Lisa Miscione - Twice

“The question is… and it nearly always boils down to this… who had the most to gain from Richard Stratton’s death?”

“Julian Ross,” answered Lydia simply. Ford had done a pretty thorough job looking into Richard Stratton’s business dealings and personal life. There was no one else who had as much to gain from his death as his wife.

“What about Eleanor Ross?”

“What about her?”

“Well, Julian is in a mental institution right now. If she’s at some point judged incompetent… Eleanor will likely become her executor. She’ll have access to all that money and the children, as well.”

Lydia nodded thoughtfully. “Which takes us back to why she’d hire us in the first place. But let’s stick to what we know for a minute. We know that there was another way into the building,” she said. “So at least there’s the possibility that someone else was there that night.”

“And we know that someone from the inside had to let him in. And that it looks like it might have been the twins.”

“Why ‘him’?”

“It seems logical. After all, we’re saying that Julian didn’t have the strength to kill her husband. Wouldn’t that hold true for another woman, as well?”

“Maura Hodge is a fairly big woman. Strong, too.”

Lydia spoke without looking up, sifting through images. A young and gorgeous Eleanor with flame red hair in her rose garden; Julian as a toddler on Christmas morning peering into a gigantic dollhouse; Eleanor again in an embrace with a man Lydia assumed to be her husband. Beautiful people, all the images representing an idyllic life of affluence, their happy smiles never hinting at the tragedies in their past, nor foreshadowing the future. The Ross family lineage was rotten at the core and you’d never know it to look at them. Beauty was so often a trick of nature, a careful camouflage.

“Are you saying you consider her a suspect?”

Lydia held a photograph in her hand, looking at it closely beneath her flashlight’s beam. “Not necessarily. What about this mysterious brother of Eleanor’s? Is it possible that he’s been lurking around all these years waiting for the chance to kill again?”

“Living in the tunnels below New York City, hiding in the woods of Haunted? Possible. Not likely.”

“How about living in the basement of this house?” said Dax, appearing suddenly in the doorway.

They both looked up at him.

“Follow me,” he said.

The door down to the basement might have easily escaped notice, if Dax hadn’t lost his footing, tripping over a spot where moisture had caused the wood floorboards to rot, one piece bending and curling up. He’d felt the wall give a bit beneath his weight when he used it to catch himself and thought it odd for an old house to have such shoddy construction. At closer glance, he discovered that there was a door fit to look like part of the oak paneling on the wall. A lock was hidden beneath a flap that had been cleverly camouflaged to look like a knot in the wood.

Now Lydia and Jeffrey followed him down as he shone the way with his light, his gun drawn. They were all quiet. The stench of mold and wet earth rose up to greet them and something about the smell made Lydia think of fresh graves. The dark space seemed to stretch on into infinity, the beam of their lights not revealing the far wall once they’d reached the bottom. All that darkness and something electric in the air made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“Look at this,” Dax said, leading them beneath the stairs.

Someone had made a little nest within a large blue nylon tent. Jeffrey got down on his hands and knees and Lydia followed. Together they poked their heads in through the tent flap. The smell was the first thing to hit her… the foul stench of body odor and semen, strong and ripe. It seemed to linger in the fabric of the tent and in the pilled brown blanket that lay atop an air mattress. Candy wrappers, empty potato chip bags, and a half-eaten can of kidney beans with a plastic spoon still in it were scattered about the space. Mingled with the other aromas, Lydia could vaguely smell salt and vinegar.

“Holy shit,” said Jeff. Lydia wasn’t sure whether he was reacting to the smell or to the fact that every inch of the walls and ceiling of the tent was covered with pictures of Julian Ross-photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles.

It was moments like this when she was glad she thought ahead, which didn’t happen often. From the pocket of her coat she removed two plastic bags, surgical gloves, and a pair of tweezers.

“Nice,” said Jeffrey with a smile.

In a rare moment of foresight, she’d taken them from her bag before they got out of the car. She slipped one of the gloves on, picked up a Milky Way wrapper with the tweezers, and put it in a baggie. Then she ran her finger across the blanket, shining the flashlight beam and looking closely at the surface. She found what she was looking for, strands of hair. Long and gray. She lifted them with the tweezers and put them in the second baggie, then stuffed them both into her pocket. She looked at Jeff, remembering what he’d said about the hairs they’d found at the scene of Tad’s murder.

“Guys,” said Dax. Lydia paused at the sound of his voice. Dax was constantly fucking around, cracking jokes; his voice was almost always edged with the promise of laughter. Except when he was worried. Then he was dead serious. And Dax didn’t worry often.

“This space heater, right here?”

“Yeah?” they answered in unison, turning to look at him.

“It’s off. But it’s still warm.”

They didn’t have time to contemplate what that might mean because out of the darkness like a freight train came a blur of gray and red accompanied by an inhuman roar. The monster, because that’s what it looked like to Lydia, knocked Dax to the floor before any of them knew what hit him. Lydia and Jeff scrambled to their feet, Jeff reaching for his gun, Lydia remembering that she hadn’t taken hers from her bag-as usual. She raised the Maglite over her head to strike the creature and get him off Dax, who she couldn’t even see beneath the gigantic mass of whatever it was that was on top of him. But she never made contact because the monster turned, as if by instinct, and swung out with an arm as heavy as a two-by-four. In the seconds before she took a blow to the head that put the lights out, she saw a flash of green eyes, a bared mouth of yellow, jagged teeth, a mask of pure rage and malice. It was a face she recognized.

The offices of Mark, Striker and Strong were dark and quiet. Everyone had gone home except for Rebecca, who was packing her bag and closing down the computer system from the main unit at the reception desk. Security was very tight at the firm and that included their intranet. Craig, their self-proclaimed cybernavigator, had built a firewall that was more secure, he claimed, than that of the FBI. And he should know, having been the most wanted hacker in the world until he was finally arrested just after his eighteenth birthday, for precisely that… breaking into the FBI databases and fucking around. Now, as he liked to say, he used his powers “for good and not for evil.” Lucky for him, Jacob Hanley, his uncle and one of the firm’s original partners, along with Jeff and Christian Striker, all former FBI agents, managed to get the kid a deal. Now he was plugged into the Internet more or less day and night, more or less legally working for the firm. Lydia called him The Brain behind his back and joked that one day they were going to look into his windowless office and find that he’d been sucked into his computers like a character in a William Gibson novel.

There was a whole elaborate shutdown process that was linked to the office security system. Rebecca was just about to initiate the final sequence that would give her precisely fifteen minutes to exit the front door when she heard the elevator. She looked at her watch-8:15. Rodney, the second messenger of the day, hadn’t arrived at his usual time. Rebecca had been trained to watch out for little things like this. So she called the service and the dispatcher said, “It’s been a crazy day. Two of my guys got into accidents today. He or someone else will get there tonight, I promise.”