Sidney Sheldon's the Tides of Memory

by Sidney Sheldon

  “Can you describe her?”

  The secretary thought about it. “She was American. Dark hair. Quite pretty.”

  Summer’s heart pounded. “How old would you say she was?”

  The secretary shrugged. “Middle-aged, I suppose. Not old, not young.”

  “But she never gave a name?”

  “No. She did say the bike was a present. I think she said it was for her son. But that can’t be right, can it? Not if this was Alexia De Vere’s lad.”

  Summer’s head was spinning. “Can I borrow a pen?” she asked. “And a piece of paper?” She wrote down her cell-phone number and e-mail address and handed it to the woman. “If you remember anything else, anything at all, would you give me a call?”

  “Of course.” The secretary looked at Summer curiously. “You’re going to think I’m mad. But do I know you from somewhere? Your face looks awfully familiar.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Summer.

  “You’re not on the telly, are you? An actress?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh well.” The woman smiled cheerily. “Good luck anyway.” She bustled back inside.

  Summer suddenly felt extremely tired.

  It was time to go home.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Alexia sat in a Starbucks, reading. Edward Manning’s report was dishearteningly short.

  Milo James Bates, born in Bronxville, New York. Married Elizabeth (Betsy), three children. Reported missing by business partner and later by his family. Left considerable debts.

  So, Alexia thought, Billy wasn’t the only one who was worried about Milo. His family also reported him missing. I wonder why Chief Dublowski never mentioned that.

  Hamlin claimed Mr. Bates had been abducted by person(s) unknown, and that he (Hamlin) had also been abducted and forced to watch a home movie of Bates being tortured. Agents Yeoman and Riley (FBI) investigated, found no substantiating evidence. Bates divorced in absentia by his wife, January 1996, on grounds of abandonment. No further contact with family.

  Alexia read between the few, simple lines. A man who by all accounts had been happily married and a devoted father suddenly disappears without a trace. Did Milo Bates panic over his debts? Was that reason enough to walk away from an entire life? Not just his wife and business partner, but his children too? Or had something more sinister happened to him?

  The second page of Edward’s report was even briefer.

  . . . 4,587 unidentified human remains were discovered in the United States in the year that Milo Bates went missing. Of these, 986 were still unidentified a year later. 192 of these still-unclaimed corpses were from the New York region. 111 were adult males.

  Alexia paused to absorb this depressing information. In one year alone, in one city, over a hundred men had died or been killed that nobody cared about. All of them had been someone’s son. Just like Michael. She forced herself to read on.

  . . . 17 corpses bore evidence of torture. All but 3 of them were of Caribbean descent.

  Gangs. Drug wars. Alexia felt the beginnings of excitement. Ever thorough, Edward had listed the causes of death for the three white males.

  Shooting.

  Shooting.

  And the third, the very last word of Edward Manning’s report, lurking at the bottom of the page as quiet and deadly as a cancerous mole:

  Drowning.

  Alexia heard Chief Harry Dublowski’s voice in her head. “We’d expect to see more cases with the same MO. More girls washing up with similar injuries. More deaths by drowning.” This body wasn’t a girl’s. But was that lone white male Milo Bates? Had he been tortured, just like Billy said? And tossed into the Hudson alive, drowned, like poor Jennifer? After all, there was no reason Jennifer’s killer should have targeted only women. Jenny hadn’t been sexually abused. Perhaps her sex was irrelevant. Perhaps it was her connection to Billy that had sealed her fate, just as it had sealed Milo Bates’s. Billy, the poor, confused, schizophrenic ex-con. Billy, whom nobody had believed, nobody had listened to. Not even Alexia herself.

  “Are you done?”

  A sullen barista removed Alexia’s empty coffee mug. Alexia looked at her watch, pushing her wild speculations about Milo Bates to one side for now. Because that’s all they are, she reminded herself firmly. Speculations. That body could have been anybody’s. Milo could be alive and well and living in Miami, for all you know.

