Die for You (13 page)

“And you use it like a blunt-force instrument—imprecise, clumsy, banging, banging, banging to get your point across. You’d use a jack-hammer for needlework.”

I heard him sigh, as though I was being obtuse in order to exasperate him. “How did you find out about it? Did you know her name, where she lived?”

“I just knew,” I told him. “I felt it. Then there was a text message. I asked him to end it; he said he would. I never knew anything about her.”

He tugged at the cuff of his shirt, straightening the line that was exposed beyond his jacket, frowning.

“You don’t seem like the type not to ask questions.”

Maybe I was more like my mother than I wanted to admit, about some things, anyway. But it was different. I didn’t want to know anything about Marc’s lover at the time, didn’t want any fodder for my imagination to spin. Without it, I could just cast her as a bit player, someone who glided across the stage barely noticed. Any detail might have started me weaving her into something bigger, more important than I wanted her to be.

“He met her in Philadelphia. That’s all I know.”

“And even that might have been a lie.”

I shrugged, gave an assenting nod.

“That’s what really got me, you know? About my wife? I think I could have gotten over the cheating part. It was all the lying, all the sneaking around that really irked me. You can almost understand infidelity, right? The whole lust thing—it’s there. But it’s the logistics that make it really ugly, unforgivable. You thought she was spending time with her mother, but she was with her boyfriend. It turns your stomach.”

I didn’t answer because I knew what he was doing. He was trying to make me angry, relate to me and get me talking, commiserating. I’d watched enough television to know this. I’d start talking and some “clue” would pop out of my mouth, or I’d say something I hadn’t intended to, give away something that I knew. Maybe even admit that I’d killed my husband, dumped his body in the East River, killed his colleagues and trashed his business and the home we shared.

“But you forgave him, huh? Stayed with him?”

“Yes.” Was it really true? Had I ever forgiven him?

“Why?” He almost spat the question. What he really wanted to ask was “How?”

I regarded him. Another natty outfit—brown wool slacks, with a dark brown leather belt and shoes, cream button-down, dark coat, black hair gelled back, the debut of purposeful stubble. His intelligence, his competence, was a thin veneer over a deep immaturity. He was a boy, a child, though it looked as though forty was right around the corner. He still believed in fairy tales.

“Because I love him, Detective.”

“And love forgives.” He sounded sarcastic, bitter.

“Love
accepts
, moves forward. Maybe forgiveness comes in time.”

The answer seemed to startle the smugness off his face; the inside points of his eyebrows turned up quickly and then returned to their place in the arch. Sadness.

He recovered quickly. “What do you think they were looking for here, Mrs. Raine? At first glance, what’s missing other than the computers and the files in that cabinet?”

He exhausted me with all his questions, his attitude, and the way he kept saying my name. All the drive and energy I’d had in the cab had drained from me. I felt as if I’d been filled up with sand. “I don’t know.”

I looked at my naked hand. He caught the glance. “Where’s your wedding ring?”

“It’s gone,” I answered. “My brother-in-law said it was gone when they came to the hospital.”

It meant something; we both knew that. Neither of us knew what. He wrote it down in his book. He asked a few questions about the ring, scribbled my answers. There wasn’t much to tell—a two-carat cushion-cut ruby in a platinum setting. It was the only material possession in the world that held any value for me.

The phone in my pocket vibrated and I withdrew it and looked at the screen. I flipped it open to read the text message there, then snapped it shut.

“Who was that?” asked Detective Crowe. A little rude, I thought, and none of his business.

“My sister’s worried,” I told him. He nodded as if he knew all about worried sisters. I felt my chest start to swell, my shoulders tense.

“You’re looking a little pale again,” he said after a beat.

I stood and moved toward the door. “You know what? You were right. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t
want
to be here. I have to leave.”

He blocked my passage with his body, which I did not like. I took a step back.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said, mellow but firm. “Since you insisted on being here, we might as well do it now.”

“I know. But I’d rather do it someplace else,” I said. “You said yourself I shouldn’t be here, and you were right. Anyway, you must have enough to keep you busy here for a while—fingerprints, DNA, whatever.”

“That’s for the techs, the forensics teams. They’ve come and gone. While they analyze what they’ve found, all I have to do is ask questions. Hopefully the right ones lead to answers that help me to understand why three people are dead, your home and office have been trashed, and your husband,
Marcus Raine
, the point at which all of this connects, is missing.”

He leaned on the name heavily, oddly.

“Why did you say his name like that?” I asked.

He raised a finger in the air. “Now,
that’s
a good question.”

His doppelgänger had returned, the shadow my addled brain was creating behind him. I felt some kind of dizzying combination of anger, dread, and dislike for the man who was crowding me in my very small office with his thick body. I took another step back and was against the wall.

“Marcus Raine, born in the Czech Republic in 1968, emigrated to the U.S. in 1990, attended Columbia University on scholarship and obtained a bachelor’s and then a master’s in computer science from that institution. Lived in the U.S. first on a student, then a work visa, before he became a U.S. citizen in 1997.”

“That’s right.” With the exception of the last piece of information, I’d told him as much last night. He wasn’t wowing me with his detective skills.

“Worked for a start-up called Red Gravity, made a small fortune when the company went public in 1998.”

I nodded. It wasn’t enough money to retire forever. But it was more money than Marcus ever thought he’d make in his lifetime—or so it had seemed at the time.

“He did well enough to set up his own company shortly after we were married,” I said.

He offered a mirthless smile. “Well, no. That’s the thing.”

