“Interesting,” he said.
Then they left and I closed and locked the door behind them. I stumbled to the kitchen and leaned against the counter in front of the sink, running cold water from the faucet and splashing it on my face. I grabbed a glass and filled it water, drinking it in a single breath.
Putting one thought in front of another was my biggest challenge at this point. I couldn’t help but believe that the hole in my memory was filled with what had happened to Terry, Ellen, and Veronica. Two of the most important people in my life, and one total stranger.
I remembered Hopper’s claim that I was supposed to have brought Veronica to Grand Central that morning to meet him, and that his clients wouldn’t be pleased that we hadn’t showed up. I didn’t have the first clue what he was talking about. More filler for the hole in my memory.
I stood at the door to the bedroom with my hand on the doorknob. Several hours had passed since I’d awakened into a giant puzzle. It was not going to look good that I had spoken to the detectives with the body merely a few feet away. A jury would see that I had clearly been hiding something, and this would imply guilt.
I turned the knob, eased the door open. I hit the light switch with my eyes closed, wanting to delay the inevitable. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
Her body was gone.
CHAPTER 12
Whitney Greene wasn’t living her dream. Nowhere close, though it wasn’t a bad life. Her third marriage was stable enough, and the latest husband was a hard worker, was gainfully employed, and he took care of her. They had a house in the suburbs of Boston in a decent school district and Whitney drove an Accord that was only a year old. Overall it wasn’t a terrible existence at all. It was just that Whitney had expected more of life, at least she had when she was younger.
She was in her early forties, and her face and body didn’t have the same impact on the world that it once had. Once upon at time she had been stunning and had turned heads. Back in the day her face had been gorgeous and she’d had a body to die for. She had dreamed of singing and dancing, but those are goals that you have to grab hold of when you are young and beautiful and the world is paying attention. Whitney’s shortcoming was that she had taken her gifts for granted and had been too complacent during her window of opportunity. The passage of time is unforgiving, she realized too late. In her early twenties she’d become a stripper to make easy cash for school, but the money was too easy and she became complacent. Then the wrinkles started showing up and she gained a little weight. Now her best years were two decades behind her. That was a hard pill to swallow.
She had a happy life, she told herself, and each day when she awoke in her small house in Massachusetts, she again tried to convince herself the sentiment was true.
Whitney worked part-time for a realtor to make spending money and was bored to tears. She was sitting at her desk on the second floor of an office building staring at recent property listings on her computer. She had waited all morning for the phone to ring. Not because of business, but because she was waiting to hear from a friend. Ellen Ingram was supposed to have called hours ago, but so far Whitney had heard nothing.
She had a can of Diet Coke with a straw in it and took a sip as she drummed her fingers on the desktop. Nervousness fluttered in the pit of her belly. She had a bad feeling something had happened to Ellen. They had both known there were risks involved but maybe neither one of them had taken those risks seriously enough. She tried Ellen’s cell but the call went directly to voice mail.
Every minute that passed without hearing from Ellen made her worry that much more. She considered calling the police but didn’t know how she would explain her concerns.
She tried to push away the nervousness, but finally she just couldn’t sit still any longer.
* * *
The warehouse in New Jersey was leased by a major grocery distributor based three states away and was surrounded by tall chain-link and a guard was posted at the gate. The shipping operation remained in full swing around the clock, big trucks rumbling in and out all hours of the day and night.
The offices upstairs were serviced by a private elevator in the back. Santiago brought Ellen Ingram up the elevator and shoved her forward into a refrigerated meat locker down the hall from the manager’s office. She fell to her hands and knees on the floor, struggling to breathe through the tape over her mouth. Santiago had placed a bag over her head, so she had no idea where he’d taken her. The only thing she knew was she’d been driven somewhere in a car and was now inside a building.
Ellen wrapped her arms around herself to keep warm. She lay shivering in the dark, scared out of her mind. She had blacked out for a time when the man clubbed her from behind with something hard. When she woke up the bag was already covering her head. She tried to scream for help but could barely make a sound.
She heard distant footsteps and then a door opened. She heard voices.
“Is that her?” a man’s voice asked. The voice was deep and gravely.
“Yes,” a second voice answered. It was the voice of the man who had assaulted and abducted her earlier that day.
“Good,” said the first man. “Leave her in here until we find out how he wants us to get rid of her.”
CHAPTER 13
For a few seconds I was convinced I was in the wrong apartment. I literally froze misstep and stopped breathing for what felt like a very long time. Then, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I backed out of the room and closed the door. Maybe it was some weird psychological trick I was playing on myself. Perhaps I’d so desperately wanted to not have to deal with Veronica Wagner’s dead body, that my brain refused to acknowledge that she was there. So I had backed out and shut the door hoping that when I went back in, my head would have cleared and she would be right back where I’d left her.
No dice. She was gone.
