Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  “It’s date stamped.”

  “That can be tampered with.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that this is all a little too easy. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t understand what that means,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “We have a lot of good evidence against your partner, if that’s what you mean by ‘too easy.’ What are you suggesting?”

  She sighed. “We were threatened,” she said. “The night before last we infiltrated this church group called The New Day. And their lawyer threatened Detective Stenopolis.”

  He frowned and his bushy eyebrows came together, looked like a long furry caterpillar on his head.

  “So you’re suggesting that this church is setting up your partner,” said Bloom carefully, as a wide smile spread across his partner’s face. She didn’t say anything.

  “How about this instead?” said Bloom, leaning into her. “Your partner became obsessed with the Lily Samuels case, started to develop inappropriate feelings for the missing girl. He ran into one dead end after another, enough so that your CO insisted that you both start working on another case. Your partner continued to follow up leads on his own time, looking for a girl who maybe didn’t want to be found, eventually relying on the statement of an unreliable witness to obtain a search warrant in the middle of the night. When that turned into a huge clusterfuck that did nothing to further your case, he was angry and frustrated. Witnesses at the scene said that Matt lost his temper with an attorney, started making threats. Is that true, Detective?”

  Again, she just stayed quiet and held his eyes.

  “Maybe finding the prostitute whom he fantasized was his girlfriend with another man was just the last straw. He lost it.”

  She shook her head slowly, held herself tighter. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  “Really,” said Bloom, tapping his pen twice, quickly, on the table. “Have you ever known Detective Stenopolis to be involved in a healthy relationship with a woman?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head.

  “While he doesn’t live in the same house with his parents, doesn’t he live just one door down and doesn’t his mother continue to cook and clean for him as if he were still a child?”

  She didn’t answer because it didn’t matter. Bloom already knew the answer.

  “Didn’t Detective Stenopolis lose his temper with Jorge Alonzo when he made a sexual comment toward you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it was sexual exactly-”

  “How would you characterize it then?”

  She found herself stammering. “I-I-” she said stupidly.

  Bloom glanced down at his notes and read. “ ‘Your shit is tight, girl.’ That comment doesn’t have a sexual connotation to you?”

  Jesamyn shrugged and shook her head slowly. They were making him sound like some sexually frustrated psychopath, and pretty convincingly at that. If she didn’t know Mount, really know him, they might be able to convince her. And that scared her. She was scared for the man who was her partner and her friend. She looked at the video on the screen in front of her, frozen as Matt climbed calmly into his Dodge.

  “Didn’t your eyewitness say that he raced from the building?”

  Bloom looked at her. She nodded toward the screen and his eyes followed.

  “He’s not racing,” she said. “He’s calm. That’s a discrepancy between the witness statement and the videotape. We’re talking about a life here, not just a career. You owe it to him and to yourself as a cop to check out that discrepancy. And to check out what I’m telling you about The New Day.” She leaned across the table and forced him to hold her eyes. “Because as sure as I’m sitting here, I will tell you that Mateo Stenopolis is no killer. The fact that he hasn’t had a girlfriend in a while and that his mom still does his laundry doesn’t prove a thing.”

  Bloom held her eyes for a second longer, then rose from his chair. He was a rumpled, tired-looking little man with messy gray hair and a funny moustache. His suit needed a trip to the dry cleaners. He wore a simple gold band on his left hand. He wasn’t very tall, maybe five-six. He had a modest potbelly that strained the bottom button on his white oxford. But she was afraid of him, afraid of what he could do to Mount.

  “Please, Detective Bloom,” she said. “Just take a look at The New Day.”

  But he just gathered up his file and walked from the room.

  “Don’t go anywhere, Detective,” said Bloom’s partner. “We have a little more talking to do.” They closed the door behind them.

