The Lost Years (37 page)

“Mariah, you have to help me.” The voice on the other end sounded frantic. “I have the parchment. I couldn’t sell it and betray Jonathan like that. I want you to have it. I promised it to Charles, but I changed my mind. He was in a rage when I told him. I’m afraid of what he’ll do to me.”

It was Lillian Stewart.

Lillian is alive! And she has the parchment! “Where are you?” Mariah demanded.

“I’ve been hiding at the Raines Motel on Route 4 East just before the bridge.” Lillian broke into a sob. “Mariah, I beg you. Come and meet me now. Please. I want you to have the parchment. I was going to mail it to you, but suppose it got lost? I’m leaving for Singapore on the seven
A.M
. flight from Kennedy airport. I’m not coming back until I know Charles is in prison.”

“The Raines Motel on Route 4. I’ll be there right away. There won’t be any traffic. I can make it in twenty minutes.” Mariah pushed back the coverlet and in an instant her feet were on the carpet.

“I’m on the first floor in the rear area of the motel. It’s room twenty-two—the number’s on the door. Hurry! I’ve got to leave for Kennedy by four o’clock,” Lillian said.

At three thirty, Mariah turned off the highway and drove past the quiet, shabby motel into the dimly lit parking area outside room 22. She opened her car door and a second later felt her head being slammed against the side of it. Waves of intense pain enveloped her and she passed out.

Minutes later she opened her eyes to almost total darkness. She tried to move her hands and legs but they were tightly tied. There was a gag stuffed into her mouth. Her head was throbbing. From somewhere near her, she could hear a whimpering sound. Where am I? Where am I? she thought frantically.

She could feel the movement of wheels beneath her. I’m in the trunk of a car, she realized. She felt something brush against her. My God, there’s someone here with me. Then, straining to catch the words, she heard Lillian Stewart moaning, “He’s crazy. He’s crazy. I’m sorry, Mariah, I’m sorry.”

A
t nine thirty on Friday morning Alvirah was sitting at the dinette table in her apartment, enjoying the cheese Danish that Willy, an early riser, had picked up for her in the coffee shop. “I know you only eat them once in a while, honey,” he had said, “but you’ve been working hard and it will give you energy.”

The phone rang. It was Betty Pierce. “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said in a worried voice. “Mrs. Meehan, I mean Alvirah, is Mariah with you, or have you heard from her?”

“Not since about five o’clock last night,” Alvirah said. “Isn’t she there? I know she went into New York early yesterday. Have you tried her cell phone?”

“No, she’s not. And she isn’t answering that phone or the phone in her office.”

“She could be on her way into the city again,” Alvirah suggested. “I know that yesterday her cell phone was off almost all day.”

“It’s more than that,” Betty said hurriedly. “Mariah is so neat. She never leaves clothes tossed around her room. Her nightgown is on the floor. The water glass on the night table was spilled and she didn’t bother to wipe it up. The closet door was open. There are a couple of jackets hanging off the hangers, as if she just grabbed something and ran. The pearls her father gave her are on the vanity table. She
always
keeps them in the safe. I thought some emergency
might have come up with her mother at the hospital and so I called over there. But Kathleen had a quiet night and is asleep. And they said they haven’t seen or heard from Mariah today.”

Alvirah’s mind was working with feverish haste. “What about her car?” she asked.

“Her car is gone.”

“Does it look as if there was any kind of struggle?”

“I can’t say it does. It looks more like she left in a terrible hurry.”

“What about the Scotts? Did you talk to them?”

“No. I know Mrs. Scott likes to sleep late.”

“All right. I’ll call Mr. Scott. I have his cell phone. If you hear from Mariah, call me at once, and I’ll do the same for you.”

“I will. But, Alvirah, I’m desperate with worry. Rory and Lillian seem to have both disappeared. Do you think there’s any chance that—”

“Don’t even begin to think like that, Betty. I’ll talk to you later.” Alvirah tried not to let the anxiety that was making her hand tremble show in her voice. As soon as she hung up, she dialed Lloyd’s number. As she feared, he had not spoken to Mariah since yesterday afternoon.

“I’ve been in the office for an hour,” Lloyd said. “Mariah’s car wasn’t in the driveway when I passed by her house. Of course, she might have put it in the garage.”

“It’s not in the garage,” Alvirah said. “Lloyd, my hunches are good. You’ve got to call those detectives and get them to put a trace on Mariah’s cell phone and rush Wally Gruber over to make that sketch. If he comes up with a face we can identify, we’ll know where to look for Mariah.”

If it’s not too late, she thought.

As she put the phone down, Alvirah tried to banish that awful possibility from her mind.

