She reached the door while Tina was still on the second landing, opened it, then came out again and pressed her nose through the guardrail. 'Mom?'
'What, honey?' she asked, hiking the bags up onto her shoulder.
'Somebody made a big mess. Is Dad home?'
At first, when she dropped the bags and galloped that last flight, she was consumed by an inexplicable surge of hope. Lies or not, Milo had come home. Then she saw that the drawers in the table by the entrance had been pulled out and turned over, leaving a pile of loose change, bus tickets, takeout menus, and keys on the floor. The mirror over the table had been taken down and turned to face the wall, and the loose backing paper had been ripped off.
She told Stephanie to wait in the hall while she examined each room. Destruction, as if an elephant had been mistakenly let in. She even thought:
So she called the number Simmons had left and listened to her calm voice insisting that this wasn't her doing, and she would be right over, and please don't touch anything.
'Don't touch anything,' Tina called as she hung up, but Stephanie wasn't in the hall. 'Little Miss? Where are you?'
'In the bathroom,' came the irritable answer.
How much more of this could Stephanie take? How much could she take? She hadn't told Stef about the sudden expansion of her family, the addition of a great-grandfather and a new grandfather she'd met in Disney World, but Stephanie was nobody's fool. In the hotel room this morning she'd started asking, 'Who were you talking to in the old people's home?'
Tina, unable to keep lying to her own daughter, just said, 'Someone who might know something about your daddy.'
'Something to help him?' Despite having never been told, she knew Milo was in some kind of trouble.
'Something like that.'
Tina took her out for Cokes at Sergio's, a pizza joint, and called Patrick. He sounded sober and clearheaded, so she asked him to come over.
He arrived before Simmons, and together the three of them returned to the apartment. The least-demolished room was Stephanie's, so they let her sort through her things while Tina told Patrick everything. Absolutely everything. By the time Simmons arrived, Patrick was in a state. Even during the height of his jealousy, he'd suspected none of this. Now he had to comfort Tina, who kept breaking down in tears. When Simmons stepped through the door, he turned on her.
'Don't tell us you didn't do it, okay? Because we know you did. Who else would've done it?'
Simmons ignored the blustering man and ranged through the apartment, stopping to smile and say hello to Stephanie, then took photos of each room with a little Canon. She stood in corners for multiple angles and crouched beside the disassembled television, the shattered vases (gifts, Tina explained, from her parents), the sliced sofa cushions, the small broken strongbox that had only held some family jewelry, though none of it had been taken.
'Anything missing?' Simmons asked again.
'Nothing.' That, in itself, was depressing enough-after all this mess, no one had deemed her possessions worthy of stealing.
'Okay.' Simmons straightened. 'I've documented it all. Now it's time to clean up.'
They got to work with broom and dustpan and Hefty bags Simmons had picked up from a convenience store. While she was squatting beside a broken mirror, picking up dozens of partial reflections of herself, she said, 'Tina?' in her most friendly voice.
Tina was behind the television, trying to screw the rear panel back on. 'Yeah?'
'You said some Company people came a few days ago. Two days before I visited. Remember?'
'Yeah.'
Simmons walked over to the television, ignoring Patrick's accusing stare as he swept up shards of glass and pottery. 'How do you know they were Company?'
Tina let the screwdriver drop to the floor and wiped her forehead with her wrist. 'What do you mean?'
'Did they say they were Company, or did you just assume it?'
'They told me.'
'Show you any ID?'
Tina thought about that, then nodded. 'At the door, yes. One was Jim Pearson, the other was… Max Something. I can't remember his last name. Something Polish, I think.'
'What did they ask you about?'
'You know what they asked about, Special Agent.'
'No, actually. I don't.'
Tina came out from behind the television while Patrick looked for the best defiant pose. By the time Tina settled on the sofa, he had found it: He moved behind her, a hand on each shoulder. 'Do you really need to interrogate her again?'
'Maybe,' Simmons said. She took the chair across from the sofa, the same place she'd sat during their first interview here. 'Tina, it may be nothing, but I'd really like to know what kinds of questions they asked.'
'You think they're the ones who did this?'
'Maybe, yes.'
Tina thought about it. 'Well, they started with the usual. Where was Milo? And they wanted to know what Milo had told me in Austin.'
'When he asked you to leave with him,' Simmons said encouragingly.
Tina nodded. 'I told them the other Company people had already been through that-your people, too-but they said maybe I'd forgotten something that would help them. They were actually pretty nice about it all. Like high school career counselors. One of them-Jim Pearson-he went down a list of items to see if anything rang a bell for me.'
'He had a list?'
'In a little spiral notebook. Names, mostly. Names of people I didn't know. Except one.”
“Which one?'
'Ugrimov. Roman Ugrimov. You know, the Russian I told you about, from Venice. I had no idea why they'd bring him up now, so I dutifully said that I'd met him once, and that he'd killed a girl and I didn't like him. They asked when, I said 2001, and they said they didn't need to hear about it.' Tina shrugged.
'What other names?'
'Foreign names, mostly. Rolf… Winter, or something like that.'
'Vinterberg?'
'Yeah. And some, I guess, Scottish name. Fitzhugh.”
“Terence Fitzhugh?'
Again, Tina nodded. The look on Simmons's face encouraged her to go on. 'When I said I didn't know anything about him, who he was or otherwise, they didn't believe me. I don't know why. It was all right that I didn't know Vinterberg, but Fitzhugh?' She shook her head. 'That, they didn't buy. They said things like, Milo didn't tell you anything about Fitzhugh and some money? I said no. They kept pushing. At one point, Jim Pearson said, What about Fitzhugh in Geneva, with the minister of- But Max hit him in the arm and he never got around to finishing the question. Finally, once they saw I was really annoyed, they packed up their shit and left.'
While she'd been talking, Simmons had again produced her BlackBerry. She was typing. 'Jim Pearson and Max…'
'I don't know.'
'But they had Company IDs.'
'Yeah. They looked fine to me. I know Milo's pretty well-it keeps ending up in the wash.'
'And they never said why they were asking about Fitzhugh?'
Tina shook her head. 'I got the feeling Max thought they were saying too much.' She paused. 'You really think those are the guys who made this mess? They annoyed me, but I wouldn't expect this from them.'
'Like I said, Tina. It wasn't Homeland. I'd have heard about it.”
