The Darkness Gathers: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  When they’d captured the killer, and Lydia had healed from her injuries, they’d returned to New York City. Lydia had turned in her manuscript and then, instead of jumping right into a new case, she had, maybe for the first time, relaxed as she waited for her book to be published. She took up yoga at a trendy East Village studio where Willem Dafoe studied. She went to Washington Square Park and watched the chess bums play their speed rounds, and wrote poetry. She searched for gourmet recipes on epicurious.com and cooked elaborate meals for herself and Jeffrey. She did not scan national newspapers and the Internet for new story ideas, waiting for something to seize her. She went for walks, talked on the phone, and visited with her grandparents in Sleepy Hollow, realizing she’d seriously neglected them over the last few years. She did not discuss with Jeffrey the cases he was working on with his private investigation firm, Mark, Hanley and Striker, Inc., for which she worked as part-time consultant. She was surprised to find one day, as she strolled down Fifth Avenue, looking in shop windows, that she had never been happier.

  The thoughts that had obsessed her since the death of her mother were echoes of another life. It wasn’t as though they had disappeared entirely, but she found she wasn’t as driven to know what motivated killers, how their minds worked. She didn’t feel any longer that she was somehow responsible for caging all the evil in the world like some hopeless superhero. She remembered her life before Santa Fe as feeling like she was running on a treadmill, full speed, but never getting further from what haunted her and never getting any closer to what she imagined might be the cure. She had finally given herself permission to turn it off and stand on solid ground. She now experienced moments of true inner peace.

  On the other hand, old habits die hard. And, truth be told, in spite of her happiness, she had been getting a bit restless and was excited when the book tour began. But after a few days on the road, the hectic schedule, the sleeping away from Jeffrey, the forced remembrance of the events in Santa Fe started to wear on her … and she just couldn’t wait for it to be over. She had to laugh. She had always despised dependence in herself. Now she welcomed it, as she did all the new things she was discovering, all the emotions she had suppressed for so long. Happiness, sorrow, fear, longing, joy, and, most of all, of course, love were powerful forces within her, reminding her for the first time since her mother had died that she was alive. As if she had killed herself emotionally because she blamed herself for her mother’s death and then resurrected herself, as well.

  Now she sat with her elbows leaning on the glass kitchen table, legs folded beneath her, watching Jeffrey make her a cup of tea. She had always loved to watch him in the kitchen, all broad shoulders, chiseled jaw, and big hands—occupied not with guns and fistfights but pot holders and teakettles.

  “We haven’t been apart like this since we’ve been together,” he said, sitting next to her. He placed a steaming cup of chamomile and Grand Marnier in front of her, and the smell was heaven.

  “I know. It was torture. I’ve never had a home before that I missed when I was away. Every place, even the house in Santa Fe, which I loved, was just somewhere I kept my things,” she said, looking into the cup, tracing the rim with her finger. “But this place … our home. I hated being away from it. I hated sleeping without you.”

  “Let’s not make a habit of it.” He placed a warm hand on the back of her neck and began working the tension he found there.

  “Deal.”

  She looked around the kitchen, lighted by the orange glow of three pendant lamps hanging over the black granite island, the terra-cotta tile floor, the bleached wood cabinets with their stainless-steel fixtures. It was a warm and cozy room, ground zero for all conversation. Like everything in the apartment, they had designed it together, paying attention to every detail of the home they would share. They’d gotten rid of most of their old furniture and belongings, keeping only what meant most to them.

  “New beginnings demand new objects,” Lydia had declared. And Jeffrey had agreed. He’d never developed attachments to things anyway. He’d never had much of a home life, so he’d never spent much time on the East Village apartment he’d owned since he left the FBI. He’d started his private investigation firm from there, sleeping on a pullout couch in the back bedroom. Now the firm of Mark, Hanley and Striker employed over a hundred people and filled a suite of offices on the top floor of a high-rise on West Fifty-seventh Street. But his apartment had remained almost empty of furniture. He found the only possessions that meant anything to him were his mother’s engagement ring, his father’s old service revolver, and a closet full of designer clothes.

  Lydia’s apartment on Central Park West had looked like it belonged on the cover of House Beautiful: sleek, modern, impeccably decorated, but, Jeffrey thought, totally cold and impersonal. “You live in someone’s idea of the most gorgeous New York apartment,” he’d commented once. She’d sold it as is, furniture and all, to some software designer just months before the dot bomb. Jeffrey had sold his apartment, too, throwing in the pullout couch and rickety kitchen table and chairs. They’d both made a killing and then bought a three-bedroom duplex on Great Jones Street, downtown.

  A metal door with three locks opened from the street into a plain white elevator bank. A real Old New York industrial elevator with heavy metal doors and hinged grating lifted directly into the two-thousand-square-foot space. By New York standards, it was palatial. The cost was exorbitant, of course, as it was New York City ultrachic, shabby-cool. But Lydia had declared it home the minute they’d stepped off the elevator and onto the bleached wood floors. The private roof garden, which was at least a story higher than most of the other downtown buildings, sealed the deal. From the garden, they could see the whole city. At night, it was laid out around them like a blanket of stars, which was a good thing, since you rarely can see any actual stars in New York City.

