Lisa Miscione - Twice

“When’s the last time you heard from Detective McKirdy?”

The events of the last few days came rushing back in a wave as Lydia tried to remember the last time she’d talked to Ford.

Slowly they’d filed into the underground chamber, Rain’s legions. Quietly, shuffling and unspeaking, they’d carried Rain and Jed McIntyre up the long metal staircase and eventually out of the tunnels, Lydia and Jeffrey following in a kind of haze. The surreal quality of the whole ordeal made it easy for Lydia to pretend she was participating in an incredibly vivid lucid dream. When they emerged into the city night, the cold air snapped her back a bit and the events that had just transpired began to sink in. At the corner of Prince Street and Lafayette, they were greeted by the stone-faced Special Agent Goban and the rest of the FBI team, as well as some NYPD uniforms.

Dax had been taken from the tunnels hours earlier, Lydia later learned, and was rushed to the hospital. Before the emergency surgery to repair his injured legs, he managed to explain to one of the hospital staff that they needed to contact the FBI and tell them where Lydia and Jeffrey were. The man, whom Dax couldn’t name and probably wouldn’t recognize, had done that, hence the greeting committee.

A waiting ambulance rushed Rain to Bellevue, where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest. And Lydia had the grim satisfaction of watching the coroner’s office team zip Jed McIntyre into a body bag. He lay white, his eyes staring, a thin line of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. She watched as he was swallowed by black plastic and loaded into the back of the van, the doors slamming hard and final behind him.

“Where will you bury him?” she asked one of the men. “No one will claim him.”

He shrugged, not looking at her. “Depends.”

“How do I find out?” Something in her voice must have caught his attention because he turned his eyes on her. He was an older Hispanic man, with deep lines etched around his eyes and a receding hairline. In his face she saw the reflection of a thousand ugly, anonymous deaths.

“Call the office tomorrow,” he said, with something like sympathy in his voice. “Ask for Hector, that’s me. I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” she said, offering her hand. But he didn’t see it and walked off.

“Time to let go,” said Jeffrey from behind her. “You don’t need to know where the body goes.”

She nodded but knew she would call to find out anyway. Why? She didn’t really understand, herself.

The next two days, they’d barely talked, left the house only to go to the hospital to be with Dax. They walked around each other in a kind of daze of pain and loss, touching more than speaking. That had always been the way with them in times of trouble; they communicated better with their bodies than with words. Everything that had happened before the tunnels had become a distant memory. Everything, of course, except the loss of the pregnancy. Lydia carried that with her like an arm in a cast. The physical pain was subsiding; she imagined the emotional pain would fade eventually, as well.

Julian and Eleanor Ross, the missing twins, their drama, all seemed to exist on a distant planet in another galaxy. Their client was dead. The questions were still out there, floating in the outer edges of Lydia’s consciousness, her curiosity, but she didn’t have the energy to acknowledge them again yet. She hadn’t even thought about Ford.

This morning Dax had insisted on coming to Rebecca’s funeral. He didn’t have insurance, so the hospital was looking to unload him anyway. Lydia believed that he needed to stay another few days, just to assure he’d stay off his injured legs. Against their better judgment, they wheeled him out and here they were.

“I haven’t seen Ford since we discovered Eleanor Ross’s body at the duplex,” she answered finally.

“That’s the thing,” said Piselli, lighting a cigarette. “Neither have we.”

“ It’s not like him. He’s not going to just take off,” said Piselli, sitting in the pub where they’d decided to meet at on Astoria Boulevard in Queens. It was a dump of a place called Cranky’s. Every inch of the wall had a beer-bottle cap nailed to it like some alcoholic mosaic. The jukebox played “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. A couple of old men hunched in the corner, nursing pints and arguing about Giuliani. The typical bar aroma of booze and cigarettes was accented by a subtle but definite hint of vomit.

Piselli and Malone sat across from Lydia and Jeffrey in a red vinyl booth; they’d parked Dax’s wheelchair at the end of the table.

Lydia really looked at them for the first time. They were both pretty good-looking guys, Piselli with slicked black hair and dark eyes that observed sharply and missed nothing. He had a fashionable bit of stubble on his square jaw and a slight hook in his nose didn’t detract from his face but made it almost aquiline, at once sexy and regal. They were both young, but Malone had more of a boyish look to him, a soft innocence around the corners of his eyes. The acne scarring she’d noticed when she’d met him the first time didn’t seem as angry or red as it had. His skin was unlined, shaven, and clean. He smelled of Ivory soap.

Lydia and Jeffrey ordered Amstels from the bartender; Malone ordered a Coke. And Piselli drank coffee from a white ceramic mug that read ONE DAY AT A TIME. Dax sulked.

“This is what we know,” said Piselli, lighting the fourth cigarette he’d smoked since approaching them at the Rover. Lydia fantasized about asking for one but didn’t.

“He had a uniform take Anthony Donofrio down to the station while he hung around the scene for a while with us. He poked around the apartment, then headed down after them. We know that he spent about forty-five minutes with Donofrio; he taped the conversation. During this conversation he learned that Annabelle Hodge had entered the building just hours before you and Ford found Eleanor Ross dead.”

“I talked to him right after he learned about Annabelle Hodge,” interjected Piselli. “He wanted me to cooperate with Rawls, the head of MCU. Make sure he got anything he needed from our files. But I didn’t ask him where he was going and he didn’t say.”

“We know he spoke to his wife briefly that evening late, after midnight. She called from Houston,” Piselli said.

“Did you talk to Donofrio?” asked Jeffrey.

“We can’t find him.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lydia, taking a sip from her beer.

“Rawls headed back there and spent some more time with him, but he basically just went over and over the same stuff he’d told Ford. Rawls had nothing to hold him on, so they had to let him go. He never made it home after he left the precinct.”

“You think he fled?” asked Jeffrey.

“With no money, no change of clothes, no call to his mother? No,” said Piselli with a shake of his head.

“Do you have the videotape of their conversation?” asked Lydia.

Piselli pulled a videotape from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. “I didn’t know if it would help you, but I thought I’d bring you a copy.

“They talked about Annabelle Hodge, mostly,” he said, and then ran down the general content of the conversation. “How much she hated Julian Ross and a bunch of other crap about how she was a voodoo priestess or some shit.”

Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look.

“You think she’s the shooter? That she took the twins?”

“She’s suspect number one as far as the Missing Children’s Unit is concerned.”

“Have you been up to Haunted?” asked Lydia.

“We been up there, looking for Ford and Geneva Stout, a.k.a. Annabelle Hodge. No sign of either of them. But we got a warrant and with the help of the locals up there, we took the Hodge residence apart. They’re still watching the place.”