Smoke

“There are lots of things I don’t get, Detective. I’m sure you feel the same way.”

He sighed into the phone as his answer. “Can we stay in touch?” he asked. “Let me know if you get any more images?”

“Yeah, definitely. And if you identify her as your missing girl, please let me know right away. Maybe we can help each other.”

“It’s a deal.”

He hung up and waited a few more seconds, then checked for the email again. This time a little bell sounded and a message from Margie Swann appeared in his inbox. He clicked on the attachment and waited while the image filled his screen. It was very blurry, as if the shutter speed had been set too slow. Colorful costumes, streetlights, bizarre masks pulled like taffy, colors ran into one another. In the center, he could see the back of a painfully thin girl, running away from a white van. One leg stuck out of the door, a black pant leg ending in a black boot, obviously connected to someone who was about to give chase. The woman’s face was turned just slightly so that he caught the edge of her profile. Her head was shaved. There was no way to tell if it was Lily or not. Lily had long, dark curly hair. In the photographs he had of her, she was busty, very lush looking. Not heavy but certainly not emaciated the way the girl in the photograph was. If it was Lily, something had caused her appearance to alter dramatically. There was a frightening chaos to the photo, the masked faces adding a surreal quality to the image.

“What’s that?” asked Jesamyn, arriving at her desk.

“It’s an image from the Fiftieth Precinct in Riverdale. That shooting you called about.”

“Man, you are fast,” she said.

He tried not to notice the happy glow that seemed to be coming off of her. He knew that in a matter of days, that glow would turn to a pall. That was the way it was with her and Dylan. Euphoria to misery and back again. She came behind him, rested her weight on the back of his chair, and looked over his shoulder.

“It’s not her,” she said.

“How can you be sure?”

“That girl is twenty pounds thinner at least than Lily was in the bank on the 22nd. And no one with hair like Lily’s would ever shave it down to the skull. Lily’s a pretty girl. Pretty girls don’t make themselves ugly on purpose.”

“What if someone else made her ugly?”

“Kidnapped her, starved her, and shaved her head?”

The phrase was meant, he thought, to sound unlikely. But it hit him hard. Mount turned to look at her, feeling his stomach hollow out. He could tell by the look on her face that she had freaked herself out, too.

“Shit,” she said.

“What are you two doing?” Kepler. “I know for a fact that you have at least three more people on your reinterview list.”

“We’re on our way out right now,” said Jesamyn, turning to look at Kepler and blocking the screen from his view. Matt didn’t turn from the screen while Jesamyn gave Kepler a rundown of the reinterviews they had conducted the day before. Matt very quickly forwarded the email to Lydia Strong; she had left a business card in the jewel case of the CD she’d given him yesterday with her email address.

“Forwarded from the five-oh,” he wrote in the dialog box. “Click this link for the story attached to this photo.” He inserted a link he’d found to an article in the Journal-News.

“If this is our girl,” he wrote, “she really needs you. I don’t know what else I can do for her.”

Or what else can be done for her, he thought. Since the girl in this photo was supposedly shot three times in the back just moments after the picture was taken.

“I’m coming back in five minutes. Don’t let me find you here,” Kepler was saying to Jesamyn as Matt pressed SEND. He deleted the file from his sent-mail box and hoped it wouldn’t come down to having to worry about what the IT guys could take off the server. He stood quickly then to his full height and was happy to see Kepler take a step back. He took some satisfaction in knowing that Captain Kepler could be a piece of gum beneath his shoe if Matt were that kind of guy.

Lydia pushed the glass doors open, and Jeffrey carried the box in. The offices of Mark, Striker and Strong had the quiet hum of a busy space with good acoustics. The sound of it, the muffled voices, the muted ringing of the phone, still gave Jeffrey pleasure. It amazed him how it had grown since he started the agency in his one-bedroom apartment in the East Village. He and the firm’s two original partners, Jacob Hanley and Christian Striker, had started their private investigation firm nearly eight years ago, now. All former FBI men, they had become tired for their own reasons of the politics of the Bureau, sick of the paranoia about the public perception of the organization, and they’d decided they’d be more effective investigators on their own.

They’d started out with small cases-insurance fraud, husbands checking up on wives, some employee screening. Then, through their connections, they’d started working with the FBI and NYPD on cold cases, or cases where the police felt their hands were tied… in those cases, the firm’s involvement was strictly confidential.

It was Lydia and Jeffrey’s first official case together, the infamous Cheerleader Murders, which put Mark, Hanley and Striker on their way to real success. He’d run into a dead end in his investigation into the disappearance of five cheerleaders at a suburban high school. He’d come to a place where all the evidence led into a black hole. He knew he needed a fresh perspective. Desperate, he called the most intuitive person he knew, a young writer named Lydia Strong. Her observations broke the case, and the publicity surrounding the book she later wrote brought them recognition they might never have had. The phone started ringing and never stopped.

The Cheerleader Murders was their first official case together. Before that, he’d consulted on her work as a writer for the Washington Post and then as a true crime writer. And it had been her observations, when she was just fifteen years old and he was a young FBI agent, that led him to find her mother’s killer. He’d kept in touch with Lydia’s grandparents after he solved Marion Strong’s murder and captured her killer, partly because Lydia’s sadness had touched him. And mostly because he felt some kind of connection to her, though she was just a young girl then.

When she came to Washington, D.C., where he was still with the FBI, to do her undergraduate work at Georgetown, he’d become her friend, then her mentor. Around the same time he quit the Bureau, she quit the Post to write her first true crime novel. With a Vengeance was the story of the serial killer who murdered her mother. With that project, they became colleagues. Somewhere along the line, he’d wanted more. But it was a difficult road to that place; not until just a few years ago had they surrendered to their feelings for each other.

When Jacob Hanley died, Jeffrey and Christian Striker asked Lydia to come on as a partner. Now, they were partners in every sense of the word; it was a thought that gave Jeffrey tremendous satisfaction.

Jeffrey carried the box into her office and put it on the floor. She stood in the doorway, keeping her eyes on the box, looking at it as if she didn’t want to enter while it was in her office.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Can we put it in your office until I decide? I don’t want to look at it right now.”

“Sure,” he said, picking it up. She moved out of his way and he carried the box back toward his office. She followed. It was musty and it smelled of mold, and he sneezed loudly as he set it down by the door. He, for one, was dying to know what was inside, but he wouldn’t push her, knowing if he did, she’d just dig her heels in and maybe never open it… just to be stubborn.

“What are you, her beast of burden?” said Dax from a reclining position on the couch.

“Comfortable, Dax?” said Jeffrey, sliding the box into the corner over by the windows facing downtown Manhattan.

“Very. What is this-chenille?”

“It is chenille,” said Lydia, stripping off her black cashmere coat and throwing it over one of the leather chairs facing Jeffrey’s desk. “Very impressive knowledge of textiles.”

“So what happened?” she said, sitting across from him in one of the matching gold chenille chairs opposite the brushed chrome and frosted glass coffee table.

Jeffrey came and sat on the arm of her chair. He caught sight of their reflection in the glass wall that separated his office from the reception area. For a second, he watched them, these three clad mostly in black. A