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She felt the other girl come around to crouch beside her, heard her pawing around in the box. “Four glasses. Four spoons. Four hairbrushes.” Lexus paused, took a breath. “Four beds in here. Four blankets.”
“I didn’t realize... Lexus, do you think...?”
“I think he’s gonna open that door at least two more times, Stevie-girl.”
Stevie nodded. “Okay. Okay, then we’re gonna have to figure out how to take advantage of that the next time he does.”
* * *
Even though we had Myrtle with us, we didn’t go to a drive-thru window for lunch. We headed instead to the Park Diner, ordered take-out and took it with us to a bench nearby with a view of the Susquehanna River. I liked that I could hear its rushing flow from where we sat, and I liked even more that I could see it. Bodies of water had fascinated me since I’d got my vision back. I live across the dirt excuse for a road from a lake—okay, a reservoir, but it looks like a lake—so I get plenty of time to study it. Rivers were an entirely different creature. The countless colors, the eddies and swirls, the constantly shifting patterns, the frothy bits and the way the sunlight reflects like diamonds when it hits just right.
I sat there, relishing my club sandwich with added hot sauce and sipping my Diet Coke, staring at the water until a paw on my leg reminded me I was not alone.
“Sorry, Myrt.” I tore the other half of my oversize sandwich into Myrtle-sized bites and fed her one of them. “Good, huh?”
Myrt swallowed it whole and whacked my shin again. And I knew what she was saying with her sightless brown eyes. How would I know if it’s good? That bite wasn’t big enough to tell. More, please. And by please, I mean now.
I sighed. I hate depriving her of people food when she likes it so much.
Mason was ripping the cellophane wrapper from the pack of styluses we’d picked up at the drugstore. “You should carry dog food,” he said. “Diet dog food.”
“Shut up. She’s not fat.”
“The vet said—”
“The vet is partial to skinny dogs. Greyhounds and Chihuahuas. For crying out loud, he owns a whippet.”
“Is his whippet good?”
I had broken off another bite and was handing it down to Myrtle, but I stopped in midmotion to send him a grimace. “That was terrible.” I didn’t tell him that I’d made the same joke in the exam room.
“I liked it.”
“Snarf!” said Myrt.
Mason smiled at her. “See? She agrees with me.”
“No. She wants her sandwich.” I obliged my dog, then said, “That’s all, Myrt. It’s all gone.”
She tilted her head to one side at the words all gone. Her least favorite words in history, besides go to the vet. Then she sighed heavily and collapsed, because bulldogs don’t lie down, they just drop. I knew that she knew I was a liar, and she knew that I knew that she knew it.
Mason whistled softly, drawing my attention away from both my dog and my guilt trip. “What?”
He was looking at the phone, holding it with his napkin and using the stylus to touch the screen. “She’s been calling Jacob Kravitz. Frequently.”
“Jacob,” I said, reviewing the details he’d given me on the way over here. “Oh, Jake. Wait a minute, isn’t that the ex-boyfriend?”
“Yep.”
“Huh. Doesn’t sound all that ex, does it? How about the current love interest? Kirk what’s-his-name?”
“Mitchell Kirk. And yes, there are two. One incoming, one outgoing.”
“Sounds like trouble in paradise.”
“All the calls to Jake were outgoing. Less than a minute each.”
I nodded. “So she was calling him. Maybe leaving him messages. But he wasn’t answering.”
“Or calling back,” Mason said, tapping the screen with the stylus but not saying much, until he finally seemed satisfied and dropped the phone back into its plastic bag. “Nothing much on there. Nothing that jumps out at me, anyway.”
I looked at my watch, grinning because I didn’t have to feel it. Yes, still, after almost nine months of being sighted. Hell, I still smiled when I opened my eyes every morning and found I could see. I’d had no idea just how much I’d been expecting the transplant to fail, my body to reject the new corneas the way it had all the others, and my world to be plunged back into darkness all over again, until I noticed just the other day that I’d stopped expecting that. There had been some kind of bowstring tension inside me. Waiting for the axe to fall, that sort of thing. And then one day I noticed its absence. Such a different feeling. Like I’d become seventy pounds lighter overnight.
