Skeleton Justice (23 page)

Jake extended his right arm, groping for Manny in the darkness of his bed. Pillows, blankets, sheets, but no soft curves, no tumble of hair. Then he remembered: Manny hadn’t stayed last night, something about an early-morning deposition. He was surprised by the depth of his disappointment.

Oh well, I might as well get out of bed and catch up on a few things before going to the office
. Jake headed downstairs for coffee and his laptop, nearly pitching headfirst off the second landing when he stumbled over a banker’s box containing the evidence in a police-restraint death that had arrived two days ago from Los Angeles. Manny was right: This place really was careening toward Health Department condemnation.

Once the coffee was on, Jake popped open his laptop and logged on to his e-mail. The screen beamed at him, showing he had eighty-three new messages. He rubbed his eyes—could that be right? E-mail, a blessing and a curse.

Cutting the green spot off a bagel he found in a bag on the counter, Jake poured his coffee and settled down to tackle his in-box. Yes, he’d be happy to speak at Quantico on the subject of bioterrorism; no, he regretted he would not be able to travel to Latvia to address a conference on investigating civilian explosions. Would he come to Athens in September for a week of in-service training? Damn! That sounded good, but Pederson would never give him the time off. These days, it seemed that keeping Jake’s light under a bushel was Pederson’s top priority.

Fifteen e-mails answered, twenty, twenty-five. Jake glanced at his watch. It read eight-forty-five.
How did it get so late? I better get a move on
. Somehow, Pederson was always standing by the receptionist’s desk when Jake rolled in at nine-fifteen, but never when he left at midnight. He scanned the list of remaining e-mails. Nothing urgent, except—

What was this from
[email protected]
? Could it be a response from one of those eBay collectibles dealers Manny had contacted about Nixon’s mug? He clicked and read the message. The dealer remembered the transaction. Jake stared at the screen. The buyer’s name sounded awfully familiar. He trolled through the many dusty file drawers of his memory. Sometimes his brain felt as cluttered as his house.

Jake slammed the laptop shut. He knew that name! But from what part of this sprawling investigation? He’d have to wait until he got to the office and started searching the files. He headed for the door, then stopped and reached for the phone. Manny would know. She had the most amazing memory, able to recall the tiniest details instantly. He claimed it was because of her youth. Her brain filled her cranial cavity with the sulci and gyri of a virginal youngster. Not like his brain, shrunken and flattened.

He dialed, but the call rolled immediately to voice mail.
Of course—look at the time. She must be in her deposition now
. Even Manny turned off her cell phone during depositions. He left a message and continued on to the office.

•   •   •

Manny’s head throbbed and her throat, parched and raw, protested every swallow. She opened her eyes a slit but quickly shut them when the room started to roll. She must be hungover. Odd, because she really wasn’t much of a drinker.

Had she been celebrating, or drowning her sorrows? She couldn’t recall. Something scratched at her wrists. She tried to brush it away but found she couldn’t move her arms. That was odd, too.

Nearby, a dog barked—very loudly. How could Mycroft be barking so ferociously? Maybe someone was outside. She should check on that. She certainly should. But she was tired, so tired.

The barking continued.

In a minute, Mycroft. In a minute …

Jake’s cell phone vibrated in the middle of the weekly staff meeting. He ignored it. A few seconds later, it started again. As Charles Pederson paced across the front of the room, pontificating, Jake discreetly looked down at the phone. The display said
LITTLE PAWS
.

He frowned. Why would Mycroft’s silly doggy day care be calling him? Then he remembered he had given Manny permission to list him as one of three emergency backup numbers. If they were calling him, it must be because they couldn’t reach Manny, or Kenneth, or Manny’s mother, Rose. Well, Manny and Kenneth were together at the deposition, and Rose was probably out somewhere having fun. She kept her cell phone turned off, using it only for emergencies, which she defined as times when she needed to reach others, not times when they needed to reach her. Jake turned his attention back to the meeting. Little Paws could wait.

Again, the cell phone vibrated. Annoyed, Jake reached down to turn it off. This time the display read
KENNETH BOYD
.

His heart rate quickened. If Kenneth was calling him, where the hell was Manny? Jake glanced at the clock on the wall. The meeting had been going for half an hour and Pederson showed no sign of wrapping it up.

“And now, I’d like to share this PowerPoint presentation with you,” Pederson said. “Lights, please.”

The lights went down and Pederson began fiddling with his laptop. Nothing appeared on the screen. Finally, one of the secretaries took pity and got up to help the chief. As they huddled together over the computer, Jake slipped out the rear door of the conference room.

Back in his office, Jake dialed Kenneth. “Where’s Manny?” he asked without a greeting.

“That’s what I’d like to know. She never showed up for the Greenfield deposition.”

Jake could practically see his adrenal gland preparing for fight or flight. “Little Paws also called me. Do you know why?”

“Because when they opened up this morning, they found Mycroft sitting at the door all by himself, dragging his leash behind him.”

