The Darkness Gathers (21 page)

“Meanwhile, Sasa Fitore is fucking Jenna Quinn on the side.”

“Things could get very messy.”

“And we’re still no closer to finding out what happened to Tatiana.”

Lydia went over to the minibar and extracted two tiny bottles of Absolut and two of Perrier. She poured them each a cocktail, then stepped out onto the balcony. She took the salt air into her lungs. The large yellow moon hung over the rolling ocean in a sky brilliant with stars; the palms fluttered lazily in the slight breeze. Nature, as usual, was oblivious to evil. She chose to take that as a sign, a sign that while man was prone to evil acts, the universe was good; that there was a benevolent God, hoping for the best even in the darkest moments, balancing sin with miracle, and demons with angels.

Jeffrey walked out and placed an arm around her shoulder; she moved into him, wrapping her arms around his waist. She looked up at him and he kissed her gently. They had reached their threshold that evening for witnessing human suffering. But tomorrow was a new day.

part two

But the darkness pulls in everything:

shapes and fires, animals and myself
,

how easily it gathers them!

powers and people—

—R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE

chapter twenty

S
he had made such a mess of her life. And it wasn’t the first time or even the second. Nothing had happened the way they promised her it would. She was ashamed of herself for ever believing that it would be different. No one had ever been honest with her except for Radovan, and he was gone. She felt small and cold inside.

The room was dim, candles burning down low on the dresser, and the hour late—or early, depending on how you looked at it. She could hear him breathing deeply, sound asleep. How he slept at night, she didn’t know, with all that blood on his hands. She wasn’t nearly as guilty, and yet she hadn’t slept in months. His heart was a black, dead place, and she hadn’t seen that until it was too late. Wasn’t that always the way with men—they seemed like a savior until they had you bound and gagged. Then the mask came off and you were stuck with a monster.

She slid out from beneath the cotton and down covers of the king-size bed and walked over to the mirror above the French wood dresser. Lighted from below by the candles, she looked like a hag, with deep black circles and wrinkles etched around her eyes and mouth, the skin loose and pasty. The candlelight illuminated the stray wisps of her hair, and she fought back tears. Her beauty was one of her only commodities, and it was fading fast. Not that, if she was honest with herself, it had ever proved much of an asset. For her or for Tatiana. Beauty had always been her biggest problem. That and a weak heart. But Tatiana was strong, unlike her mother. She wouldn’t grow up to be the pawn in the ugly, dirty games of men. If Jenna could get the two of them out of this new mess she’d gotten them into, there would be no more men. They’d make it on their own somewhere. Women did that in the world; it wasn’t like Albania, where you were little more than a whore and a maid your whole life. They’d have plenty of money when the deal was done. Somehow, they’d make it right, where the money had come from; somehow they would find a way to remove the stain. She pushed the thoughts from her head. It was better not to think on it, on what she had become to save her daughter and herself.

“What are you doing?” he said from the bed, his voice sleepy and impatient.

“I can’t sleep,” she said, her voice taking on the soft and apologetic tone she always used with him. It was the voice her mother had used with her father.

“You worry too much,” he said. “You don’t trust me?”

“Of course I do, darling,” she said, walking over to him and placing a hand on his face. He grabbed her wrist.

“But?”

“It’s just that I wonder whom
we
can trust.” He released her arm and she sat down on the bed beside him. He touched her breast beneath the cream silk nightgown she wore, and she tried not to shrink away.

“That’s what you don’t understand.” His voice took on the smug and condescending tone so typical of men like him. “We don’t have to trust anyone, because we’re in control of all of this. We have what everyone wants.”

“What do we have, Sasa?”

“Information.”

She was starting to suspect that Sasa Fitore was an idiot. She nodded. “You’re right, of course,” she said sweetly. “But that detective. He found out about your association with Nathan. And now the other two. What if they find out about American Equities and American Beauty?”

“I told you. You worry too much. The detective won’t be sharing any more information with anyone.”

