Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  I glanced down at the sidelight windows, where knowing friends usually stood to give me a view before I opened the door to them, but there was no one in sight. As angry as I was with him, I walked back down to the foyer, growing excited that maybe Mike had come to beg for forgiveness; to console me and tell me his cop friends had given Cassie top priority and he had it all under control in his big powerful (kiss my ring finger) hands. So I didn’t bother peering through the peephole. My heart fluttered an extra beat as I pulled the heavy front door open expecting to fall into Mike’s strong arms as he gave me the good news that Cassie had been found safe . . . was home in bed . . . alive . . . well . . .

  Rod Lipton bolted through the entry. “Shit, it’s cold out there.”

  “You,” I said, disappointed. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I heard your sister’s missing. McCoy asked Cory and me about it. As soon as I heard, I knew what you’d think. Because of that day at the pizza place. But it isn’t us. I don’t know where she is.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “Can I come up for a minute?”

  “No.”

  He shivered and looked behind him at the door still ajar, wincing as frigid air blew a part through his hair. “I should have worn a hat.” He pushed the door closed.

  I backed up a few steps. “Go home, Rod. What do you want here?”

  “I want to talk to you about Emily too. I tried at the party the other night. Can we talk? Right here if you want.” He looked up the stairs. “But upstairs is better. Put your cell on speed dial and hold it in your hand. If I wanted to hurt you, Miss Melone, I could have done it any number of nights I’ve seen you walking to your car after dark on George Street.”

  “And then followed me home?”

  He shrugged. “I saw you unlocking the front door once.”

  I stepped aside and let him go up, as if not granting him verbal authority made my decision less stupid.

  He began his climb to the second-floor landing and then stepped aside to let me unlock the door. Once inside, I took a book from the hall table and wedged it in the door to keep it from locking closed while he waited for me to give him further orders.

  “Go sit in the living room.”

  He walked through the lead-paned pocket doors, looked around, but in the end refused a seat. I took a chair closest to the doors and flipped open my cell phone, dialing 911 but holding off on the “send” button. He looked down at me; I stared up at him; each of us waiting for the other to speak.

  Sometimes when I’m in a plane, I play out the scenario for a crash. I listen to the engines rumble and I tell myself they’re failing, struggling to keep the plane aloft. I was playing out the scenario of Rod rushing me, pushing me down, pulling a knife from his jacket . . .

  He was standing silently in front of the window. Uncomfortable with him looking down at me, I rose from the chair. He sensed my unease and began talking.

  “I know you’re trying to unseal the Health Services records. But you can just ask Becker about Emily. I told her everything, but she’s got no loyalty to anyone but the last guy who signed her paycheck.”

  “You went to Dr. Becker about Emily?”

  “I had to. If I didn’t go on the offensive—claim Emily was stalking me—she would have turned me in and I would have been expelled. So I had a few sessions with Becker, saying how pissed I was over the horrible rumors Emily was spreading about me.”

  He continued to present his defense: she was asking for it. It was a defense I knew well and was ready for. A defense that men like O’Rourke accepted as totally rational and vindicating. Unfortunately, even some women were all too ready to accept the feeble excuse. Like maybe Mitsy Becker, whose job security required her to sweep blame under the rug and then smooth out the nap of negative press. Sure, she’d sent Emily to me in the first place, but when I couldn’t fix it and make it go away, Mitsy climbed off her limb and back to the safety of her Holton nest.

  Rod shook his head. “Look, Emily was hot. Freaking gorgeous. And the sex? She played docile at first, submissive, and then I’d make her get rough with me. It was fun. That’s all it was. She wanted it as much as I did. She started wearing those garter belts with no panties. You tell me what that was for—”

  Rod. Not Cory. “Did you kill her?”

  “No, and I didn’t rape her either.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Rape. Such a stupid word for it. I didn’t hit her or anything. She wigged out and I left her alone after that.”

  “What do you want from me, Rod?”

  “Emily’s missing. I just wanted you to know. It wasn’t me.”