I didn’t appreciate the know-it-all, smarter-than-you swagger to his bearing; it caused me to flush with the shame of a liar or a fool. I tried to push past him again. The room was suddenly too hot. He waited a second before yielding to me. I didn’t go far, just to my bed, where I sat heavily, though the sheets and comforter had been shredded. It looked as though someone very strong had sunk a knife deep into the mattress and then cut ugly swaths through the material.
There’s so much rage evidenced here
. Was it possible that Marcus and I had made love here just the morning before last?

“Marcus Raine,” he said, following me and pulling a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket, “disappeared in early 1999.”

He handed me the paper, a printout from the
Times
online. When he did, I noticed that the skin on his knuckles was split, his hand swollen and looking sore. I almost asked about it but figured I had my own problems.

With a vein throbbing in my throat, I read a small news item about a young man, a successful software engineer, and his sudden disappearance. It told of how his parents were killed and he was raised by his aunt in a town just outside of Prague during communism, how he came to the U.S. and made good, realized every immigrant’s dream of America. And just as the rags-to-riches tale came to its happy ending—he’d met a girl and fallen in love, had asked her to marry him—Marcus Raine disappeared. Didn’t come to work one day. When his girlfriend reported him missing, police gained entry into his apartment. There was no sign of a struggle. Some items—keys, wallet, a watch he wore every day—were missing. The article confirmed what I had learned about missing men: No one waged much of an effort to find them. No one heard from him again. His whereabouts were still unknown.

I looked up at the detective. I don’t know what he expected to see on my face, but I could tell by the way his eyes went soft that he felt sorry for me suddenly.

“Someone else with the same name,” I said weakly.

“And the same life story,” he said. “Possible. But how likely?”

I found myself looking at his shoes. I could tell they were expensive. From the leather and stitching, I’d say Italian. He couldn’t afford shoes like that; I figured he was in debt, maybe a lot of debt. My brain switched off like this when I didn’t want to deal with what was in front of me.

“Isabel.”

I looked up at him. He held out a photograph, and I took it from him.

“Do you know this man?” asked Detective Crowe.

For a second, I thought I was looking at a picture of my husband. But no, this man was narrower at the shoulders, the features of his face weaker, eyes hazel, not haunting blue. Really, as I looked closely, he was nothing like Marc except for his coloring, his nearly shaved head and blond goatee.

“That’s Marcus Raine, born June 9, 1968, disappeared January 2, 1999.”

Same name, same life story, same birthday as my husband—but not my husband.

I guessed the photograph was taken on the observation deck of the Empire State Building; the city lay tiny and spread out behind him. This strange man with my husband’s name had his arm draped around a pretty blonde. They both wore stiff tourist smiles.

“Do you know him, Isabel?”

Was there something vaguely familiar about him? It seemed as if I could have seen him before, somewhere, though I couldn’t have said when or where. I’d never met anyone from Marc’s life before me, not family, friends, or even colleagues.

“There’s a resemblance, wouldn’t you say?” said Crowe.

“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to give Detective Crowe anything. “Maybe.”

“What about the girl, Camilla Novak?”

The girl in the photo had that kind of hard-featured, lean beauty that seemed to characterize Czech women. I remembered noticing in Prague how gorgeous they all were in the way of gems or metals, stunning but not inviting. She had that same aura to her—
Look, don’t touch
. I didn’t recognize her, but something about her name rang familiar. Had I seen it or heard it somewhere? I couldn’t remember.

“No. I don’t know either of them.”

I had a thought that caused me to get up quickly. Too quickly; I almost sank to my knees but Detective Crowe steadied me with a hand to my elbow.

“Take it easy,” he said, leading me back to the bed. “What is it?”

“There was a small photo album, really a canvas-bound book with old photographs, letters, and recipes from his mother. He kept it in the back of his closet.”

“I’ll get it. Where is it?”

I pointed to the closet, battling a terrible nausea and dizziness. When he opened the door, I saw that all Marc’s designer clothes remained untouched, arranged by color, meticulously maintained. Suits and collared shirts were hung, sweaters and knits were folded. It was an oasis of order in the chaos. It felt like an insult. But, of course, the album and all the personal items within were gone. Detective Crowe turned to show me his palms.

“There’s nothing here.”

I felt a rush of sadness and fear. That album, with its worn edges and yellowed pages coming loose from their binding, was the only piece of the past Marcus had, he claimed—a couple of grainy black-and-white pictures of himself as a child, a picture of the parents I’d never meet, recipes in a woman’s pretty handwriting. There were letters in Czech from his aunt. I used to look at these things when he wasn’t home, when we were fighting. It comforted me to know that he was a boy once, fragile, vulnerable, that there were reasons he seemed so closed off now. Was it a fabrication? I wondered now. Were those pictures of someone else?

“Seems Marcus Raine was a bit of a loner—no family, no friends really, other than the girl,” said Detective Crowe. “One of those guys, I guess. Even his former colleagues at Red Gravity said he kept to himself, didn’t party after work or go to lunch with anyone. He worked hard but didn’t socialize. According to the notes in the file.”

“What are you getting at, Detective Crowe?” I asked.

“Before I answer you, let me ask you a question.” He went on without waiting for a response from me. “Last night you told me that you didn’t know anything about his business, didn’t have much to do with it at all.”

“That’s right.”

“Then why is everything in your name? Why was your Social Security number used to establish the EIN?” Another bomb dropping, another structure crumbling like powder.

“It wasn’t.”

“But it was.”

We held each other’s eyes, both of us disbelieving, both of us watchful. I saw Detective Breslow come stand in the doorway to my bedroom. I think she’d been standing just outside the whole time. I broke Crowe’s gaze to look at her.

“We think he used your information to avoid using his own, Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow.