“Big improvement,” said Dax. “Wow. What did she do anyway? Why are you so interested in her?”
They told him about Lily and Mickey Samuels, about Mariah, a.k.a. Michele LaForge. Dax glanced at the photograph of Mickey and Mariah.
“You can’t trust a woman who looks that good,” said Dax with a shake of his head, handing the picture back to Lydia.
“That is insulting on so many levels, I can’t even begin to address them,” she said, snapping the photo from his hand.
“What?” he said, pulling wide innocent eyes. “Why?”
“Well, what are you saying?” she asked, leaning toward him on the counter. “That I’m ugly or that I’m not trustworthy?”
He smiled at her in the obnoxious way he had when he was baiting her. “Why do you have to take everything so personally?”
She rolled her eyes and moved over toward Jeffrey, looked over his shoulder at the screen.
“Anyway,” said Dax, “my point is: did she have anything to gain from Mickey’s death or Lily’s disappearance?”
Lydia shrugged. “She’d only been dating Mickey for a short time, so I doubt he wrote her into his will. It’s my sense that she and Lily didn’t get along but I don’t see where she’d have anything to gain by Lily disappearing.”
Jeffrey was looking at her. “Maybe it’s possible that they put their differences aside and were working together to try to find out what happened to Mickey. Maybe neither of them believed he’d killed himself. That would explain her giving Lily a lift to the bank. Maybe they’ve gone off together, following some kind of lead.”
“But Jasmine mentioned that Mariah didn’t even come to Mickey’s funeral. They’d broken up.”
Jeffrey nodded. She could see him shifting the pieces around in his mind.
“Maybe,” said Dax, “she was taking advantage of Lily’s vulnerable state, manipulating her in some way.”
“What? To take her money?” asked Lydia. She answered her own question. “Maybe.”
The world was full of all kinds of predators. Lydia looked at the picture of Mickey and Mariah. Where before Mariah had just seemed somewhat off-putting with her coquettish smile and knowing eyes, now Lydia saw malice in her.
“Well, let’s see if we can’t find Ms. LaForge and see what she has to say,” said Jeffrey, turning around the screen and showing the map to her last known address.
Give it to me,” whispered Lydia. It had been her habit for most of the fifteen years they’d known each other to lean over his shoulder and give him advice on whatever it was he was doing and then try to take over. Tonight it was picking a lock on a wooden gate. Jeffrey found this simultaneously annoying and lovable, like so many of her personality quirks.
“I got it,” said Jeffrey, working at the lock with the tools he’d brought in the inside pocket of his coat.
The night was cold and dark with no moonlight, no stars visible in the sky; a streetlamp above them was browned out, glowing an eerie orange but casting no light.
“Can you even see?” she asked, trying to nudge him out of the way.
“Excuse me,” he said, nudging her back. “I was doing this when you were still in grade school.” The lock to the wooden gate snapped open as if to emphasize his point. Behind it was a high, narrow set of stairs that led into a deeper darkness.
Jeffrey led the way up the stairs as Lydia closed the gate behind them. The night was hushed, only the distant rush of cars on the Henry Hudson to the west of them and Broadway to the east was audible, just barely. And the occasional squeal of the 1/9 train coming to a stop in the railroad yards below them.
The steep stone staircase was overrun with weeds and in terrible disrepair, making their progress upward difficult and treacherous. At the top there was another door. The wood was decayed, looked as if it might have been painted red at one point. A notice had been pasted there. It read menacingly: CONDEMNED: THIS STRUCTURE HAS BEEN DECLARED UNSAFE AND UNINHABITABLE BY THE CITY OF NEW YORK. TRESPASSING IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
“You don’t think that means us, do you?” asked Lydia.
“Nah,” answered Jeffrey. He was about to go to work on the lock when Lydia pushed on the door and it opened slowly, emitting a high-pitched squeak.
They stepped onto a floor that felt soft beneath their feet; a smell of mold and rot was strong. Lydia pulled a small flashlight from her pocket and shone the powerful beam into the darkness. Some small dark forms skittered away from the light and she shuddered. The room was narrow and bare, wood floors, stone walls, a fireplace centered on the supporting wall. Two large windows at the back of the narrow space looked out into a thick of trees. They walked the space and found a narrow staircase toward the back of the building leading up to a second level. It looked old. It smelled old. It felt old.
“What is this place?” Jeffrey asked. The layer of dust, the sheer aura of abandonment told Jeffrey that no one had lived there for years.
“She used a fake address for her driver’s license?” said Lydia.
They walked up the narrow flight of stairs, Jeffrey leading the way and testing his weight carefully on each step as they wound into the darkness of the upper level. At the top they entered an almost identical room to the one downstairs. It was empty as well, clean and Spartan. From the window, he could see the Range Rover on the street where Dax was sitting, waiting for them and keeping watch on the entrance. He’d looked dejected when they’d left him behind in the car, like the last kid to get picked for the stickball game. But they all knew he wasn’t in any condition to come along.
Jeffrey could feel Lydia’s disappointment as she swung the beam of the flashlight around the barren room. They both smelled a dead end.
“Is this all there is to this place?” she said. He didn’t really think she was expecting an answer so he didn’t give one. Her voice echoed against the stone, sounding hollow and sad.
The phone in his pocket vibrated. He withdrew it and answered.
“Someone’s coming. He parked down the street and came up on foot; I didn’t see him at first,” said Dax. “Shit. He’s in the gate. Scary-looking dude.”
Jeff hung up and killed the flashlight. A second later, they heard footsteps downstairs. Firm and purposeful, they crossed the span of the downstairs room. Male, medium build, Jeffrey surmised. Expecting to hear someone climb the stairs, he drew the Glock he carried at his waist. He and Lydia retreated quickly and quietly to the separate far dark corners of the space, and waited. He felt the adrenaline start to pump.
But instead of feet on the stairs they heard a door open and then close hard. Then there was silence. They waited a second, two, then met in the middle of the room.
“I didn’t see a door downstairs,” whispered Lydia.
“Neither did I,” he said, moving close to her.
At the bottom of the stairwell, they crouched in the cover of the pitch darkness, waiting. They didn’t see the door that had slammed. There was no back exit, no closet, no other rooms.
“Maybe-” Lydia started to say in the darkness. But then a panel in the floor lifted and a rectangle of light slid across the wood surface. A large man in jeans and a long leather coat emerged from the floor. Before he closed the trapdoor behind him, Jeffrey saw his face in stark impressions. A hard, white face with a granite ridge for a brow, heavy dark eyebrows, a wide, stern mouth. His head was shaved, scalp shining in the yellow light from below.
He let the door drop loudly and he started toward the exit and then stopped, seemed to lift his nose to the air. He turned toward them. They were not ten feet from him, but in the pitch-black corner where they crouched, Jeffrey was relatively sure they could not be seen. Jeffrey heard rather than saw him take a step in their direction and he felt Lydia’s body tense behind him. She was wearing perfume, a light floral scent. He could smell it and he wondered if the man in leather could smell it, too. They both stopped breathing and the air felt electric with bad possibilities.