  “Her body was just ID’d. Emily’s dead.”

  I began to notice Rod’s gray eyes turning silver, glazing over. He was high on something.

  I started backpedaling into the foyer. “And what about Cassie? My sister. You’re sure you know nothing about where she might be?”

  His mouth fell open and he blinked slowly a few times, looking around my apartment as if he were trying to remember where he was and what he was doing there.

  “You’re stoned, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Fuck. I don’t know anything about your sister.”

  “Liar.”

  Rod suddenly jumped in front of me and I backed up against the wall. He was so close I could feel the warmth of his body in the unheated foyer.

  He looked down at me. A few strands of my hair tickled my face as he breathed. “You’d never believe a word I say anyway. Never. I’ll always be a liar to you. You fucking think it’s in my blood or something—that I’m incapable of telling the truth. It’s in your eyes all the time. I could slit my wrists in front of you right now and you’d still think I was doing it for effect. How much you hate me. It’s in your eyes.”

  Each of his exclamations had brought him closer to me. So close that I had turned my head to the side to keep my face from touching his jacket. I was facing the front door, the book still wedged in place. His anger seemed out of proportion to our past encounters. Was it paranoia from the drugs coursing through his veins? Or because he was a sociopath who thought all women were expendable, and just plain fun to rape and kill?

  He suddenly bolted away from me, kicked the book into the hallway, and jogged down the stairs. I double-locked the door and turned the thermostat up to seventy-five degrees.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Man in the Moon

  ON MONDAY MORNING I rose from my bed at five-thirty. Cassie was still missing. I showered and, without thinking, pulled on jeans and a navy blazer. Still in my walk-in closet, I reached to the top shelf where several shoeboxes held about half a dozen designer shoes for special occasions, kept in their boxes safe from sunlight and dust. To the far right, behind the shoeboxes, was another box with a special lock, in which I kept an unloaded Walther .380 automatic. In my line of work, a gun was as necessary as a fresh pair of pantyhose. I took the gun from the shelf and loaded it with bullets taken from a separate hiding place on the shelf, checked that the safety was locked, and placed it in the inside zipper section of my Tod’s backpack.

  All night long I had done the math, adding up what I had from Holton with what I had from the AG’s office, and the sum kept coming up odd. I was thinking maybe there was a point or two I was missing from 150 South Main that required a personal visit, and my encounter with Rod Lipton had left me with a chill I couldn’t seem to shake, so I called Rita and left a message on her voice-mail that I might be in a few minutes late.

  I walked into the reception area of my old offices at the AG’s. No one was in yet. It was like walking into my mother’s kitchen as a teenager after a late night out, stinking of cigarettes and alcohol—guilty, but safe. At the empty front reception desk, I heard the elevator doors open from the hall outside. The heavy cough was unmistakably Vince’s.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” He walked past me and into his office. I followed, as he knew I would. Vince wouldn’t look at me. He lit a cigarette. �
�What do you want?”

  “I want to know about this drug sting I’ve been hearing about, what you have on the murders, and whether any of it involves my sister.”

  Vince coughed heavily as the smoke caught in his wet lungs. I waited for the cough to clear. He was stalling. Trying to figure out, in a few seconds of a pre-emphysemic fit, how much I knew.

  “Run this by me again?” he said. “Your sister?”

  “Stop stalling, Vince. Tell me what you know.”

  “Wait a friggin’ minute before you start ordering me around.”

  He plopped into his thickly stuffed black leather chair, his head thudding back into the dented cushioning. He eyed me as he slowly lifted his legs up onto his desk. Crossing one ankle over the other and resting his Ferragamo tassel loafers on a mass of file folders, he used his desk as a footrest.

  “Cassie was with Rod Lipton and Cory Sherman—I assume you recognize their names—shortly before she disappeared from soccer camp. I need to know if there’s a connection. I’m not playing games anymore.”

  He twirled the smoke around in his mouth as he thought, then deftly blew a smoke ring from his Merit Ultra Light.

