The Darkness Gathers (25 page)

But if Marianna was right, this was even worse. And what they’d seen—the haunting, evil images on the DVD—indicated that she was. It had to be stopped by any means necessary. And Sasa Fitore had to be made to pay.

Lydia saw the faces of these women—Tatiana, Marianna, Felice, even Shawna, the pretty young victims of an ugly, indifferent world, like millions of others. But Tatiana was not lost—yet. Lydia could feel it, could almost touch her. And in finding and saving her, Lydia could strike a blow for all the cheated, murdered, lost women and little girls. The electric buzz made her restless, and desperate for a cigarette. She nudged Jeffrey awake to show him what she had found.

I
n the crowded, ugly airport Lydia and Jeffrey crushed their way through the usual mob of passengers, both of them getting jostled and pushed because they were too exhausted to be aggressive enough to make it out of JFK in under forty-five minutes. It entailed pushing your way off the plane while people struggled with the overhead compartments, then rushing down the gangway, making a half jog through the long hallways and escalators, volleying for the prime spot at the baggage claim, right near the mouth that puked tacky, dirty luggage. You had to have your ticket ready in case you were actually stopped by the people supposedly checking exiting luggage, then race for the taxi line. But tonight, they just allowed themselves to be scooted along by the crowd. Lydia was surprised and endlessly grateful to be approached by a limousine driver at the baggage claim.

He wore a driver’s uniform complete with a cap and jacket bearing an emblem and held a sign reading
MARK/STRONG
in black Magic Marker. His other hand rested on a luggage cart, and Lydia thought he was a mirage, seen through the blurred vision of her fatigue.

“Who sent you?” asked Jeffrey, suspiciously eyeing the frighteningly thin, acne-scarred man with thinning hair and a beak nose. He looked nervous and shifty as Jeffrey insisted that he call his dispatcher to find out who had sent him.

A small old woman with a cane bodychecked Lydia aside to reach for her embroidered suitcase, yelling, “Excuse me, excuse me” with a disproportionate amount of desperation and annoyance. When the luggage passed her by anyway, the woman let out a disappointed cry. Lydia rushed after the soft heavy bag with leather handles that the woman had reached for, grabbed it, and hauled it back to her. She snatched it from Lydia as if Lydia had been trying to steal it. She nodded in a gesture of grudging thanks, her eyes narrowed in a frown, as if trying to figure out Lydia’s angle, then she hobbled off. Lydia fantasized for a moment about having knocked the old lady over with her luggage, instead of handing it to her. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” she would have cried miserably. “Bitch,” Lydia muttered, sincerely hoping that the limo had not been ordered by one of the various people who seemed to want her and Jeffrey out of the way, because she was exhausted and really wanted to avoid the taxi line at JFK.

“Jacob sent the limo,” said Jeffrey, taking the luggage from her and piling it on the cart the chauffeur was pushing.

“How uncharacteristically considerate of him.”

“And he’s waiting in it to ride with us.”

“Great,” she said with a sigh.

“My lady, your lecture mobile awaits,” he said with a flourish of his hand.

Out on the sidewalk, Lydia’s thin leather jacket, T-shirt, and lightweight rayon pants were no match for the slicing chill in the fall air or the pinprick drizzle that wasn’t quite snow but would be if the temperature dropped another degree. She pulled the jacket tightly around her, folding her arms and pushing in close to Jeffrey as they waited for the limousine driver to pull the car around.

“Did you have a nice vacation?” Jacob asked, looking at Jeffrey and ignoring Lydia entirely as they climbed into the car and sat opposite him.

“Not really,” replied Jeffrey sullenly, acting like a teenager in a black mood.

“That’s what I heard.”

The air was thick among the three of them, and Lydia thought Jacob seemed pale and drawn, wrapped in a heavy navy peacoat, a black turtleneck sticking out from beneath it. He was a handsome man sometimes when the light hit him right and he smiled. But not tonight. Tonight, he was angry, and anger didn’t become him. His cheekbones jutted out of his thin face, and his mouth was set, eyes narrow, nostrils flared.

“And what did you hear exactly, Jacob?” asked Jeffrey.

“I think we should drop Lydia off so that you and I can talk. Alone.”

Lydia bristled but said nothing.

