The Hollow Girl (26 page)

It was all reasonable enough and, for the most part, the truth. If the Suffolk County Homicide detectives hadn’t gotten involved in a pissing match with the local detective, we probably could have left it at that. But they had gotten involved in a pissing contest, and we had spent the better part of four hours telling and retelling and retelling our stories over and over again. It really seemed to chafe the Suffolk homicide detectives that two PIs and a Nassau County detective were operating on their patch. The Southhold detective got a real kick out of reminding his Suffolk PD counterparts that it was his patch, not theirs. At least Bursaw and Brock had reasonable deniability. “Hey, Moe’s my friend. A friend asks me to help, I help. Wouldn’t you do the same thing?” Chafed asses or not, once it was determined that Dillman had been dead for more than forty-eight hours, they let us go.

“I was sick with worry about you,” Nancy said, ferrying me into Maggie’s kitchen and getting me a bottle of water. “Your friend Devo’s call didn’t do much to comfort me. He’s not a talkative fellow.”

I laughed, remembering that I’d told him to tell Nancy as little as possible. That was cake for Devo. Nancy didn’t appreciate my laughter. I didn’t blame her.

“Do you remember Michael Dillman?”

A sick, mournful expression washed over Nancy’s face. “Of course I remember Mike. I hated what happened to him and his family. That was the worst part of what Sloane did, how she hurt the friends closest to her. I don’t think she meant to do it.” She paused to think. I didn’t argue with her about her daughter’s intent all those years ago. “Wait a second. Wait a second … was Mike Dillman your lead? Did he have—”

“He’s dead, Nancy. Suicide.”

I told her the story of how my conversation with Valerie Biemann had got me thinking that if anyone had motive to hurt the Hollow Girl, it was Michael Dillman. Nancy sat in stunned silence as I built the case for her that I had built for myself against Dillman. He was perfect. Everything fit. Except it didn’t. Now he was dead, and I was no closer to finding her daughter than I had been weeks ago.

“And tonight’s post, did you watch it?” I asked after I finished and had given it a minute to sink in.

“More of the same, Moe, only a little worse.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “The ropes seemed even tighter. There was more blood and she didn’t even struggle. It looked like if you cut away the ropes, she would have just collapsed. Her eyes were closed most of the time.”

“Was there anything else? Anything different? Was the photograph still at her feet?”

“The photo was still there. I’m not sure I noticed anything different about it. And I already told you what was different about the video.” Her voice getting louder with stress.

“Okay, okay.” I reached across the table and wiped her tears away with my thumb. “Is there a place I can get some rest? I need to think, and for that I need to sleep.”

“Maggie gave us the guest room downstairs.”

As we made our way to the basement, Giorgio Brahms’s sour expression popped into my head once again. Exhaustion does funny things to a man’s brain. I needed to get to sleep before I started fantasizing about Anna Carey and me drinking pitchers of margaritas on the veranda of our Cabo vacation villa.

Bang! I woke up like I had a full body cramp. I had an idea. It wasn’t much of one, I admit, but my good ideas didn’t seem to be worth a damn either. I rolled over and saw Nancy was still asleep. I was long past the age where I found it thrilling or romantic to watch a woman sleeping, yet I found I couldn’t stop watching her. She had been an object of fascination for me for so many years, and yet I hadn’t paused to really think through what was going on between us. Maybe that was a good thing. Nothing beats the life out of something like overthinking it. I wanted to let her sleep, seeing as how she had gotten as little of it as I had. Neither what I wanted nor Nancy’s sleep mattered. For my idea to work, I needed Nancy. It would turn on Nancy’s performance. I just hoped we hadn’t missed our window of opportunity. I kissed her on the neck and told her she needed to wake up.

“Sleep,” she muttered, groggy. “Sleep.”

“No sleep,” I answered. “Sloane.”

That did the trick.

* * *

Sloane’s messages were the key, I explained to Nancy as we drove the short distance from Crocus Valley to her house in Old Brookville. Something about those messages—always so chipper, so full of vague promises—had bugged me from the start and now even Nancy had come to see them as a ploy. Still, she didn’t understand how they were worth anything to us if they were phony or had been prerecorded. She wondered if I wasn’t getting a bit desperate like her, clutching at straws.