  “Jesus, Vince, stop with the smoke signals! There are too many dead bodies turning up.”

  He lowered his feet to the floor and frowned, poking around with his butt for a clear spot in the soot-laden crystal ashtray on his desk in which to stub out his cigarette. With deliberate methodology, he smashed the butt into the glass until the filter split and tobacco burst out. “Your sister. I don’t get it. What’s she got to do with Holton?”

  “It may have nothing to do with what’s going on at Holton—the murders, the drugs—but I can’t ignore the possibility. So this isn’t about my job anymore, or Carlyle, or you. It’s my family we’re talking about.”

  Vince sat up straighter and leaned over his desk. “Have a seat, Meloni.”

  I pulled out a chair in front of his desk and sat. He passed me a cigarette, then sat back in his chair as well, and hefted his feet back on top of the desk. I took a puff of the cigarette, thinking how I hated working at Holton. In the few short weeks I’d been there, I’d learned that I’d never fit the mold.

  Vince spoke. “You work at Holton because Jeff Kendall hates your guts.”

  “Jeff wanted me at Holton?”

  “Carlyle wanted you, and I think he got Jeff to fill him in on your particulars so he could court you for the job. I guess Carlyle thought he’d be holding me hostage by hiring you. As if my loyalty to you would make me bend under pressure or something. He doesn’t know us very well, does he? He doesn’t know about our loyalties and how I can spin straw into gold.”

  Of course by “loyalty” he was referring to the lapse of mine over Hastings. “I’m really sorry about the Hastings murder, Vince. I started to tell you . . . but Jeff beat me to it and turned me in.”

  He shrugged and pulled another cigarette from his pack.

  “So what’d you mean about spinning straw into gold?”

  He looked over at his phone, where I could see a light flashing on his ten-line system. Someone was trying to reach him. “Forget that now. Go back to work. We’ll talk another time—after this is over and your sister is back home.”

  “No, Vince. I need to know it all. Did you mean something, or was it just one of your flippancies?”

  He took another drag of the newly lit cigarette and then stubbed that one out too. “These cigarettes are your fault,” he said into the ashtray. “Because I’m worried.”

  Vince had begun a confession in his usual way: by blaming someone else. I knew he’d keep talking if I kept my mouth shut.

  “At first I was mad as hell at you. I mean how could you even think of working for a pissant like Carlyle? But then I got to thinking . . . Well, the truth is, Meloni, I been trying to bust Carlyle for years on one damn thing or another. Sure I hate his guts. But now I really got something to sink my teeth into. This drug shit. It’s real and it’s illegal. But I could never get near that place. Get to the inside . . . where you are, now that you work there.” He finally looked up at me. “And you work there because I fired you. Or maybe I should say I fired you—so you’d work there.”

  I let my jaw hang open for a few seconds. Before Cassie went missing, this news would have brought tears of joy to my eyes: Vince hadn’t really fired me. I was just positioned at Holton College so Vince could get the information he needed to bust Carlyle. But now the tears welling up in my eyes were the sad kind, the kind that mean worry, fear, and premature grief if we didn’t find Cassie alive.

  I responded calmly. “You should have told me your plan, Vince. I would have done things differently. Especially with my sister. I wouldn’t have let her near the place from the beginning had I known I was a plant for a drug bust.”

  He was grinding his thick square jaw, nodding, and still stubbing out cold butts in the ashtray. “I took a shot in the dark, Meloni. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. How the hell was I supposed to know these murders would continue, and that you’d drag your sister into it? Never mind that now. You go back to work and finish your job, and I’ll do mine here. Then we’ll talk.” He stood and came around to the front of his desk. “And the cops are looking for your sister, but between you and me, are you sure she didn’t just run off with her boyfriend?”

  “Is there anything else you’re keeping from me that could involve her?”

  He threw his hands up in the air. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You pretty much know everything I know now. So get out of here before Jeff sees you and tells Carlyle you were here, because I can only trust Jeff when he’s in my sight.”

