Authors: Alison Gaylin
Brenna started to look up Buddhist temples and meditation centers in New York State, thinking all the while that this was a terrible waste of time.
Buddhists use credit cards like everybody else. But Lydia, on the other hand . . .
And then, like an answer, she heard Trent’s voice in her head. Trent, staring at his computer yesterday as if he were trying to hypnotize answers out of it, frustration tearing at the corners of that cool-dude lilt.
Maybe she joined a convent.
“Trent is a genius,” Brenna whispered.
She began researching Buddhist monasteries in the New York area. But as she looked, her state of mind went from hopeful to annoyed to overwhelmingly frustrated. There were dozens and dozens of Buddhist monasteries in New York State, spanning from Northern Westchester County, through the Catskills, and then all the way up to the Canadian border. Not one of them had a written list of members, though some did have pictures. Brenna began scanning photo albums. But looking through all those soft-focus photographs, all those orange robes and serene smiles and closed eyes, all in the hopes of seeing a set of features that remotely resembled Lydia Neff’s . . . it wasn’t long before Brenna thought,
I’m wasting my time
. It was draining. Her head throbbed and her knife wound ached and her eyes were tired from staring at the screen. Better to lie down and rest.
Okay, maybe just a few more
.
Brenna called up the Lotus Monastery and the Weeping Tree Monastery and found nothing. But when she called up the next one on the search engine’s list—the Mountaintop Monastery—her gaze rested on an image on the top of the screen and stuck there . . .
October 23, 1998. The sound of pumped water, the walk up the path, the cool air in Brenna’s face, the wind through the young trees. Brenna approaches the path, the circle of five benches, the fountain in the middle. Brenna notices the black-haired woman sitting on the far bench.
Lydia
. Brenna moves closer. She sees the woman’s hands folded at her lap, pale against her black coat. On the right wrist, a tattoo: A dragonfly. Red body, blue and green wings
.
The exact same image was at the top of the screen, hovering over the M in Mountaintop. Lydia’s tattoo was part of the monastery’s logo.
Her heart pounding, Brenna went to the site’s “about us” page and skimmed over its description: just a half hour north of Tarry Ridge, along the Hudson River. Zen fountains throughout the grounds. An emphasis on meditation.
Perfect
. Brenna kept reading . . .
Hiking trails . . . hundred-year-old trees . . . breathtaking views of the Hudson River . . . extensive library . . .
“We encourage our members to give up worldly possessions—including words. After unburdening themselves of all guilt, all pain, our members take vows of silence and live a pure life, without the distractions of the material world.”
Vows of silence
.
Brenna flashed again on Lydia’s tattoo. Even eleven years ago, Lydia Neff had been a follower of the Mountaintop sect. Even then she had a backup plan, knowing that if Iris was never found, she would one day leave all her worldly possessions behind. She would travel to Buffalo to see her ex-husband and unburden herself of her guilt. She would say good-bye to her friends, good-bye to the lover who no longer spoke to her. She would say good-bye to her pain and her good looks and her awful, crushing memories. She would say good-bye to the lack of her daughter. She would put her back to it all and drive away.
But she would stay very close.
Brenna grabbed her bag, hailed a cab to her parking garage. Half an hour later, she was headed up the West Side Highway while, in a rented Ford Focus parked two blocks away from her office/apartment, the alarmlike beep of a small tracking screen roused Adam Meade from sleep.
A
fter dropping Brenna off at her office, Morasco headed straight for the station, questions crowding into his mind. When he’d initially come up with the idea of forcing Wright to look at what Meade had done, Morasco had figured on his being
shocked
—Wright wasn’t the type to get his hands or mind sullied by reality. But the
surprise
on Wright’s face—that was a completely different thing. Over the years, Morasco had questioned enough suspects to know true surprise when he saw it. And unless he was a sociopath, Wright had been unaware of what Meade had done on his behalf until this morning, when he’d seen for himself.