“Whatever you have to say can be said in front of Lydia.”

“I’m afraid I don’t feel that way.”

“I don’t give a fuck how you feel, Jacob,” replied Jeffrey, exploding in anger and leaning forward. “She’s my partner.”

“Really. I was under the impression that
I
was your partner, Jeff. Remember Mark, Hanley and Striker, Inc.? She is not a partner in this firm, and we have firm business to discuss.”

“As far as I’m concerned, she’s more a partner than you are lately.”

Here we go, thought Lydia, looking out the window as the driver merged into the heavy traffic on the Van Wyck. A field of headlights glowed in the silvery drizzle; horns honked halfheartedly. She could tell by Jeffrey’s tone and expression that he had been holding ill feeling for Jacob inside, and she didn’t understand why he’d never discussed it with her.

“Just what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Jeffrey looked away from Jacob and shook his head. “On second thought, maybe you’re right. Maybe we do need to talk alone.”

“I hate to be a third wheel. Would you boys like me to get out and walk?”

Nobody laughed at her joke. “Jesus, what is going on between you two?”

Neither man answered, Jeffrey looking out the window, Jacob looking at Lydia with something that looked an awful lot like distrust and anger. She glared right back at him. He was out of shape; she could definitely take him.

“You pissed a lot of people off in Miami,” he said, pointing at Lydia.

She shrugged. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of the inside lapel of his jacket and handed her a faxed copy of the bill at the Delano, totaling almost five thousand dollars for the days they had stayed there. “And you cost this firm a lot of money.”

Jeffrey grabbed the bill from her hand. “This is not about Lydia and her spending habits. She brings more money into this firm in a year than you have in the last five. You
don’t
run things, Jacob. Don’t think I don’t realize that you are hiding the books from me. I may not have the same business sense that you do, but I’m not an idiot.”

“She’s been planting ideas like that in your head. She’s trying to manipulate you into making her a partner.”

“You’re some detective, Jacob. Always one step ahead of us all,” said Lydia with tired sarcasm. She was waiting for him to slip and call her Yoko. She mentally checked out of the conversation, too angry to keep her mouth shut and too tired to get involved. Besides, she didn’t have the faintest idea what either of them was talking about.

“Lydia doesn’t know anything about that, Jacob,” Jeffrey said quietly. “She’s never said a word against you.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. “So for all the money you spent, all the people you pissed off, and for all the people who are in body bags as a result of your Miami ‘vacation,’ is there even a client? Has anyone hired you, paid you anything? Have you forgotten that we’re running a business here?”

“There are more important things in this world than a paycheck, Jacob. The firm makes enough money that we can get involved in cases that don’t pay us anything.”

“Right, whenever Lydia gets the ‘buzz.’ ”

“That’s right, Jacob,” Jeffrey said calmly. “Because there’s usually a very good reason for it.”

“Like this?” asked Jacob, removing the black DVD jewel case from his pocket.

“Where did you get that?”

“I made Craig turn it over to me, even though he didn’t want to. You shouldn’t encourage him to hide things from me, Jeff.”

Lydia felt a stab of betrayal as she looked over and recognized the DVD. She wondered if Craig had told Jacob everything. But then she wondered why it should matter. They were supposed to be able to trust Jacob. He was supposed to be on their team. She looked over at him and noticed a tremor in his hand. Why does he feel like the enemy all of a sudden? she wondered.

“Did you watch it?” she asked him.

“Yes, I did. Though I wish to God I hadn’t.”

“There’s a little girl missing, Jacob. Women are dying, being murdered for someone’s sexual pleasure. Human beings are being trafficked, sold into slavery. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Lydia. I understand that. It’s been that way since the beginning of time.”

She shook her head, as if to help his words sink in while shaking them off at the same time. “What are you talking about?”

“There has always been a master class. Men whose money and power allow them to buy and sell other, less powerful human beings to fill their needs. Whether the need is to build pyramids or tend cotton fields or satisfy their sexual urges, it really doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. It’s always been this way. It’s just generally better hidden than this, especially these days, with the media and the culture of political correctness being what it is.”

He opened the case and took out the DVD while Jeffrey and Lydia looked at him, incredulous. He snapped it in two and threw the pieces out the window. A horn honked in protest of his littering.

