by Lisa Unger
“The detective told you that I received it in the mail from an anonymous party,” said Lydia from her perch on the couch.
“We thought it might have come from your answering machine, Mrs. Quinn.”
“We don’t have an answering machine. We have voice mail. There is a tap and a trace on our phone. If Tatiana called here, your men would have heard it. Isn’t that so, Detective?”
“Well, who else might she have called if she needed help?”
“How should I know?” she snapped, her Eastern European accent insinuating itself more strongly now. “Don’t you see? Tatiana hated me and she hated her stepfather. She kept everything from us … her thoughts, her feelings, her friends. She ran away, and she won’t come back until she wants something.”
There was something oddly desperate in Jenna’s outburst. For a second, Lydia saw a flicker of honest emotion in Jenna’s cold blue eyes.
“Have you lost hope, Mrs. Quinn?” Lydia asked, trying to understand the woman in front of her. “Is that why you are so angry?”
“I lost hope a long time ago, Ms. Strong. In everything. Is there anything else?”
“This note,” said the detective, handing it to her. “What can you tell us about this?”
Her face remained expressionless as she read the note, but Lydia saw her chest rise and fall slightly and thought she detected a shake in her hand.
“This means nothing to me,” she said, her voice angry and bitter. “Another false lead, Detective. If there’s nothing else, I’d like you to leave.”
“Do you recognize the handwriting, Mrs. Quinn?” the detective pressed, impervious to her growing agitation.
“No,” she said, not looking at the note again.
“I’d like to look at Tatiana’s room,” Lydia said.
“Unless you have a warrant, absolutely not. Detective, do I need to call my lawyer?”
“Ms. Strong and Mr. Mark are trying to help you, Mrs. Quinn. They came here of their own accord to help us solve this case. They are trying to find your daughter.”
“Tatiana doesn’t want to be found, Detective. No one has hurt or abducted her. She has run away and destroyed us both, even though we did everything for her, gave her everything a child could need or ask for.” She turned from them and gazed at the ceiling, tracing the bottom of her eyes with a tissue, careful not to smear her eyeliner. Lydia smelled a whiff of self-dramatization.
“Well, Mr. Quinn is not inclined to give up. And neither am I,” said the detective. Jenna Quinn did not respond for a moment. She sat small and rigid behind the desk, her eyes staring at a point on the ceiling. Then she rose.
“Perhaps you would do better to bring this matter to Mr. Quinn, then. If there’s nothing else, I have an appointment.”
With that, she walked out of the library and across the marble foyer and opened the front door. She stood and waited there as the three of them rose and followed her path.
“Mrs. Quinn, if you change your mind about cooperating with Ms. Strong and Mr. Mark, give me a call.”
“Or me,” said Lydia, handing her a card.
“Thank you,” she said, chillingly polite.
She slammed the door behind them.
“That went well,” said Jeffrey, speaking up for the first time.
The detective smiled. “In all of this, I’ve never seen her get so upset. I’ve never seen that side of her before.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I think it means we’re onto something.”
chapter ten
Lydia, Jeffrey, and Detective Ignacio sat in a Cuban restaurant about five minutes from the residence of Valentina Fitore, sipping café con leche and eating pungent ropa vieja, yellow rice, and black beans. The tiny, plain restaurant, which had been barely noticeable from the street, was made glorious by the rich aromas of coffee and seasoned pork. A woman with a bright, toothless smile, her hair in a net, had greeted the detective at the door with an enthusiastic hug and, with an expansive sweep of her arm, invited them in. “Venga, venga. Siéntate,” she said happily. They took their choice of the three bright red wooden tables with four matching chairs at each and sat by the window. The detective ordered in Spanish for the three of them, and the woman limped into the kitchen, visible through an open doorway, and cooked the food herself. Though the tender strips of flank steak looked and smelled delectable and Lydia had been starving just awhile ago, she pushed the food around on her plate. She’d lost her appetite and didn’t speak as the detective recounted for them the story of the missing Greyhound bus driver. She knew she should be listening to the details, but she couldn’t concentrate.
