Die for You (19 page)

The text in the body read:

Even reading it now, I can see why I deleted it. It was so overwrought, so silly. A week ago, I would have imagined it spam, on par with all those e-mails announcing that I’d won some European lottery, or that someone who’d had a crush on me in high school was looking for me. My box was always full of this kind of garbage. They were lures, looking for the most gullible, loneliest, most paranoid fish in the pond. I deleted mercilessly. Too bad I didn’t have such good judgment in the real world.

I hesitated just a moment and then dialed the number on the screen from my cell phone. It rang so long, I didn’t think anyone would pick up. Then there was a very sultry female voice on the line.

“Hello?”

I found I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I hesitated, almost hung up.

“Hello?” she said again.

Finally, I found my voice: “It’s Isabel Raine.”

There was only silence on the line where I heard her breathing.

“You wrote to me about my husband,” I went on. “You said he was a murderer and a liar. That I was in danger.” I sounded amazingly cool and distant, my voice not betraying the adrenaline pulsing through my veins.

Still silence. Then: “I made a mistake. I lied. I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t. You need to tell me the truth.”

“It’s too late. It’s too late.” I heard a buzzer ring on her end. “I have to go. Don’t call again.”

She hung up, and I immediately called her back. My call went straight to voice mail.

“I know about your boyfriend, about the real Marcus Raine. What happened to him? You have to help me.” But I was talking to air.

I quickly found a local listing for Camilla Novak online, wrote down the address and phone number, hoping it was the right person. The listing was in SoHo, not too far from where I was now. Then I Googled: “marcus raine missing nyc.” I wanted more details. I needed to arm myself with information before I raced into the fray.

A list of matches filled the screen and I scrolled through old newspaper articles, which didn’t offer any new information beyond what I’d already learned from Detective Crowe. The rest were inaccurate links: Another Marcus Raine was looking for a girlfriend on a dating site, someone named Marcus who lived on Raine Street was selling a mattress, an old man left his dog Marcus out in the rain (misspelled raine) and wrote a ridiculous poem about it.

I was about to move on when a listing toward the bottom of the page caught my eye:
What happened to Marcus Raine?
I clicked on the link and it brought me to a site called
forgottennycrimes.com
.

“On television, the haunted cop works the case until he retires—and even then he can’t let it go. But in the real world, people disappear and no one ever finds out what happened to them,” some copy on the makeshift page read. “Someone goes out for groceries and never comes home, is never heard from again. Everyone moves on except for those of us who are left behind, haunted by loss, anger, and unanswered questions.”

Grainy images faded in and then faded out on the screen—school portraits, mug shots, vacation shots, candid and posed images.

I clicked on Marcus Raine’s name and saw the same image Crowe had shown me, except that the girlfriend had been cropped out. The blurb there, about how Raine was living the American dream when he disappeared, how he’d been raised by his aunt in communist Czechoslovakia, how his parents died, how he came to the U.S. and was educated, got rich, was my husband’s story exactly.

On a whim, I entered the name Kristof Ragan into the search engine. But nothing useful appeared, just lists of names for schools and corporations that included “Kristof” or “Ragan.” I kept looking through page after page on the screen, just hoping, becoming more desperate with each bad link. Finally, I reached the end. And that’s when I lost it for the first time.

In my nephew’s bedroom, surrounded by
Star Wars
and Skater Boy paraphernalia, stuffed animals and sports posters—walls, ceilings covered with it all—bunk beds the size of apartments I’d had, I put my head on his desk and wept, feeling all my rage, confusion, and grief pour out of me in one mighty rush. I could have drowned in it. Two days ago, I would have turned to my imperfect husband for his intellect and calm in such a storm. I would have reached for him and he would have lifted me from the chaos of my emotions.

“Isabel, relax,” he’d say. “Clear your head.”

And I’d feel that fog—the one that descends over me in time of stress or high emotion, the one that inhibits logical thought—I’d feel it start to lift.

“There is no problem that doesn’t have a solution. There’s always a way,” he’d tell me. And I’d listen, know he was right.