H
e wasn’t sure what to do. For the first time in his life, he felt a lack of control. Would the face in that sketch turn out to be a figment of that crook’s imagination? Or would it bear a damning resemblance to what he saw in the mirror?

On the Internet, he had looked up the picture that had been in the newspapers of him and the others with Jonathan on that last dig. He had printed it out. If the sketch looks like me, I’ll show this to them, he’d thought. I’ll wave it in front of those detectives and say, “Look, this is where your sketch comes from.” It would be his word against that of a convicted felon who was bargaining for a reduced sentence.

But once the prosecutor’s office started to dig into his past, it might come out that Rory went to prison because she had stolen money from his aunt when she was her caregiver. Then, like a house of cards, his labyrinth of lies would fall apart. He had only visited his aunt once when Rory was working there, and Rory hadn’t recognized him when she came to work at Jonathan’s house. But I recognized her, he thought, and I used her when I needed her. She had to go along with me because I knew she had skipped parole, and she snapped at the money I dangled in front of her. She left Jonathan’s gun in the flower bed that night. She left the door unlocked for me.

He had taken Mariah and Lillian from the parking lot at the
motel to his warehouse in the city. He had untied their hands and let them use the bathroom, then tied them up again. He left Lillian lying on the brocaded couch, whimpering. Across the room behind a row of lifesize Grecian statues, he had laid Mariah on a mattress on the floor. She had passed out again before he left. It had been a brilliant decision not to kill Lillian immediately. How else could he have convinced Mariah to come rushing out in the middle of the night? And long ago he had made it his business to be able to slip in and out of his apartment building without being seen. It really wasn’t hard if you wore a cleaning crew uniform, pulled a cap down over your face, and had a phony ID around your neck.

He had gotten back home just before daybreak. Now he didn’t know what to do except to act as if this was a normal day in his life. He was tired, but he did not go to bed and try to sleep. Instead, he showered and dressed, and had his usual breakfast of cereal, toast, and coffee.

He left his apartment shortly after nine and set about being visible in his normal routine. Trying to stay calm, he comforted himself with the realization that if that crook was lying about seeing anyone running out of the house, and if he had seen that picture in the newspaper, he could just as easily pick out one of the other three guys to describe to whoever was drawing the sketch.

Until he knew where this was going, he’d have to stay away from the warehouse. Mariah and Lillian, he thought sarcastically, I guess you’ll get to live a little while longer. But if the sketch looks like me, and they tell me to come in and talk to them again, they still won’t have enough at that point to arrest me. I’ll only become what they call “a person of interest.” They’ll probably start following me, but that won’t do them any good. I’m not going near the warehouse until I know where I stand.

Even if it takes weeks.

A
fter speaking to Lloyd Scott, Detective Benet called Judge Brown at his chambers and received authorization to place a trace on Mariah’s cell phone and to get records of the incoming and outgoing calls, both for that phone and the one at her parents’ house.

“Judge, there’s a strong probability that Mariah Lyons is missing,” he explained. “I need a list of the last five days’ calls so that I can see who she’s been talking to, and I need access to her call log for the next five days so I can see who calls her.”

His next call was to the designated contact at the telephone company who handled emergent judicial orders.

“I’ll get right on it, sir,” he was told.

Ten minutes later Simon had the location of the cell phone. “Detective Benet, we’ve got a hit from Route 4 East in Fort Lee, just before the bridge. It’s coming from the immediate area around the Raines Motel.”

Rita Rodriguez was watching Simon’s expression and knew he had received bad news.

“We’ve got a major problem,” he said. “The signal is coming from around the Raines Motel. That place is a total dump. We can be there in ten minutes. Let’s go.”

They raced down the highway with their lights flashing and were soon standing outside Mariah’s car. The driver’s door was slightly
ajar. They could see a woman’s shoulder bag on the passenger seat. As they opened the door carefully to preserve any fingerprints, the sound of a cell phone ringing came from inside the bag.

Simon reached for the phone and looked at the caller ID. It was Richard Callahan. Simon quickly scanned the log and saw that it was his fourth call in the last two hours. There were two others from the Lyons home, which he knew would have been from the housekeeper, and two more from Alvirah Meehan in the last hour.

Two days ago when Lillian Stewart disappeared, Richard Callahan claimed that he had been trying to reach her all day, Simon thought. He’s covering his tracks again.

“Simon, look at this.” Rita was shining her flashlight on the unmistakable signs of smeared blood on the rear door on the driver’s side of the car. She pointed the flashlight to the ground. Drops of dried blood became visible on the cracked macadam of the parking lot.