The ghosts that had rested were stirring within Lydia now. A dark feeling had crept over her after leaving the Quinn residence, and though she tried to shake it, she felt it settling into her bones like a chill that portends the flu. She had grown quiet as she tried to put words to what she had felt in the Quinn home, as she tried to make sense of the malevolence and fear she had felt radiating from the walls. Jenna Quinn had confused Lydia. Usually, a person’s essence was clear to her within seconds of the first greeting. People emitted an energy that either meshed or clashed, that attracted or repelled. But Jenna Quinn was either so guarded or so practiced in the art of deception that Lydia had no clear idea who she was or what her real agenda might be. She knew who Jenna wanted everyone to think she was—Mrs. Quinn, the immaculately groomed, grieving, betrayed mother; the sad, beautiful wife. But there was a flicker of something real under the facade. Lydia had caught a glimpse of it, but she couldn’t tell what it was. It annoyed her that Jenna hadn’t given herself away.
People subconsciously telegraphed the truth in their speech and in their gestures. Lydia had learned long ago that the furtive gesture, the thing left unsaid, the shifting glance spoke volumes. It was her gift to intuit the truth even when it was hidden, even when it escaped the notice of others. She’d had this ability all her life but had really only acknowledged it after the murder of her mother.
Two days before Marion Strong was killed, Lydia saw her murderer in a supermarket parking lot. Lydia was waiting for her mother in the car while Marion ran into the A&P to get a quart of milk. Sitting in her mother’s old Buick, the fifteen-year-old Lydia punched the hard plastic keys on the AM/FM radio, checking each preset station for acceptable listening. Suddenly, she felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She felt heat start at the base of her skull and move at a quickfire pace down her spine. A hollow of fear opened in her belly. She turned around and looked out the rear windshield.
The car’s side windows were open and the already cool fall air seemed to chill and the darkening of the sky quickened. The man stood with his legs a little more than shoulder width apart, one hand in the pocket of his denim jacket, the other resting on the side-view mirror of his red-and-white car, which reminded Lydia of the car in Starsky and Hutch. His flaming red hair was curly and disheveled, blowing into his eyes. She remembered that he did not move to keep it off his face. He just stared and rocked lightly back onto his heels and then forward onto the balls of his feet. Seeing him standing beside his car, his gaze locked on her, made her senses tingle. She detected malice in his unyielding stare, perversion in the way he began to caress the side-view mirror when their eyes met. She reached over to lock the doors and roll up the windows without taking her eyes off of him.
When her mother returned to the car, Lydia pointed the man out to her. He just stood there smiling. Marion tried to tell her it was nothing. But Lydia could see her mother was afraid by the hurried way she threw the milk into the backseat and the way she fumbled to put the key in the ignition. They drove off, and the man pulled out after them. But when Marion made a quick turn, he did not pursue them. They laughed; the threat, real or imagined, was gone. But Lydia would look back at that moment as the point at which she could have saved her mother’s life. She had written down the license plate number with blue eyeliner on the back of a note a friend had passed to her
in class. That information had led to the apprehension of Jed McIntyre, serial murderer of thirteen single mothers in the area around Nyack, New York. But only after he had killed Marion Strong, leaving her where Lydia would find her beaten and violated as she returned home from school.
She knew now, of course, that even if they had reported the incident in the parking lot to the police, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. But when she got that feeling, the feeling she and Jeffrey had come to know as “the buzz,” she had never been able to walk away from it again, wondering always who else would die if she did.
