Skeleton Justice

by Michael Baden

  The barking continued.

  In a minute, Mycroft. In a minute …

  Jake’s cell phone vibrated in the middle of the weekly staff meeting. He ignored it. A few seconds later, it started again. As Charles Pederson paced across the front of the room, pontificating, Jake discreetly looked down at the phone. The display said LITTLE PAWS.

  He frowned. Why would Mycroft’s silly doggy day care be calling him? Then he remembered he had given Manny permission to list him as one of three emergency backup numbers. If they were calling him, it must be because they couldn’t reach Manny, or Kenneth, or Manny’s mother, Rose. Well, Manny and Kenneth were together at the deposition, and Rose was probably out somewhere having fun. She kept her cell phone turned off, using it only for emergencies, which she defined as times when she needed to reach others, not times when they needed to reach her. Jake turned his attention back to the meeting. Little Paws could wait.

  Again, the cell phone vibrated. Annoyed, Jake reached down to turn it off. This time the display read KENNETH BOYD.

  His heart rate quickened. If Kenneth was calling him, where the hell was Manny? Jake glanced at the clock on the wall. The meeting had been going for half an hour and Pederson showed no sign of wrapping it up.

  “And now, I’d like to share this PowerPoint presentation with you,” Pederson said. “Lights, please.”

  The lights went down and Pederson began fiddling with his laptop. Nothing appeared on the screen. Finally, one of the secretaries took pity and got up to help the chief. As they huddled together over the computer, Jake slipped out the rear door of the conference room.

  Back in his office, Jake dialed Kenneth. “Where’s Manny?” he asked without a greeting.

  “That’s what I’d like to know. She never showed up for the Greenfield deposition.”

  Jake could practically see his adrenal gland preparing for fight or flight. “Little Paws also called me. Do you know why?”

  “Because when they opened up this morning, they found Mycroft sitting at the door all by himself, dragging his leash behind him.”

  “Let’s get her up,” a woman’s voice said.

  “I don’t think she’s—”

  “I said it’s time.” A door clicked.

  Manny opened her eyes and found herself looking into a very beautiful face: shiny black hair, almond eyes, high cheekbones. Human beings are hardwired to respond positively to beauty, but Manny did not smile. Neither did the other woman.

  The room she was in had a very high ceiling, dingy green walls, and no furniture other than the bed she lay on and a small table. None of it meant anything to Manny. She hadn’t recovered the ability to reason; she could focus only on her physical needs—to drink, to eat, and to stop the incessant pounding in her head.

  “Can I have some water?” Manny’s voice came out as a harsh croak, unrecognizable to her own ears.

  The woman moved to the table and poured water from a bottle into a plastic cup. Manny watched, her mind grinding slowly into gear. The woman looked vaguely familiar to her, but she didn’t know why. Mostly, Manny was interested in the water. She propped herself up on one elbow, took the cup, and drank the water straight down. The fluids primed her brain and she looked around. The room was so dusty and dim, it couldn’t possibly be someone’s home.

  “Where am I? Who are you?” Snippets of memory returned to her. A dirty man. A smell. A fall onto the sidewalk. A slight jingling sound …

  Manny sat straight up. “My dog! Where’s my dog?” The sound she remembered was the tinkle of Mycroft’s tags as he ran. “Where’s Mycroft? He was sick. I was taking him to the vet.”

  The woman observed her coolly but said nothing. Where had Manny seen her before? She was beautiful enough to be an actress or a model, but Manny didn’t think she’d seen her on TV or in a magazine. Besides, what would a famous person be doing in a grungy place like this? She took in more details of the room: unfinished wood floor, dirty barred window, exposed pipes. What was she doing here? Manny swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed herself up. “Look, I have to—”

  Her knees buckled and her vision blurred. She plopped back down. “What’s the matter with me?” Manny closed her eyes and rubbed her temples until she felt a little better. When she looked up again, a man stood in the doorway.

  Manny smiled. A familiar face, a kind face. Then her smile faded. A face that didn’t belong here.