  Today was her last full day in New York, and she had to make it count. Tomorrow night she’d be in a plane to London, to attend Teddy’s sentencing. She only had twenty-four hours to get through the last four names on her list.

  Sally Hamlin had given her a bunch of papers relating to the time when Billy’s business had gone into free fall. Not only was this when Milo Bates had disappeared, but it was also the time when “the voice” had first made itself heard in Billy’s life. This was the crucial period, the start of it all. Searching through the files, Alexia had carefully pulled out the names of all the creditors, clients, and suppliers who’d had dealings with Hamlin Motors during that time. It was a long shot. But there was a chance one of them might remember something significant.

  Jeff Wilkes ran a hauling company in Queens that had been one of Billy’s biggest and most consistent customers until things started to go wrong. A hugely fat man in his midfifties who smelled of garlic and body odor and had sweat patches the size of dinner plates under each arm, Jeff Wilkes seemed neither pleased nor impressed to be meeting Britain’s former home secretary.

  “Look, lady, I don’t care who you are,” he informed Alexia rudely, scratching his balls under the Formica desk of his filthy office above his truck garage. “I don’t discuss my business dealings with nobody except my accountant and my bank manager. And then only if I can’t help it.”

  “Billy Hamlin was a friend of yours,” Alexia said frostily. “Both he and his daughter were found murdered. If you had information that could help solve those crimes, wouldn’t you want to share it?”

  “With the cops, maybe. Not with some woman I’ve never seen before in my life. I don’t know you.”

  “I’ve told you who I am.”

  Jeff Wilkes shrugged. “So? I don’t have information, okay? I don’t know shit about no murders. And Billy Hamlin was a business contact, an acquaintance. We weren’t friends.”

  Clearly appealing to Wilkes’s better nature was going to get her nowhere. Alexia reverted to a trick she’d learned in politics—repeating the question again and again and again until the other person broke down and answered despite themselves.

  “Why did you terminate your contract with Hamlin’s?”

  “Look, I told you—”

  “Why did you cut Billy off?”

  “Are you deaf?”

  “Was the quality of his work unsatisfactory?”

  “No. It had nothing to do with that.”

  “Did the two of you have a falling-out?”

  “No! I told you already. We weren’t friends. You know, I got a business to run here.”

  “Why did you terminate your contract with Hamlin’s?”

  Within a minute, Jeff Wilkes had caved. Alexia thought: He wouldn’t last a day in the House of Commons.

  “I got squeezed, okay?” Jeff blurted out. “In my business, it happens. The Mafia, the protection rackets. You don’t mess with that if you’re a hauling company in New York City.”

  “Someone pressured you to stop doing business with Billy? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “Were you threatened?”

  “I’m not naming names, I’m not making accusations, okay? I’m just a small businessman doing the best I can.”

  “But your relationship with Billy Hamlin became a problem?”

  “It came to my attention,” the fat man said, “that it would be better for my business if Hamlin’s business didn’t work on my trucks no more. Okay? I didn’t owe the guy anything. I paid him in full and on time fo
r all the work he did. But”—he opened his arms wide—“we went our separate ways. That’s it. End of story.”

  It wasn’t the end of the story, of course. But it was as much as Alexia was going to get out of the odious Jeff Wilkes today.

  Her next stop was an automotive-parts distributor, also in Queens. To her surprise, this time the boss was a woman.

  “Yeah, I remember Billy Hamlin. Sure. Kind of a quirky guy. But I liked him.”

  The woman hadn’t heard about Billy’s murder, or his daughter’s, and was shocked when Alexia told her the details. “My God. I did read something about that body being washed up. But I didn’t put two and two together with the name. To be honest with you, I never knew Billy had a daughter. That’s terrible.”

  Her reasons for ceasing to do business with Hamlin’s were more prosaic than Jeff Wilkes’s. “Those were tough times in the automotive sector generally. A lot of firms were going under. Truth is, we were lucky enough to get a huge contract with one of the big boys, De Sallis. We dropped ninety percent of our smaller clients after that. We were stretched to the limit. I do remember hearing rumors about Hamlin’s, though, now that you mention it.”