She looked at Jeffrey, Detective Ignacio droning on in the periphery of her consciousness. Jeffrey had finished his meal and had started working on hers. She heard her blood rushing in her ears and she pushed down a feeling of anxiety that welled inside her. She hadn’t felt like this in so long, not since Santa Fe, when she started to believe there was a serial killer at the beginning of a rampage. It was more complicated now, though. When the buzz had hit her before, she jumped into action. It gave her purpose. Every time, she was infused with hope, as if she had been given another chance to save her mother. She had risked her life, and Jeffrey’s, without a second thought. And every time, after a case was solved and the book written, she was left with an emptiness that accompanied the inevitable knowledge that her mother was still dead, still murdered. Now that she had come to recognize this about herself in her healing over the last year, she wasn’t sure if she had ever been motivated to help anyone but herself. Perhaps her whole career had been a hopelessly inadequate attempt to save her mother, to alleviate her own guilt. What did that make her? she wondered.
“What do you think, Lydia?” asked Jeffrey, breaking into her thoughts.
“Did anyone actually go to the address?” she asked in response. She had been listening, but with only about half a percent of her brain. They had been talking about the false address the fake bus driver had left.
“We looked it up. The street doesn’t exist.”
“Sounds to me like someone was trying to throw you off her track.”
“We weren’t on her track.”
“Are you sure? What lead were you working on when that came up?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” he said, sipping his café con leche. “The case had grown cold even then. There were no leads.”
“Well then, maybe someone was trying to get you going again. Maybe Nathan Quinn was trying to light a fire under you.”
“So he hired someone to come in and feed us a false lead, then disappear?”
Lydia shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. It would have been a stupid thing to do, but maybe he was desperate.”
“Did the security camera at the precinct get a picture of him?” asked Jeffrey.
“Yeah. It’s not a very good picture, almost as though he turned away on purpose. But you know we have that new face-recognition software, put it on security cameras all over the place. If the guy had a mug shot on record, it would have popped up.”
“What did he look like?”
“Big guy, heavy, strong-looking. He had a shaved head. He said he was from the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia—one of those places.”
“Sounds like the same description the bartender gave us of the guy who paid our bill,” said Jeffrey. “Let’s take a picture over to that guy after we see Valentina Fitore.”
“Who interviewed him?” asked Lydia.
“This rookie we got on the team, Charlie Sutton. He should’ve really checked the guy out while he was still there. He was just excited to have the lead. He blew it.”
“Well, how did you pursue this tip?” asked Jeffrey.
“We got in touch with the NYPD; they put a team on it up there. We spent a couple of days at the bus station here, walking around with her picture. Interviewed ticket clerks, bus drivers, homeless people who lie around the station. Stephen Parker, the PI Quinn hired, flew up to New York, went to Port Authority, did the same thing. Another waste of manpower, with no results,” he said, seeming to deflate as he spoke. “I had even more heat on me than ever from that point. It looked like my fuckup, like I had let a lead slip through my fingers. It got the media all revved up again, but then they lost interest.”
“So maybe that was it. A stunt to get the media involved again. To keep the story in the paper.”
“Maybe,” the detective said without much enthusiasm. Lydia could tell he was burning out on the case. He’d been through all these mental acrobatics already and he was tired. She didn’t blame him.
“So who was she, Detective?” Lydia asked, hoping that making him think about Tatiana would get him fueled up again. “Was she the type of girl who runs away? Did she have a boyfriend? Who were her friends at school? Did you find a journal? Read her E-mail?”
He smiled a little and met Lydia’s eyes.
“Sometimes I forget about her, you know? She’s become this abstraction, what with all the other stuff going on in this case. It’s like she exists in the shadow of Nathan Quinn’s desire to find her.”
Lydia nodded, having sensed this already.
“She didn’t have many friends. She was beautiful, you know. Something like that isolates a kid. Kids are even pettier, crueler, and more jealous than adults, because they haven’t learned to hide it yet. I think she was shy, too. The kids I spoke to at her school said she didn’t speak up much in class, didn’t socialize during gym and lunch. I got the sense they thought of her as a snob, even though they all seemed pretty snobby to me,” he said.
