Dead Lies (23 page)

“The twin thing,” he said after a moment. “You must identify with Web. I get it now.” He knew she felt something for him—he saw the way they looked at each other—but he wasn’t going to bring that up now. She’d been prickly when he tried to talk to her about it the other day.

“Yes,” admitted Anna. She quickly added, “But if you think I’m interested in him, you’re wrong.”

Kreeger didn’t respond.

“I just feel drawn to Web,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

Yes, to his good looks and his money, Kreeger thought bitterly. Aloud he said, “Regret is a pointless exercise.”

She glanced over. “Sounds like you know that firsthand.”

“Doesn’t everyone, Anna?”

Anna shoulders slumped visibly. “You’re right, Jerry. And you were also right about what you said before. I
was
affected by the fact that Serena and Web were twins, probably more than I realized. I’ve probably been burying my head in the sand because it’s just so painful to watch somebody else go through what Max did.”

“No need to apologize,” he said. “There’s no such thing as total objectivity. In fact, empathy is crucial in a law enforcer. If we didn’t have it we’d burn out. Either that or say ‘damn it all to hell’ and turn dirty.”

Anna nodded. “In my book there are two kinds of police officers—Good Cops or Bad Cops. It helps to know which ones you’re working with.”

They had reached Perona so Kreeger said, “Maybe sometime you’ll tell me where that cynicism comes from.”

“Maybe someday I will.”

They drove the last few blocks in silence. When Malik’s building was in sight, Anna pulled her right hand off the steering wheel and lightly touched his arm. “I’m sorry for dumping all that shit on you, Jerry. But I needed to say it. Thanks for listening.”

Kreeger turned away. He’d made a decision, and he knew she wouldn’t like it.

“Anna, I want you to wait outside while we take Malik,” he said to the door window.

She shot him a look of disbelief. “Why?”

He felt himself stiffen, trying to hang onto the emotional armor he’d put on this morning along with his Kevlar. It was the edge he’d need to make the bust—the one every cop wore at times like this. “You’re not in the right frame of mind right now.” He needed his team to be clear-headed and focused, and right now Anna was not.

Her eyes were bright, her hackles up. “C’mon, Jerry, I’m fine.”

He looked at her and shook his head. “No.”

“Really, I’m fine,” she insisted.

He didn’t respond.

“This is me every day, every minute,” she said forcefully, “and until now you haven’t had a problem with it. I think
you’re
the one who should wait in the car.”

His resolve wavered for a millisecond. “I’m sorry Anna. I’m pulling rank.”

Her angry silence filled the car. He felt bad about shutting her out of the bust. She’d earned the right to be part of it. But he couldn’t have a distracted officer threatening everyone else’s safety.

He wondered if she could see that there was another issue at play here as well. The truth was he was jealous that she was attracted to Web, and he had to admit he was punishing her just a little for it.

“If you want, you can drive Malik in,” he said lamely. “I’ll make sure you get credit for the collar.”

“Throw me a bone.” He felt her bitterness pierce him like a blade.

Anna pulled into the same spot on the corner Kreeger had found last time, and he got out of the car. She didn’t turn her head or speak. He didn’t shut the door. He stuck his head back in and looked at her.

After a few seconds, she spoke. “Our first fight, Jerry,” she said, the anger still apparent in her voice, although she was clearly trying to make light of it.

“And I’m sure it won’t be the last,” he said.

She attempted a smile, but it came out more like a grimace. Still, he appreciated the effort. He knew she wouldn’t be sore for long. He shut the car door and crossed the street to join the others. The two patrol officers who’d been doing surveillance were slipping on their vests.

De Luca eyed Kreeger as he approached, and, seeing Anna wasn’t with him, his eyebrow raised slightly. But something in Kreeger’s expression must have told him not to ask what was up. Kreeger appreciated his friend’s discretion. De Luca may have been a goof-off, but he always knew when to back off.

When Kreeger reached the group, he ordered the two uniformed officers to cover the fire escape at the back of the building, where Malik might try to make an escape. “The rest of us will head upstairs and knock on his door, adding the warning, “We need to consider Malik armed and dangerous.”

The men nodded gravely.

“Everyone ready?” he asked.

A chorus of yeses followed.

“Okay, let’s go.”

As they crossed the street to Malik’s address and entered the building, Kreeger pushed thoughts of Anna out of his head. It was time to focus on the task ahead.

They reached the sixth floor, and as they slowly approached Malik’s door, Kreeger saw it was ajar. Not a good sign. His first thought was that Malik had gotten spooked and flown the coop, not bothering to shut the door behind him, but when they entered the apartment, guns drawn, five pairs of feet pounding the squeaky floorboards, they discovered a very different explanation for the unlocked door.

