Twice

And then there was no shutting her up. Until he shut her up permanently.

He suspected she had known she was going to die whether she talked or not, even though he’d promised otherwise. He didn’t like to lie, but sometimes it was necessary. He thought she was hoping not to be disfigured, for her family’s sake. He found it so odd that people cared about things like that. But she was pretty in death. Prettier, he thought, than in life.

He looked out over the Great Lawn, the grand Metropolitan Museum of Art white and stately across the park, took in the cold air and the aroma from a nearby hot dog vendor’s cart. He watched as the short Mexican man bundled in a New York Yankees sweatshirt, scarf, and hat against the cold, handed a dog, lathered in mustard and kraut to a young rollerblader. The young man glided off down a slope, eating joyfully as he went.

“The devil is in the details,” Jed said aloud, as he came to a bench, pulled his cart over, and sat heavily. None of the people moving past him on the path, not the businesswoman in her red wool coat and frumpy, well-used Coach briefcase, not the young mother pushing a stroller carting a baby so wrapped up that he resembled a cocktail wiener, not the old man and his little kerchiefed wife in their matching black coats and orthopedic shoes, turned to look at him when he spoke aloud. Persistent ignorance. He laughed out loud and noticed how people quickened their pace.

It’s an acquaintance with the minutiae of a life that makes people truly intimate with each other, he thought. It’s the knowing of preferences, habits, idiosyncrasies, the little quirks of personality that really allow you to get inside someone’s head. When you know what someone loves, what someone fears, what turns someone on, what repulses him, and most important what hurts him, you have the lock, the full nelson. Nobody was going to give that to Jed McIntyre. He couldn’t get close enough to Lydia and Jeffrey to figure it out for himself. So he’d had to hijack it.

Well, okay, maybe he hadn’t exactly gotten into their heads via the information Rebecca had about them and what he could find in their offices. But what he did find was appointment books, cellular phone numbers, things he’d been lacking. The tunnels hadn’t really given him the access for which he’d been hoping. They’d gotten him close, but not close enough. He’d fantasized that he’d find a way into Lydia’s building through one of the mythic speakeasy tunnels he’d heard so much about. But it didn’t work out that way.

So, he’d cased the offices of Mark, Striker and Strong and found easily the flaw in their security. The Speedy Messenger service, the one that came at the end of the day when most people had gone. It was easy enough to derail a few of the messengers… a flat tire here, a busted chain there. And then finally, grabbing the guy from his route, surprising him at the service exit of the CBS building with a pipe to the head. As far as Jed knew, no one ever found the naked body he’d left in the Dumpster. He took the kid’s outfit, his bag, and his cellular phone. Called into the preprogrammed number on the phone to the Speedy dispatcher and told him he’d run into delays but would still make the stops. It was that simple. Rebecca had just been caught off guard.

Now, of course, the real question was how to use what he’d learned to its maximum effect. As darkness closed around him, he waited for inspiration.

“You cheating Aussie bastard,” Lydia complained weakly as Dax destroyed her for the third time at the game of Go. He had a gift for pattern recognition and a strategy that was truly unsurpassed, and at the moment Lydia hated him for it.

“The least you could do is let me win,” she said, feeling better for a few hours of thinking about nothing more serious than little black and white stones on a wooden board. Her nightmares had temporarily been put on hold and she was almost feeling normal again. Whatever that meant.

“Never. I have too much respect for you,” he said. She looked at him for evidence of sarcasm, but his face was serious.

“Oh, please,” she said with a laugh.

“And I’m sure you’d be even a worse winner than you are a loser.”

“You’re probably right about that,” she said, leaning back on the couch. It was good to be with Dax, good to be with someone who didn’t share her loss, whose face wasn’t a mirror of her own sadness. The hurricane of emotions she’d experienced over the last few days had left her drained, too numb to feel anything at the moment. She knew the comfortable numbness wouldn’t last. Grief wasn’t linear, getting progressively better with time. It came in waves, in an ebb and flow. For a moment or a day, you’d feel almost whole, ready to begin the move forward. Then it came again out of nowhere like a tsunami, wiping you out with a crushing force. And then, of course, there was the Jed McIntyre nightmare looming, the innocent Rebecca in his clutches.

“So how long are you going to sit around in your pajamas?” asked Dax, regarding her with an open, honest face.

“Hi, I just had surgery?”

“Laser surgery,” he said, as though it didn’t count.

“Oh, yeah, I’m a real slug for lying around for two days after having a miscarriage,” she said, getting a little pissed at him for being such an insensitive clod.

“Three days. And I think you should throw away those painkillers. Whatever pain you’re in at this point is bearable. Those things will slow your recovery, and they make it easier for you to lie around here wallowing in depression.”

“I’m not wallowing,” she said defensively.

“Not yet,” he said with a shrug, putting the Go pieces into their little wooden bowls.

“Why is everybody always telling me what to do?” she said, realizing that she sounded like a sullen teenager.

“Look. Jeff loves you. He wants to protect you from any pain or danger that might befall you. He’d be happy to keep you in a padded room under twenty-four-hour guard until Jed McIntyre is six feet under. But that’s not you, you know? With everything going on, and now this,” he said, pointing to her belly as if it were the offending party, “I think it would be easy for you to get really depressed. You need to pull yourself together and get back to work. Worry about someone else’s messed-up life for a while.”

She looked at Dax and wondered why she’d never realized he was so smart. Everything he’d said had been dead on and she added a new layer of respect to her concept of him.

“Fuck off, Dax,” she said with a frown and a shrug. He just smiled and got up to put away the game. The phone rang.

“Can you get that?” she called as he disappeared upstairs.

“Get it yourself,” he called back. She laughed and went over to the phone.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Is this Lydia Strong?” came a woman’s voice, sounding edgy and fragile.

“Who’s calling?” asked Lydia, trying to place the familiar voice.

“This is Julian Ross.”

Lydia let a second pass as the information sank in. She could hear the sound of people talking in the background. She heard some laughter and then what sounded like a wail off in the distance.

“What’s happening, Julian?”

“I need to see you. I need to talk.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Payne Whitney Clinic. Can you come? Can you come right away?” she asked. Her voice was desperate and Lydia could hear she was on the verge of tears.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” she answered without hesitation.

Forty minutes later they were in the Rover. There was something beautiful about a late fall dusk in New York City. The sky had taken on a kind of blue tinge, and Lydia watched as people hustled along the sidewalks, rushing to or from, carrying bags. Christmas was just a few weeks away and the shop windows were dressed to draw in holiday shoppers. She loved the energy this time of year, the excitement of tourists in the city to see the tree and look in the windows of the department stores on Fifth Avenue, the ringing bells of Salvation Army Santas outside Macy’s. It reminded her of when she was a child, how thrilled she’d been when her mother took her into the city for these things, and for the museums and the theater, for the ballet and the Philharmonic. She’d never wanted to live anyplace else and she couldn’t imagine her life without these things. She looked over to Dax, who was staring intently at the road ahead though traffic was thick and they were barely moving.

“It’s an amazing city, isn’t it?” she asked.

“New York City is a whore,” said Dax with disgust. “It looks good enough from a distance, but there’s disease