The Darkness Gathers (10 page)

“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.

L
ydia 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.

“What do you have for me?” she asked Craig.

“Let’s see,” he said with a sigh. “There’s no way to describe Nathan Quinn, other than he is an American blue blood. The heir to the fortune his father, Reginald Quinn, made in real estate, he went to Groton, then on to Yale, which he graduated in 1963. From there, he went into international banking at Chase Manhattan. He got his MBA from Columbia University. And after working at Chase for nearly fifteen years, he spread his wings and opened his own company, Quinn Enterprises.”

“What do they do?”

“As far as I can tell, they are a venture-capitalist firm. They loan money to entrepreneurs, struggling countries, whatever they deem to be an appropriate risk. And then they either make a huge percentage on their shares when the enterprise succeeds or take ownership when it fails. It’s hard to tell, though. It’s a privately held company. They’re clean with the IRS. They made nearly a billion dollars in the nineties. But the weird thing is, they pulled out of their dot-com companies a few months before everything started to crash. Meaning they didn’t lose their shirts like a lot of people.”

“Interesting.”

“It gets more interesting.”

“Do tell.”

She watched as a handsome, well-dressed young man left the Fitore residence. At first glance, he looked like a thinner, more modern James Dean, with slicked-back darkish blond hair. He walked with a casual slump and the smooth, confident gait of a young punk who thinks he’s a man. She could also tell by the way his expensive jacket hung at the inseam that he was carrying a gun—a very big gun.

“Jenna and Tatiana Quinn and the maid, Valentina Fitore, are all Albanian, right? Quinn Enterprises was heavily invested in the Albanian government—if you can call it that—that took the reins right after the fall of communism. You know about that? The whole pyramid scheme that basically destroyed the country’s entire economy?”

“Um, no.”

Craig had a way of making Lydia feel like the most uninformed human being on the planet. Even though she read more than most people and studied newspapers religiously, he always seemed to have more information than seemed possible for someone so young.

“When the Communist regime ended in Albania,” he explained patiently, “chaos ensued, leaving the country ripe for the takeover of organized crime. It was already the poorest country in Europe, but things got even worse in 1997. An investment opportunity, into which hundreds of thousands of Albanian citizens had sunk their life savings, was revealed as fraudulent. The government had, according to critics, colluded in the scheme. Riots ensued when the investors realized that their money was gone forever.”

“Wow … that’s fucked-up.”

“Well, Nathan Quinn made a lot of money on that, too.”

“How?”

“I’m not clear on that. I just tripped over the information. I was entering the names of the companies in which Quinn Enterprises had invested, which I got from the IRS database, into a search engine—”

“Craig,” she interrupted, “you hacked into the IRS? Please don’t tell me these things. Jeffrey would kill us both.”

“Okay, I mean got from my ‘contact’ at the IRS. One of these companies was called American Equities. I got a list of articles about the crash. Turns out that Quinn Enterprises funded the company that destroyed the Albanian economy. The president of AE, an alleged boss in the Albanian mob, a John Gotti–type character over there named Radovan Mladic, killed himself. Quinn walked away from the whole thing without a financial blemish. In fact, nearly a hundred million dollars richer, according to the IRS.”

“That has to be illegal somehow? Aren’t there laws?” asked Lydia.

“Not for some of us, apparently,” he replied with a smug laugh.

Lydia found herself wondering if Craig was talking about Quinn or about himself. She couldn’t imagine how he was hacking into government computers without getting caught. And she didn’t want to know.

She watched the young man get into the Porsche and back up out of the driveway. He pulled up right next to the Jeep, but because of the black tinted windows on her vehicle and the fact that she slouched down in her seat, he didn’t notice her inside. He flicked on the interior light and was intent on his own reflection in the rearview mirror as he paused for a second while he smoothed out his already-perfect hair. He had the bluest eyes Lydia had ever seen. Then he gunned the engine, barked second, and was gone.

“That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m still digging.”

“Thanks, Craig.”

She hung up the phone and looked at the black tire marks the Porsche had left in the road. She didn’t have time to wonder who the young man was, because then a black stretch limousine pulled up to the curb. She had to assume it was the Quinns’ driver, because Valentina Fitore climbed out, still in her maid’s uniform. She walked around to the driver, who hadn’t made a move to get out and open the door for her. They exchanged what looked to be a few friendly words, and then he drove off, leaving Valentina standing in the street.