  Now it was home, the place in the world they shared. But it had seemed empty, a shell of itself when she was gone. Lydia was his home, Jeffrey had realized while she was traveling. He’d had her all to himself since Santa Fe and he’d grown used to that. But he had sensed her restlessness even before she left on the book tour, and he knew she would be getting back to work soon. In fact, he knew the second he had walked into the apartment and saw her come out of her office with her coat still on that something had caught her interest. It made him sad and tender for her, but he knew her well enough to know that he had to let her go in that way if he was to share her life at all.

  “So, what were you doing when I came in?”

  “Oh,” she said, standing, “come with me. I want you to hear something.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said with a small laugh.

  “It might be nothing.”

  “But first …” he said, pulling her into his lap and pressing his mouth to hers.

  “Yes …” she answered, “first things first.” She led him upstairs to their bedroom.

  chapter two

  It was quiet on Great Jones Street at 3:00 A.M. Lydia hadn’t heard any screaming, singing, or horn blares in at least an hour as she lay listening to rain tap at the windows and to Jeffrey’s soft, steady breath. Usually, she was history as soon as her head hit the pillow, sound in a deep black sleep that was difficult to disturb. And God help the person who did. But tonight, she was restless, sleep uncooperative. Realizing she was fighting a losing battle, she untangled herself from Jeffrey and slipped out from beneath the down comforter. Jeffrey turned with a sigh as she grabbed his black knit cotton sweater from the floor and put it on. She stood in front of the window for a second, the sill coming to just above her knee. Streetlights bathed the gritty neighborhood in an amber glow; three cabs sped down Lafayette as if they were racing one another. A man in a black coat strolled along, oblivious of the rain, in spite of the fact that he was soaked, water dripping down his face like tears. Maybe he had just given up, was so wet that rushing for shelter had grown pointless.

  She padded
down the spiral staircase that led from their second-floor bedroom directly into the living room. She didn’t turn on any lights as she went into the kitchen and opened the stainless-steel refrigerator door. She wasn’t hungry, but looking for food was just something to do. Jeffrey was so healthy—fruit, vegetables, some deviled eggs, carrot juice, skim milk, protein bars. She opened the freezer and saw a big cold bottle of Ketel One vodka. “Yum,” she said, removing it. She got a lowball glass from the cabinet above the kitchen island, filled it with ice, and poured herself a double. She headed into her office. Because, of course, that’s where she had been headed all along.

  She listened to the tape again as she booted up her computer, sipping slowly on her vodka. “It’s Tatiana. Are you there … please?”

  “Who are you, Tatiana Quinn?” she whispered, her fingers dancing across the keyboard.

  She logged on to her very powerful search engine and entered the name. Lydia waited, feeling the effect of the straight vodka right away, as she hadn’t eaten since a late lunch and hadn’t had a drink in weeks. The sound of the girl’s voice on the tape—the call obviously made from a pay phone—young, vulnerable, got Lydia in the gut in a way she didn’t appreciate. Ever since Shawna Fox, Lydia had developed a soft spot for lost or broken teenage girls.

  A list of articles in order of their most recent appearance in newspapers filled her computer screen. She scrolled down to the earliest article, appearing in the Miami Herald on September 15. Its headline read DAUGHTER OF PROMINENT MIAMI BUSINESSMAN MISSING. The accompanying picture featured a small woman with her face buried in the shoulder of a very handsome gray-haired gentleman wearing an expensive suit and an expression of stoic grief; they were standing on the steps of a police precinct. There was something about the photograph that struck Lydia as odd. She stared at it for a second and realized that it was the art quality of the news photo, how focused the camera was on the man and women in the center of a moving crowd of police and bystanders. It communicated grief and grace under pressure, the chaos of the moment. It was beautiful. In fact, it was so perfect, it could have been staged by a publicist.

  The article reported that fifteen-year-old Tatiana Quinn, who had emigrated to the United States with her mother from Albania in 1997, had disappeared from her bedroom sometime after midnight on September 13. Her backpack, the $160 dollars she had in her jewelry box, and her favorite clothes were also missing, leading police to the conclusion that she had run away. The article also revealed that Tatiana was Nathan Quinn’s stepdaughter and not his biological daughter, the child from the first marriage of Jenna Quinn, the sobbing woman in the picture, according to the caption. The Quinns offered $1 million for information leading to Tatiana’s safe return. That’s a lot of money to throw around, thought Lydia as she continued to scroll through the articles. As the weeks wore on, the articles grew shorter; one reported that a Greyhound driver had been questioned regarding his claim that he had seen Tatiana on a bus bound for New York City; another reported that the Quinns had hired a private detective to find their daughter. The last article, written on October 17, was a feature on missing girls, the terrifying statistics on their fates, and a mention of Tatiana, “who has not been heard from and may never be.” Looks like Tatiana has ceased to be of interest to the media, thought Lydia. Not even two months after her disappearance, and Tatiana had already become a past tense, a sad picture on the news, a mystery that leaves an ache when you read about her in the paper.

