Twice: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  Not that she put her love life in the same category as she put Jed McIntyre. But it was all part of the mounting sense that she had lost control of her once very orderly existence.

  She came to a stop in the middle of the bridge under the first gigantic arch and walked over to the railing facing west. She felt the cold on her nose and her cheeks, her heart thumping the rhythm of exertion. The skyscrapers of lower Manhattan reached, gleaming monoliths against a flat slate sky, and the morning rush hour flowed beneath her, a slow, noisy river of tires whispering on wet asphalt, the occasional screeching of a sudden stop or the blast of an angry horn rising from the current.

  All the answers were on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the place she always came to when her mind wrestled with a thousand worries and the cacophony in her head made the city noise seem like an orchestra, composed and melodic. She wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with her. Why she wasn’t more euphoric, the way you were supposed to be, about the baby … Jeffrey’s baby … and about the fact that he was gung-ho to get married. Isn’t this what women were supposed to want? But she had never wanted what other people wanted. She had never understood the urgent desire some women feel to procreate. Or the happy blissful glow they displayed when they discovered they were finally pregnant. Don’t you realize, she’d wanted to ask, what an awesome responsibility you have to this new life? That your actions from here on out will affect this child forever?

  Lydia wondered how she could bring a child into a world populated by monsters, monsters that she seemed to have an insatiable desire to chase and destroy, one at a time. Or vice versa. She worried that, at the end of the day, she didn’t have enough to offer a baby. It seemed like so many people were concerned about wanting a child, while they never considered what they had to give. She didn’t want to be one of those people. Maybe you should have thought about all this before you went and got yourself knocked up, she chastised.

  Jeffrey, on the other hand, seemed to have a Zen-like confidence about the whole thing. “It happened now because it’s time for us,” he had said during one of their midnight conversations after anxiety had disturbed her sleep, and as a consequence his as well. “You’ll surprise yourself. You’re going to be a doting, intelligent, sensitive mother … with your own identity. Trust me.”

  Jeffrey was the only person in the world she did truly trust with her life, her future. Lydia had met Jeffrey when she was only fifteen years old and he was a twenty-five-year-old FBI agent investigating her mother’s murder. Over the next fifteen years, they stayed in touch and their connection evolved into friendship. They became colleagues on a number of projects and he became for her a mentor, confidant, and advisor. Somewhere along the line, he became much more. But it was only a little more than a year earlier that they both finally gave in to the feelings that had been boiling beneath the surface of their relationship.

  The years before her life with Jeffrey seemed like a landscape of loneliness and isolation that she had crossed. While her career had flourished, her inner life had been a wasteland of fear and pain. She had felt permanently scarred by the loss of her mother, whose body she had discovered one autumn day when she returned home from school. Abandoned long ago by her father, Lydia was raised by her loving but elderly grandparents. In spite of the love and care she got from them, she grew up afraid to really care for them or anyone, afraid to trust because of a crippling fear of loss. After the death of her mother, she had clawed her way back from the abyss of grief and as a young woman she’d decided, albeit on a subconscious level, that she had no intention of ever being thrown back into that slick-walled pit again.

  Loving Jeffrey had changed that, had helped her to trust the universe more, to trust herself, had helped her to embrace life instead of wasting it fearing the death of those she loved. Things had been more or less blissful until she invited the monsters back into her life … into their lives. Now Jed McIntyre roamed free. She reached down and felt the Beretta in the pouch she wore at her waist. It gave her some small measure of security.

  From the corner of her eye, Lydia spotted a thick figure dressed in black making his way quickly through the smattering of people strolling up the wooden slats of the bridge’s walkway. He was like a drifting mountain and people turned to look at him as he made his way past. Lydia moved quickly behind the stone ballast that stood in the center of the walkway dividing it in two, the bike path on the left and the pedestrian path on the right. She pressed her back against the cold stone and waited, her heart racing.

  She knew it would happen just like this. When she was being careless, or worse, reckless, he would come on her in broad daylight in a throng of people. He wouldn’t come in the cover of night, when demons were expected. He would move from the crowd, take her in front of bystanders. No one would make a move to stop him. She could imagine it all as clearly as if it were a memory. When the time came there would be a fight to the death and the odds were even as to who would walk away. She peered around the ballast to see the giant form almost on top of her.

  Dax Chicago rounded the corner, breathless and clutching his side.

  “Bang, you’re dead,” said Lydia loudly, startling him.

  “Jesus Christ, woman. What is wrong with you?” his heavy Australian accent making the words little more than a jumble to her. But she had learned to understand him better after three weeks of seeing him every single bloody day.

  “I thought you were in better shape,” she said with a smile.

  “I’m trying to help you,” he said, walking a circle, still holding his side.

  “You’re a mercenary, Dax. Let’s not glorify your role here.”

  “Fuck off,” he said miserably. “It’s fucking cold out here.”

  Dax Chicago was six-foot-four of pure muscle and grit. He had the kind of strength that bulldozers envied, and the kind of graceful speed that seemed impossible in a man of his size—in the short haul. Lydia knew that over miles, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with her. She did like to make him earn the money Jeffrey was paying him to be with her when he couldn’t be. A fact she greatly resented. But Jeffrey could not be dissuaded … so Lydia made it as difficult as possible for everyone.

