The Forgotten Girl, page 15
Alicia and Jake’s lawyer was impossible to get a hold of. The best they could do was get an appointment with him for lunchtime, three days from now. A different tactic would have to be employed in getting Alicia’s statement, one that involved the NYPD detectives, who were reluctant to press too hard, given that Alicia’s family was highly influential in the city.
They owned the whole building where she lived and where the Unicorn Lounge was, as well as several others in the area. She was clearly going through her “slumming” phase, because she was actually the heiress to a multibillion-dollar empire. And people like that were notoriously hard to pin down for any crime.
“If she did this, we’ll get her,” TJ said, after Ellie had informed them Alicia was actually the daughter of Rowland West, owner of West Industries, among other things.
Lynn had shrugged and didn’t say anything.
He also suggested they grab some lunch, which Lynn didn’t fight him on, despite not being hungry at all.
She made plans with Shanna’s parents at four PM, to tell them what they know so far. Detective Ellie wanted to go speak to them herself, but Lynn managed to convince her it was better if she went. She was not looking forward to it.
The quattro formaggi ravioli she ordered in a famous Little Italy restaurant, Andrea’s, that TJ had picked for them should’ve been something she could eat. She could always eat pasta or cheese, but today it just all tasted sour and disgusting.
The decor of the restaurant was black marble with silver and dark wood accents. Since it was nearly four PM, the place was empty, save for the bored looking black-haired waiter in a starched white shirt and black pants that looked new, leaning against the bar counter. He looked more like an extra in some goodfellas movie than a restaurant worker. From a recessed alcove in the back, she could hear male voices, speaking with thick Italian New York accents, and that sounded like something out of a mafia movie too.
“You should get the tiramisu too,” TJ said in between enjoying every bite of the Italian delicacy that Lynn never could remember the name of.
“Even if you take it to go,” he added. “It’s the best in the world here.”
She split a ravioli with her fork and fought not to tell him the last thing she cared about right now was food. Especially creamy desserts which were not her favorite on the best of days.
“Kevin should be our next stop,” she said instead. “I want to ask him if he was at the campsite.”
TJ grimaced and lay down his fork and knife to wipe his mouth. “All business, then.”
“Yes, all business,” she snapped at him. “This one is personal.”
The pink teddy bear charm and carving in the tree flashed before her mind’s eyes, even before she saw Shanna’s bloody face there. This was personal in more ways than one. And more ways than she could easily explain to him. Yet. She’d have to try eventually.
“I can come with you to speak to the parents,” he offered, but she shook his head.
“I think it’s better if you work your bro magic on Kevin and find out just how close him and Shanna were,” she said. “Or rather, how close he wanted to be. And I’ll try to get more information out of her best friend.”
He nodded and picked up his knife and fork. “Bro magic incoming.”
What they were referring to was TJ’s uncanny ability to make instant friends with anyone he met if he wanted to. His all-American, blond and blue-eyed boy next door jock charm was something he’d used to his advantage in many of the undercover cases they worked together. Few saw through it.
“Eat your food now,” he said. “You need to eat.”
She must’ve looked every bit as dejected and lost as she felt for him to say that to her. He was known for trying to take care of her when he thought a case was taking too much out of her, and she did the same for him. That’s why they worked so seamlessly together. They always had each other’s backs, knew how to instinctually. So she made a real effort to follow his advice.
The guilt that she wasn’t telling him about the connection to the twenty-year-old murder of her best friend found at Shanna’s crime scene didn’t make her appetite any better.
But she’d buried all that too deep for it to come out easily. First she needed to understand it herself. Then she’d tell him everything. The reasoning sounded hollow even in her mind. But it was what it was, as made men in Scorsese movies usually said.
She couldn’t dunk Ryan into being a suspect in another murder investigation until she knew that’s where he belonged, for one thing. And for another, if she was the reason Shanna was dead—if the same man who killed her friend Alicia also killed Shanna, then left the breadcrumbs for Lynn to follow—then that was not something to be shouted from the rooftops either.
It was something for Lynn to wade into and make sense of the best way she knew how—by putting herself in the killer’s path like she’d done for the last fifteen years as an undercover agent. Or something along those lines.
They spent the rest of the meal discussing the merits that Alicia killed Shanna in a fit of jealous rage.
“If she did, then the rest of the film crew must know something,” TJ said, sounding skeptical. “They didn’t seem jumpy enough for that to be true when I spoke to them.”
“Could be they were in shock,” Lynn said, but she knew exactly what he meant. None of the crew gave any indication that they’d seen a woman be tortured for two days when she spoke to them either.
They could be wrong though, so they decided to track down the rest of the film crew to test the theory. And get a better feel for Alicia’s personality, which was the best they could do until her important lawyer made time for them.
The Myers’ apartment was on the twentieth floor of one of the old-style skyscrapers along Central Park. The living room was stuffy and too warm, the smell of all the old wood paneling along the walls in every room predominating and making Lynn feel like she’d stepped back in time to a time when this living room seemed cozy, and laughter was the main sound she could hear in it. But that was just what she wished she could do.
