Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  Jesamyn climbed on board and stood beside Evelyn, who lifted the sheet again. The wind whipped around them. Rosario’s face was bloated and green, badly decomposed but not unrecognizable from the photos Jesamyn had seen. There was a tiny lump beside her on the gurney where they’d laid her, which Jesamyn was careful to keep covered. That was something she didn’t want to see.

  She lifted a hand to her nose against the wet, heavy stench that came off of the body. Something had been at her, probably more than one thing. Jesamyn pulled back the sheet farther. She wanted to see what Rosario had been wearing. A long gray knit cotton dress, like a nightgown. Not something you’d wear to the club. Something you’d wear if you were pregnant and tired and home for the evening.

  “The guy that pulled her out says it looks like there was a blunt-force trauma to the back of her head. But it’s hard to tell at this point,” said Rosa.

  “She didn’t get dressed to go to the clubs,” said Jesamyn.

  “What?” asked Evelyn.

  “Baby Boy said that Alonzo was hounding her that night to go out. When Baby Boy came home, he said that what she’d been wearing when he left was folded on the bed. That he figured she’d gotten dressed and gone out to avoid a fight.”

  Evelyn nodded. “But she didn’t get dressed.”

  “It doesn’t appear so,” said Jesamyn lowering the sheet. Evelyn was quiet a moment, looked at the gray sky turning black over Jesamyn’s head.

  “So what are you thinking?” she asked. Her voice was smoky and deep, her eyes heavy and thoughtful.

  “I’m not sure,” Jesamyn said. The medical examiner came up behind her quickly and startled her.

  “Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound sorry at all as he nudged her out of the way. She stepped aside and let him start taking pictures. As she stepped off the boat onto the dock, she saw an unmarked Caprice pull up, and two guys she recognized from Midtown North homicide stepped out. She couldn’t remember their names, but she remembered Mount saying he didn’t like the tall one with the bad skin and the strawberry blond hair. She hadn’t heard anything too bad about his Latino partner, other than that he was a bit of a dog.

  “Hey, Breslow,” said the redhead as they approached. “I heard you got a floater.”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking at him. She tried to remember his name but it wouldn’t come to her.

  He looked at her a second. “I heard some fucked-up shit about your partner today,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. There was a kind of malicious glee there that made her want to slap his pale white face.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said, squaring off her shoulders at him.

  “I don’t,” he said, raising his palms and giving her a condescending smile. “Seriously, though. What’s the deal?”

  Her cell phone sounded then and she’d never been so happy to hear its annoying little ring.

  “You can talk to Evelyn over there. She’s the principal on the Mendez case,” she said, giving him a look and answering the phone.

  “Breslow.”

  “You’re my one phone call,” said Mount.

  “Jesus,” she said, feeling her heart skip she was so happy to hear his voice. She walked away so that the others wouldn’t hear her conversation.

  “Get me the fuck out of here, Jez.”

  She sighed, looked at the cold gray waters of the East River. Two seagulls fought in the air over something one of them was holding in his mouth. They were screaming bloody murder.

  “How would you like me to do that?” she said quietly. “You’re envisioning a jailbreak maybe?”

  She heard him breathing on the other end. “Tell me you know I didn’t do this.” He sounded tired, afraid.

  “I know, Matt,” she said without hesitation. “I know you couldn’t do it.”

  “They’re doing this… The New Day.” She believed that, too. But something about the way he said it made him seem so desperate, a little unstable. She knew no one would believe him, unless they could prove it somehow.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You need to figure it out, Jesamyn,” he said when she didn’t answer. “How they got that videotape, planted the evidence in my car, how they got that witness to tell the story he told.”

  “What about the fingerprints? How did they get your fingerprints in there?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. “My fingerprints would have been in there already.”

  She sighed. “Oh, Matt. Christ.”

  “I was there that night, the night she was killed. They must have been waiting for me to come and go.”

  She exhaled through pursed lips in a soft whistle. That was very bad news. Yeah, Officer, I was there that night with the prostitute but she was fine when I left her. I swear.

