“Tell you what, Detective. I’m going to ask you to leave because I know answering your questions will bring me no closer to finding my daughter.”

He looked at me. “You sure about that?”

“Kindly get the hell out of my house. Now.”

“Suit yourself.” Regan started for the door. When we reached it, he asked, “Where’s Rachel Mills?”

“Don’t know.”

“She’s not here?”

“Nope.”

“No idea at all where she could be?”

“I think she’s on her way back to Washington.”

“Hmm. How do you two know each other?”

“Good night, Detective.”

“Okay, sure. But one last question.”

I stifled a sigh. “You’ve watched too many episodes ofColumbo , Detective.”

“Indeed I have.” He smiled. “But let me ask it anyway.”

I spread my hands for him to go ahead.

“Do you know how her husband died?”

“He was shot,” I said too quickly, and immediately regretted it. He leaned a little more into my space and kept on me.

“And do you know who shot him?”

I stood without moving.

“Do you, Marc?”

“Good night, Detective.”

“She killed him, Marc. A bullet to the head at close range.”

“That,” I said, “is a load of bull.”

“Is it? I mean, are you sure?”

“If she killed him, why isn’t she in jail?”

“Good question,” Regan said, backing down the walkway. When he reached the end of the walkway, he added, “Maybe you should ask her.”

Chapter 26

Rachel was inthe garage. She looked up at me. She suddenly looked small, I thought. And I saw fear in her face. The car trunk was open. I moved toward the driver-side door.

“What did he want?” she asked.

“What you said.”

“He knew about the CD?”

“He knew we’d been at MVD. He didn’t say anything about the CD.”

I slid into the car. She let it drop. Now was not the time to raise any new issues. We both knew that. But again I questioned my judgment here. My wife had been murdered. So had my sister. Someone had tried very hard to kill me. Stripping it bare, I was trusting a woman I really didn’t know. I was trusting her not only with my life, but with my daughter’s. How stupid when you think about it. Lenny had been right. It was not so simple. In truth, I had no idea who she was or what she’d become. I had deluded myself into making her something she might not be, and now I wondered what it might cost me.

Her voice cut through my haze. “Marc?”

“What?”

“I still think you should wear the bulletproof vest.”

“No.”

My tone was firmer than I’d wanted. Or maybe not. Rachel climbed into the trunk and closed it. I put the duffel bag with the money on the seat next to me. I hit the garage-door opener under the sun-visor and started the car.

We were on our way.

When Tickner was nine years old, his mother bought him a book of optical illusions. You’d look at a drawing of, say, an old lady with a big nose. You’d look a little longer and then, poof, it appeared now to be a young woman with her head turned. Tickner had loved the book. When he got a little older, he moved on to those Magic Eyes, staring for however long it took for the horsey or whatever to appear in the swirling colors. Sometimes it would take a long time. You’d even start to wonder if there was anything there at all. And then, suddenly, the image surfaced.

That was what was happening here.

There were moments in a case, Tickner knew, that altered everything—just like those old optical illusions. You are viewing one reality and then, with a gentle tilt, reality changes. Nothing is as it appeared.

He had never really bought the conventional theories on the Seidman murder-kidnapping. They all felt too much like reading a book with missing pages.

Over the years, Tickner had not dealt with that many murders. They were, for the most part, left to the local cops. But he knew plenty of homicide investigators. The best ones were always off center, overly theatrical, ridiculously imaginative. Tickner had heard them talk about a point in the case where the victim “reaches out” from the grave. The victim “talks” to them somehow, pointing them toward the killer. Tickner would listen to his nonsense and nod politely. It always sounded like a load of hyperbole, just one of those meaningless things cops say because the general public laps it up.

The printer still whirred. Tickner had seen twelve photos already.

“How many more?” he asked.

Dorfman looked at the computer screen. “Six more.”

“Same as these?”

“Pretty much, yeah. I mean, same person.”

Tickner stared down at the photographs. Yes, the same person was featured in all of them. They were all in black and white, all taken without the subject knowing, probably from a distance with a zoom lens.

The reach-from-the-grave stuff—it no longer sounded so silly. Monica Seidman had been dead for eighteen months. Her murderer had gone free. And now, with all hope lost, she seemed to have risen from the dead to point a finger. Tickner looked again and tried to understand.

The subject of the pictures, the person Monica Seidman was pointing at, was Rachel Mills.

When you take the eastern spur of the New Jersey Turnpike north, the night skyline of Manhattan beckons. Like most people who see it nearly every day, I used to take it for granted. No more. For a while afterward, I thought I could still see the Towers. It was as though they were bright lights I’d stared at for a long time, so that even when I closed my eyes, their images were still there, imbedded. But like any sunspot, the images eventually began to fade. It is different now. When I drive this route, I still make myself look for them. Even tonight. But sometimes I forget precisely where those towers stood. And that angers me more than I can express.

Out of habit, I took the lower level of the George Washington Bridge. There was no traffic at this hour. I drove through the E-ZPass. I had managed to keep myself distracted. I flipped stations between two talk radio shows. One was a sports station where lots of guys named Vinny from Bayside called up and complained about inept coaches and how much better they’d be at the job. The other station featured two beyond-puerile Howard Stern rip-offs who thought it was funny for a college freshman to call his mother and tell her he had testicular cancer. Both were, if not entertaining, mildly distracting.




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