“Rache?”
I realized I had been staring at the ticking second hand. “Sorry. I was just wondering what’s taking Amy so damned long.”
“I’m here, I’m here!” she called from about fifteen feet away. She was scurrying toward our bench with a paper bag in her hand. She wore a black T-shirt dress with a neon green geometric design over leggings and black leather boots. She had spiked her purple-and-black bangs with more gel than usual, and her nose stud was winking in the sunlight. “Sorry I’m late. My mother called just as I was heading out the door. What’s the emergency?”
Myrt lifted her head at the sound of Amy’s voice. She was one of Myrt’s favorite people, probably because Amy was the one who’d rescued her and brought her to me, then used skillful emotional manipulation to trick me into falling in love with the mutt. I don’t know exactly how. Introducing us, I guess.
“It’s all good. How’s your mom?”
“Excellent, as always. Sends her love, says she’ll send you that stuffing recipe from Thanksgiving. She won’t, though. She never shares her secret recipes. Says I’ll get them all when she’s dead.” Amy took a seat on the bench next to ours, opened her bag and took out a bag of chips. She ate one, gave one to Myrtle and flashed the bag at me when I scowled at her. “It’s all right, see? They’re baked. And it was just one.”
“You know by the time each of you and everyone else in that dog’s life gives her ‘just one bite’ it adds up to a couple of extra meals’ worth of food a day,” Mason said. “At least.”
“Life’s short. Dieting only makes it seem longer,” I said.
“Oh, that’s a good one, Rache. We need to put that one on a mug.” Amy yanked her smartphone from her bag, wiped her fingers on her black spandex leggings and started tapping the screen. “‘Life’s short. Dieting only makes it seem longer.’ Rachel de Luca.”
Mason frowned at me.
“She’s working on some new merchandising for me. We’re adding mugs and mouse pads to the affirmation cards and perpetual calendars.”
He tightened his lips and nodded. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking and was afraid he thought I was greedy. Well, hell, maybe I am. If there’s more money to be made, I’ll go for it. But I share. A third straight off the top to Uncle Sam to pay for bombs and guns, of course. And I give bushels to my charities on top of that.
“So, Amy,” he said, turning his full focus to my assistant. Hard not to. “I wanted to talk to you about last Thanksgiving.”
She stuffed her cell phone back into her oversize bag. Black. Of course. “When those two pervs snatched me off the side of the road?” she asked. Then she looked up at him. “How come? Did you finally catch the second guy?”
“No. Just want to keep it fresh in my mind.”
For a detective, he was terrible at deception. Amy saw right through him. “You didn’t catch him. Then there must have been another kidnapping.”
“No,” Mason said at the same exact moment that I was saying, “We’re not sure yet.”
He shot me a quelling look. I waved a dismissive hand. “What? Like she’s gonna go Tweet it to the world?” I looked at Amy sternly. “This is strictly hush-hush. Spill it and you’ll nix Mason’s shot at the chief’s job.”
“You told her that, too?”
“She’s my personal assistant, Mace. I tell her everything.”
“Yeah,” Amy said. “Nice job in the sack, by the way.”
He looked like he was gonna pass out before I said, “I don’t tell her that, for crying out loud.”
He closed his eyes and gave his head a rapid shake.
“So, Amy,” I said. “Yes, a girl is missing. And the truth is, she might just have run off. But I keep getting a feeling it has something to do with what happened to you.”
“And we all know better than to ignore her feelings,” Mason added, probably relieved that I hadn’t blurted out Stephanie’s name, address and phone number while I was at it.
“I am so dying to help out on a case,” Amy said.
“You’re not helping out. And it’s not a case.”
I clapped a hand onto Mason’s thigh. “You are helping out, and it’s not a case yet. But it might turn into one if she didn’t leave voluntarily. So if you can stand to go over it one more time...”