I felt his loss so profoundly that I almost just crawled into Trevor’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. My friend, my husband, my lover was a liar at least, quite possibly a criminal as well. But still the thought of being without him nearly crippled me. For all the fractures in our marriage, all the things that caused me pain, I truly loved him, had the most basic kind of faith in him, even if I’d never
really
trusted him again after his affair.

For some reason, I found myself thinking back to my conversation with Detective Crowe.
And love forgives?
he’d asked bitterly.
Love accepts, moves forward
, I’d answered him. But maybe, in my case, love accepts too much, wants to live so badly that it creates what it needs to survive.

Next to the computer keyboard my cell phone vibrated, started shimmying along the smooth white surface of the desk. I looked at the little screen.
Erik calling
. I hesitated, then answered it but didn’t say anything.

“Don’t do this, Iz,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Just come back and we’ll work it out together.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Or at least go to the lawyer’s office. You know where he is, right? John Brace and Son, on Park Avenue. He’ll know what to do. That detective said if we can’t get you to come back, he’s going to consider you a person of interest in all of this. A
suspect
, Iz. Let’s not have this get any worse than it already is.”

I pressed the
End
button on my phone and set it back down. It started buzzing again a second later.
Linda calling
. I let it shimmy itself off the desk and fall to the floor. Eventually it stopped ringing.

As I got up and walked away from it, it started buzzing again. That little phone, the fat silver weight of it, smooth and warm like a worry stone, had always been a source of comfort to me. Seemed like it was always in my hand, all the people in my life just one push button away. All those voices—my sister, my mother, my husband—at least as loud as my own, often louder. I left them all there calling after me.

I took an old coat from my sister’s closet and I was about to leave when I had a thought. I ran to the room Erik used as an office and went into their file cabinet, which I knew they left unlocked. It was easy to find their passports—and mine among them. Linda and I had traveled with the kids last summer, an impromptu trip to Mexico. In the melee of traveling with two kids, our passports got confused. I had Linda’s at my apartment, or did. She had mine. I grabbed it with a wash of relief and euphoria. I thought that sometimes fate smiled on you, even when she had been slapping you around in every other way like the abusive, narcissistic bitch she is.

He just didn’t like the lighting, the stale decor, or the smell of an institutional kitchen. These things offended his aesthetic sensibilities, made him anxious and uncomfortable. And it annoyed him that people suffering from disease weren’t treated to a more pleasant environment. Wouldn’t it help them to feel better if they didn’t have to look at gray Formica and dirty white walls, if they didn’t have to look at themselves beneath the ugly glare of fluorescent lighting? And if their last days had to be spent here, shouldn’t a little more attention be paid to detail? Should the last thing they see be peeling wallpaper or a metal bed rail? Then again, maybe not everyone was as affected by these things as he was.

His phone rang.

“She’s moving,” Jez said on the other end. He heard a siren wailing in the background and she sounded a bit breathless.

“Are you on foot?” he asked.

“I am now. She took a cab to her sister’s apartment. I’ve been sitting here, waiting. She just left on foot, moving fast. I thought she’d hail another cab but she didn’t.”

“Where’s the vehicle?”

“Parked illegally across the street from the Books’ building.”

“Where’s she going?”

“I don’t know,” she said, drawing out the words as if she was talking to a toddler. “That’s why I’m following her.”

“Keep me posted,” he said, glancing up at Linda Book, then over to the two kids who both seemed pretty bored or unhappy or both. He’d been asking them questions in the family waiting area, getting nowhere.

“Where are you going?” Jez asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then you keep me posted, too.”

In the first smart move he’d made in twenty-four hours, he had left Jez outside the hospital while he went inside. He couldn’t hold Isabel Raine; he knew he had no legal reason to do so. But one of them could stay on her, see where she went. Maybe she’d lead them to her husband. Maybe they’d see someone following her, like the alleged thugs who’d nearly killed her stepfather.

Isabel Raine was a runner. Not that he thought she was guilty necessarily, but she had an idea of herself that made her a flight risk. She was angry, she was arrogant, and she’d been betrayed. And she was looking for answers, thought she was better qualified than anyone to find them. She didn’t disappoint him, took the first opportunity she had to bolt. But, he’d noted, she’d waited until she knew her stepfather was okay, knew that he had family nearby, before she left. To him it said that she was a good girl at her core, if not a rule follower. Her staying when she could have more easily left was what they called in the business a telling detail. Not in the police business, in the writing business. The little quirk that spoke volumes about character.