“Do you think there’s some code embedded in her messages? Are you going to have your friend Devo run them through a computer or something?”

“It’s not the messages themselves, Nancy. It’s not about what Siob—Sloane says in the messages or how she says it.”

“Then what?”

“It’s when they come. Have you noticed that they are always timed so that you’re never at home to receive them? If they’re prerecorded, like we’re both fairly sure they are, what would happen if you were there to pick up the phone when one was coming in? If it’s Sloane playing the hoax, it would make her look silly. She’d just hang up, or stop the recording and get on the phone with you. But if what we fear
is
true, that someone is holding Sloane against her will and has somehow gotten her to make these messages, he can’t afford to have you pick up the phone when those messages come in. If you were home and picked up mid-message, the very means he was using to keep you from being alarmed would instead have the opposite effect.”

“So what? I already know the messages are—”

“But he doesn’t know that you know. And that’s not the point, anyway.”

She was exasperated. “Then what is the fucking point, Moe?”

“How does he know when to call? That’s the point.”

“Oh, my God.”

“That’s right, Nancy. He’s watching your house, or he has someone watching your house. He waits for you to leave and then he calls.”

“But wait. Hold on,” she said. “I’ve checked caller ID and the messages come from Sloane’s cell.”

“Of course they do. He has her cell. When you leave the house, he uses her phone to call and he plays a digital recording into the phone.”

She buried her head in her hands. The reality that her daughter might actually be someone’s captive or worse was hitting home. “If her messages are prerecorded, then the video posts might be prerecorded, too. Sloane might be—”

“Don’t even go there,” I shouted at her. “Don’t go there. If she was dead, he wouldn’t be working so hard to delay you. He’s buying time for something. He has a plan that requires the world seeing these posts. Otherwise he would be gone or covering his tracks, not risking capture by calling more attention to himself. She’s alive, Nancy. She’s alive. I’m sure of it. There’s a reason he’s doing this, presenting her to the world this way. It has to have something to do with the old Hollow Girl posts. It has to. I feel it in my belly.”

“Remember what you told me, Moe, they cut half of that belly out.”

“But not the half where I know things. Okay, we’re almost at your place. Sit up tall in your seat. I need the press and anyone who might be watching to know for sure you’re entering the house. Wave to them if you want to, blow them a kiss. Do anything to get their attention. I’m gonna drive in real slow. I need whoever is watching to get a good look at my car, too.”

“Do you think this will work?”

“We won’t know until we try it.”

That wasn’t the answer she was hoping for.

* * *

I realized this was a long shot at best. So far all of my gut feelings and machinations had added up to very little in the way of results. I’d been sure Mike Dillman was holding onto Siobhan Bracken, and it turned out the only thing he was holding onto was an overwhelming amount of pain. Even more than Giorgio Brahms’s disgusted expression over his stupid walls, I could not get the vision of Dillman out of my head. He looked so unhappy even in death, it made me wonder if there ever really was rest for the weary. At my age, as sick as I had been, you think about shit like that. You think about it a lot.

That there was no message from Sloane on the house line’s voicemail system seemed to bolster my theory. Rushing to the phone was the first thing Nancy had done after we’d finally waded through the phalanx of paparazzi and reporters. She had escaped from the media the previous day by hiding away in Maggie’s trunk, so anyone watching the house would have assumed she had never left. If my theory was right, the watcher wouldn’t have dared risk leaving a message had there been any chance Nancy was there to pick up. Of course there were hundreds of other more reasonable explanations for there being no phone message. The real test would come soon enough.

* * *

As I checked my watch there in the front seat of my rented Chevy Impala, I felt a fool. In the four and a half hours since driving away from Nancy’s house—making sure everyone got a good look at me and my car—I’d done a lot of maneuvering, hoop jumping, and arm twisting. Now I was about to find out if it would amount to anything more than me looking like an idiot. Only once before had I ever tried to pull off something as elaborate as this. And that one time, thirty years ago, it blew up in my face. I’d come this close from getting murdered in an abandoned hotel in Miami Beach. But it was too late now to worry about looking stupid. There. Nancy’s gate opened—1:45
P.M
., right on schedule. Time for her to head into Glen Cove for her regular two o’clock tennis game. Her red Porsche Cayman came rolling slowly out of her driveway. Nothing screams “Hey look at me” like a pretty woman in a red Porsche. She turned right and headed north up 107, passing me as she went. The countdown had begun. If I was right, Nancy’s house phone would be ringing within the next hour, give or take.

