“More information than we usually give, but we’re pulling out all the stops,” Captain Larry Ahearn told Leesey’s brother at nine o’clock Wednesday night. “But, Gregg, I’m going to be fair with you. Truth is, if Leesey was abducted, every hour that passes lessens our chances of finding her alive and safe.”
“I know that.” Gregg Andrews had gone down to headquarters after giving his father a strong sedative and making him go to bed in the guest room of his apartment. “Larry, I feel so damn helpless. What can I do?” He slumped in his chair.
Captain Ahearn leaned across his desk toward Gregg, his expression sober. “You can be a crutch for your father and take care of your patients in the hospital. Leave the rest of it to us, Gregg.”
Gregg did his best to look reassured. “I’ll try.” He got up slowly, as if every move was an effort. He reached for the door of Ahearn’s office, then turned back. “Larry, you said, ‘if Leesey was abducted.’ Please don’t waste your time thinking that she would deliberately put us through this agony.”
Gregg opened the door and came face-to-face with Roy Barrott, who was about to knock on the door of his boss’s office. Barrott had heard Andrews’s statement and realized it echoed what Carolyn MacKenzie had said about her brother in this same office two days earlier. Pushing aside that comparison, he greeted Andrews, then stepped into Ahearn’s office.
“The tapes are finished,” he said briefly. “Want to look at them now, Larry?”
“Yes, I do,” Ahearn said, looking at Gregg’s retreating figure. “Do you think there’s any benefit in having her brother look at them with us?”
Barrott turned swiftly to follow Ahearn’s line of sight. “Maybe there is. I’ll grab him before he gets to the elevator.”
Barrott caught Gregg as he was punching the elevator button and asked if he’d accompany them down the hall to the tech room. Barrott explained, “Dr. Andrews, the tapes taken Monday night by the security cameras at the Woodshed have been enhanced, frame by frame, to try to pick out anyone who seemed particularly close to Leesey on the dance floor or who was among the last to leave the club.”
Without speaking, Gregg nodded, then followed Barrott and Ahearn into the tech room and took a chair. As the tape ran, Barrott, who had already studied it twice, briefed him and Captain Ahearn on the contents.
“Except for the friends she was sitting with all night, nothing we have seems to show anything significant. The friends all agree that Leesey was with them except for the fifteen minutes she was with DeMarco at his table or when she was on the dance floor. After the rest of her group left at two A.M., the only time she sat at a table was when the band started to pack up. The place had thinned out by then, so we have a couple of pretty clear shots of her until she exited alone.”
“Can you go back to that shot of her at the table?” Gregg asked. Watching his sister on tape sent a wave of sadness through him.
“Sure.” Barrott rewound the tape in the VCR. “Do you see anything that we’ve missed, Doctor?” he asked, trying to keep his voice noncommittal.
“Leesey’s expression. When she was dancing, she was smiling. Look at her now. She looks so pensive, so sad.” He paused. “Our mother died two years ago, and Leesey’s had a hard time struggling with that grief.”
“Gregg, do you think that her state of mind would cause her to have a temporary amnesia or anxiety attack that would make her run away?” Ahearn’s question was penetrating and demanded a straight answer. “Is that a possibility?”
Gregg Andrews raised his hands and pressed his temples as though trying to stimulate his thought processes. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I just don’t know.” He hesitated, then continued, “But if I had to stake my life, and Leesey’s life, on it, I would say it didn’t happen that way.”
Barrott fast-forwarded the VCR. “All right. In that last hour, whenever the camera scans her, she never has a glass in her hand, which backs up what the waiter and bartender told us, that she only had a couple of glasses of wine all night and wasn’t drunk when she left.” He turned off the VCR. “Nothing,” he said in disgust.
Gregg Andrews got up. His voice strained, he said, “I’ll go home now. I have surgery in the morning and I need to catch some sleep.”
Barrott waited till he was out of earshot, then stood and stretched. “I wouldn’t mind catching some sleep myself, but I’m going to the Woodshed.”
“Do you think DeMarco will show up there tonight?” Ahearn asked.
“My guess is that he will. He knows our guys are going to be swarming all over the place. And he’s smart enough to know that it will be a big night for him. Plenty of customers will want to get in, out of curiosity, and of course the minor-league so-called celebrities will flock to the place knowing the media will be around. Trust me. The maggots will gather.”
“Of course they will.” Ahearn stood up. “I don’t know if you’ve checked since you got back, but the track we have on Leesey’s cell phone shows whoever has it has been moving around in Manhattan all day. DeMarco only got back from South Carolina late this morning, so if he did it, he has someone in New York working with him.”
“It would be nice to think that girl went off the deep end, and she’s the one who’s running around Manhattan,” Barrott commented, as he reached for his jacket. “But I don’t think that’s the way it’s going to turn out. I think whoever grabbed her has already dumped her somewhere and is smart enough to know that when the cell phone is on, we can target that area and start searching there.”
“And smart enough to know that by moving her cell phone around, it leaves open the door that she’s alive.” Ahearn looked thoughtful. “We’ve checked out DeMarco so thoroughly that we know when he lost his baby teeth. Nothing in his background suggests he’d try something like this.”
