Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  “Who was that?” said Jeffrey, putting down his book and looking at her.

  “A detective. Lily Samuels is missing,” she said leaning against the counter.

  “Who?”

  “Remember that journalism class I taught at NYU as a visiting professor a couple of years ago? She was one of my students. She started at the Post last year on the crime desk.”

  Lydia had felt a special affinity for Lily from the day she had walked into the large, over-warm classroom and sat in the front row. There was an earnestness, an honesty to her that Lydia could see in her deep brown eyes. And she had a belly full of fire. Lydia could always recognize it, that love of the hunt, that drive for the heart of a story. Lily’s talent had set her apart from the rest of the class; the kindness and compassion in her interview style and in her writing put her head and shoulders above most of the professional writers Lydia knew. In the past two years, Lydia had given her advice on pursuing stories she was working on for her degree, and eventually a reference that got her a foot in the door at the Post.

  It wasn’t long before the buzzer rang. She checked the video monitor. A very tall, well-dressed, youngish man in a leather coat lifted his shield to the video monitor. Lydia pressed the button that allowed entry to the elevator bank downstairs. She watched as he stepped out of view and into the elevator that would lift directly into the apartment.

  It was the little things like this which reminded her that she was free; she didn’t have to feel the cold fingers of fear tugging at her every time the buzzer rang late, didn’t have to wonder if the person she saw at the door was a threat. It was like a grip had been released from her heart. Jed McIntyre, the man who murdered her mother and then last year came for her after his erroneous release from a maximum-security mental hospital, was dead. Unlike incarceration, death was a securely permanent condition. And Lydia found she could breathe again.

  As she waited by the elevator door, she heard Jeffrey in the kitchen making coffee.

  “How long has she been missing?” he called from the kitchen.

  “Two weeks,” said Lydia grimly. In a missing persons investigation it was the first thirty-six hours that were critical. After that time period had passed, the odds of anyone being found alive decreased exponentially. For Lily, that window had closed.

  “And the guy is still working into the night,” said Jeffrey. “Must have its hooks in him.”

  Lydia nodded to herself. They both knew what that was like.

  Detective Matt Stenopolis was, simply put, gigantic. He ducked his head slightly as he stepped from the elevator and Lydia’s hand disappeared into his when he took it in greeting. He had pale white skin, a chaos of blue-black hair and a dark shadow of stubble to match. He smelled like snow and cigarettes.

  He’s bigger than Dax, thought Lydia, as he and Jeffrey introduced themselves. It was a different kind of big, though. Dax was big by design. The detective was big by genetics. His shoulders, wide as a refrigerator, slouched the way the shoulders of all extremely tall people seem to, as if protecting themselves against the jeers and taunts that have been hurled at them all their lives.

  “Thanks for letting me stop by so late, Ms. Strong.”

  “No problem. Lily’s a friend,” she said. “Anything I can do.”

  He followed her into the living room and she encouraged him to have a seat on the couch. When he sat on it, the large sofa looked as if it had been made for Barbie Dolls. She thought she heard it groan in protest.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Please,” he answered gratefully.

  “Three weeks ago today,” began the detective, as Lydia handed him a cup of coffee, “Lily Samuels’ brother Mickey committed suicide in his car in an Office Depot parking lot in Riverdale.”

  “Oh, no,” said Lydia. She remembered thinking that Lily had sounded strained and worried in her message. But she hadn’t mentioned Mickey’s suicide. Not that anyone would leave that kind of news on someone’s voicemail.

  The detective nodded slowly, took a sip of his coffee, and continued.

  “The police ruled it a suicide right away. The guy was alone in his car with all the doors locked. He had a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels between his legs. There was gunshot residue on his right hand. He left a note for his sister. He put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  They were all silent for a second, as if out of respect.

  “What did the note say?” asked Lydia.

  “It said: ‘Dear Lily, I’m so sorry to leave you all alone here. But I just can’t do it anymore. You’re the strong one. It’s too much for me.’ ”

  He said it like he’d played the note over and over in his mind and the words had ceased to have meaning for him. But Lydia could hear the crushing sadness in them.

  “Lily was totally devastated, of course. And apparently she refused to believe he would kill himself. I mean, she wasn’t just doubtful. She was positive that he couldn’t have done it.”

  “That’s pretty common with family members of a suicide,” said Jeffrey.

  “An initial phase of denial is common. But, according to friends she was certain, and after the funeral she set out to prove it. She took a week off from her job and went up to Riverdale.” Detective Stenopolis took a sip of his coffee.

  “I remember her telling me that she and her brother were close, more like best friends than siblings,” said Lydia. “She didn’t have any indication that he was depressed or in some kind of trouble?”

  “Apparently not. Friends got the sense that there had been some kind of conflict between them. But she never said what specifically, just that he was ‘acting like a jerk.’ He had moved from the city up to Riverdale about six months ago, apparently wanting to open some kind of café and performance space, leaving a mega-money job in banking. Sounded to me like he was burned out.”

  He was quiet a second, then he went on.

