Lisa Unger - Die For You

There was something else, too. Something recent and strange that I had ignored. I kept receiving bizarre e-mails in the mailbox on my Web site. Normally, I received multiple messages a day from fans, detractors, booksellers inviting me for events, conference invitations, and the like. Every now and again, I’d get an e-mail from someone who wanted me to write his story or from someone with a “brilliant idea” for my next novel. And sometimes the mail was just from crazy people, with threats, rantings about mistakes they thought I’d made, inappropriate requests for pictures, and blatant come-ons.

Over the last few weeks, I’d received two or three messages from someone claiming to have information about my husband. “You’re in danger,” I remember one e-mail reading. “Your husband is not who you think he is.” I’d had so much strange e-mail over the years that I just pressed Delete , without giving it so much as a second thought. Now I racked my brain for the name of the sender, for more of what had been included in the text of the messages. But I’d barely glanced at them; deleted them and forgotten them.

Then, suddenly, I knew where to go. Somewhere safe, somewhere where I could use a computer, get on the Internet and figure out what to do next, try to find those e-mails, which might still linger in my trash folder. The thought gave me a new energy, a feeling of purpose and strength. One thing I wasn’t going to do? Move on. If Marcus thought I was just going to crawl under the covers and grieve him, I was as much a stranger to him as he was to me.

GRADY WATCHED THE cab disappear into a stream of other taxies up Broadway. He’d considered physically restraining Isabel Raine. But instead he let her go. Had to. No legal reason to hold her. If he put his hands on her, he was opening himself up to seven kinds of trouble. Trouble he didn’t need. So he let her have her flight response and hoped she came back to him when he called. Or on her own when she realized how badly she needed help from the police.

She was beautiful, in a Manhattan kind of way. That is to say edgy, with nice style and pretty skin. But she wasn’t his type. Not that he’d been asked, but a woman like Isabel Raine was not for him-too much angst, too much intellect-like his ex. He wanted someone who didn’t think about being happy. He just wanted someone who was happy, who went with the current of life and love, not someone bent on swimming upstream all the time.

“Where’d she go?” Breslow at his elbow.

“She freaked. Her accounts are close to empty.”

She nodded as though it was news she expected. “What’s she going to do?”

“My guess?” he said, still looking up Broadway in the direction of the cab that had sped Isabel away. “Something stupid.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jez nod her agreement.

“Let’s find Camilla Novak,” Breslow said after a moment. “I think we have to go back to that point to figure out what’s happening here.”

Grady shrugged. He didn’t have any better ideas. But he stood rooted in place; there was something else nagging at him. He couldn’t quite get a hold on it, though.

“ Today , Crowe,” said Breslow impatiently. “I’ve got to pick up Benjy at three in Riverdale.”

“The doorman,” said Crowe.

“Who? Shane?”

“Yeah.”

“Never showed up at his apartment today.”

“Let’s get a warrant and search his place first.”

“I don’t think we’ll get a warrant just because the guy didn’t turn up at home after work.”

“He had opportunity to let the intruders in, he left his post before the next guy showed, and he withheld information. Let’s try.”

She raised her eyebrows at him and gave a quick nod, took her phone from her coat. She always made these kinds of calls, had more finesse, more relationships and less of a temper. Things just always seemed to go easier when Jez handled them. Crowe found he could rub a certain kind of person the wrong way. He had no idea why.

His ex had called the night before last. He knew it was her when he heard the phone ring, though she hadn’t called him in months. He’d just finished working out on the weight bench he kept in the basement of the Bay Ridge row house they’d shared.

“Keep it, Grady” she’d said of the house when they were splitting up assets. “I hate Brooklyn. And I hate this house.” They’d inherited the house from his grandparents and hadn’t been able to afford to change much. So they walked over the same linoleum floors his father had as a child, endured the same pink-tiled bathrooms, and climbed the same creaky steps. But he loved that house, and it was theirs free and clear-paid off long ago, taxes insanely low. So we sell it. Buy something that’s ours . He wouldn’t, couldn’t sell the house where his father had grown up, where he had, too, essentially. Their first and angriest arguments were about that house.

He was breathless, his shirt damp with sweat, when he heard the phone ringing. Something about the way it traveled through the house, how he heard the ringing through the floorboards, made his palms tingle. He took the stairs two at a time and got to the phone, an avocado-green wall unit, by the third ring.

“Crowe,” he answered.

Just silence on the line. But it was her silence. He’d know the sound of her anywhere.

“Clara. Don’t hang up.”

A round release of air, as though she was trying to cloud cold glass with her breath. When she spoke, her voice was taut. “How did you know it was me?”

“Every time the phone rings, I think it’s you. I just happened to be right tonight.”

“Stop it.”

“I miss you. Clara,” he said, and it sounded like a plea, “I could die from how much. I keep thinking about the last time.”

He heard the sharp intake of breath that he knew meant she was going to cry, and he felt close to tears himself, a thickness in his throat.

“Come back to me.” It wasn’t the first time he’d begged.

“I have to go. I shouldn’t have called you.”

“Wait,” he said quickly. She hung up and he leaned his head against the wall. “Wait,” he said again into dead air. He drew his fist back and punched the wall hard. The plaster buckled in a near-perfect circle and he brought his hand back fast to his chest. The pain started dull, slow, then radiated up his arm, his knuckles split and bleeding.

“Fuck,” he whispered, though he wanted to scream. The pain felt good. He’d rather have physical pain than the raw gnawing he’d had in his chest since Clara left. Unfortunately, now he had both.

“I’VE BEEN MEANING to ask what happened to your hand,” said Jez as they sped up the Henry Hudson, the dirty river glinting to their left, the city rising to their right. The warrant issued through some magic on Jez’s part, they were headed to Charlie Shane’s Inwood address.

“Bar fight.”

“Yeah, right.”

“What?”

“Let’s just say I see you more as a lover than a fighter.”

“Nice,” he answered, slightly offended. They were partners after all; supposed to have each other’s back. Did she really think he couldn’t hold his own in a brawl? He stopped short of asking.

“Seriously.”

“Hurt it working out. Punching bag.”

She nodded, looked skeptical, but didn’t say anything else. She had that motherly way about her, always with a tissue in her purse and a nose for bullshit. She always had snacks, too-peanut-butter crackers or granola bars.

“I know it’s not easy,” she said finally, looking out the window and not at him, almost as if she was thinking aloud. He didn’t bother pretending that he didn’t know what she was talking about. They took the rest of the ride in silence.