  “Pregnant women who are being stalked by serial killers should not be jogging anyway,” he added with a smirk.

  She punched him hard on the arm and connected with flesh that felt more like a boulder than a man. She didn’t really mind Dax, and even when she hated him it was the kind of hate reserved for family members, always threatening to bubble over with laughter and lined with affection. She had to admit he was a good man to have on the team. A former Special Forces agent for the British army, his knowledge of weapons, surveillance, and an almost supernatural gift for stealth had definitely been an asset in the past.

  The other thing Lydia liked about Dax was that his whole life was cloaked in mystery. He revealed little about his past, how he came to work for the firm, how he came to live in a palatial home in Riverdale complete with a basement that put dungeons to shame. His basement was a maze of rooms—one a weapons armory filled with enough firepower to equip an army; one with a cruel metal table, complete with five-point restraints; yet another adjacent to a second room connected by a two-way mirror. Lydia never tired of probing Dax for details about himself that he refused to disclose. It was as if Dax Chicago sprang fully grown from the earth in a full set of body armor and carrying an AK-47.

  “Come on, Lydia. Let’s go,” Dax said, a pleading look in his jade eyes. His pale skin was blotched with angry red patches from cold and exertion. A few brown curls snaked out of the charcoal wool stocking cap he’d pulled down over his ears. He was not bad-looking for a big dumb Aussie.

  “Dax, maybe we need to get you a girlfriend,” she said as they reached the bottom of the bridge and headed back into the court district.

  He snorted his contempt as Lydia’s cell phone rang. She unzipped the pouch at her waist and removed the tiny silver Nokia that rested against the not
so tiny Beretta.

  “Hi,” she said, having seen Jeffrey’s number on the caller ID.

  “Where are you?”

  “At home, on the couch, like a good little prisoner.”

  He sighed on the other end of the phone. “Are you with Dax?”

  “I can’t seem to shake him.”

  “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you two hop in a cab and come to the office? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  They walked across Chambers Street, the sickly sweet smell of honey-roasted nuts from a vending cart carrying on the cold air. An angry cabbie leaned on his horn as a Lincoln Town Car cut him off and sped past them. Sharply dressed yuppies rushed along in a blur of navy and black on their way to important jobs, tasks, meetings, carrying paper cups of Starbucks coffee.

  “What’s up?” asked Lydia, hearing the lick of excitement in his voice.

  “Did you see the news this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll explain it to you when you get here. Half an hour?”

  “About that.”

  Dax and Lydia jogged to Sixth Avenue and hopped a cab heading uptown to Mark, Striker and Strong.

  chapter two

  Detective Halford McKirdy, Ford to his friends, liked the dark. Darkness formed a cocoon where thoughts could gestate into theories, theories into answers. The light beckoned a man outside himself, encouraged him to be distracted. That’s why he always pulled the shades in his dingy, cluttered office so that only just the hint of sunlight leaked in between the blinds and the sill, between the slats, creating thin ladders of light across the files and photographs on his desk.

  This morning there was a strange odor in his office. It could have been the half-empty coffee cup—or half full, as an optimist, which Ford was not, might note—that was perched dangerously on the corner of his desk. It could have been the pastrami sandwich that he knew still lay on the bottom of his wastepaper basket beneath a drift of discarded paper, forms, and message slips. Or the stale cigarettes in the ashtray that he kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his metal and faux-wood desk, so that no one would notice that he was still sneaking the occasional cigarette. Or maybe it was just that the smell of death had followed him from the crime scene he’d left an hour before. Likely, it was some combination of all of those things.

  “He has come for me again,” she’d said slowly with a nod, her pink silk pajamas stained with blood, clinging to her, her voice quavering, her eyes staring off into some horror only she could see. The horror right before her eyes seemed to elude her.

  “I’ll never escape him now. He’ll eat my young … swallow them whole. And me as well. You can’t stop him. No one can.”

  The words she’d spoken to him as the paramedics wheeled her away in restraints were echoing in his head now as Ford flipped through the crime scene photographs. They were up there with the most gruesome he’d seen in his twenty-year career. He sat quietly at his desk. Only the halogen lamp beside him lit his office as he slowly wrote notes in black ink on a yellow legal pad, trying to make sense of what he had seen this morning. This would be the second time he’d investigated the murder of one of Julian Ross’s husbands.

  He remembered the first time clearly, just as he remembered all the cases where the answers had never come clear. Something had haunted her that night ten years ago. He could see that behind her eyes, ringed horribly in black by the mascara she had wept from her lashes. But she is not innocent, he remembered thinking. Nor, however, had he sensed in her the capacity for the cold and calculating murder of her husband. He’d had the same conflict about Julian Ross again as he’d arrived at her Park Avenue duplex at five in the morning, called in to investigate the murder of her second husband. It was a good thing she kept her maiden name.