The steaming porcelain cup with tiny pink flowers and gilded edges felt unnaturally cool in her hands. The contents tasted more like coffee flavored water, but she didn’t complain.
The armchair she was sitting in was old style too, covered with rough, floral print cloth and lumpy because it had been so long since it was new. Shanna’s parents, Cindy and Roy, were sharing the wine-red leather sofa across from her. It had seen better days too, but was the most comfortable seat in this room. They did not seem conformable in it.
And the mirror along one of the walls, meant to make the room appear larger, wasn’t helping much either. Their grief was mirrored back from it, forming an endless loop in front of Lynn’s eyes.
“Why wouldn’t she tell us she was having a problem with a stalker?” Roy asked in a cracked, hoarse voice that sounded as though he was recovering from a very bad cold.
But it was grief and he might never recover from it. He’d asked the same question at least five times already and he’d be asking it five thousand times more. Maybe five billion.
“She wanted to deal with it on her own,” Lynn said. “She knows she could’ve come to you or me, and we’d handle it, but she was trying to be a grown up.”
Lynn’s words choked her and she took a sip of her watery coffee. The armchair she was sitting in didn’t feel as lumpy or cold or old on any of the previous times she sat in it. Like when she watched eight-year-old Shanna, dressed her finest in a pink ballerina skirt and flowers in her hair recite lines from a play her school was putting on that evening. Or the wide smile on her face as she blew out the candles for her thirteenth birthday. Or the hushed voice in which she confided in Lynn later that evening that there was this boy she liked in school—Victor—and she didn’t know how to tell him. She didn’t want her parents to know about that either. But she’d come to Lynn then, as if Lynn knew anything about boys or relationships for that matter. She did her best to offer advice though, and she would’ve done her best had Shanna come to her with the stalker situation. The last clear memory Lynn had of this room was Shanna’s beaming face after she had just gotten her acceptance letter to the NYU Drama and English department.
Lynn set the coffee cup on the brown marble-topped coffee table and drew up her shoulders. She needed to be the strong one now. For Shanna. For her parents. For herself.
So she cleared her throat and told them what they knew so far.
“Do you think a woman could’ve done… that to her?” Cindy asked, barely able to suppress a sob. “It was so violent, so bloody…”
“I’ve seen women do worse, if jealousy is in play, and if they’re narcissistic enough,” Lynn said. “Alicia West seems to fit the bill, but it’s too early to focus on just one possibility.”
“This must be terrible for you,” Cindy said, because that’s the kind of compassionate person she was. “It must’ve brought up all sorts of bad memories from your past. How are you holding up?”
She reached out and sneezed Lynn’s hand in her papery warm one.
Truth was, it had brought up stuff. But not in the way Cindy feared. Lynn never really dealt with her parents’ deaths. Or her best friend’s, for that matter.
What she had done was bottle it all up, push it aside and bury it deep. Then spent her life pretending she was someone else, multiple someone elses, in her undercover work. That’s why there were so many holes in her memories of Shanna growing up, that’s why the memories she did have were vivid and lifelike. Because there were not that many. And that’s why Shanna did not come to her to confide in and seek her help.
“Don’t worry about me, Cindy,” she said softly and squeezed her hand. “I will find out who did this to Shanna and nothing will stop me.”
The doorbell rang, the chime echoing in the silence left by her promise, making it sound every bit as hollow as it actually was. She would keep her promise, but nothing would change once it was kept. Shanna will still be dead. The emptiness would still remain.
“That must be Cora,” Cindy said and stood up to answer the door on shaky legs.
In the past Shanna’s best friend Cora would run into the room, laughing and shrieking her hellos, her long, curly red hair a curtain of fire streaming behind her. Today, even her hair seemed dull and it was the bright red around her eyes that drew all of Lynn’s attention.
Cindy guided her to the second armchair facing the sofa, which matched the one Lynn was sitting in, and Roy poured her a cup of coffee from the pot in the center of the table. It was no longer steaming hot and his hands shook so hard a lot of it landed on the marble table top, but no one commented. Cindy just used a paper tissue to wipe it off. The silence was so thick with pain, Lynn had trouble drawing a full breath.
“Did you know Jake, the filmmaker?” Lynn asked, needing to break the silence with work or it would suck her in like a whirlwind and never let go.
Cora nodded. “I met him once. Shanna had the biggest crush on him. An obsession, really. But he had a girlfriend and I told her she should lay off. “She got so mad at me for saying that. It was like the final straw.”
“The final straw?” Lynn asked. “You had other disagreements?”
Cora’s eyes focused on her, and she could just hear Cora’s mind working, trying to decide how many of her friend’s secrets to reveal. She glanced at Cindy and Roy too.
“The more I know about Shanna’s life, the quicker I find out who did this to her,” Lynn said placatingly. A part of her wanted to just shake Cora so that everything she knew would fall out. But that was an impulse she often had with people she interviewed. Patience was not one of her more prominent traits.
“Well, it was the stalker that we argued about,” she said. “I kept telling her to go to the police or at least tell her parents, but she wouldn’t. She was annoyed that I kept pestering her about it.”