  “Oh?” Alexia’s ears pricked up.

  “Some people were saying Billy and Milo’d been blacklisted. I don’t know whether they had trouble with one of the gangs, or it was something else. But everything those guys touched seemed to turn to shit, if you’ll pardon my French.”

  Alexia knew the feeling. Her last year in politics had felt the same.

  “Do you know who took over supplying Hamlin’s, after you quit?”

  The woman scrawled down a name. “You think any of this has a bearing on him and his kid getting killed?”

  “Probably not,” said Alexia. “I’ll see myself out.”

  Alexia made four more stops that day, three to former clients and one to another supplier. The stories were the same everywhere. It was either, We were threatened. We got calls warning us off. Or, We got a better offer. Hamlin’s was undercut by rival mechanic shops. Billy’s two closest local competitors, Queens Cars and MacAdams Auto Services, both received large injections of cash from white knight buyers that enabled them to slash their prices—bizarrely, given that the auto business generally was in a severe recession at the time.

  Alexia got back to the hotel at five, took a power nap and a shower, and was about to go out and grab an early bite to eat when her phone rang.

  “Where are you?” Lucy Meyer’s voice was as warm and conspiratorial as ever.

  Alexia grinned. “You know where I am. I’m in New York, the city that never sleeps.”

  “Still?”

  “Still. I fly to England tomorrow.”

  “I see. So, have you solved the case yet, Sherlock Holmes?”

  “No, not yet. I’ve been chasing my tail, as usual. What’s going on with you?”

  “Look out of your window.”

  Alexia did a double take. “Look out of my window? Now?”

  “No, in two weeks’ time. Yes, now!”

  “But why?”

  “Just do it!”

  Alexia walked over to the window and jimmied it open. Below her, on the street, stood Lucy, grinning like the cat that swallowed the canary. She had her cell phone in one hand and a cluster of Barneys shopping bags in the other.

  “I thought I’d come and check on you!” she shouted up. “So where are you taking me for dinner?”

  They ate at Elaine’s, at Lucy’s insistence.

  “I only get to New York once in a blue moon, so I may as well treat myself.”

  “I thought I was getting dinner?”

  “That’s right, you are. Even better. Think I’ll go for the caviar, the lobster ravioli, and a nice bottle of vintage Chablis. And you can explain what on earth you’ve been doing here all this time, not to mention when you decided to go to London. I thought you said you weren’t planning to go to the sentencing.”

  “I wasn’t. But I changed my mind.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  Alexia took a sip of her white wine. “Teddy’s done a lot of terrible things. But then so have I, in the past. He’s still my husband.”

  “And that makes it all okay, does it?”

  There was a bitterness to Lucy’s tone that Alexia hadn’t expected, a hard edge she didn’t remember hearing before.

  “No, of course not. Nothing can make it okay. But it means I should at least try to forgive.”

  “I don’t see why.” Lucy hid her face behind the menu, so Alexia couldn’t gauge her emotions. “Do you still love him?”

  Alexia paused. “Yes,” she said at last. “I suppose I do. I daresay it sounds ridiculous, but meeting Billy Hamlin’s ex-wife this week really got me thinking.”

  “Meeting Billy Hamlin’s . . .” Lucy shook her head despairingly. “Now you really have lost me. What on earth does she have to do with you and Teddy?”

  “Sally and Billy had been divorced for well over a decade before Billy was killed. But when I met her, she still had so much compassion for him, so much love. It was really touching. Like they were two parts of the same body.”

  “Please.” Lucy gave a dramatic eye roll, drained her glass, and poured herself another.

  “I’m serious,” said Alexia. “And it struck me, that’s what it’s like with Teddy and me. After all these years together, he’s as much a part of me as my arm or my leg. I can’t just cut him off. You must feel the same with Arnie, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know if I do or not,” Lucy said matter-of-factly. “Arnie’s never killed a man, buried him in our backyard, and lied about it.”

