The Darkness Gathers (11 page)

“Are you all right?” he asked when he entered the room. She rose and let herself be taken into his arms, where she clung to him for a second.

“I’m okay. Valentina Fitore is dead,” she said, moving away from him and sitting down again. Jeffrey and Detective Ignacio took seats at the table.

“What happened?”

“One second, we were standing on the street. The next second, a black Mercedes came out of nowhere and just mowed her down. It was unbelievable. I never saw it coming.”

“They’re calling it a hit-and-run,” said the detective.

“It was no accident—whoever was driving that car aimed for her and raced off after he’d finished the job. It was a hit, no doubt about it.”

“Did you give your statement?”

She nodded. “I told them what I saw.”

“And why you were there?” asked the detective, wondering how much damage control he was going to have to do with his superiors.

“More or less. I said it was for an interview, based on a correspondence I had received from Mrs. Fitore. In my capacity as a writer, of course.”

The detective smiled.

“Did you get a chance to talk to her? Did she say anything to you before she died?”

“She never had a chance.”

Lydia tried not to replay the moment in her mind over and over. But her brain was stuck in some sort of sick loop. Repeatedly, she saw Valentina lifted away by the Mercedes’s fender, heard the horrifying crack at impact, saw her lifeless eyes. But sitting there waiting for Jeffrey and the detective, she’d had a chance to consider a few other things, as well. Who suspected that Valentina had information she shouldn’t have, and how did that person know that Lydia would be there waiting to speak to her about it? How did Valentina afford to live in a neighborhood like that on a maid’s salary? And why wasn’t that a detail that seemed suspicious to Ignacio? Who was the young man driving the Porsche?

She looked over at the detective, who had his head down, one hand on his forehead, and was tapping his right index finger lightly on the table. He’s kept something from you, her inner voice warned as goose bumps raised on her arms. There’s another piece to the puzzle that he didn’t reveal.

She slid in closer to him. “I was thinking, Detective,” she said slowly, “that’s an awfully nice house for a maid. And another interesting thing I observed … I saw a young man leaving in a Boxster.”

The tapping finger stilled, but Detective Ignacio didn’t raise his eyes to hers.

“What’s going on, Detective? I get the sense that there’s more to Valentina Fitore than you let on.”

The detective looked a little embarrassed. She watched as a flush of red crept up from beneath his collar and painted his cheeks.

“Valentina lives with her daughter. Marianna is just a kid, like I told you. A sophomore in college this year,” he said, delaying what came next. “But Valentina’s brother, Sasa, spends a lot of time at the house. Sasa … he’s a real bad man in the Albanian Mafia. On a pretty high level, from what I understand. Anyway, that’s somebody else’s problem.”

“The feds?” asked Jeffrey.

“Yeah. And they’re pretty uptight about the whole thing. When this whole Tatiana thing came down, they more or less told us to back off the Fitores. They didn’t want us fucking up their investigation. I guess I was sort of hoping that maybe there wasn’t a connection between Sasa Fitore and Tatiana’s disappearance. I guess I was wrong.” He shook his head.

“That’s why you let Lydia go there alone? Because you knew you would get shit for going where you had been told to step off?” asked Jeffrey.

The detective looked down at the table. “I’m sorry, Lydia. I never imagined I was putting you in any danger. Not like that.”

“I know,” she said. She didn’t blame him for being desperate and taking his opportunity for a back door into the Fitore house. But Jeffrey did.

“I’d never even heard of the Albanian Mafia until all this came down,” he said, looking at Lydia but avoiding Jeffrey’s eyes. “Apparently, they flew onto the FBI’s radar in 1994. The feds call them YACS—Yugoslavians, Albanians, Croats, and Serbs, though they mostly consist of Albanians. They pulled a bunch of heists—ATMs, cell phones … small-time stuff but big money. They were superorganized, skilled paramilitary shit, planning for every contingency … even getting arrested. And when someone got caught, he never talked. Like I said, the American police and prison systems look like Club Med to some of these guys. The FBI spent years spinning their wheels. Then things started to escalate after 1997. The feds started to believe that they were into all kinds of shit—drugs, prostitution, slavery. And they’re vicious—they make the Italians look like a bunch of Campfire Girls. They don’t have a code.… Women and children are fair game. They don’t have “families” and “bosses” like the Cosa Nostra. So they’ve been harder to pin down. I am guessing that now the feds have something on Sasa and they don’t want it fucked up, even at the expense of a little girl’s life.”

