3
Lyle suppressed a yawn as he went through the preliminaries with a new sitter. Not that he was bored talking about his spirit guide-how could Ifasen feel anything but excitement about communing with his ancient mentor Ogunfiditimi? Lyle was dead tired. He felt as if he'd spent the night completing an ironman triathlon.
Tara Portman or whatever it was had rested easy last night after the spirit-writing display. No noises, no blood, no breakage. Still sleep had eluded Lyle. The mere expectation of noise, blood, or breakage had turned his mattress into a bed of nails.
Charlie, on the other hand, looked fresh and fully rested this morning. That Bible of his, no doubt.
But Lyle's malaise went beyond fatigue. He couldn't pin it down. Not so much a matter of feeling bad as not feeling right. He felt... changed. The world looked and felt different. Shadows seemed deeper, lights brighter, sharper, the air felt charged, as if something momentous was in the offing.
He shook it off. He had work to do.
With the Channeling Room repaired, they'd begun rescheduling sittings. Lyle had adjusted the day's appointments to leave room for the meeting with Konstantin Kristadoulou. He'd called the old real estate agent first thing this morning and set up a meeting at one o'clock. He'd left a message for Jack about the time and place.
But that would be this afternoon. This was now, and Lyle wasn't happy with now. Melba Toomey was a far-from-ideal sitter. Lyle blamed his distracted state for allowing her to slip past the screening process. She would not be a good subject at any time, but especially not as the first of the day.
But she'd paid her money for a private sitting and now faced him across the table in her housedress and flower-decked straw hat, dark eyes bright with expectation in her black face.
According to the information on her questionnaire, Melba was fifty-three and cleaned houses for a living. Not at all typical of Ifasen's clientele, and certainly not the social class he was courting.
Lyle cringed at the thought of how long it must have taken her to save enough for a private sitting. But she'd said on her questionnaire that she'd come to him because he was black-didn't say African-American. Black.
Melba Toomey wanted to know if her husband Clarence was alive or dead; and if he was dead, she wanted to speak to him.
Lyle did his utmost to avoid the class of sitter whose concerns deprived him of precious wiggle room. Melba was the worst of that class: Alive or dead... was there a more black-or-white, yes-or-no proposition than that? It left him zero wiggle.
He'd have to do a cold reading on Clarence through Melba to try and get a grip on what kind of man Clarence was so as to make a roughly educated guess on whether he might be alive or dead.
I'm going to be sweating for my daily bread this round, he thought.
Lyle had placed two potato-size stones on the table, telling her that they were from Ogunfiditimi's birth place and, because Ogunfiditimi hadn't met her before, it enhanced first-time contact if she kept a good grip on those stones. It also kept her hands where Lyle could see them.
To set the mood-and kill some time-Lyle treated Melba to the histrionics, the table and chair tipping, then settled down to business.
Lyle came out of his pseudo trance and stared at her, watching closely. Her features were slightly fuzzy in the dim red light from overhead, but clear enough to pick up what he needed. Body language, visual cues in a blink of the eyes, a twist of the mouth, a twitch of a cheek... Lyle could read them like an old salt reads the sea.
First, some try-ons. She'd mentioned on her questionnaire that Clarence had been missing since June second. He'd start there.
"I'm getting a sense of a state of absence... of separation since... why does early June keep popping into my head?"
"The second of June!" Melba cried. "That's when I last saw Clarence! He went off to work in the morning and never came home. I haven't seen or heard from him since." She worked a used tissue out of her housedress pocket and dabbed her eyes. "Oh, Lord, you do have the gift, don't you."
Oh, yes, Lyle thought. The gift of remembering what you've forgotten you've told me.
"Please keep your hands on the stones, Melba," he reminded her. "It weakens contact when you remove them."
"Oh, sorry." She placed her hands back on the stones.
Good. Keep them there, he thought.
The last thing he wanted her to do was reach for her pocketbook. Because Charlie, covered head to toe in black, should have crept out of his command center by now and be ready to grab it from where it sat on the floor next to her chair.
