Die for You (7 page)

I shook my head. “Marcus doesn’t have any family. His parents died when he was a boy. He was raised by his mother’s sister in the Czech Republic. He came to the U.S. as soon as he was able to after communism fell in 1989, earned a scholarship to Columbia and worked various jobs as he went to school, got his master’s in computer science.” I found myself smiling a little. I had always been so proud of Marcus, of his intelligence, of his strength and fearlessness, of his machinelike drive toward getting what he wanted. Even when all these things had worked against us as a couple, I was still proud of him.

“Was he having any problems with anyone? Colleagues? Clients?”

“Not that he mentioned,” I said. Then: “Well… the earlier break-in? Whoever it was had a key and knew the alarm code. That was strange.”

“A disgruntled employee?”

I nodded. “There was an investigation. Still ongoing, I think. The police were looking at a programmer Marcus had fired a few weeks earlier. He’d made some threats. I don’t remember his name.”

“I’ll look into it.”

I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself to be strong, to be solid. But I kept seeing dark spots in front of my eyes, feeling that fuzzy, light feeling that comes right before you pass out. I tried to measure my breathing.

“You okay?” I heard the detective ask.

I opened my eyes and glanced toward the two of him—the solid one and the blurry, shadowy figure behind him. “Do I look okay to you?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not really. I’m sorry.” He put the cap on his pen, let his hand drop to his lap.

“If those people weren’t FBI agents,” I said when he didn’t say anything else, “then what happened to Rick Marino? He was there with me; they took him away. I thought he was being arrested.”

“Rick Marino is dead,” he said simply. His delivery could have used a little work. I could tell he thought it was better not to soften the blow, that it was a policy he’d decided on long ago. He continued speaking into the stunned silence, where I was having trouble processing the information and forming an appropriate response.

“We found his body in the office along with the bodies of two other employees—Eileen Charlton and Ronald Falco.”

I tried to visualize their faces, to think of the last time I’d seen them. The company party we’d had at our apartment last year. Eileen was a game designer and artist. She was petite, bookish with round wire-rimmed glasses. I remembered Ronald, a sound engineer, as lanky and shy with a mild stutter. Were either of them married? Did they have kids? I couldn’t remember.

“I’m sorry,” he added, an afterthought.

“What’s happening?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat, coming out in a raspy whisper.

“We’ll find out,” he said, putting away his pad and pen. I could see he believed it but I already had the sense of a yawning black abyss opening in my life. I was about to tumble in and I really didn’t think Detective Grady Crowe was going to be of much help. I could already see he was out of his depth. I just didn’t realize yet that I was, too.

But we wandered through the quaint cobblestone streets with the tourists, stopping in shops and having a local beer at the pub. He knew everything about the history of the town, Kutná Hora, once the second most important town in Bohemia because of its silver mines, now just a side trip tourists make while visiting Prague.

He spoke with the locals in Czech, explained to me how things had been during the communist era. How there were lines around this block for oranges that had come from Cuba, how this thriving store once was just a hollow space with empty shelves, how the communist propaganda had been taught in that tiny school.

On the way back to the city we stopped at a small Bohemian restaurant which, with its heavy oak tables, wood paneling, and thick ceiling beams, could have been plucked from the Middle Ages, if it weren’t for the jukebox and the young thugs smoking cigarettes and drinking enormous glasses of beer at the bar. The waiter brought a giant cast-iron platter of meat and potatoes. We ate until we were stuffed.

He’d been quiet all day. Not sullen or morose; just contemplative, maybe a bit sad. I just assumed that it was hard for him to be back in the place where he grew up, where so much had been lost—his parents, his aunt. I didn’t press him to talk.

“Isabel,” he said when we were done with our meal and waiting for our dessert. His accent was heavier than I’d ever heard it, had been since we’d arrived in the Czech Republic, as if being home, speaking his native language, reconnected him to a part of himself he’d neglected, even tried to quash. “I never thought I’d bring anyone here. Never thought I’d want to.”

“I’m glad you shared this with me,” I said. “I feel so much closer to you.” He was looking at me attentively; I felt heat rise to my cheeks. He wasn’t handsome, not beautiful in the classic sense. But his intensity, the hard features of his face, had a kind of magnetic power that lit me up inside. He dropped his eyes to the table.

“I want to share
everything
with you,” he said softly. He reached into his pocket and slid a blue velvet box across the table toward me. “Isabel. Maybe it’s too fast. I don’t care. I could have done this the night I met you.”

I opened the box to see a gleaming, cushion-cut ruby in a platinum setting. It was breathtaking.

“Isabel,” he whispered, grabbing both my hands. “This is my heart. I’m giving it to you. I’d die for you. Marry me.”