Jeffrey knew better than anyone that the FBI could be like a dog with a bone—it was part of the reason he’d left the Bureau. When it came to an end result, they worried more about media scandal than they did about human casualties, more about making the collar at any cost.

“I’m sure we can expect a visit sometime soon,” said Jeffrey.

“I’ll bet you’re right. And I have a few questions for them, too,” Lydia responded. She paused a second and then leaned toward Detective Ignacio. “If we’re going to help you find Tatiana, Detective, you’re going to have to be honest with us from this point forward. No more surprises.”

Jeffrey didn’t say anything, but his cool expression and folded hands said he wasn’t happy about anything that was going on.

“You have my word,” the detective said, raising his hands and giving a little laugh. Jeffrey thought he looked too relieved, as if he’d gotten away with something.

“What’s he into, Manny?” said Jeffrey.

“Who? Sasa?” he asked.

Jeffrey just looked at him.

“I don’t know for sure,” he said. “A prostitution thing, you know, pimping, I’d imagine.”

Lydia noticed the blush creeping back up from his collar. Jeffrey shook his head. “No, that’s not big enough for all of this intrigue,” he said.

“Listen, I really
don’t
know for sure,” he said earnestly. He paused a second, as if trying to figure out how to say it. “But I heard that it involves films.” He sounded as if the words tasted bitter on his tongue. “Bad stuff. You know, bondage porn that ends with murder.”

“You’re talking about snuff films?” asked Lydia, incredulous.

The detective nodded. His answer hung in the air between them, the implications expanding in each of their minds. Lydia’s mind went back to the letter she’d received: “And you must help Tatiana Quinn and all the other girls who are in need of rescue. There are too many who are already past helping.”

“And even with this knowledge, you were able to convince yourself that there was no connection between Sasa Fitore and the fact that a young girl is missing?” asked Lydia, trying and failing to keep the judgment out of her voice.

His face darkened a bit. “Like I said, I’ve been warned to step off. I have to follow the rules here or I’ll lose my career. I’m not a free agent like the two of you. I lose my job and my kid doesn’t go to college, my wife doesn’t get medication for her diabetes. Do you understand that?”

She did understand. She understood that this was the reason he’d been so happy to have their help, because they were going to be able to follow leads that he couldn’t, take the kind of risks that he wasn’t willing or able to take for Tatiana.

“Do you think that whoever killed Valentina did it because she knew something and someone didn’t want her to talk? Or could it have been a message to Sasa?”

“I don’t know,” said the detective. “I just don’t know.”

“It’s a pretty big coincidence that Valentina got hit just a couple of hours after we took that tape and note to Jenna Quinn,” observed Jeffrey.

Lydia nodded, taking the information in and wondering if they had gotten Valentina killed. And if so, what did that tell them about Jenna Quinn?

“What about the bartender?” asked Lydia, remembering the errand Manny and Jeff had been on when Valentina was killed.

“When we walked in the door of the restaurant, that pretty-boy bartender looked like he was going to wet himself. He pretended he didn’t remember me,” said Jeffrey. “Eventually, fifty dollars jogged his memory about the event. But when we showed him the picture from the surveillance photo, he said he couldn’t be sure if it was the same man who had bought our drinks. Said it was possible but that he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.”

“He was lying,” said Detective Ignacio. “Someone got to him. I thought he was going to pass out when we showed him the picture.”

Jeffrey nodded his agreement and then turned to Lydia with a frown. “If we’re done here, I’m taking you back to the hotel. You need some rest.” Jeffrey’s tone suggested that argument was futile, the kind of hard flatness he got to his voice when he was covering worry or fear with anger. And she was tired, so she rose to comply.

“Look, Lydia, I’m sorry about not telling you everything. I never imagined you could get hurt,” the detective said, offering his hand, which she took.

“I understand, Manny. I really do.”

