Jez tilted her head to the side, walked over to the banister and gazed up the stairwell. She gave a reluctant nod.
“After Book came inside, Isabel Raine left,” Grady said, “claiming she’d find her husband and make things right for her sister’s family.”
“And he just let her go?”
“What was he going to do? Physically restrain her?”
“It wouldn’t have been a bad idea. She’d look less guilty if she stuck around. Did she take anything with her?”
“Erik Book says no.” Grady was skeptical. He felt that Book was holding back, wanting to protect his sister-in-law-or maybe his own interests. At the moment, people who looked like victims yesterday weren’t looking as innocent today.
“But where’s Novak’s purse? Coat’s on the couch, like she was getting ready to leave,” Jez asked.
Grady shook his head slowly. “No purse, no cell phone, no keys, no wallet in the residence.”
“Someone took her bag.”
“Seems so,” he said. “Did you see the stamp on her hand?”
“She’s a hot, single woman living in New York City. Of course she has a club stamp on her hand.”
“Yeah, but the club’s in Queens.”
Jez wrinkled her nose. “Queens? That’s weird. No self-respecting Manhattanite goes to Queens to party.”
More laughter wafted out the apartment door, and Grady felt a fresh wave of annoyance and frustration. He tried to tamp it down, didn’t want to lose his temper. He was already getting a reputation.
“I really don’t like that woman,” Grady said.
“You don’t like anyone,” Jez replied with a patient smile.
“I like you.”
“I guess that makes me one of the lucky few who meets with your approval. Do you ever think you might be a little too judgmental?”
“I’m a cop.”
“My point exactly. You’re supposed to have an investigative mind, not a mind like a steel trap.”
“More insults from my partner.”
She pulled a face of mock sympathy. “Think of it as tough love.”
He gave a little chuckle, thought about making a comment about his ex, but Jez’s earlier admonitions still rang in his head.
“Women don’t usually cut each other’s throats,” he said after a beat. “That’s an intimate act. And one that takes tremendous strength. You need to immobilize the person with one arm, draw the knife across her throat with the other.” He mimed the action.
“Or it’s an act of trust,” Jez said. She leaned in quickly, close to him, brought the tip of her index finger to his throat and drew it quickly across. She moved back to the wall. “You wouldn’t let a stranger near enough to cut your throat, unless you were overpowered. Camilla Novak let her killer in, let him get very close to her.”
He remembered something Isabel Raine had told him at the hospital. “Isabel Raine said that her husband had had an affair. She said it was a couple of years ago, that she never knew with whom.”
“Maybe it was Camilla Novak.”
“Which gives both husband and wife possible motive here.”
“And provides another connection to the missing Marcus Raine.”
“So, what now? Our best leads missing and dead.”
“We need to find out where all that money went. We follow it. It’s easy enough for people to disappear, but money always leaves a trail.”
“Already on it,” Jez said. “Warrant issued, records subpoenaed. We should have everything first thing tomorrow.”
“And what about cell phone records, for both of them?”
Jez rolled her eyes at him. “What am I, a rookie? And by the way, you could do some of this stuff every once in while, instead of walking around looking tortured and complaining that you can’t think, trying to feel the scene.” She waggled her fingers at him. “You’re like a character cop, an idea of yourself.”
“Any more insults for me today? Let’s just get them all out of the way now.”
“Not insults, Crowe. Just observations. Don’t be so sensitive.” She gave him a sly smile, knew that she was getting to him and enjoying the hell out of it. “I’m just trying to get you to keep your feet on the ground.”
“You don’t give me a chance,” he said, sounding a little peevish even to his own ears. “You’re all over this stuff. Anyway, you’re better at getting things like that done. People listen to you.”
“Hmm,” she said, moving back toward the apartment.
“Let’s get a photo of Marcus Raine the second and make a visit to Red Gravity, see if anyone there recognizes him.”
“If it survived the dot bomb. A lot of those little tech companies didn’t make it.”
“Worth a shot.”
“Another thing that’ll have to wait till morning.”
Grady looked at his watch; it was close to ten P.M. The morning seemed a long way off. He didn’t think they could wait around on banking and cell phone records, offices that might or might not still exist.
“What till then?” he asked.
She turned back to him. “We go door-to-door and let everyone tell us they didn’t see or hear anything. Then I say we take Erik Book in and talk to him a little more. I don’t think he’s telling us everything.”
“And when he lawyers up-if he hasn’t already-how ’bout we do a little clubbing?”
“You read my mind.”
I WAS FEARLESS once. I remember this. I remember being so sure of myself, of my opinions, passions, and goals. I remember raging and debating in my classes at NYU-politics, literature, history. Everything seemed clear. Everyone with a different opinion was simply wrong. There wasn’t one event that changed this, not that I remember.
But as I grew older, that passionate certainty faded. I became more reserved, more reticent. My righteousness was less assured. I avoided the kind of heated political debates that I once enjoyed. Existential, religious, moral arguments made me uncomfortable. There were so many opinions, so many convinced of their own righteousness. A slow dawning that the world was impossibly complicated, that differences were too often irreconcilable, made me less inclined to do battle.
I saw this mellowing in Linda, too. After our father’s suicide, she was so angry. And she stayed angry-angry at him, at our mother, at Fred, at anyone who crossed her or disrespected her. She was always embroiled in some argument with this one or that, fought with clerks in various shops, waitresses, massage therapists, over any little issue. Once I had to drag her, screaming over her shoulder, from a gay sing-along bar in the Village after she fought with a drag queen over I can’t even remember what. I was pretty sure it was about to come to blows.
But when Erik came into her life, something in her shifted and settled. “He removed the thorn from her paw,” Fred said in his usual quiet way. Emily’s arrival calmed her still more. By the time Trevor came on the scene, she seemed as serene as a monk. I’d arrive at the loft and find the place in chaos-dishes in the sink, the floor a gauntlet of baby gyms, cloth blocks, and teddy bears-and Linda peacefully lying on the living room carpet, holding up a set of keys in the light for Trevor, or reading to Emily from a towering stack of books.
“I just don’t have the energy, Isabel,” I remember her telling me one afternoon. I was at the loft, and she mentioned a bad review she’d received. The reviewer had called her work “common” and “maudlin.” No one likes a bad review. But Linda could be expected to go off the deep end, sulking for days, making complaining phone calls to editors, writing nasty “reviews” of her reviews and sending them to the critic. But that afternoon, she just seemed to shrug it off.
“I can’t afford my own temper tantrums anymore. You owe them something, you know. These kids, you bring them into the world. They didn’t ask for it; you did it for all your own reasons, good or bad. The least you can do is not be a bitch all the time, someone who’s always in a rage, or complaining, or depressive.”