never wanted anything more in my life, he thought. Nothing must spoil it for us, and I’m so afraid something might. Then he relaxed and laughed aloud as he thought of what his father’s reaction would be to that kind of negative thinking.
As dear cousin Franklin said, he thought, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
19
L ate Wednesday afternoon and long into the night, grim-faced NYU students, scattered throughout Greenwich Village and SoHo, were taping posters on storefronts and telephone poles and trees in the hope that someone might recognize Lisa “Leesey” Andrews and provide information that would lead to her recovery.
The photo that her roommate had taken only a few days earlier of a smiling Leesey, the statistics of her height and weight, the address of the Woodshed, the time she left it, her home address where she was presumed to have been heading, and the fifty thousand dollars reward offered by her father and Nicholas DeMarco were all included on the poster.
“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
J ackie 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.
