The Darkness Gathers (15 page)

“You’re probably right.”

“It’s interesting how many people on Quinn’s payroll seem to be turning up dead lately,” said Jeffrey.

“See?” said Lydia.

“What?” asked Detective Ignacio.

Lydia recounted for him the details of their visit to Quinn Enterprises, including his offer to pay them for their investigation.

“So what did you walk out of there thinking?” asked the detective, jingling the ice in his class.

“That I wanted to get as far away from Nathan Quinn as fast as I could.”

The detective paused and looked at Lydia and Jeffrey. He looked some combination of disappointed and hopeful. “Does that mean you’re going to walk away from this?”

Lydia and Jeffrey looked at each other. An exchange of words between them wasn’t necessary. She knew he wanted to leave Miami and he knew that there was no way that was going to happen.

“No way,” said Lydia. “We’re going to find out what happened to Tatiana and we’re going to take Nathan Quinn down in the process.”

“Whoa,” Jeffrey and Detective Ignacio said simultaneously.

“We don’t know that Nathan Quinn has done anything wrong,” said Jeffrey, lowering his voice and looking around the restaurant.

“Give me a break. That guy is as dirty as they come.”

“You think he’s involved with his stepdaughter’s disappearance? How?” asked the detective, leaning closer to her.

“I didn’t say that. I don’t think he knows where Tatiana is. It’s why he wants her back so badly—rather,
how
he wants her back so badly—that puts me on edge. There’s desperation without emotion, a desire without love to the way he talks about her. Like a junkie looking for a fix. It’s ugly.… There’s something ugly about it. I don’t believe he knows where she is, but I bet he’s a big part of why she’s gone. Whether she ran away or was abducted. He’s definitely involved and he knows more than he shared with us, but I don’t think he knows where she is. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be riding everyone so hard.”

“Yeah,” said Manny. “Leave no stone unturned unless it involves his ‘business affairs.’ ”

His sarcasm hung in the air like cigarette smoke. “What did Stephen Parker find out about Sasa Fitore and how did it connect to Nathan Quinn?” Jeffrey asked, thinking aloud. Then he turned to the detective. “How did that conversation between the two of you end?”

“I don’t remember,” Detective Ignacio said softly.

“You don’t remember?” asked Lydia.

The detective didn’t say anything, just shook his head and looked down at the table.

“Lydia,” said the detective after a moment, “you need to be careful.”

“Careful about what?”

“It’s just that Nathan Quinn is connected to organizations that … you know, control things in the world. People like him can make life dangerous for people who piss them off.”

Lydia was lost. She wasn’t sure how the conversation had taken this turn.

“What are you talking about, Manny?”

“Listen. You guys were here for a couple of hours. They found you, followed you, and broke into your hotel room. Valentina is dead because they knew she was about to talk to you. Stephen Parker is dead. I was stopped by my superior officers from looking into Quinn’s business dealings. I mean,” he said with a shrug, glancing behind him, “think about it.”

“
They?
Who’s ‘they’? You sound like a conspiracy theorist,” said Lydia with an uncertain laugh. She regarded the man for a second, wondering why he suddenly seemed afraid that she and Jeffrey were about to drag him in deeper than he was willing to go. He’d been so eager for their help when they arrived. Had been concerned enough about the investigation that he let Lydia follow a lead he knew might be dangerous for all of them to pursue. He met her eyes, and she thought for a second that she saw fear in them.

“I have a family, Lydia,” he said finally, softly, offering an excuse against an accusation that hadn’t been made.

Lydia looked at him coolly, cocked her head to the side, and smiled a little.

“Someone got to you, didn’t they, Manny?”

He looked away from her, shame softening his handsome features, his bottom lip trembling almost imperceptibly. He folded his hands and sighed.

“No, it’s not like that. It’s just that I have to focus on Tatiana. Just on finding her or what happened to her,” he said, stumbling over his words as if they didn’t fit comfortably in his mouth.

“There’s a piece missing from your puzzle, Detective. And without it, you’ll never have the full picture. You’ll never find Tatiana.”