  “True. But if he had? Don’t you think you’d forgive him?”

  “No.” Lucy was so certain, so brutally final about it.

  “Even if he did it to protect Summer?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Really? But how can you know that, Lucy? You’ve never been in that situation.”

  Lucy shrugged. “In my book, some things are beyond forgiveness. It’s as simple as that. Let’s eat.”

  They ordered food, and the mood instantly lightened. Alexia filled Lucy in on the progress of her search. Her meetings with Chief Harry Dublowski, with Jennifer Hamlin’s friends and family, with the various business associates who had abandoned Billy and driven him bankrupt back in the nineties. Finally, she told Lucy about the information on Milo Bates that Sir Edward Manning had unearthed for her.

  “Billy always claimed his partner had been abducted and killed, but everyone dismissed it as a morbid fantasy. The police, his wife, everyone.”

  “But you think differently?” Lucy sipped her ice-cold Chablis and speared a deliciously buttery sliver of lobster ravioli with her fork.

  “There was a body, just one body, of a white male, washed up in the Hudson the year that Milo Bates took off.”

  Lucy laughed. “But that could be anyone! A homeless man or a kid on the run. Do you have any idea how many people go missing in this city? How many wind up dead?”

  “Yes, I do,” Alexia said excitedly. “Close to a thousand. But only half are men, and only a handful show signs of torture, which is what Billy said happened to Milo. This one white guy had been tortured and thrown into the river alive, to drown. That’s exactly what happened to Jennifer Hamlin. Exactly!”

  Lucy took this in. “Where’s the body now? Can you test it? For DNA or . . . something. Whatever it is they do on CSI.”

  “Unfortunately not. Unclaimed John Does are cremated after two years. But I’m certain it was Milo Bates, that he was killed by the same psychopath who murdered Jennifer Hamlin. Billy’s voices weren’t all in his head. One of them was real.”

  “So you keep saying. But how do you know?”

  “Because the same person called me, in my early days as home secretary. Right after Billy showed up in London. They called Cheyne Walk spouting biblical mumbo jumbo, making threats. And they used a voice distorter, just like the one Billy described. I hardl
y think that’s a coincidence, do you?”

  Lucy frowned. “You never mentioned any weird phone calls to me at the time.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “No. And you told me everything else. Your whole past life, Billy, what happened in Maine that summer. How come you never brought this up?”

  “I guess I didn’t think it was that important.” Alexia waved a hand dismissively. “If I’d let every crackpot out there bother me, I’d never have succeeded in politics for as long as I did.”

  “So the calls didn’t scare you?”

  “Not really. Maybe a little. But I never took them too seriously. Till now, that is. When Sally Hamlin described the voice Billy was so afraid of, I knew at once. It was the same bastard who called me. I’d bet good money that the voice is our killer. And he’s still out there.”

  “You think he killed Milo Bates?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Jennifer Hamlin?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Billy? He doesn’t exactly fit the pattern, does he?” said Lucy.

  “No.” Alexia looked away. “I don’t know what happened to Billy.”

  Part of her wanted to tell Lucy the truth: that it was Teddy who had ambushed Billy at his London flat and stabbed him to death. She’d told her everything else, after all. What difference would one more gruesome secret make? But something in Lucy’s tone made Alexia hold back. She couldn’t bear the thought of alienating Lucy, her one remaining rock and only support. Besides, she had promised Teddy she would keep his secret about Billy, and Alexia De Vere honored her promises. This wasn’t her confession to make.

  Lucy scraped the last of the creamy lobster sauce off her plate with a small sigh of satisfaction. “I take it you’ve gone to the police with this new information?”

  Alexia’s silence spoke volumes.

  Lucy dropped her fork with a clatter. “You haven’t, have you?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Alexia! You just said yourself you might be in danger from this ‘voice’ person. He’s still out there. Why wouldn’t you report what you know?”