I’ve never been so shocked by anything in my entire life. Everything about the room was exactly as I’d left it, except there was no sign of her body. I got down on the floor and studied the patterns in the carpet fibers where she had been. There was no evidence of a human form. Even the sheet I had placed over her wasn’t there either. I ran into the bathroom, then into every room in the apartment. She had officially vanished, and my mind was officially blown.
It felt like my knees were going to give out. I sat on the edge of the bed and placed my head between my knees to try to keep from hyperventilating. I was seriously on the verge of vomiting. Standing at the counter in the bathroom I splashed water on my face. Surely I was losing my mind.
Veronica Wagner was gone. That was impossible. This was my home, and she had died on the bedroom floor, and I had left her there and locked the door. Now she was gone. Nothing added up. Maybe I was still dreaming. Maybe everything from this morning was all part of the same crazy fever dream and nothing was real. None of it could be real. None of it. Large blocks of memory seemed to have returned, but suddenly, nothing in my world felt trustworthy.
The only reasonable answer was that someone had broken in and stolen the body. I opened the front door and inspected the doorjamb and the lock. None of it appeared tampered with. The wood was undamaged. The door had been locked when I came home. No one else had a key. Well, except Ellen. She kept my spare for when she planned to crash at my place.
Nobody had come through the door, so they had taken her some other way, but that seemed impossible and ridiculous. I live seven floors up in a high-rise. There’s one entrance. The door had not been disturbed. There was no evidence of a break-in. No one had busted their way in with an axe, but still, she was gone.
Someone was jacking with my head. No way around it.
Then it hit me: what if Veronica Wagner hadn’t actually been dead?
A sudden spark of hope bloomed inside me. I closed the door and went to the bedroom. Her purse and clothes were gone, as if she’d simply awakened on the floor, gathered her things, and exited under her own strength.
Was that possible?
Sure it was. Right?
I had checked for a pulse and found nothing. Her eyes had been open and staring vacantly at the ceiling. Her skin had been cool to the touch and she wasn’t breathing. She was as dead as dead gets. Those facts didn’t matter if she had apparently, stood up and walked away. All of it was getting up in my head and screwing with my sanity.
I went into the hallway outside my apartment and paced. Could a neighbor have seen something? What would I ask without making myself look crazy or guilty?
I remembered the beer cans and wine bottles by my bed. Maybe that’s how I had been drugged! Seemed as likely a theory as anything. I went back to the bedroom but didn’t like what I found. It was all gone. The cans and the bottles. No sign of any of it.
Now I knew that I was seriously going crazy.
How much of today was really real? How much of this experience had really happened.
My iPhone rang.
“Hello?”
“This is Louis, where are you?”
“Home.”
“You need to get back here.”
“I don’t feel like myself.”
“It’s a weird day for all of us, Nick.”
“Is Terry really dead?” I asked him.
“I’ve been asking myself that all morning. Today feels like a dream.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Clients are already calling. We need to release a statement.”
I closed my eyes and bumped my back against the wall. Please let me fall asleep and wake up tomorrow and erase all of this nonsense and let me start over…
“I’ll be there when I can,” I told him.
I poured a drink in the kitchen. Molly sauntered over to get some love.
“What has happened to me?” I asked her.
She smiled up at me. All she had heard was blah blah blah blah.
“What is happening to me?” I sighed.
Terry was really dead, and apparently, Ellen was missing, but the bright spot appeared to be that perhaps Veronica Wagner had been purely a hallucination. That was a fabulous thought. I felt a tremendous burden lift from my shoulders. I could deal with the loss of Terry, and I could help the police look for Ellen, but at least I didn’t have to worry that I had taken someone’s life whether by accident or otherwise. It seemed crazy that I had awaked to find a dead woman in my bedroom, but even crazier that the same individual had been either purely my imagination or had somehow been removed. But she couldn’t have been removed. No way. Because, like I said, there were only two keys. I had one.
Ellen had the other.
CHAPTER 14
I ignored the stares as I walked toward Louis’s office. The atmosphere at the agency was subdued but everyone seemed glad to see me. Heather rushed over.
“Did you see him?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Terry.”
“No.”
“Is it true?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“About what?”
She was speechless a moment. This was a woman who seldom got flustered. “I mean, is today business as usual?”
I turned to face her. A few hours earlier she had been a stranger to me, but now I distinctly remembered nearly every moment of our working relationship, all the way back to her initial interview at the agency. She had graduated from Brown and was grossly overqualified for the position of my assistant, but the crappy economy had worked in my favor and she needed immediate employment. She was a trust fund baby, but her parents insisted she maintain a full-time job in order to keep the money train running. Turned out we clicked very well and by the time she could have looked elsewhere for an offer I was able to give her enough of a bump in pay to keep her overqualified ass planted at the desk outside my office.