Lydia climbed out of her Jeep and walked around the front of the vehicle.

“Mrs. Fitore,” she called.

Valentina looked as if she had been expecting Lydia, and she regarded her with some combination of sad resignation and fear. She backed away a little, glancing uneasily around her.

“Mrs. Fitore,” Lydia said gently, leaning on the hood. “We need to talk.”

“I can’t speak to you, Miss Strong. I make a horrible mistake.” she said. Her words were clear and her accent heavy. She had forced her mouth into a hard line, and she frowned, deep lines creasing her brow. Lydia could see in Valentina the stress of a lifetime of struggle and fighting to protect herself.

“Please, Valentina. I want to help Tatiana,” she said, appealing to the emotions that must have been present to inspire her to send the letter and tape, if she had, in fact, done so. Lydia could see in Valentina’s eyes the battle being waged between conscience and fear.

Then she saw the older woman’s expression soften, and Valentina took a step toward Lydia. But when she opened her mouth, her words were drowned by a screeching of tires that sounded like a human scream. Time seemed to slow and warp as a black Mercedes sedan with heavily tinted windows closed in on them like a storm. In one moment, Valentina stood before Lydia. In the next, she was struck hard by the metal grill with a sickening crack. She was mercilessly pushed by the car fender as Lydia watched, helpless, astonished. An inhuman sound that was despair and anger escaped Lydia’s throat as she, unthinking, ran after the Mercedes. When it stopped, Lydia froze, and for an eternal moment the street seemed to hold its breath. A flock of small green parrots screeched overhead as they fled from the tree they’d been perched in. Then the driver slammed the car into reverse, Lydia directly in its path. She managed to leap to the side of the road and crawl behind the Jeep. Her gun was still inside the vehicle, sitting uselessly on the bottom of her bag on the backseat. She struggled toward the back door, watching the wheels of the Mercedes from beneath her car as it continued its path, backing down the street, then sped off. She lay still for a moment, gasping for breath; then she pulled herself from the ground. People had started to come from their houses.

“Are you all right?” a frightened voice called.

“Call an ambulance,” a more frightened voice answered, and Lydia realized it was her own voice. She ran toward Valentina, who lay on the road, a crumbled pile of herself in a spreading pool of blood. Her dead eyes registered horrified surprise, her lips slightly parted.

“Oh God,” whispered Lydia, assailed by guilt and regret as she knelt beside the woman, Valentina’s blood soaking into the knees of Lydia’s jeans. “Oh God. What’s happening here?”

chapter eleven

H
e felt a shock of fear when he saw her sitting with her head in her hands and the knees of her jeans soaked through with blood. She sat alone in a glass-walled interrogation room. Her heels resting on the metal chair legs, her elbows on her thighs, she moved her fingers across her forehead in circles, as if rubbing away the sight she had just witnessed. He was reminded what a small woman she was, just under five six, weighing in at 120 pounds, give or take. He always thought of her as strong and powerful, the energy of her personality taking up much more space than her physical frame. He remembered the first time he’d seen her, perched on the stoop of her mother’s house in Sleepy Hollow, sinking into grief, terrified and traumatized. He hadn’t thought of that night in so long.

Jeffrey and Detective Ignacio had raced back to the station house when the call came over the police radio. And the ride had been an eternity, even knowing that Valentina was the sole casualty at the scene. He’d had an instinct that Lydia should not make that trip alone, but he had kept his mouth shut, knowing that she would have given him shit for being overprotective. She easily could have been killed. It would be awhile before he could forgive himself for that.

She raised her eyes, saw him approaching, and gave him a weak smile. He hoped she would jump up and run to him, but she didn’t. He could see as he strode toward her that she had pulled the shades down in her eyes. She had taken on the coldness that she used to protect herself in moments like this. And he hated it. Hated that she’d had cause to learn how to do that in her life, and hated that she was in a position where she needed to again. Their last year together had been so peaceful, free from murder and mayhem. He was starting to think that they needed a career change.