  “Lily Samuels went up to Riverdale on October 15th. She was in touch with her friends for the first week. Then nothing. Her cell phone voicemail, which we accessed with the help of her mobile service provider, was full of worried messages from her friends. One of those messages was from you. Do you remember what she said on her message to you?”

  “I can do better than that, Detective. I’m sure I saved it because I didn’t hear back from her. I tend to save email messages and phone messages until I connect with the person involved, otherwise I just forget.”

  “There are messages on there from 1995,” said Jeffrey with a small smile. He considered her system of keeping track of messages somewhat disorganized. Ever since he’d read Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, he’d been nearly impossible to live with on such matters. She ignored him as she grabbed the cordless phone. She entered her codes and after she skipped about twelve messages, she put the phone on its speaker setting.

  “This message was left on October 22nd at 7:04 P.M.,” said the electronic voice.

  Then, “Ms. Strong, it’s Lily Samuels.” She released a heavy sigh. “I really need your help. I am out of my league. Big-time. I-I just really need to talk to you. Can you call me back? As soon as possible? Thanks. Bye.”

  Lydia felt a twist of guilt in her stomach. Listening to the message now she heard the fear, the anxiety in Lily’s voice. When she’d heard it the first time, Lily had just seemed really stressed to her. It had taken Lydia until the next day to return the call because she’d been stressed out herself, wrestling with her own work.

  “I’ve never heard her voice before,” said Detective Stenopolis, an expression on his face that Lydia couldn’t read. “She sounds so young.”

  “She is young,” said Lydia. “Twenty-five or twenty-six, I think.”

  “Twenty-six,” he said. “Under what circumstances did she generally contact you? Did you talk often? Would you say you were friends?”

  “It was really more of mentoring relationship. She was a student of mine when I taught a journalism class at NYU. She was specia
l, really talented. At the end of the class, I encouraged her to keep in touch if she needed anything. She’d call for advice on stories, references, stuff like that.”

  “So when you got the call you thought she was probably calling about work?”

  “Yes. That was generally what we talked about. Sometimes we chatted about personal things briefly but mainly not.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I think we had drinks about a year and a half ago. She wanted to thank me for getting her in for her interview at the Post.”

  Detective Stenopolis was scribbling notes as she spoke and continued writing for a minute after she’d gone silent.

  She remembered that Lily was radiant that night with excitement. The interview had gone well and she felt like she was on her way to fulfilling the only dream she’d ever had, to be a journalist. She was dating someone new-a banker, if Lydia remembered right-and Lily seemed smitten with him. At the time, things in Lydia’s life had been pretty hairy, so her time with Lily had seemed like a little oasis of cocktails and girl talk in a sea of madness.

  “Who reported her missing?” asked Lydia. Curiosity was tapping her on the shoulder.

  “Her mother. When Lily missed her mother’s fiftieth birthday everyone knew there was something wrong. Apparently, it was not unlike Lily to be incommunicado for a week or so when she was working on something. But she was a loving daughter and a good friend. No matter how busy she was, she wouldn’t miss her mother’s birthday, especially knowing what a hard time it would be for her on the heels of Mickey’s death.”

  “Her mother must be a wreck,” said Lydia. What a nightmare it must be to lose a child to suicide and then for the other to go missing. It was hard to imagine.

  “She’s heavily medicated right now. Major valium just to get through the day, the husband says.”

  “Lily’s father?” asked Lydia, reaching for something Lily had told her about her family.

  “Her stepfather. Raised both kids from the time Lily was two and Mickey was four.”

  “What happened to their father?” asked Lydia.

  Detective Stenopolis paused for a second, seemed to consider whether he should say. “Suicide,” he said, finally. “Shot himself in a car, drunk on JD. Just like his son Mickey.”

  Lydia felt her heart thump. It was strange to be having this conversation after just hearing about her father’s own death. It seemed surreal and Lydia felt a familiar nervousness, a slight anxiety.

  “That’s pretty odd,” said Jeffrey, narrowing his eyes.

  The detective rubbed his hands together as if he were warming them, seemed to consider it for a moment, whether it was odd or not. Then, “Depression runs in families often. I’m not sure how uncommon it is. Suicide. I don’t know… maybe it’s easier to do it if you know someone who has.”

  Lydia wouldn’t have thought of it that way but it made an odd kind of sense to her. As if the idea of suicide was a contagion; the more closely exposed to it you were, the easier it was to catch.

  “So you said you’ve been working on the case for two weeks?” said Lydia.

  The detective nodded. “Today is the fourteenth day. I think she’s been missing since October 23rd, though, because no one who called her on or after that day heard back from her. Which means that the thirty-six hours where it would be most likely for us to find her passed before we ever knew she was gone.”

  Lydia looked down at the floor. If I’d called her back on the 22nd, could I have helped her? Lydia thought. It wasn’t a healthy way to think but that was the way her mind worked. There was little point in considering the answer.

  “So what have you got so far?” asked Jeffrey.

  Detective Stenopolis gave him a look. “Thanks so much for your time,” he said, politely. “Ms. Strong, would you mind if I sent a tech over to record that message from your voicemail?”

  “We can take care of that, if you want, Detective,” said Jeffrey. “One of the communication techs from my firm can do it tomorrow and we’ll email you the digital file.”