Tears streamed down her face as she looked at Roy and Cindy. “I should’ve told you. Then she’d still be alive. You must hate me. All of you.”
Roy had a stony look on his face as he shook his head, but Cindy hastened to comfort her.
“What kind of things did this stalker do?” Lynn asked, drawing Cora’s attention back to herself.
She wiped away her tears with the wad of tissues Cindy had handed to her and blew her nose loudly.
“He’d leave little notes and gifts for her, and she felt like he was always watching her,” Cora said. “Like for a few weeks, she thought he was standing out in the street every night, looking up at her window. She was afraid to go out at night. But then she decided she didn’t want to live her life in fear, so she tried to live normally. But she felt like she was followed most of the time. I was with her one time that happened, but I didn’t see anyone.”
“How would he leave these gifts for her?” Lynn asked.
Cora shrugged. “Like in her bag, or in her mailbox. Sometimes when she was at a diner or a café and she’d just go to the bathroom and when she returned, something would be waiting for her at her table.”
It made no sense to Lynn why Shanna refused to tell anyone.
“How long had this been going on for?” she asked.
Cora looked up, her eyes unfocused. “About four months, give or take. But then she started hanging out with Kevin and the stalker backed off. Or so she said. Although she stared getting the threatening texts then. And she’d still get the occasional gift.”
“Did she enjoy the attention?” Lynn asked, eliciting a sharp look from Roy and a choked-off sob from Cindy. She hated herself for asking the question. It sounded so mean, but Cora nodded.
“That’s what I thought, and what I said to her,” she said. “We had a huge fight about it. I accused her of liking being the center of attention like that and that’s why she wasn’t telling anyone. I didn’t like who she was becoming.”
Her words ended in another sob and another stream of tears. This time, Cindy did not hand her tissues or try to comfort her.
“I know it’s a terrible thing to say,” Cora sobbed. “Shanna was my best and oldest friend in the world and I loved her like a sister. But she had started acting so haughty lately, like she was better than anyone else from her old life.”
She blew her nose again.
“Like with that Kevin guy who was clearly completely in love with her and would do anything for her, but she just led him on…” she said. “I mean, he’d like devoted all his time to protecting her from this stalker and she made him sleep on the floor of her bedroom like a dog after the stalker broke into her apartment. I mean, I’m not saying she should’ve been with him if she didn’t want to be, but making him sleep on the floor, that was just so cold…”
“It kind of sounds like you’re saying that she should’ve rewarded him for helping her,” Roy said harshly.
Cora shook and looked at him with wide, fear-filled eyes. Both Roy and Cindy were looking at her now, accusation plain in their eyes. Lynn really should’ve spoken to Cora in private.
“But Kevin did manage to make the stalker go away?” Lynn asked. “Did the stalker lose interest?”
Cora looked at her. “For a while. But then the texts and middle-of-the-night calls started. Like she didn’t feel like she was being followed anymore, but the calls and texts got more violent.”
“What did he say on the calls?”
“Sometimes he just breathed, other times he called her a bitch, told her she was his, stuff like that,” Cora said.
Lynn was starting to get the picture of why Shanna hadn’t told anyone.
She liked the attention. She liked the thought of making men so crazy they would think about her day and night. If she were completely honest with herself and her memory of Shanna, she had felt that desire to be worshipped even when Shanna was younger—for example when they spoke about that guy she liked. And she clearly thought she was safe with Kevin.
“And after all that time of just getting threatening calls and texts and him not doing anything about it, I think she just felt safe, you know?” Cora said. “Like he was all bark and no bite. She even started taunting him to come at her when he called.”
Roy’s head dropped down to his chest and the expression on Cindy’s face made it look like she had no idea where she was.
“And Jake? How serious was that?” Lynn asked.
“Oh, Shanna wanted to date him,” Cora said. “She thought his girlfriend Alicia was all wrong for him and that he was just with her for her money and connections. She was going to break them up while they were filming. That was her big plan.”
One she might’ve carried out. And it ended in her death at the jealous girlfriend’s hand. That would explain the fact that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted—the one bright thing in her ordeal—since rare was the obsessive love type of stalker that didn’t rape and murder their victims once it escalated to that point.
“You really should’ve told us all this, Cora,” Roy said, not in an angry voice, just a cold and matter-of-fact one.
It sent Cora sobbing again, and this time it turned into full on wailing. Cindy wrapped her arms around her.
“She was just being loyal to her friend, Roy,” Lynn said. “And the blame for this lies squarely at the feet of whoever did this to your little girl. Our little girl.”
Roy nodded and so did Cindy, looking at her over Cora’s head.
She meant it absolutely. Shanna wasn’t to blame either. She was just a beautiful young woman who thought she was safe to explore all the world had to offer her. Only she wasn’t. Like so many young women aren’t in this world.
18
TJ didn’t have trouble setting up a meeting with Kevin who had been on the number seven train heading to Flushing, Queens where he lived with his mother. He didn’t take a lot of convincing to head right back and meet up with TJ in Union Square Park. Shanna’s apartment was in a building on the corner of 16th Street and Broadway, or Union Square West as that section of the avenue was officially known as, and it overlooked the park.