  None of the articles mentioned the tape, which meant that no one knew about it, or that no one had told the police about it. The tape that Lydia had been sent, if it was in fact Tatiana Quinn’s voice on it, would have been a big break, a compelling lead in the case of a missing child. So either the parents didn’t know about it or, less likely, didn’t care. But it just didn’t make sense. If someone were truly concerned with helping Tatiana, why wouldn’t he or she give the tape directly to the police?

  People didn’t throw a million dollars around for show. And grieving, terrified parents with a million dollars to throw around surely would have arranged for a phone tap in the event that the child called in a frightened moment. So did that mean Tatiana had left that message for someone else? There was definitely something strange going on.

  “Lydia, it’s four-thirty in the morning,” said Jeffrey softly behind her.

  “I know,” she answered, not even looking up, “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked, looking over her shoulder at the screen. Lydia had zoomed in on a picture of Tatiana’s face. She was exquisite for a fifteen-year-old child—full waves of jet-black hair and fathomless blue-green eyes, high cheekbones, and fragile features. She was a Lolita, with that sexy, coquettish smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Something about that look reminded Lydia of those beauty pageant children, their little-girl bodies in sparkling bodysuits, posing, provocatively, with no idea what they were provoking, looking like some disturbing combination of baby doll and whore. There was a vacancy to Tatiana’s gaze, a look of wishing she was somewhere else.

  “This is what I wanted you to hear,” Lydia said as she rewound and played the tape again. She handed him the letter, which he had to squint to read in the dim light without his glasses. He sunk into the sienna leather couch across from her desk and put his feet up on the mahogany table, which had once been the door of an eighteenth-century Spanish castle. Lydia’s office, which had been more or less transplanted from her home in Santa Fe, took up the greatest square footage on the first floor. The south wall faced Great Jones Street and was comprised largely of four ten-foot windows. The east wall was covered by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, containing the intellectual clutter of books she had read and all she had written in her career.

  “What’s that language she’s speaking?” Jeffrey asked.

  “I’m assuming it’s Albanian. I have no idea what she’s saying, though.”

  “So what have you found so far?” he asked.

  She told him what she had read on the Internet.

  “Something doesn’t seem quite right,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Well, a fifteen-year-old rich girl disappears. There’s a flurry of media coverage; the parents offer a million-dollar reward for her return; weeks go by and attention peters out. Another little girl lost to the street, another statistic. Not really that out of the ordinary, except for the million. But then there’s this tape, which is not mentioned anywhere. It’s a big lead in an investigation that certainly shouldn’t have been closed yet, especially when the parents are rich, prominent people. Desperate parents would run to the police and to the media with that kind of thing. But it doesn’t look like they did. So that means to me that they didn’t know about it. And who would send it to me? Why wouldn’t they have gone to the police?”

  “Maybe it’s a crank. Maybe it’s not Tatiana at all on that tape.”

  “But why? If someone went to all the trouble of setting up a crank call, why wouldn’t they use it to try to get the million? Why would they send the tape to me? How would that help them?”

  “Maybe they think it will seem more like a legitimate lead coming from you,” Jeffrey offered, though it was a bit of reach.

  “But it was sent anonymously.”

  “That’s true. I’ve heard that name before … Nathan Quinn. Who is he?”

  Lydia entered his name into the search engine. A list of over 150 articles in the last year alone appeared on her screen. She scrolled through and read the headlines aloud to Jeffrey.

  “Let’s see … ‘Nathan Quinn donates one point five million to NEA’; that’s five hundred thousand more than he offered for the safe return of his stepdaughter. Interesting … ‘Nathan Quinn wins Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award … importing/exporting business’; ‘Venture Capitalist Nathan Quinn: Hero to Albanian Refugees.’ The list goes on. Sounds like your general, all-around man-of-the-year type.”

  Jeffrey had come to stand behind her. “He g
ets a lot of media coverage. I guess that’s why his name sounds familiar. But I could have sworn I’d heard it somewhere else.”

  “Maybe someone in your firm was talking about the case. Here’s his picture. Does he look familiar?”

  “Not really. But look at that jaw. He belongs on the hundred-dollar bill or something.”

  Nathan Quinn had a bearing that communicated power, and this was apparent even in the grainy Internet photographs they were looking at. He seemed to stand at least a few inches taller than most of the people around him; his shoulders were square, his smile cool and permanent, his taste in clothes impeccable. He was positively regal.

  “Maybe someone is trying to ruin him?” Jeffrey suggested.

  “Well, then why not go to the police? Or the media?”

  “Well, you are kind of the media.”

  “Not the immediate, news-at-eleven kind of media.”

  She started tapping her pen on the desktop, a gesture that she had picked up from Jeffrey years earlier.

  “The buzz?” he asked.

  “Big-time.”

  “So? … What?”

  She swiveled around to look at him. She cocked her head to the side and gave Jeffrey a gorgeous megawatt smile.

  “You know,” she said after a moment. “We’ve been working so hard, haven’t we?”

  “Well, not really. It’s been a little slow.…”

  “We have. And, honestly, Jeffrey, you are looking a little pale. The winter weather must be getting to you.”

  “It’s only the end of October.”

  “I think we need a vacation.”