“Did our guys find anything in the files of the other three girls who disappeared?”
“Nothing that we haven’t investigated into the ground. We’re checking out the credit card receipts from Monday night to see if we can match any patrons of the Woodshed to the names we have of the people who were in the bars in those cases.”
“Uh-huh. Okay, see you, Larry.”
Ahearn studied Barrott’s face. “You’ve got someone in mind besides DeMarco, haven’t you, Roy?”
“I’m not sure. Let me think about it,” Barrott said vaguely. But Ahearn could see that Barrott was focused on something.
20
Jackie Reynolds has been my closest friend since the first grade, when we attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart together as six-year-olds. She’s one of the smartest people I know, as well as a gifted athlete. Jackie can hit a golf ball so hard that it would make Tiger Woods blink. The September after we graduated from Columbia, we drove to Duke together. While I was studying law, she was working for a doctorate in psychology.
She has that unmistakable look of the born athlete, tall and firm-bodied, with long chestnut hair that, as often as not, is held together at the nape of her neck with a rubber band. Her extraordinary brown eyes are her dominant feature. They exude warmth and sympathy and make people want to confide in her. I always tell her that she should give cut rates to her patients. “You don’t have to drag their problems out of them, Jackie. They walk through your door and spill their guts.”
We talk frequently on the phone and get together every few weeks. It used to be even more often, but now Jackie is getting pretty serious about the guy she’s been dating for the past year. Ted Sawyer is a lieutenant in the fire department and a genuinely top-drawer person. He intends to be fire commissioner of New York someday, then run for mayor, and I’d bet my bottom dollar that he’ll do both.
Jackie has always been worried about how little interest I’ve shown in dating. She correctly attributed my lack of interest to the fact that I’ve felt emotionally burned out. Tonight, if the subject came up, I intended to reassure her that I am now actively working to put all that inertia behind me.
We met at
Il Mulino, our favorite pasta place in the Village. Over linguine with clam sauce and a glass of pinot grigio, I told her about Mack’s phone call and the note he left in the collection basket.
“ ‘Uncle Devon, tell Carolyn she must not look for me,’ ” Jackie repeated. “I’m sorry, Carolyn, but if Mack did write that note, it suggests to me that he may be in some kind of trouble,” she said quietly. “If he weren’t under stress and just wanted to be left alone, I think he would have written, ‘Please don’t look for me,’ or simply, ‘Carolyn, leave me alone.’ ”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. The more I look at the note and think about it, the more I sense desperation.”
I told Jackie about going to see Detective Barrott. “He practically showed me the door,” I said. “He wasn’t interested in the note. He gave me the impression that if Mack wanted to be left alone, I should respect his wishes. So I started my own investigation by meeting with the superintendents of Mack’s apartment building.”
She listened to my description of the meeting, interrupting only to query me about Mrs. Kramer. “You say she seemed nervous when you talked to her?”
“She was nervous, and she kept looking over to her husband for approval, as if she wanted to make sure she had given the right answers. Then they both changed their story in midstream about the last time they saw Mack and what he was wearing.”
“Memory is notoriously inaccurate, especially after ten years,” Jackie said slowly. “If I were you, I’d try to see Mrs. Kramer when her husband isn’t around.”
I made a mental note, then told her about my second conversation with Detective Barrott. Jackie hadn’t realized that my studio is right next door to the building where Leesey Andrews lived. I told her about Detective Barrott meeting me there and that I felt there was something behind his wanting to stay in touch with me.
The expression in Jackie’s eyes changed. I could read deepening concern in them. “I’ll bet Detective Barrott wishes he had taken that note from you,” she said vehemently. “I’ll bet he’ll get around to asking you for it soon.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
“Carolyn, have you forgotten about the missing persons cases that were in the news just before Mack disappeared? That a bunch of Columbia guys, including Mack, were in the bar in SoHo where that first girl who disappeared had been hanging out? That was just a few weeks before Mack himself vanished.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “But why would that be relevant now?”
“Because you’ve handed the D.A.’s office a possible suspect. Mack doesn’t want you to find him, which, as I just suggested, could mean that he may be in some kind of trouble. Or it could mean that he is the trouble. He called your mother on Sunday and left the note in the collection basket later in the morning. Suppose Mack decided to check out where you now live, maybe to warn you away again. Your address at the apartment is listed in the phone book. Suppose he came by early Tuesday morning and spotted Leesey Andrews on the street walking home. I’ll bet that’s the way your Detective Barrott is adding things up.”
“Jackie, are you crazy?” I began, but the words died in my throat. I was desperately afraid that she had analyzed Barrott’s thinking process correctly. In his eyes, and because of me, my missing brother may have become a person of interest in the disappearance of Leesey Andrews, and perhaps of the young woman who vanished ten years ago, only weeks before he did.
Then, in utter dismay, I remembered that not one but three young women had vanished in these ten years before Leesey Andrews failed to return home.
In his wildest dreams, could Barrott possibly be beginning to believe that if Mack is alive he may have become a serial killer?
