Behind them, Michael heard a key enter a lock.
The two men slipped out of the bedroom, into the bathroom. There it was clear that the window had been opened and closed many times. Michael reached over, slipped it open. The window was small, but it looked big enough for them to fit through.
A second key turned in a second lock and the front door opened just as Tommy crawled out of the window behind Michael.
“NYPD!” Michael heard as he and Tommy made their way down the fire escape. They’d had to leave the window open, but there was nothing to be done about that.
Moments later they were in the alley behind the apartment. Shortly after that they were out on the busy street.
They circled the block to Tommy’s car.
Michael arrived at Kew Gardens at one forty-five. He had fifteen minutes to get changed and get to the courtroom. He had no fewer than twenty phone messages on his desk. He stepped into his office, closed and locked the door.
There was something he had to do first.
He sat at his desk, opened his laptop. He did not have a built-in floppy drive, but he had an external USB 3.5 floppy drive. Somewhere. He did not use it often and had stuffed it somewhere in his office. After a few minutes he found it, jammed behind a box of old files in the closet.
It was 1:46.
He connected the floppy drive, slipped in the disk. The screen came up much more quickly than it had on Viktor Harkov’s PC. In seconds he was looking at the spreadsheet. There were six rows, eight columns. Across the top were the expected entries – First Name H, First name W, Last name, Address, etc. The final entry was A. Michael figured this to mean “Adoptee,” for when his eye ran down the column, the entries were F and M. Two entries leapt out. One entry for a couple in Putnam County and the entry for Michael and Abigail Roman. Both had an entry for 2F in the last column.
Two females. Twins.
One other couple had adopted twins through Viktor’s office in 2005. Michael clicked on the printer icon. Seconds later he had a hard copy of the file.
At 1:49 there was knock on the door, followed by someone jiggling the doorknob. Michael instantly hit the eject button, removed the floppy. He then held the floppy, slid over the protective window on the diskette, took out a pair of scissors, and snipped the plastic disk inside, cutting it into three pieces, irretrievably destroying the data. He tossed it all into the wastebasket. Another knock.
“Hang on,” Michael said.
He put the scissors in the drawer, turned off the computer, rose, opened the door.
It was Nicole Lanier, his tireless and overworked paralegal. Nicole was a petite and trim forty, a veteran of the office, birdlike in her movements, ursine in her protective nature. If you weren’t expected, you did not run the gauntlet that was Nicole Lanier. She looked at Michael, at the casual way he was dressed. “Okay. Why was the door locked?”
“Where am I supposed to smoke my crack, in the hall?”
“Why not?” Nicole said. “The rest of us do.” She looked at the clock. “Um, aren’t you supposed to be in court?”
“I’m on it.” He pulled off his QDA windbreaker, took his suit out of the dry cleaner’s plastic bag. “Running late.”
“Want me to call over there?”
“No, I’m good.”
“You don’t look good.”
“Sweet talker.” He handed Nicole his briefcase. “Just get this in some kind of order for me. Outline on top. I’m going to change and be out of here in two minutes.”
Nicole took the briefcase, but didn’t move. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Nicole.”
“Okay, okay, boss.” She took the briefcase from him, but still didn’t leave.
“You know, if you don’t leave right now you’re going to see me naked.”
“Beats looking through the keyhole.”
Michael shooed her away. Nicole winked, spun on her sensible heels, closed the door.
Michael took a deep breath, looked around his office. Everything was where it was supposed to be: his desk, his bookcases, his apartment-sized fridge, the framed articles on the wall, even the 8? 10 photograph of him and Tommy at ground zero, a picture taken on September 13, 2001. Everything was the same, but suddenly looked completely different, as if he were a stranger in this place he knew so well, as if the comfortable, well-worn things that made up his life had now been replaced by duplicates.
Focus, Michael.
Yes, Viktor Harkov’s murder changed everything. And yes it was entirely possible that the state of New York might discover the illegalities surrounding the adoption, and start proceedings to take his daughters away. But that did not change the fact that the state of New York – and more importantly, a girl named Falynn Harris – was depending on him today.
He stripped off his T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, slipped on his suit pants, dress shirt. He tied his new tie – the one Abby had given him in a ritual that suddenly felt as if it had taken place weeks earlier – then put on his suit coat. He gave his hair a quick brush, checked himself in the mirror. It was as good as it was going to get. He opened the door, grabbed his briefcase, bumped a quick fist with Nicole for luck, and headed down the hall. He was already five minutes late.
TWENTY-THREE
Sitting at the dining-room table, Abby felt as if she were going to throw up. The words Aleks had spoken still seemed to be ringing in her ears.
They are my daughters.
When Zoe Meisner had come over, Abby met her at the edge of the property. Abby explained away the man named Kolya as a man who was there to give them a price on some landscaping. Zoe had given Abby a sly smile – Eden Falls was nothing if not discreet about its various trysts and daytime assignations – and it was probably due to her salacious suspicions that Zoe had scurried away rather quickly, only to observe Abby and Kolya from the alleged cover of the small greenhouse at the rear of the Meisner property.
They are my daughters.