"I told the police but I don't think they's doing much to find him. They don't seem the least bit interested."
"They're very busy, Melba," he told her.
Her distress sent a shot of guilt through Lyle. He wasn't going to do any more for her than the cops.
Value for value...
He shook it off and formulated another try-on. The first had been just an easy warm-up, to break the ice and gain a smidgen of her confidence. From here it got a little tougher.
Look at her: cleans houses, bargain-rack clothing; he couldn't see Clarence as a corporate exec. She mentioned him going off to work as if it were a routine thing. Good chance he had a steady blue-collar job, maybe union.
Try-on number two...
"Why do I want to say he worked in a trade?"
"He was an electrician!"
"A loyal union man."
She frowned. "No. He was never in a union."
Whoops, but easy enough to save. "But I get the feeling he wanted to be in the union."
"Yes! How did you know! That poor man. He tried so many times but never qualified. He was always talking about how much more money he could be making if he was in the union."
Lyle nodded sagely. "Ah, that was what I was picking up."
Let's see... blue-collar, frustrated... maybe Clarence liked to knock back a few after work? And even if he was a teetotaler or an ex-drinker, the temptation to drink offered a ready fallback.
"I'm getting the impression of a dimly lit place, the smell of smoke, the clink of glassware..."
"Leon's! That awful place! He'd go there after work and come home reeking of beer. Sometimes he wouldn't come home till after midnight. We had such terrible fights over it."
Drunk... frustrated... go for it, but keep it vague.
"I'm led to say that some harm was done?"
Melba looked away. "He never meant to hurt me. It's just that sometimes, when I got him real mad after he came home late, he'd take a swing. He didn't mean nothin' by it. But now that he's gone..." She sobbed and grabbed the tissue to dab at her eyes again. "I'd rather have him home late than not at all."
"I'm losing contact!" Lyle said. "The hands! The stones. Please stay in contact with the stones."
Melba grabbed them again. "I'm sorry. It's just-"
"I understand, but you must hold the stones."
"Got her wallet here," said Charlie's voice in his earpiece. Obviously he'd made it back to his command center with the pocketbook. "Picture of her and some fat guy-I mean, I could be looking at the Notorious B.I.G. here-but no kid pics."
Lyle said, "I'm looking for children but..."
He left a blank space, hoping she'd fill it in. As with most sitters, she didn't disappoint.
"We didn't have any. Lord knows we tried but..." She sighed. "It never happened."
"Not much else goin' down here," Charlie said. "Keys, a lipstick, hey-beat this: a harmonica. Bet it ain't hers. Good shot it's her old man's. I'll get the bag back lickity."
While waiting, Lyle made a few remarks about Clarence's weight problems to bolster further his psychic credibility. The picture he'd formed of Clarence was that of a frustrated, money-squeezed, bad-tempered drinker. An answer to a dead-or-alive question on a guy like that had to lean toward dead. He might have got himself involved in some quick-buck scheme that went wrong, leaving him food for the worms or the fish.
Lyle felt a tap on his leg: Charlie had returned the bag.
Lyle cleared his throat. "Why am I hearing music? It sounds reedy. Could it be a harmonica?"
"Yes! Clarence loved to play the harmonica. People told him he was terrible." Melba smiled. "And he was. He was just awful. But that never stopped him from trying."
"Why do I sense his harmonica nearby?"
She gasped. "I brought one with me! How could you know?"
Preferring to let her provide her own answer to that, Lyle said, "It might facilitate contact if I can touch an object that belongs to the one we seek."
"It's in my handbag." Melba glanced at her hands where they rested on the stones, then back at Lyle. "Do you think I could...?"
"Yes, but one hand only, please."
"We gonna take this poor lady's money, bro?" Charlie asked in his ear. "She ain't exactly our usual breed of fish."
Lyle couldn't give him an answer, but the same hesitancy had been nibbling at him throughout the sitting.
He watched Melba free her right hand, pull her handbag up to ker lap, and fish out a scratched and dented harmonica with "Hohner Special 20 Marine Band" embossed along the top.
"This was his favorite," she said, pushing it across the table.