  A second later the door opened slowly and Dylan poked his head in.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She simultaneously was happy to see him and wanted to put her fist through his teeth. She shrugged, looked away from him. She didn’t trust her voice at the moment. He entered the room and closed the door behind him, straddled the chair Bloom had just left. He held a gray fleece pullover in his hand, which he slid across the table to her. She took it gratefully and pulled it on. He always knew her so well; it was part of the reason he was able to manipulate her so easily.

  “So, what’s the deal?” he asked.

  “They’re trying to make him sound like some sexual freak.”

  “Is that the surveillance tape?” he asked, nodding toward the video monitor.

  She nodded, reached over, and rewound it to where Mount exited the vehicle. She fast-forwarded it and they watched as a small, balding man with an earring came rushing out the front door wrapped in a blanket, looking stricken. He ran to a nearby pay phone. A few fast-forwarded seconds later, Mount walked calmly from the building and climbed into his car.

  “He’s calm. He doesn’t have a drop of blood on him. He’s not wearing gloves,” she said, looking at Dylan.

  He nodded. “But look how he has the jacket zipped all the way up to his neck. On the way in it wasn’t even closed, you could see his shirt. The gloves could be in his pocket.”

  She turned her eyes to his. “Whose side are you on?”

  “Yours, Jez. I just think it’s better if you have an open mind.”

  “What? Like be open to the possibility that my partner is a psycho who could beat a woman to death with his own fists and then walk out of her place like nothing happened?”

  He shrugged. Looked at the wall above her.

  “Come on,” she said with disdain. “Open your mind. Forget your history with him for one second and think about it.”

  He let out a long, slow sigh. “There is one thing weird about this tape.”

  “What?”

  “If the guy came out just a minute or so after Stenopolis entered and called the cops, why did it take them twenty minutes to get there? I mean he had time to finish the job, wash his face, zip up his coat, and walk calmly to the car. They get a call that a woman is being beaten to death and it takes them that long? I doubt it. Someone will have to check the 911 tapes to get the timing.”

  She nodded. “That’s true,” she said, feeling a rush of excitement. She watched her ex-husband for a second and wondered if she could trust him with her thoughts. He stared back at her, like they were in some kind of standoff.

  “What?” he said finally, showing her his palms.

  “Dylan, I think Mount is being set up.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Come on. Seriously, Jez?”

  She told him about The New Day and the threats Templar had made. She told him about Jessica Rawlins. He didn’t say anything for a second after she was finished talking.

  “Just tell me you think it’s possible,” she said. He held her eyes for a second and then looked away.

  “I guess it’s possible,” he said grudgingly. “Unlikely, Jez. But possible.”

  She sat back, relieved. That was all she needed: independent confirmation that her thoughts weren’t totally insane.

  Nineteen

  Lydia sat, fidgety and anxious, in the passenger seat of the Rover. They sh
ould have flown. But between Jeff’s ever increasing phobia of flying and Dax’s need to travel with a small armory, Lydia was outvoted. If they took turns and didn’t stop except for gas and snacks, they could make it in seventeen hours. A big waste of time they didn’t have. The sky was dusty pink and gray with the setting sun and a light rain fell. Lydia watched as the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler approached in the oncoming lane and then whipped past them in a wet, noisy blur. She shuddered at its speed and size, imagining vividly that it jackknifed and the Rover went crashing into its body, squealing tires, then metal on metal, killing all three of them instantly.

  “Whatever the deal was,” said Dax, “seems to me like Tim Samuels got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

  Lydia shook her head. “I didn’t figure him for a suicide. He seemed too narcissistic.”

  In her experience people like Tim Samuels thought too much of themselves to ever put an end to their own lives. It didn’t rest well with her that she was so wrong about him.

  “Is it possible someone else shot him in the head?” asked Jeffrey from behind her, reading her mind.

  Dax shook his head. “No one left or entered his place while we were there. And you say no one left or entered while you and Jeff watched. Unless someone came and went and we missed it, which I doubt, there was no one else there to do the job.”

