Sliver Of Truth

“Yes,” I breathed, putting my hands to his face. I felt the smoothness of his clean-shaven jaw, the ridges of his cheekbones. Everything about his face was so beautiful to me; when I looked into his green eyes, I could see his goodness, his strength. I loved him so much. It didn’t change all the reasons we couldn’t be together, but it kept me returning to his body, kept my skin seeking his skin over and over again in the sad dance we did.

The light coming from the doorway cast our shadows huge on the far wall, as the rest of the clothing that separated our flesh found its way to the floor. I let him take me hard, felt the need of his body and the greater need within him rocket through me, recognized the same need within myself. The song says that love is not enough (and we all know how true that is), but in that moment, in the electric pleasure of our lovemaking, in the sating of that awful need, I could almost believe it was enough and more.

“I WENT TO Detroit,” I said to him as he lay beside me, hand on my belly. “I talked to Nick Smiley.”

He didn’t seem surprised. Nothing I ever did seemed to surprise him. It was as if he’d already read the script of my life and was just waiting for events to unfold.

“Did he talk to you?” he asked, pushing himself up on his elbow. He seemed to be looking at a spot behind me somewhere.

“He did,” I answered.

“He’s crazy, you know,” Jake said after a minute. “Like clinically. Been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, has taken lithium for most of his adult life.”

I kept looking at his face; it seemed very still. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying forget about all of this,” he said with a sigh, finally meeting my eyes. “You said last night that you wanted to move on. Why don’t you? I’m going to try to move on, too.”

“But the medical examiner’s report and Myra Lyall’s disappearance…” I said, incredulous, thinking of all the meticulous and obsessive notes in that file.

He nodded. “That ME was incompetent; made numerous mistakes throughout his career. Myra Lyall…no one has ever found anything to link her disappearance to any of the stories she was working on. Her landlord has strong connections to the Albanian mob. He’s going to get four times what they were paying for that apartment-these days that’s as good a motive as any.”

I didn’t say anything, just watched his face. There was something strained and fatigued about his expression, something about the corners of his mouth, the lids of his eyes. “The NYPD is looking at the landlord now,” he said. “They’ve moved away from the stories she was working on.”

“This is an FBI case,” I said, sitting up and pulling the sheet with me. “This is why they yanked me in.”

“Well, the FBI stuck their nose in when the NYPD found the Project Rescue connection, and maybe they’re working their own angles, still looking for someone to hang, like you said. But I know the cop that’s working the case, and he says they’re looking hard at the landlord.”

“The ME who processed Max’s body was murdered,” I said. He didn’t meet my eyes; a muscle worked in his jaw.

“He had a car accident.”

“The brake lines were cut.”

Jake issued a little laugh. “That’s not a very effective way to kill someone. Besides, a very cold brake line could snap cleanly enough to look like a cut.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know if that was true or not.

“I mean, it leaves a lot up to chance,” he went on in the silence. “There’s no guarantee that a car accident would be fatal.”

I shrugged. This was such a one-eighty, such a complete role reversal from his usual stance about this topic, that I was caught off guard, didn’t know what to say.

“If you really want someone dead, you shoot him,” he said. “Even if you want it to look like an accident, you throw him off a building or push him in front of a train. Brake lines? If they’re cut, the fluid leaks out and eventually they stop working, but you’d never know exactly when. It’s unreliable.”

“You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

He sighed again and lay down on his back, put his hands behind his head.

“And those articles from the London Times and the BBC online,” I said. “What does any of that have to do with Max?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t know. I was just searching the Web for information on missing children, looking for leads, possible connections to Project Rescue. I was casting, Ridley. Looking to see if what we know is just a small piece in a bigger puzzle.”

“And?”

“And you know what? It isn’t. And you know what else? When I thought about those articles, it gave me some perspective. The things that happened to me, okay, they were bad. But not as bad as what happened to the girls and the kids in those articles. I’m still here. We’re still here.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe my ears.