“I was driving to my mother’s in Erie for Thanksgiving,” she said, nodding. “I stopped for gas and noticed these guys in a white pickup pulling in behind me. I went in for the restroom and some snacks for the drive, and when I came out, they were still there. Not buying gas, not shopping, just sitting there.”
“Right. We saw the surveillance footage,” Mason said. “What do you remember about the second guy?”
“It’s all in my statement,” she said.
“I know, but you might have left something out that didn’t seem important, or remembered something since. Maybe there’s something you thought you told us but didn’t. Just humor me, okay?”
“Okay.” She ate another chip, handed one down to Myrtle, then took her sandwich out of her bag and unwrapped it slowly. “I didn’t really look at the guys in the truck at that point. I just sort of noticed the truck was there as I left. I didn’t get any bad vibes until I saw them pull out behind me. And even then, I thought I was just being a drama queen.”
I nodded and said to Mason, “She can be a real drama queen sometimes, so that adds up.”
Amy threw a chip at me. It landed on the sidewalk and Myrtle snapped it up before it settled. “Then my tire went flat. I still wasn’t overly concerned, until they pulled over in front of me. That’s when my alarm bells started going off. I snapped a quick pic of the truck with my phone and slid it under the car just in case.”
“Remind me how smart she is if I ever even consider letting her go, Mace.”
“I promise.” He nodded at Amy to keep going.
“After they dragged me into the truck, the driver dropped the second guy off. Do you need me to describe them again?”
I looked at Mason to answer that one. He shook his head. “No, the driver’s dead, and we have the sketch you and the police artist did of the second guy on file. We’re just trying to figure out why they took you. Did they say anything that might be a clue? Maybe something you’ve remembered since the incident?”
She frowned really hard, and I knew she was trying her best to recall every detail. “The jerk drove me off to that freaking no-tell motel and chained me to the bed. But he didn’t touch me. Didn’t even try. Then I said I had to use the bathroom. He cuffed me to the pipe in there so I wouldn’t run off. I picked the lock and crawled out the window, then ran for it. He chased after me. Caught me and tied me up again out there in the woods, and then you guys showed up.” She shrugged. “The only odd thing he said was when he was chasing me through the woods. He was calling me, only not by my name. He called me Venora.”
Mason blinked and looked at me. “Was that in the report?”
I shrugged and looked at Amy. “Was it? Did you tell the cops that?”
“I think so.”
“Either way, it bears looking into,” Mason said. “Thanks a lot, Amy. Remember not to say anything about this to anyone. Not even your mother.”
“Please, if I told my mother it would be on America’s Most Wanted by tomorrow. That woman is better networked than I am.”
* * *
Jacob Kravitz lived in an apartment above a tattoo place on Washington Avenue in Endicott, one of what we locals call the Triple Cities, the other two being Binghamton and Johnson City.
I’ve had Manhattanites tell me that all three combined don’t really qualify as a single “city,” but it works for us. We’ve got the river. We invented Spiedies, bits of chicken marinated in our own Spiedie sauce, served on sub rolls with cheese and other tasty toppings. Hell, we even have our annual blowout, the Spiedie-fest. And we’re on the Best Small Cities in America list.
Washington Avenue is a funny place. It’s got the highest-end salon we can lay claim to and drug deals going down on the sidewalk outside. It’s got a Greek diner where customers come to get a whole meal for five bucks and park their Mercedes out back. It’s got local celebs strutting up one side of the sidewalk and pants-falling-off gangbangers on the other.
We went through the front door and up a set of steep stairs to Jake’s apartment door, rapped on it and waited.
“You lookin’ for me?”
We both turned toward the guy who was at the bottom of the stairs, standing in the open door, a plastic grocery bag dangling from one hand and a six-pack of Genesee beer in the other. I sized him up visually, which was becoming way more automatic than I liked. I pick up more about people non-visually.
