall the other day. Made a fine mess of himself over the years, it looks like. I guess a guy like that-he kind of has his moment in the sun. Then it's over and"-he made a drinking gesture, lifting and tilting his hand as if there were a glass in it-"I guess that's showbiz for you, huh."
I tried to smile as if I were not hysterical with anxiety. "Well, he's definitely a drunk, no question. That's why I didn't listen to him at first. But if they did murder this kid in the swamp…"
"Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I follow you," he said, playing with his pencil, observing me, seemingly unconcerned. "Makes sense. I'm just saying."
He lapsed into silence. I watched the pencil moving in his hand. My eyes went to the clock on the wall.
"We should hear something soon," Fitzgerald said at once. He was watching me, reading my thoughts. "We got our guys all over it. NYPD, too. They have the mother in now. They're talking to her. That should help."
I nodded, but the fact they were talking to Lauren didn't exactly inspire confidence in me. I could just imagine her shrugging off Serena's story, shrugging off her danger. I did much worse when I was her age.
The detective waggled the pencil at me thoughtfully. "Gimme this again, though-about why you didn't come to us before. Or NYPD or someone. After Serena tells you about the Diggs kid in the swamp, you just…"
He let that hang there, waiting for me to fill in the rest. I rubbed my eyes wearily. "I was bringing her to them-to the NYPD. I was bringing her back to her mother's house and then we were going to go to the police. That was the whole idea. Then when she jumped out of the car like that and ran away with these guys, I guess I thought-"
"You're talking about the same young gentlemen she went off with tonight."
"Only she didn't go off with them tonight. Tonight they came after her."
"Right, right, I mean, the ones that came after her. These are the same ones she went off with before."
"Yeah."
"Okay," he said. "So I'm just trying to picture this. You were bringing her to the police and then she ran off with these clowns in the Cadillac and so you figured the whole thing was just a cock-and-bull story. About the kid and the swamp and so forth."
"Right. I figured: If they'd really killed him, why would she run off with them like that? It didn't make sense. That's why I didn't come to the police myself."
"And if they did kill him, going to the police might put her in danger-there's that to consider."
"Right."
"Then you just happened to see Piersall's show about the Diggs kid on TV," said Fitzgerald. "Just total coincidence."
"Exactly."
"So you knew there might be something to it now. To Serena's story."
"Well…"
"But you still didn't call the police."
"The whole thing just seemed too crazy, I just-"
At this point, the phone on his desk rang. Fitzgerald tipped his hand at it as if to say, See? Here we go. Everything is being taken care of. My heart seized on this in hope: Maybe they had found her. Even if they hadn't, I was glad of the interruption, glad of the chance to stop babbling, trying to explain myself.
"Fitzgerald," the detective said into the phone. He listened. "Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely." He listened and frowned judiciously at me and held up a finger as if to say, Wait. This is it. All things are being made clear. But I couldn't shake the feeling that he had passed his rigid papal judgment on me and I had been found sadly lacking. I couldn't shake the feeling that his friendly, helpful demeanor was just a ploy to string me along until he could get at the truth-some other truth, I mean, besides the one I was telling him.
He hung up the phone. "Well, there we go," he said. That was all he said.
"Is there anything…?"
"Yeah, they're all over it. It's covered. The mother's given them some good leads, and they're following up on your story too so it's
… it looks like it's pretty much gonna be in their bailiwick now." Your story, I thought faintly. They're following up on your story. I forced this inner voice into silence almost before I heard it. "Whoever these gentlemen were she went off with, it's pretty sure they're based in the city," Fitzgerald went on. These gentlemen she went off with. "Thing for you to do at this point is for one of my people to take you home so you can get some rest. NYPD'll probably want to talk to you in the morning."
"In the morning?" This is what I mean: Everything inside me screamed to take up the hunt at full throttle. The bad guys had Serena. She was in danger. They were getting away. If the police needed to talk to me in the city, shouldn't I get on the phone with them? Shouldn't the Long Island cops be racing me to Manhattan in a screaming squad car? The idea of going home, of just sitting there…"Maybe I should just go into town tonight-" I began.
"Ah, no, no, no. You'd just be sitting there like you're sitting here. There's nothing else you can do tonight. They've got enough to go on. And you need your rest, too, I mean, look at you. With luck, you'll wake up and it'll all be over."
Fitzgerald was already rising to his feet to show me out.
A uniformed officer drove me back to my mother's house. I suppose I had some idea that a crime scene unit would still be there, searching for clues, dusting for fingerprints and so on. But if they'd ever done any of that, they were finished now. They were gone. They'd recovered the gun, of course. One guy had fished it out from under the oven, dumped it into a plastic bag, and carried it away. Another guy had taken some photographs of the place. Other than that, there was no evidence they'd examined or dusted or probed much of anything. The kitchen looked exactly as it had when I left.
I stood still in the silence of the room. In every corner, on every piece of furniture, on the appliances, on the floor, there seemed to be an imprint of the battle I'd fought for my life and for Serena not two hours before. Whenever I turned my gaze on something, the image would flash into view: Serena struggling by the sink; Jamal gagging and rasping orders from the table in the breakfast nook; the thug reaching under the oven for the gun like a kid who'd lost a marble; me on the floor. It was as if those sixty seconds of fear and violence had burned themselves into the fabric of the place.