Lyle reached toward it, then stopped as warning alarms rang through his nerve ends. Why? Why shouldn't he touch the harmonica?
After a few awkward seconds, with Melba's expression moving toward a puzzled frown, Lyle set his jaw and took hold of the harmonica-
-and cried out as the room did a sudden turn and then disappeared and he was standing in another room, a suite in the Bellagio in Vegas, watching a fat man he knew to be Clarence Toomey snore beside a blonde Lyle knew to be a hooker he'd hired for the night. He knew everything-the half-million-dollar lottery prize Clarence had won and kept secret from his wife until he'd collected the money, how he'd left home and never looked back.
Melba's cry from somewhere in front of him: "What's wrong?"
Charlie in his ear: "Lyle! What's happenin'?"
The feel of the harmonica in his hands... uncoiling his fingers one by one until...
The harmonica dropped onto the table and abruptly Lyle was back in the Channeling Room, looking at Melba who faced him with wide eyes and her hands pressed against her mouth.
"Lyle! Answer me! Are you all right?"
"I'm okay," Lyle said, for Melba's sake as well as his brother's.
But he was anything but okay.
What had just happened? Was it real? Had he truly been looking at Clarence Toomey or imagining it? It had seemed so real, and yet... it couldn't be.
Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He didn't know what to make of it.
"Ifasen?" Melba said. "What happened? Did you see anything? Did you see my Clarence?"
What could he say? Even if he were sure it was true-and he wasn't, not at all-how do you tell a woman that her husband is bedded down in Vegas with a hooker?
"I'm not sure what I saw," Lyle said. Couldn't get much truer than that. He pushed back from the table. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut short our session. I... I don't feel well." No lie. He felt like hell.
"No, please," Melba said.
"I'm sorry. I will refund your money."
"Mah man!" Charlie said in his ear.
"I don't care about the money," Melba said. "I want my Clarence. How will I find him?"
"The lottery," Lyle said.
She looked at him. "The lottery? I don't understand."
"Neither do I, but that was the message that came through the clearest. Check with the New York State Lottery. Ask them about Clarence. That's all I can tell you."
If she did that, and if Lyle's vision had been real-a big if-she'd learn about Clarence's big win. She could hire someone to track him down, maybe get a piece of whatever was left.
She wanted to find her husband, but success was going to bring her only a load of hurt.
Charlie appeared, looking at him strangely. He had to be bursting with a million questions, but couldn't ask them while Melba was here.
Lyle said, "Kehinde will show you out and return your money. And remember what I told you: Check with the lottery. Do it today."
Melba's expression was troubled. "I don't understand any of this, but at least you tried to help. That's more than the police have done." She held out her hand. "Thank you."
Lyle gripped her hand and stifled a gasp as a whirlwind of sensations blew through him-a brief period of anger, then sadness, then loneliness, all dragging along for a year and a half, maybe more, but certainly less than two, and then darkness-hungry darkness that gobbled up Melba and everything around her.
He dropped her hand quickly, as if he'd received a shock. Was that Melba's future? Was that all she had left? Less than two years?
"Good-bye," he said and backed away.
Charlie led her toward the waiting room, giving Lyle an odd look over his shoulder.
"Ifasen is not himself today," he told Melba.
Damn right he's not himself, Lyle thought as uneasiness did a slow crawl down his spine. But who the hell is he?
4
Jack will kill me when he finds out.
Gia stood before the flaking apartment door and hesitated. Against all her better judgment she'd gone back to the abductedchild.org web site and called the family number listed on Tara Portman's page. She'd asked the man who answered if he was related to Tara Portman-he said he was her father-and told him that she was a writer who did freelance work for a number of newspapers. She was planning a series of articles about children who had been missing more than ten years and could he spare a few moments to speak to her?
His answer had been a laconic, Sure, why not? He told her she could stop by any time because he was almost always in.
So now she was standing in the hot, third-floor hallway of a rundown apartment building in the far-West Forties and afraid to take the next step. She'd dressed in a trim, businessy blue suit, the one she usually wore to meetings with art directors, and carried a pad and a tape recorder in her shoulder bag.