“Let’s get her up,” a woman’s voice said.

“I don’t think she’s—”

“I said it’s time.” A door clicked.

Manny opened her eyes and found herself looking into a very beautiful face: shiny black hair, almond eyes, high cheekbones. Human beings are hardwired to respond positively to beauty, but Manny did not smile. Neither did the other woman.

The room she was in had a very high ceiling, dingy green walls, and no furniture other than the bed she lay on and a small table. None of it meant anything to Manny. She hadn’t recovered the ability to reason; she could focus only on her physical needs—to drink, to eat, and to stop the incessant pounding in her head.

“Can I have some water?” Manny’s voice came out as a harsh croak, unrecognizable to her own ears.

The woman moved to the table and poured water from a bottle into a plastic cup. Manny watched, her mind grinding slowly into gear. The woman looked vaguely familiar to her, but she didn’t know why. Mostly, Manny was interested in the water. She propped herself up on one elbow, took the cup, and drank the water straight down. The fluids primed her brain and she looked around. The room was so dusty and dim, it couldn’t possibly be someone’s home.

“Where am I? Who are you?” Snippets of memory returned to her. A dirty man. A smell. A fall onto the sidewalk. A slight jingling sound …

Manny sat straight up. “My dog! Where’s my dog?” The sound she remembered was the tinkle of Mycroft’s tags as he ran. “Where’s Mycroft? He was sick. I was taking him to the vet.”

The woman observed her coolly but said nothing. Where had Manny seen her before? She was beautiful enough to be an actress or a model, but Manny didn’t think she’d seen her on TV or in a magazine. Besides, what would a famous person be doing in a grungy place like this? She took in more details of the room: unfinished wood floor, dirty barred window, exposed pipes. What was
she
doing here? Manny swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed herself up. “Look, I have to—”

Her knees buckled and her vision blurred. She plopped back down. “What’s the matter with me?” Manny closed her eyes and rubbed her temples until she felt a little better. When she looked up again, a man stood in the doorway.

Manny smiled. A familiar face, a kind face. Then her smile faded. A face that didn’t belong here.

“Dr. Costello, what’s going on? And where’s Mycroft?”

The vet turned his back and looked out the only window, a barred opening facing an air shaft. “My wife, Elena, will explain.”

“Surely by now you realize who we are, Ms. Manfreda?”

Manny’s hands gripped the rough covers of the bed. A man and a woman working together, a person with some medical expertise, born in the late seventies. “You’re the Vampire? The two of you?”

Elena smiled.

“Why are you doing this?” Manny continued. “What do you want from me?”

“We want you, and your friend Dr. Rosen, to tell the world about the Desaparecidos,” Elena said. “And we have taken measures to make sure the world is finally listening.”

This was it. The endgame she and Jake had been predicting the previous night. Manny turned to face the other woman.

“You poisoned my dog to get me here? How?”

Elena laughed. “Mycroft is a creature of habit. He takes a walk in the park every day with his keeper from Little Paws. A woman walking six small dogs is used to getting a lot of attention. While Frederic fussed over the others yesterday, I slipped Mycroft a little treat.”

“What did you give him?” Manny demanded. “You killed my dog!”

Dr. Costello looked offended. “Certainly not. It was just a little something to upset his digestion. He didn’t get enough to cause serious damage.”

“But where is he?” Manny asked again.

Dr. Costello and his wife exchanged a glance. “Don’t worry about your dog,” Elena said. “Suffice it to say that Mycroft has brought you here in a way that is virtually untraceable. No one knows where you are, Manny. If Jake Rosen wants to save your life, and the life of Travis Heaton, he will have to tell the world about the torture and death our parents suffered.”

No longer cool and elegant, Elena paced around the room in rising hysteria, her skin flushed a muddy red beneath her tan. “Jake Rosen will tell the world how my husband and I and Esteban Sandoval and so many others were ripped from our mother’s wombs and given away to be raised by the very people who had killed our parents. When Lucinda Bettis and the others see how all our parents were tortured, they will finally renounce this lying life they have lived for all these years.”

She grabbed Manny by the shoulders. Her eyes were wild; her nostrils flared. “They don’t believe what I have told them. It’s only words to them, and pictures. They have to see it lived. They have to witness how our parents were tortured. Then they will understand. You and Jake Rosen will make them understand.”

The first thing Jake noticed when he entered Manny’s apartment was a strong, scorched scent of Hawaiian Peabody roast left over-long on the warming plate of the coffeemaker. He looked into the tiny kitchen area. “Pot’s full—she left without drinking any,” he said to Kenneth and Pasquarelli, who had come with him to search for signs of Manny’s whereabouts.

Kenneth looked in the other direction. “And the Murphy bed is still down. Manny always makes the bed before she leaves. Says it tricks her into believing her bedroom and her living room aren’t the same room.”

“All right, so we know she slept here last night and we know she left in a hurry this morning,” Pasquarelli said. “Why? Where’d she go? And how did the dog wind up alone at Little Paws?”

