Into the Dark

by Alison Gaylin

  Brenna’s cell phone vibrated in her hands—just once. A text—and it brought her back to the present. She gasped, the pain fading, the face of the paramedic coming back into focus. “My name is Angel, by the way,” he said, which made Brenna smile.

  “Of course it is.”

  She glanced down at the text, from Maya: WHEW!!!! All caps. Four exclamation points. Maybe life wasn’t completely brutal and random and unfair. Maybe some things did happen for good reason. Not to get too sappy about it, but how could Brenna not feel this way when, in just three months, her life had been saved, twice?

  Maybe some girls get into blue cars and live.

  “Okay, let’s get you into the ER,” Angel said.

  Morasco said, “I’m coming with her.”

  Brenna gave Angel a pleading look. “Just one more quick text? For my daughter.”

  He sighed.

  “Thank you,” Brenna said. She typed up the one-sentence text as fast as she could, hit send, and obediently turned off the phone. As Angel wheeled her into the ER, Brenna imagined Maya reading it, and stifled a grin. She could practically see the eye roll, but also that shy little smile—unchanged since she was a toddler.

  The text had read: You are my hero.

  After their wounds were treated, Trent and Brenna were both given MRIs. Both came out normal—well, free of brain injury, anyway. But predictably, Brenna’s made the doctors do a double-take. Because of her hyperthymesia, more than a dozen parts of her brain were larger than usual, some extraordinarily so. She’d been told this three years ago, after participating in the California study that finally put a medical name to what her mother always claimed was God’s will. (Don’t you see, Brenna? It’s God’s will. With that memory, no one will be able to truly leave us again.)

  At any rate, Brenna knew what to expect. What she hadn’t planned on was reliving the MRI she’d had on June 23, 2006, as part of the study. It had been the first and only MRI she’d ever had, and the first time Brenna had realized—palpably—that she was a lot more than mildly claustrophobic. No sooner was the MRI tech at Columbia-Presbyterian giving her the earphones than Brenna was back on the table at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, in that white room with the vague chemical smell . . . Her heart pounds as the technician, Doreen, hands her a pair of puffy black earphones. “Are we gonna listen to some Black Sabbath?” Brenna tries. Her throat is dry.

  Doreen doesn’t smile. “They’re to protect your ears. Ever had an MRI?”

  “No.”

  “Well, without these, the sound is even more unbearable than ‘War Pigs.’ ”

  “Hey, I like ‘War Pigs.’ ”

  Still no smile. “Then maybe you’ll enjoy this.”

  Brenna slides into the tube. A series of shrieking beeps slices into her brain. Test of the Emergency Broadcast System from Hell. Where’s “War Pigs” when you need it, Brenna thinks. The beeping stops.

  Doreen’s voice comes through the speakers. “Please stay still, Ms. Spector.” Brenna opens her eyes, but the walls of the tube look closer. The space is getting smaller. She wants to push against the walls. She wants to scream.

  “Four score and seven years ago,” started Brenna.

  And then the voice of the Columbia-Presbyterian MRI tech boomed through the speakers around her. “Please don’t move, Ms. Spector.”

  . . . and she was back at the City of Hope again. In her mind, she sees Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green watching peaceful scenes on a movie screen as he is forcibly euthanized. She opens her eyes and the tube is smaller still . . .

  “Will this be over soon?” Brenna said now.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Thankfully, it was. After giving lip service to the chief surgeon—who talked about her brain in the same way that Trent talked about particularly well-endowed girls—Brenna met up with Morasco in the waiting room. “Hey, your eye looks better,” he said.

  Brenna touched her hand to it. It felt better, too. Just a dull throb and nowhere near as swollen. “You think Maya will freak out when she sees me?”

  “No way,” he said. She couldn’t tell whether it was a white lie.

  “So . . . Brenna?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You want to tell me how you got acquainted with . . . Man, I feel like a schmuck even saying their names out loud.”

  “Bo and Diddley.”

  “Don’t you feel like a schmuck now?”

  “Yes,” Brenna said. “Yes I do.”

  “So, how did you wind up with those cretins in your car?”

  “Trent doesn’t lock his doors.”

  “Okay. Let’s go a little further back than that.”

  Brenna sighed. “It’s a long story,” she said. But she gave him the fast-forwarded version, taking Morasco from her breakfast with Kate O’Hanlon to Hildy Tannenbaum’s apartment, complete with the call from Mr. Pokrovsky, to her and Trent’s wild ride with the two dorkiest named enforcers in the history of organized crime. One of the good things about a perfect memory: So long as you don’t get distracted, you can retell a story very well and very quickly, without stumbling to recall facts.

  “So, Tannenbaum was in debt to this Pokrovsky guy?” Morasco asked. “What for?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “Incredibly dated reference,” he said. “How old are you, anyway?”

  Brenna grinned at him. Same thing she’d said to him in Lydia Neff’s kitchen on October 1. He’d just quoted her directly. “Way to a woman’s heart,” she said, “is through her memory.”