She wished she'd asked about Mrs. Portman-was she alive, were they still married, would she be home?
The fact that Tara had written "Mother" with no mention of her father might be significant; might say something about her relationship with her father; might even mean, as Jack had suggested, that he was involved in her disappearance.
But the fact remained that the ghost of Tara Portman had appeared to Gia and Gia alone, and that fact buzzed through her brain like a trapped wasp. She'd have no peace until she learned what Tara Portman wanted. That seemed to center on the mother she'd mentioned.
"Well, I've come this far," she muttered. "Can't stop now."
She knocked on the door. It was opened a moment later by a man in his mid-forties. Tara's blue eyes looked out from his jowly, unshaven face; his heavy frame was squeezed into a dingy T-shirt with yellowed armpits and coffee stains down the front, cut-off shorts, and no shoes. His longish dark blond hair stuck out in all directions.
"What?" he said.
Gia suppressed the urge to run. "I-I'm the reporter who called earlier?"
"Oh, yeah, yeah." He stuck out his hand. "Joe Portman. Come in."
A sour mix of old sweat and older food puckered Gia's nostrils as she stepped through the doorway into the tiny apartment, but she stifled her reaction. Joe Portman hustled around, turning off the TV and picking up scattered clothing from the floor and a sagging couch; he rolled them into a ball and tossed them into a closet.
"Sorry. Didn't expect you so soon." He turned to her. "Coffee?"
"Thanks, no. I just had some."
He dropped onto the couch and indicated the chair next to the TV for her.
"You know," he said, "this is really strange. The other night I was sitting right here, watching the Yankees, when I suddenly thought of Tara."
Gia seated herself carefully. "You don't usually think of her?"
He shrugged. "For too many years she was all I thought of. Look where it got me. Now I try not to think of her. My doctor at the clinic tells me let the past be past and get on with my life. I'm learning to do that. But it's slow. And hard."
A thought struck Gia. "What night was it when you had this sudden thought of Tara?"
"It was more than a thought, actually. For an instant, just a fraction of a second, I thought she was in the room. Then the feeling was gone."
"But when?"
He looked at the ceiling. "Let's see... the Yanks were playing in Oakland so it was Friday night."
"Late?"
"Pretty. Eleven or so, I'd guess. Why?"
"Just wondering," Gia said, hiding the chill that swept through her.
Joe Portman had sensed his daughter's presence during the earthquake under Menelaus Manor.
"Well, the reason I brought it up is, Friday night I get this feeling about Tara, then this morning you call wanting to do an article about her. Is that synchronicity or what?"
Synchronicity... not the kind of word Gia expected from someone who looked like Joe Portman.
"Life is strange sometimes," Gia said.
"That it is." He sighed, then looked at her. "Okay, reporter lady, what can I tell you?"
"Well, maybe we could start with how it happened?"
"The abduction? You can read about that in detail in all the old newspapers."
"But I'd like to hear it from you."
His eyes narrowed, his languid voice sharpened. "You sure you're a writer? You're not a cop, are you?"
"No. Not at all. Why do you ask?"
He leaned back and stared at his hands, folded in his lap. "Because I was a suspect for a while. Dot too."
"Dot is your wife?"
"Dorothy, yeah. Well, she was. Anyway, the cops kept coming up empty and... that was the time when stories about satanic cults and ritual abuse were big in the papers... so they started looking at us, trying to see if we were into any weird shit. Thank God we weren't or we might have been charged. It's hard to see how things could have worked out any worse, but that definitely would've been worse."
"How did it happen?"
He sighed. "I'll give you the short version." He glanced at her. "Aren't you taking notes?"
How dumb! she thought, reaching into her bag for her cassette recorder.
"I'd like to record this, if that's okay."
"Sure. We lived in Kensington. That's a section of Brooklyn. You know it?"
Gia shook her head. "I didn't grow up in New York."