  “That would be great,” he said, rising and handing Jeffrey his card. “It could take a week to get someone from the department over here on such a low priority.”

  “Low priority?” said Lydia with a frown. “I’d think something like this would be big news. A pretty young reporter goes missing while trying to prove her brother didn’t kill himself. In fact, I’m surprised I haven’t heard anything about this earlier in the media.”

  Lydia was usually a news junkie, but admittedly she had been a bit of a hermit in the last few weeks while she struggled to finish her manuscript. She had tried to keep outside input at a bare minimum.

  “The Post did a piece. And there’s been some coverage in Riverdale. But there’s absolutely no evidence of foul play. She had clothes and a good deal of cash with her; we know that. Her car is gone. She easily could have just taken off.”

  “But you don’t think she did.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “What do you think happened?” Lydia said, knowing she was pushing.

  “All due respect, Ms. Strong, but I’m not going to discuss this with you.”

  She nodded to indicate she understood. They’d been fortunate with access in the past because of Jeffrey’s connections to the FBI and the NYPD. But cops generally didn’t like writers or private investigators. Since she was a true crime writer and a partner in Jeffrey’s private detective firm, Mark, Striker and Strong, she was a little of both.

  “I understand,” she said, following him toward the elevator.

  “I appreciate your cooperation, both of you,” he said, shaking each of their hands. “If you think of anything else, call anytime.”

  He stooped back into the elevator and gave them a little wave as the door closed in front of him.

  “Lydia,” said Jeffrey, his voice a warning and a question.

  “What?” she said defensively. The buzz was so intense that her hands were shaking a little.

  Two

  Detective Matt Stenopolis contorted himself into the unmarked Caprice. The whole car bounced with his weight when he got in and his partner Jesamyn Breslow was tossed around like she was in a ship on stormy seas.

  “Jesus,” she said when he was finally settled, his knees fanned out around the steering column.

  “Put on some weight. We won’t have this problem.”

  She was small. Too small, he’d thought at first, to be a cop at not even five-four, barely a hundred and fifteen. Everybody knew that it was the smaller men and women who were more likely to use deadly force because they couldn’t handle themselves in a hand-to-hand struggle. But over the last two years, she had proven herself to be tougher than any man he’d ever known without ever drawing her weapon. He felt sorry for some of the perps who’d tangled with her. There was a skell they’d picked up in the Bronx for killing his girlfriend and their three-month-old son. He resisted and before Matt even realized what was going on, the guy was on the ground screaming like a little girl, his arm twisted unnaturally behind him.

  “I know kung fu,” she liked to joke, imitating Keanu Reeves’ line in The Matrix. But it was no joke; she did know kung fu, had studied it for nearly ten years.

  “How’d it go?” she asked him.

  “They still have the original message,” he told her. “They’re going to have one of the techs from their firm email us the digital file.”

  She nodded. “You didn’t give them anything, did you?”

  “No. But they were definitely curious. Soon as they started asking questions I was out of there.”

  “Good. Because that’s the last thing we need right now.”

  They’d been warned about Lydia Strong. She had a national reputation as a major pain in the ass. And Jeffrey Mark, a former FBI agent turned private investigator, had a lot of connections, not just with the Feds but in the department as well. Enough so that it was hard to get rid of them once they got their teeth into your
investigation.

  “They’re like pit bulls,” warned their supervisor, Captain John Kepler. “Once they get their jaws around your leg, you’ll have to shoot ’em to get them to let go. And even then it won’t be easy.”

  Matt wouldn’t have gone to see them at all except that he was desperate. Out of leads and out of time. Kepler wouldn’t allow them to focus on Lily Samuels full time for very much longer, he knew. It was the bank records that really did them in. They’d subpoenaed her banking records the first day and it had taken about a week and a half to get the information. Just this past Thursday, they’d learned that on October 22nd, Lily Samuels closed her checking, savings, and money market accounts at Chase Manhattan bank, withdrawing close to $40,000. As far as they could tell, it was all the money she had in the world.

  “Okay,” said Kepler, Friday morning. “That’s it. She took off.”

  “No,” said Jesamyn. “Not necessarily. What if someone forced her to withdraw that money?”

  Kepler sighed, looked back and forth between them.

  “Did you get the security tape from the branch where she withdrew the funds?” he asked.

  “We’re still waiting for it,” said Matt.

  “Well, what the fuck is taking so long?”

  Matt looked down at the floor. “They promised by Monday.”

  As soon as he’d seen the withdrawal he’d asked the bank contact for the security video from the branch. They’d been promising it for two days.

  “Get that tape,” said Kepler. “If she’s on it and it doesn’t look as if she’s under duress, we’re going to close the case. I need you two on other things.”

  They’d left his office. Jesamyn had her head down; he could see her jaw working the way it did when she was angry or frustrated. He was a little of both. Over the last two weeks they’d gotten to know Lily through her friends and family, through spending time in her West Village apartment. She was not the type of girl to close her bank accounts and take off for parts unknown. Something had happened to her; they were both sure of that. And sure if they couldn’t figure it out, they’d be failing someone who needed help. Big-time.