Kreeger cursed aloud. There was a slap of leather as he slipped his gun back in its holster. He wouldn’t be facing off with Malik in an interrogation room today, and the hit man wouldn’t be doing anymore time. That’s because he was dead on the floor, the blood from his beefy body swirling an angry red around him, a hearty breakfast for the flies that had already arrived at the party.

CHAPTER 24

W
HEN WEB WAS MULLING OVER A PROBLEM, HE OFTEN WENT TO BED AND
let his subconscious noodle it around. More often than not, he found that he woke up in a state of clarity about the issue.

That’s exactly what happened the morning of his sister’s funeral. The thought that had been scraping the back of his mind last night was right there at the forefront the moment he opened his eyes.

It made perfect sense: His sister’s killer had been searching for something. The police had looked. He’d looked. No one had found anything.

Maybe it was here at his parents’ house.

He got out of bed and padded down the hall to Serena’s bedroom. Pushing open the door, he felt like he was entering a church. He looked around in respectful silence. In front of him was her old canopy bed, which stood between two windows overlooking the backyard. It was flanked by leggy tables topped with porcelain reading lamps dressed in cream-colored shades. An antique wooden dresser and mirror sat on one side wall; the other contained a secretary whose shelves were stacked with the yellow-spined Nancy Drew mysteries Serena had loved as a child. Tucked in the corner were a comfy chair and ottoman covered in green and white striped silk. And propped against the chair’s back cushion was a lacy pillow stitched with Serena’s name. Web remembered their mother buying it for Serena during a vacation in Cape Cod.

His gaze swept back to the bed, eyes searching for telltale signs—an imprint in the pillows or a wrinkle on the sheets—that his sister had taken the nap his father mentioned. But there were none. The pillows were fluffed and perfectly aligned, and the sheets were crisply folded over the blanket. The cleaning lady had been through here long ago.

The room had the stale scent of an unused space, yet he could still sense Serena’s presence—the ghostly spirit of a girl once filled with life and promise. He was flooded with memories. This is where the two of them had spent hours on the floor playing with Legos, and where they’d come to eat candy they’d stolen from the kitchen snack drawer and hidden under the bed. This is where they’d played endless games of Go Fish and Monopoly and where they’d tried to glue the pieces of a dish they’d broken after tossing it around like a Frisbee. This was where Serena had sobbed when her cat got hit by a car and where they’d once laughed so hard they’d both peed their pants.

This was a room in which he felt as much at home as in his own.

Web realized he was holding his breath and let it out. He knew where to look first. Crossing the room, he went to Serena’s desk and opened the bottom left-hand drawer, the one where she’d always kept her most important things—report cards and love notes in the early days and, later, condoms and bags of pot. That wasn’t the only reason the drawer was notable. One day in ninth-grade shop class, Web had cut and stained an inch-thick piece of wood fitted with a handle that looked like it was part of the wood but popped out when you pushed it in a certain spot. He’d wrapped it up and given it to Serena for Christmas without an explanation of what it was for. He hadn’t needed one. While everyone else puzzled over what it could be, she’d known right away that it was a false bottom for her special drawer.

He found the old sweet spot with his fingers and tapped at it lightly. The handle popped up with a faint squeak and only a little resistance. He tugged at the piece of wood and it slid slowly out, making just a faint scraping noise as it hit the sides of the drawer.

Web held his breath to see what he would find underneath. It was a plain manila folder. His heart raced as he removed the inch-thick file and sat down cross-legged on the floor to open it.

It took a moment to assess the contents, which were curious to say the least. There were copies of dozens of magazine and newspaper articles about New York real estate developer Gordon McGrower. Web knew the name—everyone did—but he didn’t know much more about the man except that his name was plastered on dozens of glitzy buildings all over the city. He was almost as famous—and rich—as Donald Trump.

He skimmed through the articles looking for clues as to why Serena might have amassed this file. The stories went back about ten years, when McGrower had begun to make a name in the business world. There was a
Business Week
article about how, in his first big deal at age 30, he’d purchased the old Seabring’s department store building on Fifth Avenue and converted it into multi-million-dollar lofts, turning a ninety-million dollar profit that helped fund future ventures. There was a
People
magazine story about how he’d donated five condominiums in one of his Lincoln Square buildings to 9/11 families, as well as a 2002 Forbes article that announced he’d made their Richest People list. Web read the entire printout of his Wikipedia biography and was surprised to learn the man had grown up in Upton Park, a working class town on the southern end of Bergen County, and had a rags-to-riches story like his own father’s.

Most of the stories chronicled McGrower’s business conquests; a few touched on his personal life, which included his wife and one-time supermodel Melanie Fox, and their six-year-old daughter.

Web stopped reading for a moment and again asked himself the obvious question: Why the hell would Serena have kept a secret file about Gordon McGrower?