  I left it at that, because Vince was done talking. And I knew he’d never jeopardize my sister’s life.

  “One question before I leave.”

  Vince had his hand on the phone ready to lift the receiver where the lines had been flashing continuously. He shook his head. “Not now. I’ve got to get Carlyle in my grips first. We’ll talk about your job when this whole thing is over.”

  “I don’t care about my job anymore.”

  Vince was no neophyte to a certain monkish self-control. He would never show the weakness of surprise. Maybe knowing he was no longer the man in my moon or the sun in my sky made Vince a bit sad. But he wouldn’t show sorrow either. He simply looked up at me and shook his head. “What do you want? I’ve got a lot of work here.”

  “Mike McCoy. Any dirt on him?”

  He shrugged. “Other than the dirt that’s rubbed off on him from rubbing shoulders with Carlyle?” Then Vince furrowed his brow. “You went from Jeff Kendall to Mike McCoy? You’re one of those broads who likes to be abused, huh?”

  “My sister’s missing, Vince. I’ve got to know who I can trust.”

  “If I were you, Meloni, I wouldn’t count him in.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Black, White, and Blood

  I ARRIVED AT HOLTON by eight-thirty. Elliot was shivering outside Langley as I marched up to the front gates.

  “Why didn’t you wait in my office?”

  “I shouldn’t be hanging around your office too much. I’m not supposed to get you fired, remember?”

  I couldn’t argue with him. He was right. But that was the problem with Elliot, he was so often annoyingly right.

  “There’s some kind of pot party going on in Patterson Park tonight. Sherman will be there.”

  “I can’t really worry about Sherman anymore. My sister’s missing. She went to soccer camp out on the Cape and now she’s disappeared. Two days. No word.”

  “Wow. So you think it has something to do with Sherman or Lipton?”

  At the foot of the stairs, I stopped and looked at him. “Why would you make that leap?”

  “What’s the only thing on your mind right now? Do you even care about busting them for drugs anymore?”

  No, I thought. Cassie had become my prime concern.

  “And,” he said, “you’re wondering if your
sister is dead like the others—”

  “Stop it!” I bolted away from him, up the stairs, and lunged at the massive front door.

  He followed at my heels. “You think maybe the Holton killer has struck again.” He mocked me in a low whispering voice. “Your head is spinning, wondering. Has she been raped? Murdered? Or did someone just pick her up from camp and take her partying for a couple of days to throw you off track? And if it was Sherman and Lipton, their plan is working. You don’t care about their drug parties anymore. And what’s worse, Miss Melone, is that you’re blaming yourself. You put your sister in harm’s way.”

  I was too sick to my stomach to admit to him he was right. But damn him. The little dweeb was right.

  I got rid of Elliot by agreeing to meet him at six-thirty on a dead-end street that backed up to the woods at Patterson Park. Whether I’d go or not, I hadn’t yet decided. Frankly, I was hoping that by then, I would have found Cassie.

  I spent the day on the phone with police, the camp counselors, Cassie’s address book contacts, and, naturally, the girls, but everything was coming up to that same dead end in the park by the river. Despite my panic that Cassie’s disappearance was tied to the Holton murders, as Elliot had perceived, the most likely scenario, I kept telling myself, was that Cassie had simply gotten bored at the camp, gone off for the weekend with a high school friend, and was partying somewhere in the Cape. Meanwhile, Cassie probably thought she’d gotten away with the innocent subterfuge, and had no idea that she was now officially a missing minor and that her family had already succumbed to the paralysis of grief.

  But by six o’clock, there was still no word, so I left Langley and headed for my car. Darkness was in full dress black. Streetlights sputtered on, then off, and my imagination provided the London mist and dense fog that whirled in dizzy spirals around the smoke from a cigarette whose trail I could see from yards away. A silhouetted body was leaning against the hood of my parked Jeep. He was smoking. I stopped walking until he noticed me and stepped out into the streetlight.