  “I-cared about her. She was a good person,” he said, his voice catching. “She didn’t deserve this.”

  “Okay,” she said, pushing any uncertainty from her voice. “We’re going to figure out how they’re doing this to you. We’re going to prove that you’re being set up.”

  “Start with that witness.”

  “We’re already on it.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Dylan’s got some time on his hands.”

  “Dylan.” There was no love lost between the two men. “Why would he want to help me?”

  “I think he wants to help me.”

  “Well,” he said with a sigh, “beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Just do me a favor. Watch your back, Jesamyn. If they can get to me, they can get to you.”

  Her mind immediately went to Benjamin and she felt a pulse of fear. He started to say something else, but there was a heavy click on the line and an electronic voice told them that their time was up. The line went dead in her hand. The wind was whipping around her, pulling at her coat and flipping her blonde hair around.

  She turned to see the two homicide detectives and Evelyn huddled around the covered bodies of Rosario Mendez and her child, whose life probably ended before it began at the bottom of the East River. She found herself thinking about Baby Boy Mendez and how he’d wavered between the past and present tense when referring to his sister. She thought about something Mount had said about Rosario practically being Baby Boy’s mother. About how his mother hadn’t cared enough about him to give him a proper name. Then she thought about Mount, accused of murdering a woman, beating her to death with his fists… a prostitute he might have loved or thought he loved. It was up to Jesamyn to prove he didn’t kill her. And suddenly, it all just felt like too much. She walked toward the road, turning away from anyone who might see that tears she couldn’t stop had welled in her eyes, threatened to spill down her face.

  Twenty-One

  Florida didn’t seem like a real place with its pink birds and orange groves, mobile homes and hurricanes, the endless Jimmy Buffet soundtrack that played from the speakers of every restaurant and beachside souvenir shop. It seemed like someone’s idea of a place. And not a very good idea at that. Furthermore, it was uncomfortable to wear black in Florida. And why would anyone want to go somewhere where it was difficult to wear black?

  “And don’t even get me started on Disney,” Lydia said, peeling off her leather jacket and looking at the paper white skin on her arms.

  Jeff and Dax both rolled their eyes. They’d heard the Florida rant before. They both knew after a couple of days down here, she’d shed all her clothes and turn into a total beach babe. You had to force her to put a tee-shirt on over her sunburn like a kid.

  “If you ask me, this place is black at its core,” she went on, not noticing as Jeffrey and Dax exchanged a look in the rearview mirror. “Anything this shiny and pretty and plastic has to have a rotten center. Pure evil.”

  In front of them, the gleaming white Gulf beach and the crystalline blue water beyond looked like an oasis between the heat waves that rose off the black concrete of the road. Of course, their last visit to Florida had been pretty frightening.
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  “You know, when we travel, we tend to see only the very worst a place has to offer… men with guns, back alleys,” said Jeffrey. “Maybe you should give it a chance.”

  An ice cream truck jingled around the roundabout they were waiting to enter.

  “They should outlaw those things,” said Lydia.

  “They should,” said Dax. “That stupid goddamn music makes me want to pull out my rocket launcher.”

  “Man, this is a tough crowd,” said Jeff. “You can’t take New York anywhere. I kind of like it here. It’s peaceful.”

  They pulled past a strip of outdoor bars and restaurants, tacky souvenir shops and real estate offices. To the right, white-capped water lapped lazily against a sugar-white beach. A median lined with tall, full palm trees that looked like giant pineapples divided the north- and south-heading lanes of the road. They stopped at a crosswalk and let a dumpy tourist family wearing tacky beach cover-ups and painful-looking sunburns cross in front of them. Dax ogled two bikini-clad rollerbladers with matching heads of bottle-blonde hair, huge fake tits, and impossibly slim bodies.

  “Maybe it’s not so bad down here after all, eh?” he observed absently.

