The trouble was, so far Folcroft showed no signs of illegal activity outside of that twelve-million-dollar bombshell in the bank account.
As he got up to set the downsizing of Folcroft Sanitarium in motion, his heel struck a piece of the broken picture window lying on the floor. The shard cracked underfoot.
Swearing, Koldstad reached down to pick up the glass. He froze.
The fragment of glass had broken into three pieces. Three separate mirror reflections of Jack Koldstad's grim face stared back at him.
Koldstad scooped up the largest piece. It was a mirror. But when he turned it around, he could see his fingers through transparent glass.
"Damn!"
He went to the fractured window. The hole was large enough for his head but the edges were too sharp to risk it, so he stuck his hand out, holding the piece of glass mirror-side in.
The mirror's own reflection showed up in the glass. Koldstad should have seen himself reflected. The other side of the window was obviously a mirror, too.
"A damn one-way window," Koldstad growled. "Folcroft isn't so innocent after all."
He dropped the shard into a wastepaper basket as he strode out of the office, his squeezed-in temples making him look like a man with the most excruciating headache in the universe.
Chapter 7
Desk Sergeant Troy Tremaine had seen it all.
During his thirty years on the Port Chester, New York, police force, he had seen every human aberration, every nut case, nut job, dimwit, chuckle head and dip-shit loser come through the frosted-glass front doors and step up to his old-fashioned high precinct desk.
The skinny guy with the thick wrists didn't look like one of those. In fact, he looked very sincere. There was great sincerity in his deep-set brown eyes. They were veritable wells of sincerity. Sergeant Tremaine would have staked his pension on the skinny guy's high sincerity quotient.
He walked up, squeezed the front edge of the desk with his fingers and said in a very sincere voice, "My wife is missing."
Tremaine, who had a wife himself, immediately felt for the poor guy. But business was business.
"How long?"
"Two days."
"We need three days before we can file a missing-person report."
"Did I say days? I meant weeks."
Tremaine's hot button should have gone off right then. But the guy was so sincere. He looked exactly as though he was heartsick over the loss of his wife.
So Troy said, "You said two days."
"I'm upset. I meant weeks."
"Her name?"
"Esmerelda."
Troy looked up. "Esmerelda?"
"It was her mother's name, too. Esmerelda Lolobrigida."
"That would make you..."
"Remo Lolobrigida." And the skinny guy produced an ID card that said he was Remo Lolobrigida, private investigator.
"You try looking for her yourself?"
Remo Lolobrigida nodded soberly. "Yeah. For the past week." His voice dripped sincerity.
"But you said she was missing two."
"I was out of town one week. Look, this is serious. I gotta find her."
"Okay, let me hand you off to a detective." He craned his bull neck and lifted his voice to a passing uniform. "Hey, who's catching today?"
The answer came back. "Boyle. But he's out to lunch."
"Damn. Okay, I'll take it. Give me the particulars, friend."
"She's about, I'd say twenty-eight."
"Say?"
"I think she lied about her age before we married. You know how women are."
"Right. Right."
"She's brown on brown, slim, wears her hair long."
"Recent photo available?"
"No. She was camera shy."
Oh, great, Tremaine thought. He kept it to himself. "How do you expect us to find your wife, buddy, without a recent snapshot?"
"Is there a police artist around? I know I can describe her pretty well"
Tremaine chewed on that as he erased something he had written.
"Guess we can try that." He picked up a phone and said, "DeVito. Got a guy out here who's missing his wife. Yeah. No recent photo. In fact, no photo at all. Want to take a crack at it? Sure."
Tremaine pointed to a door. "Go through there. DeVito will help you. Good luck, pal."
"Thanks," said the skinny guy, walking away. Only then did Troy Tremaine think that it was damn cool out there to be walking around in a T-shirt. By then it was too late.
POLICE SKETCH ARTIST Tony DeVito thought nothing of the skinny guy's light attire, either. He waved him into his office and said, "First I want you to look at some head shapes. Just to get us started."
The skinny guy went through the book and picked out a nice oval. Tony transferred the oval to his sketch pad and said, "Let's start with the eyes. What kind of eyes did-I mean does-your wife have?"
"Nice."
Tony winced. "Can you be more specific?"
"Sad."
"Sad but nice. Okay," Tony said, rolling his own eyes. Why did people think it was possible to draw nice? "Were they long, round or square?"
"Round."
Tony sketched round eyes. "Eyebrows?"
"Thick. Not plucked. But not too thick."
Tony drew Brooke Shields eyebrows, figuring he could subtract hair later on.
"Now the nose. Snub? Ski? Or sharp?"
"Neither. More of an Anne Archer nose."
Tony closed his eyes in thought. Anne Archer had a nice face and a memorable nose. He drew it from memory.
"Can you describe the mouth?"
"Not too full, not too wide."
"Good. More?"
"It was nice. Kind. Kind of motherly."
"I can draw kind, but not nice," he said tightly. "Do better than that."
They argued over the mouth for another ninety seconds before settling on a Susan Lucci mouth.
Tony started to put his pencil to the sheet and couldn't for the life of him remember what Susan Lucci's mouth looked like. Her legs, yes. Her eyes, sure. Her mouth, no.
"Any other actress besides Susan have a mouth like your wife's?" Tony asked.
"Minnie Mouse."
"Her I can draw."
The face came out surprisingly well for a first try. It was a nice face, even if the eyes were on the sad side.
"All we need is the hair," Tony said.
"Long in the back, but combed off the forehead."
"That's easy to do."
In the end Tony turned the sketch around and asked, "How close is that?"
The citizen frowned. "No, that's not her at all. The mouth is too thin, the nose too sharp, and the eyes are all wrong."
"Other than that it's a good likeness, right?" Tony asked dryly.
"The hair looks about right," Remo Lolobrigida admitted.
Great, Tony thought. It's a style twenty or thirty years out of date, but I'm right on the money with it.
"Okay," he said, "let's try tweaking the facial elements." He began erasing. "How about if I do this to the eyes?"
"She looks angry."
"Okay, she looks angry. Does she ever look like this when she's angry?"
"I never saw her angry."
"Married long?"
"No."
"Okay, how about this?"
"That looks about right."
"Let's bring the nose down, too."
It took twenty more minutes, but in the end the distraught husband said, "That's her. That's exactly her."
"Sure? This is going to go on posters everywhere. We want it exactly right."
The worried husband took the sheet of paper from Tony's hand and stared at it for an unnaturally long time. He was searching the face as if seeing it for the first time in a very, very long while.
"It's exactly her," he said in a wistful tone.
"Okay, let's get this on the wire."
Tony started to stand up. The worried husband reached out with an absent hand, his eyes never coming off the sketch. The hand caught him by the right knee and locked. Tony felt as if a pair of steel pliers had taken hold of him. The plierslike hand forced Tony back into his hard wooden chair with inexorable strength.