21
Sometimes the best thing about the moment he took a life was when the scent of fear reached his nostrils. They knew they were going to die, and at that point they stammered out a few words.
One of them asked, “Why?”
Another whispered a prayer, “Lord, receive . . . me . . .”
A third tried to break away, then spat an obscenity at him.
The youngest pleaded with him, “Don’t, please don’t.”
He ached to go back to the Woodshed tonight, to listen to everything they were saying there. It was amusing to watch the plainclothes detectives at work. He could spot them a mile away. Their eyelids always had a hooded look because they were trying to conceal the fact that their bright little eyes were darting around the room.
An hour ago in Brooklyn, he had phoned the number they had on the poster, using one of his unsubscribed phones and prepaid phone cards. He’d made his voice sound excited, and said, “I just left Peter Luger’s Restaurant. I saw that girl, Leesey Andrews, having dinner with some guy there.” Then he turned off both that cell phone and Leesey’s cell phone and hurried into the subway.
He could just imagine the way the cops must have swarmed over there, disrupting the place, annoying the diners, querying the waiters. . . . By now they’ve probably decided that it was just another nutcase calling. I wonder how many crazies have called in to say they’ve seen Leesey, he wondered. But only one person saw her. Me!
But the family wouldn’t be sure that it was a crank call. The family never is sure until they see a body. Don’t count on it, family. If you don’t believe me, have a chat with the relatives of the other girls.
He turned on the television to catch the eleven o’clock news. As he’d expected, the breaking news story was being reported opposite the Woodshed. There were crowds of people lined up trying to get into the place. A reporter was saying, “The tip that police received that Leesey Andrews was seen having dinner at a restaurant in Brooklyn has been largely discounted.”
He was disappointed that the police had not released the information about the tracking of her cell phone in Brooklyn. But later on, I’ll take Leesey’s cell phone to Thompson Street for a quick visit, he thought. That will really drive them crazy—thinking she might be being held so near her home.
He almost laughed out loud.
22
It was Friday afternoon before I heard from Nick DeMarco. As luck would have it, when my cell phone rang, I was standing just inside the open door of the Sutton Place apartment, saying good-bye to Mom.
Elliott had just arrived to take her to Teterboro Airport, where she would join the Clarences to fly on their private jet to Corfu, in the Greek islands, where their yacht was anchored.
Elliott’s chauffeur had carried the luggage down the hall and was pressing for the elevator. In another thirty seconds they all would have been gone, but I flipped open the phone automatically. I could have bitten off my tongue after I said, “Hello, Nick.” Instantly alert, there was no question that both Mom and Elliott guessed it was Nick DeMarco. The statement he gave at a news conference, expressing his deep regret that Leesey Andrews may have met a predator at his club, had been broadcast and rebroadcast in the forty-eight hours since he had made it late Wednesday afternoon.
“Carolyn, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner,” Nick said. “As you can understand it’s been pretty hectic these past few days. What’s your schedule? Are you free to get together this evening or sometime tomorrow?”
I turned slightly away, taking a step back toward the living room. “This evening would be fine,” I said quickly, aware that Elliott and Mom were staring at me. They reminded me of the game “Statues” that we used to play when I was about ten years old. Whoever was the leader swung the others around by the hand, and after she let go, you had to stay frozen in exactly the position you were in when you stopped spinning. The one who could last the longest without twitching a muscle was the winner.
Mom’s body was rigid, her hand on the doorknob, and Elliott, holding Mom’s carry-on bag, was standing statue-like in the vestibule. I wanted to tell Nick I’d call him back but was afraid to let the chance pass to confirm a meeting with him.
“Where will you be?”
“The S
utton Place apartment,” I told him.
“I’ll pick you up there. Seven o’clock, okay?”
“Fine.” We both clicked off.
Mom had a worried frown on her face. “Was that Nick DeMarco? Why on earth is he calling you, Carolyn?”
“I called him on Wednesday.”
“Why would you do that?” Elliott asked, his tone puzzled. “You haven’t had any contact with him since your father’s funeral, have you?”
I combined a couple of truths and twisted them into an untruth. “I had a serious crush on Nick years ago. Maybe it’s still lingering a bit. When I saw him on TV, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to phone him and express my concern that Leesey Andrews disappeared after leaving his club. Result—he phoned!”
I saw an expression of cautious relief on my mother’s face. “I always enjoyed Nick when he came to dinner with Mack. And I know he’s been very successful.”
“He certainly seems to have done very well these past ten years,” Elliott agreed. “As I remember, his parents had some sort of storefront restaurant. But I must say I don’t envy him the publicity he’s getting now.” Then he touched my mother’s arm. “Olivia, we must get started. As it is, we’re going to hit all the rush hour traffic, and the Lincoln Tunnel will be a nightmare.”
My mother is famous for leaving at the last minute and counting on all the traffic lights to be turning green to make smooth her path. At this moment, I found myself comparing Elliott’s gentle reminder with my father’s reaction, if he had been here.
“Liv, for God’s sake, we’re getting a free ride to Greece. Let’s not miss it!” would have been his way of hurrying her out.