Hold Tight
“Where?” Yasmin asked.
“The office. I need to pick up some stuff. But Beth just stopped by. She’s downstairs watching TV, if you need anything.”
Yasmin smirked. “Just stopped by?”
“Yes.”
“Like she didn’t sleep here? Right, Dad. How old do you think we are?”
He frowned. “That’s enough, young lady.”
“Whatever.”
He closed the door. Jill sat on the bed. Yasmin moved closer to her.
“What do you think happened?” Yasmin asked.
Jill didn’t reply, but she didn’t like where her thoughts were taking her.
COPE came into Muse’s office. He was, Muse thought, looking rather natty in his new blue suit.
“Press conference today?” Muse asked.
“How did you guess?”
“Your suit is natty.”
“Do people still say natty?”
“They should.”
“Agreed. I am the picture of nattiness. I am nattatious. The Natt Man. The Nattster.”
Loren Muse held up a sheet of paper. “Look what just came in to my office.”
“Tell me.”
“Frank Tremont’s letter of resignation. He is putting in for retirement.”
“Quite a loss.”
“Yes.”
Muse looked at him.
“What?”
“Your stunt yesterday with that reporter.”
“What about it?”
“It was a tad patronizing,” Muse said. “I don’t need you rescuing me.”
“I wasn’t rescuing you. If anything, I was setting you up.”
“How’s that?”
“You either had the goods to blow Tremont out of the water or you didn’t. One of you was going to look like an ass.”
“Him or me, was that it?”
“Exactly. Truth is, Tremont is a snitch and a terrible distraction in this office. I wanted him gone for selfish reasons.”
“Suppose I didn’t have the goods.”
Cope shrugged. “Then you might be the one handing in your resignation.”
“You were willing to take that risk?”
“What risk? Tremont is a lazy moron. If he could outthink you, you don’t deserve to be the chief.”
“Touché.”
“Enough. You didn’t call me to talk about Frank Tremont. So what’s up?”
She told him all about the disappearance of Reba Cordova—the witness at Target, the van, the parking lot at the Ramada in East Hanover. Cope sat in the chair and looked at her with gray eyes. He had great eyes, the kind that change color in different light. Loren Muse had something of a crush on Paul Copeland, but then again, she’d also had something of a crush on his predecessor, who was considerably older and couldn’t have looked more different. Maybe she had a thing for authority figures.
The crush was harmless, more an appreciation than any kind of real-life longing. He didn’t keep her up at night or make her hurt or intrude on any of her fantasies, sexual or otherwise. She loved Paul Copeland’s attractiveness without coveting it. She wanted those qualities in whatever man she dated, though Lord knows she had never found it.
Muse knew about her boss’s past, about the horror he’d gone through, the hell of recent revelations. She had even helped see him through it. Like so many other men she knew, Paul Copeland was damaged, but damaged worked for him. Lots of guys in politics—and that’s what this job was, a political appointment—are ambitious but haven’t known suffering. Cope had. As a prosecutor it made him both more sympathetic and less likely to accept defense excuses.
Muse gave him all the facts on the Reba Cordova disappearance without her theories. He watched her face and nodded slowly.
“Let me guess,” Cope said. “You think that this Reba Cordova is somehow connected to your Jane Doe.”
“Yes.”
“Are you thinking, what, a serial killer?”
“It could be, though serial killers normally work alone. There was a woman involved in this one.”
“Okay, let’s hear why you think they’re linked.”
“First the MO.”
“Two white women about the same age,” Cope said. “One is found dressed like a hooker in Newark. The other, well, we don’t know where she is.”
“That’s part of it, but here is the big thing that drew my eye. The use of deception and diversion.”
“I’m not following.”
“We have two well-to-do white women in their forties vanishing within, what, twenty-four hours of each other. That’s a strange similarity right there. But more than that, in the first case, with our Jane Doe, we know the killer went through elaborate staging to fool us, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, he did the same with Reba Cordova.”
“By parking the car at a motel?”
She nodded. “In both cases, he worked hard to throw us off the track with false clues. In the case of Jane Doe, he set it up so we would think she was a hooker. In the case of Reba Cordova, he made it look like she was a woman cheating on her husband who ran off with her lover.”
“Eh.” Cope made a face. “That’s pretty weak.”
“Yes. But it is something. Not to be racist, but how often does a nice-looking family woman from a suburb like Livingston just run off with a lover?”
“It happens.”
“Maybe, but she would plan better, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t drive up to a shopping mall near where her daughter takes ice-skating lessons and buy some kid underwear and then, what, throw them away and run to her lover? And then we have the witness, a guy named Stephen Errico, who saw her go into a van at the Target. And he saw another woman drive away.”
“If that’s what really happened.”
“It did.”
“Okay, but even so. How else are you tying Reba Cordova with our Jane Doe?”
Muse arched an eyebrow. “I’m saving the best for last.”
“Thank God.”
“Let’s go back to Stephen Errico.”
“The witness at the mall?”
“Right. Errico makes his report. On its own, sure, I don’t blame the security guys at the Palisades. It sounds like nothing. But I looked him up on the Web. He’s got his own blog page with his photo- graph—a big, heavy guy with a bushy beard and Grateful Dead shirt—and when I talked to him, he is clearly something of a conspiracy nut. Errico also likes to insinuate himself into the story. You know, the kind of guy who goes to the mall and hopes to see a shoplifter?”