accident in Bavaria. It was partly my mistake in getting involved with such a weak person, but Heidi was in a way already crazy, only we didn’t see it.”
She stops, pulls another cigarette from her bag, and holds it up. Wisdom signals his agreement and she repeats the earlier ritual of two puffs before extinction. She seems to possess incredible self-control, he thinks, to be able to handle all this with strangers. He shifts in his seat and leans forward.
“When she was only sixteen, I found out that she already had sex with a neighbor’s son. After I challenged her with this, she only laughed and said she planned to do it next with his father. I never confronted her again, but over the next few years, bits and pieces of what she did and what she thought came out. I learned that it was Jewish men she went after. She was determined to prove herself better, determined to show them she was in control. And she found she could use sex as a way to get the power.
“I wasn’t sure why she felt this way unless she got it from our father who blamed the Jews for displacing us years ago. But then he also blamed the other Arab states, the Americans, and the Communists. Why she singled out the Jews I’ll never know.”
The words hang in the air like wood smoke. Bennett clears his throat. Weis bends to the side and whispers to her as she reaches for another cigarette. She hands one to Weis and they both smoke. Wisdom thinks that Chief Ferris was very shortly going to be pissed big-time at the invasive tobacco smell in his office. This time, as if to reinforce his thoughts, she keeps the cigarette alive past a few drags, although Wisdom thinks she’d be better off with a glass of vodka. He certainly would.
“When was the last time you heard from her?” asks Bennett. “Was it the night she left your parent’s home in Vienna?”
“No. About two years ago I got a very short note from her. Said she had just come to the States for her residency. That’s all. No apologies. No suggestions we meet. No matter what happened or what my parents feel or I feel, she’s still my sister. I need to end this. I need closure. Please find out what happened to her.”
No one speaks. The room is quiet except for the distant hum of an air conditioner.
“Do you know if a man might be involved? Probably a Jewish man. It would make some sense if there was.”
Wisdom catches Bennett’s eye without difficulty and tilts his head perceptibly.
“The police are pursuing some possibilities,” Bennett says, “But there isn’t anything concrete at this time.”
She stares ahead and jams the cigarette out. Then for a brief moment she looks like she was going to cry, but the moment passes and she’s back in control. She leans toward Weis and mumbles something in German. Wisdom looks at Bennett who shakes his head sideways. Weis asks if they’re done.
“For now.” Wisdom and Bennett both answer. Weis rises and takes Brigid’s arm to help her stand, but she eases her arm free.
“Can we reach you if we need to speak again?” he asks.
“That won’t be a problem,” she says. “I’ll be staying at the guesthouse of one of the Washington Embassy people for a few days. It’s actually very close to here. My luggage is in Herr Weis’s car. I also plan to take a leave of absence from work for as much as a few months and rent a place in the area. I understand it will be easy to do after your Labor Day weekend. The senior people in Geneva have already approved the idea. I need to find out what happened and I think the answer is out here somewhere. If you need me, Herr Weis will have my number and address.”
Then she points to the photo of Heidi that rests atop the open file. “May I have a copy of that?”
Wisdom is quick to answer. “Yes. We have copies,” and he hands her the picture.
Weis produces a card that seems to appear from up his sleeve and passes it to Wisdom. They all shake hands. Wisdom is surprised that Brigid’s feels incredibly warm for someone with such a controlled exterior. The two Austrians walk a few steps toward the door that Bennett holds open. Weis waits for Brigid to pass ahead when she stops and faces Wisdom.
“Do you think she’s still alive?” she asks. He feels her eyes bore right through him.
Before he can answer, she turns and walks through the door with Weis in pursuit. Wisdom watches them disappear down the hall through the opaque glass on the top half of the door.
“So what do you think?” Wisdom asks after they reassume their seats.
Bennett pulls his chair closer to Wisdom despite the fact that they’re alone.
“I think we just found someone who had a real reason to make our friend Heidi disappear. Lucky for her she wasn’t in town back in early May. But we’ll check that out just to be sure. By the way. Posner and Stern are both Jewish, aren’t they?”
Wisdom nods then leaves to find and update Chief Ferris while Bennett returns to his routine, which includes updating NYPD, whose interest had fallen from curiosity to nonexistent in the past few months. As far as he can tell, he’s the only one in law enforcement who has the slightest interest in finding out about what happened to Heidi Kashani. There is Bennett, of course, but his interest at this point seems more academic than anything else. Maybe he thinks it’s all just a waste of everyone’s time. And the chief? Well, his top priority is not to discover a body hidden away somewhere in tourist season. Soon after the issue was first raised, Wisdom and Chief Ferris briefed two town councilmen and the supervisor about the case and left the elected officials with the assurances that, “If something bad happened to the young woman, it couldn’t have been in our town.”
Wisdom is for all intent and purposes on his own. So be it, he thinks.
CHAPTER 7
Ten days have gone by since the first meeting with Brigid. Summer is now almost officially over and nothing about the missing New York female doctor has surfaced to disturb the Town Board. Then out of nowhere, Brigid calls to advise Wisdom she’s rented a house in Montauk for the next two months.
“It’s on the Old Montauk Highway and looks out over the ocean. I’ve never lived in such a place before.”
Wisdom tells her he hopes she’ll find some peace and comfort and was about to hang up when she says she has an idea she needs to speak to him about. She says it’s important.
He reluctantly agrees to meet with her later that afternoon, but not before repeating to her what Bennett said at their initial meeting,
“You realize that this is still a local investigation. So far there’s no basis for calling in the County on suspicion of a major crime. And as far as NYPD, the New York City Police, well, they’re just happy she didn’t disappear in the city.”
“Yes, I know all this,” she says almost too quickly, “But I am living here for now and I want to do something. I need to talk to someone, certainly not the FBI or the New York City Police. It’s far easier to talk to someone I’ve already met who’s also out here. Can’t I just do that?”
At five thirty that afternoon Wisdom pulls his unmarked blue Ford Crown Vic into an empty driveway that descends slightly from Old Montauk Highway. The driveway curves around to behind the house where he assumes she parks, but he stops and parks just feet from the front door. He sighs with a controlled weariness and glances again through the case file that rests on the empty passenger seat. He stares one last time at the photo of Heidi. He has gotten to know her face well over the past several months, but until meeting her sister he never really began to have a sense of the person.
The house is low and wrapped with horizontal slices of worn cedar planks that glisten with flashes of silver in the late afternoon sun. From the driveway with the curtains open he looks through the large picture window that exposes a stark interior. He sees an even larger picture window at the back of the room that guards a rear deck cantilevered out from the cliff it had been built into. Specks of white foam fly out from above the ocean beyond. From experience he knows that there is likely another floor downstairs that isn’t visible from the outside. All in all, quite a house.
He walks from the car to the front door. As he waits for a reply to his knock, he hears the rhythm of rolling surf some hundred feet below interspersed with the shriek from a circling bird.
“Come in. The door is open.”
It’s Brigid’s voice. He prefers that she open the door, but there’s no further sound so he pushes forward and the wood slides silently open. He moves into the house and stands a few feet from the door. Everything is in white; the walls, furniture, and rugs all bring a dazzling starkness that competes favorably with the still visibly robust
