Lisa Miscione - Angel Fire

Lydia tried to speak but was choked by her rage and her horror, just as she had been nearly fifteen years before.

“Mom,’’ she managed, “let me help you.’’

“No, dear,’’ she said, “let me help you.’’

Lydia began to scream as the blind man played his guitar.

The light had long faded from above the New York City skyline before his thoughts returned to Lydia for the first time that day. Jeffrey Mark closed the file he was looking at, removed his glasses, and rubbed his tired eyes. The offices of Mark, Hanley and Striker were quiet now. He could hear only the hum of a vacuum cleaner down the hall and smell the burnt bottom of a coffeepot someone had forgotten to turn off.

He spun his chair around to look out at his view of the city. A million squares of light reached into a starless sky. A million lies, a million heartbreaks, a million crimes to match, he thought. He wondered again where in the hell she was and why she hadn’t called. He supposed he should be used to this by now after fifteen years. But instead it seemed to be getting harder. He stared at his dark reflection in the plate-glass window. He looked older and more tired than he liked to imagine himself. He unconsciously rubbed his right shoulder.

He remembered the first time he saw Lydia Strong, fifteen years ago. He was twenty-five then. The death of her mother had been his first case with the FBI. Marion Strong was one of thirteen women murdered in their homes in the New York area in three years. One of the more memorable details of the serial killer’s MO was that he would make sure to leave his victim where she would be found by her children returning home from school. All of the victims were single, working mothers with at least one teenage child.

Jeffrey was assigned to the case because no one else wanted to be the junior man under Roger Dooley, a twenty-five-year veteran with a miserable personality and a tendency toward obsession. Unwashed, mostly, and reeking of fast food and failed relationships, Dooley was the most unpleasant, bitter man Jeff had ever known – and that was when he was in a good mood. Every lead in the case had turned cold in Dooley’s hands for three years. This investigation looked to be his last before retirement and he couldn’t stand to end a superstar career on a losing streak. He was a real prick and Jeffrey hated him. But he was a genius investigator, and Jeff would learn everything he knew from the man.

They may never have found the killer if it hadn’t been for fifteen-year-old Lydia. She had an eye for detail and an active imagination. Some days before her mother’s murder, she had noticed a man in the parking lot of the local supermarket. She had noticed him because of his bright red hair, and the way he had stood staring at her and her mother beside a red-and-white car that reminded her of her favorite TV show, Starsky and Hutch.

“Look, Mom, that man is watching us,’’ she remembered telling her mother.

“Lydia, don’t stare. Get in the car,’’ her mother had told her sternly, not in the mood for another of Lydia’s fantasies. But Lydia was already playing a game in her mind, pretending the man was following them. She wrote down his license-plate number in blue eyeliner on the back of a note passed in class from one of her friends. She was pretending, but in the back of her mind, the man looked familiar to her. In fact, he had been watching them for months.

Going through the house with detectives, she had also noticed one of her mother’s earrings was missing. Not from the pair Marion was wearing when she was murdered, but from a pair of garnet studs Lydia coveted and had borrowed the day before but carefully replaced in her mother’s jewelry box.

“She’s a natural detective,’’ Dooley had said, with something like resentment in his voice.

In a matter of hours they had traced the plate to Jed McIntyre, a freelance engineering consultant living in Nyack, New York. When they raided his home, he was in his underwear, drinking a beer in front of the television. He smiled as he was led away in the cold night.

“You idiots,’’ he kept repeating. “You idiots.’’

In the subsequent search of his home for evidence, they found thirteen photo albums filled with pictures of his victims and a large jewelry box with twenty tiny, velvet-lined drawers. Thirteen of them held one earring from each of his victims – minute, glittering trophies of his deeds.

Lydia coolly identified Jed McIntyre in a lineup a week later with a strange, trancelike composure. She looked dangerously close to floating away into her grief-stricken mind. Jeffrey was afraid for her and took her to his office so she could avoid the hordes of reporters that followed her everywhere.

“I need to be left alone,’’ she had said to him, “just for a minute.’’

But as he closed the door and walked down the hallway, he had heard a scream that he carried with him still, that would, to him, forever be the very sound of grief. He ran back to his office to find Lydia sitting on the floor screaming and sobbing. He dropped to his knees and took her in his arms and rocked her until she stopped. She became limp with grief and fear, whimpering for her mother.

Sometimes he still saw her that way when he looked into her gray eyes over dinner or when they were working. He remembered her small, gaunt features taut with stress and terror on that first day. Her eyes heavy-lidded, blinking slowly – they would seem almost reptilian if they weren’t so warm and intelligent. She’d had an odd strength and maturity for an adolescent. Her voice never quivered when they interviewed her, but she never made eye contact. She sat next to her grandfather, who sat with a protective arm around her as tears fell from his eyes.

Even now, though at thirty she was an award-winning journalist and an author, an investigative consultant with Jeffrey’s firm, and a strong and accomplished woman, when they were alone he could see the demons in her still. He could see the little girl inside who had never really healed but had been locked away in the attic of her subconscious. He knew one day she would have to be let out. He only hoped he would be there when it happened.

He had been trying for weeks to reach her at her Upper West Side apartment in New York and on her cell phone. The number to the house just outside Santa Fe had been disconnected. That was not unusual, as she changed her numbers often. He could find her, he knew, if he really tried. But he always let her be, let her come to him.

Five years ago, he had left the Bureau and started his own private-investigation agency with two other former special agents. The firm Mark, Hanley and Striker Investigations, Inc. had started in a studio apartment in the East Village. With one phone line and one computer, a couple contacts at the Bureau, and a couple of informants on the street, he, Jacob Hanley, and Christian Striker had built the firm to what it was today: a suite of offices on the top floor of a high rise on West Fifty-seventh Street, employing over a hundred top people, grossing more money last year than Jeff would have thought possible. At first they took the cases no one else wanted, cases the police had dropped or deemed unsolvable, like desperate parents with no money looking for lost children, welfare fraud investigations. Hanley had a nose for finding the lost. Striker had a gift for surveillance. And Jeffrey, military and FBI to the core, had a hard-on for the facts, the evidence, the crime-scene details. As far as Jeff was concerned, the facts were the only element of any case that could be totally trusted. People lied, intuition failed, but facts, if followed carefully, would always lead to the truth. Working closely with government agencies they quickly earned an inside reputation as the guys the FBI and the police called when their hands were tied, when their leads had gone cold and they were about to give up.