Authors: Alison Gaylin
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t some movie. Real life, things happen. They don’t really fit together—they just look that way. That’s why you have to look at the facts. Houses burn down for all sorts of reasons. Tim O’Malley was a chain smoker. Carol Wentz wasn’t Klavel’s only client. Mount Temple has a high crime rate.”
“Nick.”
“Yeah?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just a second.” Brenna heard the shuffling of feet. When Morasco spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “Brenna, Graeme Klavel was murdered.”
B
renna stood just outside the open door of Graeme Klavel’s basement apartment/office, crime scene techs swarming his wrecked body so that she was only able to see it in parts—an outstretched arm here, a foot there, shoeless and sallow, and blood, so much of it, the rotting smell so thick she had to breathe into her shirtsleeve. As with what few other crime scenes she’d been to, Brenna hated to look, yet there was that car-crash curiosity that made it impossible to turn away. It was sick, yes, but it was also instinctual.
You’re the only species that knows it’s going to die, you will stare at the preview. You can’t help it
.
Though Brenna was technically outside the apartment, she still felt trapped. Klavel’s space was so small to begin with, and with all his files upended, his closets emptied, clothes and papers strewn all over the floors as if the apartment itself had been assaulted, it was a wonder all those cops and crime scene techs could fit in there.
Brenna’s gaze slid from the body to the tipped-over kitchen table to the pulled-out drawers—Klavel seemed to do all his living in two small rooms—then rested on the dark window over the sink, a window looking up at the street.
Sad
. Brenna heard her name then, and saw Morasco, moving through the room toward her, a stocky, silver-haired guy at his side in a navy blue blazer and a checkered oxford that dug into his neck. Brenna assumed it was the Mount Temple cop who’d heard her message on Klavel’s answering machine. As Morasco had told Brenna on the phone, one of the detectives on the case had called him because her message had mentioned Carol’s name.
The two men made their way out the door, Morasco touching her arm lightly when he greeted her. “Brenna,” said Morasco, “this is Detective Wayne Cavanaugh, Mount Temple Police.”
“Good to meet you.”
Cavanaugh nodded. “You too.”
Oddly, Brenna’s gaze settled on his nose—the tiniest afterthought of an Irish nose buried in his meaty face, bright blue eyes hovering over it. “You’re a PI?”
Brenna nodded. “I work out of the city.”
“So . . . I’m taking it you didn’t have much contact with Mr. Klavel?”
“Never spoke to him,” she said. “In fact, I was getting a little annoyed he wasn’t returning my calls.”
“What were you calling him about?”
“He had done some work for Carol Wentz. Her husband, Nelson, is my client.”
The blue eyes narrowed, and for a moment he reminded Brenna of her mother’s cat, Rodin—overfed and milky-eyed, always teetering on the brink of a nap. “You mentioned that on the machine,” he said. “Do you know what the work was?”
“You didn’t find it in his files?”
“Please answer my question.”
“Yes,” Brenna said. “I know what the work was.”
He sighed. A heavy sigh with a wheeze attached, which again made Brenna think of Rodin. Twenty-two years old and so fat he could barely stand up, so uncomfortably bulbous his skin seemed a size too small, yet still that cat was alive, proof that nature made no sense, never did, never would . . . “Gimme a break.”
“Hey, I answered your question.”
“You go to law school or something?”
“Nope. I studied psych.”
“Great.”
“Now my turn,” she said. “Did you find Klavel’s files regarding the work he did for Carol Wentz, or were those files missing?”
Another massive sigh. “All of his electronic equipment was stolen,” Cavanaugh said, as Morasco made his way back to them. “He kept all his files on a laptop, so, to answer your question, yes, Carol Wentz’s files were missing. All of Mr. Klavel’s files were missing.” He looked at her. “My turn.”
“Yes?”
“You know the friggin’ question.”
Brenna smiled a little. “Klavel got Ms. Wentz the police files for the Iris Neff case.”
“That little girl? From eleven years ago?”
“Yep.”
“Weird.” Cavanaugh looked at Morasco. “But it’s probably more interesting to you guys in Tarry Ridge.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Four of these in less than half a year, I can’t get one fuckin’ witness, one latent print, nothing . . . this guy is too smart,” he told Morasco, between his teeth. “You’re lucky.”