Exactly thirty minutes later, at 2:15, my phone rang. It was Brian Doyle’s cell.

“Her phone just started ringin’,” he said. “I hope all this cloak and dagger bullshit is worth it to you. I nearly broke my freakin’ ankle climbing over the back wall.”

“Not now. How many rings?”

“Three. You’re gonna look awful stupid if—”

“Forget that. How many—”

“Four.”

“It’ll pick up on the fifth,” I said.

“Okay, here we—ah, fuck. False alarm. It’s her pool guy. You might wanna tell the lady of the house that her pool guy is gonna be late on Thursday.”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“So, Boss, you really think this guy is gonna call?”

“He better. Now get the fuck off the phone and keep your head down.”

Click.

Ten minutes later, Doyle was back on the phone. “Second ring,” he whispered.

“What the fuck are you whispering for? Nevermind. Keep counting.”

“Three … four … five. Her voicemail message is playing. This Nancy Lustig got a sexy voice.”

“I’ll let her know.”

“Fuck me, you were right, Boss. There’s a message comin’ in. She’s saying what you said she would, almost word for word.”

“Good, now get upstairs and stay on the line.”

I listened to him chugging up the steps and running into the guest bathroom on the second floor where he’d set up his camera. In a house with so much open space and so many glass walls, there weren’t many places for Doyle to see out without being seen.

“I’m here. I’m here,” he shouted breathlessly into the phone. “Fuck, I’m gettin’ old.”

“Tell me about it. Any cars pulling away on either side of the street?”

“No, nothin’ yet.”

A minute passed. A bead of sweat snaked its way down my side. “Anything?” I shouted into the phone.

“Jesus, Boss. I’m gettin’ old, not deaf. Still nothin’ … wait, yeah, yeah. Here we go. A black Chrysler 300C, about a hundred yards ahead of you. He’s pulling out from between the two satellite vans. Do you see him?”

“No.”

“He’s facing the same direction as you.”

“I see him. I see him. Tag number?”

“Fuck. It’s a Utah tag. Probably a rental, Boss. I’ll have somebody run it.”

“Well, keep snapping until he gets out of range. I’m following.”

I hung up and pulled into traffic behind, of all things, a white, orange, and blue-striped Nassau County police car. I almost didn’t care about the cop because it felt so good to be right for a change.

The good feelings didn’t last as the three of us—the 300C, the cop’s Crown Vic, and my Impala—wound our way south along Route 107 at a comfortable twenty-nine miles per hour. There were lots of majestic old trees to behold, many ridiculously enormous houses to laugh at or envy, and the occasional country club golf course abutting the road. The thing is, I needed to get a look at the guy at the wheel of the Chrysler. My view of him was limited to fleeting, distorted glimpses around the Crown Vic and through its windshield and rear window. As we approached the State University of New York at Old Westbury, I got a bit more hopeful. The road widened here and as we got closer to Hicksville, there’d be something like six lanes to choose from. But as long as the cop was between us, I really couldn’t risk swinging out around him and speeding up. As much as I needed a better look at the guy driving the 300C, I didn’t want to get pulled over for speeding and risk losing the Chrysler completely.

Although the road kept widening and exit ramps for Jericho Turnpike, the LIE, and the Northern State Parkway presented themselves, both the Chrysler and the cop seemed perfectly content to stay in single file and to maintain the same speed. My patience ran out. Coming to a red light, I changed lanes in an attempt to scope out the guy at the wheel of the 300C. It worked out well. With a tiny Fiat directly in front of me, I was afforded a clear view of the driver’s left profile. The driver was a young man, maybe twenty-five, with a neatly trimmed brown beard and mustache. His hair was a little darker than his beard, longer, too, and not very carefully brushed. He wore heavy-framed black glasses à la Elvis Costello. His skin was pale and he didn’t appear physically imposing. I guessed he was about five-eight and weighed about what I had weighed as a high school freshman. He wore a blue sport jacket over an open-collared light blue shirt. Doyle must’ve been right; the car had to be a rental. I couldn’t see some skinny, twenty-five-year-old white boy choosing a 300C as his dream machine.