And even still, another question loomed: Meade had secured no known employment since getting laid off ten years ago. What was he doing when he
wasn’t
killing off people who threatened to reveal Wright’s darkest secret? Far as Morasco knew, Carol Wentz had been the first person to do that in a decade. Had this savvy business mogul—this great commercial mind who had made Tarry Ridge the recession-proof mecca it was today—had he honestly been paying off a killer all these years, simply because, should the situation arise, he’d be ready to take action? That didn’t seem likely—which begged another question: What had Meade been doing the rest of the time?
Morasco pulled into his parking space and headed into the station. It was early—barely eight. Most of the other detectives usually showed up around nine, including Chief Hutchins, who was known to enjoy a leisurely breakfast après golf.
Golf with Wright
. Hutchins was getting an earful this morning, that was for sure. Morasco didn’t give a damn.
The squad room was empty, save for Baus and Fleiss, just back from the gym and wearing their sweats. “Hey, Nick,” Baus said. “You want the paper? I’m through with it.”
“Sure, thanks.” Morasco took the copy of the
Tarry Ridge Times
, brought it to his desk. At the bottom of the front page, there was a story about Graeme Klavel, headlined “Switchblade Killer Strikes Again.” A sad picture of Klavel stared out from under the headline, a coat-and-tie shot against a black background that looked as if it had been taken for some professional organization—maybe the Rotary Club or the Elks—the mouth downturned, the hair slicked lank against a broad expanse of forehead. Morasco remembered the corpse, the cruelty inflicted on it,
And for what?
Morasco read:
“It is identical to the other switchblade murders,” said Detective Cavanaugh, who will not reveal specific details of the killing due to the ongoing investigation . . .
And such awful details . . . the gut carved open, the neck so deeply slashed he had nearly been decapitated.
“
Takes pride in his work, this bastard,” Cavanaugh had said last night, eyes riveted to those wounds. And Morasco had nodded, stomach turning. “Quite the artiste.”
Morasco finished reading the article, but he didn’t turn the page, a thought working its way through his mind. He reread Cavanaugh’s quote and his muscles tightened. The thought gained strength.
“How many others of these have there been?” Morasco had asked Cavanaugh last night.
“Over the past few years? Several. Three in the past six months. Two of ’em lived together. Brothers. Both killed together, this exact same way. This asshole’s strong, that is, if there’s just one of him.”
Brothers in Mount Temple
. Morasco thought back to a drug raid that had happened a few years back. Two Cuban immigrants operating out of a pastry shop on Main Street. The arrest had been a big deal—very few convicted drug dealers came out of Tarry Ridge. Hutchins had given one of his sappier press conferences about it, purple prose flying out of his mouth like a flock of doves. The Cubans, though—brothers, if Morasco wasn’t mistaken—had gotten off on a technicality a few months later and moved to a neighboring town . . . Hutchins had been pissed off about it, to say the least.
Morasco went online. Looked up “brothers” and “switchblade murders” and “Mount Temple.” The name was in the first line of the first article that popped up on the screen:
Miguel and Luis Cabrero
. Same brothers. Stabbed to death in the “exact same manner” as the earlier switchblade victim, though “for the sake of the investigation,” that manner wasn’t revealed in this article, either.
“It has to be the same killer,” Cavanaugh had said. “The style is identical to the others.”
Identical
. The earlier switchblade victim, Morasco learned from the article, had been named Carrie Reynolds. Morasco knew that name, too: Carrie had been a Tarry Ridge heiress—completely out of her tree. Refused her meds. Back when he was a uniform, Hutchins had taken her in at least three times for vagrancy and disturbing the peace and then Carrie would post bail. Before you knew it, she’d be back in the middle of Main Street, screaming at the top of her lungs that the CIA was poisoning her herbal tea . . .
“An embarrassment,” Hutchins had called her.
Morasco thought about going online, looking up all the unprosecuted killings that had happened in the area over the past ten years, the brutal slayings of drug dealers and freaks and big mouths and gadflies . . . that handful of murders that went unsolved and, because of the victims, forgotten. But he didn’t need to go online.
It was the same killer
. Meade hadn’t been working for Wright all these years. He’d been working for Hutchins.