As much as Abby wanted to believe it was all a bad dream, as much as she wanted to believe this man was lying to her, that it was some sort of ploy to extort money out of them, one look at Aleks’s face told her it was none of the above. There was no mistaking the resemblance. He looked like the girls.
But why, after all this time, had he shown up now? What did he want?
Abby watched the girls playing tag, each taking turns being ‘it’. They never seemed to let each other take the role of seeker or sought too long. Abby wondered what it would be like to be that selfless. She loved Michael with all her heart, but she had to admit to a certain dark glee at besting him at backgammon or chess or even gin rummy. Not so for the twins.
Abby looked at the corner of the lot. She noticed a small shiny object. When she focused she realized it was a bow, a shiny pink bow. A breeze soon gathered it up and tumbled it across the yard.
It’s from the party, Abby thought. The party that now seemed to be a hundred years ago, a time when her family was intact, and there were no monsters in a place called Eden Falls, New York.
While Kolya watched her from the backyard, Abby turned her head to the sounds of the house. She heard footsteps above her – barely, Aleks seemed to be extremely light on his feet. She heard a closet door open and close. She tried to think of what he might find. There wasn’t much. Most of their important papers – the deed to the house, insurance, passports – were in the file cabinet in the office on the first floor. There was a jewelry box on the nightstand, but nothing in it of value. She and Michael used to joke that if the jewelry box cost more than the jewelry, you don’t need a jewelry box.
Then there was the gun. The gun was usually kept in a foam-lined aluminum case on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, beneath a box of old greeting cards. Had she locked it? Of course she had. She always locked it.
Then it hit her. The alarm system. The panic button. It was across the living room, three steps to the right, next to the front door. If she could just get there without Aleks or Kolya not
icing, she could have the police on the way in minutes.
Was this the right thing to do? Would these men hurt her or the girls if the police just showed up at the door? What would Michael do? What would Michael want her to do?
She tried to put all these questions out of her mind as she slowly rose to her feet and, before she could think of a reason to stop herself, ran to the foyer.
TWENTY-FOUR
The window, powell thought. Why was the bathroom window open?
Standing in the middle of Joseph Harkov’s shabby apartment, Powell tried to put Viktor Harkov’s last few hours together. It was something at which she was very good. She didn’t always understand the finer points of forensic detail, but she was quite skilled at divining the motives and movements of people.
In her years on the force, she had faced a number of obstacles, each one of them cleared with her fierce determination to succeed and advance, her unyielding belief in the power of logic.
She had grown up in Kingston, Jamaica, a shy, serious girl, one of five daughters born to Edward and Destiny Whitehall. They were poor, but they never went hungry, and until her death from cancer at the age of thirty-one, Destiny, who took in washing and sewing for the smaller hotels along the bay, saw to it her children’s clothes were always clean and pressed.
Desiree had married Lucien Powell when she was just fifteen, a gangly dawta sketched of skinny arms and legs, topped with a seemingly constant blush, an embarrassment given rise with each of Lucien’s sweet proposals, beginning when she was only fourteen. Day after day Lucien would follow, always at a respectable distance, preaching Desiree’s not-quite blossomed loveliness to the hills, to all who would listen. Once he presented her with a basket of lilies. She kept the flowers alive as long as she could, then ultimately pressed them into a dog-eared copy of The White Witch of Rose Hall by H. G. de Lisser, her favorite book.
Then, after more than six months of this gavotte, Lucien walked her home. Standing on her mother’s porch, with a simple kiss on the cheek from Lucien Powell, Desiree’s heart was forever detained. Seven months later, with the blessing of their families, they married.
When Desiree was just three days shy of her sixteenth birthday, Lucien was gunned down in a Kingston back alley, the victim of a police vendetta. The Acid, they were called, the brutal arm of the police force. Lucien was shot four times – one in the throat, one in the stomach, one in each shoulder. The sign of the cross.
Lucien had been a hard-working young man, a brick mason by trade, but he had flirted with the fringes of the bandulu life, the criminal existence so common to the Jamaican way. They say the last thing Lucien said was “Tell Des I did not hear the bullet coming.”
Six months later, Desiree’s father moved the family to New York. Her father, already widowed himself, brought them to the Jamaica section of Queens, having no idea the area had nothing to do with the Caribbean island of his birth. Instead, her father would one day learn, the neighborhood acquired its name in 1666 or so by the British, taken from jameco, the Algonquian Indian word for beaver. The locale, although now home to many Jamaicans, was a diverse, struggling section of the borough, just a mile or so from JFK Airport.
In her shearing grief, Desiree thrust herself into study, and in just over three years earned her BA in criminal justice from CUNY.
She’d taken her share of lovers over the years, always on her timetable and terms, made the mistake of seeing a married lieutenant from Brooklyn South in her mid-thirties, her loneliness overruling her good sense. But that was a long time ago. These days she had the job, her two alley cats Luther and Vandross, her three inches of Wild Turkey – no more, certainly no less – every night before Tivo and bed. But mostly she had the job.