  “Or unless there was someone in the house already,” suggested Lydia.

  “We saw the flash in the upstairs window and were in the house in less than five minutes. If there had been someone else in the house, we’d have seen him leave.”

  “They could have come from the water,” suggested Lydia, thinking of the beach behind the house.

  “We’d have heard the boat or seen the lights. Besides, the water was really rough. Too rough for a small craft.”

  “How did you get into the house?” asked Jeffrey.

  “Through the front door. We were going to break it down but it wasn’t locked.”

  “That seems weird. Who leaves their door unlocked?”

  “Lots of people,” said Dax. “Look, if you’re planning on offing yourself why would you bother locking the door? What exactly at that point would you worry about protecting?”

  “It’s a habit,” said Jeffrey. “You do it without thinking.”

  “They live out in the middle of nowhere,” suggested Lydia. “Maybe it was his habit not to lock the door.”

  “Don’t you remember seeing an alarm system in that house?” asked Jeffrey. “If I recall it was pretty high end. Not the kind of thing you would invest in if you were going to leave your doors unlocked.” He always got very worked up about people who were careless about their personal security. Maybe it was their work, or the fact that they’d had to be so vigilant about their own personal security for so long.

  “Maybe he was expecting someone,” she said.

  No one said anything for a minute, each lost in their thoughts about Tim Samuels.

  “He was smart,” said Dax finally. “He put the gun to his temple and fired. Most people think they should put it in their mouth. But you can really fuck yourself up like that. Make yourself a total vegetable. His face was okay, good enough for an open casket, but he was seriously dead.”

  “Where was he?” Lydia asked.

  “It looked like a girl’s bedroom. Must have been Lily’s childhood room, lots of dolls and gymnastics trophies, pretty pale pink carpet and window seat looking out over the ocean.”

  Dax told Lydia and Jeffrey how he’d found Samuels slumped in the bed. The gun had fallen to the floor. It seemed that he’d positioned himself so that the blood and brain matter would splatter on a blank wall beside the bed. But maybe that hadn’t been his intent. Maybe he’d just wanted to be in Lily’s room when he ended his life, not caring what kind of damage his exit would do to it.

  Lydia shook her head. There was something about that detail she didn’t like. Something about it seemed wrong. Thinking about his wife, she wondered what it would be like to know your husband had killed himself in your missing daughter’s bedroom.

  “You sure it was him?” asked Lydia.

  “Who else would it be?”

  “You’ve never seen Tim Samuels before. How do you know it was him?”

  He took his eyes off the road and gave her a look.

  “What am I… an amateur? I checked. There were some pictures on the shelf in Lily’s room. Him teaching her how to ride a bike, him at her graduation. It was him. Trust me.”

  They were all quiet for a second, as if out of respect. Each of them was thinking about Tim Samuels and his final moments.

  “So what kind of deal would involve him killing himself?” asked Lydia.

  “A really shitty one,” said Dax.

  “I mean, how could he be sure the other party was living up to his side of the bargain?” said Lydia.

  “And if you were going to kill yourself, why would you bother to make a deal at all, in the same way that you wouldn’t bother to lock the door,” said Jeffrey.

  “Unless the deal was his life for Lily’s,” suggested Lydia. “He could die knowing that she’d be safe.”

  “But he couldn’t know that,” said Jeffrey. “He would only have the word of a psychopath, assuming that he made the deal with Rhames.”

  Lydia sighed. “Maybe it was literally the last thing he could do. All of his other resources had been exhausted. Nothing else he could do would save her. He told us Rhames wanted him to surrender. Isn’t suicide the ultimate surrender?”

  Dax laughed without mirth. “No,” he said gravely. “Suicide is the ultimate fuck-you. It’s the ultimate act of control, of total selfishness. It tells everyone that you make the decisions about your life, no one else.” He said it with conviction, as if he’d given it a lot of thought. A lot of thought. He went on, “You’re a soldier and you get captured by the enemy? If you surrender, you’ve failed. If you kill yourself, you’ve robbed them of their control over you.”