I remember being stunned but nodding vigorously, tearing as he put the ring on my finger and came to kneel beside me and take me into his arms. People around us looked on; one woman, another American—I could tell by her Tommy Hilfiger sweater and khaki pants, but mainly by her sneakers—clapped her hands and released a happy little cry.

What had I expected to feel in that moment? I didn’t know. You see it from the outside, stylized and engineered to sell in films and commercials. You hear the stories your sisters and girlfriends tell. But you only know how it’s
meant
to feel. It’s one of those moments in your life, in your relationship—the markers, the milestones, the important snapshots. But I could only experience the moment as I experience everything, observing, narrating. How Marcus was as close to emotional as I’d ever seen him. How the men at the bar turned to look at us, one of them sneering. How the lights were too dim for me to really see the ring. How a truck passed by and caused the bottles on the shelves behind the bar to rattle slightly. And I observed myself: happy, surprised, and, dare I admit it, a little relieved that my life wouldn’t pass without this moment. From the outside, I supposed it looked very romantic. But that’s where romance dwells, isn’t it, in the observation? Inner life is far too complicated; one doesn’t
feel
romance. You feel
love
, and even that isn’t one note resounding above all others; it’s one element in the symphony of your emotions.

“When it’s right, you know,” I said with a shrug. “Right?”

That’s when she started to cry, just tear a little, really. But still, it was enough to cause disappointment, and not a little anxiety, to wash over me.

“I thought you liked him,” I said, sinking onto the bed beside her.

“Izzy” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, then lowering them to mine. She took my hand. “He’s just so … cold. There’s something unavailable about him, something distant.”

I shook my head. “You just need to get to know him better,” I told her. “That’s all. It’s a cultural difference.” But there was a hard knot in my middle.

She nodded and tried to smile. “Just take your time with the wedding.
You
get to know him a little bit more before you dive in.”

I felt a lash of anger then. “You know what I think, Linda?”

“Don’t,” she said, lifting her hand.

“I think you don’t really want me to be happy in a relationship.”

“Stop it, Isabel.”

I lowered my voice to a whisper. I didn’t want everyone else to hear. “I think you’re happier when I’m
unhappy
. That you’re more comfortable when I’m alone so that you can be the one with everything—the great career, the perfect family.”

“That’s bullshit,” she spat, “and you know it. You
know
I’m right. That’s why you’re so angry. Christ, Isabel, he’s just like our father.”

If I didn’t love my sister so much, I would have slapped her. Instead, I got up and walked out of the room.

“Izzy” she called after me. I heard apology in her voice but I didn’t care. I told Marcus I wasn’t feeling well and we left soon thereafter.

I didn’t talk to my sister for almost two weeks—which felt more like two years. Eventually, she called to borrow a pair of shoes and things went back to normal—no apologies, no discussion, no resolution, just water under the bridge. Marcus and I were married six months later in a small church up in Riverdale near my mother and stepfather’s home. An intimate gathering of my family and friends followed. Marcus didn’t have anyone to invite. At the time, it didn’t really seem strange or sad. I don’t recall thinking about it. We were happy; that was the only important thing.

It was rush hour. The streets were packed even downtown with people hustling back and forth, huddled against the frigid air. It was a Village crowd, hipper, more casual than what he’d see if he’d found himself in Midtown at this hour. Messenger bags slung across chests instead of briefcases gripped in tight fists, leather instead of cashmere, denim instead of gabardine.

He’d always liked the lower part of Manhattan best. He considered it more the real New York than Midtown, but less the real city than, say, Brooklyn. Shop windows glittered with Christmas decoration, horns sang in the bumper-to-bumper river of traffic on the avenue. In the air he could smell the wood of someone’s fireplace burning. He always liked that smell, especially in the city. It made the streets seem less hard, less impersonal when you could imagine someone cozy at the hearth, maybe drinking a cup of tea.

He weaved his way across Twelfth Street through the stopped traffic toward the waiting unmarked Caprice. Exhaust billowed from behind, glowing red in the parking lights. His partner sat talking on her cell phone, her Bluetooth actually—a little device clipped to her ear which also had a microphone. From a distance, it made her look like nothing so much as a schizophrenic having a passionate conversation with herself. He’d told her this. She’d called him a Luddite. He kept meaning to look it up.

Inside the car, the heat was kicking. His partner, Jez, kept it at nearly eighty degrees in the winter. She was small, couldn’t stand the cold. He didn’t complain. He’d been raised to give women what they wanted.
You can fight
, his father told him.
You can bitch. If you’re a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul? Just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars
. The old man was right about that. And with three sisters, Grady had occasion to learn early. But it was his wife who drove the lesson home—then drove off in his new Acura. Turns out lip service isn’t enough; you have to
live
the surrender.

“So … what happened?”