“Louis and I are going to draft a statement for clients regarding Terry’s passing. What I need you to do is start compiling a client email list for when the statement is ready for distribution,” I said.
Heather was five-five but in three-inch heels was only about two inches shorter than me. She stared straight up at me. I could tell she’d been crying and that she was embarrassed that I’d noticed the red in her eyes. Heather was not one for expressing emotions other than impatience. It was no secret to me about her and Terry. They had been discreet about it, or at least as discreet as Terry could be about anything. Keeping secrets had never been Terry’s strength. Pour a few shots down him and the vault would open wide. I’d never told Heather that I knew, and I don’t know if she suspected it or not, but right now I could see in her amazing blue eyes that she was hurting.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Her blue eyes flicked past my shoulder to the wall.
“I’m fabulous,” she said.
“They found him in the bathtub. The cops think he drowned.”
“Does it matter?”
“Does what matter?”
“Whether he drowned, or was thrown off the roof, or overdosed on heroin, the result doesn’t change.”
“He drowned, Heather,” I said. “A man who filled his life with a million reckless decisions for once wasn’t being reckless at all. He simply slipped and hit his head.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“Why?”
“Terry would have rather gone out in style. Like skydiving or having sex. Something he could brag about.”
That was certainly Terry’s style. He was all flash. He would be mortified that he’d gone out with such a resounded thud.
“Ironic, huh?” I said.
She avoided eye contact for a long moment. She was feeling weak and hated herself for it. It was interesting to watch but I decided to show mercy.
“Get to work,” I said.
She nodded, “I’ll have that list ready in half an hour.”
Louis’s door was open. I dropped into a chair in front of his desk. He had the biggest office at the agency. His desk was the size of a monument and he looked ridiculously tiny seated behind it. He still typed on an IBM Selectric. I didn’t even know you could still buy ribbons for those things, but he claimed to keep a box of them in his refrigerator at home. He was wearing trifocals and lifted his eyes from the document trapped in his typewriter.
“The last one of these I typed was for Terry’s father,” he said. Louis’s voice always reminded me of Andy Rooney.
“Every twenty years sounds about right,” I said.
“You’ll be typing the next one for me.”
I shook my head. “I’ll have Heather do it.”
He smiled. “I might request that in my will, and insist she wear something very low-cut to the funeral.”
“Count on it,” I said. “Ballard and Curry had a lot of questions for me.”
Louis reclined in his plush captain’s chair and stared down his gin blossom nose at me. I couldn’t quite tell what was going on in that razor-sharp brain of his. “You went to Terry’s apartment?” he asked.
I nodded. “They had already removed Terry’s body. There was a cop at the door and the two detectives were in the kitchen talking.”
“He drowned?”
“That’s what it looks like. Someone had called nine-one-one about an intruder inside the apartment.”
“The detectives mentioned it. Do you think there was an intruder?” he asked me.
“I doubt it. The building has cameras everywhere. If there was an intruder, video of him should turn up soon enough, but I don’t think that has anything to do with how Terry died.”
“Was he clean?”
It was no great secret that Terry had been a longtime fan of recreational drugs. All the years I’d known him he had struggled with sobriety. He still battled with coke. I suspect he’d had very little interest in quitting. Louis knew this as much as I did.
“I don’t know if he had used lately,” I said. It was the truth.
�
�I’m going out on a limb and guessing this could be drug related.”
“We will know when the toxicology report comes back.”
“Terry was full of self-loathing, just like his father. They both died young because neither of them were comfortable in their own skin. Both chased women while drowning themselves in alcohol and pharmaceuticals.”
“I really thought Terry could pull himself out of it.”
“Nonsense!” Louis tossed his reading glasses onto his desk and they rattled across the mahogany surface. “He was weak. He was a great ad man, but he had no self-control. I watched him inch closer and closer to the edge for twenty years. I knew eventually this day would come. At least his father was man enough to survive into his fifties.”
“Heather is compiling a client list for the memo,” I said.
Louis leaned forward and tore the sheet of paper from his typewriter.
“Read this,” he said.
I took it from his hand and stood to read it. It was short and sweet. It briefly memorialized Terry Burgess as an irreplaceable asset to the agency while at the same time assuring our clients that our service and dedication to them would continue without interruption. I read it twice, then shrugged and handed it back to Louis.
“Anything to add?” he asked.
“Not a word. Nobody writes fiction like you.”
“Have you spoken to Carmen?”
“She’s out of the country.”
“Does she know yet?”
“No.”
“Call her,” he said.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” I replied. Then I went to my office to try to track down Carmen Burgess in Australia and inform her that her husband was dead.
* * *
I closed my office door and sat at my desk. The photo of Ellen was still facedown on the shelf. I was tempted to leave it, but instead took it in-hand and stared at her face.
“Tell me you’re okay,” I said.
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