He nodded and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m afraid that’s a price I’m going to have to be willing to pay. I have a little girl, too.”

The detective stood up and straightened his tie, as if trying to hold on to his dignity in an unbearable situation. He looked beaten. Lydia opened her mouth to speak, but he held up his hand. She could see in his tired eyes that he had weighed his options and the consequences in his mind and made his decision.

“The FBI will be in touch with you by tomorrow, Lydia, regarding what you saw at the Fitore residence. I spoke with them today and have been told I’m to have no part in that investigation. Let me know what you decide to do.”

“What’s going on, Detective?” Jeffrey asked, moving to get up. “We can help you.”

“No, you can’t. Don’t overestimate your power to handle this. Take my advice and go back to New York. Forget you ever heard about Nathan Quinn and Sasa Fitore. And hope they forget they ever heard of you.”

He left them then, striding confidently from the restaurant, not looking behind him. He looked short and shabbily dressed in the context of the beautifully decorated room. For a second, neither of them spoke, just looked after the detective, mouths slightly open, brows knitted.

“So I suppose there’s no chance we’re going to take his advice and walk away,” said Jeffrey.

“Over my dead body.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Oh, come on. You, too? I didn’t think you scared so easy,” she said with a teasing smile, trying to lighten the mood.

“I didn’t use to,” he said, reaching for her hand. “But I’ve got … I think
we’ve
got more to live for now, don’t we? I don’t want to sound like a pussy, but I’ve never been happier than I have in the last year with you. I don’t want to lose that. Do you?”

She didn’t say anything, his words echoing her own recent thoughts about what she was and wasn’t willing to put on the line anymore.

“I wouldn’t risk our lives, either. Not anymore. I think Detective Ignacio is overestimating Nathan Quinn.”

“Lydia, two people connected with this case are dead already.”

“And what about Tatiana?”

“She might be dead, too. You said so yourself.”

“But what if she isn’t and we are the only two people who have a chance of finding and helping her?”

“It’s Detective Ignacio’s job to find Tatiana.”

“But he
won’t
find her because he’s too afraid to follow the path that might lead to her,” she said, an old feeling of desperation creeping up on her. The image of a frightened girl huddling in a phone booth somewhere, thin and cold, hair soaked with rain, played in Lydia’s head. She’d been too late for Shawna, but something told her that Tatiana was still within her reach.

The restaurant was getting more crowded, the sound of laughter and conversation starting to fill the room. She looked around at the people gathering for happy hour, smartly dressed, ordering chic cocktails. She envied them, suddenly, lives that seemed so
normal
, so safe to her. Her life hadn’t been normal since she was fifteen years old. Since then, it had been populated with monsters. You bring it on yourself. You invite them in, she chastised herself.

“All right, let’s think about this for a minute,” said Jeffrey. “Is this still about finding Tatiana for you? Or is it about Nathan Quinn now? Is he the villain of the year? The next bad guy on your list?”

“Maybe both.”

He exhaled sharply. “I don’t have to remind you that we have no proof that he’s done anything wrong.”

“I’m not often wrong about things like this, Jeffrey.”

It was true. In all the years he’d known her, she’d almost never had an instinct that failed them. This time, he had an instinct, too: to get himself and Lydia as far away from this case as possible. The detective’s warning resonated with Jeffrey. In his years as an FBI agent, he had come to realize that there are men in the world who have all the control. Control over governments, over most of the world’s money and resources, over the media. He had felt their influence as an FBI agent, much in the way Detective Ignacio was feeling it—investigations manipulated, evidence and witnesses disappearing. It was just something that he had come to accept—that behind the events of the world were puppet masters like Nathan Quinn. And if you got caught up in their game, chose to play on the wrong team, you got crushed like meat in a grinder.

He flagged down the perky blond waitress who’d been hovering and ordered two martinis for them.

“A couple of years after the Jed McIntyre case, when Jacob Hanley and I were partners, we ran into something like this,” he said suddenly, as if he had been holding it back.

“You never told me about it.”

“You were still just a kid, then. And I haven’t thought about it in awhile.”

