Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [6]
Going through the house with detectives, she had also noticed one of her mother’s earrings was missing. Not from the pair Marion was wearing when she was murdered, but from a pair of garnet studs Lydia coveted and had borrowed the day before but carefully replaced in her mother’s jewelry box.
“She’s a natural detective,” Dooley had said, with something like resentment in his voice.
In a matter of hours they had traced the plate to Jed McIntyre, a freelance engineering consultant living in Nyack, New York. When they raided his home, he was in his underwear, drinking a beer in front of the television. He smiled as he was led away in the cold night.
“You idiots,” he kept repeating. “You idiots.”
In the subsequent search of his home for evidence, they found thirteen photo albums filled with pictures of his victims and a large jewelry box with twenty tiny, velvet-lined drawers. Thirteen of them held one earring from each of his victims—minute, glittering trophies of his deeds.
Lydia coolly identified Jed McIntyre in a lineup a week later with a strange, trancelike composure. She looked dangerously close to floating away into her grief-stricken mind. Jeffrey was afraid for her and took her to his office so she could avoid the hordes of reporters that followed her everywhere.
“I need to be left alone,” she had said to him, “just for a minute.”
But as he closed the door and walked down the hallway, he had heard a scream that he carried with him still, that would, to him, forever be the very sound of grief. He ran back to his office to find Lydia sitting on the floor screaming and sobbing. He dropped to his knees and took her in his arms and rocked her until she stopped. She became limp with grief and fear, whimpering for her mother.
Sometimes he still saw her that way when he looked into her gray eyes over dinner or when they were working. He remembered her small, gaunt features taut with stress and terror on that first day. Her eyes heavy-lidded, blinking slowly—they would seem almost reptilian if they weren’t so warm and intelligent. She’d had an odd strength and maturity for an adolescent. Her voice never quivered when they interviewed her, but she never made eye contact. She sat next to her grandfather, who sat with a protective arm around her as tears fell from his eyes.
Even now, though at thirty she was an award-winning journalist and an author, an investigative consultant with Jeffrey’s firm, and a strong and accomplished woman, when they were alone he could see the demons in her still. He could see the little girl inside who had never really healed but had been locked away in the attic of her subconscious. He knew one day she would have to be let out. He only hoped he would be there when it happened.
He had been trying for weeks to reach her at her Upper West Side apartment in New York and on her cell phone. The number to the house just outside Santa Fe had been disconnected. That was not unusual, as she changed her numbers often. He could find her, he knew, if he really tried. But he always let her be, let her come to him.
Five years ago, he had left the Bureau and started his own private-investigation agency with two other former special agents. The firm Mark, Hanley and Striker Investigations, Inc. had started in a studio apartment in the East Village. With one phone line and one computer, a couple contacts at the Bureau, and a couple of informants on the street, he, Jacob Hanley, and Christian Striker had built the firm to what it was today: a suite of offices on the top floor of a high rise on West Fifty-seventh Street, employing over a hundred top people, grossing more money last year than Jeff would have thought possible. At first they took the cases no one else wanted, cases the police had dropped or deemed unsolvable, like desperate parents with no money