The Darkness Gathers by Lisa Unger Page B

hope, as if she had been given another chance to save her mother. She had risked her life, and Jeffrey’s, without a second thought. And every time, after a case was solved and the book written, she was left with an emptiness that accompanied the inevitable knowledge that her mother was still dead, still murdered. Now that she had come to recognize this about herself in her healing over the last year, she wasn’t sure if she had ever been motivated to help anyone but herself. Perhaps her whole career had been a hopelessly inadequate attempt to save her mother, to alleviate her own guilt. What did that make her? she wondered.
    “What do you think, Lydia?” asked Jeffrey, breaking into her thoughts.
    “Did anyone actually go to the address?” she asked in response. She had been listening, but with only about half a percent of her brain. They had been talking about the false address the fake bus driver had left.
    “We looked it up. The street doesn’t exist.”
    “Sounds to me like someone was trying to throw you off her track.”
    “We weren’t on her track.”
    “Are you sure? What lead were you working on when that came up?”
    “That’s what I’m saying,” he said, sipping his café con leche . “The case had grown cold even then. There were no leads.”
    “Well then, maybe someone was trying to get you going again. Maybe Nathan Quinn was trying to light a fire under you.”
    “So he hired someone to come in and feed us a false lead, then disappear?”
    Lydia shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. It would have been a stupid thing to do, but maybe he was desperate.”
    “Did the security camera at the precinct get a picture of him?” asked Jeffrey.
    “Yeah. It’s not a very good picture, almost as though he turned away on purpose. But you know we have that new face-recognition software, put it on security cameras all over the place. If the guy had a mug shot on record, it would have popped up.”
    “What did he look like?”
    “Big guy, heavy, strong-looking. He had a shaved head. He said he was from the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia—one of those places.”
    “Sounds like the same description the bartender gave us of the guy who paid our bill,” said Jeffrey. “Let’s take a picture over to that guy after we see Valentina Fitore.”
    “Who interviewed him?” asked Lydia.
    “This rookie we got on the team, Charlie Sutton. He should’ve really checked the guy out while he was still there. He was just excited to have the lead. He blew it.”
    “Well, how did you pursue this tip?” asked Jeffrey.
    “We got in touch with the NYPD; they put a team on it up there. We spent a couple of days at the bus station here, walking around with her picture. Interviewed ticket clerks, bus drivers, homeless people who lie around the station. Stephen Parker, the PI Quinn hired, flew up to New York, went to Port Authority, did the same thing. Another waste of manpower, with no results,” he said, seeming to deflate as he spoke. “I had even more heat on me than ever from that point. It looked like my fuckup, like I had let a lead slip through my fingers. It got the media all revved up again, but then they lost interest.”
    “So maybe that was it. A stunt to get the media involved again. To keep the story in the paper.”
    “Maybe,” the detective said without much enthusiasm. Lydia could tell he was burning out on the case. He’d been through all these mental acrobatics already and he was tired. She didn’t blame him.
    “So who was she, Detective?” Lydia asked, hoping that making him think about Tatiana would get him fueled up again. “Was she the type of girl who runs away? Did she have a boyfriend? Who were her friends at school? Did you find a journal? Read her E-mail?”
    He smiled a little and met Lydia’s eyes.
    “Sometimes I forget about her, you know? She’s become this abstraction, what with all the other stuff going on in this case. It’s like she exists in the shadow of Nathan