“You didn’t …”

“Don’t worry about what I did and didn’t do,” he said, getting angry now. He sat up on his elbows, his blue eyes blazing and his blond hair falling onto his forehead. He had the Byzantine double-headed eagle of the Albanian flag tattooed in black on his chest.

His cell phone rang on the dresser, and she got up quickly to get it for him, eager to have an excuse to move away from him. Since first Valentina had been killed and then tonight Marianna, she could barely stand to have his hands on her. He hadn’t grieved a moment or shed a tear for his sister or his niece. “They betrayed us,” he’d said to her. And in that statement was an explicit warning to her. She was more afraid of him now than she’d ever been of Nathan Quinn. At least, she thought, they didn’t betray themselves.

“What?” he said into the phone. “All right.”

“Listen,” he said to her as he got out of bed and hung up the phone. “You just handle your end of this and I’ll handle mine. In the end, everyone will be fucked except for you and me. And we’ll be laughing about this in Rio, yes?”

He took her face in his hands and she nodded, feeling tiny and powerless with him so close and so strong.

“Good,” he said, kissing her on the forehead like a child. “Now, go home before you’re missed.”

“Nathan’s in New York, looking for Tatiana.”

Sasa laughed at how well that element of everything had worked out. They’d confused the hell out of the police by sending Boris, having him pretend to be a Greyhound bus driver, and now every free moment Nathan Quinn had, he went to New York to look for his precious Tatiana. As if only
he
could find her in that sea of junkies and prostitutes. If only Nathan knew how much the girl hated him. All the money and all the powerful men he had at his disposal weren’t going to change that for him. Not that the little bitch cared much for Sasa, either. He’d seen the way she looked at him when she thought he didn’t see. If he didn’t know better, he’d think there was murder in her eyes sometimes.

“Where are you going?” she asked as he pulled on a pair of Calvin Klein jeans and a black ribbed sweater. He checked out his impressive physique in the mirror as he dressed, liking the way the candlelight accentuated the cuts of his muscles.

“I have one more thing to take care of before we leave,” he said, pulling on a pair of work boots.

She hurried to get dressed so that she could leave with him. She didn’t want to be alone in the house where Valentina and Marianna had lived. She couldn’t bear to face their ghosts alone.

chapter twenty-one

C
ities that weren’t New York always seemed like they were faking it. When you were in New York, whether it was the elegance of Park Avenue, the seedy cool of the East Village, the ultrachic shops and cafés in Soho, there was no mistaking where you were. The smells: the sweet warm scent of honey-roasted nuts and pretzels from the street vendors’ carts, the acrid stink of urine in the subway on a hot day. The sounds: the cacophony of car horns, the wail of sirens, homeless people arguing with their loud, slurred voices. The stately buildings: the elegance of Grand Central, the Deco Chrysler Building, even the run-down, abandoned structures of Alphabet City were distinguishable from any other place on earth. When Lydia visited another city, she always felt like she was waiting for it to reveal a personality, some little quirk of individuality that identified its character. But in America, she was almost always disappointed. Even San Francisco, which most New Yorkers agreed was acceptable, just seemed like a loosely connected group of passably cool neighborhoods.

Lydia had heard people describe Miami as New York City on the beach. But from what she’d seen, most of the city possessed the hard edge of the urban condition but little of the sophistication. South Beach was a party, no doubt, and the beach was gorgeous, but the rest of the area was a collection of opulent burbs scattered about but separate from the massive highways passing through run-down neighborhoods with poorly kept streets. Parts of it just looked neglected to Lydia. But there was definitely no shortage of good coffee. Which was hugely important. Especially at 4:30
A.M.
, as she and Jeffrey sat in their rented Jeep outside the Fitore residence.

Sleep is like a cat. It doesn’t come when it’s called, only when it wants to. It didn’t want anything from Lydia and Jeffrey as they had lain wide-eyed in the darkness, staring at the ceiling fan, an eerie glow from the yellow moon washing the room.

“The detail that continues to bother me is the surveillance camera,” Jeffrey said suddenly after an hour of silence in which they’d both tried to sleep and failed.

