“Catherine called. She’s counting on you for dinner tonight,” Laura said when I opened my door and stepped out of my office with Mercer. “At Forlini’s. She said she asked you yesterday.”
“I knew I was supposed to tell you something,” Mercer said, snapping his fingers. “I’m in, too.”
Forlini’s Restaurant, behind the courthouse on Baxter Street, had been like an annex of the DA’s office for more than fifty years. Judges, cops, and prosecutors ate many of their lunches and dinners in the joint, assistant district attorneys and their adversaries waited out jury verdicts at the bar, and all of us drowned our sorrows there when cases went the wrong way.
“Sure,” I said, although my focus was on getting Lucy’s story from her before she spun out of control or shut me down. “Has Mike phoned?”
“No.”
“Is Lucy awake?”
“Not yet. Max is making calls to find the complaining witnesses who swore out the original complaint against Lucy, outside the room where she’s napping,” Laura said. “Not a peep.”
“What are you thinking?” Mercer asked.
“That Mike’s right. That I need to have this conversation with Lucy sooner rather than later,” I said. “If Creavey thinks I’m investigating a cop, I’ll have the whole department in an uproar against me, and for all I know, it’s just a wild guess I made.”
“Let me see what I can pull up on the Internet about Welly’s case—see if the investigators’ photos come up, and print them out for you.”
“Print out the Feebies, too,” I said. “You can use Max’s desk. Nothing would make Mike happier than if the bad guy was a fed and not a cop.”
Laura gave me the rest of the messages. I put them to the side and looked up the number again for Hannah Dart. This time when I dialed, she answered.
“This is Hannah.”
“Ms. Dart? It’s Alex Cooper again. From New York,” I said. “About Lucy.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She’s sleeping now, but she’s fine.”
“Sleeping? It’s the middle of the day,” Ms. Dart said. “Is Lucy in trouble?”
“No, she’s not in trouble. Why do you ask that?”
“Well, you’re calling from a prosecutor’s office, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but that’s because I’m trying to help Lucy.”
“Help her? How?”
“Ms. Dart, I’m thirty-eight years old, and I was just a year out of law school when Weldon Baynes shot Lucy’s friends,” I said. “But I remember the shock and horror of those crimes.”
My statement was met by silence, before an icy response.
“If Lucy hadn’t run away from home—my home—those kids would still be alive and her head might have stayed on straight.”
Hannah Dart might have exactly what I needed to know about Lucy’s head to get her story.
“That man was a stone-cold killer, Ms. Dart. Nothing that you or Lucy did could have altered his path.”
“Can we make this quick, Ms. Cooper? If my daughter walks in the house and hears me talking about Lucy, she’s likely to rip the phone out of my hand.”
The cousins who didn’t like Lucy Jenner. She was obviously right about that.
“It’s your niece I’m calling about, Ms. Dart. If I’m not mistaken, you’re her only blood relatives,” I said. “You might want to care about how she is.”
“She’s got a father. Let him start to care.”
“Lucy’s father is dead. That’s why she came to New York.”
“Why? Then where has she been staying in the city?”
“Well, actually, I don’t know the answer to that question,” I said. “I thought perhaps you could fill in some of the blanks.”
“Why is she in your office?” Dart asked. “There can’t be a good answer to that.”
I sighed and gave a short explanation. “Five years ago, when Lucy was in New York for a brief period, she may have stolen some food and necessities. I’m trying to clear that warrant—which seems mighty unimportant compared to her role in the murder case.”
Hannah Dart’s voice seemed to soften. “Everything pales in comparison to what Lucy experienced, and to the death of those boys.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
“What happens if I do?” Ms. Dart asked. “What happens if the judge agrees to let Lucy go?”
“Well, I was hoping you might be willing to take her in for a while,” I said. “Let her live with you.”
“Lucy’s not a minor, Ms. Cooper. She can make her own way,” Dart said. Whatever had briefly melted the ice was gone. Her voice was again as cold as the words she uttered. “That would be good for her.”
I stifled my anger. “When was the last time you saw your niece?”
“Five years ago, Ms. Cooper. Right before she took off for New York.”