He was tall. Even from up here I could tell he was taller than Mason. Maybe six-three, six-four. He had Frampton Comes Alive! hair (I’d seen Amy’s classic vinyl collection) and a rugged unshaven thing going on. Wore jeans and an army-green coat with about fifty pockets, despite that it was a sixty-degree afternoon.
“If you’re Jake Kravitz,” Mason said.
“I am.” He came up the stairs, tucking the beer under one arm and then fishing a set of keys out of one of the coat’s pockets. When he reached the top and inserted the key in the lock, he said, “You look like a cop.” Then he looked at me. “And you don’t.”
“That’s ’cause I’m not. But you’re good. How could you tell he’s a cop?”
He shrugged and opened his door, then waved an arm at us to enter ahead of him, so we did. The place was a hole. Sofa with a blanket over it to hide the worn spots and stains, assuming the rest of it matched the arms. Linoleum floors so old the pattern was worn off. A fat-ass-style TV set sitting on the middle of a wooden card table that was sagging a little under its weight. An open door revealed an unmade bed and scattered clothes on the bedroom floor. He walked into a kitchen with appliances that were almost old enough to qualify as retro, dropped the bag on the Formica table, took a can of beer out of the sixer and slung the rest into the ancient fridge.
He did not offer us one.
“So what do you want?”
“Wanted to talk to you about Stephanie Mattheson,” Mason said.
“And to know how you knew he was a cop,” I added, because I thought there was something there. He didn’t like cops. It felt like he, big guy that he was, was shrinking into himself on the inside, where it didn’t show. On the outside he wasn’t revealing a thing, subconsciously making himself bigger. Like an animal in defense mode. I wondered if I could close my eyes without being obvious. My inner senses worked better when I drew the shades.
He shifted his gaze to me only for a second, then it went right back to Mason. “What about her?” he asked, ignoring my question completely.
It pissed me off a little, frankly.
“When’s the last time you heard from her?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. A couple of years ago. Something like that.” Then he popped the top on his beer can and took a slug.
I felt the lie, but that was cheating. I already knew the truth.
“Her cell phone says different,” Mason told him.
I walked a few steps away, to the window that looked down onto Washington Avenue, parted the curtain like I was looking out and closed my eyes.
“If you think you already know, then why waste time asking me?”
“Because I want to hear it from you,” Mason told him.
“She’s been calling,” he said after a brief pause. “I haven’t been answering. I haven’t called back. I haven’t talked to her in a couple of years. Just like I said.”
And that was the truth. But he was nervous as hell. I could feel it radiating from him. I said, “It’s kind of important, Jake. She’s missing.” Just so I could feel his reaction to that.
And I did. I felt a pulse of something big. Shock? Surprise? Concern? Or was it fear that we were on to him?
“What do you mean, missing?”
I stayed right where I was. Mason would read his face, his body language. I was reading his emotions. And they were all over the place.
“Missing. As in, no one knows where the hell she is,” Mason said. “Unless you know. Do you?”
“She’s missing?”
“Her father thinks she’s probably run off.”
“She’s blind. Where the hell is she gonna run off to?”
“How do you know she’s blind, Jake?” Mason asked. “Her family kept it pretty quiet.”
He walked a few steps, set his beer down. I heard all that. “We still have a few friends in common. I heard about it.”
He still cares about her, I thought. I could feel it beneath the words.
“I don’t know where she is. I wasn’t lying. I haven’t talked to her in a couple of years. And I didn’t know she was missing.” I had the feeling he was telling the truth, and then he got all tense again. “You’re here because you think I had something to do with...with whatever happened to her, aren’t you?”
“We’re not sure anything’s happened to her,” Mason told him. “I saw your name on her outgoing calls and thought I oughta talk to you, since her father said you two ran off together a few years back. It’s that simple.”
I turned from the window, ’cause my senses had given me a big clue. “You don’t like him much, do you?”
“Who?” Jake knew exactly who I meant. He picked up his beer, turning his back to me as he did.
“Stevie’s father. Judge Howie.”