"Well, it sounds ritzy, but it's not. It's just plain old middle class, nothing special. I worked for Chase here in the city, Dot worked out there as a secretary for the District 20 school board. We did okay. We liked Kensington because it was close to Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery. Believe it or not, we saw the cemetery as a plus. It's a pretty place." He looked down at his hands again. "Maybe if we'd lived somewhere else, Tara would still be with us."
"How did it happen?"
He sighed. "When Tara was eight we took her to Kensington stables up near the parade grounds. You know, so she could see the horses. One ride and she was an instant horse lover. Couldn't keep her away. So we sprung for riding lessons and she was a natural. For a year she rode three days a week-Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and Saturday morning. On Thursdays she'd have to wait a little while before Dot could pick her up. We told her to stay at the stables-do not under any circumstances leave the stables. And for a year it worked out fine. Then one Thursday afternoon Dot arrived to pick her up-right on time, I want you to know-and... no Tara." His voice cracked. "We never saw or heard from her again."
"And no witnesses, no clues?"
"Not a single one. We did learn, though, that she hadn't listened to us. Folks at the stable said she used to leave for a few minutes on Thursdays and return with a pretzel-you know, the big kind they sell from the pushcarts. The cops found the pushcart guy who remembered her-said she came by every Thursday afternoon in her riding clothes-but he hadn't seen anything different that day. She bought a pretzel as usual and headed back toward the stable. But she never made it." He punched his thigh. "If only she'd listened."
"What was she like?" Gia said. "What did she like besides horses?"
"You want to know?" he said, pushing himself out of the sofa. "That's easy. I'll let you see for yourself."
He walked around the sofa and motioned Gia to follow. She found him standing over a black trunk with brass fittings. He pulled it a few feet closer to the window and opened the lid.
"There," he said, rising. "Go ahead. Take a look. That's all that's left of my little girl."
Gia knelt and looked but didn't touch. She felt as if she were violating someone, or committing a sacrilege. She saw a stack of unframed photos and forced herself to pick it up and shuffle through them: Shots of Tara at all ages. A beautiful child, even as an infant. She stopped at one with Tara sitting atop a big chestnut mare.
"That was Rhonda, Tara's favorite horse," Portman said, looking over her shoulder.
But Gia was transfixed on Tara's clothing: a red-and-white checked shirt, riding breeches, and boots. Exactly what she'd been wearing at Menelaus Manor.
"Did... did she wear riding clothes a lot?"
"That's what she was wearing when she disappeared. In colder weather she'd wear a competition coat and cap. Made her look like the heiress to an English estate. God she loved that horse. Would you believe she'd bake cookies for it? Big thick grainy things. The horse loved them. What a kid."
Gia glanced at Portman and saw the wistful, lost look on his face and knew then he'd had nothing to do with his daughter's death.
She flipped further into the stack and stopped at a photo of Tara beside a trim, good-looking man in his thirties. Their hair and eyes were matching shades of blond and blue. With a start she realized it was her father.
"Yeah, that was me. I was Portman then, now I'm portly man." He patted his gut. "It's all the meds they've got me on. Name an antidepressant and I've tried it. Every one of them gives me these carbohydrate cravings. Plus the only exercise I get is moving around this place." He waved his hand at the tiny apartment. "Which, as you can imagine, isn't much."
"You said you worked for Chase?"
"'Worked' is right. Not a big job, but a solid one. I made decent money. And I was planning on getting my MBA, but... things didn't work out."
Gia flipped to the next picture. Tara standing beside a slim, attractive brunette.
"That was Dorothy," Portman said.
"Her mother."
Portman shook his head. "She took Tara's disappearance harder than I did, which is pretty hard to imagine. They were best buds, those two. Did everything together. Dot never recovered."
Gia was almost afraid to ask. "Where is she now?"
"In a hospital room, hooked up to a feeding tube."
"Oh, no!"
Portman seemed to go on automatic pilot as his eyes unfocused and his voice became mechanical. "Car accident. Happened in 1993, on the fifth anniversary of Tara's disappearance. Ran into a bridge abutment on the LIE. Permanent brain damage. Because of the speed she was going, the insurance company said it was a suicide attempt. Our side said it was an accident. We met somewhere in the middle but it still didn't come near covering her ongoing medical expenses."