Brenna said, “Why is he lucky?”
Cavanaugh gave her a tight smile. “No more questions,” he said.
M
orasco and Brenna walked away from the crime scene, the silence between them somehow punctuated by the near-constant roar of traffic. It was dark already, with that insidious fall chill in the air—another year beginning the slow fade to black—and that added to the feeling.
Brenna had spent a decent amount of time on Columbus Street back when she was working for Errol. She’d stood in the doorway of number 2034—then a boarded-up building, now a vacant lot—haunted it for a good two hours, all so she could snap pictures of a cheating husband by the name of Victor Gomez getting some afternoon delight from one Sam McFarlane, who lived in 2037, directly across the two always-busy lanes. Sam had not been a Samantha but a Samuel—a mountain of a New York City bus driver, and Brenna had used her telephoto lens to capture images of the two men in the doorjamb, Victor standing on tiptoe to kiss big Sam good-bye. It had been one of her sadder assignments—Brenna had always viewed men who cheated on their wives with other men to be acting not so much out of selfishness or even weakness, but out of physical need . . . Anyway, Columbus had been a crap street back then and it was still a crap street now—the type of street the real Columbus would say, “Thanks a whole hell of a lot” over, maybe reconsider that whole claiming-of-America thing, if this crap street was all it was going to get him.
Morasco started to walk toward the nearest cross street, where his car was parked. Brenna thought for a moment he was just going to leave her there, without saying another word, when he stopped and turned to her. “Nelson needs a good lawyer,” he said.
“That’s why Cavanaugh called you lucky. Because your murder is already solved. You’re going to arrest him.”
Morasco nodded.
“Unbelievable.”
Morasco took a step closer. “Here’s the thing, Brenna,” he said. “Cavanaugh told me Klavel’s killing was identical to the other switchblade murders in the area—stabbed in the neck and gut in the exact same way. That information was never in the papers.”
Brenna looked at him. “What was stolen from Klavel?”
“You heard Cavanaugh. Same thing that was stolen from all the switchblade victims.”
“Electronic equipment.”
“TV, recording stuff, speakers, spy cams . . .”
She gave him a flat look.
“And yes,” Morasco said. “The iBook that Klavel did all his business on.”
“If someone wanted to find out what he’d told Carol,” Brenna said, “then these particular robberies were an excellent cover.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Just like a chain-smoking addict could easily burn down a group home.”
“Right.”
“And an unhappy marriage could end in murder.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “So we’ve either got one super-genius killer, desperate to cover up an unsolved disappearance from eleven years ago . . .” His gaze dropped to the sidewalk. “Or, seeing as this is life, Brenna, we’ve got what’s known as a rotten coincidence.”
Brenna put a hand on his shoulder. She watched his face until finally, he looked back up, into her eyes. “Which do you think it is?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
Morasco said nothing. He didn’t need to.
“So,” Brenna said, a smile coming on. “We
are
on the same side.”
A
s Morasco walked Brenna to her car, they discussed Carol Wentz and Iris Neff, searching for connections beyond the gossip that once swirled around Nelson and Lydia. There was the blue car, of course. The Vivio Bistro, which had cruised by the Wentz home following Nelson’s press conference and had obviously been parked outside Lydia’s house more than once. But Brenna was now convinced that Morasco truly didn’t know who its pretty-faced cop driver was—or if that driver, the one with the mole, had ever been a cop at all.
There was Carol’s wallet, found in the Neff home, and the files and files of research Carol had kept on Iris’s disappearance and Carol’s claim to her chat room friends that her “daughter” was alive and back in touch . . . but beyond that, there wasn’t much that tied together this middle-aged, murdered woman and this eleven-years-missing girl. Except, of course, for another vanished person. “We’ve got to talk to Lydia,” Brenna said as they turned up the street where her car was parked.
Morasco shook his head. “We’d have better luck finding Jimmy Hoffa than Lydia Neff. No one around here has seen or spoken to her in two years, and that includes her Realtor.”
“Hoffa. Timely reference there.”
“Hey, it’s a classic.”