  They passed a row of gleaming high-rise hotels and crested a causeway that looked out over a marina lined with hundreds of boats in a canal that led to the Gulf. High cumulous clouds towered full and dramatic in a cerulean sky. Lydia rolled down the window to breathe in the salt and they all felt the swath of hot, humid air as it saturated the cool interior of the car.

  The causeway ended in a lush explosion of green. The temperature dropped as they passed beneath a glade of trees that seemed to shelter the island in a dark canopy. From the road, they could no longer see the ocean because of the high walls that edged the magnificent homes lining the beaches. A thick cover of palms, oleander, and hibiscus bushes, fanning birds-of-paradise, and loblolly pine allowed only glimpses of tile roofs.

  “I think this is it. Up here on the right,” said Dax, scrolling down on his portable global positioning device.

  They slowed as they passed a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates, the metal twisted and shaped to resemble thorned branches. Lydia saw the New Day logo on an unmarked plaque above an intercom speaker box. She felt the familiar buzz, an agitation to get behind those gates made her fidget in her seat. When she thought of Lily now, all she could see was that image, those sharp shoulder blades, the shaved head.

  “Maybe we should call the police,” said Lydia.

  “Tell them what?” asked Jeffrey.

  “That we think a missing girl is locked inside those gates,” she said.

  “And what do you think they’ll do? Take a report and investigate, announcing to Trevor Rhames and company that we’re here in Florida.”

  “And who knows?” added Dax. “They’re as powerful in this town as the FBI seems to think, who’s to say the chief of police is not a New Day devotee.”

  “Jeez, it was just a thought. Take it easy.”

  “We’ll wait till dark,” said Jeffrey, his eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel. “Then we’ll try to find our way in.”

  “Since that’s been working so well for us,” she said, looking at him.

  She heard Dax in the back tapping on the keys of his BlackBerry.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, turning to watch as he typed furiously with his thumbs.

  He looked up at her. “None of your beeswax,” he said, sticking the device in his pocket. Lydia had a wave of technology lust and felt jealous.

  “I need one of those,” she said sullenly as she turned to watch the property pass. She could see the cupola on the roof peeking out through the trees and her thoughts turned, for some reason, to Shawna Fox, a girl she’d been far too late to help. She remembered the green eyes that stared out at her from a photograph handed to her by Shawna’s desperate, sad boyfriend, Greg.

  Lydia was a different person then, as sad and desperate as Greg, haunted by an unresolved grief for her mother that had become so much a part of her she barely even realized it. Old photos of people who were gone had angered Lydia then. They were cold, eerie reminders of how easily life was lost, of how vividly alive people remained in the memories of those who loved them, and how grief was the slick-walled, bottomless abyss between those places.

  Her experiences since that time had taught her something about the nature of love and what it meant to lose it. She’d come to understand that though we may lose the people we love, the gift of their love remains. In the throes of grief, that was little comfort. But in time, that knowledge could bring a kind of peace, a tentative healing. She thought then of her father, whom she’d lost before she ever knew him, who she now realized had been trying to reach out to her for most of her life. She thought of the woman, the stranger, who might be her sister. She felt a wash of anxiety mingling with a strange feeling of hope. Shawna. Tatiana. Lily. The lost, grief-mangled girl Lydia herself had been once.

  “Shit,” she said aloud.

  Jeffrey put a hand on her knee. “We’ll find her,” he said. “I promise.”

  She put her hand over his, looked at the wedding band on her finger, and nodded.

  “We need to go inland,” said Dax.

  “Why?” asked Lydia, watching the house disappear from her view in the mirror.

  “That compound you mentioned… organic produce or something, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I found a listing for a New Day Farms.”

  She turned in the passenger seat to look at him; he turned his GPS out to her and showed her a little map on its screen.

  “That must be the place Rusty Klautz claimed they were stockpiling weapons.”

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” said Jeffrey. “The waterfront property in an affluent area and a farm out in the-middle-of-nowhere Florida.”

  Dax nodded. “It’s a good setup for trafficking.”