  Morasco looked into her eyes. His smile dissolved and in his eyes she caught a hint of it—that same ache she’d seen there the previous night, as he watched Lula Belle talk about the wounded bird . . . If Mama were to see me, she’d have been amazed. She thought I was crazy like my daddy. She thought I couldn’t take care of nothin’ without breakin’ it. Mama said that gift for destruction ran through my veins.

  “What’s wrong, Nick?” she said quietly.

  Someone called out, “Get a room!”

  Trent. Brenna turned to see him, getting wheeled through the waiting room by the young bespectacled paramedic, a large white bandage on his forehead.

  “Heading home?” Brenna asked.

  “Yep. The doctors have officially declared my brain awesome.”

  “Great,” she said. “But I want you to promise me something.”

  “Sorry, my heart belongs to Claudia here.”

  The paramedic smiled again.

  “You are very tolerant, Claudia.” Brenna leveled her eyes at Trent. “I mean it. As soon as you get out of here, I want you to go straight home and rest. Get a good night’s sleep tonight. And by getting a good night’s sleep, I don’t mean—”

  “Coralling the baloney pony. I know, I know. Trust me. Tonight, the only thing I’ll be exploring with my fingertips will be the supple keyboard of Tannenbaum’s Mac Pro.”

  “Okay, now I’m going to throw up.”

  “That is, unless Claudia—”

  “Have fun with the Mac Pro,” Claudia said.

  “Aw, that’s cold, baby.” He looked at Brenna. “Seriously, Claudia and I have tons in common. Her brother does computer stuff for the FBI.”

  “You don’t have a brother, Trent.”

  “No, but see . . .”

  “I don’t know anything about computers,” Claudia said.

  Brenna said, “Seems like you have more in common with Claudia’s brother. Maybe she should introduce you.”

  Trent sighed. “Fine, I give up.”

  Brenna leaned over and gave Trent a quick, tight hug. “Please stay out of trouble.”

  “Telling the T-Man not to get in trouble is like telling the sun not to shine.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  Morasco added, “Telling the T-Man not to refer to himself in the third person, on the other hand . . .”

  “Or asking the T-Man not to make up stupid nicknames for himse
lf.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I promise.”

  Once Brenna and Morasco were outside the hospital, he put a hand on her shoulder. “So, listen. I want to talk to you about something. You wanna go get a drink?”

  “It’s barely three o’clock.”

  “You spent lunchtime in a rolling car, followed by an MRI. That automatically makes the rest of the day happy hour.”

  She laughed. “Good point,” she said. “But I should get home to Maya, and she wouldn’t appreciate it if I came in trashed.”

  “True.”

  “You want to give me a ride home? My car’s in the shop.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “And your car’s at a crime scene.”

  “Remember that, too,” he said. “Of course, knowing my luck, it got impounded.”

  They headed for the curb, and Brenna started to hail a cab to take them to Inwood Hill Park, but Morasco stopped her. “Okay, first of all, you’re supposed to let the guy hail the cab.”

  “Says who?”

  “This guy.”

  “Sexist.”

  “Secondly . . .”

  Brenna’s cell phone chimed. “One second.” She checked the screen—a number she’d never seen but with Freeman’s same area code. She held up a finger to Morasco, put her back to him, and answered, very quietly.

  “You’re not alone,” Freeman said.

  “No,” Brenna said. “But listen, as long as I have you here, have you ever heard of a Robin Tannenbaum? He also goes by RJ?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “No. Why?”

  “He may be with our girl.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, they know each other and they both disappeared at the same time, and he, for one, seems to be in a whole lot of trouble.”

  Another long pause. “Okay,” he said. “But keep in mind, I’m only paying you to look for her.”

  Brenna frowned. Her eye hurt. “People don’t always disappear alone, Ga—”

  “Sssh. Don’t use my name.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No worries,” he said. “Look, I don’t want to talk any more if there are people with you. Just remember—if anybody asks you about me—anybody at all . . .”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “Right. Talk later.”

  Click.

  Brenna stared at the phone for a few seconds. Good God the guy was paranoid. Did he buy himself a new disposable phone every day?

  “Who was that?” Morasco said.

  Brenna smiled a little. It was practically as though Freeman had hired him to test her. “Nobody. Just a client.” She cleared her throat. “So, what were you going to ask me?”

  “You’re going to give up this case, right?”

  She turned to him, her smile slipping away. His face was more serious than she’d expected. “Of course I’m not giving it up.”

  “Brenna.”

  “I can’t.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Why the hell not? One day of it, and you’re in trouble with organized crime over this Tannenbaum guy—and he’s not even the person you’re looking for.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You almost got killed today,” Morasco said. “You scared your daughter half to death. And for what? Some . . . some shadow? Some weird-ass fetish?”

  “She’s a person.”

  “So are you. You have people who care about you. You owe them something.”

  “I owe her, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Lula Belle.”

  “You don’t.”

  Brenna’s jaw tightened.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Why?”

  “Uh . . . Because I said so?”

  “I’m not kidding around, Brenna.”

  “I can see that.”