Morasco grabbed his cell phone and headed out of the station. On his way out, though, he noticed that Hutchins’s door was closed. He stopped at Sally’s desk. “Chief in already?”
She nodded. “He got stood up for golf,” she said. “He’s pissy this morning.”
“Wait till later,” Morasco said.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” Morasco headed out the door, to the shady trees by the fountain. He turned his back to the road, and called information and asked for the Westchester County DA’s office. “Can you please put me through to Internal Affairs?” he said. But as soon as the receptionist had connected him with the investigator in charge of his precinct, a thought hit Morasco.
Meade’s last job
.
Brenna.
And he hadn’t been successful . . .
Morasco heard footsteps coming up the walk behind him and turned to see a man in coat and tie, striding—not walking, but
striding
—into the station at top speed. The man was Roger Wright. Morasco followed, just as fast.
T
he Mountaintop Monastery reminded Brenna, just a little, of the Cornell Medical Center. The grounds were nowhere near as expansive and there wasn’t a golf course in sight, but it had that same collegiate look to it—a long gravel road, winding through rolling green grass dotted with Asian maples and pines and weeping willows. She passed some of the members of the order—that’s what they were called, not monks—men and women, all in rust-orange robes, walking in twos along the path of a stream. “Here, we study the Buddha’s eight-fold path in the sanctity of silence,” the Web site had read.
She found her way to the parking lot and pulled into a space. She flipped open her cell to call Morasco—no service. Of course there was no service. The members of the order weren’t even allowed to talk to each other, they didn’t have much need for Skype and text messaging.
Guess I’m on my own
.
Brenna headed out of the parking lot and made for the main building—a large wooden structure with big windows and a seventies-modern design. It looked more like a ski chalet than a Buddhist temple—nothing Eastern about it at all.
Once inside, she was greeted by a big empty space. There was a dragonfly mosaic on the floor—the same design as Lydia’s tattoo—at the center of which stood a bubbling fountain. Brenna felt as if she’d been plucked out of this world and dropped into another—a landscape from one of those fantasy computer games Maya used to play, ancient and brand-new at the same time. Utterly unfamiliar . . .
Except for the sound of the fountain. Brenna listened to the pulsing of pumped water, and in her mind, she was back at the Waterside Condominiums eleven years ago, once again on her way to see Lydia Neff. She was walking out of the parking lot and heading up that path, that curving path, following it up to the circle of benches, the fountain in the middle, where Lydia Neff meditated every day. She could see it all before her—the fountain that stood atop a circular mound in the earth, five curved benches around it,
like the petals of a flower
. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the narrow paths to the right of each, then the clubhouse bounding off the area, the flicker of a swimming pool through the sheer fence, another wide path leading to it,
like rays of a sun . . .
Brenna pulled the drawing out of her bag and stared at it, and it all began to hit her, the same way a tunnel might fall in upon you if you pulled out one small rock—that one tiny rock that had been holding everything together, keeping you safe and in the dark for years.
S
urreal
, Morasco thought. That was really the only word to describe where he was right now, and what he had just done—which was to stand in Chief Hutchins’s office and accuse him of hiring a killer off the books to destroy all his and Wright’s enemies, Wright standing next to him all the while, nodding in agreement, backing him up. Hutchins sat at his desk looking up at them, that thick monkey jaw squared for battle, hatred dripping out of his eyes. “I don’t know anyone named Adam Meade,” he said.
“You know that isn’t true,” said Wright. “I introduced him to you myself.”
Hutchins stared up at him, his jaw working. “Roger,” he said quietly, “if I were to admit that I’ve met Adam Meade, I’d imagine there are a whole bunch of other things I’d have to admit.”
Wright’s face went pale. “That’s irrelevant.”
“Is it? Is the Teasdale fortune irrelevant? Because that’s what you’d be losing, along with your wife, your children, your reputation . . . Your freedom. I’d like you to stand back, consider everything that might be gone from your very nice life if I were to start reminiscing out loud.”
Morasco said, “Why would he lose his freedom?”