The front door of Harkov’s apartment had a recently installed deadbolt, the windows were all closed and latched with clasp-locks, and were also fitted with a vertical steel window bar, which prevented the double-hung-style windows from being lifted. The door and windows were all secure, except for one. The window in the bathroom.
Why?
Powell instructed the CSU team to print the bathroom window sill and glass, paying particular attention to the locking clasp and hardware. As the two CSU officers went about their business, processing Viktor Harkov’s apartment for trace evidence, and Marco Fontova did a canvass of the other tenants in the building, Desiree Powell examined the area around the window. There was no broken glass, no fresh chips out of the enamel-painted casing, which might have indicated a forced entry.
So why was the window wide open? There was no screen on it, and a fire escape just beyond. Anyone could easily break into the apartment. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of high-ticket items in the apartment, but still. Nobody left their windows open in Queens.
Had someone been in the apartment and gone out the window?
And why was the computer unplugged?
Powell returned to the desk in the living room. She had put her hand on the monitor, and found it still warm. Which meant that it was probably only recently unplugged. Powell had plugged the computer and the monitor back in, and watched as the computer went through its cycle, informing the user that it had been improperly shut down. If Joseph Harkov was some kind of paranoid regarding fire, or figured on saving a few pennies on electricity when the computer was not in use, why not shut it down properly? Powell wondered.
Fontova returned, gloved up, and began to poke unenthusiastically around Harkov’s bedroom. “Remind me never to go to law school,” he said. “This place is wicked fucking bad.”
Fontova rolled his eyes, pulled a thin roll of bills out of his pants pocket, peeled a dollar, handed it to Powell. She took it without a word. They had a running contest during Lent. Whoever said the f-word owed the other a dollar. After about a month they were about even.
“This guy was a street lawyer,” Powell said. “And probably not a good one. It’s almost impossible to make this little money.”
Fontova grunted, continued opening drawers, closets, lifting sheets and emptying pockets, as anxious as Powell was to get in and out of this grim place.
They would take Harkov’s old computer, as well as any files, documents, and paperwork. Whoever did this had a vendetta, a deeply planted hatred, and that doesn’t just happen overnight. There was a connection here somewhere. They would find it.
TWENTY-FIVE
Something was wrong. The two green lights on the right side were dark. Abby tapped out the panic code anyway. Twice. Nothing happened. She banged on the panel. The sound seemed to resonate throughout the house.
Nothing. No flashing lights. No response of any kind.
“I am disappointed,” came the voice from behind her. She spun around. Aleks was standing just a few feet away. She had not heard him come down the stairs.
Aleks descended fully into the foyer. He opened his shoulder bag, pulled out rope and duct tape.
“Unfortunately,” Aleks said, “many of the American home-security systems run on telephone lines. If there is a large storm, or for any other reason the telephone service is interrupted, so too is the connection to the security firm’s center.” He held up a pair of clippers. It seems he had cut the phone line before they had entered. “I told you no harm would come to you or family if you did exactly what I said. I am a man who does not like to repeat himself.”
He crossed the foyer in a blur, lifted Abby in the air, as if she were weightless. He carried her across the foyer, down the stairs, into the basement. He placed her onto an old metal folding chair. His physical strength was terrifying.
“No,” Abby said. She did not fight him. “You don’t have to do this. I’m sorry.”
In moments Aleks had her arms and legs bound to the chair.
Abby did not struggle. She tried to fight the tears.
She lost.
Aleks watched the girls through the basement window. His face was unreadable, but Abby scanned his pale-blue eyes as he followed Charlotte and Emily swing on the swing set. His
expression seemed to be one of deep longing.
His friend – his accomplice, Abby reminded herself – had left. The girls seemed to be okay, but every so often they would glance at the house. They were bright, intuitive children, wise far beyond their years, and Abby was certain that they knew something was wrong, despite her assurances that the men called Aleks and Kolya were friends of the family.
They are my daughters.
Abby’s stomach turned at the thought. As she stared at the man’s profile, there was no doubt in her mind that it was true. This man was Charlotte and Emily’s biological father. She didn’t want to believe it, but it was undoubtedly true.
She found herself wishing it was all about something else, that it was some sort of a home-invasion robbery, and that these men were there seeking ransom, or jewels, or cash. These things she understood, and was willing to relinquish in a second if it meant keeping her family safe.
But one question loomed large. How did this man know where they lived and who they were? How had he found them?
Abby’s worst nightmare was rapidly becoming a reality. He wasn’t here to see his daughters. He wasn’t here to merely establish contact, or a bond.
He was here to take them back.
Aleks leaned close to her ear. When he leaned over, Abby saw something sparkle, catching the light, something hanging on a chain around his neck. On the chain were three small crystal vials. One of them held what appeared to be blood, with small bits of what might be flesh suspended in the deep-red liquid. The other two were empty. The dark possibilities made Abby sick.
Aleks whispered: “If you disobey me one more time, I will kill you in front of the girls.”
Abby struggled against the ropes and duct tape. She could not move. Her tears coursed down her cheeks.
Without another word Aleks climbed the steps, opened the door, and closed it behind him.
The Devil_s Garden Page 15