"What do you think happened?"
"I don't know what happened, but what I think is between me and Dot. Anyway, I couldn't afford to pay for all the care she needed-I mean I couldn't lose the house because I had to think of Jimmy who I had to raise all by myself then."
"Jimmy?"
"Flip ahead a few photos. There. That's Jimmy."
Gia saw Tara next to a dark-haired boy with a gap-toothed smile.
"He looks younger."
"By two years. He was five there."
"Where is he now?"
"In rehab. Booze, crack, heroin. You name it." He shook his head. "Our fault, not his."
"Why do you say that?"
"Jimmy was six-and-a-half when Tara disappeared. We forgot about him when that happened. Everything was Tara, Tara, Tara."
"That's understandable."
"Not when you're six. And then seven. And then eight-nine-ten, and your family life is an ongoing wake for your sister. Then at eleven he loses his mother. I'm sure he heard the suicide talk. And to him that meant his mother had abandoned him, that her grief over her dead daughter was greater than her love for her living son. He was too young to understand that maybe she hadn't thought it through, that maybe it was the worst day of her life and some crazy impulse took control."
Gia saw his throat working as he looked away. She couldn't think of anything to say except, You poor man, that poor boy. But that sounded condescending, so she waited in the leaden silence.
Finally Joe Portman sniffed and said, "You know, you can keep hope alive for only so long. When we hit the five-year mark and no Tara, we had to... we had to accept the worst. Maybe if I'd been with her more that fifth anniversary day, Dot might have got past it, and she'd still be up and about today. But everything must have looked too black to go on-maybe just for a few minutes or an hour, but that was enough. So now Jimmy was motherless and his father still wasn't paying attention to him, what with all that Dot needed." Portman rubbed his face, as if massaging his jowls. "Jimmy's first bust-the first of many-was at age thirteen for selling marijuana and it was all downhill from there."
Gia felt a growing knot in her chest. The pain this man, this family had been through... no wonder he was on medication.
"Then I learned I had to divorce Dot."
"Had to?"
"To save the house and-so I hoped at the time-to save Jimmy, I had to divorce her. That way she'd be without support and could qualify for welfare and be covered by Medicaid. The irony of it is, if I'd waited a couple of years it wouldn't have been necessary."
"You mean they changed the law?"
"No." He smiled, but it was a painful grimace. "I stopped going to work. Jimmy was in a juvenile detention center at the time and I was alone in the house, and I just couldn't get myself out of bed. And if by some miracle I did, I couldn't leave the house. I kept the shades down and the lights off and just sat in the dark, afraid to move. Finally the bank let me go. And then I lost the house, and wound up on welfare and on Medicaid, just like Dot."
Almost numb from the torrent of pain, Gia placed the photos back in the trunk and looked around for something that might elicit happier memories. She picked up a short stack of vinyl record albums. The cover of the first featured a close-up of a cute red-haired girl with a wistful stare.
Gia heard Joe Portman let out a short laugh, not much more than a "Heh."
"Tiffany. Tara's favorite. She played those records endlessly, from the moment she got home."
Gia flipped the top one over. She remembered Tiffany, how she toured shopping malls at the start of her career. What were her hits? She did new versions of old songs. Hadn't she redone an early Beatles tune? Gia scanned through the song list...
She gasped.
"What's wrong?" Portman said.
"Oh, nothing." Gia swallowed, trying to moisten her dry tongue. "It's just that I'd forgotten that Tiffany remade 'I Think We're Alone Now.'"
"Oh, that song!" Portman groaned. "Tara would sing it day and night. She had a great voice, never missed a note, but how many times can you listen to the same song? Drove us crazy! But you know what?" His voice thickened. "I'd give anything in the world-my life-to hear her sing it again. Just once."
If Gia had harbored any subconscious doubts that the entity in Menelaus Manor was Tara Portman, they'd vanished now.
She dug deeper into the trunk and came up with a plush doll she immediately recognized.
"Roger Rabbit!"
