Strong 03 - Twice (24 page)

Lydia walked over to the books and observed leather-bound volumes of all the classics—full collections of Tolstoy, Dickens, Milton, Lawrence, Hawthorne, Shakespeare—pretty much every major author Lydia could imagine. She also noticed medical and law texts, volumes on botany, biology, psychology. She reached up and extracted one of the books,
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë, and opened it to realize by the stiffness of the binding and the pristine
condition of the pages that the book had never been read. But written on one of the endpapers was a note:

It made her think back to what Maura Hodge had said about Eleanor and her brother. There was something so final in his assertion, almost as though it were more of a threat than a declaration of brotherly love. Really, there was nothing brotherly about it, and looking at it written on the page in the faltering hand of a younger person, dark wonderings about the Ross family started to dance in Lydia’s mind like haunting specters.

Glittering particles hung in the beam of Jeffrey’s flashlight like stardust as he shone it toward Lydia. She turned to smile at him and showed him the inscription.

“Weird.” He nodded, taking the information in and wondering what it meant to the investigation at hand.

She placed the book on the shelf and walked behind a gigantic desk that stood before a bay window. The leather chair creaked beneath her weight as she seated herself and started opening drawers by their gilt handles. She looked like Alice in Wonderland, sitting in furniture that had clearly been made for someone much larger than herself. Jeff was just about to sit on the sofa across from her when he noticed a used condom there. He decided to stand.

“Let’s think for a second,” he said, walking behind her and glancing out the window behind him into blackness.

“Okay,” said Lydia. “What do we know for a fact?”

This was their ritual. To line up the facts like cans on a wall, then shoot at them one by one with logic, intuition, evidence, or just plain guesswork. The last can standing was the winner, or the loser, depending on how you looked at it.

“That both of Julian’s husbands, as well as Eleanor’s husband, were brutally murdered in very similar ways. And that all three of those crimes are as yet unsolved.”

“We know that Eleanor Ross has a twin brother who may or may not be dead,” said Lydia. “And we know that she never revealed this fact to us. She also never revealed that her husband was murdered, until I cornered her with it. So what does that tell us about Eleanor?”

“That she’s hiding things.”

“So why did she hire us, then?”

“Because she doesn’t know who’s killing these men, either?”

“Or because she’s afraid?”

Jeffrey shrugged, the question hanging in the air while Lydia rifled through what looked like old letters. He walked over and sat on the windowsill behind her, glancing over her shoulder.

“Afraid of what?” he asked.

“Or afraid of who?” She put the letters back into the drawer, apparently not finding anything that interested her. Then she opened another that was filled with old photographs jumbled together in a pile so large that she had to struggle to pull the drawer out all the way.

“The question is … and it nearly always boils down to this … who had the most to gain from Richard Stratton’s death?”

“Julian Ross,” answered Lydia simply. Ford had done a pretty thorough job looking into Richard Stratton’s business dealings and personal life. There was no one else who had as much to gain from his death as his wife.

“What about Eleanor Ross?”

“What about her?”

“Well, Julian is in a mental institution right now. If she’s at some point judged incompetent … Eleanor will likely become her executor. She’ll have access to all that money and the children, as well.”

Lydia nodded thoughtfully. “Which takes us back to why she’d
hire us in the first place. But let’s stick to what we know for a minute. We know that there was another way into the building,” she said. “So at least there’s the
possibility
that someone else was there that night.”

“And we know that someone from the inside had to let him in. And that it looks like it might have been the twins.”

“Why ‘him’?”

“It seems logical. After all, we’re saying that Julian didn’t have the strength to kill her husband. Wouldn’t that hold true for another woman, as well?”

“Maura Hodge is a fairly big woman. Strong, too.”

Lydia spoke without looking up, sifting through images. A young and gorgeous Eleanor with flame red hair in her rose garden; Julian as a toddler on Christmas morning peering into a gigantic dollhouse; Eleanor again in an embrace with a man Lydia assumed to be her husband. Beautiful people, all the images representing an idyllic life of affluence, their happy smiles never hinting at the tragedies in their past, nor foreshadowing the future. The Ross family lineage was rotten at the core and you’d never know it to look at them. Beauty was so often a trick of nature, a careful camouflage.

