Lisa Miscione - Twice

“What did you find?”

“We found a knife that was consistent with the injuries incurred by Richard Stratton. But it had been thoroughly cleaned, no prints, no blood evidence.”

“You talked to Maura Hodge?” asked Jeffrey.

Malone and Piselli shook their heads.

“Can’t find her, either?”

“She’s gone, too,” said Malone.

“The Missing Children’s Unit is working around the clock. Julian Ross’s attorneys are riding them like you wouldn’t believe. Those kids are worth millions.”

“No leads?”

“Nothing, and I mean nothing . They’re taking tips from a hotline. They’ve been canvassing the neighborhood and Haunted, too. The lawyers posted a reward, we’ve got sketches of Annabelle and Maura Hodge all over the television, newspapers, the streets. Rawls won’t admit it, but he’s feeling desperate. You can see it in him.”

Lydia felt a flutter of panic and a little guilt. She’d been so overwhelmed with the events of her own life that she hadn’t even thought about the kids since she’d left Eleanor’s apartment that night. Lydia thought of their sweet faces, remembering shaking each of their little hands that day at the hotel. She felt a little ache in her chest, wondering what had happened to Lola and Nathaniel, their father and grandmother dead, their mother locked away.

“It’s cold and getting colder. The case is at a dead end. Two bodies, two missing children, one missing detective, the only survivor whose whereabouts we know of,” said Piselli, showing the palms of his hands, “in the nuthouse. Crazy, talking about ‘destroyers’ and monsters eating her young.”

“Eating her young…” said Lydia. “She’s been saying that from the beginning.”

“She has, hasn’t she?” said Jeffrey.

“A cop disappears like that,” said Malone, apparently not listening to the conversation but thinking about Ford, “people figure he turns up somewhere having parked with a bottle and his service revolver. You know what I mean?”

There was a look of worry and sadness on his face; the job hadn’t yet taught him how to hide his emotions better, hadn’t desensitized him to the ugliness of a cop’s life. Lydia found herself hoping that maybe he’d get out before it did. There was something refreshing about a young man whose feelings you could read on his face. Even Jeffrey had learned a game face; Lydia couldn’t always tell what he was feeling by looking into his eyes.

They were all quiet for a minute. “We been to Ford’s place in Brooklyn,” said Piselli. “Rose came back; she’s worried sick, of course.”

“Though maybe if she was so worried she wouldn’t have left in the first place,” said Malone with a disapproving snort.

“Not your business,” said Piselli, giving him a look.

“You said he talked to Rose the night he disappeared. What was that conversation about?” she asked.

“She told him she was coming back so that they could talk.”

“He would have been happy about that; the conversation would have made him hopeful,” said Lydia. She remembered her conversation with Ford when they’d driven upstate. He’d seemed very depressed then, unsure about the future and doubting the way he’d lived his life. Those things and the pressures of the job, the lack of an outlet for his emotions and a viable support system… well, it led a lot of cops to the end Malone feared. But not with Rose coming back. Unless that added a whole other set of pressures that he couldn’t handle.

“Ford wouldn’t go out like that,” said Jeffrey, sounding certain. “Especially not with Rose coming back. It doesn’t make sense.”

“So what can we do, guys?” said Lydia.

Now that they were talking about the case again, she was infused with a sense of urgency. It gave her a jolt of energy that she hadn’t felt in a while. Her fear for Ford and the twins and the itch of curiosity awoke a familiar fire within her. She felt a little guilty, but part of her was relieved to have a problem to solve. Her work had always helped her keep her mind off of her life… for better or for worse.

“Nothing,” said Piselli with a shrug and a sideways glance. “We’re just following up with you, Lydia, since you were one of the last people to see him.”

“Nothing?”

“Yeah, since you know, legally we got no reason to go back up to Haunted and take another look around,” he said, looking pointedly at Lydia. “The Richard Stratton case takes precedence over Ford, since there’s no evidence of foul play in Ford’s case. MCU is handling the twins and our help is not exactly welcome. We have no chain of evidence that leads us back to Haunted, with Maura and Annabelle Hodge nowhere to be found. We’re stuck.”

“Well,” she said, leaning back and looking at Jeffrey, unable to keep the edge out of her voice. She was hoping that he wasn’t going to try to stop her from getting involved. “We should be getting back to work on the Ross case, anyway.”

“Even though our client is dead, we have a responsibility to Julian Ross to follow through,” agreed Jeffrey. “Maybe we can come up with something on Ford while we’re up there.”

Lydia observed the same combination of concern and energy in Jeffrey’s face, in the way he was so quick to agree. Distractions could not be overrated when the options were sitting around grieving and reliving nightmares.

“Of course, you’ll let us know how it goes,” said Piselli with a satisfied nod.

“Naturally,” answered Lydia.

They all looked at one another for a minute, the questions and possibilities turning in front of their eyes.

“Why doesn’t anybody in this country just say what they mean?” said Dax sourly.

Back at the apartment, they watched the tape of Ford’s interview with Anthony Donofrio. Jeffrey and Lydia sat next to each other on the couch and Dax had asked to be parked by the window. Lydia had a pad on her lap and a Montblanc pen in her hand. She tapped the pen quickly on the arm of the couch, turning things over in her mind as the tape played.

“So Annabelle-” said Jeffrey when the taped had ended, getting up and flipping off the VCR, “why would she hate Eleanor and Julian so much?”

“Maybe it’s inherited hatred. Passed from mother to daughter, like the curse?” answered Lydia, speculating.

“As far as we know, she was the last person to see Eleanor, the last person to enter that apartment before the twins went missing,” Jeffrey said.

“But why? Why kill Eleanor in cold blood and take the twins? What does she have to gain?”

There was no answer for that question that Lydia could get her brain around. She knew the facts, that Annabelle was the obvious person to be looking at for the murder of Eleanor Ross and the disappearance of the twins. But the motive seemed weak to her: Kill Eleanor because Maura hated her. And even if that were the case, why take the twins?

“So we go back to the basic question: Who has the most to gain now that Richard Stratton and Eleanor Ross are dead and Julian is locked away?” said Jeffrey, sitting beside Lydia. “I mean, it looked for a while like Eleanor had the most to gain.”

“But now she’s dead.”

“So presumably the Stratton-Ross estate will go to the twins.”

“But they’re only children. So right now probably those lawyers Piselli was talking about would be in charge of their trust.”

“So the lawyers have the most to gain.”

“Assuming that all of this comes down to money.”

“Doesn’t it usually?” said Dax.

Someone had said to Lydia not very long ago that it was not money but the love of money that was the root of all evil. She didn’t want to believe that… there was something so cheap about the concept that the human soul could be corrupted by something so fleeting, so ultimately unsatisfying as monetary wealth.