He’d read this in one of the myriad books he’d read about fiction writing. It had stayed with him. He thought it was something that made sense in real life, too, in police work. The two professions weren’t really so different. You had to have the belly of fire, that drive to know and solve and speculate, to follow your hunches and go where incident and evidence impelled you. You had to have a terrible curiosity about character, about what made people do the awful, wonderful, terrifying, brilliant things they do.

He looked up at Linda Book, who was watching him.

“She went to your apartment.”

Linda nodded, as if this didn’t surprise her. “She has a key.”

She stood by the window, leaned against the sill and looked out, her arms wrapped tight around her body. He noticed that the skin on her hands was creamy white, her nails short, sensible squares. She wore a honker of a diamond, cushion cut, a carat and a half at least. She clenched and unclenched this hand unconsciously, squeezing the thick cashmere of her coat. He could tell it was cashmere, had always been good about identifying fine fabrics by sight or touch.

The way the light came in from the window, the golden light of afternoon, it caught the highlights of her hair. In the line of her nose and something about her brow, he saw Isabel Raine. It was easy to see they were sisters, though they had opposite coloring. Isabel Raine looked like she’d been dipped in milk. Linda Book was gilded by sunlight. They were both beautiful, but Linda Book was softer, more real somehow. It was the mother factor. There was a look to a certain type of mom, a compassionate knowledge of the human condition that can only come from changing diapers and soothing tantrums, bandaging knees and assuaging fears.

“Where will she go, Ms. Book?”

“Wherever she thinks the answers are,” she said, looking out the window again. He felt a wash of frustration. Stubborn stoicism must run in the family.

“You’re not helping her,” he said. “You’re not protecting her.”

“I’ve never been able to do either of those things, Detective. Never. Not unless she wants me to.” He watched her eyes drift over to her daughter, a tiny dark-haired girl who slumped in an uncomfortable chair, pretending to be asleep. “If I knew where she was going, I’d tell you.”

His phone rang again. He saw it was Jez, so he answered quickly.

“I lost her,” she said, yelling over street noise.

“What? How?” he said sharply, causing both Linda and the girl to look at him.

“I got caught in the crowd pushing out of the train and she snaked in. The doors closed and she was gone.”

“What train?”

“The uptown N/R.”

“Fuck
me
.”

Linda Book shot him an annoyed look, shook her head. The girl smiled, a small, amused turning up of the corner of her mouth. And in that second she was identical to her aunt. Detective Crowe was really starting to dislike this family of stubborn, too-smart women with bad attitudes.

“What are you going to do?” he asked her, sounding a little petulant even to himself.

“What
can
I do, Crowe?”

“See if you can catch her at the next station.” He heard her release an exasperated breath.

“Okay.” She said it as if he was an idiot and it would never work but she’d try it anyway. He ended the call. If he’d been alone, he’d have kicked something, issued a string of expletives to blow off steam. But he managed to keep his composure.

“I have an idea.” It was the girl, looking at him as if he might be interested in her thoughts.

“Really,” he said, sarcastic and annoyed. He saw anger, anger rather than intimidation, flash on her small face. He hated to admit it, but it cowed him a bit. He kept his eyes on her. She turned to her mother, as if he no longer deserved to be spoken to.

“Make Daddy go home and check the computer,” she said. “You can use the spyware you installed to see what sites she visited and try to figure out where she went that way.”

“What spyware?” asked Linda, widening her eyes and lifting her brow in a bad imitation of innocence.

“Yeah, right,” said Emily. “Like we don’t
know
, Mom.”

“Hey, that’s a good idea, kid,” he said, surprised.

Emily Book gave him a nasty smirk. “Duh.”

Five minutes later Erik Book was on his way downtown. Linda Book looked uneasy, rubbed her temples with the spread thumb and index finger of one hand, as though she was wondering if she was helping or hurting her sister.