  “Dr. Costello, what’s going on? And where’s Mycroft?”

  The vet turned his back and looked out the only window, a barred opening facing an air shaft. “My wife, Elena, will explain.”

  “Surely by now you realize who we are, Ms. Manfreda?”

  Manny’s hands gripped the rough covers of the bed. A man and a woman working together, a person with some medical expertise, born in the late seventies. “You’re the Vampire? The two of you?”

  Elena smiled.

  “Why are you doing this?” Manny continued. “What do you want from me?”

  “We want you, and your friend Dr. Rosen, to tell the world about the Desaparecidos,” Elena said. “And we have taken measures to make sure the world is finally listening.”

  This was it. The endgame she and Jake had been predicting the previous night. Manny turned to face the other woman.

  “You poisoned my dog to get me here? How?”

  Elena laughed. “Mycroft is a creature of habit. He takes a walk in the park every day with his keeper from Little Paws. A woman walking six small dogs is used to getting a lot of attention. While Frederic fussed over the others yesterday, I slipped Mycroft a little treat.”

  “What did you give him?” Manny demanded. “You killed my dog!”

  Dr. Costello looked offended. “Certainly not. It was just a little something to upset his digestion. He didn’t get enough to cause serious damage.”

  “But where is he?” Manny asked again.

  Dr. Costello and his wife exchanged a glance. “Don’t worry about your dog,” Elena said. “Suffice it to say that Mycroft has brought you here in a way that is virtually untraceable. No one knows where you are, Manny. If Jake Rosen wants to save your life, and the life of Travis Heaton, he will have to tell the world about the torture and death our parents suffered.”

  No longer cool and elegant, Elena paced around the room in rising hysteria, her skin flushed a muddy red beneath her tan. “Jake Rosen will tell the world how my husband and I and Esteban Sandoval and so many others were ripped from our mother’s wombs and given away to be raised by the very people who had killed our parents. When Lucinda Bettis and the others see how all our parents were tortured, they will finally renounce this lying life they have lived for all these years.”

  She grabbed Manny by the shoulders. Her eyes were wild; her nostrils flared. “They don’t believe what I have told them. It’s only words to them, and pictures. They have to see it lived. They have to witness how our parents were tortured. Then they will understand. You and Jake Rosen will make them understand.”

  The first thing Jake noticed when he entered Manny’s apartment was a strong, scorched scent of Hawaiian Peabody roast left over-long on the warming plate of the coffeemaker. He looked into the tiny kitchen area. “Pot’s full—she left without drinking any,” he said to Kenneth and Pasquarelli, who had come with him to search for signs of Manny’s whereabouts.

  Kenneth looked in the other direction. “And the Murphy bed is still down. Manny always makes the bed before she leaves. Says it tricks her into believing her bedroom and her living room aren’t the same room.”

  “All right, so we know she slept here last night and we know she left in a hurry this morning,” Pasquarelli said. “Why? Where’d she go? And how did the dog wind up alone at Little Paws?”

  “She never would have left him outside alone,” Kenneth said for about the fifteenth time. He chewed on a long pink fingernail as his eyes darted around the tiny apartment.

  “I’ll get started subpoenaing her phone records,” Pa
squarelli said. “Get a list of her incoming and outgoing calls this morning.”

  “That will take hours,” Jake said. “There must be some evidence here that will give us a lead sooner.”

  “Her closet!” Kenneth shouted. “Let’s see if we can figure out what she was wearing. Then we’ll know where she intended to go.”

  Pasquarelli raised his eyebrows. “That’s one approach.”

  Kenneth flung open the doors of the walk-in closet, revealing neatly hanging blouses, skirts, pants, and dresses, not to mention towers of shoe boxes spaced between a floor shoe rack.

  “It’s hopeless,” Jake said. “How can you possibly tell what’s missing from all that?”

  But Kenneth was down on his knees. “Look at how most of the shoes on the shoe rack are thrown around. She was searching for something.” His voice grew muffled as he crawled farther into the depths of the closet.