“Are you saying you consider her a suspect?”

Lydia held a photograph in her hand, looking at it closely beneath her flashlight’s beam. “Not necessarily. What about this mysterious brother of Eleanor’s? Is it possible that he’s been lurking around all these years waiting for the chance to kill again?”

“Living in the tunnels below New York City, hiding in the woods of Haunted? Possible. Not likely.”

“How about living in the basement of this house?” said Dax, appearing suddenly in the doorway.

They both looked up at him.

“Follow me,” he said.

The door down to the basement might have easily escaped notice, if Dax hadn’t lost his footing, tripping over a spot where moisture
had caused the wood floorboards to rot, one piece bending and curling up. He’d felt the wall give a bit beneath his weight when he used it to catch himself and thought it odd for an old house to have such shoddy construction. At closer glance, he discovered that there was a door fit to look like part of the oak paneling on the wall. A lock was hidden beneath a flap that had been cleverly camouflaged to look like a knot in the wood.

Now Lydia and Jeffrey followed him down as he shone the way with his light, his gun drawn. They were all quiet. The stench of mold and wet earth rose up to greet them and something about the smell made Lydia think of fresh graves. The dark space seemed to stretch on into infinity, the beam of their lights not revealing the far wall once they’d reached the bottom. All that darkness and something electric in the air made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“Look at this,” Dax said, leading them beneath the stairs.

Someone had made a little nest within a large blue nylon tent. Jeffrey got down on his hands and knees and Lydia followed. Together they poked their heads in through the tent flap. The smell was the first thing to hit her … the foul stench of body odor and semen, strong and ripe. It seemed to linger in the fabric of the tent and in the pilled brown blanket that lay atop an air mattress. Candy wrappers, empty potato chip bags, and a half-eaten can of kidney beans with a plastic spoon still in it were scattered about the space. Mingled with the other aromas, Lydia could vaguely smell salt and vinegar.

“Holy shit,” said Jeff. Lydia wasn’t sure whether he was reacting to the smell or to the fact that every inch of the walls and ceiling of the tent was covered with pictures of Julian Ross—photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles.

It was moments like this when she was glad she thought ahead, which didn’t happen often. From the pocket of her coat she removed two plastic bags, surgical gloves, and a pair of tweezers.

“Nice,” said Jeffrey with a smile.

In a rare moment of foresight, she’d taken them from her bag before they got out of the car. She slipped one of the gloves on, picked up a Milky Way wrapper with the tweezers, and put it in a baggie. Then she ran her finger across the blanket, shining the flashlight beam and looking closely at the surface. She found what she was looking for, strands of hair. Long and gray. She lifted them with the tweezers and put them in the second baggie, then stuffed them both into her pocket. She looked at Jeff, remembering what he’d said about the hairs they’d found at the scene of Tad’s murder.

“Guys,” said Dax. Lydia paused at the sound of his voice. Dax was constantly fucking around, cracking jokes; his voice was almost always edged with the promise of laughter. Except when he was worried. Then he was dead serious. And Dax didn’t worry often.

“This space heater, right here?”

“Yeah?” they answered in unison, turning to look at him.

“It’s off. But it’s still warm.”

They didn’t have time to contemplate what that might mean because out of the darkness like a freight train came a blur of gray and red accompanied by an inhuman roar. The monster, because that’s what it looked like to Lydia, knocked Dax to the floor before any of them knew what hit him. Lydia and Jeff scrambled to their feet, Jeff reaching for his gun, Lydia remembering that she hadn’t taken hers from her bag—as usual. She raised the Maglite over her head to strike the creature and get him off Dax, who she couldn’t even see beneath the gigantic mass of whatever it was that was on top of him. But she never made contact because the monster turned, as if by instinct, and swung out with an arm as heavy as a two-by-four. In the seconds before she took a blow to the head that put the lights out, she saw a flash of green eyes, a bared mouth of yellow, jagged teeth, a mask of pure rage and malice. It was a face she recognized.

