Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [5]
“She’s here,” he said simply, smiling kindly.
Lydia smiled back, relieved. “Oh, you can see. I’m so happy for you.”
“The only important thing,” he said, looking past her, “is what you see.”
She followed his eyes and saw her mother. Not as Lydia chose to remember her from her childhood, but as Lydia had last seen her.
Her arms were tied over her head, her wrists bleeding and black and blue from her struggle. Though she smiled beautifully at Lydia in the way she always had, her eyes rolled back into her head and her face was ghastly white. Her throat was slit from ear to ear, and blood bubbled in and out as she breathed. Her ankles were tied in the same manner as her wrists, and her panties, covered in blood, were down, tangled around the ropes. Her white nightgown was ripped and filthy with dirt and blood and semen. She was forty-five years old.
Lydia tried to speak but was choked by her rage and her horror, just as she had been nearly fifteen years before.
“Mom,” she managed, “let me help you.”
“No, dear,” she said, “let me help you.”
Lydia began to scream as the blind man played his guitar.
chapter three
The light had long faded from above the New York City skyline before his thoughts returned to Lydia for the first time that day. Jeffrey Mark closed the file he was looking at, removed his glasses, and rubbed his tired eyes. The offices of Mark, Hanley and Striker were quiet now. He could hear only the hum of a vacuum cleaner down the hall and smell the burnt bottom of a coffeepot someone had forgotten to turn off.
He spun his chair around to look out at his view of the city. A million squares of light reached into a starless sky. A million lies, a million heartbreaks, a million crimes to match, he thought. He wondered again where in the hell she was and why she hadn’t called. He supposed he should be used to this by now after fifteen years. But instead it seemed to be getting harder. He stared at his dark reflection in the plate-glass window. He looked older and more tired than he liked to imagine himself. He unconsciously rubbed his right shoulder.
He remembered the first time he saw Lydia Strong, fifteen years ago. He was twenty-five then. The death of her mother had been his first case with the FBI. Marion Strong was one of thirteen women murdered in their homes in the New York area in three years. One of the more memorable details of the serial killer’s MO was that he would make sure to leave his victim where she would be found by her children returning home from school. All of the victims were single, working mothers with at least one teenage child.
Jeffrey was assigned to the case because no one else wanted to be the junior man under Roger Dooley, a twenty-five-year veteran with a miserable personality and a tendency toward obsession. Unwashed, mostly, and reeking of fast food and failed relationships, Dooley was the most unpleasant, bitter man Jeff had ever known—and that was when he was in a good mood. Every lead in the case had turned cold in Dooley’s hands for three years. This investigation looked to be his last before retirement and he couldn’t stand to end a superstar career on a losing streak. He was a real prick and Jeffrey hated him. But he was a genius investigator, and Jeff would learn everything he knew from the man.
They may never have found the killer if it hadn’t been for fifteen-year-old Lydia. She had an eye for detail and an active imagination. Some days before her mother’s murder, she had noticed a man in the parking lot of the local supermarket. She had noticed him because of his bright red hair, and the way he had stood staring at her and her mother beside a red-and-white car that reminded her of her favorite TV show, Starsky and Hutch.
“Look, Mom, that man is watching us,” she remembered telling her mother.
“Lydia, don’t stare. Get in the car,” her mother had told her sternly, not in the mood for another of Lydia’s fantasies. But Lydia was already playing a game in her mind, pretending the man was following