“She was an average student, not great, but not a problem child. She worked hard, but she seemed to have problems concentrating, according to her teachers. I didn’t find a journal. She didn’t have E-mail … probably the only kid in the world who doesn’t. Her parents didn’t allow that and didn’t let her have a phone in her room, not even an extension phone.” He paused, seeming to drift for a minute. He took a sip of his coffee, then wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“She had all these things, you know … all these clothes, makeup, CDs, but I just had the sense of unhappiness in the room. My kid, she doesn’t have half the stuff, but when you walk into her room, it’s like … happy girl clutter, everything messy, stickers and sparkles all over the place. It’s almost as if you can hear her giggling, dreaming, gossiping … like it echoes in that stuff. With Tatiana’s room, it seemed as though everything was for show, like a picture in a book. She was someone’s idea of the perfect teenager. But there was another layer that no one saw, that no one was allowed to see. I’m no closer to knowing what goes on in that house than I was the first night. For people who seem so perfect, no one seems all that happy. It’s like that house is a soundstage, like their whole life is a soundstage. But God only knows what happens when the camera is off.”
“Whoever sent me that tape knows. Could it have been sent by anyone other than Valentina?”
“If she had a close friend or a boyfriend, no one knows about it. I think she spent time with Valentina’s daughter Marianna, who’s nearly eighteen. But that was more of a baby-sitter thing, when Valentina couldn’t stay.”
The detective massaged his temples. “But something keeps me from giving up inside. You know, I could just be going through the motions, thinking that she was gone for good but persisting because the men upstairs won’t say die. But remember that movie Poltergeist, where they could hear that little girl’s voice but she’s just out of their reach. That’s how I feel about Tatiana.”
They were all quiet, and a siren wailed down the street outside the restaurant. Lydia leaned back in her chair and looked out into the street, where a young woman was reprimanding a child at the crosswalk and a teenage boy was skulking with a skateboard under his arm. The sky was painting itself shades of gray behind thick, high piles of darkening cumulous clouds.
“So why don’t you two go take the picture to the bartender and let me go talk to Valentina by myself?” said Lydia finally. “She’s scared of you, Detective. But
if she sent the tape to me, maybe I’ll be able to convince her to talk. She might feel less intimidated if I go alone.”
She could tell Jeffrey didn’t like the idea very much, but he nodded his agreement. He had too much respect for her to act like her protective boyfriend in front of other law-enforcement people, knowing that it undermined her in a male-dominated profession. They got the check from their elderly Cuban waitress, who patted Detective Ignacio on the cheek.
“Gracias, mi amor,” he said, kissing her hand. She trotted away, giggling like a schoolgirl.
“Come here often?” asked Lydia, snagging the bill from his hand.
“My first time. I just have a thing for old Cuban ladies,” he said, smiling.
Lydia called Craig from the Jeep after Jeffrey and Detective Ignacio headed back to the precinct to pick up the surveillance picture so they could show it to the waiter at the Mexican restaurant. The detective had promised to get Lydia and Jeffrey in to see Nathan Quinn as soon as possible. And Lydia wanted to be armed with as much information as she could get.
Though she could hear the threatening rumble of thunder in the distance, the storm that had seemed imminent was biding its time, hanging around, making the air thick with humidity. Lydia was parked across the street from Valentina Fitore’s Fort Lauderdale home, waiting for her to return from her work at the Quinns’. According to the detective, she generally arrived home at around six o’clock.
A modest yellow-and-white ranch house, surrounded by neat hedges and blooming hibiscus trees, it was one of five different models Lydia had observed driving through the subdivision. Property in Fort Lauderdale wasn’t cheap, and the upper-middle-class subdivision didn’t seem a likely choice for the family maid, not to mention an immigrant from Albania, unless she was paid very, very well. The black Porsche Boxster that sat in the driveway was somewhat conspicuous among the late-model Toyotas and Volkswagens that were parked in front of some of the other houses. She wondered whom the car belonged to and why Valentina wasn’t home yet from work. It was almost 6:30.