Portman reached past her and took the doll, He turned it over in his hands, staring at it with brimming eyes.
"Roger," he whispered. "I almost forgot about you." He gave Gia a quick glance. "I haven't been in here in a while." He sighed. "The movie came out the summer she disappeared. She made me take her three times, and I swear every time she laughed harder than before. Probably would have had to take her a fourth time if..."
He handed back the doll.
Gia stared at its wide blue eyes and felt tears begin to slip down her cheeks. She quickly wiped her eyes, but not quickly enough.
"I'll be damned," Portman said.
"What?"
"A reporter with feelings. I can't tell you how many reporters I've talked to since 1988, and you're the first who's ever shown any real emotion."
"Maybe they were more experienced. And maybe this hits a little too close to home for me."
"You've got a daughter?"
Gia nodded. "She's eight... and she just discovered Roger Rabbit on video. She loves him."
The tears again. Gia willed them back but they kept flowing. What happened to Tara Portman-plucked out of a happy life and killed or worse. It was too cruel, just... too cruel.
"Don't you let her out of your sight," Portman was saying. "Stay on top of her every minute, because you never know... you never know."
Terror spiked her. Vicky was far away, at camp. Why on earth had she let her go?
But she couldn't raise Vicky in a bubble. Part of her wanted to, but it wouldn't be fair.
Gia replaced Roger in the trunk and rose to her feet. She felt lightheaded. "I... I think I've got enough now."
"You'll send me a copy?" Portman said.
"Sure. If I sell it."
"You'll sell it. You've got heart. I can tell. I want it published. I want Tara's name out there again. I know she's gone. I know she'll never come back. But I don't want her forgotten. She's just a statistic now. I want her to be a name again."
"I'll do my best," Gia said.
She felt terrible about lying to him. There'd never be an article. Scalding guilt propelled her toward the door to escape this hot smelly box where the walls seemed to be closing in.
Portman followed her. "Do you know what Tara might have been, where she could have gone? She could sing, she could play piano, she could ride, she was smart as a whip and she loved life, every moment of it. She had two parents who loved her and a great life ahead of her. But it was all snuffed out." He snapped his fingers. "Just like that. And not by some freak accident, but on purpose. On purpose! And what about Jimmy? Who knows what he could have been? Better than the junkie he is now. And what about me and Dot? We could have grown old together, had grandkids. But that's never going to happen." His voice broke. "You let people know that whoever took my Tara didn't kill just a little girl. He killed a whole family!"
Gia only nodded as she stepped into the hall, unable to push a word past the invisible band that had a death grip on her throat.
5
"So, Freddy," Eli said. "I understand you think I'm crazy."
Strauss had stopped by with news about his investigations-he tended to prefer to report in person than on the phone-but Eli was more interested in straightening out this popinjay vice cop who thought he had all the answers.
Strauss stiffened. "I never-" The wiry cop turned toward Adrian and shot him an angry look. "I see someone's been shooting his mouth off."
"Just as you wanted him to do, am I correct?"
"Listen, you gotta understand-"
"What I understand, Detective Strauss, is that you are a faithless man. I offer you virtual immortality and how am I rewarded? By you whispering behind my back. I'm of half a mind to disband the Circle and continue on by myself, as I used to."
"You can't be serious!" Strauss said. "Just because of a little remark I happened to-"
"More than a little remark! It challenges the integrity of the Circle!"
Eli could tell by Strauss's expression that he didn't want to be held responsible for breaking up the Circle. One could only imagine what the other members would do to him. But a defiant look came over his face. He straightened his narrow shoulders and glared at Eli.
"I ran checks on you, Eli," Strauss said. "Hell, I ran half a dozen on you, from every angle, and nowhere does it say you weren't born in Brooklyn in 1942."
Eli smiled. "I've had centuries of practice hiding my origins. I'm very good at what I do."
"And so am I. And ay, don't think some of the others ain't thinking the same thing as me. You tell us you've lived this charmed life for over two hundred years, how you're as good as immortal as long as you keep performing the Ceremony, and then some guy strolls up to you and stabs you with your own knife."