  “What are you saying then?”

  “I’m saying what if Tim Samuels broke the deal he made with Rhames or whoever? What if his suicide wasn’t the deal at all but his way of taking back control of his life, even if only to end it.”

  It made a sick kind of sense to Lydia. She rubbed the fatigue from her eyes.

  “So if he broke the deal with Rhames, then what happens to Lily?” she asked.

  Dax stared at the road, his jaw tense. He didn’t answer. Jeffrey caught her eyes in the rearview mirror and she turned to look at him. He reached for her shoulder.

  A heavy rain started then and Lydia settled into her seat. They still had ten hours of driving ahead of them before they got to Florida, her least favorite place in the world. Or one of them anyway.

  Twenty

  The bodies of Rosario Mendez and her unborn son were spotted floating in the East River by a tour helicopter pilot. The Coast Guard and NYPD responded immediately and within an hour had retrieved the bodies from the frigid gray waters. It was grim work, unclear whether Rosario had given birth to her son prior to her death, or whether the gases of her decomposing body had expelled the fetus. The umbilical cord was intact.

  The wind seemed to have a personal problem with Jesamyn as she stood beside Evelyn on the pier near the medical examiner’s van. With the sun low in the sky and a damp rain to make things worse, the cold pulled at the bottom of her coat, snuck in through her cuffs, under her collar. She wrapped her arms around herself and watched as the Coast Guard officers lifted the bodies with as much care as the rocking waves would allow. Jesamyn turned away, walked back toward the FDR, and watched as the cars raced past. Some guy from the ME’s office she’d never met before leaned against the back of the van smoking a cigarette like he was waiting for a bus. She nodded at him.

  On the way down, she’d found herself hoping that it wasn’t Rosario Mendez that they’d found. But then she thought, if it’s not her… then who. Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing to hope for in this
line of work. She watched Evelyn, who kept her eyes on the boat, trying to see the face of the corpse no doubt. She looked strained and exhausted; she paced the end of the pier with her hands in the pockets of her thick parka. Evelyn’s partner, Wong, was on medical leave after knee surgery. And with Mount in trouble, they were assigned to each other.

  “Can you keep your mind on the job?” asked Kepler when she’d returned to the station.

  She nodded, not really sure if she could. But she didn’t have the luxury of flaking; she had Benjamin. As much as she’d like to run off on a crusade to prove Mount’s innocence, she needed to do her job and do it well for her son. Luckily, she had a repentant ex-husband with a lot of time on his hands.

  “Good. Because there’s nothing you can do for him right now,” said Kepler, sitting down at his desk. He actually sounded human. She found herself examining him as he sifted through papers on his desk.

  “You know he didn’t do this, right?”

  He looked up at her and gave her a quick shrug. “That’s not for me to decide. Innocent until proven guilty, as far as I’m concerned,” he said with no feeling at all.

  “Right,” she said.

  He looked at her, seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then the moment passed. Finally, he said, “Wong’s out on leave. Work with Rosa until things are… resolved.”

  He didn’t look up at her again, started scribbling something on the page in front of him. She wondered, not for the first time, what made this guy tick. He obviously didn’t give a shit about the job or the people who worked with him. Why be a cop if you just didn’t care at all? Nobody was in it for the money. She nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her, and left his office. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang about a floater in the East River.

  Jesamyn and Evelyn watched as the boat approached the pier, engines sputtering, smoke filling the air with the aroma of gasoline. One of the guys on board threw a line which Evelyn caught and tied off on a cleat. She jumped on board as another guy tied off the stern line. Jesamyn stayed on the dock and watched as Evelyn uncovered the body and stood staring for a second. She laid the sheet back down after a second, looked at Jesamyn, and nodded. She felt a dryness in her throat.