“
That’s
the detail that continues to bother you?” said Lydia, still struggling with the images that played over and over in her mind: Valentina hitting the grill of the Mercedes; Marianna dying on the dance floor of the G-Spot; the nameless pale wisp of a girl being repeatedly raped by men in black leather masks. Every time Lydia closed her eyes, she was assailed by these images. She had seen too much death in her life. She wondered, not for the first time, if she was some kind of cosmic magnet for mayhem, if it was her fate, and not just her choice, to chase the evil of the world and bear witness to its deeds.

“There were no fingerprints on the inside touch pad; it had been wiped clean. The outside pad had only Nathan Quinn’s fingerprints on it, which means that it had also been wiped clean before the Quinns came home. So that means that someone came in from the outside, from the front door. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have bothered wiping down the outside pad and doorknob.”

“Okay …”

“But the camera would have had to have been turned off from the inside; otherwise, it would have captured at least a second of the person entering the house, or the intruder would have worn a mask, or spray-painted the lens in order to avoid being identified later.”

“So whoever entered wanted it to
look
like Tatiana had run away? Which rules out a kidnapping for ransom, or for some threat to the Quinns.”

“But they didn’t realize that Tatiana didn’t know how to operate the camera. Or it was just a detail they overlooked.”

“Or she did know how.
Somebody
turned off the camera from the inside of the house and then let the intruder in.”

“Maybe she wasn’t alone in the house.”

“But no one else entered after the Quinns left that night. The security system was armed, and there were cameras all over the property, not just on the front door.”

“Right, but it was only armed when the Quinns left. What if someone entered the house
before
they left.”

“Valentina left early that night, but we never found out why.”

“Maybe so that Jenna had time to let someone in.”

“Sasa.”

“Maybe.” Jeffrey shrugged. “But the question is, Why? Why would Jenna arrange for the abduction of her own daughter? And why would Sasa participate?”

Lydia remembered Sasa at his sister’s memorial service. She recalled the way he had reached his hand into the open car window as if caressing someone’s cheek. Another strand tangled in the knot of this investigation.

“How are we going to find out the answers to these questions when everyone who will talk to us ends up dead, and everyone else tells us to walk away?” Lydia asked the ceiling fan.

“Maybe we just need to be a little more subtle. Let’s take a ride.”

C
raig didn’t seem in the least surprised or sleepy when he answered the phone at 4:00
A.M.
He was not, however, happy that Lydia again asked him to go to the street and call her back from a pay phone, but he did it anyway. She sat in the Jeep, parked directly next to the phone, close enough to reach it from the driver’s seat, and watched Jeffrey through the plate-glass window of the twenty-four-hour Kinko’s. He leaned over the counter, smiling and saying something to the young Hispanic girl who worked the desk, and Lydia saw her smile back. Lydia watched as the girl reached into the drawer and pulled out a set of keys. “Okay, come on,” Lydia read on her lips. The girl led Jeffrey over to the darkened computer center and took a seat. A few seconds later, one of the screens turned blue. She got up and Jeffrey sat down. From where Lydia sat, she could see the back of his head. He was burning the DVD they had watched, then would put the copy in a FedEx envelope to be mailed back to the office in New York, same business-day delivery. They both agreed they needed a copy sent away in case anything happened to them. They also agreed, after what they had seen yesterday, that neither one of them was willing to walk away, no matter what the cost. There were just some things that could not be ignored; some things the very knowledge of which changed the world for the worse. And neither one of them was willing to live in that world until they had changed it back to the way it should be. She was edgy and suddenly tired, of course, now that sleep was nowhere in her future. Lydia sat there, zoning out on the orange-and-green glowing gauges on the dash. She was reasonably sure they hadn’t been followed. She glanced around her and lighted a cigarette, trying to keep it out the window. She looked for the black Mercedes, carrying menacing Eastern European men with guns. When the phone in the booth rang, she jumped, feeling a burst of adrenaline.