Crowe pulled out into traffic, cutting off a cabdriver who leaned on his horn.

“Crowe?”

“You talking to me? I thought you were still on your
communicator
. You know—beam me up, Scotty” He tried to add some electronic sounds to the joke but it came off lame. Jez gave him a smile, anyway. She was cool like that.

“Very funny. Yeah, I’m talking to you. What’d you get?”

In the movies, female cops were always hot. But on the real job, to Grady’s eyes, they were generally pretty butch—dirty mouths, pumped biceps, chopped hair. Jesamyn Breslow was the exception, though he wouldn’t say she was
hot
exactly. She was cute. Definitely on the femme side comparatively speaking. But in spite of that button nose and blond bob, she was tough in a very real way, minus the self-conscious bravado of most cops, male or female. She knew kung fu. Really.

He relayed the story the victim had told him about her husband not coming home, about the phone call, and the people posing as FBI agents. It gelled with what they’d found, the vests discarded at the scene with the white letters stenciled on. It was a rush job. Someone who hadn’t already been distraught and overwhelmed might have noticed right away that the letters were sloppy, unprofessional.

“She thinks she’d be able to identify some of the people if she saw them again, but beyond that she doesn’t know anything about what happened, or why,” he said, reaching for the coffee in the cup holder. It was as bitter and stone cold as his ex-wife. He drank it, anyway.

“You sure? You know you’re a sucker for a pretty face.” They’d seen her picture on Marcus Raine’s desk. Jez had recognized her, was actually carrying a paperback of one of her novels in her bag. Isabel Connelly, her maiden name, on the jacket. Not Isabel Raine, her legal, married name.

“I’m sure,” he said. “She was a mess.”

Isabel Raine looked like a doll someone had dropped by the side of the road—bashed up, broken, and abandoned. He’d had the urge to dust her off, tuck her into a little bed somewhere.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“She gave us permission to look around her apartment. Said she’d call the doorman to let us in.”

“No lawyer?”

“Not yet. She’s focused on finding her husband. She thinks that’s the major problem, that he’s missing and something’s happened to him.”

“Maybe she really doesn’t know anything.”

He gave her a quick glance, raised his eyebrows at her. “I’ve still got my wits about me. Not all your partners fall in love with the victim and go off the deep end.” He was referring to Mateo Stenopolis, her partner when she was with Missing Persons. Stenopolis had fallen in love with a missing girl and pretty much laid waste to his life and his career trying to find her—nearly getting himself and Breslow killed in the process.

“No,” she said with a laugh. “You’re no romantic, Crowe.”

“Just ask my ex-wife.”

He listened as Breslow called her mother, told her she’d be late picking up her son, Benjamin. He found himself thinking that it was the one small mercy in his failed marriage—no kids. He saw how Breslow struggled with her on-again, off-again husband and the child they shared. You’re bound forever by that life you created. As it was, there was nothing to bind him to his ex, nothing at all. They split what little money there was and that was that. He’d wanted kids, a lot of them. But she hadn’t—maybe one, eventually. She was concerned about her career, didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom like her mother, not on a cop’s salary. His mom had raised four on far less than he made, had never even had a job. She’d gone straight from her parents’ home to her husband’s. Bringing this up didn’t make things better.

“Those were different times, Grady” she’d countered. “Besides, you think your mother’s happy? I’ve never heard your parents exchange one kind word—hell, I’ve never even seen them kiss each other.”

She was always talking about “happy” like it was a lottery she was waiting to win. As far as Grady was concerned, happiness was just where you decided to lay your eyes. You see three people dead in a downtown office, their faces contorted in such a way that you understand they died in agony, you feel bad. You go home and find the woman you love and your kids waiting for you, you feel happy. That simple.

“Obsessing about your ex again?” asked his partner, examining her cuticles.

“How could you tell?”

“You make this kind of tiny chewing motion with your jaw, like you’re biting on your tongue a little. You do that whenever you’re working some kind of problem in your head.”

“You don’t know everything,” he said.

“No. I don’t. But a year sitting here and I’m getting to know
you
. My advice: If you can’t let it go, get help. It’s turning you into a sour pain in the ass. You talk about it constantly and you think about it more. Move on, Crowe.”

“Thanks, Dr. Phil.” He knew she was right. He was a dog with a bone; he just couldn’t stop worrying it, looking for that last bit of marrow.

Apparently satisfied that she’d made her point, she went back to business. “I put the information we had on Marcus Raine—date of birth, Social Security number—into NCIC and Vi-CAP. I’m waiting to see what comes back.”

“The wife seems convinced that he’s a victim in this. She’s seriously rattled by that phone call, thinks it was him screaming.”

“What do we believe?” she asked, really just thinking aloud.

“Could go either way. We need to dig deeper.”