“What happened?”

“There was a girl found dead in Tompkins Square Park. That was back in the mid-eighties, when the East Village was in real bad shape and Tompkins Square was a place strictly for junkies and homeless people. She was the daughter of a very wealthy executive at Chase Manhattan Bank. She was a junior at Chapin … a gorgeous, brilliant debutante, real New York society. Anyway, a homeless man found her. She’d been raped and strangled to death.”

“I vaguely remember that, now that you mention it.”

“We were brought in on the case because this girl was the fifth to have gone missing in the past year who fit a particular profile: all society girls from various prep schools around the city … all pretty, busty, long dark hair. Anyway, long story short, all the evidence came back to this kid. He was a member of a hugely powerful political family, had just graduated from Yale, was about to head to Columbia Law. To look at him, he was every parent’s wet dream. But I swear to God, I saw a demon in this kid’s eyes. So we went after him.

“But every time we got close, something happened. One judge took four hours to issue us a search warrant for his parents’ Upper West Side penthouse. When we got there, the whole family and their very powerful attorney were waiting for us. Someone had tipped them off. We found a pair of girl’s panties in his gym locker at the New York Health and Racket Club. But they were lost somehow after we had taken them into evidence. The media started hammering us, writing articles about how we were harassing an innocent boy, trying to pin something on him, when the girls’ bodies hadn’t even been found, except that one. This was before DNA evidence was as widely used as it is now—it was still like science fiction back then.

“Next thing we know, NYPD had arrested the homeless man who found the girl in Tompkins Square Park. The FBI got kicked off the investigation altogether. The police all of a sudden found the bodies in an abandoned building in Alphabet City. And the case was closed.”

“But you didn’t think the homeless guy was responsible.”

“He definitely wasn’t the guy. First of all, he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic … so far gone that he was totally delusional, barely operating in reality. Which satisfied the public perception that he was the type of person who would have committed this kind of crime, but, in actuality, his mental state eliminated him as a possibility. He just didn’t have the mental organization to pull off an abduction, a rape, and a murder and then hide the bodies. Plus, why would he have reported the last girl he found in the park? He certainly didn’t have opportunity or proximity to these girls. It was ludicrous really. But the media was on board with it. Certainly this crazy homeless man was a better villain than a bright young law student with a brilliant future,” Jeffrey said, disgust and anger filtering into his words.

“So what did you do?”

“Jacob and I protested to our supervisor. We were told in no uncertain terms to stand down. They didn’t give us any explanation; they didn’t even really try to convince us that we were wrong. They just issued the order to walk away, go back to D.C. for our next assignment, and that was what we were expected to do. There was just this sense that it was bigger than we were, a sort of implied threat that if we made waves, we could kiss our careers good-bye.”

“And you let it go?”

“Not exactly. I called this woman I knew who worked at the
New York Times
, Sarah Winter. She was young and ambitious, looking to make a name for herself. I figured an exposé like this would appeal to her. I met her for a drink at Telephone Bar on Second Avenue and I told her the story.”

He paused as the waitress delivered their drinks and thanked her. Jeffrey raised his glass to Lydia, who lifted hers in response. “Where was Jake in all of this?” she asked.

“He was ready to walk away. After the meeting with our supervisor, this real old-school bastard named Leon McCord, who later died of colon cancer, Jacob was really nervous. So I didn’t tell him about the reporter. I just went on my own.”

“You’re killing me here. What happened?”

Lydia felt another, milder wave of nausea. She suppressed it but pushed her drink away.

“The next day, it just all resolved itself so neatly, it was surreal. The homeless man—his name was George … George Hewlett—managed somehow to hang himself in his cell. And, get this, there were layoffs at the
Times
. Guess who was one of the unlucky reporters to find herself out of job?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No … and that was it. There was no battle left to fight. I mean, it was perfect. If George or Sarah had been murdered, say, or even if Sarah alone had been fired, or if George’s case had made it to trial … well, it would have been like a John Grisham novel—lone FBI agent bucking the secret establishment, exposing an evil conspiracy. But, instead, it just disappeared.”