  He shifted in his chair, leaning back and rubbing his eyes. He rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, hearing the tension crackling there. He remembered Julian as a tiny woman, really frail-looking, with a fragile beauty that threatened to shatter with the passing years. For some reason he had always remembered her hands and her wrists vividly, so white that he could see the blue of her veins beneath the parchment of her skin. Every time he’d seen one of her paintings over the years, in a magazine or a SoHo gallery, he’d remembered those hands and the questions he still had about her years after she had been acquitted. Something about it had never rested with him. Here he was again. That was his karma; the sleeping dogs never did lie.

  Julian Ross, still tiny, still frail-looking, had aged considerably since he’d last seen her, in spite of her wealth and success. To be fair, the fact that she was covered in her husband’s blood and rocking back and forth on her haunches in the corner of her bedroom didn’t do much for her. She had looked at him when he entered, and said, “You again.”

  When he’d walked through the front door of the duplex, the energy of rage and terror had raised the hair on his arms. Something wasn’t right, he knew at once. Something wasn’t simple. When he saw the room where the crime was done, all the feelings he’d had that night ten years ago came rushing back to him … the disbelief and the slightest notch of fear in the back of his throat. It was like when he took his wife to Egypt for their honeymoon and they saw the Great Pyramids, those gigantic monuments reaching into the sky so solid, so symmetrical. All he could think was, No human could have done this with the resources available at the time.

  Julian Ross’s second husband, Richard Stratton III, the father of her twins Lola and Nathaniel, had been stabbed repeatedly in their bed while she allegedly slept beside him. But stabbed was really too friendly a word for what had been done to Mr. Stratton. He had been disemboweled, nearly decapitated. His face had been bashed beyond recognition. His blood and innards had been spread around the room. There were long trails of blood along the floor and along the walls, as though he’d been dragged about by a poltergeist.

  Just like Julian’s first husband, Tad Jenson, his wedding ring and the finger on which he’d worn it had been removed. Neither object was anywhere to be found.

  It didn’t seem physically possible that Julian Ross could have done what had been done to her husband. But at the moment, there was no evidence that anyone else had entered the apartment. Julian’s elderly mother, Eleanor; Julian’s six-year-old twins; and their young nanny were sleeping in rooms on the lower level of the duplex. Julian’s claim that she had popped sleeping pills before bed and didn’t wake during the violence wasn’t exactly an airtight alibi.

  On the other hand, there was nothing at the scene that could be easily identified as the murder weapon. Then there was the pure physicality of a 100-pound woman beating and bludgeoning to death a 250-pound, six-foot-four male and somehow managing to get his blood all over the walls and even on the twelve-foot-tall ceiling. There was something definitely spooky about it.

  “You again,” she’d said when he walked into the room. A smile played upon her lips. Shock or insanity … maybe a little of both.

  “What is she still doing in here?” he’d asked the cop who stood at the bedroom door, supposedly guarding the scene until the ME and forensics arrived.

  “I’m not leaving my husband,” she said, her voice shrill with the hysteria he knew was going to hit like a tornado in a few minutes. The cop he’d addressed shrugged his helplessness.

  “Ms. Ross, let’s get you out of here, okay?” he said, holding out his hand.

  “No, I’m not leaving him,” she answered. Her eyes had started to glaze over and he could see that she was trembling. He looked around him at the bloodbath, trying to determine the source of a dripping noise he heard. Blood had soaked through the sheets and was collecting in a pool on the hardwood floor next to Julian. She didn’t seem to notice as it grew and crept toward her.

  It was the kind of room showcased in magazines—or anyway it had been before the carnage. The bed was the size of some apartments he’d been in, with its dramatic four posts and plush mattress, at least ten brocade t
hrow pillows. French doors opened onto a balcony revealing a breathtaking view of uptown Manhattan. Pictures of Julian and Richard or the twins, beautifully framed in sterling, wood, or crystal, occupied most of the available nooks and crannies of space on the dresser and night tables. A small alcove of bookshelves reached to the ceiling and a plush maroon chenille chair, matching ottoman, and standing lamp nestled in the space. Embers still glowed in the fireplace, above which was a large canvas that Ford recognized as an early work of Julian’s. An entertainment armoire stood partially open, revealing a large-screen television, DVD player, stereo, and speakers. All of it was marred by blood splatter.

  “Sir, the paramedics are here,” said the other uniform on the scene, after jogging up the stairs and stopping at the bedroom door.

  “Only one of them in here,” answered Ford. “She needs to be sedated and removed from the room and then no one else will be allowed in here until the crime scene investigators arrive.”

  “You think I did this, don’t you?” she asked him in one of her last moments of semi-lucidity.

  He looked at her, knowing he should inform her of her right to remain silent.

  “I took sleeping pills before I went to bed. I woke up and found him … like …” she said, as a sob took over her body and her voice. “Like this,” she finished in a whisper. He looked over at the body of her husband face down and naked on the bed, one arm draping over the side, knuckles touching the floor. The body looked white and deflated, which Ford guessed made sense, as it seemed to have been drained of most of its blood.

  “I wouldn’t say anything at all right now if I were you, Ms. Ross,” he said, trying not to sound as cold as he felt inside.