  “Eeew!” Kenneth came scuttling out backward, holding his right hand out in front of him. “There’s something wet and disgusting on the floor in there.”

  Jake grabbed Kenneth’s wrist, stared at the greenish slime under the manicured nails, then lifted them to his nose to sniff. “Dog vomit,” he pronounced. “Mycroft must have been sick in the night. Manny left in a rush to take him to the vet.”

  Kenneth’s eyes lighted up, then immediately dimmed. “But she must never have gotten there. And neither did Mycroft.”

  “Let’s call the vet.” Jake snapped his fingers. “What’s his name again?”

  Kenneth returned from washing his hands. “I have the number here on my phone.” He clicked a few buttons and started talking. Jake would have snatched the phone away from him, but Kenneth seemed to be asking all the right questions.

  “The vet said she paged him at five-fifteen this morning to say that Mycroft was vomiting,” Kenneth reported. “He said he told her it sounded like he’d eaten something toxic to dogs and that she should take him to the Animal Medical Center on Eighty-sixth Street and York. They have an animal poison-control center there that’s open twenty-four/seven.”

  “You call the Animal Medical Center to check if she ever made it there,” Jake told Kenneth. “Vito and I will go down and talk to the doorman.”

  At 10:00 a.m., the morning rush had ended and the doorman in Manny’s lobby had settled into signing for deliveries and assisting a few elderly residents and stay-at-home moms.

  “Who was on duty at five this morning?” Jake asked.

  “I was.” The doorman yawned. “We’re all working overtime this week to cover for one guy’s vacation. I’ve been here since midnight.”

  “Did you see Ms. Manfreda leave with her dog?”

  “Manny? No, I haven’t seen her all day.”

  Jake stepped closer to the doorman, a good-looking guy of about thirty. He seemed like a heads-up person, but he might have been busy or distracted when Manny passed by. “This is very important,” Jake said. “She was probably in a hurry. Maybe you missed her.”

  The doorman shook his head insistently. “Miss Manny? No way. She always says hello, no matter how fast she’s moving. Not like some others in this building.”

  Vito took over. “Look, we know she came home last night, and she’s not in her apartment now, so she had to have gone out. We’re trying to trace her steps.”

  “I didn’t say she couldn’t have gone out; I just said she didn’t pass me. From five to six, no one left but Legere in 12B—he swims laps every morning before work.” The doorman shook his head at this insanity. “But lots of people go out the west side service door in the morning. It puts them one block closer to the E train station.”

  Jake shook his head. “Manny never takes the subway. And she certainly wouldn’t take a sick dog on the train. Besides, that subway doesn’t take you anywhere close to Eighty-sixth and York. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe she went out the back door to go to her garage,” Vito suggested.

  “Her garage is that way.” The doorman pointed uptown, proving he knew Manny’s routines. “And when she’s taking a cab, she always lets me hail it.” He dangled the silver whistle around his neck. “She can whistle pretty loud, but this is louder.”

  Jake looked down, concentrating. Manny was sometimes impulsive, but never irrational. There had to be a good reason why she’d exited through the rear door. What was it?

  Kenneth emerged from an elevator and crossed over to them. “The Animal Medical Center has no record of Manny or Mycroft being there today. Something had to have happened to her on the way there.”

  Jake continued to stare at the tasteful pattern of the lobby carpet. “Illogical.” He looked up at Kenneth. “Mycroft should be at Little Paws now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call them and find out how he’s doing,” Jake commanded.

  Kenneth did not reach for his cell phone. Instead, he put his hands on his hips and glared at Jake. As devoted as he was to Mycroft, he was more devoted to Manny, and he clearly thought they should be focusing their efforts on the owner, not the pet.

  “I want to know just how sick the dog is,” Jake explained as he walked toward the elevator. “Maybe Manny changed her mind about taking him to the Animal Medical Center.”

  “Why are you going back up to the apartment?” Vito asked.

  “I want a sample of the vomit.”

  “Why?” Manny asked.

  Dr. Costello had reentered the room and now he carried a gun. Earlier, he’d acted nervous, almost embarrassed, but the weapon seemed to impart confidence.