“She never would have left him outside alone,” Kenneth said for about the fifteenth time. He chewed on a long pink fingernail as his eyes darted around the tiny apartment.

“I’ll get started subpoenaing her phone records,” Pasquarelli said. “Get a list of her incoming and outgoing calls this morning.”

“That will take hours,” Jake said. “There must be some evidence here that will give us a lead sooner.”

“Her closet!” Kenneth shouted. “Let’s see if we can figure out what she was wearing. Then we’ll know where she intended to go.”

Pasquarelli raised his eyebrows. “That’s one approach.”

Kenneth flung open the doors of the walk-in closet, revealing neatly hanging blouses, skirts, pants, and dresses, not to mention towers of shoe boxes spaced between a floor shoe rack.

“It’s hopeless,” Jake said. “How can you possibly tell what’s missing from all that?”

But Kenneth was down on his knees. “Look at how most of the shoes on the shoe rack are thrown around. She was searching for something.” His voice grew muffled as he crawled farther into the depths of the closet.

“Eeew!” Kenneth came scuttling out backward, holding his right hand out in front of him. “There’s something wet and disgusting on the floor in there.”

Jake grabbed Kenneth’s wrist, stared at the greenish slime under the manicured nails, then lifted them to his nose to sniff. “Dog vomit,” he pronounced. “Mycroft must have been sick in the night. Manny left in a rush to take him to the vet.”

Kenneth’s eyes lighted up, then immediately dimmed. “But she must never have gotten there. And neither did Mycroft.”

“Let’s call the vet.” Jake snapped his fingers. “What’s his name again?”

Kenneth returned from washing his hands. “I have the number here on my phone.” He clicked a few buttons and started talking. Jake would have snatched the phone away from him, but Kenneth seemed to be asking all the right questions.

“The vet said she paged him at five-fifteen this morning to say that Mycroft was vomiting,” Kenneth reported. “He said he told her it sounded like he’d eaten something toxic to dogs and that she should take him to the Animal Medical Center on Eighty-sixth Street and York. They have an animal poison-control center there that’s open twenty-four/seven.”

“You call the Animal Medical Center to check if she ever made it there,” Jake told Kenneth. “Vito and I will go down and talk to the doorman.”

At 10:00 a.m., the morning rush had ended and the doorman in Manny’s lobby had settled into signing for deliveries and assisting a few elderly residents and stay-at-home moms.

“Who was on duty at five this morning?” Jake asked.

“I was.” The doorman yawned. “We’re all working overtime this week to cover for one guy’s vacation. I’ve been here since midnight.”

“Did you see Ms. Manfreda leave with her dog?”

“Manny? No, I haven’t seen her all day.”

Jake stepped closer to the doorman, a good-looking guy of about thirty. He seemed like a heads-up person, but he might have been busy or distracted when Manny passed by. “This is very important,” Jake said. “She was probably in a hurry. Maybe you missed her.”

The doorman shook his head insistently. “Miss Manny? No way. She always says hello, no matter how fast she’s moving. Not like some others in this building.”

Vito took over. “Look, we know she came home last night, and she’s not in her apartment now, so she had to have gone out. We’re trying to trace her steps.”

“I didn’t say she couldn’t have gone out; I just said she didn’t pass me. From five to six, no one left but Legere in 12B—he swims laps every morning before work.” The doorman shook his head at this insanity. “But lots of people go out the west side service door in the morning. It puts them one block closer to the E train station.”

Jake shook his head. “Manny never takes the subway. And she certainly wouldn’t take a sick dog on the train. Besides, that subway doesn’t take you anywhere close to Eighty-sixth and York. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe she went out the back door to go to her garage,” Vito suggested.

“Her garage is that way.” The doorman pointed uptown, proving he knew Manny’s routines. “And when she’s taking a cab, she always lets me hail it.” He dangled the silver whistle around his neck. “She can whistle pretty loud, but this is louder.”

Jake looked down, concentrating. Manny was sometimes impulsive, but never irrational. There had to be a good reason why she’d exited through the rear door. What was it?

Kenneth emerged from an elevator and crossed over to them. “The Animal Medical Center has no record of Manny or Mycroft being there today. Something had to have happened to her on the way there.”

Jake continued to stare at the tasteful pattern of the lobby carpet. “Illogical.” He looked up at Kenneth. “Mycroft should be at Little Paws now?”

“Yes.”

“Call them and find out how he’s doing,” Jake commanded.

Kenneth did not reach for his cell phone. Instead, he put his hands on his hips and glared at Jake. As devoted as he was to Mycroft, he was more devoted to Manny, and he clearly thought they should be focusing their efforts on the owner, not the pet.

“I want to know just how sick the dog is,” Jake explained as he walked toward the elevator. “Maybe Manny changed her mind about taking him to the Animal Medical Center.”

“Why are you going back up to the apartment?” Vito asked.

“I want a sample of the vomit.”