“You can’t stop it any more than you could single-handedly stop the drug trade. And if you try, you’ll both be destroyed, and this firm will be destroyed along with you. I can’t allow that. It means too much to me. You,” he said, turning to Jeffrey, “mean too much to me.”

There was silence for a moment as Jeffrey looked at Jacob’s face in the dim light. He remembered clearly the days when he had loved Jacob, when they had been friends who trusted each other and counted on each other. The man sitting across from him had somehow become a stranger. Jeffrey realized that the only feeling he had in his heart for his college friend was indifference, and a smattering of distrust. He couldn’t say when this had happened or why, but he suspected that his feelings for Jacob had begun to erode a night long ago in a dark New York City hotel room.

“I remember that night,” said Jeffrey.

“What night?”

“In New York. The George Hewlett case.”

Jacob paused a second, taking a breath before speaking. “I was able to stop you from destroying yourself then, Jeffrey. Over a homeless man, the ultimate failure of society, you would have ruined us all.”

“Oh my God, Jacob,” said Jeffrey sadly. “Who are you?”

The hand still shook, Lydia noticed. And Jacob lowered his eyes in what looked like shame.

“What are you guys talking about?”

“The story I told you in Miami, about George Hewlett. There was a little more to it.” Jeff kept his eyes on Jacob as he spoke. “I went back to my hotel—you remember I was still stationed in D.C. at the time—after my meeting with Sarah. When I got there, the door was ajar. Jacob was there. It was so
weird;
he was just sitting there in the dark, like we were in some kind of bad spy movie. I said, ‘Jake, what the fuck are you doing, man? You scared the shit out of me.’ ”

Jeff paused for a second, looking at Lydia. “I can’t believe I never told you this. It’s like I put it out of my mind.”

“Anyway, Jacob says, ‘Why did you do that, Jeff?’ And he was scared, but a little angry, too. ‘It’s one thing for you to be a cowboy. But I have a wife and kids, man. Did you think about that? Do you have any idea what you’re fucking with by doing what you just did?’ I got really pissed, told him I couldn’t believe his career was more important to him than the fact that an innocent man was probably going to get the death penalty for a crime he didn’t commit. And he said, ‘Not our careers, man. Our
lives
. These are people you do not fuck with. Don’t you understand that?’ And I’ll never forget what he said, next. ‘That homeless guy, his life was already wasted. You, me, my wife and unborn baby, our lives still mean something. I saved your ass tonight, Jeff. I won’t be able to save it again if you don’t drop this thing.’ And then he left. I called after him, but he just turned around and gave me this sad shake of his head.

“I didn’t know what to think at first when he left. It kind of half-felt like a joke. I tried to forget about it, convince myself that he was just being paranoid. I turned on the lights and television, made myself a drink from the minibar. But I started wondering how he knew where I had gone and what I had done. It’s not as though he knew the woman I was with, so even if he was tailing me, it would have been hard for him to get close enough to me to hear without my recognizing him. Then
I
started to feel paranoid.

“But like I said, the next day it all went away.”

Lydia looked at Jacob and saw someone she wasn’t sure of. She had always known that Jacob disliked her, but she never imagined him to be anything but loyal to Jeffrey. He looked small and mean when she looked into his eyes.

“It wasn’t so cloak-and-dagger as that, Jeff. I was just worried about losing our jobs,” Jacob said with an unconvincing laugh.

“Of course. It was all in my imagination,” said Jeff, looking out the window. Lydia couldn’t read his expression.

“And what about Tatiana Quinn, Jacob?” asked Lydia. “Daughter of the rich and powerful Nathan Quinn. How much is her life worth? Is finding her going to ruin us all?”

“Tatiana is dead, Lydia.”

The words felt like a punch in the stomach, and Lydia flinched.

“No, she isn’t,” she said reflexively.

“Yes, Lydia. She is. They found her body tonight. During the raid of a crack den on Tenth Street, they found her in a closet. Beaten beyond recognition, violated. One of the cops recognized her necklace from the description of what she’d worn when she ran away. The medical examiner identified her by the dental records they had on file. One of the dealers they picked up said she showed up a couple of weeks ago, had been prostituting herself for crack.”