“You can remember that so precisely because—?”
“Because it was my birthday. June twenty-second,” Dart said. “Easy to remember because she spoiled the entire evening for my family. Something about wanting to go to New York to see one of the people who had handled her case—”
I took a deep breath. That part fit with the bits that Lucy had told us.
“—and when I disapproved of that, she simply left the house in the middle of the night.”
“There might have been a good reason for her to want to make that trip,” I said. According to the little that Lucy had revealed to me, she had a score to try to settle.
“Well, if there was,” Dart said, “Lucy didn’t think it necessary to tell me. She simply stole the money for the bus trip from my briefcase before she left.”
“That wasn’t smart.”
“I could forgive that easier than the fact that she stole a ring I had given to my daughter for Christmas.”
“A ring?”
“If you’ve got my Lucy Jenner with you, then you’ll see the ring,” Dart said. “It’s a thin gold band, with the words ‘LOVE, Mom and Dad’ inscribed inside. She wears it on her pinky. Took it right off my daughter Callie’s nightstand, in the bedroom they shared, when she left for New York.”
I was racking my brain to think if I had noticed any jewelry on Lucy’s hands.
“It’s been five years, Ms. Dart. She may not have that ring anymore.”
“Last time Lucy posted a picture of herself on Facebook a couple of months ago, it was still there on her finger. Makes my daughter crazy mad,” Dart said. “I can bet everything I got that there are three things Lucy won’t part with till she’s dead.”
A dark thought, but I wanted Hannah Dart to speak again.
“That little gold band, a handkerchief that her mother embroidered for her just before she died—which is the only thing of my sister’s that Lucy was left with—and a two-dollar bill that her grandfather, my father, gave to her when she was ten,” Dart said. Then she added, “For good luck. He always said the Jefferson two-bucks was for luck. That’s why Lucy won’t let go of it.”
Grandpa Jenner might have been surprised to know that the rare bill had not proved all that lucky for its recipient.
“You’re telling me that this girl has been through every kind of hell I can imagine, and she’s still hanging on to things? To material things?” I asked.
“Those three things are her only connections to what once was a family—that each represent people who loved her very much,” Dart said. “They’re what gives me a spark of hope that there’s some humanity left within her.”
“But even so, you won’t consider bringing her in from the cold?” I said, borrowing a phrase from le Carré.
“Callie idolized Lucy,” she said. “Lucy’s three years older than my daughter, and was so bold and so strong that Callie thought everything Lucy did was worth looking up to. Till she stole that little gold ring and ran off.”
She paused for a few seconds. “If she’s ready to apologize to Callie, and if she still really has that ring to return, I’ll give it some thought.”
“Ms. Dart, you said that Lucy’s head isn’t on straight. Exactly what did you mean?”
“Why? You think it’s right to steal from family?” she asked. “To lie and steal, then come back here, looking for mercy?”
I thought of the young woman’s life and how every part of it had been fractured. A mother she seemed to adore who died way too young, a man who fathered her but played no role in her life, friends murdered in her presence for hanging out with her, and quite possibly a law enforcement official in whom she had put her trust at such a critical time in her life who might well have betrayed her.
“Stealing is one thing,” I said. “Can you tell me what Lucy has lied about?”
“How long have you known my niece?”
“Today. I just met her today.”
Hannah Dart laughed for the first time. “Well, that goes a long way to explaining things to me. She can suck you in like a riptide going out to sea, if you let her.”
It didn’t sound like Lucy would be welcomed back to Winnetka any time soon.
“There’s the front door opening now. My husband or one of my girls,” Dart said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to cut you off, Ms. Cooper.”
“May I call you tomorrow?” I said, anxious not to lose the only connection to Lucy Jenner’s past that I had.
“I’ll get back to you when I can talk,” Dart said. “But you watch yourself, Ms. Cooper. That girl is the most manipulative creature I’ve ever met.”
It was my turn to be silent. My gut was churning.
“Lucy has the face of an angel,” she said, “but she’s got the soul of a viper, too. You can go to bat for her like you’re telling me you are, but I’m warning you—you’re doing so at your own risk.”