Jeffrey was conspicuously silent, and the detective gave him a rueful look.

“Manny, when do you think you can get us in with Nathan Quinn?” asked Lydia as she and Jeffrey reached the door.

“I’ll call you at the Delano tomorrow and tell you when. Don’t bother just showing up at his office. No one sees Nathan Quinn without an appointment.”

chapter twelve

T
he ocean whispered and a child laughed. A gull screeched overhead, and the breeze flipped pages of a magazine Lydia had been reading before she dozed off, startling her back to semiwakefulness. She looked around her and saw the beach through amber-colored glasses and was aware of a certain unreality the afternoon had taken on, as if she were peering into another dimension through the glass of a genie’s bottle. The pall that she had been carrying around with her since Valentina was murdered two days before was starting to lift. Jeffrey’s towel was empty, wrinkled, and pressed into the sand where he had lain a few moments ago … or was it longer? Next to her, the laptop was closed. She looked around her and didn’t see him, then sat up in the low beach chair and reached for her bottle of water. It was warm, but she drank it anyway. Jeffrey had gotten his beach time after all, as they waited for their audience tomorrow with Nathan Quinn.

She fought a swell of anxiety as her eyes scanned the beach again, searching for Jeffrey’s familiar form among the crowd of strangers. The Art Deco buildings across Ocean Drive stood pink, lavender, yellow, and white, solid and pretty among the giant palms and endless parade of strollers, shoppers, and restaurantgoers. In the distance, towering condominium buildings stood grand and elegant against the jewel blue sky. The scene around her was a picture postcard, but all she could imagine was how quickly things could go bad, how the sky could darken, the wind pick up, how people might start to run. She could imagine the happy chatter of their voices turning to alarm, the music coming from boom boxes, drowned out by a violent clap of thunder. She pushed her imaginings away; she hadn’t allowed her mind to conjure images like that for a long time.

It was as if seeing Valentina murdered had released old fears within her. Demons she thought she’d wrestled and defeated had come back to call. A little vodka—no, a lot of vodka, and a lot of sleep had helped to fade the image of Valentina being struck by the Mercedes. But it was as if the direct exposure to violence had left her vulnerable again to the old feelings of guilt and fear that she had suffered since the death of her mother. She’d thought she was free of the feelings that had kept her denying her love for Jeffrey for so long. Free of the fear of losing someone else. She hadn’t said anything, but every time Jeffrey had left her sight, she had half-believed she would never see him again. She hated it. She hated feeling weak and vulnerable and scared.

But stronger than her fear was the buzz that had been coursing through her veins like a drug since they’d left the precinct. She had spent most of the day before scanning the Internet, confirming the information she had received from Craig and trying to find something more specifically damning on Nathan Quinn. But it seemed like everything printed about the man was a virtual valentine. No publication had anything bad to say about him or about any of his companies. The newspapers and local reports carried brief mentions of the “hit-and-run” that had claimed Valentina Fitore’s life, but it was made to sound like an accident. They said her body was to be shipped back to Albania for burial but that a memorial service was to be held at an Albanian center in Miami on Friday. There was no mention at all that she was the Quinns’ maid. It seemed as if someone didn’t want people to know that Valentina had been murdered and that she was connected to the disappearance of Tatiana. It made her wonder how far-fetched it was to imagine that someone was controlling the media coverage of the event. And if similar forces were at play in the case of Tatiana, controlling the investigation of her disappearance.

The morning after the murder, Detective Ignacio had called to tell Lydia and Jeffrey that the two of them had an appointment with Nathan Quinn on Tuesday at noon. “The feds have taken over the Valentina Fitore investigation,” explained Detective Ignacio over the phone. “I told them what we know. I told them about the tape and the letter and how you were there to talk about Tatiana. They kind of humored me. It was like ‘Yeah, good work, Detective. Go home.’ And they said they would contact you. I have to be honest—this is the most fucked-up investigation I’ve ever been a part of. Someone doesn’t want connections made.”

But the FBI hadn’t contacted her. Lydia actually went so far as to get the name of the head agent on the case, someone named Anton Bentley, and called him herself. But he hadn’t returned her call.