  “Trafficking what?” asked Lydia.

  Dax shrugged. “Pretty much anything,” he said. “Guns, drugs.”

  “Diamonds,” said Jeffrey.

  Dylan Breslow wouldn’t walk a block to piss on Matt Stenopolis if he was on fire. The guy was an asshole, and if it weren’t for old Mount, Dylan strongly suspected that he and Jesamyn would still be together. Maybe not. But it certainly hadn’t helped their situation when Matt had stumbled upon Dylan making out with a female rookie from the Fifth Precinct at a bar on the Lower East Side. In fact, that was the incident that had led to Jesamyn asking Dylan to leave their home. Not that things had been great prior to that incident.

  “I’ve dealt with the pain and humiliation your infidelity has caused me in our relationship. But I can’t handle being humiliated in front of my co-workers,” she told him. “You’ve just walked over the line. Don’t even try to come back.”

  She’d meant it. He hadn’t believed her at first but it wasn’t even a month before he was served divorce papers. She had him served on the job during roll call, trying to get even with him, he figured, for hurting and humiliating her the way he had. He didn’t blame her, really. He knew every shitty thing that had passed between them had been his fault; he even knew he didn’t deserve her. But he loved her, loved her like a freight train through his heart. He just couldn’t be faithful to her. He didn’t have enough perspective on himself to understand why.

  “Why am I trying to help this guy?” he asked himself aloud as he pulled the unmarked Caprice in front of the Brooklyn row house that belonged to Clifford Stern, the eyewitness who claimed to have seen Matt leave the scene of Katrina Aliti’s murder. The day was bright and cold. An old lady in a black wool coat and a kerchief on her hair made her way slowly up the street with a walker and an air of determination. A young mother in tight jeans and a short, puffy white coat pushed a stroller, had a little rhythm to her step from whatever she was listening to on her headphones. In the schoolyard across the street, children about Ben’s age played, bundled in thick parkas and little wool hats… jump rope,
swing sets, jungle gyms. He smiled, thinking that no matter how the world changed, the schoolyard seemed always to maintain a comforting sameness. No video games, no Internet, just the simple physical games he had played when he was a kid. That’s what kids needed, to run around, burn off some of that energy. They didn’t need to be sitting in front of a screen somewhere, stimulating their developing brains with the worst possible garbage, growing physically inactive. It was a recipe for bad physical and mental health. He noticed teachers standing like sentries, arms crossed, eyes alert, by every possible exit or entrance from the yard, four in total. Someone had to keep the world and all its many terrible changes outside the perimeter of the last safe place.

  He peeled back the tab on his coffee from the deli up the street and settled in. A door slammed somewhere close by and he started, spilling a little hot coffee on his jeans.

  “Nice,” he said, reaching for a napkin from the glove box. He dabbed the hot liquid and swore at the stain it left on his thigh. Since the shooting, he’d been really edgy. He dreamed about Jerome “Busta” White, the boy he’d killed. He’d wake up sweating, and more frightening, he’d had a couple of intense flashbacks during his waking hours. The shrink they made him see told him it was normal and that it would pass. And it did seem to be better, a little better every day. But he knew for a fact that he’d never forget that kid’s eyes. How they were liquid and full of life and in a moment they’d turned cold and still as glass.

  He’d never given a whole lot of thought to the concept of soul. But Dylan saw something leave that kid. How could it be that life just vanished that way? It was hard to understand in theory; it was harder to witness. They’d all wind up that way, abandoned by life. Him, Jesamyn, Ben, too, someday. The thought filled him with dread. He tried to push the dark thoughts away. They made him question everything about himself, everything about the way he’d lived his life so far. He got the terrible sense that everything he thought was cool and important was shit. That the things he thought were irrelevant, the things he had abused and taken for granted, were the only things that mattered. He’d been on the road for forty years, walking in the wrong direction, taking all the wrong turns. It made him feel sick inside. Worse, Jerome knew it, too. In those last seconds, he saw it. But it was too late for Jerome.