Sidney Sheldon - Chasing Tomorrow

Jean ordered a bottle of Bordeaux and poured a large glass for Tracy.

Tracy said, “I’m still angry with you. You do know that?”

“I know.”

“You promised me Elizabeth would be put away.”

“And she will be. Just not for as long as we would have liked.”

“A year! That’s a joke, Jean, and you know it. You realize you may never find Cooper? You and Buck had Elizabeth, and you traded her for what? A name. A shadow.”

Jean Rizzo took a big slug of wine. “We’ll find him. We have to.”

He didn’t sound convincing, even to himself.

Tracy looked at his heavy-lidded gray eyes and the traces of salt and pepper in his once-dark hair and thought, He looks tired. Defeated. Though she wouldn’t admit it, even to herself, she’d grown fond of Jean. She hoped for his sake, as much as for the murdered girls’, that Daniel Cooper was the man they’d been looking for. Deep down she still found it hard to reconcile her own memories of Cooper with this image of a ruthless, sadistic killer.

“You knew him,” said Jean, once their appetizers arrived, two Caesar salads with extra anchovies. He and Tracy had remarkably similar tastes. “I know we’ve been grilling Elizabeth for days. But what were your perceptions?”

Tracy rubbed her eyes. She was tired too. “I really didn’t know him. He was a shadow to me. Always a step or two behind. Never really a threat. I guess I thought he was kind of . . .”

“What?”

She searched for the right word. “Pathetic? I don’t know. He was smart. Jeff used to think he was in love with me,” she added, laughing.

“And was he?”

“He never gave me any reason to think so. In fact he spent years of his life doing everything he could to send me back to jail, so I’m gonna say no! Jeff thought he was dangerous.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Not really. Which is weird because I had a lot more reason to hate him than Jeff ever had.”

Rizzo raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Daniel Cooper knew I was innocent of the crime I went down for. He actually came to see me in that hellhole in Louisiana and told me as much.”

“Cooper came to the penitentiary?”

Tracy nodded, an involuntary shiver running through her. She never spoke of her time in prison. Never. Those were the darkest days of her life. It had taken her decades to stop dreaming about Big Bertha and Ernestine Littlechap and Lola and Paulita. The beatings. The terror. The hopelessness.

“The insurance company sent him. He sat there and told me he could prove I never took that Renoir. That Joe Romano framed me for the insurance money. But when I asked him for help, he refused. He left me in that filthy prison to rot.”

Jean digested this information. “Why do you think he did that?”

Tracy considered. “I don’t know. It was as if . . .” She struggled to put her impressions into words. “I got the sense it wasn’t personal. He was like a machine. I guess he and Elizabeth have a lot in common in that regard. I honestly don’t think it occurred to him that he should have gotten me out of there.”

“That’s very forgiving of you to say,” Jean observed.

Tracy shrugged. “You asked me my impressions of Cooper. I’m telling you. When I got out of jail there were a long list of people I needed to get revenge on. Joe Romano, Anthony Orsatti, Perry Pope, that bastard judge, Lawrence. They were so corrupt, so wicked, and they thought they were untouchable.” Tracy’s green eyes flashed with anger at the memory. Not for the first time Jean Rizzo thought how beautiful she looked when her blood was up. “Daniel Cooper was many things but he wasn’t corrupt. Quite the opposite in fact. There was something of the zealot about him.”

“And yet he’s spent the last decade as a world-class art and jewelry thief,” said Jean. “Isn’t that corruption?”

“It depends on how you look at it,” said Tracy. “I doubt he sees it that way.”

“So you’re not surprised Cooper turned to crime?”

“To be frank with you, I haven’t given Daniel Cooper a thought in the last ten years.”

“Do you think he killed those girls?”

The question was so direct, Tracy was taken aback.

“I don’t know.”

She watched Jean’s face crumple, like a paper bag with the air sucked out of it.

“I know that’s not the answer you want. You want me to have a gut instinct on this, but the truth is I just don’t know. Part of me always felt a little sorry for him. Now that I know all that stuff from the FBI files, about his mother being murdered when he was a kid and him finding her body . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know. He seems to have led a sad and lonely life, that’s all.”

“A lot of killers do,” Jean Rizzo said darkly.

His phone rang. Tracy watched him answer it. Then she watched the blood drain from his face. She knew what had happened before Jean said a word.

“It’s happened again, hasn’t it? They found another girl.”

Jean Rizzo nodded grimly. “Let’s get out of here.”

EIGHT HOURS LATER, TRACY was in her hotel room, packing, when Jean Rizzo knocked on the door.

He’d been at the crime scene all night and was still wearing the same shirt he’d had on at the restaurant. He looked close to tears.

“You need some sleep,” Tracy told him.

“It’s our man, no question.” Jean collapsed into a chair. “The girl’s name was Lori Hansen and she’d been dead at least thirty hours by the time anyone found her. Raped, tortured, strangled. The apartment was immaculate, the corpse too. And that damned Bible . . .”

Tracy put a hand on his shoulder. “There was nothing you could have done.”

“Of course there was,” Jean exploded. “I could have stopped him! I could have found him and stopped him in time. It is Daniel Cooper, it has to be. Elizabeth told Buck the guy was always spouting religion at her.”

“I’ll admit, it is starting to look more likely.” Tracy closed her suitcase.

“She also told him Cooper was obsessed with you and Stevens. That he deliberately planned their jobs to copy your methods. It was Cooper who paid Elizabeth to seduce Jeff and break up your marriage.”

Tracy had pulled a picture of Nicholas out of her wallet and was staring at it like it was a talisman, trying to block Rizzo out. Her son represented peace and goodness and sanity. She longed to return to him, to feel his small, strong body in her arms, to smell the clean, soft smell of his cheeks. She did not want to hear about Daniel Cooper anymore, or about Jeff friggin’ Stevens. This morning at breakfast she’d seen a report in the newspaper about a stolen Byzantine coin collection—some Russian girl had been robbed while she was at the Winter Wonderland Ball. Tracy knew it was Jeff who’d been the thief, and the report had made her feel momentarily close to him again, and then angry and then bereft. She had to get out of here, out of this city, away from Jeff and all of the madness that she’d worked so hard, so very hard, to escape.

Jean Rizzo said, “I think Jeff Stevens was dead right. I think Daniel Cooper was in love with you.”

Tracy lifted her case off the bed.

“I think he still is in love with you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Tracy moved toward the door, but Jean put a hand out to stop her.

“No, it’s not. It’s not ridiculous. I knew you were at the heart of this, Tracy. I knew it and I was right. He’s going to come for you, you know. Eventually.”

“I have to go.”

“Go? No. You can’t go,” Jean told her. “You have to stay, now more than ever. We’re so close! Please, stay in New York, at least for a few more days. Cooper may still be in the vicinity.”