T
he offices of Mark, Striker and Strong were dark and quiet. Everyone had gone home except for Rebecca, who was packing her bag
and closing down the computer system from the main unit at the reception desk. Security was very tight at the firm and that included their intranet. Craig, their self-proclaimed cybernavigator, had built a firewall that was more secure, he claimed, than that of the FBI. And he should know, having been the most wanted hacker in the world until he was finally arrested just after his eighteenth birthday, for precisely that … breaking into the FBI databases and fucking around. Now, as he liked to say, he used his powers “for good and not for evil.” Lucky for him, Jacob Hanley, his uncle and one of the firm’s original partners, along with Jeff and Christian Striker, all former FBI agents, managed to get the kid a deal. Now he was plugged into the Internet more or less day and night, more or less legally working for the firm. Lydia called him The Brain behind his back and joked that one day they were going to look into his windowless office and find that he’d been sucked into his computers like a character in a William Gibson novel.

There was a whole elaborate shutdown process that was linked to the office security system. Rebecca was just about to initiate the final sequence that would give her precisely fifteen minutes to exit the front door when she heard the elevator. She looked at her watch—8:15. Rodney, the second messenger of the day, hadn’t arrived at his usual time. Rebecca had been trained to watch out for little things like this. So she called the service and the dispatcher said, “It’s been a crazy day. Two of my guys got into accidents today. He or someone else will get there tonight, I promise.”

Christian Striker was waiting for photos back from the lab they used down in SoHo and she knew it was important he have them for tomorrow even though he was already gone. So she fixed her makeup, peering at her flawless pink skin in the Clinique compact mirror and waited, watching the elevator climb by the tiny numbers alternately lighting green as it climbed to their floor. She quickly pulled a brush through her silky blond hair and applied a berry shade of Princess Marcella Borghese lipstick to her full lips.

The stainless steel doors opened and a wiry bike messenger with long curly dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail, dirty, tattered bicycle shorts, and a tight white T-shirt with just do it emblazoned in orange across his chest walked into the elevator lobby and headed toward the door. A large messenger bag was slung across his shoulder and she noticed he was wearing soccer cleats when he pushed through the glass doors.

“Speedy Messenger?” she asked.

“You got it. Sorry for the delay,” he said, removing a bundle of packages from his pouch.

“Last stop of the night, I hope,” she said, looking down on her desk for a pen to sign his clipboard.

“Not quite,” he said. There was something in his voice that made her look. She looked into ice blue eyes and caught sight of a few wisps of red hair peaking out from beneath the black. She realized too late that she was looking at Jed McIntyre.

B
efore Jeffrey could react to Lydia flying back and hitting the ground hard, he saw a bright white flash and heard the unmistakable sound of the Desert Eagle firing off rounds. The basement exploded with the sound, as loud as a bomb, followed by a sharp report. The smell of gunpowder filled Jeffrey’s nose as the assailant roared in pain or terror or maybe both. Jeffrey dove for Lydia as the monster got up and ran for the stairs, moving impossibly fast. Dax, a large cut bleeding on the side of his face, got up in a heartbeat and gave chase.

“I missed! I can’t fucking believe it. He was right on top of me,” he yelled as he disappeared into the darkness. Jeffrey heard the sound of the gun again as he pulled Lydia into his arms. His heart lurched with relief when she moaned. A line of blood trailed from her nose, and the light shadow of a bruise that he could see would flower into a deep purple and cover most of the right side of her face was already making its debut.

“Jesus,” he said, filled with anger, fear, and a painful love for her. He wanted to lock her in a padded room for the rest of her life. He hated himself a little for it … and hated her for not allowing him to do it. He had known it would come to this if they weren’t careful. And they hadn’t been.

“Dax,” she said, opening her eyes when more shots rang out upstairs. “I’m fine. Go. He needs help.”