More puzzled than ever, he continued digging. While most of the articles about the businessman were glowing, some were downright nasty. An
Amsterdam
magazine article from last year accused him of skimming profits off his construction projects by using inferior materials and undocumented workers, tactics that compromised the buildings’ safety. In other articles there were ugly allegations about his personal life—that his wife was a drunk and a drug addict and that their daughter was abused. The articles didn’t say whether it was physical or sexual, but there was a whiff of both.

Web felt his heart race when, toward the bottom of the pile, he came across a front-page story from last month’s
Avondale News
detailing a controversy with McGrower at its center. Two years earlier the magnate had purchased eighty-six acres of park land in Deerwood, the town bordering Avondale, for $150 million. The town put the land up for sale because it was verging on bankruptcy; when McGrower made an offer, they agreed to re-zone it as a residential property. At first, the residents resisted, but they were appeased when McGrower told them his plans to build a tasteful, two-hundred unit condominium complex that would be surrounded by plenty of grass and lush landscaping. However, a month before ground-breaking it was leaked that McGrower was proceeding with entirely different plans. He would instead build a massive apartment complex that would ultimately house several thousand people and contain more concrete than greenery.

Web had been in business long enough to suspect there’d probably been a back-room deal in place all along. And now that McGrower’s true plans were out in the open and that Deerwood’s town council had probably been complicit all along, the area residents were up in arms. They cried foul on the town leaders, calling them liars and carpetbaggers. They likened McGrower to Hitler invading Poland. They argued that it was bad enough a public park would be destroyed, but that a complex of such size would increase traffic on the quiet residential roads surrounding it, thus endangering children. They also claimed that, simply from a visual standpoint, the new campus would bring down surrounding property values.

Web agreed completely. The plan was a travesty on all counts. Furthermore, he appreciated the strategy the residents had adopted: Exploiting McGrower’s reputation as a philanthropist, they were asking that he donate the land back to the town so that it could remain a public park.

As he often did at work, Web boiled the information down to the bottom line: If the residents got their way and the project didn’t go through, McGrower had a hell of a lot to lose. He let the article fall from his hands. Was it possible Serena had been one of the protesters and had somehow caught McGrower’s eye? Had her actions forced McGrower to do the unthinkable: hire a hit man to kill her? He spun the idea around in his mind. It was so farfetched. No, it was downright insane. A guy like McGrower didn’t need to
kill
people. It wasn’t logical. He could do more damage with his pile of money and team of lawyers. Something wasn’t right about the scenario Web was concocting. He felt it in his gut.

He willed himself to calm down and think rationally. Serena and McGrower must have had some sort of connection. He ran his hands through his hair and massaged his temples. He looked at the checkerboard pattern the sun was making on the rug as it streamed through the window. He could tell the trees outside were blowing in the wind because the shadows of the leaves danced on the floor in front of him.

The shifting light gave him an idea. Perhaps he’d been focusing on the wrong thing. Perhaps instead of asking why Serena had kept the file he should have been asking why Serena had
hidden
it.

Web’s gut clenched. Serena’s secret activities weren’t about business. They had to be
personal
.

He felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead. There was something here. He could feel it.

He blew through the last few articles, tossing each one aside as he skimmed them, and there, toward the bottom of the pile, was a 5 X 7 yellow envelope. It was wrinkled and grimy at the edges, as if Serena had opened and closed it many times. He imagined his sister sitting right in this spot, furtively handling the envelope and listening for sounds in case someone might walk in and catch her. With shaky hands he opened the metal clasp and turned the envelope over. The contents slipped out. They were photographs. Not magazine or newspaper cutouts but loose 4 X 6 prints from an old-fashioned camera like the kind people used before the digital revolution. He flipped through them one by one. They were pictures of a little girl. There were maybe twenty photos in total and they were taken from afar—presumably from across the street with a camera fitted with a zoom lens—covering a brief moment or two in time. The little girl was five or six years old and adorable. She was wearing a blue plaid skirt and white stockings—obviously a school uniform—under a gray wool coat that swung out at the sides. It looked like the middle of the afternoon, and she was coming out of school. There she was walking down the steps, knapsack over her shoulders, holding the railing so as not to slip on the ice; there she was taking the hand of a uniformed chauffeur and being helped into the limo at the curb; there she was looking out the window, tiny and unsmiling, as the car drove off.

Web stared at a close-up of the girl. He took in her pale, freckled skin, strawberry hair and Kelly green eyes, and his heart stopped. He recognized her.

He put the photos down and picked up the pile of articles again. He raced through them, ignoring the sting of a paper cut that drew blood from the fleshy space between his thumb and forefinger, and within seconds found the one he was looking for. He read the caption for the photo, then read it again to make sure he’d read it correctly.

He blinked once, twice.

The little girl’s name was Violet.

Violet.

Get Violet
. That’s what Serena had been trying to tell him the night she died. Not
Bet Violent
but
Get Violet
.

Web stared at the picture of the little girl. He knew her. He knew her as well as his own face.

Violet was Serena’s daughter.