  He pointed the gun at Manny and waved her against the wall. “She’s wearing pants. That’s not ideal,” he said to his wife.

  Elena eyed Manny up and down. “She’s bigger than I am, but I’ll find something that will work.”

  Bitch. Manny watched her leave the room.

  “Why are you doing this?” she repeated to the vet. “You’ve spent your whole life taking care of sick, helpless animals. How can you hurt people like this?”

  “I haven’t hurt any people,” he said. “Amanda Hogaarth and Raymond Fortes were lower than the lowest cockroach that crawls across this floor.” He spit in the dust at his feet. “They used their medical training to inflict more pain than the stupid soldiers and police could have dreamed up on their own. For that, they deserved what they got.”

  Manny wasn’t about to argue the negative value of vigilantism with a man holding a gun on her. Still, she couldn’t resist probing more. “What about Boo Hravek and Deanie Slade? They have no connection to Argentina.”

  “Boo Hravek was a thug who sold drugs and beat people up for gangsters. We can’t mourn his death.” He hesitated. “The girl, Deanie, well… I didn’t really want to leave her like that. But Elena insisted. Said it was necessary to send a message.”

  Elena insisted. Costello had taken over the animal hospital when Mycroft’s previous vet moved out of state. He had immediately impressed her as a strong, confident man, but she’d known strong men who’d acted against their better judgment to please their wives. Usually, it took the form of buying a bigger house than they knew they could afford, or having another child they really weren’t prepared for. But torturing an innocent girl because your wife insisted? Man, that was some screwed-up relationship.

  Elena returned at that moment carrying a flowered sundress. She tossed it at Manny. “Put this on.”

  “Why? Why do I have to change clothes?”

  “You ask too many questions.” Dr. Costello pointed the gun at her heart. “Just do as you’re told.”

  Reluctantly, Manny took off her jeans, cashmere T-shirt, and Golden Goose boots and put on the dress. It was sleeveless and well above her knees, made of some thin, slippery fabric. She felt cold, inside and out.

  “Turn around,” Elena said. She tied Manny’s hands behind her back. Then she tied her ankles together. “Go get him,” she said to her husband.

  Manny noticed that the rope that bound her was quite loose. She knew damn well
from what the Costellos had done to Deanie Slade that they were capable of better work. The loose ropes made her uneasy.

  A few moments later, the door opened and Dr. Costello returned. He was not alone.

  “Travis!” Relief at seeing her client again momentarily buoyed Manny’s spirits. At least he was still alive, but he looked terrible. Always thin, his bones now protruded at sharp angles. His sunken eyes peered at her from under matted, greasy hair.

  He smiled slightly and shuffled over to her side. What can you say in a situation like this? “Good to see you. How’ve you been?”

  Manny’s dread returned as she watched the vet loosely tie Travis. Even if she couldn’t save herself, she had to save Travis. She didn’t discern an iota of compassion in Elena, but Dr. Costello was different. He had treated Mycroft so tenderly; surely he wouldn’t want to hurt a kid. “Travis is just an innocent child,” she reminded Costello. “Paco was the person you intended to implicate in that bombing.”

  “Yes, we wanted his parents to know the pain of having a child imprisoned unjustly,” Elena replied before her husband could. “Unfortunately, that part of our plan didn’t work out perfectly. Even in this country, the Sandovals are above the law.”

  “So why punish Travis? Keep me, but let him go.”

  Dr. Costello turned to his wife. “Please, we could—”

  “No!” Elena grabbed her husband’s upper arms. She was nearly as tall as he, and she held her face inches from his. Manny could see her chest heaving as she harangued her husband. “You are such a coward. You turn whatever way the wind blows, just like our countrymen who cooperated with the junta. I might have known that when it came to the end, you would be too timid to act.”

  Impugning his masculinity, the oldest trick in the book. Surely Costello wouldn’t fall for it. But no, Manny saw the doctor narrow his eyes, thrust out his chin. That’s why it was the oldest trick, because it worked so predictably.