Brenna smiled. He smiled back.
“Listen, Nick. If you were concerned about sharing facts with me because I work for a possible murder suspect, you don’t have to worry anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nelson Wentz fired me a couple of hours ago.”
“What?
Why?
”
“I have no idea.”
Her phone chimed, and she answered it, well aware he was still gaping at her. “Brenna Spector.”
She heard a choking noise on the other end of the line—a cutting off and releasing of the breath in drawn-out, trembling whispers. “Who is this?” Brenna said, before she recognized the sound.
Crying
. “Hello?”
And then she heard the voice. “I’m a terrible person,” said the voice, the wet, choked voice of a teenage girl. The same girl who had called Nelson. “I’m so sorry, so, so sorry.”
“Who are you?” Brenna whispered.
The girl ended the call. Brenna looked at Morasco. “We need to find Lydia Neff,” she said.
V
isiting the last place a missing person had been seen. Retracing steps in reverse. It was something Brenna had always done at the start of investigations—but not this one. And she knew she had to. Lydia Neff hadn’t been heard from in two years, but her furniture was in her old house—pretty much everything she owned was in that house—and, as Morasco said, “Far as information on Lydia goes, that’s as good as it’s gonna get.”
Brenna wasn’t working for Nelson, true, but she couldn’t turn back now. She owed it to Carol and Timothy O’Malley and Graeme Klavel and to the girl on the phone. She owed it to all those pieces of information shoved into her head, from eleven years ago and from today, all those bits of knowledge bumping into one another, like a machine full of bum parts, nothing really clicking.
On what was probably the last night of her life, Carol Wentz had gone to the Neff house. What had brought her there? What had made her leave that house in such a hurry that she left her wallet behind, never wanting to go back—this practical-minded woman choosing instead to replace her driver’s license? What had she been so frightened of?
“I’m going to the Neff house,” Brenna told Morasco once they reached her car.
“I figured.”
Brenna opened the car door and the light switched on, illuminating the age-enhanced photo she’d left on the passenger’s seat. Morasco picked it up, his gaze soft on the girl’s face. “Iris?”
“Yes.”
“It’s funny, I had one of these made up every year, from when Iris would have been ten through fourteen, maybe fifteen. Every year. I’d fax or e-mail the photos to the hospitals, the missing children’s organizations, FBI, every place that might be able to track her down . . . I did it behind the chief’s back—it was a closed case by then, after all, and hell, I wasn’t even supposed to be on it when it was open.”
“I’ll bet Lydia appreciated it.”
“She never knew,” he said. “I figured, why get her hopes up, you know? But the thing is, Brenna
, I’d
get my hopes up. Every time I sent that damn thing out I’d imagine Iris walking through the station door, asking for her mom.”
Brenna said, “I know exactly how you felt.”
“You do?”
She studied the soft gaze, the way his hands held the picture, that tenderness . . . “You felt like, if Iris were to come back, then anything would be possible,” she said. “Anyone could come home.”
Morasco swallowed hard. He looked up from the picture and into her eyes, and she saw that his eyes were clouded—not with tears but with the threat of them. “Yes,” he said softly.
“By any chance,” she said, “are you a father?”
“No.” The word sounded dry enough to crumble in the night air. Brenna knew there was something Morasco wasn’t telling her—a pain under his skin he couldn’t talk about out loud, and she wasn’t going to make him. She had pain, too.
She put a hand on his arm. “Would you like to come with me to the Neff house?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I really would.”
I
ris’s childhood bicycle was still propped up at the side of the Neff house, frayed handlebar streamers glinting in the garden lights.
Seeing the bike for the second time, in the exact same spot as it had been three nights ago, Brenna couldn’t help but picture Iris herself—sixteen-year-old Iris—sneaking onto the grounds of this house after so many years away. She pictured this long-captured girl knocking on the front door and whispering her mother’s name, searching the grounds for anyone alive but finding only her own bike, splayed in the dirt, dripping with cobwebs and rust. Brenna pictured Iris righting the bike, wishing there were so much more she could right with that blue car lurking somewhere, its engine running, waiting to take her back.
“You coming?” called Morasco, who was already around the side of the house, moving toward the back door.