He just shrugged. “I don’t have any contact with the man.”
“But you did. Two years ago when you and Stevie ran off together. Right? I’m sure he threw a fit about that.”
“Threw a fit?” He frowned and turned to look at me. I totally got that he was searching for something in my face. Then he quickly schooled his expression into a mask. “I don’t have anything to do with him. And I don’t know where Stevie is. I hope she’s okay. And I really have to get ready for work now.”
I couldn’t tell if that was sincere or not. The man had closed up tight, was keeping everything inside and showing us the door. Literally. He went to the door and opened it.
Mason sighed, and I knew he was disappointed. “Call me if you hear from her, okay?” He handed the guy a card.
Jake took it from him but didn’t even look at it. “Sure.”
I didn’t believe him.
I waited until we were back on the sidewalk in the bright afternoon sunshine to say, “Something happened between him and Judge Howie. Something big enough that he thought we already knew about it. You need to find out what it was.”
Mason nodded. “I think the guy has a record.”
“Really? I didn’t get that at all. How did you—”
“You get a feel for it after a while. People who’ve done time almost carry the scent of it. I’ll run him through the system, see what pops up. Should’ve done that first, but I figured the judge would’ve told me if there was anything.” He looked at me. “What else did you get?”
“I think he still cares about her. And he was either surprised to hear she was missing or surprised that we were there asking him about it.” We got to the car, Mason’s big black beast. I opened the passenger-side door and had to heft my bulldog out of the way to make room on the seat. Her loud snoring broke into aggravated bursts and she opened one eye, but other than that, she didn’t break nap. “When do we get to talk to the other boyfriend? The current one? What’s his name again? James Tiberius?”
Mason got behind the wheel and started her up. “Mitchell Kirk,” he corrected, deadpan. My Star Trek reference went right over his head. He wasn’t a Trekkie like me. “Tomorrow night at the chief’s anniversary party.”
“He knows the chief?”
“He’s his nephew.”
“Oh. I did not know that. The plot thickens.” I relaxed in my seat and watched the city pass by as he headed for the highway. Ten minutes and we were back on 17, heading for 81.
“So what now?” I asked after riding in silence for a little bit longer.
“I take you home and head back to HQ to tell Chief Sub what we’ve found so far. See if he’s ready to make this thing official yet.”
A big sigh rushed out of me before I could prevent it, catching me by surprise. He shot me a look. “What?”
“I don’t know.” I frowned. “I think that was me being disappointed that our day hanging out together is over. Weird, huh?”
Mason’s grin made his dimple flash at me. It was a more potent weapon than his stupid handgun. “I enjoyed it, too. It’s like old times, huh?”
“Old times meaning the last time a serial killer was after us? Pretty sad when I’m missing those sorts of good ol’ days.”
“Are you?” he asked.
I shrugged, because I didn’t want to get too deep or stupid. “I think if I wrote a book about you, the title would be Meets, Screws and Leaves.”
“Is that literary humor or a serious complaint?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Never mind.”
He eased into the left lane, then pressed the pedal down. He had a big, loud motor in the Beast, and even I got a little thrill when he made it roar. The nose end of the thing literally rose a little as the powerful engine kicked up a notch. I had discovered that the sighted Rachel was a little bit of a motor-head. I drove a convertible T-Bird that was a modern homage to the classic 1955 model, and I loved it. I had to admit, the ’74 Monte Carlo was growing on me, too.
A little.
As he merged onto 81, he said, “Jeremy has a home game tonight. You should come.”
I looked at him fast. “I wasn’t hinting around for an invitation.”
“Shit, Rachel, you don’t hint around for anything.”
“It’s fine, we have the party tomorrow night. Don’t overdo it or I’ll get sick of you.”
“I was going to ask you anyway. Josh has been griping that he never gets to see your potbellied pig anymore.”
“Hey!” I punched him in the shoulder and hoped it hurt. “Fine, my gorgeous, sweet-smelling, damn near svelte bulldog and I will be there. What time?”
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