said, “He’s come for me again. I’ll never escape him now. He’ll eat my young… swallow them whole. And me as well. You can’t stop him. No one can.”
chapter three
The temperature in the offices of Mark, Striker and Strong seemed to drop ten degrees when Eleanor Ross pushed through the glass doors. Even from a distance, she had the stern demeanor of a warden and about as much charm. Her long, black cashmere coat was buttoned to the neck and its hem skirted the floor. Dark red lipstick made her face appear paler than a live woman should want. In her proud chin and unsmiling mouth, she carried with her the air of authority that money afforded and the attitude that any deviation from her wishes would result in a beheading.
She was familiar to Jeffrey Mark and he watched her with interest through the glass wall of his office, through which he could see out but those in the waiting area could not see in. It took a few seconds to place her. He had just figured it out when the intercom buzzer on his phone sounded.
“Jeff, there’s an Eleanor Ross here to see Lydia,” announced Rebecca, the firm’s receptionist, who was also a student at John Jay College studying for her master’s in forensic science. “I told her Lydia was out and she asked to see you.”
“Give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”
He had just turned off the television in his office after watching the footage of Julian Ross being rolled out of her Park Avenue building in a stretcher. He remembered her well from ten years ago, and he was not surprised to learn that she was under suspicion again. The only surprise was that it had taken so long. He spun around in his black leather desk chair and looked out over the city, trying to stitch together the fragments of his memory.
The murder of Tad Jenson, Julian’s first husband, was never solved. Even after Julian Ross had been taken into custody and arraigned, Jeff’s good friend Ford McKirdy, the Ninth Precinct homicide detective working the case, couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t that Ford was crusading for her innocence as much as he’d just had a sense that there was more to it, that there was someone else involved. Ford’s superiors considered the case closed. So Ford had contacted Jeffrey and asked for his help, unofficially… not as an investigator but as a friend.
The night her first husband was murdered, Julian claimed that she had been painting in her studio at the far end of the loft, with the door closed and the music blaring. She claimed that she had come out of her studio around six o’clock to see what her husband wanted for dinner and found him brutally murdered. She dropped to her knees beside him in shock and picked up the knife that lay next to him. When the police broke down the door, responding to an anonymous 911 call, that was how they found her.
Ford had arrested Julian Ross because she had been found holding the murder weapon, covered in her husband’s blood, and there appeared to have been no one else at the scene. Only her prints were found on the weapon. The building doorman claimed that no one but Julian and Tad had entered the apartment that night. But something about it had never rested easily with Ford. He was convinced that there was another piece to the puzzle. So, even as Julian went to trial, he and Ford had tried to track down another suspect on Ford’s own time. For a number of reasons, Jeffrey and Ford both agreed that Julian at least had not worked alone. Turned out they were the same reasons that gave the jury enough reasonable doubt to acquit her.
A twenty-three-year-old heroin addict, Jetty Murphy, who had been shifting through the building garbage four floors down from Tad and Julian’s apartment, said he heard three voices, two male and one female. At one point, he heard an inhuman roar come from the window and a woman’s desperate scream. Then, minutes later, as he cowered behind the Dumpster, a giant figure with long hair looking like “some kind of homeless dude on steroids, man, like a real giant but super fast like Speed Racer,” burst from the building’s back door. Jetty claimed to have followed the figure to Prince Street, where the man just disappeared.
There were several long brown and gray hairs found at the scene. But they were never able to match those hairs to anyone Julian knew… friends, associates, neighbors. There were places in the gore where it appeared that someone had wiped something away, possibly foot- or handprints, and the cloth used to do so was never found.
Most compelling of all was Julian’s physical size. It seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that such a small woman would be capable of overpowering a man who outweighed her by a hundred pounds and was nearly a foot taller. Yet the beautiful NoHo loft had been nearly destroyed in the mortal struggle that ended in Julian, allegedly, overpowering Tad and stabbing him to death with a serrated kitchen knife. From the newscast he’d just heard, it sounded like Richard Stratton had met with a similar end, nearly decapitated, parted from his insides.
There had been enough evidence to suggest that someone else had been present; but not enough to figure out who it was or how he got in and out of the apartment that night.
Ford was a good man, with the instincts and tenacity of a bloodhound. He’d been given his nickname, short for Halford, by the other guys at the Ninth Precinct because he was solid and reliable, made of steel, and never said die. Jeff knew that over the years he’d never stopped asking questions about the Julian Ross case. It always came up on the rare occasions they managed to get together for a drink at McSorley’s on Fifth Street. The same place they used to get together nights and talk about the case when it was on, it seemed like the right place to have a beer and talk about old times.
“Remember the Tad Jenson case?” Ford would say with a shake of his head, filling the lull that followed after they’d talked about the job or his kids for a bit.
It was too romantic to say that the case haunted Ford, that it was the one that he never got over. But it was something Jeff knew Ford’s mind turned back to often enough that it niggled at him on those nights after he’d happen to read about Julian Ross in the paper or see her interviewed on television.
Jeffrey swiveled back around in his chair, picked up the phone, and left a message on Ford McKirdy’s voice mail. He called Lydia, then rose to usher Eleanor Ross into his office.
“Do you know why I’m here, Mr. Mark?” asked Eleanor as soon as Jeffrey had closed the door and she had seated herself in one of the two leather Eames chairs that sat across from his desk. Her voice was thin and shaky, with the rasp of a smoker. But he noted that she moved with the grace and strength of a dancer.
“I just turned off the news. I am sorry for your loss,” he said, leaning back on the edge of his desk in front of her, keeping his voice neutral but courteous, compassionate. “How can I help you?”
“I want you to find out who murdered my son-in-law,” she said, turning a cool stare on him.
He turned away from her and felt her eyes on his back as he walked around his desk and sat in his chair. He could smell just the lightest scent of her perfume. It was airy and floral and reminded him of a scent that Lydia wore.
“Which one?” he asked, placing the tips of his fingers together and finally returning her gaze. He had sensed that she was a woman accustomed to giving orders and he wanted it straight at the outset that he was a man not accustomed to obeying them.
She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be assessing him, taking in the details of his face, his clothes, like a boxer sizing up an opponent.
“Ten years ago, the police failed to do their job,” she said slowly, her voice flat. “I want to see that the same thing doesn’t happen again here.”
“Have you considered the possibility that it was the jury that didn’t do their job, Ms. Ross?”
Eleanor Ross’s face lost some of its hardness, seemed to crumble a bit as if she might cry. But Jeffrey had a hard time imagining that kind of emotion from the woman, would have been less surprised if tears fell from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty.
“I know how it looks, Jeff. Can I call you that?” she said, her voice suddenly becoming softer as she leaned toward him in her chair. When he nodded, she continued.
“But I know my daughter and I
“Do you have any idea who that person might be?”
He thought he saw a flicker there; something that passed in front of her ice blue eyes but was gone as quickly
