The Woods

She turned toward me.

“I could have been projecting. I mean, you’re right. I did blame myself to some degree. What if we hadn’t gone off? What if I had just stayed where I was supposed to? And maybe the look on his face was just the pure devastation of a parent losing a child. But I always thought there was something more in it. Something almost accusatory.”

She put a hand on my arm. “Oh, Cope.”

I kept driving. “So maybe you’re on to something. Maybe I do need to make amends for the past. But what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why are you delving into this? What do you hope to gain after all these years?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. What are you after exactly?”

“The life I knew ended that night. Don’t you get that?”

I said nothing.

“The families—including yours—dragged my father into court. You took away everything we had. Ira wasn’t built for that kind of hit. He couldn’t take the stress.”

I waited for her to say more. She didn’t.

“I understand that,” I said. “But what are you after now? I mean, like you said, I’m trying to rescue my sister. Short of that, I’m trying to find out what really happened to her. What are you after?”

She didn’t reply. I drove some more. The skies were starting to darken.

“You don’t know how vulnerable I feel being here,” she said.

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. So I said, “I would never hurt you.”

Silence.

“Part of it is,” she said, “it feels like I lived two lives. The one before that night, where things were going pretty well, and the one after, where things aren’t. And yeah, I know how pathetic that sounds. But sometimes it feels like I was pushed down a hill that night and I’ve been stumbling down ever since. That sometimes I sort of get my bearings but the hill is so steep that I can never really get balanced again and then I start tumbling again. So perhaps—I don’t know—but perhaps if I figure out what really happened that night, if I can make some good out of all that bad, I’ll stop tumbling.”

She had been so magnificent when I knew her. I wanted to remind her of that. I wanted to tell her that she was being overly melodramatic, that she was still beautiful and successful and that she still had so much going for her. But I knew that it would sound too patronizing.

So instead I said, “It’s so damn good to see you again, Lucy.”

She squeezed her eyes shut as though I had struck her. I thought about what she said, about not wanting to be too vulnerable. I thought about that journal, all that talk about not finding another love like that, not ever. I wanted to reach out and take her hand, but I knew for both of us right now, it was too raw, that even a move like that would be too much and not enough.

CHAPTER 24

I DROPPED OFF LUCY BACK AT HER OFFICE.

“In the morning,” she said, “I’ll visit Ira and see what he can tell me about Manolo Santiago.”

“Okay.”

Lucy reached for the door handle. “I have a bunch of papers to correct.”

“I’ll walk you in.”

“Don’t.”

Lucy slipped out of the car. I watched her walk toward the door. My stomach tightened. I tried to sort through what I was feeling right now, but it just felt like a rush of emotion. Hard to distinguish what was what.

My cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and saw it was Muse.

“How did it go with Perez’s mother?” Muse asked.

“I think she’s lying.”

“I got something you might find interesting.”

“I’m listening.”

“Mr. Perez hangs at a local bar called Smith Brothers. He likes hanging out with the boys, plays some darts, that kind of thing. Moderate drinker from what I hear. But the last two nights, he got really lit up. Started crying and picking fights.”

“Grieving,” I said.

At the morgue, Mrs. Perez had been the strong one. He had leaned on her. I remember that I could see the cracks there.

“And either way, liquor loosens the tongue,” Muse said.

“True enough.”

“Perez is there now, by the way. At the bar. Might be a good place to take a run at him.”

“On my way.”

“There is one more thing.”

“I’m listening.”

“Wayne Steubens will see you.”

I think I stopped breathing. “When?”

“Tomorrow. He’s serving his time at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia. I also hooked you up to meet with Geoff Bedford at the FBI office afterward. He was the special agent in charge of Steubens’s case.”

“Can’t. We have court.”

“Can. One of your associates can handle it for a day. I have you booked on the morning flight.”

I don’t know what I expected the bar to be. Something tougher, I guessed. The place could have been a chain restaurant like T.G.I. Friday’s or Bennigan’s, something like that. The bar was bigger than in most of those places, the dining area obviously smaller. They had wood paneling and free-popcorn machines and loud music from the eighties. Right now Tears for Fears was singing “Head Over Heels.”

In my day, they would have called this a yuppie bar. There were young men in loosened ties and women trying hard to look business-y. The men drank beer out of bottles, trying hard to look like they were having a good time with their buddies while checking out the ladies. The ladies drank wine or faux martinis and eyed the guys more surreptitiously. I shook my head. The Discovery Channel should film a mating special in here.

This didn’t look like a hangout for a guy like Jorge Perez, but I found him toward the back. He sat at the bar with four or five comrades in arms, men who knew how to drink, men who hulked over their alcohol as though it were a baby chick in need of protection. They watched the twenty-first-century yuppies milling about them with hooded eyes.

I came up behind Mr. Perez and put a hand on his shoulder. He turned toward me slowly. So did his comrades. His eyes were red and runny. I decided to try a direct route.

“My condolences,” I said.

He seemed puzzled. The other guys with him, all Latino men in their late fifties, looked at me as though I’d been ogling their daughters. They wore work clothes. Mr. Perez had on a Polo shirt and khaki pants. I wondered if that meant anything, but I couldn’t imagine what.

“What do you want?” he asked me.