The Couple Next Door

She has to keep busy. She starts in the front entryway, cleaning the antique grate that covers the air duct. The scrolled ironwork is covered in dust and has to be scrubbed by hand. She gets a bucket of warm water and a cloth and sits down on the floor by the front door, begins to clean it, getting deep into the grooves. It calms her.

As she sits there, the mail arrives, cascading through the slot in the door, landing on the floor beside her, startling her. She looks at the pile of envelopes on the floor and freezes. Probably more hate mail. She can’t stand it. But what if there’s something else? She puts down her wet cloth, wipes her hands dry on her jeans, and sorts through the pile. There is nothing with a typewritten address label on it like the one on the package that contained the green onesie. Anne realizes she’s been holding her breath and lets herself exhale.

She doesn’t open any of the letters. She would like to throw them all out, but Marco has made her promise to keep everything. He goes through all of it, every day, in case the kidnappers try again to get in touch. He doesn’t share the contents with her.

Anne takes her bucket and cloth and goes upstairs to clean the grates up there. She starts in the office at the end of the hall. When she pulls off the original decorative grate to clean it more easily, she sees something small and dark inside the air duct. Startled, she looks more closely, fearing a dead mouse—or perhaps even a rat. But it’s not a rat. It’s a cell phone.

Anne puts her head between her knees and concentrates on not fainting. It feels like a panic attack, as if all the blood is leaving her body. There are black spots before her eyes. After a few moments, the fainting feeling dissipates and she raises her head. She looks at the cell phone inside the duct. Part of her wants to put the cover back on, go downstairs for a cup of coffee, and pretend she never saw it. But she reaches in to grab it. The phone is stuck to the side of the air duct. She tugs, firmly, and it comes away in her hand. It has been fixed to the inside wall with silver duct tape.

She stares at the cell phone. She has never seen it before. It isn’t Marco’s. She knows his phone. He carries it with him always. But she can’t lie to herself. Someone hid this phone in their house, and it wasn’t her.

Marco has a secret cell phone. Why?

Her first thought is Cynthia. Are they having an affair? Or is it someone else? He sometimes works long hours. She has been fat and unhappy. But until the night with Cynthia, she never thought he might actually be unfaithful. Maybe she’s been completely oblivious. Maybe she’s a complete fool. The wife is always the last to know, right?

The phone looks new. She turns it on. It lights up. So he’s kept it charged. But now she has to draw a pattern to unlock the phone. She has no idea what it is. She doesn’t even know how to unlock Marco’s regular cell phone. She makes a few attempts, and it freezes her out after too many tries.

Think, she tells herself, but she can’t. She sits numbly holding the phone, frozen in place.

? ? ?

There’s a lot running through Detective Rasbach’s mind on the drive to the crime scene in the Catskills. He thinks about the interview earlier that day with Marco and Anne Conti.

He suspects that this is Marco’s way of telling him that this dead man was his accomplice—and that Marco is asking him to help him get his baby back. They both know it may be a little late for that. Marco knows that Rasbach believes he abducted Cora and that he’s been outwitted. Clearly this dead man had something to do with it. He must be the mystery man who drove the car down the lane at 12:35 a.m. And what better place to hide the baby than in a remote cabin?

The baby must have been alive when she left the Contis’ house, Rasbach realizes, or Marco would not have come to him now. Marco is taking a big risk, but he is plainly desperate. If what Rasbach believes is true, it puts the mother in the clear—mental-health issues aside, she must not have killed the baby.

He is very interested in seeing what he will find at the murder scene.

Meanwhile Jennings is looking for a connection between Marco and the dead man, Derek Honig. Perhaps they’ll find something, however tenuous, linking the two. Rasbach doesn’t think so, or Marco wouldn’t have come to him. But Derek Honig is dead—maybe Marco feels it’s a risk he can afford to take, on the very slight chance he can get his baby back.

Rasbach is convinced that Marco loves his daughter, that he never intended for her to get hurt. Rasbach almost feels sorry for him. But then he thinks about the baby, who is probably dead, and the mother, who is shattered, and his sympathy disappears.

“Turn here,” he tells the officer driving the cruiser.

They take the highway exit and travel for some time on a lonely dirt road. At last they come to a turnoff. The cruiser bumps and sags down a rutted driveway overgrown with weeds and bushes until it comes to rest in front of a simple wooden cabin, surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape. There’s another cruiser on the scene, obviously waiting for them.

The car comes to a stop, and they get out. Rasbach is happy to stretch his legs. “Detective Rasbach,” he says, introducing himself to the local cop.

“Officer Watt, sir. Right this way.”

Rasbach looks around, missing nothing. A glance beyond the cabin shows a small, deserted lake. There are no other cabins in view. A perfect spot to hide an infant for a few days, Rasbach thinks.

He enters the cabin. It’s 1970s vintage, with ugly linoleum flooring in the kitchen, a Formica table, outdated cabinetry.

“Where was the body?” Rasbach asks.

“Over there,” the officer says, jerking his head toward the main room. The room is furnished with mismatched castoffs. There is no doubt about where the body had been. The old dirty beige carpet is stained with fresh blood.

Rasbach stoops down to look. “The murder weapon?”

“We’ve taken it to the lab. He used a spade. Hit him over the head with it. A few times.”

“Is the face still recognizable?” Rasbach asks, turning to look up at the other cop.

“Battered, but recognizable.”

Rasbach stands again, considers taking Marco to the morgue to have a look. This is what you’re playing at. “So what’s the theory?”

“At first glance? We’re saying a botched robbery, but between you and me, there’s nothing here to take. Of course, we don’t know if there was something here. It’s a pretty isolated spot. Drug deal gone wrong, maybe.”

“Or a kidnapping.”

“Or a kidnapping.” The officer adds, “It looked a bit personal, the way he was struck repeatedly with the spade. I mean, he was good and dead.”

“And no sign of any baby things? No diapers, bottles, anything like that?” Rasbach asks, casting his eyes around the cabin.

“No. If there was a baby here, whoever took her cleaned up pretty good.”

“What did he do with his garbage?”

“We figure he burned some of it in the woodstove there, so we’ve been through that, and there’s also a fire pit outside. But there’s no garbage here at all, and nothing in the stove or the fire pit. So either our dead guy had just been to the dump or someone tidied up. There’s a dump twenty miles from here, and they get the license plates, and he hadn’t been there in the last week.”

“So not a botched robbery. No one comes to commit a robbery, kills someone, and gets rid of all his garbage.”

“No.”

“Where’s his car?”

“At the lab.”

“What make is it?”

“It’s a hybrid, a Prius V. Black.”

Bingo, Rasbach thinks. He has a feeling the tires will match the prints in the Contis’ garage. And no matter how thoroughly someone cleans up, if the baby was here for a couple of days, there’ll be DNA evidence. It looks like they may have their first big break in the kidnapping of baby Cora.

Finally they may be getting somewhere.

TWENTY-FOUR