Lisa Unger - Smoke

“Okay,” she said with a frown. “So who was it?”

“A guy named Manny Underwood. Started out in corrections. Lost his job and did some hard time for dealing drugs to inmates.”

Dax winced. “Corrections officers don’t usually do well in prison.”

Jeff nodded. “He lived through it because he made some powerful friends inside. Later on, these same people gave him work in ‘personal security.’ Apparently, Manny’s a big guy, total roid case. Good bodyguard material. Anyway, after he was released he went to work for a company called Body Armor. Ring a bell?”

“Body Armor,” Lydia repeated, the name sounding familiar to her.

“Owned until about a year and a half ago by Tim Samuels.”

Lydia let the information sink in. “Huh,” she said, not having anything more intelligent to offer at the moment. The loose connections between people and events were not coalescing for her. Tim Samuels to Michele LeForge to The New Day, The New Day to Mickey, Mickey to Lily, Tim Samuels’ former employee to a jewel robbery to a pink stone found in an abandoned building that LaForge once declared as her residence. It was a chain of evidence linked only to itself, circular and useless.

“Do we know who bought his company?” asked Dax.

“We don’t know. But I’m starting to have my suspicions.”

“The New Day,” said Dax.

“I’d put money on it. That’s probably how Samuels got tangled up with them in the first place. Maybe he didn’t even know it.”

“What would The New Day want with a personal security firm?” said Lydia.

Jeffrey shrugged. “Maybe they needed some trained muscle.”

They were all quiet as they considered the reasons why a ‘church’ would need trained muscle. She thought of the men who’d chased her from the premises. She thought of Lily in restraints. She thought of the jewel heist and Detective Stenopolis accused of a terrible crime she was sure he couldn’t have committed. Who are these people? she thought.

“Well, maybe Underwood has some answers,” suggested Dax.

“Doesn’t sound like he knows much of anything. At least nothing Bechim was willing to share.”

“We can talk to him when we get back to New York. Tomorrow. With Lily,” said Lydia. She was shooting for optimism but it sounded more like desperation even to her own ears.

“When are we going to leave?” asked Lydia. She’d managed her anxiety into a low-level buzz but the volume was coming up again.

“I just want to do a little more research on that building,” said Dax, moving over to the computer.

There was an aggressive knock on the door to their room. All of them froze for a second, then Lydia moved to the wall beside the door. She felt her heart start to stutter and looked at the bag across the room that contained her gun.

“Room service,” a gruff muffled voice said through the thin wood. Jeffrey and Dax exchanged a look.

“Ever see a dump like this offer room service?” whispered Dax.

“Especially when we didn’t call for anything,” said Jeff, kneeling behind the bed and taking his gun from his waist. Dax was about to follow suit, when the door busted in and three unpleasant-looking men in suits entered, guns drawn.

“Guns on the bed, please. Hands where we can see them,” said a balding man with ice blue eyes and a small but powerful-looking physique. He sounded tired, bored, like he’d said the words so many times that his jaw ached from it.

Jeff and Dax put their guns on the bed and their hands on their heads. Lydia felt the tension drain from her shoulders and her adrenaline stop pumping. Federal Agents; better than The New Day freaks.

“Ms. Strong, can you please stand over by your associates?”

Lydia complied and the man replaced his sidearm in its holster and withdrew identification from the lapel pocket of his jacket.

“I’m Special Agent John Grimm with the FBI and you are in my space.” He glanced behind him. “Stand down, boys.” The two younger agents, both thin and fresh faced with good haircuts, replaced their weapons.

“You can take your hands off your heads,” said Grimm, moving toward the bed. Jeffrey and Dax got to their feet. Grimm leaned down and picked up the Desert Eagle.

“Jesus. That’s nice. I’ve never seen one of those. Going moose hunting?”

Dax looked very stiff, his face drained of color. Grimm laid the gun back on the bed.

“I know who you are, Ms. Strong. And you, Mr. Mark, I believe we met when you were still with the Bureau. But I’m not sure I’ve been introduced to your colleague here.”

“Ignatius Bond,” said Dax, extending a hand.

Grimm looked at Dax and nodded. Dax withdrew his hand with a smile that was really more like a grimace. There was an energy between the two men that Lydia wasn’t sure she understood.

“So what brings you all to Florida?” said Grimm, walking over to the laptop and touching the mouse pad.

“We’re vacationing,” said Lydia.

Grimm turned the laptop around so that they could see the satellite photo of the New Day Farms.

“I don’t know what you’re planning here, my friends. But let’s sit down and have a little talk about what you think you know about The New Day.”

Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”

Baby Boy Mendez kept asking the same two questions as they drove him from the Alphabet City apartment he’d shared with his sister to the morgue at Belleview Hospital. It was like he’d been caught in some kind of hysterical loop since they showed up at his apartment and gave him the news. He’d been eating a Whopper and watching Sponge-Bob SquarePants on Nickelodeon when they’d entered the apartment, told him the body of a woman and her child had been found in the East River.

“We’ll need you to identify her, Baby Boy,” Evelyn told him quietly. “We’ll confirm her identity with dental records but that’ll take time. It’s going to be hard but you need to come and see if the woman we found is your sister.”

He’d looked at them, eyes moving back and forth between the two women as if he was looking for an expression that would tell him it was a joke or a mistake. Then he ran from them. They waited patiently as they listened to him throw up in the bathroom.

“What if you’re wrong?” Evelyn whispered to Jesamyn.

She put her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels, considering the question. Then, “He still needs to identify her.”

“He could do it from a photograph or on a video monitor.”

Jesamyn shook her head. She wanted Baby Boy Mendez to see his sister’s body and the body of his nephew. She wanted him to see what she suspected he had done to them. If she was wrong, well, she was unnecessarily traumatizing an innocent family member. And that would suck for him and for her; she’d feel very badly about it. She just didn’t think she was wrong.

Evelyn looked doubtful. She didn’t see it in Mendez. But Jesamyn saw a kind of childish rage, a jealousy over the baby who would soon be the focus of his sister’s life, leaving Baby Boy without a mother, in his mind anyway. The child who no one ever cared about enough to even name would be losing the only mother he’d ever known. He probably hadn’t meant to kill her. Or maybe he had. It didn’t much matter in the scheme of things.

In the car, she could still smell his vomit and the acrid odor of fear, sweat.

“Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”

She’d be doubting herself if he was wailing, accusing Jorge Alonzo of his sister’s murder. But he wasn’t doing any of those things. He was pale, the features on his face slack, his eyes shifting back and forth almost imperceptibly. To Jesamyn all of these things said guilt and fear, not grief, not terror over the fate of a loved one, not hope that the police were mistaken in their tentative identification of the body.