  Behind the glasses, his eyes went hard. “Is it because of Ludlow?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  She started to remember October 23, 1998, and she shut her eyes tight, she bit it back. “No,” she whispered.

  “You’re remembering Jim, aren’t you?” Morasco said.

  “No, I . . .”

  “You’re remembering how he reacted when he found out you’d worked for Ludlow again, even though you’d promised him you wouldn’t. “

  “Stop.”

  “You’re remembering that night, and you should remember that night. You should remember how you made him feel when you put yourself in that kind of danger, just to go work for that asshole—”

  “I said, stop it!” Brenna’s eyes were hot from tears. She turned away from him, tried to catch her breath.

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  Brenna closed her eyes and thought of the Lord’s Prayer, recited it in her head start to finish until the memory was gone. Even then, her eyes were still hot. She felt a tear slipping down her cheek. She swatted it away and breathed very deeply until the feeling passed, and then, finally, she opened her eyes. She turned to Morasco. That much she could do. But still she didn’t trust herself to talk, not yet. God, Brenna hated herself sometimes. Hated all her limitations.

  “That wasn’t fair of me,” Morasco said.

  She said nothing.

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “It’s just . . .” His voice trailed off. “This is going to sound stupid.”

  She didn’t help him. Didn’t say a word. Just stood there, hands crossed over her chest, watching.

  “Your mind is so crowded,” he said. “I want in. I wish you would let me in.”

  “Why? Hell, I don’t even like it in there.”

  Nick’s gaze dropped to the sidewalk. “I do,” he said quietly.

  She stared at him, at his downcast eyes. Much as she wanted him to meet her gaze, he wouldn’t and in a way she was glad. She was afraid of what she might see. “You do?”

  “Yes. A lot.”

  Brenna felt herself softening. “You’re crazier than I thought.”

  Nick took a step closer. Then he looked into her eyes.

  Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all . . . “I’m not staying on this case because of Ludlow.”

  “Then why?”

  “This.” Her hand went into her bag and removed the manila envelope full of Robin Tannenbaum’s things. She slipped out the photo of Clea and herself and gave it to him.

  “Is that you and your sister?”

  Brenna nodded. “That picture was in Robin Tannenbaum’s computer. It was sent to him. By Lula Belle.”

  His eyes widened.

  “Half the stories she tells—they’re specific stories from my childhood.”

  “Your childhood,” he whispered, his eyes clouding over, filling again with that strange emotion.

  Is it pity?

  Morasco went back to the picture. Brenna pressed on. “She sent him that photo, Nick. She got him to put at least one of her PO boxes in his name. If I can find Robin Tannenbaum, I think I might be able to find Lula Belle, and if I can find Lula Belle, I might be able to . . .” She cleared her throat. It was harder than she’d thought, putting it into words with him.

  “Find your family,” he said.

  She looked at him. “Yes.”

  Morasco kept staring at the picture, then lifted his gaze to Brenna’s face. “Let’s get Tannenbaum,” he said.

  During the cab ride back to her place, Brenna went through the manila envelope and pulled out Robin Tannenbaum’s most recent credit card bill. It was a brand-new Visa with a balance of just five hundred dollars. “He must have done some damage to his other cards,” she said. But outside of an Old Navy card and Diner’s Club (who has Diner’s Club anymore?) she couldn’t find bills for any others. “He hid his old bills?”

  Morasco said, “Maybe he didn’t want his mother to see them.”

  Brenna thought of Hildy Tannenbaum’s husband, that stack of Playboys. “
Or his mother didn’t want anybody else to see them,” she said. “She could have just paid them off. Made them go away.”

  “Too bad she couldn’t have done that with whatever he owed Mr. Pokrovsky.”

  “He owed Pokrovsky twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  He shook his head. “What a dumbass.”

  Brenna skimmed the bill. The last charge was on October 9, 2009—sixty dollars at a gas station. In Brenna’s mind, Hildy showed her the note:

  Mother:

  No need to keep dinner warm. May be gone for a little while.

  Best, RJT

  “That was the day he left,” Brenna said. “Check it out. Filled up his tank. In White Plains—your area.”

  “I can ask around,” Morasco said. “You got a picture of him?”

  Brenna handed him one of the photos Hildy had provided.

  “Handsome devil.”

  “He’s grown a beard since then.”

  “To cover up the pock marks?”

  “Actually, Trent thinks he did it to look like Spielberg.”

  Morasco snorted. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. He had a picture of Steven Spielberg taped next to his mirror. Let me find it.” Brenna thumbed through the papers. She didn’t see it. “Trent probably took it—he wanted to do some Photoshopping.” She did find another photo of Spielberg—but this was different, an older, black and white one he’d clipped from a magazine, probably mixed in with everything Hildy had removed from Robin’s desk. “Hmm. Looks like he had a collection.”

  “Go figure. Some guys want to look like Fabio. He chooses a sixty-year-old director . . .”

  “Who the hell wants to look like Fabio?” Brenna stared at the bottom of the clipped photo—handwritten words, so tiny she could barely read them:

  DEUT 31:6

  “He wrote a Bible verse on this picture,” she said.